Israel: Children of the Devil

➡ Paul, the voiceover for a ministry called Your Daily Bread, discusses the spiritual connection with Christ through scripture. He emphasizes the conflict between the children of God, who uphold truth, and the children of the devil, who are swayed by lies. He also highlights the church’s role as the pillar of truth and its opposition to worldly values, particularly on issues like homosexuality. Paul urges believers to uphold biblical views both in the church and society, despite potential backlash.
➡ The text discusses the challenges faced by Christians in a world that increasingly rejects biblical morality. It emphasizes the importance of standing firm in faith and truth, even in the face of persecution. The author warns that attempts to appease the culture or adapt to worldly trends can lead to the church losing its relevance. The text ends with a call to remain faithful and strong, and to continue shining one’s light in the world.

Hello, my name is Paul, and I am the voiceover for a ministry provided to you by Jim Pugh at God is Government called Your Daily Bread. Taken from Christ’s teaching of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6, verse 11. This is a daily devotion ministry focused not only on uplifting Scripture, but Scripture that will grow your spiritual connection with Christ. We hope that you receive these devotions to uplift you, encourage you, but most importantly advance your knowledge base of the Holy Scriptures. Today’s focused discussion will be on Israel, children of the devil. I want you to look at John chapter 8 for a moment.

John chapter 8, verses 44 and 45. Our Lord is speaking to the leaders in Israel, and he is identifying them as being children of the devil rather than children of God. But in verse 44 he says, you’re of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. Now these are religious Jews, but anybody outside the true kingdom of God is a child of the devil, doing the desires of the devil. He was a murderer from the beginning, doesn’t stand in the truth because there’s no truth in him.

Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I speak the truth, you do not believe me. That sets the church in direct opposition to the world. You have the family of God and the family of Satan. You have the children of God and the children of the devil. The children of God know the truth, proclaim the truth, live the truth of God. The rest of the world is dominated by the lies of Satan. There could not be a more obvious point of conflict.

In Paul’s instruction to Timothy, in 1st Timothy chapter 3 and verse 15, he says this, in case I am delayed, I write you. He is giving Timothy instruction for ministry as a pastor of the church in Ephesus. I write you so that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God. You need to know how to conduct yourself in the household of God, along with everybody else in the church of the living God, which is the pillar and support of the truth. That is a definition of the church that cannot be missed.

The church of the living God is the Stulos, the column, the support, the pillar of the truth. We hold up the truth. Metaphorically, that word Stulos is used of authority, specifically of authority. The church is the authority. The church speaks authoritatively, in Galatians 2.9, recognising the grace that had been given to me, James and Cephas and John, who were reputed to be pillars, pillars in the church. There the word refers to men who are the Apostles, who gave the Apostles doctrine, which becomes the support of the church. The second word he uses here, beside the word pillar, is the word that NAS translates support.

It’s Hedryoma, it means the foundation. Hedra means seat. It is the idea of being settled, seated, fixed, firm, steadfast. This then becomes the foundational definition of the church. It is the bastion of the truth of God. That is the church. It therefore is in absolute antipathy to everyone living outside the church. This has been pressed, I think, into bold relief in recent years in our country and in our world. There was a sense in which a biblical morality had prevailed in our nation for some centuries. That is long gone, as I told you a few weeks ago.

There’s a flow that you can see happening. First you abandon the Bible, then you create a new morality, which is an immorality. Then you demand tolerance, and for those who don’t give you tolerance, you are intolerant, and that leads to persecution. We’re that in all honesty is as it should be expected to be. Antipathy toward God, and this is something I want you to get. Antipathy toward God’s truth resides in the heart of all sinners. Antipathy toward God’s truth resides in the heart of all sinners. They resent the truth.

They are part of the system of lies. Popular evangelicalism has, I think, as its biggest fear, the idea that they will somehow be rejected by the culture. The only way you could not be rejected by the culture would be to lie about the truth, or to hide the truth, or to cover the truth, or to compromise the truth, and then being bent on becoming the friend of the world in the words of James, you have become the enemy of God. There are two kingdoms operating, the Kingdom of God, the Church with the truth, the Kingdom of Satan, the world with lies.

They are always on a collision course. I was being interviewed on the phone a couple of days ago, and the question was asked, what position is your church going to take gay marriage, homosexual marriage? And I said, the biblical position, the biblical position. Marriage is between a man and a woman for life. Homosexuality is a sin like a lot of other sins, but it is a sin. That’s the biblical position. The question then followed, but what’s your position? My position, and why was I asked that? Because there’s an old Anabaptist tradition.

The old Anabaptist tradition bifurcated between one’s personal and biblical opinion, and one’s social tolerances. What’s your opinion about gay marriage? Should it be legalized or not? The Anabaptist view was, well in the church we take the biblical position, but we don’t care about the society. In the church we take the view that the Word of God articulates, but in the world, since we’re otherworldly, since we’re no part of that, we really don’t care about that. I don’t think that’s a position a believer can take, or it terribly weakens the position that is biblical.

I think we do care about gay marriage because people who live that way go to hell. We care about people living together in sin, as we heard earlier in a testimony, because people who continue in that lifestyle do not inherit the kingdom of God. We care about all of those iniquities that alienate people from God and catapult them on their way to hell. So what is our view in the church toward gay marriage? The biblical view. What is our view in the society toward gay marriage? The biblical view. We don’t allow it in the church and we want everyone to know that it is a total disaster and a crime of epic proportions to allow it in the culture, because it puts a stamp of approval on people who are living in a way that will send them to eternal punishment.

We can only take one view. We can only take one view. We can’t hide from the world in which we live. We are aliens and strangers here. We are in conflict with the system around us. We have to acknowledge that, and we can’t have some kind of morality that we want in the church and not care how people live in the world. Of course we care how they live. We care that they continue in their sins, whether they’re heterosexual sins or homosexual sins or any other kinds of sins, they damn people forever.

The church can never be the friend of the world, because friendship with the world is becoming an enemy of God. There has been, there always will be, a fundamental irreconcilable incompatibility between the church and the world, between the truth and the lie, between God and Satan. True gospel faith involves a denial of worldly values. Biblical truth contradicts the system of Satan. That is why Jesus said to his disciples the very night that he was in the upper room with them, getting them ready for what they were going to face.

He said, the world hates you. Why do they hate you? Because they hated me. You are not of the world. I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. But be of good cheer, he says in the next chapter. I have overcome the world. In fact, in Luke we read, woe to you when all men speak well of you, woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so did their fathers to the false prophets, Luke 6.26. False prophets want the world to speak well of them.

Why? Because they want to gain popularity, notoriety, money. There is this fixed animosity between the truth of God and the world, and therefore between the church and the world. John 7, our Lord, says, the world hates me because I testify of it that its works are evil. Did you get that? The reason the world hates us is because we condemn its behavior. That generates hatred, animosity. Contempt for our convictions marks the world. Contempt for the gospel, and it’s not because they don’t buy the intellectual aspect of it, it’s the sin, condemnation, judgment that they hate.

Systematically, you’re going to see over the months and years in the very near future, this hate reached the level of the powers that run the social and political systems of our nation. And you’re going to see their animosity toward our view of premarital sex, extramarital sex, homosexuality. All of those things become so intolerable that laws are going to be made to come against us. What are we going to do? We have a fixed and established and eternal body of truth. We can’t change anything. You’re going to see, as you’ve already seen, churches and leaders who call themselves Christians make that sort of old Anabaptist distinction about, well, personally, and somebody who is a Christian, I don’t like it, but I think politically we have to allow it.

Which means, inside the church we care about our theology, but we don’t care if people go merrily on their way to hell outside. These are going to be very challenging days for us. Go back to my little list. The Bible has been totally rejected by the culture, by the power brokers. In the place of a biblical morality, they have put a morality they’re comfortable with, which means an immorality has become the morality. Tolerance is demanded, intolerance becomes a point of anger and hostility, which leads to persecution. Still, as clearly as the distinction can be made, there will be churches, Christian leaders, who will try somehow to make the world like them, thinking that that’s how you win people.

Listen, the only time the church has made any spiritual impact on the world is when the church has stood firm, uncompromising, unwavering, and boldly proclaimed the truth, right into the face of the enemy. That’s what the prophets did and they were killed, they were stoned. Jesus said to the people of Israel in his time, look at your history, you killed the prophets, you stoned the people that were sent to you, and then they killed him. And then he says to his disciples, they’re gonna hate you, they’re going to kill you.

And church history has gone like that, hasn’t it? And we’ve had a bit of a respite in some parts of the world, not in all. I have a book that thick, that I’m beginning to read on the persecution of Christians around the world now. There’s always been this. And some kind of faddish attempt to appease the culture with music and some kind of soft-cell psychological message is to betray the only responsibility, the primary responsibility we have, and that is to uphold the truth. So you have churches trying to find faddish entrees into the world, which become passe very soon, and the church itself becomes obsolete when new fads develop.

Biblical Christianity says there is truth and the truth is in the Word of God, and all necessary spiritual truth is contained here and nowhere else. Postmodernism says there is no absolute truth. Moral relativism says there is no authority. Personal freedom says there are no rules, and humanistic practical atheism says there is no judge. The Bible doesn’t agree. The Bible says there is truth, there is an absolute authority, there are rules, and there is a judge. And this is contrary to the world. That’s where we are. That’s where we’re going to increasingly be.

I guess in a sense I’m saying to you, get ready, because we aren’t going to change anything. I don’t know how it’s going to play out. I don’t know how it’s going to play out in our school systems. I don’t know how it’s going to play out in our church, in our communities. I don’t know what they’re going to demand that we not say from pulpits. But that’s not going to change anything except maybe the consequences. But God will be glorified in the faithfulness, whatever the consequences, right? Thank you for joining us in this exploration of Israel, Children of the Devil.

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].