HTPC – APPRECIATING AND SHARING YOUR SALVATION
Assignment:
Look over the Scriptural references this week (perhaps even
memorize a few) on the Holiness of God, The Fall, and Human
Nature. Then, attempt to explain these three essential messages
of the gospel to yourself. Hint, looking at a mirror can be very
helpful.
From Uri: If there are any questions regarding the content of this material please feel free to e-mail me at: apologus@hotmail.com.
Great references: Michael Horton: Putting Amazing Back into Grace; J.I. Packer: Knowing God; R.C. Sproul: The Holiness of God.
All
these books are found in the Holy Trinity bookstore.
LESSON 1 – THE HOLINESS OF GOD, THE FALL AND HUMAN NATURE
*Our goal in these next six weeks is to give you the necessary guidance you will need to a) define and discuss the gospel in Biblical language and b) present this gospel with truthfulness and passion.
I will attempt in these next six weeks to help you understand the content of the gospel of Christ and by God’s grace help you share your faith.
Our class is divided into six weeks and here are the topics I will try to bring before your attention:
Week 1) The Holiness of God, The Fall, and Human Nature
Week 2) The Work of Christ – Death, Burial, and Resurrection
Week 3) Drawn By the Father – Spiritual Resurrection
Week 4) True Conversion – The Doctrine of Repentance and the Lordship of Christ
Week 5) Evangelism in the Bible – The Greatness of the Great Commission
Week 6) How to Proclaim your Faith
THE HOLINESS OF GOD
One of the greatest tragedies in Christendom occurs when we fail to begin discussing the gospel in terms of why we need it in the first place.
The reason I begin this lesson with the Holiness of God is because His Holiness must be the starting point of the gospel. If sin does exist, if there was a point and time when sin came into existence then this has offended a Holy God. But what is Holiness? As the Scripture tells us, holiness describes both the majesty of God and the purity and moral perfection of His nature. Holiness is one of His attributes, in other words it is an essential aspect of His Nature. His holiness is as necessary as His existence. As opposed to His creation, which constantly betrays the Imago Dei (the image of God) given to us at creation, God never contradicts His character because He himself is Holy. Therefore, unholiness is infinitely opposed to God. That is why when we do not know what to do we seek the perfect, righteous, and Holy law of God, because the law proceeds out of the mouth of a Holy God (Matthew 4:4).
God’s holiness then is perfect freedom from evil. As I John 2:5 says, “God is light and in Him there is no darkness.” Of course, when the Scriptures speak of this distinction of light and darkness it has immense significance. Darkness represents inconsistency. For example, John says, “Men love darkness rather than light because his deeds are evil.” So men find pleasure in the inconsistencies of nature such as drunkenness, immorality and so on. Whereas, God is pure light! His thoughts and actions are consistent with His character. He will never abandon consistency or perfect logic. In other words, He will never be Holy and Not Holy at the same time. In the beginning and from all eternity past and to all eternity from now on, He will never cease to be Holy. He is by nature HOLY and as the Torah tells us, He is the Lord God and there is NO ONE like Him.
Now, by contrast consider our own lives. In time we Christians mature and we develop a certain degree of Christian character. We grow in areas such as truthfulness, purity and humility. But as you have already discovered from your journey in life today you are still not consistent. Because you broke that pattern when you lied, when you spoke evil of someone, or even thought about evil. That is why James tells us that, “If we have broken one of His Holy laws then we are guilty of them all.”
With that in mind, let me say that the Holiness of God should be one of our greatest comforts in life. Because if God is perfectly Holy then all that He does is always and consistently perfect and just.
This is the God introduced to us in the Gospel of Genesis. In the Beginning a (Holy and Righteous) God created Heaven and earth.
In Revelation 4:8 the angels cry day and night, “ Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God almighty, who was and is and is to come. Isaiah’s vision in Isaiah 6 represents once again the threefold ascription of God’s holiness.
And in Exodus 15:11 we read: “Who is
like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in
holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?
In fact the Bible uses “holy” as a prefix to His name more than any other title. Holiness is God’s crown. Imagine for a moment that God possessed omnipotence (infinite power), omniscience (perfect and complete knowledge), and omnipresence (everywhere present), but without perfect holiness. Such a one could not be described as God.
John
Gerstner expresses the same perennial Reformed interest
epigrammatically when he says to the contemporary world,
“One
cannot think of God’s holy ways without thinking of our
unholy ones. We cannot think of ourselves without thinking of our
sin. Sin is the most important conviction any man can have. It is
a bad theology, which thinks man good. Any good theology must
start with man as bad.”
Q&A
Transition
- This is the foundation of all our theeology. This is the
context in which we see the gospel being displayed.
One great professor whom you are probably all
familiar with began his class one day by saying: “ Man is
very, very bad, and God is very, very mad.” R.C. Sproul
THE FALL OF MAN
Passages to look up:
Psalm 51:5
Ecclesiastes 7:20
Isaiah 53:6
Isaiah 64:6
Jeremiah 17:9
Ephesians 2:13
Romans 3:10-19
The fall
"Monster," from first-time filmmaker
Patty Jenkins, is told from Wuornos's point of view, starting
with her girlhood dreams of being swept off her feet by a Prince
Charming who would see her inner, as well as outer, beauty.
Wuornos's dreams, however, led only to sexual
abuse, and by the age of 13, she was working as a prostitute on
Florida's highways. As "Monster" opens, she is sitting
under a freeway overpass, out of the pouring rain, contemplating
taking her life with a pistol.
But her dreams of a better existence, of finding
someone who will rescue her, save Wuornos from suicide. She puts
away the gun and wanders into a local bar where she meets Selby
Wall (Ricci), who has been sent to Florida to live with relatives
because her parents believe it will help cure her lesbianism.
Wuornos is not homosexual, yet she is drawn to
Wall because the woman offers her comfort and makes her feel as
if her life is worthwhile. Wall gives love and companionship.
The prostitute tries to straighten out her life,
but her efforts to get a regular job are rebuffed. After Wall
convinces her to go back to prostitution, Wuornos is brutally
raped and that incident sets off her killing spree.
Before her death, Wuornos was interviewed by
Jenkins many times, and eventually the film maker won the
confidence of the killer. The night before she was executed,
after 12 years on Death Row, Wuornos gave Jenkins hundreds of
letters she had written, detailing her life and her thinking.
"The letters changed everything,"
Jenkins said. "They gave us insight into her
character."
Theron said reading the letters was like reading
a diary. "It was much more personal than I think we would
have ever gotten with each other had I sat with her."
Wuornos's real-life lover Tyria Moore, on whom
the Wall character was based, had nothing to do with the movie,
Jenkins said.
The film's makers call "Monster" a
love story, and it is, albeit a tragic one. They say they don't
want audiences to sympathize with Wuornos but feel empathy. But
empathy is hard to conjure up for a serial killer.
In the end, "Monster" asks audiences
to look at the monster inside all of us, and it exposes society's
warts -- the kind make-up doesn't cover. "She was just a
human being," Theron said. "That was one thing that I
think people missed."
Well, you all know the story. God created humans
in His own image and “took the man and put him in the Garden
Eden to work it and take care of it.” Then He gave Adam
instructions: “ You are to eat from any tree in the garden;
but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die (Genesis
2:15-17).” This is the first divine threat. The process in
this fatal decision is instructive. It began with Satan’s
rebellion against God’s Word. He declared, “ You will
not surely die.” There is no mistake. Satan always downplays
the gravity of sin as God describes it. I mean, what he really
said is, “ Look Eve, God is not really serious about this
punishment thing, He is just trying to intimidate you.”
Perhaps this is what triggered her mind since instead of leaving,
she started a dialogue with the serpent. I think the same mistake
happens today when we see God as a kind George Burns type of
figure. He is not taken seriously, because people don’t see
Him as Holy as the Scriptures make Him out to be. They don’t
see Him as just. He is there for our happiness, not we for His.
Mistake number one.
The second stage in Satan’s plan is the
same one he used when he was expelled from heaven. Eve, took the
bait and many have done the same, “ You shall be as gods”
(Genesis 3:5).
The nineteenth-century poem by William Ernest
Henley expresses this idea well:
I thank whatever gods that be
For my unconquerable soul…
I am the master of my fate
I am the master of my soul.
Maybe Eve thought that she had an unconquerable
soul. And of course, Satan’s undermining of God’s words
is the climax of the Fall, remember? “Did God really say…?
It is also the central theme of a movement today called: “
Postmodernism.” This movement seeks to undermine the
objectivity of language. In other words, language does not always
mean what it is intended to mean.
In Augustine’s “Confessions”, he
tells the story of how he and his friends would plunder the
neighbor’s pear tree. It was not out of necessity, any more
than Adam’s actions were as he had a pleasant pear tree in
his own back yard. Remember, Adam had an incalculable tree
selection. St. Augustine, confessed the pleasure was in the sin,
not in the pear. The neighbor’s pear tasted good precisely
because they were stolen.
Genesis 3:6 – “ When the woman saw
that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the
eye, also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.
She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate
it. Then their eyes were opened and they realized they were
naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for
themselves. (Genesis 3:7). This has been the condition of
humanity ever since. We continually try to cover our sins.
Sometimes we spend hundreds of dollars in seminars or therapists
who will tell us how to deny our shame. Yet, we know deep inside
that we behaved shamefully; we feel guilty and we feel guilty
because we are guilty before a Holy and Righteous God.
Human Nature
Now
what happened to man? The Scriptural Witness combines the truth
of man’s createdness and the truth of man as sinner. The
result is falls in perfect harmony with what we see in mankind
today.
Of course, to say something is Biblical requires
us to demonstrate it from Scriptures. I want to share a few
central passages to this theme. Some of them we have already read
but now we want to look at them with greater attention.
From
the earliest records of the Scriptures we see how sin had
corrupted man:
Genesis 6:5: The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
This corruption is internal and complete: every
intention of the heart was only evil continually. This is radical
corruption not “sickness.” Such a person is not in
spiritual challenge but in spiritual deadness. This is a complete
rebellion against a Holy God. And the flood took care of this
problem with judgment, however even after the flood we read:
Genesis 8:21: And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.
So you see that man’s radical corruption had not changed: from his youth his heart is evil; not just here and there but continually. Can good come out of man’s heart? According to Scriptures the answer is clear: NO.
No one can change his nature.
Jeremiah
13:23: Can the Ethiopian change his skin
or the leopard his spots?
Then also you can do good
who are accustomed to do evil.
Just as one cannot change the color of their skin, or the leopard its spots, one who practices evil cannot break the bondage of sin and start doing good. The corruption is indelible and can only be removed by a radical transformation of the heart. Of course the media, books, and so on are constantly telling us that there is a “little good” in man, a little fire. But the Bible tells us:
Jeremiah
17:9 – The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
Psalm 51:5 – Behold I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me.
This is a general statement to include all of human kind without exception. In fact, and this is an important aspect of what we will be dealing with in terms of evangelism, the New Testament is continues the radical attack on man and His Nature. You will not find in New Testament evangelism, someone sharing the gospel by saying: “ Jesus loves you,” or God has a wonderful plan for your life.” Showing that he would fail almost every evangelism class currently offered in seminaries in the land, Paul begins with a dreadful treatment of the universal sinfulness of man. A biblical view of man is found mostly in the writings of Paul in Romans 1 and 3.
Here these words in Romans 1:21-25:
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
Man has twisted the Holy God of Creation and made something in their own image to fit their predilection, their fantasies, and desires.
Paul goes on two chapters later to describe this horrifying, sickening, and depressing state of human nature; this is a Biblical view of man:
Romans 3:10-18:
as it is written:
“None is righteous, no, not one;
11 no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
12 All have turned aside; together they have become
worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
13 “Their throat is an open grave;
they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
14 “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood;
16 in their paths are ruin and misery,
17 and the way of peace they have not known.”,
18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
This litany of quotations is designed for only one purpose: to shatter, destroy, and obliterate once and for all any idea of self-righteousness that might remain in man. The testimony is fatal to any kind of “evolution of the goodness of man.”
Spurgeon said:
“ As the salt flavors every drop in the Atlantic, so does sin affect every atom of our nature. It is so sadly there, so abundantly there, that if you cannot detect it, you are deceived.
This is the state of man. Next week, we hope to see hope in the pages of Scriptures to rescue us from these dark descriptions of our nature.
Split groups and answer these objections to unbelievers:
How to answer these objections posed by unbelievers: