Clough Proverbs Lesson 15
Christ in the Heart (Maturity)
Today we finish
our introduction to Proverbs. We have
found it necessary before dealing with the book of Proverbs to deal with the
psychological terms used in the book of Proverbs. These terms will largely be misunderstood and
their meaning will be lost on modern readers unless you carefully understand
exactly what it is that the biblical writers meant by such things as heart,
soul, spirit and so on. Before we begin
with the last section of the introduction I’d like to answer some questions
that people have handed on the white cards.
God speaks to Eve
after the fall and says, [quote] “Your sorrow and your conception shall be
multiplied.” Note the word “and.” Does this make population problems a spiritual
one resultant from the fall and not just from man’s whims? Does mean the population explosion problems
would not have been a problem had there not been a fall? First, the text, “Your sorrow and your
conception shall be multiplied.” The
problem with that text is, again it goes back to Hebrew, the Hebrew word for
“and” is a waw, and it’s called a waw conjunctive or the waw disjunctive depending on how it’s
used. You have your Hebrew word and
you’ll have a Hebrew word there. And
this Hebrew waw, it’s a Hebrew
letter, the Hebrew alphabet, but it’s used as a connective or a
disjunctive. And usually in your King
James translations it’s translated with the word “and,” but it can have other
translations. And in this particular
text, judging from the context, the best translation is not “and” but
“even.” In other words, this is an
appositional use of “and” so that what God is saying: your sorrow will be
increased, namely that associated with your childbirth. So this does not necessarily teach that over
population comes from the fall.
But over
population problems do in a result come from the fall by another route and that
is that over population generally follows from a carrier of stewardship of
resources. Over population in many areas
of the world today does not come because people are having too many
children. It comes because people are
not wisely using their natural resources available. In many areas of the world people are
starving to death, supposedly because of over population and yet if you analyze
these areas they would have been starving to death if there had been one person
per square mile because they are sloppy and inefficient in their use and
utilization of natural resources. I’m
not saying this is always the problem of over population but much of over
population comes from man’s sinful use of his environment and man’s sinful set
of priorities that he has in his life.
The next question
is: What in man is fallen? Is only the
body fallen and the spirit unaffected?
Is the soul corrupted only because the body is cursed? About your battery analogy (which I used last
time) where is the moral element. It
rather looks like some mechanistic malfunction in man has led to sin. How can God become righteously angry over
something like this? In man all things
are fallen, both his spirit and his body.
But the problem is the consequences of sin in each are different. The consequences of sin through his spirit is
guilt. The consequences of sin in the
body is death, corruption and son on. So
whereas we’re talking about death as a result of the fall in the body, please
understand that guilt is a result of the fall in the spirit, so that man is
guilty by his own choice. So we do hold
to the doctrine of total depravity, namely that all of man is fallen.
The third
question: If Acts records errors, how
can we use Acts 20:28 to support the doctrine of the deity of Christ? Isn’t it possible that Paul was in error? This comes, I think, from a misunderstanding
of my remarks last week about the book of Acts.
The book of Acts is a historical book.
The book of Acts was not meant to teach doctrine. The purpose of the book of Acts is given in
the first three verses of the book of Acts, that is, it is an apologetic for
the historical basis of Christianity.
But as a history book the book of Acts has to be read under the control
of the epistles. This is what is wrong
with a lot of charismatic teaching that is about today and that is these people
just plow into Acts and pull out something in a few verses in chapter 2 and a
few more verses in chapter 10 and then out of this they develop systematic
theology. This is wrong; the book of
Acts, basically, records history as any Old Testament book does. Now you can get truth out of these history
books if you interpret the book in its own framework. For example, the book of Genesis can easily
be interpreted within the framework of the man who wrote Genesis. 1 and 2 Kings can easily be interpreted
within the framework of Deuteronomy which was the scope of the writer of 1 and
2 Kings. And so similarly Acts can be
interpreted on the basis of Luke’s other writings, his Gospel, and also Paul’s
epistles. So we are able to get doctrine
out of Acts, but carefully, not promiscuously.
And it just turns out that Acts 20:28 message with other Pauline
teachings, we know he was not off base, there was a particularly strong
statement of the truth of the crucifixion.
That concludes the
questions, now let’s go to Romans 1 and we will finish our introduction to that
next week, finally, we will begin the book of Proverbs. The last time we were in the introduction to
Proverbs we dealt with what we called “Christ in the heart.” This was a picture of Christian
maturity. As such it revolves around
certain processes. The process called
Christ in the heart is not something that occurs all over the board. It is something that occurs in certain areas
of your life; you may mature faster than other areas of your life and so on.
Christ in the
heart is the Christian problem of maturity and this has five steps; these five
steps I did not invent, they are there in the Scriptures. The first one is positive volition; Christian
maturity flows from Christian obedience.
The next thing that results after we begin to move for the Lord is that
the Holy Spirit gives light to our hearts, that’s described in Ephesians
1:17-18, so that Paul prays that we might be given a spirit of wisdom and
revelation in the knowledge of Jesus Christ.
Now this is not some mystical thing, you will not see the message
written on the wall, you will not see it in flashing lights. The enlightening ministry of the Holy Spirit
is simply to open your eyes to the content of what is now in the canon of
Scripture. You can read the Bible and
read it and read it and read it and not see certain things, and then suddenly
some day you come to it and there it is, things you never saw before. Did someone just add a few words? No, it’s not that at all, it’s simply that
the Word of God has been seen.
The third step is,
after the enlightening ministry of the Holy Spirit, the divine viewpoint
framework. And this is a product of the
enlightening ministry of the Spirit.
This means that gradually, and this takes time, gradually you will
develop in the mentality of your soul an overview of what God’s plan is like,
including history and so on. And these
will be integrated in a framework and when this framework finally begins to
build, then you can be utilizing in a greater and easier fashion the faith
technique. Prayer will become
meaningful; confession will become meaningful; and they will not be some
religious exercises. They will not be
some emotional exercises. They will be
something that flows out of your abiding confidence in this truth. In other words, you will become convinced
that this is true; you must become convinced that something is true before you
can believe it. This rah-rah business
that floats around Christian circles where you say I believe, I believe, I
believe, I believe and go through some sort of religious ceremony and come out
the end thinking that you believe, is a bunch of junk; it is not biblical. In the Bible you are always challenged to use
your mind first and after you have used your mind and ascertained it’s the
truth, then you can believe it.
Then the fourth
step we said in Christ in the heart is the fact that you begin to experience
the love of God. This love is
experienced two ways. It is experienced
both in your individual life and in your corporate life as a believer. This is why in Ephesians 3:18 it speaks of
the fact that God may give you a comprehension of the height, and the breadth
and the depth of His plan which is the body of Christ. And this shows that we perceive the love of
God as the love of God shows up in His dealings with us and in His dealings
with other believers. So this will be an
experiential perception of the love of God.
Please notice
something very, very important about this sequence, something that is totally
neglected today and that is people always want to drop the third step; they
always want to move out to some area of obedience, I vow to do this, I vow to
do that, I dedicate my life to go to the mission field 20 years from now and
all the rest of it and they go through this religious ritual and sooner or later
they expect God to somehow mystically make Himself known to them, strike a tree
with lightening or something, and then out of this they’re going to have this
spooky, mystical emotional concept of the love of God. That is wrong. You cannot see the love of God operating in
your life or anyone else’s life until you have some sort of a grid that you can
use to judge other people and judge yourself.
You must have some sort of a set of standards to evaluate life. And when you have this set of standards, the
divine viewpoint framework, then you can love God.
Then finally we
come to the last thing, which is fulfillment.
Ephesians says that you might be filled with all the fullness of God.
That’s the fifth and final step. And
this step means that you have a maximum fulfillment in your life which comes
from a very definite confidence that you are in the center of God’s will this
moment. It comes from knowing that you
have a role to play in the plan of God for the universe and that you are
significant and what you do is significant, and that you can actually produce
fruit that will remain for all eternity. All the froth of life that lasts a few
minutes is one thing, but the things that you do in the power of the Holy
Spirit that will last forever is another thing.
And these things are described as the fulfillment. So that is Christ in the heart.
Now today, in our
last section of the introduction to Proverbs we come to the very opposite of
Christ in the heart, chaos in the heart.
And today if you are on positive volition, if you are in fellowship you
are moving toward Christ in the heart.
However, today if you are on negative volition your mind is on other
things right now, other than the Word of God, then you are headed in another
direction in certain areas of your life, chaos.
So what we’re going to describe this morning is chaos in the heart; how
this operates and how you can tell when it’s there.
The passage that
we are going to study is Romans
First Romans 1:21;
now this describes those who are heathen in the Scripture. By definition “heathen” as I used the word
refers to people who have never heard the gospel of Christ, nevertheless, the
processes described therein apply to believers also. Verse 21, “Because that when they knew God,
they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their
imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” The important thing to see
that these people knew God. They would
be analogous to a believer today who has some understanding of the Word of God
but he goes negative toward that understanding.
He rejects that understanding and the form that his rejection takes is
described here as failing to give thanks.
This is primarily, if you want a thing to check your own life, your own
heart, this primarily is one of the key indicators of your spiritual state right
now. How easily does thanksgiving come? Now you just measure that in your own life
and that will measure for you pretty well where you stand spiritually right
now. And the sign of negative volition
is that thanksgiving comes extremely hard, for many reasons which we can’t get
into this morning. But thanksgiving will
come easily on positive volition, very, very difficult or not at all with
negative volition.
So these people,
“when they knew God they did not glorify Him as God, and neither were
thankful,” but then it describes something else. It says “their foolish heart was
darkened.” Now these two verses, “they
glorified Him not, neither were thankful, but became vain in their
imaginations,” describe the first and second steps of chaos in the heart. These are precisely opposite to the steps of
Christ in the heart. Remember Christ in
the heart started off with positive volition, the result was that the Holy
Spirit would open our eyes to more of God’s truth. Here negative volition sets off darkness of
the soul, or darkness of the heart and this is described by this phrase, “their
foolish heart was darkened.” And the
word “darkened” is associated with the word foolish. And this word “foolish” in the original
languages is related to a word that means to perceive morally.
So this darkening
is a darkening of your moral senses, primarily.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t add two and two and get four just as fast
before as after. Your intellectual
processes may not be disturbed, at least at this level. But your moral judgments will be and
therefore going back to see how we are made and taking this in line with our
conscience, we find that the darkening has to do with the conscience. That is the primary area, not the mind at
this point. “Their foolish heart was
darkened,” foolish draws attention to the fact their heart that has difficulty
perceiving moral issues; in other words, there’s something wrong with the
conscience and this is the first thing that goes kafooey on negative volition,
is that your conscience begins to be suppressed.
If you’ll turn to
Ephesians 4:18 you’ll see a very parallel passage, except in Ephesians 4:18
we’re in the middle of a passage of Scripture that has to be taken in a
different way than the verses are numbered.
This sentence starts in verse 17 and proceeds through verse 19, but
syntactically and on logical grounds it should start in verse 18, move to verse
17 and then move to verse 19. That’s the
grammatical order if you want to diagram the sentence you’ll see that logically
the sentence begins at verse 18. Now
let’s look at verse 18, “Having the understanding darkened, being alienated
from the life of God through the ignorance that is them, because of the
blindness of their heart.” Now the word
“blindness” actually is a word that describes insensitivity of their
heart. And it is preceded with the word
“because.” So this describes the cause
of what is going to happen. The cause of
chaos in the soul and the mind is a result of this status, insensitivity, which
means the fact that again the conscience is having a problem; the conscience is
being rejected. And so we have a whole
process initiated that affects both the mentality of the soul and the emotions
of the soul.
Let’s look at
this; first of all, let’s look at how it effects the mind, how it affects this
part of the soul and then we’ll describe how it affects the emotions of the
soul. Both these areas are immediately
affected when this darkness sets in.
This is the Bible’s analogy, or the Bible’s way of describing what I
tried to describe the very first Sunday in this introduction. I remember all the uproar it caused when I
made the statement there’s no such thing as mental illness. And what I meant was that apart from organic
and chemical causes in the brain, there is no such thing in the Bible as mental
illness. What we describe as mental
illness is not illness at all if it is not caused by organic causes. What we describe by mental illness basically
is the result of the blackout of the soul.
And I will tell you now some of the results of blackout of the soul and
you compare them to people that you think are mentally ill. Now this is not, as it were, a tough message
for man; it sounds gruesome at first to say oh, you’re not pitying these poor
people with all their mental illness.
Well, we do pity them, but it’s not pitying somebody if you think you’re
going to help them to tell them, listen your trouble, friend, is that you have
a mental illness and its caused by your environment and so on, and you can’t do
anything about it. Is that a real
message of hope for somebody struggling with some mental problem? That’s not a message of hope; that’s a
message of doom and this is why people don’t get better under psychotherapy and
other systems.
As a counselor, as
a professional counselor, I encounter more people who have been to some
psychiatrist for this and all they’ve gotten is a bunch of pills, when
basically after counseling with them their problem is a spiritual one and it is
solved, sometimes within minutes by discussing the problem of guilt, by taking
them back to the standards of the Word, discussing grace, discussing salvation
in Christ and so forth. And yet all the
time it was somebody had a mental problem and they were given tranquilizers and
everything else. Now that’s ridiculous;
God never intended people live this way.
The proof of it is that He commands mental health in the New Testament,
the love, the joy, the peace, the patience, the long-suffering and all this,
aren’t they marks of mental stability. And when God gives us a command doesn’t
He always give us the means of attaining that command. So therefore if God commands mental stability
obviously God must provide the means for it.
So mental illness largely in our day is a result of a rejection of Bible
doctrine; it is a result of these processes that I am describing as blackout in
the soul. If you carefully read
Thursday’s Avalanche Journal you
notice a review that I had early quoted, Dr. Szasz, a New York psychiatrist,
and you remember what one of his books was: The
Myth of Mental Illness. And his
whole point is as a professional practicing psychiatrist he sees time and time
and time again when people come to him wanting an excuse to go around their
responsibility. He had many wonderful
things to say; now we don’t totally agree with his position but Dr. Szasz among
psychiatrists comes very close to the bibliecal position at this point.
Let’s look at some
of these processes; once our mind begins to fight our conscience we have a
series of defense mechanisms set in.
Here’s where your background in this introduction is going to pay off;
we haven’t got time to review the conscience but you will recall when we
discussed the conscience and God’s Word we said something very important about
it, and that was that it can’t be destroyed.
The conscience, according to Proverbs 20:27, is a [can’t understand
word] of the Lord that continues to monitor you; you are under continual
surveillance, I am under continual surveillance; every thought, every activity
is constantly monitored by the conscience and you can’t shut off the
conscience; there is no way you can shut off the conscience. So therefore, how are you going to deal with
it?
Here you are on
negative volition, and you don’t want to listen to the condemnation of the
conscience; you don’t want to listen to that, that’s the last thing on earth
you want to hear. And so therefore God
has given you means of defending yourself against your own conscience. Now this is very similar to fainting
physically. In fact Hebrews 12 calls it
mind fainting, or soul fainting. The
reason why you faint physically is because you can’t handle the pain load and
God has very graciously endowed your body with a mechanism so that you can cope
with pain and when the pain gets too great you faint. Now in a very similar way God has endowed
with ways of coping with moral pain. And
these mechanisms go automatically into operation when you go on negative
volition and your conscience begins to condemn you. We call these defense mechanisms. And so the mind begins to erect a perimeter
about itself to keep the conscience away, and we call that progressive
insensitivity or scar tissue of the soul, whatever term you’d like. But this is what happens; the conscience
begins to become cut off from the mind.
Now I have listed
five defense mechanisms here, and if you’ve studied psychology you can come up
with a lot more, these are only meant to be a sample of some of the defense
mechanisms that the mind sets up in antagonism to the conscience. When you go on negative volition what happens
is you create a war between your mind and conscience. You actually become divided within yourself
and you actually have a large scale internal conflict going on, and this is
what robs you of your peace, which robs you of your stability, which makes you
upset which causes you to do all sorts of crazy things. So let’s look at some of these defense
mechanisms to see if you can recognize them operating in your own life. To some degree we use these throughout our
life to varying degrees because we’re all this side of Eden. However, when these mechanisms begin to be
over used then they become dangerous.
Let’s look at the
first one; the first one is fantasy. I’m
going to make a little acrostic here to make it easy to remember. The first defense mechanism is fantasy;
because your real situation encounters condemnation from your conscience you
say I want to escape from my real situation and so you sit down there when
you’re supposed to be studying, or you sit down there when you’re supposed to
be cooking a meal or you sit down there when you’re supposed to be on the job
and you’re living in your own little fantasy world. And you can create all sorts of things and so
this becomes a system or an out. And what is it an out from? It is an out from your own conscience. You create a world of fantasy and you begin
to live in it. Now that’s all right,
most of us do this every once in a while but when you start doing this all the
time you’ve got problems; this leads to neurosis and psychosis and so
forth. So this is one area.
Then we have a
second defense mechanism; all of you I’m sure are very familiar with this one,
this is rationalization. This is when
the mind says the conscience, oh conscience you really don’t mean it, you see
it’s this way. So rationalization is
when your mind talks back to your conscience and you try and build a wonderful story, your
conscience has got it all wrong, this isn’t the way it is, this is the way it
was and so your mind begins to crank out this wonderful little tale of how it
(quote) “really was.” And this is an
attempt by your mind to shut up your conscience. That’s the second gimmick that can be used.
A third gimmick
that become very serious, leading to schizophrenia and other ills is isolation;
that is when you can’t stand your own conscience but somehow have successfully
dealt with it, but now you’re in trouble because out here are other people and
they have a conscience, so here you’re encountering the problem of conscience
in other people and you don’t want to live before the conscience of other
people so what happens? You begin to
withdraw from then, and you can invent all sorts of excuses: so and so doesn’t
like me. So what if so and so doesn’t
like you, tough; find out why they don’t or if the want to be a snot about it
forget it, relax. But isolation means so
and so doesn’t like me so I am going to isolate myself from so and so. So and so belongs to such and such a club and
I don’t like so and so so I’m not going to go to their meetings any more, I’ll
show them. And so and so goes to such
and such a church, we’ll I’ll show him, I won’t show up. This combination of self-pity and operation
isolation, same thing. The people on the
dorm floor don’t like you so I’ll sit in my room all day with the lights out
and the door locked. This is isolation,
and of course it’s an attempt to back off an area where you’re going to be
interrogated by other people’s conscience.
You don’t have to use all these gimmicks; 1 John 1:9 is the way to solve
the problem. Get right with the Lord,
then you know you’re right with your conscience and so you’re clear. But instead of using that, people on negative
volition will not use 1 John 1:9, they will not use confession and since they
reject grace they have to come out with some sort of works. You can look on these defense mechanism, this
is another system; these are systems of salvation by works. In another way they are your attempt by works
to resolve your problem. You are trying
to do the doing here instead of relying upon God’s grace to remove the guilt.
Now we have
another defense mechanism and this is depression; this is when you have
something in your life, you know it’s wrong, your conscience tells you it’s
wrong but every time it comes to you attention you suppress it, and you get a
lot of garbage collected in your unconscious mind. It’s like having garbage around the city of
Lubbock for the last month, it’s never collected. Dogs are having a wonderful time on every
street; all you have to drive out in your car at 7:00 o’clock and you can see
what has been the feast for the canine corps the night before. We have a garbage problem and this
suppression leads to this; suppression leads to a garbage problem in your
unconscious mind and this leaks out in dreams and so on and various other ways
that psychologists have discovered.
And finally, we’ll
just list one more, then you can remember the acrostic [?] if that means
anything to you, projection; what is projection? Projection is blaming somebody else for it;
oh, that’s not my fault, it’s hers. You
always hear this in marriage counseling; you talk to the man first, it’s the
wife’s fault; if you talk to the wife first it’s always the man’s fault. So you bring them together and it’s both
their faults. And if you’re luck and
don’t get a fist fight started you can usually work with it.
So here we have
these defense mechanism that every one of us has. And you can tell your own spirituality by how
frequent these things occur in your own life.
You might examine your life prayerfully and ask yourself, is there some
area in my life where I see these things constantly occurring over and over
again. And if you see this you might ask
yourself, now what is it that’s bugging me, where is my conscience bothering
me. And you can pray and ask the Father, Father, show me where it is my
conscience is bothering me on this.
Let’s get some clarification, so you can deal with the problem instead
of fooling around with this technique.
This just shows what happens to your mind; your mind begins to fight
your conscience. But that’s not all that
happens under blackout of the heart and blackout of the soul. Something else begins to happen too, as if
this isn’t enough.
We showed earlier
how your emotions actually in the Bible are said to follow your mind. They act as a flywheel, your mind initiates
something, your emotions respond and your emotions then activate your body to
do something. They activate your mind to
give you energy to think with and to act with.
So your emotions are a preparation device; your emotions can be very
wonderful and I’m sorry if some of you walked out of here interpreting my
remarks against emotions as saying that we don’t’ believe in emotions; of
course we believe in emotions, we just believe in allowing emotions to have
their proper role which is not leadership.
You cannot be lead by your emotions.
And this is what is happening by the score in Christian circles, these
so-called spiritual life groups where we all get together and hold hands and
pray and do whatever else you do in sensitivity groups and so forth. And this thing is based on emotions and the
proof of it is I have interviewed people that have been in them, and when you
talk to these people that have been in these groups they are people that can’t
make a decision if their life depended on it, they’ve got to run back to their
little group so they can get an emotional charge. And by that time they’ve forgotten what the
issue was. So here we have people being
led by their emotions. We have leaders
running for high office in this country that are led by their emotions. Something doesn’t go right so they cry about
it, this kind of thing. And these are
men that are actually being led by their emotions and it shows you what a
horrible state we are in as a national entity today when we have leaders that
can’t even be led by their minds but have to be led around by their
emotions.
Let me tell you
the disaster that happens when believers are led by their emotions and not by their
minds. Turn to Romans 16:17, here we
have a classic statement on the emotions and the blackout of the heart
conditions. This shows you what happens
when the mind fights the conscience and the mind is so busy fighting the
conscience that the emotions begin to get haywire and they now begin to call
the mind to account, out of all this warfare you see with the conscience,
emotions are triggered off and the emotions begin to say let’s do something,
let’s do something, lets do something, I’ve got this feeling, I’ve got to
discharge this feeling. And so the
emotions begin to have some very serious effects and in Romans 16:17-18 Paul
deals with one of these. It happened in
the historic Roman church; this is not some theory, this is actually what
happened in early Christianity.
“I beseech you,
brethren,” that’s a strong command, he says I want you to watch this statement,
watch it in your Christians groups he says, it’s “brethren,” it’s addressed to
all believers, and it means that every believer has the responsibility to watch
his local Christian group or fellowship for this kind of thin. “I beseech you, brethren, mark them who cause
divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned,” that
means people who are spreading heresies and they can be apparently innocuous
sounding heresies like a post salvation baptism of the Holy Ghost or they can
be serious heresies such as denying the deity of Christ or something like
that. “… and avoid them,” verse 17. I want you to just take a hard look at that
verse in case some of you think New Testament Christianity is this goofy thing
where everybody is welcome including Satan himself into the brotherhood. Verse
17 obviously shows you that is not the case and then in verse 18 he goes in
back of these people to show you why they are heretics. And if you can study some of the writings of
the great heretical thinkers of our time, if you study their biographies you’ll
see this rule of verse 18 applies to their lives, I’ve seen this over and over
again.
Verse 18, “For
they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ but they serve their own
stomach,” and here is one of those cases in Scripture where emotions are spoken
of through the medium of a physical organ in the body. There are three basic organs in the body that
refer somehow to emotions. One is
kidneys, translated reins in the King James Bible, which doesn’t mean kidneys,
it means the adrenal glands; the second word is gut or bowels, and it refers to
the whole abdominal area, and the third word is the one used here, the
belly. Whenever you see these words used
in either the Old Testament or New Testament you are looking at a description
of emotion. The phenomenon of ulcers of
the stomach was nothing new with these people of the New Testament. They knew that if your emotions got out of
order where do you feel it? You feel it
right here. And this is a description of
it; it is a phenomenal description of emotions.
So he says these people serve their emotions, in other words, they get
this feeling and they have to discharge this feeling so they go out and do some
screwy thing. Now why are they doing
that? Because they are not thinking,
they are allowing themselves to be led by their emotions. And this is the mark of a heretic; whenever
you find a heretic it’s always some emotional issue. They don’t believe in Jesus Christ. Why?
Because when I went to church stepped on my toe and there are hypocrites
in the church and something else equally profound. And then if you ask them, why do you believe
this or why do you believe that, well, something happened to me when I was a
little kid and I can’t accept this problem of evil and so on. Largely it is a problem of emotion; these
people are led by their emotions.
Now I’ll show you
another result, a sad result of allowing your emotions to rule and that’s found
in 2 Corinthians 6:12. Again, the Bible is not against emotions, it’s not
against emotions! Philippians 4 deals
with the emotions in a believer’s life; emotions have a wonderful role to play in
your life, just don’t let them get out of control. In 2 Corinthians 6:12, Paul is talking to the
Corinthian believers and he says these people have a problem. Now the Corinthians had lots of problems,
between the Cretans and the Corinthians they had more problems than most
churches combined today. These two
churches were fantastic in the number of problems they had; they had
fornication in the pews and everything else going on in Corinth and Crete; it
was fantastic the things that were going on there, things what would make a
very permissive society today turn white was going on at Corinth.
Now at Corinth
they were having another problem associated with all this and that was they
were getting turned off to the Word of God.
They were having a problem responding to Paul. Now here is an emotional problem of a reverse
sort. Here the problem is their emotions
are killed off and are reorienting them.
So here’s the Word and we’ll put Paul after that word because Paul is
the Word as far as Corinth is concerned, and they are having problems
responding to him. And this shows you,
by the way, you need emotions; you can’t respond to something without your
emotions; you emotions are very definitely needed but here their emotions were
killing their response and Paul notes this in verse 12, “you are not straitened
in us,” now the word “straitened” means to make tense, they weren’t relaxed,
they couldn’t relax with Paul; they couldn’t respond to him graciously, they
couldn’t respond to what he taught. And
he says you’re all tense, you all get uppity every time around you teaching the
Word; what’s the matter with you people.
And he says I’ll tell you one thing, it’s not because “in us,” now “in
us” is a locative and it’s by means of; he says it’s not something we’ve done,
it’s not us that’s the problem, it’s you that’s the problem and then he adds
the last of verse 12, “you are made tense by your own bowels,” again a
phenomenological description of emotions.
And he says here you have believers, these aren’t unbelievers, these are
believers who have gone negative toward Christ, who have rejected His Words,
and therefore they’re having problem with blackout of the soul. So we’re still at this second step of chaos
in the heart, negative volition and now we have darkness happening; the
darkness affects the mind, the darkness affects the emotions and you have all
sorts of problems begin here.
Now let’s go back
to Ephesians 4:18 for the third step.
The third step is again analogous to the third step under Christ in the
heart. Remember Christ in the
heart? Positive volition, light and then
the third step was as a result of this you have the production of a divine
viewpoint framework in the mentality of the soul. Now in Ephesians 4 the precise reverse is
observed because now in verse 17, remember verse 17 follows verse 18, not vise
versa, verse 18 logically first, then verse 17, in verse 17 we have “in the
vanity of their mind.” Now the word
“vanity” is mataiotes in the Greek,
which is the word which means vapor; it is a word that is traditionally used
throughout Scripture to refer to human viewpoint. If you an exposition of that there’s one
whole book dedicated just to you in God’s word and that book is called the book
of Ecclesiastes. That is a complete
description of human viewpoint.
But the next thing
that begins to develop in your mind is you begin to suck in human viewpoint by
the ton. And so as a result of negative
volition, darkening of the soul, the mind fighting the conscience and now the
mind has no criteria of truth and so the mind begins to suck in human
viewpoint. You see, the reason you can
tell divine viewpoint from human viewpoint is that only divine viewpoint meets
the test of your conscience. But if your
conscience has been wiped out or your conscience is being suppressed, then
you’re a sucker, then you absorb anything that comes along and the first thing
to come along will be human viewpoint or this, “the vanity in their mind.” And vanity would take various forms, it would
take forms of human viewpoint that you would pick up in the academic world,
there’s be human viewpoint you pick up through the media, human viewpoint you
pick up through writers, TV and so on.
So this is the
third step and again opposite to divine viewpoint the result this is going to
have is all of a sudden you’re going to have doubts. You’re going to begin doubting things that
you never had trouble with before. Now
there’s one little footnote I want to put in here and that is be careful, there
is such a thing as legitimate doubt which comes as a result of growth. When you
begin to grow God will face your life with various facts you haven’t seen
before and you will become aware of these issues and you will begin to think
about them. But that doubt is different
than this doubt because when you face those issues the doubt is over the
specifics, not the general. In other
words, you may have a doubt about this little detail, or you have a doubt about
this little detail, what God wants you to do here, what God wants you to do
there, but your doubt doesn’t extend upward to your very relationship with…
[Tape turns]
Romans 1:23, “And
changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to
corruptible man, and birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.” Now what’s going on in verse 23? There is the fourth step beginning to
operate. And it’s hatred toward the
character of God, that distorts His character.
And so here you begin to hate, you begin to resent God Himself, and this
creeps into your life and this step, the fourth begins to introduce an ugliness
into your experience. It begins to
introduce something that is very displeasing, very ugly, sour [can’t understand
word] concept. Now you begin to resent
God for allowing this to happen to you; you begin to resent Him for this, you
resent Him for that, you resent Him for this, and everywhere in your life you
find something that’s displeasing to you you resent God and so what you’re
doing in effect is remapping the character of God. You’re making Him into some sort of grouch,
some sort of a boogey man or something, sitting in heaven and out of all the
billions of people on the earth God is so [can’t understand word] that He’s
just reaching down and bullying you. He
has a personal vendetta against you; He’s bullying you and so on. So you begin to experience hatred and sooner
or later what happens? It spills over
into your Christian with other people, you begin to resent people, you begin
[can’t understand phrase], this kind of thing.
Those miserable clods that God, He is a miserable God and he made
miserable clods and so on, this kind of reasoning type thing. So this hatred begins to spill over into your
personal relationships and these begin to sour.
This was shown by idolatry in the ancient world.
Now verse 24 the
final and fifth step. This corresponds
again with the fifth step over here where you have total fulfillment under
Christ in heart. Here you have an
experience of the wrath of God and total frustration. Instead of fulfillment you have frustration
here, because in verse 24 God begins to do certain things. He says, “Wherefore, God also gave them up to
uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies
between themselves.” Verse 26, “God gave them up unto vile affections….” Verse 28, “And even as they did not like to
retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over,” you see the deliverance;
there are three deliverances there and Paul identifies these in this chapter
with the wrath of God. This is what that
strange little phrase means in verse 18 of this chapter.
In verse 18 it
says, “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness,” some
people, when they read Romans, thing that wrath mentioned in verse 18 is the
second judgment, the Second Coming of Christ.
That is not what wrath means there because the wrath in verse 18 is
denoted by a present tense; that means right now when we experience the wrath
of God. Now that can’t be the future
judgment, so the wrath of verse 18 is what is described in verse 24 and
following. The wrath of God can be
experienced today in your private and personal life. It can be experienced corporately as a
nation, as a national entity. We’ll get to that in a moment but turn to
Ephesians 1 for the parallel.
The same step is
outlined in Ephesians 4:19, “Who being past feeling, have given themselves over
unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.” Now “being past feeling” is a perfect
participle which means that the step has been reached and now we are looking at
the result of that step. “Who being past feeling” means the conscience has just
been torpedoed so to speak by these defense mechanisms, and so they have given
themselves unto lasciviousness, “to work all uncleanness with greediness.” Now this means… the word “work” means to work
and plan as a business endeavor. So that
word [can’t understand word] in your King James [can’t understand word] in
verse 19 is more than just do; it doesn’t mean just do this, it means this
becomes the maddening drive behind your own experience. That’s what verse 19 is talking about. Pleasure seeking, trying to seek something
that will fill the void that has been left by your carnality. And you’ll try this, try that, try something
else, it can be booze, it can be drugs, it can be anything, it can be
materialism lust, I need three cars in my two car garage. I’ve got one boat now I need two boats. I have a $30,000 home so now I need a $40,000
home. I’ve got one business, now I need
two businesses. Now there’s nothing with
production ,but done as unto the Lord.
And materialism lust is one way people seek to fill their hearts with
this void that has been left by their carnality.
Now let’s go back
to Romans 1 and see if this really is the case.
Over and over again when I read God’s Word, particular in the area of
morals, and in particular today, I always like to ask myself, can I show along
with the teaching of the Word something in every day experience that confirms
the Word of God. In other words, doesn’t
it make sense to you that if God, the Creator, has said don’t do such and such
and do such and such, that somewhere out in your everyday experience this ought
to be confirmed. Let me give you an
example. In the Old Testament God told
the saints to go out, wash their hands before meals, and put their dirty
clothes out in the sun. Now why do you
suppose He told them to do that?
Certainly in Moses day they had no idea of germs; they had no idea of
ultraviolet rays from the sun sterilizing things, none of that process was
known. And can’t you just see and hear
some of the Old Testament saints gripe, why do we have to wash our hands, just
like little kids, why do I have to wash my hands; they’re reasonably clean, as
the mud drips off on the floor. Or can’t
you just imagine them fussing about putting their clothes, if I put my clothes
out in the sun all their colors are going to get bleached, it’ll ruin my good
dress putting it out in the sun like that, that’s stupid. Then they had
sanitary precautions, all the latrines had to be on the outside of the camp,
and you can imagine people fussing about that, what do I have to walk all the
way outside the camp for. Now again,
nobody in the ancient world had a knowledge of germs but isn’t it strange that
God told them just do it, never mind why, just do it. Well, it turns out, some 30 centuries later
that we understand why.
Now my point is
this; there are moral demands made upon us in God’s Word for which even today
we don’t have good sound “becauses.” For
example, the Bible warns us here and obviously in Romans 1 against the problem
of homosexuality. In other passages it
relates and warns us against the problems of promiscuity. Now is God just being a meanie and saying
don’t do this because He likes to say this.
No! I firmly believe that as more
and more facts are uncovered we’re going to discover why, just like in the Old
Testament He told them not to do this because now as we have found out there
was good and sufficient reasons for it.
So similarly we will find out someday there are good and sufficient
reasons for these commands. And recently
I’ve run across several papers of scientific research that indicate there are
reasons behind these warnings against homosexuality and warnings against promiscuity.
One paper in the New England Journal of Medicine,
November 18, 1971 was a study on the problem of homosexuality. Dr. [can’t understand name] took a sample of
homosexuals and he studied them by their activity. In other words, he categorized them, I don’t
know the exact categorization, but he categorized them on the basis of
increasing activity. The more homosexual
they were they more he put them in the high numbered classes; so he grouped
these volunteers for his study. The next
part of the study was done to measure the male hormone; these were all male
homosexuals and he began to measure the male hormone in each one as a function
of their homosexual activity. And when
he got through plotting the curve, this would be the normal, the average male
hormone, testosterone, the testosterone and the female level of testosterone is
down here, it may shock some of you to realize that each of us, no matter what
sex we have, basically have some chemicals of the other one. And so the female level of testosterone is
about here; the male level of testosterone is about there. Now when he plotted his work he found
something like this; he began to have a curve that looked like this, and he
wound up the study with this statement; page 1173, “There must be speculation
that the depressed [can’t understand word] testosterone levels could be the
secondary results of a primary homosexual [can’t understand word] orientation.”
Now translated, what Dr. [?] was saying by his study is that it appears that
the body itself changes to accommodate aberrant behavior and once it changes it
becomes desperately difficult to repair.
So it’s this wrath
of God. Let’s compare this with Romans
1:26 and read verse 26 in the light of this finding. “For this cause God gave them up unto vile
affections; for even their women did change the natural use for that which is
against nature; [27] And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the
woman, burned in their lust one toward another, men with men working that which
is unseemly,” and notice the last phrase of verse 27, “and receiving in
themselves that recompense of their error which was meet [fitting].” Now that “receiving in themselves” can’t be
the judgment because that is a present tense so whatever is received in verse
27 cannot be judgment, because if these people were believers they wouldn’t
judge face judgment anyway, in this area; they’d face evaluation but not the
great white throne judgment. But
regardless of whether believer or unbeliever, the point still remains that that
recompense in verse 27 can’t refer to a future judgment of God. It must refer to something present. And Dr. [?] study would support it, namely
that the hormones of the body itself begin to change, and of course once the
hormones change then that just adds to the desire. And so you see the person begins to damn
himself on the basis of their own behavior.
But how different
from the usual view; today man is viewed as just sort of a mechanism of nature,
it’s a chemical machine, and yet the Bible says no, no, no, no, no, no, it’s
not that at all. Your body is a machine
but you’re the operator. And when you
operate your machine in a certain way the machine will have certain
consequences happen to it and here it is.
Another
illustration, a recent paper done in the area of promiscuity, and again I say
if research continues you’ll see more and more of this happen just like we
finally found out why God said certain things in the Old Testament. A paper in the Journal [can’t understand
word] by Dr. Abraham Roberts, June, 1970 Vol. 27, No. 6, pages 1493-1496. The article was entitled [can’t understand
words] Susceptible Organs. [Tape
difficult to hear, phrases or words may be missing]. His article basically is concerned with the
problem of is there a virus behind cancer of the sex glands. And his point is that there is. But … doesn’t bother us for reasons for my
illustration this morning. What I am
interested in is one remark that Dr. Roberts make on page 1493 of this journal,
in which he points out, and what he’s talking about here is you have a man and
a wife and they are monogamous. The idea
is that they live in a monogamous relationship, so the sexual relationship is
confined to just them. Now Roberts
points out an interesting thing; coming into the marriage one of those partners
can carry either the germ of gonorrhea or the virus [can’t understand word]
hypothesized virus that he speaks of, and if the sex relations are confined
between that one couple an amazing thing happens; the other one develops
immunity to it. But it doesn’t happen
under promiscuous relationships. If a
person has sexual relations with many people, their body never develops
immunity to the various viruses they encounter.
And 30 or 40 years later he finds these cropping out as cancer. And so there is a long term virus thing that
stays in the body. But his point is what
is it, and he’s interested, not in the sense of the moral argument, he’s interested
in has he uncovered a mechanism a defense against cancer.
So his paper is
written for another purpose. But I’m
saying look at one of his observations and here’s what he says: The [can’t understand word] immunity that in
time developed in gonorrheal infected married couples seems also to develop in
[can’t understand words] married mates.”
And his point is that the monogamous relationship t hat is conducted
along the lines of the Word of God is a relationship that purifies and a
relationship that protects. Whereas the
promiscuous relationship has a system set up that it has no guard against.
So I throw these
out as [can’t understand word] evidences that are being daily discovered; don’t
sell the Bible’s moral commands short and don’t wind up in the same are that an
Old Testament saint would have, we don’t want latrines outside of the camp, we
don’t want to wash our hands before the meal.
[Can’t understand sentence]
Later, when all the data is in, people will say oh, we want promiscuous
relationships, nothing wrong with homosexuality, it’s just a disease, they’re
going to look equally silly.
With our heads
bowed….