Bible Lesson 100
DEFENDING THE FAITH
For such are false (Satan’s) apostles, deceitful workers,
transforming themselves into apostles of Christ.
2nd Corinthians 11:13-15
Defending The Faith 2nd In A Series
We saw last week, there in Jude verses 3-4, that there were false apostles that had already slipped into the young church, immediately after the cross; and because they taught a false gospel. Jude called for everyone to be aware and stand firm and contend earnestly for ‘the faith’, the truth of God. In the words of the Roman proconsul, Pilate, when God in the flesh stood before him for judgment, ‘What is truth”
That is the question that we all must plumb the Word of God, the Bible, to find for ourselves. Do you know the truth’ What would you say to a person who asked you, what is the truth’ Think about that for a moment and consider whether or not you could answer that properly. Probably you notice that I have substituted the term ‘The truth’ for our subject in this lesson, which is ‘The faith’. I want you to understand that both, The truth and The faith, are synonymous (John 8:32). You can know the truth and not have saving faith; however, you cannot have faith and not know the truth.
Jude in verse 3 of his epistle tells us that we must contend earnestly for ‘The Faith’ and the first thing that we must understand is that only those who know the truth can contend for the faith. The truth is everything that is contained in God’s Word the Bible. The Canons are today’. and have always been and will always be the truth, and we have to know the truth to be saved and to contend for the faith that saves (John 17:17; Psalms 91:4; Psalms 119:142; John 14:6; Ephesians 6:14; 1st John 3:18-19).
Those who do not know the truth and profess to have saving faith, try to act and sound as if they have faith and know the truth; but they are people that come in with the perilous times that the Apostle Paul tells us about in his second letter to Timothy (2nd Timothy 3:1-7). These messengers of Satan are people who have never trusted Christ, but who like the social atmosphere of the visible church and so they come among us and spread disorder, and misunderstanding, actually intending to lead the people of faith astray. The question now becomes’. Is it possible to draw a truly saved person away from salvation’ The answer is that it is not possible; however, they can confuse someone and make them unfruitful.
Those confused people will lose rewards in the judgment. Now, I have said all of that to say this, we now know and I want you to always remember that Christians are not simply sinners with their brains kicked out, they are people who know God through Christ, and they know God. We know that God has revealed Himself to us in two distinct ways, one, in the creation; and the other source we have is from His inspired Word, the Bible, and the living Word Jesus Christ.
The first revelation is the Creation that exists all around us, the world, people, trees, plants, animals, and our bodies, plus the sun, moon, and stars. Any rational person who observes how our system works to sustain life on this planet has to ask himself, how did this come into being’ The answer has to be that there was a Creator and we know Him as our God Jehovah (Genesis 1:1). I had a neighbor at one time, who was lost and undone and dying.
Every time he had a heart attack and went to the hospital he would call on me to come and pray for him; but when he was back home he would always challenge me by saying, ‘Brother bob you can’t prove to me that God exists!’. I always told him that if he was that foolish I wouldn’t even try to prove that God exists, but I challenged him one day to look around himself and tell me what he saw. He did and said that he saw the sky, the sun, the trees, and the lake, etc. Then I asked him if he had created any of the things that he saw. He answered no of course and I told Him that I had not created it either and since nobody we know of had done it’ it had to be God.
He had left word that he wanted me to preach his funeral when he died. He asked me if I would do that and I assured him if that was what he wanted I would do it. A short time later, he came over and asked me, ‘Brother bob are you going to say something nice about me when I die’ I laughed and told him that if he would do something nice before he died I would say something nice about him at his funeral. It is never a problem for me to preach a funeral; because what I do is never preach any soul into heaven or hell. I always assure those who attend that I am not the judge, God is, and then I go on to recognize the life of the dead one and attempt to preach a salvation sermon to those who attend. You will find people at a funeral who never go to church, so it’s a good time to make it clear that only God can judge anyone and that we all need a savior. The good news is that there is ‘A’ Savior and that is Jesus Christ. There is no other way to be reconciled to a Holy God, and if you are not reconciled to Him, you are destined for hell for eternity (John 3:16-21).
I hope by the time you have read to this point you have heard my call for you to believe the Word of God and the God of the Word above anything or anyone on the earth. There is only one way that anyone will ever be saved and that is by the Grace of God, through faith in His Son Jesus Christ and His work on the cross to be sufficient to forgive your sin and save you.
We are saved by God’s amazing Grace, because God determined before the foundation of the world (In eternity past, before there was a world), that He would save a people. God did not simply say that He would save a certain number of people, but he determined to save people by name and personality. Why did God chose some and pass by others’ Because He is God, and He chose to choose the individuals that He did. If you want to argue about that, you will have to argue with God; but I think if you are a serious thinker and reader of the Bible, you probably won’t argue the point. It is past time that our world should stop playing church and calling themselves Christians, as they walk in the dark and reject the light.
By that, I mean that over the decades we have condensed, pared, distilled, miniaturized, and completely gutted the Bible, the Word of God. That has brought us to the place that we think that joining some group that preaches some corrupt gospel (no gospel at all), and getting in touch with our feelings and our needs, that we are saved for eternity. Judgment day will be a great disappointment and great terror for those who have worshipped a false Jesus, carried a Bible that they chose to believe only when it said what sounded good to them when they hear God say to them ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’
Incidentally, the lawlessness that Christ is speaking about there is unbelief. Those who truly believe the truth of God, the Word of God, the Bible, will be drawn to the truth; and the truth is that God has revealed Himself to us in only two ways, as we said before, in the Creation which is always with us and in His Word (written and the living world) the Bible and Jesus Christ.
Now some multitudes see God’s handiwork in creation, but they never look past the manifestation, to see God’s hand in it all as the Creator. Consequently, some multitudes have the Word of God, His revelation of Himself to mankind, but they never take the time or spend the effort to read it, meditate upon it, and pray about it to understand God’s plan for their lives.
God does not work in generalities, and close is not nearly close enough with God. We must believe the Bible as it is written, and in the context of all that God has said to us, both Old and New Testaments. We cannot decide to think that we are smart enough to improve on what God has said to us, we must take it like God had it written. Incidentally, two of the biggest signals to me that any man is attempting to discredit God’s inerrant Word the Bible is when they say, well, it was written down by men and men make mistakes so the Bible contains truth, but it is not all true.
Then some like to prove how intelligent they are by saying, well, the Bible is true in its original state, which insinuates that the Bible we have is not necessarily true. My answer to that is, that it signals a lack of faith, regardless of how many people you can get to agree with you on either of those statements. Yes, God used men to write down His revelation to us, but these men were under the direct inspiration of God, who cannot make a mistake.
As far as the originals, the men who make those statements are men who do not have a copy of the originals and we don’t either, but we do have an Almighty, All-knowing God, who incidentally is still alive today and who will always be alive, who protects his revelation to us even though so many translations. I hope that I am not confusing anyone, but if you have trouble keeping up, just go back and read your Bible; because what I want to teach you is that God is so Great and so High above us who are His creatures, that we must learn to obey everything that He has said.
We must believe that God is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him (Hebrews 11:6). Then we must believe that God is the God of Grace and though He would be perfectly Just and Holy if He sent us all to hell, He nevertheless has chosen to redeem some of us through the death of His Only-begotten Son Jesus Christ. God tells us that before the foundation of the World, sometimes in deep dark eternity, He had prepared a plan for mankind, and those who would submit to and obey the Lordship of Christ would be reconciled to God by the blood of Christ. It was God that planned to save those who would believe. God chose to elect them in eternity past and to call them by His Holy Spirit in time.
God in due time sent His Son Jesus Christ to pay the penalty that God required for sin and Jesus did that by dying, being buried, and on the third day rising from the dead to be seen of many people. Christ ascended back into heaven from whence He had come and sits today at the right hand of God interceding for those who are His sheep. ( See Ephesians 1:3-9; 1st Peter 1:2; Romans 8:29; John 3:16-21; Romans 5:1-5; Romans 5:19-21; Romans 3:23; Romans 6:23;Acts 1:9-11; Colossians 3:1).
God did it all and He did it for those who would obey Him. I am spending so much time about God because we seem to have forgotten about God, and if we have not forgotten about Him we have forgotten who He is. We will never be saved until we get the proper understanding of God as He is revealed in the Bible. We have trouble with seeing Him as He is because we have not gotten ourselves out of the way. We mentioned just a few lines ago about God’s elective purpose, and this causes people to be indignant sometimes because they are not thinking about who it was that did the electing.
It was the One who created everything and everyone, and since He owns us all He can do what He will with us. You would think it strange if you made a dress or built a table and then when you wanted to give it someone or even burn it, some would think you had no right to do that. God is the Creator and we are the creatures, so God has all the rights and privileges to do with us as He will, and still be Holy, Just, and loving. What we should be doing is praising God since He decided to save any of us! God did not put a mark or a sign on any of those whom He elected or predestined to be saved.
Nobody but God knows who they are and the way we prove that we are among the elect is that we recognize that we are lost and run to Jesus Christ, learn the Word and Will of God and obey all that it commands us to do. That’s what happens when a person has been called out of the world by God and saved and that is what proves us to be one of the elect. Now, if you are not truly saved, begin to read and study and pray of the Bible because that is where we find out about faith, or establish a ground for God to plant faith in us (Romans 10:17; Ephesians 2:8-9).
Being saved is not like going shopping for a loaf of bread. Salvation is all of God it involves a dying to self and a taking up of our cross. It comes from the heart and hand of God, through the death, burial, and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ, who sacrificed Himself to redeem us from sin. Since I don’t know and you don’t know who it is that was elected to salvation, why don’t you prove you were by diligently seeking the face of God in His Word the Bible and strive to obey Him’ Don’t go to hell with a question mark in your head and heart, either do it or let it alone. Don’t be a fence-sitter, and by that I mean don’t think that you can stand to choose to sit on top of the fence between God and self and be above the fray. Many in the Laodicean Church did that and God made it clear that He would vomit them out of His mouth (Revelation 3:14-16). God would rather have you on the wrong side of the fence than on the fence.
I hope I have made the point and that you understand that salvation comes from God alone’.through faith alone in Christ alone in the work of His Son Jesus Christ on the cross. Salvation is a supernatural work of God in the life of those who are saved. In true salvation, God puts to death the old creature, raises a new creature and that creature is one that has God as His only hope, God as his only desire, God as the center, the edges and the fullness of his life and hope. This new creature is connected to God because they are indwelled by the Holy Spirit of God, and only these who are new creatures can live in such a way as to please God, and only these new creatures have that inheritance in heaven that is promised to those who are adopted as children of God.
This is important’ and I hope you will spend some time examining your own lives and asking yourself if the way you have been living can glorify our great and powerful God. We have as organized religion been slowly but surely ‘dumbing down’ the clear doctrines of the Word of God. Remember now that doctrine is any teaching of the Bible. Whatever the clear meaning of any moral value in the Bible becomes a doctrine. To mention a few doctrines may help us to understand how we have muted, softened, changed, or simply ignored things like abortion, adultery, fornication, homosexuality, marriage, witness, and many more. Whenever the church begins to appear soft on any teaching of the Bible, we have ‘dumbed down’ that doctrine, and the congregation now pays no attention to what that doctrine says.
We can say and be reasonably sure that there can be no argument that most sin and perhaps all sin begins in the church. They are planted, watered, and reaped by cheap-grace preachers, preaching sometimes the truth but preaching it objectively. In other words, we can preach about what Abraham or Isaac or Jacob did that was a sin and harangue that sin, but those who hear that, are not convicted of those sins. That is always a safe way to preach; however, it does not honor God normally. Real gospel preaching always preaches ‘Thus saith the Lord’, and then applies it to the congregation that hears it.
If we want to preach on abortion, we need to preach it for the horrible sin of murder (premeditated killing of our children), then make it clear that if there is any who hear our sermon on abortion, that if they are guilty of that sin, they need to repent and get reconciled to God. Any sin no matter if we term abortion as a woman’s right, abortion is a sin and will separate us from God until we have repented and asked God for forgiveness. It is the same with adultery. It is not enough to preach that abortion is a sin, the preacher must show how adultery violates that vow that was made before God and man in marriage and accuse, in fact, anyone in the congregation who is guilty of that particular sin and challenge them to repent.
I don’t mean that we point to anyone or call anyone by name; because that should have already been done on a one on one basis. However, if that person doesn’t repent (stop doing it), and confess it to the church then they should be put out of fellowship with the congregation. Sin and I mean any sin, is an offense against our Holy God, it must be stressed in our preaching, not once in a lifetime but often enough that everyone knows for sure that we will not tolerate it in our midst.
Godly living is done by God’s grace. We are at the beginning saved by Grace through faith, but Grace goes on to become our teacher and it teaches us to ‘deny ungodliness and worldly lust and to live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world.’ The flesh that we are born with cannot, and will not live, in such a way as to please God. That is the reason that in true salvation, God puts the old creature, that creature that has the nature of Adam to death and raises a new creature, a creature ‘in Christ’ who has the very power of God to live in such a way as to glorify God (Ephesians 2:8-10; Titus 2:11-12; Philippians 2:13; Romans 6:1-4). This new creature that God raises will always be drawn to a strong desire to know more about His God and Savior, and they will not be drawn away from the truths (The Faith) of the Word of God.
Anytime you begin to feel that you want to argue with the Word of God, remember you are arguing with the Will of God and you will fall on your knees and repent of your doubt. God’s children are zealous because it is zeal, with knowledge, that will receive the approval of God. Our God is jealous and we must and we will show zeal in our worship and obedience to Him. How about you’ Check your zeal for God. Are you earnest, thorough, whole-hearted, fervent in spirit. What is your priority, how real is your zeal for God’ Is God your priority whether you are healthy or sick, rich or poor, whether it pleases men or offends them, whether you get blame or credit, honor or shame’ The greatest hindrance to any man or woman being saved in our world today is themselves. Self seems to have ascended to be the priority in just about everyone’s life and that closes the door on salvation. What we have to see is that God is the Creator, and man is the creature.
God is the capital ‘C’ Creator and man is simply a little ‘c’ creature. Man is the product of God’s all-powerful hands that first created the world and then scooped up some dirt or dust and formed man. Man is insignificant when compared to God, and God could, and has at one time, destroyed all of his created beings including man except Noah and his family (8 people), and enough animals to provide seed to repopulate the earth. God spoke all that we know into being and having done that He has providentially provided all that His creatures need to survive and prosper on the earth. We are worms in the sight of God (Job 25:6), and yet He sent His Son Jesus Christ to die to redeem those who will obey Him.
If we understand God properly, our first thought should be about Him, yet if we are honest, most of the time when we wake we think of ourselves. There would be or could be no ‘self’ were it not for the loving care of God. We must wake up from our sleep and begin to strive to find God and His forgiveness. He tells us that our priority should be to ‘seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you’. My recommendation to everyone is to put everything else aside and concentrate on God until He finds you. When I say concentrate on God, I mean concentrate on the God that is revealed in the Bible.
Read and pray over and agonize over God’s words and His will, which you can know only from reading your Bible or hearing some faithful preacher preach it. God said that it all begins in gaining some knowledge about God and the only place you will find that is in the Bible (Romans 10:17). Begin your search for God by putting aside all the easy or cheap grace things you may have heard. Christians live in this world and they are susceptible to disease, heartache, bad times, and many bumps and bruises ‘.just like everyone else. Being a Christian does not make you exempt from life’s problems, but what it does do is to give you a heart and mind that accepts whatever comes knowing that whatever happens to them, it is working for their good. It may not seem good at the time but we can know that God is in control and He is working it out to our good (Romans 8:28). Let me give you some homework until our next lesson. Please read Romans chapter 8 and meditate on all that it says, several times until it seeps into your mind.
Until next time,
may God bless and keep you
This is Bro. Bob