Transcript
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Welcome to Gospel in life. You don't have to look far to see that something's deeply wrong with our world and with us. But is there an answer that gets to the root of why? In today's message, Tim Keller explores the human condition through stories in the Bible, uncovering what scripture says about sin and why. It's the only explanation deep enough to face the truth about our.
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Week. Over the next couple weeks, four weeks, actually, we're going to be looking at what Isaiah tells us about what's wrong with us. Isaiah has some pretty fascinating things to say. The longest, in some ways, the greatest Old Testament prophet. And what we have here is one of the great prophecies about the Messiah and what the Messiah will do. Isaiah 61:1 11 the Spirit of the sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn and provide for those who grieve in Zion, to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor. They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated. They will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations. Aliens will shepherd your flocks, foreigners will work your fields and vineyards, and you will be called priests of the Lord. You will be named ministers of your God. You will feed on the wealth of nations, and in their riches you will boast. Instead of their shame, my people will receive a double portion. Instead of disgrace. They will rejoice in their inheritance, and so they will inherit a double portion in their land, and everlasting joy will be theirs. For I, the Lord love justice I hate robbery and iniquity. In my faithfulness I will reward them and make an everlasting covenant with them. Their descendants will be known among the nations, and their offspring among the peoples. All who see them will acknowledge that they are a people the Lord has blessed I. Delight greatly in the Lord. My soul rejoices in my God, for he has clothed me with garments of salvation and wrapped me in a robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. For as the soil makes the sprout come up and a garden causes seeds to grow, so the sovereign Lord will make righteousness and praise spring up before all nations. This is God's word. Now, because this is the third in the series, we need to take some stock. What we're doing, why we're doing it, where we've come, we're talking about sin. Doing a series on sin. Why? Well, because early in this century, maybe late 19th century, early 20th century, this isn't. We can't be completely. You can't pinpoint this exactly. Basically, our Western society told us to get rid of the concept of sin, to get rid of it. And there were some pretty good reasons for it. I mean, because of the abuses. They said when you use the word sin and evil, when you use sin with regard to yourself, when you look at yourself and call yourself a sinner, you just crush yourself. Just make yourself feel guilty. You make yourself feel terrible and worthless, see, filled with shame. And when you call other people sinners, when you put sin on them, you do the same thing. You not only crush them and make them feel shame, but. But it probably might lead you to abuse them. They're sinners, so you can just treat them in all sorts of ways. So sin was considered a dangerous and unhelpful category. And the reason at the time, there was some at least logical reason to get rid of it was because at the very same time, many, many people in Europe and America were saying this, they were saying, well, you know, the troubles and the difficulties of our country and of our society, the reason people are filled with the reason for violence and for oppression and for selfishness is really because of unjust social conditions, because of bad education, because of the bad environment. And through political and social transformations and the procedure, the progress of science, we can deal with these things. That's a much better way of putting it. And of course, it does sound much more optimistic. But we got a problem now at the end of the 20th century. We've been through the Holocaust, we've been through two world wars. And a couple years ago, a book that's really had a big impact on me. Andrew Delbanco, right up here at Columbia University, wrote a book called the Death of Satan. Fascinating book. And he says something here, I'll read it to you. He says, a gulf has opened now in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it. And then he puts it perfectly, we now have an inescapable problem. We feel something that Our culture no longer gives us the vocabulary to express. Now it's pretty simple. Look, Marxism, at least that I know it's. We know it's wrong. You know, they had a theory what's wrong, why we're so messed up. And of course, Marxism is done as a movement. Freudianism had a theory about what's wrong with us, but it's over. With a movement, you see, the optimistic idea that if we just educate people and we do this and that, we can deal with, you know, oppression and racism and violence and so forth, that's over. It's gone. And Delbaco says, but here's the weird thing. We got rid of the vocabulary. We got rid of the concept of sin. And now we see it in front of us. When we can't talk about it, we can't deal with it. We feel ourselves in the presence of something that we no longer have the vocabulary to deal with. It's terrible. In fact, next week maybe, or a couple weeks from now, I'll come back and give you some examples that Delbanco gives. I can't do that tonight, but today. But here's the point. We have got to go back to the Bible to get the vocabulary. And here's my proposition to you. The reason that the Bible's vocabulary and concept of sin was jettisoned was partly because it wasn't very well understood. The average person. If I asked you, what's sin? You know, our memory as a society about what the Bible says about sin is pretty simple. Sin is breaking God's law, and that makes us guilty. And that's true. And actually, I've got a sermon coming on that. But I want you to see that if you start with that, you really don't understand the multidimensional, profound nuancedness of the biblical doctrine of sin. We started last week and we said, okay, first of all, sin is. The first thing is that sin is breaking God's scale. It is reducing God, and that creates smallness of spirit. It's refusing to treat him as glorious. Remember then last week we said, sin is not just breaking God's scale, it's breaking God's heart. Breaking God's scale and treating him as something less glorious than he is, making him too small leads to shrunkenness of spirit. But when you replace God, when you break his heart and you reject his love, then what you're actually doing is you create addiction. Remember that. So sin is smallness of spirit. Sin is addiction. Now, this week, we're going to go still, before we get to the idea of breaking God's law, we have to understand it's breaking God's scale. That means it's treating him as less glorious than he is. Otherwise, you don't understand sin. It's breaking God's heart. He says, I want to be the lover of your soul. And we put ourselves in the arms of other lovers, and as a result, we're addicts. This week we're going to look at one more before we get anywhere else. And that is sin is not just breaking God's scale, breaking God's heart, it's also breaking God's design for us. You do not understand sin at all unless you think. Unless you understand that sin is breaking God's design. See, God's law is not just an expression of his heart. So to break God's law, you're trampling on his heart. God's law is also your own. It's your design print of your heart. It's the way you were built to work. And when you. When you break God's law, you break yourself. You're trampling on yourself. Let's get into this. This passage actually is telling us about that because it's telling us what the Messiah is going to do. And the first thing it shows us is the Messiah is going to deal with the problems of life. And that shows us something about sin. So here's how we're going to break this down. We're going to see what the problem is, what God is going to do about it, and how we should respond. Okay, what the problem is, what we should do about it, what God's going to do about it, how we should respond. First of all, what is the problem? Right away, we have to see. This is remarkable. All the things this Messiah does. And the thing that first hits you is the range of them. First of all, take a look here. First of all, he deals with both body and soul. For example, he comes to the poor. Kala, read from Matthew 11. Jesus was very big on this passage. I'll tell you how big he was. The first sermon he ever preached, he chose this text. Now, when you're going to start a campaign, you're really careful what you say that first time, isn't that right? Because you want to make sure it's perfect. It perfectly conveys what you're trying to, what you're all about. When Jesus Christ preached his very first sermon in Luke 4, he preached on this text. Isaiah 61:1 2. Okay? And the first thing that comes up preaches to the Poor. That has to do with. He's dealing with economic brokenness. But then secondly, look it. He binds up the brokenhearted. So he's dealing with emotional brokenness. Then it says, look, he's released from darkness. He releases from darkness. We have to be careful because it says, proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness. And those are two different things. It's not repetitious. And he's talking about intellectual blindness. He's talking about spiritual blindness, not seeing the truth. But then lastly, and this is the one that takes just a moment to massage. All right. He says, he sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives, and then down to the second verse, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Now, this is not something you're going to get by reading it in English. What he's doing here, this person who comes and says, the spirit of the Lord is upon me to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, the year of the Lord's favor, proclaim liberty. He is quoting Leviticus 25. And Leviticus 25 is talking about the Jubilee. And this Messianic figure is coming to say, I have come to bring the Jubilee. What's that? Well, let me tell you. You've heard of the Sabbath. You've heard that in the Old Testament, God said to the people, one day in seven, sabbath rest. But maybe you haven't heard that he also said to the people, one year in seven must be a Sabbath year. He didn't just institute the Sabbath day, he also instituted a Sabbath year. And the Sabbath year was in those days when someone threw poor crops, poor, poor fortune or poor judgment would come to the place where you get so in debt you couldn't pay your debts off. What would happen is you would become an indentured servant to the people that you were, that you owed, and you'd become their servant. And of course, that's the sort of thing that happened. You know, some people got more prosperous, some people didn't get as prosperous. But every seventh year, God says, Sabbath. What is Sabbath? In the Sabbath year, all debts were forgiven. All servants went free, therefore, and the land was to lie fallow, which meant in order to build up its nutrients, the people were to eat out of the storehouses and not till the field. So everybody rested and the land rested. And you forgave your brother from the heart their debts. And you forgave your brother from the heart any wrongs that you had done. That's the Sabbath year. But then on top of that, that was in the Old Testament. You can read about it in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. But in Leviticus 25 we have one of the weirder parts of the Old Testament. It's weird because it's so radical. And from what we can tell, it was never practiced. And it's always a possibility that wasn't supposed to be. But here's what would happen. You said every seven days is a Sabbath day, and every seven years, a Sabbath year. But every Sabbath, Sabbath. In other words, every seven Sabbath years, which would mean the 50th year, the Jubilee year, every seventh, seven of years there was to be a jubilee. And the jubilee was even more extensive. Not only were all the debts free, you know, forgiven, not only were all the servants and the slaves freed, but if you lost your land, anytime in that 49 years, bad crops, bad judgment, if you had lost your land, your family's original land, it came back to you. And the whole purpose behind the Sabbath year and, and for the jubilee was how do you make sure, how do you make sure that if you blow it, you get a running start, a second chance economically? How do you make sure that you don't have long term families getting down into the culture of poverty, learning habits that have to do with poverty, other people getting into the culture of wealth and having those kinds of habits? How do you do that? Well, that's how it was supposed to be done. Now, one of the things that's pretty interesting about this is it clearly goes, the jubilee was an institution that was not only for spiritual rest. It wasn't only the place where you were saying, I'm going to forgive you and God has forgiven me. But it was also, economically, I was forgiven and I'm going to, I'm going to give you so that you can come up out of the place economically where you are. It's astounding. And it really was pretty remarkable. And as far as we know, Israel never observed it. Can you imagine? And the Messiah shows up and says, I bring the jubilee. And he not only shows that this means body and soul are going to be put together, but if you look carefully, it also shows that he comes to not only deal with body and soul problems, but also individual and corporate problems. Because look at verse 3 and verse 4. In verse 3 we see complete individual transformation. I will bring you a crown of beauty. We'll get back to that. Oil of gladness, garments of praise, and you'll become oaks of righteousness. That's what, that's not just symbolic oaks of Righteousness means organic righteousness. God is not just going to declare you righteous, which he does when he wraps you in the robe of righteousness in verse 10. But he's going to make you actually righteous. He's going to put his spirit in you. He's going to put his nature in you. And that's what you have. In verse three, they're going to become inside out, completely transformed. But then in verse four, we see that they're supposed to go and rebuild cities. And if you look at verse four and five, it doesn't just say, oh, you know, forget the cities. You know, let's put up a new subdivision. You go back and you rebuild the cities. And if you look carefully in that city, there's going to be racial harmony. It says aliens are going to be working with you. You have to be a little careful because the English doesn't bring it out. It says, for example, when it says the aliens are going to shepherd your fl. That word for shepherd doesn't just mean they're going to be your hired hands, but that means that they're going to stand with you and they're going to take responsibility with you. There's a racial harmony. There's a rebuilding of cities. There's personal transformation, there's social transformation, there's spiritual wholeness, there's psychological wholeness, there's economic wholeness. See, there's racial wholeness, the whole nine yards. And the Messiah comes back and says, that's what I'm about to do. Now, what does that tell us about sin? That's the first point. And here's what it tells us about sin. The wages of sin is ashes. You notice in verse three, it says, I will put a crown of beauty on where you have ashes. And he's thinking very literally, when somebody died or when anything went really wrong in your life, you didn't just put on black. What you did was you put ashes. You went into the fireplace and you picked up ashes and you put them on your forehead. And not just a little. The little, you know, cute little cross you see that you put even today at Lent, in many churches, where you put the ashes on there for good, for Ash Wednesday. No, you poured it on your head. Think about it. You looked ugly. You were totally dirty. And here's what you were saying. Life is like this. The Bible. What are ashes? You put something in the fire and the fire knocks it apart. There's chemicals that were cohering. You put a wood in the fire and there was a cohesion, there was a coherence. It was integrated. There was all these various sorts of chemicals and various things that turned it into wood. But what does the fire do? The fire destroys that which keeps those things that should be together. It destroys the coherence, and it goes to ashes. If you put your hand in the fire, it'll go to ashes. If you put your paper in the fire, it'll go to ashes. But you see, when the Messiah says, I'm going to give you beauty for ashes, he's actually referring to everything he's been looking at in the whole survey. Because essentially, life is like that. My favorite illustration is this. Let me give it to you. There's a couple ways of putting this. Think of a chicken in your oven. You bring the chicken out, you put it on the table. It's too hot to eat, so you wait for 15 minutes and you're happy. Why? Because now I can eat it. But the only reason you can eat it is because it's losing energy, because that's how life is. Leave it for three hours, then you won't want to eat. Loses energy till it's kind of yucky. Leave it for three days. And now it's a health hazard. Leave it for three weeks. But when you watch it go to pieces, oh, of course, if you could burn it up, you see, in the fire, it goes to ashes very quickly. But don't you see, if you just let it be, it's going to ashes anyway. And as you watch the chicken go to ashes, why? Because that's the way existence is. You're looking in a mirror, you're going to ashes. You put yourself into the fire, you'll go to ashes very quickly. But if you. It doesn't matter. Diet all you want. Go to the doctor all you want, okay? Exercise all you want to keep yourself together, to keep yourself whole, to keep yourself tight. But you're spreading. And you will continue to spread until finally you are ashes. You are dust. Dust thou art. Ashes thou art. Now, what are we talking about here? The Bible says that the whole world is burning in a flame of sin. That when I want to be my own master, when I want to be my own Lord, when I want to be my own savior, what I'm just doing, essentially, is I put fire, sin is fire, against the design that God has for the way he wants things to be, which is peace, flourishing, growth. Shalom, which is the Hebrew word for peace, but it means every kind of human flourishing. Now, you can get this down into the micro. Can I get it out of the micro? Somebody treats you bad and you say, I'm not going to forgive. I will not forgive. And some of you are in this situation right now, Right now. The Bible says, God says, I forgive. Therefore, you must forgive. You must forgive. That's the word of God. If you don't forgive, that's a sin. Now, let's think about this for a second, all right? If you sin, what are the consequences of sin? Well, a lot of people say, I'm just scared. You know, Maybe God won't answer my prayer if I keep my sin in my heart. Maybe that's that. Well, it does say that. Okay, so maybe you think of sin like this. I better not sin because God's sort of watching me. And as long as I stay sinful, you know God's going to get me. He's going to watch me and say, boy, that person's sinning. What can I do to make their life miserable today? But, boy, you misunderstand. You misunderstand. When you hold that grudge, the doctor will tell you that that is actually turning up the flame on your heart. You're much more likely to have heart problems. You're much more likely to have stomach problems. You're much more likely to have physical problems because you're mad. But not only that, of course, you start to break down psychologically. You'll be in denial. It'll control you, but of course, it breaks you down spiritually. Sin disintegrates us. Sin makes us break down. Sin puts. Sin is an invisible flame. It's visible to God. Oh, God sees it. God looks down and he sees us all on fire. He sees us all falling apart. Why? Because what we're doing is we're going against our design. Whenever you want to be your own savior and your own master, it's not like, oh, gosh, you know, here I did what I shouldn't have done today. I wonder whether God's going to get me. Sin is guilty, but sin is, first of all, stupid. Sin does break God's law. But God's law is simply the way he built you. He built you to love, not to hate. He built you to be unselfish, not to be selfish. He built you not to spend all your money on yourself. That's the reason why he says, give it away. He built you to forgive. That's why he says, forgive. He built you to have sex inside a covenant of marriage. That's why he says to do that. None of this is busy work. This is not like my 8th grade algebra teacher used to say. Well, you know, kids got to be stay off the street. So she said, do all these things to keep off the street. That's busy work. There's no busy work in the will of God. God comes and says, I built you this way. You will only flourish. If you break this, you break yourself. If you trample on this, you're trampling on your own heart. If you're trampling on this, you're trampling on your own world. And every time you sin, you're just turning the flame up, turning up the burner, and you go to ashes faster. Do you see that?