← Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life
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Welcome to Gospel in Life. Some people say the fundamental problem of the world is poverty. Others say it's bad systems, poor education or biology. But what if none of these can fully explain the brokenness we see both in the headlines and in our own hearts? In today's teaching, Tim Keller looks at how the Bible's teaching on sin gives us a deeply honest and yet incredibly hopeful view of the world.
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Turn to a part of your bulletin where you have the passage on which the scripture is scripture, passage on which the teacher is based. And we're starting this week a new series, and it's on sin. There's nothing more fundamentally relevant and practical than to understand an answer. The answer to the fundamental human question, what's wrong with us? If you're trying to raise a family or run a corporation, or if you have political or community involvement, in fact, anything you do in this life, you need to have a working theory of an answer to that question. What's wrong with us? Why? The selfishness, the cruelty, the corruption, the crime, the racism, the injustice? Why? Where does it come from? Now, the Bible's answer is ancient and it's profound. And that is sin in the human heart. One of the reasons why it's so widely rejected, I believe, is actually because what's not understood is that the biblical understanding and doctrine of sin is multi dimensional. All of us understand or remember or think they understand what the Bible says about sin. We say, yes, we know what the Bible says about sin. Sin is breaking God's law and therefore we're guilty and condemned. Yes, I know what the Bible says, but that's only one. In fact, that's the last of the aspects of sin that we're going to look at in this series. I think one of the reasons why sin as an answer to the reason to the problems of our life tends to be widely overlooked by people is because we don't understand the multidimensionality, how nuanced, how rich, see how multi perspectival the biblical teaching on sin is. We're going to look at the first of those dimensions today and we're going to read a passage of scripture that I can almost proudly say it's very possible, very likely, that even if you've gone to church all of your life, you've never heard anybody so stupid as to try to preach a sermon on this text. This text is almost never preached on. I've never preached on. It's almost never studied. It's the end of the Book of Judges. And one of the reasons why nobody knows what to do with it, why it's there, and so but nobody ever tries to speak about it is because it is so inexplicably boring. Judges 17:1, 13. This is just the beginning of a story, and I'll tell you how it ends. You don't need to know. Now, a man named Micah from the hill country of Ephraim said to his mother, you know the 1100 shekels of silver that were taken from you? And about which I heard you utter a curse. I have that silver with me. I took it. And then his mother said, the Lord bless you, my son. And when he returned the 1100 shekels of silver to his mother, she he said, I solemnly consecrate my silver to the Lord for my son to make a carved image and a cast idol. I will give it back to you, O Lord. So he returned the silver to his mother, and she took 200 shekels of silver and gave them to a silversmith, who made them into the image and the idol, and they were put in Micah's house. Now, this man Micah had a shrine, and he made an ephod and some idols and installed one of his sons as his priest. In those days, Israel had no king. Everyone did as he saw fit. A young Levite from Bethlehem in Judah, who had been living within the clan of Judah left that town in search of some other place to stay. And on his way, he came to Micah's house in the hill country of Ephraim. And Micah asked him, where are you from? Oh, I'm a Levite from Bethlehem and Judah, he said, and I'm looking for a place to stay. Then Micah said to him, live with me and be my father and priest, and I'll give you 10 shekels of silver a year, your clothes and your food. So the Levite agreed to live with him, and the young man was to him like one of his sons. And then Micah installed a Levite, and the young man became his priest and lived in his house. And Micah said, now I know that the Lord will be good to me, since this Levite has become my priest. Now, let me tell you what we have here. One of the reasons why people ignore this section or really find it kind of confusing, is this. Up to now, everything in the Book of Judges has been extremely interesting. Book of Judges is a history of Israel after they came into Canaan. They'd been led there by Moses and Joshua out of Egypt, and they came into Canaan. And what we have in the Book of judges the first 16 chapters is a series of fascinating stories because over and over, the people would slide into sin. And when they slid into sin, they soon became enslaved by some foreign power. And then over and over again, 12 times actually, in the book, God sends a judge, which is really a deliverer. You mustn't think in terms of a magistrate or someone sitting at a bench. A judge was a deliverer, essentially a savior. And the judge would come and turn the people away from sin back to God and liberate them from the military oppressors. And it was always fascinating, very dramatic, and some of the most famous people. We have Gideon here, we have Deborah here. We have Samson in this book. And it's always thrilling and exciting to see the salvation come. They're saved, you see. But then when you get to chapter 17, to chapter 21, there's these last five chapters, and they're very, very hard to understand because they don't seem to be about anything. There's no judges in here. There's no salvation that comes. God hardly shows up in some ways. And what's so intriguing is that there's two incidents in chapter 17 and 18. We have one, and you've read half of it, and in chapter 19 to 21 you have the other. And the first one we've already read. And what do we see here? Well, first of all, we see three. If you're going to give this story a title, and it couldn't be a very interesting title because it's not a very interesting story. It's a bunch of trivial people doing kind of dumb, weird things. I could call it Micah, mom, and the Levite. And what you have is you have these three people. First of all, you have Micah cheating his mother and then giving her the money back when she hears him uttering a curse against the robber, whoever it is. And he says, well, you know, Mom, I did it. I robbed. And I was kind of scared when you, you know, he's not very good or very bad. I mean, how good can you be to rob your own mother? But then how bad could you be to get, you know, give it back, you know, kind of, gee, I'm scared you cursed. I wonder. And then, so you see Micah cheating his mother. Then you see his mother cheating God. Because if you notice, when she's really excited, she says, I will give it all back to the Lord. I'm so happy about this. I'm so happy my son came back and did all this. He says, I solemnly consecrate my silver. I give it back. But when she actually came to it, she only used 200 shekels. And she makes two images, two idols out of silver, and puts them in, in a sense, her son's chapel where he worshiped the Lord. In complete contradiction to everything God says anywhere, right in the Ten Commandments, all through the law of Moses, where he says, you mustn't make images, you mustn't make idols. So first we have Micah cheating Mom, then we have mom cheating God, and then along comes the Levite. Now, what's his point? Well, Micah and his mother decided they were going to have their own shrine. See, in those days, there was a tabernacle, a sanctuary, a place where God said, worship me here. And it was at Shiloh. And in that tabernacle, there was an ephod that was the breastplate of a priest that the priest wore and had stones on there through which God spoke to people. There was an ephod, and there were priests. And the priests had to be Levites. They had to be of the tribe of Levi. And there was a sanctuary where people could come and pray and worship. But Micah and Mom, they wanted to have their own sanctuary. They wanted to have their own ephod, they wanted to have their own place of worship. And so they made one of their sons, you know, Mom's grandson, Micah's son, a priest. Until along comes a Levite. And Micah says, wow, I can have a genuine Levite here, just like in the law of Moses. So he says, how much would you be willing to work for this amount? And Levite says, sure, fine. And so now he says, boy, now I've really got it. I've got a Levite, I've got an ephod, I've got everything I want. Except in chapter 18. And this is how the story ends. A group of men come along. Danites, they're trying to find a new place to live. And they say to the Levite, you come with me. Come with us. We'll pay you more and bring those images along, which, of course, were worth quite a bit of money. And so Micah comes running out saying, you stole my Levite. You stole my images. What are you doing? And the Danites say, go home or we might hurt you. And so he did. And that's how the story ends. And then in chapter 19 to 21, suddenly, at the very end of the Book of Judges, we're completely unprepared. After all these boring people doing all these trivial things, we're completely unprepared for what happens. There's A gang rape of a woman that leads to not just civil war between the tribes of Israel, but genocidal destruction of whole towns and villages, down to the infants. And what's so strange about this? Again, no judges, no salvation, no nothing. Now, what's going on here? Now, on the one hand, this is terrible storytelling. Now, when I say terrible storytelling, I don't mean I think this was just made up. But you see, this incident was chosen out of this whole period of history. Why? Why was it chosen? When I say it's a bad story? First of all, in a good story, you have to have somebody, some character who you get engaged with that you care about. You have to have some character that you're concerned about. Otherwise, it's just a terrible narrative, you know? And nobody here you care about. See, they're all. None of them are very good or very bad. They're very shallow, they're very uninteresting, they're very boring. They're very unprincipled. They don't stand for anything. And not only that, there should be some kind of crisis, right, that's resolved, but the crisis that there is, only crises that come about because they're so shallow and uninteresting and boring and unprincipled. Why is this here? And why would this be in front of this horrible story that comes right after. Well, it began to dawn on me and it's dawned on other people. I'm not the only one that knows this or understands this. Please, there's no judges here. Isn't this interesting? Every other part of the book is about God's salvation and what the author is showing us. And therefore what God's showing us is what we look like without his salvation, what we look like without him, what we are in our natural state. In other words, this is showing us the nature of sin. And this right away actually shows us some things that are very, very surprising to us. If you are. If you live in this. If you live in this society, you've got some, how do I say, stereotypes about what you think the Bible teaches about sin and about evil. And this goes right against it. Look real briefly, because we're going to the Lord's table today and we're going to have a series. Look real briefly. Let me show you. This tells us what sin does to us, what sin does to God and how we can be cured of it. What sin does to us, what sin does to God and how we can be cured of it. And every one of them is surprising. The first one what sin does to us? What do you think sin really does to you in its advanced stages? What does sin really do to the human heart? What does it do to the character? Most of us believe that most of us are kind of, you know, regular people. Of course we sin. Of course, you know, to err is sin, and, you know, to err is human and so on. But when we think of people who are really diabolical, really, really advanced in their evil, we think of evil geniuses. We think of the people in all of the films. Those terrible, those charming, those witty, but those diabolical, those cruel. That's not at all what the Bible says. When Hannah Arendt went to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi butcher, she was shocked by what she found. And she wrote an essay that really got a lot of flack. She wrote an essay on what she called banality of evil. Now, banal is a word that basically means common. It means run of the mill. And she looked at this guy and she says, anybody could have done this. Must be a monster. But when she saw him, she realizes this isn't a monster. First of all, she found he was a boring little man. He spoke in cliches, no insights, really, very little sense of humor. And he had the absolute run of the mill like all the rest of us. Desire to be important, desire to be liked, ability to kind of, you know, not think about things that are unpleasant. And she wrote, and she said he wasn't a monster. He was just like all the rest of us. He was boring and superficial and uninteresting and shallow. And people got very upset with her. And they said, you can't say that anybody can do this. This man, anybody who can do this, cannot be like us. But Hannah Arendt got it partly right, but partly wrong, at least according to the Bible, because she said because he was so banal and superficial, it led him to do evil. But the Bible says it's evil that leads you to be banal. The most advanced, the most prominent, the most characteristic effect of sin on the human heart is not to make us bad, but boring. There's nobody that said it better than CS Lewis, of course. And actually, I've got a number of his quotes that help me with this sermon. He says, I am really upset with the most pernicious of all the literary images of evil. It's Goethe's Mephistopheles. In Faust, the humorous, civilized Mephistopheles strengthens the illusion that evil is liberating. But the real mark of hell is A sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon the self. We must understand hell as a place where everyone is perpetually concerned about his or her own dignity and advancement, where everybody always has a grievance and where everybody lives in the deadly seriousness of envy and self importance. Here's another section. In preface to Paradise Lost, Lewis says this. To admire Satan is to give one's vote for a world of lies, propaganda and incessant autobiography. Yet the choice is possible. Hardly a day passes without some slight movement toward it in every one of us. Sin in each of us is something that wants just to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives. It especially wants to be left to itself. It wants to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher than it. Anything that would make it feel small. But unimpeded. Sin will exploit the whole universe if it could. Now here's what Lewis is saying. Here's what Hannah Arendt saw, at least partially. Here's what we're being told. Why in the world would this be considered a case study of human beings without God? Why not something more awful? Why not something more cruel? Why not something more like the last part of the book? What is this about? And the answer is what Lewis says. The most advanced. Listen, advanced sin makes you boring because all you're ever worried about is how you're doing, how you look, how things are affecting you. There's always a grievance, incessant autobiography you can never get out of yourself. You're always feeling sorry for yourself. And you know what's so weird about this? You say, ah, you know, that's not, that's not like, you know, Jack Nicholson is the Joker in Batman. I mean, there's evil, you know, no sin makes you mediocre. The most advanced sin makes. There's nothing more boring than somebody's always worried about how you look. Sin makes you these very uninteresting, unprincipled, shallow, boring people. It's pretty interesting. There's an article, the Culture Zone column in the New York Times Magazine today about the tremendous popularity of one person shows. Have you seen that? Where they just get up and they stand up there and they talk about their lives and they talk about their stories and they talk about everything one person shows. And virtually everybody knows. It's sort of an open secret, even though it keeps going, that the vast majority of people are just boring. The vast majority of people. Those one person shows tell you way too much. This is what the line says in the, in the article. Way too much about People that you have no desire to know. Why are people so uninteresting when they just simply talk, when they're not part of a story, when they just say, here's how I feel, here's what's on my mind? Sleepless, unsmiling concentration on the self. That's the essence of sin. And the first thing we see here is that what sin really does is not make you bad before it makes you boring. That's the primary thing, incessant autobiography. But that's the first surprising thing. But the second surprising thing is in a way more seminal. Because in the Bible, when sin ruins you, it's because already your attitude toward yourself is always based on your attitude toward God. Your understanding of yourself is always based on your understanding of God. Your emotions toward yourself are always based on your emotions toward God. Because what we have here is just as surprising. It tells us what sin leads us to do toward God. What does sin lead us to do? How does sin lead us to regard God? Now, again, most people would think that advanced sin would make you an atheist. That's advanced. We have a lot of those advanced sinners right around New York City. Actually, a pretty surprising number. Higher percentage than almost any other city in the country. People say, I don't believe in God. And maybe you're one of those. I don't know, you know, somebody brought you here out of curiosity. Maybe you're one of those. Well, I got good news for you. Atheism is not the essence of sin at all. Here's what we're told. Mom says I dedicate to the Lord these two images. Boy, that's terrible. Doesn't she know what the Ten Commandments says? The first commandment, thou shalt not worship any other gods. Doesn't the first commandment say, thou shalt have no other gods before me? Why is she making those idols? Doesn't she know? Why would she worship other gods right there in front of God, right in his shrine? You see? And the answer is, she's not worshiping other gods.
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Everywhere we look, we see brokenness, wars, cruelty and heartache. We feel it in the world around us and in our own lives. How did it get this way? And what can be done about it? In his brand new book that's releasing this month, what is Wrong with the World? Tim Keller offers a clear and compassionate answer. Drawing from a series of teachings given at Redeemer, Dr. Keller shows how the reality of sin explains the pain we see all around us and how only the gospel offers lasting freedom and healing. Whether you're overwhelmed by the state of our world, struggling with your own mistakes or choices or looking for hope and joy or what is Wrong with the World will help you see how the gospel speaks to both the heartache of our world and the pain within each of us. This newly released book, what Is Wrong with the World is our thanks for your gift this month to help gospel and life share the good news of Jesus. Request your copy today@gospelandlife.com give. That's gospelandlife.com give. Now here's Dr. Keller with the rest of today's teaching.
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Listen. There's plenty of gods named in the Book of Judges. The Canaanites had the Baals and the Ashtaroths and the Philistines had Dagon and the and the Assyrians had Rimmon and the Moabites had Chemosh. But she doesn't say, I'm going to make an isle of Chemosh. I'm not going to. She didn't make a baal. She didn't make an Ashtaroth. She didn't make a Chemash or a Dagon or Rimmon. What did she make? Who are these images of? Well, they're the ones in whose name they're dedicated. These are images of God. These are images of the Lord God. These are images of Yahweh, the God of Israel. What she has done is not she hasn't worshiped another God. And she's not worshiping no God. She's worshipping a reduced God. She has whittled God down. She has made him. She has put a handle on him. This is a God you can put in your purse. This is a God you can take places with you. This is a God who's manageable. This is a God who's tame. And this is the heart of sin. A little God, a manageable, tamed God, will make you a little manageable, controllable person. Is it? Hannah Arendt said the scary thing was that banal person was capable of unbelievable terror and evil under certain circumstances. And the point at the end of the Book of Judges is banal people caused by sin, sleepless, un sleepless concentration on the self, unsmiling, humorless, therefore boring, incessant autobiography makes you feel so sorry for yourself that you are capable of terrible things. Eventually. All of our problems come in essence from whittling God down. Psalm 50, verse 21 talks about it when God looks at the people and he doesn't say, you've rejected me. He doesn't even say, you're worshiping Other gods. What does he say? He says, you thought this is Psalms 50, verse 21. You thought I was like yourself. And this is the essence of sin. We are sure God has got to be like us. We're going to whittle them down to our size. Let me give you some examples of how we do it. There's only a few. Kathy said, please keep it at 30 because we were sitting and talking about him. I began to realize, well, this is the essence. Look, number one, first of all, we think God's like us and we think he can be bought. Some of you have started coming to church, started reading your Bible, started cleaning up your life because you say, I need strength, I need inspiration. Stop it. Well, wait a minute. Shouldn't I read my Bible? Shouldn't I pray? Shouldn't I live a good life? Shouldn't I come to church? Isn't that what God wants? Well, it all depends on why you're doing it. Because here's what I'm afraid. Almost always the way, when we move toward God, our hearts are filled with this. And therefore we always, in the beginning, start like this. We think God can be bought. We think God can be impressed. And the reason we start cleaning our life up is what so we can say, and here's the essence of sin. Now God has to be good to me because I'm doing everything right. See, Micah was so happy that he knew he was out of compliance with his own son as a priest. He realized what the word of God said, but said, oh, wait a minute, I can get a Levite. Now surely God will be good to me. He's obeying. But why is he obeying? To get control of God, to buy him highly religious people who are absolutely sure that God has to be good to you. God has to answer your prayers. God has to bless you. God has to give you a good life. God has to give you the spouse of your dreams. Why? Because I'm doing everything right now. The Lord has to be good to me. What have you done? You put a handle on God. You're trying to control God. You've whittled him down. You think he's like you, he can be bought, that he can be impressed. He can't be. And by the way, there's nothing that will make you more boring than making you a smug, self righteous religious person. Nothing. They're the worst kind. Little God creates little people. Secondly, we think God's like us because you know that he can be bought. Secondly, you think God's like you because you don't think he's any wiser than you are. Do you know why we're so scared so often? Why we're so angry? Because things aren't going right. Do you know why so many of you have walked away saying, I cannot believe in a God who would let this happen and this happen and this happen? What are you saying? What are you saying? What you're saying is because I can't think of a good reason for this to have happened. There can't be one. When you say, I can't believe in a God who would let this happen, you simply have pulled him down. You said he couldn't be wiser than me. Well, now what? How asinine is that, intellectually, you know, to say, if you believe there's a God big enough to have caused this, then you've got to believe there's a God who's big enough to have some reason for it bigger than you that you wouldn't know. You can't have it both ways. You can't be mad at God because you acknowledge he's more powerful than you. But then you won't let him be more wise than you. I mean, that's just. And yet we're so bitter in our soul and we're so cast down all the time. Why? Because we just don't believe God. You believe I'm like you. He says, you have whittled me down. You have made me into an image, something controllable. You've revised me, you've edited me. You've pulled me down. You know, Elizabeth Elliot, who I often quote when she. There was a book she wrote years ago about how her husband and a number of other women's husbands were killed in the jungles of South America as part of their missionary work. And it's called through the Gates of Splendor. And many years later, it was reissued in a kind of silver anniversary edition. And she wrote an epilogue to it. And this is what she said in it. And it just slammed me. She says, people ask me, what did you learn from all that? What did you learn from your husband? The love of your life being killed when you had a little baby girl and you'd only been married for two years? What did you learn? And this is what she said. I have reflected on all that happened to me. And one thing, one thing is pointed out. Quote, if he is God, he is worthy of my worship and my service, and I will find rest nowhere but in his will. And that will is infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notion of what he is up to. The one thing I learned is if He's God, I will find no rest anywhere but in his will. And that's true of everybody on the face of this earth. There'll never be freedom in your heart unless you're willing to admit that his will is infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notion of what he's up to. Let me give you a couple more. We think he's like us in math. In other words, we think he can be bought. Secondly, we think he is like us in his wisdom. Therefore, if we can't think of something, if we know what he's up to, then he can't be up to anything. Good. Thirdly, we think he's like us in our scale. Scale. I got this from Kathy late last night. She's been reading the series in the New York Times science section on what we're learning about the galaxies. Now, listen. You know this. You know stuff like this. If the distance from the Earth to the sun 93 million miles was reduced to the thickness of a piece of paper, then the diameter of just this galaxy would be a stack of paper 310 miles high. And our galaxy is just one of gazillions and gazillions of galaxies just in our cluster. Our galaxy relates just to the cluster of galaxies the way a single grain of sand would relate to all the beaches on the entire. And all the sand and all the coasts of Florida. That's how many galaxies there are. And that's just in our cluster. And even from the moon, you can't see us. We're even a speck from the moon, right? And yet the Bible says that if there is a God, right? Think about this. He holds the world together. He holds it all up with the word of his power. The entire universe is like a contact lens on his little finger. Now, do you say to somebody like that, please come into my life to be my assistant? Do you say to somebody like that, don't call us, we'll call you. Do you say to somebody like that, well, yeah, I might deal with you after I've had a little fun. I've moved to New York City after all. Do you say, well, I'll be happy to believe in you if you'll give me a complete explanation for all of my questions. You've forgotten the scale. You think I'm like you. You know the audacity of it. Give you another one. You know what racism is? You know what racism is it's taking cultural differences and imbuing them with moral significance. Let's just say. And listen, white racism isn't the only kind of racism, but it's pretty prominent. So let me pick on us white people, all right, for a second, okay. What do white people do? They especially. What do Northern European types do? You know, us with a background in, you know, British or German, all that. We see these ethnic groups and they're much more emotional. So when they're happy, they're more emotional and when they're sad, they're more emotional. And what do you feel when you see that? You say they sort of lost it, haven't they? Kind of, you know, they're different. But you, deep in your heart, have assigned moral superiority to your difference and moral inferiority to their difference. And they're going to do the same thing. I know that. But here's the point. What is white racism? It's saying, my God is white. My God is like me. God is white. That's Exactly. See Psalm 50, 21, you thought I was like you. Everything comes from that. All of our doubts, all of our anger, you see, all of our self righteousness. I'll give you another one. You think God is like you in his attitude toward time. You know, when God sees time, he sees it all at once. If you were high up over the earth, you would look down at the Mississippi river and all parts of the Mississippi river would be equally visible, right? If you're down on the Mississippi river, you only see your bend. Now a lot of you are saying, oh, years ago, yes I did this and yes I did this, and yes I did, I did these things, but you know, they were bad, but you know, I've gotten over it. Certainly God wouldn't hold that against me. My friends, God's attitude towards God is the very, the thing you remember way in the past, he is seeing now, it's still happening right in his nostrils. This is the reason why God is a God of justice. This is the reason why God never gets over anything. This is the reason why there has to be atonement, there has to be punishment. And when you say, well, you know why I can't believe in a God who judges, you think he's like you. You think that because of the terrible things you've done. And at the time you felt doggone guilty and it hurt a lot of people. But now it's been a year, it's been two years, it's been 10 years, it doesn't bother you anymore. You thought I was like you. All of our problems come from this. Because God, our God, has become little. We've made him little. We've made him manageable. We get rid of the things that we don't like. Ah, I can't believe in this anymore. I can't believe in that anymore. We've whittled them down as a result. We've been whittled down. There's no greatness to us. There's no freedom. Do you realize if you really accepted the God that Elizabeth Elliott is talking about, a God who is infinite, his will is infinitely, immeasurably beyond anything you can ever any notion of what he's up to. If you said, I accept that, I embrace that, you'd be free, totally free. Nothing could bother you anymore. If you said, I'm not trying to obey God so He'll be good to me, so he'll give me the things I want, so he'll give me the status. He'll give me the marriage so he'll give me the things I want instead. If you said, but he said, not, I'm going to use him to get the things that give me meaning in life, but that he is my meaning in life. If you really made him the meaning in life. If he was the ultimate instead of just a little means to an end, something you've learned how to handle in order to get what you want. If he was your meaning in life, in other words, if he was big, you'd be big. If he was great in your eyes, you'd be a great heart. You would walk through life greatly. You wouldn't be scared and upset and circumstances beating you around all the time. This is the reason why there's this one little place in the Narnia Chronicles, those Fairy Tales by C.S. lewis. It goes by so fast that you just don't even notice its significance. But it's so incredibly interesting. It's where little Lucy meets Aslan, who's Jesus. He's a lion. And she meets him in the second book and she says, aslan, Aslan, at last. Welcome, child. He says, aslan said, lucy, you're bigger. That's because you're older, little child, not because you're bigger. No. The bigger you get, the more you grow, the more you'll find me bigger. Now what is he saying? It goes by so fast, you know, you don't even stop and think about it. But let's. Lewis is saying, the bigger your God is, the bigger you will be. The more you let God be God, the more you make him not a means to an end, but the end. You know not. Someone has to answer your questions. The more you put him on his proper scale, the more of a great heart you will be. Well, how. How is it possible? How in the world? And you know what the normal thing for a Christian to do. And I'll tell you, over the years, I used to end my sermons here. I used to say, now what? I know I've got sermons like this from the past. I've been looking at them over the last couple weeks. I would say study the attributes of God, think of his holiness, think of his majesty, think of his wisdom. Don't whittle them down. Accept everything the Bible says about him. What is this commandment where he says, do not make a graven image of me? He says, and what he's saying is, don't imagine me to be what you want me to be, but worship me as I am. So what does it mean? Accept what he says. But you know what? When I study, when I just study His Holiness, when I just study His Majesty, when I just study his wisdom, I don't feel I'm not getting greater, I'm not getting bigger. It just starts to crush me. And it'll crush you. This thing that Aslan is saying to Lucy, I don't sense that dynamic at all. It just makes me feel worse and worse and worse, like, oh, my word, this is God. But I'm going to have to just put up with it. But the answer is this. In verse 6, it says the reason for all this was there was no king. You see that? It says the reason all this idiotus idiocy, the reason all this smallness. In those days, Israel had no king. Now what is the author saying? He says, there's no savior. We need something better than these judges. We need a king. But when you get to the king, even the best King David, we see that he needed a savior. And what we're being pointed to is simply this. Why is it that God said no image? Why is it that Israel was the only religion on the face of the earth at that time? It's the first religion, almost invented it, that if you went into this temple, you went into the holy of holies, into the inner sanctum, and you even went to the Ark of the Covenant, which is the throne of God. And there was the cherubim, the angels, facing inward and right where you expect to see an image, something palpable, something you could grab hold on, something accessible, right? We're physical beings. We taste Touch, hear, see, smell. We have senses, and we want to see something. We want to feel something. And right there, there's nothing. God says, don't you dare put an image there. My throne is empty. You say, oh, my word, Is that it? We have to put up with an abstract, invisible God, a God. We can't touch God. We can't see, hear or smell. And God says, no, no, no, no. Don't you dare put an image there. But not because there never will be one. In Colossians, chapter 1, verse 15, we read something amazing. He is the image. Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God. For by him all things were created, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities. Now, here's what God is saying. God is saying, I understand why you want an image. I understand why you want something you can grab hold on, and I will give you something. I will supply the image. Don't you supply the image. Because any image you try to make of me, to make me something you can relate to, will only make me tinier and smaller. And it'll make you smaller. But I will give you the true image, a living image, the Lord Jesus Christ. And he will so reveal my glory. That on the one hand, he'll be someone you finally can relate to. A human being, a person, someone who loves and who weeps and who embraces. Finally, someone who's successful, but somebody who actually makes me, in your mind, greater than you could have imagined. Not smaller, but greater. Why? Because this great God you know, before whom we are nothing but specks, we are nothing but specks of dust. We are nothing but parameciums. We're nothing but amoebas. No other image could possibly have told us what this image does. And that is, he came to die for us. He died for the paramecium. He died for the amoebas. When you have a God that's so big that he could become small, you got a bigger God than you could have imagined. No other religion has such a God. No other religion admits that God is so big he could have become small. Only when you have a God like that. Only when you admit that Jesus Christ is the image of God, that he died for me. That is what finally shows me a greatness beyond anything I would know otherwise. But it's not a greatness that crushes me. Now I want to live for him now. I don't care. I won't say, now God's got to be good to me because I'm obeying all the rules. Because Jesus is my goodness. He is the thing I would want. What would I want more than that? He's my meaning in life. Now you see, God can't be bought, but we can. The bigger he gets, the bigger we'll get. Let's pray. Father, we know that one of the reasons for the Lord's Supper is it's something physical. It's something we can put in our hands. And it reminds us that you have put Jesus Christ on the earth to be our image. Image of you, our way of understanding your greatness. It's only as we receive him, as we remember who he is, remember what he's done, that you finally take upon, take in our minds your proper proportions. And when that happens, we'll be so free. We pray, Lord, that you will make yourself real to us in your proper proportions as we take the Lord's Supper, as we take the bread and the cup. Be yourself in our eyes. Be yourself in our hearts. Be yourself so we can finally be ourselves what you've made us to be. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
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Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life Podcast. If you'd like to see more people encouraged by the Gospel center teaching and resources of this ministry, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel and Life Monthly partner. Your partnership allows us to reach people all over the world with the life giving power of Christ's love. To learn more, just visit gospelandlife.compartner. that website again is gospelandlife.com partner. Today's sermon was recorded in 1999. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life Podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.