Jna. 13, 2002

The Works and the Word of God

Psalm 19

This last week I was watching the evening news, with Tom Brokaw, and I got so mad I had to get up and leave the room. They were doing an "in depth report " on that 15 year old kid that flew a Cessna into the building in Tampa, and there was no news in it. It was just the reporter's biased, editorial opinion, pretending it was news, and it really got me fired up.

Later that night, I was reading a Psalm of David, and it struck me that some things haven't changed in thousands of years. We still live in a world where people are constantly feeding us disinformation, slanted opinions and lies, and King David had exactly the same problems.

If you have your Bibles with you today, and I hope you do, turn to Psalm 19, this is a psalm of David. David was raised in what was probably a middle class family, he was apparently well educated, and as a young man he spent many years as a shepherd, outside at night, alone with his thoughts. He had time to think, to contemplate, to look at the world around him, compare it to what the Scripture said, and during those times, the Holy Spirit led him to an understanding of what our world is really like.

Psalm 19 divides itself into three parts. The first part is the works of God, the second part is the Word of God, and the last part is what effect those works and that word ought to have on us. David asks the question: what does it mean to be really converted? What about sin in my life? What happens when I deliberately ignore God and sin brazenly and wilfully? Serious questions. We need to know the answers.
David also gives us a good opportunity to know what God means when He refers to "the Law", and we'll also spend some time on that.

Verse 1: "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
:2 Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
:3 There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
:4 Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world."
Did you ever get around a group of people and they got talking about the judgement of God, and somebody would bring up an argument that sounds something like this: "I just can't see how God can judge those poor people off in the far corners of the earth that have never even heard the Gospel! If some people have never heard the Gospel, it's not fair of God to judge them, or hold them accountable."

Superficially that sounds good, but it's also kind of shallow. David had that question figured out 3,000 years ago. God has revealed His existence through His creation. The fact that there is a marvelous creation is evidence that someone marvelous created it. Design equals designer. The complexity of the design demonstrates the intelligence of the designer. The heavens and the earth demonstrate the intelligence of God. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above us demonstrates that He is an artist.

More than that, it communicates itself to man. In verses 2 & 3, David points out that every day, in all the world, knowledge, and a testimony of knowledge - speech, is everywhere on earth. There is nowhere that it does not testify of the existence and the works of God. God's testimony of His power and glory is like the sun. It shines on all the earth, verses 6 & 7, the sun is like the power and glory of God, it shines it's light everywhere, nothing is hidden from it, there is no place on earth that man has any excuse not to recognize that there is a God in heaven, the earth is the work of His hands, and He knows all about us. Amen?

But for believers, the place where this psalm really gets interesting is in verse 7: "The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple."

"The law of the Lord." Let's talk about that. Over the years, we have had several occasions where there have been some who would try and persuade us that Christians need to keep the law, keep the Sabbath. In addition to trusting in Christ for salvation, we must also keep the Ten Commandments just as Israel was commanded back in the Old Testament. We believe and maintain that a person cannot be saved by keeping the law, the only way that a person can be saved is by receiving Jesus Christ by faith, and the Ten Commandments can add nothing to that salvation. We like to quote verses like Romans 3:20: "Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin." That's what the Law is for: to create a knowledge of sin. But now we have this verse in Psalm 19, which says that "the law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul." Interesting.

Galatians 2:16 tells us: "Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified."

We appear to have a contradiction here. Psalm 19 tells us that the law of the Lord is perfect, and it is; and it also tells us that it converts the soul; so obviously it does. But then we also read that none of us are justified by the works of the law, and that no flesh can be justified by the works of the law. Hmm...
I think that if we can figure this one out, maybe we can come to a solution about any questions or confusion concerning the relationship of God's law to a believer today.

Four thousand years ago, when Abraham followed the call of God, and came out of Babylon to become the father of the faithful, he didn't know much about Jehovah, he didn't know anything about Israel, he didn't know anything about the church, and he didn't have any Bible, or any Law. He just did what God told him to do. He simply obeyed God, he was obedient to what he knew God wanted.

Five hundred years later, when God gave the Ten Commandments to Israel, they knew a lot more about God than Abraham did, but they also knew a lot less than David did. And David knew a lot less than Peter and Paul did. And none of them knew as much as Jesus did, and Jesus distilled all the "Law" and teachings of the Old Testament down into four simple sentences in Matthew 22:37: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
:38 This is the first and great commandment.
:39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
:40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

What does the Bible mean when it talks about the Law? Sometimes it means strictly the Ten Commandments. In other places where the Bible speaks of the law, it takes a much wider view. Here in Psalm 19, I think we have the idea of the law as referring to the whole revelation of the will and the mind of God, because David goes on to mention God's statutes, His judgements, His warnings, everything. So when David speaks in this place of the law of God, I think he is speaking of all God's truth as it is revealed to us, not just the Ten Commandments. I think that's why he brings all of creation into it in the first six verses. The revelation of God in creation, and then also His will, as it is expressed in the rest of the Bible, covers all the truth about God that we can know.

So it seems to me that depending on the situation, when the Bible speaks of the law, it can refer to either the big picture or the specifics. Either way, it means being obedient to what God wants, and obeying His will. I submit to you that if you are a believer, and you are accepting and believing all of God's Word- not picking and choosing what you like and what you don't like, but trusting, believing, and obeying all of it as best you know how, then - you are keeping God's law.

I believe that for us today, keeping God's law is not focusing on just the Ten Commandments, but in searching out the whole counsel of God as it is sketched out in the Old Testament, and then brought into sharp focus in the New Testament. Keeping the law for you and me, for believers today, means accepting that the whole Bible is the truth of God, and God's will for us, and that means we need to believe it and act on what it says. God has certainly revealed His truth here, and if you believe it, and trust in what the Bible tells you, it will certainly convert your soul; Amen?

Verses 7 through 11 go on to point out in detail what God's Word is like, and how it is intended to bring people into the place of God's blessing, and they would make a wonderful study, but that's not where I want to spend the rest of our time today. I want to spend most of our time today on verses 12 and 13. These two verses get into an area that we really need to take seriously, because it has to do with sin, and our walk with God. David asks God here for guidance concerning two different kinds of sins; ignorant sins and deliberate sins.

Verse 12: "Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.
:13 Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me: then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression."
Two different types of sin: errors, or careless sins; and presumptuous, or deliberate sins. David says: "Who can understand his errors?" Romans 3:23 says: "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God."
Even when we plan to obey God, we still come short, mess up, because of whatever the reason. We didn't mean to come up short, we just did. We don't take the trouble to read His Word, so we don't know what is proper, and then we do what is inappropriate. We didn't mean to, but we messed up anyway.
We get thoughtless, we get careless, we get indifferent, we get lazy. We don't do what we should have done, and we end up doing what we shouldn't have done.

Why do we act that way? We frustrate ourselves, we aggravate the people around us, and life would be so much easier if those "error sins" didn't happen, and we don't even know why we do most of them.
David says: "Who can understand his errors?" David didn't know why he did them either, but he knew that he did. He knew that he even did things that he was not even aware of. He asks God: "Cleanse thou me from secret faults." He tells God: "There is stuff in my life that I'm not even aware of, and it is contrary to who You are and what you're like. And it is an offense to you, and I don't even realize it. Please cleanse me of it, I don't want to be that way." Beloved: that is a repentant heart. That is a heart that wants what God wants. That is the kind of heart that each of us ought to have. We ought to want to please God, and we ought to have a tender conscience about it. Amen?

Verse 13 talks about the other kind of sins; presumptuous sins. He says: "Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me. Then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression."
This refers to deliberate sin. This is when you know what God's Word says, you know what God wants, you know the difference between right and wrong, and you go ahead and do it anyway. The difference between errors and presumptuous sins is that one of them is because of carelessness and the other one is intentional. There is a big difference, and God takes it very seriously.

If you have come to Christ, if you have received Him as Savior, then He has cleansed you of all your sins, past, present and future. If you think that trusting in Jesus Christ and the power of His blood cleanses you from all sin, you are correct. But if you think that gives you a license to go off and go do anything you want to do, you are in for a rude awakening.

Romans 6:12 tells us: "Let not sin therefore reign - like a king on a throne- reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.
:13 Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.
:14 For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.
:15 What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid.
:16 Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, - watch this close- his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?"
The one you serve is the one you make your master. When you serve righteousness through obedience, you affirm that God is your master. When you serve sin through rebelliousness, you affirm that you are serving the one who's kingdom leads to death: Satan.

When you sin presumptiously against God, you begin to relocate yourself from the place of freedom and joy in God to a place of bondage. You begin to relocate yourself from the kingdom of God back to where you came from before you got saved, the kingdom of Satan. You begin to move yourself from the place of blessing to the place of judgement. Most important: you begin to harden and deaden your conscience, you become like a rebellious child that will not receive instruction.

You know how rebellion tends to alienate a rebellious person? The more they rebel, the harder it is to get through to them? You try and reach them, you try to get through to them, but the more rebellious they get, the harder it is for them to see reality, or hear the truth. That is what happens to us when we deliberately sin against God. We harden ourselves, and it becomes harder and harder for us to hear the Lord when He speaks to us. We become like a child that is so rebellious that the parents can't get through to it.

And at that point, our Heavenly Father has to resort to extreme measures to deal with us. Instead of being treated like a normal child that maybe messes up and gets sent to bed early, or loses privileges, or gets taken out to the woodshed once or twice a year, we make ourselves into a prodigal son or a prodigal daughter that leaves the Father, leaves the family, and goes off into a judgement of our own devising, of our own rebelliousness. Presumptuous sins will have you like the prodigal son or the prodigal daughter, out away from God, sitting in a hog pen somewhere eating husks and wondering what happened.

Don't get me wrong; if you have truly trusted Christ for salvation, if you have truly received Him as your Savior, your salvation is secure, you won't lose it. If you are truly His child, you won't ever lose that.
But if you have put yourself under the dominion of sin by presumptuous sins, then have you also put yourself under judgement here and now in this world. For instance: if you go out and rob a bank, Christ died for that sin, but the State of Tennessee will probably still put you in prison for a long time. If you go out and cheat on your spouse, Christ died for that sin, but if or when your marriage comes apart, then you have reaped exactly what you have sowed. That is the judgement that you will get in this world, and sometimes it can be pretty rough.

What kind of an attitude should the church have toward believers within the local assembly if they should go off into gross, sinful behavior? If some believing member's sin is wilful, brazen, and is becoming obvious to the people within a church, what should the church do about it? Ignore it? Pretend like it's not there? Act like nothing's happening? The world teaches that tolerance of others is more important in society today than anything else, and the biggest sin in our society today is to be intolerant. Well, that's tough. The church is not the world, and what the world thinks scores no points with God.

In 1 Corinthians chapter 5, Paul tells us what to do. He deals with how to handle sin when it is over the top, and everybody knows about it. Beginning in verse 1, he tells us: "It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife."
There was major sexual misbehavior going on, and this church was being too open minded, in fact, they were even proud of their open mindedness.
Verse 2: "And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you." Stop for a minute and think about what that means...

Verse 3: "For I verily, as absent in body, but present in spirit, have judged already, as though I were present, concerning him that hath so done this deed,
:4 In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ,
:5 To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
:6 Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?"

Just like a little yeast in a big lump of dough, sin in one part of the church will work it's way through all the church. When there is sin in part of the congregation, and that sin is not judged, then it changes the character of the whole church, and God cannot bless that kind of a church.
Verse 7: "Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us:
:8 Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth."

When we take communion, one of the verses that we mention in 1 Corinthians 11 is about how some of the Christians at Corinth had gotten sick or died because they would come to the Lord's Supper without judging the sin in their lives. They were keeping the feast with old leaven, the leaven of malice and wickedness in their lives. And God won't put up with that. The Holy Spirit makes it His responsibility to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ, and if you think you will make a mockery of His death in the remembrance feast by sinfully partaking of it, He will deal with you.

And Paul is making the point here that just as unleavened bread has no yeast at all, we should not accept or tolerate sin in our lives. We should also expect that the other believers in our congregation will not tolerate it in their lives either. Because just as leaven in one part of the dough will eventually affect the whole thing, sin in one part of the church will eventually affect the whole congregation.

That is why it is in our church covenant that we watch over each other, we warn and admonish each other, and we seek to guard the honor of the church. Because if we won't do it, the Holy Spirit will. And if it gets to the point that He intervenes, we'll all wish that we had warned and admonished one other instead of waiting for Him to do it.
Verse 9: "I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators:
:10 Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then must ye needs go out of the world.
:11 But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother (a fellow believer, a fellow church member, somebody that is part of this assembly) - if any man (or woman) that is called a brother (or sister) be a fornicator, (we know what that means) or covetous, (we know what that means; somebody that is eaten up with greed) or an idolater, (we know what that means) or a railer, (somebody that is notorious for verbal abuse, they tear others down with their mouth) or a drunkard, (we know what that means) or an extortioner; (someone who puts another person in a bind and then takes advantage of them, rips them off) with such an one no not to eat.
:12 For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? do not ye judge them that are within?
:13 But them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person."

When there is gross sin in a church and it is becoming public knowledge, it is the responsibility of the local congregation to deal with it. If there is no repentance, if there is no correction, if restoration is impossible, then that person should be put out of the church. With the church government that we have in this assembly, it is the responsibility of the elders to judge open, flagrant sin in the church, deal with the persons involved, and help them see that a sinful lifestyle is unacceptable. The goal is to try to get those persons to see what they are doing, see where they are going, get them to turn themselves around and be restored back into a holy, healthy, normal Christian lifestyle. If they will not listen, if all you get is talk and no action, nothing changes, then that person is to be put out of the church, and as verse 13 says, God will judge them. That judgement is explained in verse 5, where God withdraws His hand of protection and allows Satan access to that person, with the result being that Satan will destroy their health.

Perhaps it would be helpful if we could picture this assembly as a big umbrella, or a big shield, and all those under it are under God's protection. God uses the local church as a place of safety, security, protection and blessing. When a person chooses to depart from that place of blessing and protection by rebelling against God, and going after sin, then they get put out from under that umbrella, out from under that shield. That is why God says to put away from among yourselves a wicked person. You deliver them from the safety and security of the church into an area where there is no protection. They are delivered over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh. There is an old Jewish curse that says: "May you inherit a ship full of money, and may it not pay all your doctor bills." That's scary.

The reason I am being so very plain about this is because there is a situation going on in this assembly right now where sooner or later something is going to have to happen. And for right now, we will just leave it at that, because I am still hopeful to see some things turn around.

I realize that might sound very harsh; but David also mentions a worse possibility. In the first half of verse 13, David prays that deliberate sin might not rule him, because the second half of verse 13 says: "Then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression."
What is the great transgression?

2 Corinthians 13:5 tells us: "Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?" A reprobate is someone that is beyond correction. they have hardened their heart, they have ignored God for too long, and God has given them over to their choice of continuing in sin.

If you have a problem with presumptuous sins: if they have dominion over you: if you know what God's Word says and you don't care - if you know what God's Word forbids, and you could give a rip less - if you have a mind to just go ahead and suit yourself no matter what - be afraid. Be very afraid.

Because that tells you that your conscience is not open to the Holy Spirit. That tells you that you are not under the rule and authority of Christ. That tells you that you are very much a servant of sin unto death, and most likely you have never been saved, you have just deceived yourself that you think you are.

The phrase "great transgression" here means apostasy: falling away from God. Once again, let me say that I firmly believe that no one who ever truly comes to Christ will ever be lost.

But I believe that there are many who spend their whole lives playing church, talking the Christian language, going through the motions, and at the same time they have kept the Holy Spirit at arms length, while they do their own thing. And eventually they will wind up in hell.

If you suspect that there is any chance you are one of those people, listen up: the Holy Spirit has brought you under the sound of the Gospel. He has brought you to Christ. He has convicted you of sin, He has shown you that you need a Savior. But you have never repented, you have never bowed the knee to Jesus, you have never submitted your will, your heart, or your life to Him. You give Him lip service while you are still the only one on the throne of your life, and when it comes right down to it, you still do just as you darn well please, and you plan to keep on doing it.

On that great day of judgement, will you be upright? Will you be innocent from the great transgression of never bowing your self before God and receiving His righteousness to cleanse you of your sin? What is it that has dominion over you? The Son of God? Or your presumptuous sins?

We need to get serious about these things before God. David says: "Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer."
David considered the works of God in the world around him, and they taught him a lot. He considered the Words of God, and they taught him about God and they taught him about himself. Finally he considered the effects that those things had on him, and it served to make him very aware of his own shortcomings, and also his potential to mess up really bad. He asks God to cleanse him and keep him from sin, and to help him to get his head on straight concerning the things of God, and his life before God.

You need to do the same things today. These words of David apply just as much today as they did 3,000 years ago. They still apply to me, and they still apply to you. Let the works of God and the Word of God show you about yourself, and if the Holy Spirit has spoken to you today, let these words have a life changing effect on how you think and how you live. Let's pray.