Dennis Tuuri

the sermon scripture. Today we read of those who trusted in idols that their hands had made and of some who turned from those idols to the living God. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. We’ll be reading Acts 14:8-20.

Acts 14:8-20. And there sat a certain man at Lystra, impotent in his feet, being a cripple from his mother’s womb, who never had walked. The same heard Paul speak, who steadfastly beholding him, and perceiving that he had faith to be healed, said with a loud voice, “Stand upright on thy feet.” And he leaped and walked.

And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in the speech of Lycaonia, “The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men.” And they called Barnabas Jupiter and Paul Mercurius, because he was the chief speaker. Then the priest of Jupiter, which was before their city, brought oxen and garlands under the gates, and would have done sacrifice with the people, which when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of, they rent their clothes, and ran in among the people, crying out, and saying, Sirs, why do ye these things?

We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that you should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein, who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless, he left not himself without witness in that he did good and gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.

And with these sayings, scarce restrain they the people that they had not done sacrifices unto them. And there came hither certain Jews from Antioch and Iconium, who persuaded the people, and having stoned Paul, drew him out of the city, supposing he had been dead. Howbeit, as the disciples stood round about him, he rose up and came into the city. And the next day he departed with Barnabas to Derbe.

We thank God for his word and pray that he would illuminate it to our understanding.

A long way from home. I guess we could say they weren’t in Kansas anymore. As we mentioned last week, they are moving away from Jerusalem. The thrust of the book of Acts is that the gospel is taken first to Jerusalem and then eventually to the uttermost parts of the earth. They’re traveling down what I suppose you could look at in those days as the information highway that existed.

They’re traveling down a road built and maintained by the Roman Empire. And they’re traveling away from civilization. Civilization being defined, I suppose, as the influence of God’s word on a group of people that has a civilizing impact upon them. People do not naturally mature or come into civilization. People in their fallen state devolve. They don’t evolve. They go from one level to a further rebellion against God.

And we can see this movement of culture as we see the movement away from the center of Jerusalem, the center of the world where God resided in a special sense, moving away from the influence of his people who had the treasury of his word. You know, in this particular missionary journey, these series of four cities that are laid out for us, they began in Antioch, Pisidian, and they began in the context of a Sabbath service.

They began in the context of the synagogue. And then last week in Iconium. We see no mention of the Sabbath service, but we do have a synagogue. We do have members of the Jewish faith who had at least the Old Testament revelation. I say at least that was a great blessing. And we can see there that the results were different. Now we come to a city in Lystra where there’s no mention of a synagogue. We’ve gone away completely from the Sabbath service.

We’ve gone away from the influence of the written revelation of God’s word upon this group of people. And indeed at the end of this recitation of a historic event. The persecution that comes will have to come being agitated by imported Jews from these other two cities that had heard what was going on in Lystra. They’ve gone a long way away then from a civilization is defined by the influence of God’s word on a group of people.

And indeed they are now traveling to the uttermost ends of the earth. And we see in the context of that several things in the recitation of the events the Holy Spirit has laid out for us. We see first of all that no matter how far away from Jerusalem and the center of the world they get in the influence of God’s word, we see people with needs. We see a lame man lame from his mother’s womb, crippled three times repeated for emphasis.

And the apostles, this is a picture, of course, of the lameness of all men, dead in their sins and trespasses, dead in their rebellion against God, unable to assist themselves from their mother’s womb, coming out of the womb in rebellion to God and completely dead and cut off from him and in need of a miraculous event that’s a regeneration that’s only pictured by in a pale way by the miraculous healing of this man’s feet.

So no matter how far we get away and how into the darkness of man’s rebellion against God we get we see people with need and we see people who need is mirrored by the same need in the center of the world. Remember that Peter in Acts chapter 3 healed a man who was lame in his feet as well. He was at the gate of the temple and so the context to the center of the world as well as the uttermost parts of the earth.

We see men in total need and we see God’s spirit moving men with his gospel message to call forth the elect and to meet those needs and to affect a miracle of restoration to them. We’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes.

We also see however a different sort of religion at work. We don’t see the absence of religion, do we? As we get away from the center of the teaching of God’s Old Testament revelation, no, we see man in need, but we also see man involved in religion. Man is created in the image of God. He is born a religious creature. He will always engage himself in ritualistic practices of religion of one sort or another. Pluralism is simply a movement away from one orthodoxy to another. And in the center it’s called pluralism. Well, here we see the orthodoxy as you get away from the faith is plain bald-faced idolatry.

Now, again, there’s correlations to Peter’s account in Acts chapter 3. Do you remember what happened when Peter healed that man at the gate of the temple, the gate beautiful? Do you remember that? We’ll look at that in a couple of minutes. But really, the reaction of the people was in some way, even in Jerusalem at the center of the Old Testament faith was in some way corollary to this idolatry, plain bald-faced idolatry in the city of Lystra. No matter how far away from the center of the world at the church, the revelation of God’s word in his spirit and his people called together to convocate and create community and likeness, being restored to the image of God in its fullest sense, No matter how far away from that you get, people have needs and people exercise religion.

That’s the situation that Paul and Barnabas found themselves in as they move down that information highway. As they move down the road that would carry the message of the Lord Jesus Christ to the uttermost parts of the earth, they carry it to those who are have a need, dead in their sins and trespasses, imaged by the lameness of man from his birth, and who also are religious and are rebellious to God in their religious aspirations.

And Paul’s message is different to these people than it was back at the center of the world back at Jerusalem. His account in Antioch, Pisidian, where the influence of synagogue and Sabbath were felt was far different than his sermon or his rather message that he presents to those in Lystra who had rejected and had not even known of the Old Testament religion. Probably there in their idolatry do not need to hear the story of the history of Abraham.

They need the history of the world spoken to them. Paul doesn’t begin in the latter chapters of Genesis with them. He begins in the creative acts of God in the opening book of the Bible in Genesis. And as our culture moves further and further away from Christianity, we will find increasingly it is a pagan country. It is an idolatrous country. And to speak of it in biblical terms, as we Christians do and regularly in terms of evangelization, these things fall on deaf ears.

These people don’t know the first thing when we talk to them about sin or savior or Jesus Christ. Increasingly in our culture, these are terms that have no basis of understanding with the people we speak to. And we must change our message to that of Paul as he moved into the darkness of the of the geography in which he lived. So as our culture moves into the darkness and we go out into that darkness shining his lights in the world, we take the message of God’s creative acts making the world and everything that is in them.

So we have a different sort of account as the gospel penetrates out. Now, as we go through this, I want us to look at four specific points of application.

First, I want us to see in the healing of the lame man, the relationship of salvation to restoration. When it says that the man was healed, the same word is translated other places, he was saved. Salvation, healing go together. Just as in Paul’s sermon in Antioch Pisidian, he related deliverance from sin with a deliverance from a oppression by man in the context of the world around us.

Deliverance from the chastisements of God due to us for our sin. He relates those things together. Not a gospel simply of heavenly goal out here, but rather a gospel that has real life implications. So it is here in the proclamation of salvation to the lame man. We see a relationship between salvation and wholeness or restoration. We see an evidence of the biblical understanding that indeed the faith is evidenced by a change in the way we live.

Jesus, when asked by the followers of John the Baptist, was he the one or should they expect another one to come? What did he say? He pointed to the evidences of restoration. The blind received their sight. They’re restored to wholeness both in terms of their relationship to God, but also in terms of the influence and impact they have in the culture in which they live. And so, first of all, we’ll see by way of application, the importance, the centrality, the importance of restoration in relationship to salvation.

Secondly, we’ll see that paganism is the world in which Paul and Barnabas now found themselves and increasingly it’s the world in which we find ourselves. And that means that if we are going to do our job to raise our children correctly, we begin by teaching them the acts of God with creation. You know that little shorter catechism, the very small children’s catechism we use and we’re now starting to teach to Charity.

We ask her at the age of two, who made you? We’re trying to teach her to say God. What else did God make? God made all things. Simple things, but so important for a correct understanding of life. And so important to avoid our children being raised in a context of a pagan culture and as a result being raised as pagans.

We’ll see in this second point of application then this idea that we see here the evidences of paganism and in our culture today, the evidence of increasing paganism.

We’ll see the limited usefulness of miracles as well in terms of special miracles such as healing. So first of all, restoration and salvation. Secondly, paganism and the implications of that for our message of the gospel. And the third thing we’ll see then that is the result of this paganism affects our message. And part of that message is creation. But the other part of that creation is God’s goodness as a central part of the gospel message as well.

And we’ll see that in Paul’s answer to these men who had moved into paganism. We’ll see in the context of creation that the witness of God is said by Paul specifically to relate to his created acts to the and then to the providence by which he gives us all blessings. There is a relationship we’ll we’ll make this point when we come to the third point of the outline. There is a relationship between the creation witness and the witness of the word.

The word and world go together to witness to the reality of God. And Cornelius Van Til said that you cannot have one without the other. You shouldn’t think of them really as separate as we tend to think of them at in our view of the faith. General revelation, special revelation, they work together. The spirit uses men. He uses the word of God. He writes it upon our hearts as we move through this created order in which we live.

So that’s the third point of application, the relationship of creation to goodness and then to the spirit. And then fourth, we’ll see a picture as the mobs turn from wanting to make gods of Paul and Barnabas to then wanting to kill Paul and Barnabas will see then the character of man revealed for us in this account from the scriptures. And if our children need to know anything about life, they need to know about the character of the men in the context of the world in which they live.

That men are fickle. To go from hero to bum is a natural event and the affairs of men. Men are prone to wander, prone to be unstable in all their ways. Prone to exalt you at one moment and tear you down at the next moment apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. And we’ll see, by the way, in the context of all of that the story doesn’t end with the fickleness of men and the death of Paul. It ends with Paul’s resurrection.

Now, I’m not saying he physically died in the account, but the picture obviously is one of death to resurrection. And so, as the gospel penetrates the darkness of the world then, and as it penetrates the darkness of the world today, we’ll see again, as we’ve repeated over and over through the book of Acts, that we should teach our children, we should teach ourselves, that the end result of all this is that we win.

The faith prospers, The Lord Jesus Christ has victory and the gospel has its effect. Lystra is not simply left as a dead city. Converts gather around Paul at the end of his end of the story here. The end of the historical events recorded for us in holy scripture. They gather. There are converts who have been made in Lystra. And indeed one of those converts is Timothy himself.

By the way, as we go through this then and talk about these four lessons or applications first of all restoration, its relationship to salvation. Secondly, paganism as men move away from the faith. Third, the answer to that, our message must include the concept of creation, God’s goodness, and the witness of the spirit through the word and world. And fourth, the characteristic of man as opposed to the characteristic of God. Man persecutes other men. He changes, etc. God always gives us the victory in the Lord Jesus Christ. Those are the four lessons.

And as we go through that, I’ll also mention why I’m wearing this tie today. So let’s go through these lessons then.

First of all, we read in the first account for us here in the first portion of your outline, we read of the healing of a lame man from birth. And as I’ve mentioned and I mentioned on your outline, you can compare this to Acts 3:1-10. The gospel, the preaching of the gospel to the Jewish people is preceded.

Now this is post Pentecost, but then in terms of its missionary aspect, you go into Jerusalem and Samaria. It is preceded by this healing of the lame man at the gate of the temple in Acts chapter 3. And here on the first missionary journey, we see one of the very first accounts happening is this restoration of a lame man. Again, there’s a correlation and this forms part of the witness. Then as he goes into the rest of the world, there’s a relationship between the first half of the book, as we’ve said over and over again, the story of Peter with the first mission commission rather of gospel preaching to the second half of the book.

Paul’s basically being the apostle to the Gentiles. There’s a correlation here and it points out for us certainly the this two-fold nature is repeated for us again of the correlation between Peter and Paul. But I think it helps us to understand why this account is given for us in this particular portion of scripture as well relating it back to what happened. Well, this is recorded for us in verses 8 and following.

We read in verse 8 or A certain man at Lystra, impotent at his feet, being a cripple from his mother’s womb, who never had walked. And what do we have? We have a three-fold emphasis. Right? We’re given three times how bad his scenario is. Three times we’re told this man was in bad shape, unable to help himself. And as I said, that’s a picture for us. The relationship between salvation and healing is pointed out for us by the use of the word for healing, the same word for salvation.

And it’s a picture for us then of our moral crippleness from the womb as well. Man is three times dead, you might say. As this man was three times crippled, unable to help himself, so man comes forth into this world, three times dead. Flatliner, flatliner, flatliner, cannot help himself. Only the grace of God extended to him can bring him to saving faith and the personal work of Jesus Christ. And only the grace of God through the preaching of the word and then Paul’s special sensitivity to the spirit as the spirit informs him by some means we don’t know that this man was capable of and would indeed be healed.

Only by that special manifestation of grace can this man come back to fullness. The same heard Paul speak. So he’s hearing Paul preach to the people at Lystra. And he was and Paul was steadfastly beholding him. Paul perceived that this man had faith to be healed. And there’s the word that means saved as well. It said with a loud voice, “Stand upright on thy feet.” And he leaped and he walked. So we have here a picture of healing.

I talked about this in terms of restoration because you remember that was the message of the man healed at the gate of the temple at the gate beautiful in Acts chapter 3. You might not remember this but remember the man was healed. The people then got around the man at the temple and said what’s going on here and Peter then preaches a sermon and Peter begins by the way by telling him why do you look at us as if by our power we made this man whole.

You see that correlates to the mobs who will look at Paul and Barnabas and say these men are gods. It’s their power that has done this. But in any event, Peter then goes on to preach to the people about what has just happened. And he preaches the message of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And at the center of that message, Peter says, “This is the time of the restoration of all things.” And so the picture of the healing of the man at the temple gate who was a beggar by the way, who is begging alms, could not exercise vocational calling.

That preaching of Peter reminds us that is a picture of the restoration that is now being affected of all things. Salvation is holistic across the board for the believer. You don’t have part of you that’s saved that has no correlation to the rest of your life. And so when we’re saved and when we preach to people and when we see men converted to a saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, the job isn’t over.

It’s just begun. Because now indeed the blind will see. The lame will be able to have feet again. They’ll be able to walk and have life. But to what purpose? Well, first of all, to worship God again. The blind the lame man at the gate of the temple. He could then enter into the temple and enter into the worship of God. When we come to worship God, the first thing we say at our worship service is we have been lame from birth.

We are crippled. We are prone to wander and walk out of the path. We confess our sins. And God makes us whole again. He reminds us that we’re made whole once for all in the work of Jesus Christ. But he applies it to us. He tells us what we need to know every day. That those sins are forgiven. That we may rise up in our hearts to heaven and we may enter into his worship. And so salvation is pictured for us reminding us here that even with the Gentiles there’s this correlation to the Jewish culture and this healing has the idea of restoration first to worship this man can now worship God and secondly by way of application analogy to that first healing again that the man can exercise vocational calling.

We don’t think of this today very much but if you were crippled you had to rely upon other people to sustain you couldn’t exercise vocational calling. That’s why that man was begging at the gate beautiful and that’s why this man probably also was dependent upon other people. And so salvation restores us to a sense of vocational calling and dominion. And you know we in this church over the last 10 12 years we have seen men restored to a sense of vocational calling.

We have seen men come away from dependence upon the civil state or upon reliance upon other people ultimately and instead come to a position of full vocational calling by God. And you know that is a there’s a correlation a direct correlation to the application of saving faith to a life and that ability to both worship and to work in obedience to God’s word. And so we have in the healing of this lame man by way of correlation back to Acts chapter 3.

We see again the relationship of health to salvation to restoration in all of life. Now the scriptures tell us indeed as well. We’ve said that incoming of the Gentiles. It’s a picture of the fulfillment of prophecy. And in Isaiah 35:6 we read, “Then shall the lame men leap as in hart and the tongue of the dumb sing. For in the wilderness shall waters break out and streams in the desert.” We have moved away from Jerusalem and we’re now out in the desert where people are plain bald-faced idolaters.

But streams of living water, the Holy Spirit comes out of the apostles into that culture and causes the lame man to leap and the one who could not speak the dumb to sing forth the praises of God. A picture of the salvation brought to the uttermost parts of the earth. And that’s the context in which we live as well. And we want to take the gospel message to those who are lame and cannot enter into worship or work and whose voices cannot sing forth the praises of God because of their moral rebellion against him.

And we to reach the elect and cause them to leap. Hebrews 12:13 tells us indeed to make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way, but let it rather be healed. We have a positive obligation to people in the sense of their lameness being a result of the failure to apply God’s word to their life to assist them and exhort them that they’re might be turned back to the path of life.

Interesting too, the lame man in Jerusalem back in Acts chapter 3. We have no evidence there of faith on his part. Remember what he begged for from the apostles? He wanted money. He didn’t seem to have any exercise of faith. And yet he was sovereignly healed. Faith apparently in his case followed his healing. But here with this gentile lame man, Paul gazes at him intently and sees evidence of faith prior to the healing.

And it reminds us of our Lord Jesus Christ who when the gentile centurion told him, I’m a man under authority. You say, the word I know my daughter will be healed. The Lord says he’d not seen such great faith in all of Israel. And so we have encouragement to witness even in the case of darkness. It isn’t back in Jerusalem where the influence of the word is felt that faith is exercised prior to healing.

But it’s here in the depths of darkest paganness we see men coming to faith through hearing the preaching of the word first and as a result of the exercise of that faith also being healed and restored in a fuller sense as well. So we see then this application to our lives. we see this miraculous cure of the lame man at the temple being now imaged again at the miraculous cure of the lame man in the pagan darkness as well.

And so we see this relationship restoration and healing go together. Restoration and salvation rather go together. And so we must preach that full gospel.

Secondly then there’s this response to what happens in verses 11 following we see the ascription of deity to the apostles. And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices saying in the speech of Lycaonia, “The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men.” They called Barnabas Jupiter and Paul Mercurius because he was the chief speaker.

And the priest of Jupiter, which was before their city, in other words, the temple of Jupiter was before the city. The city was owned, so to speak, by Jupiter. brought oxen, that really is bulls, and garlands. That’s wreaths of like flowers and stuff they would put upon the bulls or the sacrifices or whatever under the gates and would have done sacrifice with the people.

So we see here what happens in darkest of darkness. We see men completely idolatrous. We see men removed from the influence of God’s word, removed from that civilizing effect on their culture, totally pagan. Now there’s an interesting historical relevance to this. Jupiter and Mercury are the Roman names for the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes. Hermes was the one who would interpret or speak for Zeus. So Mercury is the messenger.

Hermeneutics, you know, the interpretation of scripture comes from a word, the same root word as Hermes. See, Hermes was the interpreter. He was the speaker for the powerful one Zeus. So Paul is said here to be Hermes or Mercury because he is the one who was giving the speeches. Barnabas may have been more imposing or something. Who knows? But in any event, they ascribed the powers of Zeus or Jupiter to Barnabas.

And it’s interesting too that there was a legend at this point in time recorded by Ovid in one of his works that indeed Jupiter and Mercury had come to a neighboring city and those people had rejected them and finally an old couple took them in and Jupiter and Mercury then destroyed the rest of the city and made this old man and wife into priests at a temple given to them there in that city.

So when these guys come down and The priest hears these guys may be Jupiter and Mercury. He right away wants to sacrifice. See, he’s driven by fear. He doesn’t want their city destroyed as well. He doesn’t want himself taken away. So there’s historical reference going on here to what had the paganness of this particular part of the world.

Well, this is the third account. Luke is big on three-fold repetition of things in his writings both in the Gospel and the book of Acts. And you remember that origin Peter had to deal with Simon Magus in Samaria and remember Paul then had to deal with Elymas the magician back at Paphos and here we have outright superstitious idolatrous worship going on as well. So it’s like the third repetition and again it’s a devolution as you move away from the influence of the word. Simon the magician Simon Magus worked in the context of Samaria Jewish area.

Elymas was explicitly said to be a Jew although he counseled a gentile ruler. And here we have no Jewish involvement at all. We have pure unadulterated paganism. This country as it moves further and further away from the center, the center being the Lord Jesus Christ and rejects him as center, nothing holds. And eventually what happens is the resurgence of bald-faced paganism once more. And the scriptures repeatedly warn us against these gods.

We recited it in the responsive reading from the Psalms earlier that men make these gods up. And these gods are completely vain. They’re useless things. They are bound to disappoint whatever God puts other men put in the place of the great creating living God is really a dead thing and nothing and instead is bound to give disappointment and we live in the context of such a world today we live in the context of a world that increasingly engages itself in religious superstition I’ll talk about this toward the end of the talk but suffice it to say this is the area of Phrygia and Galatia that’s where we’re operating here and Phrygia is an very ancient culture and their influence was strong upon religious ritual and the big thing in Phrygia was the earth mother goddess.

And so as we look in the United States today and see the resurgence of goddess worship, you can go down to Hawthorne Street and you will come across a goddess shop down there with idols etc. We have a resurgence in America today of this kind of bold-faced paganism and specifically we have specific correlations back to the religion of these people this area of Phrygia back to the emergence of mother or the goddess of earth mother being worshiped again in America.

The country is moving toward paganism. Now, by way of application, I want us to remember that our children are now being raised up not in the context of Christian moral America with all its problems, mind you. nonetheless, they’re now being raised in the context of a culture that is moving rapidly toward a new form of paganism. Alas, what these people were doing with idol worship. Increasingly, that’s what’s going on.

We should see in this the drift of our country beginning to happen, but we should also see in response to that our renewed responsibilities to train up our children in the way of the Lord. And so, it’s a good thing that we have now three classes, I believe, of growing kids God’s way in place. It’s a good thing that we repeat over and over again the necessity of fathers in this congregation raising their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

You have a positive obligation. If you don’t do that, your children are going to be affected by not Christian America, but by post-Christian America and by influences that are becoming increasingly self-conscious in idolatry and paganism. And I just want to use this opportunity to once more exhort the fathers in this congregation to faithfulness relative to your own personal reading of scripture and relative to the teaching of your family with those scriptures.

That is your positive obligation and that is the way to avoid this culture or community becoming pagan in the context of an America that comes increasingly pagan. Fathers, you are under admonition and charge by the word of God to train your children so that this is not the way that they respond to the world round about them. Now, if you think that uh if you if you are concerned that this is not going on in your household and you need help and exhortation.

You know you can get it from the elders of this church. You know you can get it from the prayer group leaders and you know you can get it from the other men of this church. And I want you to understand that you have an obligation to do that. And I want members of your family who think that you’re not fulfilling your responsibilities to understand that this is not some kind of uh community where we have men as the priests of their own household whatever they want to do.

goes whatever they want to have happen in their house is what happens. No, we are all responsible to the greater priest, the Lord Jesus Christ. We are ministers or priests in our households, but we should not be pagan priests as these men were. We want to be God-fearing priests. And so, if there are members of your of your family that think you’re not fulfilling your obligations, we encourage them to speak to the elders of the church relative to your failure of performance.

There was a day and age, we’ve spoken of this before, in the time of the Reformation when if men didn’t conduct regular times of family worship and didn’t teach their children the scriptures, they were brought before the session and if necessary were suspended and excommunicated for their failure to minister the word of God. What does Paul tell us? If you don’t provide for your family, you’re worse than an infidel.

He says that about bread, about food, but how much more important the eternal food of God’s word. So, as we see this culture continue to degenerate into paganism. I want us to feel an increasing sense of responsibility that more and more it becomes the obligation of the church, but more importantly than that, the family to raise our children with the knowledge that will prevent them from falling into this kind of raw paganism that more and more characterizes our world.

Well, in response to all of this, we have a call to turn from vanities to the living creator God in verses 14-18. And again, here there’s a correlation. I said that the restoration to the temple the lame man at the temple was then followed by Peter telling the people why do you look at us as if it’s Peter and John actually back at the temple in Acts chapter 3 just as it’s Paul and Barnabas here another correlation between these two stories and back there in Acts chapter 3 Peter says why are you looking at us as if our power did this thing and now Paul speaks to these idolaters saying why are you looking to us as if by our power we’re doing these things now it happens in a little a little more excited fashion in verse 14 angry that when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of this, they rent their clothes and ran in among the people crying out.

Now, see, they were speaking in the language of Lycaonia, which Paul and Barnabas didn’t know. So, it took them a while to kind of figure out what was going on here. But as soon as they saw idolatry at practice being practiced here, they didn’t say, “Well, let’s analyze this and think about the best way to meet common ground with these folks and go have a prayer meeting about them being involved in this idolatry, etc.” No, they immediately rushed into action.

They lead, the word says, into the middle of the mob that’s going to do the sacrifices for them and to this priest. And they cry out and what do they say? Saying, “Sirs, why do ye these things?”, no, let’s just stop there. They start by asking a question that gets to motivation. They cause they attempt to cause the men in which hear them to come to a self-conscious understanding of their own motivations.

Why do you do this stuff? Excellent question to ask people. People are much more liable to hear you instead of coming to them and saying you’re doing this wrong to ask them instead why are you doing this? Why are you doing this wrong? And then you get to the question of motivation. You begin to have them become self-conscious and reflective in thinking about themselves. If you confront somebody right on frequently, boom, they will put up the brick wall.

But if you get them to become self reflective and thinking through what they’re doing. That can be the beginning of a good period of instruction. This is an excellent thing to do with our children again to ask them why they’re doing certain things. It’s an interesting question to ask.

I was in an incident this last Friday where I was in the process of purchasing a car. And I don’t want to it’s a complicated story that goes on several weeks, but suffice it to say that I’m driving down Highway 26 headed toward Portland at rush hour in a car that’s leaking gas out the gas tank. Not a little drip, a little more than a little drip. It’s leaking. A little puddle in front of my house. And I took off. I’m driving down there. I’m halfway down to where I’m going to trade this car back to get my money back for paying for this car.

And I’m thinking, why am I doing this? What is my motivation? I want my money back. Well, is $400 worth your life? I mean, you’re in rush hour traffic. A guy’s smoking a cigarette. He throws a cigarette over, you know, like this guys do at the car. Boom. No more dentists. So, motivation. It’s an important thing. Now, the guy I was taking this to What was he doing? Well, suffice it to say, and I don’t want to get into all the story. I don’t want to embarrass the man or anything, but he struggled in his heart and soul, he began to tell me untruths over the phone as we discussed his situation and tried to shirk his responsibility relative to this leaking gas tank. And I could hear, you know, you see some of these Walt Disney cartoons again, you see these guys kind of kind of crazy like Donald Duck and pretty soon his eyes will start having dollar signs, whatever, and he gets kind of glazed over in his eyes.

Well, that’s the way this fellow was becoming and discussing this car situation. He knew what the right thing to do was. But for $400, he was endangering his immortal soul by not telling the truth. You know, motivation is an odd thing. How do we get into these situations? Well, it’s good for us to back up a little bit and ask us what our motivations are. And that’s what Paul does here. He asks them, “What is your motivation?

Why are you doing these things?” And then he goes on to tell them a couple of things. He says, “First of all, by our very nature, you shouldn’t be doing this. By who we are as men. Secondly, what we teach you says you shouldn’t be doing this. And third, what we teach you contains the message not of a dead useless thing, but of a living God, not a dead thing.” He goes on to say this. Then he says, “We also are men of like passion with you.

We’re subject to the same vicissitudes of life, the same problems that you suffer. We’re liable to persecution. We’re liable to hurt just like you hurt is what the word mean here. doesn’t mean we get all worked up like you do. It means we are of like nature. We’re homeopathic with you. We’re the same substance of the same essence. We’re subject to infirmity and suffering is what Paul is saying here. So we’re not we’re not to be worshiped and we preach unto you.

Indeed, our doctrine says that you should turn from these vanities unto the living God. Idolatry, idols in the scriptures are not some terribly evil, wicked thing at their essence. Now they become that in people’s lives, but at their essence They’re a nil. They’re a cipher. Zed, zero, nothing. Paul says they’re a vanity. They’re a useless thing.

That’s one reason why I wore the tie. My children love me. One of, you know, a couple of them gave me this tie. So, I wanted to show my love to them by wearing the tie. A little embarrassed to wear a cartoon tie to worship God. And I wouldn’t have done it except that it does give me a sermon illustration. We have Bullwinkle and Rocky. These are cartoon characters. They’re nothing. See? Well, the idols are the people round about and the idols anything people put their trust in rather than God. These idols particularly created idols, Jupiter, this temple, etc.

These are nothing. They’re a cartoon. There are no substance to them. By the way, the other thing on this tie, you know, one of the more famous Rocky and Bullwinkle episodes is, “What’s the matter of you?” The school that Bullwinkle was going to go to and play for. “What’s the matter of you?” Anyway, university, you know, that on there is a reminder of motivation. Paul’s asking him first, what’s the matter of you? Why are you doing this thing and he brings them to a recognition they’re doing this for the sake of an idol that is absolutely nothing.

It’s vain. It is an empty thing. And he says that our doctrine teaches you to turn away from these things unto the living God. That’s the difference. It isn’t just that one is useless and bound to be disappointing and one is useful. One is a nothing and the other is living. God who created all things is living. Who made heaven and earth and the sea and all that in them that are in therein. Who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways.

Nevertheless, he left not himself without witness and that he did good and gave us rain from heaven, filling our hearts with food and gladness. And they scarce restrain the people, but they did restrain the people. It was hard, but they kept the people from doing these sacrifices. And let’s just note a couple of things here. He talks about the living God. He says, and the and right away attached to that is the fact of the creation of the heaven and the earth and the sea, all things that are in a direct quote.

Quotation from Exodus 20:11. Why do we rest on the Sabbath day? Because of the creation week that God created heaven and earth and the sea and all things that are in therein. Another reference in the Psalms that you have in your outline as well. This is a big theme in the scriptures. This same theme is repeated in the book of Revelation as the angels go forth to sing the praises of God in the book of Revelation.

The angel flies in mid heaven. He sings out with a loud voice, fear God and give him glory because the hour of his judgment has come and worship him who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and the springs of water. This goes back to the creation of the world in paradise. And we have God as the creator strenuously put forth by Paul. It is essential to the Christian doctrine that God created all things heaven, earth, sea, and all that are in there therein.

That he did this by himself, not as a result of natural processes. And he did it in a creation week. Exodus 20:11 tells us the importance of the correlation between the six days of creation and the six days in which we work and a day of rest at the end. We live in the context of a culture that is no longer biblically motivated or educated. And increasingly, our message must turn away from the sort of message that Paul began with back at Antioch Pisidian with the synagogue crowd who knew the scriptures.

Most of the people we’re going to witness to are outside of the church are people who don’t know the first thing about the scriptures. And the first thing they need to be confronted with is that God created heaven and earth in the space of six days. The doctrine of creation is essential. If we want to train our kids not to be pagans, we want to train them about God’s creative acts in history. And if we want to reach our nation with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, we should start just where Paul starts, Genesis 1.

And if you want to get involved, and this is probably going a little too far, I hope not. You want to get involved in a Bible translation program to the missionaries, don’t start with the Gospel of John. Start with the first six chapters of the book of Genesis. That’s where Paul starts. He doesn’t start with the Gospel of John and the story of Christ’s birth. He starts with the creation of all things by God.

And I there are people who in this congregation who never understood what the scriptures were all about until they were taken back to Genesis 1 and explained the creation, the fall of man, dominion, the creation in God’s image, all that. picture of the Genesis first six chapters provides the understanding for what Christ is here to accomplish both coming to earth and then being present in his people.

So we would do well to acquaint ourselves of the creation and the importance of that. Now this is real important because in the context of the orthodox reformed conservative Christian world today this is a matter of controversy. Crazy as it seems it is a matter of controversy. I was at a meeting of the Oregon Alliance for Reformed Churches last Tuesday. We have adopted as an alliance a position that God created the world in six ordinary days and that came up for about an hour’s worth of discussion at our last meeting.

Do we really want to do this? Do we want to exclude those members of the reformed community who may be with us and everything else and yet deny the six day creation?, you know, I don’t know if we want to do this. Some guys were saying there are members of our presbytery, we were told, who may not go along with this and this would keep them out of this alliance. What are the conservative reformed denominations?

So the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the PCA, Presbyterian Church in America. Then there’s the CRC. Those are the three biggest ones. Christian Reformed Church. Christian Reformed Church gave up six day creation a long time ago. And in the only seminary they have, they have men who believe and teach theistic evolution. They have men in the CRC who believe we have animal origins. Okay. In the OPC, there’s a disciplinary case working its way through now.

It probably take a long time to get to general assembly where an elder is up on charges for teaching that we have animal ancestry. Not just denying six day creation, teaching we have animal ancestry. PCA, same thing. A man who’s teaching some sort of form of theistic evolution being brought up in charges take a long time for it to work through. These denominations are not willing, none of them to take a position on the simple fact that God created the heavens and the earth in six days.

Not willing to do it. We were told at this meeting that I was at by one man and who’s in one of these denominations that we’re afraid that if we make this kind of position will hold us up to the ridicule of the world run about us. Well, you know, it’s it’s important to recognize that this is the power is preaching the gospel and part of that gospel is the preaching that God created the heavens and the earth and it’s important that we take that message forth.

I’ve provided for you on the table as you go out not you know the left hand as you’re going out you picked up the orders of worship on the right hand as you’re going out of the main hall here out of the sanctuary. You’ll see some pamphlets and brochures about the church. You’ll also see a five or six page things stapled together. There’s 35 copies. Anybody who wants one should be able to take one. It is the first draft of the confessional conference that Elder Maynard and myself will be attending in a week and a half in Chicago relative to creation.

And it’s a series of assertions and denials. For those of you who don’t remember, last year was the first year of the confessional conference. We talked about and approved as a conference a document on hermeneutics. H how what are the interpretation of the scriptures? How what does that mean? How do we interpret them correctly? This year the theme last year we received instruction on creation. This year we will finalize the draft of the assembly on creation, the importance of that doctrine etc.

And then we’ll also hear messages instruction relative to egalitarianism and the ordination of women being forbidden by scriptures. So this will be the document we’ll be will be discussing and hopefully approving at this next session of the confessional conference to be held a week from this coming Wednesday. It will be the opening day of it and Elder Maynard and myself were flying back there through the gracious gift of one of the members in terms of the airfare.

But in any event, read that document and if you have input for either Elder Maynard or myself, please let us know. By the way, both those drafts were written the last year the hermeneutical principles one and this year were written by Dr. Bahnsen who will have as our family camp speaker in August. So, are in real good company at family camp and this might be a good topic of informal conversation with them.

The importance of teaching creation is being central to our preaching of the gospel. Let me just read you a couple of statements from that confessional statement. And as I said, Dr. Bahnsen actually wrote these and these are ones we’ll be discussing in Chicago.