Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

John chapter 6 for today’s sermon text. We’ll begin reading at verse 22 and read the first verse of chapter 7. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. John 6:22 through chapter 7 verse 1.

On the following day, when the people who saw that there was no other boat there except that one which his disciples had entered, and that Jesus had not entered the boat with his disciples, but his disciples had gone away alone. However, other boats came from Tiberias near the place where they ate bread after the Lord had given thanks. When the people therefore saw that Jesus was not there, nor his disciples, they also got into boats and came to Capernaum seeking Jesus.

And when they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Jesus answered them and said, “Most assuredly I say to you, you seek me not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled. Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life which the Son of Man will give you because God the Father has set his seal on him.

Then they said to him, “What shall we do that we may work the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God that you believe in him whom he sent.” Therefore, they said to him, “What sign will you perform then that we may see it and believe you? What work will you do? Our fathers ate the manna in the desert. As it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat.”

Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly I say to you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but my father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Then they said to him, “Lord, give us this bread always.”

And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall never hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst. But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me. And the one who comes to me I will by no means cast out. For I have come down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.

This is the will of the Father who sent me that of all he has given me I should lose nothing but should raise it up at the last day. And this is the will of him who sent me that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have everlasting life and I will raise him up at the last day.

The Jews then complained about him because he said, “I am the bread which came down from heaven.” And they said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it then that he says, I have come down from heaven?” Jesus therefore answered and said to them, “Do not murmur among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.

It is written in the prophets, and they shall all be taught by God. Therefore, everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God. He has seen the Father. Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in me has everlasting life. I am the bread of life.

Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and are dead. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I shall give is my flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.”

The Jews therefore quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whosoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.

For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him. As the living father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not as your fathers ate the manna and are dead. He who eats this bread will live forever.

These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaum. Therefore, many of his disciples when they heard this said, “This is a hard saying. Who can understand it?” When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples complained about this, he said to them, “Does this offend you? What then if you should see the Son of Man ascend where he was before?

It is the Spirit who gives life. The flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit and they are life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe and who would betray him. And he said, “Therefore, I have said to you that no one can come to me unless it has been granted to him by my father.

From that time many of his disciples went back and walked with him no more. Then Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also want to go away?” But Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also, we have come to believe and know that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?” He spoke of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, for it was he who would betray him, being one of the twelve. After these things, Jesus walked in Galilee, for he did not want to walk in Judea because the Jews sought to kill him.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this text of scripture. We thank you for this high privilege we have of coming before you and worshiping and praising you and bringing our petitions and prayers to you as well. We thank you that you have called us together in one sense to offer prayers to you for the world, but this is our duty this day as we come into the house of prayer, the house of God, which is to be a house of prayer for all the nations.

Help us, Lord God, to be informed in our prayers this day by your word. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. Shortly after our savior’s birth, there was of course the visit of the wise men to Bethlehem. We don’t know between 40 days to two years. Somewhere in that context is when they came, probably more like shortly after 40 days. And we know that on their way to see Jesus, they stopped and inquired of Herod. You know, they were kingmakers from another country and they came and asked the king if they could go see Jesus. That’s part of what they were doing there. He was the ruler of the land.

And after this what happens is of course that Joseph is warned in a dream that Herod will seek the life of Jesus and he’s supposed to take Jesus down to Egypt. So Jesus goes and spends some time in Egypt and during that time Herod then does a horrific thing. Herod engages in what’s become known as the slaughter of the innocents. One phrase the church has given to it. He tries to make sure that his means of salvation, that his means of peace and security for the land is intact. And that’s himself. He doesn’t want a rival king, a rival savior in the context of the land. So he kills all male children in Bethlehem who are aged two and under.

And we don’t know how many there were. But we know the scriptures call our attention to that fact as a fulfillment of the prophecy that in this place there’d be mourning and weeping. Jesus during this time is kept safe by going to Egypt. Why Egypt? Well, part of the reason Egypt is used is because it’s a fulfillment of the prophecy that out of Egypt I have called my son. And that’s explicitly told us in Matthew’s gospel. And there’s a picture here of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt as a picture of Jesus coming from Egypt into the promised land. And so Jesus is Israel. That’s one of the main points.

But again, why Egypt particularly? Why does this account of Herod find itself in the gospel? Well, Herod has to be seen as a Pharaoh because we remember that the place of Egypt was a horrible place for our people, for the church of God, because Pharaoh compelled the Israelites to kill their male children, to drown them in the river Nile. And when God comes to judge Pharaoh, then the river turns red with blood because the blood of God’s children is in that river killed by Pharaoh.

So I think it’s hard to miss the connections in the account of the slaughter of the innocents that what’s happening is that the land of God, the holy land, the promised land had become Egypt and Jesus goes away for safety to the place of Egypt. You see the juxtaposition of these two events. You got to flee the promised land to be safe. You got to go to where previously they had to escape from to get saved.

And so Herod is pictured as a new Pharaoh killing God’s elect children. And Pharaoh does this. Herod does this. And so we have it recounted in the scriptures.

Well, I talk about this by way of introduction to the context for what we’re doing today. This is some churches have designated it Human Life Sunday. We have more often than not referred to it as anti-abortion day of the Lord. The day of the Lord is what Lord’s day worship means—it’s the same term—and Jesus comes today to be with us. As we read in Matthew’s gospel when Jesus comes near, it’s not sweetness and light. You know, the six and seven year olds today were asked to think about: is it safer or more dangerous when Jesus comes? Well, John the Baptist says it’s more dangerous. He says repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Jesus is almost here. And Jesus comes with an axe to cut down the tree.

And by the end of the gospel, of course, Jesus curses the fig tree that represents the unbelieving. Jesus comes to separate wheat and chaff and to burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. To be in the presence of God is a dangerous thing. And that’s what God has called us to do today. To come before him in his presence, recognizing that he is indeed the judge of all the earth and the judge of the nations.

And this particular Sunday, the closest to the anniversary of Roe versus Wade in 1973 on January 22nd. Our church since its inception has set apart as a day to particularly engage in prayers that this wicked sin of abortion would be put to an end in the context of our land.

America was founded as a new Israel. It was referred to that way by many people that founded our country, Christian men who sought freedom to worship here and looked at America as the new promised land. Not that it was exclusive. You sometimes hear people throw that idea. No, it doesn’t mean that. Wherever you go and establish a country based on God’s principles, it’s Israel. But the problem is that just like Israel of Jesus’s day and Herod’s day, we today have a promised land in which the most innocent—so to speak, not ultimately, we’re all in the Adamic nature, but those that are innocent of any actions, unborn children in the wombs of their mothers—are killed at a horrific rate.

Here in Oregon, the leading cause of death is abortion, far and away. Far and away. Abortion, the killing of the unborn in the womb, on an average day in Oregon, if you average the statistics out, one person dies in a car accident, seven die of respiratory failure, eight die of stroke, 19 people die from cancer, 20 from cardiovascular problems—heart attacks in other words. But 39 unborn babies are murdered on an average every day in the state of Oregon.

We have our own slaughter of the innocents reminding us that what was once a Christian nation now has blood on its hands.

Now, before I get too far, I think it’s very important—and really the title of today’s sermon is the primacy of life. Ultimately, what we want to see happen is not the death of people that commit abortions. It’s their conversion. And ultimately, there are people in this church. We’ll talk about preparing our hearts to pray imprecatory prayers in a couple of minutes. There are probably people in this church or who get the tape or something who may have actually been complicit in the sin of abortion in their life.

And all of us who hear this sermon are complicit of capital crimes, pride, sinful actions. If you break one part of the law, you’re guilty of it all. So when we come together today and we hear the assurance that God has forgiven us our sins, that’s particularly important for people that may have been complicit in abortion who have repented of those sins to believe the forgiveness of God is given to them today.

James B. Jordan has a new book out called Primeval Saints published by Canon Press. He has a chapter in there on Esau and he attempts to rehabilitate Esau, which is, you know, interesting. But he talks about various things and he doesn’t say that he knows for sure if Esau is going to be in heaven, but it’s an interesting chapter to contemplate what the biblical data he brings to bear. But he brings an image together that when I first heard it about six months ago as he was preparing this chapter, I thought is really an image of who we are.

You know, we read biblical stories and we always want to associate with the good guy. Jacob was a righteous guy. We want to associate ourselves with him. But more often than not, whether it’s books or movies, there’s a hero, but we’re never the hero. We’re the guy in the middle trying to move back and forth between should we do what’s right or should we do what’s wrong. We’re the sinful people in the middle.

Jacob, this is one of Jordan’s observations, in a way brings Esau before Isaac in his request for blessing from Isaac. The mother prepares stew from two kids, right? Two children, Esau and Jacob are represented there. It’s the kid that Jacob raised, but Esau’s spices are included in the mix. And then, of course, Jacob is dressed. And no matter what we think about what’s going on there—and Jordan seems to think that’s a prayer by the mother for both sons to be blessed—Esau should be blessed by submitting to Jacob.

No matter what we see that as, really, if we think of Jacob as a picture or a model of the Lord Jesus Christ and we recognize that we’re sinful rebels in our own fallen nature, we’re Esau. Understand? Now, if you don’t understand that, you don’t understand the grace of God and salvation. We are, you know, in our own, left to our own devices, we would kill not just children but each other. That’s what the scriptures say. We’re Esau.

And the only way we get blessing, any of us sitting here in this congregation, the only way we get blessing before the Father today is riding on the back of the Lord Jesus Christ, the greater Jacob, united with him. Our problem is like Esau’s problem. He wanted blessing first. God says you’ll get blessed as you submit to Jacob, to the authority that I’ve placed in the context of this relationship.

And it’s the same with us as we come here today, being carried on the back of the Lord Jesus Christ, so to speak, being assured of the forgiveness of sins through the work of our savior, not our own work. And as we come pleading that truth, the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ and not our own works, we can be very confident that God has forgiven whatsoever sin we have engaged in and have been brought to repentance by him for.

So if you’re here today and have complicity in abortion, you know, I don’t mean to state this overly strong, but it is really sin for you, sin for you, to not believe that sin has been atoned for through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. You need to rest in the finished salvation of the Lord Jesus Christ, his work.

Now, there are people—part of the work of the pregnancy resource centers is actually counseling women who have a tough time dealing with that guilt of aborting their own children. And I would encourage that service to anybody here, or if you know people that are struggling with guilt over that situation, to look at that. We have some brochures downstairs and to talk to somebody about God.

We come before God today in the context of a slaughter of the innocents of absolutely gargantuan proportions compared to anything that Herod did in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. We come before God in a situation where our country, in an attempt to get whatever view of salvation and rightness and peace and prosperity and health is at play, rejects the word of God and teaching of the life in the human womb.

And instead we have a nation where people like Herod want their own method of salvation, health, wealth, and prosperity and end up killing their own children. That’s the context for what we do today. We come before God in the context of a slaughter of the innocents. And we have to understand that we come before a God who is not pleased with this state of affairs. There’s no doubt in the scriptures that God is at wrath and at war with wicked people. He tells us today that he hates wickedness.

And indeed, Psalm 97:10 says, “You who love the Lord hate evil.” If you don’t hate the evil of murder, then you really don’t love the Lord Jesus Christ. Psalm 139:21 says this: “Do I not hate them, O Lord, who hate you? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?”

Ultimately, I suppose the demonic forces that are in back of abortion in this country are the same demonic forces that were at work in the context of Herod’s mind and soul. It’s an attempt to kill the seed. There is enmity judicially placed by God between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, between the serpent and the woman and between their seed. And the serpent seed hates the seed of the woman and wants to kill the seed of the woman.

And so we have the seed of women, the offspring of women being made war against by abortionists and those in concert with them in the curse. So we have to really ultimately, to kill someone is to strike out at the image bearer of God. And ultimately all sin, as David confessed in his penitential psalm, is ultimately sin against God. “Against thee, against thee only have I sinned”—in terms of priority. Now he’d done some wicked stuff, engaged in murder. He’d sinned against Bathsheba certainly. But ultimately it’s all sin against God.

And so we should hate those people that strike out at the image of God by striking out at unborn children in the context of the womb.

So the context we come before God in is this context of a slaughter of the innocents and we enter into prayers of malediction today. We have a benediction placed upon us at the end of every service. Bene is good, beneficial. Diction is words, of course. So there are good words pronounced upon the people of God at the conclusion of the worship service, all based upon the work of the Lord Jesus Christ as the sacrifice for our sins. And God wants us to say those sort of words. But God also wants us to say words of malediction—malice, malevolent, evil.

God wants us to say bad words to people that are in rebellious, high-handed sin against him, to people that kill babies. Benediction means good words. Malediction means bad words.

The leading cause of death in Oregon is abortion. Far and away, far and away—39 people.

You know, I was watching a football game last night, one of these playoff games. Probably a number of you might have seen it. A terrible call by the referee in the last minutes of the game which really turned the entire game around, made it go into overtime, and it was just a bad call. What can you say? Men make mistakes. And of course, you watch that kind of thing and it’s kind of hard to take, and it’s hard for the team to take and all that stuff.

And then later in the evening, it turned out that one of our people, and there were tears shed for that, of course. And I thought about these things as I prepared for today’s sermon. I thought, you know, we get so upset about a bad call in sports, which in terms of the flow of life has almost no effect. I mean, some people will have more money than others if they get to go on to the next round of the playoffs. But there’s a sense of injustice, I suppose we could say, that justifies our being upset over bad officiating.

And we get, I think, properly, again, you know, teary-eyed over, you know, family pets that die. They’re just fish. But you know, we have become so callous to the officiating, the refereeing that goes on a daily basis in this country where the chief referees in our country say there’s not human life in the womb and it cannot be protected no matter how much a civil magistrate wants to protect it.

Now, that’s a bad call and it has a lot of significance for all kinds of families, not just the children, but for the mothers that do this sin that’s engaged in. They know conscience, you know, is given to us by God and they know ultimately that’s sin. It has horrific effects.

China, of course, has forced one-child policy. And what we see developing in the nation of China is a nation of single men, right? Because men are valued higher in a pagan culture than women. That is a pagan thought to value men higher than women. God makes it quite clear. If you have any thoughts like that, men, and you do, get rid of them. China values men more than women. Parents do. So they kill the girl babies and they keep the boy babies. What’s that going to produce after a generation or two? Way too many boys.

George Gilder taught us years ago—as if we needed to have a man teach us, but certainly he has in his studies and his books—that single men are responsible for most of the crime on the planet. Because men that cannot enter into marriage end up in the providence of God committing most crimes. Can you imagine a nation comprised largely of single men as an enemy to our country 30 years from now? That’s a scary thought, is it not? That’s a result of this bad refereeing going on in various countries. Bad calls made about human life or not human life.

And we shed tears for family pets, but how often do we shed tears for the 39 children being murdered on an average every day in our state? Just in our state, things have gone horribly wrong. This country needs to come to repentance. And we’re going to pray today that God would bring particular judgments upon this country for this terrible sin.

Is hating always wrong? No. We live in the context of a culture that says that hating is always wrong. It’s not wrong. God tells us that if we’re going to love him, we have to hate evil. And do I not hate them? The psalmist writes with a perfect hatred: Yeah, I hate them. Those people that do these wicked things. Now, you know, we have to define what hatred is and all that, but hatred itself is not necessarily wrong.

Does God hate some people? Yes, he does. It’s quite clear. God hates people that murder the fatherless. The fatherless is one of those groups in the Old Testament that says over and over again that God hates it when people take away the clothing, the food, the legal rights of the fatherless, those that are vulnerable in the context of a society. God hates civil magistrates that take away the rights of the fatherless, so to speak, the right to life. And God says that we should hate that as well. We should hate that sin. We should hate those people for killing unborn children in the context of the womb.

Herod, the wicked king of the New Testament accounts of the slaughter of the innocent, has nothing on the rulers in our country who allow this horrible holocaust to go on.

So that’s the context and that’s why we’re going to pray the way we do. And I wanted to point out just a few New Testament texts for those of you that are new to our church. There is a New Testament basis for these kind of prayers. It’s not just found in the Old Testament.

In the book of Revelation, we have martyred saints martyred for the cause. They’re in heaven. So we can’t have, you know, there’ll be no sin on the lips of those who are portrayed in Revelation 6 as being in heaven with God, having been martyred for the faith. These people are raised up. Okay? They’re in heaven with Jesus.

And what do they say in Revelation 6? When he opens the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”

They prayed to God that he would bring temporal judgments, that he would judge physically with actions the wickedness of the people that killed the saints of God. So there we have a New Testament citation that tells us quite clearly that it is proper for the church to cry out to God as the psalmist cried out to God all along. You withhold your punishments from these sins. Why? God wants us to feel that anxiety. He wants us to cry out to him that his justice would come to bear.

Now, he wants us to be patient. His timing is always perfect. And his answer for many years has been, “I’m not putting it to an end yet in this country. My purposes behind all of this are not yet fulfilled.” I think we have had answers to prayers that aren’t quite so evident. But for now, he wants us to continue to cry out, “How long?”

In Galatians 1, Paul talking about those people that would trouble the church. And he says, “If I or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed.” Prayer of malediction. Let him be cursed by God is what he says. And he says it twice. As we have said before, I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed.

Now the gospel is a full orbed understanding of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ and that he’s king of kings and its implications for all of life. And it is a different gospel. It is a different good news that convinces women to kill the children in their womb. I think it’s very proper that we say to them that they should be accursed.

Now we pray for their repentance, but we pray that God would judge them.

In Galatians 5:12, to those that wanted the church to have to submit to a requirement of circumcision for salvation, Paul says, “I could wish that those who trouble you would even cut themselves off.” He’s using very colorful language about the men that would trouble the church of Jesus Christ. And his wish in his prayers recorded in holy scripture—not my words, not Paul’s words, ultimately the words of the Holy Spirit—is that such men should themselves be cut off.

Again, in 2 Timothy 4:14, Paul says that Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm. Now, he’s not talking about the harm other people have done, but he saw the harm that Alexander has done him as an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. May the Lord repay him according to his works. Paul prays for lex talionis, the law of the hand—hand for hand, eye for eye. He prays that kind of judgment, that kind. He prays precaratorily. He says those bad words, maledictory words about Alexander the coppersmith and he prays ultimately that God would repay him trouble for the trouble that he’s brought to the church of Jesus Christ.

Indeed, in 2 Thessalonians 1:6, we read that it is a righteous thing with God to repay with tribulation those who trouble you, those who trouble the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. So in Revelation 6, we read godly saints praying for God to judge the wicked. And Paul was the man who named another man, Alexander, made mention of his specific name, asking God to judge him. Alexander. So the New Testament clearly comports with the Old Testament psalm book and the rest of scripture in telling us that our proper sense of hatred for the wicked is that we would pray to God that what they do would come to an end, particularly thinking today of the slaughter of the innocents would come to an end in the context of our country.

Now the preparation of the soul for these imprecatory prayers is quite important. We don’t want to pray these prayers in the flesh. We don’t want to pray these prayers from a sense of pride. It’s just the opposite. We come together as those who have been brought through the convicting work of the Holy Spirit to a humility before God who know that we’re the Esaus, not the Jacobs. We’re those who have been brought to salvation through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I mentioned Psalm 139 and the psalmist said that he hates certain people. But in verse 22, he goes on to say, “I hate them with perfect hatred.” That doesn’t mean with really strong hatred like I’m really mad at them. It means a perfection of hatred according to the character and attributes of God himself. I count them my enemies. And then verse 23, listen to how he gets to this perfect hatred.

Search me, O God. Know my heart. Try me. Know my anxieties. See if there is any wicked way in me. And lead me in the way everlasting.

As we come before God to ask him to bring temporal judgments on other men, women, to put an end to this awful situation, we must come saying the same thing that the psalmist did. Search our hearts. Don’t let us utter these words that we’re going to utter here in a little bit. Don’t let us say these things unless we have searched our own hearts and gotten rid of whatever sin might be informing these kind of prayers.

You know what I’m talking about. If people have sinned against you, it’s tough to distance yourself in your own personal sense of anger and grief and injustice from really a godly way of going about doing that. You know, when the flesh raises its angry head, your old nature, your old nature wants to curse everybody on the earth. So we have to be very careful when we enter into these kind of prayers that we have searched our own heart.

You know, David—Nathan went to David about a man who did a bad thing, right? And David gets very angry and he says, “Well, this kind of a person is just awful. David is greatly enraged against the man and he says to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this shall surely die.” And then of course, Nathan tells him, “You’re the man. You’re the guy.”

What we’re—you know, temptation is common to all of us. And the sins that lead people into the horrible sin of abortion, the thoughts and the other sorts of sins are things that are very common to all of us. And that they’re not restricted just to a particular group of people. So we must search our own hearts, see if we have hurtful ways in them, sinful ways, and then come before God in opposite of that.

I mentioned, perhaps, Proverbs 8:13 says this: “The fear of the Lord is to hate evil.” So fear of the Lord, that’s what Proverbs is all about. Beginning of wisdom—how are you wise? Fear of the Lord is to hate evil. So what we’re encouraging ourselves to do today is to exercise a proper fear of the Lord, to hate evil or wickedness. But it goes on to say, “Pride and arrogance and the evil way and the perverse mouth I hate.”

God says that as we search out our hearts in preparation for these prayers, we should search them out for any evidences of pride. You see, God hates pride. Ultimately, it’s the pride of man that needs to be humbled by God’s actions in time and space that will lead to a turning away from this horrible sin. Man is prideful. He can determine where life begins and doesn’t begin. He can convince himself there’s no life there. It’s for his benefit for that to be true.

You know, you do the same thing. You make all kinds of rationalizations for actions that you enter into. And really, you know, they’re just sinful. That’s what man does. And he does it in his pride. I’ll decide when life begins and doesn’t begin. I won’t look to the scriptures for my definition.

Now, there’s a progression in the Proverbs. These actions are preceded by thoughts, thoughts that are not thinking God’s thoughts after him. In Psalm 10, where the wicked are prayed against imprecatorily, and it says that God is not in all their thoughts. That’s their problem. They have no reckoning of what God might or might not think of their actions.

And we would hate to come to this prayer in the same way that somehow we come prideful, thinking we’re better than other people apart from the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. He asks us today to humble ourselves before him as we enter into these kind of prayers. If we properly understand who we are and what we did this last week, we would, as is repeated in Jeremiah 31, strike ourselves on the thigh when I considered what I’ve done wrong. We should repent and howl before God, wail over the sinfulness of what we’ve done this last week and denying the Lord Jesus Christ, not thinking his thoughts or engaging in his actions, the sins that we’ve engaged with.

God wants us to come preparing to pray for this prayer today by our true repentance of who we are. And that’s why we have that long section at the beginning of the liturgy of these particular services to really drive home to us that while we’re speaking to one particular action, the murder of the unborn, which draws forth God’s curses, we included all kinds of other stuff, including stuff that you did that you did this past week.

So, as we come before God, we prepare our hearts by remembering our own ways and turning from those ways. We want to come in humility. We don’t want to come exercising the flesh or an ungodly anger. And we want to come desiring their repentance.

You know, there’s a text in Proverbs that’s been used to justify what I think are wrong actions by some in the anti-abortion movement. Proverbs 24: “Deliver those who are being carried away toward death. Hold back those stumbling to the slaughter. Deliver those who are drawn toward death. Hold back those stumbling to the slaughter.”

Now, if we put this in the context of the book of Proverbs, Proverbs at its introduction talks about people that are drawn away and stumble down to the place of death and slaughter. Who are they? Where are they? They’re the young men who go after the wrong kind of woman, who go after Dame Folly as opposed to Lady Wisdom, right? We go down to her house. Proverbs 9 tells us her house is death, but we get drawn down that way. Who is she? She’s foolishness. She’s pride. She’s engaging the flesh, so to speak, in its sinful desires.

Who does Proverbs 24 say we’re supposed to be rescuing? Those people. It’s not talking about people that are going away against their own will. It’s talking about people that are being drawn away to death, stumbling into the slaughter by being seduced by the world system that is foolishness but believes itself to be wisdom.

There’s a sense in which who we’re really praying for today are not elect infants. So there’s a sense in which we’re certainly praying for them, but they’re going to heaven, folks. And some people think based on solid biblical evidence that all these children are going to heaven. Who are we really trying to turn today? It’s the fools who think they’re wise who define when life starts apart from God’s word. It’s the foolish woman who listens to the counsel of the fools around her who convince her that this is not a good thing for her. That it’s the foolish abortionist who’s taught in medical college that this is a blob of tissue instead of human life.

It’s the fools like that who are stumbling toward their slaughter, who are headed on the road to hell, the highway to hell. Those are the people that we’re praying that God might judge, whack them on the nose, get their attention, and turn them from their trip down to the slaughterhouse.

So preparing our hearts to do this, we should think in terms of that. It’s not those lousy people right to hell. No, it’s those lousy wicked people, but just like me. I hope God brings them to repentance for their sins. And I hope they don’t end up in hell. I hope they end up in heaven.

“He who sins against me wrongs his own soul.” All those who hate me love death. Psychology of fallen man. He loves death. Whether he understands it or not, he goes after death even though he thinks he’s going after life. But understand that this proverb also says that these people wrong their own souls. And that should be part of our attitude of preparation for these prayers: to understand we’re praying that these people might do well to their own souls, not that their souls would be wronged.

So as we come before God to pray these prayers, we should search our hearts. Search our hearts to make sure that we’ve confessed unhealthy ways of approaching this. What do we hope wicked people will do? We hope they repent. And second, on the outline, we hope they’ll repent because the message of the Lord Jesus Christ is one not of malediction. It’s not one of implication. It’s not one of curse ultimately.

Ultimately, the message of the Lord Jesus Christ is one of life. John 6, which we’ll return to finally next week before we go on to John 7. John 6 talks about life, life, life, life. They read it that way. I hope you understood the emphasis as we read through those many verses.

Jesus Christ comes to die for sins and that’s a legitimate statement and that’s a true biblical statement. But here in this text, what did our savior say? I have come to give my flesh not for sins. I give my flesh. I give my humanity. I die on the cross for the life of the world. Now some people don’t enter into life and some people will not believe and some people God has not drawn to himself and they abide in death. But Jesus makes quite clear in John 6 that the whole purpose of him coming is to draw right. What he says: this is the will of the Father that people would be drawn to life and I’ll raise people up because they’re dead.

So the primacy of life is talked about here in the context of John chapter 6. If you go through John 6 and in the back of the children’s outlines give you a translation of it. And if you go through there and look for the word life or living or alive, you find it all over the place. I mean, just listen to these verses.

Verse 27: “Don’t work for the food that perishes, but work for the food which endures to everlasting life.”

And then as we move down into the major part of his discourse in verse 33: “The bread of God is he who comes down from heaven who gives life to the world.”

He said to him, “Lord, give us this bread.” And he said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall never hunger. He who believes in me will never thirst.” I said to you that you have to believe. And he says that the work of this is to believe upon him.

And then let’s drop down to verse 39: “This is the will of the Father who sent me that of all he has given me, I should lose nothing, but should raise it up on the last day.” To raise it up on the last day is a picture of life.

“This is the will of him who sent me that everyone who sees the son and believes in me may have everlasting life.”

Now, they complain and grumble about this, but he goes on and on and on. Drop down to verse 47: “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in me has everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and are dead. This is the bread which came down from heaven, which one eats of it will not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. The bread that I will give is my flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.”

We could go on, but you know, I’ve probably used enough time on this. But as you read through the Bread of Life discourse, it is just that—it’s talking about the bread of life. This text in John chapter 6, the context of those who refuse to come to belief. Jesus makes it quite clear that his whole purpose for coming was to bring life to the world.

Now we already know that in John’s gospel because the whole thing is set as a new creation. But here it’s quite obviously portrayed. Life itself is used 12 times in this text. That’s how often the word life is used. To live is used four times. Living is used three times. 19 times in these set of discourses here that our savior engages in. He makes reference very directly to living, life, or live. And then there are other indirect references such as resurrection.

The Lord Jesus Christ comes to establish the primacy of life. You know, benediction and malediction are not equal things going on in the history of mankind. Malediction serves the greater purpose of benediction. Why do we ask that God’s judgments would come upon people? Ultimately, we’re praying that they would come to repentance and many of them do. Some of you came to repentance for the judgments of God upon you that might have been prayed by somebody saying, “Lord, really let them see how bad their sin is.” And God does it and he brings it to life.

Malediction serves the greater purpose of benediction. We don’t—in the service of malediction, we move to the benediction of God upon those people that have repented of their sins because of his just judgments in the context of the world.

So the word of God is about the primacy of life. Jesus dies for the sins of the world, but he dies to bring life. And this is a universal theme, right? We’ve read before that this is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. We read about, right? And the Samaritans at the end of chapter 4 say, “We know that you’re the savior of the world.”

Universalistic expressions of who Jesus is permeate John’s gospel because John portrays, at the culmination of the four gospels as the last one in the sequence, he says that Jesus has come that the world might—but that the world might have life. And I think that’s important to stress here as we move to prayers of malediction.

Now in the providence of God, that’s one of the reasons why the elders and deacons have chosen that in this particular month in which this particular service would happen, these alms offerings are dedicated to the pregnancy resource centers. If all we do to combat the sin of abortion is to ask for judgment upon abortionists and yet don’t reach out and try to help convince women not to bring their children to abortion, then what have we done? We’ve stressed the primacy of death as opposed to the primacy of life.

In the providence of God, yesterday morning, you know, we had another Schubin born, another George Schubin. Anuska George—a girl. Pictures already on the web page. Praise God that as we move to the service of malediction in terms of those that kill their babies, God brings us a baby born yesterday. Life—that’s what the flow of the scripture is about. That’s what John 6 is all about. And that’s what the purpose of our service is all about, that life might be ministered to even those who judgments come against.

I want to strongly encourage you. You know, I sat here at the presentation for the pregnancy resource centers. I don’t know when it was, couple three months ago, that Rachel Anger and Deacon Hoover put together down in the fellowship hall, and I thought, you know, if we don’t get involved in this as a benevolence ministry, what would we ever get involved with?

These are the fatherless. One of the very categories the scriptures say we are supposed to reach out in a benevolent fashion to. These are children that have no ability to speak for themselves, right? I mean, they can do nothing to resist the murder that is about to take place to them. But we can. We can make a direct difference in the life of certain people by giving money to these centers so that they can, for instance, buy ultrasound equipment and actually show mothers there’s something living and moving inside of you. There’s not just a blob of tissue.

We can give money to these pregnancy resource centers so they can get clothes, baby clothes, ready so some poor woman who has no clothes to put on her child’s back, and is deluded as they are, telling her, “Well, it’s better not to have a really poor baby you can’t clothe. Just kill the baby. It’s not really a baby anyway.” If we could provide money to give to these women clothes and other means of sustenance that would convince them not to abort their babies—that would be a great thing. That’s a very direct effect.

I want to encourage you today to write a check, to get out your wallets. Don’t feel bad, you know. Don’t think people, you know, this part of the service happens, you get ready for communion and you want to sit there for a little while, write out a check. Don’t think you’re doing something wrong. Don’t be embarrassed by pulling out your wallet and looking through it. How much can I give today? Don’t be restrained from doing that. Feel encouraged to do that. It’s what the essence of this service is about.

Malediction serves benediction, right? Jesus comes and stresses the primacy of life. And we have the ability here today to contribute to the works of these pregnancy resource centers in our area that are doing this very thing, that they’re reaching out to rescue those moms that are being led to the slaughterhouse by ridiculous Planned Parenthood people and demonic schoolteachers and parents that have just gone over the edge who would encourage their children to abort their babies, you know, to rescue those women being stumbling toward the slaughterhouse.

Well, they’ll have to live for years with the guilt of abortion on their heart and soul. We can affect that directly today. We are giving today to pregnancy resource centers—PRC’s, that’s what we call them, PRC’s, pregnancy resource centers—both this Sunday and next Sunday as well, the whole month of January. These are the designated recipients. And we do that because this is a day affirming the primacy of life.

Now, we read in the account then that Jesus tells these Jews that he’s the bread of life, right? And he stresses life. And their response to that is to grumble and dispute. And next week we’ll talk about how that correlates to this whole wilderness theme, right? The people grumbled in the wilderness and these people are grumbling here.

But yet they don’t understand what Jesus is saying. There’s an intellectual problem here and it’s the same problem that Nicodemus—how can a man be born again—or the woman at the well—water of light, never thirst. What is he talking about? And these people: how can you say you came down from heaven? You were married. You were the result of that marriage between Joseph and Mary, right? They don’t get it. There is a blindness that is very evident in this text, and that’s part of the problem when we try to convince people not to abort their own babies. There is a blindness.

There’s a hardening of the mind that has occurred. There’s an intellectual problem that must be gotten through. I mean, ultimately, why do we believe that the child in the womb should not be killed? Why do we believe it’s a human life? What’s the answer to that? And I hope it’s not the scientific data for you because ultimately the source of all truth is the scriptures.

Now, there are some things we have to discern with scientific data, making extrapolations of truth from the scriptures. This is not one of them. This is not a hard call. This is not a call that the referee looks at in the little box and can come out one way or the other. If you look at the box of scripture, the standard of scripture:

John the Baptist leaped in his mother’s womb with the approach of Jesus, right? And the Psalms say that David says, “In the womb, you knew me. You were fashioning me. I had relationship to you. I was covenantally in relationship to you while I was in the womb.”

And the case laws of the Old Testament make it quite clear that if two men struggle and a woman suffers a miscarriage that results in the death of the child, that it’s got to be eye for eye, hand for hand, life for life. The man has committed manslaughter. So it’s not a tough call.

But you see, if we don’t have the word of God as our standard, it becomes a very tough call. I mean, ultimately, it’s a statement of faith to believe that something is alive inside of you. You know, I have diabetes and I can’t tell from day to day if I’m feeling bad. The blood sugars move sampling every day. I have no idea. It takes faith on my part to believe what the doctors tell me is correct, that if I eat this stuff here, I’m going to die quicker, I might lose a toe, a foot, whatever it is.

The same is true in this thing. That’s why the importance of, you know, ultrasound can be helpful. But ultimately, of course, the only answer for women who are so blinded that they would give up their own children to death is the work of the Holy Spirit taking off the blinders.

So one of the reasons we pray that God would bring judgments is to shake the intellectual standing of the world that is arrayed against the unborn in the context of our country. 2 Corinthians 4 says that the God of this world has blinded men to the light of the Lord Jesus Christ. There’s an intellectual problem in terms of understanding what’s going on here.

And in Romans 1, when people rebel against God, they think themselves wise, but they become foolish. Their minds become darkened as a result of God’s punishments against them. And we pray that God would remove those blinders by using, among other means, the means of judgments against the wicked to shake their intellectual foundations, which are really ethical foundations. That’s the point.

It is their rebellion against God that must be addressed to meet the intellectual difficulties that they have. Otherwise, they continue in their blindness.

After all this is over in John 6, the disciples say, “This is a hard saying.” We’ll talk more about what that hard saying is next week. But for now, he says, “Do you want to go away? This is tough what he’s doing.” And politically, it’s a bad idea. Jesus was not good politically. And we’re not good politically today.

What we say today asking God to bring judgments upon abortionists is not politically wise. It’s politically difficult. People are going to, you know, people may walk out of the service. We’ve had that happen. People may not think this is a good or proper thing to do, and we think it is. But politically a hard saying—that God wants us to ask him to particularly judge, to break the arms of the ungodly.

It’s also politically difficult in our context to talk about the national sin of abortion and relate it to the humiliating acts that came to this country on September 11th. I mentioned this before, but I was at the Bush rally a couple weeks ago. Joan and I had gotten—we went and enjoyed seeing President Bush. One of the great things he has done is to bring this biblical view of evil back into the context of how we evaluate men.

But Miss America, I don’t know if she was just sloppy in her speech or what, but I mean, if you go to these rallies or you watch TV, what has happened in our country is exactly the opposite of humiliation. There’s no humbling of ourselves as a nation before God, at least not evident in these rallies. There’s an increased pride before God in our national stature.

Miss America says, “Well, as long as we’re united and like each other and work together in spite of our different views about things, nobody can take our country down.” See, as long as we have, I suppose, you know, multi-faith services, as long as we get along and it’s not important ultimately whether we’re Christians, Jews, Muslims, or Satanists, as long as that’s still in place, then we’ll be okay and nobody can tear our flag down.

Well, that’s foolishness, right? It is exactly the reverse. God says that when a nation, you know, exalts itself in that way against him and refuses to acknowledge that they’re but a drop in a bucket, they’re a little thing held in the hand of God—that’s all we are in the sight of God. When we get prideful against God, he humbles us, you know, and he uses wicked men to humble us.

It didn’t start with September 11th. Black Hawk Down is outright. I haven’t seen the movie. A couple of my children did, and I understand they don’t tell all the stories. I mean this full story of Black Hawk Down was not that we got these guys out and it cost 18 American lives to be an important truth. We had to get him. We had to remove all dead bodies. There was a guy trapped in a helicopter dead. The motto for this group of the military service was you don’t leave a comrade down. You got to get him out. They spent 18 lives getting the guy out.

And certainly those were courageous, heroic actions. Praise God for those men who did that, who thought that honor was something important to them. But the full story of this initial encounter with Osama bin Laden, who trained the Somalians to adjust their grenade launchers, the way they used them in Afghanistan to shoot down Russian helicopters—that’s how these copters came down was through the training of Osama bin Laden’s organization.

Within days after Black Hawk Down story ends in the movie, within days, another helicopter was shot down in Somalia and American servicemen were dragged through the streets and it was shown out through television all around the world. I’ve seen interviews of these men who were there in the Black Hawk Down sequence and they said, you know, the next day we went into our barracks, we watched TV and we could not believe it. There were some of our guys being dragged through the streets.

You see, that wasn’t a point of pride for this country. That was God rubbing our noses in it. You see why? Well, I think one reason is because of this abortion issue. The country is proud and lifted up in spite of the millions of abortions that occur.

Osama bin Laden, you know, another humbling thing about that Black Hawk Down story is that we were after this warlord Aidid or whatever his name was, and that was the whole point of the exercise. And within months, within days, these bodies are dragged through the street, American soldiers beamed around the world. And within months, this warlord that we’re there to kill or capture, he goes to a peace conference invited by the Clinton administration and American military provides security for this man whose forces did this, provides security for this man to attend a peace conference relative to Somalia.

This isn’t pride. We get a movie out that makes us all patriotic. Patriotism is okay. Recognize that God has been doing things to us through an infidel, pagan, evil, wicked man and his organization to bring us humility. So it’s not a politically correct thing today to talk about the need for humility as a nation. And yet, it’s the truth. It’s the truth. This nation should be humbled and God is already doing it.

And the more we stiffen our necks against his acts of humiliation, the greater those acts will become.

So we have the same problem. It’s a hard thing that we do today. But I hope you understand the spirit in which we engage in it. Patriotism is good. Our country is beloved. It’s wonderful that we can do this publicly, these worship services. And it’s wonderful that we got a man in the White House who talks about evil and righteousness.

But we as a nation need to come to repentance for this awful sin. That’s part of what we’re talking about today.

To whom shall we go? Well, it was hard for the disciples to do what they were supposed to do—to stay with the Savior who’d said things not politically correct, but drove people away. What’s our motivation? How do we do this year in year out? Nothing seems to change. How do we do this?

What’s our motivation? Our motivation is that we come to the realization that the disciples did at the end of John 6. I said that Jesus uses the word life, living, life all through it. And at the end, what’s the motivation for continuing to follow Jesus? You have words of life. And you are the Son of the living God.

The words of our savior affirming life, that’s his purpose for coming, are finally imaged by the words of his disciples. And that’s their motivation for keeping on keeping on in what will be a very difficult task for them. They’ve entered into a new phase of ministry when the crowds don’t come anymore, or when they do come, they come to kill them. And our motivation today to do the right thing is because we have no place else to go. Jesus has words of life. He is the Son of the living God. And as we follow in his train and as we war for him, the right war for the right land, sooner or later—we pray sooner, but in the providence of God maybe later—life is our motivation for doing what we do.

The essence of the gospel is that God is changing things now. The gospel is the good news of the ascension of the Savior King to the throne. And he rules until all his enemies be made his footstool. We don’t look with the eyes of sight to see if this works or not, what we do. We look with the eyes of faith that say that the gospel is all about things changing.

Paul told pagans in Acts 17 that in times gone by, God winked at certain offenses. But not now. Now he’s calling all men to repent and the movement of the world is God’s actions against the wicked that the righteous might be exalted and that those very wicked might be turned.

Interesting post on Biblical Horizons a couple of days ago from Rich Blood, so: Who had more power, David or Jeremiah? Who had more power externally? David did—height of the kingdom. He could order all kinds of things and he killed a lot of God’s enemies. Jeremiah’s time—low point of the kingdom. They’re going into captivity. They’re so bad. What power do they have externally? Where are we at today in America? We’re not at the height. We’re not in control of, you know, the civil government and all that stuff. We’re at a low point.

But Jeremiah made declarations about every important country in the world in the context of his prophecies. He made declarations as the prophet of God that changed the world. He prayed to God. We could think of it that way. I don’t think it’s just that God tells Jeremiah, “Oh, this is going to happen.” No, Jeremiah is God’s man who humbles himself, who recognizes and leads the nation in repentance of sins. And therefore, God listens to him and works through him to make positive declarations.

Well, what’s going to happen to all the nations of the world? Our motivation is the savior who died. We suffer the heinous sins of abortion in the context of our nation that we might carry that suffering before the throne of God and make positive proclamations and ask for his judgments and see the world changed in God’s providence.

God says that our motivation is that Jesus indeed has the words of life and as we model him, we bring life to the world.

Let’s pray. Father, we do pray that you would bring life to the world. We pray particularly for China that you would roll back the awful situation there and whatever political maneuverings are going on now to fund or defund groups there. Help the Bush administration, Lord God, be pointed toward trying to see that horrible sin of abortion eliminated in China and help them, Lord God, to do the politically incorrect thing, to use the bully pulpit to speak about the importance of the unborn.

We pray, Lord God, for the nations of this world that you would bring life to them in light. Bring your judgments, Lord God, to the end that they might repent, that we might see the exercise of life in the context of our world. And help us, Father, to recognize the importance of our prayers and our actions as well. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.