R.C. Sproul: Cosmic Treason

this afternoon I want to look at the theme of cosmic treason I want to direct your attention to a text that I've preached from many times including in the series that I did years ago called the holiness of God and I will be looking at this text from a little bit different perspective from how I treated it in that context but nevertheless there will be some duplication if you've heard that before but the way we learn things is by repetition so if you haven't learned it yet maybe today you will I'm going to be reading from the Book of Leviticus from chapter 10 beginning at verse 1 and I'm going to read until we get through verse 11 and again if you won't mind I'd ask you to stand for the reading of the word of God then they dab in a by who the sons of Aaron each took his censer and put fire in it put incense on it and offered profane fire before the Lord which he had not commanded them so far went out from the Lord and devoured them and they died before the Lord and Moses said to Aaron this is what the Lord spoke saying by those who come near me I must be regarded as Holy and before all the people I must be glorified so Aaron held his peace and then Moses called Mishael and alsa fan the sons of Uziel the uncle of Aaron and he said to them come near carry your brethren from before the sanctuary out of the camp so they went near and carried them by their tunics out of the camp as Moses had said and Moses said to Aaron and to Eleazar and Ithamar his sons do not uncover your heads nor tear your clothes lest you die and wrath come upon all the people but let your brethren the whole house of Israel be wail the burning which the Lord has kindled he shall not go out from the door of the tabernacle of meeting lest you die where the anointing oil the Lord is upon you and they did according to the word of Moses and then the Lord spoke to Aaron saying do not drink wine or intoxicating drink you nor your sons with you when you go into tabernacle of meeting lest you die it shall be a statute forever through your generations that you may distinguish between holy and unholy between unclean and clean and that you may teach the children of Israel all the statutes which the Lord has spoken to them by the hand of Moses the God whom we worship today in spirit and in truth was the God who exercised this judgment that you heard on the sons of Aaron let us be instructed by it please be seated let us pray again our Father we come before you to be instructed by your sacred word which word has the power to cut between sinew and muscle between bone and marrow cutting through the calcium of our hearts the stiffness of our necks and the blindness of our eyes in this hour give us fresh understanding of the sinfulness of sin before we ask it in Jesus name Amen though I've preached many times on this text from Leviticus 10 I have never been satisfied that I've been able to do it to justice in one sitting one of my favorite books that I commend to all of you and especially to those who are in the pastoral ministry is the book written by with your t'en jeremiah Burroughs entitled gospel worship we have a crisis with worship today in the church and so many of us seem to be floundering wondering what it is that is pleasing to God in our worship the best answer I've ever read to that question is found in that book gospel worship by Jeremiah burrows which the entire book is an exposition of the text that I just read to you a moment ago let's look back and rehearse the circumstances that are recorded for us here in Leviticus chapter 10 we're told that the two sons of Aaron made a banna by who each took his censer and put fire in it put incense on it and offered profane fire before the Lord which he had not commanded them they experimented with the worship of Israel you know yesterday when dr. Ferguson talked about Scripture and how scripture and the Word of God came in so many various forms included in that a statement that may have startled some of you when it was said when he mentioned that some portions of scripture even came by dictation because critics of Orthodoxy in their view of the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture constantly accuse conservative people of believing in a dictation theory of inspiration which I know of no orthodox theologian who has pled that case about the mode of the Divine superintendence of the Word of God in fact the only time I know of where that term appears historically is in the fourth session of the Council of Trent wherein the Council of Trent the fathers of Trent made passing reference to the Bible which came to us through the Holy Spirit Dick tante dictating but even there it is not used in the manner that the biblical writers were reduced to automatons or ax men UNC's who took down each word as God added it from his throne or was it his easy-chair his lazy boy his round table oh it was his throne which he established where dr. Lawson in the heavens I just didn't want anybody to forget where that throne it was established but the point is is that there are portions of the Bible where God does dictate verbatim what he wants and the place where that occurs more often than anything else is when he dictates what he commands for his worship so the Lord God who has established his throne in the heavens is of jealous God and it's the same God who dictated to Moses and to Aaron how he is to be worshipped that we worship today and he cares as much today that we not offer him profane worship than he did on that occasion in the history of Israel now what really happened there than they'd AB and AB I who I've read some interesting theories that explain to us what actually took place on that occasion I remember reviewing a curriculum that was offered by the northern Presbyterian Church in the decade of the 60s for junior high and senior high students in an overview of the Old Testament and they make specific reference to this tax where they say obviously in light of the new testament revelation of the love of God we can't believe the historical accuracy as such occurrence as this sudden execution this harsh and brutal treatment of the sons of Aaron because we know that God is not really like that and that this is simply one evidence of a pre-scientific unsophisticated Hebrew account of a natural disaster that they didn't understand but it obviously blamed it on God shades of neo Marcion ISM you remember the heretic Marcion who presented for us our first Bible in antiquity but an expert ated version at that when he went through the New Testament with a comb and deleted from the gospel references in the epistles all references to Yahweh the god of the Old Testament because Marcion was convinced that that the God of the Old Testament was not really God but a Dem I urge who had a demonic side to him and it was that damn I urge from home Jesus redeemed us and brought us to the true God who is the god of love for centuries people have struggled with the portrait of God that is unveiled for us in the Old Testament and the two problems that creates such difficulty in understanding that God revealed in the Old Testament this that we don't understand in the first instance what dr. Lawson referred to yesterday as the goddness of God and next to that we don't understand at all the sinfulness of sin and it is these two problems that constantly provide a barrier to our understanding of the things of God we don't understand who God is and we don't understand who we are because we cannot distinguish between the holy and the unholy between the sacred and the profane one of the most fascinating attempts to explain this particular incident in Israel's history with the sudden destruction of made AB and the by who came from the pen of Immanuel Velikovsky you may be familiar with his two popular works one entitled worlds in collision and the other one earth in upheaval professor Velikovsky was a professor of geology and antiquities at Princeton University and was one of Albert Einstein's closest friends on the faculty there and Velikovsky was convinced that the Orthodox view of geology called uniformitarianism was mistaken and has left in its wake so many anomalies that cannot be fit into the uniformitarian paradigm that he called for the philosophy of a second glance in geological theory and his book Earth and upheaval he cited almost an endless number of such anomalies such as the discovery of undigested tropical food in the stomach's of Mastodon that were found encrusted in the ice and the polar regions those men thus must have been awful slow that been swallowed up by the glaciers before they digested their breakfast of plants that seemed to come from the equator and so numbering anomalies like this over and over and over again Velikovsky poke fun at uniformitarianism but his other work worlds and collision was more imaginative in this he studied the mythology of ancient peoples people from the North American continent people from Africa people from Asia people from all over the world and he found certain patterns of similarity in myths that had been handed down over generations in different cultural groups around the world and he speculated in this manner he said usually myths emerge in cultural history as uneducated responses to real natural events that take place that people can't understand and so they tell their stories in mythological categories and so he said what possible natural phenomena could explain so many of these myths that we find in the ancient world and he came up with the idea that at one point in times past a huge comet that would soon become a planet actually came so close to the Earth's surface that it caused catastrophic upheaval even to the point of reversing the poles of our planet which reversal would have caught a sudden shift their stop and it's rotation in one direction and making it stop and rotate in the other direction and he said that would explain the story in the book of Joshua where Joshua saw the Sun standstill he also said this fari comment that would spend some time in duration near the Earth's surface would account for the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites following the tale of this comet which appeared as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of smoke or fire by night and so he used this imaginative catastrophic event to explain all kinds of passages in the Bible not the least of which was the one I just read to you he said along with that cataclysmic turbulent upheaval all kinds of gases were spewed and emitted from this comet passing so class my pouring naphtha gas and petroleum into the Earth's surface would seep down through the crevices particularly in the oil-rich Mideast and he said it would be natural that people in that they would find some of this bubbling crude and like Jeb Clampett takes them home taste it try to cook with it then these enterprising young priests said hey wonder what would happen if we put this with the incense and tried it out on the altar and so they scooped up some of this natural gas put it on the altar and had the surprise of their life indeed the end of their lives as the stuff exploded and consumed them well those are some of the explanations for what happened here I put more confidence not in the speculations of curriculum designers in the PCUs a church or even in the imaginative speculations of Immanuel Velikovsky as much respect as I have I want to hear how God explains this story I'm not the only one that upon first reading of this wanted an explanation the person who was most insistent on finding an explanation for this disaster was the father of these two boys Aaron Aaron went the Moses and if we read just a little bit between the lines here we can imagine something of that conversation I hear Aaron coming to Moses and saying Moses what's this all about they're young they like to try new things all they were doing was experimenting a little bit what's worship they're trying to relate to their generation trying to improve upon the Lord's principles of worship he said in God without any warning just like that Wham strikes them that does my service in ministry mean nothing to God Moses you know I've stood next to you I've been faithful to you I've tried to be as devout as I can possibly be as a priest of the Most High God and this is what I get but maybe he didn't say any of that but I can't imagine that he didn't and Moses said to Aaron don't miss this please Aaron is suspect II prefaced it with words that aren't included Aaron you know I know your hearts broken I know you're paralyzed with grief I know you can't understand why this tragedy has befallen you and your house but Aaron don't you remember what the Lord said Aaron this is what the Lord spoke saying by those who come near me I must be regarded as Holy if you're gonna come into my presence if you're gonna serve in my name if you're gonna approach the altar of burnt sacrifice if you're going to mount the stairs of my pulpit I will be regarded as Holy and in front of all of the people I want to make sure they're entertained no but before all the people I must be glorified I must be glorified not your innovative sons who are playing cute games on my altar they're not respecting me and they're not glorifying me in front of the people you know what I love about Sacred Scripture is the way in which the Holy Spirit so often inspires understatement the next statement is an understatement with a vengeance for it reads so Aaron held his peace God says hey I will be guarded as fully by anybody who comes near me do you remember that Aaron you bet Aaron held his peace he held it as tightly as he possibly could because there was nothing left to be said but God wasn't finished then Moses called Mishael and also fan the son of UCL the uncle of Aaron and said to them come on over here carry your brethren from before the sanctuary and give them a proper burial in sacred ground no get their charred corpses and I want you to take these corpses outside the camp the same place we send the scapegoat into that place that is the outer darkness that place that is unclean they didn't know the difference between what was clean and what wasn't clean between what was holy and wasn't holy and I want him out of here I don't want just dead and they were dead I learned a new concept about that this week I had lunch with the police chief of Lake Mary and he was telling me a couple of gunfights he was in and talking about a call he had to a place where there was a corpse and rigor mortis had set in and the corpse was propped up against the door and the police had a very difficult time pushing the corpse from out of the way of the door so that they could get in and he looked at me and he says that man was DRT that's a DRT I've heard a do a he need that on arrival what's dr t he said dr t is dead right there that's made a vana by who they are D RT they are dead right there and Moses said take them out of here into the unclean place were the light of the countenance of God doesn't shine and I don't want to catch anybody tearing their garments or engaged in mourning for these men there will be no mourning for them don't you uncover your heads and or tear your clothes lest you die and wrath come on all the people but let your brother's the whole house of Israel but wail the burning that the Lord has kindled not nap the gas from a comet that the burning that God himself has kindled and you don't go out of the door of the tabernacle lest you die for the anointing oil the Lord is upon you and they did everything that Moses said and then the Lord said don't drink wine or toxic rains you knew your son's with you and so on he said that you may distinguish between the holy and the unholy and between unclean and clean never forget the first time I read the story of oz' in the Old Testament or aza the Ark of the Covenant had been recaptured from pagan hands of the Philistines and had been stored and now that was time to return it to its rightful place David leads the parade and he calls for the art to be transported on the back of an ox cart and aza presumably a KOA thight we don't know that for sure we do know that the KOA thoughts were that subdivision or that clan of the Levites who were specifically charged with the care of and transportation of the holy vessels of the tabernacle and you know the story as they're in this glorious procession of bringing back the throne of God not the one that he has established in the heavens dr. Lawson but the one that he had established on the earth in the Ark of the Covenant he puts on the back of this ox cart and as the procession is moving down the road one of the oxen stumbled and it looked as if with the cart being unsteady that this sacred vessel that came from the Holy of Holies was about the slide off of this ox cart and fall into the mud along the road and be desecrated and besmirched by the dirt instinctively reflexively almost automatically as I reached out his hand to steady the ark lest it fall into the mud and the voice was heard from the claws thank you no that's not the way the story goes the same thing that happens to a made Avenue by who happens to us a God strikes him dead that incident well of course the writers of that Presbyterian curriculum had a field day with this as well they said all of the KOA thoughts had been instructed from their youth that under no circumstances on heaven and earth were they ever allowed to touch that sacred vessel there were rungs at the end of it where staves were pushed through so that it could be transported without even touching the ark but rather touching the poles that carried the ark and they all understood that the penalty for touching the ark was death and so the framers of the curriculum say well obviously they knew that and so when he instinctively reached out and touch the ark he scared himself to death right there in this plan had a heart attack but God wouldn't do anything like this to kill poor little aza Jonathan Edwards preaches on this text and he said us as sin was the sin of unspeakable arrogance he thought that his hand was less unclean than the mud they say there's nothing profane or unholy about mud when dirt mixes with water it becomes mud just as God ordained in nature the contaminant that would defile the throne of Yahweh wasn't the dirt on the ground it was the hands on the sinner but us it was so presumptuous that he thought he could keep the ark holy when he was not holy you see other didn't know who God was he didn't understand the goddness of God and he didn't understand the sinfulness of man back in the decade of the 60s the Peck's bad boy of the roman catholic church hans king wrote a book in German called reckford agon or justification which he gave a very lengthy treatise of his understanding of justification trying to find points of agreement between classic Protestantism and comes understanding of the Roman view of course he failed in that Karl Bart wrote the foreword to it saying that if what you say is in fact that Roman Church's doctrine of justification I will go to Saint Margaret Margaret arrow and say fathers I have sinned I wouldn't because then Bart didn't get it right either but in any case in that book he had a lengthy excursus when he talked about incidents like this that occur in the Old Testament the killing him made a vana by who the killing of oz' the hareem the instituting of the slaughter of men women and children in the conquest of Canaan the Dell use of the flood that wipes off website everybody except the family of Noah fast forward to the New Testament the sudden destruction was a nice and Sapphira when they lie to the Holy Ghost and couldn't said how are we to understand these things he said at first blush it seems like the God of the Old Testament is cruel and he dispenses judgment that involves cruel and unusual punishment if you look at the civil sanctions of the theocratic state of Israel in the Old Testament you will see there are about thirty crimes that are listed as capital crimes consulting with a wizard or a necromancer being engaged in homosexual sexual activity these warranted the death penalty public blasphemy was the reason to be put to death years ago I saw an article in Time magazine that expressed outrage of an incident that took place in Baltimore Maryland when a truck driver was arrested for his unruly conduct and he was abusive and profane with his resisting arrests and cursing out the arresting officers and he was taken before the magistrate the magistrate wanted to throw the book at him and the only thing you'd find in there for this orderly conduct of this sort was thirty days in jail and a hundred dollar fine but he knew that there was still a statute on the books of Maryland that also provided with a 30-day sentence and a hundred dollar fine for public blasphemy and so the magistrate tacked that on to the man's punishment to the horror of the editors of Time magazine that anybody in this day and age could be sentenced to jail for thirty days simply for blaspheming in the name of God publicly oh that that truck driver wished that he didn't live in ancient Israel because the ancient Jew would have give everything he had and done anything have his sentence reduced to 30 days in prison and a hundred shekel fine for publicly blaspheming the name of God but when we look at the Old Testament civil sanctions against the New Testament where we're not in a theocracy and it seems as if Hong Kong argues that capital punishment has been reduced from some 30 crimes to basically one Frieda meditated murder and that seems like a tremendous contrast between the law of God as it's executed in the New Testament and how it was carried out in the Old Testament and he said but we overlooked something but by the time that God makes a covenant with the people of Israel with Moses as its mediator God has already radically to an unimaginable degree reduced the number of capital crimes for his people and King said have we forgotten creation it's not the soul that creates public blasphemy shall be put to death it's not the soul that consults necro monsters and wizards who should be put to death it's not the priests who offers strange fire on the altar who should be put to death but it is the soul who sins shall die that originally all sin was a capital offense do you believe that all sin from gross and heinous prime to the smallest peccadillo originally came under the death sentence of God and at some point if Christ does not if Christ does not Terrier feed us Terry you will die and I will die as we are born DOA we are born already under the death sentence of sin yes I know this thing has been removed but it's still appointed once for man to die because every sin is a capital sin why you don't surely think that if I Drive my car 36 miles an hour in a 35 mile an hour speed zone that that makes me worthy of being executed yeah I do think that because the Lord God omnipotent commands me to obey the civil magistrates and when I disobeyed the civil magistrate only slightly on disobeying the Lord of glory only slightly but I am asserting my will over his my knowledge as superior to his making myself the judge is what is clean and what is unclean rather than he making that declaration do you see that the very first temptation you shall be as God we think of humanism being invented by the Greek thinker Protagoras with his motto homo men surah man the measure Protagoras said man is the measure of all things man is the canon man is the standard of all that is right and all that is wrong there is no higher standard than man himself but you see I challenge the historians who say that Protagoras was the founder of humanism know the profounder of humanism was the serpent in the garden who brought his motto of homo Mansura to Adam and Eve saying you shall be as gods you can set the standard and the temptation in Eden was the temptation to be autonomous to be a law unto ourselves so that everybody could do what was right in their own eyes and fallen humanity will not have God in their thinking will not have God to reign over them and in the slightest peccadillo our serpentine nature is made manifest as we declare our independence against God and we revolt against his eternal right to impose obligations upon us and to say with finality thou shalt or thou shalt not when we say I shalt if I feel like it the nation of the United States of America is in deep deep trouble dear friends the mantra of separation of state and church does not mean that division of labor anymore between two institutions ordained by God one for redemptive purposes one for common grace purposes of ordering society to protect preserve and maintain the sanctity of human life no no no no now on the lips of the politicians separation of church and state means separation of the state and God it's not the church that the politicians worry about it's God and our nation has declared its independence from God I won't have him in the public square I won't have them in the public school I won't have them or anything that has to do with this state you know if you want to worship Him privately in your home or in your churches on a reservation like Indians go ahead and we'll let you now for now but we will not have God reign over this country we've signed our death warrant it's one thing to declare your independence from King George it's another thing to declare it from the one who has established his throne in the heavens who will not be Marmont but why are we blinded to the sinfulness of sin well first of all we don't know who God is and so we don't know what the ultimate standard is we can't distill between the holy and the unholy because we don't know the holy that's why I beat that drum all the time about the holiness of God that's why I take people back to Isaiah 6 all the time because when I say I had that vision in the temple and he suddenly realized who God was for the first time in his life he learned who I say it was when he saw God and his eggs altered glories woe is me I'm coming apart at the scene I'm undone I'm a man of unclean lips I've got a dirty mouth and I realized it's not just me I live in a whole culture of people with filthy mouths for mine eyes have seen the king in His Holiness Calvin said it this way as long as we keep our gaze on this world on the horizontal terrestial level and judge ourselves by ourselves we can come to a very optimistic view of who we are and we begin to flatter ourselves and consider ourselves only less than demigods but if for once we lift our gaze into heaven and consider what kind of being God is we join the ranks of those in Sacred Scripture who were considered righteous men by their contemporaries who having one glimpse of God were reduced to dust and ashes and trembled at the sight of it do you not tremble before God is there no fear of God in this world or in our churches after that day in Israel every priest that went to that altar who had seen what happened to made a banner by who they shook in their boots before they approached the presence of God and the Prophet said let the priest weep between the porch and the altar there's no time in my life I say this to the pastor's where I'm more acutely conscious of my own helplessness than when I step into the pulpit to preach because I know as well as I know my own name it's in clearing it I know as well as I know my own name friends that no matter how much time or energy I put into the preparation of the sermon no matter how much learning of accumulated over the years no matter what skills I've ever been able to gain and hone through decades of doing this I know that all the rhetoric all the eloquence all the knowledge is pitiably impotent unless God the Holy Spirit is pleased to accompany the preaching of his word and so like Luther on the night before the diet of warmth in his cell on his face before God he said how God send help these hands are not clean your word is holy but I'm not I'm of the dirt my feet are of clay my frame is of the dust and my help is in the name of the Lord we need Christian leaders men and women who can distinguish between what is holy and what isn't who will not engage in treason against the Lord God omnipotent Edwardson as sinners in the hands of matter to God said you know God is more angry at you then any Prince has ever been at a rebel who dared to revolt against him in his kingdom God loves you unconditionally find that in the Bible I read where God says he applause the evildoer but because he withholds his judgment in his patience and his long-suffering we become at ease in Zion and think that the hammer will never fall when his patience and long-suffering is designed to lead us to repentance it leads us to calloused hearts and stiffened necks thinking God will never judge us because we don't know who he is and we don't know who he is who we learn if you learn anything this week learned to think about the goddness of God and the sinfulness of sin if you understand those two at all then you understand why there had to be a cross and why there is a gospel let's pray father awaken our hearts and our minds to be sensitive to your purity your perfection your greatness and all of your attributes help us to see the sinfulness of our sin that we may flee to the Savior and trade our ugly rags for the cloak of his righteousness before we ask it in his name amen

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Length: 53min 20sec (3200 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2015