Transcript
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Welcome to Gospel and life. Why is the world so broken? And why are we capable of inflicting such harm, even toward those we love? People point to politics, poverty, or psychology, but none of these fully explain what we see in ourselves and in history. This month on the podcast, Tim Keller is teaching from a series exploring the question, what's wrong with us, showing us how the Bible's teaching on sin offers the only explanation deep enough to face the truth in all its complexity and the only hope powerful enough to transform us.
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Isaiah 64, verses 1 to 9. And then it skips on down near the latter part of this long passage. Isaiah 65, 17, 18. So read 1 to 9 and 17 to 18. Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you, as when the fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil. Come down to make your name known to your enemies and cause the nations to quake before you. For when you did awesome things that we did not expect, you came down, and the mountains trembled before you. Since ancient times, no one has heard, no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you who acts on behalf of those who wait for him. You come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways. But when we continued to sin against them, you were angry. How then can we be saved? All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags. We all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. No one calls on your name name or strives to lay hold of you. For you have hidden your face from us and made us waste away because of our sins. Yet, O Lord, you are our Father, we are the clay, you are the potter. We are all the work of your hand. Do not be angry beyond measure, O Lord. Do not remember our sins forever. O look upon us we pray for we are all your people. Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create. For I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people to be a joy. This is God's word. Now what we're doing is we're looking in a series on what the Bible says about sin, and we've been digging into the Hebrew Bible in particular and actually into Isaiah in particular. And tonight we come to the most unpopular part of what the Bible teaches about sin and what I'm about to Tell you. I'm about to tell you. I mean, I'm about to tell you what I'm about to tell you. And I've asked the ushers to bar all the doors so that you stay for at least the first point after hearing the very, very galling and unpalatable introduction to the sermon. What this is teaching is that God is an angry God. God gets angry. Look, verse five, you were angry at us. Verse nine, don't be angry at us. The Bible's presenting to us a God who gets angry at sin. Now, need I say this isn't one of his, you know, his polls aren't very high on this attribute. One of the ways that you can see this is that in the, in the. If you went to school in the United States, somewhere in middle school or maybe junior high school, very possible that you came across when you were studying US Colonial history and you were looking at the life in the early 18th century, mid 18th century, you may have come across an excerpt from a sermon which is one of the more famous sermons ever preached here, Preached back in 1741 by Jonathan Edwards, and it's called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. And you might have had some little excerpts. You know, very often in your, you know, your Little History, your 8th grade history book or whatever, there's a little bar over here, and then it has some excerpts from Sinners in the hands of an angry God. And you raise your hand and you say, teacher, did the people really believe that back then? And the gist of the discussion goes something like this. Well, you know, it used to be that most people in this country did believe in an angry God who punished people. But today, more and more, we believe in a loving and good God who's more accepting of people. And that's the gist of it. I don't know. I was there. I mean, I had that in eighth grade, ninth grade. But here's what I'm going to say. The biblical angry God, the angry God that's presented to us by the Bible. Yeah, we have lost it. We have lost connection with it in our society and our culture. And I'm here to tell you it's a bad thing. In fact, I'll go this far. You need an angry God. You need in your mind and in your heart a God that gets angry at sin. You need an angry God to live with hope. You need an angry God to live with humility. And you need an angry God to know how loved you are. And if you don't believe in an angry God, a really angry God who hates sin and is going to punish it. You're impoverishing yourself. You're taking away all sorts of hope and humility and love. That's what I'm here to tell you. And you know, you say, how does that work out? Well, okay, let's go first of all. And basically, you just work right through the text on this. First of all, verses 1 to 3 tell us that you need an angry God, the biblical angry God, to live in hope, to be able to live in hope in a broken world. One of the things that's easy to miss when you study these books like Isaiah, Ezekiel, in fact, big parts of the Old Testament, is that they have a historical situation. They were not just written as essays, they weren't lectures. They were written into historical situation. And everybody agrees that Isaiah, chapter 40 and following after chapter 40, was written to a nation, to Israel, that was facing exile, that was facing tremendous injustice, that was going to face or did face, or had faced when they read this, their capital city Jerusalem torn down, their own children slaughtered. Go read about it in Psalm 137. Their infants, their little heads of their infants dashed against the rock by the victors. Captivity, chains, terrible injustice. And so what are they doing? Well, we see in verses one to three, they're asking God to come down and judge the injustice. They're saying, oh, you would rend the heavens and come down, the mountains would tremble before you, as when fire sets twigs ablaze, come down and make your name known to your enemies and cause the nations to quake. And what they're really saying is if you came down with all your justice and you went after the oppressors, and you went after the perpetrators of injustice, they would be like dust before you, they would crumble, they would be like burning twigs that the wind drives away. And so they're saying, of course, this is what verses one to three saying, how in the world could you possibly live in a world filled with injustice, with any hope at all, unless you believed in an angry God, a God who gets angry and injustice. And so here's the first point. First point is that God's anger in the Bible is not like our anger usually is. It's not crankiness, it's not ill temper, it's not ego, it's not explosion, it's not out of control. It's a settled, fixed, implacable, irrevocable, incorruptible opposition to injustice and evil, so that no debt will go unpaid, every account will be squared, and nobody will get away with anything. And that's what the Bible means when it says there's an angry God. That's the kind of God that we have. That's what the Bible presents. Now, right away, objection. I know. Right away people immediately put up their hands and say, wait a minute. One of the problems with that, one of the reasons why many people, most people in New York City certainly believe that that's a primitive idea, is they say, you know what? This idea of a God of vengeance, oh my. It's primitive. We've got to get beyond that because we need to work for a peaceful world. This idea of a vengeful God who bears the sword, oh, my word. That leads to intolerance and eventually to violence. What you really need is you need to believe in an accepting God. If you're going to believe in a God, you have to believe that sin is in the eye of the beholder. You have to believe that sin is sort of a matter of perspective. This idea of a God of vengeance, that's going to lead to nothing but violence. Nothing but intolerance and violence. Well, recently I read a book that is one of the most powerful refutations of that extremely common belief that we have to get beyond a God of vengeance if we're going to have a world of peace. Incredible book, actually, in many ways. It's a book written by me, Miroslav Volf, who's Croatian, and the name of the book is Exclusion and Embrace. And let me tell you, let me read you his thesis. He says in this book, Listen, he. Because he's Croatian, he's part. He was, he was raised in the former Yugoslavia. He has seen all the stuff, the people who this passage was written to, who are crying out for vengeance and crying out because of the injustice. He's seen all that. He's been through that. And this is what he says. The practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance. I'll say that again because it just. I mean, if nobody's eyebrows are raised, you're not listening. The practice of. There we go. That's better. The practice, the practice of non violence requires a belief in divine vengeance. He says the only way to non violence is to believe in a God who gets angry at injustice. Without an angry God, you'll never get out. You'll never get into nonviolence. You'll be stuck in the cycle of violence. Now, how does he make that point? Well, here it is, here's the quote. And he says, my. Whoops. My thesis that the practice of Nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially in the West. But to the person inclined to dismiss it, please imagine something. Imagine you're delivering a lecture in a war zone where I delivered this chapter as a paper. And among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have first been plundered, then burned and then leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, and whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. Now, the topic of your lecture is a Christian attitude toward violence. And the thesis is we should not retaliate and be sucked into the cycle of continued violence. We should not pay back. Why not? And here's what he says. Violence thrives today secretly nourished by the belief that God refuses to take the sword. And then he says, if you do this, if you lecture like this, soon you will discover that it takes the quiet of a suburb for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence is the result of a God who refuses to judge. In a scorched land soaked in the blood of the innocent, the idea will invariably die like other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind. In a world of violence, it would not be worthy of God not to wield a sword. If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not take a final end of violence, that God would not be worthy of our worship. Now, can I put it in a nutshell? Here's what he's saying. Anybody who says that a God of vengeance will lead to violence has not actually been a victim of violence themselves. You live in a nice suburban little bubble or a very, very nice area where you haven't yourself been the victim of injustice. He says, when you're the victim of injustice, you will have to pay back unless you're assured that there is a God of vengeance, that there is a God who hates injustice, that there's a God who's angry with injustice, and a God who's going to settle every account so that nobody gets away with anything. He says, unless you believe in a God of divine vengeance, you will not be able to resist picking up the sword and being, you know, being the avenger yourself, or else you'll just die of despair. That's the reason why he's able to come back and say it's a practice of nonviolence that absolutely requires a belief in divine vengeance. And so here's our first point. You know, people say, oh, why do I need an angry God? He says, non violence is impossible without belief in a judge. In fact, let me press A little further. If you are what he calls a victim of one of these liberal pieties, you've always heard, oh, if I believed in a God of justice, that would not lead to peace in the world, that would lead to more violence. He says, you will be absolutely. If anybody ever comes and actually does something bad to you, you will be sucked right into payback. Actually, you've been already. You just haven't had, maybe in many cases, you haven't had actually somebody actually attack you and draw blood or kill you or kill people in your family. Anybody try to do that, he says, because unless you believe in a God of vengeance, you will not be a peacemaker. You will not be able to live a life of peace in the world. You will not be able to live a life of hope in the world. In fact, one of the things that worries about me as I look out at many of you, many of you do live in that bubble because most of us live in a world far more safe and far more happy and far more secure than most other people who have lived anywhere else in the world or anywhere in any other time in history. And if that bubble should break and you have a namby pamby God who does not wreak vengeance on injustice, you will either get sucked into the violence, you have to pay back yourself, or else you'll die in despair. That's the first thing. You need a God. You need an angry God, or you won't be able to live in peace in an unjust world. Secondly, you need an angry God if you're going to live in humility. Now, here's what's so intriguing. Let's move right on to the next three verses. All the commentators say it is extremely interesting to see the ironic relationship between the first and second stanzas. The first stanza is verses one to three. We just read it. What they're saying is we are the victims of injustice. And so we call down into the world the God of judgment. If you would only come down and make the mountains shake, what would happen? Well, the enemies, the wicked people, the enemies, the bad nations. What they would do is they would. They would just. They would be consumed, they would become dust, they'd become consumed and they would. The wind would blow them away. But get this, see before you, verse 2. The nations would quake before you. But now look, verses 4, 5 and 6. Here's the great irony. Who's shriveling up now? Who is wasting away? See, who is shriveling up like a leaf? Verse 6. And like the wind our sins sweep Us away. They are. The very thing they called God down to do is happening to them. And this is what we're saying. And this is, at this point, by the way, this is an extremely important little test to know whether or not you're understanding the difference between the angry God that maybe you were taught about or you taught other people. Maybe somebody taught you about this as you were growing up, or maybe you were taught other people believed in an angry God and the angry God of the Bible. When you meet the angry God of the Bible, you will find out, you will come to see what they see. You'll get out of verses one to three. When you're in one to three, what you're thinking is if God would come down, the bad people would be judged. But in verses 4 to 6, they find out that we deserve as much judgment as anybody else, that we too are under judgment, that we too absolutely deserve punishment as much as those people that we thought were the wicked perpetrators. That's absolutely critical. And this is one of the great tests to know whether or not you're getting in touch with a biblical God. Let me show you what I mean. There's two kinds of people in the world that seem to be opposites. Two kind of people. By the way, there's two kinds of people in the world. Those who divide everybody in the world into two kinds of people and those who don't. Did you know that? What I meant is there's. There's two groups of people that are very prominent. I wouldn't say there's only two kinds of people here. On the one hand, you've got people we would call religious people, traditionally religious. And they certainly believe that there are absolute standards and that there are absolute moral values and that we're going to be judged by them. And therefore they believe that if God were to come down, he would judge the bad people. And people who are religious, they say, well, you know, I don't cheat on my spouse and I'm good to my family and I obey the Ten Commandments and I go to church or synagogue and I. I'm, you know, I give to the poor and so on. I'm a good person. And so in verses you're. In verses one to three, you say, if God were to come down, you see, the bad people would be judged and they feel pretty good about themselves. On the other hand, you've got their nemesis. I mean, in our society, the nemesis of the people who believe in traditional moral values are that you might call the secular people, progressive liberal people. And what they say is, you know what? Everybody, sin is in the eye of the beholder. Everybody's got their own way of defining sin. What's sinful for you wouldn't be sinful for me. And what we have to do is we have to, we have to embrace them, we have to embrace everybody, we have to tolerate everybody, we have to accept everybody. And they look very, very tolerant, except they're just as much in verses one and three because what they are saying is, yes, you know what the trouble with this world is, is all those people over there who are intolerant. I'm not like them. You see, the religious people and irreligious people are all walking around saying, if only everybody in the world was like me, we wouldn't be in trouble. If only those people over there that are causing the trouble if somebody would just, you know, knock them down. And so you see, it really doesn't matter whether you're religious or irreligious, whether you're conservative or liberal, if you live in verses 1, 2 and 3. But what happens to Christians when they finally get close and to see what God really is like? Inevitably, what they say is verse six, all of us have become like one who is unclean. And all our righteous acts are filthy rags. Now that is a stunning statement. In fact, you know, when you first read through it, you say, wait, what? He didn't say all our sins are as filthy rags. Of course they're filthy rags. All our righteousness. And he's not just saying righteousness as if it's sort of a general thing. Our righteous deeds are filthy rags. What happens is a Christian has begun to look past the externals into his or her own heart. Start looking at motivations. That's the only way you could possibly say that my righteous deed stinks. I mean, how could a righteous deed stink? How could doing the right thing stink? How could it be a stench in God's nostrils? Well, the answer is the gospel turns you into a kind of Nietzschean person. When you look at your own heart, you begin. Nietzsche, of course, was always looking at motives. Nietzsche almost invented what's called the hermeneutics of suspicion. Looking inside and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're real good. You go to church, you do this, you do that. But why, why do you, you say to everybody, we should love everybody, but why do you say everybody? What aren't you really trying to do is you're trying to keep people down. Are you trying to be superior? You say, ah, we should obey and should be very moral. But why aren't you really trying to stay in power? You see, a Christian looks at your own heart and here's what the Christian is saying. Christian is somebody who says, I come to realize that the reason for my sins and the reason for my good deeds is the same and it's wrong. I don't even when I do a bad deed, I'm trying to be my own Lord. But when I do a good deed, I am too. When I do a bad deed, I'm trying to be my own savior. But when I do a good deed, I'm trying to be my own savior. When I do good deeds, I'm really trying to get God to do right by me. And I'm trying to control him. I'm trying to put him in my debt. I'm trying to. You see, one of the ways you can tell your righteousness is a filthy rag. A lot of you are very righteous. Some would think you'd do many good things. But are you always angry because God's not letting your life go right? Why is that? You know why? He said, I've lived this very good life and my sister in law is not living a very good life for my brother. Why is my life going so bad? Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Nietzsche says, wait a minute. Why were you being good? Trying to get God to do your will. That's the essence of sin.