Works of Providence - Chapter 7

is putting up a hedge in her way so that she cannot do the sin that she desires to do. And that's how we need to think about ourselves.

We have still sinned against the Lord in our minds by desiring the sin, by working towards it in any way, but we can prevent that greater sin from actually acting in our lives by putting up those hedges, by letting those works happen.

Now for those, this is a good question I think a lot of people ask is why Methodists and other Christian denominations maybe, maybe just Methodists have this doctrine of Christian perfection.

Because they read a lot of these passages, especially those in John as well, where he tells us that those still sinning are ones rejecting the

Lord. They ask how could one who is regenerate still sin? Rather we should expect that we're still going to have sin against the

Lord for the rest of our lives. There is no way to become perfectly without sin while we are still here, or at least not an expectation that that should be a state we come to.

It says those without the Spirit who are still slaves to sin though, they avoid sin often.

You can see good people quote unquote throughout the world. Always mention,

I've always heard from some people really a different but similar kind of question about like well if none of us does any good without the

Lord like having worked within us, then what about like the fireman running into the building? It's like this is still not necessarily a good act in the eyes of the

Lord if not done for his glory, and if done just for the glory and physical salvation of man.

But in the same way they may avoid sin only because of the effects, not because they hate sin, or not because they hate sin in the way that God hates it, or because they don't hate sin because of how it gives dishonor to him.

We should hate sin in that kind of way as well so that we're not avoiding it just because it makes our lives worse.

That is an aspect, but we have to hate it because it is sin. And this we can get from, there's three different passages we shared here.

Let's look at just one of them, the first one again. Job 10, 17. You renew your witnesses against me and increase your vexation toward me.

You bring fresh troops against me. I think actually let's look at Psalm 6, 1 as well.

O Lord, rebuke me not in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath.

Usually God is displeased with our sin. He disciplines us. We should expect that same kind of thing, and we should also work to have the same mind as God against these things.

Now, moving from the work of the Spirit internally, how does God affect us externally?

How does he prevent these things and work his providence in us in this way? He points out the sin is much too difficult for any of us to deal with.

The best of men cannot stray away from sin. If anything, we look to the best of men and often find the most sin.

If we think of best as in those, like in kingly estates, so to speak. But let's even just keep it confined to the church.

What about the best of men within the church? If anyone pays any attention to sort of Christian culture as a whole, you'll see plenty of men who are the greats, so to speak, and seeing them fall into deep sin.

I think it was Wottebockum had a quote about, I don't remember the quote exactly, but the premise of it was that if you look to Scripture too, the greats of Scripture, like David and Solomon, they were men overrun with sexual temptation and overrun with sexual sin.

This is something we should, in some sense, expect from those who are in any kind of leadership.

Let's not expect them to sin, but expect that they need to be greatly guarded against it and that they have a great temptation against them.

And so the best of men fall to sin, so how can we accept God's external help?

How can we recognize it, praise him for it, and even gather more of it unto ourselves? So it's good to look first to what is external providence even?

External providence works to further reduce and restrain the sin of those who are affected by the spirit.

The verse reference here, Ecclesiastes 10 .8. He who digs a pit will fall into it, and a serpent will bite him who breaks through a wall.

And so this is speaking of ways in which our own acts are the things that cause us to sin, the ways that we fail to prepare and the way that we do something foolish to begin with.

So there's an external providence even in seeing and just preventing ourselves from digging the pit, breaking through the wall, and instead thinking about the actions we're taking and taking to heart what

God is teaching within us. So what is the greatest hedge that we can use to avoid falling into the pit and breaking through the wall?

It is the law of God. The serpent that he mentions here, he considers it to be remorse and subsequent consequences.

So the remorse we have for coming into sin and the consequences that come thereafter, those are the things that bite us.

They are meant to teach us as well. We shouldn't be desiring to get into that situation of teaching to begin with, but once we are being taught what the serpents bite, we need to move forward with that somehow.

We have more examples of this in the Bible. Because this is a unique one where we actually have something in our confession about it,

I'm gonna read the confession portion. Not that our confession is unique in speaking to things, but this one was just really direct.

Lee there, so 1689, section 5 -5. The most wise, righteous, and gracious God doth oftentimes leave for a season his own children to manifold temptations and the corruptions of their own hearts, to chastise them for their former sins, or to discover unto them the hidden strength of corruption and deceitfulness of their hearts, that they may be humbled, and to raise them to a more close and constant dependence for their support upon himself, and to make them more watchful against all future occasions of sin, and for other just and holy ends, so that whatsoever befalls any of his elect is by his appointment for his glory and their good.

So, when we fall under his discipline, we should recognize it also in a sense as a good thing.

It's something that's meant to build us up and meant for us to then turn around and give glory to him, that he may even save someone as lowly as us.

And now, we're given this affliction not because it cleans us. That's something that other groups have misunderstood about scripture, saying that we need penance.

You can see the Catholic Church does this. The Eastern churches in general have a lot of different practices for giving penance.

Like, I know of a friend of mine who explained to me that a man who's found to have been a drunkard would have to go to the front of the congregation and pray and wail loudly in the front of the congregation for X number of weeks, as if it's supposed to have some kind of effect on him.

Now, there's something to be said for living down the shame of one's sin publicly, but this is not what scripture is asking us to do.

Scripture's not asking us to bring attention to ourselves in this way and to also seek absolution through the actions we take.

Rather, Christ is the only one and the only one who has been able to cleanse us of our sin.

We cannot be cleansed by suffering. And taking it even further, you may notice I have the Roman Catholic Catechism mentioned here because this is the purpose of purgatory.

I'm gonna read at least part of their catechism on this, just to give you an idea of how they misunderstand the way in which

God intends to work in us these pains. All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation.

But after death, they undergo purification so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.

The church gives the name purgatory to this final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned.

They have a lot here, I'm just not gonna bother with it. They do say the scripture speaks of a cleansing fire.

I believe this is in, it's in one of the letters from John, or it's in one of the

Peters. I honestly can't remember, about there being a way in which our works are proven through the fire.

They're interpreting it as we need to be purged and cleansed in order to be set right before God.

Rather, we believe that Christ did that for us already. He has cleansed us, his righteousness is only our righteousness by his covering of us.

It is not something in which we are actually made perfectly righteous as of right now.

That it's only Christ's righteousness over us. Now, backing up a bit, there's external providence working to reduce sin in us.

Now, there's also a warning he gives about men becoming too affectionate of the comfort that God has given to them.

Man is easily corrupted and must be continually mortified in this life. He gives a lot of great examples.

I wanna go to the Jonah one, because it comes up a lot in the coming chapters as well.

And it's a, I think it's a, I've not heard it spoken on very much. I wanna just hear more about it.

Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade till he should see what would become of the city.

Now, the Lord God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah that it might be a shade over his head to save him from his discomfort.

So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant.

So it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and he asked that he might die and said, it is better for me to die than to live.

But God said to Jonah, do you do well to be angry for the plant? And he said, yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.

And the Lord said, you pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night.

We really should just ponder how many gourds as he calls it through the book, but how many plants have grown up over us to give us temporary joy that was no work of our own.

And we get so totally angry about it not being there. I remember at work recently, I heard some colleagues complaining about how the snacks have decreased in quality since COVID.

I'm like, you still have inordinate amount of free food and snacks given to you at your work and you're in a situation that no one else should expect.

They were not actually aware that the normal blue and even white collar job do not provide these things.

They thought this was normal. I had to explain this to them. So this is a way God has really given us a lot of special comforts and we take them for granted and it can even drive some to greater corruption that he has given them these comforts to begin with.

And so in the same vein, we require mortification on account of our pride among men.

God may give a successful man up to shame and pity for a time only then to correct him. We even see this, you could almost map this to Job in a sense,

Job has been given a great hedge in his life. He is also, he greatly admires the

Lord. He has this great relationship. He's the greatest man of the East. However, the

Lord still puts him under trial at request of the devil. And it's not that Job doesn't grow out of the circumstance.

He does learn much about the Lord. He learns much about how to be content in the Lord and how to rightly think about him through this experience.

Next bit. Our heart is seen to be corrupt and we put too much of our contentment in the comfort

God has provided. Very similar to the comfort he's given us already. Here's a quote from the book though that I liked.

They that have great and well -grounded expectations from heaven may have too great and ungrounded expectations from the earth.

But when it is so, it is very usual for providence to undermine their earthly hopes and convince them by experience how vain they are.

So really in the end, we should take what Jeremiah 45, four through five is teaching. We should target our affections towards the

Lord, not towards the comforts of the creature. This is another thing that's gonna come up patterned in the following chapters is that we often put the creature, whether that's man or an actual animal or just the things of creation over the

Lord. And we value them greater than we would the Lord. But he asks us to reject everything on account of him.

Now, those are the ways in which God works in us to mortify sin. But now that he has mortified sin, he asked us to really reflect on a bunch of the implications of what

God has done for us and what this, especially in just sanctifying us. How amazing is it that the

Almighty is familiar with men? This is the main point he tries to make through this, that he really in a sense that God has also chosen to be made familiar by men.

It's not something he had to do, but it's something he is willed to do. So he may be glorified more and that we may enjoy him.

Oh Lord, what, from Psalm 144, three. Oh Lord, what is man that you regard him or the son of man that you think of him?

And so there are three major points he wants to make here for us to really just remember the importance, the significance of our mortification.

God is great, man is a worm, yet God loves us. Under God is great, there's a few major statements being made that God is immense,

God is present in ways that we cannot really properly comprehend. He's more than omnipresent.

He is in totality over all of creation. He's not present in any specific spot, yet he is fully present in all spots, right?

God is greater than the angels and God is greater than any man. There's plenty of people who worship the angels, plenty of people who worship random spirits in this world, but God is much greater than them.

They do not deserve this worship. It's only worship due unto him. A man is a worm.

The blood that runs in our veins is as much as tainted as there is in hell, was a quote from this chapter.

Let's look at Ephesians 3 through, let's look at both these chapter, verse references. How the mystery was made known to me by revelation as I have written briefly.

For consider, and this is 1 Corinthians, for consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards.

Not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth, but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.

God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.

Something in the past few years that I've come to really appreciate about, especially the Christmas story, is the circumstances of which

Christ was born into. He's born into a manger. He's born to a virgin, which in this situation, he's born to a couple who is not yet married, is sort of the point of being in this lowly condition.

He's born to a lot of special circumstances that put him in the lowest tier you could think of societally, yet he's still in the lowest tier.

He is our Lord, he is the king over all, and he even dies the death, he dies a death only reserved for the worst of criminals, for the lowest of the scum in his culture.

So the fact that Christ is crushed for us when we ourselves are ones not even worthy of the death that he had is something to really consider.

We are unworthy of the revelation we are given. It's also coming from Matthew. Matthew 11, 25.

At that time, Jesus declared, I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise in understanding and revealed them to little children.

For the last point, with God loving us, he chose us before time began, he crushed his son for us, he is constant in his love for us, his love is comforting and refreshing, he gives us many unique mercies and his angels minister to his elect.

You may ask how these relate at all. To mortification, how these relate to sanctification. It's really for you to consider that you don't deserve the mortification and sanctification to begin with, yet he has chosen to show that mercy for us.

So these are things for you to ponder and just recognize about the depths of his love. It's not that he, he was,

I'm trying to think, it's something we come across in street evangelism a lot, which is that people expect, people expect of God that he should be saving them.

They expect of God that he should be saving all of man and not condemning any of man, but rather we should be thinking the opposite, that we should not be expecting any of this salvation, we should be expecting total condemnation of man, but rather we have the gift of his son, we have the gift of Christ's crushing and being crushed on our behalf so that we may be saved and enjoy him at all.

And so that we may enjoy his presence, we may enjoy living without sin, we may be recovered as man.