An Urgent Call to Salvation (Part one of three)
By Jay Wegter
Psalm 96, A Call to Worship the LORD the Righteous Judge.
1 Sing to the LORD a new song;
Sing to the LORD, all the earth.
2 Sing to the LORD, bless His name;
Proclaim good tidings of His salvation from day to day.
3 Tell of His glory among the nations,
His wonderful deeds among all the peoples.
4 For great is the LORD and greatly to be praised;
He is to be feared above all gods.
5 For all the gods of the peoples are idols,
But the LORD made the heavens.
6 Splendor and majesty are before Him,
Strength and beauty are in His sanctuary.
7 Ascribe to the LORD, O families of the peoples,
Ascribe to the LORD glory and strength.
8 Ascribe to the LORD the glory of His name;
Bring an offering and come into His courts.
9 Worship the LORD in holy attire;
Tremble before Him, all the earth.
10 Say among the nations, “The LORD reigns;
Indeed, the world is firmly established, it will not be moved;
He will judge the peoples with equity.”
11 Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
Let the sea roar, and all it contains;
12 Let the field exult, and all that is in it.
Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy
13 Before the LORD, for He is coming,
For He is coming to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
And the peoples in His faithfulness.
I. The Person of God II. The Personality of Sin III. The Person of Christ IV. Your Personal Response V. Your Personal Destiny
The Person of God
The good news of the gospel is first of all about God. He is sovereign Creator. He is the designer, fashioner, and sustainer of all creation (Ps 100:3; Acts 17:24-31). The universe is not self-existent, self-sustaining, or self-explanatory—He called the universe into existence by His spoken Word and He explains it by His written Word, the Scriptures. As sustainer of the cosmos, He is revealing His mighty attributes by means of the creation and the laws by which He preserves the created order (Rom 1:18-20). The created universe discloses God day by day (Ps 19:1-6).
He is sovereign Ruler and Lord over everything that exists (Is 14:27). He owns everything and He is absolute over all reality (Ps 24:1, 2). This is God’s world, nothing can change that; sinners do not create a separate reality by their rebellion, God sees their day coming (Ps 2:1-9).
As infallible Creator, He is infinite in wisdom. He is light; He is love, the source of all truth, wisdom, knowledge, and ethics (1 Jn1:5 Prov 1:7). He is holy; He made the universe in order to demonstrate His holy character. God is unchanging in His moral majesty, purity, and holiness (Is 6:3). He alone sets the standard for right and wrong—every commandment He has given is the manifestation of His holy character (1 Pet 1:16, Rom 3:19-21).
He is personal Creator. God is a personal Being. He is self-aware, personal, holy, knowable, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient (Ps 139; Rom 11:36). Our personhood and hunger for relationship is grounded in the fact that we are made in the image of a personal God (Gen 1:27) in order to have a love relationship with us (1 Jn 3:1; 4:7-10). We were made for communion with Him. He created us for His glory to take delight in worshipping, serving, honoring, and reflecting Him (1 Cor 10:31; Is 43:7, 21).
God is worthy to be loved. His character is perfect, wonderful and excellent. We were created to be satisfied in Him and all that He is for us. Therefore, it is the creature’s duty to live for God’s glory—our accountability to Him flows from our being made in His image (Matt 22:37).
Only God knows how wonderful He is in His character, and how worthy He is to be the center of our lives. It is impossible to have a saving relationship with God without knowing Him through Christ as He has revealed in His Word.
In fact we don’t really know who we are until we know our Creator. Why one might ask? The answer is that our creational identity is to reflect, represent, serve, enjoy, love and worship Him. So according to Scripture it is impossible to define a human being without defining who we are in relation to God—for we are His image and likeness, created to reflect our Maker. How can we know who we are if we do not know who it is we are created to reflect?
By way of example, I think about our own moon—we define it in relationship to the earth. Its monthly cycle is the basis for our calendar. Its phases, whether crescent or full or quarter, reveal how the moon appears when it is facing the sun directly (from our vantage point) or facing almost entirely away from it. When facing mostly away from our sun, we see a thin crescent or ‘new moon’.
Our Creator has given the moon many valuable roles and functions; it flushes out bays and estuaries with tidal movement. It keeps intertidal ecosystems alive and healthy. Its tidal action transports heat to the earth’s poles. And, without that circulating action, algae blooms would produce stagnation and deadness in countless lagoons, bays, and wetlands. The moon is also the means by which hundreds of thousands of creatures time their reproduction. And, there is an entire world of nocturnal animals that do their feeding and hunting at night.
The moon has an important role in sustaining our planet’s web of life. But what if the moon decided to leave its orbit around planet earth? What if it wandered off on its own, pulling away from, and escaping the gravitational hold of earth and silently moving into the dark recesses of the universe? What if it tired of its servant role and of depending upon our gravity for its predictable course?
You see the moon as a light bearer has no glory of its own; all of its glory is reflected glory. Unlike the sun the moon doesn’t generate its own light; like us, it is created to be a reflector of another’s glory. If the moon moved away from its orbit into the deep recesses of black space it would be a useless dark ball of rock and dust sitting alone in the dark with nothing to define it, and with no valuable purpose.
In some ways this pictures the human rebellion. Our glory is borrowed glory. Our highest glory and honor flows from a true knowledge of our Maker (Ps 89:14-18; Jer 9:23-24; Rom 1:23). God has put us over the work of his hands—our dignity is bestowed by Him who is infinite in dignity (Ps 8). Our creational identity is that of stewards, representatives, and reflectors of our Maker. And, since we are made in God’s image and likeness, our purpose and cultural calling is to BE the image of God—which means we are to live all of life in a ‘Godward’ manner. “Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor 10:31).
Thus, our rational, reasonable, responsible lifestyle is to treasure God by trusting and obeying him and finding our highest satisfaction in him. But Scripture tells us that there was a great defection from God, or apostasy in the original paradise of Eden.
The Personality of sin
When Adam and Eve took their cue from Lucifer and broke faith with God, our first parents lost the potential of unbroken fellowship with God and endless life. They also lost their status before God, their righteous covering, and the ministry of the Holy Spirit. This means that their sudden recognition of nakedness was more than simply having their private parts visible to the light of day. It meant that there was a deeper nakedness exposed—the nakedness of sin and shame brought to light before their Maker (Gen 3:7-10).
As a result of their rebellion, they had no more standing before God and therefore they wanted to hide the very parts of their bodies that would be responsible for reproducing another fallen human being like themselves. Now, so important to understanding human history and the nature of mankind is to grasp the fact that all human beings have inherited this defiled corrupted nature from Adam as a result of the fall in Eden (Rom 3:9-20; 5:12; Eph 2:1-3).
The original sin which we have inherited has produced a great divide, a great separation between God and man. Now this alienation from our Creator has an intellectual dimension to it—the Bible says that the mind of man in its natural state is darkened; it filled with ignorance of God; and it is hostile to God (Col 1:21). And this separation from God is actively expressed in a continual studious suppression of the knowledge of God (Rom 1:18ff.).
So we should not be surprised then to find that mankind in his academic, philosophic, cultural, and religious endeavors precipitates toward world and life views which are antagonistic to God’s self-revelation in Scripture. Mankind chooses a life view which insulates him from his accountability to God, for the natural man treats sin and all of its effects as normal. But Scripture penetrates the fortresses of error man raises up against the knowledge of God (2 Cor 10:3-5).
The Word of God gives us God’s infallible authoritative vantage point as to the disastrousness of the human condition by reason of sin. God describes sin as a cruel intruder which produces lust, war, misery, rebellion, victimization, injustice, death, and eternal separation from God (Jas 4:1-4). Now, since man is prone to cover his sin and dismiss its seriousness, a true understanding of the wickedness of sin can only be revealed by Scripture.
The Word of God functions as a divinely empowered diagnostic tool. Scripture exhibits the severity of man’s sin predicament—it is a dilemma which is beyond man’s ability to correct (Jn 8:34-35). We could summarize man’s dilemma as follows: in his natural state he has a bad record in heaven because he continually breaks God’s commands. He has a bad heart which is the source of his problem moral problem. He is a ‘bad tree’ which bears bad fruit making the production of good fruit impossible without a change in his nature. And he has a bad master— he follows the rebellion of the evil one, the god of this world (Eph 2:2). And he is not able in himself to correct or reverse a single one of these. But . . . apart from the Word of God, no man would arrive at this diagnosis.
Man is helpless and hopeless in himself (Rom 5:6-12). Sin is not what sinners imagine it to be: ‘merely the proneness of humans to err’—no, sin is lawlessness according to 1 Jn 3:4. But, sin is also a moral and spiritual disease which hides its true condition. As such, human sin is a very deceptive malady. It hides the real condition and prognosis from those under its influence. The natural man continually tells himself that he is not miserable, that he is not in dire straits, that he has the power to amend his ways, and that he will be able to deliver himself by his deeds, and that his case is not so serious as to merit eternal damnation. Each of these assumptions is a falsehood, for apart from divine grace, sin in every case is a terminal disease (Rom 5:12).
Jeremiah chapter 17 verse 9 states, “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” This means that the potential of sin to deceive its human host is beyond our powers of investigation. This is indeed startling. When the sinner first hears from Scripture that he is completely unable to accurately diagnose or remedy his own case, fury rises up in his heart. Sin is very efficient at hiding its insidious nature from those under its rule.
Therefore in our labor to communicate the deadliness of this aspect of sin, we find it useful to employ certain metaphors. Past divines have described sin’s deviousness in this manner: Sin is so eager to sustain itself, that if it were possible, it would plunge a knife into the heart of God in order to sustain its activity—Christ’s crucifixion is proof of this.
Sin has a certain madness and insanity about it as it pursues its lustful desires. Some shipwrecked individuals have displayed this suicidal compulsion. When thirst tightened their throats, it drove them to slurp down cold sea water which produced an agonizing death— dehydration set in as their tongues swelled and their kidneys failed.
The self-deception produced by sin is filled with pride, the sinner tells himself, “Oh at any time I could turn my life around, I have the ability to pull the pleasure out of sin, stop short of bondage, and evade sin’s lasting consequences.” Imagine a lollipop that has rat poison at the center, but candy on the outside. The sinner says “I can lick off the candy and stop just short of the poison.”
God has given us countless examples of how pernicious sin is as we observe certain behaviors in nature. There is a particular beetle that climbs a tree above an anthill. It lays a single egg which drops onto the ant hill. The egg perfectly resembles a plant seed. So an ant picks it up in its pincers and takes it into its nest and carefully stores it in the pantry. When the beetle larva hatches, it crawls into the next room (the ant nursery) and begins to feed on the ant larvae until it has fully developed, and since it has the scent from the nursery it is able to crawl out of the ant nest undisturbed by the soldiers. You see sin operates in a covert fashion; it hides its activity and seeks to conceal its consequences.
Sin is very parasitic, but it requires a willing host for its activity. Another example from nature is the cuckoo bird. They have a lovely call but they are entirely parasitic in their reproduction. They lay their eggs in other bird’s nests while the song birds are out gathering food. When the song bird parents return, there is a large egg in their nest along with their own eggs. And, since the cuckoo’s egg incubates faster than the other eggs, the newly hatched cuckoo chick can eliminate all competition for food from the nest.
The parasite chick has a sensitive patch on its posterior. It puts its little body in reverse and backs the other eggs out of the nest. The parents can’t count—they don’t notice that their own eggs are missing, so the song birds spend all of their time gathering food for the cuckoo chick. Soon the chick is larger than the song bird parents, and once it is fully fledged, it flies off to repeat its parasitic cycle. The poor song birds have used all of their resources to perpetuate parasitism—all there energy, hard work, and devotion have been used to raise an intruder. They have nothing to show for their efforts. What a picture of sin robbing the soul. It brooks no rivals; it wants sole dominion over the heart. “But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death” (Jas 1:14-15).
The personality of sin is also seen in its tendency to defend itself, cover its deeds, and rationalize its activity. The Lord Jesus Christ condemned His unbelieving hearers as self-justifiers who lived to please men and not God. Self-justifiers order their lives for the praise of man (Lu 16:15). But God tells us that that which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in God’s sight.
Not only is sin filled with self-deception it also has no fear of God. We certainly see this in the 14 point indictment in Romans chapter 3. The sinner has a greater fear of disapproval from his friends than from God Almighty. He fears the IRS, the CHP, and the possibility of cancer more than God, the Judge of all the earth. Sin puts the conscience to sleep. It produces a growing insensitivity to its corrupting effects. Scripture likens this consequence to cauterizing the conscience into unfeeling scar tissue (1 Tim 4:2).
An accurate diagnosis of sin is so vital to our grasp of man’s moral and spiritual condition before God and thus, essential to a true understanding of why man needs a Savior. In terms of the gravity of the issue, one could say it this way, “What you think of your sin and how you regard God as seeing your sin reveals what you think of God Himself.”
I think of a little infant who has no concept of germs or filth. Perhaps you have your toddler learning to walk in the backyard as the family enjoys a sunny day. Then you see something that arrests your attention: your little child picks up something the pet has left. You yell, “No, no, no!” she puts it in her mouth, we are immediately disgusted and we run over to wash out the filth. Like that little child, the sinner is oblivious to the polluting power of sin. And, in order to view sin as God sees it requires that our consciences be educated by Holy Scripture otherwise we will be foolish and complacent as we inch toward the flaming abyss.
Because all sin is against an eternal God, all sin has a kind of endless existence to it. We think of radioactive substances—radioactive isotopes have a half-life. As those materials decay, there is less of the parent element to bombard its surroundings with sub-atomic particles. The deleterious effects of the substance are gradually reduced over time—they are eventually used up. But sin has no half-life. It keeps producing the ‘fallout’ of shame, blame, degradation, condemnation, and guilt. The reason why is because sin is against God personally. Oh if we only knew what a disaster sin is—its wretchedness involves the hatred it has for God’s righteousness.
We are ‘bounded creatures’ designed by God to flourish within the ‘blueprint’ of His good and wise laws. But, only through the power of the gospel are believing sinners restored to their created purpose. “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Rom 8:1-4).
GFL’s Article of the Month: parts two and three of “An Urgent Call to Salvation” to come