Clough John Lesson 56
Relationship with the World System – John 15:18-25
Last time we stopped at John
From John
And then John 15:1-17 dealt with the vine imagery and we saw there that God used a very anti-legalistic symbol for His joy, and that was wine. God says that He enjoys believers that are in maturity, believers who can relax, believers who will trust the Word day after day and become stable. The Lord says that He enjoys those kinds of believers as much as a man enjoys a good glass of wine. And this is why the vintage, this is why the vineyard illustration in John 15. And we found through the purging discourse there that it is taught God will chasten the Church, God the Father, He’s the husbandman, He will chasten the Church to get rid of unbelief. And so down through the years there have been purifying persecutions and adversities which are designed to drive off the phonies and to keep those who are regenerate close to Him.
Then we have also the trimming that God does as a husbandman would do in vineyard for a branch which brings forth the production and the bunches of grapes, but also has a lot of new growth on it and that new growth can sap the vine of a lot of strength and so after production the vineyard owner cuts back his vine. So God is saying the same thing to us, that while we are producing for Him and while we are advancing for Him in sanctification we also have a lot of discordant, unnecessary parallel growth that has to be cut out. And so God gets rid of all the extras that are not needed. We also said what the fruit was. We defined the fruit as inner loyalty to God. It could be shown by outward works or it might not be shown by outward works; obviously if you’re in a prison compound in solitary there’s not too much evangelism you’re going to do unless you try to win the bugs to Christ. So there are situations where our loyalty cannot flow outward into outward expression. The Bible is realistic and the Bible recognizes that. And so the central fruit apart from its manifestations on the outside is this inner loyalty to God. And that would include, when it can, the obvious expressions of fruit of the Holy Spirit in Galatians 5 and also people won to Christ, if that’s available and possible.
Now we come to an entirely new section; John
The world system—this is what Christ is now going to study; it’s something that is invisible, sometimes it shows up, sometimes it doesn’t but basically this is the heart of evil. So all during this time when we work with the word kosmos that’s translated “world” and you’ll see how important it is to John because if you look at verse 19 and count the number of times it occurs in verse 19 you’ll see that John uses it over and over and over and over and over. He wants us to understand this word kosmos. So since he wants us to understand it we pause at the beginning of our verse by verse study to go through some doctrines to understand what the cosmos is.
The cosmos
central character is evil. And most
people do not have any idea of what evil is.
People inevitably think of evil as something immoral but that is not
evil. Evil is more basic than that and
this is what Christ is going to deal with.
He’s going to give a tremendous background on the essence of evil. What he calls the cosmos we have labeled by
another term here, I used it in the framework pamphlets and so on, the kingdom
of man. So let’s review a few points
about the kingdom of man, study its structure and then we’ll be able to spot
evil. In this election year you’re going
to hear politicians who are Christians, who are sincere, who are good people,
who are telling you to vote for me because I am evil, in essence. And they are going to do it with all sorts of
good vocabulary and it will only be those people who know Scripture who will be
able to spot it and say this program, this person is evil and if I have to vote
for the communist party I’ll vote against him, they are evil. They are evil and we have to be able to spot
evil. So the kingdom of man, which Satan
has always tried to promote, has tried every scheme under the sun to promote,
is the exact opposite of the
You remember
the kingdom of God is shown going back to the divine viewpoint framework, it’s
shown by the call of Abraham, the Exodus, Mount Sinai, conquest and settlement,
election and reign of David. In the call
of Abraham you had the promise of the
The Exodus was the beginning of the kingdom of God; the beginning of the kingdom of God was the origination of a nation in an utterly unique way, that no other nation has ever come about; without an army, without a military victory executed by man, there was a military victory but it was executed by God supernaturally, you had the birth of the kingdom of God as a political visible entity.
And then the
next step after that in history was
And then we
find the conquest and settlement period.
What’s the theme of that whole period?
The expansion of the
And then we
have finally the fifth step or feature to the kingdom of God in the Old
Testament, the leadership of the kingdom of God and David in his life as you
read it in the Psalms projects the mental attitude of a citizen of the kingdom
of God, a totally grace oriented person, a person who enjoys the Lord, a person
who can relax, a person who can take the Word of God and see himself and all of
his faults and all of his grossness and see through the Word of God that God’s
forgiven us and His blessing, who doesn’t sit around and mope because he’s
sinned; he moves on, confesses and moves on, always enjoying the grace of God,
a man who recognizes, unlike Saul, a man who recognizes that he’s a clod and
therefore needs grace. That’s the kind
of citizen that is needed in the
Now when
Jesus Christ begins this discourse and He’s talking about the cosmos He is
talking about exactly the mere image of these five points. So that’s what we’re studying when we come
now to the kingdom of man. What is the
mere image of the
So this,
then, is always the heartthrob of the kingdom of man and of the cosmos. It is what Satan wants men…Satan will try
everything he can to distract men, to get their attention focused on security
that he says he can give. That was the
first thing, that’s the basis or the promise of the
The second
statement of the kingdom of man is the opposite of the Exodus. In the Exodus what happened? You had a great historic event; you had blood
atonement; you had people who became free because they were free morally. Moral freedom preceded political
freedom. This has always been the case
in history, never have you had a group of people gain political freedom who
were enslaved in their souls. And every
group of people who have been enslaved in their souls have been
Christ-rejecters to a degree. Take
The birth of
the kingdom of man is always by a dictatorship of some sort. It’s strange but every time you have a birth
of a political version of the kingdom of man you have minus freedom and the
ironic thing is, it is always in the name of freedom. Take the great slogan of the French
Revolution, “
So we have that second point in the world system; it always tries to get into an active political visible form and when it does so you have a loss of freedom. Now we taught a new addition of a term to a doctrine last week and this is where that will help you see the second step. And that is when you have negative volition and human viewpoint cry out for freedom you will always get positive kind of government. Where you have divine viewpoint you always have a negative government. The Mosaic Law is the greatest piece of legislation for negative government the world has ever seen. 1 Samuel 8 is one of the most magnificent articles or charters of what negative government is and what positive government will be like in all of its horror.
Negative government, once again by definition, negative government is the restraint of evil; government’s job and its only job as a post-fall institution is to restrain evil, not promote good. Government is the herbicide that is placed in the field and no matter how much herbicide you place in the field you’re not going to make a crop from the herbicide. The crop that is made is made from the plants who are saved, who are left alone, who are protected from the weeds that the herbicide kills. And that’s the function and picture of government. Government is to kill all the weeds so that the crop can grow, unhindered, with nobody ripping off the moisture, nobody taking all the nutrients; all; the resources go into production of something worthwhile, and that’s a picture of the first, second and third divine institutions which come from before the fall. So after the fall you have negative government, or you should have negative government. But human viewpoint always distorts this and turns the fourth divine institution into a messiah. And so all statists have a messianic complex, that it is the government that will save.
For example, ever read the United Nations charter? What is the preamble? They discuss the issue of the salvation of the nation; the world government is going to save, using the very vocabulary that we ought to be using of Jesus Christ, and yet we have so-called good people, sincere people, Christian people, thinking that kind of a situation is great. It’s horrible, it’s evil; it is taking a blasphemous term on biblical words. Some fundies get bent out of shape when somebody drops a hell or a damn; they ought to get out of shape when somebody says that the government will save; that is a lot more blasphemous, a lot more evil than a hell or a damn.
So we come
to the third point in this kingdom of man; opposite what? Think of the divine viewpoint, think of your
divine viewpoint framework, think of what followed in history. You’ve got a concrete picture; after the
Exodus you had the giving of legislation, the Mosaic Law. And so here the kingdom of man has what we
will call creature law, that is law that stems from the finite creature who is
trying to undertake the impossible. He
is trying to legislate what is right and what is wrong and you cannot legislate
what is right and what is wrong. What is
right and what is wrong is given by God and law can only be designed to
recognize it; it can’t be designed to define it. Law is not the source of right and
wrong. God’s Word is the source of right
and wrong. But no, every nitwit in the
world has tried to generate goodness and generate the definition of evil on the
basis of human definition and it never works out, never will work out. This is why we have
So the fourth thing that would correspond to the kingdom of God as would correspond to the holy war, the expansion of the kingdom would be the expansion, or we would say the imperialism of government as it extends itself domestically and into the foreign fields, gets bigger and bigger and bigger and I think we made a big enough point over that last week so we’ll leave you with that.
The fifth
thing, leadership. Just as David becomes
the picture of the leader of the good
And so therefore we come to the point when Christ has made, in John 14, the issue of love, He is going to use the issue of hate in John 15 and He’s going to divide the two on the basis of the character of God. Now here is the division that Christ makes between good and evil. The division is not based on a piece of legislation. Ultimately it is based on His character. Let’s list the attributes of God: God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and eternal. That is the character of God, those are the attributes of God. No one can change God’s character; God’s character is given. Men can hope that He was different but that’s all, they can only hope that He is different. They cannot change that character, no way, it will never change. The universe will not change God, the universe is not affected by God, God did not have to create the universe because He was a lonely God feeling sorry for Himself. God had perfect fellowship within the Trinity, the Father loved the Son and the Son loved the Father and they enjoyed one another immensely and they didn’t need us around for their entertainment.
So God is self-sustaining, and this is His character and this becomes a division between good and evil. Good is attracted to that character. Evil hates it and is repelled by that. Think of a magnet, think of the fact that you have the positive and the negative poll of a magnet and you have another magnet, the two unlike polls, minus and plus. They attract; these could be two negative polls, say, and they repel. That’s the issue. God’s character is what sets the pace, everything else flows out of God’s character and this is why time and time again in these verses you will see the Lord Jesus Christ say they love Me, they hate Me, they love My Father, they hate My Father. I and My Father are one, they have seen us and they hate us. I and My Father are one, you have seen us and you love us. Christ is not making morals the division point between good and evil. He is making God’s character the division point between good and evil. It is the creature’s response to the attributes of God that is the issue. So ultimately the difference between good and evil is the difference in the response of the creature towards God’s character. You cannot remain neutral; you go one way or you go the other, there is no in-between. The creature is not like just a piece of wood in a magnetic field. The creature isn’t that way; we are born, and we, because of our fallen nature, are repelled until grace does its work.
So now with that in background let’s read beginning in John 15:18 and we’ll continue down to verse 25 and you’ll see how the Lord Jesus Christ begins to deal with the disciples to get them used to the fact that they are going out into a world that hates them, hates them because their identification with Christ, who in turn is identified with the Father, and therefore the world hating that essence of God, and being evil, will hate the disciples.
John 15:18,
“If the world hate you, you know
that it hated me before it hated you.
[19] If ye were of the world, the world would love its own: but because
ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the
world hates you. [20] Remember the word
that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have
persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept My saying, they
will keep yours also. [21] But all
these things will they do unto you for My name’s sake, because they know not
him that sent
Of course the last part in verse 25 is the point to which we are traveling in this section of Scripture, it is the point that again reiterates and will do so in an even more graphic way than what we have done so far to show us the nature of evil. This is going to be hard for some of you because some of you, all your life, have had this concept that evil is a violation of man’s standards. You have had in your mind your own standards of what is good and what is wrong; these may line up with Scripture or they may not. But these have been your basic thing, no higher than that, no more profound than that. Maybe your parents had a certain code they raised you by and that code became your standard in life, even though you didn’t consciously do it, just subconsciously you picked it up from your parents. And therefore you have followed in your parent’s footsteps with this kind of standard and it’s been your guide all these years. And when you come to Scripture and see a passage like this you’re almost incapable of understanding it because you are so used to measuring people by that ruler; it’s like you have a little six inch rule in your pocket and you can just whip it out and measure. You’re so used to doing that you fail to realize that that’s ultimately not the issue; the issue is the character of God, what we know of Him through His revealed word.
This is why in John 15:18 Christ begins, “If the world hate you,” first class, and it will, “you know that it hated Me before it hated you.” The word “before” translated here in time means more than just time precedent; it means logical precedent, it means precedents of rank. In other words, Jesus Christ has said because I represent a far, far, far greater revelation of God to the world than you ever will, understand that the world has hated Me. Don’t, Christ is saying to put it another way, Don’t, believer, think that as you have observed this animosity of the crowd, because remember these men are shortly going to see that crowd that says “Crucify Him, crucify Him, crucify Him,” as they watch the heart of depraved men express itself at the trial of Christ, they’re going to walk away with a temptation to think well, you know, if the Lord had just done it a little bit differently, if we had somehow been a little more politic about how we approached the scene, if somehow Christ hadn’t gone to Jerusalem, if only He hadn’t walked in that temple and got everybody mad at Him when He threw the moneychangers out, if Christ somehow had made a grand policy difference, a shift in tactics, a shift in strategy, then all would have been better. Christ’s basic problem wasn’t the heart of man; Christ’s basic problem was His policy or His tactics. We would say His gimmicks were wrong.
But that, Christ says, wasn’t the issue. And here He’s straightening the disciples out before they have any such temptation; understand the world must hate you. The world has hated Me and I am of greater revelation of God, therefore the world will hate you. They will respond to this. It “has hated Me,” perfect tense, it has hated Me at a point in time before the time it hated you. So don’t think that first this came about because people didn’t like you. Let’s translate that another way; there’s a fine line and we have to be careful how we say this because we don’t want to be stumbling blocks to the world; we don’t want to be the oddballs that turn people away from Christ.
But if you will take to heart what this verse is teaching maybe some of you will be comforted by the truth, suddenly breaks in upon your soul and you understand that people hate you not because of your idiosyncrasies, they hate you fundamentally for a reason that is totally divorced from your personality. Now they would love to have you think that its your personality but you know, one of the counter examples of that is that when Jesus spoke to the crowd He said isn’t it strange, the people hated John the Baptist and the reasons they gave for hating John the Baptist was that He was kind of an odd personality; John never came to the parties, we had all these great fellowships and John was a loner and every time he showed up he had that awful smelly camel hair garment on and he wouldn’t the ice cream, he wanted honey and he wanted locusts in place of hot dogs so not only did he have an odd diet, the guy was just an oddball type person. And you see, that’s really, man would say to God, that’s really why we rejected. We rejected the message because of John’s personality.
Well now Jesus said that’s an interesting theory but the exact objection that you made to John the Baptist’s personality you can’t make to Me because I’m naturally more gregarious; it’s part of My personality to be more sociable. And now you’re turning around and accusing Me of going to too many parties; John didn’t go to any, I go to too many. So no matter what we do you’ve got some sort of a built-in excuse and that’s all it is, an built-in façade, a fake excuse. Don’t you ever, and this is hard to do, you have to have maturity to think this through, and none of us have infallibility so we’re going to make mistakes, but when you feel guilty about people who spiritually react negatively to you, it isn’t always your personality; it isn’t always something you’ve done to them. Jesus says here the evil system inherently reacts this way and then glosses it all up with these excuses. Well, you part your hair the wrong way, your hair is too long, your hair is too short, you wear the wrong kind of skirt, or something else. Always some excuse. Learn to see through excuses to the basic fact, and Jesus Christ here is giving the basics; the basics is the world hates you because you’re identified with Me and forget all the excuses about how you act, how you don’t act, what you say, what kind of an accent you have and all the rest of the thousand and eight different things that people can dream up as excuses. It’s the same thing.
In a modern day illustration it’s why people don’t like the Word of God because we have shown time and time and time again that our response to the Word of God is our response to the Lord Jesus Christ. Now it’s just that simple and if you want to be contemporary and make this a little bit more real, re-read verse 18, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated the Word of God before it hated you.” Got a new job; meeting a whole new group of people, walking into a new situation, Jesus says understand that those people in their depraved natures have already hated the Word of God before you walked in the office and then as they get to know you and they begin to see and detect your affiliation with the Word of God, they will carry that prior animosity over to you. And suddenly you’re going to react as though gee, what did I do. Nothing, you just happened to walk in to a highly fused evil situation.
That’s what Christ is warning; Christ loves us, He is trying to comfort us. He said, “My peace I leave with you,” My shalom, My goodbye, and I leave it not as the world leaves and this is how, He doesn’t just say that’s a sweet little word, He’s going through detail after detail after detail of doctrine so that He says when I leave there are going to be situations arise that are going to discomfort you, you are going to be embarrassed, you’re going to be hurt. Things are going to happen to you, people are going to say things about you. You may wind up in jail, but all through this what He’s trying to do is when that happens think it through Christianity, go back to the basics and ask, now just a minute, just a minute, this is all smoke on the surface, let’s get down to the real kernel of where it’s at. Where it’s at is that you’re living inside an evil system that hates with a passion the breakthrough of the Word of God.
He goes on in verse 19, verse 19 begins with a second class “if.” “If, and it is not so.” “If and it is not so, but if you were of the world, the world would take care,” the world would care for, it’s not agapao, it’s phileo, “the world would care for you, but because you’re not of the world … the world hates you.” Now notice it has nothing whatsoever to do with your personality. It has to do with your spiritual orientation; that’s what’s offensive.
Maybe we could think of another little temptation we all get a time or two and that is oh, if I were only smarter, if I could only put a more brilliant witness forward, then surely these people would accept me. Do you really think that? Wasn’t Jesus a rather brilliant man? What kind of reception did He get. Wasn’t Paul quite a brilliant man and what reception did he get? It wasn’t a question of brilliance. Oh yes, we try to be as good as we can, we try to put forth the best witness we can, but after we’ve done all that don’t sit back and cry because you feel guilty, because oh, if I just knew a few more facts, if I just said it a different way I could have persuaded them. No, you say what you know to the best of your ability and let the chips fall, the Lord will take care of it but don’t get bent out of shape because of some little thing like that.
John 15:19,
“If you were of the world,” what does that mean? Turn to Ephesians 2; it means something very
specific, it’s not a vague set of terms.
Christ has on His mind a very definite thing when He says “if you were
of the world.” He doesn’t have what many
legalistic fundies have on their mind.
In the
All right, one factor to this order is unregenerate men. These people who are spiritually dead; think of people, a field full of corpse, let’s say we were to drive through parts of Beirut tonight where you have bodies that have been lying out in the ash heap for three or four weeks, it does wonders for the atmosphere around, and that’s exactly the imagery that Paul has here. Dead people spiritually stink up the place as much as dead people physically stink up the place and Paul uses the very word “air” here. “You he has quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins, [2] Wherein in times past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience; [3] Among whom also we all had our manner of life in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath.” “…by nature the children of wrath.” Notice that, “by nature,” this shows you how serious this evil problem is; it is rooted into the very nature of unregenerate man. And the government passing a few laws isn’t going to solve any problem like this. This goes back to how we come into this world, with a fallen, depraved nature. That’s verse 1 and that’s part of verse 3 but verse 2 has another factor that is responsible for the world system.
“In times past you walked” or behaved, “according to the course of the age,” now the first verse is talking about the orientation; the orientation of the age would go back to that first point under the kingdom of man which was what? What was the orientation of the kingdom of man? The orientation of the kingdom of man was that man would seek happiness and security independently of God. That’s “the course of this age.” “…according to the prince of the power of the air,” “…the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience.”
Whether this is Satan or whether this is something else is a matter for discussion but nevertheless it pictures a demonic command set up over human society; it’s built like a military command, has battalions, platoons and so on down the chain of command. The demon powers have organization and military terms are used for the ranks of demons, therefore we know that demon powers have this command structure. It says “the prince” or commander “of the authority of the air” and this means the atmosphere around the planet earth is inhabited and ruled by demon power under the command of one particular demon. Now several demons are named in Scripture, we can’t speculate as to which one this is but there is one commanding demon and under him are myriads upon myriads upon myriads of demon forces. The “spirit” he says, notice it’s singular, “that now works in the children,” plural, “of disobedience.” Now the interesting thing about demon powers and spirits is that they are interchangeable. The only way I can mentally conceive of them is like an amoeba, it just kind of parts and slurps together and so forth. Well, this is the way spirits are, they can kind of go apart and come together. The reason we know this is because Jesus Christ, when He goes to cast out Legion, what does Legion say, he’s one demon and yet when Christ interrogates him he says we are many. And the word “legion” means 2,600 parts. So here’s one demon who can split into 2,600 different pieces; each one can inhabit an individual. Then we have the one lying spirit of 1 Kings 22 but when he volunteers to do service the Lord asks him, hey, what are you going to do to foul up Ahab. Oh, he says, I’ve got 400 parts, I can divide up and have a part of me in each one of his prophets. So demon powers can split in some way and yet each part somehow becomes an independent person and retains… this is how they get coordination in their system, this is how you can have a world leader who is demon possessed on one continent and have a world leader demon possessed in another continent and it can be the same demon who indwells both of them and they can have perfect coordination in the system. This is how antichrist is going to bring about his system. So the powers of evil are fantastic.
And that’s what Paul says, be realistic, he says, what was the morass from which you’ve been drawn by Christ? Now be careful here; you can go see The Exorcist and The Omen and you can get a wrong sidelight on evil; you can walk out of those films depressed at the over aweness of evil; careful. The Bible never terminates by just saying boy, evil is big. It always goes on to add one final statement—Christ is bigger! So any film that does not terminate on the victory ultimately through Jesus Christ is Satan worship, of a subtle sort but nevertheless, Satan worship. So evil must be seen in perspective and Paul does. But the important thing here is to see the seriousness and the assets of the evil cosmos; it is built into the nature of man, it is constantly fed from above by demon forces under an organized command. Do you see how it’s so stupid, so naïve for someone to come up and say we’re going to legislate society out of a morass. How on earth is law going to help man when number one, man in his heart is unregenerate and he isn’t going to obey the law anyway. So you’re going to have a system of force to enforce the law but the moment you create a command structure to enforce the law Satan hits you with verse 2. Who is it that’s going to control the command structure. So he’s got you both ways. And that’s why there is no answer to evil apart from regeneration and Jesus Christ.
So this is what Jesus Christ means when He says if you were of this system all these demon powers would work together, everything would go great, but that’s not so, you’re a misfit, you’re a square peg in a round hole now. You don’t fit with the system. And so the system begins to chip you out of itself. It’s like we have antibodies in our system, a foreign body comes, the body chemistry begins, antibodies are created and a big struggle starts. Visualize Satan’s cosmos as a body; we are the invaders, we are the intruders. And all of a sudden we get hit with these antibodies. That’s what Christ is saying you should prepare yourself for.
Turn back to John 15 and see what else He says. “If you were of the cosmos,” or of the system, by the way, if this doesn’t drive you to prayer I don’t know what would because prayer is your basic tool for carving out holes in Satan’s system. You can’t do it with any physical sword, you have to do it with the Word of God. “If you were of this system, the system would love its own.” You can translated “world” as “system” if you want to, maybe that will communicate better to some of you, the system, “but because you are not of the system, but I have chosen you out of the system, therefore the system hates you.” Now notice election in verse 19, that’s the plan and the boundaries of Christ’s redemptive work. Jesus Christ, here’s the system down here, Christ comes down and invades the system; He is a threat to the system, and so therefore the system reacts. You, by your identification with Christ, whether you know it or not, and I feel sorry for some of you if you’ve been told by somebody who witnessed to you, oh, all you have to do is invite Jesus into your heart and you’ll have all the peace and joy and all the rest, and you just kind of float into nirvana after death. Now it’s true, you have a joy but it’s the kind of joy that you see in Christ throughout the Gospels. The realistic picture of joy in the Scripture is that deep peace that Christ has but it’s not all pleasure because we are identified with Him.
We call that around here category four type suffering; suffering because of our identification with Christ in a fallen world. Ever wonder why you happen to walk out and get hit all of a sudden; ooh, where’d that come from, why did I get hit with this adversity, good night, what was I doing, standing under the wrong tree when it fell over? What happened? Illustration, book of Job. Imagine what Job must have felt like, he had some sort of a cataclysm that struck him wiped out his business, wiped out his home and then he sat there and had to listen to his wife fuss at him and all the rest; I don’t know which was worse. And that’s the story of Job for 38 chapters. Well now, what’s the problem? Job chapters 1-2 tell you the problem. It tells you that topside, prior to Job’s adversity down here there was a little heavenly conference. God and Satan got together, they do talk, they still talk, Satan has not been thrown and will not be thrown out of heaven until the tribulation, the middle part of the tribulation when we are prepared to resume his position in the heavenly council. That’s one reason why he hates the Church so much.
Therefore, while Satan comes to God in the book of Job and he says, now the reason… he has a big theory of Job’s faith. Job’s faith, Job’s faith says Satan, is grounded on a false premise and that is that he’s not going to bite the hand that feeds him. So if You withdraw your hand, Job will withdraw his allegiance. In other words, Satan goes back to the dilemma that we diagramed earlier in this business of God’s character. Satan’s argument was that Job was not loving the character of God; Satan’s theory is that the creature only loves the blessings that come out of that character of God and if the character of God stops the blessing, then the love will stop. Satan cannot stand to have people in his system have their loyalty oriented to God’s character because Satan doesn’t have the character, his loyalty oriented this way. Satan cannot even comprehend how a creature, leave alone a lowly creature as he would think man is, a lowly creature loving God just for the sake of his character. Yes, that’s the story of regeneration and the work of the Holy Spirit in history.
So we go on,
God has intervened. Jesus says in John
15:19, “I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” And now He gives counsel in that day, in that
situation. When the adversity hits and everything seems like it’s falling
apart, the counsel of Christ in this chapter that spoke of peace that He
leaves, isn’t to go into your closet, turn out the lights and dream about all
these things, or say Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus until you’ve hypnotized
yourself. Or as one person in
Therefore,
in John
But in verse 20 Christ is emphasizing the word, “The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted Me,” and notice the division, He takes it back to the essence of God, not to the blessings of God, not to anything Christ does but to what He is. “If they have persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept My saying,” and that is My doctrines, “they will keep yours also.” That is the divine viewpoint teachings of the Apostles. Christ says it is no different, it is not going to be based on your personality or lack thereof, it is not based on your IQ, it is not based on your degree, it is not based on your social or economic position in life, it is based on their primary allegiance to God’s character and nothing else.
John
Watch what happens. Here’s God’s character, God’s character is immutable so it can’t change. Now therefore God has always remained the same, so let’s draw a timeline from creation to the end of history. It doesn’t make any difference what era you’re living in, it doesn’t make any difference what your background is, any point along this line if you’re a living and breathing God-conscious individual, you have to do with the same essence of God. All right, now what Christ is arguing is that it is not due to the fact that he suddenly incarnated Himself and because of the incarnation, something went wrong, it’s not clear enough, that therefore people are rejecting Him. See, at one point in time you have the infinite God coalesce in some way, the doctrine of the hypostatic union, with human nature, so the two come together as one person. Now God’s character hasn’t changed. When Christ was born of Mary, as she held that baby in her arms, that baby was omnipotent; that baby was omniscient, He had divine nature that had remained unchanged for all eternity and would never change for all eternity. His character would always remain the same. Now during the period of the incarnation you have deity plus humanity and the argument that was often used was that well, we just didn’t recognize God when He showed up in a suit of clothes. See, if God had shown up in another way, we would have recognized Him. And Jesus says no you wouldn’t; your reaction to me is the reaction as it’s always been to God, always the same.
Your reaction to Christ is your reaction to God. People often ask, well what about the person who doesn’t see that Christ is God and they’re very religious people, they believe in one God, they may be monotheists but they just cannot see God in Christ. The answer that you get consistently out of the pages of the New Testament is they have never known God before Christ came along. Let’s take a man who’s grown up down in some country some place, and now at age 32 he first hears the message of the gospel; he hasn’t heard the gospel ever. Christ is a foreign concept to him; only at age 32 he comes face to face with some believer who shares doctrine with him about the person of Christ, and he hears about Christ at age 32, and then he goes negative and he says no, I reject Christ, I don’t buy it, I just discard the whole package. The biblical answer as to what’s going on in this man is that for 32 years prior to that point, all the way back in here, he did not know God ever once.
Now some verses to substantiate that position. In John 1:9 the second personality of the Trinity, called here the Logos, is said to be the source of all truth for all men at all times. “That was the true Light, which lights every man who is coming into the world.” “Every man” that cometh into the world. This refers to God-consciousness and what it says is that any man, the hotten-tots, somebody that lives out in country X, Y or Z for 32 years, whatever God-consciousness he has, he has of the Second Personality of the Trinity. And the argument goes if he really has responded to the God-consciousness that he has, when the gospel comes along he’ll quickly put 2 and 2 together and get 4. He will quickly recognize that in this Jesus that is preached by this witnessing Christ, I see that God that I knew before, the God of whom I am aware.
John 1:10, “He was constantly in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not.” That’s not talking about the incarnation, the incarnation doesn’t begin until verse 14. Verse 10 is talking about all the centuries of history, the Logos was in the world, the Son of God was making Himself known to man. So it is not true that when Christ came it was such an utterly new concept, that the poor neutral person didn’t have any idea.
The other passage, similar to this John passage, Romans 1:18 and following, the classic passage that shows that all men, in fact, know very well that God is there. Verse 20, “The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by means of the creation,” the end of verse 20, “so that they are without excuse.” No one can ever plead ignorance before God’s throne; no one! Every person has been exposed to some God-consciousness. So application of this in evangelism: when you walk into a situation you’re not walking into a new situation. If you walk up to somebody who is 32 years old you ought to say to yourself, oh, 32 and you obviously learn in the conversation, what you’re about to tell him about the gospel is something that will blow his mind because he never heard it before. What you ought to say to yourself is 32 huh, that means for 32 years you’ve been God-conscious; I don’t come to you with your mind a blank slate, the tabla rosa concept of John Locke, I don’t come to you like that, I come to you with your mind already having content in it, already prepared because you’re a creature made in God’s image and when I preach Christ to you, you ought to connect what I preach with what’s already there. And therefore what you have done with the light that you have had determines what you will do with the more light that you get. That is, what you’ve done with your God-consciousness before gospel hearing has a lot to do with what’s going to happen at gospel hearing.
Back to John 15, this is why Christ said in verse 21, “because they know not Him that sent Me,” they have not responded to God-consciousness, therefore they are going to reject you like they have rejected me.
John 15:22, “If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin,” now obviously verse 22 is not talking about sinlessness. Christ is not putting something here that’s at odds with the rest of Scripture, it’s just an emphasis, “they had not sin” exposed for what it really is. In John 3 what goes John say? He said the “light has come into the world,” the world, the system, the evil system “loves darkness rather than light … neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds be reproved.” There’s a hidden motive, and that’s what Christ is getting at here. “If,” second class, “I had not come, but I did, and I spoke unto them, they would not have sin, but now they have no cloak for their sin.” He’s not arguing sinless perfection, He’s just saying that before they could say well, you see, it wasn’t plain. But if Christ is God become man and He walks up to an individual and talks to that individual, that individual may be 18 inches in front of his face, what’s going to happen in eternity future at the judgment seat, when that person who has rejected walks up and says well, I’m sorry, there just wasn’t enough evidence, I needed some more ontological proof for God’s existence and you didn’t give it, so I didn’t believe. That will carry no weight in the final judgment. That person sat 18 inches one day from the face of God Himself. Jesus Christ is not a man bearing God in Him; Jesus Christ is one person who at the same moment is human and divine; this is something that we’ll get into, Christ is not just a God indwelt man; He is God become man, so that the personality on the other end of the line that you’re talking with is none other than the Second personality that runs the universe. That’s the hypostatic union, that’s the orthodox doctrine, the titanic claim for Jesus Christ.
He goes on, He explains this, John 15:23, “He that hates Me hates My Father also.” All eternity is involved. [24] “If I had not done among them the works which none other man did,” and remember from John one of the arguments, John 9, the healing of the blind man; no Old Testament prophet ever healed a blind man, Jesus did, the significance was not lost on at least the blind man, “they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both Me and My Father. [25] But this cometh to pass, that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law, They hated me without a cause.”
Turn to Psalm 35:19, that’s the place from which this is quoted. Here we get to probably one of the most spectacular revelations of evil. Again putting our diagram up here, love on one side, hate on the other, God’s character’s is to determine in between; God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, immutable and eternal. Now watch what happens. In Psalm 35 what is the theme, verse 19, “Let not those who are mine enemies wrongfully rejoice over me; neither let them wink with the eye that hates me without a cause.” Now the word “cause” here means moral cause or moral fault. And the point of David’s Psalm at this juncture is let them, if they’re going to hate me let them have a reason morally for so doing, but don’t let them hate me without a cause. [20] For they speak not peace, but they devise deceitful matters against them who are quiet in the land. [21] They open their mouth wide against me, and said, Aha, aha, our eye hath seen it. [22] This thou hast seen, O LORD; keep not silence. O Lord, be not far from me. [23] Stir up thyself, and awake to my judgment, [even to my cause, my God and my Lord;” by the way, notice the way he talks to God in verse 23, that is a very, what we would consider, rude thing to say. If somebody got in a prayer meeting in the average church and said God, would You get off your rear end and do something… what? This is the way the psalmist spoke to God, that’s what that “stir up” means, I’m giving you the cultural context.
Psalm 35:24, “Judge me, O LORD my God, according to Thy righteousness, and let them not rejoice over me. [25] Let them not say in their hearts, Ah, so would we have it; let them not say, We have swallowed him up. [26] Let them be ashamed and brought to confusion together who rejoice at mine hurt….” The theme of that Psalm, among other things, is the fact that the person who hates has no moral basis; the object of their hate is perfect righteousness and perfect justice and so when you find the evilness of evil ultimately goes back to the fact it is a moral vacuum, it has no moral claims for itself. Evil uses morals to excuse itself. The evil system will always cover its tracks with some superficial moral things and if you’re a sharp Christian with doctrine you ought to unmask it. The evil systems and the evil people always justify and they are utterly opposed to the opposite side. And I think it’s very appropriate that when Ron prayed tonight he started the theme from Revelation 4 because that’s where we’re ending up.
This is the
other side of evil, so let’s turn to Revelation 4. Undoubtedly one of those Calvinistic
accidents that just happened. Revelation
What is the major purpose of history? The major purpose of history is what you see sung in the two hymns that are sung in Revelation 4 and 5. In Revelation 4 as the great hymn goes on it concludes with this closing stanza: “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.” The key of verse 11 is “Thou art worthy.” Now from the moment of creation as Adam and Eve came up out of the soil in response to God’s Word, at that moment they opened their eyes and they looked out in the Garden, they could not appreciate the worthiness of God. Had not the fall ever happened man still would have had to have gone through history, trial, pressure, just to see if God were worthy. Why? Because we, His creatures, can only judge [can’t understand word] on the basis of historical experience with that person; you can only judge someone by a long association with them. That’s how you read by their words and the works of history. And that’s how we read, as creatures, God’s character.
Now God doesn’t have to do that because He’s omniscient; we have to do that because we’re not omniscient; we have to date our data through the flow of time and therefore as we have this experience, that experience, we read the Bible about past experiences, we read prophesies about future experiences, we put it all together and we come up with an estimate of God’s character. Now at this point in our sanctification some of us have a good estimate of God’s character and some have a lousy estimate of God’s character because you see, there’s a struggle between our sin nature and our regenerate state. The sin nature still hates God; it’s feeling frustrated with the demonic ideas that would impugn God’s character. We still kind of listen to the silent songs that Satan sung to Eve, Eve, has God really got your best interest at mind or do you suppose that God has some hidden purpose and that He’s just neglected you Eve, does He want to go for your great and highest good, your summum bonum, you cannot go for the summum bonum under God’s word, you msut go for the summum bonum by human autonomous works if you want to get there because God doesn’t have your summum bonum closest to His heart. That’s the siren song of evil, the summum bonum will be attained outside of the will of God for the creature.
But when it says “Thou art worthy, at this point in history we will be able to join that great hymn and we’ll be able to sing with full conscience because in that hour the sin nature will have been destroyed from our soul, our soul will be freed of these distractions, and we can say yes, I am totally convinced, there is not a doubt in my heart that God is absolutely worthy. Now be honest, right now none of us could ever sing this hymn. This hymn is reserved for a future time but in the future we will be able to sing it. You can measure your own state of sanctification tonight by how close you come to singing the hymn. Of course most of us come close to singing the hymn when we’re blessed and when we’re cursed we couldn’t sing that hymn if you paid us to do it. But the nature, the regenerate nature is being trained, it’s being pruned, that’s what the Holy Spirit is doing in your life; that’s what sanctification is all about, to get you in a state where you can stand before God’s throne and admit on the basis of history God is fully worthy for every bit of eternal praise that He gets, over and over and over and over.
Now the same
line in [can’t understand word] connection is also given in Revelation 5:9-10,
again thinking in terms of good and evil. The good is this tremendous love for
God’s character. Notice Revelation
5:9-10, “And they sang a new song,” it’s new because it would have been
impossible to sing this song before the end of history, “they sang a new song,
saying, Thou art worthy,” and this time the song is being sung to the God-man. Some of you be careful, Jesus Christ did not
lose His humanity when He rose to be at the Father’s right hand; some think
that. Remember your
So they sang this hymn and we will be joining in the singing of this hymn, you might start memorizing it now for later, “Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof; for Thou was slain, and hast redeemed us to God by the blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; [10] And has made us unto our God kings and [a kingdom of] priests, and we shall reign on the earth.” Again the song begins in verse 9 with the same line of Revelation 4:11, “Thou art worthy,” and that’s the whole key to history, that’s the highest thing that I know in all the canon of revelation that we are given to tell us why. Why? That we may worship God this way, by recognizing His character. That is what is good and the opposite is a maligning attack of evil, Christ says the world that repels by this, the world that would never, never sing “Thou art worthy,” that is evil. It is theocentric, not society-centered, not legally centered, not anthropocentric; the whole issue between the battle of good and evil isn’t even God’s rule, ultimately. The battle between good and evil is God’s character, is He worthy or is He not. And if everyone of us will examine our souls tonight you’ll find some good and you’ll find some evil because we’re in a transition state as born again Christians, on the road to sanctification, but we haven’t arrived yet and therefore it’s sobering to think that we share a traitorous nature with the world system. There’s part of that world system in all of us.
Father, we thank You…