A Greater Sickness V: Against Your Body | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Gratia, joined by Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church, New Albany, and author of the Behold Your God Studies for Media Gratia.

The last couple of weeks, we've spent a series where we're talking about man's greatest epidemic, man's greatest pandemic, and that being sin. And, you know, last week we talked about understanding the proper diagnosis and then finding the one, the only one, who is an expert on sin.

Christ as the Expert on Sin

And paradoxically, whereas usually you would want someone with the most experience in a field and consider them an expert, when it comes to sin, it's the one who has the least experience, who knows the most about sin, and that being Christ.

So, John, today, where are we going with this? Yeah, well, last week we talked about sin,.

Understanding the extent and the nature of sin, so what the old writers would call the sinfulness of sin. Understanding that, not in light of kind of dictionary definitions, but seeing how sin is presented to us by God in the Scriptures, in its activity.

Sin Against God and Sin Against Ourselves

So last week, how sin is against God, and this week, how sin is against us. But before we get to that, I think we need to kind of go back to our working definition. When we say the word sin, I find that, I mean, in my own life, I find that it's very easy just to kind of flip the switch and kind of go into, you know, autopilot, because you think, well, I already know about this, or because you think it's almost a laughable term, it's so archaic, the idea that, you know, me waking up and asking myself, well, what do I want to do with my life today?

There's no problem with that, you know. So a person who is an unbeliever might view sin as such a laughable term that when we say it on the podcast, immediately they turn off. But I'm more concerned about the churchy person, so we who go to church, and so we hear about sin a lot, and then, so the preacher says, we're going to talk about sin, and immediately we kind of just go into neutral and say, well, I already know about that, you know, I know the concept.

But what we're talking about is, our working definition is that sin is waking up and living for yourself. It's self against God. It's self against the people around me. So especially at a time like this with self-isolation, you know, many people around their family a lot, and you might get on each other's nerves, and you realize how sinful we are.

It's sin is against other people. So sin is a life lived for me, and the shocking thing is that sin is not only against God, but sin is actively against you. In.

Other words, living for yourself is against you. Yeah, and I think that some people may be surprised to hear that. I mean, we understand that sin is against our creator, but to say that it's against us, people who enjoy it, I mean, if we could say that in honesty, there's so many evidences for the fact that sin is indeed against you that we really have to limit ourself this morning.

The Bible is replete with examples and with facts, but so we're going to have to limit ourself, and we only want to look at how sin is against us in this life. If you admit to yourself, so even an unchurched person, an irreligious person who says, well, maybe there's an afterlife, even the most irreligious person who makes that admittance would say that the wrong I do here will have an impact on the afterlife.

But I think that even people who regularly go to church might be surprised to hear just how big of an impact sin makes on them here.

Sin as a Spiritual MRI of the Body

And now. Yeah, what we want to do in this podcast is to look at two groups of metaphors. The way that the Bible describes the influence of sin on our lives, how it comes to steal and kill and destroy, can be seen in the biblical descriptions of how it affects our bodies, and then next, how it affects the senses.

And there's some overlap there, so we'll try not to, you know, we'll try to keep ourselves from repeating. But when the Bible describes the activity of sin in us and how actually living for yourself is against you, it often does that by using the metaphors of the body.

And Paul talks about this in Romans 6 often, but listen to what he says in verse 19. He says, talking about us, our lives before Christ, you presented your members, this body, as slaves of uncleanness.

Quite a shocking picture. Before Christ, what were you like? Well, I wasn't so bad. Well, actually, what Paul says is, you devoted this physical existence as a slave of uncleanness and of lawlessness, leading to more lawlessness.

And that might seem hard to believe, so what we want to do is kind of give a spiritual MRI. How does sin show up.

Influencing our body using these bodily metaphors in the Bible? Yeah, so let's start with the head, right? So Isaiah 48 verse 4 says that because I know that you are obstinate and your neck is an iron sinew and your forehead bronze.

So you could think of this as an Old Testament way of just saying you're being hardheaded. And I think that's something that we're very common, we're very aware of, especially if you are married or if you have kids, you're used to somebody being hardheaded.

If you were my wife, you're very used to someone being hardheaded. But there's another phrase that's used throughout the scripture. God in the Old Testament calls Israel Jesus in the New Testament calls the people stiff-necked.

And again, it just goes to say that their necks are like iron. They will not bend. And so we can see this today when it comes to the Word of God, and you see something that challenges you, that reveals sin in your life.

Are you willing to bow, to bend to the Word of God,.

Sin’s Distorted Sight and Deaf Ears

Or do you try to force the Word of God to bend to you? Yeah, another biblical metaphor for sin's impact on us is seen in the way it influences our sight, the eyes. Listen to Proverbs 27, verse 20. Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, nor are the eyes of man ever satisfied.

So death and the grave. Think of that. How many graves are there on planet Earth? Well, if we could calculate the number of graves, and how many bodies have gone into the Earth since the beginning of time, it ought to shock us that the grave never gets full.

It's like an open mouth that is always ready to accept someone else. Death always seems hungry for more. And the Bible compares that to the eyes of a man when his life is ruled by selfishness. We are constantly looking around for more, never satisfied.

So like the grave, our eyes just can't get enough. And it leads to a life of what Thomas Akempis in his little book, The Imitation of Christ, said, covetousness, always looking for something more, always wanting to see more.

It leads us to a life where we never have rest. We're always chasing after something. Why?

Because sin, through our eyes, is never satisfied. And I think that today somebody may look at that and say, well, I'm not really chasing a whole lot right now. But you do chase entertainment. I think our generation particularly chases entertainment more than anything else in their lives.

Just as an example, the CEO of Netflix was once asked, what is your biggest competition? And he looked at him and said, sleep. And the reason is, is because the only thing that stops a person from watching Netflix, or at least stops them from watching it more, is the fact that they have to fall asleep.

And so, yes, we are never satisfied. Our eyes are never satisfied. But it's not just the eyes. While the eyes can never see enough, the ears just simply don't hear. We think we do, but sin makes our ears dull.

Matthew 13, 15,. It's funny when you can hear every whisper of someone talking bad about you, of someone crossing you, of every evil thing, every evil slight that you think is headed your way, and yet when it comes to the truths of God, we're so slow, not just to hear, but to listen to them.

Yeah, it's not that sin makes it so we can't hear anything, that we're insensitive to everything. It's that the ears are really keenly open to anything that says that we are the center of the universe and we deserve more, and we are just so disinterested in what God says about Himself.

You know, again, like, you know, you think about the feelings where, you know, I deserve better, and our ears are open to that, and the statement that God deserves everything in our life, and we just find it hard to even think that way.

Or you can think of it as the voices of masters. Before Christ rescues us, sin gives us ears to hear a thousand masters that are all saying to us, you've got to listen to me if you want to be happy, you've got to do this, you've got to do this.

When we come to Christ, we have ears for one voice, and not the thousand masters. But before, when Christ talks, it just seems very indistinct, you know, sermons that roll over us, and it just doesn't change anything.

Sin in the Mouth, Heart, Hands, and Feet

What about our mouth? Well, the way we talk, sin so clearly destroys and kills, steals from us through the way it engages our conversation. So, the Bible uses pictures like mouth, tongue, even throat.

Paul writes this in Romans 3, where he sums up the evidence of the impact of sin on all humanity, religious or irreligious. In verse 12 of Romans 3, he says this,. All have turned aside, together they have become useless.

There is none who does good, there's not even one. Their throat is an open grave, with their tongues they keep deceiving. The poison of asps is under their lips, whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.

So, very descriptive pictures there. Sin so guides the way we talk to people, that our mouth is full of bitterness, our tongue is full of deceit, our lips are poisonous, and our throat is like an open grave.

People are walking by us, and they fall into a dangerous situation, listening to us talk. James says it differently. James says that the tongue is really little, but what a fire it can start. It can start this great forest fire that destroys so much that we hold precious.

And we see this, sadly, all the time. In marriages, we hurt each other by things that we say without thinking. Maybe with our kids, or siblings to siblings, and kids to parents. At work, we say things, and later, you know, it shoots out of our mouth, and we realize that really was inappropriate, but you can't take it back.

We watch the destruction just begin to.

Spread, because sin turns even our mouths against us. Moving on with the spiritual MRI, next we come to the heart. I think in the heart, maybe it's the least surprising place where we know that sin has an impact, but I think we often underestimate just how impactful sin is to our heart.

Ezekiel describes our heart as a heart of stone. It's harmed. It is rough, and really nothing penetrates. Nothing sinks in. Jeremiah, in chapter 17, he says that the heart is wicked and deceitful above all things.

Even going to the New Testament, in Hebrews chapter 3, the writer says that the heart is evil, unbelieving, hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. Calvin, going into the Reformation age, says that the heart is a factory of idols.

Another strange metaphor for the impact of sin on our lives is the belly. Paul says in Philippians 3, verse 17, brethren, join in following my example, and observe those who walk according to the pattern that you have in us.

So, he's distant from the young church, he says. When you see someone who comes to teach you on behalf of God, make sure their life matches the pattern you saw in us. For many walk, of whom I have often told you, and now tell you even weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ.

That's quite a shocking statement. Paul says, you know, as I write this letter, it breaks my heart. I even weep over the thought of men traveling around, teaching the Bible, but actually, they're enemies of Christ's cross.

And then he describes them. Their end is destruction. Their God is their appetite, or literally, their belly. They glory in their shame, and they set their minds on earthly things. Sin causes the appetites that God gives us, which are right and good as humans, to become all these dominating masters.

So, it's not just talking about food, but every physical appetite. You know, these things become our master, and they rule us, and they destroy us, and they make us to live as people who are opposed to the cross of Christ.

Yeah, and I think that is such a good thing to be reminded of right now. When we're talking about the impact sin has on our heart, and on our belly, and our mouth, these things in and of themselves, the heart, the mouth, they are good things given by God, but these are things that have been impacted by sin.

So, let's remember that, especially when we're looking at our hands, something we wouldn't think of. I mean, John, honestly, my hand's not good for much, not super handy, but Micah 7 .3 says that both of my hands are very good at sin.

Yeah, we talked about this before. I was watching a YouTube video before the COVID virus thing about a guy and his son named Goodall who hand make guitars, and their guitars are beautiful, and they're quite expensive, but I watched this hour-long kind of video that they filmed of how long it takes them, and all the processes of taking the wood, and bending it, and fashioning it, and all the way down to the finished product, and it was just so fascinating, and I thought, you know, I can't do any of that with my hands.

I don't have any of that skill. I remember reading a thing where another guitar maker, a Canadian named Larive, how long it took him to train an apprentice to be able to build a guitar. So, he would teach him part by part, and he would talk about it would take some of them seven years before he would entrust them to just build the entire guitar themselves.

So, I look at my hands, and I think, I don't have the skill to do any of that. I don't have the skill to play a guitar very well, and I only know a few chords, but like you said, sin has made it, so my hands are so adept.

They are perfectly skilled at selfishness, you know, both of them. What about our feet? If we think about sin, one very simple way of showing the sad impact of sin on all of humanity is just to ask yourself this, where has sin, what places does sin take me to do what it tells me I need to do if I want to really be happy, and you just think about humanity.

How many places have men, and women, and children gone to find happiness, and it's destroyed them, you know. Look in your own life. Where have I gone? I mean, physically, where have my feet taken me, promising me happiness, but it just stole, and killed, and destroyed.

Romans 3 .15 talks about having feet that are swift to run to the shedding of blood. Even when violence or cruelty is required, humanity will do that if only the promise is believed that if you do this, you can be happy too.

So, it's not to be limited to murder, but look, where have I gone in my relationships that have been cruel, and that I've hurt people, because I thought I got to do it if I'm going to get what I deserve.

So, feet, even the feet.

Sin’s Hijacking of Sight, Touch, and Taste

Are affected by sin. You know, it's not just the physical things. We've talked about the head, the neck, the heart, the hands, the mouth, the feet, but even our senses have been impacted by sin. Let's just, for now, let's just take three.

Sight, touch, and taste. The interesting thing about sin is that there are viruses that would destroy those senses, but sin doesn't destroy them. It just kind of hijacks them, kind of like a coronavirus is known for doing right now.

It's hijacking cells to spread itself. Well, sin first impacts our sight. Sin doesn't. It blinds us, the Bible.

Says, and it leads to a life lived out in a spiritual darkness, but the blindness is not complete. It's selective. So, there are some things we seem to be, our eyes are open to, and then there are other things, of course, that they're not, and we kind of mentioned this, but think of this.

Isaiah 59, verse 10. The spiritual impact described as leading to a life of darkness. Isaiah writes this, we grope along the wall like blind men. So, that's a spiritual description. We're so confused.

Like, you know, how do you, how does God want you to live your life? And sin blinds us so that our best description of what life ought to be like, what a marriage ought to be like, what a man ought to be like, what a woman, what a child, you know, what a worker, what a church ought to be like, and you watch us answer that in practical ways.

It's like watching a person who's blind find a wall and grope down the wall, using their hand to try to figure out where to go, and then it goes on to say this, we grope like those who have no eyes, who stumble at midday, as in twilight.

So, you watch people make decisions, and they're stumbling, they're falling, they hurt themselves, they hurt their families, they hurt their, you know, their churches, and you think, why did you do that?

The sun is clear and bright, but you stumble like a man that's blind, and that's because of sin. Another description is found in the book of Proverbs. Let me read what Proverbs 419 says, the way of the wicked is like darkness.

They do not know over what they stumble. So, they stumble, and you look at their life, and you think, man, how did that happen, you know? Think about, you know, not talking to friends for a while, and then you get back into contact with people, social media.

So, you know, years since you've seen Joe, you see him on Facebook, you know, you end up having a conversation with him, and you say, how's the family, Joe? And then the sad story starts, like, well, actually, you know, the wife and I, we broke up, and she's got the kids, and so it's like watching a person fall and hurt themselves, and you think, well, why did, how did that happen?

And they have no idea. Look, I didn't know anything was wrong, and what the Proverbs says is true. The way of the wicked is like darkness. They don't.

Know over what they stumble. Blindness. And it is selective blindness, and that's part of the deceptive nature of sin, right? Yeah. They can see enough that they think their sight is fine, so they can see some truth, but they can't see the depth of the truth, the beauty of the truth.

They can't see the truth about themselves, and we see this all the time. Yeah, I remember in.

College having friends that would make life decisions based on the newest pop rock song, you know. They'd say, you know, so it would be like a girl, and she's in a bad relationship, and you know, maybe she was your friend.

You're like, why are you in this relationship with this guy? You are so unhappy. This is really a bad choice, and she would say, well, it's like that new song. She'd quote some phrase from the radio, and your jaw would just drop, and you think you're gonna, so you're gonna make all your life decisions based on, you know, the newest song, but it is.

There's a spiritual blindness. Sadly, spiritual blindness is not just out there, so to speak. The Bible has a lot to say about men and women who are spiritually blind in a church building. Jeremiah says it this way, the prophets prophesy falsely, and my people love it so.

God speaking through the prophet. The preachers are telling you lies, right? They're painting a picture in front of your face that it's false. It's not reality, and you love that kind of talk, you know, because we're spiritually blind, and one evidence of that is that when people lie to us, we're happy with that.

Another example in the Bible is idolatry. Nothing is more obvious than the fact that a man who worships something that he made with his own hands or someone else made for him, and he thinks that that thing can substitute for God, that man has problems with his eyesight, you know.

You want to shake him and say, are you blind? He is blind, but we see it in ourselves as well. The Old Testament, we find the prophets mocking the idolater, and so, you know, Isaiah, Jeremiah, they talk about it like this.

They say, you know, a man goes out into the woods and he cuts a tree, and he cuts a section of that tree out, and he divides it into two, and half of it he gives to a craftsman, and he pays that guy a lot of money to shape that and carve that into a beautiful idol, and maybe he covers it in gold, but if the man's poor, maybe silver, maybe nothing, and he puts nice chains around it, he decorates it, and the man brings it home and worships it.

The other piece of the tree he takes and cuts it into firewood and heats his home with it, and so the prophets are showing the insanity of idolatry. Half of it you burn to keep your house warm, half of it you said, this is a God that will rescue us.

It's such a clear picture of spiritual blindness.

One of the saddest examples of living for yourself is the fact that you are blind to the loveliness of Christ himself. Yeah. I mean, I can speak to experience from this. For so many years, you know, what I thought was precious and what I thought was worthy was so foul and just worthless, but now, seeing the loveliness of Christ, and not just that, but seeing the loveliness of Christ and remembering how I saw these things of the world, when I begin to look again, right, because we're all tempted to look again on the sin and on the world, how those things could have ever seemed attractive to me, and then looking over here at the loveliness of Christ, but, you know, we see that still today.

So, I've been slowly working through John Owen's communion with God, and there are so many wonderful, soul-gripping truths in that work, that when I go and I talk to someone, particularly people who are lost, people who are religious, and they'll say, yeah, yeah, I know Jesus, and all that's great and fine, but when I share these things that John Owen brings out from the Scriptures, it is so obvious that these people are completely blind to it, and it's so heartbreaking, and John, that does lead me to a question.

When we have a loved one who is clearly blind, clearly deaf, their heart's clearly stoned, but they think that the relationship between them and God is okay, what do we do? How do we respond to that? Well, I think we have two big tools,.

We have the Scriptural descriptions of God, of Christianity, you know, of the new life that He gives, of the love and loveliness of Christ. So, just because they're blind doesn't mean that we throw our hands up and say, you know, they don't seem to get it, they seem to be willing to be led by blind guides, they think they're fine, they're groping about like the blind man, even though there's light all around them in the Bible, they don't seem to benefit, but that doesn't mean we don't use the truth.

It is the Scriptural truths are the things God has given us, so that's the light, but then we also have access to the King who gives eyesight, and who can make the blind to see, and so we go to Him and say, as I'm opening up the Scripture, you know, when I have little chances just to say something about you, God, you're going to have to give them open eyes to see it, you know, open heart to unclog their ears.

Everything we've said about sin's impact on us, and the sense is, God, you're going to have to reverse those things so that they might be saved for your glory. And we can go on, I mean, the way sin affects our touch, we get numb and calloused, we don't even notice how painful the life of sin is, because it's all we think, it's all we know.

We can talk about, you know, the taste buds, how like a virus, sin affects our appetites, and things that we, that ultimately, you know, people, someone gets really sick, and someone makes their favorite meal for them, and they try to eat it, and they say, I'm so sorry, I can't hold it down, I just can't eat that, you know, and then sin is a thing that warps our appetite so that we think what's poisonous is good, and what's good is poisonous.

You know, we could go on, but sin just turns all of those senses against us. So, you know, the bad news is that sin doesn't just paralyze the body and clog the senses so that they don't work, but it actually invades, and hijacks, and dominates, and becomes a tyrant, and uses this physical existence, and all the senses God has given us, what could have been devoted to good, what could have been a gateway of good, has become warped, and it's caused our physical existence to be something that brings unhappiness, one form of unhappiness, and emptiness after the next.

It's why the old writers called sin the plague of plagues, you know. It's worse, they said, than anything you can imagine. It's worse than the consequences of sin. It's worse than hell itself. It's worse than the sorrows.

The root is worse than the fruit, and so one of the things that ought to grip us before we get to the podcast where we talk about the cure, is that it's great news that God sent His Son, not just to get us into heaven, but as He says in two different places, you know, you will call His name Jesus because He will save His people from their sins.

He will save us from these terrible influences of sin on our physical existence, and also John says Christ was sent to destroy the works of the devil. All these things that we've been talking about, the redemption, the rescue of Christ, will begin to reverse and shift these, and you know, a very different life, so different that Paul says it's like a new creation.

Puritan Help for the Cure of Sin

Will be the result. Who were the Puritans? Is the reputation deserved, and is there anything.

They had that you and I might need? Are you interested in knowing the Bible? Are you interested in knowing Christ? Do you want someone to attend to the care of your soul? Then you're going to.

Want to get to know the Puritans. To learn more about Puritan All of Life to the Glory of God, visit mediagracie .org or click the link in the description below. We want to close with a prayer.

That T .J. has found for us from a man named Louis Bailey. Now, Louis Bailey is a Puritan, and he's not a well-known Puritan. He was well-known during the early 18th century, George Whitefield, Hal Harris, Daniel Rowland, a lot of the guys that were leaders in the evangelical revival read Louis Bailey's book, and this is it, called The Practice of Piety.

So, dealing a lot with a holy lifestyle, and it revealed to them their need of a Savior. Let me read a prayer that Bailey wrote. O Lord, I stand here guilty of the curse and everlasting torments in hellfire, when this wretched life has ended, if you should deal with me according to what I deserve.

Yea, Lord, I confess that it is your mercy which endures forever, and your compassion which never fails. With you, O Lord, there is mercy and plenteous redemption. I beseech you, O Lord, not only to wash away my sins with the blood of your Immaculate Lamb, but also to purge my heart by your Holy Spirit from the dross of my natural corruptions, that I may feel your Spirit more and more killing my sin, so that I may serve you, the everlasting God, in righteousness and holiness this day.

Amen.