In this sermon, the speaker shares a personal experience of removing a television from their home due to the negative influence it had on their children. They emphasize the importance of not being swayed by worldly values and instead focusing on the foundation of sin, judgment, and redemption. The speaker also discusses the audience's reaction to talks about the Holocaust, noting a reluctance to fully accept and embrace the judgments of God. They then mention the theologian Karl Barth and his profound insights on sin, judgment, and redemption, which are not widely known or appreciated in the evangelical community. The sermon concludes with a challenge to truly understand and confront the nature of sin.

...materials that I brought. One is a catalogue from a local department store in Bemidji for clothing, and the other is the Gruenwald-Eisenheim altar. It's a depiction of Jesus crucified. That is a Holy Ghost masterpiece. I wish I could hold this up larger than life. If you have no other reason to go to Europe, then to go to Colmar, France, to see it, is reason enough. And somewhere I'll find slides that I brought back from there. Maybe we can see it one day in slides, but if you want to look at it, let it come by. I'll show it to you. What a remarkable contrast with this catalogue. I was just about to dump it today. What am I carrying this for? I dumped it and I took it back up out of that trash barrel because I took another reason to look at why I was keeping it. I was struck by the faces and the countenance and disposition of the young men who were posing in modish clothes. Really, the kinds of things you used to knock about in sloppy is now the style. But the faces have a certain look on them. Of course, you can't see it from where you are. One's wearing an earring. I wonder why the other is an exception. And the hairstyle. But the look. Lord, give me the skill and the ability to describe their expression. It's sullen. You know that word? S-U-L-L-E-N. It's an attitude of, I think the French say, ennui. Like an exhaustion of spirit, like what the hell? There's nothing worthwhile, no authority worth respecting. Anything goes. We know the way it is. We're streetwise. We're hip. It's a statement of, well, they're candidates for the American Nazi movement. And they'll kill Jews and blacks and anyone without so much as batting an eyelash. They are without human pity, without compassion, without natural affection. As indeed the scripture said in the last days, not evil times, perilous times shall come. Now, the Lord could have said dangerous. What's the difference between dangerous and perilous? Danger is apparent. Peril is concealed. But equally, if not more deadly for that very reason. This is that peril. It chills my soul. I can't look at our contemporary children. There's something about their streetwise faces at the age of 10 to 12 that have seen so many rapes, so many murders, so many brutalities on TV. They're inured to pity. But here's the catch. This is in the catalog now for us to buy the clothing. It has become not just the style of the beat generation, the underculture, but the underculture has become the culture. That's the ominous, perilous, terrible thing about it. And the last analysis, if we could see as God sees, it goes back to one fatal omission, namely, the acknowledgement of God in truth, the only place where it can be obtained, in the recognition of Christ and Him crucified. So we're reaping the terrible consequence of the neglect of the knowledge of God, which allows the exaltation of men. Pit squeaks, upstarts. Give me a word for it. Like the kid who came to us and didn't eat one meal with us, to my knowledge. Before he came up the driveway at one o'clock in the morning, he had already determined he was not even going to stay two days. He determined, the autonomous, self-willed entity, not yet 18, possessing a $65,000 violin, determined he was not going to stay. So I'm pleading with him, give God a chance. Well, all of that is to warm us to the subject that the Lord has put on my heart this morning. It may take three speakings to do it any kind of adequate justice, but it's worth pushing aside every other consideration. It's pointless to go on with any end-time consideration of Israel, the Jew, church, if we miss this foundation, sin, judgment, redemption. You know what I'm growing conscious of, and what the initial talks on the Holocaust have begun to reveal to me about you? A kind of, how shall I say it, a nominal agreement with the truth of it, but a deep-down gut rejection of an unwillingness to condescend to the truth of it with a yea and amen to the depths of your being and the judgments of God. You still find fault. You still have a controversy with him. And at least with one soul here, it has really surfaced in a very tangible and unmistakable way. And I'm grateful for that, because it shows me the depths of what is in our hearts, and likely my own. So I want to examine the subject of sin. And isn't it just like the Lord, that as I was out on a walk, knocking around, looking for something else, I bumped into this. Notes that I had taken in 1993. See how it pays to be a note-taker? On some thoughts on sin and redemption. And the first statement is from the New Bible Dictionary, published by Eerdmans, on sin. Have you ever looked up the word sin? You know that we don't know as we ought to know? And we don't know at the most fundamental, basic levels of faith. The most elementary, basic considerations upon which everything else is predicated. Those are the things that we don't know. We're full of sophistication, cunning and insight about a whole range of other subjects. The end times and its ramifications and prophecy and so on. But we don't know as we ought to know, in the most foundational truths of the faith, that have to do with sin and redemption. And no surprise, because sin itself, and this is one of its distinctives, is its own ability to cover its tracks. It does not reveal itself as sin. That's how perverse the thing is. And that's why it takes something from God to reveal it. But if we reject that, what an unhappy condition then. And the that which God has employed, is his statement of his judgment, as it was visited upon his own son. This gargoyle of a man, twisted beyond almost all human recognition, pathetic, and the feet, here's the, can you see the feet? Is the statement of God's wrath, its punishment for sin, its destructive power of God, that sin deserves, and found its victim in God's own son. That's his statement. Because there's no way to know the exceeding sinfulness of sin, except by the means required to expiate it. That's it, that's the long and the short of it. There's no other way to know sin, than what it cost God to requite it. So the most characteristic feature of sin, in all its aspects, is that it is directed against God. Sin is what is against God. In spirit, in tone, in attitude, in disposition, he even despises the uplifted eyes, and the heady arrogance, what do you call that? The tilt of the head, the haughtiness, is an abomination in his sight. The stink of man daring to lift itself before the most high, the effrontery of it. Everything, sin is everything calculated against God. Even that which is not of faith is sin. And here we indulge ourselves in unbelief, as if it's a luxury which is our privilege. When God says that if you're in unbelief, it itself is sin. It's a defiance. It's a disrespect of my character, which was formulated in my words. Why have you not believed them? Is there some defect in me, that you dare can take the liberty to disregard my word, as if it is not true, as if I would give a half-truth or a lie? How dare you? Presume not to believe what I have spoken. Who are you? O man, and sin is the transgression of the law, not in some narrow legal sense, like we made a boo-boo, and we failed to comply with the legal requirements. The law is the summation of God. It's what he is in his righteousness, as is expressed through his ordinances and commandments. To transgress that is to transgress God. It's not just to run a traffic light. It contradicts God. Because, as the New Bible Dictionary says, from Praise God for it, the law is the transcript of God's perfection. When a man writes that, he can retire. Some of us will go a whole lifetime, never making a statement that begins to approach that. To make one statement like that is to justify your whole earthly existence. Do you want me to repeat it? Are you guys all paid up, by the way? Have you paid your dues and your enrollment? Don't dread. Be righteous. We don't have to run after you. The law is the transcript of God's perfection. You know what a transcript is? What do you call it when they take a message on the tape and then they transpose it? They transcribe it. The law is God transcribed, put into words, formulated. But it's God. To transgress the transcription is to transgress God. It's a violation and a contradiction of God. And this was Satan's attack in the Garden with Adam and Eve. It was an attack against the integrity and the veracity of God. Hath God said? You know what the astonishing thing is? That this woman would even hear such a question raised. That she was not horrified, nonplussed. I'm scratching for words. I don't have a word for it. That it would even be something that could come into her consideration as a subject even to discuss. Hath God said? That she was not horrified at the very intimation of such a thing is already the evidence of sin working. And she acceded to the whole thing. To the temptation to be as God and to know good and evil. To be as God. I think probably every sin in the last analysis is that sin. To be as God. Or even to exceed God. Wasn't that the idea? In building the Tower of Babel? To get higher than the heavens? How many of us are exceeding God with our own children? Or spouses? And taking initiatives and directing lives or pastors or manipulation is playing a role that is not man's. As some of you may have heard me share about the woman in Germany who came to me broken hearted to pray for her shameful sin of habitual masturbation. Married to a, what do they say today? A hunk? A really good looking guy. Like what need? And she couldn't understand it because she was a moral woman. And this is what horrified her soul. And as I'm looking to her and talking and praying, it came out that the problem was that she was domineering her sons and playing the role of God with her sons and directing their lives and smothering them in the Jewish manner so that she had displaced God and she could never be corrected because the culture itself condones it and even honors it and calls that motherly love. But the Lord, in order to arrest her attention got her in the place where she's vulnerable. Her moral sensibility. And I had to show her that the issue was not sexual. The issue was the transgression of God and that the sexual thing was only the thing to arrest her attention and when she will correct her relationship with her sons and not displace the Lord as Lord, this thing will vanish for the same reason for which it came. To exalt oneself as God. To protect the congregation from the prophetic man. As a pastor, thinking he's doing God's service would be another instance of the same. Every transgression is against God. Against thee and thee only have I sinned. She accepted the blasphemous assault upon the integrity of God. She coveted for herself divine prerogatives and for that reason God had to be depreciated. You can't exalt yourself as God and want to be as God if you don't first put him down and make him to be less and other than what he is. So, did he really say? If you can get him, if you can attack his integrity at that level, then you can begin to exalt yourself as God. I'm amused or is that the word for it? That people think that they have a higher morality than God. Like they would never do what he does. They would never be as cruel as he seems to be. And if only they had an opportunity to straighten him out and to teach him what moral sensibility is, he would be a much better God than he happens to be. Because man has a higher sense of morality than God and would never be as cruel. In her failure to react with horror against his suggestions and in her acquiescence there is disclosed the process that preceded the eating of the forbidden fruit. I wish that we had eyes like that to see. The things that proceed, the act, the disposition, the attitude, the real beginning and to nip it in the bud there before it becomes a fact. Just to recognize the disposition toward it or to take it into your mouth in your own conversation and to contemplate it before it becomes a deed. I wish that we had a church that was as discerning as that to catch something in its inception so that I wouldn't have to come after three years away from my original church in New Jersey to find out that the three or four most eminent spiritual women have every one of them gone to whoring. Every one of them had departed from their husbands and every one of them was a moral mess. And they were the most impressive of the women spiritually. And nobody saw the origin of the sin. They only caught it when it was in bed, so to speak. Full-born. But why didn't they catch it when it was in the winking stage? When it was a little condescension and petty flirtation or a word, a hint, a look, a gesture and stop it there. Because we ourselves are not in that impeccable place where we have, we would be keen enough to discern something in its inception and have the courage to address it. The statement of those women were the statement of the church in its own inability to discern because it was not in the keen place toward God that it ought. It itself was winking and nodding and you know, in one way or another, if not with the opposite sex with the world. So, that's the gravity of the first sin. Violated the command, thou shalt not eat. And it was the exhibition and that command was the exhibition of the authority, goodness, wisdom, justice, faithfulness and grace of God. A command is not just a command. A commandment, the law, is the statement of God and it encapsulates all that God is. His mercy, His goodness, His wisdom, His righteousness, His justice, everything was caught up in thou shalt not eat. To disobey that is an astonishing affront against God. It's the repudiation of His authority. Hath God said. It doubts of His goodness and I've already said a few things about that unbelief and doubt is not a luxury which is ours to enjoy. As if, well, maybe time will heal our unbelief. Well, I can believe this much but I can't believe for that. As if we have that ability and we can walk in that condition without even a twinge of disturbed conscience when it brings the Word of God into disrepute. It's like saying again, hath God said? Doubting, disputing, spurning, rejecting is all in substance the same sin against God. The author writes sin was the contradiction of God's perfections. My language would be something like the contradiction or the antithesis of God or the negation of God and this ever continues to be its character. Like sin is non-God, sin is the antithesis of God expressed through a piece of His creation that dares to exalt itself before Him who created it and that's why mankind is shot through with shame and fear and other corruptions of personality and and why their minds break out, their veins, their nervous breakdowns, the tumors, the collapses, the insanity and and alcoholism, drugs, I mean to stupefy the consciousness that is saturated with sin and whose necessary consequence is shame. Guilt because they don't even recognize its source and shame and guilt is so normative in our civilization that we have drugs by the cartload to assuage the pain and take the headache away and and the corruption in the body and the various other things that are the consequences of an evil corruption not being acknowledged as sin. I mean we've done the great chemical firms great benefit, its multi-billion dollar business to stupefy the consciences of men that they are somehow left in a way that they can function without feeling the pain of their condition. Oh dear saints, oh if we could see as God sees and know his grief as he looks down upon the earth and sees the condition of men, the marred condition of men and the violence that erupts out of unreconciled guilt and the abused become the abusers and raise up a whole other generation and capable of acts of an unbelievably atrocious kind which is like a form of self-death. I'm not even psychological but you can just sense the ramifications of sin. Surely God is not exaggerating when he says the wages of sin is death and that's not just the termination of biological life it's death while they live. The world is peopled with stalking automatons, the puppets who burp and echo their way through life and are incapable of an original thought, a gracious act, a gesture that eat and vomit and puke and fornicate and die. They're steeped in death. So the consequence of sin is death, God's wrath, curse, expulsion. Sin elicits God's wrath. To be complacent towards sin is an impossibility. For God to allow sin to be unrecognized and for him not to respond to it renders him non-God. Certainly not a God who's holy, certainly not a God who's righteous. He's going to condescend to sin and pat and make nice and tolerate it and not respond in his divine anger against this which is the greatest violation and attack against himself he renders himself non-God. Now maybe he would be willing to do that because he's not a great egotist that he requires that recognition but what would be the consequence for mankind if God is not God? I don't even want to think of it. If God becomes something other than God some effete emasculated deity who's incapable of wrath and looks the other way and blinks and winks I would dread for mankind. That's the kind of God mankind wants and thinks in fact that they have but God forbid he should become that and the thing that prevents it is his holiness and his righteous indignation and wrath. For us to take issue with his wrath is maybe the ultimate sin of man. For us to say well you're not too moral can't you be nicer shows a total incomprehension of what sin is as an attack against God and against his creation that threatens the whole moral order of his creation and doesn't recognize that God is not arbitrary and punitive and pulls the wings off flies because he likes to see things tortured that what is visited upon man in wrath is in exact proportion to the sin that has provoked him. Not an iota more no less what's the implication of that for the Holocaust and here are we Jewish people 50 years after it come have come out of it smelling like a rose and congratulating ourselves for our superior virtue and looking upon the German with condemnation as if they're the bad guys and have not understood that everything that has been visited upon us both then and in every previous Jewish calamity as it will again be in the final calamity is in exact proportion to our sins. If that were not so God would not be good he would be a vindictive what's the word unjust capricious mean spirited God. AIDS is the exact just righteous reprisal what's the word vindication recompense for the sin that has required it. The horror of that sin has brought the horror of that judgment and here's Elizabeth Taylor opening her home and her fortune and other of the bleeding hearts to obtain funds for AIDS research that men can continue to revel in what God calls not only an offense an abomination in his sight and that they can be medically saved from the consequence of it and think that somehow she's serving the righteousness can you imagine that and the government responding and breaking their necks to find some laboratory solution for the dread disease that has come so inexplicably upon the homosexual and the bisexual and the whole perverse generation that wants to wallow in their filth and have the government save them from its consequence sin evokes God's wrath he said to Adam curse it is the ground for thy sake the very place that God gave men to kill to what's the word to tend to tend because the thing that is cursed and remains so to this day that we have any measure of benefit out of a cursed earth is the mercy of God but I want you know Saints it is substandard even at its best it's non-edenic and we're learning that now daily with droughts and crops failures and diseases of the the bees are suffering from a fungus or a mite MIT that has depopulated half of the bees of Western the world where they can't even now fructify plants by their operation the ailments of a kind that we have never heard is now increasingly being visited upon the earth in proportion to man's growing sin and it's not God's vindictiveness it's his mercy to alert the attention of men that they might direct their thoughts upward the catastrophe catastrophe of man's fall brought the catastrophe of curse upon that which of which he was the crown and over which he was given dominion what a statement the very thing that God gave him in honor and dominion over the earth becomes a very cursed thing under his feet so death is the epitome of sins penalty expulsion from Eden and expulsion likely from Zionist Israel expulsion seems invariably to be the statement of God's wrath against chronic sin that refuses to be recognized and to be met that men if men think that they can establish a political state on a ground that God has reserved as holy and blessed in the condition that they are as natural mortal sinful man shows the very statement of the obdurateness and density of modern Jewish thinking how can such an enterprise conceivably succeed at all except that there first be the most radical transformation of the men who will come and populate that chosen piece of earth no wonder what is being raised up on it now is hardly less than a Sodom and Gomorrah and that they want to be as all nations and the Hong Kong of the Middle East what's so hot about Hong Kong in Asia that it needs to be the characteristic of of Israel and that the world should come to it as its Middle Eastern shopping mall where you can get Gucci lavish merchandise and high-tech civilization that that's God's intention for Israel it's a it's a wonder that the judgment of God has not fallen yet and before it will he'll have witnesses in the streets of Jerusalem pleading with that nation whose death that nation will celebrate by giving gifts one to another in the city where Jesus was crucified and which is now Sodom and Gomorrah that's future but it's a future presently being prepared and we have a whole sappy Christendom that wants to see Israel succeed what a statement of sappy Christendom if we do not reckon with Adam we are thereby excluded from a proper understanding of Christ Oh praise God for these men you know you don't come to insight like that by just merely graduating a seminary if we do not reckon with Adam we don't see ourselves as identified with Adam we don't recognize our Adamic taint what is resident in us as man we are excluded ipso facto for that reason from any proper understanding of Christ and no wonder Christ has been made into a superstar a culture hero or some other cheap version and why that stupid Beatles could say we're more popular than Christ which Christ are they talking about the popular version of the one who runs our errands and gets us boyfriends and girlfriends and health and and other kinds of things that we think are our do certainly not the Christ of God we don't know him except we first know ourselves in Adam all who die in Adam are made alive in Christ and too much of our Adam is still alive to receive the life that came with God's Son so I don't know if the word depravity is in scripture but it's certainly in Christian theological reflection that the that sin is the total depravity of man and I talked to you about Eric from but I could have mentioned half a dozen other Jewish names and and their corollary among non-jewish philosophers and theologians and so on that have an exaltation of man well what is humanism it's predicated upon the art the immovable conviction that man is innately good innately and if somehow he's bummed out here or he performed the war there or a rape or a riot well it's his environment I used to subscribe to this why that's why I know it so well I was absolutely assured that man is innately good and there's any evil issuing from man it's not man's fault it's something external imposed upon him that made him do it and and even now we can't bring criminals to justice and how many of what is what where was it I was reading in the magazine a newspaper some guy who raped girls and they found the bodies and they had one in the cage for how many months and then got another 12 year old and finally through the second one they were able to cry out and find help and they were released and the whole scandalous thing was found of young girls in their puberty and their bodies buried by a man who had previously been arrested for the rape of preteens and served the three-year term and was released judges can't bring themselves to throw the book at these guys because they got a little something going on inside themselves and maybe that's our problem with judgments maybe that's that's why Samuel could not bring the king of the Amalekites down though God commanded him because there's something in his carnal heart that wanted also a kind of a mercy that he was now extending to Amalek that he may one day need because he takes his liberties also only men who are impeccably righteous can be ruthlessly judgmental the judgmental is not the word judging or agree with God's judgments without blinking hmm yeah what did I say oh so forgive me Samuel slip he wept all the night Samuel what follow my back yeah yeah it was interesting Saul is a picture of the carnality of the church brother and boasted yet but we did most of it you know we we we fulfilled most of your requirement like hey we must be batting at least over 350 hey we're candidates for the Hall of Fame as if partial obedience is full obedience when partial obedience is disobedience when are we going to weep all the night over that so what is depravity I looked it up this morning to pervert make crooked it's perverse it's wicked it makes bed it's corrupt it's vicious vile heinous atrocious unholy base low mean odious repulsive and the scriptures imply that's man's in his nature that's the Adamic man depraved or else there would be some hope for his improvement and amelioration through a personality course or some self-imposed discipline or lying on a psychiatrist couch God says his condition is irremediable any man who draws breath comes with this nature it's utterly depraved it's it's at enmity with God the carnal mind is at enmity with God and perhaps that that's what David was implying in the great Psalm 51 I was shape shape in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me is not some statement that she was cohabitating with her husband and enjoying it right it's amazing how men try to explain this and who of us has not cried out my iniquity is ever before me have you ever cried that out are you ever conscious of that not because you boo booed but you when you can cry it out when you've had a perfect and blemishless day and still be utterly conscious that in the best of your effort and then you're being your iniquity is ever before you you're getting close to being in a right place before God who is man that that you should acknowledge him Jesus would not entrust himself to man for he knew what was in man would to God that we knew but the witness of Scripture unerringly everywhere is to the pervasive pervasiveness and totality of this depravity it extends to the deepest movements of the human heart and characterizes all humanity you know when the day came when I took my TV set out of the house in the earlier years of Ben Israel when I found my kids glued to it and the kids of other of the Ben Israel people they were not watching some wicked violent thing with sex and violence they were watching a love story about two athletes who met in the Olympics in Russia an American athlete and Russian athlete it was a romance but when I saw what it was depicting what values it was implying what wisdom it was expressing without a word I walked right over and I turned that thing off to the horrified gasp of all those who are thoroughly loving it and the next day that thing was out of the house it's found a way back in since we say well why were you so vehement and violent because it was the ostensibly good thing that revealed the depth of its evil if it was only outwardly violent and and sex oriented anyone could see that but it purported to depict truth love relationship on the most sickly sentimental unrealistic and un-God related terms as being real and my kids were sucking it up as if it were the fount of life it was the most vicious evil because it purported to be good and when the good is evil what can be hoped for you can make a career just out of analyzing and critiquing movies and TV programs for their anti-God content and I don't think it means that there are men who are consciously finding ways to insinuate a barb against God it's in their breathing in and breathing out they are wicked they're being jerked and manipulated by the prince of lies and whose employ they are and they're just ventilating right out of the pit of hell another wisdom and that purports to be truth righteousness value and we've so sucked up on that stuff that when we hear something that is biblical and righteous and the judgment of God we wince and don't like what we're hearing and want to cast it from us by finding some defect in the man who's bringing it so inured are we to God's righteousness and so much have we been bent and affected and tainted by the air in which we breathe that that is you can't escape it it's there with Mother's Day if you want to want to see me puke take me to a high school graduation anywhere and listen to the oratory of how they have been prepared for life I want to get up and shriek and scream and and and hit the light switch or do something and there's a man nodding and wearing the beatific expressions and and the kid it's like a bar mitzvah it's as false as our bar mitzvahs were that today we are a man and that we have entered the covenant that's what the bar mitzvah means son of the commandment and we didn't know from beans what a covenant is and and the kid it's like a bar mitzvah it's as false as our bar mitzvahs were that today we are a man and that we have entered the covenant that's what the bar mitzvah means son of the commandment and we didn't know from beans what a covenant is and had never heard of a commandment let alone that we should obey one we did it because we wanted to become a fountain pen as they used to say in those days because that was the frequent and ubiquitous gift for bar mitzvah candidates and and your mother put on a nice table with the chali bread and the gefilte fish and the families came and the friends and it was just a warm participating event and she shed a tear or two in the hearing of her son chanting the portion from the prophets not understanding a word he was chanting but but learned in how to elevate his voice and to touch the vibrant heartstrings phony phony phony phony phony lie and the world has its corollaries that is the world and we have condescended and nodded and brought our presence and our silence and even our admiration is a terrible statement of the church's condition we should be shrieking in the horror of young souls being prepared for death that's the Judaism that wants to be recognized in the place of equality with Christendom this writer says at the point where the demands of God's glory are most manifest at that point man's hostility is most violent I have to think about that that's probably true where demands of God's glory are most manifest at that point is man's hostility most violent so depravity is total it is the inability for that which is good and well-pleasing to God the natural man cannot know the things of God for they are spiritually discerned and for us to think that we know when we don't know is it self presumption and arrogancy and God has to wrap the knuckles of Israel and say you thought I was such a one as yourself your your view of me is nothing more than the projection of yourself and you were satisfied with that view you made yourself the standard of what you think I am or ought to be you've got it all excuse my language and you can explain that to some of the students from other countries when we take a break not to know God as God and to presume that is one such as we are is the height of presumption and arrogancy and maybe that's why Psalm 19 says keep back keep back my soul from presumption and then I will be saved from the great this is great transgression it leads to familiarity with God buddy buddy what he's going to do for us he's our errand boy I tell you dear saints I agonized as a young Jewish believer when I first had my entry into the church and had to listen to the almost every other sentence reference to Jesus I thought it was somebody down the corner around the block or up the street Jesus Jesus Jesus this Jesus and how they adored him and it was like a verbal haze I may have been an atheistic Jew and I may have only had a minimal Jewish education so-called but I understood well why Orthodox Jews do not spell the word God and omit the O and put a hyphen that there's something of a kind of arrogance even to take the word the name of God to your mouth only the high priest and that once in the year and in the holiest place of all with the blood appropriate to in God's sight a sacrifice could speak the holy name then now Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus we have defamed him through our familiarity we have made familiar we have trivialized and once you've trivialized God look for the escape hatch get out before everything goes to trivialize God is to pull down the whole of civilization it's to invite devastation a total undoing of God's moral order when when he is no longer God and we continue to mouth the word if there's anything that the church you have as its foremost obligation it is to protect and to cherish the sanctity and the sense of God his name his reverence his fear his or may we be ignorant of everything else but may we clutch that like people want is holding a life ring rather they should be down for a third time if we lose that we lose the game and I and I think that it's more lost than we know and that's why all of the nonsense that taking that is taking place takes place he's become too familiar too cheap too trivial and we think that he he's approving our programs and we talk about his presence when there's not an iota of it to be felt and we talk about as an anoint his anointing when there's nothing that suggests anointing that we take the holiest words and dare use them with such blind disregard and complete contradiction to what a child could recognize as not being true and speak that as ministers from the platform in the place of obligation before God's people and in his hearing we're going to tell him what's anointed when it's not anointed we'd be far better off going down on our faces and crying out why are you not present when the very situation explains it it's the presumption to say that which is not as if God can be jerk manipulated to endorse to condone to anoint to to verify by his presence something in which he was not even invited or consulted and was arranged by the skullduggery of men because it was good oh and this is going to move Jews to jealousy this kind of soppy church is going to save them in their last days extremity and even be in any way prophetically to explain to them why it is the necessary and final historic experience no way so you can see why God is against sin and the sin of the church and he cannot be complacent toward it and why his set his judgments necessarily begin in the house of God and I think those of us who are prophetic are going to have more and more occasion to be used by him to bring that judgment as I have had on a few occasions in the past to be so employed that the word out of my mouth was their death warrant sitting on the platform of a new fellowship that was the splinter of one that was wrecked and out of division and strife and another one born and circulating that morning through the Sunday schools and by the time I did that my gut was already churning for the unreality of what was going on then sitting on the platform to be the speaker having no message and they're talking in their their religious palaver about God and his blessing and what they're going to do in their programs and and then to take the offering and then to invite me up to bless the offering or something like that oh don't suck me into this don't cue me in to be your little patsy and to validate what you're about but no they wouldn't hear other and they had me up there and I turned I remember looking at the young pastor it's always a young pastor always a whiz kid always one with gifted administrative ability and knows how to get it together and I said well I'll pray I said but I'll pray in this way if this is God's work which he has raised up that this offering will be the token of his blessing and it will and it will continue to flow and finance and bring everything needful to the establishment of his will but on the other hand if this is only the the adroit work of man and his religious ambition to do his own thing let it come to naught you still want me to pray yeah well I prayed and you go in that city in Texas today and find me that church try and find it six weeks later went up like a puff and we're going to see God's judgment begins in the house of God oh I can hardly wait I hope that it'll pass over us but I'll tell you what we have received already our share not the least of which was a three-year expulsion from these very grounds and maybe nothing less would purge the conceit and the various kinds of things that we exhibited corporately and went on individually that nothing less than a purging of the entire property would fit it for its present use when you love the judgments of God you love God now God is against sin he cannot be complacent toward it or indifferent to it he must react against it he cannot help himself being God he has no choice don't think he enjoys it it grieves his heart to have to perform it and that's why he beseeches and he beckons and please and he says his prophets rising up early and late if they would but hear the word but when the word is rejected and every appeal from God has been disdained he must then bring his act and that act is his wrath the deliberate and resolute displeasure of God which is the contradiction of his holiness and which his holiness demands if he were not holy we wouldn't have to worry but I'd rather have a holy God and fear his judgments than to have a patsy who will save us from their displeasure you can't have it both ways you want a God who's holy his wrath is the name of it and that wrath and judgment is not to be construed as being vindictive or indignant there's no malice in it there's there's no evil in God he's not doing it as I said because he enjoys it he takes no delight in it if you would know what it cost him in his own heart the grief that it cost him that and that with the affliction he himself is afflicted he was with his son at the cross and in that suffering the son could not experience that as presence but the full torment and the anguish was born by the father as well as by the son they are indivisible and he was with us Jews in Auschwitz also he couldn't express that in a way that our dense sinfulness could recognize but he experienced all the mortification all the anguish all of the suffering all of the torment and the torture of men themselves he's not some God who holds himself at a distance and looks down in a kind of disdain from it as if he is absolved from and doesn't feel the pangs of what through what his creation must suffer I'll tell you if there's no other motive for righteous living and the avoidance of sin let this be motive enough that it saves God from having to perform judgments that are an anguish for his own soul let that be the motive that keeps us blameless and maybe it's the only motive that will to suggest that God has some delight in this and that he's mean-spirited and vindictive that he's the God of the Old Testament of wrath and we need not expect that in modern times is heaping insult upon injury that's adding to our sins that's misreading him yet more faith fatally and if we don't say it with words but we're intimating it in our hearts if if it rises up as a thought in our secret hearts it's just as deadly the essence the writer says of final perdition for the reprobate will consist in the unrestrained infliction of God's indignation all the more heated for the rejection of his offer of mercy in his crucified son Wow if he needed to bring it to a boil if it wasn't enough just the objective response to the sins that have horrified his soul the rejection of his mercy that had been offered in his crucified son to expiate those sins brings that final indignation to a boil it heats all the more the wrath of God and we need to understand that in an Israel that has for 2,000 years consistently continued in that rejection now we had a brother here last year maybe some of you who have come in early camps may have remembered him he's here no more and I have forbidden ever his return someone has said but what if he repents he will not repent he's reprobate and what he did in his last time here that required his expulsion on my authority contradicted the mercy that was offered him after being of a sinner being given final opportunity there can't be after that another repentance that's what reprobate means and if you offer it and you're soft hearted intended sentimental you're acting in a way disrespectful to God you are fawning on those whom God looks upon as vile and isn't that the character of our entire civilization now this basketball player who had AIDS becomes a culture hero because he returns to the basketball court the most sickly figures have become the great culture heroes of our time and what they command our fortunes that would have boggled the minds of the great financiers of a century ago and they get it by the millions for a season of sport and they are the adulation of kids who must have their kind of athletic shoes even that they kill them kill one another get a pair and the millions and billions that these companies obtained by the endorsements of those characters because we have exalted the vile and make despicable and have rejected the saints and servants of the most high God you can't have it both ways and have the posters of these seven-foot characters that your kids adulate and then think that you can find a place of respect for some guy who comes you with a suitcase in his hand who sent of God who speaks funny as strange messages I can't tell you in advance what he's going to say well all of that was a preliminary an introduction to the subject of sin to get now into call bought out of his great magnum opus his great life's work church dogmatics which I believe ran to 14 volumes he died before he could finish his vision for it the last book that he wanted to do was on eschatology the things pertaining to the last days he died I think he was 86 and he was vital and clear virtually to the day of his death but it's a great treasure trove for the church and few even know of his existence let alone this treasure and the remarkable thing is he's not held with great esteem by the evangelical community they have some question or two about his position on this or that and that but I'll tell you what I've never read anything more devastating on the nature of sin and judgments and redemption that in call bought and I have it here before me do you have the energy to hear it you have the moral ability to bear it should we take a little break before we begin it okay but not without a prayer don't go rushing this is holy holy saints listen this is our fourth fifth school we've never had one like this I've never seen God churn up his people the way he's doing now probing the depths of God's reach in the course of the material where this is holding ground and don't think that you are the sum object of God's attention this morning you're only the excuse for bringing this subject forth but the tape of it and the transcription of it and the publishing of it in other languages will go far beyond this little dot of earth I have never heard any depth of teaching on sin and judgment and I think that it is crucial for the church of the last days or it cannot be it so we are the privileged ones who are drawing God's heart out on something that is holy and has to be reserved for this time so let's not go rushing off and being flippant or light and walk softly and have a right heart attitude Lord thank you precious God we are hearing your heart you're beginning to take the veil off you're giving us my God glimpse of things that have never been put before us and we're believers 10 15 20 30 years we have lost the foundations and if the foundations be destroyed where shall the righteous go and we thank you my God for your jealousy over your church for if you lose it if it becomes a commonplace in a cultural addendum in a Sunday phenomenon what hope have your people Israel or the issue even of your own coming and kingdom so we thank you for pouring your heart out and for dotting the i's and crossing the t's and speaking to us as if we are really sons and daughters who can hear you and receive your truth and Lord may you continue look we're faltering we're weak we're sagging our legs are going out from under us up our minds are pounding we don't know that we can take more but we know you have more to say through this choice st. my God who is so precious and so much a gift to the church and so little understood and sought come now give us a breather and a break and bring us back my God with the right heart and attitude and spirit to receive the full measure of your heart this morning and we want for now to say thank you receive our gratitude in Yeshua's holy name the remarkable tenacity that the man had to pursue a truth through we're just so unaccustomed to thinking and to pondering and weighing the thoughts of God to unpacking them and that's what he does there's there's no more precious vocation for a man that to be a theologian to be a student and a teacher of the things pertaining to God and he's looked upon as being in the same category of giants of the faith as Luther Calvin they talk about him as being the 20th century giant he was explosive in his contribution that first appeared in 1918 on a book called the epistle to the Romans and a return to the Word of God and to a Christ centeredness the man is so centered in Christ Christ crucified and resurrected and ascended is the hermeneutical principle not only of the New Testament of the entire faith remove Christ and you have a shambles of bits and pieces and I've never seen such a celebration and such depth and richness and insight of understanding little wonder that the same man sees the mystery of Israel and the church like no one I have ever read and it's only a side comment in order it's only in the fine print I don't know one present-day commentator who begins to approach the depth of his insight who have published their own books and and this is just an aside of his coming out of the discussion of other truths so we're going to be transfigured just by reading him and hearing him and rightly so listen to this first statement access to the knowledge that he is a sinner is lacking to a man because he is a sinner elementary my dear Watson but it's so elementary that we've missed it yeah access to the knowledge of a man that he's a sinner is lacking to a man because he's a sinner the very fact that he's a sinner incapacitates him to recognizing himself as a sinner because that's what sin does and this isn't just a little minute observation this is critical to understanding God's whole redemptive work and why it had to come outside of man and by God and by God alone in Christ because nothing else would have revealed sin it couldn't it does not reveal itself and those who think that they know their sin or are humbled or what's the word selfie-facing don't know as they ought to know could you repeat that again sir this last statement yes I don't know that I can even those of us who think that we know don't know as we ought to know if our observation of sin is something that we can measure for ourselves as if we are in a position to estimate or evaluate our own condition that's the that's the number the matter we can't sin incapacitates us to do that therefore if there's going to be any revelation and the understanding of the truth of our condition both as individuals and as the nation Israel which is nothing more than what man is what is the distinct of Israel Israel is man writ large the sin of Israel is the sin of man and the sin of man is the sin of Israel it's a nation demonstrating what is the condition of a man superbly in their apostasy and their fallenness so this is his opening shot access to the knowledge that he's a sinner is liking to man because he's a sinner the medicine is completely closed to this negative determination he does not see beyond the natural inward contradiction of his existence in the face of which he is capable perhaps of remorse and self-pity and melancholy you know he can pout a little bit but that ain't nothing till you have anguished over your condition you've not yet seen it merely to pout and to feel sorry for yourself is the very indication that you've not seen it's the deceptive false imitation but it's not the genuine terror t-e-r-r-o-r and that's why Paul says knowing the terror of God I persuade men if we've not seen the terror of sin we've not seen and I love this statement in a biography of Abraham by C.S. Myers or Meyer and I'll never forget when I stumbled across he said Abraham knowing the terror of sin took Isaac cut the wood and laid it upon the ass and set forth to Mount Moriah Abraham knowing the terror of sin he didn't say how come why if and but how can you ask this of me this contradicts what I understand God to be you don't exalt in human sacrifice this is the son of promise anything that you've said to me that will come to me as inheritance will have to come through Isaac and now I should make of him a sacrifice on the mountain you will show me come on this doesn't figure doesn't calculate not a word not a syllable of protest not even in his secret heart but don't think that Satan was not in the three days it took to get to that mouth same of Jesus in the grave it was for for Abraham nothing less or something comparable to dying many deaths but knowing the terror of God he rose early in the morning and settled his ass and went not knowing the terror of God which is to say not knowing the terror of sin is to fill our mouths with all kinds of complaint against God how come and why and if you're just and if you listen we don't know the terror of sin of our own condition of the condition of the nation we can't see the beyond a natural inward contradiction of our existence we're capable perhaps of remorse and self-pity and melancholy but not of genuine terror in the face of which he can own always quiet and excuse himself or justify himself and remain obstinately blind and deaf to the contradiction which is his guilt and breach well you need to read it to hear it being read is not quite the same thing but what it is he's sketching man in such a beautiful way the tendency to justify and excuse ourselves to remain obstinately and willfully blind and deaf to the contradictions of our life he sees and thinks and knows crookedly even in relationship even in relation to crookedness he sees and thinks and knows crookedly there's a warp a necessary warp everything has got to be askew even in relation to crookedness itself even in relation to sin he sees crookedly he doesn't see rightly or he would know the terror of sin and the terror of God he's crooked even in the knowledge of his crookedness you can see how popular Karl Barth was one of the boys and being invited to ministerial functions he exploded the contemporary Church of Germany in its liberalism and its deviation from biblical truth and you know how he came to these truths he struggled and he agonized as a pastor and as a preacher having to face a and not feed them pablum and not feed them little cliches to reinforce them in their self-exalting image of themselves he wrestled and struggled with an agony and a suffering and we are receiving the benefit he's crooked even in the knowledge of his crookedness he can only oppose the Word of God which enlightens him concerning his crookedness the very nature of his sin puts him in a place of opposition against God even as a supposed Christian within this fear of self-knowledge there's no place worthy of the name knowledge of sin men preoccupied with themselves have no eyes to see this or categories to grasp it what a remarkable resonance that is of the opening statement from this Ulrich Simon who wrote that book on the Holocaust this Jewish theologian who has passed away and has been lost to obscurity he said we have no categories to consider a phenomenon like the Holocaust where we're categorically impoverished we cannot employ the categories that have been appropriate to other considerations to consider this and that's as true of sin and the human condition as it is of the Holocaust which is the result of it we need other categories that have not been ours and they are not categories that a sinful man or presumed Christian will seek find or employ and even if they are offered to him he'll resist them that that gives me a little clue to prophetic speaking and why it is often so strange and doesn't give you three points of preaching and then your conclusion it'll start out in I don't know in some absurd place and way and the people we want what you're talking about later on you understand why God had to dig into man in that way and into the audience because he had to violate their conventional framework of hearing of sermons and to devastate them from the blind side to begin to open them to truth that could not be communicated in their trained and way of anticipation now where the greatest men who will speak that way for God and suffer the enormous humiliation of it who themselves don't know what the end of their speaking will be and are required to begin if we don't get any other chance to speak about the prophetic calling I said more in that one statement then you'll get by running to Florida or some other place where they produce profits the place of the producing of profits is the school of humiliation where you begin by beginning with without any more knowledge than those who are hearing you a way you're going to end but you do not withhold yourself and you're not always vindicated in one speaking either sometimes you're as rattled and as confused and as bewildered as those who have heard you because the site it didn't end with a nice conclusion and a nice cellophane wrapped message it left the heroes agitated and restless and strangely disturbed as well as yourself maybe a long while before the end of it is seen or known but you still have to bring it I don't think that the church will break its neck to run to hear men like that okay so men preoccupied preoccupied themselves have no eyes to see this or categories to grasp it there is not revealed that which if a man is not to remain a sinner and perish can be removed and made good only by the death of Jesus Christ at the cross autonomous self-sufficient man may be disturbed unsettled alarmed but not finally frightened or perplexed I wrote terrified not stirred up to a horror of his own existence and the desire for a different existence so I read that again if a man is not to perish in his sin then something has got to come to him that has to do with the death of Jesus at the cross because autonomous self-willed man we had a profound revelation of it in the 17 year old squirt that was with us who decided as he was coming up the driveway I'm not going to give this thing more than two days and didn't and is able to make such determinations at the age of 17 whatever the inconvenience to ourselves or to his parents or the expense is a picture of man as autonomous and this is and isn't that what the schools are encouraging these kids to be today you got those in the appearance who are they the old-fashioned 10 commandments hey you determine your own morality and your ethic and whether I have your own self-sufficiency such men may be disturbed or unsettled or alarmed but not finally frightened or terrified that's what I love you may think me cruel I'd love to see that kid flat out on his face I don't mean prospering I mean digging into the floor with such convulsive gasps and heaves and sobs as you would think that his poor body couldn't take it and he'll perish and die from the exertion of it that's what I want to see for him or else he's a candidate excuse the language for hell that autonomous self-willed independent spirit unless that is met at the cross of Christ Jesus it will never be bridled that kid is a candidate for hell and the loss of the potential for the kingdom of God is grievous even to consider we can't spare Saints we can't make nice we can't congratulate them and comfort them in their rebellion the fact that we want to is a very embarrassing statement about our condition so maybe such a one is ready to come to terms with himself at a level which is deep but not too deep I love this about okay get the picture and this is a description of of Christians of a superior kind who want God to meet them they want the things that are deep but not too deep they want to go far but not this far and I am often asking God's congregations how far are you willing to go you know where have you drawn the line how far is permissible and who are you to draw that and who are you to determine that what are you God oh I tell you this sense the church is not much better than the world swimming to go so far but not all the way it's willing to go deep but not too deep it's willing to be frightened but not terrified in general terms it's true enough that the knowledge of God alone includes within itself the knowledge of sin and that this knowledge arises only in the confrontation of man by the majesty and holiness of God if man is going to see himself as a sinner one thing is required a confrontation with God as God in his majesty and awesome proportions and where do you think that kind of revelation is alone contained and given at the cross at Auschwitz at the place where the atheist thinks faith would end that's where it begins in the place of horror in the place of judgment in the place of destruction in the places that are terrifying in the burning bush in the midst of it there is reserved the deepest revelation of God in his awesome majesty as judge and there because of it is the revelation of man as sinner that's why God complimented Moses for turning aside to see who wants to see that about ourselves when everything around us is encouraging our self-esteem and we have to guard our little egos and vanities let someone bruise it and our self-image and and and don't insult and don't offend and everyone is so fragile I've never seen a generation more prone to be insulted and offended than this generation what struggles we've had with the youngest members of our community post World War II if you say the wrong word look at them differently your voice is too harsh and what do we hear in the church well your message was good but the way you said it as one brother writes me from Israel I agree in substance with your statement on the time of Jacob's trouble but what's wrong with you cats is you lack compassion or I don't like your voice or if you only spoke that more compassionately then maybe I would have heard it the abstract God of an abstract law cannot justify man before God so how can he really and truly accuse and condemn him and the obvious ineffectiveness of this imaginary God and his claim it is not shown is it not shown that this God is an arbitrary invention depositing of which is simply another act of our own self-understanding our own self communing our own soliloquizing you know what he's saying we were making God in our own image and it's a God who does not judge certainly doesn't judge us and we call him Jesus but don't think that by appending that name that you have the right party we need to be so on God that we are not mindlessly conjuring up a God of our own vision and our own proportions who serves our purposes and is not the God who is God the fact that you call that one Jesus that not does not make him so anymore that than the God who is celebrated in Judaism is the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob but it serves the purposes of Judaism and they refer to him as such and find appropriate scriptures to describe him as being that but in their heart and walk and understanding it is not that God that's why he says to those who say Lord Lord I have never known you the fact that you've invoked the title the label and the and the name doesn't establish the truth of the relationship if we have not had effectual reunion at the cross it's an