Sermons from Lone
Rock Bible Church To Tell the Truth (Part 2) We should never "witness falsely" with regard to our neighbors, which means the strength of our testimony lies in God’s people being known as people of the truth. Why should Christians be characterized by God’s truth? 1. Because God is a God of truth Exodus 20:16 - You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Time was, back in the days of the Old West, if someone said to the other guy, "You’re a liar," what happened next? I will meet you at high noon out in the street. That’s a big issue. That’s the only way to settle it. I think to myself, is that that big a deal? In the Old West, there was no established legal system, so they say, and the judge was two days ride away. To many, it was a big deal to tell the truth because if you did not have a trustworthy reputation, you had nothing. It was as big a deal as taking a guy’s boots because it could mean life or death. My dad has always said if you can’t trust a person to the tell the truth, you can’t trust them for anything. If they will lie, they will do anything. God says don’t you even misrepresent the truth to your neighbor. Christians cannot be liars. They don’t go together. Why can Christians not be liars? Revelation 21:27, talking about getting into the heavenly city:
God’s people cannot be liars. I have four reasons. We talked about two of them, but it has been a long time and I’ll just remind you of those reasons. Then we’ll move forward. The first reason has everything to do with character; that is, God’s character. God is a God of truth. It is who He is. It is absolutely part of the character of God. He is perfect. He is complete. He is unchanging. He needs nothing. He is sovereign and that expression of God we see everywhere. That’s why we have physical laws with which we live and have all throughout human history. They can be counted upon. Physical laws are standard because God is standard. He changes not because He is perfect. When you are perfect, you have no needs. God has no needs. So God’s character makes Him a God of truth. Secondly, because God has proven Himself truthful. That only follows. If indeed He is perfect, that’s His character, it should show. And it does and it has, always has and always will. God has proven Himself truthful in history, in Bible history. We can study the scriptures and can see that every time God said He would do something, He did it. God has always kept His word, always kept His promise, always perfectly, consistently, and completely on schedule, all the time, every time. In Bible history He has proven Himself truthful. In Bible prophecy He has proven Himself truthful. He has never missed once. How can He miss? He has the vantage point of the Goodyear blimp. He can see the end of the parade from the beginning all at the same time. Reason number three. Why should God’s people be characterized by truth? Because the world does not embrace the truth of God. We are so saturated with the influence of the world, that maybe this does not occur to us very often. Remember when God took His children into the Promised Land, one of the standing orders they had from Him was whatever you do, do not look like the nations you are going in to dispossess. They are all messed up. They are immoral, they are ungodly, they are rebellious, they are disobedient, they are ripe for judgment. Don’t look like them! There is a sense in which God’s people should shine for Him on the basis of contrast. Every bit as though a candle in a dark room shines by virtue of contrast with the darkness. That’s the point that’s made here. The world does not embrace God’s truth. To the extent God’s people embrace it and represent His truth, we will honor and glorify Him and stand apart from the world, which is a good thing. Several points here, one is this. God’s truth as it represents Him in His perfect state is naturally, automatically, repackaged by people. We have a natural tendency to tweak what God says is true, because of our fallen nature. We tend to turn all issues into self-centered ones. Ourselves are our chief concern. When God says this is truth and this is false, we have a way of sifting that and oftentimes modifying it to fit what we really want, taking us to error to be sure, to sin, and eventually to condemnation. This began in the Garden. How clearly could God put it? Hey Adam, hey Eve, here are the rules. For the most part, very good ones, as far as they would accept them. But there was one rule they were given -- stay away from that tree, because the minute you eat of that tree then you will gain a knowledge of good and evil. Do that at the risk of being condemned. Of course, Satan came along in the form of a serpent. He cast doubt into the mind of the woman. Do you think God really meant it? She took the truth that God had delivered and said I’m not so sure He exactly meant it that way. Satan says you’re on a roll, Eve, sure He didn’t. Why, God just knows that you will be more like Him if you eat it, so I would suggest that you do. Of course, that suggestion, combined with the appeal of the fruit, led to Eve’s conscious decision to disobey. That began in the Garden. Throughout Scripture, this is proven to be the case. If you think clear back to Genesis all the way through Kings and on into the New Testament Gospels, how many times did people embrace a lie? God would speak clearly -- This is who I am. This is what I want -- and the people would make a modification. For instance, Moses disappears for a few days too many up on Mount Sinai. He has left instructions: wait for me, I’ll be back. Before he could get back down the people, not believing, not trusting, not clinging to the truth, began to clamor and cry and say, "This isn’t working for us." Aaron, you are in charge. Show us the gods who brought us out of the land of Israel. Aaron scratches his head and goes to work with gold and produces, of all things, a calf and says, "Here are the gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt." We wonder how they get from God all the way to abomination. It’s because of this natural inclination that everyone has to apply God’s truth in a repackaged sort of way. God would hold forth the truth from the prophets and the people would decide whether or not they wanted to respond to it. I’m going to take a detour to the book of Jeremiah, but before I do I’m going to Romans 1. I think the apostle Paul had an outstanding handle on the lay of the land, spiritually speaking. He wrote in chapter 1, talking about how it is that the entire human race shares the responsibility and the penalty for sin. The apostle tells us how glorious the gospel is and its power in verse 16 and 17. He says in the gospel we see God’s righteousness. Then he shifts gears drastically between verse 17 and 18. It’s as though he is saying in 17 God’s righteous is held forth; in verse 18, by contrast, mankind’s unrighteousness. He gets on a roll, as we shall see.
From there the apostle goes to say once God’s truth is sacrificed on the altar of our preference, immorality follows. We have talked about this before. We talked about make no graven image. Every time a person substitutes an image of any sort for a God who cannot be seen, not will not but can not be seen, when we suggest our own notion of an image of God, it will always be wrong because He cannot be seen. It will always be an expression of God that is less than what and who He truly is. It will always be an image also with which we can live more comfortably. Behavior always follows error. Create your own notion of God and unravel morally and spiritually along the way. Paul looks at this and says the human heart is in tough shape. Indeed it is. I want to touch down in the book of Jeremiah to illustrate several situations where the world does not embrace God’s truth. The first one is Jeremiah 7. We talked about these verses a few Sundays back when we talked about our building, this one we are sitting in. Because the tendency of people is to get a building, like they did. They had a temple, and thought now we have arrived. Now we have something. Now we have some kind of spiritual leverage we didn’t have before. The people of Jeremiah’s day felt that way, to be sure. They had the house of God built by Solomon so they assumed because they had the house of God they also had God. But their behavior betrayed that fact. So Jeremiah stood in the gate of the Lord’s house (Jeremiah 7) and proclaimed there this word, "Hear the word of the Lord." By the way, whenever that is said, it’s going to be true because God doesn’t play games. This is how it is. This is what God says.
Don’t count on this!
If you will repent, and turn back to truth and embrace first things, I will let you then dwell in the land. In verse 8 he says you are trusting in, you are basing your faith on, you are resting upon, deceptive words. You are hugging a lie. Verse 9 - you are stealing, murdering, commiting adultery, swearing falsely, offering sacrifices to Baal, walking after other gods. You are doing all this heinous sin and then you come and stand before me in this house and say, "This is God’s house." I didn’t do that so you can keep doing all this abominable stuff. He says no, a thousand times no. These verses underscore problems in society, certainly amplified here in Jeremiah 7 having to do with the people of Jerusalem. That list of issues is not that far removed from society today. Things have not changed much. The general public cannot be trusted with the truth of God or to represent the truth of God. It is interesting when Jesus asked His disciples in Matthew 16 who do people say that I am? Right now we know that whatever the people say will be wrong, and it was. Some say you are John the Baptist, some say Elijah, some say you are one of the prophets. All wrong. We cannot trust the world at large to present God’s truth accurately. People sometimes think if enough people believe it is so, it must be true. Truth is not established as truth because Ann Landers or Dear Abby or Dr. Phil or any of those people say it is so. Truth is true as God addresses it. The Bible says let God be found true though every man be found a liar. God is the standing majority and He will never be wrong. Sadly, people will be. If you were to take a microphone and a clipboard or tape recorder out to any street anywhere in the world and if you were to say to anyone, "How do you get to heaven?", ninety-nine out of a hundred will say something about being good, working your way, going to church, getting baptized, giving money, not murdering. If someone stands and says trust in the saving work of Jesus, stand by to be laughed at. "Where did you get that?" Happily, I got that from God in the Bible. But that is not the reigning philosophy. We cannot hitch our wagon to the community star when it comes to eternal and spiritual issues. Jeremiah was not the only prophet in town. He just happened to be the only one who was right, the only one truly speaking what God had said to speak. Whereas in Jeremiah 7 we talked about problems in society, in Jeremiah 28 we would call this professional corruption.
We stop there because anything said about Zedekiah means bad. Zedekiah was a fourth stringer who rebelled and would not listen to God. Zedekiah is the king. It’s a bad time.
Everybody is there. Everybody is listening. Sometimes, Christian people, to greater or lesser extent, have icons. If this guy says it, it must be. This is what Hananiah said:
Good news! Just hold out a little longer, all you besieged Jerusalemites because the Lord has spoken. Jeremiah is going, What?! What frequency are you on? Jeremiah got in his face.
In other words, I wish you were right Hananiah. I’m kind of sick of this Babylonian issue myself. It would be nice if Nebuchadnezzar would pack up and leave and give us back our stuff that he has taken.
Hananiah said, "Are you taking issue with my position?" Jeremiah said, "We’ll just see who is right." Hananiah said "I’m right." Jeremiah is told by God to go speak to Hananiah saying you have broken the yokes of wood but you have made them instead the yoke of iron. The short end of this is this: Hananiah is saying, "I have good news." Jeremiah is saying, "You are wrong." Hananiah was wrong. In the 18th chapter of Deuteronomy there is discussion about the office of prophet. The technical definition for the prophet is one who speaks for God. Some people run around today claiming that. If you spoke for God, and here Hananiah stands in the temple, in the presence of the priests and the people saying, "In the name of Yahweh, the Lord of Israel." That’s speaking in the name of God. "This is what is going to happen within two years." The prophet had to be correct because he is speaking for God and God is always correct. So they had a rather severe penalty for the prophet who spoke in the Lord’s name and was wrong. They took them out and "rocked them to sleep," because you cannot have that. You cannot have someone misrepresenting God so deliberately and so defiantly. If you read the story of Hananiah, Jeremiah says Hananiah, nobody around here is going to throw a rock at you because we are not there spiritually. But you are to die this year, and he died in the seventh month. It’s interesting how God says one thing in Deuteronomy 18 and makes it happen in Jeremiah 28. Professional corruption is still with us and we would like to think if somebody writes a book or gains a following or has a TV show or produces a video series or something like that, that they can be trusted. But oftentimes, that sort of thing is more about marketing than it is about truth. God’s people must be discerning there because professional corruption is a fact and always involves bringing God a little lower so that we can handle Him a little easier and/or exalting people a little higher so we don’t need quite as much. Every cult, every religion, outside of biblical Christianity does that. Every one. Either it reduces God in some sense, makes Him a little more manageable, perhaps a little smaller and maybe a little more physical, at least a little more indecisive or a little more absent or makes people so much better that we really don’t need Him that much after all. Jeremiah 37 - let’s talk to the king. This is King Zedekiah. Zedekiah has issues, and is headed for trouble. I would not want to be Jeremiah. He went through it! And here he is again. What is Jeremiah’s most famous misadventure? He was thrown into the cistern. This is what leads up to that. Jeremiah is imprisoned in chapter 37. The Chaldeans have lifted the siege. They were distracted by Egyptians for a little while. Jeremiah owned property just over the hill and thought he would go check on his property. He was leaving out the Benjamin gate, it says in verse 13.
You’re a turncoat. You’re a deserter. You are abandoning ship. This is treason. You can’t do that.
King Zedekiah took him out to his palace. He gets him out and away from the prison population, takes him to his palace secretly and says to him, "Jeremiah, is there a word from the Lord?" Jeremiah said, "There is!
This is the Titanic, buddy, and rearranging the deck chairs will not keep it afloat. It’s doomed and you are going down with it. He has said this repeatedly. So Jeremiah said, by the way, king, since I have your undivided attention, what did I do wrong? What am I doing to deserve this treatment? Zedekiah gives him a break for awhile and then in the next chapter, chapter 38, Jeremiah gets thrown into the cistern. Zedekiah is told the truth. There is absolutely no way to misinterpret that. But deciding what to do with it, he decides in error. In Jeremiah 38, Jeremiah has another audience with Zedekiah. Thus says the Lord, so I’m not making this up, Jeremiah is saying. If you, Zedekiah, will just surrender, by surrendering you are confessing that God is right and you are wrong and you are submitting to what God has said He is going to do. Zedekiah, are you there? Are you with me? If you do surrender, you will live and the city will not be burned with fire and you and your household will survive.
What was going to happen with Zedekiah is he is going to have his sons slaughtered before his eyes and then his eyes poked out, courtesy of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. The last thing he will see is his sons slaughtered. He has these two options in front of him. I find verse 19 very revealing. Zedekiah is the king, the consummate politician.
"I am afraid." Pride or fear will turn us from truth, will cause us either to change it or to ignore it because we are afraid. That’s why, in my opinion, we hear from time to time how hard it is to find an honest politician. Why? First of all, a politician, someone who rises to an appreciable level of public prominence, has a pride issue. It is a heavy thing to have that sort of influence, that sort of power, that sort of acclaim. So pride is an issue, and then along about halfway into the term they really want to get reelected and fear they won’t. Pride and fear figure powerfully into the system of human governance and that is why character matters at the polls, in the booth. It so easy for a person, an individual, politician or otherwise, to yield to pride and fear and to tweak the truth because of it, or to ignore it. Zedekiah ignored it to his own undoing. The dust has settled and the Babylonians have done their job and Zedekiah is dead and gone and the captives have been carried away, leaving just a few people in the land. They had political problems of their own. They think what they really ought to do to avoid the conflict and the reprisal of the Babylonians -- it is time to go to Egypt, they say. Jeremiah is still on the scene and so they ask for his consultation. There are a bunch of malcontents fixing to leave the country. They say, Jeremiah, we would feel a lot better if we could hear from God before we leave. What does God want us to do? Jeremiah said something very interesting, and it is for you and me. He is saying why do you even want to know because you are going to do what you are going to do anyway. So why ask? The guy tells him. Seriously, Jeremiah, we will do what you tell us God wants us to do. Jeremiah tells him that God is telling them not to go to Egypt. You will be fine if you stay right here. A lie!, they say. We are going to Egypt. Did they pay? Yes. Because God communicates clearly and truthfully yet we have such a nasty way of thinking we will be the exception or somehow God does not mean it or so far, so good. We need to get past that as God’s people and traffic completely in the truth. The world, with all its problems, in its turbulence and in its danger, remains remarkably disinterested in God’s truth, from the idea of creation as the Bible depicts it, in science and in history, in politics, ethics, any arena. Name an arena where the literal truth of scripture is intentionally applied. I cannot think of one. The world does not consult the God of the Bible. It is a comedy of errors out there in some ways. It is the Keystone Kops trying to figure it out. The pope says this about Islam and Islam says it’s about itself, and Christians say this about the pope and Islam and everybody is trying to interpret and there is not a soul out there who says, "Does anybody want to stop and go to first things?" But nobody will. I haven’t seen it recently, so this is totally an unscientific observation. I can remember years ago seeing a picture of the United Nations building and a great, big tall Jesus. He’s kind of looking into the UN, the idea being, I wonder why don’t they let Me in? The reality of the matter is as absurd as a forty-story Jesus looking into a building -- because He is not welcome there. Where God’s people come in, as we become people who are committed to our Savior and to His truth, we will see that that represents a light shining in a dark place. People are morally and spiritually adrift and they need to see the lighthouse. Brothers and sisters, Jesus said you -- that is, you people -- are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. We are the lighthouse. Truth should characterize what we do. We will need to wait a week for point four. "Scripture
taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Jim Carlson 2006, Lone Rock Bible Church, Stevensville Montana, USA |