[Sunday School] What's So Bad About Sin? (WSC 17&19)

If you're looking for a church in Mount Juliet, TN, we'd love for you to come and visit us at 84 S Greenhill Rd (10:15 AM for Morning Worship and 5:00 PM for Evening Worship). For more information, please visit http://hickorygrovepca.org.

To give to the Lord's work at Hickory Grove, please text 'give' to (866) 860-7817 or visit https://www.hickorygrovepca.org/giving.

Transcript

SPEAKER_06 0:34

Heavenly Father, thank you for this morning and for these brothers and sisters in Christ. Thank you for the beauty and the warmth of the sun shining down upon us. Thank you, Lord, that you have gathered us by the Spirit of your Son. Not just the Sun in the sky, but the Son who is exalted to the highest heaven who's sitting seated at your right hand. Lord, thank you for the Holy Spirit who gifts us and empowers us for service in the church. Thank you for the spirit of light that shines upon our understanding so that we might rightly read your word and take to heart what you have revealed there. Help us this morning as we continue to grapple with the reality of sin, especially its consequences in our individual lives and in our world. Lord, again help us to understand the bad news, not so that we can wallow in a pit of misery, but we can glory all the more in our great salvation. And so that we can read the world through the right eyes and help our friends and our neighbors and our loved ones understand the predicament in which they find themselves, so that they can turn to you for grace. We need your grace this morning to help us understand your word. We pray that you would give it in abundance, and we pray confidently because you know we know that you have given us the spirit of understanding in the mind of Christ so that we might receive the things that you've freely given to us in Scripture. We pray all of these in Jesus, all of these things in Jesus' name for his sake. Amen. Alright, broad question to get us started. What are some of the consequences of sin in our world?

SPEAKER_05 2:20

Yeah, we'll know that. Well, it separates us from God. Separates us from God.

SPEAKER_04 2:27

It makes people sort of forget that God exists and uh who's God and and uh and they make him a deist, you know, he's just not dead.

SPEAKER_06 2:39

Yeah. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit about what separation from God means. But it separates us in a relational sense, it also separates us in the sense that we think God doesn't exist.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

The biggest consequence is death.

SPEAKER_06 2:52

Death. Yeah. Yeah, that is the ultimate consequence. And you're right to say it's the biggest consequence because death isn't something that just happens at the end of life. Death is something that happens in a sense at the beginning, because we're living in a state of death because of our sin. That was the consequence in the garden. God said to Adam and Eve, or Adam in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. And in that day, he didn't die in the way that he might have expected to die, or we might expect him to die if we're reading the story for the first time. But he did die in a sort of spiritual, eternal sense. And we'll untangle that a little bit as we go. What else? Consequences of sin in the world.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Enmity between each other.

SPEAKER_06 3:40

Yeah. Distrust. Distrust. So not just enmity between us and God, but us and us. Yeah. Yeah, it helps to think about the entrance of sin into the world. If you've been around here for more than 10 minutes, you've heard me say this. But it's like a fourfold relational break. So in the fall, we have a break between man and himself. So our relationship to ourselves is messed up because of sin. We have a break between man and man, so our relationship with each other, a break between man and the world, creation. Adam was created to cultivate the ground. Now in the curse, we sow the ground with thorns and thistles. It's all frustration and futility and all of that. And then, you know, principally, foundationally, a break between man and God. A vertical relationship is broken. So yeah, these are great answers. The consequences of sin in the world are widespread. There was once a newspaper contest or something like that where the newspaper invited people to write in and answer the question, what's wrong with the world? And G.K. Chesterton, this might be apocryphal, but G.K. Chesterton wrote in and said, Dear sir or madam, I am. And that's true, right? Because of sin, you want to ask the basic question, like, what's wrong with the world? What we're what's wrong with the world. In our sin, we ruin everything. That's true historically, and that's true existentially, that's true individually. So we're continuing to talk about sin. And today, last time we talked about questions 16 and 18, which had to do with uh the extent of sin to all of humanity and also the nature of it. So sin gives us a guilty status before God. We are judicially guilty. It corrupts our nature so that we, instead of being the good soil from which good fruit comes, we are the bad soil from which bad fruit, rotten fruit comes. And we talked about acts, sinful acts, which is which are the rotten fruits. And we also talked about how grace heals each one of those things. Now, today we're looking at the um the nature of the state or estate that sin brought us into. So question 17 asks, what into what estate did the fall bring mankind? The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery. So last time we talked about the sinfulness of that estate. This week we talked about the misery of that estate. And that's what question 19 gets at. What is the misery of that estate wherein to man fell? All mankind by their fall lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and so made liable to all the miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever. So, as we usually do, we're looking at each one of those causes as we go through. All mankind by their fall lost communion with God, are under his wrath, under his curse, made liable to all the miseries of this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever. So, first let's talk about communion. We've lost communion with God. Communion, it's based on the Greek word koinemia, which means partnership, fellowship. You can think of it like community. You can think of it most basically like relationship. And relationship is what we were made for. The biblical word for it is covenant. Augustine, he wrote in his confessions, as he's praying to God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. I mean, that's that's the heart of it, right? Adam and Eve walking with God in the garden in the cool of the day. That's what we were created for. Sin, we see it breaking that relationship and necessitating an expulsion from the garden. Uh Genesis 3, 20 through 22. The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skins and clothed them. Then the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever. And then it goes on and talks about man and man and woman being expelled from the garden, and the great angels placed there with the sword to keep them from entering back then. Because if they were allowed to stay in the garden, they would have stayed in the garden, living in God's presence, not in a state of bright relationship, but in a state of broken relationship, in a state of alienation. And if they would have eaten from the tree of life, they would have continued to live in that state of alienation forever. What's the one-word answer? What is existence in the presence of God yet in a state of alienation forever?

SPEAKER_02 8:41

Four-letter word.

SPEAKER_06 8:42

Four-letter word. Hell.

SPEAKER_02 8:45

H G double else.

SPEAKER_06 8:46

Yeah. And we'll talk more specifically about hell in a little while. But what we're focusing right now is on that loss of communion. That loss of relationship. That's the core misery of being in the estate of sin. We were made for relationship with God. Now that relationship is broken, and apart from his grace, we don't have it. We have a kind of relationship, again, the relationship of alienation, but we don't have a relationship of blessing. Again, communion, community, partnership, fellowship. And we see that in a variety of, we see that cash out in a variety of ways in scripture, right? It's foolishness. Psalm 14, 1, the fool says in his heart, there is no God. It's like what Wendy was talking about a little while ago. It's not just that we're opposed to God, but at the extreme we actually believe as if God doesn't exist. Even though Romans 1 tells us that his invisible attributes are written in the visible things that he has made, and such that we know him, but we suppress the truth in unrighteousness. So we know him in the core of our being, but at the level of our mind, we suppress it. We act as though he doesn't exist, as if that were possible. Enmity, right? It's not just folly, it's enmity. Romans 5 talks about us being enemies against God. Worse than enemies, even rebels. Psalm 2, the nation's rage and the people's plot in vain. Romans 8, those who are in the flesh cannot please God. They're hostile toward God. We, apart from grace, are hostile to God. So communion, the loss of communion, it's just a devilish mixture of indifference, enity, rebellion, wickedness, all the bad words. A couple weeks ago, maybe a month ago, we talked about all the different words that scripture uses for sin. We saw the lawlessness, the waywardness, the transgressiveness, all of those things. Now, a question we asked as we looked at sin over the past couple weeks, is we asked how grace comes in and deals with that aspect of sin, that aspect of our fallenness. So I'll ask the same questions. We look at things today. How does grace deal with the fact that by our sin we have lost communion with God? How does grace deal with our loss of communion with God? How does salvation restore or affect that?

SPEAKER_04 11:14

Well, there has to be payment. Yeah. And you kind of, and I'm thinking in your in your dialogue, kind of skipping over, why there has to be payment rather than just, um, well, we'll just excuse it. You can't excuse.

SPEAKER_06 11:29

Right. Right. So the nature, it's a good point, the nature of the broken relationship is such that there needs to be some kind of satisfaction in order to repair the relationship. Or restitution, we could say, right? If I steal 20 bucks from you, um you can forgive me for stealing that 20 bucks, but moving forward in our relationship, for it to be restored, there needs to be some kind of restitution.

SPEAKER_04 11:58

Yeah, somebody pays if it's not the if there's nothing. It's either the bacon or the trade.

SPEAKER_06 12:04

Right. Right. So, you know, the the Bible, the New Testament uses the language of reconciliation. Through the death of Christ, we are reconciled to God. That reconciliation has to do with the removal of that enmity, the removal of the thing that broke our relationship. But there's also the positive, like bringing us back together, right? So salvation is in part, you know, again, we're understanding the bad news in order to understand the good news. If the problem is a loss of communion, the solution is a restoration of communion. So through Christ, you know, think of Ephesians 2, talking about how once we were once aliens and strangers to the people of God and the covenants of promise. We're without hope, without God in the Word, all of that. There's a dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile, and also between everybody and God. And what did Jesus do? In his body, he breaks down the wall, he reconciles us to God and to one another. Then Ephesians 2.18 says, Through him we both have access in one spirit to the Father. So through the broken body of Christ, the blood of Christ, we are given access to the Trinity. We have a restoration of that communion for which we were initially made. And we see that in lots of places in lots of ways. Philippians 1:23, we'll go to be with him when we die. I am Paul talking, I'm hard pressed between the two. That's living and dying. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. We're restored to a communion that exists now, will exist when we die, and we go to be in the presence of Christ, and will exist ultimately and in a consummate way in the new heavens and new earth. Revelation 21, 3 through 4. I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe every tear from every eye, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more. For the former things have passed away. So if in our sin we lost communion with God, by grace we are restored to communion with God. We're restored to relationship. That's a really important aspect of the of you know of the whole of biblical soteriology doctrine of salvation, right? If you're missing that relationship piece, you're missing really the heart of what's going on.

SPEAKER_04 14:40

Yeah, another whole place, another thing you're skipping over there, too.

SPEAKER_06 14:44

Um would you like my chair?

SPEAKER_04 14:50

Something as I wish I had the skills I could do that. Um not you, but you know, in other places where they need a teacher. Um so uh and uh giving grace that there's a limitation there on grace in that the person has to trust in Christ, because otherwise, if you just uh if God paid for all the sin and it was just went out to anybody, everybody, including his enemies, then you'd be back in hell. And we hear that preached in some places where they say all people go to heaven.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

Because Christ died for all.

SPEAKER_04 15:29

Yeah, Christ died for all. His death, his blood was sufficient for everybody, but not everybody goes to be, has a restored relationship. It's only those who have your changed heart have that restored relationship.

SPEAKER_06 15:43

Yeah? You're getting at some stuff that we'll talk about when we talk about the atonement in whatever week and whatever question that is. A basic difference between what we would believe and teach in our church, and let's say uh an Armenian church is, you know, when Jesus died on the cross, what did Jesus do? Did he accomplish the salvation of his people? Or did he make possible the salvation of his people? For us, we would believe that Jesus, when he when the Good Shepherd laid down his life, he laid down his life for the sheep in an effectual way, that accomplished our salvation. Another church, an Arminian church, would say, Jesus made it possible for your sins to be paid for if you grab hold of him by faith. So then faith becomes the one work that you have to do in order to be saved. As opposed to, again, with us, we say, yeah, we are saved by a work. We're saved by the finished work of Christ. And faith is not the work we do, faith is the instrument by which we lay hold of and receive what Jesus accomplished for us. Right? And grace, uh grace is irresistible in the sense that God actually has to put to death the sin in us, take our heart of stone, give us a heart of flesh so that we might believe. Whereas in the Arminian setting, grace is resistible. God gives you a certain baseline of grace that kind of overcomes original sin, then it's up to you to partner with God, to participate, to respond rightly to that grace, and then you get some more grace and you go the rest of the way. Yeah. Grace coupons. Yeah.

unknown 17:21

Grace coupons.

SPEAKER_06 17:22

So the no, it's not quite that.

SPEAKER_04 17:33

I just thought I won't be here when he has it here.

SPEAKER_06 17:35

Yeah, yeah. People are sick and they take a pill. Yeah. It's more like when, you know, if my dog is sick and I have to put a pill in a bit of peanut butter, hold his mouth open and jam it down his throat.

SPEAKER_04 17:46

Yeah, is it are you dead or do you are you sick? Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 17:50

It was in real life.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

Um when I think of um the separation uh of us before uh we received the gift of faith and and grace. Um, I think of Jesus' uh parable when we talked about Lazarus and the chasm that was between the rich man and Lazarus, and that it was impossible for anyone to come from where the rich man was over to where Lazarus was, and it was impossible for Lazarus to go to the rich man. You just it was yes, it was so deep and so impossible to scale. And Christ in his word levels that gives us the path.

SPEAKER_06 18:49

Yeah, and he himself becomes the path. Yeah, and he becomes the path. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

Yeah, it's a narrow path.

SPEAKER_06 18:58

Yeah, it's it's an impossibly narrow path. He is the only one who could walk the path, and we in him walk the path. Alright, it's not like we walk the path in order to get to him, and we're he's kind of like waiting down there somewhere and we climb up on his shoulders. No, we can't get there. And so he comes and gets us. Alright, so that's the the loss of communion, the restoration of communion. Now the next part of the catechism answer talks about us being under the wrath and curse of God. So let's take that first word, wrath. What is wrath?

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Condemnation.

SPEAKER_06 19:34

Condemnation? What else? That feeling you get when you stub your devil. Here's a a good answer from the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. In the total biblical portrayal, God's wrath is not so much an emotion or an angry frame of mind as the settled opposition of his holiness to evil. Accordingly, God's wrath is seen in its effects, and God's punishment of sin in this life and the next. These inflictions include pestilence, death, exile, destruction of wicked cities and nations, hardening of hearts, and the cutting off of God's people for idolatry or unbelief. The day of wrath is God's final judgment against sin, is irrevocable condemnation of impenitent sinners. So the settled opposition of God's holiness to evil. That's a good way to think about wrath. Even in his anger, even when the Bible says his anger burned hot, that's not God flying off the handle. Like think of your own wrath versus God's wrath. Think of my own wrath versus God's wrath. My wrath is reactive. You know, a kid did the thing I said not to do for the 463rd time. Right? And I'm so tired of repeating myself, and it's all the emotions, right? Or somebody cuts you off in traffic, or some coworker says something foolish. I just think of all the ways in which we might experience something that we would consider wrath. God's wrath is not like that. God's wrath is perfectly measured, perfectly proportionate. God is sovereign over his own emotional life. There is nothing reactive about God's emotional feelings. So that wrath, Romans 1.18, tells us is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. The Bible even goes so far as to call us children of wrath. Ephesians 2.3. We once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. This is Paul talking to people who were former sinners and now have been saved by grace. Ephesians 5.6, let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. So God's wrath is not just a thing that's being reserved for the end of time and judgment day. God's wrath is a thing that has been revealed, is being revealed, and will be revealed. Again, the settled opposition of His holiness to evil. Anytime we see some evil in the world or the consequences of sin, we see God's wrath being poured out. So The question, how does grace deal with the wrath of God? The answer here is more obvious than you probably think. Y'all are nervous. Somebody just wants to say Jesus. How does grace deal with the wrath?

SPEAKER_00 22:53

I would think he deals with your heart.

SPEAKER_06 22:55

He deals with your heart. Okay. Why not?

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Because we're clean. He sees us what?

SPEAKER_06 23:10

Yeah, and what did Jesus do?

SPEAKER_00 23:11

Jesus is righteous. He took the wrath.

SPEAKER_06 23:13

He took the wrath, right? The cross, right? The answer is the cross. That's what that's what grace does with the wrath of God. Because wrath, again, is settled opposition of his holiness to evil. Well, God turns that wrath upon his own son, he takes it on his back. So all the wrath that was due to us because of our sin, Jesus willingly takes it upon himself on the cross. So that if we are in Christ, there's no more wrath left for us. Like at all. So let's say you go and you go and sin big this afternoon and you experience the consequences of it. What are those consequences? Are those consequences the wrath of God inflicted upon you? No. They're the discipline of your heavenly father. Because he no longer deals with you on account of your sin. Your sin has been atoned for, your sin has been dealt with on the cross. So you get something much different, right? You don't get the inflict the infliction of a judge against you. You get the discipline of a father. And that discipline is restorative, it's not punitive. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 24:25

That's something. Yeah, well, that's just my biggest what is traditionally been my biggest thing is the understanding that my things are like forgiven, like truly forgiven. Yeah. Like post, surely I'm not worth that. Yeah. You know, that's like that's my only thing, my big is like inner struggles. Yeah. Is just understanding that. And like I'm coming more and more, it's it's so weird, like coming to terms with the fact that I'm worth that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 24:58

Because God in Christ chose you from the foundation of the world. In ourselves, we're not worth that. Right? But by virtue of God's sovereign and electing love, he says, you, you're mine. And this is what it's going to look like for me to make you mine.

SPEAKER_04 25:18

Did you uh come up with that if you said biggest who came up with that? Me, right now? That's portable.

SPEAKER_06 25:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 25:26

I'll put that in a kid.

SPEAKER_06 25:28

Sure. Alright, so that's wrath. Well, the curse of God. What is the curse of God? How would you define that? Four-letter words hurled from heaven against you?

SPEAKER_04 25:44

Ah, well, it's separation from God, is what it is.

SPEAKER_06 25:49

Yeah, it's part of it. We've talked about that with the loss of communion. The Bible actually talks about curse in a number of ways. One is the Hebrew word Allah, A-L-A-H, only one L. It's kind of like a conditional oath. It's a spoken imprecation or a spoken oath. It's mean words. Often used as a prayer that God would bring justice on an evildoer whose guilt cannot strictly be proven. So calling down the curse of God. Numbers 5.21. This is in the context of marital infidelity. It talks about the priest shall make the woman take the oath of the curse and say to the woman, The Lord make you a curse and an oath among your people, in the case of an adulterous woman, right? Praying that God would ultimately inflict upon her the consequences due to her for her sin. Another one, arar. It's a kind of banning decree. It's an authoritative binding word that actively excludes, limits, or anathematizes someone or something. Think in the context of Genesis 3, when God's speaking to the serpent. Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field. It's a curse that establishes a permanent condition. Your curse, aka your cast out. Something that God utters or someone in authority can utter. A third way the Bible talks about cursing is maybe the more mundane way we think about it, as uh an act of disrespect. It's treating someone or even treating God's standards lightly. And it covers a whole wide range of incidents in the Old Testament, from verbal, just verbal insults, verbal harms to actually physical harms. I can curse you by punching you in the face. Leviticus 20, verse 9. Anyone who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death. That's just talking about an active, intentional, positive way of dishonoring your parents. Genesis 3, we already talked about the serpent is cursed. Also, the land is cursed. God talking to Adam, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. So it's the establishment of a condition. The ground had been created as being open to the cultivation of human beings. If the ground had not been cursed, Adam and Eve's job is to cultivate the garden and to expand its borders outside of Eden, they would have had a pretty decent time of that. They wouldn't have experienced all the things that we experience when we try to cultivate the land, either literally or figuratively. None of the futility, none of the frustration. That's because the land is under a curse. Genesis 12 talks about a curse being extended to all of those who dishonor Abraham. Genesis 12, 3. I will bless those who bless you. And him who dishonors you, I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. The law talks generally about curses coming upon anybody who breaks God's law. Deuteronomy 27, 26. Cursed be anyone who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them, and all the people shall say, Amen. Or think about Israel entering the promised land, and God sets up, uh basically sets someone up on two opposite mountains and says, From this mountain, you're going to proclaim the curses over the people of God, and from this mountain you're going to proclaim the blessings. And it's kind of a vivid way of holding before them the stipulations of the covenant and asking them, which way are you going to go? So we see a lot of cursing. Cursing is God's sort of judicial response to what we do that creates a condition in which we experience all of the consequences of sin, like we've been talking about. So my question, how does grace deal with it? What does grace do to deal with the fact that we are under a curse apart from grace?

SPEAKER_04 30:11

Jesus takes all the curses of God.

SPEAKER_06 30:15

Yes, once again, the answer is Jesus. Galatians 3, 13. God redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree. So how does grace deal with the curse? We were cursed. We broke the covenant. We're liable to all of the curses, all the sanctions, all of the bad things that are laid out in the covenant. So what does God do? He sends Jesus to become the curse for us. Takes all of the punishment on his behalf. He becomes the cursed criminal hanged on a tree in our place and for our sake. So that we no longer get the curse that we deserve, we get the blessing that we don't deserve. Alright, so we've talked about loss of communion, we've talked about wrath, we've talked about cursing. Now the catechism goes on to talk about what were made liable. Kind of the um, again, more of the consequences of these things. And it speaks really generally of the miseries of this life. Think of Ecclesiastes 1-2. Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, vanity of vanities. All is vanity. Or Job 5-7, man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. There's a general futility we experience in the world. There are miseries in the world, there are aching knees and ankles and feet. There are car accidents, there are job losses, there are broken relationships, there's sickness, there's cancer, there's all the things, right? All the miseries of this life. I asked the question earlier what are what are the consequences of sin in the world? There you have it. Everything that goes wrong in our lives. You can trace it back to the bottom cause of sin. But it also goes on to talk about the miseries of this life, then to death itself. Death is the peak misery of this life. That is the climax of all the miseries we experience as individuals, but also is the cause of all the miseries that we experience outside of it. There's a reason why Hebrews 2 talked about Jesus setting us free not just from death, but from a lifelong slavery to death. Because death is the black cloud that hangs over all of us. There are whole fields of psychology. They're called terror management theory that deal with death is like our core problem, and everything else we do in life is us combating that dark cloud hanging over us. So, question, is death a part of life? Yes. Is it?

unknown 33:12

Is it a part of life?

SPEAKER_06 33:13

Okay, we have a yes from Roy, we have a no from Wendy. We're gonna go home and argue about this. It's not a normal part of life. Alright, why do we make that qualification?

SPEAKER_04 33:22

Because there was no death.

SPEAKER_06 33:29

We're designed to live forever.

SPEAKER_04 33:32

It became what seems to be a part of life for most of us.

SPEAKER_06 33:37

Sometimes when somebody dies, alright, it's kind of like the advice you might hear, the comfort you might hear, it's like, well, this is a part of life. This is natural. There's nothing natural about death. At least I'll say human death. There's nothing natural about human death. We were not made to die. Death is a consequence. Romans 6.23, the wages of sin is death. But the free gift of God is eternal life. Death is not something to just make our peace with. In a sense, yeah, we can have a peace in the face of death because we know that death wasn't had the last word. But death in itself is not something that we're just supposed to take as a fact of life. Think of Jesus in John 11. You know, when he comes to the tomb, he sees the people weeping, he sees Mary weeping, Martha weeping, the Jews weeping, and then he's deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. He said, Where have you laid him? They said to him, Lord, come and see. And Jesus wept. Jesus who is the life himself, Jesus who knows exactly what he's about to do, nonetheless weeps over death. Because death is the thing, the kind of thing that you weep over. It's not supposed to be here. It's not a natural fact of life. It's not a friend. It's not ordinary. Well, it is ordinary because of the state of things. Ultimately, it's an enemy. And it's the last enemy. 1 Corinthians 15, 26, the last enemy to be destroyed is death. Roy.

SPEAKER_04 35:12

I thought Jesus wept over their unbelief. I bet that's discussion to someone.

SPEAKER_06 35:20

I don't think so.

SPEAKER_04 35:21

And somebody said, well, Jesus, because Jesus wept because Lazarus died. And uh and I was like, I thought they he was weeping because they did. Over their unbelief.

SPEAKER_06 35:34

It says, when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. There are other times. How does Jesus generally react to unbelief? Not with weeping, right? And in other parts of the gospels, not with weeping. So if he is responding to their unbelief, if he is weeping under their unbelief, he's weeping over their unbelief as evidenced in their not understanding the life that he comes to bring. So death is still at the center of it. I mean, he could get mad about their unbelief, but instead he gets sad about their unbelief. Because he doesn't believe that they've that he's come to overcome death. And it's it's kind of six one way, half dozen the other to me. But I think he is weeping in the face of death. Yeah. Yeah. So it is an enemy to be defeated. I talked about earlier how death has different senses in scripture. There are three real ways, the three kind of categories of death talk in the Bible. There's physical death, which is like the obvious one. Someone breathes their last, they give up the ghost, they go on the ground, all of that. There's also spiritual death. This is the kind of death that Ephesians 2 talks about, that when we were apart from God, we were dead in our sins and trespasses. So walking upright, still breathing physically, but in a state of death because we're alienated from God and under his wrath and curse. And then there's a third sense of death, which is eternal death. And eternal death is the finalization of that state of spiritual death. Because we, you know, we could be alive right now, but in a state of death because we're separated from God. But we're still alive. We're physically alive. And so we have the opportunity to be made spiritually alive in Christ. But if we die in that state of spiritual death and separation, Hebrews says it's appointed to man and to die once, then comes judgment. If we die in that state of spiritual death, then the only thing we have left in front of us is eternal death. And so that gets us into talking about what is the eternal state of those who die in that state of spiritual death. And it gets us to talking about hell. Hell specifically understood, classically understood is eternal conscious punishment. Now, Jesus, you know, that's it's a difficult thing to talk about, right? We acknowledge it from the outset. And if you can talk about hell with a sort of glee, then you don't really understand what hell is. As a sermon illustration, maybe six months ago, I talked about how, you know, there have been plenty of times in my life when I've told someone to go to hell. Way back when, right? Long time ago. And the only reason I could say that to someone is because I didn't actually believe hell was real. At least in the state that we understand it from Scripture. Because once you come to faith in Christ, and once you learn what hell is and what it means, it becomes really hard to say that to someone. I mean, think about Paul in Romans, I think it's 9, 10, or 11, where he's talking about how he has such anguish in his heart and such sorrow in his heart for his fellow Jews and the rejection of Christ and the consequences of that that he wishes that he could be cut off and sent to eternal perd himself. It's a grave, grave thing. And we might feel that bubble up in us. Like, say you have been harmed, you have been wronged in just an egregious way. And you're praying those kind of prayers. Prayers of imprecation, like, Lord, please come and take this person out, right? It's still really hard to get to the place where with knowledge you say, I want you to send them to hell. So again, all that to say, it's it's not the kind of thing we talk about lightly. But it is the thing that the Bible, the kind of thing that the Bible talks about. Uh more often than we might want to admit. Because who spoke more about hell than anyone else in the Bible?

unknown 40:21

Jesus.

SPEAKER_06 40:22

Jesus.

SPEAKER_02 40:24

You know, I guess they answered every question. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_06 40:29

But you know, you often do have a pitting of Jesus, and this is an ancient heresy that crops up again and again throughout the history of the church. The pitting of Jesus, the loving Moshikoshi son, against the angry father of wrath, who we know mostly from the Old Testament. But it's Jesus himself talking about eternal punishment in Matthew 25, 46, everlasting destruction in 2 Thessalonians 1.9. He draws on all kinds of biblical stuff. Uh Daniel talks about everlasting contempt in Daniel 12, 2. And Jesus again, unquenchable fire. Talks about Matthew 3 and 5 and 18. Damnation, Matthew 23, the blazing furnace, Matthew 13, 42, and 50. The blackest darkness, Jude talks about, reserved for Satan and his angels. The fiery lake of burning sulfur in Revelation 21. The eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels in Matthew 25. You got a few apostles sprinkled in there, but the vast majority, that's Jesus himself talking about this eternal state of conscious suffering. Weeping and gnashing of teeth. Matthew 8, 22, 25, Luke 13. So it's a reality in the New Testament. It's something that Jesus talks about and something that the apostles point to as this is the eternal state of those who die apart from a relationship, those who die in a state of sin and spiritual death. Now, something I've talked about before that it bears repeating. Often evangelicals will define hell as separation from God. Eternal separation from God. And you kind of get some justification for that from something like 2 Thessalonians 1.9. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might. But then you have other verses. Revelation 14, 10. He will drink the wine of God's wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. So how how does that work? Which one is it? Is hell uh eternal conscious suffering away from the presence of God or eternal conscious suffering in the presence of God?

SPEAKER_01 43:12

The latter would be the question.

SPEAKER_06 43:14

Right.

SPEAKER_01 43:14

Keith, then the latter would be the worst.

SPEAKER_06 43:17

The latter would be the worst.

SPEAKER_01 43:19

Yeah. It's because it's there just out of reach. And I know what I did. I can't get there.

SPEAKER_06 43:27

Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_04 43:30

I said, I said that was a very good question. As my mind quickly goes to the story, the parable of the um of the landowner who uh was away, and he sent his uh servants and they killed the servants. And then he sent his son and killed the son, and then when he came back, he had the people killed who were against him in front of him in his presence. Yeah. But then the next story is kind of an instance thing versus the description of hell, the people being tormented, is that continuous thing. And I I know we're getting into areas, I don't know.

SPEAKER_06 44:20

One strategy is to say the Bible is contradicting itself, that hell is not a real place. It's just a bunch of confused people trying to whack people over the head with their religiosity. That's not an Option for us. And I don't think there's any contradiction at all. I think you know when it comes to the presence of God, there are different ways to talk about presence. There's a spatial way in which we can talk about presence, which has to do with our physical proximity. There's also a relational way to talk about presence, which has to do with, I just imagine like during this class, you're on your phone the whole time. You're here, but you're not here. Or you're at the dinner table, you're on your phone the whole time. You're there, but you're not there. Or think about if you had a fight with your spouse. You're sitting on the couch, a foot or two away from each other, physically, but relationally, you're miles apart. So I think when it's talking about, you know, the pre- God is omnipresent, right? God is everywhere. Paul or David in Psalm 139 said, if I try to get away from you, where am I going to go? I go to heaven, you're there. The farthest reaches the sea, you're there. Sheol, the very grave itself, you're there. God's everywhere, right? So God is actually in hell. So he is present in that sense. Spatially, you want to call it, spiritually, you want to call it, but relationally, right? There is not a presence to bless, there is a presence to curse. God, for those who are separated from him, who are in hell, he is there as a judge. He is there as the creator full of wrath, who has every right to inflict every curse upon the people who are suffering conscious eternal torment. And that makes it worse. Infinitely worse. But in heaven, God is there, his present to bless.

SPEAKER_03 46:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:38

I've always, that's something I've not chewed on and never really been able to understand what that means.

SPEAKER_06 46:45

Yeah. Yeah. That's a tricky one. Because the church has been confessing it for part of the answer is that, you know, hell, the way it comes down to us in English, hell used to be something more like Hades, right? Just in terms of the English words. And it didn't carry the conscious, or it didn't carry all of the freight of being the place of conscious eternal torment. But still, there are people in church history who do believe that Jesus went to hell. And based on a kind of reading of 1 Peter 3, that he went and proclaimed to the spirits who were there and set them free. Cactus believes, like the harrowing of hell. To be honest with you, I don't 100% know where I land on it. I think that Calvin is close to the truth when it's really talking about the manner of his death. What did Jesus experience on the cross? I don't think it's enough to say, well, that's just another way the creed says that Jesus was buried in the ground. He went to the grave. You know, hell is Hades. Because it, you know, he suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. So that amounts to say he died and was buried and he went into the grave. That's two ways of saying the same exact thing within the short compass of a creed like that. It's just it wouldn't they wouldn't do that.

SPEAKER_02 48:12

There's a whole lot crammed into a short side.

SPEAKER_06 48:15

So I I think, you know, the answer I like the most today is that he experienced hell for us on the cross. That's what I think is getting at it.

SPEAKER_02 48:27

But then the next statement is what gives me levels. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 48:33

Yeah. Yeah. So there are two, when we think about hell, we only have a couple minutes, so I'll just briefly bring them up. There are two big errors that kind of exist in the church. Universalism and annihilationism. Universalism, there are a lot of different ways to be a universal virtualist. At the end of the day, a universalist believes that everyone is saved. Maybe they believe everyone is saved because nobody has to be saved. Others that get kind of closer, because sin is just something we make up, and you know, God is a loving Father who brings everyone to heaven, that kind of thing. There are people who get closer to the evangelical reservation who believe that there is no hell because Jesus accomplished the salvation of everyone on the cross. Or if there is a hell, it's at least, it's not permanent, right? It's it's temporary. It's a kind of pedagogical place where you go, you're taught the depth of your sin, and then you take your medicine, and then ultimately everyone is saved. You see that kind of thing throughout the history of the church. You even see it today in some evangelicals who will argue for something like uh evangelical universalism.

SPEAKER_04 49:49

And still, there's so many that that you know if you violate some moral law in the street that you're going to they have an exception for that. Yeah. It's just weird.

SPEAKER_06 50:01

Yeah. The thing to say.

SPEAKER_04 50:07

Well, you have our conqueror's things. Yes.

SPEAKER_06 50:12

No, uh, we can't run universalism to the ground. But the thing to, if you're kind of facing that sort of thought or facing that kind of talk, then the question to ask is well, what about all the texts that talk about the eternality of punishment? Thinking of Matthew 25, or the weeping and gnashing of teeth. Um, you know, the the passage I just read from 2 Thessalonians 1 9, they'll suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, right? Uh in Revelation talking about the smoke of their torment going on forever and ever. All this forever language that's attached to people who are suffering this state of eternal death. Well, what do you do with that? If if universalism is true, and either there is no hell or hell is of finite duration and eventually there will be no hell, what do you do with that? What Jesus is talking about? People are going to suffer the eternal consequences of their sin apart from faith. That's the question to ask. That's the question to really wrestle with. Now, another, the other error is annihilationism. And this one does get closer to evangelical faith because people who hold to annihilationism, they do it often for biblical reasons. They believe that it's the best biblical argument. So they're not unbelievers, they're not skeptics, they're believers who believe all the same things about the Bible as we do. So you gotta acknowledge that when you're talking to someone who might have this kind of view or have these kinds of questions. They're not trying to deny hell, they're not trying to deny the gravity of sin or downplay any of that. They're just saying, hey, when I look at scripture, it seems like immortality is a gift that God gives to certain people, people who are saved. If you're not saved, immortality is actually not for you. You will die and go out of existence at some point. And for the annihilationists, they would say, well, that is what hell is for. So you might experience hell until the final judgment, and then at the final judgment, you'll be sent into the lake of fire, which is the second death. For an annihilationist, that's that's the cessation of your existence. Right? That's that's when you cease to be. So hell exists, but not as a place of eternal conscious torment. And the arguments for that kind of thing, I don't think that's the right view. I think that's the wrong view. But the arguments for it, one is you know, anthropological in the sense of what I just said, that immortality is a gift. Another is biblical, right? They'll argue that um fire in scripture is used as an image of consumption and destruction and not torment. When things burn in the Bible, they burn not, they don't burn forever. Or um, you know, uh 2 Thessalonians 1:9 that I read a couple times now, where it talks about the destruction of the wicked. Or even Jesus says, don't fear the one who can destroy your body, fear the one who can destroy both your body and soul in hell. And they say, look, Jesus himself says that our souls will be destroyed in hell, right? And then the theological sort of reason to believe annihilationism is say, well, God is infinite, we are finite. Eternal conscious punishment is an infinite punishment. For God to inflict an infinite punishment on finite creatures who've sinned in finite ways would be unjust. It would be way overblown. So the way we might respond to that is to those three lines of argument, is the theological one to say, well, because God is infinite, because he's infinitely holy, infinitely just, infinitely righteous, infinitely loving, all of these sorts of things, even our finite sins, because they're committed against an infinite God, merit an infinite punishment. Right? That's that's one reason to believe against the annihilationists that infinite punishment is not unbecoming of God. Well then the biblical argument, in part it's what I said about universalism. All those texts about punishment being eternal. And the one, the strongest argument, I think, for me, for the annihilationists, at least in a kind of rhetorical way, to talk about this destruction text. He's gonna destroy you. Well, think about the meaning of to destroy something. Let's say I get in a wreck this week and my truck is destroyed. What does that mean? Does it mean my truck has gone out of existence? No. It means it's been reduced to a pile of metal, it's it's a mess of what it once was, and it's no longer able to fulfill its design.

SPEAKER_04 55:11

Yeah, its purpose is gone out of existence.

SPEAKER_06 55:13

Right. Its purpose is hopelessly uh just wrecked, right? That's the kind of the Bible uses destruction language in that kind of way. So for Jesus to say the body and soul are destroyed in hell, or for Paul to say in 2 Thessalonians that we'll be destroyed in the presence of God, it's not to say that we'll be blinked out of existence, but it is to say that we will be utterly ruined. We we won't, not us, because we believe in Jesus, but apart from grace, apart from faith, we're just utterly, utterly wrecked in the presence of God, no longer able to know him and make him known like we're made to do. And ultimately, and you know, the anthropological argument about you know whether immortality is a gift, it goes hand in hand with the other things that I've I've I've been saying. Look to all that Jesus says about punishment being eternal, separation from God being ongoing, the weaving and gnashing of teeth that never ends, the everlasting darkness on the outside, all of these sorts of things. Jesus is painting a picture, not of you just getting kicked out for a while then going out of existence, but always being on the outside, always wanting to be on the inside, constant torment forever and ever and ever. Be glad. Like I said, a heavy topic. But the reason we run these things to ground and we really try to understand what scripture is teaching on them, is because these are the saves. This is the destiny of everyone who dies apart from faith in Christ. We need to know that for ourselves, but we also need to know it for the sake of the people with whom we interact. Like, where is our urgency? The early church had a lot of urgency in preaching the gospel, even in the faith, in the face of persecution and death. Why? Because they knew what the stakes were. We have all kinds of strategies that kind of reduce the pressure for us, uh, slacken us up a bit, make us think somewhere in our minds, or make us doubt the fact that my unbelieving neighbor, they might not believe in Jesus, but they're gonna be okay in the end. Somewhere in our hearts or in our minds. We want to be able to feel that because it's more comfortable. But that takes the urgency away from us. We gotta know what the stakes are so that we can bring them their only hope of life. All right, the people are piling up out there. Sorry we've gone a little long. Let's pray. Father, the bad news is bad. These are hard things to think about. They make us uncomfortable. We'd rather not think of them, we'd rather not speak of them. We'd rather set them aside, Lord, but these are truths that you've revealed in your word about the fate of all those who die apart from faith in you. So, Lord, help us to have a sense of those stakes. Remind us of what's true and what we all need. Lord, give us opportunities not to be jerks, not to be uh preachers of fire and brimstone on street corners or with every person we meet in some kind of way that's harsh and unhelpful. But a people who are motivated by the free offer of life and the gift that you've held out in Jesus. Lord, help us to be about proclaiming his name wherever we go. So the people you've placed in our lives don't have to experience this awful fate, but they can experience eternal life with you. I pray that's in Jesus' name. Amen. Alright.