Romans 9:19-24

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Today, we're looking at 19 -24, but as we normally do, we'll start in verse 1.
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I am speaking the truth in Christ. I'm not lying. My conscience bears me witness in the
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Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen, according to the flesh, their
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Israelites. To them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises.
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To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the
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Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.
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But it is not as though the word of God has failed, for not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel.
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And not all are children of Abraham, because they are his offspring. But through Isaac shall your offspring be named.
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This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.
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For this is what the promise said, About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.
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And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather
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Isaac, though they were not yet born, and had done nothing, either good or bad, in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works, but because of him who calls.
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She was told, the older will serve the younger, as it is written,
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Jacob I loved, and Esau I hated. What shall we say then?
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Is there injustice on God's part? By no means. For he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom
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I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. So then, it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy.
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For the scripture says to Pharaoh, For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.
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So then, he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.
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You will say to me then, why does he still find fault?
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For who can resist his will? But who are you, old man, to answer back to God?
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Well, what is molded, say to its molder, why have you made me like this? Has the potter no right over the clay to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?
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What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory?
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Even us, whom he has called, not from the Jews only, but from the
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Gentiles also. Last week, we discussed how
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God hardens hearts and that he does harden hearts. And despite what some might want to say,
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Pharaoh is not the exception to this.
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We also have discussed predestination and double predestination. And multiple times, as we've gone through,
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Paul in Romans and in other epistles has a knack for heading off objections.
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He knows exactly what the objection is going to be based on what he said.
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And in this, in verse 18, as we read before, he says, so then he has mercy on whomever he wills and he hardens whomever he wills.
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And Paul knows naturally the next thing that's going to come out of someone's mouth when this is read is, will you say to me then, why does he still find fault?
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For who can resist his will? Well, why does he find fault in Pharaoh?
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Because God is the one that hardened him. God hardens a man.
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Then how can he still find fault in that man? This is a reasonable question. It's not an unreasonable question because what we're talking about is meat.
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These are hard things. But as we talked about last week, just to recap for a moment, the reason that God still finds fault is because he is not responsible for the sin.
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He is responsible for the restraining grace that keeps you from sinning every time you want.
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And when God removes that restraining grace and gives a people or a person over to their sin, this is justice.
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This is what the person wants. This is what that people want. One of the best examples of this is in Matthew.
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There are multiple examples throughout the Old Testament and throughout the New Testament and Acts. One of the best is in Matthew 27, verses 15 through 26.
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Very much ought to be familiar with it. It says, now at the feast, the governor was accustomed to release for the crowd any one prisoner whom they wanted.
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And they had then a notorious prisoner called Barabbas. So when they had gathered,
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Pilate said to them, whom do you want me to release for you?
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Barabbas or Jesus who is called Christ? For he knew that it was out of envy that they had delivered him up.
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Besides, while he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, have nothing to do with that righteous man for I have suffered much because of him today in a dream.
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Now the chief priests and elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus. The governor again said to them, which of the two do you want me to release for you?
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And they said Barabbas. Pilate said to them, then what shall
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I do with Jesus who is called Christ? They all said, let him be crucified.
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And he said, why, what evil has he done? But they shouted all the more, let him be crucified.
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So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd saying,
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I am innocent of this man's blood, see to it yourselves. And all the people answered, his blood be on us and our children.
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Then he released for them Barabbas and having scourged Jesus, delivered him to be crucified.
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I want to point out that before saving grace entered your life, every person in this room and on this planet would have been shouting, crucify him.
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One of the most clearest and most obvious examples of natural man choosing sin over God.
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Pilate, even in his sin, washing his hands and sending an innocent man to death, no doubt about it, didn't choose to crucify him.
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It was Christ's very own people. The people, no less, that just a few days prior had welcomed him into the city of Jerusalem as their savior,
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Palm Sunday. And make no mistake, this is foreordained.
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All of this was foreordained before the foundation of the earth. This is the means by which
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God ordained salvation. But that doesn't absolve anyone of their sin.
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It doesn't make God responsible for their choice. Three years of ministry, a week he spent in Jerusalem.
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And yet, they chose a murderer. Took very little convincing.
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You notice there's a sentence there. And the Pharisees and the elders convinced the crowd.
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Didn't take a very long time. But this is the natural state of man.
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The preference that natural man has for evil. And when
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God gives a people or a person over to that, it is indeed a just judgment.
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So this is where he finds fault. Because you are at fault in your sin.
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But in light of everything I just said, Paul doesn't go into a long diatribe.
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He doesn't. Paul gives the answer, well, that you ought to get.
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The same, in the same manner that God answers Job. But who are you, old man, to answer back to God?
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Well, what is molded, say to its molder, why have you made me like this? Has the potter no right over the clay?
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To make out of the same lump, one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use.
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Who are you? Paul is saying. Who are you?
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In the same way that God answered Job. Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
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And whether you're still sitting in your natural state and need the gospel, or whether you're a
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Christian doing your best to live your Christian life, the last thing you ought to ever do, especially as a
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Christian, is in your flesh, shake your fist at heaven. Because God didn't answer your prayer the way that you wanted.
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By the way, he also says to Moses, if you're still questioning anything about sovereignty here in Romans nine, let's go back to Exodus four, where he says, then the
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Lord said to him, who made man's mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind?
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Is it not I, the Lord? What right does anyone have?
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Does anything have to question the one that created it? Paul is pointing out the absolute absurdity of that question, that a creation would question the authority or motives of a creator.
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And he uses this analogy of a potter and his clay. Just as the potter owes no explanation to the pot or the vessel that he creates as to what it is going to be used for,
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God, who is greater, as Matthew Poole points out in his commentary, heaven created both the potter and the clay.
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The clay, sorry, the creator owes you nothing, nothing.
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He doesn't owe us anything. He doesn't owe us our salvation.
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He doesn't owe us his word. And he certainly doesn't owe us any explanation as to what our purpose is supposed to be.
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Now he's gracious enough to give us his word and to tell us our purpose.
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He's even gracious enough to tell us everyone else's purpose. Not in detail, but it's there.
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There's another thing that I want to point out about this. I want to point out what Paul is not saying in this.
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Because this is hard, and there seems to be quite a bit of back and forth, depending on who you talk to, is not saying that God made some people to be sinful from the beginning and go to hell and others to be saved and go to heaven.
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They weren't fashioned one and the other. Okay? Now that may seem a little bit contradictory, but I want you to think on it.
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This would indicate that it would indicate double predestination as we talked about before. And predestination is of course double or nothing.
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But in that particular reading of the text, that would make God responsible for the sin of man or the vessels of wrath.
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If he made them to be sinful, therefore it's easy for us to conclude that because this conflicts with the rest of scripture, this cannot in fact be what
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Paul is talking about. So what is Paul talking about here in regards to this? Well, we need to remember that analogies only carry us so far.
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This analogy of the potter and the clay is not necessarily supposed to tell us everything about predestination and God's decree.
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It's not meant to. If it did,
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Romans would end here. That'd be it. But we have nine more chapters that we need to cover.
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So in this analogy, it is an analogy that argues from the lesser to the greater.
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If Paul argues about the potter and the clay, it's very obvious that God who created, as I said before, both the potter and the clay has vastly more authority than the person in the analogy does.
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As we spoke about before, if we're talking about humanity as a lump of clay,
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God has absolute authority over it just as a potter does to do nothing with it.
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Man was created perfect in every conceivable way.
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Perfect. We know this because in Genesis, God says, and it was good.
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God said it was good. So not to go into a very long thing because we're gonna cover this later on as well.
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We've covered it before. Adam and Eve were created with perfect free will.
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They were created with the ability to sin and the ability not to sin. And on top of that, they were given a strict command not to eat the fruit, be obedient.
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They didn't. They chose not to be obedient, thus bringing sin and death into the world.
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And thus the lump is corrupt. But from that lump of corrupt clay,
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God makes many different vessels. Some of mercy, some of wrath.
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But all are for his purposes. Another thing about this particular text that we have to remember, and this goes for any text in Scripture, is when we're reading it, if it's very hard to understand, the last thing, the one thing that you are never allowed to do is insert a meaning into the text.
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You're not allowed to do that. You can look at every single church father, at all of the reformers, you're allowed to read
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Scripture on your own. You are not allowed to make it mean what you want it to mean. We can't take new concepts and insert them into Scripture.
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We can't take our own meeting and insert it into Scripture. Which also means all those people out there every
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Sunday or every Wednesday in Bible studies, asking each other what they think the text means, stop it.
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But we struggle with these texts and we're going to struggle through them.
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We're into the heavier parts of Romans. And it doesn't matter whether it makes us uncomfortable, or whether we're attempting to make something more understandable or soften a hard truth.
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We cannot insert what we want into the text.
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To get back to what Paul is saying here, as far as the brass tacks of the matter, that men are tiny things made of mud.
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Do you remember the creation of Adam? How God created Adam from the dirt?
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Anybody familiar with the famous meme from R .C. Sproul, what is wrong with you people?
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He's legitimately angry when he says that, because someone asked a question about how, why is the punishment so severe in the curse?
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And he literally says, what is wrong with you people? These tiny little things made of mud, dare to defy a holy
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God, and then dare to question the fact that he didn't immediately block humanity out of existence forever.
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It was too harsh, the curse. Well, we're getting into that right now.
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What if God desiring to show his wrath and make known his power? I'm going to stop here on that for just a moment.
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This is another thing. The blatant denial in the modern church, really especially the
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American church, of a wrathful God, nevermind what our culture thinks about Jesus.
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Some in the church even go so far as to express that they feel that God changed between the
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Old Testament and the New Testament. This is where we get modalism, that he changed.
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The problem with that is that God explicitly says about himself, I don't change.
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But in the Old Testament, he was angry and wrathful, and then he decided at some point during the intertestamental period to not be that way anymore and to be merciful and loving.
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And then that's when Jesus comes in and he starts teaching love and peace. If you believe that, you haven't read a word of what he said, but this is how the modern church operates day to day.
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This is how most American Christians go through their day, believing and operating.
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Even some false teachers going as far as to, which, I mean, they're false teachers, so do really not expect it, but to unhitch the
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Old Testament from the New Testament. We don't need all of that. It has nothing to do with the fact that all of that is explained in the
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New Testament, nevermind that point. But I wanna point out, if God has no wrath, if he's no longer wrathful, if he has, in fact, changed, if he has no wrath toward the sinner, then what do they need to be saved from?
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What is there to be saved from? If God loves you just as you are, what is the point?
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Why are we here? What is the point? Do you see how impotent this view makes the gospel?
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If we go around telling sinners that God loves them just the way they are, then we have cut ourselves off at the knees in the most important thing that the church has been charged with.
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How is a person to repent of sin if we don't tell them? There are two parts to a gospel presentation.
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You can't just give the second half. I'll show you here.
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Mark 11, 15 and 19. All right, not 15 and 19, 15 through 19.
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And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple.
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And he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.
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And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And he was teaching them and saying to them, is it not written, my house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations.
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But you have made it a den of robbers and the chief priests and scribes heard it and were seeking a way to destroy him.
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For they feared him because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching. And when evening came, they went out of the city.
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Not wrathful, huh? This is that one exception, he just didn't have his coffee.
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This is righteous anger of God. It's funny how when we read the text, sometimes we forget that Jesus is
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God. So everything that he displays in the gospels is
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God doing it, right? Because as we read in the creed before, right? We can't separate his manhood from his
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God. Godhood, can't do that. When we see in the
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Old Testament, God punishing evildoers, we cheer, we're like, yeah.
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Those evil Canaanites, the evil Egyptians. We cheer because it's what they deserve.
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Evil people. We don't wanna think about the fact that we deserve the same thing.
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As a reminder, if you ever read to the end of the book, this is also the same type of righteous wrath that God displays on the day of judgment.
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This should instill fear in the unbeliever. It absolutely should.
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There is nothing wrong with being afraid of God. And yet the church does everything it can to keep people from being afraid of God.
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It's just your friend. What is it it says at the very beginning of Proverbs?
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The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, right?
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Now as saints, we know that because of the work of Christ, we do not have to fear God's condemnation.
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We don't have to fear him as a righteous judge. We're in Christ. Christ has taken that punishment for us, but we understand that we still deserve it.
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This is why we rejoice in God's mercy. And his love being displayed in us.
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But we do, and tell this to yourself until you're blue in the face.
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You do need to fear him as a son fears his father.
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Do you remember the fear of going out and doing something you weren't supposed to do against what your parents wanted?
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And you were just like, oh, I'm gonna get caught. You got caught. And that fear that you had, it's similar, but way greater.
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But I want you to think about this for a moment. We do need to fear correction. But think about this.
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When we are chastised by God as children, because we have been disobedient, is that not a display of love?
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To allow someone you love to continue in error is hatred.
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And God no longer hates us because we are in Christ. So even in that chastisement, there is joy.
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Paul continues. He says,
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I'll go back to the beginning of 22. If God desiring to show his wrath and to make his power known has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory.
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A couple of examples of God's patience. Right off the bat, boom,
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Canaan, right? The first time we hear about Canaan, not the person, but the place is with Abraham.
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And God says, this is the land that I'm gonna give you, but it's not ready yet. And then
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God waits hundreds of years and lets them fall deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into their sin until they're ripe for judgment by him through means of the
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Israelites. So not only does
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God build a people in the land of Goshen, builds them up, saves them out of slavery, brings them through the desert and that disobedient generation that they started with goes away, right?
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The only people that are left out that actually make it in are
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Moses and Joshua, not Moses, I'm sorry, Joshua and yeah.
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But he uses the Israelites to punish the Canaanites. He is patient with the
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Canaanites. He is patient with everyone who is not elect, nevermind the fact that he was patient with you, letting you go as far as he would let you go, patient with Egypt while his people grew, while the
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Hebrew people grew in number in the land of Goshen, until he wasn't, until his patience wore out at the appointed time.
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The one thing that we must always keep in mind as we go through the text, all that it teaches us, the wonderful wisdom that God has revealed to us through the scriptures is that every doctrine, every single truth, everything that you read is all ultimately about, as Paul says, the wonderful, wonderful riches of God's glory.
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Think about the fact that God has not only elected us from before the foundation of the world, but he is also in this time for thousands of years bore with much patience everyone else, haters, blasphemers, so that the elect could see the depth of that glory and mercy.
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God could just as easily kill everyone the first time they see him. He doesn't.
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In fact, he has wonderful mercy on us, on them, especially on us, but on the unsaved as well, on natural men as well.
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He lets them marry and have children and experience love and the sun and rain.
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And yet, all they have done, all man has done from the beginning of time, since the fall, is figure out different and better ways to be disobedient, to shove it in the face of God, as it were.
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As I said before, I want to point out again, mankind, these tiny, tiny things in a vast, vast, vast universe, they're made of mud, dare at all to question the actions of an almighty
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God that made them, and in every way possible, blaspheme and profane his creation.
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In all honesty, the simple fact that humanity persisted, as I said before, after Adam and Eve, is a wonderful grace and mercy.
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In our confession, it says, by the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestined and ordained to eternal life through Jesus Christ, to the praise of his glorious grace, others being left to act in their own sin to their just condemnation, to the praise of his glorious justice.
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Speaking of which, one of the references is exactly what we're talking about today. The fact that God has foreordained and decided from all eternity to use some people in this manner or that manner is his prerogative, but in view of that, those who he has called, even us, not from the
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Jews only, but also from the Gentiles, the saints are the ones who
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God has chosen to be his people, saints, the elect, those that he chose to save out of our sin, out of the coming wrath, and Paul goes much further into this as we go along.
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That's basically the entire rift of chapter nine and 10 and this is in 11, but out of these two distinct groups,
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Jews and Gentiles, the taking of people out of those two groups and the creation of a new thing, a new creature, one that is not defined by geography or ethnicity, but by God himself to whom we belong.
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Reiterate Galatians 3 .29, and if you are Christ's, then you are
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Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. We'll continue with this next week, this wonderful meat that Paul is giving us by the grace of God.
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I'll leave you with this. Ephesians 2 .15, by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing hostility.