Tag Archives: grace

A well deserved Hell…

Posted on by
Reply

“For the wages of sin is death…”
(Romans 6:23 (ESV)

Rob Bell and Love Wins notwithstanding, there really is a place called Hell, there is a final judgment, and God is righteous in His anger and wrath against sin.  It’s not fun to talk about, but then neither would it be “fun” to ignore the subject altogether only to find yourself already there when it’s too late to do anything about it. 

Unfortunately, God’s judgment has gotten a bad rap by those who stand under it.  We hear God’s righteous decree to be holy, for He is holy (Lev. 19:2), but we know that’s impossible, so the call must be impractical.  We try to live a good life, we do our best anyway, and we look for whatever joy we can find – even if the Bible says it’s a sin.  We tell ourselves, “God really wouldn’t hold this against me, surely He will understand.”  When confronted with the truth of God’s Word, we kick against the goads.  We bristle under correction.  We despise discipline.  “Who died and made you god,” we complain.  In our arrogance, we think we are more compassionate, more just, more forgiving than God himself.  We’d prefer the toothless and tame god of our own creation who is kind and generous to all, giving everyone a hall pass through life.

Living under such a delusion will lead to our destruction.  We worship a holy God who cannot even look upon sin, how then can we presume to stand before Him in our sin?  Psalm 5:4–6, teaches us, “For you are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with you. The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers.  You destroy those who speak lies; the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.”  Habakkuk 1:13 says, “You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong…” 

The fact of the matter is that we must deal with a Holy and Righteous God who has issued His decree on all of humanity.  We are called to live in holiness before Him, but “we have all sinned fallen short of His glory” (Rom 3:23), “none is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (Rom 3:10-12).  Under this judgment of God we stand condemned, for the “wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23).  God is just in declaring that sinners are bound for Hell.

The preaching of judgment is not intended to scare you into believing or acting a certain way, but to tell you that you do indeed need a savior.  Luther called it one side of the gospel coin.  Unfortunately for many of us, it is a lesson we need to hear again and again.  We tend to insulate ourselves from the need for help.  I can manage just fine on my own.  I’ve got Jesus is in my life as a “spiritual insurance” policy – just in case things get bad, but hopefully I’ll never have to call upon him.

Friends this is not gospel living, this is not the gospel faith.  The truth of the gospel is this: you are in desperate need of a savior.  Things are bad, they are beyond repair.  Your life is not acceptable to God, in fact, our lives apart from Christ are offensive to God.  We owe to God a perfect life we cannot live, a tremendous debt we cannot pay, an offering we cannot make.  Only when you see your life as forfeit before God do you truly begin to appreciate the miracle of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  God is gracious in calling the redeemed to His side in glory!

It is true that “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” but the story does not end there.  Paul goes on to say we are “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom 3:24).  It is true that “the wages of sin is death,” but it is equally true that “the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 6:23).  To preach the judgment without the gospel would be cruel, but to preach the gospel without the judgment would be meaningless for us today.

We deserve Hell, but our loving God has seen to it that, by faith in Jesus Christ, we can be made fit to live in heaven.  We are covered by his righteousness, made alive by his spirit, redeemed by his blood, purchased with his life, given victory over death and hell by his empty tomb.  This is the free gift of God through faith in Jesus Christ.  There is nothing we could ever do to deserve this gift, to try would keep us from receiving as it was intended, as a gift.  We live by responding in joyful obedience; God equips us and sends us for the work He has prepared for us from before time (Eph 2:10), but these works are always in response.  God, from the beginning of time, has always been the one to act first in grace, we were created to respond and live in the joy and splendor of His grace and glory!

Richard Baxter, the 17th century Puritan preacher, wrote in his work The Saint’s Everlasting Rest, “So let ‘DESERVED’ be written on the door to Hell; but on the door to heaven and life, ‘THE FREE GIFT.’”

I’ll say “Amen” to that.

The Unforgivable Sin

Posted on by
3

“Whoever says, ‘I know him’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar…”
(1 John 2:4 ESV) 

There was a time when Jesus’ warning against blasphemy really troubled me.  In Matthew 12:31-32 Jesus says, “Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.”  As a child, I was a little preoccupied with this, wondering what “The Unforgivable Sin” really was.  Was there one sin, one particularly nasty sin, which if committed, would forever damn you?  Did pastors know what it was, but not tell anyone so as not to tempt them with that sin?  What if I had already committed it?

I remember hearing Dr. John Gerstner when I was only 8 or 9 years old, teaching on the Perseverance of Saints (it must have been good, because I don’t remember much from that long ago.)  In Gerstner’s scratchy old voice, I vividly recall him declaring, “Because my salvation is the work of the almighty God, and because I am sealed with the power of his Holy Spirit, my savior will not allow me to blaspheme and thereby lose my salvation.  My salvation is secure because it is the gift of God.”  That helped to relieve my conscience, but I still wrestled with what it meant to blaspheme God. 

I remember one person telling me that suicide was the unforgivable sin.  His reasoning was, you have to ask for forgiveness after you sin in order to be forgiven.  Since suicide makes that impossible, it is unforgiveable.  I am so thankful that I’ve had some good reformed pastors who have exposed the problems with that line of thinking.  If our salvation depends on our ability to seek forgiveness for every fault, then we, like Luther, had better be obsessed with self-examination and repentance.  However, if we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus, and that faith produces within us a spirit of repentance and trust in Christ, then our salvation is not at risk when our sins are unconfessed.  That is not license to go on sinning, but relief in knowing that our salvation is not dependent upon our own moral perfection.

What then, is this “unforgivable sin?”  Jesus helps to define blasphemy as “speaking against the Holy Spirit.”  In the immediate context of the passage in Matthew, this could mean saying that Jesus is the devil, attributing to Satan the work and power of God through the Holy Spirit.  This outright denial of the revelation of God’s Spirit to our hearts and minds is the denial of God Himself.  For those who continue to reject and deny the reality of God, and the truth of God’s Son, Jesus Christ, they have blasphemed the witness of the Holy Spirit.

But it is also possible for those who call themselves Christian to blaspheme.  After all, this warning given in Matthew was for an audience of those who already believed.  So what was at stake?  In the very next line in Matthew, Jesus says, “The tree is known by its fruit…”  In other words, if you are really alive by the power of the Spirit, then your life will reflect the holiness and life that the Spirit gives.  As John said in the passage above, “By this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep hi commandments.  Whoever says, ‘I know him,’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.”

I love this commentary from George MacDonald:

God says, as it were, “Let a man have committed any sin whatever, I forgive him; but to chose to go on sinning – how can I forgive that?  It would be to nourish and cherish evil!  It would be to let my creation go to ruin.  Shall I keep you alive to do things hateful in the sight of all true men?  If a man refuse to come out of his sin, he must suffer the vengeance of a love that would be no love if it left him there.  Shall I allow my creature to be the thing my soul hates?”

There is no excuse for this refusal.  If we were punished for every fault, there would be no end, no respite; we should have no quiet wherein to repent; but God passes by all he can.  He passes by and forgets a thousand sins, yea, tens of thousands, forgiving them all – only we must begin to do good, begin to do evil no more.

If you are content with holding on to your sin, in persisting in your way rather than submitting to the way of the Lord, you have no part in him at all.  To hold on to sin when God calls us out of sin is a slap in the face of our loving savior.  Shall we continue to live in the sin that Christ died for?  Would it be loving for God, for the Church, for brothers and sisters in Christ, to allow sin to go unchecked, uncorrected, unrepented, so as not to offend; when such a sin will ultimately lead to judgment and death? 

I, as dear old Gerstner taught me, believe that, ultimately I cannot blaspheme God because I have been saved, and am being made righteous, by God himself.  Under the first definition of blasphemy, God’s Spirit of Holiness will keep me from rejecting the truth of my savior Jesus Christ, by the continued renewal of the mind and the piercing of my heart through the sharp sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God.  Under the second definition, God, who has begun a good work in me, a work of righteousness and holiness by the power of His Holy Spirit, will continue to sanctify me and cleanse me from sin, for He is faithful to complete what He has begun.

“If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness,
that you may be feared.” (Psalm 130:3-4)

So let us rest in the sure and certain promise of God, that we are saved by grace through faith, and let us grow in righteousness, leaving behind all the sins that would weigh us down and keep us running the race that is set before us.

Know that you are forgiven, and be at peace!

SDG