Dennis Tuuri

and I decided to return to it today and we’ll be returning to it in three weeks also to deal with the next verse and then another week after that to deal finally with the last verse of Psalm 15. Just by way of information at our congregation meeting Friday night we gave affirmation to the change in Sunday services. However, for the next two Sundays we’ll be returning to the tape series by Reverend Rushdoony so that I can work on administrative rule hearings and testimony for the upcoming home school bill which is now law and we thought that was pretty important that we address that.

I’ll be returning to the morning service of Psalm 15 three weeks from today. It’s been such a long time, I thought it’d be good to review just the first few things we talked about in Psalm 15 during communion service a month or two ago. Psalm 15 basically talks about the requirements for citizenship in Zion or in the church of God and who can dwell in community with God and with his people.

In verse two, there’s a summation of that type of lifestyle that’s required. He that walketh uprightly worketh righteousness and speaks truth in his heart. These are action-oriented terms that talk about the necessity to have the truth of God not only in our minds but to have that truth so believed by us that we act in obedience to it. So it’s a very practical psalm and then the verses that follow are very practical things. I think we talked about the emphasis upon there first of all that these things are true first and foremost of Jesus Christ and secondarily true also of those that he calls into election in him in salvation in Christ, of his people.

The psalm then leaves the obvious behind in terms of the walking uprightly, working righteousness and speaking truth and addresses specific areas. And I think one of the reasons for that is that it’s talking about specific sins or omission of specific positive actions that when engaged in can bring a deadly effect upon the community of Jesus Christ, into the covenant community. There are two verses that talk about five different sins of the tongue.

Then a verse that talks about two sins of money. And these are all very practical elements. And as a result, failure to walk in obedience to these very basic requirements of citizenship in the church of Jesus Christ, failure to keep those basic requirements are practical denial of the faith and actually practical atheism. We dealt with the first sin of the tongue that was talked about in terms of verse three, backbiting and slander several weeks ago.

And that of course can be a very deadly sin in anybody’s life and particularly in the life of the church as well. So we have strong admonition against that in the scriptures. And today we want to move on to verse four and talk about the verses that require basically three things here. Very simple. The vile person should be condemned, to honor them that fear the Lord and we should swear to our own hurt and change not.

Three basic requirements of citizenship in Christ’s community. These are very practical and should be easy to understand and hopefully I won’t confuse them at all. Hopefully I’ll make them a little bit more easy to understand. And these also should be things in relationship to last week’s talk. These things should be very easy to teach to our children and should be taught to all the covenant children.

Just by way of introduction, we wanted to remind ourselves we talked about several weeks ago that Matthew 12:36 tells us that every idle word will be judged for every idle word that we speak in this life. Our tongues are extremely important and we talked about the necessity of understanding the importance of our words. The importance of God’s word of course is readily understood but the application of that to us who are in the image of God isn’t always thought about very often and it’s very important.

Of course we’re made in the image of God we have speech no other animal has speech. We talked last week in terms of the covenant, the rearing of children to teach them how the scriptures reveal God is anxious to reveal himself in the scriptures. He was anxious in the Old Testament to reveal himself through various types and stories that taught Jesus Christ as the covenant keeper. God is anxious to reveal himself to us and that’s why we want to teach our children to read by the way, because without reading the scriptures they can’t understand that revelation of God that he’s anxious to give to them.

So speech and language are very important. It’s the mechanism by which God has chosen to reveal himself in the scriptures and he puts great importance upon it in terms of personal sin as well.

Moving on into the text, the first requirement is that vile persons be condemned. Well, the first thing we want to do there is just clear up a couple of words. What does vile mean? The word vile, the Hebrew word in its basic form means to disesteem or to despise.

In relationship to that, it’d be good to look at 1 Samuel 2:30 where we read the following. And the context here is that God is talking to Eli and remember what’s going to happen here: Eli is in the lineage of Aaron, the priest lineage, that holy family as it were, and yet God’s going to do a new thing here. Remember Douglas Kelly in one of his sermons talked about how God does a new thing in the nation. God is going to do a new thing here—he’s going to raise up Samuel who was not in that physical lineage to be priest. And this is the reason for that.

It actually begins in verse 27 when God comes to Eli and begins to tell him, “Look, I swore that I would honor this family forever.” However, in verse 30, he says, “Wherefore, the Lord God of Israel saith, I said indeed that thy house and the house of thy father should walk before me forever. But now the Lord saith, be it far from me, for them that honor me I will honor, and they that despise me shall be lightly esteemed.”

That word despise there—that means to disesteem or to despise. So the vile person is the one who despises God.

And by the way, probably the chief reference here are to the sons of Eli who are walking in disobedience. But he’s talking about Eli as well because in verse 29, he says, “Wherefore kick ye at my sacrifice,” talking to Eli, “and at mine offering which I have commanded in my habitation, and honorest thou thy sons above me to make yourselves fat with the chiefest of all the offerings of Israel, my people?”

So God’s saying because Eli put his sons, his affection for his sons and his devotion to his sons above God—proven by his action of not disciplining them—God says that Eli has despised God himself. And so when we talk about the vile person, we’re not just talking about the reprobate out there who self-consciously sticks his tongue out at God and says I hate him and to heck with God. We’re talking about people within the covenant community as well who by their very actions indicate they’re despising of God.

Roger’s been reading through the book of Malachi and I really appreciate those readings. In Malachi 1:6, God talks about the priests of the nation of Israel that despised God. And they say, “Wherefore, we despised you.” He says, “In that, that you have offered up bad sacrifices. You’ve offered up, as it were, the fruit of the labor of the poor and the lame among you, and you haven’t done justice to those people.”

So, people who don’t walk in obedience to God’s law, even though they may be part of the covenant community and priests and leaders in the covenant community are still to be counted among those vile people that are being condemned.

The word condemned—it’s interesting. It’s the exact same word as the word vile or to despise. And so it’s a repetition of what God tells Eli here. Those that honor me, I’ll honor. Those that despise me will be lightly esteemed. So those that despise God should be despised by the covenant family of God. They’re despised by God and they should be despised by the covenant family of God.

I wanted to just read in terms of application a quote out of Spurgeon’s Treasury of David. It wasn’t written by Spurgeon. The man says, let’s see, to condemn the wicked and honor the godly—opposite the one to the other. True enough. But the former may seem not to be sufficiently becoming to a godly man. For why should he condemn or despise others, who is commanded by all means to care for the credit of others, as we have heard even now. Nay, a godly man letting others go, ought to search into himself, and to accuse himself, but not to judge of others.

But this saying of the prophet is understood rather of the fault than of the person. So this commentary says that what we’re supposed to do is despise the faults or the sins of the person, not the person himself.

Is everybody awake? Well, that is not correct. That’s not what the verse says. And there’s lots of examples in scripture, but that’s not what God requires of us either. But that’s what most of us have probably heard for many years—that we’re to despise the sin and not the sinner.

I’m not exactly sure where we picked that up, but there are some verses. For instance, a particularly good verse is Isaiah 1:28-31 where he says the following: “Transgressors and sinners will be crushed together and those who forsake the Lord will come to an end.” And then later in verse 31, “The strong man referring to the sinner will become tender. His work referring to his sin also a spark. Thus they shall both—the sinner and the sin, in other words—burn together and there will be none to quench them.”

God doesn’t make a differentiation here. In fact, he goes out of his way to tell us that the sinner and his sin will be burned up. If God loved the sinner and hated his sin, it would be the sinner that would be sent to hell and not the sin. But we know that’s not the case.

Since I’ve maligned the Treasury of David, now I want to read another quote from it on the positive side written by William Secker. He says the following: “There is no ascertaining the quality of a tree but by its fruits. When the wheels of a clock move within, the hands of the dial will move without. When the heart of a man is sound in conversion, the life will be fair in profession. When the conduit is walled in, how shall we judge of the spring but by the waters which run through the pipes?”

And of course, all Secker is doing there is paraphrasing our Lord who said that a good tree can’t bring forth bad fruit and bad trees can’t bring forth good fruit. So by their fruits you shall know them. Their indication of the heart of the man.

Christ, because of a lack of fruit of a fig tree, did not curse the lack of the fruit. He cursed the fig tree.

Isaiah 5:20. This should be a warning against those people who say such things. We read the following, if I can find it: “Wo unto them that call evil good and good evil, that put darkness for light and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”

If we don’t follow this command of God, God says there are woes placed upon us through the prophet Isaiah. Cursings will come upon us if we don’t act in obedience to the simple requirement of citizenship in the community of God to despise those that despise God.

One of the reasons why we started to preach through the book of Psalms is that I think it’s proper that we sing through the entire book of Psalms in what’s known as comprehensive psalmody. One of the reasons for that is that it’s very easy to let our theological presuppositions or biases keep us from looking at certain of the psalms.

When we sing Psalm 83 in this church—for the first time we sang it—it’s a little disconcerting at first to realize that God has that kind of hatred for the wicked. There are many psalms that call for imprecations or the wrath of God against the ungodly. And it’s good that we start to learn that again in the church.

You know, a lot of us joke around about Gordon Rogers and his loving those passages that talk about, you know, David asking for God to break the teeth of the ungodly and cut off their generation and do all kinds of mean and nasty, wicked things to them. But I think what Gordon is feeling is that he—like he said in a recent tape to me—is that you know we’ve stressed God’s love so much in our generation that we’ve not looked at God’s justice and that of course is one of the reasons why one of the names of his boy that he just had he named Justice.

It’s important to recognize God’s justice and wrath against the ungodly. In Psalm 109, in relationship to the entire three portions of this verse we read about God’s wrath against those who don’t keep their vows and who don’t like him. It’s just one example. And this one I think we’ve sung once or twice and it’s really it is kind of embarrassing sometimes. It shows a problem with our own mindset to be embarrassed by the word of God.

“As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him. As he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him. Talking about the wicked now, the ones who despise God. As he clothed himself with cursing, like as with his garment, so let it come unto his bowels like water and like oil into his bones. Let this be the reward of my adversaries that speak evil against my soul.”

And a few verses before that, he says things like, “Let his children be continually vagabond and beg. Let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.” They’re tough verses. They’re tough verses to understand and then they’re particularly tough to apply in our day and age. But it’s important that we try to do that.

Now, lest somebody talk about all we’re talking about is Old Testament stuff here—that would be enough, wouldn’t it? If all we had is Old Testament examples and no contradiction of that in the New Testament, that’d be enough. But we have more than that.

When John the Baptist came, he referred to various people as broods of vipers. Well, if you think about it, you know, it was the snake, the serpent that came and deceived Eve. And that’s what he was calling these people—as offspring of Satan. Those are pretty harsh terms. John was applying what we’re learning about today to condemn the ungodly and those who despise God.

And it wasn’t just John who used that term—Jesus Christ himself used that same term referring to those in the covenant community who weren’t walking in covenant obedience and so showed their reprobation. Jesus Christ—God in the form of Jesus Christ—referred to those people also as broods of vipers.

Even the civil magistrate, we know to honor the position, but does that mean we can’t condemn the man? Well, it doesn’t, because Jesus Christ condemned the civil magistrate at the time of Israel, Herod. When he was brought a report about Herod, he called Herod a fox. Now, some of your translations may be a bit more accurate and refer to the word vixen there, because that’s what he was calling him—a female fox. There are other words that could be used as well, which we won’t mention here, but that term was commonly used in the nation of Israel at the time to refer to somebody of low cunning and of disdainful weakness.

Jesus Christ in applying that term to Herod was walking in obedience to the law of God which we know he did with all his life and particularly those scriptures that talk about the need to condemn those who despise God.

So what are the implications? Well, one of the implications we have to judge. We have to judge, right? How can we decide who to condemn and who to honor if we don’t make judgments along the way?

But obviously one of the implications of that is that we judge with righteous judgment, which means you only have to know the word of God. We have to understand who those Pharisees are among us who aren’t walking in obedience to the word of God and substituting their own law for God’s law. We have to understand those things. We’ve got to study the scriptures so we can make these righteous judgments so that we can walk in obedience to this command.

Finally, then a citizen of Zion will condemn the ungodly. A basic requirement of citizenship in God’s church is that you condemn the ungodly.

Just a side note there, some of the books that have come out in the last few years that apply this verse literally and condemn the ungodly in print. I’ve had various Christians say, “Well, they have a bad spirit about them or they don’t have a good temperament or something.”

You know, we don’t have a bad spirit. I was told on the reverse side of that some people who denied basic biblical truth were involved in cultism and as a result in deep sin. I was told by certain people, “Well, yeah, they got some things wrong in their doctrine, but they have such a good spirit about them.”

Well, you know, the word of God says that the spirit is the spirit of truth. And if people aren’t engaged in truth and in obedience to God, but instead are engaged in despising God, those people don’t have a good spirit about them. I don’t care how much you may enjoy talking to them or how much you might get along with them.

And if those people who condemn the ungodly do so in what may seem harsh terms to us, we better be careful what we say about those people because we could be calling the very people that are acting in obedience to this scripture ungodly. And that would be a sin on our part and bring God’s curse upon ourselves.

Since it’s Reformation week, I want to just mention too that you know Luther—when the enthusiasts came to Luther and cried “the spirit, the spirit”—he said “I slap your spirit on the snout.” I think that’s a good attitude towards some people that have a mistaken understanding of the spirit of God in relationship to heresy.

The second part of this verse says we should honor them that fear the Lord. And this is the positive side of the last verse. We’re to condemn the despisers of God. But we’re to honor them that fear the Lord.

Now the word honor here in its original form means to add weight to. No laughing. And I wanted to talk about it. I was honored by the church the other night and thought maybe you’d make connection with my way. Well anyway, it is used in the scriptures in various forms both in the Old Testament and New Testament referring to monetary honoring or honoring with our mouths or in some way adding respectfulness to that person or respect for that person and honoring him in that way and so making him more weighty in our own eyes because he’s weighty in God’s eyes.

He fears the Lord and acts in obedience to him. And I did want to express my appreciation for the church at the business meeting Friday night—honored me with a with a real nice gift and I really appreciate that. And it’s important to recognize that we should honor those in positions of authority or responsibility over us. But it’s important too to remember that the people that fear God are the rest of the members of the covenant community.

When we sit at communion later on, what we say if a person is sitting there eating and drinking at the Lord’s table with us is that those people are presupposed to be members of the covenant community. And they’re due full honor and respect as friends of the king. They’re his friends. And so we should honor and respect one another in this church and those in other churches as well, recognizing that God is working in various churches in various different denominations.

We should honor those people. You know, it’s a difficult thing because I don’t know about you, but when I was thinking about these verses, it’s harder to come up with practical ways to do that. And I think one of the reasons for that is because we don’t understand honoring anymore. Our generation has been brought up to not honor people and to not honor those who are respected or older in the faith and more mature in the faith.

We don’t have a great deal of honor and respect for people anymore. And that’s a real sad thing that we’ve lost.

Another Reformation example of this is Luther and Calvin. And now that I’ve got these all out of order, basically of course you know that Luther and Calvin had different views of the supper—radically different views—and Luther sometimes got very nasty referring to opponents of his particular view of the supper. And there was a tendency on the part of some to want to respond in kind. And Bullinger specifically wanted to respond in that way. So he wanted to act meanly and harshly toward Luther.

But when they talked to Calvin about that, Calvin persuaded and exhorted him to carry the business so as to show all due respect unto Luther, considering what worth and excellency there was in him, however he had demeaned himself in that particular. And he added, and this is Calvin speaking about Luther—who, like I said, Luther was not nice about the way he treated some of the reformers and their position on the supper.

He added that he often used to say that although Luther should call him devil, yet he would do him that honor to acknowledge him a choice servant of God. And that should be our attitude toward each other as well. Though we sin in particular areas, yet we should have that honor and respect. And particularly for those who have proven themselves great in the faith.

We’ve heard a lot the last couple of years about various members of the reconstruction community who have said not nice things about another. We shouldn’t allow that particular sin on their part to diminish what the work they’ve done for God and continue to do. We should honor those people.

This and the next portion of this verse particularly came home to myself when Dr. Bahnsen visited here in April for our conference and you know Judge Beers was at the nursing home then or hospital, whatever it’s called, and we wanted to get Dr. Bahnsen there. Bahnsen came in on a Thursday night, I believe—I think that’s right—and left Monday.

And we intended to get him over there Friday morning and it didn’t work out. When we finally got over Monday, the day he was going to leave after three or four days of not getting him over there, I went in and the judge was real—I went in first to make sure everything was okay and I had Steve Carmack and Dr. Bahnsen with me. The judge was really quite upset and he said, “We should have been there on Friday,” and I said, “Well, you know, they really intended to but things came up.” He says, “We don’t intend to. We’re men of our word.”

And you know that at first I thought, well, you know, this man is dying of cancer. He’s probably—at that time he’s been in the nursing home, I think, a couple of months. And I sort of said, well, he’s just going to be cranky.

Well, I got to thinking about that afterwards and he was being right. He was right in those things. He said it was not honoring to him to not get Bahnsen over there as soon as he came in. We should have done that. And I can put that off in other people, but I as elder of the church should have made sure that responsibility was carried out.

But see, we don’t think in those terms anymore. We don’t think about honoring those people among us who are doing great things and Judge Beers as I know now knows how much we love and respect him. And that I’m not trying to make excuse for our sin, but it is true that we weren’t raised to do that so we don’t understand those things.

Hopefully we’ll learn from those sort of incidents and learn to honor and respect those above us and also to carry out our word. Because he had been told he’d be over earlier, things came up. Well, things do come up, but what does it tell us in Psalm 15? It says that we should swear to our own hurt and change not.

Our words should be good. Our words are important and we can’t just say we’d like to have done it. We said we were going to do and it didn’t work out. That’s wrong on our part. Our words are important. We’re made in the image of God. And he wants us to esteem our words very highly and to make sure they’re pure words—words that are spoken not in haste, words that are spoken with the intention of fulfilling those words.

Again, we’re talking about basic requirements of citizenship. Matthew 5:37, our Lord tells us that our yea should be yea and our nay should be nay. It’s very easy to teach our children. It’s important that we do. So, it’s come back at us a few times. You know, you tell your children, “Well, we’re going to do this,” and you don’t do it. And they say, “Well, it says in the Bible, your yea should be yea. Your nay should be nay.” They will remind you of that.

And that’s good, too, because we should be reminding each other of our obligation to keep God’s law.

This commandment to swear to our own hurt—in other words, even if what we’ve sworn to do will result in our own hurt if it’s carried out—and to change not is really included in the third and ninth commandments. The third commandment relating to our responsibility to God in that swearing and not using his name in vain and the ninth commandment talking about responsibility to man as well in terms of not bearing false witness.

Life abounds with examples of what these things are talking about. But we went down to the coast the other day. We had to fix a door, a glass sliding glass door at a place at the coast and we had to do it a particular day at a particular time. So I had called beforehand to locate a glass company that had the right size glass and they said they had it for sure. I was given a price. I made a whole weekend trip on the basis of that.

I went down there and it turns out they didn’t have the right size glass. Well, to make a long story short, this man took glass out of another assembled door, okay, used that glass, which was a lot of work. He then had to make a special kind of molding around the edge of the glass since it wasn’t quite the right thickness. Had to do all kinds of things. It took him a couple three hours, but he still held to the quoted price which was like I don’t know, $40, $45, which is real cheap.

Well, why? Because that man had a sense of ethic left over in this society—when people did act on the basis of the word being good. He swore to his own hurt. He quoted us a price over a phone—contractual obligation. And though it hurt him because he was not correct in thinking he had the right size glass, yet he swore to his own hurt. He fulfilled that. He said that’s the way they worked there and that’s the way they’ve done it for 20 years and they’ll continue to do that. And that’s a good place.

But unfortunately, that’s the rare example these days. I’m a purchasing agent and I deal in contractual obligations and regularly people break these contractual obligations as if it’s nothing. A man’s word is just not worth much anymore.

Another example of keeping our word to our own hurt—my wife brought this up last night as we were talking about this. I’m always—I’ve always been real big on being places on time. That’s a simple thing to be someplace on time. And yet it’s an important thing because we in a sense have given our word. If we’ve given our word to be there on time.

For instance, our church starts at 10:00. We should be here at 10:00. If we’re not, somehow we’ve done something wrong. We ought to readjust our lifestyle so we can get here on time. Well, Chris reminded me of various times in the past when I insist we get there on time and we’d get there on time, but she wouldn’t have put on her makeup and her hair was flying around.

We swore to our own hurt. It was hard for her to come looking kind of weird, but we were there on time. The rarity though of that occurrence speaks of a disaster for social stability.

In a book that Dan Prenel loaned me, Panic Among the Philistines, talks about some of this. He talks about how critics of books, reviewers of books these days on a regular basis use the words “stupendous” and “marvelous”—extremely important words to speak about very mediocre books. And he says, of course, there are important books once in a while that do get written, but the tragedy of this spectacle is that the few serious books of this grimly flippant century were being buried by the avalanche of mass-produced importance.

When one person’s book came out and was hailed as a fine and important book, he may well have been speaking the honest truth. But what chance did the occasional honest fine book have against the ritualistic chant of “stupendous,” “enormous,” and “myth-shattering”? Those reviewers and authors who still spoke the simple truths were, like the young men and women who hold the truth on job résumés, victims of the general hype of a democracy gone haywire. Their words and accomplishments devalued by the automatic dishonesty of the competition.

It’d be very difficult to work in a personnel office these days because résumés are frequently, well continually, probably 90% of them are puffed up way beyond the accomplishments of the person submitting the résumé. And so for those people who are out of work and want to be honest on their résumé, they have a very difficult chance of getting a job. They’re buried under the avalanche of all this garbage.

He says quoting a man named Sydney Smith: “Among the smaller duties of life, I hardly know of anyone more important than that of not praising where praise is not due. Reputation is one of the prizes for which men contend. It produces more labor and more talent than twice the wealth of a country could ever rear up. It’s the coin of genius. It’s the imperious duty of every man to bestow it with the most scrupulous justice in the wisest economy.”

Our words and how we use them can affect all of society—simple duty of man and yet extremely important—how we redeem things and how what things we swear to and how we change. The words reflect our faith in God.

Robert Ingram talking about third commandment says this: “The foundations for all legal procedure involving so-called civil disputes is clearly in the third commandment and it would certainly carry over its importance into the realm of criminal law.”

In application of that, and not quoting a man who’s a theonomist, here’s another quote for you. “Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?”

Well, that’s really true. If oaths are not made in the name of God and are as flimsy as the people’s faith, which it is in this country, where is security for life, liberty, property?

That quote came from George Washington in his Farewell Address and is in the context of his remarks about the necessity to have a religious base for morality. And that’s what he was talking about—oaths again. But it’s not just the civil arena. Things will begin to break down.

Reverend Rushdoony talking on third commandment says this: “Where there’s no regard for truth, when men can ascribe to oaths and vows no abiding by their terms, then social anarchy and degeneration ensue.”

Think about how much of your life is contingent upon oaths. Maybe not written out formal oath but informal oaths—your word given to other people—and some formal ones as well. Marriage—there’s oaths sworn to there—and yet these days it means nothing and so the divorce rate increases and we have social instability.

Therefore, Rushdoony says: “More serious than the act of stealing or of murder even is the false oath. Theft robs a single man. Murder takes the life of a single man or perhaps a group of men. But a false oath is an assault on the life of an entire society. False oaths here and there as they gather throughout society produce social instability.”

Our words are important. We’re to be dominion men and women because we’re to be covenant men and women—people of our word. Words are important.

And again, the context of Psalm 15 are the various sins that can kill covenant life. If we’re not faithful in our simple statements one to another in this church, the covenant community here will vanish and disappear. It’ll lapse into instability and finally destruction and decay. Our words to one another are extremely important.

Our covenant community is based upon the covenant keeper who swore to his own hurt—God himself who made the covenant with us and then sent his son to be the covenant keeper to his own hurt. And there’s the example we’re to follow.

The context of these verses again are who may stand with the king and his assembly. In Proverbs 6, we read a series of things that are hateful to God—verses 16-19. These six things the Lord hates, yea, seven are an abomination unto him: “A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, and a heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among the brethren.”

At least three or four of those seven things are talked about in these verses that talk about the basic requirements of citizenship. Simple acts of obedience are important.

Our Lord has told us in Isaiah 45 that though we see in our day and age a diminution of the importance of our word, yet Isaiah 45:23 says this. God is speaking here: “I have sworn by myself, the word has gone out of my mouth in righteousness and shall not return. That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.”

God declares that history shall culminate in a universal worship of him and the godly oath as the foundation of every society. The godly oath will be the foundation of this society again. But it won’t happen until men and women, boys and girls act in obedience to the simple requirements of keeping our words one to another.

It’s the simple acts of obedience that will produce that godly society based upon God’s oath to us and that our imaging him in keeping our oaths to one another, though it be to our own hurt.

We then are to help bring about the kingdom of God, to act in obedience to his law, word and to produce growth in the kingdom of God. In this area we have some very simple things to do in our own lives, in the life of our family and our church and our society as well.

We’re to condemn the reprobate. We’re to honor those that fear God and act in obedience to his commandments. And we’re to be covenant men, covenant women, covenant boys and girls. We’re to keep our word. We’re to swear to our own hurt and change not because we serve a God of his word who honors us as we act in obedience to him.

Let’s pray.

Father God, we thank you for yourself. We thank you for the requirements of your holy word. We thank you, Lord God, for giving us the spirit and offering forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. We thank you that in him we are secure in you. That you’ve given us the spirit on the basis of his righteousness that we might act in obedience to all your commands.

Help us, Lord God, to be men and women who walk in the simple requirements that you’ve demanded of us of citizenship in your church. We thank you, Father, that you’re reforming us. And we pray, Lord God, that you would give us the power of the spirit to reform us this week as we seek to be more and more men and women of our word, condemning the ungodly, honoring the godly, swearing to our own hurt.

Help us, Lord God, not to make foolish vows and oaths, and let simple statements to one another not be misconstrued and so be seen as violations of our oath. Help us, Father God, to be truthful and honest with one another, and to have the understanding of your requirements, to follow through on what we’ve told each other we’ll do. Help us, Lord God, to honor you this way this day and forever in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.