Nahum 1; Romans 1
Okay, Nahum chapter one, it says an oracle concerning Nineveh, the book of the vision of Nahum of Elkosh. The Lord is a jealous and avenging God. The Lord is avenging and wrathful. The Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies. The Lord is slow to anger and great in power, and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty. His way is in whirlwind and storm and the clouds are the dust of his feet. He rebukes the sea and makes it dry. He dries up all the rivers, Bashan and Carmel wither, and the bloom of Lebanon withers. The mountains quake before him, the hills melt. The earth heaves before him and the world and all who dwell in it.
Who can stand before his indignation? Who can endure the heat of his anger? His wrath is poured out like fire, and the rocks are broken into pieces by him. The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble. He knows those who take refuge in him, but with an overflowing flood, he will make a complete end of the adversaries and will pursue his enemies into darkness. What do you plot against the Lord? He will make a complete end, trouble will not rise up a second time. For they are like entangled thorns, like drunkards as they drink. They are consumed like stubble, fully dried.
From you came one who plotted evil against the Lord, a worthless counselor. Thus says the Lord, though they are at full strength and many, they will be cut down and pass away. Though I have afflicted you, I will afflict you no more. And now I will break his yoke from off you and will burst your bonds apart. The Lord has given commandment about you. No more shall your name be perpetuated from the house of your gods. I will cut off the carved image and the metal image. I will make your grave for you are vile.
Behold upon the mountains, the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace. Keep your feast, old Judah, fulfill your vows for never again shall the worthless pass. through you, he is utterly cut off.
Now, a passage easier to find, Romans chapter one. I think you’ll be familiar with lots that is in Romans chapter one, but it will help us understand these catechisms, Heidelberg catechisms for Lord’s day four. So the beginning of Romans, Paul is writing and he says, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through the prophets in the holy scriptures concerning his son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the son of God in power, according to the spirit of holiness. By his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ, our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you because your faith is proclaimed in all the world. For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his son, that without ceasing, I mention you always in my prayers, asking that somehow, by God’s will, I may now at last succeed in coming to you. For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you, that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine. I want you to know brothers that I have often intended to come to you, but thus far have been prevented in order that I may reap some harvest among you as well as among the rest of the Gentiles. I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and foolish. So I am eager to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome.
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith. As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile, and their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
Therefore, God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature. And the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossip, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. Amen, God’s word.
All right, tonight brings up a conundrum, a question, a struggle that people have. Is God wrong or is he unjust in requiring man to do something that he cannot do? Now, I know you all are smart people and you’ve been here for Lord’s days one, two, and three in the catechism. I know y’all are smart people because many of you have come to confession of faith classes and you are having bells go off in your head and you’re saying, no, no, no, God is not unjust, partly because you know his character, but partly because you know that God gave Adam the ability to do what was right at the first. He could choose to not eat and live, or he could choose to eat and die.
And so when we consider the question, is God unjust? You can leave off the by doing this or that to man. And the question just itself, is God unjust? ought to get you wiggling uncomfortably in your seat. It ought to get you sweating on the backs of your palms. The top of your head ought to swell as if you’ve just had hot sauce. But in this case, with maybe a little righteous anger that someone would even ask or suggest that God was unjust.
Here’s the reason, couple reasons people ask these sorts of things. Number one, they want to find fault with God. That’s never a good mission. Number two, they’re sinners and they can’t even begin to understand the things of the spirit.
But what about many Christians, not M-I-N-I, like little, you know, mini me Christians, but many, M-A-N-Y. What about many Christians who in today’s We’ll call it the anti-sovereignty of God realm. They put their human reason, which is bent and broken and not so great. They put that over what the Bible teaches. And so they stand over the scripture and judgment and say, I could never love a God who elects some and passes over others. Or they say something like, I could never love a God who would punish evil. I could never believe in a God who would do this. And the simple answer to them is, well, don’t. Read your Bible and you’ll find out the character of God.
This question that pops up tonight is really striking at the justice of God. And I don’t know if you’ve come to understand this, but at the heart of the atonement, at the heart of God making unrighteous people righteousness, is the justice of God. When we hear the phrase justification, we hear the phrase made righteous. We have to think about two different words, one a noun and one a verb. But in the New Testament, you have a word family that has a noun and it has a verb. And it’s to be righteous, like a character, a quality, but it’s also to be made righteous or to be unrighteous. And these words are in the justification family, which is legal. God, in his justice, does things legally to clear the sinner. He does things righteously. He doesn’t sweep sin under the rug and say, I don’t see it, so it didn’t happen. No, sin is actually paid for. We’ll think about that in a moment.
But the justice of God is what’s at stake here. And I think we gotta be careful if we’re asking these questions ourselves, we gotta be careful because we’re attacking the character of God, the moral character of God, but we’re also showing our ignorance, aren’t we? If you read the Bible, you’ll find out God is a God of righteousness. You’ll find out he’s a God of justice. He’s a God of wrath. He’s a God of mercy. And you’ll find out that justice and mercy and love and peace, kiss and Christ at the cross, all those things meet together.
Well, the justice of God is what we call one of his moral attributes. Uh, there are commonly, let’s just say seven moral attributes. They are the holiness of God, the goodness of God, the love of God, the grace, uh, graciousness of God, the mercy of God, the patience of God, and then the righteousness of God. And let me make mention of each of these very briefly and end with justice or righteousness and make a lot of it. Cause I think it will help.
God is holy. That means he is other. That means he set apart. I think several of you have been in the class. Michael Reeves, the fear of God, the fear of the Lord. It means we reverence him who is otherly. Think of John the Apostle as an old man on the Isle of Patmos. He saw into heaven, saw the throne of God, and because of the holiness of God, he fell on his face as the dead. He realized creator, creature, holy, unholy. How about Isaiah? When he was volunteering to go on a speaking mission to Israel to preach woe and doom and judgment, but also hope and salvation, he realized that he was going to have to be a speaking prophet. And what did he realize when he saw into heaven, and he saw the temple, and he saw the train of the robe of the majesty fill that temple, and he saw the angels and seraphs and all singing. He said, woe unto me, cursed is me, I’m a man of unclean lips. The angel took a tongue from the altar, took a hot coal and touched his lips and said, your sin has been atoned for.
And so holiness is something that we can’t stand in the presence of when we are sinners. Holiness is something other and set apart. Think about our room next door. If we ever get there, it’s a place set apart for worship. And it has a feeling of holiness. Instead of putting back the Kmart ceiling, we put wood, we put a bit of creation. It’s high for the transcendence of God. You know, it has a feeling of warmth. You’re in the embrace of God, but it has a sense of majesty and all kinds of other things. So there’s principles behind why we do what we do the way we do it.
But God’s holiness is one of his important moral attributes. God is also good. Psalm 100 calls us to worship. Come, let us bow down. Psalm 95, I think it is, but Psalm 100 verse 5 ends up saying, why worship the Lord? For he is good. Where do we find the standard of goodness? We find it in God himself. Only God is good. Isn’t that what Jesus teaches when he’s making his way through Israel? Teacher who is good. Only God is good. That’s what he says.
What about love? God is love. Very often we speak of three aspects of God’s love. Very often when we speak of God’s love, we’re speaking of his love of complacency. He loves himself. And yes, he’s allowed to do that. There’s inner Trinitarian love. He loves himself and anyone who is in Christ. That’s the love we often speak of. God is love. He loves within the Trinity. And that Trinitarian love is shared through the covenant when he made man and determined to love them through Jesus. But then we have two other words of love. They’re pretty close. One is beneficence. God loves his creatures. He feeds them. He’s made a world that works for each of them in their ecosystem. Then there’s the love of benevolence. God takes care of man, even unrighteous man. The rain falls. on the just and the unjust.
But don’t confuse God’s love of complacency within the Trinity and on those he’s covenanted with, who have faith in Christ and are united to Jesus. Don’t confuse that with the others. We live in a world that’s confused love. You go through court square in Graham, you see the big mural, love is love, whatever that means. What have we determined in our culture? You can do whatever you want to. especially in the privacy of your own home. And then somehow we have to go tell about it and tell what we do. Uh, and that gets us, uh, advancements in life. At least it did. Maybe this tide is turning, but love is love. Don’t, don’t you say I’m not married. Don’t you say I’m not in a committed relationship or on and on it goes. Love is love. Well, that’s a bunch of malarkey. Uh, God is love and his standard is there for us.
Well, God is also gracious. So he’s holy. He’s good. He’s love. He’s gracious. Grace is God’s unmerited favor. If God wasn’t gracious, we’d be in big, big trouble. God is merciful. He’s kind to the weak. A bruised reed he does not break. God is long-suffering or patient. His views is longer than it should be. He’s slow to anger. He’s abounding in steadfast love. He remembers that we are dust.
But then we come to God is righteous. So he’s holy, good, love, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, but he is righteous. And this is the one we need to think about if we’re going to look through these three aspects of the Heidelberg tonight. He is upright. He is just. He has moral excellence. Whatever he ordains is right. And whatever he does is right. And he will by no means clear the guilty.
A righteous God does not overlook sin. A righteous God does not sweep sin under the rug and say, don’t see it, doesn’t count, doesn’t matter. A righteous God does things by the book. And so one of the things we understand about God’s righteousness is it affects how he rules the world and everything in it. He gives a just or right law. And he expects righteousness or rightness from his people. And he blesses those who obey it and he curses those who don’t.
Well, then he distributes according to the works of those who live before him. He gives good things to men and angels who do right. And he gives evil things, penalties to men and angels who do wrong. One of the things we understand to be true is at the last day, when the trumpet sounds, Jesus returns, the dead in Christ will rise and there will be a judgment of the unjust or the unrighteous. And there will be a judgment of the righteous. The righteous will be found and hidden in Christ and will enjoy the blessedness of God forever. The unrighteous will be found wanting and be cast into everlasting darkness, body, and soul,
and so the righteousness of God means he has to act righteously. He can’t act unrighteously. So we come to the first question in that first stanza, does God do wrong to man in requiring of him in his law that which he cannot perform? And so to put this into a set of premises with a conclusion, it would go like this. God requires what is impossible. Therefore, he’s unjust. Right. God requires what is impossible. So he’s unjust. God requires perfect obedience. Man can’t do it. Therefore, God is unjust. That’s that’s the accusation, isn’t it? If you require what is impossible, you’re unjust. If God requires what is impossible, a man, then then he is certainly unjust because he can’t make us do something.
If you told your kids by tomorrow evening, I want you to build a rocket ship out of this refrigerator box And if you don’t fly to the moon, you’re in big trouble They they couldn’t do it You would be unjust in requiring that of them.
But what did God do when he made Adam and Eve? He created them male and female after his own image and And we got a steal from the Westminster Shorter Catechism here to help us with the Heidelberg. He made man male and female after his own image and knowledge, righteousness, and holiness with dominion over the creatures.
And then we steal from Thomas, Boston, the fourfold state of man. It was possible for Adam to not sin. And it was possible for Adam to sin. And what does our catechism tell us? It says God made man capable of performing it. It was possible for Adam to not sin, to resist the devil, and he would flee. Jesus did it in the wilderness as the second Adam.
But it was possible for Adam to perform the law, but through the instigation of the devil did God say, Then by his own willful disobedience, Adam was standing there with Eve when she took the fruit. And what does Genesis say? It was a delight to their eyes.
You’ve seen the Narnia movie, I think. You’ve read the books. And what does the character in the Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, the little boy, he wants Turkish delight. And what does the White Witch promise? You come with me. I’ll give you all the Turkish delight a boy could want.” And so Edmund goes and, what is it, he gets frozen? Something like that.
Things are a delight to our eyes. You think of your fishing lures. If you’ve ever done fishing, they have that little silver spoon. And behind that silver spoon is a hook with a barb. And the idiot fish sees that thing and strikes at it, right? And so when you catch the fish, you pull it out of the water. You have to figure out how to get the hook out and the barb at the same time. It’s a tricky operation.
But what happens in the anatomy of sin, James tells us, we are lured and enticed. We’re given opportunity and we’re given desire. And what do we do? We go for it. We strike at the silver spoon. We want the Turkish delight.
The devil is the father of lies. He is the one who prowls about seeking how to deceive and destroy. and to devour. But God made man capable of performing the law. What happened when Adam and Eve sinned? Well, they deprived himself and posterity of this power.
We speak of the word imputation, which kind of goes in the justification and legal stuff of atonement. Imputation is to credit to someone else’s account. And we think of three big historic imputations in the way of salvation. Adam’s sin was imputed to all his posterity. Was Jesus Adam’s posterity? No, he was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of her without sin. So he was not born with a sin nature. He was not born with original sins and he never committed actual sins.
But we think of that imputation of Adam’s first sin, his original sin and the guilt of that sin. It’s imputed to us. It’s credited to us. We call it, he’s our federal head, our federal representative. But then at the cross, the sins of the elect, the sins of those God would save were imputed to Jesus. Why were not the sins of everybody imputed to Jesus? What happens, let’s just say half the world accepts Jesus, half the world doesn’t. What happens when Jesus paid for everybody’s sin in this theory and half the world doesn’t accept it and they go to hell? That’s double payment. It’s unjust, right? And you see very quickly how our American Christianity that’s really been riddled by human reason and maybe some of the Armenian tendencies gets God’s justice wrong very quickly. The atonement had to be particular, otherwise it would make God unjust.
So anyway, the sins of the elect were imputed to Jesus on the cross. That’s why we read passages like Colossians, and it says, our sins were nailed to the cross. The record of our debt was canceled by God nailing our sins to the cross. Were you there? No. Were your sins there? In a sense, yes. There is this wonderful effect of the imputation of our sins to the cross at Jesus.
Well, there’s a third imputation, and that is the righteousness of Christ to sinners who come to him by faith. When God justifies us, he sees us as if we never sinned, because our sins were imputed to Jesus, and he sees us as if we always obeyed. His obedience or righteousness was imputed to us. And so be of sin, the double cure we sing, cleanse us of its guilt and its power. God sees us. The other night, I think it was Tuesday, no, it was Wednesday afternoon, we examined a young fella for licensure to preach the gospel. Young guy, really bright, really smart, did really well. But he said this, and we busted him. What do we get in justification? And he said, we get forgiveness of sin. And so we’re all sitting there like, and what else? And I know you guys would answer it, right? We also not only get forgiveness, we get obedience. It’s just as if I never sinned, just as if I always obey. That’ll come when we get to the Heidelberg on justification, you’ll see right where we ripped that off from.
But anyway, this first section speaks of the theoretical wrong of God to require of man what he cannot do. but we know because of Adam it is not possible. But it was at a point in time.
All right, the second stanza, God will by no means suffer such disobedience and rebellion to go unpunished, but is terribly displeased with our inborn as well as actual sins. He’ll punish them in just judgment in time and eternity as he has declared, curse it as everyone that continueth, not in all the things which are written in the book of the law to Do them.
God. Follow follow what I’m saying here, God can’t not punish sin. Did I get that right? OK, he’s got to do it. What did your parents say when they knew they had to give you a spanking? It’s going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you. It doesn’t mean God hates us. It doesn’t mean, you know, he’s some sadist or whatever, but he cannot. ignore, overlook, not deal with sin. That’s why it’s so wonderful for us that he laid our sin on Jesus. That’s the beauty of the gospel. He who knew no sin became sin for us in order that we might become the righteousness of Christ, the righteousness of God.
God cannot overlook sin. He must deal with it. His justice demands it. His righteousness requires it. And it’s every sin. It’s the little ones and it’s the big ones. Everything that is against the will of God is sin. Some sins are more heinous. Some sins are less heinous in God’s sight. We have the aggravations of sin and all the rest.
But what does God punish? He punishes the inborn as well as actual. What does he mean by inborn here? It’s the original sin. and the original guilt. What does he mean by actual sins? Well, you’re born with the sin nature and that sin nature will produce sinful actions. And so God holds us accountable for our original sin and actual sins, our inborn sins, as well as our committed sins.
And what does God declare about his law? If you keep it blessed, if you don’t keep it cursed, Don’t you know Jesus knew of the curse that was due for sin? You know, on the night he was betrayed when he took bread after at the end of the Passover, broke it, gave it to him. I’m sure he was thinking of his next day broken body. He knew what was coming. He knew the wickedness of the Romans. He knew more so the wrath and curse of God.
That’s why that night when he went to the garden to pray, he was sweating blood, his capillaries under the stress of facing the cup of God’s wrath burst and he sweat blood. It was it was why he prayed, Lord, if there be another way, there’s absolutely no other way. Could God invent anything he wanted to invent? Yes. But just because God invented it, would it make it the right solution? Could he have Could he have created a scapegoat and said, I’ve made this scapegoat just for the sins of people. He could do that, but it wouldn’t be able to atone for sin. It had to be Jesus, had to be the spotless land, had to be, uh, Christ the righteous.
All right. The last stanza, this is the important one. God is merciful, but he is also just. Therefore, his justice requires that sin, which is committed against the most high majesty of God, be also punished with extreme, that is everlasting punishment, both of body and soul.
I’ll speak of the gospel because we need a little hope here. If we come to Jesus by faith, We recognize that we are sinners. We recognize that sin must be punished by God. We recognize that because we are sinners, any death we die could never pay or atone for our sins. And so we come to the knowledge of a substitute who bore our sins in his body on the tree. He bore the curses for our disobedience in his body on the tree. And so we exercise faith in Jesus Christ. receiving the righteousness of God, just as if I never sinned, just as if I’ve always obeyed.
But we get way more than just forgiveness and obedience. We are regenerated, given a new heart and our new heart desires to keep the law of God. And we don’t do it perfectly because we have a divided heart. We struggle in life with the spirit and the flesh. Our heart is tugged one way and tugged the other. And some days we live well for God and other days we don’t live so well. And sometimes it’s just a big old mess. But that’s the way God has designed it.
But when we come to faith in Jesus and believe in him, he gives us the grace of obedience. But we also in this life deal with life under the curses of creation, and so we have aches and pains, we have thorns and thistles, we have broken relationships, it hurts to have babies, it’s hard to raise children, and on and on it goes.
And then we undergo what we might call temporal chastisements. If you, like King David, just did a doozy, Remember, Bathsheba, bathing, saw her, coveted her, sent for her, took her, committed adultery, tried to get her husband to come home and lay with her so that the baby would be his. Then he had to get Joab to put him on the front line to knock him off because, well, that was just a great plan. That was a great sin of David, a man after God’s own heart.
The wages of sin is death. And yes, David did die. He did rest with his fathers. But David was a man of faith. He looked for the coming Messiah. In fact, he was a type of the Messiah, right? He was a little M Messiah. We believe David is in heaven, his sins forgiven and all the rest.
But did he not deal with temporal chastisements and judgments? In fact, a child died. Eventually the kingdom was split. The people of Israel suffered because of his sin. And David became humble in his old age through these difficulties.
And so you may walk through life as a believer, as a man or woman of faith, justified before God, having the peace of conscience that comes, the joy in the Holy Ghost, the increase of grace and perseverance to the end. You may have all that, but God may chastise you along the way. And it may seem as if he is unjust. It may seem as if you’re being punished for that which was laid on Christ, but we have these temporal chastisements, both of body and soul, that come our way.
And Hebrews tells us, what kind of father on earth doesn’t love his children and chastise them? How much more?
But what about the judgment that the unrighteous do not escape? Sometimes in this life, while we’re suffering our chastisements, it seems like the righteous, I mean, the unrighteous are prospering. Why is it they’re loaded, right? Why is it the righteous can just do, I mean, the unrighteous can do unrighteous things and it seems like God is blessing them. They got money, they got wealth, they got fame, they got power, they got all these things. Of course, we’re not supposed to want all that, but it seems to us there is an inequity.
And what will happen one day to the unrighteous? Think of the rich man and Lazarus. Remember how well the rich man ate and Lazarus laid outside his gates? But what happened when eternity came? Lazarus was in heaven in Abraham’s bosom. The rich man was in the torments of hell, his thirst never assuaged.
And so we’ve got to remember, we’ve got to juggle in a sense in our mind and heart that the righteous have everlasting joys, and yes, some temporal blessings, but also some chastisements. But while the unrighteous seem to be getting away with it, as it were, there will be something for them that they cannot escape. And I don’t know about you, I try not to think about the torments of hell. But when you do, it’s a terrible and awful thing.
And so how do we think of these things tonight? Well, first, I think we need to remember rightly who God is. What were those things? He’s holy. He’s good. He’s love. He’s gracious. He’s merciful. He’s long suffering. And he is righteous.
What about man? We are sinful by nature. Even when redeemed, we still bear in us remnants of original sin. We still commit actual sins. We still will undergo temporal judgments and chastisements. But ultimately, our home is in heaven with Jesus. We will be saved to sin no more. And what a wonderful thing that will be.
But when we look around the world, we need to have a burden for those who are apart from Jesus. We don’t know who’s still in Adam. And we don’t know who’s in Jesus and we don’t know who’s destined to remain in Adam and or destined to come to faith in Jesus. But we need to live and speak of the gospel so that perhaps like Noah, who was hammering and nailing for 100 years on the ark, would speak of the cross and we’d speak of Christ so that others may escape the wrath and curse of God due for sin.
Let’s pause and give thanks to God for what he’s done for us.
Our God, we thank you for the covenant of redemption where you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit determined in your love to make a people, to elect a people, to allow sin to enter the world, but also to send your son, our savior, the redeemer to obey in our place to suffer in our place and to die in our place. We thank you for this glorious covenant of redemption that has been fulfilled.
We thank you that we are in the covenant of grace where by faith in Jesus, we are obedient by faith in Jesus. We are able to live lives for you, but we do fail. We do falter. We don’t live at our level of children of the King. So help us to strive after holiness. Help us to strive after living by the Spirit and not the flesh.
And Lord, may we call others to faith in Christ so they may escape your hot wrath and your anger and your displeasure that will indeed come one day for sin. Make us evangelists because of what we know we have in Jesus that others ought to have. Help us, we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.