Your Daily Bread – Warning to The Church: Breaking Moses Law

Paul calls it the fury of a fire which consumes the adversaries. That’s speaking of hell itself, that fire, taken from Isaiah 26. You have nothing to look forward to but a fire that burns forever. Notice his continued thought in verse 28. Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. You broke the law of Moses, there was a death penalty, and when two or three confirmed that you had indeed violated that law, you were to die. That was judgment. Now, if you look at the law of Moses, break the law of Moses, and pay a serious penalty, verse 29 says, how much severe a punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled underfoot the Son of God? It’s one thing to break the law of Moses.

It’s a far worse thing to trample underfoot the Son of God. The Son is greater than the law, in that sense. If you have trampled underfoot the Son of God by not embracing him as Saviour, when you have heard and understood his gospel, if you have regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant which he shed to sanctify, if you have thus insulted the spirit of grace who offered you the gospel, how much severe a punishment shall you receive? That’s why I said earlier, and I say again, the worst place for an unsaved person to be is in the church, because all you’re doing, all you’re doing, is increasing your culpability and guaranteeing a severe a punishment.

You’d be better off to go to Las Vegas on the weekend. Hell would not be as severe, in terms of its judgments. You’d be better off not to be here at all, than to be here all the time, rejecting this message. This is the worst place you can be, one of the reasons I don’t want to make the church comfortable for unbelievers, I guess, in the end. You either want them to hear the message, and believe, and embrace Christ, or leave, lest they just increase their eternal torment. And verse 30 says, vengeance is mine, I will repay.

And again, the Lord will judge his people. Verse 31, it’s a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. You see, it’s not just a nice thing to come to church and feel sentimental about Jesus. It’s a very serious issue. Now finally, look at verses 38 and 39 of chapter 10. 38, my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. Anybody who falls away, anybody who comes all the way this far, comes out of the world as it were, and gets cleansed from the pollutions of the world.

He moves toward the Gospel, associates with Christians, gets involved in the church, but shrinks back, falls back from a real commitment to Jesus Christ, God says, my soul has no pleasure in him. That’s taken out of the prophet Habakkuk. But verse 39, we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the persevering, that have faith to the preserving of the soul. That refers to heaven. We’re the true believers, the writer says, not like those who fall back. All of that, to suggest to you in very, very certain terms, that you’re in a dangerous condition if you understand the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and you’re just hanging around the church, but you’re not real.

Rejection of the Gospel is dangerous. It intensifies eternal punishment. That’s why the worst place to be unsaved is in the church. Now let’s go back to our text. This is the matter which Paul discusses in this passage. This very matter comes to our attention in 2 Corinthians 13.5, test yourselves to see if you are in the faith, examine yourselves, he says. Paul is concerned about the authenticity of his people. Now, let me get this in the context here, because it is a fascinating, fascinating little section. Remember, the familiar false teachers that we always talk about had invaded the Corinthian church, which was Paul’s church.

He had planted it, founded it, led these people to Christ. The false teachers had invaded the church. Well, they wanted to teach lies. In order to succeed at that, they had to attack Paul because the people trusted and loved Paul. So they went on an all-out campaign to slander Paul, and the people went along with it. They assaulted Paul’s authority, along with everything else about him. They attacked his authority. They said, he doesn’t speak for Christ, he doesn’t speak the truth, he’s not a true apostle. In fact, Paul referred to that, didn’t he, in verse 3, when he said to them, since you are seeking for proof of the Christ who speaks in me.

They were, they were wanting him to prove that Christ actually had spoken through him, because that’s what the false teachers had denied. They said Christ doesn’t speak through him. He’s a charlatan. He’s a fraud. He’s a fake. He’s a phony. He’s a self-appointed prophet. He says whatever he wants to get money and to build an empire. They wanted proof that actually Christ was speaking in him. And they were saying, he’s so weak, his presence is unimpressive, his speech is contemptible. And he admitted he was weak, and he was a clay pot, and he was always suffering and always in pain and always in prison.

He just was weak, and he refers to that. We are weak, he says. And so here in our weakness, you have bought the lie of these false teachers that Christ doesn’t speak through us. He admitted to being weak, but was he in fact the agent of the living God, the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, even though weak? That was the issue. It shouldn’t have been, but it was. So he comes to the bottom line in verses five and six, and here is his response. Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith.

Examine yourselves. Now, what’s the point? If you do your spiritual inventory, listen, and you conclude that you are in the faith, that you are true believers, that the gospel of Jesus Christ has transformed your life, that Christ dwells in you, if you conclude that, then you know I’m a true apostle, right? That’s his point. Look at your lives. Are you true believers? Have you been genuinely transformed? If you are, then I must be a true apostle who preached a true message, a message that brought Christ to you.

If they doubted his apostleship, they would have to doubt his message. If they doubted his message, they would have to doubt their own conversion. So he says, take a look at your life. Has it been transformed? If it’s been transformed, it was the truth of Christ that transformed it, and I’m the one that preached that to you. If you test yourselves, if you examine yourself to see if you’re in the faith, and you find that you are genuine Christians, then you certainly can’t doubt that I had Christ speaking in me.

It’s exactly his point. In 1 Corinthians 9, chapter 9, verse 2, he said earlier to them his first letter, if to others I am not an apostle, some people might not think I’m an apostle, at least I am to you, why? For you are the seal of my apostleship in the Lord. You’re the proof of it. You stamped the seal of authenticity on my apostleship by virtue of your transformed lives. He said essentially the same thing in 2 Corinthians 3, too. That was 1 Corinthians 9, too. This is 2 Corinthians 3, too.

You are our letter written in our hearts, known and read by all men, being manifested that you are a letter of Christ, cared for by us, written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts. In other words, the authenticity, they were saying, well, he doesn’t have any letters. He doesn’t have any commendation letters. He doesn’t have any official documents. And Paul says, look, you’re my official document. You are the letter that people read and can affirm the validity of my apostleship.

You can’t conclude that you have been genuinely transformed, that Christ is in you, and I’m not legitimate because I’ve brought Christ’s message to you. That’s the point here. It’s a tremendous truth. The bottom line is any preachers, any pastor’s authenticity is verified most notably by the lives of the people to whom he ministers. Test yourselves, perazo. It means to examine, to prove. Examine yourselves, doquimazo. Two words used as synonyms here. The synonym examine you is a very familiar one in the New Testament. Do an inventory to find out if you’re true.

Check yourselves out, test your hearts, examine yourselves. What are you gonna find out? Because what you find out has immense implications for me. Now, what are they looking for? Verse five, to see if you are in the faith. The faith means the Christian faith. It’s objective. If you’re in the faith, if you’re in the kingdom, if you truly belong to God, objective. If you’re a true Christian, check yourself. Now, this is very important. What I’m going to say here, very, very important. All of this is, but this notably unique, I think, to understand.

It is crucial to remember this, that in this context, Paul is calling for a self-examination. Listen carefully, which he is sure will reveal that they are true Christians. In other words, he’s literally putting his apostleship on the line, on the basis that he is sure they’re genuine believers. Go ahead, he says. I will put the authenticity of my apostleship on the back of your self-evaluation. I’ll rise or fall with it. He was that sure, that when they did the inventory, they would conclude that they were true Christians. And therefore, he had to be a true apostle, because they were Christians by virtue of his ministry.

And you know what that tells me? That tells me that Paul expected them to find themselves genuinely transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. He expected that. And beloved, I want you to know this, he knew them, and he knew they were Christians. And you can know when someone’s a Christian. You can know that, it’s not mysterious. There are some people that you may not know it about, but you can know that someone is a Christian. He knew it about them. He didn’t have any hesitation about that. He knew their lives.

He knew there was no explanation for the transformation, apart from the power of Jesus Christ. This is one of the great New Testament texts to affirm that one can know if he has genuinely been born again. This idea that has been largely perpetuated by the Roman Catholic Church, that you never know until you die, is foreign to the New Testament. You can know. This is not some mystery to somehow be disclosed after death. And you sort of die wondering whether it’s going to be hell, purgatory, or heaven, but not being sure of any of those.

Paul is really saying, look, you know very well you’re in the faith. I know very well you’re in the faith. What in the world are you doing questioning my authority when you know your lives have been transformed by the message which I preached, and it was Christ who preached it through me. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have transformed your life. [“The Last of Us”] You can’t question Paul’s apostleship if you look at his results. You know you’re in the faith. But he gets sarcastic about it. He’s so upset. Verse five, or do you not recognize this about yourselves that Jesus Christ is in you? That’s sarcastic.

Is it so hard that you can’t even see that Jesus Christ is in you? That’s sarcasm. Of course, it was obvious. That’s why he says sarcastically, do you not recognize what is most apparent? The most apparent thing about you is that your life has been transformed. You know you’re in the faith. You know that Christ is in you. If any man be in Christ, he’s what? A new creation. Old things have passed away. New things have come. You know that. And by that very knowledge, you know Christ has spoken through me, the very Christ who transformed you.

This isn’t some mystery. In fact, he says back in 2 Corinthians 4, too, that the truth has been commended to their consciences. He says the same thing in chapter five, verse 11. Their conscience, their conscience responded to what they knew about their own genuine conversion and about Paul’s true apostleship. Why in the world would they believe the lies of these false teachers? So foolish. True salvation, beloved, is recognizable. It’s perceivable. I certainly don’t go through my life saying, oh, am I a Christian or am I not a Christian? Oh, I don’t know if I’m a Christian.

I’m not sure. There’s no explanation for my life except that Christ has transformed it. There’s no explanation for my attitude towards sin and my attitude toward righteousness. There’s no explanation for why I commit my life to the teaching of God’s truth. There’s no explanation for why I want to praise and rejoice in the Lord. There’s no explanation for that other than the Lord has transformed my heart. True salvation is perceivable. It’s recognizable. You can look at your life and see it. You can know that Jesus Christ is in you because you’ve been transformed.

You’ve been born again. All that means is you’re a new person. And he was so certain that these believers would validate their true conversion that he put his apostleship to that test. And he is sure that their self-examination will reveal that they’re converted and they’re converted because he preached the truth. And if they were authentic, then he was authentic. But, verse five, he does have to say, unless indeed you fail the test. Indeed, meaning in fact or in truth. Some of you might be a documos, unqualified, disqualified, despised, unworthy, reprobate.

That’s what that word means. Some of you are going to fail the test. You’re gonna do the inventory. It’s possible to fail. It is possible to fail. There are those people in the church. Some of them are here this morning, as always. Christ is not in them. By the way, Jesus Christ is in you is a great truth, isn’t it? If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he’s none of his, Roman says. Christ lives in you, Galatians. Galatians 2, 20. The life you live is really Christ living in you. And this manner, this presence of Jesus Christ in you and in me produces manifest discernible transformation called new creation.

Thank you for joining us in this exploration of the warning to the church, breaking Moses law. Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong, and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way. [tr:trw].