AUSTRALIAN BIBLE CHURCH July 28, 2013 

A Presbyterian Church following the Bible without Qualification
and the Lord Jesus Christ without Compromise by Faith

VIRTUE, VICE, VENGEANCE AND VICTORY

PSALM 94 and its Sequel

 

STRATA:

1-3  Punishment for the Proud
Vengeance on the Vicious

4-7 Persecution for the Lord's People
Presumption against the Lord's Person

8-11 Proclamation of the Lord's Performance
Futility of False Fashioners

12-13 Rest in the Ways of Righteousness till
Judgment Comes

16 Call to  Spiritual Arms (cf. Ephesians 6)

17-19 Cure for the People's  Alarms

20-21 The Falsity of Fellowship with the Futile

22-23 The Lord both Defence and Refuge II Corinthians 6:14-18
 

THEMES
 

I THE COLLISION 94:1-7

2 THE CREATOR 8-11

3 THE COMPANY 12-15

Individual

Composite and Corporate

4 THE CALL   16-23

Its Conditions16-19

its Principle 20
Its Crowding by Enemies and Encompassment by God 22
Its Conclusion 23

5 Psalm 95 THE ALTERNATIVE
THE CHALLENGE
THE EXAMPLE

Sermon Notes

POINTS

 Part 2, vv. 8-11

The Creator - does the manufacturer of ears, not hear!

Imagine an inventor carefully formulating the conditions for hearing while neither having it nor having thought of it! God scoffs at such irrational folly (vv. 8-11), as if the world were run by dreams. If you do not have what is sufficient to start a work or a universe, you will never finish. We are increasingly a finished race because our sacred culture refuses our beginning, taking matter from nowhere and mind from the sub-moronic nullity of the thoughts of matter, which are not, and spirit from thin air, yet it is this by which they know! Magic is its name, and method is voided as reason lies void, fallen in the street.

Nothing has no thoughts and is no inventor! Imagine nothing formulating the ear or the product of nothing doing so; far less man! God tears apart the hypocritical vanity and vagueness of spiritual aliens, gifted at the null and the nebulous. The products of nothing are not endowed, indeed, it is even more moronic than matter, in imagination and creation. Shall the most be the product of the least, of nothing ? Shall wonders come from nowhere ? in steps or at once ? Will form and law, serviceability and agility, organic function and multiplied commands, all integrated, 'arise' like a sleeper at dawn ? But this does not sleep. It comes activated and constrained, from nowhere, but has neither consciousness nor forbears. Such is the naturalism which God denounces, as He announces His personal care.

It is possible to be playful with life, imagining a vain thing, as Psalm 2 puts it, and avoiding the solution to the tragedy that is man (Proverbs 1). God however has foreknown all, foretold the remedy in Christ Jesus, and will in due time, pronounce the severance of lies, and of the very earth under them (Psalm 2, Isaiah 24, II Peter 3, Matthew 24:35).

POINTS

 Part 4, vv.16ff.
 

Blessed is the man whom the Lord instructs, we read.

"WHO will rise up for Me against the evil workers ?"

Who will attest ? As Paul puts it, he is called for the defence and confirmation of the Gospel (Phil. 1:7). It must be defended, received, itself the site for transfer of power, as in the Berlin air lift. Our power is of God, who flies it in, not in aeroplanes, but through His Spirit (Zechariah 4:6).

"Not by might, nor by power,
but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts."

This was the word when Jerusalem needed rebuilding; how much more when the evil one defames Christ, distorts the Gospel, misdirects many churches, and culture becomes king increasingly in lands where once Christ was revered, which now in subversive substitute, merely means self-worship.

Who will  attest ? Is it not enough in our land in particular

	i) to drug the minds of the young with grave and brutal fairy stories with nothing in them but unfettered imagination and desire ? for years ? with no right of reply at the interface of instruction in these mysteries!
	ii) selectively to import those who vehemently reject the claims of Jesus Christ ?
	iii) abandon the original rocky foundations sketched and surveyed in institution and Preamble to the Constitution, for philosophic sand ?
	iv) take the unbased morals of the United Nations, who have evacuated as a body, for all practical purpose, from God! and thereby dictate!
	wander mesmerised towards vehement assault on man as product of God, and so denying the greatest example of observable definitional design on earth, the human body in its personal base, start attacking those who remind and warn, as others have done in former generations, unheeded with appalling results, lest the truth be defended with reason, restored to physical reality!

What have I done ? God asks in Micah 6:3, and in what have I wearied you!

What we need for our developing culture, we must have! they say. What have I done! God exclaims! If God of our Preamble to our Constitution be God, then follow Him; and if these naturalistic mysteries be your foundation, then follow that; but never say you were not warned! Israel was. You are. Can love do less!

And into what is this society developing as it rushes to follow after the world, as Israel did in appointing a king for the wrong reasons ? To what is this profoundly blessed land coming ? Is it not realised that the greater your opportunity, the greater your responsibility!

It is moving to become a land that is a law-unto-itself, despising design, voyaging into vice, teaching what is at war with reason, revering what is never found, and living a fairy story, where the outcome of unrealism is forgotten, until it becomes income, and the nations fail - ready to imitate Sodom, Babylon, Tyre, Nineveh and for a long time, the Jerusalem that is now restored in part. Is this the unheritage listed mutant desired! This would become as common as dirt and as useful, when it is mere mud, or a dry well, broken as in Jeremiah 2:13. It as one who rejects the snowy waters of purity for the sake of emptiness. Has blessing anaesthetised thought ? Are evcen warnings to be cut off and  served with summonses? or is truth to become toxic!

To be sure, there is a battle coming (Revelation 19), but there is no victory in it for vice; only misery. The war to end all wars, is that with God, and self-destruction is its outcome. Ezekiel 33:11 puts it keenly, as does Jeremiah 13:27.

The world is charmed with happy domestic felicity, steady work, child production from the ordained sources, dutifulness as it looks at the Royal Couple. How It longs for goodness and righteousness, naturalness and self-control. But it must also  long for the truth, without which there is no peace!  and repent at its violation and that of life. Yet this world surges for justice, disrupts for desire, purges for bitterness, bites for zest of resentment, is irreconcilable. Redemption is the beginning, restoration to the direct presence of His beloved by His Spirit, through His salvation, that is found in the redemption through the blood of Christ. It  is this which leads on to what David states in Psalm 94:19.

"In the multitude of my churning thoughts within me, Your comforts delight my soul."

It is good for each individual to be encompassed by the One who knows the directions, dynamised by the power which is given with wisdom, delivered by the rescue operations of the One who made man, liberty, love and opportunity (Psalm 144:7, 14518:. God never fails (Zephaniah 3:5). Every morning He brings truth to light: therefore in the morning, seek Him! He delights in being found, in repentance and faith (Jeremiah 18:31-32), that He might show mercy; and what is found is no foundling, but gains authority to become a child of God (John 1:12-14).You have faith ? use it. Eternal life is gift:  then receive it. Christ Jesus is reliable ... then rely on Him. His word is truth ... operate on it.