Dennis Tuuri

Then came to Jesus scribes and Pharisees which were of Jerusalem, saying, Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they wash not their hands when they eat bread. But he answered and said unto them, Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition? For God commanded, saying, “Honor thy father and mother, and he that curseth father and mother, let him die the death.” But ye say, “Whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, it is a gift. By whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me, and honor not his father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition. Ye hypocrites, well did Isaiah the prophet prophesy of you, saying, This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

And he called the multitude, and said unto them, Hear and understand, not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.

Let’s pray. Almighty God, we have heard your call to worship this morning, and we have come forth in obedience, being empowered by the Holy Spirit, given to us on the basis of Christ’s doings and dying. We thank you, Lord God, for his righteousness in which we now approach you, imputed to us, called as it were our righteousness in your sight.

We thank you for his shed blood, making atonement for our sins, which alienated us from you, and brought upon us your cursing. We thank you, Lord God, that him who knew no sin took upon him our sin, and became a curse for us, hanging on the tree, that we might be delivered from the curses and ushered into the blessings being given his imputed righteousness. So we come forward this Sabbath day to rest in his finished work and to rejoice before you and to give you praise and thanks for so great a salvation and to be built up that we might work out that salvation in all that we do this day and always in the power of the Spirit.

Father, help us to realize as we come forward to you today that if we walk away from this place not obedient to your teachings, not obedient to your scriptures as taught to us by your Spirit through the Bible, then we walk away vainly having worshiped you and instead of departing from this place with your blessing upon us, we leave with your curse upon us. Help us, Father, then to have open ears to hear your scriptures and your word today and open hands to obey them this afternoon and into the week.

We pray, Lord God, that all this would be done to your glory in Jesus’ name. Amen. Praise ye the Lord. Praise ye the name of the Lord. Praise him, oh ye servants of the Lord. Ye that stand in the house of the Lord, in the courts of the house of our God. Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good. Sing praises unto his name, for it is pleasant. Praise ye the Lord. Sing unto the Lord a new song. Let Israel rejoice in him that made him.

Let them praise his name in the dance. For the Lord taketh pleasure in his people. Let the saints be joyful in glory. Let the high praises of God be in their mouth. To execute vengeance upon the heathen. To bind their kings with chains, to execute upon them the judgment written.

This is Micah 5:5 and 6. Micah 5:5 and 6, this man shall be the peace when the Assyrians shall come into our land. And when he shall tread in our palaces, then shall we raise against him seven shepherds and eight principal men. And they shall waste the land of Assyria with the sword, and the land of Nimrod in the entrances thereof. Thus shall he deliver us from the Assyrian when he cometh into our land, and when he treadeth within our borders.

Received a letter a couple weeks ago from a good friend. We had given him a copy of “What is Christian Reconstruction,” a little booklet, and he wrote back a two-page response to it, and he basically liked it. He had some problems with the fourth pillar that we talked about the sovereignty of God in terms of history, optimistic eschatology. And I wanted to just read a short portion of his letter because there are some very common objections in it. He says:

“If Satan is the god of the world system that opposes God, then we can anticipate a world system agonistic to God as long as there is a Satan alive and well on planet Earth. Of course, if everybody in the world were elected to salvation, Satan’s kingdom would be an empty threat and some sort of Christian culture would result, even if imperfect. And since it does not seem that God ever has or ever will elect more than a remnant from among the nations of the world, saved of course through the agency of the word and spirit as carried by faithful witnesses, we can expect there to remain in effect a significant world system opposed to the rule of Christ until he himself eradicates it once and for all. That seems a more biblical scenario, especially when we look at specific emphases concerning the end times.”

Now, if you look at that paragraph that he wrote, you’ll find four basic statements in there as to why he has a hard time looking at the future optimistically from a Christian perspective. The first thing he said was that Satan is the god of the world system. He said that as long as Satan is alive and well on planet earth, that means we’ll have a significant world system in opposition to Christianity. He said that God only elects a remnant, it seems like throughout history. And he said finally then that also the end times scenarios in the scriptures paint a bad picture of what’s going to happen in the end times. And for all these reasons, then we can anticipate a downward progression of history instead of an upward growth in righteousness and cultural Christianity.

Now this question is very vital to anticipate or to try to dissolve whether he’s right in these statements or not. How we, what we believe about what God has accomplished in Jesus Christ, what we believe about Satan’s present position in terms of this world will help us—will actually then determine how we interpret the events that come around us in our society and culture. Now this church probably knows as well as any church the disaster that this American society is moving into and the great dangers and threats that are posed to the Christian faith in America.

I mentioned, I think just a couple of weeks ago, that we’ll certainly shortly be seeing the removal of “In God We Trust” from coins and “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. And sure enough, in my mail last week, I received a mailing from John Gilly’s organization in Oklahoma. And it’s just a compilation of news items. And he says in here that the National Legal Foundation is conducting a media campaign to head off efforts by atheist leader Madalyn Murray O’Hair and her efforts are to have the words “In God We Trust” removed from US currency.

Other goals of the American Atheists include removing “Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance and changing the national motto from “In God We Trust” to “E Pluribus Unum” and they have now filed lawsuits to achieve all these things in courts across the land. They have a particularly effective time to do this because there is growing talk about redesigning and modernizing the American coin. So now would be a good time to take “In God We Trust” off of them.

I read a new news item from Christian News put out by a Lutheran organization this last week. These are just things I got in the last week about what’s happening in our society. “Symbol of Christianity opposed a sign of bias.” And this is about how a real estate agent in Washington State, just north of the border here, a realtor there had a fish sign, you know, on their ads that they would put in magazines or on other posters they would put up or whatever indicating that they were Christians. And they’ve been ordered now by the commissioner who’s in charge of human rights in the state of Washington to remove that from their advertising because that indicates bias against non-Christians in terms of housing which is illegal under the state of Washington.

Another news item from Gilly’s organization: a federal judge has ruled that a large wooden cross overlooking a marine base in Hawaii violates the establishment clause of the first amendment and must be removed by the end of the month.

Another one: InterCristo. You all know probably a lot of us know that InterCristo is a Seattle-based agency that finds jobs for Christians with Christian organizations. They’ve reached an out-of-court settlement of a discrimination lawsuit. The ACLU charged the organization with discrimination on the basis of religion because applicants seeking jobs in Christian ministries are asked whether or not they are Christians. And the suit was significant enough and dangerous enough to InterCristo that they agreed to an out-of-court settlement with the ACLU.

Now, as I said, we know in this congregation these sorts of things. We see them all the time. The question though is that depending on how you anticipate or understand Satan’s role in the earth, how do you, what do, how you read these signs in the papers? Are these papers really telling us that we’re in a declension here that we cannot pull out of as a country or as a world? Or do these newspaper signs tell us something else?

This morning we’re going to talk about the serpent treading church, and we’ll address these four specific issues as we go through today’s presentation. For those of you who were here two weeks ago, you’ll remember that we began to deal with this particular passage, Micah 5:5 and 6, two weeks ago and we didn’t get through with it—the whole sermon—so we had to postpone half of it to this week and hopefully we’ll get through all the material I’ve prepared this morning in decent time.

You remember that this passage tells us about the great dragon Assyria who, the various kings in Assyria would claim, would proclaim themselves the great Satan—not the great Satan—the great serpent rather, the great dragon, which of course is a title of Satan. And in the text we’ve just read from Micah 5:5 and 6, this follows the announcement of the birth of the shepherd king and the effect of his birth and his, the coming of the Messiah and what it will do in terms of the cultural manifestations of the world that he comes to.

And the verses we just read indicate that he will not only save his people—that salvation is not just being clutched out of the hands of the dragon or out of, represented in the text before us as Assyria or Nimrod—but instead Messiah comes and with the seven shepherds and the eight principal men that he raises up from the covenant people, he penetrates the very heart of the Assyrian Empire and he goes in there and crushes them in their own land and he takes them in their own gates, their own citadels, in their own towers, in their own places of authority and rule.

And it’s very important to recognize that when the New Testament tells us the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church, this reference here should be kept in mind. This reference tells us that Messiah will come, that the great dragon will be defeated by Messiah as emblematically identified in the text for us as Assyria and Nimrod. We talked about the fact that Messiah’s defeat of the great dragon would be based upon the plundering of the serpent’s house.

Jesus said that he came and would plunder the house of the devil having bound him. He’s going to rob this house then and take away his goods as it were. We said that Jesus, the Messiah, affected the loss of authority and power of the devil, ending his reign as it were in a definitive sense. In Luke 10, Jesus says that he saw Satan falling from heaven. It doesn’t mean he actually fell physically from a place called heaven to physically a place called earth.

We talked about how that aligns with the book of Revelation and what that means is that Satan has lost his preeminency of authority with the coming of Jesus Christ. He has been replaced now in a very visible sense and his authority is greatly reduced and de-emphasized. He said that Christ accomplished this by redeeming the guilty. Remember we talked about Zechariah 3:1-5. You’ve got Satan at the right hand of the high priest saying this man’s guilty. Satan is the accuser of the brethren. We’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes.

But Jesus comes to redeem the guilty and so remove the power that Satan has over the people that are in sin. Colossians 1:13 talks about Christ delivering us from the power of darkness and links that to the redemption of the believers. We talked about Christ came to destroy specifically the works of Satan. And so the serpent is conquered by the coming Messiah, but he comes to destroy the works of the devil. 1 John 3 tells us that explicitly.

So on the basis of all these things, we can say that Satan may be alive on planet earth, but he’s certainly not well. Jesus Christ has dealt him a death blow to his head. He’s removed his authority. He’s plundered his house. He’s destroyed his works. He’s established peace for his covenant people. And now we’ve redefined peace today to mean an absence of conflict somehow or just being safe in our homes. But peace throughout the scriptures indicates a comprehensive ordering of God’s world under God’s order. That’s the peace that Christ came to effect in the world around us.

And that peace requires the advance of the covenant people behind the victor Jesus Christ into the very stronghold of Assyria and Nimrod, into the very stronghold of the serpent. And we said that the serpent was not just defeated by Messiah. He’s also defeated by the church, and that church is first of all protected from harm from two weeks ago’s sermon. The church is protected from Satan touching it as it were. It tells us that in John 17:15 and 1 John 5:18.

It says the church is offensively pressing forward. The gates of hell as we said shall not withstand the earthly advance of the church. We’ve been given power over the demons quite clear through the gospel accounts and again in the accounts of Acts. Ephesians 6 says we’re supposed to take up the armor of God and sometimes we read that Ephesians 6 passage in the light of presuppositions about our defeat and we sort of see it as just kind of keeping us safe in our home so that Satan can’t quite get at us.

But you’ve got to realize that Ephesians 6, we’ve got six component elements of that armor. And two of those elements, having your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel and having the sword of the spirit in your hand. We said before, and most commentators will say it, there’s one offensive weapon, the word of God. But if you realize that Romans 16 says that God will shortly crush Satan under your feet, that the gospels say that you’ll be able to tread upon serpents and scorpions and those are pictures of Satan and the demonic influences in the world, then you’ll recognize that your feet are also in a sense offensive weapons.

And we were talking with the catechumens and I was asking the boys if they had any serpent blood on the bottom of their feet. And that’s what we’re going to talk about more directly here in a couple of minutes. The serpent treading church. You see, having your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel means they’re ready to go out and crush heads. Okay? And you can think of other maybe more colorful euphemisms you could put to that.

The point is it’s an offensive weapon and so is the sword of the spirit. And if you think about the other four elements of that armor that we’ve been given by God, it was interesting to me to see some correlations to how we’re supposed to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, with all our mind. By the way, if you’re trying to teach our children that truth, the comprehensiveness of our love and obedience to God, we do it by pointing to different parts: with all our heart, with all our strength, with all our mind, and with all our soul. We use this sort of saying the whole thing.

And why do I bring that up? Well, Ephesians says we’re supposed to put on the breastplate, the breastplate that he provides us. That breastplate protects our heart, the breastplate of righteousness. You see, we’re supposed to put on the helmet of salvation, protect our mind. We’re supposed to gird our loins with truth. And the loins are always talked about in scriptures as your strength, the strength of the loins. And then we’re supposed to have the shield of faith, which prevents us from being hurt by the fiery darts of Satan.

What I’m saying is there’s a correlation between those four pieces of somewhat defensive armor and the idea that we’re supposed to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. You see, you’ve got to turn it to the positive and see, you’ve got to do what God requires of us, and that’ll protect us from Satan’s harm. And it means we’ll also then go to crush heads and cut off the heads of the serpents that we come across as it were spiritually.

Now, the demonic forces of what’s being talked about there, we wage not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual powers, forces of wickedness. One last thing about Ephesians 6 before we move on to what we really want to talk about this morning, and that is this: I question whether those four elements are even defensive in nature primarily. You look at the references that Paul is using there to that armor and those references come primarily from the book of Isaiah and they refer to Messiah and they refer to Messiah’s coming in strength to defeat the adversary that we’re talking about this morning.

And so you—that’s a study for you to do this week or next week. You look at those cross references and see the implications of what it means to have our loins girded with truth for instance and have the breastplate of righteousness. And you’ll see that the whole picture involved is of a warrior going out to do conquering, to do battle, going into the Assyrian stronghold as it were to drive back spiritual darkness that penetrates in that place.

Okay. So the church is going to go on the offensive. We’re protected from Satan’s harm, but we’re also offensively pressing forward. Luke 10 pictures the 70 going out and saying the demons are subject to us in Christ’s name. Well, that’s certainly a picture of the power that we should have over the forces of spiritual darkness. We’re progressively conquering. Romans 16:20 says the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet. You see the correlation again between peace that God affects being the result of the right ordering of society around us, not just peace in our hearts. It works itself out and the God of peace will bruise Satan under our feet shortly. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. That verse ends with Amen. Tremendous implications of that.

And we said that the primary method through all this conquering occurs is the evangelistic prosperity that the church is pictured as having in the end times. You know, it’s interesting to me the places of continuity and discontinuity that people choose to draw. The letter I read earlier, and I’m not trying to dump on this particular fellow—it’s so typical of what we come across in the evangelical community and in dispensational churches.

They see continuity with a remnant. Now, you’re going to be hard-pressed to find very many references in the New Testament to a remnant. You’ve got to realize that the Old Testament was among other things, of course, given to us to show us the necessity of Messiah. And what you have in the Old Testament is the birthing of Messiah through the Old Covenant community. That’s a witness to the people that are opposed to God. There is in some respects a winnowing down process, winnowing down to the coming Messiah who is the remnant.

Okay? He himself is the ultimate remnant and that remnant then becomes the stone that is the base of the mountain that fills the whole world. The remnant concept pointed to the coming of Jesus Christ. But now that Jesus Christ is here, things have changed. Now that the new covenant has been ushered in with his definitive work on the cross, we now have tremendous—we went over many verses a couple of weeks ago about the evangelistic prosperity that God has called us to.

We’re not looking for a remnant anymore, okay? We’re supposed to go out and disciple the nations. We’re supposed to bring in believers from every blood and kindred and tongue, right? The gospel is supposed to go forward and cover the earth as water covers the earth. Little bit higher, a little bit higher. It’s a flood of the preaching of God’s word that opens the doors for evangelism. Jesus said, “I open the door that no man can shut.” And Paul identified that open door as an open door of evangelism for us.

We don’t have to be, you know, pulling in. We’ve got to be going out and preaching the gospel. And God tells us that the new covenant is distinctive from the old covenant in the explosion in the evangelism explosion that will occur as the result of the preaching of the gospel because Christ is definitively ushered in now the time of new covenant fulfillment. The Holy Spirit has been given to us and the power of God is the preaching of the gospel.

Yet you know, when it comes to whether or not we’re going to be successful evangelistically, now all of a sudden we’re Old Testament Christians. God only saves a remnant. That’s just not the picture in the scriptures. Say that we’re going to be evangelistically successful. And that’s the mechanism, the primary mechanism whereby the Assyrian great dragon as it were, Satan, is pushed back and back and back and back out of the world.

Scriptures tell us—we went over these verses two weeks ago—even the cultic opposition will be converted to Jesus Christ. Even false religions become submissive to Christ. That’s the characterization of them in Revelation 3:9 and Isaiah 60. Evangelism is the power of God unto salvation. And so we have this shift from the old covenant which had prefiguring of evangelistic success in the time of Solomon, in the time of David, all pointing to what would happen in the time of Jesus Christ.

It’s also interesting in terms of continuity and discontinuity talking about end times. You know, they say, “Well, these are the end times. Scoffers are going to come these days.” Well, okay. Okay. Let’s talk about end times. Let’s use let’s be consistent and say, “Yeah, these are the end times. What does that mean?” And the Old Testament, we’ve gone over these before—verses before a couple of weeks ago, a month ago. The Old Testament is replete with references to the end times being the time of the establishment of the kingdom of God, the preaching of the gospel that brings men and nations in and the effects of that on culture.

So you can’t talk about the end times as being times of scoffers without saying that the corollary to that is that yes, there’ll be scoffers and though they walk in the name of their god, we’ll walk in the name of Jehovah God. And the end result of that will be the preaching of the gospel and the conversion of even the cultic opposition that we face in the world.

So we have a serpent treading church and we’re going to talk this morning now specifically about ways in which we become serpent treaders and what does that mean in our lives today.

The first point we want to make, having done a review now of our lessons from two weeks ago, is that the serpent treading church resists the adversary. Zechariah 3 and 1 Peter 5:8—the references are on your outline. We won’t take time to look at all these this morning. I want to get through most of this material. It’s important to recognize that the word Satan itself means adversary or enemy. And that’s important because it means we have an enemy.

Now, we’ve talked a lot about the effects of Jesus Christ coming and the offensive war that he wages and the fact that he’s crushed Satan’s head and has bound him on a chain. His activity is greatly reduced. His authority is greatly reduced, but he is there. In 1 Peter 5:8 says to be diligent then and be sober and be vigilant because your adversary, the devil, prowls about like a hungry lion. So you’ve got to know that he’s there, that you’re going to have an adversary to be conquered here.

Okay. Well, I’m going to talk now about some aspects of the adversary, the things that are his work in the world. And thereby, we want to sensitize ourselves to this and look at what God tells us in terms of how to combat the offenses of the adversary that we’ve been given by God, Satan.

First of all, Satan is a fear-bringer. We talked about Revelation 9, which shows, of course, among other things, that Satan is at the command of God and what he does. But Revelation 9 said that people would want to die. They’d be so despondent and so terrified. Satan brings fear to people. Hebrews 2:14, a very critical passage for understanding the nature of our deliverance, says that for as much as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he (Jesus of course) also himself likewise took part of the same, that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is the devil, and delivered them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.

Fear—the kind of panic-stricken fear being spoken of here, fear of death, fear that causes people to not want to live out the night and want death to come and yet it won’t come. That kind of fear is brought to us by Satan. It’s interesting when we were visiting with the poor leaseholder from Port Angeles, he was talking to me about the origins of various words. Victor is real good with that. He knows a lot of etymology of words. He was talking about the word panic. And this is the sort of fear being talked about here that Satan brings to our lives.

Now the word panic comes from Pan, remember that goat—half goat, half man—sort of creature, and Pan would send a panic into the sheep apparently if the shepherds didn’t do him obeisance, didn’t worship him correctly. And so today you see, if you’re being panicked and you find yourself in a condition of panic, recognize it doesn’t come from God. God doesn’t give us a spirit of timidity or great fear that way. God gives us peace.

And so you’ve got to recognize first of all that if you’re getting very frightened and fearful, you’ve got to resist that. You’ve got to rely upon the sovereignty of God to have brought all this to pass in your life for your edification and for his glory ultimately. And so you’ve got to resist the fear that comes upon us. It comes from Satan. I’ve listed some references there. Romans 8:15, we didn’t receive the spirit of bondage again to fear. We’ve received the spirit of adoption whereby we cry, “Abba, Father.”

If there are conditions that are hard for us to handle in our lives and there will come those times, then we cry out to God as our Father. Not in fear, but in praying that he might deliver us from whatever the situation is that’s causing us that fear and that he might help us to resist the devil in that and not allow ourselves to be thrown into a blind panic.

So important we teach our children this. Fear of the dark, fears of lots of things. We’ve got to teach our children time after time. It doesn’t happen overnight with children. Repeat to them over and over again. God doesn’t bring this fear into our lives. Satan wants us to be frightened. We’ve got to resist the devil and recognize that God gives us not the spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of a sound mind.

Satan attacks those things through fear. Perfect love casts out fear. So we have to recognize that when we fear, that doesn’t come from God, that comes from Satan.

Some specific things you might do to remind your children and yourself about this is memorization of scripture. My wife was reading the Psalms the other night and she read Psalm 131 to me. Such a nice little psalm, easily memorizable, easily taught to your children to memorize.

“Lord, my heart is not haughty nor mine eyes lofty. Neither do I exercise myself in great things or in things too high for me. Recognition of one’s limits. That’s a good help against unreasonable fear. Verse two, surely I have behaved and quieted myself as a child that is weaned on his mother. My soul is even as a weaned child. Let Israel hope in the Lord from henceforth and forever.”

Beautiful little psalm of comfort there. And God gives us these things that we might write them on our hearts and not sin against him and allow ourselves to go into a panic type fear and not grab a hold of our emotions and hold of our mind that might be thinking thoughts that produce fear in our lives. It’s sin if you don’t grab a hold of that. You see, we don’t want to give into that. God says with every temptation, he gives us the ability to resist that temptation successfully.

And so we have to recognize we’ve got to hold that fear back.

Another mechanism that we use, and I’ve recommended this to other people in the church over anxiety and fear, is the memorization of the Heidelberg Catechism. Question number one is such a beautiful statement of the Christian faith. It’s the summary statement of all the Heidelberg Catechism. And if you have problems with fear or with your children fearing, this is another thing you might try memorizing.

The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism is, “What is my only comfort in life and in death?” The answer is that I with body and soul both in life and in death am not my own but belong to my faithful savior Jesus Christ who with his precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins and redeemed me from all the power of the devil and so preserves me that without the will of my father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head. Yea, that all things must work together for my salvation. Wherefore by his holy spirit he also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready henceforth to live unto him.

R.G. Rushdoony, several times in the last couple of years on his tapes or sermons, has talked about—and I don’t remember who the quote is from now, an old reformer I believe—Are you willing to be cursed for the glory of God? Are you willing to recognize that he has redeemed you? He has bought you with body and soul. You’re his now and he’ll bring his glory to pass through your life. And if you lose all else, if you lose your very life and yet God is glorified by it, praise God. “Though he slay me, yet I will bless him and I will praise his holy name.”

That if you understand that and you understand that God’s glory is the end result of what we’re here on earth to accomplish, not our own well-being ultimately, then you’ll understand what you need to know to resist the fear and panic that Satan will throw into your lives.

Satan’s also a slave master. In Hebrews 2:14 talked about the fear of death, which produces bondage in people. Satan is the one who brings bondage to men. He is the one who we have been delivered out of the hands of. Romans 6, Bob Dylan said it so well in that song. You got to serve somebody. You’re either going to serve Satan or you’re going to serve God. You’re either going to be a slave to Satan or you’re going to be a freed bondservant as it were to Jesus Christ.

Satan wants us to be in bondage. And so we know that to put ourselves in a position of bondage opens up the door of opportunity for Satan to affect our lives and to put us in a bad position and to bring us away from loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and might like he tells us to do. We’re supposed to recognize that the bondage that we’ve been delivered from—that bondage. Romans 6:16 says, “Know ye not that to whom ye yield yourselves as servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey, whether of sin unto death or of obedience unto righteousness. But God be thanked that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you, being then made free from sin you became the servants of righteousness.”

Now this is very important because it tells us that what we do with the members of our body—tongues, with our hands, with all that we are—is critical as to whether or not we’re going to be freemen under Jesus Christ or whether we’re going to put ourselves back into bondage to the one that we have been redeemed away from the power and curse of.

We are expected to resist that sort of slavery. The way we do that is to call ourselves to account. Our mind can wander off and think bad thoughts, whatever produces fear and panic in us, we’ve got to pull it back. And our members of our body can go off and do sinful actions and lead us back into slavery to sin. And we’ve got to pull them back. We’ve got to be disciplined in our lives. We’ve got to recognize that God has delivered us from that. We’ve got to resist using the members of our body in sin.

When we sin and commit ourselves on a perpetual basis or habitual basis to a particular sin, we’re enslaving ourselves. We begin to sin. And we’re moving apart. We’re moving away from the path that God has called us to walk on over into that yard where Satan lies, chained up, but still ready to nip at our heels as God uses it to bring us back to the path.

Satan will attempt to put us under bondage again. And we must resist that.

Now, you know, I’m going to mention it one more time. We mentioned it a number of times over the last five or six years. So important that you recognize this: debt in the scripture is slavery. An implication of this for your life to be freed from bondage to Satan is to get out of debt. Don’t be bound up to people. You’re bound to Jesus Christ. You’re to serve him alone. Get out of debt. Stay out of debt. Resist all the worldly temptations that are going to be thrown your way to pull you back into debt. Don’t do it. Remember, you’ve been freed from slavery, and debt is slavery.

We’ve been freed, and we therefore should not enter into covenants with non-believers. Don’t bind yourself up into a relationship with another person who is not obeying Jesus Christ because he is ultimately obeying Satan. Instead, when you bind yourself up, you put yourself under now the authority of Satan to a particular sense or to a particular degree.

When we sin, submit ourselves to sin in a perpetual manner, we worship Satan by denying the freedom that God has called us to. Satan’s a truth twister. Those two things really talked about actions, controlling our mind, controlling what we do there. And now we’re talking a little bit about doctrine here.

Satan is a truth twister. He’s a perverter of the truth. I’ve listed some references there. John 8 says that there is no truth in Satan. It says that Satan was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth because there’s no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own for he is a liar and the father of lies. He’s the father of lies.

Here again, it’s so important to tell our children—it’s important to tell the truth. Not because that’s a nice American, you know, traditional thing to do, but because when we tell the truth, we worship God. And when we lie, we worship Satan by doing acts and obedience to him and under his authority. Again, we’ve got to pull ourselves away from lies.

Now, I know, you know, the caveat here, of course, is Rahab, the justifiable lie that she told. And there are circumstances like that. You’ve got to keep that in mind that, you know, if CSD comes to your home tomorrow and wants to know where your children are and if they are going to take them out of your authority and out of God’s authority and put them—give them over to a homosexual adoptive parent (which by the way in this morning’s paper they kind of bragged about, said yeah we’ve got foster care parents that are gay, they’re doing a real good loving job, so what wrong with you guys, you got a problem or what?)—CSD comes to your children to do that with them, you don’t tell them where they’re at. You lie to them. Sure, we’ve talked about that before in this church, but it’s important that you recognize that this is a real peculiar situation where you may have to enter into deception to the enemy for the greater good of protecting those that God has called you to protect.

But ultimately here your life should be characterized as being truth tellers and not by being liars. Satan’s the father of lies and Satan perverts and twists truth. Satan very rarely makes up something altogether apart from the truth. He twists the truth. “Hath God said?” you know. He twists the truth.

In our country today, 1 Timothy 4:1 says that now the spirit speaketh expressly in the latter times some shall depart from the faith giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons. Demons really should be the better word there. Devil specifically refers to Satan. Sometimes the King James I think mistranslates the word there instead of diaboloi. Diaboloi is the Greek word for devil. This word here is demon, so there’s the doctrine of demons that is at work in the spirit of the age as it were. And that means that there are teachings out there that are contrary to God’s word, lead men into bondage and submission to sin again, lead men into fear and panic.

And those things are doctrines of demons.

Now, demons aren’t particularly stupid. The Antichrist comes out from us, but was not part of us. So these doctrines of demons, they’re not going to be Anton, whatever the guy’s name was, down at the Church of Satan primarily. It’s going to be down the road, you know, at First Community Church. I don’t, I’m not using a specific name in Portland, but at a church that professes to be a Bible believing Christian church and yet twists and perverts the truth of God.

That’s the doctrine of demons that leads again to spiritual bondage instead of spiritual deliverance and peace. And we’ve got to resist that. We’ve got to go on the offensive and turn and preach good, sound doctrine and preach the truth of God. It’s so important that what we talked about earlier—this idea that the church is just some sort of whipping boy for Satan and can’t go on the offensive against him.

That’s so wrong and twisted from what the scriptures obviously tell us. These are days of gospel expansion and blessing. And to assert a church that is to reject the law of God out of hand is to assert a teaching that brings us into bondage to sin and into bondage to the devil. It doesn’t deliver us from those things. To assert a church that’s anti—to assert a life that should be antinomian is a direct violation.

And it images, it apes as it were the saying of Satan in the garden. “Hath God really said?” You’re supposed to obey this law. Think it through a little bit. Decide for yourself. Don’t submit to God’s ethical standards.

Satan’s a truth twister. We should recognize that. And of course, the way to avoid that is to study the Bible. If you’re going to understand what the truth of God is so that you can discern falsehood, you’ve got to know the scriptures. You’ve got to study to show yourself approved. It doesn’t do any good just to come here on Sunday morning and get a good sermon occasionally, one day out of seven. You’ve got to be reading your Bible on a fairly regular basis. Cases, you’ve got to be immersing yourself in the word so you can understand the truth here.

It’s often been said that the way you find, the way that good security FBI agents or treasury agents, the way they understand what counterfeit money is, they don’t study counterfeit money. They study real money. They know what real money feels like. They know what it looks like. If you know that, then you can spot the counterfeit. And so, if you don’t want to go off and study the doctrines of demons to find out what I have to avoid, you want to study the word of God. Compare that to the standards that God gives us in his word, the doctrine of demons will be obvious to us.

Satan is also an accuser of the brethren. The word devil, which we mentioned a little bit ago, which is another name of Satan specifically and not the demons. The word devil means—actually, it can be better translated as an accuser or a slanderer. That’s what devil means. Satan means adversary. Devil means accuser or slanderer. And so it’s important to recognize that scriptures repeatedly talk about Satan as the accuser of the brethren. Revelation 12:10, the accuser of our brethren is cast down.

Satan accuses people and slanders people. And believe me, this is one crack that we so frequently will allow Satan into our lives and his teaching as it were, his effects on us when we slander and accuse and gossip about other believers. That’s just a diabolic thing to do. Okay? Diabolic comes from diabolos which means devil. It’s a slanderous thing to do. You’re not supposed to bear false witness against your neighbor. You should be very devoted and committed to not allowing gossip or slander.

And if somebody in the church or outside the church comes to you with gossip or slander about another believer, you rebuke them. You tell them, “Don’t do that. We’re not supposed to do these sorts of things.” This is satanic work in our midst here that’s being done. Devilish work, diabolic work.

1 Corinthians says that love believes all things, love hopes all things. And our presuppositional bias in terms of our brothers in this church and sisters in this church should be that they’re worshiping God and they’re serving him. And if we see some circumstances that may indicate the contrary, we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that they’ve entered into sin and believe the accusation of them that Satan would want us to believe.

We should say, “No, there’s probably another explanation for this. Let’s wait and hear it out. I believe this is a good—this is a member of Christ’s body. They receive communion at this church. We’ve got a presupposition that they are part of the elect community of God and we should conform ourselves to that presupposition and resist the devil in this way.”

Further, we should go on the offensive with our tongues. What does the scriptures tell us? Beautiful passage from Isaiah 30, verse 19, talking about the blessings that Messiah will bring:

“For the people shall dwell in Zion at Jerusalem. Thou shalt weep no more. He will be very gracious unto thee at the voice of thy cry. When he shall hear it, he shall answer thee. And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet shall not thy teachers be removed into a corner anymore, but thine eyes shall see thy teachers. Verse 21, and thine ear shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it when you turn to the right hand, and when you turn to the left.”

To help the people that God has called us into covenant community to, we should use our tongues to edify and exhort them into faithfulness. And when we see him straying from the path even, and we know that they’ve actually strayed from the path a bit, we don’t come down and start talking to other people about them. We go to them. We whisper in their ear, “This is the path. You’re straying off here a bit. Get back on the path here. Satan’s over there. He’s going to nip at your heels. God wants you back here. Accept this. Get back on the path.” Whispering, exhorting, encouraging each other to be faithful.

That’s what we should properly use our tongues for instead of being diabolic and gossiping and slandering.

Satan is a tempter. He tempts the saints. So we have some verses there. Recognize the temptation will come. Jesus himself of course was tested by Satan in the wilderness, tempted of the devil.

I thought about this. I took one of the kids out fishing the other day. First time I’d gone fishing in years. Went to a place where there usually isn’t any fish. And I prepared my the child I took with me for that eventuality. And they didn’t catch a fish all day. And they had a real good attitude. And I caught four fish. And you know, it’s interesting. You go out to a place like that, you start fishing, and you think, “Yeah, if I can catch a fish all day.” Then the temptation that comes our way is to get mad at God.

“How come I can’t catch a fish? What’s the deal here? I’ve tried all the right things.” So you get fall into the sin of being discontent with God’s providence. But then you start catching fish and there’s still a temptation that will come along. All of a sudden, I found myself telling my daughter, “Well, you’ve got to set the hook this way and you’ve got to cast this way and you know, here’s how you’re supposed to do it.” You know, like this has happened is because I’m such a great fisherman, right?

So pride is an easy thing to fall into. It’s another temptation that comes our way. And before you knew it, I was out there like, you know, the guy on TV telling them all about how to fish for trout at a lake that God was just gracious to me, you know, and he taught me that lesson real clearly because I took the two other kids out at a couple other days and caught zero. Well, they caught fish. So the point is—