Bible Study Romans Part 29-Guilt, Power, Pollution

Welcome to the program Study in the Chapel.

God's Word is supreme at Chapel Ministries.

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We study it, we love it, we rely on it every minute of every day.

The following program is an edited recording of the regular Bible studies we hold, and we decided to share these with you in the hope that you too will be able to find inspiration, encouragement, and ultimately salvation through discovering Christ in Scripture.

Our intention is to travel all the way through the Bible.

It will be a challenging journey, but one that will undoubtedly bring you to a decision.

Through this study, you will be faced with either believing or rejecting what God has said to us.

It is our intention to provide you with enough knowledge to make an informed decision about God and his word.

We strongly encourage you to listen intently and diligently, because though at the moment you may not realize it, these things are truly a matter of life and death.

In fact, these are matters of eternal life and eternal death.

Never treat what God has said lightly.

There's truly nothing more important to you.

Now join us as we seek God's will through his inspired word.

For the past few weeks, we've been talking about salvation.

The letter to the Romans will be dealing with this topic extensively, and I want to make sure you realize that this is something you have to pay attention to.

I don't want you to think that this is some historical document or a G Wiz study into the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean or even just a really interesting philosophy course.

This is something we all need to pay attention to.

If you're a human, you need to know what Paul is going to say in this letter.

You're being a little dramatic today, aren't you, John?

Listen to me.

Regardless of whether you believe it or not, you, me, we all need a savior.

This is the most basic of all human needs.

You see, we have a sin problem.

We've always had a sin problem, and God will not let that stand.

Isn't that wonderful?

God is actually the offended party.

God is the one most affected by sin, and yet he's the one who offers the solution.

And like the fools we are, we turn our backs on that solution.

God has every right to snuff us out immediately.

It would be easy for him, actually, mechanically.

All he'd have to do is send another worldwide calamity, and that would do the trick.

Actually, if he really wanted to, he could just let us do it to ourselves.

I'm telling you, friends, we'd have wiped ourselves out long ago if it were not for the restraining force of his Holy Spirit.

Believe me, if he just turned his head for one minute, this place would empty out.

Someone would come up with a plan or a device or a strategy that would destroy all of mankind.

I believe that.

And I'm pretty sure you do too.

But he hasn't allowed anything like that to happen because he wants us reconciled to himself.

He's not given up on us.

Don't ask me why, but his justice has found a way to save us.

He has identified and anointed a savior.

And that savior, that anointed savior, just so happens to be his son because it had to be his son.

Our savior had to be a God that would in turn become a man.

And there's only one reason that Savior had to be a God who became a man, and that reason is sin.

Now we've covered this many times before, so I'll be brief with this first part.

The savior had to be a God because he had to be powerful, powerful enough to pull it off.

And he had to be a man because sin is a human problem.

No other created being that we know of sins.

So in order for the payment to be in the right currency, so to speak, it has to come from a man.

A sin-free human life is what is required for our redemption.

The ransom price to free us from the bondage of sin and the devil must be in human terms.

If I walked into a store in Philly, picked up a tasty cake, and tried to pay with Euros, I'd be sorely disappointed because the clerk would tell me to put the Euros back in my pocket and a tasty cake back on the shelf.

You can't pay for our sins with the life of a God.

It has to be the life of a man.

That is the currency the debt is written in.

That's why Jesus was born in that manger.

That's why Jesus lived a perfect human life, and that's why he was crucified as if he wasn't or he didn't live a perfect human life.

That's what sin has done.

It has taken the Son of God off of his throne and subjected him to a grisly death.

Actually, a grisly life and a grisly death.

And yet, people still think that sin is no big deal.

You'll hear people say, well, you know, I'm not perfect, but I do my best.

I mess up here and there, but in the end, I'm a good guy.

If we could only see the direct connection between what we think is minor and what our Lord went through, our entire outlook would change.

I'm convinced of that.

What most people don't know is that whether we think they're big or small, serious or minor, venial or mortal, all sin affects everything about us.

And Jesus didn't just obtain forgiveness for us, he liberated us.

First of all, he risked rescued us from the guilt of sin.

All of us are born sinners.

That's something the modern Christian really struggles with.

They seem to find it very difficult to believe.

One of the most reviled truths of God, even among churchgoers, is the concept of original sin.

Now I'm sure there are a few out there who don't know what that means, so let's take a moment or two to talk about it.

Original sin is usually defined in a twofold manner.

Number one, it's the sin to use a big theological word, it's the sin imputed to all of us due to Adam's disobedience.

Imputation is the action or the process of ascribing a quality of some sort to someone by virtue of a similar quality in another.

In other words, guilt or righteousness made a part of us without our own action, only because we are human like Adam.

That's what imputation is.

So original sin is imputed to us from Adam.

So that's the usually the first way original sin is described, the imputation of sin to us from Adam.

And number two, the second way that original sin is often described is it is seen as this natural tendency of human beings to depravity, lawlessness, rebellion, things like that against God.

Now, let me quickly say that I don't agree with this bifurcated view.

I believe that original sin is simply as number one describes it.

It is the stain of sin on our souls, if you will, passed down to us undiluted from the physical father of all of us, Adam.

The depravity, the dark heart, the wickedness, I believe, are all a result or the consequences or the outcome or even the proof of that original stain on us.

When Adam sinned, the human race was banished from the presence of God, and that changed us.

We were never meant to be without him.

And now that that has happened, we are exposed to the evil one and his influence on us.

And because of that, as I said, we've been changed.

We have been corrupted.

We are not sinners because we sin.

We sin because we're sinners.

You want that again?

We are not sinners because we sin.

We sin because we're sinners.

It is in us.

And it manifests itself in the way we act toward the world and toward God.

Whether you like to hear it or not, you are guilty of sin.

You do what you shouldn't do simply because you were born into the human race.

That is original sin.

Now, again, you may not see it that way, but God does.

And that's really all that matters here.

If God says you're a sinner, then you're a sinner.

And God says you're a sinner because you were born a son or daughter of Adam.

To use Paul's words, we were in Adam before Jesus came along.

Being in Adam means we have what he has, and he has sin.

And then when Jesus died on that cross for us and we accepted his sacrifice, we moved from under the headship of the sinful Adam and we were placed under the headship of the sin-free Jesus.

When that happens, when we become saved, we are no longer in Adam, we are in Christ.

We were once associated with the guilt of sin.

Now we are associated with the power of grace.

Paul talks at length about this in this letter, so we'll leave it there for now since we'll be going over it again.

So Jesus delivered us from the guilt or stain of sin, the imputation of sin.

Next, I want to point out that Jesus delivered us from the power of sin.

He delivered us from the guilt of sin.

He's delivered us from the power of sin.

You know, I'm sure we really don't appreciate, we don't fully understand the control sin has over us.

It's what makes a mother murder her children.

It's what causes a son to steal from his elderly parents.

It's what motivates a tribal warlord to stop aid shipments to desperately malnourished villagers.

Now I'm sure you're going to say to me, but John, those are seriously mentally or morally ill people.

You can't possibly lump me in with that crowd.

I'd never do anything like that.

In 1939, the Nazi regime of Germany established Reserve Police Battalion 101.

It was one of many similar squads whose mission it was, whose stated mission it was to round up Jews and send them off to a brief life of slavery to the German state.

And the only reason it was a brief life of slavery, because they normally didn't last very long.

Either they were worked to death in short order, or they were executed once their usefulness was exhausted, or executed just because they were Jews.

Either way, once you were in the Nazi system, your time on this earth was severely limited.

And sometimes, often in fact, these special units were ordered to skip the rounding up and shipping out and just murder the murder the Jews where they stood.

Within only a few years, Reserve Police Battalion 101 became one of Nazi Germany's most prolific killing units.

From July 1942 until November of 1943, this group alone was responsible for 83,000 deaths.

43,000 of those happened in one operation, consisting mostly of shooting the victims one by one, mostly point blank.

Even though the entire battalion was involved, it still took them two days.

Now there are several shocking aspects to this story, but perhaps chief among them is the fact that these men weren't soldiers.

They were police officers.

Yes, this was wartime, and yes, they functioned as a paramilitary force.

Nonetheless, they were not soldiers.

So?

Well, that means that their mandate to kill was perceived as a matter of civil law and order.

The murders they committed were sanctioned by governmental edict and not on some battlefield protocol or military law.

Again, you may say, so what?

Well, at least in my opinion, this meant that there was no restriction either through some honor code or agreed upon international rule of armed combat.

The victims were all innocent.

They were all unarmed and non-aggressive, except for maybe some kicking and screaming out of survival instincts.

And listen, I know this is hard to hear, but imagine what the creator of all things must have felt.

Now, something else to consider about the intended targets of these police actions.

Since there was no consideration of whether or not the person was a combatant, an enemy soldier, this meant that the majority of the victims, and I'm sorry to bring this ugliness up, but the majority of the victims of this undeserved violence were, of course, the elderly, the infirm, women, and sadly children.

How about I stop with these gruesome details and just bring up the point I want to make?

Historians and researchers have determined that these police officers were not ex-felons released from prison then that then exercised their violent tendencies for the good of the fatherland.

They weren't ravening ideologues dedicated to the cult of Adolf Hitler.

They weren't dangerous and violent, mentally disabled maniacs hearing voices urging them to kill.

These were ordinary men.

And actually, that's the title of a chilling book that chronicles the history of this group, ordinary men.

These guys weren't even members of the Nazi Party, by and large.

They were simply shopkeepers and professionals, educated, normal, everyday citizens, no different than anyone else, except, of course, they became mass murderers.

And by the way, the I was just following orders defense was offered years later when these men were brought to trial as war criminals.

But as has happened so many times before, the premise was rejected.

As a matter of fact, records show that no man could be forced to take these actions.

If one of them for any reason wished to refuse to murder, they could not be punished for that refusal.

A few took that route, but the vast majority did not.

Now the people who have studied this and similarly disturbing and horrific stories have tended to blame the apparent disregard for the typical thou shalt not kill mindset on peer pressure or an exuberant desire to please authority or some other such psychological or sociological motivation.

Listen, friends, let's not complicate this.

This is nothing but the power of sin.

This is slavery.

We are enslaved to sin.

Do you think if these men hadn't been under the rulership of sin, that they'd have been able to shoot babies in the arms of their mothers and then shoot the mothers too?

Peer pressure or not, it pleases the boss or not.

This is the power of sin.

Sin drives us, despite our feelings toward whatever we're doing.

And listen, don't fool yourself.

You may not be a member of a Jew-hunting Nazi kill squad, but you're still under the power of sin.

And you stay that way until Jesus saves you from it.

Hey, I don't think I like what you're inferring.

Doesn't matter if you do or you don't.

It isn't my purpose to upset you, but it is my purpose to convince you of the power of sin and its grip on all of us.

When Adam was created, he was made the head of the human race, the human tribe, if you will.

From the moment of his creation onward, whatever happened to him would trickle down to every one of his ancestors.

Remember, we are born in Adam.

And when he was created, he was created free from sin.

That was our destiny.

And then we lost that freedom simply when Adam did what God told him not to do.

He lost his freedom and went into bondage, and by default, so did we.

We went out from underneath the protection of the creator to under the subjection of the deceiver.

If Joe Biden walked up to Vladimir Putin and slapped him in the face, you would become an enemy combatant.

If Russia declared war on America because of the president's left hook, you'd immediately receive a target on your back because you're under his leadership.

No political eye rolling, please.

Just listen to my illustration.

It doesn't matter if you think it's unfair or not.

It doesn't matter if you voted for him or not.

You would be considered persona non grata within the borders of Russia.

Before the slap, you could walk around that beautiful country without a care in the world.

After that slap, you wouldn't get three steps in the red square before you'd be arrested or shot.

It comes down to who you're associated with.

When Adam sinned, you were doomed to become one of the children of disobedience, as Paul puts it in Ephesians and Colossians.

That status, that label child of disobedience, was in that delivery room waiting for you.

You were born into a race of people under the dominion, the power, the authority, the tyranny.

Of sin.

And there's nothing you can do about it.

Since there was nothing you did to get yourself into it.

It's all outside of your control, but that doesn't relieve any of the oppression of it.

Knowing that you're not responsible for this desperate position doesn't help much.

Just because you're not the one that put yourself under the authority of sin doesn't make you any less a victim of its persecution.

Listen, I know how hard this is to take.

I know this is not pleasant news, nor does it, I guess, make much sense from a human perspective.

We actually need the Holy Spirit to explain it to us.

But that's neither here nor there.

Please don't just set this aside because you're having such a hard time making sense of it.

Don't judge the power of sin's influence on you as being inapplicable just because it doesn't feel like you're under its influence.

That's part of the power of sin over you.

Listen, Eve didn't think she was doing anything wrong when she plucked the fruit from that tree.

In fact, the Bible said she saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise.

She had convinced herself, that's what the original word means.

She saw, she talked herself into believing that all would be well, and she had no idea things would turn out so badly.

She listened to the serpent and not God, and it affected her perception.

Of course, you don't feel like a sinner.

And you're in his grip now, and he's a smart guy who has lots of experience deceiving people.

The devil will not let you think that there's anything wrong with you.

And you fall for all of that because you're under the power of sin.

And Jesus is here to break that power.

Hey, whatever happened to the letter to the Romans, we're making our way back.

But we've got a few things to clarify first.

And besides, all of this will come up again in this letter.

All we're doing is laying the groundwork.

So we need to be rescued from the guilt of sin.

We need to be rescued from the power of sin.

What else?

You know, what a beautiful world God created, don't you think?

But even the most beautiful parts of it are not perfect.

John, does it have to be perfect?

Well, God made it that way.

And you know, the closer I get to Him, the more I realize how far from perfect it actually now is.

You know what happened to that perfect creation?

Of course you do.

Sin.

Sin polluted the perfection.

This world is under the pollution of sin.

I grew up in the late 60s and early 70s.

I know I look much younger than that.

In the Midwestern United States, the industrial Midwestern United States, Detroit, Michigan, to be exact.

Up to that point, my entire family since immigrating to the United States had been involved in heavy industry of one sort or another.

My grandparents on both sides were copper miners in northern Michigan.

My father and almost everyone I knew growing up worked for the automakers.

Everyone in my life, in one way or another, was connected to manufacturing.

I grew up in a factory town.

And as a result, I was raised and lived my entire youth in an environment that was mostly toxic.

We weren't allowed to swim in our rivers.

We couldn't eat too many fish from our lakes.

I never knew the smell of fresh air until I was about 10 years old.

We knew what pollution was all about.

In fact, my mother wouldn't even allow us to eat fruit off of any branch or vine.

My neighbors had the most beautiful raspberry bush I had ever seen up to that point.

Okay, it was the only raspberry bush I had ever seen.

And despite my mother's voice in my head, I once dared eat a berry off of it.

It was incredibly delicious.

And when I told my mother about it later on, she was very upset with me.

To her, the only safe fruit came from the grocery store.

To this day, I'm still a little hesitant to pick right off the plants in my own garden.

Toxicity was ingrained into our mind.

When other kids were outside playing in the flooded streets after a day of heavy rain, we were forbidden to join them.

Who knows what's in that water was always the reason we were given.

You see, born and raised Detroiters were around in the early part of the 20th century, and they saw nothing but danger in the environment.

And they weren't too far off.

They witnessed what was once lovely and fruitful and vigorous turn ugly and withered and lethal.

Listen to me, pollution slowly seeps into everything around it, choking the life out of what was once so vibrant.

Adam was made pure, and sin entered in and polluted everything in his life, including the world he was standing on.

Now the race of mankind is thoroughly eaten up with corruption.

Have you ever been around a lifelong smoker?

Their faces are always pale and splotchy.

Their breathing is labored.

The way they walk makes it look like they're carrying a 500-pound block on their back.

They complain they can't taste things the way they used to.

When they want to smell a lovely flower, they're forced to put it right up to their nose.

They don't sleep right.

And God forbid they have to climb a flight or two of stairs.

The tar and nicotine have entered into all the once healthy cells in the body and turned it into a wasteland.

Well, as pitiful as that sight is, sin is worse.

Listen to me, I'm not being dramatic.

Sin has done so much damage that in order to be free of it, we have to be reborn.

And not just spiritually, but physically too.

Listen, friend, let me say it again.

When Adam was created, he was pure.

And again, not just spiritually, but physically.

Neither he nor anyone related to him would have ever died of a disease.

As I've grown older, the typical age-related ailments are starting to materialize.

Some of the things my ancestors suffered from are just now making their way into my doctor's reports.

If you've had a healthy youth like I did, this sort of stuff serves as a wake-up call.

And listen, I've been active and eating relatively well and avoiding most of the self-inflicted nonsense most of my life.

Now that has made things easier and slower and has reduced the impact.

But in the end, even clean living has its limits.

The physical pollution of sin will have its due.

That's why we are dying every day, the physical pollution of sin.

That's why the earth is not perfect.

There's no perfect part of the world because of sin.

But that's not even the toughest part.

Hardly a day goes by that we aren't faced with the extent of the depravity of the human soul.

Recently in Ohio, a woman was sentenced to life in prison for her role in the death of her daughter.

Let me warn you, this story is horrific.

I'll be brief.

This young mother decided to go on vacation in Puerto Rico with her boyfriend, but for some reason she didn't want to bring her daughter along.

So she left her for 10 days alone.

Now, what makes this particularly awful is that her daughter, her daughter, was only 16 months old.

The mother packed the suitcase and walked out the door, leaving her toddler to fend for herself.

Sin has entered into our most basic forms of decency and polluted them.

I wish there was a worse word.

And let me say, let's be careful about the disapproving head shakes because within all of us is that same corrupting influence, and though it may never manifest itself to the extent it did in that monster in Ohio, it will bend your will to its.

You will, if you haven't already, which I suspect, like me, it's happened a few times.

If not, you will find yourself doing, saying, thinking something you never thought you were capable of.

You'll involve yourself in matters that go against everything you believe in.

And you will be, listen to me, powerless to stop it.

You will be powerless.

Now, that doesn't mean you're hopeless.

That's the point of this entire section.

I'm not just trying to bring you down.

I'm trying to show you you have a hope, but there's only one hope.

It's Jesus.

Jesus can rescue us from the pollution of sin.

And the way that happens, and this is how bad this pollution is, the way you get rescued from it is that through Christ you are given a brand new life.

David wrote in Psalm 51:10, create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

Psalms 51:10

The word create there is bara.

And it's the same Hebrew word that we find in the very first sentence of the Bible.

You all know this.

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

Now, the word is appropriate in both locations because it means to listen to me, to create something out of nothing.

Before the beginning, though it's impossible for us to imagine, before the beginning there was nothing, absolutely nothing.

How do you know that?

Well, the word bara tells me, bara means to create.

I'm going to say it again, something from nothing.

If God bara created, that means first there was nothing, and then there was something.

In Psalm 51, 10, David is not interested in a repaired heart.

In fact, his prayer is that God not use a single molecule of his existing heart when he gets a new one.

Borrow in me a clean heart.

That's what the original says.

And listen, if there's anything brought in from the old one, David knows it wouldn't be pure because the old one is riddled entirely with sin.

It is polluted with sin.

His heart, like yours and mine, is a victim of the pollution of sin.

And by the way, if we take this one step further, we can see that's why we can't fix ourselves.

Any effort to solve our own sin problem will fail because we are thoroughly contaminated.

There's nothing in us that's not contaminated with sin.

Anything that comes in contact with us will come out polluted.

There's only one pure man, and that's Jesus.

And if you want a solution for your total corruption, and that's what you should want, your complete pollution, he's your only hope.

Now, I honestly could go on and on and on about our salvation, but we have to get back to Romans.

And by the way, this was not a wasted trip by any means.

We had to make sure that we're all on the same page regarding the enormity of salvation.

This is the very heart of human existence.

Everything in the universe is on hold until sin gets resolved.

Nothing is as it should be, and therefore nothing can get accomplished in God's original plan.

This must be resolved, and a vital aspect of this solution is your coming to terms with it.

You must understand and accept why you need salvation and how that salvation was accomplished, or you can be of no help to anyone.

You may be able to have influence in your short life, but even like the greatest human beings who have ever lived, your accomplishments stop at the grave.

Nothing that is temporary is able to be a part of God's plan.

And all those that aren't saved are temporary.

Please meditate on salvation.

And if you've not given your life to Christ, I implore you to do so before it's too late.

All right, next time we'll get back to Romans.

See you then.

God's word is a great treasure, and it's our belief that a thorough, purposeful study of it will bring all of God's children to an understanding of his eternal plan of redemption.

It is our prayer that this will be so for all of our listeners.

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