Lesson 12c

Okay, we're lesson 13. If you don't have one, there's a couple back there. Next week, like it or not, Courtney will be up here. So everybody can miss next week. So we're working our way through chapter 4 in this lesson, verses 6-14. I don't know if any of you have been taking a look at Romans chapter 4, 6-14. But it's incredibly cool information in there and begins to show forth God's grace from a limited standpoint. So I encourage you to spend some time there. So I'm going to read 6, 7, and 8.

Even as David also pronounced blessing upon the man unto whom God reckons righteous apart from work, saying, Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not reckon sin. So, my first question was, Paul now cites David regards this doctrine of grace. Define what forgiveness is in verse 5. Your turn. What is forgiveness? Is that the heart of the question? None of you guys have ever been forgiven? You don't know what it's like?

It's divine. It's divine? Being declared righteous and what? No, it's not that. No. What is forgiveness? Newell says that it involves the heart of the forgiver. Yes. Maybe to set this up, forgiveness is remitting the penalty. You see that? So when you go to God and you ask for forgiveness, He remits the penalty. If you grew up a Catholic like me, if you went to confession and confessed your sin, there was a penalty. They called it a penance. You had to go out and say prayers. something, you know, but there was a penalty. And so you don't get a real sense of what forgiveness really is if you're involved in an environment where you have to pay a penalty.

So it's more than that. So Newell uses the example of a judge who of a judge who might remit a fine that someone has to pay because it was paid by somebody else. But it's more than that, and I think that Joanne's right. It has a lot to do with the heart of the one who is the forgiver. We're all so self-centered most of the time that we don't think about the forgiver. The one who is forgiving. God's, how do I say this, God's forgiveness is aggressive and it comes towards us in, Newell calls it infinite tenderness. I really like that. Towards the object of his mercy.

Well and the thing that always blows me away on that is that God's forgiveness It wasn't free, it was a huge price to pay to be able to forgive. It's interesting when you think about this sequence of the events of the cross, in one sense how brutal it is in terms of the crucifixion of Christ to solve the issue of sin and its penalty. On God's side of the ledger, it was horrible. He took care of the entire thing so that he could come towards a sinner like the father and the prodigal son came towards that son and wanted him close, wanted him near, wanted to have no barrier between the two of us.

I'm sure we all in this room at some point, especially if you have children, they ask for forgiveness, and you give it to them, but you have to work through kind of the, boy, you know, I do forgive them, but, or people come to you and say, well, I forgive you, but I'm not going to forget.

That meant they didn't forgive you, kind of thing. To understand God's heart. when he forgives us, there is absolutely no residual. He doesn't remember. He doesn't inflict a penalty. Now you may pay a price for your sins from an instructive standpoint, from a spiritual growth or a chastening standpoint, but it's never because God is being vindictive or he just didn't quite get over it. You see that? I think that's important. We don't think like that. We don't at all think like that.

And I've often thought, I have people ask me, well, how do I deal with a situation where I may have harmed somebody else? Should I go tell them I'm sorry? What do you think about that? Say I did something to you and I went to you and said, Russ, I'm sorry. Is that the best way to handle that? I think you ask for forgiveness. Yeah, I think if you go to them and say, look, will you forgive me? What have you just done?

You can question whether I'm sorry or not, right? But if I ask you to forgive me by the virtue of the fact that I did ask you, now you have to decide whether you're going to do it or not. And I think when you ask for forgiveness, there's a recognition that you have done something harmful. Harmful and that you have thought about it and been contrite about it and probably gone to the Lord about it. And so let's say I come to you and say, will you forgive me? And you say, not on your life. But you've gotten all this stuff, how could I not?

But see that's the point. As you begin to understand as a believer, The tenderness of the heart of the Lord Jesus towards you. There's nothing he... because it's already been taken care of. Well, all sin is against God. Yes, it is. And all sins were taken care of at the cross. So there's nothing to hold him back. But there's no forgiveness of the old man. Well, that's a good point.

Let's talk about that. So I go to God and I say, you know, I confess my sins and He's faithful and just to forgive me my sins and to cleanse me from all unrighteousness, right? Does He forgive an old man of that sin nature? Did He forgive that nature? Well, you can't say no without explaining. No, not yet. We're dead to it, but what did he do about the nature?

He crucified me, which separated me, but Romans 8.3 says, what the law couldn't do, and that it was weak through the flesh, God did, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, there's that sin nature, and for sin, singular, He condemned sin in the flesh.

So your sin nature and my sin nature is condemned, not forgiven. I'm forgiven as a person, but that sin nature isn't. That's one of the big problems of not becoming a believer before you leave the planet, because if you leave the planet still attached to that sin nature, you're going to get what the sin nature is going to get, which is condemnation. So by being crucified with Christ you are separated from it, so when you leave it goes to Aurora or somewhere. So in terms of forgiveness, it is important to think about it from God's side of the ledger. Notice it says, Blessed is the man who the Lord will not reckon sin, but for iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered.

What does sins being covered mean? It means he got his shovel out and covered them up? Covered is an Old Testament term. The Day of Atonement, what's the Day of Atonement? What's the Jewish word? Yom Kippur, right? Kippur means covering. And so when The Jews would go to the temple on the Day of Atonement or whenever they would give sacrifice for their sins, they were covered over. So what's the significance of being covered over? Did God just say, well I'm going to put a tarp on them and I'm not going to look at them? They're still there, but with us, they're completely done away with. He doesn't see them anymore. They're gone.

And the way you know that is that the first inclination of that was when John the Baptist saw the Lord Jesus. He said, Behold the Lamb of God, who covers the sins of the world and takes them away. Away from who? From God. So it's important to understand that covered When Paul quotes David, and David says, blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered, but then blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not reckon sin. So sins were yet to be taken care of. So what did God do about the Jews' sins? If they were just covered, that means they were still somewhere hanging around. How was he able to do that before the cross? Once a year do the same thing. What's that? Once a year do the same thing. But that was still a covering. Yeah. It didn't get rid of him. But it looked forward. Sure.

Isn't it interesting how even God uses a Visa card. He knew it was coming and he knew it was going to get paid in full so he could do it. But yet from an eternal viewpoint it was a done. Christ is a lamb slain from the foundations of eternity. That's exactly right.

So he could do it that way. But in time he waited for the cross. So David then could pronounce a man whose sins were covered out of God's sight in his mercy but not yet removed. He could do that. David understood that. But he couldn't quite rejoice that Christ has been manifested to put away the sin by the sacrifice of himself.

Hebrews 9.26.

It's really important for us as believers to understand the difference between how God dealt with sin in the Old Testament and how he deals with it now. And the reason that's so important is hopefully it will keep you from getting hooked up into Reformed theology because Reformed theology isn't quite sure.

Which is it? Put away or cover? I had a guy tell me one time, years ago, in the Tuesday Men study, he said, well, you know, one of the great things about going into eternity with the Lord as a believer is that every once in a while you're going to remember that you sinned and that God in Christ paid for those sins. I said, nonsense, that's not going to happen. Sounds like purgatory. Yeah. I said, why?

I said, why would God allow any of his saints one millisecond of thinking about sin? He didn't save us so that we could think about our sins and be sorry for them. He saved us so we could behold Him non-stop all the time and never even think about the fact that we ever sinned. Because anything like that is a self-thought and takes away from beholding His glory and He doesn't want that. He wants us focused in on Him all the time. See that? Well, we won't have this in nature. That's right. Until... Yeah, that's right. So not having the sin nature will change the way you kind of look at stuff, don't you think?

So verse 8, blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will not take into account or reckon. So what's the promise here in verse 8? The blessedness. What's that? The blessedness. But think about from God's side now, what's he promising you? He's not going to bring it up again. How cool is that? Courtney's always bringing up my sins. It's amazing grace. Yeah, it is. He won't let me forget. Lots of us. Newell talks about Peter. Do you think the Lord ever brought up to Peter what he did? He did one time to do what? For the purpose of restoring you.

He did the same thing with David. Psalm 32 says, Jehovah has put away thy sin. You shall not die. So have many been forgiven. David was a cool character. He committed adultery and then he kills the husband of the woman he has adultery with. There was a consequence for that. The sword would never leave his house, but he still had children after that. He was gracious enough to send Nathan to David's house and reveal to him that he was the one that needed forgiveness.

So the answer to what's the promise of God in verse 8 is really pretty simple. He promises never to bring up your sins again. So let's say you're cruising down I-25 in your Pontiac and you begin to think about some sin you committed way back when. Where did that come from? Nature. whispering in your ear, you remember when you did X, Y, and Z, or X, and how could God really forgive you for that? Now some of you who have been Christians since you were infants don't have problems like that, but us older guys who got saved when we were 35, there's a lot of baggage back there. And there are times, it still happens to me after 40 years, that a thought will come in my mind and this is the thought. Did God really forgive you for that? That was pretty nasty. I mean, that was a terrible thing you did. And you got by with it, too. You don't have that kind of experience? Not the only one. Four.

What is the attribute of God that is most hated and why? What attribute of God is most hated And why is it? Would it be grace? Yeah, God is gracious. That's the thing that everybody hates about him. He's gracious. Because are we gracious? Sometimes. But God is infinitely gracious and the world hates God because it hates grace. Have you ever noticed that? I don't know if you've ever noticed that, that people just don't like to be around grace. God is way too gracious. I notice within the confines of believers that when you teach, especially Paul's epistles, that grace gets to be too much. And you just can't bring yourself to believe that God would be that gracious.

Do you understand what I'm talking about? That's the sin nature. Because if grace is realized, the sin nature is suppressed or put away. Because the sin nature always wants to do something. It wants to do. And when you say it's gracious, unmerited, nothing you can do, who is the one who is fighting that all the way? It's the sin nature. I mean in the world and in believers. Because that goes against or puts down the sin nature. And the sin nature will fight That tooth and nail. So what's a good example of a cementure? It's what David wanted to do to Uriah and ended up doing. Have you ever murdered anybody in your own mind? I almost did one time. I did last night in my dream. I didn't dream about you last night.

Usually after lunch I have that feeling when we have lunch. I know. Whoever pays gets to feel like that. But the point being is that the sin nature Even as much education as we have about this in nature, we're cruising along and here it comes. Here's this whole thing that you're angry, upset, or you've been wronged, or whatever it is, and you just can't trust God about it, what he said, because my feelings are stronger than the word of God. They're kind of quiet, so I think you know what I'm talking about. Imagine having a God that will not, under any circumstance, reckon sin to you, you the guilty one. Imagine that. At no time does he ever reckon sin to you.

Isn't that something? his love, but he had to sacrifice his righteousness and his holiness. He didn't sacrifice his righteousness and his holiness. He had to take care of that issue of his character before he could demonstrate his love towards it. God so loved the world that he sent his own son.

It's really interesting I think when you look at how God can be so gracious in the middle of such vile acts as we commit, especially the real deadly ones that you never talk about that go on inside of you like pride and anger and greed and all of those, those are the real killers, right? And notice, you know, when we talked about the fact that I think Courtney was teaching that day, what is the thing about God that leads a man to repentance? What attribute of God leads into repentance? You don't remember? His goodness. It's his goodness that leads a man to repentance.

See, that's a really interesting thing. The Spirit of God is always drawing. He's not pushing. He's drawing. And it's God's goodness that draws a man. Especially from an environment where he's functioned in sin all of his life, or her life, and it's the goodness of God. You begin to become aware that God will accept me on the basis of what he has already done through Christ. No matter how bad it is, he's wooing me. And it's real, it's not phony. Do you see that?

God could not do that without the cross. Without the cross God would never move, none of us would ever get saved, we'd all be condemned and rightfully so. But it's his goodness that draws us based on the fact that sin was handled. And that's why God, like in Romans chapter 4, is so incredible. You begin to see this thing grace for the first time and how it works in spite of all the obstacles. Question 5. Do divine ordinances have anything to do with God's righteousness? Do you know what I mean by divine ordinances? Give me a divine ordinance, like we did one last Sunday here.

Thou shalt not kill? No, that's a law. Baptism, circumcision. The Lord's table? The Lord's table is an ordinance. So what do we mean by an ordinance? Something that God's ordained that we do. Say that again? Something that God has ordained. God has ordained it. But think about this now. God is operating under this umbrella of grace. An ordinance seems like a word that goes against grace. It's like, I want you to do this. Or do this. Like 1 Corinthians 11 says, Christ says, do this in remembrance of me. He says, do this.

Command. So how does a command fit under grace? or an ordinance, where he wants us to do something. It's for your benefit. For my benefit? Okay. How would I, I mean, if I read about baptism, let's say, and I think, oh boy, you know, now that you've become a believer, we've got to get you baptized. Why? Because God said? Or is it because it adds something to your spiritual acumen if you are baptized?

People say, well, you only do the Lord's Table once a month at Holly Hills. We do it every week at our church. We must get more grace than you do. Or you do it every day. Is an ordinance something that we live under grace except for two rules? Baptism and the Lord's table? Isn't it more of a principle? A principle? How do you mean, Mike? Well, I don't know. You tell me. It's grace. It's not... Well, in verse 9, does his blessedness then come upon the circumcised only or upon the uncircumcised also? For we say that faith was accounted to Abraham for righteousness.

How then was it accounted, while he was circumcised or uncircumcised? Answer, not while he was circumcised, but while he was uncircumcised. So if Old Testament In the Old Testament economy, the ordinance was circumcision, right? And what did circumcision demonstrate?

Cutting away the flesh, but also being set apart as separate people to God. So the question is, divine ordinances have anything to do with His righteousness? In other words, do you have to do the divine ordinance to get the righteousness? Answer no. So last Sunday we baptized three kids here. Did they leave Holly Hills and go back to Georgia with something different than they showed up with in terms of God's grace? What do you think? See now the denomination I came out with they would say yes, absolutely. Absolutely they did.

So an ordinance, so why would you do it? Because he asked. Because you're afraid if you don't do it you might be angry? It reveals the truth. Reveals the truth, but what I'm after is why would you do it? Because that's who we are in Christ. And what does it demonstrate on your side? That you believe in Him. That you trust Him. And so you go through what He's asked you to do, baptism or the Lord's table, because you believe in Him. Because you're a person of faith. Okay? Okay. But in answer to the question, they have nothing to do with righteousness. That's exactly right. It has nothing to do with righteousness at all. I think I heard how Lindsay, he was baptized five or six times. Was he? Yeah, the first time didn't take or something.

Well, if you're a Baptist, every time you switch churches you have to get baptized again. Do you really? Yeah, I do. Baptism is really interesting, I think, because it's such a demonstration of the cross. What happened? I've always thought that a baptismal should be in the front lawn of a church. Not inside somewhere, out there, because what you're really doing is waving goodbye to the world. You go in the water and you're resurrected in Christ, a new creature. I had a friend that wanted me to baptize her in Sloan's Lake. Did you do it? No. She died on me. So was Abraham declared righteous before or after circumcision? Before.

Now, I've told you this story before, but across the street from us for five years lived Zev Pomerantz. Zev and his, how many kids did he have? Started out with four, when he left he had six or seven. He was the number two rabbi at the synagogue over on Bellevue. He was a really neat guy. And he was a Hasidic Jew. and wore the black veil with the fedora and all of that. He was the one Jewish guy in the neighborhood who was really a nice guy. And so was his wife and their family.

So he came over one day before the Passover and he said, look, we have this thing we do in the synagogue where all Jews own some yeast. He called it hamas. We can't own any during Passover, so we either get rid of it or we sell it to the Gentiles. He said, would you be interested in buying the yeast, the leaven?

I said, yeah, how much? He said, well, the whole congregation. I said, what are you talking about? He said, well, you know, the way this works, Because we can't mess around with God, when you agree to buy it and put a deposit down, it's yours. And if we don't want to buy it back, you've got to buy it off." I said, well, that could amount to several hundred thousand dollars. He said, yeah.

I said, I don't trust you that much. He gets the Mayor of Greenwood Village to go for this deal, right? But he came over to my house the day before Passover started, and he said, we've got all the families covered except for one family, and they've got a few things. Would you cover them? I said, sure.

So I give him 20 bucks as a deposit, which he gave me the 20 bucks to give to him. And he says, you've got a handkerchief. And I would get a handkerchief. He holds it over his head, and he prays, and I pray with him. And we shake hands. We've got a deal. So now it's all mine. I can go take it if I want it. I don't know what it was. So I got to thinking over the Passover, because I've always wanted to talk to this guy about grace. So we went to lunch, and then he said, I'm going to come over tonight, and I'm going to buy the stuff back from you.

I said, OK. I said, by the way, I've been studying Abraham lately. He said, really? He said, he's our father. I said, I know he is. I said, you know what's cool about him? He said, what? I said, well, he was declared righteous by God. He said, yeah, I know. I said, 14 years before he was circumcised. He never said another word. He didn't want to talk about it further than that. I said, well, isn't that right? He wouldn't answer me. Isn't that interesting?

Because if you're law-bound, you've got to have all of these ordinances and systems in place. Yet God declares Abraham righteous because of his faith 14 years before he was circumcised. So what does that tell my buddy Zev? Kind of messes up his theology, doesn't it? And so I said to him on the left, I said, if you ever want to talk about that, I'd like to talk further about it because I don't understand how this works. I do understand it, though. from his side I didn't understand.

A Jew relied upon and based on the outward mark of circumcision which God gave to him in Genesis 17 prescribed by Abraham and his fleshly seed. Entirely forgetting that God 14 or 15 years before circumcision had accounted Abraham righteous wholly apart from circumcision.

Sacraments, ceremonies of the church, if they're viewed in the proper light, they're terrific, like baptism. But you can't substitute the sign for the reality. Do you see that? If you never get baptized, does it change anything with you? You already are righteous.

So circumcision or baptism or even the Lord's table is an outward sign or it's a symbol, both to Abraham and to the world. So it's a two-part thing. It's something that says something to you, but it also says something to the world. Abraham's righteousness, circumcision, said to the world, I'm not part of you anymore. Our baptism says to the world, we're not part of you anymore. It says that.

We become righteous because we have faith in the person and work of Christ, right? And even though the Ethiopian eunuch went down in the river and got baptized, it didn't change or add to anything that he had done. You see that? So, Newell says that it's a deadly, he puts it this way, it's a deadly delusion to think that baptism in and of itself amounts to anything before God. So it's important to know that and we have such a tendency to want visible stuff to verify what's going on with us spiritually.

7. Can a Jew be justified physically and not spiritually? What do you think? It's not according to Romans 3. That's right, that's right. So, we talked a couple of weeks ago about, well we didn't talk about it here, we talked about it on Tuesday. You know, we're studying Jude on Tuesday, I'm enjoying that to no end.

But he talked about that when the angels sinned, they lost their estate. And what he meant by that was that when God creates a creature, he also creates the environment he wants them in. Angels were created to be in heaven. Man was created to be on the earth and to live in a place like the Garden of Eden and have dominion over the earth. Well one of the problems with sinning is you lose your estate. Not only do you get separated from God like the angels, but they lose what they were created for. They kick them out of heaven. When Adam sinned, did he lose his estate?

Sure he did. He ended up out of the garden and out there plowing the fields and dealing with all the problems that were there. But Abraham has said that he is heir of the world, meaning that he shall not kneel. The meek shall inherit the earth. Now, wait a minute.

And God promised through Abraham the Jews would have the land, didn't he? Are they going to have it? All of it? Every acre that God promised? Yeah. So how does the Jews, in terms of the promise to Abraham, And those who are under the Sermon on the Mount, the weak ones, will inherit the earth. Who are they? Well, they're not Adam's. They're not Adam's offspring. They're Abraham's offspring. Why Abraham? Because he's the man of faith.

So when you became a believer, did you get a new estate? A physician. Did you get a new position? Where is it? It's in heaven, not here. It's in heaven. So when God recreated us in Christ, we got a whole new place to hang out that we're suited for. We as believers are heavenly human beings. All other human beings who are not believers are not heavenly human beings. If they are earthly ones, they have lost their first estate. The Jews are going to regain it on the earth through the promises of Abraham when they recreated heaven and earth.

Isn't that cool? So God is really consistent on how he not only creates a creature, but he also creates an environment for them to live in that suits them perfectly. Does that make sense? will suit the Jews to some degree, but not like it's going to be an eternity. So the answer to the question is no, just because you're like the nation justified physically or not spiritually, you have to be justified spiritually.

And the promises made to Abraham were that your seed, so shall your seed be as he looks at the Syrian sky and sees, you know, you ever been to Lake Powell? You ever been out like in Utah someplace at night when it's a clear night and the stars are like, there's jillions and jillions of them. That's what he was promising Abraham. Eight, was the promise to Abraham and his descendants made through a law system and why?

Verse 13. For not through law was the promise to Abraham or to his seed that he should be heir of the world, but on the contrary through the righteousness of faith." What does this do with any thought of acquiring anything from God? Let me ask it a different way.

Was the promise to Abraham and his descendants made through a law system? Do you understand what I mean by law system? How does the law system work? You do this, and I reward you. If you don't do this, I'm going to punish you. Is that how Abraham got all these promises? No. No. It was an unconditional promise. It was unconditional. I've had this thought a lot. God comes to Abraham and says, listen Abe, here's what I'm going to do. And Abraham, the fetus said, Okay, that's fine. But I don't believe you.

Would God still have done it? Yeah, he would have. Because he made the promise. And he would have done it through Abraham. Problem was, Abraham wouldn't have been righteous. But he still would have done it. But Abraham believed God and he was accounted righteous. It's done solely on a promise of the Word of God. God said it.

Now, what's the difference between the promise that God made to Abraham and what he tells us. I didn't ask that very well. Are we operating on promises? No. What are we operating on? Facts. I think it's really important for us to understand that. We don't read and understand the promises that God made to Abraham. We all know we're going to go to heaven. We're going to be somewhere else in the future. But right now our faith isn't based on what's going to be. What's our faith based on? What already is. What already is. And I dare say that the believers that I spend time with that seem to grow at a snail's pace, it's because of that one fact.

They won't believe what God tells them about who they are, where they are, and what they have. They just think it's too much, or they don't deserve it, or whatever their reasoning is, they just won't look at God and say, OK, I believe you. I don't need to feel about it, I just take you at your word. And I think if believers would just do that, it would change their life dramatically. Just trust him in what he says. He's already mine. And try to get off of this idea that I've got to feel it to make it real. No you don't. Abraham didn't feel anything, he just believed what God said.

And there's so much that God tells us, especially in Paul's epistles about who we are, where we are and what we have in terms of blessings that you just could spend the rest of your time just navigating through those blessings that are already ours. But we won't do it because we want some sort of physical or personal verification. We want an emotional attachment to it. And so God comes along in grace and puts us through a series of a series of trials to convince us that those are our gracious benefits. You see that? That's really what a trial is all about, is to show us, wait a minute, this belongs to you. If you believe me, it isn't that the trial will go away, but you'll rest about it. You see that?

I'm convinced that's what God does, and that's why the child training goes on all the time. And it's designed to put the old man out of business, to stop relying on him, just like the 40 years of the Jews in the desert, and bring forth those that believe, Joshua and Caleb, to put the death, the doubt in me and my old man so that the life of Christ can come forward. So I can do what? I can possess what's already mine. Last question. Does the law nullify the promises of God? Think about this.

What did it cost God to give us Christ? What did it cost Christ to put away sin? Your sin at the cross, my sin. What honor has God given Christ because of what he did? What plans for the future has God arranged through Christ having made peace by the blood of his cross to reconcile things upon the earth and things in heaven unto himself? What plans for the future has God arranged through Christ having made peace?

So the question is, how does law nullify the promises of God? How would it nullify it? And I'm not talking about from a positional standpoint, but from a conditional, to me, because law can't nullify the promise. If you engage in a works program, which the Bible clearly says are dead works, You neglect all God is and all He has done and all He desires for you and substitute your own uncertain fearful trifling notion of works to please Him.

For the narcissistic. To me it's just amazing, but we do it every day, don't we? Dear Father, how we thank you for your grace. How thankful we are that you are so careful to explain that it is by your grace alone that we are righteous and that we grow in the Lord Jesus Christ and the knowledge and grace of him and that we all may continue the growth process that you have begun. and that we would rest by faith in your provision and in your position for each one of us. And we pray in your son's precious name. Amen.