responsibility to try to find ways to apply it to one's own life. Sometimes it has been said that when the man in the pulpit is doing this, notice that he's got three fingers past pointed back at himself and only one finger pointed at you. And that's always, I think, the case. And that's one of the reasons God says, hey you, Hanson, you need to study the Bible.
You need to apply this to your own life. Let's pray before I begin. Our Father, we thank you that you have given us your word, that it is holy and that it is revealed the truth. Help us to grow in our understanding of it.
Help us to be empowered by your spirit to live it. That we may bear a right testimony before the world. And that we may enjoy, that we may enjoy the things that you intended for us to enjoy in Jesus' name. We pray, amen.
Paul wrote to Timothy and in the first chapter, he says, but we know that the law is good. If a man use it lawfully, and that of course is a play on words, Paul was a man who was extremely familiar with the law, both in its details and in its application, like perhaps few men in his day. And one of his serious concerns with the various churches, including those that Timothy would oversee, was that legalism and the Jewish law would begin to take root and begin to have an effect on these churches. But that is not to say that the law is useless even for Christians, even for the Christian church that we have in for Timothy 1, but we know that the law is good if a man use it lawfully.
That means that it is possible to apply the law in a non-legalistic manner. Well, that is actually a contradiction in terms, because the law pertains to that which is legal, and that which is legal pertains to the application of the law. So it does raise the question, what does it mean to apply the law lawfully, if you are a Christian, living under grace and not living under the law? What do you do with the law?
Very good question. Paul was extremely aware of the centrality of that question and of the implications of going astray and of the need to, as he says, to use the law lawfully. And so this is my second message on the Ten Commandments. It may not be the last.
You might expect a part three in the middle of March. So if you find that to be a bit tedious, I would suggest that you settle down in your seat and get used to it. The Old Testament is very profound. And we might ask why study the Ten Commandments, if I am under grace?
Well, one reason, there is a number of reasons. One reason is that the principles applied by the laws, the principles implied by what you might call rules, are actually timeless. A good example would be the commandment, don't lie. Nine.
Don't lie. What is the underlying principle? The Christian should be in love with the truth. The Christian should be allied with what is true, not with what is false.
We should not be bearing false witness in any sense out of love for the truth. The Lord Jesus reminded us and revealed to us something that is a disturbing truth that Satan is the father of lies and has been lying from the beginning. That is a very sobering thought. How do you avoid believing in a lie?
By being in love with the truth and knowing what the truth is, that is how you can avoid being swept into untruth and into lies. The Lord Jesus spoke of how to build a foundation of a house, whether it is the temple of your life or whether it is the assembly of the church. How do you make sure that that house is going to stand? Well, one thing you do not do, you can take it from me as a civil engineer, you do not build it on wet sand.
And when you build a house or a structure on shifting sands, that is a very, very foolish thing to do. And what we see around us in society today is in fact nothing but shifting sand. The flavor of the day is the flavor of the day and the standards don't exist behind that flavor. Everything is shifting.
And you look around and you wonder what to trust in. The answer is becoming increasingly nothing. Nothing you hear in the media. Nothing you hear from the educational system is trustworthy more and more and more.
That should drive the Christian into this to think more deeply about it, but also to enjoy it. So there are principles underneath the rules and we speak sometimes of the letter of the law. Yes, don't lie. What about the spirit of the law?
Love the truth. Love the truth. It is interesting that when we speak of the law, it depends who you read how many instructions there are. You see on the screen the number 10, the word 10.
The Jews had rules that numbered just over 600. Some people say 613. Some people seem to say 160 and so on. Well, that's an awful lot of rules.
And the apostle Paul did not want this church or any Christian church going back to the first century as he wrote to Timothy to get embroiled in rules and burdened with rules. In fact, the problem is, as Paul points out, you don't know where to stop. Once you get going on following rules as rules, it turns out there's more than 600 of them and many of them are actually impossible for the Jew to follow today. Impossible.
For one thing, the temple doesn't exist. The sacrificial system can't be obeyed. And that's just for starters. A preacher was on an airplane and he sat opposite some rabbis.
And he asked the rabbi, there was two of them here and one here. A well-known British preacher and he tells him how he sat down and, wow, here I am in the middle of three, hecetic Jews, three rabbis. He spoke up and he said, do you obey the law? Oh, yes.
What about that one? Well, that one, we do something else instead. And then he's turned to the other rabbi and said, do you obey the law? Oh, yes, yes, absolutely.
What about this one here? Well, we can't do that anymore. So we would say we do something else. And it was true with all of these rabbis that sat around him.
They had an out on all of the things that the Jewish law could not be followed through on. And that's the message, in fact, of Paul in the book of Galatians that it is an all or nothing proposition. We might think of the pearls of the law. You might think of a necklace and these individual rules and truths as individual pearls.
But the situation is it's an all or nothing situation. You are either a law keeper or you are a lawbreaker and the necklace of pearls is either intact or it is broken. And if it is broken, it is broken. It is not a matter of considering how many pearls you might have in your pocket.
You have a continuum in the Jewish law. And Paul is saying in Galatians, it's an all or nothing proposition with regard to the law. And we need to know where we stand. How do you know where you stand with regard to God's truth and God's law?
Thirdly, when we think of the fact that we live under grace, what does that even mean? In the wisdom of God and the design of the history of mankind and the plan of God from creation to eternity, we can see that the presentation of the objective, the objective moral law preceded grace. We understand grace. We live under grace.
We enjoy grace. What does that mean if you have no concept of objective righteousness? And in your Bible, you have the presentation of objective righteousness before you have the presentation of grace in Christ. So the law becomes an extremely important context in which to understand what it means to be a Christian.
In Romans, you have the idea because you think of the man on the street who's never opened a Bible, which nowadays is almost everybody, it seems. We see in Romans that Paul presents the school teacher of the law. And for the Jew, that is a way in which the Jew can realize, you know I can't do it. Here it is.
I can't do it. I keep sinning. Well, the reason you keep sinning is because you are a sinner. It is like you have a disease and you have noticed some symptoms.
You have noticed the symptoms because as Paul refers to the law as the school teacher or the school master, is pointing you in the direction of what is holiness and you realize that is what I am not. I am a law breaker. But Paul also gives us a way to think about the man on the sidewalk. And when he begins to read this and he reads the Ten Commandments, he says, you know, I always did pretty much think that lying was wrong.
Now what I see is that it's a sin against God. I lied to someone and it may be said that I sinned against that someone in telling them a lie. But the conscience is where Paul is going with the common grace given to the world to realize that things like lying and stealing are probably wrong. It is the common grace of one's conscience.
And both of those things are presented in Romans. As I say, when we dive into the Bible, we can then see that God is aware of many things that we do wrong. James refers to the royal law. What is that?
I suggest to you that the royal law are the teachings of Christ and the Beatitudes. And those teachings should disturb us because what they tell us is that although someone might see you steal something, or someone might realize that you told a lie, God sees your heart. God sees your wicked heart. God knows what you want.
God knows what you hate. God knows who you hate. And that hate is like murder and lust is like adultery. And God sees it before it happens.
And he knows that the nest of your heart is actually like a brood of vipers ready, waiting to strike and to sin. And then we feel undone. We feel like, whoa is me, one prophet said. I am a man of unclean lips.
I am undone. We are undone. Our situation is very grave. And so it is a good thing to study the principles of the Jewish law.
And in order to do that, you need to look at, you might say, the rules of the Jewish law, which are reflected by God's principles. Should I give this percussive maintenance? So in this world today of shifting sand and of the loss of principles and the loss of fundamentals, the word axiom and the word axiomatic come to my mind. And one of the reasons that when you speak now to the man on the street or the godless university professor or whoever it may be, you find that it reminds me anyway of the old Chinese proverb.
I am not an authority on the age of Chinese proverbs. That it is a bit like a chicken and a duck trying to talk to each other. It doesn't work. These two creatures are not communicating.
The fundamental principles under which you as a Christian are operating, the presuppositions under which you are operating are in no way adopted or accepted by the other party, by the atheist. And so you find that it is very difficult to have a conversation when the axioms of your belief system are actually totally, totally different. What are some of the things that would be applicable or true or necessary as presuppositions for a biblical world view for the Christian? Well, one is that God is the person with a capital P who created everything.
He is the creator. The beginning of the American Constitution is an example of the wording of the idea of an axiom. It says, we take these truths to be self-evident. In other words, if we can't accept certain facts like the equality of man before God, well, we have a very hard time knowing what to put down on the rest of the paper.
Very, very important basic assumptions, presuppositions as a philosopher might call it. And for the Christian, the idea that there is a creator who is God and not only that he is our creator, but that he is a person. If you look in books of metaphysics, philosophy, religion, you will find that there is a category of theist, not atheist, there is a category of theist known as a deist. And that is deus, and it's very close to the Spanish word for God.
And a deist is a person who says that God is like, I don't know, there was a comic book years ago called The Fantastic Four. And the Fantastic Four said that there is a watcher. There is a being that's out there and he just watches everything. He's not interested.
He just watches. He made everything but he just watches. And he was called the watcher. And deist believe in a God who is just the watcher.
He doesn't intervene. He doesn't seem to care. And yet the theist who is a deist believes in that kind of God. That is a kind of God that basically has no personality.
We believe as Christians that God is not like the watcher, that he has personhood with a capital P. And that is why you have personhood. That is why you have value because God created you as his special creation. And you are created in the image of God.
That is fundamentally why you have value. Under Darwinian evolution, you are reorganized mud, as I said last time. Why should we care if somebody dies? It is no accident that these kinds of trends and these kinds of thought processes wherein Darwinian evolution and so on permeates through the thinking.
So what does it matter about abortion? What does it matter about assisted suicide? That is because of the permeation of the idea without perhaps even realizing it. That we are just reorganized mud that has no fundamental value.
And the latest movement, which has a lot to do with, you will see this kind of movement when you, when you deal with the climate change people, is that we are like a bad infection on the earth that the human race should actually be considered like a disease on the planet. And if half of us die so much, the better. There are people who think that way. The Christian does not think that way.
The Christian considers every human life to be precious to God. And that his personhood or her personhood is given as part of creation and is referred to as being made in the image of God because God is the ultimate person and creator. So this is very axiomatic. Another aspect of what is axiomatic is the idea of honor.
The idea of honor is important because if we have no concept of honor in the universe, there is no reason to believe that God has any feelings one way or the other about what is right and wrong. In point of fact, when we sin, we dishonor God. We disrespect God. We are doing something which is the exact opposite of worshiping God.
But the idea of worshiping God is founded on the idea of honor. What did Jesus say? I remember struggling 20 years ago with the Jehovah's Witnesses, you know. They can throw you for a loop sometimes.
And I came upon this verse which became a precious verse to me. There were two or three that really helped me. But I'll share one with you. John 522, we read about the fact that God, the Father, has entrusted all judgment to the Son.
23, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. What do you think worship is? What is worship? Worship is two things.
It is the ultimate way of showing honor. And it is reserved for one person and one person alone. That is God. When we worship God, we are showing God the ultimate honor that we as human beings are capable of.
And we can only do that correctly and meaningfully and legally if you want to use the word toward God, you would remember in your Bibles that sometimes men would be so impressed with an angel. They would just fall down. It must be God. It must be God.
Get up. Only God, only God is to be worshiped. It is the highest form of worship. Where are your, how is your memory?
I have a silly acronym that I shared with you last time, but these are the key ideas in these 10 commandments. First commandment has to do with the fact there is only one being, only one that we should be in relationship with. And what you find in the sixth commandment is referenced to love me, love me, God speaking of himself. Only me and love me, W worship.
That's my letter that I use. What's the next one? Do you know from memory? What's the letter of the next one?
Oh, dear. I for idolatry. One might say that it is a corollary of a commandment number one, but God in his wisdom through Moses gave this commandment because sometimes men are tempted to think, well, this will help me worship God. I'll make an image of God.
I do have Jehovah in mind, and this will help me to worship Jehovah. God slams down his fist and says, no, don't do that. Don't do it for any reason. Third one, V for vanity.
And I use that word in a certain sense, and I will explain later. You will remember that we don't like it. Certainly Christians don't like it, but the non-Christian often knows this phrase. Probably couldn't find it in the Bible if his life depended on it.
Don't use God's name in vain. That is actually a subset of the concept of the third commandment on taking God's name upon yourself in vanity or in vain. Fourth commandment, the letter S, Sabbath, Sabbath. The fifth, honor your parents.
The sixth, do not commit murder. The seventh adultery, the eighth, the ninth, lying, and the tenth envy. It's interesting how when I study my various sources, brother just said to me, I know him, friend of mine, John Grant. And when I've been studying these various sources, one of the things that was brought out, a few things that were brought out about these 10 commandments is the absence of caveats.
If you know what a caveat is, some people say caveat. It's a Latin word. You can think our phrase of if ands and buts, if ands and buts are caveats. Does the Bible say honor your parents if they were good parents?
Does the Bible say don't tell lies but if you lie to a liar, it's okay? Does the Bible say don't steal but if you steal from a thief, that's okay. He has the Elgatin gain. You can take it away from him.
There are no caveats. There are no caveats. Secondly, it's semantically unambiguous. These 10 commandments are very clear.
They're so clear that it is hard to mess them up. It is hard to reinterpret them. It is hard to change them. They are what they are.
They have been around for nearly 4,000 years. And here they are. In your hands. That's actually amazing.
But it is because of the work of God in preserving His Word. That leads to the third point. Their timelessness. The principles of the 10 commandments are timeless.
Many of those 600 plus rules are not timeless and can no longer be observed. But these 10 commandments, the principles of them especially, are timeless. Their applicability is basically universal in time and space. It doesn't matter where you go.
It doesn't matter when it is. These are valid. One, uh, scholar broke things down. The first four of them are Godward.
And the last six of them are toward others. There are connections between these things however. For example, did you ever think that idolatry, the second one, and envy the tenth one, have a certain linkage. They have a certain correspondence.
What is your spirit doing? What is your inner person doing in both cases? Focusing on the wrong thing. You're focusing on an idol.
It can be a metaphysical idol. It could be the Cheltenham soccer team or some such thing that has absorbed your life. Or it could be an idol that you can carve out of a piece of wood as a representation of your favorite God. But if you are focusing your inner person on that thing, that is a misfocus.
That is an inappropriate direction for you to guide yourself toward in the same way that if your inner man is focused in the tenth commandment on envy, look at his car. That's a nice black pickup truck there at the stoplight. I think I want one. Why does he get to have one of those?
I, you know, I really got to work harder and get my money and get a really good pickup truck. I don't know what to pick up truck. I've actually thought about buying a pickup truck. Why is my spirit so obsessed with that materialism?
My spirit, my inner man should not be focused on that kind of thing anymore than it should be focused on idols that are nothing and not worthy of worship and focus. Another connection would be between the third and the seventh, between what I call vanity and adultery. If I take upon myself, if I bear the name of Christ in vain and my life speaks of evil, that is a terrible thing. I am claiming to have a status called Christian inside the word Christian is the word Christ.
I am taking the name of Christ upon myself and telling my friends and my colleagues I'm a Christian and I have no patience and I get angry at the drop of a hat and all I care about is saving up for pickup trucks and I treat my wife with disrespect and the world goes don't know what that is. Don't like it. Don't have any use for it and actually they are right. That is not the kind of person who should bear the name of Christ.
You claim to have a status as it were of a Christian and you live opposite to that. How different is that from saying I'm married and people see me with girlfriends? What? You say you're married but you have girlfriends?
This is a total contradiction in your status. You claim that you are something and then your life doesn't match it at all. So the vanity of bearing the name and the contradiction of being married with a mistress, these are both life contradictions. Commandment number one and commandment number five.
God is my father. He has authority over my life. Oh yeah but my dad is a jerk and I refuse to honor him and I disrespect him and I call him down to the dirt and I don't do anything. I don't respect anything that my earthly father suggests to me.
I deal nothing but disrespect toward my what what? How is it that you have a concept that authority comes from God and actually God gives fathers authority over their families and you can't accept that authority? Well that's a contradiction. That's a linkage between the first commandment and the fifth commandment.
So W-I-V-S-P, M-A-T-L-E, whatever you want to try to hang on to the Ten Commandments. This will help you to meditate upon them. Now in preparing this sermon I came across something. You know I became a Christian in 1977, tried to study the Bible ever since and I have to say that a lot of things that I read I may well have read before or an observation from the scriptures that it's given in a sermon.
I may well have encountered that concept before. Not always of course but I came across this and it kind of blew me away that this was in the scriptures not once, not twice but three times referring to something with regard to the giving of the law. Now last time I talked to you about the proximity of the law and we had this from Udurami 30 where Moses says you know something the word is very near you. I love this because it is it was true for them.
It was true for the earthly children of God. It was true. Moses was speaking the truth. How about you?
You need a Bible? Go get a free one. Start reading it. You the guy in the sidewalk?
Give it to the one to him. The word of God has never been so available. You can go on Bible gateway and the first thing you do is decide whether you want English or Spanish or other and you go to English dozens and dozens of translations into English. Go to Español, Renavilera in 1960 is what the brothers like.
I didn't know that but there's lots of them there. You want the word of God? Open a computer. Pick it up but for the Christian with the Holy Spirit dwelling within how near is the word of God to you in the beginning was the word and the word was God that word that meaning that truth that fundamental meaning where is that?
That's here. That's here because of the Holy Spirit. That means that when you read this you should experience the spiritual analog of a resonance. Resonance is a dynamic engineering phenomenon.
You will not be pleased to know that civil engineers are no longer taught dynamics. We used to have an entire course in dynamics. One of the famous videos I'm sure many of you have seen it is the collapse of the Tacoma narrows bridge in the state of Washington, a case of dynamic failure due to resonance where the natural frequency of the structure and the forcing function began to match often enough that the whole deck was swinging back and forth in that bridge and eventually the amount of resonance reached to the point where it flew apart. The road flew apart.
The whole, the entire deck just flew apart and tried and and and and and and and and and drew down into the chasm below in pieces. That's an example of a bad a bad occurrence of dynamic resonance but in spiritual resonance you need to be a person who reads some of these verses and goes that just got me. That was exactly what I needed to hear this morning. I'm going to take that with me today.
That thought can stay in my brain rent free for today and for my life. Wonderful truth for me to carry. So the word is near you. One might say that it's as near to you as you want it to be.
But what is the you might say countervailing truth that comes out in the scriptures is that the fact that and we shouldn't be very surprised. God is holy. His law from him is a holy law. Are you holy?
If you only had some vague idea of how unholy you are outside of Christ. You would be mortified beyond words. You would be shocked at how profoundly dirty, impure, ill-motived and unholy you are outside of Christ. The natural man and God is holy.
That means that there is on the one hand, as I say, God's word, God's holy word and its proximity to your heart. Yes, but there's another principle that your filthy heart and God's holiness are very far apart. We see a picture here that I had never seen before. It says in Deuteronomy 32 and it varies in the translations.
Did you ever read this so that it caught your eye? And he said the Lord came from Sinai and rose up from seer unto them. He shined forth from Mount Peran, also Mount Foran, and he came with ten thousands of saints from his right hand, went to fiery law for them, the Jews. And the word saint refers to set apart ones.
And when we read the New Testament, not once, not twice, but three times, is it pointed out to us that these ten thousands, ten to the power four, multiplied by how many we don't know, these ten thousands plural of saints were angels, or angels. Now that is an interesting study. That is one of the most profound and interesting studies you can ever engage in is the study of angels in your Bible. The New Testament keeps on saying that it was put into effect by angels.
What? How come I didn't see that before? Interesting. It's almost 20 after, and I'm stopping at 20 after.
Out of good faith with the Sunday school teachers, Deuteronomy 33, 2, and some translations, Holy Ones. When Stephen is about to die, he gives a long sermon. And in verse 53 of Jack 7, is referred to as the law disposition of angels. In Galatians 3 Paul, not Stephen, says it's ordained by angels, but it is the same diatagis word in Greek.
Hebrews 2, 2, diatagis is not there. It is Babbios, which is in the sense of binding. I've been an expert witness in an overscotial legal system on a couple of occasions, and you sit down with a lawyer. You ready?
Dr. Hanson, you ready? Okay, where's my notes? The history of this, and maybe I need a textbook or something.
You ready? Okay. Paper quarter. What I'm about to say is a matter of legal record.
It is called a deposition. I am creating a legal deposition. What is my legal scientific opinion of the damage caused by this flooding or this service connection, whatever it may have been, from a scientific and legal point of view? And guess what?
It's going to be typed up, and it's going to be going to the prosecutor and the defendant and the judge and everybody else. And I don't get to take it back. Or if I try to take it back, I'm going to look pretty stupid. So we have before us in the scriptures the fact that tens of thousands of angels were present at the giving of God's law.
What a thought. What a thought that is. To me, that implies that we in our unholyness and God in his holiness, in the design of what happened, and in the description given in your scriptures three times, angels were there, witnessing what happened. As it were as a third party, there's God, there are angels which are not us, and there's us, and we're not angels, and we're not God.
And the angels were there as witnesses as to the fact of what was given to us. And we are now responsible. One writer suggested that God wrote the law with his fingers, gave it to the angels, and angels gave it to Moses. What an interesting thought.
But it does highlight for us that although the Word of God is near us and we can enjoy it and benefit from it, and it is holy and God is holy, and we can benefit from worshiping God if you want to use the word benefit, it is also true that we should have reverence for God. We should have an appreciation and understanding of his awesome holiness and purity and glory at the same time. Paul spoke of the glory found in the face of Christ in 2 Corinthians 5. That glory is the glory of God, and that has been given to the believer.
So I trust as we continue through the 10 commandments, and as we continue through the Bible, you will continue with me and do some reading as well, and think about some of the underlying principles of the 10 commandments. And you will hear me again on this subject in the middle of March. Shall we pray? Father in heaven, we thank you that you have drawn us into a relationship with yourself, that we, if we know you and as believers, that we, when we have your spirit, we are blessed in inexpressible ways.
Lord, as we partake of your word individually, daily in our lives, may we be encouraged and strengthened and fed, and may our minds be enlightened in this dark world. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.