The Sword Room

Today I want to continue where I left off yesterday by launching into 1 Kings 13. We saw in chapter 12 how the kingdom had been split into two halves, the northern and southern and how Jeroboam introduced a new apostate religious system in the northern kingdom.

Chapter 13 begins with an unidentified prophet being instructed by the word of the Lord to go north to Bethel to pronounce judgment against Jeroboam as he offers incense at the altar of his false gods. The judgment will be meted out through a future godly Davidic king named Josiah, who will slaughter the false priests and offer them as sacrifices on their own altar. As a confirmatory sign the altar is split in half and the ashes are poured out on the ground. Jeroboam stretches out his hand and orders his men to arrest the prophet, but when he does this his hand is withered and frozen in place. Jeroboam  begs the prophet to pray to the Lord for the restoration of the hand, which he does. Once the hand is healed Jeroboam urges the prophet to come and dine with him and receive a monetary reward. The prophet refuses, having been commanded by the Lord previously not to eat or drink with anyone while on his mission, and to return by an alternate route.

An old prophet living in Bethel is informed by his sons about the episode, and he goes out to meet the visiting prophet and extend an invitation of food and lodging. The visiting prophet refuses, citing the Lords prohibition, but the elderly prophet lies and says he has received a word from God to the effect that the visiting prophet is to eat with him and spend the night in his home. The visiting prophet accepts the invitation, and the next day as he is en route to Judah he is attacked and killed by a lion. The lion does not eat the man and does not attack the donkey. Instead the lion and donkey stand by the corpse of the prophet as people pass by on the road.

I see several practical applications from this story. The first is that God will not tolerate the worship of any other gods, nor will he excuse any form of worship other than what he has prescribed in scripture. Jeroboam and his false priests were in violation of the first three of the ten commandments, and for their idolatrous practices they were under the sentence of death: they were to be slaughtered like beasts and burned on their own pagan altars. In our country we hear tolerance of other faiths praised, but this attitude does not come from God. Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, Buddhism, and all other religions that do not embrace and honor the true God of scripture are false and abominable before the Lord. There is only one true God and one way of access to Him, as prescribed in scripture; and all other paths lead directly to death and hell.

We also see that God punishes disobedience. The false priests had been judged, and to show the earnestness of the promise of death the Lord punished his own prophet as a sign to wicked Jeroboam. If God would take the life of the prophet for what seemed like a trivial act of disobedience, how much more sure was the fate of those who worshipped and offered sacrifices to the calf idols at Bethel, condemning not only themselves but also the masses of Israelites led astray by their apostacy?

We also see the foolishness of listening to others instead of the Lord. God had spoken to the prophet with explicit instructions. When the elderly prophet approached him with an alleged word to the contrary, he should have not heeded it. Personally, I do not believe God is talking to anyone outside His word in an audible voice. But I can tell you this: if God ever wants to tell me something He knows my address–He can speak to me directly. The last thing I want to hear is some pious moron coming to me with a spoken word from God to him for me.

We see that at the end of the story Jeroboam, despite God’s mercy in sending a prophet to warn him and then heal his withered hand, refused to repent, even after the prophet had been killed by the lion for his disobedience. Sin hardens the heart, and repeated stiff-necked rebellion callouses the heart even more.

This story makes me even more conscious of the deceitfulness of sin. We need to stay close to God and His Word. We need to worship no one but the God of the bible who is one and the same with the Jesus of the Bible. Let our justification be by faith alone in Christ alone. Let us share the good news of the gospel with those around us who are lost and in darkness in the bondage of the world’s false and satanic belief systems. God will call His sheep to Himself in His own time and way, and blessed are we to be instruments of redemption in His hand.

I predict that spiritually and theologically the direction of North American evangelical Christianity in the coming years will be guided by two assumptions or presuppositions. The first assumption is that God is all love and no judgment; or God’s love is so strong that, as Rob Bell puts it, love wins in the end and there will be no real judgment (at least not eternal conscious torment). What punishment there is will be temporary and a result of the operation of the second and related assumption: man possesses a libertarian free will such that his choices are not predetermined by God and that he possesses ability in the unregenerate state to respond to the gospel in faith or perform meritorious acts of righteousness. So if man is punished at all it will be because he in a sense punishes himself; and if he is saved it will be because he chose to cooperate with God. Because neither of these assumptions is taught in the word of God, the implications which flow from them are likewise alien to Scripture.

The implications fall under two categories–universalism or annihilationism. Universalism is the teaching that all will be saved. God is all-love and no judgment, and everyone possesses varying degrees of righteousness. Men who according the Bible are absolutely bankrupt spiritually will be there with Peter to greet us at the pearly gates–Gandhi, the Dali Lama, Buddha, Confucius. Once inside we will see Hitler, Judas Iscariot, Voltaire, and Jack the Ripper. According to some even the Devil himself will make it in. Lest this position be too extreme for some, there is annihilationism, which teaches that those who do not make it in after receiving a second chance will simply cease to exist. It will be like going to sleep forever, with no eternal conscious torment.

As more and more people approach the Christian faith with these false assumptions and implications, Scripture will be reinterpreted and/or rejected outright in favor of subjective humanistic groupthink. Anyone with the audacity to adhere to the faith once delivered will look as odd as an Amish person at a Lady Gaga concert. Read your Old Testament and you will see that this is precisely what happened to the prophets time and again as they sought to bring the people back to God’s word with warnings of punishment. We are seeing a repeat of history before our eyes, and I pray that you will not get sucked into the spiritual sinkhole.

You can dress man up and make him look sophisticated with technology, art, religion, and education. But he does not possess any innate righteousness, and in the unregenerate state he does not possess a libertarian free will such that he can overrule the sovereign will of God. Though the false prophets of Baal outnumber the true prophets of God 450-1 God cannot be outvoted. Outward appearances can be lethally deceiving, as can our subjective feelings about how God ought to act and how life ought to be.

I will close with a snippet of Chris Farley dialogue from the movie Tommy Boy. It is a bit crude, but I think it is appropriate in this context.

Tommy: Let’s think about this for a sec, Ted. Why would someone put a guarantee on a box? Hmmm. Very interesting. 

Customer: Go on, I’m listening.

Tommy: Here’s the way I see it, Ted. Guy puts a fancy guarantee on the box ’cause he wants you to feel all warm and toasty inside.

Customer: Yeah, makes a man feel good.

Tommy: ‘Course it does. Why shouldn’t it? You figure you put that little box under your pillow at night, the Guarantee Fairy might come by and leave a quarter–am I right, Ted?

Customer: What’s your point?

Tommy: The point is, how do you know the fairy isn’t a crazy glue sniffer? “Building model airplanes,” says the little fairy. Well we’re not buying it. He sneaks into your house once, that’s all it takes. The next thing you know there’s money missing off the dresser, and your daughter’s knocked up. I seen it a hundred times.

Customer: But why do they put a guarantee on the box?

Tommy: Because they know all they sold ya’ was a guaranteed piece of shit. That’s all it is, isn’t it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer’s sake, for your daughter’s sake, you might wanna think about buying a quality product from me.

Customer: (Pause) OK, I’ll buy from you.

Tommy: What!?

Yesterday I spent some time talking to a seventy-something man whose wife has suffered for the past ten years with dementia. Half the time she does not recognize her husband or children. She loses many of her personal items–checkbook, debit card, daily planner, medications, etc., on a regular basis. She forgets where she is or why she is there and wanders off. Her husband told me that on the outside she looks just like she always did, but on the inside she is like a totally different person. It is as if he doesn’t know her and she doesn’t know him. The outer packaging is the same, but the inner substance is not.

We live in a new and different nation this morning. We still call ourselves the United States of America. We still have  a flag and states and a government. Our homes and towns look the same as they did yesterday. The streets, buildings, and landmarks are still there. Our neighbors are still there. Our jobs are still there–for those of us who have jobs. Cosmetically it looks like the same old same old. But on the inside this is not the same nation it used to be. We have become a godless, secular, humanistic, pluralistic, hedonistic, relativistic mish-mash. We are a nauseating bowl of  moral and spiritual stone soup. We are on a collision course, plunging toward judgment. Only God knows if it is too late to turn this apostate country around, or if we will go the way of ancient Rome.

The church is largely responsible for this mess. The state of the nation is but a mirror image of the church. The church is like the demented wife whose outward appearance is the only part of her left unchanged by her disease. Yes, we still have church buildings on every corner. Yes, people still congregate in these structures for an hour on Sunday. Yes, they still sit in rows, looking at the backs of the heads of the persons seated in front of them. Yes, there is still singing. Yes, a man (or woman) still gets up and talks. And, yes, people still still mill around and socialize after the service. It all looks much like it has for decades: the form is still there but the function is in most cases long gone.

The function of the church must center around Christ and His Word. But we have abandoned the teaching of the Word, we have left off proclaiming sound doctrine in these days of pluralistic diversity and political correctness for fear of pissing someone off. Yes, I said piss; and no doubt some of you are more troubled by that than you are for the sad state of the body of Christ. We have scratched every itch of the world with the twisted hope that titillating the flesh of goats would somehow woo them to the Good Shepherd. We have given them casual services with cool music and watered down sermons laced with humor, homey anecdotes, and self-help/psychobabble. When we have preached from the Bible we have promoted a man-centered caricature of the truth that challenges and convicts no one. We say we love Jesus with our lips but we do not do what He says. Croissants, latte’, and Christian comedians have usurped the place of the truth. Goats love garbage. If you feed them they will come.

The Bible tells us that days will come when there will be those who retain the outward form of godliness but deny its power (2 Tim. 3:5). The Bible also tells us that in the latter times God will send forth a deluding influence (2 Thess. 2:11). Those days are upon us–in the nation and in the church. WARNING: Do not be like the man freezing to death in a snowstorm. At first the cold bites to the bone. Then he becomes numb to the cold and begins to feel warm and safe and comfortable. He becomes drowsy and tempted to fall asleep in the nearest snowbank. If he yields to his craving for sleep it will be the last nap he ever takes. He is perilously close to death’s door, and he doesn’t even know it.

You slumbering Christians wake up. Drag your bodies out of bed and open your Bibles. Choose life today. Read, study, pray, meditate–then obey. You church leaders and pastors. Stop mincing words and trying to make nice with the pagan culture in the name of relevance. God has not changed. The nature and needs of man have not changed. The Word of God has not changed. Stop clinging to the outward form and get back to the original function of the church, for that has not changed either.

We live in a new America this morning. Time for judgment to begin in the household of God (1 Peter 4:17). Spring housecleaning, if you will. Starting with me. Time to bite the bullet!

PS–No, the passing of the health-care bill is not a fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Get your nose out of the stupid LaHaye novel and into God’s Word!!!