Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

is not something that one hears much of these days, but we should. One of the emphases of modern Christianity is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. And that’s fine as far as it goes. It’s certainly good and proper. But what exactly does it mean? Where can we turn to understand what that relationship with Jesus Christ and relationship with the Father through the covenant mediator Jesus Christ is all about?

In a conversation earlier this week with people from the church, I was excited to think through the fact that in the Psalter itself we have a good model for us as we seek to have a personal relationship with our God. David of course is the man whose heart desired God—had a heart after God—and God acknowledged that, and he’s a perfect model for us then of a man who has a good relationship with God. And so this psalm being part of the holy Psalter that David wrote a lot of is an indication to us what a personal relationship with Jesus Christ will consist of if we believe that our relationship to Christ is to be growing in conformity to God’s word.

It seems that this type of prayer that David prayed in this psalm, and by the way, which David made the same sort of prayer so often as evidenced in other quotations of these sorts of psalms in the Psalter, seems like this psalm then and this prayer should be on our lips occasionally as well. So how can we reconcile this request for God’s judgment that can so easily be misperceived as stupidity on David’s part, as presumption, arrogance, or worse?

I believe one corrective that we need to apply this morning to our Christian worldview, our Christian mind that God is renewing in us with the washing of his word, the scriptures that we’re exposing ourselves to this morning. One corrective then this psalm helps us to see has something to do with the judgment itself. Now, judgment is inevitable in society and in our lives, but frequently only the negative side of judgment is stressed. And that in terms of the consummation of all things, as I said earlier with return of Jesus Christ. But there’s a positive side to judgment as well.

God’s judgment like that of our own courts—at his court of justice—when it finds against a particular person also usually finds in favor of another person. We have plaintiffs and defendants in court cases. And so it is at God’s bar of justice here. Here David is acting as a plaintiff against wicked men. And God not only finds against the defendant in this case—the wicked men—but he finds in favor of the plaintiff David. And so it’s to be expected that the church that has forsaken God’s objective standard of justice, his law, also would find itself in no position to be a plaintiff against anyone at God’s bar of justice. But that’s David’s position here and should frequently be our role as well as we approach just and judging God.

“Don’t be judgmental,” we’re told. But if God is just, then his judicial action is an essential part of who he is. And if we’re supposed to image God as God’s creatures, which we know we are to do, then we must also be judgmental in the sense of discerning behavior that is commendable and that behavior which is fit only for condemnation from God. The words of our Lord Jesus Christ, “judge not,” must be seen in the context of another one of his commands regarding judgment, that to judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment.

Now, David’s case that he lays out before the law court of God calls for both condemnation on one hand and commendation from God on the other hand. As so, as we said before, as this is a frequent play throughout this altar, even if however, we now are more acclimated to the necessity of imaging God in both defending ourselves and calling for God’s judgments against those who are ungodly. We’re still very much disturbed by the very next phrase of this verse, the first verse after we acclimate ourselves to the fact that we may ask God to judge.

But then David goes on to say, “For I have walked in mine integrity.” Another rather remarkable statement. Where’s the humility that is supposed to drive us to be doormats for our enemies that we encounter in our life according to many modern-day preachers? What is this claim to integrity that David makes here? Won’t God just sweep this ungodly sinner named David out of the court and dismiss his case because of his presumption?

Did David forget when he went to this particular court action of God, to where his please be patient with me, God isn’t finished with me yet button? Or doesn’t David know that all he can plead before the bar of God’s justice is the blood of Jesus Christ and that alone? It’s all David here. Even Spurgeon, who most of us would agree with in a lot of his writings in commenting on this very verse, says that quote, “It’s a far more ing prayer for a sinful mortal is the petition, enter not into judgment with thy servant.”

This passage really doesn’t seem to make much sense at first glance, but then we should remember what Mark McConnell said so eloquently two weeks ago that we go to the scriptures for it to make sense out of us, for it to correct our actions and attitudes. So we come to the scriptures this morning for that purpose. Let’s look at some rather obvious teachings of this psalm then relative to integrity. And the outline you have before you shows the four points we’ll be talking about: first, integrity and judgment. Secondly, integrity and truthfulness. Third, integrity and worship. And finally, integrity and eschatology.

Now, the first thing this verse rather clearly teaches us just in these first verses is that integrity is possible before the judgment throne of God. Now, there are two kinds of people we’re frequently told, the elect and the non-elect, saved and unsaved, forgiven and unforgiven. These are all good biblical categories. But the scriptures are replete with the teaching that another way of biblically categorizing two types of people in the world are good guys and bad guys, good people and bad people. And we’re not too used to hearing those sort of categories, but that’s the categories this psalm presents us with this morning. And I might say that it’s not unique to this psalm either.

In the book of Nehemiah, there’s a verse that I remember the first time I read through the Bible, it just really struck me. This is a really interesting prayer of Nehemiah’s. He makes it no less than four times throughout the book of Nehemiah, first beginning in Nehemiah 5:19. “Think upon me my God for good according to all that I have done for this people.” Nehemiah prays to God that he’s been a good guy and that he wants blessing from God because he’s been a good guy. Again in Nehemiah 13:14, “Remember me my God concerning this and wipe not out my good deeds that I have done for the house of my God and for the offices thereof.” He’s actually claiming to have good deeds here.

Now it’s rather interesting then in verse 22, the second half of verse 22: “Remember me oh my God concerning this also and spare me according to the greatness of thy mercy,” calling for God to remember his works, that he’s a good guy and for God to spare him on the basis of his mercy plus these works that he has affected. And then the last verse of the book of Nehemiah itself says, “Remember me oh my God for good.”

Nehemiah pleads with God to remember that he’s done good things, that he’s a good guy and not a bad guy. Job—the first verse tells us about Job. God says that Job is perfect, blameless, upright, fearing God and turning away from evil. Now, you may think that these are just Old Testament references to good deeds and good works as a basis for pleading before God’s bar of justice and that this doesn’t really apply to us.

But remember that John the Baptist’s parents, in Luke chapter 1, verse 6, Zacharias and Elizabeth are said to be righteous in the sight of God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and requirements of the Lord. We, if you remember when we went through a discussion of the requirements of eldership in 1 Timothy 3, it says that elders are to be blameless. It’s a specific qualification for elders of the church to have this sort of understanding of their lives. But not just for elders. Remember, most of those qualifications for eldership apply to all of us.

And indeed in Philippians 2:14-15 we’re said that we’re not to have grumbling or disputing that we might prove ourselves to be blameless and innocent children of God, above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation among whom you appear as lights in the world. There’s another category: light and darkness. There are sons of light, there are sons of darkness—good guys and bad guys.

Now, before this corrective that I’m trying to make, before this warning is carried too far afield and goes past the mark, I want to quickly point out of course that David’s words here have reference to a particular set of crimes within which his opponents at the bar are guilty of. In other words, David is not here claiming a total freedom from sin or guilt at every point. Nor is this taught in the other references we have cited. They’re not claiming to be totally free of sin. Rather, these verses speak to a life characterized by integrity and uprightness, not by a total absence of sin or perfectionism.

These verses, none of them, speak to a perfectionism which we know the scriptures clearly teach is impossible even for the elect. Additionally, David’s integrity even in the matters that he seeks to redress here is not seen in relationship to God’s perfect holiness. Okay. Spurgeon was quite right in quoting David as stating in Psalm 143, “Enter not into judgment with thy servant, for no man living is righteous before thee.” Now, “before thee” is an important qualifier to that whole statement. However, when we compare ourselves to the righteous, holy character of God himself, then we have no plea for righteousness before God.

So David isn’t saying he’s totally free of sin and he’s not saying that he’s as good as God is in these verses. Obviously then, we’re not here speaking of a righteousness or integrity that would merit salvation. Okay, David didn’t believe that. And in the Psalter, if it’s obvious throughout the Psalter that David makes confession to sin, as it is, and it’s also obvious that he wasn’t talking about a works righteousness here in that sense of the phrase. And so this very prayer we’re talking about in Psalm 26 asks in the 11th verse for redemption and for also God’s mercy unto him.

And so David isn’t saying here that he’s totally without guilt in relationship to God. But the point I’m trying to make here is that if we define faith righteousness with absolutely no reference to works and with absolutely no references to perseverance as an evidence of that righteousness—and notice carefully I just said that the perseverance and works would be evidence of the righteousness and not meriting righteousness before God. If we try to define faith righteousness without works, without perseverance, then in that context, David and the scriptures don’t teach faith righteousness any more than they teach works righteousness.

James of course says that faith without works is dead. We go, and David in our example, rather our example of a man who had a heart after God himself and a personal relationship with God, David went and we also should go to God pleading his mercy and redemption. Of course, in the blood of Jesus Christ as the covering for all our falling short, but we also bring forward our works, our integrity, our uprightness as an evidence to the God who is to judge these disputes that we are indeed covered under the blood of Jesus Christ. And we do indeed lay claim to his imputed righteousness upon our account. Evidentiary works, not meritorious works, are what we’re speaking of.

Indeed, this very thing is what we do at communion every Sunday. Now, we know that David had sinned, that he wasn’t perfect in that sense before God, but he felt free to approach a holy God in this prayer and rightfully so. David’s life was not characterized by the blatant violation of the ten commandments that characterizes the wicked, the second sorts of people. There’s a difference between sin. What I’m trying to say here is: David had sin, but he was condemning the sins of the ungodly, the wicked men that he was speaking in the context of here as being much worse and of a totally different character than the sin of the man who falls short of the perfection required of God’s holiness.

When we come to the Lord’s table, then downstairs, and we evaluate ourselves at the end of the week and we come before God repentant for the falling short, we also should come before God saying that we have walked in integrity this past week as well—not perfectly, but certainly not committing the gross and vile sins that these wicked men that David was speaking in the context had.

In other words, what I’m saying is: when we come to God, we also bring our works to communion. We bring our faith in Jesus Christ and we bring a life lived in obedience to the requirements of the gospel as best we can, realizing we’re fallen creatures. We bring that life lived in this past week forward to God as evidence that we are indeed members of the elect community of Jesus Christ. He requires that of us.

Another man who once attended this church some years back used to talk about the fact that we shouldn’t try to remove the scary passages of the Bible. By the scary passages, he was referring to those passages that many people would talk about as teaching that one could lose their salvation. The scary passages, you know, if you fall away, there’s no repentance, this kind of thing. He said that we shouldn’t give those up and he affirmed correctly that we must not sacrifice these passages, these scary passages at the altar of cheap grace or at the altar of a somewhat errant statement, “once saved, always saved.”

This is true. We shouldn’t sacrifice those scary passages. But I want you to see this morning from this text that there’s another side to these scary passages, if you want to call them that. And that is that if our lives are marked by integrity, we should then have great boldness to approach God and plead that integrity as we seek his deliverance and retribution poured out on his enemies and our enemies as well. Grace, yes, we come pleading the grace of God and the shed blood of Jesus Christ. That’s obvious. But we also plead our obedience before God’s bar as David did in this psalm—evidentiary obedience as evidence of our salvation, not as meriting our salvation.

Now, this has much to do with repentance and lack of repentance as well. There’s two more biblical categories for the two kinds of people there are in the world: there are repentant people and there are unrepentant people. But repentant people have works of repentance. There’s a demonstration that they’ve indeed turned from those things back to God. There’s not simply pleading a cheap grace and then saying the requirements of God’s justice don’t have to be fulfilled in relationship to my sin against my fellow man, for instance. We’ll talk more about that in several weeks, but I want you to see this morning that these scary passages indeed should be an encouraging thing to us as well as we live lives of integrity.

What is this integrity? Integrity that David claims here is a completeness or a wholeness. It speaks of a life not perfect in the sense of no sin, as David’s frequent confessions and calls for God’s mercy show. But integrity speaks of a life rather characterized by a heartfelt obedience to God and his requirements. David makes this sort of declaration frequently in the Psalms. You might jot down these other references: Psalm 101:2, Psalm 7:8, Psalm 18:20, many other Psalms. You can use a cross reference from this psalm as well to find other verses in the Psalter where David pleads his works or his integrity before God’s bar of justice.

It would be wrong then to ignore the profession of faith, but just as wrong to ignore the works required of the man of integrity. I think demonstrated in this psalm are two lines of evidence of David’s integrity—two witnesses if you will. I was thinking that I guess one way I thought about this in my head is I don’t know if Houston still has the Twin Towers or not, but at one time they had two real tall centers and they were called the Twin Towers.

Well, David has these Twin Towers as evidence of his uprightness or his integrity that he’s going to talk about here in the next few verses. And when we go to God pleading for his grace and pleading for deliverance from the hand of our enemies and pleading for his wrath to be poured out against his enemies so that they would turn to Jesus Christ and be saved, when we go to him in this way, we also should be able to present these Twin Towers of our integrity.

And so it’ll give us guidance in terms of what this means. The first Twin Tower is the integrity of truthfulness. And so our second point is integrity and truthfulness.

Verses 3-5 read the following: “For thy loving kindness is before mine eyes. I have walked in thy truth. I have not sat with vain persons, neither will I go in with dissemblers. I have hated the congregation of evildoers and will not sit with the wicked.”

Notice the change of tenses here in verses four and five. He says, “I have not sat with vain people, neither will I go in with dissemblers. I have hated the congregation of evildoers and will not sit with the ungodly.” There’s a profession here to integrity in terms of truthfulness that David makes. And then a statement that what he has accomplished will continue to characterize his life—so it’s a life of integrity and truthfulness.

David stresses the positive side of the first element of integrity: that he has walked in God’s truth. Now note here that truth is not an abstract set of logical elements. It’s not a relativistic or changing standard. It’s God’s truth. He said, “I’ve walked in your truth.” He says, “In my integrity I have walked in thy truth.” It’s God’s truth. And because it’s God’s truth, it is both unchanging and fixed. The foundation of all truth must be in God. And if it is not, it is by definition non-truth or a lie.

We’ve been speaking in law courts this morning and in our civil courts at least at one time, I don’t know if they still do this or not, a person was sworn in with the following statement: “Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth? So help you God.” Now, this statement hearkens us back to a day when our country understood that truth was to be seen as defined by God in his scriptures. That God was the basis of truth and so a person could tell the truth only with God’s help, understanding God’s scriptures and applying God’s truth to the situation involved.

We’ve gone far away from that now. We’ve taken God out of the picture entirely. And today, I suppose that when a person is asked if you will tell the whole truth, nothing but the truth, that they leave off with “God’s help.” The proper answer, I suppose, in a court today, if you’re going to have that question posed to you, would be the same question that Pilate said: “What is truth? Who’s truth do you want me to tell today?” And all too often, an honest answer from the court today would be that it’s the state’s truth as it seeks by positive law to redefine the meaning of morality and truth.

Today, it’s stated that if something is legal, if a law has been passed making something legal, it’s moral. And if it’s illegal, it’s immoral. That’s positive law—a definition of morality and truth according to the laws of man. Does Caesar affirm it? Then it’s so.

An example of this would be the insurance rate question that’s been going on for several years in this country. Now they’ve decided that all insurance rates have to be unisex. You can no longer make determinations—you can’t really take into account if a person’s a man or a woman. Even though actuarial tables insist that the fact of the matter is—according to the evidences that God has given us in the creation around us—that men and women live different periods of life statistically. You can make a differentiation. But the state says no. We’re going to redefine that fact today. And now we’re going to say that men and women should be treated as—and the fact of the matter that you have to keep in your head as you prepare these tables is—those things are not true. There’s an attempt to redefine the reality of the actuarial tables on the part of the legislature.

Last night I finished up rather late and turned on the news and they were talking about Neil Goldsmith’s address to the gay rights political action committee. I’m not sure what the name of the pack is, but he’s speaking to a gay rights pack last night and it was interesting because the little bit they showed—and you’ll, if you look for this, you’ll see it all over the place—but it just showed what I’m trying to get at here.

Goldsmith said that, speaking to these homosexuals, “You’re full partners in Oregon’s comeback,” and that’s a fact that no one can change. It’s a fact. He says, “You’re full partners in Oregon’s economic comeback.” He attempts to say by fiat, because he’s an elected official of the state of Oregon and he has signed this declaration regarding state hiring practices. He says it’s now a fact that they’re partners in the Oregon comeback. Well, it’s not a fact.

Now, if homosexual people don’t repent of their actions and don’t turn to God, then they’re under God’s curse and judgment. Now, we’ll talk in next week in reference to the fact that we’re not to give holy things to swine or to dogs. There are references that many people find quite objectionable about homosexual people in the scriptures as dogs. Now, I’d remind you there—we’ll talk about this more next week—but remind you there that remember what David Chilton said when he was here talking about the book of Revelation and the mark of the beast. That’s to be kept in context there. It’s not necessarily just a derogatory term that God wants us to use about homosexuals. But he’s saying that men who reject the truth of God here—and that’s the thing we’re talking about now—is God’s truthfulness—become beastlike. Again, they take upon themselves beast actions and attitudes instead of man’s actions and attitudes.

I know some of you have made a lot of fun about the fact that I listen to Devo or have listened to Devo in the past, but I was listening to one of their songs this week. I was playing “Are We Not Men” for my wife, trying to explain to her why I like some of this music. The fact is that song, “Are We Not Man, We Are Devo,” is a more honest approach to the world around us than most humanists would take. From a fallen man’s perspective, we are Devo in the sense that those people are not regenerate. We’re not man anymore. We’re devolving. We’re not getting better. We’re getting worse. And Devo acknowledges that fact.

Now, they have other problems that they don’t recognize the positive side of that truth, but at least they’re more intellectually honest with themselves when they look around and say, “Hey, if we’re products of evolution, then we’re the bad animal of the lot here. We’re the ones who are killing the other animals and we’re the ones who kill people and we do all kinds of mean and nasty things that animals never thought about doing. So we must be devolving.”

Well, fact is the scriptures say that we become beasts then and not men when we turn from God to ungodly actions, as the homosexuals do. The point is that regardless of Neil Goldsmith’s stated fact that they’re part of Oregon’s comeback, anybody who engages in that kind of sin and that kind of denial of God’s truth is only under the condemnation and curse of God. And if any—if they’re a part of anything in Oregon, they’re part of the continuing curse of God upon this state. They won’t be part of an economic recovery or revival. They’ll be part of an economic disaster long-term in this state unless they turn from their sin back to God.

The elected majority cannot determine truth just by fiat will. A representative of the elected majority who have been elected by that majority cannot determine truth by fiat, even though they may try. Now, we can’t ask what Caesar affirms in terms of defining God’s truth. We ask instead, “What does God affirm truth to be?” And if God affirms something and if we’re creatures of God who have been redeemed in correct relationship with him, then we must answer with Paul as he says in the book of Romans: “Let God be found true, though every man be found a liar.”

It’s God’s truth. Now that same book, the book of Romans, identifies fallen man as particularly that man who suppresses the truth of God in unrighteousness. There are, according to these texts then, two kinds of men: liars and those who tell the truth—more biblical categories in terms of men. And so David gives us the first evidence of his life as integrity, being one marked by walking in the true truth, which is God’s truth. Not just liking the truth, not just affirming mentally truth, not just guarding his heart from lies, but actually walking in God’s truth. Active obedience to the truth of God’s scriptures. Not just avoiding the lie, but walking in the truth.

Ephesians 4:25, when it speaks of putting off the old man and putting on the new man, doesn’t just say, “Stop lying.” It says, “Laying aside falsehood, speak truth each one of you with his neighbor.” So David says there’s two categories: not liars and non-liars, but liars and truth speakers. And he identifies himself with his first witness as a truth speaker.

The scriptures tell us that God is a God of truth. That our Lord said he is himself the way, the truth, and the life. And that if we’re going to obey our call to image our creator in all of our relationships, our relationships must be marked by truth and not by deceit.

Turning now to the negative examples of truthfulness that David gives us, David instructs us that deceit and hypocrisy here are fellow travelers with evildoing and wickedness. Alexander, in commenting on this as most commentators do, says that the word there that is translated in the King James Version as “vain men” really is better translated “men of falsehood” or “deceitful men.” It’s this deceit and its accompanying hypocrisy that marks the second class of people—the bad guys. They fail rather in the most basic test of imaging God—that of telling the truth and affirming God’s truth.

Their lives are seen as they are depicted in Romans 1 as a further disintegration, a devolution—what Vos calls a downward integration into the void, away from God and toward death. The long slippery slope talked about in Romans seems to begin with a perversion of truth and a movement toward falsehood. Important thing: truth and falsehood.

Alexander also believes that the terms used in this verse are to be seen as related to the terms used in Genesis 49:5-6. In that passage of scripture, Genesis 49:5-6, Jacob blesses the two brothers, Levi and Simeon, and he says this:

“Simeon and Levi are brethren. Instruments of cruelty are in their habitations. Oh my soul, come not thou into their secret. Unto their assembly mine honor be not thou united. For in their anger they slew a man, and in their self-will they dug down a wall. Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce, and their wrath for it was cruel. I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel.”

These verses hearken back to another incident, the only incident where these two brothers are linked together in a deed of deception. And some of you may remember: when Dinah their sister was raped, they decided to take vengeance on themselves. They went to the Shechemites. They made them a false covenant of peace. They had said, “We’ll take you guys in and everything as long as you circumcise yourselves.” So all these grown men circumcised themselves. Not a particularly painless act. They were recovering from that act the next day and Levi and Simeon came in and slew them.

They deceived these men and they committed murder against these people. Now, look at the rationalization they could have had: Of course, sister was raped by these fellows. They’re ungodly covenant breakers. You know, they’re lousy, outside of us. But God was serious when he wanted to proclaim peace to people. He seriously wanted the tribe of Israel, the tribe of Levi and Simeon to go out and evangelize these folks—not for the purpose of just slaying them physically, but to bring them instead to God’s altar and to have their lives converted the way our lives were converted upon our conversion that God effected for us.

So what I’m saying here is that they were cursed for that action. Some of us think that’s kind of a neat ploy in wartime: you know, get them to circumcise themselves and we’ll kill them. Well, it wasn’t a neat ploy. They were condemned at the time by their father and they were condemned in the blessing that God had here—he put upon them, which turned out to be a curse upon them. Simeon itself later continued to falter and only had a few cities left among the tribes. Levi’s curse was actually turned into a blessing as their preeminence as the priestly tribe shows and their curse of being scattered in the tribes became a blessing then for the tribe.

But remember that when you hear about Levi being scattered originally, that was a curse from God for their deceit and their murder of the Shechemites.

Proverbs 30:7, which some people believe is actually written by Jacob, says two things he asked for. The first thing he asked for is to remove me far from vanity or for deception and lies. He asked not to be around men of deceit who would deceive him. It’s certainly logical for Jacob to make that kind of plea to God late in his life because he certainly seen enough deception in his life and knew the awful effects of it.

I suppose that many of us who work in businesses or corporations, where there’s various levels of management—I know that for myself for the last four or five years at the graduate center—this was a prayer that I would make frequently: that God would deliver me from deceitful men in businesses and corporations today. The lack of integrity that there is, you see an awful lot of deceit as people move their way up the economic ladder and the corporate ladder there. Machiavellian tactics in the workplace are one more indication of this deceit and vanity that we should all pray that God would deliver us from. It’s a terrible thing in one’s life.

By the way, I’m real thankful in light of this passage that my last day at the graduate center will be this Friday and I won’t have to deal with that particular set of problems anymore.

Liars are part of the evil group of men who have no inheritance in the kingdom of God. Book of Revelation chapter 21 gives us a terrible list of terrible people and says that these people their part is in the lake of fire. And that list includes the abominable, the murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolators, and all liars. Liars don’t sound as bad as some of the other stuff, does it? But God says all these people had their place in the lake of fire.

Sweet in his commentary in the book of Revelation points out that this list and other similar lists in the epistles belong in the context of baptism and putting off the old man and putting on of the new that we talked about from Ephesians 4. Again, there are old men and new men. There are saved people and unsaved people. There are truth tellers and then there are liars as categories that God gives us.

Fallen men in this nation indeed are marked by deceit and by lies. I wanted to quote someone—I’ve done this before, I know—but a quote from George Steiner several years ago in an interview with Bill Moyers. And by the way, speaking of deception and Bill Moyers, there was a rather incredible TV show this weekend—I don’t know if many of you saw it—about the hidden government and the dangers to us of this hidden government with Ali North and the Contra affair. And I’m sure there’s much going wrong the regular administration today. I’m not trying to defend what’s going on there, but this show I watched the last half hour was an incredible mass of deceit and lies.

They would make a statement then show clips from the Watergate hearings and the Contra hearings as evidence for the statement and there was absolutely no correlation. The person who wouldn’t want to just come and believe what Moyers was interpreting for them would have seen that falsely. But most people when they go to a special like that—the statement then sets up the way they perceive the answer. It sets up the presupposition in their mind. And Bill Moyers’s show this last week was just an abominable collection of deception and lies.

At any event, Moyers interviewed George Steiner, who at the time was chief literary critic for the New Yorker magazine. And it’s interesting how people perceive the beginning of mankind. This is what Steiner’s point was. He says:

“I think the way we jumped out of the animal kingdom to being men was when two things happened in language. Somebody came along and said, ‘Where’s the water hole?’ And instead of pointing to where the water hole was, the person he asked—perhaps his enemy, perhaps a practical joker—said, ‘It’s a couple of hundred yards over there.’ And he lied. The first lie is the beginning of humanity. That is to say, the almost unfathomable power to say what which is not, to say no, to say otherwise, to say no to the created order or world, to restructure for one’s own purposes. That’s the beginning of humankind.”

Well, Steiner has it like Devo has it—half right. That is the beginning of fallen humanity. The first lie of Satan and then the lie that man involved himself in as well by disobeying God’s command and God’s truth. So lying is the foundation of the humanist order.

We have national lies today relative to the social security system. I don’t know if many of you watched the debate on the Republican debate several weeks ago. They were talking about the social security system. Anybody with an honest perspective and who looks at the demographic tables of this country knows there’s a tremendous problem coming twenty years down the line with the social security system. And yet the politicians—even the nice right-wing conservative ones—want to deny that fact and they want to say it’s no problem. It’s solvent. It remains solvent. All the problems been taken care of. Well, they’re not taken care of and it’s a deception and lie.

We’ve said before. I quote from Clint Eastwood: “A man has to know his limitations.” Well, I thought this week, you know, one of the problems with this country is it denies the truth that a nation has to know its limitations as well. This nation believes it can by fiat again create wealth in terms of money by denying God’s money, weights, and measures. It believes it can move into meeting all the needs of all the people all the time. And by doing that, it embraces the lie and not the truth.

Now, given that fact, given that so much of our national politics and so much of our fabric is built upon the lie, is it any wonder then what happened this last week with Judge Ginsburg? And I don’t know if most of you heard, but yesterday he pulled out of the race. It’s no wonder then with the kind of rejection of God’s truth that we have and the universe created by him that we would then have in place a whole group, a whole generation of people that have rejected God’s reality in the created order and instead turned to drugs and turned to trying to restructure that reality for themselves through the use of drugs.

Timothy Leary made, I thought, a very apt statement this last week when asked about the Ginsburg case. He said, “Well, you better get ready for a whole bunch of more marijuana disclosures.” He said, “Because the whole generation did it then.” And he’s pretty much right.

I’ve heard from unconfirmed sources that there’s a statement, supposedly from Chicago in the 1930s. I don’t know how accurate it is, but it was a statement about liars are part of the evil group of men who have no inheritance in the kingdom of God. This was made, it was a critique of the dishonesty of the city. It goes something like this: “Virtue, honor, truth, and the law have all vanished from our life. We are smart alecks. We like to be able to get away with things. And if we can’t make a living at some honest profession, we’re going to make one anyway. The home, the home is our most important ally. After all, the madness of the world has been going through subsides, we will realize that as a nation, very strong at the home is important. The stronger we can keep our home lives, the stronger we can keep our nation.

When enemies approach our shores, we defend them. When enemies come into our homes, we beat them off. Homebreakers should be undressed and tarred and feathered as examples to the rest of their kind.”

That’s nice. Good, strong, conservative statement and a good critique of the dishonesty of the country in the thirties that has led to the eighties today. It might interest you to know though that the fellow making those statements was Al Capone, the same man that we went to see that movie of Capone several months ago, and if you go to see that movie you’ll find—and well, many movies made about Capone’s life and biographies—you’ll know he was a very wicked man. One of the scenes that was really quite disgusting in this movie was when he bashed in another fellow’s head at a dinner party he was having with a baseball bat. This was not a good man.

It’s not enough to critique the outside. We’ve got to start with ourselves.

Rushdoony in writing on this same passage here from Capone says that during the Kennedy administration, a humorous critique of the Kennedy critics had more than a little truth to it. The typical critic of Kennedy, of which no doubt many of us would have been critical of his policies as well, he says:

“The typical critic went to public schools, riding there on a county bus on a public highway. He went to college on the GI Bill, bought a home with an FHA loan, started a business with a loan from the SBA, Small Business Administration, made money, retired on social security, and then sat back to criticize the welfare program, demanding that the freeloaders be put to work.”

See, truth and critiquing truth outside of ourselves isn’t good enough. We’re going to sing a song at the end of the service in which we ask God to slay the falsehood in our own hearts as a way to cure the evil of the nation around us. And that’s true.

I haven’t done it, seems like I’m doing well. Let’s see. Probably most people involved in counseling people within churches would tell you that the vast majority of counseling problems that you’re going to run across have as one of their critical elements a deceitfulness or a dishonesty in terms of people you’re dealing with. A failure to come to grips with the truth, to be repentant, to acknowledge that they’ve done things wrong, and then to take whatever actions are necessary to correct it. A failure to be honest with one’s mate, for instance. These sorts of things.

This next week, we’re going to have an excommunication unless Tim Hansen comes to repentance this coming week and demonstrates that repentance to us. I would just, you know, I don’t want to be real personal—I suppose I’ve already been personal—but the point is that when you think about this particular individual, what I want you to think about instead is that here’s a man whose many of his problems began with simple lies and simple deceit. That path, the way of deceit and lying, leads toward the judgment that we’re going to exemplify next week in terms of excommunication.

The way to stay out from those situations is to be honest in our dealings one with another.

Rushdoony quotes from a fellow about a painter named Bruegel in terms of honesty in the marriage contract. Says that this man lived with a woman, but he says as long as he lived in Antwerp, he kept a house servant girl. He would have married her, but for the fact that having a marked distaste for the truth, she was in the habit of lying—a thing he greatly disliked. He made an agreement or contract with her to the effect that he would procure a stick and cut a notch in it for every lie she told, for which purpose he deliberately chose a fairly long stick.

Should the stick become covered in notches in the course of time, the marriage would be off, and there’d be no further question of it. And indeed, this came to pass after a short time. Stick ran out of places to put notches. And so he didn’t marry her. He recognized—and although again he was a sinner, imperfect, and was certainly not a Christian—but the point is that even the secular world recognizes that marriage must be founded upon truth and upon an honest relationship one with another.

It’s terrible when you have to turn to somebody like Billy Joel, who rejects the scriptures of course, and yet one of his recent songs talks about how it’s a matter of trust—talking about relationship with your mate—and it has to be a matter of trust. And dishonesty in the marriage can be just absolutely devastating to it and probably leads to more breakups than any other single cause.

Honesty with our marriage partners, with the other relationships we have in our covenant community, honesty in our family is extremely important.

How horrified we are when we see pentagrams and bloody rites and other satanic sort of pictures. Is this? But how easily we succumb to the lie of convenience, to the hypocrisy of embracing even our brothers and sisters in the Lord and yet talking about them the first chance we get to other people—even in the church.

How easy it is to tell someone in the church something, not because we really have an intent to carry through on what we’re telling we’re going to do, but rather because we want to make them feel good or we want to get out of a situation that’s somewhat uncomfortable for us, and then later on not to follow through on what we’ve told our brother or sister in the Lord that we’re going to do.

The scriptures say our word as Christians is important. We’re to image God in truthtelling. We’re to image God in terms of acting in obedience to what our tongues have gotten us into, or else asking for retreat from the person involved. But what I’m trying to say here is that lying and deceit is endemic within our own lives.

James says the tongue is a terrible fire. The tongue can burn down a church and it can burn it down very fast—it can burn down this church. Tongues can. We must be very careful. Gossiping, rumors, slanders. In these cases, one should go to the source. Don’t talk to other people about people’s problems. If you have people talking to you about people’s problems, direct them back to the source. Don’t get into little groups and continue to foment gossip groups about problems in the church or problems in other people’s lives. Do something about it. Go to the source of the problems and talk to them about it.

Don’t be deceitful. Don’t be a dissembler as these verses talk about. Don’t be hypocritical. To love the lie, to embrace deceit and dissembling is to be hypocritical and untruthful. And it’s an act of obedience to Satan, the father of lies, and not to the God of truth. If we agree we all would that we should not expose our children to satanic rites such as pentagrams and this sort of thing, let’s also be careful to teach our children that Satanism also lies in a life characterized by lies and not truthfulness.

Let’s teach our children by word and by our deeds that we’re to be people of our word. Do we need integrity today? Yes, we do. We can move this very day in our lives to make changes, to make commitments in our own mind to root out false forms in our lives and to try to root out the sinful deceit that so easily creeps into our lives. We can endeavor to break with falsehoods and to move toward God’s truth in all aspects of our life.

Politically, we can stand for the standard of God’s truth and not for compromise. These things are important. It’s the first tower of witness that David brings before God’s bar. But there’s another witness also that he brings with him to that court—the second tower, as it were—and that is the relationship of integrity to worship, which is our third point.

Verses 6 through 8 describe David. He says, “I’ll wash my hands in innocency. So will I compass thine altar, oh Lord, that I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving and tell of all thy wondrous works. Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house and the place where thine honor dwelleth.”

One of the specific ways that he characterizes—that God characterizes us in our world today is that we’re religious creatures. And one of the ways in which our society continues to adhere to the lie instead of to the truth of God’s word is the intellectual and practical denial of the role of religion and religious actions to modern man. Our world is characterized by a secularism that is itself a lie or denial of the inescapable religious nature of that creature of God that is man himself.

In the church, this error manifests itself in a seeming indifference to the liturgical nature of our lives and much of the scriptures. This is particularly true of the Psalter.

One of the commonest mistakes to make as you approach one of the psalms for exposition or for study is to forget that this is part of a Psalter that was produced for worship, that this has as its context worship or liturgical actions, and the psalms themselves are replete with these sorts of references.

When we read David in terms of washing his hands, we should realize that’s a particular here—the Hebrew word “rachats” is a technical term used for the cleansing the priest was to go through as he washed his hands in the laver before he approached the altar of God. And if we believe today that we’re all priests, then we also should believe that we all also have to wash our hands as it were before we approach God. We’ve got to confess our sins. We have to go through these liturgical actions for proper worship.

When we come together at the beginning of service, we make a confession of sins as we approach God for worship. We ask his assistance in worshiping him. We wash our hands as it were. We cleanse ourselves of the dirt that accumulates through our sins of the week.