Clough Proverbs Lesson 12
The Flesh”: Old Sin Nature
Last time we had
someone ask a question; they actually had two questions, one I will answer at
the end of our lesson and one at the beginning.
A card handed in last week that was probably stimulated by the evening
session on Matthew 11:25 about God hiding things from the wise and prudent: How
can the error be avoided of using this to defend ignorance as a sort of reverse
snobiness, as is common in many fundamental churches in rural areas. This pride and stupidity often seen in blue
collar workers and even in college circles toward real Christianity is
obviously a twisted envy and how does God avoid it. The idea throughout the Bible is not that
God stimulates stupidity; it’s rather the kind of knowledge that God is
interested in. We have to basically
distinguish between two kinds of knowledge in the human race. One kind of knowledge is what we would call a
common knowledge and the other is what we would call a theoretical
knowledge. Theoretical knowledge let’s
use as an illustration, Genesis 2:7, and psychology.
If you read your
Sunday paper on the front page this morning you’ll see an extensive article on
Sigmund Freud; Sigmund Freud would be an example of man who was working in the
theoretical area of psychology, technically psychiatry, but let’s use the term
in its broad sense. And Sigmund Freud is
a man who died in 1939 and left a tremendous impact on our generation. The article is exactly correct in the fact
that this man has had tremendous impact.
To the Bible-believing Christian we are sorry for a lot of his impact
because Sigmund Freud actually reversed, he was one of the arch foes of
Christianity and its doctrine of psychology.
The reason for this is, as Freud himself said, it took the Jews to
introduce conscience, or he called it super ego, into history and Freud said it
will take a Jew to erase it from history.
And he did his best. And so
therefore we are disappointed at the results that Freud had but nevertheless he
had good results. Now what Freud did was
he dwelt on the theoretical; there’s nothing wrong with the theoretical except
very few people actually in their daily lives work with the theoretical; very
few people read Sigmund Freud.
Very few people
read the works of these men, but yet on the other hand God is interested that
we have at least common knowledge and the common knowledge is the kind of
knowledge that the Word of God gives you.
The Word of God gives you material from which it is possible to deduce
theories. I have not deduced, contrary
to what some of you have thought, I have not presented any psychological
theories here. All we are trying to do
is simply exegete the Word of God. Now
the Word of God gives the psychology of the soul in terms of common knowledge.
Let’s go through
some of these terms: (1) the human spirit; the human spirit in the Word of God
is never thought to be some sort of an abstraction, some theoretical
concept. The spirit, very simply to the
everyday person who lived in the Old Testament era was simply human
breath. The word pneuma in the Greek means spirit and means breath, ruach in the Hebrew means spirit and
breath, and this is why I sought to show in all of this that these terms that
we are preparing for as we prepare for the Proverbs series are terms which the
common everyday man would have understood.
This is why the term, for example, heart was used for mind; there’s no
such thing as head knowledge and heart knowledge in the Word of God for the
simple reason is that there’s no distinction of terminology. I know what people mean by that but
unfortunately the Word of God has no way of expressing it. The heart in the Bible means the heart and
it’s simply because in the ancient world, and true in the West up and through
Homer, men, when they thought, were aware constantly of their bodies. And so when they thought some exciting
thought what would their heartbeat do?
Their heartbeat would increase in respond to the thinking.
In other words,
they were constantly monitoring the condition of their body. This is why last time we dealt with the word
bowels and we showed that bowels means more than bowels; it means womb, it
means stomach, it means a lot of things but “bowels” again were used because
whether the connotation was sexual or whether it was fear or whether it was
emotion in response to the Word such as in 2 Corinthians 6:13, whatever the
situation was, people were constantly thinking in terms of their body’s
reaction. Now that’s common knowledge
and God never condones stupidity in that area.
Now what Matthew
meant when he pointed this thing out about God hiding things from the wise and
prudent, he’s not talking about the real wise and the really prudent; he’s
talking about those who think they are wise, those that think they are prudent
and are actually filled with human viewpoint and so forth, and therefore are
not truly wise. We’ll see the concept of
wisdom later in the book of Proverbs, God never condones [not sure of word] and
I will agree that within a lot of fundamentalist circles there is a pride and
stupidity. Many fundamentalists are
exactly where we are because we are behind the 8-ball in all areas simply
because we have despised answering men’s genuine questions, with the result is
that fundamentalists have isolated themselves, and yet we find and we’ve had an
obvious illustration here in Lubbock, that whenever you have the guts or the
courage to articulate the Christian position without compromise in all areas it
inevitably attracts thinking people.
Why? Simply because truly
thinking people are after real answers and only the Word of God is ever going
to give you a real answer.
So actually there
is a pseudo pride in fundamentalism that it’s “unspiritual” to emphasize any
thought concepts. This is what’s wrong
with evangelism; this is why we have this froth at the mouth thing. This is how we’ve got the charismatic
movement started, why people foam at the mouth, roll down the aisles, raise
their hands and all the rest of the gobbledygook that passes for evangelism.
Anybody that’s a student of church history knows that we never had an
evangelistic invitation before 1830. How
do you suppose people became Christians before 1830; they couldn’t raise their
hand or trot down the aisle. Do you know
how they became Christians? The same way
they always became Christians, believing the content of the preached Word of
God. This is why, for example, we have
criticism of
We have been
proceeding through these terms and we have these common labels that are given
in Scripture for various parts of the body and it’s relationship to the
soul. Today we’re going to finish the
area of the flesh; last week we began the concept of the flesh and this week we
deal with the concept of the flesh and again we start from Genesis 2:7. “The LORD God formed man of the dust of the
ground,” now the word “man” in the Hebrew looks like this, Adam, and the word for ground here is adamah, and I think you can see the obvious correlation between the
word “man” and the word “ground.” Man is
named for his earthly nature. This is
why in 1 Corinthians 15 the first man was of the earth, earthy. I mention that to you because some of you are
in philosophy classes where you encounter the idea of what they call the soul
and the body. And usually it’s given to
you in some sort of an either/or situation and this is Platonism and not the
biblical Christianity. There is nothing
wrong with the body in the Bible; what is wrong is what has happened to the
body, not the flesh itself.
So let’s
distinguish between “flesh” in the sense that it is just the ground, the
elements of the ground in our body, there’s nothing wrong with that; however,
what has happened is that the flesh has picked up, to use a biological
expression, an acquired characteristic.
Now it’s supposedly one of the laws of biology that you do not have an
inheritance of acquired characteristics and yet this is exactly what the Word
of God says and insists upon, that at one point in time something happened to
the germ cell that has been propagated from father to son, father to son,
father to son, father to son, father to son, down through history and we now
have the inheritance of an acquired characteristic. That acquired characteristic is passed by
means of the body.
Again we go to our
chart that describes the body and the soul and the spirit. You remember in Genesis 2:7 God first makes
the body. This is the first thing He
makes; after He makes the body He breathes into the body a human spirit. This, by the way, shows why a fetus in a
pregnant woman is not real life; it can’t be real life until it breathes. So while abortion may be wrong it cannot be
wrong because it’s murder; abortion is not murder, there’s no way abortion can
be murder. The spirit is given at the
point the baby takes the first breath, just like the life came when Adam took
his first breath and with that we have the soul as a resultant of both; the
body and the spirit in the body produce a soul.
Now that word,
“soul,” is actually what we’re aiming at but before we can get there there’s
one more element that we have to deal with and that’s this element, the
flesh. It’s not that the body is bad but
our bodies have been poisoned, as it were; just think in terms of a regular
poison. Look further in Genesis 2:17,
“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it,
for in the day that thou eats thereof thou shalt surely die.” Now without allegorizing anything, how do you
suppose an ancient Jewish person would have understood this passage? He would have understood it just the way any
common sense would have understood, namely something’s going to happen if he
eats the thing. If you turn to Genesis
3:22 you read of another tree in the Garden of Eden. “And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is
become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his
hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” So obviously both trees are physically
present, there is a physical eating and there is something that is ingested
into the body.
Now you can make
up all the theological theories you want but your primary data still is the
physical act of eating and this eating is a causative thing. God is not conducting a charade here; God is
not just playing games. The actual
eating is going to produce an actual state of the body and so what we have here
and we will study it further this morning, is the spread of sin in the flesh so
that now instead of just flesh we have dying flesh. So flesh is bad but not because of the way
Plato thought. Flesh is bad because
something has happened to it.
Just to show you
that my interpretation of Genesis and the literalness of it is not something I
just thought of, this was the normal way this story would have been taken
throughout the ancient east. For example,
here is a Babylonian cylinder seal and here’s the same story that’s just given
to you in Genesis 3 and you can see it right there; there’s the man, they don’t
call them Adam and Eve, but there’s the man, there’s the woman, there’s the
serpent, and there’s the tree and there’s fruit. By the way, it shows you it wasn’t an apple
either; Adam and Eve didn’t eat apples.
All the tradition of the ancient was that it was a vine, whatever it
was, and here’s the inscription: In Eridu grew a dark vine, the command was
established in the Garden of the God; the Ath [sp?] man” we don’t know what
that is, “the Ath man fruit they ate, they broke in two, its stalk they
destroyed, the sweet juice which injures the body, great is their sin.” And this is a survival of the Genesis
narrative in another culture. And so you
can obviously see this story in the ancient Near Eastern context would have
been taken literally, physically and so on.
No doubt in anyone’s mind in the ancient world that there was a
poisoning that happened here, a literal physical poisoning.
So we have, then,
an inheritance of an acquired characteristic in the human body. This is why again to go back to our chart
you’ll notice that the body is inherited.
If something is inherited it comes through the body, not the
spirit. The spirit comes at the point of
birth and new birth; the body, however is inherited from Adam. So we then have the inheritance of an
acquired characteristic. And we
mentioned last how the ancient world was very cognizant of something else and
this is the survival of that fantastic promise in Genesis 3:15 where it is
said, and this is a unique expression, “the woman’s sperm,” now with all the
sex education in school we don’t have to go into the fact there’s something odd
here in this expression.
This is a unique
expression in God’s Word and what it means is that the woman and not the man is
the one who carries the seed of Messiah, and that seed, evidently has a
potential immortality to it that is transmitted down through history and the
reason why; it always produces a person who dies is because the male sperm
carries the sin nature, so to speak, corruption always unites with it and cause
an offspring that is going to die. So a
baby is actually born from this point forward to die because it’s always
produced by a male sperm. And many godly
Christian scholars believe, having studied the physiological evidences and so
on that this Bible is meant to be taken very seriously, both at this point in
verse 15 and also in 1 Timothy 2 where the woman is saved through child-bearing
and the idea of the woman and she houses, as it were, immortality. Now the ancient world expressed it a
different way. They expressed it a
different way, they expressed it by using the woman’s body as a symbol of
fertility and so you always read, in whatever culture you like to study, the
fertility goddesses; they are always female. Why? Because the female is the one
that houses the immortality, she is the one that carries it through history and
this is why Jesus Christ is virgin born.
The Holy Spirit takes over the male side but the female side remains
human. And therefore we have Christ
produced.
And Jesus Christ,
as we’re going to find out tonight, was not killed on the cross. Christ chose to die on the cross. Jesus Christ did not have to die; there were
only two men in history that did not have to die; that had immortality…they had
potential immortality from the time they were born or created and that was Eve,
actually there’s three, Eve, Adam and Jesus Christ. Those three individuals, not one of them ever
had to die; they could be killed, they could choose to die and they could
choose to destroy themselves but they did not have a necessity upon their head
to some day die like you do and like I do. So we, then, apart from these three
we all have the result of this thing, we have corruption.
Now if you turn to
Romans 5:12 we’ll do a study of sin or corruption in the human flesh. This is a very difficult passage, very
difficult passage. We’ll try to thread
our way through three verses in Romans 5 and then look at scattered verses in
Romans 6, 7 and 8. Our objective is to
pin down this “flesh” concept. Romans
5:12, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin,
and so death passed upon all men, for all have sinned. [13] For until the law
sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed where there is no law. [14] (Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam
to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgressions,
who is the figure of him who is to come.”
Now two things to start this passage off. In the first word is “wherefore.” The last clause in verse 14, “who is the
figure of him who is to come,” now both the word “wherefore” and “the figure”
refer to something very, very important in the Bible and that is that the Word
of God is tremendously consistent. If it
wasn’t we’d reject it, it would not be true.
The Word of God is consistent from Genesis to Revelation. Its consistency is never broken and its
consistency extends even to such a little detail that you and I might just
overlook it. But in verse 12 we have one
of those little details, and to me these are one of the great details because
these to me are one of the great evidences that the Bible truly is the Word of
God.
In verse 12 Paul
is arguing that in the light of what went before verse 12, see “wherefore,” in
other words, on account of everything that has gone on before verse 12. Well,
what’s gone on before verse 12? What’s the subject before verse 12? Is it talking about Adam or is it talking
about Jesus Christ? It’s talking about
Jesus Christ; Christ, not Adam is the subject.
Let’s see how we can tie this together.
First, it’s Christ and the so great salvation we have through Him. Next we have Adam but when he goes to talk
about Adam he says now listen, I told you all about the salvation that comes to
you through Jesus Christ, now because of this salvation this is why Adam was
made the way he was, or because of this so great salvation that comes through
Christ, this is why sin came through Adam the way it did. Do you catch the logic? Let me run it by again. Listen: Because of our so great salvation
available through Christ, sin came through Adam this way.
Now what his line
of logic is, that Adam and the whole introduction of sin went along by a
particular and peculiar design; in other words, history was set up so that
generations and generations and generations and generations in the future, when
salvation would be dispensed through Christ it could be. So the human race starting Adam was
especially designed by the imputation principle; that is, sin would be imputed
to the whole human race out of Adam.
People say oh, that’s unfair and so forth. Every man is behind the 8-ball because of
what Adam did, but pail says this is because God was looking ahead in time to
see how He would give out salvation by the same mechanisms. And so whatever mechanism you have operating
back in the Garden of Eden with the fall of Adam is the mere image of a
mechanism that a you have operating through the person of Jesus Christ. In other words, they’re not disconnected
events. There is a unity and a
consistency throughout the Word.
I know there’s
always a tendency when you first become a Christian, there was with me, you say
fine, I’m a Christian, I believe in Jesus Christ, and I believe in the New
Testament from what I see of it but that Old Testament stuff, I just don’t
quite go with, it’s just a little too unscientific for the 20th
century. But you see, the moment you
start reading the New Testament you’re in trouble. It took me about two years to find this out
after I became a Christian but every time I’d read a passage like Romans 5:12,
bang, I’d be in trouble because my theistic evolutionary views wouldn’t fit
with this, there had to have been a literal Adam, not just because Paul
believed it, that’s one reason but the second reason why there had to be a
literal Adam is that the mechanism of dispensing salvation through Christ is a
meaningless mechanism unless it’s really there, unless it’s part of how man is
built. So man is built, that’s the
word, “wherefore” and that’s why in the last part of verse 14 Adam is a “figure
of Him who is to come.” That doesn’t
mean Adam was just an allegorical story; it’s talking about Adam as a literal
man; you could have shook hands. But
Adam was literal and if you don’t accept a literal Genesis you, by all laws of
logic, must discard the person of Christ.
Now I’m saying
this hard deliberately because my experience has taught me that some of you
never get the point until I get up here and make some fantastically dogmatic
nasty statement and then you get mad enough to go home and think about it. And I deliberately do it to irritate some of
you, deliberately; I know you suspected that all along. I just deliberately do that because my
experience is this is the only way to get through. If I don’t irritate you enough you just walk
out the door and forget it. So I’ll just
irritate you enough so either one or two things happen, either you start
thinking about and get with it or you just leaven; nobody’s hurt my feelings
because they’ve left.
Romans 5:12-14,
“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world,” so now we have the
concept of sin and death. Let’s look at
these two words because the whole argument is going to hinge on what these
words mean. The word “death,” there
shouldn’t be any question about that, it means death. Always interpret the Bible literally unless
there is reason in the context that forces you to do otherwise. There’s nothing here yet that would say that
the word “death” should mean anything other than normal, physical death. There’s nothing here that says that. So since we’re not forced to say it’s
something other than the plain obviously normal word meaning we accept the
plain obvious normal word meaning which is physical death. So let’s look at it again, “Wherefore, as by
one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin.” Those of you taking Greek, “death by sin” dia plus the genitive, agency, death by
means of sin. Aha, so this is now saying
that physical death in man is administered by means of a mechanism.
What is the
mechanism of death? Now this is
something that has eluded medical investigators for generations. Still to this day it is not clear why people
die. It may amaze you, it’s not really
clear why people die at all; it’s not just due to aging either; aging and death
are not necessarily the same process. dia plus the genitive means that
whatever it is that science has not yet got its hands on, it’s trying to get
its hands on to explain why do people die.
Remember earlier I said how Dr. Alexis Carrel at the Rockefeller
Institute in New York kept a chicken tissue alive for 35 years. The only reason why it died then was because
there was a breakdown in the experimental apparatus in the laboratory. Tissue apart from the body if nourished can
go on living forever, certain kinds. Now
if it can go on living forever why is it that our tissue in our bodies doesn’t? What is it about the human body that causes
it to die? There is not just tissue; it
is not inevitable that death occur.
There is something about the body that makes it die.
Now, that
mysterious X factor that has not yet been isolated by science, that causes
physical death, is described here in this verse—sin. Now let’s define further what sin is. Sin in the Bible, particularly in Paul’s
writings, occurs two ways. It occurs in
the singular and it occurs in the plural.
Generally, this is not an absolute rule but generally speaking when the
word sin is plural it refers to personal acts of sin, that is, in the mind, in
the behavior pattern and so forth.
“Sins” with an “s” on the end means acts of sin. But that’s not true with the word “sin” singular. The word “sin” singular, as Paul uses the
word, and after all, who wrote this particular verse? Paul.
So we have to go with how Paul used the word in the singular. When Paul uses the word “sin” in the
singular, it means the mechanism of sin or what we might call the sin
nature. That’s how Paul uses the word
“sin” in the singular. He’s referring to
the power or the mechanism, whatever word you want for that, but that’s what
I’m trying to tell you, the mechanism or the nature of man, that which is in
him that precipitates the act of sin; not the acts themselves.
So let’s read it
again, verse 12, “Wherefore, as by one man,” notice, “one man,” one man! It
doesn’t say two, do you notice that? You
say wait a minute, I thought Adam and Eve fell.
True, Eve fell but Adam is the one that is responsible for the
transmission; again, through the male side, “one man,” not two. One man, Adam, “by one man sin entered into
the cosmos,” sin! So you have the
introduction of something new; s-i-n is the acquired characteristic that is
inherited on the body side. “…as by one
man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, so death passed upon all
men, because all sinned.” Now here’s the
logic Paul’s saying. He’s looking at a
phenomenon we’ll call PD, physical death.
And this phenomenon he seeks an explanation for. And he says what causes this? Now 20th century man wouldn’t even
bother to ask the question because we are so programmed by our schooling,
wonderful public education, we are so programmed by this kind of education that
death becomes part of the normal thing, after all, didn’t we all evolve through
death, survival of the fittest and so on, death is just part of what is
there. Not so with Paul, to Paul
physical death is an anomaly that has to be explained. It’s not true that death is normal; the
universe is abnormal, there’s something wrong about why men die. And so Paul was not content, like the modern
man is, to just say well, death is part of life. That’s not the way Paul thought, huh-un,
death is not part of life, emphatically reversed, opposite.
There is something
wrong here about physical death and I want to explain it. So Paul is going to use this argument; there
can be only one cause behind physical death in the Christian system and that
cause is sin, an act of sin. Now if an
act of sin is behind physical death, Paul says, why did people die? Notice verse 14, “death reigned from Adam to
Moses,” why pick out those two guys?
Let’s look, Adam to Moses. You
have Adam here, that’s obvious why he picked that one. Why Moses?
Because with Moses what happened?
What was new with Moses? The Law.
Notice verse 13, “For until the law [sin] was in the world, sin is not
imputed where there is no law,” I mean, it was not credited. So here’s the dilemma Paul faced. Let’s take Noah; Noah sins between Adam and
Moses. Why did Noah die? Paul’s asking the question, why did Noah die? It wasn’t because Noah broke the Mosaic Law
because did Noah have the Mosaic Law?
No, the Mosaic Law 1440 BC; Noah 3000 BC or thereabouts. No law; why did Noah die?
Why did Noah
die? Paul says my theology tells me he
couldn’t have died because of the Mosaic Law because he didn’t have the law,
and he says verse 13, the sin isn’t credited where there isn’t any law so he
couldn’t have died because of any personal act of sin he committed in his
life. Why did Noah die? There’s only one conclusion. Noah died physically because in some way he
participated in Genesis 2:17, remember, “In the day that thou eatest thereof
thou shalt surely die.” That’s the only
place, that’s the only location where you can ascribe a cause to death. So therefore Paul argues that in some way…
and then the theologians have all sorts of theories how this happened, Paul doesn’t go into the specific theories,
he simply says in some way Noah was implicated in Adam’s sin. If you don’t accept this then you’ve got a
logical problem of great severity.
So here’s the
argument. Adam did something that
precipitated by divine decree death upon the human race. So we have two things; let’s look at it. We
have a decree, “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Here’s the decree, the decree says die, but
is the decree sufficient to actually bring about that which is decreed. For example, I’m on the city council (for
example), we pass a law that says you will do such and such. Is merely passing the law sufficient to cause
it to be enforced? No; we have a police
force. Now the police force is there to
bring about the law enforcement. So God
decrees death but how is death actually brought about in history? Death is brought about in history… well, we’ll
just call it the poison, the poison that was received from the tree, the exclusion
from the Garden so that you couldn’t get access to the antidote to it, whatever
it was in the tree of life, man shall get out of the Garden so that you can’t
eat of the antidote. And you will die. So the administration of physical death
through history is through sin, as it says in verse 12.
Now, let’s look
further at Romans 6:7 and pick up something more about this. We’ve seen in
Romans 5:12-14 how sin originates with Adam and it spreads through all human
flesh. In Romans 6:7, here is a verse
that will show you when it stops; Romans 5:12-14 shows you when it starts;
Romans 6:7 tells you when it stops.
Romans 6:7 “For he that is dead is freed from sin. Now what happens at death? Obviously at death you have the removal of
the human spirit from the body and it leaves the body. Now if the person at death is free from sin
and this is what happens at death, namely the human spirit goes away, what does
logic tell you where sin must be located?
It must be located on the base of the flesh, on the body. The word
“flesh as Paul used it was never intended to be allegorically interpreted. It means the literal physical flesh. Now it has implications of the spirit because
of total depravity and so on, yes. But
the base of operation is the body, the flesh.
That’s why it’s called flesh; it wouldn’t be called flesh if it wasn’t
flesh.
So this verse,
Romans 6:7 tells us that “he that is dead is freed from sin.” Now Romans 6:7 is actually, and this is just
a footnote, is actually a wonderful promise to you as a believer. Do you know why? Because Romans 6 tells you that if you are a
Christian, if you’ve personally accepted Christ as your Savior, you are
identified with Christ in His death and if you are identified in His death it
means that potentially you have already died.
This is why at a funeral I always make the point, that the great chasm
you cross is not at the grave. The great
chasm has already been crossed when you become a Christian. There is continuity through death, there’s no
big grand canyon to cross when you die, things are going to be the same after
you die in one sense, relationship with the Lord and so on, there’s continuity
there for the Christian. Now for the
person who has not accepted Christ, yes, you do have a grand canyon, you do
have a chasm there that you have to face.
But for the Christian the chasm has already been faced. That’s why we have baptism; what is baptism? Simply to show death; ever think of baptism
as a funeral? That’s what it is; baptism
is actually a Christian funeral to show that you died at the time you became a
Christian.
So Romans 6:7
tells us when it ends. So now we can set
up an interval, we can say okay, my flesh is dying from the time that I am
physically born until the time that I physically die; during that interval I
have my flesh in death status, that is sin operates within it. By the way, also, you could say at the point
of conception; correction, from the point of conception, even though the human
spirit isn’t there, from the point of conception, Psalm 51, “In sin did my
mother conceive me,” so we inherit the sin nature.
Now Romans 7:16,
another set of verses and these again teach us another thing about flesh. Again so that you get the point we’re simply
going through various verses to pin down, get a better idea of what flesh is so
when we get in Proverbs we’ll know what we’re talking about. Romans 7:16-18, this three verse
interval. Now this is Paul speaking as a
regenerate man, and he is talking about the problems of living the Christian
life and the frustrations he has.
Now every once in
a while in my counseling I run across a peculiar thing; to me it’s peculiar but
to the person who comes to counseling it isn’t peculiar. I don’t know where this idea gets started but
no end of people have come to me with this problem. They become a Christian, usually some young
person becomes a Christian, they’ve had a raunchy background, they’ve had
problems, they become a Christian, for about 3 or 4 days after they become a
Christian, great, living on cloud #99, no problems. And then all of a sudden they suddenly
discover in their lives, you know what?
I can be tempted, and all of a sudden they experience within their soul
temptations; temptations! And they’ve
heard me talk about 1 John 1:9 or something and they start doing this—they
start confessing their temptations. And
they say you know, the Christian has become very miserable for me, I keep
getting these temptations, I keep confessing them. You don’t confess temptation; you confess
after you have yielded to the temptation.
You don’t confess temptations and you shouldn’t be dismayed because you
have temptations. If you understand what
I’m telling you this morning about flesh, no longer will any of you here be
worried about the fact that you have temptations. It’s part of being in a body of dying flesh;
that is why you are experiencing temptations.
Now there’s
something you can do about it, we’ll get into that, but still, Romans 7:16-18
here’s the temptations of the flesh.
Paul was tempted; do you think you’re better than Paul? Jesus Christ was tempted, though not of the
flesh, but nevertheless He was tempted.
There’s no escape from temptation in life and you can be a crybaby
believer and fold up under a little pressure and toss it in, forget it, not
going to go with Christianity, too many temptations, just go out and raise all
kinds of Cain and so forth. That’s one
way and you will receive a certain kind of experience for doing that too. But the point is that in the Bible don’t be
dismayed because you’re tempted. Don’t
be dismayed by it; do you know why?
After you’ve become a Christian and you’ve rocked along a couple of days
in the Christian life and now all of a sudden you experience temptation, you
should give thanks. Do you know
why? That’s the sign that the Father
says you are strong enough now to start walking on your two feet. That’s what it means.
Turn to
Deuteronomy 32:11 a moment; here’s the attitude of the Father to believers;
this is actually toward Israel, the principle remains the same, the same
God. This is the problem of a new
Christian and I’m kind of pausing here in the flow because I want to hit this
problem of the new Christian facing temptation.
The reasons why those temptations come to you is simply because God the
Father has said, believer… we’ll call him Mark, now Mark has got to the point
where he can sustain temptation, now I’m going to open him up to temptations to
see what he can do. See what God the
Father is doing? It’s an act of love so
He’s letting you be exposed to this kind of temptation and you always have the
promise that “no temptation has taken you but such as is common to man,” 1
Corinthians 10:13, God will never allow you to be tempted “above that which you
are able.”
But in Deuteronomy
32:11 there’s a neat analogy between God’s attitude and an eagle. “As an eagle stirs up her nest, flutters over
her young, spreads abroad her wings, takes them, bears them on her wings, [12]
So the LORD alone did lead him,” that’s an attitude that God has. Now what do eagles do? The first phrase, “an eagle stirs up her
nest,” this is when the little babies get up to the point where it’s time to
learn to fly. Do you know what the
mother eagle will do? She will actually
tear up the nest to make them fly. She’s
not very nice, she actually tears up the nest to make those baby eagles learn
to fly, and that’s what it means she “stirs up the nest.” In other words, to make her young fly she’ll
tear up the nest to do it, to make them, if they don’t get out on their own
they’re going to have to because get out of my way, I’m tearing it up. “…flutters over her young,” that’s the way
she has of protecting them and it’s also a way she has of showing them how, she
flutters over her young to show the young how to move their wings. She’s teaching them, instructing them, and
she “spreads abroad her wings and she takes them, and bears them on her
wings.” She actually teaches the baby
eagles to fly by letting the baby eagles get on her wings and then she just
dumps them off in mid air, and then if they don’t make it she comes in under
them, picks them up and gets them on her wing again, and then she’ll dump them
off, until they learn how to fly.
Now let’s look
back on this; does the baby eagle have much choice in that matter? He doesn’t, does he; he hasn’t really got too
much choice, he’s going to learn to fly or he’s going to get hurt; that’s the
way the mother eagle does it. Now in an
analogous way that’s exactly what the Lord’s doing to you if you’re a believer. He wants you to live on your own and He’s
going to bust up the nest wherever it is; you may have your own Christian
cliché and you never show your head outside because you might get polluted or
something and you are not content to get out of the nest. Do you know what God’s going to do? Bust it, kick you out. Do you know what He’s going to do also? He’s given you promises in the Word of God,
that’s the mother showing you how to trust.
He’s given you thousands and thousands of promises in the Word of God,
He’s showing you, here’s what you do, you trust these things when you get in a
jam.
And so what does
he do analogous to the eagle that takes the babies on her wing and then she
drops them and as they start to fall she’ll pick them up; that’s exactly what
God does to us. He’ll take us in some
situation where we have to trust, we have to use the faith technique, and then
as oftentimes we cry Oh God, why did you let this happen to me and all the rest
of it, then he comes in underneath and gets us back on Him, and sure enough
next week, boom, there we are again.
What is He trying to do? He’s not trying to be nasty to you, He’s just
like the mother eagle, He’s trying to get you to fly spiritually. He’s trying to get you to believe. Now that’s why those temptations come. They are allowed by God for that purpose,
that teaching purpose.
Now back to Romans
7, this is Paul’s experience. Romans
7:16-18, “If, then, I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it
is good. [17] Now, then, it is no more I
that do it, but sin that dwells in me.
[18] For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwells no good thing;
for to will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good I find
not.” Does that sound familiar; one of
the most easy passages to identify with is Romans 7. What does he say? Verse 18, “I know that in my flesh dwells no
good thing.” That means it is totally
corrupt. “In my flesh dwells no good
thing, for to will is present with me,” now where did we say volition was, part
of the body or the spirit. We said it
was part of the spirit, didn’t we. So
here you are, the spirit, that’s the thing that’s regenerated, over here. [Tape turns]
…sit there and
blah, blah a couple of times and say Jesus 4,000 times as fast as you can, and
the first thing you know you too are having an experience. Everybody has an experience; Buddhists have
experience all the time not related to Christianity. So therefore, the modern movement is just an
attempt to do away with this thing and in analogy with the eagle, instead of
learning gradually how to fly you’re going to learn just like that, first
time. That isn’t the way God works!
Now in Romans 7 at
the end Paul gets frustrated and here is the deliverance. Romans 7:23, “I see another law in my
members,” now the members means his body, remember what we said about the body,
it’s the instrument for service. “I see
another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind,” why? Because the indwelling Holy Spirit works
first and always remember this, this is one of the most important principles of
the Christian life. The Holy Spirit
always works first on the mind, then the emotions and behavior pattern; never
in reverse… never in reverse, always first the mind, then emotions and behavior
patterns. And so here Paul is experiencing the work of the Holy Spirit in his
mind and it’s giving him the sense of what is right, what is wrong, what is
God’s will. “…and I see another law,”
that means a mechanism, “in my members, warring against the mechanism in my
mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is” WHERE, “in my
members.”
So don’t you see,
the corruption, the poisonous condition is rooted in the physical constitution
of man, if you want to be more precise I think it’s rooted right there, in the
central nervous system of man’s body.
There is something that is physically wrong; now we can’t tell because
we don’t have a normal person to compare it to.
Do you realize that, that no doctor, no physiologist has a normal
specimen. We don’t know what the normal
is. Now if we could have looked at
Adam’s body then we would have a normal specimen to go by to see what the central
nervous system should really be like but we don’t have any so we don’t know
what normal is, all the Bible says is that something’s wrong with our physical
body and the result is in verse 23, it brings the spirit into captivity. So what we have is this reaction; we have
first the reaction of the body which is from sin, our human spirit is here, our
human spirit sins with result—guilt. And
so now we have a problem; now our human spirit is guilty, it’s depraved before
God and so now we’ve got this problem.
Remember what I said the three needs of the human spirit were? Nutrition, you have to know the Word of God;
you have to exercise, the faith technique; and you have to eliminate, that is,
you have to eliminate guilt by confession and restoration, the three needs of
the human spirit.
So what Paul says,
verse 24, “O wretched man that I am! Who
shall deliver me from the body of this death?”
That’s what he’s talking about.
Now let’s look at it. There are
two ways of being delivered from the body of this death? What’s one way, a very obvious way? Kill yourself, that’s one way, but it’s not
God’s way. What’s the other way? The
other way is found in the next and last series, last verse reference this
morning Romans 8:13, here’s the proper way to operate in the Christian life
with the problem of the flesh. I’m just
going through this very, very briefly in the whole area of living against the
flesh. My objective here is not to give
you techniques on combating the sin nature; my objective here is only to
develop an understanding of “flesh.”
Romans 8:13, “For
if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die; but if y, through the Spirit, do
mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.”
Now what that’s talking about is actual death. Let’s take the first part; “if,” suppose,
first class in supposition, “suppose you live according to the flesh,” that is,
here’s your flesh; your flesh is corrupt.
If you want an illustration of corruption of the flesh think back to the
literal picture of Genesis 3. Remember
when God said to Adam, “cursed be the ground,” what did He say to Adam. We live in an agricultural environment and it
should ring a bell. What happened to Adam? What did God say? He pronounced the curse in agricultural
terms. He said you will work with the
sweat of your brow and the land will bring forth thorns and thistles. Now expressed another way that is two
illustrations, a positive and a negative and they carry over, this agricultural
illustration carries over into your Christian life. Positively it means the thorns and thistles
will be there, weeds, corresponding to –R learned behavior patterns that will
be developed in your life, easy. Do you
ever have to try to get weeds? No; so
similarly with the flesh do you ever have to try to get bad habits? No. So
positively you don’t have to try to be bad.
Watch a kid; did you ever teach a kid how to be bad? No, you have to teach them how to be good;
you don’t have to teach them how to be bad.
The weeds, the bad habits grow spontaneously, expression of the
flesh.
Now negatively
what does this mean? It means ever try
to get something to grow when it’s supposed to? Bermuda grass can grow
beautifully in the flower beds but try to get it to grow on the lawn. So it’s the same thing here, you have the
things that are bona fide, we’ll call it fruit, the stuff you want you can’t it
to grow. There’s resistance, in other
words, in the ground, the physical ground.
There is resistance and this would be +R learned behavior patterns,
there’s resistance to developing these.
Now remember how I
started this morning? What did I say
Adam’s name was? Adam, and the word ground is adamah,
and what is cursed? adamah is cursed and Adam
is named for the ground for which he has come; from the dust you have come and
to the dust you’ll return. Dust is
located where? Ground! And so therefore the curse applies to the
ground and man is made of the curse of the ground, our bodies are made of the
chemicals of the dust of the earth, and so when God cursed, in an agricultural
way, the ground, the adamah, that
curse includes your body and mine because our bodies are made from that cursed
earth. So just as the curse of earth
rejects the fruit where you want it, and always stimulates the weeds, so when
the adamah is molded within your body
and becomes a living system you have the same thing morally; you have weeds
versus the fruit problem. It is always
easy to let these come about through your flesh and it’s always hard to get
these started; they can be started but again the analogy. What do you have to do? Is it a once and for all operation to keep
the weeds out of your lawn? Is it a once
and for all operation to make things grow where they’re supposed to? Huh-un, hour after hour after hour, day after
day, week after week, in the sweat of your brow. Have you ever applied the literalness of
Genesis to the Christian life that way?
“In the sweat of your brow” it must be lived. That’s what it’s talking about.
Does the struggle
here, Romans 7:24-25 look anything else but the same thing Adam had had in the
sweat of his brow? Listen to Paul’s
words, “O wretched man that I am! Who
shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Does it sound like it’s all joy
and peace? It does not; there’s a
struggle. [25] “I thank God through
Jesus Christ, our Lord. So, then, with
the mind I serve the law of God; but with the flesh, the law of sin.”
Now Romans
8:13-14, “For if you live after the flesh, you’re going to die;” now this last
phrase, you’re going to die, refers to physical death; it refers to the fact
that if you live after the flesh and you let it have it’s own way, in other
words, weeds come up and so on, the weeds choke out the fruit until your life
is told by four words, –R learned behavior patterns. And down here you might have a few +R learned
behavior patterns. What’s happened? Weeds have choked out the whole thing in your
life. Do you know what the end result of
that is? Physical death. God will remove physically believers from
this scene, torturous ways, torturous ways but He has nice ways of handling
it. He had Saul go out with a very
painful death. And in 1 Corinthians 11
he has another passage where very painfully….
So Romans 8:13 the
last part, “if you through the Spirit,” now here’s what can be done, “if you
through the Spirit, kill the deeds of the body, you shall live.” Now, the Spirit will give us the help; the
Holy Spirit indwells our human spirit, but remember what we said last Sunday
night, we went through the doctrine of kenosis, the doctrine of kenosis—Jesus
Christ gave up voluntarily the use of His divine attributes under certain
conditions during His earthly. That’s
called the doctrine of the kenosis, humiliation. Now, the Holy Spirit does something similar
to that when He indwells us. The Holy
Spirit is a gentleman and gentleman don’t force themselves on individuals. And so we have the Holy Spirit in you but He
sits there, waiting for you to desire Him to go into action. The Holy Spirit is not going to take the
initiative. You must take the initiative
with positive volition. You must say I
desire this to be eradicated from my life and I’m willing to pay the price.
And so Paul says,
“If you, through the Spirit, do mortify” or “kill off the deeds,” now the word
“deeds” comes from the Greek word practice, and that is analogous to my term,
the –R learned behavior patterns. These
are behavior patterns that the flesh picks up and these can be killed off
through the Holy Spirit. Do you know
how? Because you have some habit, you’ve
all experienced this with some habit; you have some habit like this, here it
is, and how is that habit maintained in your life? You have to feed it; you have to constantly
do whatever it is that’s the habit. Now
if you start breaking off and denying the habit what happens to the habit after
a while? It just fades out, and it’s the
same thing here. If you, through the
Holy Spirit, that is through the enabling ministry of the Holy Spirit in your
life reject the temptations of the flesh, the temptations themselves dry off;
you’ll always have new ones, kill off crabgrass you’ll always some other weed
coming in. You’ll always have another
weed so don’t worry about it but you can get rid of them and this is how it is
done. “If you, through the Spirit, do
mortify the deeds of the body, then,” Paul says, “you’re going to live,” and
not just live but live with the eternal life of the Lord Jesus Christ
manifesting itself in every area.
So let’s summarize
the doctrine of the flesh: first, by “flesh” the New Testament refers to
corrupt flesh, not just flesh. Again:
flesh refers to corrupted flesh, that is, it’s not talking just about flesh as
Plato would or the Greek philosophers.
So we use the word here, “dying flesh” to make sure that point gets
across, “dying flesh.”
Two, corruption of
the flesh is pictured by the weeds in Genesis 3; man is Adam, the ground is adamah
and adamah so therefore Adam is cursed. There’s a negative and a positive aspect.
Three, corruption
is physically based, Romans 6:7; Romans 5:12-14. And because the flesh is part of Satan’s
dominion, it was part of the fall; it is cursed in God’s sight. In other words, adamah is cursed, it’s actually the as point three, it is cursed,
it shares the cursing.
The conclusion to
the matter is: can any good thing come out of the flesh; in the Christian life,
things that appeal to the flesh, whether good in themselves or bad, does it
ever produce that’s worthwhile? Huh-un;
nothing that comes out of the flesh is worthwhile, simply because it’s already
cursed before it starts. The only good
to come out of the flesh is what the Holy Spirit sows.
Let’s close with
one further analogy. Can any good thing
come out of the flesh; and let’s ask ourselves, in the course of history was
there any good thing that came out of any female, as far as an offspring or a
child that was good? Only one, Jesus
Christ. And how did He come forth? Because the Holy Spirit impregnated. The Holy Spirit impregnated the woman and out
of that came something that was worthwhile.
The same thing in the Christian life, 1 John 3:9 says that Christ’s
sperm abides in every believer. We are impregnated, every believer in this
sense is a female, the Bible’s analogy of the believer is a female at this
point; now it’s a male in other points but at this points it’s female, 1 John
3:9, Christ sperm has impregnated the believer and the fruit of the Spirit is
produced because like with Mary it can only come if the sperm comes from God’s
side, and the only good thing that come in your
life is that which Christ impregnates your life with and the fruit of
His impregnation is what is good. That
is divine good, everything else is mere human good and corruption.
Shall we bow…..