Abraham's Intercession

Good morning.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Say to reading us, uh, kind of a long one.

Genesis 18, 16 to 33.

Then the men set out from there, and they looked down towards Sodom, and Abraham went with them to see them on their way.

The Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?

Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him.

For I have chosen him that he may command his children and his household after him, to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.

Then the Lord said, Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me, and if not, I will know.

So the men turned from there and went towards Sodom.

But Abraham still stood before the Lord.

Then Abraham drew near and said, Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?

Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city, will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it?

Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous bear as the wicked.

Far be that from you.

Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?

And the Lord said, If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.

Abraham answered and said, Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes.

Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking, will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?

And he said, I will not destroy it if I find forty five there.

Again he spoke to him and said, Suppose forty are found there.

He answered, For the sake of forty, I will not do it.

Then he said, Oh, let not the Lord be angry, I will speak.

Suppose thirty are found there.

He answered, I will not do it if I find thirty there.

He said, Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord.

Suppose twenty are found there.

He answered, For the sake of twenty, I will not destroy it.

Then he said, Oh Lord, let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again, but this once.

Suppose ten are found there.

He answered, For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.

And the Lord went his way when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Raffman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

I've got a couple of announcements, and then we'll pray and get into our text for today.

So, first up, uh, May 9th, we'll be having a baby dedication here.

And if you've had a baby over one of the COVID babies, if you've had one of those, uh, then uh sign up by emailing Megan at redemptiondenver.com, and we'll be able to get you signed up for that May 9th baby dedication.

Also, in related news, um, and uh this is the kind of the first time I'm announcing this, I guess, explicitly or most clearly, we have baptisms coming up on May 16th.

And I've experienced one of those things that you see happen to pastors every now and then, where in their study they uh come upon some aspect of their theology that actually begins to change.

And I think I've been in this process for about two years now, especially through studying in seminary and seeing a sort of picture of the covenant throughout scripture.

And one of the things that I've become convinced of, we want to share our church and bring our church into, uh, is uh offering infant baptism.

Now, I know that's a strange concept, especially for us Protestants typically.

Uh, but it's been a tradition throughout church history since uh the earliest recordings that we have speaking about baptism, dating even to the second century.

And uh it throughout throughout scripture, we see this language repeated over and over again, and especially through this time in Genesis, what we've seen that the covenant is for you and for your children.

And so children are called to be treated as members of our covenant community, and we are likewise uh able to offer them the covenant sign.

Now, uh, a couple of things to note, just so we don't get too off the rails here.

Uh uh this isn't something that like I'm like I'm requiring, so that would be possible, as that you're required to affirm uh for uh membership or for anything in our church.

Uh well not well, for membership at least.

And there's uh uh and right now I think that we're probably in a moment where for many of us this concept uh feels uh uh just just strange and something that's that's like kind of uh difficult for us to grasp or to wrap our minds around.

Uh so uh I've got some resources.

Uh and my goal with offering these resources, this is this is called why do we baptize infants?

It answers the question uh about tithing.

So we're uh so I want to offer some of these resources.

Look, as I said, my goal right now isn't isn't necessarily to convince, okay?

But I I want to remove some of the uh I'm looking for a particular word, but I can't find it.

Stigma.

Does that work?

Uh from the practice.

Because I think many of us we've we fall into a sort of like, isn't that a Catholic thing, or isn't that somehow like marrying salvation?

And this we see this just consistently throughout the uh reformers' thinking is this this concept.

And so I think it was only a matter of time until I was worn down and uh saw you know, Luther thinks this in a compelling way, and uh the church fathers have thought this for centuries in this compelling way.

Uh so I want to offer this.

Now, as I said, this is not something that you must affirm, and this in no way negates how we perform uh believers' baptism for new converts or for your children if you uh don't affirm infant baptism.

We we will celebrate those uh with no less vigor and joy.

Um, but this is an introduction of a concept.

I think back to the L2 days, and I heard Russ say frequently that describing his change of position regarding uh this is meaningful to like six people, but regarding the view of the millennium in Revelation.

Uh and he was preaching through Luke, and he said that he had to stop and take take two years, and he asked permission for the elders to give him time to stop because he realized he he couldn't preach the premillennials theological term that he had been preaching because he was no longer seeing in scripture.

And he had to take time and then redevelop this new way of understanding this particular view of the end times, uh more in accord with what he was actually seeing in scripture.

Well, we've been preaching through Genesis, and that there's been this clarity of the picture of the covenant.

And as I'm preaching, that this same covenant that's offered to Abraham is ours in Christ.

This is an implication of that.

And uh, so I want to provide you with resources and also just provide you with myself uh as a resource for these things as these changes uh sort of come up.

So, does that all make sense from where we are?

Okay, cool.

So, the announcement, baptisms, May 16th.

Uh, you can email me.

Uh we've already got some uh adults signed up that have converted to Christianity, which is so thrilling.

Uh in fact, she might be watching online, but I just want to share the story will again.

There's there's someone who discovered our church just online through Facebook, which you've got to be pretty good to be able to do because like I do our Facebook posts and stuff, and I'm terrible at least.

And has been just watching and live streaming online and uh reached out because she wants to be baptized because she's become a Christian uh through this time during COVID.

Isn't that amazing?

Yes.

Yeah, so exciting.

So we have that to look forward to as well, just as a church.

Alright, final announcement.

Uh oh, these books are up here, by the way, that's the point.

So come up afterwards, you can talk, grab one of these, uh, and you're going.

Uh, Saturday, April 24th, so that's this Saturday, Centennial Elementary, our neighbor is right next door.

They've offered to us the opportunity to join them in a garden cleanup day.

So uh I say we do it.

So from 9 a.m.

to 1 p.m.

on Saturday, uh, we'll just head over to Centennial, bring any gardening tools that you have, and we can help our uh elementary school clean up their garden.

It's a great way for us to just be connected as a church in our neighborhood.

Sound good?

Let's pray.

Father, we pray for your guidance and your care.

Lord, we ask that you would give us open hearts to see something that we might not even anticipate in your word today.

Lord, I ask that you would open our hearts.

Show us clearly who you are.

Lord, let us be transformed by the presence of your word this morning.

Lift that up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Alright, so today is about uh Abraham's intercession.

And the background is God destroying Sodom.

He's destroying, he's setting out to destroy the city of Sodom.

And so really it's about justice and judgment and what the judgment of God is.

You know, I think in our culture we tend to hold together these two contradictory points regarding judgment and justice.

And it shows how we hold them in different places politically and spiritually.

Politically, which almost all of life is filtered through the lens of politics currently.

Which is I that's not good.

Uh, but it's but it's a reality.

And so politically, we view justice very strongly very staunchly as essential.

And we ought we show these deep desires to see justice realized in the world.

And when justice is realized, that's a picture of judgment.

A judgment is made and executed.

But spiritually, when we consider God showing his justice and his judgment in the world, we typically filter that out as a culture, and rather than celebrate the judgment of God as the ancients would, instead we say this is a picture of a harsh, vindictive God, some archaic picture that we should step away from and understand God as only a God of love and only God of grace.

Do you see how those two things kind of play out in our culture simultaneously?

On the one hand, in the political realm, a deep desire for justice, in the spiritual realm, a sort of anxiety about justice and pushing justice away.

So there's this contradiction here.

When justice is applied, it's judgment.

And today we're seeing God set himself to the judgment of a city.

A city that's become completely corrupt.

And we'll get a picture of its corruptness next week.

But today we'll just have to take God for his word, that the city has become completely corrupt.

And it what's what's interesting is that as a society becomes more and more corrupt, they're less able to be conscious of their own corruptness.

Because right and wrong become ideas that lose their meaning in a sense.

Now, I had this kind of thought for this week, and I even talked with Zach about it, of like doing a lot of work to demonstrate a sort of deconstruction of our culture's views of justice and to show how they they don't measure out to be the things that we desire.

But as I got more and more into the text, I just uh I started to realize I had misunderstood the shape of God's justice as it's revealed in this particular text.

And what we'll see is is something that I think is far more dynamic than what the assumptions are that you would make about what justice is.

I took a logic class uh in school, and I thought that uh I thought that that would be a very easy class.

Because if ever there was a problem, the solution should just be logical.

Um but it turned out that logic oftentimes is very counterintuitive.

It oftentimes is not exactly what you expect, and I think that justice is very similar.

We think we can just intuit what justice looks like.

But our justice does not come from us just understanding ourselves and each other.

Our justice is given to us in the very character of God.

And that's what we're torn today.

Today we're going to see the weight of God's judgment, what it means when we as individuals understand the judgment of God and just the weight that that contains.

And then, pushed by the weight, we're going to be driven with Abraham into a deeper understanding of God's justice as he explores.

So notice those aren't necessarily two points or two takeaways.

Instead, my hope is that as we explore the justice of God with Abraham, we'll give a new vision for how God shows himself to us with more clarity.

And in that, our hearts will actually be transformed.

So my hope for this morning is that you actually leave transformed rather than just with some new insights.

Are you ready?

I mean, might as well try uh.

First, the wave of God's judgment.

Genesis 18, 16 through 17.

Then the men set out from there and they looked down towards Sodom, and Abraham went with them to set them on their way.

The Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?

Okay, so the angelic men that were eating with Abraham last week are still with Abraham in the story.

And two of them set their sights down towards Sodom.

They mean literally down.

Uh uh it's both south, which they still set down like we do today, and it is literally it's literally a low point of the earth.

It's low.

And so what we see in this picture is Sodom is like the anti-Eden.

Uh, did you know that Eden is on top of a mountain?

The Garden of Eden is on top of a mountain.

That's why rivers flow from it.

And uh in it, we see this glorious picture of a place.

And Sodom is the perfect opposite of that.

It's down and it's low.

It's literally south and it's it's like below sea level.

And they're heading down to this place where everything is inverted, everything is an opposite of the way that we would see God's intended designs played out in Eden.

And the Lord considers this as he's going.

He says, Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?

We'll see that God decides to tell Abraham before he destroys Sodom why he's going down to destroy Sodom.

Or not why, so much as just that he is going down to destroy Sodom.

So there are two reasons that he decides to tell Abraham.

The first is his chosen status, Abraham's chosen status before God.

So God chose Abraham out of all the people of the world and called him to himself into this particular relationship.

And the second reason that God gives is so that Abraham will be able to teach his children in the generations to come of the righteousness and justice of God.

And so there's this twofold reason that God decides to choose, that God decides to tell Abraham or shown in Genesis 18, verse 19.

Genesis 18:19

It says, For I have chosen him that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.

You know, what we're seeing here has this perfect parallel in John 15.

In John 15, Jesus says to his disciples that he no longer treats them as servants, but now he calls them friends.

And why are they called friends?

It's because they know what the Father is doing.

Jesus says, I call you friends because you're no longer servants.

Servants don't know what their master is doing, but I have told you everything that the father has told me.

And so God is operating in that same way that we see Jesus operating in John 15.

God is operating towards Abraham in this story, where he's saying, I'm not going to hide my intentions from you.

Part of being a Christian, being called or chosen by God, means that God is bringing you into his intentions and understanding of the world.

God is showing you, look, I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do, just like a friend knows what I'm going to do.

And this is a beautiful and glorious thing that God offers to us so we can be friends of God, able to understand what his intentions and reasons are in the world.

It's a beautiful thing.

But in the midst of that, there's this incredible weight.

There's this deep weight that we bury, excuse me, that we carry in those terms.

But before we get there, first we need to look at.

First, I want us to see that Jesus in that passage says, You're my friends because I chose you.

And then he invites his disciples to pray.

He says, Now, whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give you.

He invites his disciples to pray.

Now in Genesis 18, 20 through 21, God shares what his intentions are.

So then the Lord said, Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me.

And if not, I will know.

Okay, now look at the way that God is speaking there.

He's speaking in this incredibly accommodating way to Abraham.

Because, look, does God not know what's happening in Sodom?

He most certainly does.

Does God need to go down and like take a survey of Sodom and say, hey, how are things going down here?

What's your experience in Sodom?

Has been, you know, fair, poor, good?

What's your likelihood of recommending Sodom to a friend?

No, he doesn't, God doesn't need to learn, right?

He knows.

So why is God talking that way to Abraham?

In the same way that Jesus says you are chosen and invites his people into prayer, God's operating in that same way here, where he's creating a space for Abraham to speak into what God's designs are.

He's literally creating an opportunity for Abraham to pray to God.

So that's precisely what Abraham does.

When this space for conversation opens up, Abraham moves into it.

Genesis 18, 22 through 23.

It says, so the men turned from there and went towards Sodom.

But Abraham still stood before the Lord.

You know, there's that half a beat.

Will Abraham say anything?

Then Abraham drew near and said, Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?

Okay.

Now you can begin to hear in Abraham's heart this weight of what it means to come up against the reality of God's judgment.

And we can understand why we wouldn't want to experience that.

In fact, we want to kind of push that away because it's so dramatic and it's so absolute.

What news he just received was I will destroy this entire city.

I'll destroy the whole city.

And Abraham is feeling this intense weight from that, thinking he has family in that city, that family likely has friends and acquaintances in that city, and to know that the whole thing will be destroyed.

This weight settles in on Abraham's heart.

You know, there's a weight to the friendship of God.

When we're coming into friendship with God and we're knowing his intentions for the world, we're knowing absolutes.

We're knowing that there are real standards of justice that we will actually be held accountable for.

What Abraham's feeling here, that friendship with the Lord, this is something that any Christian can relate to.

Paul explains it really well in 2 Corinthians chapter 2.

2 Corinthians 2 · chapter mention

He says, For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.

To one, a fragrance from death to death, to the other, a fragrance from life to life.

Who is sufficient for these things?

Look, what Abraham knew on a small scale about one city, judgment is coming, and it will be absolute and total.

We know, as friends of God, about the whole world.

Judgment is coming, and it will be absolute.

And the dividing line is Christ for the judgment that is coming.

And so Paul shows this weight and the burden of this absolute nature of God's judgment.

When he says, we live as Christians and we are the aroma of Christ.

And you know what?

To some, it will be a fragrance that is sweet and draws them in.

And to others, it will be a fragrance that is filthy and casts them away.

John Piper, speaking on this verse, offered this image.

He said, Imagine that you were walking through a park or a busy place in a city, and you just walked down the street, and everyone that lined up behind you was going to heaven.

And everyone who didn't and kept walking would be doomed to hell.

But who could bear such a thing?

Who could bear to walk past so many people?

This is the weight that Abraham is experiencing.

It's the weight of friendship with God, the reality of God's absolute and complete judgment.

Who's sufficient for these things?

Now, Abraham experiencing the weight of this, rather than fleeing from it or casting it away, he presses in to explore the goodness of God.

So let's do the same.

In Genesis 18, verse 25, Abraham continues, he says, Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked.

Genesis 18:25

Far be that from you.

Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is right?

Alright, so in this in uh this question that Abraham poses, he also gives a sort of definition of justice, and he assumes a standard of justice.

So the definition of justice that he provides is shall the righteous be treated be put to death just as the wicked?

Far be it from you for the righteous to fare as the wicked.

So what's this principle of justice that he's operating off of?

Wicked people should be treated in kind with their wickedness, and righteous people should be treated in kind with their righteousness.

That's simple and intuitive, right?

We all tend to think of justice in those very ways.

When we represent justice, who is she?

She's holding scales.

Right?

And those scales represent that same sort of symmetry.

The wicked represent wickedly, the righteous are treated righteously.

And then he offers a standard of justice when he says, shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?

What is the standard of justice for Abraham?

It is God himself.

God himself is the standard of justice.

God himself is.

Okay, look at how his method of argument, Abraham's, is the perfect opposite to our culture, which says we need to get rid of the God of judgment.

Maintain it in the political space, which shows our intuition for it, but get rid of it when we're actually talking about a God who comes down and brings judgment onto the earth.

Because what we do is we say we have our own grid of justice and what justice is and should be.

And when we push God through our grid of justice, and we see him destroy a whole city, we say, God, actually, by my understanding of justice, you are just.

And so rather than us seeing God as the picture of justice from whom we learn to derive our understanding, we reason out justice amongst ourselves and then push God through it, and then see that, and then say that he doesn't measure up to our standard of justice.

Abraham argues from the opposite position, where he is arguing from God's justice, but for God's justice from a position of his justice.

So we are seeing Abraham assume that God himself is the judge.

And therefore, he is the standard by which all others and all of our actions are to be judged.

Now, when we remove God as the one who determines who is righteous and who is wicked, then all we have left to judge by is ourselves.

And I think that there was this assumption, especially early on in the sort of postmodern transition in our culture in the 90s and 2000s.

I think there's this assumption that we would devolve into a sort of total anarchy when we removed any absolute truth of God from determining the rights and wrongs of the world.

And there's a lot of talk of that.

Like we're going to see this anarchy develop, and everybody will just be living for themselves and living only in a way that uh suits themselves, and it will be a chaotic sort of world to be in.

But what's interesting is I think more than we've seen a picture of anarchy develop, we more tend to see, at least in lockstep with anarchy, a sort of tyranny develop.

Because we each have our versions of justice, and then we hold those over each other as though they are absolutes.

And since there is no God outside of us who can arbitrate amongst us, then all of us have what to ourselves are these absolute versions of justice, and we hold them tyrannically over one another.

Sometimes it's an individual that holds it tyrannically over a group, sometimes it's groups that hold it tyrannically over an individual, but in both cases, this anarchy is paired with a tyranny because we have nobody outside of the human space that can demonstrate to us a legitimate, actual, objective picture of justice.

There's no real judge.

So what do we do?

We take it out on one another.

When there's no transcendent justice, the justice has to be imminent.

And so we take it out on one another.

Abraham argues from the opposite position.

He assumes a transcendent giver of justice.

So there is a real standard, one that he not just imposes, but one under which he himself stands.

He says this, and he begins to explore this justice.

He says in verse 24, suppose there are 50 righteous within the city.

Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the 50 righteous who are in it?

Okay.

Notice Abraham is arguing to spare the whole city.

Now, what is our picture of justice?

It's the scales, right?

So if we were arguing from our own perspective of justice, this is what shocked me.

What would we be arguing for?

That the wicked would be destroyed and that the righteous would be spared, right?

That's balance.

But Abraham appealing to God as the source of justice says, would you not spare the whole city for the sake of the fifty?

Isn't that strange?

Come on, that's weird.

Spare the whole city, spare the many unrighteous for the sake of the few righteous.

That's what he's arguing for.

And this is the principle that he uncomforts, because listen to God's response.

The Lord said, if I find at Sodom 50 righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.

Okay, this is different.

This is a different conception of justice than a normal conception of justice.

God is saying something like, like, I will demonstrate my patience to the entire city just for the sake of the few righteous.

I will count the city in solidarity with the righteous so that they experience the benefits of their, of those people's righteousness, a righteousness that isn't even their own.

Now, Abraham has discovered this principle that he would spare the many for the sake of the few.

And then he starts exploring, okay, so here's this strange principle of justice in God, and what's the limit of this thing?

And it sounds like they're just like working a deal, you know.

It sounds like he's, you know, barbering or negotiating with God and his justice, but it's it's more the way to think of it is an exploration of God's justice.

You know, if he's got God in the room, let's press in to discover what the um picture of justice really is.

So he asks, what about 45?

Would you spare the whole city for 45?

What's the limit of this thing?

God says yes.

Okay, what about 40?

Yes.

Okay, what about 30?

Yes, God says.

What about 20?

Yes, that we're approaching some sort of limit, right?

What about 10?

Yes, even for just 10 righteous in the city, the whole city would be spared.

What's being driven home in this principle of Abraham's discovery of God is this strange proportion of God's justice.

We think of justice just like the scales.

But the reality of justice is that it flows out of the character of God.

And God does not hold punishment in mercy proportionally.

In the heart of God, mercy far outweighs punishment.

Listen to the way the God describes himself in Exodus 34, 6 through 7.

The Lord passed before him, Moses, and proclaimed, the Lord tells Moses his name.

The Lord the Lord, a God merciful and gracious.

These are, this is what's central to God.

Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.

But who will by no means clear the guilty?

Visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation.

Okay, so he shows steadfast love and faithfulness to thousands of generations, and he shows his wrath and indignation towards three or four generations.

Do you see the proportion?

This strange proportion that's in God?

Mercy, thousands.

Punishment, three or four generations.

In him is this graciousness that's abounding.

It's an abounding graciousness.

And then he says, but who will by no means clear the guilty?

So at the same time, we see this disproportionate tendency in God towards mercy and graciousness and yet an absolute framework of justice.

Will the guilty be cleared?

By no means.

How can those two possibly be held together?

This is the strangeness of the justice of God.

Now we see how these two are held together.

Kind of by pressing into this strange part of the story, which is why does Abraham stop at 10?

I mean, this is obviously arcing towards one critical moment.

And the critical moment is what about if there was one righteous person?

Then would you spare the whole city?

But Abraham doesn't go there.

It's incredibly frustrating.

It's just left off.

In fact, God cuts off the conversation.

Now, the different commentaries that I've read, they're kind of split on why Abraham stops.

Some think, well, it's because he was considering Lot and Lot's family.

Lot is his nephew who lived in Sodom.

So if Lot's family is about ten people, then once he got the answer that he was spared city for ten, then there was no need to question any further.

But as the story plays out, there weren't ten people who make it out in Lot's family.

I think we could also consider that perhaps it was just a lack of nerve.

Right?

Like, I don't know, it's pretty intense to negotiate with God.

So we could have just been like, alright, ten is good.

You know what?

I think, you know, he knows he's headed towards one.

And you know what I think he starts to consider?

This is just pure conjecture at this point.

Maybe he thought something like, what if it was just me?

What if it was just me in the city of Sah?

I'm not righteous.

We followed enough neighbor Ham's story to see him lie and basically sell his wife to a king.

We've seen him constantly kind of waffling in his faith.

And so this question of, well, what if it was just me in the city?

Would God spare it for me?

And he would have to know, with any sense of honesty, he's not righteous.

Who could the city be spared for?

Who is truly righteous?

There's this principle here.

Where God, by his very character, is willing to join in solidarity the wicked with the righteous.

So that's a demonstrate of his mercy, though the wicked might gain the benefits of the righteous.

But there is no unrighteous.

Not one.

And so this heart of God cannot be manifest towards Sodom.

Because his disposition towards mercy and punishment, they're vastly disproportionate.

But God is absolute.

He will not let the wicked go unpunished.

But where Abraham wouldn't go, God does go.

Abraham didn't go down to the one, but God did.

Where ultimately he will say that not just for the city, but God so love the world that he would give his son the only truly righteous one.

And for the sake of the righteousness of his son, who would be treated as unrighteous.

The wicked who had faith in him will be saved.

It is absolute because the wicked in the world do not go unpunished.

In fact, we see that very punishment in Christ and in those who do not come to Christ in hell.

And it is vastly disproportionate as it shows the heart of God for justice, which is that for the one righteous, countless will be saved.

You see what the heart of God is like?

Do you see how it's so different from what your normal intuition of justice would be?

Do you see how when we lose that transcendent lawgiver that we keep exacting blood from one another?

Because we haven't seen how disproportionately he gave his own blood for us.

How desperately we need to shake off this contradiction in our culture of absoluteness of justice in the political sphere, and then a disallowance of justice in the spiritual sphere.

Do you see how our only hope in understanding this is that the spiritual sphere of justice might inform the political?

Okay, I'll start ranting before I start preaching.

We see the disproportionate and the absoluteness of God's justice.

We see the beauty of it given to us in the person of Christ.

Okay, I'll take any questions if we have any.

Seems like today our understanding of justice is manifested in cancel culture.

What does it look like to operate as a Christian in this world of rampant false justice?

What does this mean for eternal judgment?

Yeah, so cancel culture is a is like a perfect example, right, of we don't believe in any sort of transcendent justice, and so we outsource it to the mob.

And because we don't have any absolute standards which we could share as a culture for one another, then we uh certain groups or certain individuals adopt particular standards at any given moment and then enact immediate justice, you know, in quotes.

Enact immediate vindication against uh someone else.

Now, cancer culture is a perfect example of a lack of a transcendent offer of justice, because it's something where we just need to take it into our own hands and enact our own justice against one another.

What does it look like to operate as a Christian in this world of rampant false justice?

So the wonderful thing about the way the church moves forward is that it moves forward by sacrificial love.

And in a culture that views the meaning of life as positive internal experiences, there's not a place to witness sacrificial love for another.

And so that means that something like cancel culture could be a wonderful opportunity because you get to see a sacrifice made for saying something that could very well be loving.

And that doesn't mean we're like martyr seekers, right?

Where we're we adopt the stance of provocateur uh in our culture.

In fact, I think that that's a uh I I think that that's that's operating with the very same tools or by the very same beings that cancel culture is operating with.

But we see in scripture these these pictures of these incredible Christians who are willing to stand by something because it's true and then receive, be treated as though they were liars.

Now, what does that require?

An incredible internal character and faith.

Trust that a life laid down for others is good, that it might actually bear fruit.

So I think there's this picture in the gospel of how we react to cancel culture, which is one of we're more able to receive blows than I think maybe anyone else could be.

What does this mean for eternal judgment?

In a culture that doesn't have eternal judgment, the worst thing that can happen to you is to be canceled.

But in a culture, in a church or in a person who has an understanding of eternal judgment, being canceled is not the worst thing that can happen to you.

I think it's one of the reasons that something like cancel culture would be so ravenous and so unable to be satisfied because we intuitively understand that the value of a life that's sinned against deserves something like an eternal punishment.

And that's not something that we the mob can do.

And so it's never satisfied.

Never satisfying.

So the vision of eternal judgment, I think, should be very clarifying for our ability to withstand something like cancel culture.