Bible Lesson 175

Almost Truths about the Word of God

“Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth” John 17:17

The truth is as old as the everlasting hills. Therefore, dear friends, be not touched with that Athenian madness of always seeking after some new thing. Did you ever hear of new gold? To all intents and purposes, all gold that is worth having is old.
Spurgeon

Let’s talk about truth today, but first we should try to understand what truth really is. We have allowed little imbeciles to train some of us to say ignorant things like ” well, truth is what ever you as an individual wants to believe.” and truth is some times truth for one individual but not true for others. Now, some of you who read this may think that I use some language that you may not think is appropriate for a preacher, and that is because I call some people who do not have a clue about truth, imbeciles; however, it is time that those of us who know the truth must speak the truth and anyone who would say some of the things that are not true about God and His Word, ‘you are an imbecile! Truth is hard and it never changes and it must be spoken like God spoke it. God spoke nothing but truth when He inspired the writers of the Bible to write the absolute truths that govern our world. I think that it was that great old preacher Charles H. Spurgeon that said of truth, ‘If truth is optional , error is justifiable.’

It may seem to you, because it does to me that we have been subtly led down the primrose path, and little by little we have believed the devil’s lie, to the point that we now think that the children of God can take other religions and integrate them into our worship of God. The problem is that we have believed a lie and not believed the truth, because we do not know the Word of God, the Bible. As close as some ever get to Biblical truth, is to carry around a Bible that we never really read or study.

Bibles have become the most viewed but the least read books in America. What makes that doubly bad is that everybody thinks that they have heard enough about the Bible, and God from conversations overheard, sermons preached, and simple osmosis which means that because there is knowledge of God, we somehow supernaturally know it. The majority of people that you will encounter in your daily walk will ‘know’ much about the Bible and about God that is not even close to being true. The question becomes, what can we who are truly saved, born again and obedient to God, do about this lack of knowledge’ We have to become witnesses of the truth. We have to step out once we have prepared ourselves, begin to confront the errors that exist and use our Bibles to prove our points.

Most of the people who want to know truths?that are not truths will probably almost never have a Bible handy, so you must carry yours. The first order of the day for us is that we are never to attempt to prove something to one of these that do not know the truth but think that they do, is to always have your bible ready and know where to find the scripture that is in question.

If you don’t have your Bible and are able to point to the scripture and read it to them and have them read it for themselves, you will be wasting you breath most of the time. People today are not people who want to learn or be taught anything, and when you attempt to correct them about something that they have wrong, they will stop listening.

The thing that we must remember is that we must never get into a shouting match with those who want to disagree. We cannot save anybody, so we speak the truth and those who listen have an opportunity to be saved, but we cannot change anyone’s mind nor can we save anybody. We can take a lesson from our Savior Jesus Christ on that. Remember, Jesus and the rich young ruler? This rich young man who was a leader of Israel, came to Jesus and asked ?What shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ At this time in his life Jesus was under the law because He was a Jew, quoted the commandments concerning man’s duty to man, to which the young man said that he had kept from his youth. God did not argue with him, instead, God simply said “if you want to be perfect, go sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.

Was Jesus equating our being poor with salvation? Absolutely not, Christ knew what the young rulers problem was and it was that he was worshipping his treasure, and if he was willing to give up that idol that he had and come completely to Christ, then he could be saved. What did the rich young ruler decide? He decided to go to hell along with his money and goods, (Matthew19:16-22). Now, notice that Jesus did not call him back and sweeten the deal. Jesus did not seem concerned about this nice young man who had money and the fact that He needed to be saved. Christ knew that the Father must do a work to call anyone who is saved to Christ and until and unless The Father worked, nothing would help this rich young ruler. So as far as you know today, this rich young ruler who had been so blessed in the world, is today in hell for eternity. He may have been saved later on but we are not told that he was. That is the difference between Christ and many professing Christians today, Jesus had given the young man the information he needed and did not have, but Christ knew that unless the Father drew this young man to Him, the young ruler would not be saved ( John 6:44). Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler is one of the truths that we will high light in this lesson.

Lie number one out there today about Biblical Truths is that people believe or act as if they believed that a person can be argued into salvation. That’s the reason that so many witness opportunities turn into screaming and yelling sessions. There is no where in the Bible that we can find that would lead anyone to believe that high-pressure witness and quoting of scriptures can save anyone. The best scripture to prove that point is found in Ephesians 2:1, where God speaks to us through the Apostle Paul and points to the fact that everyone of us (saved or lost), was born dead in trespass and sin; and that it takes a work of God to quicken us in order for us to have the capability to understand the scriptures. The sweetest baby that you ever saw ?and to me they are all adorable, is born dead in trespass and sin, they have no means of communicating with God and hence they have no desire to know about God. We are born connected to the flesh and disconnected from God. We are told in Romans 8:7, that the carnal mind (fleshly mind) is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. Everyone of us that has ever been born of the flesh (sexual reproduction), was born under God’s wrath, going to hell, unheeding and unable to help ourselves, but because God is rich in Mercy, because of his great love with which He loved us, some of us will be called, justified, sanctified and regenerated by God in time (Ephesians 1:1-10).

Now, just about everyone in our time, likes to believe that God is going to save everyone ?somehow, someway, before we get to hell, that is another great lie that has been propagated and loved by those who are Satan’s children. We like to believe that because God is a God of love that He will allow His love to set aside His justice and that in the end we will all be somehow saved. We can put the lie to that by reading and understanding Matthew 7:14, which says “Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few that find it.” Then we can read Matthew 7:21-23, which informs us and this is Jesus preaching, the Sermon on the Mount, just as He was in Matthew 7:14, and He says, “Not everyone who says to Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. In Romans 2:5-13, we find again as we do in many verses throughout the Bible, that it is only those who are obedient to the commandments of God that will be saved. That brings us to another great lie that has been propagated by Pastors, Teachers and Evangelist, and then trumpeted by those who do not know any better, and that is that we are all God’s children, so therefore God loves us all just the way we are. That sounds good to the lazy and unconcerned but it is a blatant lie off the mudsills of hell. The truth is that only those who are reborn by God, and are obedient to God are His children, all others are the children of the devil (Satan). Jesus Christ, the only savior of mankind, says “If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of Myself, but He sent Me. Why do you not understand My speech? Because you ae not able to listen to My word. You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it. (John 8:42-44).

Another lie that is often told as the truth is that “There is not a hell, and no eternal suffering.” Hear me well, now, because your eternal lives depend upon the truth and how we receive it. Hell is appointed for those who for whatever reason never come to the point that they hate their lives and their lifestyle, and then they cast themselves on the Work and Person of Jesus Christ. If you never get to that point, then you will never be saved. If you read the Bible and study it and believe it as you should, you have probably noticed that Jesus spoke more about hell than He did heaven, He may not have mentioned hell more than He did heaven but He described the torments etc of hell, in much more vivid details: for instance in Luke 16:19-31, we read of the torment of hell and the fact that it does exist. That account goes like this?.”There was a certain rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day. But there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, full of sores, who was laid at his gate” now, I will paraphrase the rest of the story?.the old infirm beggar died and was carried by the Angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried and being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. Then the rich man cried out “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” The rich man did not ask for his release, for he knew that hell has no escape, he would have to be tormented forever; what he wanted Abraham to do was to send Lazarus to witness to his brothers to keep them from coming to this place of torment. Abraham said ?they have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them. The rich man argued that they would be prone to listen to one that had been raised from the dead, than they would be to believe Moses and the prophets, but Abraham said no! Now remember you need to read those verses for yourself because I paraphrased some of it, then you need to remind yourself that you have every thing that you need to convince you that you should seek the face of God. It’s all in the Bible and you need to search the scriptures. Remember, once you get to hell there are no second chances, so do it now, do it today.

Another truth that takes a lot of wresting or twisting, is the love of God and Christ. Now, nine out of ten people that you could or would talk to today, will tell you that God and Christ loves everybody. That is what they have been taught in Sunday School and church ever since they were born. It is a pleasant and pleasing idea, but it is a lie according to Jesus Christ. Jesus assures us that it is “He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me, and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.” (John 14:21). Now does that say that the Father and the Son (God loves everybody). Unless you are not very smart, you have to know that Jesus just put the lie to that idea that God loves you just the way you are. If you are His Child and obedient to Him, He loves you and you know His Son Jesus Christ in the forgiveness of your sin, but if not God has you under his wrath. God wanted us to be sure and understand that His love depends upon our obedience, because He also says to us, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and we will come and make our home with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine but the Fathers’ who sent Me. (John 14:23-24). Then to make sure we hear it right Jesus preaches in John chapter 15 ,that ?As the Father loves Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.”(John 15:9-10).

That brings us to another truth that has been confused and all of these lead people astray, away from the salvation of God. This lie that has been preached and taught as a truth is that Jesus died for everyone. Do you believe that Jesus died on the Cross for everyone? Chances are you do; because most people today really believe that. What does the Bible say about it? The Bible says that “Though He (Christ) was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. And having been perfected, He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.” (Hebrews 5:8-9). That says that Jesus Christ died for those who would obey Him, not for everybody. If Christ had bled and died for everyone then everyone will be saved and we know that is not true because Jesus tells us in Matthew 7:13 that only a few will take the time and make the effort to enter in at the strait gate and walk that narrow way. We are told in John 3:16 that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Most people in our day stop right there because that says what they think is something easy and does not require anything from them. However, that is not so because there is more to that than most people ever consider. First, that says that God loved, that’s past tense, and refers back to eternity past, back before God had created the heavens and the earth, God had a plan, an eternal plan for mankind and He had before the foundations of the World, God elected or chose a people that would be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will. (Ephesians 1:3-5). So when we read John 3:16 we know that God gave His Only begotten Son, to save those whom God had chosen before the foundation of the world. Don’t let the truth of God disturb you because nobody but God knows who He elected, God did not put any mark on those that He elected and you may be one of the elect. The only way that we can know if we are God’s elect is that we desire to serve God more than we desire to serve self or the world. If we would read the rest of what God says there in John 3, verses 16-21, that will give us the meaning of what is being said; and those other verses tell us in verse 17, that “god did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. That tells us that Jesus did not come to judge and condemn the world when He came the first time. Instead, He came to provide the only way for anyone to be saved, He substituted Himself for those who were chosen before the foundation of the world. God, the Father had already condemned the world in Adam, and now the Father sends the Son to propitiate, or satisfy God’s wrath against the sins of those whom the Father had loved in eternity. The other verses there in John 3:16-21, tell us that it takes real belief and obedience to be saved. We must love light more than we love the darkness of the world.

There are many more lies that people have accepted as truth and then went about spreading the devil’s lie; but most of them come from the fact that we grew lazy, apathetic and so busy with the world and the worldly that we have not really cherished the Word and Will of God. We do not know the Bible! We like to think we do but we do not and it is a crying shame. We do not know enough about God’s Word to know when someone is making up what they say the Bible says. I know you have heard some of the mistakes that have come down through the centuries, and I will list only a couple because I use them to illustrate, not to teach so do not believe these, simply know that others have believed them and passes them on as Biblical truths, for instance ?every tub must sit on it’s own bottom’, that is not Bible truth, although it may make some kind of sense to us, it is a lie and must not be taught as Biblical truth. If you were to ask many people today to describe Satan, they would say something about a red-man with a tail and horns and a pitchfork, and he is in charge of hell. That’s not true, for we know that Lucifer (Satan) was a beautiful creature who was cast out of heaven because of his pride. He wanted to be God! (Isaiah 14:12-15). We will close with one of the worst lies, at least in my mind and that is that, those who fancy themselves to be intellectual like to criticize the Bible by saying that men wrote down the Bible but men make mistakes and so there must be mistakes in the Bible. That might be true if God was dead, but God is not dead and cannot die, He is eternal. God protects the intent of His Word and we can count on that. Psalms 119:89. There have been many faithful preachers before us and there will be after us, we just have to know our Bibles to know what is truth. I am going to close this with a short truth by another very great pastor, who is no longer with us.

BIBLE PRESBYTERIAN PASTOR H. F. MacEWEN ON GOD’S SOVEREIGNTY
Dear friends, we must learn to hear what God says. There is no use listening to this opinion or that opinion. We are never told to hear opinions. We are told to hear the Word of God. God speaks to us in His Word. Oh, may He give us ears to hear it! ? “Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?” Can anything be more presumptuous than for the creature to pretend to greater wisdom than the Creator? Any wisdom the creature possesses must have been received from the Creator; and if the Creator has the power of forming rational beings, must He not Himself be infinite in wisdom? Does it not insult the Creator to pretend to find imperfection in His deeds and acts? God has mercy upon whom He will have mercy, and whom He wills He hardens. There is no escaping this truth of His holy and infallible Word. Martin Luther once wrote to Erasmus, the scholar of Rotterdam: “Mere human reason can never comprehend how God is good and merciful; and therefore you make to yourself a god of your own fancy, one who hardens nobody, condemns nobody, pities everybody. You cannot comprehend how a just God can condemn those who are born in sin and cannot help themselves, but must by necessity of their natural constitution continue in sin and remain children of wrath. The answer is God is incomprehensible throughout, and therefore His justice, as well as His other attributes, must be incomprehensible.” “Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?” Of course God has this power. But His power is always consistent with His justice. Out of the same original mass He forms in His holy sovereignty one man unto honour and another unto dishonour, without in any respect violating justice. There is no difference in the matter of the lump, for all are alike under condemnation, and if left to themselves would merit the lake of fire for eternity. God might in justice have left the whole to perish, but out of His holy sovereignty He saves some and upon the others He pours out wrath.

Nothing can be more true, dear friends, than the fact that we are all in the hand of God as the clay in the hand of the potter. Jeremiah said to the house of Israel, “O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter, saith the LORD. Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mind hand, O house of Israel.” A potter forms his vessels for himself, and not for the vessels. This determines the question with respect to God’s end in creating man. Philosophers can see no higher end in creating man than that of making him happy. But the chief end of the Potter in molding His vessels has a reference to Himself, and God’s chief end in making man is His own glory. Let man strive with his Maker as he will, still he is nothing but the clay in the hand of the Potter. “Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou?” (Isaiah 45:9). ? By Horace F. MacEwen, 1914-1988, as taken from a message given over his “Harbour Lights Radio Broadcast” from Sydney.

Until next time,

may God bless and keep you

This is Bro. Bob