Bible Lesson 126
The Pulpit and Politics #4 in series
“But the person who does anything presumptuously, whether he is native-born or a stranger, that one brings reproach on the Lord, and he shall be cut off (put to death) from among his people.” Numbers 15:30
“MANY A MAN’S KNOWLEDGE IS A TORCH TO LIGHT HIM TO HELL. THOU WHO HAST KNOWLEDGE OF GOD’S WILL , BUT DOTH NOT DO IT, WHEREIN DOST THOU EXCEL THE DEVIL, WHO TRANSFORMS HIMSELF INTO AN ANGEL OF LIGHT.” THOMAS WATSON
We meet again to discuss the pulpits of America and the politics of America. If you have read the preceding lessons in this series, you should be aware that America needs the pulpits of America to teach their congregations the proper format or formula for selecting its leaders as they vote in elections. We have a problem or problems to solve and before we can do that we must know some basic truths about our God, ourselves, our church, and our church leaders.
We must be a church that is sold out to God and His Biblical Truths, always observing God’s will and following in His way. The church has a mission and that mission is to do God’s commands, in God’s way, for God’s glory; and I would add, it cannot be done except by God’s people. God teaches us that in 2nd Chronicles 7:14, where God speaks to us and says “If My People, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”
God calls for His People, who are designated as His people, to first humble themselves, and then pray and do what they were supposed to do to receive His approbation from heaven and the forgiveness of their sin and the healing of their land. God does not accept what we would like to do to receive God’s help, what God demands is for us to do exactly as He has said. First God says that we must humble ourselves and perhaps we should spend some time understanding what it means to be humble. It is used in the Bible to indicate a low degree, low estate, lowly, cast down, abased, humble in spirit, and humble-minded.
In my mind, it means that we are to see ourselves as God sees us, and that is a creature in our unsaved state, and as children when we are saved and adopted into God’s family. We have a serious problem in the visible churches of our day because we have not stressed the vast difference in God and His creatures. God is the Creator and man is the creature. God is perfect and eternal, while we the creatures are imperfect, temporal, and at odds. at birth, with our Creator. We are born dead in trespass and sin, under the wrath of God and we continue in that state unless and until God takes the initiative to call us out of that state and save us (Ephesians 2:1-10).
I suppose that it might be helpful for us to find in the Bible, the Word of God, some examples of humility. Bildad, the pseudo friend of Job, at least understood what humility looks likes when he said to Job, “Dominion and fear belong to Him; He makes peace in His high places. Is there any number to His armies’ Upon whom does His light not rise’ How then can a man be righteous before God’ Or how can he be pure who is born of a woman’ If even the moon does not shine, and the stars are not pure in His sight, How much less man, who is a maggot, and a son of man who is a worm'” Bildad may not have been much of a friend to Job, but he certainly had humility understood. When was the last time that anyone referred to you as a worm’ When was the last time that you got close enough to God that you realized on your own that you were at least a worm’.
Our problem is that we have begun to think that we can bring God down to our level, and raise ourselves in our estimation, to be more than the worms that we are’ For decades now our society and hence our Churches have been teaching the importance of the individual, the great value of the individual and individual freedoms; and that would be fine if we had not forgotten God. We lifted the individual so high that God almost disappeared from the picture. Much of our worship these days goes toward our church buildings, our church programs, our church outreach, and our church leaders that we do not have any worship left for our God, our Creator, sustainer, and savior. Now, even though many will dispute what I have just said, it remains the truth. We have become so arrogant in our self-worship that we sometimes go for days and weeks without speaking the word, God. I’m sure that almost everyone in the visible church of our day thinks in their mind that they are saved, albeit on their terms, and that they are going to inherit heaven when they die.
But our Omniscient God has issued a warning about that when He said in Proverbs 16:25, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in its end is the way of death.” That kind of thinking highlights the fact that so many are not humble before the Lord. It is not all about God, but all about their lives and their desires and their peace and their felt needs being met. We cannot feign humility, because everyone knows when a man is humble. Humble does not mean that we are a door-mat or doesn’t mean that we have no power to understand reality, or that we doubt our power. It has been said by John Ruskin that great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through them, and they see something divine in other men. The true Christian has great powers within himself; because He is in Christ and Christ is in Him. Now that is not a slogan that Christians use to make themselves seem secure, that is an absolute truth for those who have truly been saved, (born again and a new creature in Christ). The Apostle Paul wrote under the inspiration of God and said “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless, I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in Him who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Galatians 2:20.
The lack of humility has caused the collapse of many nations, great and small, and we may be looking at collapse for our nation since we have become so condescending toward our Creator God. John Adams said, “It must be felt that there is no national security but in the nation’s humble acknowledged dependence upon God and His overruling providence.” Many who read Second Chronicles 7:14, apparently overlook the priority of the tasks that God assigns to His people who apply for forgiveness. If we look at it, God spoke to us and said first humble yourselves, or recognize your position before me and unless we do that, we have no way to reach God. Humble speaks of the opposite of arrogance, and we must always be careful not to arrogantly approach God.
We must come only under the blood of God’s Son, seeing ourselves as God sees us, not high and lifted up but instead lowly and with a humble and contrite heart. Once we see ourselves as only God can see us, we will, without any outside encouragement pray as we have never prayed before. Once we are reminded of the facts of our lives, how we were the enemy of God, and under His wrath, with no help and no hope of ever being able to change our status: but God who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved) Ephesians 2:1-5. Now, that being said, how should we then live, and when I say us, I’m speaking of those who are truly saved’ meaning that only those that are saved should be members of the church.
What do you imagine God sees when He looks at the visible church, at least in America, what does He see’ God has to see the institutional church, the denominational church, the visible church of America for the most part like He saw His people in Judah when He spoke through Jeremiah the prophet, when He says, “For My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken the fountain of living waters and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” Jeremiah 2:13. Some of you may not know what a cistern is and I am old enough to tell you. Before people had water supplied from central points into their homes, people had to provide water for themselves. They dug wells, and put up large tanks to catch rainwater, and built cisterns which simply were large holes dug in the ground and prepared to catch and hold water. God was upset with these people because they had left their first love, the Lord, and thought that they could replace Him with something or someone that they preferred.
The problem has always been with cisterns that they leaked or leached water back into the ground and collected waste of all kinds. They were serviceable only when there was a good bit of rain. We would be wise to look back to the Old Testament to find out for ourselves how God feels about places of worship where there is not the purity that should be in God’s people. We can find out by looking at Ezekiel chapter 9 and verses 3 through 6, which tell us, “And the glory of the God of Israel was gone up from the cherub, whereupon He was, to the threshold of the house. And He called to the man clothed with linen, which had the writer’s ink hold by his side; And the Lord said unto him, Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof. And to the others He said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through the city, and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity: Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark; and begin at My sanctuary. Then they began at the ancient men who were before the house.”
Now, I want to clear that up for you, so I will put down for you those same verses in the language of our day from the Tyndale Life Application Bible. Those verses that I set down above from the KJV, are explained in the commentary of the Tyndale Life Application Bible, and they say, “Then the glory of the God of Israel rose from between the cherubim, where it had rested, and moved to the entrance of the Temple. And the Lord called to the man dressed in linen who was carrying the writer’s case. He said to him, “Walk through the streets of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of all those who weep and sigh because of the sins they see around them.” Then I heard the Lord say to the other men, “Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked. Show no mercy; have no pity! Kill them all’..old and young, girls and women and little children. But do not touch anyone with the mark. Begin your task right here at the Temple.”
The spiritual leaders of Israel blatantly promoted their idolatrous beliefs, and the people abandoned God and followed them. Spiritual leaders are especially accountable to God because they are entrusted with the task of teaching the truth (See James 3:1). When they pervert the truth, they can lead countless people away from God and even cause a nation to fall. It is not surprising then, that when God began to judge the nation, He started at the Temple, and worked outward (See 1st Peter 4:17). How sad it is that in the Temple, the one place where they should have been teaching God’s truth, they were teaching lies. That leaves no doubt for us to know for sure that God will begin Judgment in the church; because the people that are truly saved are to set the standard for the world.
Now, I ask you how would your church, or any church for that matter, fair if God set that same judgment in place today’ Suppose God marked, someway, all of those that were pleasing to Him and then sent armed men to kill everyone else’ Well, that is exactly how it will be in judgment and nobody but God knows when that will be. God is going to sit in Judgment and all who have not obeyed Him and been pleasing in His sight will be sent to hell for eternity, and yet we continue to ‘play church’ and walk in our way. It sometimes seems that we are not only blind but that we are also deaf and dumb. When most people in churches today hear the unvarnished truths of the Bible, they either get angry or simply dismiss the truth as an error. We have been wrong for so long that the truth simply does not compute with us.
The church has become undisciplined because it left the Word of God. The Bible certainly teaches discipline; however that word has been banished from the visible church and the minds of its members, it’s pulpits, and in fact, our culture. We have been taught to be tolerant over every other teaching, and so we do not discipline ourselves, our children, our government, or anyone wrong. God established the death penalty after the flood, but in our time most ‘death watches’ (People who gather outside a facility where someone has been given the death penalty) consist of mostly people who are church members. It seems worse for a teacher to spank a child than it is for the government to put to death a murderer.
You may wonder what all this has to do with the church and politics, and I’m glad you asked. Until individual people come to the place that they can abide by the truths of the Word of God, the Bible, we can never have a proper influence upon the society or the politics of our society. Individual church members will either have to seek the face of God and become obedient Christians or the leadership of the churches will have to do what they should have done in the first place, and that is to either see that they do not call themselves Christians and excommunicate them. Politics is one of the dirtiest games going on in America today and it has affected the entire society.
When we elect homosexuals and refuse to execute judgment on admitted sodomites, when elected officials can steal the national treasure, when the American people elect to give preferential treatment to those who have dishonorably served in a government position, then we deserve to lose our country. As I said before, we as people who call ourselves children of God, (and only a truly saved person, born again and obedient to all that the Bible says) can properly call themselves Christian, must stand for the commandments, precepts, and testimonies of God as they are stated in the Bible. That kind of church and that kind of lifestyle is the only thing that will ever influence our churches, our society, and our politics. The church has taken a defensive position and it has become almost separate from anything outside the stain glass windows. Yes, Christians are told not to live as the world lives but it does not tell us to separate ourselves from the world.
What do you do with salt, it is never any good if we leave it in the salt shaker’ Christ said we were to be salt to retard the growth of corruption; however, we must be poured out and rubbed into whatever it is that we are to safeguard. That reminds me of a story I read a while back, about a church in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. It was located right next to a railroad track that was used by trains to carry Jews to the death camps. Every Sunday, as trains went by, the congregation was subjected to the screams and cries for mercy of the Jews who had been uprooted from homes and families and sentenced to almost certain death in the labor camps. As most churches would do they decided to just sing at the top of their voices when a trainload of Jews passed by, and this drowned out the Jewish voices. Were the people in that church salt or light’ Absolutely not, and neither are we as we sit by in our comfortable pew and our air-conditioned environment and simply sing as loud as we can as the world around us goes to hell along with many who are members of our congregation.
I believe that Jesus Christ said that He would build His Church (Matthew 16:18), and meant that it would be a living entity, one that would always reflect His glory to the world, and be salt and light to their communities. I do not believe that Christ would build all kinds of denominational churches that would all use the same Bible but not interpret it the same way. I won’t say any more than that right here but I believe that the Church is a single entity, at least the true church is. So should the church of the Living God have anything at all to do with politics from its pulpits’ It should but only after it has come back to the Bible as it is written and it’s context and has purified itself and begins to start right outside its front door and work it’s way to the nation’s capital. Are you willing as one individual to begin to study God’s Word, and I mean to read it to hear from God, instead of reading it to teach God what you have heard. To stand for God regardless of the consequences and honestly walk with God, not intending to lead Him anywhere. If we will all do that, and it won’t be easy, we can leave a marker for our children in this world.
Until next time,
may God bless and keep you
This is Bro. Bob