Transcript
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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.