Episode Transcript
We're in 2 Kings 17, verse 17.
2 Kings 17 and verse 17, and that was our stopping point last week.
And we left off studying what the word divination meant, had its root in the word divine.
And we noticed how serious an offense this was against the Lord.
And now we're turning to the next part of verse 17.
Look with me and let's go ahead and read the whole thing.
And they caused their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire and used divination and enchantments.
And sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger.
Now we're on the word enchantments.
The children of Israel, specifically those in Samaria, during the reign of King Hoshiah, sold themselves.
But before this, they used divination and enchantments.
It all goes together anyway, as you'll see in a few moments.
The word enchantments is a slightly different Hebrew word than the one for the word divination.
However, it is also translated as the word divine, indeed, certainly, and the word experience.
You might say, well, how do those all fit together?
Well, we'll look at that.
And here's the difference.
Divination pertained to that which was spoken.
And enchantments pertained to that which was practiced.
That which was performed because the word experience is one of the alternate translations for the word enchantment.
In fact, speaking of the Hebrew word, the first use of it is translated as the word experience, rather than the word enchantment.
And we find it in Genesis chapter 30, in verse 27.
Genesis 30, verse 27.
You'll remember Uncle Laban.
It's been a long time, I know, but Jacob's Uncle Laban.
And Jacob served him for seven years, thinking I'm going to get Rachel for a wife.
And Laban substituted Leah in the marriage tent.
So he stayed another seven years and that went on and on.
Well, listen to what Laban said in Genesis 30, verse 27.
And Laban said unto him, I pray thee, speaking to Jacob, if I have found favor in thine eyes, Terry means stay here, for I have learned by experience.
Now, that's the same word for enchantment, by experience that the Lord hath blessed me for thy sake.
So a couple of things we might take from that verse are, one, enchantments have something to do with what is experienced, not just what is said.
And two, just as divination was not always bad, neither is enchantment or experience always bad.
Because in this case, Laban learned a truth about God by experience, not just by what was said.
And that word experience is what our text calls enchantment.
So when you hear the word enchantment, you might immediately think of something related to witchcraft.
And it certainly is when it's used incorrectly, when it's practiced incorrectly.
What made divination bad?
When it was used contrary to God's word.
When it was used contrary to truth.
In other words, when a person spoke something that they said was spiritual truth, but it was an untruth, and they tried to claim that it was true.
Various churches do that.
Various denominations say this is accepted by the Lord, and it's not.
When they bow down to their statues as they walk into their sanctuary, believing that pleases the Lord, that is an experience.
Their claiming is holy, but it's not.
And so with divination, speaking spiritual untruth in an attempt to make it accepted as spiritual truth is when it is bad.
What about enchantment?
What makes enchantment bad?
The same thing.
When it's used contrary to the truth of God's word.
That is, when a person does something unholy in an attempt to mimic something that is holy.
Now who's the author of that?
Satan is.
If you read the entire book of Revelation, you'll see that Satan mimics what God does.
He has his unholy trinity, if you will.
The world, the flesh, and the devil, as it's been said.
But hopefully that'll help you a little bit.
Now you're going to base your experience on what you've been told.
You think about how divination and enchantment go together.
Divination, what is said, enchantment, what is experienced.
You're going to base your experience on what you've been told.
So if a person is told that in order to be saved, they have to do several things, one of which is to speak in tongues, then they will base their salvation.
They'll base what they were told about being saved on what they experience.
And that is, they show up in a religious assembly and start mumbling some kind of gibberish and people say, there you go, there's your evidence right there that you're saved, you're speaking in tongues, even though nobody, including the gibberish speaking person knows what they're talking about.
They have no idea what they're saying.
And that contradicts the very scriptures that they're relying on to say that it's evidence of salvation.
So they base their experience on what they were told.
They were told wrongly, they practiced wrongly.
They assume they were told right and that they were practicing correctly.
Now let's look in the next part of the verse, verse 17.
It says, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger.
Let's look at those few words and sold themselves.
In fact, that is one Hebrew word.
And the way it's conjugated tells us or tells me anyway, that the verb, the action of the verb refers back to the person who's using it.
In Spanish, we call that the reflexive tense.
When you conjugate a verb and in English, you might need two words to translate it.
And in Spanish, you just need the one word.
It's understood.
Same in the Hebrew here.
They sold themselves.
And that's what I want us to look at just for a moment.
They sold themselves to do evil.
This transaction was a personal choice.
It always is.
Spiritual wickedness is always a personal choice.
And the word for sell or sold in our text, if you track it through the Old Testament, you'll see that it's not normally used in a favorable sense.
In other words, it's not normally seen as a positive thing that you sell something or are sold to do something here in the Old Testament.
The first time that word for sell is used is in Genesis 25 and verse 31.
And you see there a scene of Jacob and his brother Esau.
They were twins.
And Esau is about to sell something that he has no right to sell because it wasn't sold to him.
It was given to him by right.
He's about to be tricked by his brother Jacob.
And in Genesis 25, 31, it said, and Jacob said, sell me this day thy birthright.
He's speaking to his brother Esau.
Esau's birthright was his by right.
That's why it's called a birthright.
It wasn't supposed to be sold, but Esau did it anyway, traded it for a bowl of soup, bowl of potage.
And I bet it wasn't as good as my wife's anyway.
So I don't know why he'd sell a birthright for bowl of soup in the first place, but he did.
So they sold themselves to do evil.
Israel made merchandise of themselves.
Now here's a question.
This one just jumped out at me when I was studying.
Did Israel have the right to sell themselves?
Now you might give an opinionated answer.
Well, of course they did.
It's their own choice.
Or you might say, no, they didn't have a right to sell themselves.
Okay.
Well, let's look at what the scripture tells us about that.
Do we have scriptural proof or a scriptural reason to say that they either did or did not have the right to sell themselves?
This is good stuff.
Deuteronomy chapter 13 and verse five.
Deuteronomy 13 verse five.
Where God speaks through Moses to his people says, and that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death because he has spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt and redeemed you out of the house of bondage to thrust thee out of the way, which the Lord thy God commanded thee to walk in.
So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee.
So God was telling the children of Israel that these false prophets, these filthy dreamers who steer you away from the Lord are worthy of death.
And the Lord describes himself in that passage as among other things, the one who redeemed Israel out of the house of bondage.
The key words in that verse are redeemed you out of the house of bondage.
In fact, let's look at this word redeemed.
This helps us answer the question I asked a moment ago.
Redeemed is ransomed.
When you redeem something, you pay a ransom for it.
You deliver it, you rescue it.
And it has the meaning of paying for someone's freedom.
When God delivered or redeemed the children of Israel out of Egypt, he freed them from their bondage.
He purchased them from their bondage.
They had sold themselves.
Long time ago to Egypt, and we'll get there in a minute.
But from that event where God delivered his people from Egypt, from bondage, we're taught about how God delivers the sinner from the bondage of sin when he redeems us by the blood of his son.
Galatians chapter three, verse 13.
Galatians three, verse 13.
Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us, for it is written, curse it is everyone that hangeth on a tree.
Now, Galatians is translated from the Greek language, not the Hebrew language, but the word redeemed there means the same thing in the Greek as it does in the Hebrew.
It's the same idea.
And further in Revelation chapter five and verse nine, we're seeing how God dealt with his people and he redeemed his people.
And that's going to be key to understanding the answer to our question.
Revelation five, verse nine.
This is a future event though John heard it, saw it in this vision, this revelation he was given.
And they sung a new song saying thou art worthy to take the book and to open the seals thereof, for thou was slain and has redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation.
So just as God redeemed Israel out of Egypt unto himself, he's through the blood of Christ to whom this song of praise is being sung, redeemed his people out of every kindred, tribe and tongue and nation.
So did the children of Israel have the right to sell themselves?
Well, now that we understand what it means to redeem, let's go ahead and answer that question with some more scripture.
First Corinthians six, verses 19 through 20.
First Corinthians six, verses 19 through 20.
As the apostle Paul asks this rhetorical question to the children or to the church at Corinth.
What?
Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which you have of God, and ye are not your own.
For ye are bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's.
Those verse, verses teach the Christian that first of all, we are not our own.
By that very statement, we can conclude that we have no right to sell ourselves to do evil.
Secondly, those words in that passage teach us that not only are we not our own, but we've been bought.
We're not neutral, just floating out there.
We've been bought with a price.
That word bought in the verse I read you from first Corinthians chapter six, that word bought is also translated as the word redeem three times in the New Testament.
So if someone else bought us, then we have no right to sell ourselves because we're not our own.
And thirdly, those verses teach us that the one who bought us is presently the one who owns us.
The end of verse 20 said, your body and your spirit which are God's, our body and our spirit, they belong to God.
They're not our own.
That's right.
The Christian has been redeemed by God and belongs to God and he has no right to sell himself.
Now, what is Israel in the Old Testament?
Israel is not just a nation or a race of people.
Israel represents the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.
When we learn about Israel, we learn about us, the church.
And going back to our text here in second, King 17 verse 17, if you've just tuned in, then we can conclude rightly that the children of Israel had no right to sell themselves to do evil.
Specifically, God says this about the children of Israel whom he redeemed from the physical bondage of Israel.
All the way back in Genesis chapter, I think I've written the verse down wrong.
I'm just going to read you the verses.
And the Lord said, this is back in Genesis, I have surely seen the affliction of my people, which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters for I know their sorrows.
I think that's in Genesis chapter 32 or so, but I just typed it wrong.
Y'all know why it's typed wrong, because I typed it wrong.
Has nothing to do with spell check not being on my computer because I'm too cheap to put it on there.
Did you catch that?
The children of Israel did not become God's people after he redeemed them.
Let that soak in for a second.
They did not become God's people after he redeemed them.
But even while they were in bondage in Israel, they were his people.
He said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people, which are in Egypt.
That means they haven't been physically delivered from Egypt yet.
Now, how could that be?
If he hasn't redeemed them yet, how could they be his people?
Well, I'm going to tell you how, because the Apostle Paul tells us how.
If you're taking notes, write down Romans 10 21 through 11 2 and the little a.
Romans 10 21 through Romans 11 2 with a little a, meaning we're reading part of verse 2.
And here's what he wrote.
But to Israel, the same group of people we're reading about in our text, the same group of people God redeemed from Egypt.
But to Israel, he saith, all day long, I have stretched forth my hands unto a disobedient and gain saying people I say, then, have God cast away his people?
God forbid, for I also am an Israelite of the seat of Abraham of the tribe of Benjamin.
Listen to this.
God hath not cast away his people, which he for new.
That is key right there.
Because in those days, the Apostle Paul wrote Israel, just like they are today, the majority of Israelites were unbelievers, whether they were Pharisees or Sadducees or Gnostics or whatever they may have been.
They were unbelievers.
And the question was asked at least by somebody prompting the Apostle Paul to write this in his letter to the church or to the Romans that, well, Israel is in unbelief.
Has God cast them away?
And he said, no, God hasn't cast them away.
He hath not cast away his people.
He's calling them his people, though they're in unbelief, his people whom he for new.
So before Israel was ever in bondage in Egypt, in the Old Testament, God for new them.
He had a plan to call them out to deliver them from the bondage of Egypt.
He knew the end from the beginning.
And not only did Israel not have the right to sell themselves to do evil in Hoshiah's day, they also did not have the right to sell themselves to Egypt during Jacob's day.
Perhaps you remember that in Genesis, chapter 42, and you can read that chapter for yourself at another time.
That'll give you a point of reference.
And you may recall there was a famine in those days.
The Bible says it was over all the earth.
And in those days of the famine, Jacob, to whom God had been nothing but faithful and gracious, sent his sons to where to buy corn?
To Egypt.
And that was the precursor to their eventual bondage in Egypt.
Now, if you rewound the tape back to the famine and could give Jacob some advice, you'd say, Jacob, there's a famine, but don't send your boys to Egypt.
Don't do that.
You go to the Lord.
God has always provided for you and he's going to keep doing it.
Don't go to Egypt for your corn.
But that's not what happened.
Jacob should have told his sons to seek the Lord for deliverance from the famine.
And even in that dire situation, even though they did go to Egypt to get the corn and everything appeared to be good for a while, as Joseph was already there, unbeknownst to his father and was second in command only under the Pharaoh and in the throne and was able to get his family there in the land of Goshen, where they prospered and were able to raise their sheep and their cattle for all those years.
It went south when a Pharaoh arose who knew not Joseph and he died and his sons died.
And those 400 and some odd years of bondage from generation to generation were all that the children of Israel knew.
And even in that, God turned evil into good.
He knew before they ever went into Egypt, he foreknew his people, who would go into Egypt and be in bondage, that he would deliver them out of bondage one day.
That was already in his plan, even though Israel did not believe when God had already told them that before they went into bondage.
Isn't that something?
Now, looking back in your text, it says in verse 17, and so themselves to do evil.
Now let's look at those few words to do evil.
Just as their parents, Adam and Eve did in the garden.
You remember that God warned Adam.
Now this was before he made Eve.
He didn't make Eve until about verse 18 or 19 in chapter two, but God warned Adam in Genesis two verse 17, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it.
For in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.
So when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate of that fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, what did they do?
They sold themselves to do evil, just like the children of Israel did in our text, just like people do today.
And they had no right to sell themselves to do evil because God was their creator and they belong to him.
He made them in his own image and they belong to him.
And when God shed the blood of those innocent animals after they had sinned and he clothed the sinning man and the sinning woman with those animals coats, he was showing them and us what he would have to do to redeem us from the evil to which we have sold ourselves to do.
You know, people have long said, and you've heard it, maybe you even said it at one point, I don't know, people have long said, I have the right to do whatever I want with my own body.
Well, that's based upon a false premise, isn't it?
Now, we may say, or I may say, this is my own body.
I decide what I want to eat and whether I want to exercise or not and how much sleep to get and what vitamins to take and all of that.
And between you and me as an adult in our society, I have certain rights.
But what I don't have the right to do with my own body is to steal Brother Jesse's nice car that he refurbished and I don't have the right to go over here and pull all the okra out of Ann's garden because I don't think she needs that much.
I don't have those rights.
But when God is our creator, then to say it's my own body, not between you and God, it's not.
Now, if you don't need any of the things that he used to create you, then you wouldn't be here, would you?
But people have their own opinions and they say, well, my own opinions are mine and my desires are mine and they shouldn't be judged by anyone else.
I want you to listen closely.
This might be worth writing down.
You have the choice to sin, but you don't have the right to sin.
You have the choice to sin, but you don't have the right to sin.
Back in our text in verse 17, and so themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord.
Let's look at that in the sight of the Lord.
There is no sin that God cannot see.
In fact, it's a given that when you sell yourself to do evil, the evil that you do is in the sight of the Lord.
Whether it's written that way or not, it's in the sight of the Lord.
Proverbs chapter 15 in verse 3, Proverbs 15 in verse 3 says, The eyes of the Lord are in every place beholding the evil and the good.
So you're fooling yourself, but not God if you think that whatever you did, whatever you thought, whatever you wished, whatever you neglected, desired, was done so out of the sight of God.
I shared with you last week and I think Brother Fulton did also that about that Alabama pastor who was caught doing all those wicked things and putting himself online as a woman and said that his public life had nothing to do with his holy life.
Not in the sight of God.
In the sight of God, it's all the same.
There is no difference between public life and holy life.
In fact, that's a great part of the problem with religious leaders and with self-professing Christians today is saying, well, now when I go to church, I won't do that.
I won't talk that way.
I won't be that way.
But when I go home, I'm on my time.
Really?
In six days, God created the heavens and the earth.
On the seventh day he rested, all of those belong to him, right?
And time belongs to him.
He was there before time and he will be there after time when time is no more.
In the sight of the Lord.
Psalm chapter 1, 39 verses 7 through 12.
Write that down.
I'm going to read you that passage.
And this is a good one.
They're all good, but this is a good one to keep in mind.
If you get in one of those dark times and you think, you know what?
God's not even concerned with me.
He doesn't care what I do.
I might as well go out here and get drunk.
I might as well run around on my wife or husband.
I might as well do this or that.
I want you to think about what the psalmist wrote here.
Wither shall I go from thy spirit or wither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there.
If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me, meaning God can't see you if it's dark, even the night shall be light about me.
Yea, the darkness heighteth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day.
In other words, it's the same to God.
The darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
It's not that way with me.
I can tell you that.
It's a good thing I've memorized where all my furniture is in the house because at night I walk around by faith that none of it's been moved.
But with God, it's all the same.
And the psalmist realized the utter futility, the uselessness of trying to hide from God anywhere.
And if a person cannot hide from God, then everything he does, whether it be good or evil, just like the proverb said, is done in the sight of the Lord.
And the children of Israel sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord.
And next we see that doing evil in the sight of the Lord brings about a strong, particular reaction.
What does the verse say at the end of verse 17?
To provoke him to anger.
To provoke him to anger.
And this is where woke religion gets off the rails pretty quickly.
Yes, God is a loving God.
All religions that believe in a God or a single God would say, God is a loving God.
And yes, he is a compassionate and a saving God.
But the Bible tells us he is also a jealous God and sin makes him angry.
Psalm chapter seven verse 11, a very short verse, Psalm chapter seven verse 11.
God judges the righteous and God is angry with the wicked every day.
God doesn't take a day off from being angry with the wicked.
He doesn't have a Sabbath from his anger for the wicked.
In fact, God has been angry with the wicked every day since Lucifer and the host that followed him sinned against him in heaven.
Now, I guess from my psychology background in college, this appealed to me about God's anger.
Did you know anger is a relatively new emotion for God?
Think about that.
With whom is he angry with the wicked?
Before Lucifer sinned in heaven, there was no sin.
There was no wickedness.
Everything was perfect.
God would have no cause to be angry with holiness.
And he wasn't, but he became angry with the wickedness.
And what did he do about it?
He cast Lucifer out of heaven and the third of heaven's host.
But he doesn't take a day off from being angry.
So considering eternity, anger is a relatively new emotion for God, but it's going to have its climax one day, a pinnacle.
It's a boiling point.
And it happens when he pours out his wrath.
And there's no escape for the wicked.
But God's putting that time off where he pours out his wrath because he is long suffering.
Now, the woke religions would say, oh, God would never send anybody to hell.
Oh, God would never punish poor little mankind.
But his boiling point is known as wrath.
Revelation chapter 16 verse 1.
Revelation 16 verse 1, and I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, go your ways and pour out the vials of wrath of God upon the earth.
Well, that's pretty plain, isn't it?
It's going to happen.
And it's going to happen when that anger reaches that boiling point when God says, that's it.
This is the time.
This seal has been opened and this seal has been opened and this one and this one and this one.
And then God is going to pour out his wrath.
He will have taken his people to be with him by that time at when the sixth seal is open.
Many think it'll happen before any of that.
They're called a pre-tribulation rapturous.
They believe that God wouldn't put his people through any kind of tribulation.
Well, the Bible says, Jesus said, you shall have tribulation.
It doesn't say that we won't have tribulation, but that's for another message.
And we actually have covered that in our study of revelation and other places.
God's going to pour out his vials of wrath upon the earth, upon the wicked.
Many of the wicked attend and even pastor religious assemblies across the world, although I hesitate to call their leaders pastors because they're really wolves in sheep's clothing.
And those wicked people somehow believe that God has given his wrath a bit of a vacation in order to accommodate the new way of doing church.
They believe that God is set aside many of his commandments, such as those in 1 Corinthians 6, verses 9 through 10.
1 Corinthians 6, verses 9 through 10, which says, Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?
Be not deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God.
Now there's a hope-filled verse that follows that one.
I'll read it in just a moment.
But when you take these two verses, I just read you, these are people who have not repented of their sin, put their trust in Jesus, they're unbelievers, they're the wicked, they're the unrighteous, and that's the key.
God calls them the unrighteous.
You and I were not born righteous, we became righteous through the righteousness of Christ.
So this includes all people who have not been born again.
And the people that Paul just described are in churches all over the world, and especially here in the United States.
And they assemble with each other in their sanctuaries and tell each other everything is okay.
And they preach about a God with a little gee who is fine with their alternative lifestyles.
And furthermore, they believe that anyone who disagrees with their sinful ways is a bigot, or a homophobe, or a narrow-minded person, hateful.
And they say that God is love and he would never send someone to hell.
But that's not what the Bible says.
It does say he is love, and he not only sends the wicked to hell, it says, and death and hell were cast into the lake of fire.
Being a fisherman, I picture a giant surf rod with about a one ounce weight and a treble hook on the end of it, and God doing that right there, not this little pitching and flipping.
That's just the way my mind works, I'm sorry.
But God cast death and hell into the lake of fire.
And I want you to remember this, no matter how loud they beat those drums of woke-ism and all of those new terms that have been adopted to describe what the Apostle Paul calls unrighteousness, don't you let their narrative change your narrative.
Because your narrative is written by the great narrator, the Holy Spirit of God, as he worked in man through those hundreds of years and they wrote their respective parts of the Bible.
The Bible is our narrative.
So if anyone ever says, well, I question your narrative, or what is your narrative, your narrative is the Bible.
Your narrative is not to be your opinion about the Bible, it's the Bible.
If you have faith in God's Word, then you don't have to go somewhere and find talking points.
They're right here in the Word of God.
And nobody has a right to change our narrative because nobody has a right to change God's Word.
They really can't change God's Word, they can change what they say about it.
But this narrative we have right here says that God is angry with the wicked every day.
But it also says that they may, in fact they must, repent and be saved.
That's right.
The very wicked ones I read to you about, they're in 1 Corinthians 6 verses 9 through 10, where we learn that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God.
We'll listen to the next verse he wrote in verse 11.
And such were some of you.
That's you and me in here.
Such were some of we, some of us.
But ye are justified, or excuse me, but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.
So the difference between the list of people in there is not whether you've ever done any of those things or not, it's whether you've been justified, whether you've been washed in the blood of Jesus, or whether you remain in your sin.
So there is hope for the wicked, but only if they're washed in the blood of the Lamb.
You see the problem with the homosexual, the drunkard, the thief, the fornicator, the idolater, the effeminate, the abusers of themselves with mankind is not that God doesn't love them.
It's that they refuse to love God and they refuse to trust His Son who God sent to die for their wickedness.
He who is angry with the wicked every day gave His Son so that the wicked may turn from their sin and to the Son of God who loved them and gave Himself for them.
And that's what you need to tell the person who says, well, are you saying God doesn't love the homosexual?
Are you saying God doesn't love the person who does this or that or who went to prison for a horrible crime?
No, I'm not.
In fact, I'm saying He loves you so much that He sent His Son to die for you.
And in that same passage in John chapter 3, He said, but He that believeth not is condemned already because He hath not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God, not because He had done this or He had done that or this other, but He's not believed on the name of the only begotten Son of God.
It's all one puzzle, isn't it?
And God solves it for us.
You see, here's the problem with the wicked.
They deny that their lifestyles are wicked in the first place.
And because of that, they see no need to repent of their wickedness because they don't believe what they're doing is wicked.
And they deny that God is angry, therefore, with their idolatry, their homosexuality, their drunkenness, their thievery, or any of their other pet sins.
And according to their beliefs, if what they do is not wicked, then God's not angry with them.
And if God's not angry with them, then He will accept them, which in their minds means they have no need to repent of what they're doing.
That is what you call the righteousness of man, isn't it?
When man decides what's right and wrong.
Well, listen to what you remember what Isaiah said about that righteousness.
I'm going to read it to you.
It's Isaiah 64 verse 6.
Isaiah 64 verse 6.
But we are all as an unclean thing.
That's every one of us.
And all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags, and we all do fade as a leaf, and our iniquities like the wind have taken us away.
So, Senator, I don't care what your background is, how horrible your sin is, or how many of them you've committed.
When you come to God, you come to Him as an unclean thing.
You don't come to Him saying, well, Lord, there are parts of me that are unclean, but the rest of me is good.
You come as an unclean thing.
You're filthy spiritually speaking from head to toe and inside out.
And you come deserving His anger.
In fact, you deserve His wrath to be poured out upon you in the day of the Lord.
You dare not come to Him and say, I'm somewhat clean, or that your private life should be accepted by Him.
You're an unclean thing, and unclean things are whom God saves.
That's who He saves.
In Luke 5 verse 31, as we close, Luke 5 verse 31, Jesus said, they that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.
In your uncleanness, you come to God as one who is sick, not one who is whole, because you're either sick or you're whole, aren't you?
If you have a little irritating nose drip like I do when I teach and at no other time, apparently, it's a thorn in the side.
There's a flesh that God's given me to buff at me, lest I be exalted above measure.
It's okay.
But I don't say, well, I'm completely whole.
No, I've got an irritating nose drip.
You might have an earache or you might have a cold sore.
You're not completely whole physically, are you?
And that's the way we are as sinners.
And Israel then and the unbelievers today disregarded God's daily and righteous anger with the wicked.
And with that, we'll close.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank you for laying out your word so clearly that we can see and understand.
And Lord, I pray that you would just enlighten us with your truth today to help us not only in our daily walk with you, but also, Father, when we witness to others, when we look at what's going on in the world, and particularly in those places that are called churches, that we'll understand that this is nothing new.
It's nothing more than Satan, the author of all deception and lies, warming his way into the church as these wolves arise from without, but also within.
And Lord, I pray as these people at this church accept nothing less than your word and those who teach it correctly, that it'll always be that way here until Jesus comes.
And it's in his name we pray.
Amen.
