[0:00] We pray that you would bless us with an understanding of your word. Help us to not just hear words, but to consider them.
[0:10] And not just to consider them, but Lord, we ask that they would go deep into our souls and that we would live by your word, trusting that your word is a light to lighten our path.
[0:24] Lord, that it is food for our souls, that it is a blessing from you. Lord, as we consider these words, we pray that your Holy Spirit will be at work.
[0:35] We pray this in Christ's name. Amen. In January 2015, two French-born Algerian brothers, Saeed and Sharif Kouachi, opened fire on the staff of Charlie Hebdo in France, a satirical cartoon magazine.
[1:00] They killed a dozen people and they injured 11. And they were acting on behalf of an Al-Qaeda cell because Charlie Hebdo published pictures of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
[1:15] In Islam, this is blasphemy. And blasphemy is a capital crime in the Quran. They were carrying out, in a sense, the wishes of their God.
[1:29] Christianity, likewise, has categories for blasphemy. Blasphemy. Like, I mean, not completely the same, but similar to Islam.
[1:43] Blasphemy is not taken lightly in God's word, in the Christian faith. So it's hard, in a sense, for us moderns to grasp the idea of blasphemy because we live in a tolerant age, an age where people can choose which God to follow, which things to believe in, who to have relationships with.
[2:06] There's the ideals of freedom and free speech. Mind you, that, in a sense, is not always the case, especially in a time where people are getting cancelled, which, for moderns and for people that live in 2024 Ottawa and in the West in 2024, it's a form of blasphemy that is dealt with, but on a secular level.
[2:39] But the question is, what is real blasphemy? Is it what we saw in 2015 in Paris with the Charlie Hebdo murders? Is it something in the Bible where there's similar blasphemy laws?
[2:54] So on one hand, we can look down our nose at Islam, but we kind of have that junk in our own faith. Or is it just offending somebody and their sensibilities?
[3:07] What is real blasphemy? And why does this matter to us today? This morning, we continue on in Jude. Jude, verses 8 to 16.
[3:19] Jude will talk about blasphemy in the Christian faith. What a wonderful thing to talk about on a Sunday morning. Blasphemy. But Jude's going to draw our attention to the importance of understanding what it is.
[3:32] He will tell us what it is, what it does, and how it will ultimately be dealt with, and why we ought to be aware of it and fight against it. But do we fight against it like the Kuwachi brothers?
[3:48] Jude's going to draw our attention to three aspects of blasphemy this morning. The shape of blasphemy. The second thing is the activity of blasphemy. What blasphemy does.
[4:00] How it plays out. And then finally, the end of blasphemy. How blasphemy will ultimately be dealt with.
[4:11] So let's first look at the shape of blasphemy. We'll be in verses 8 to 10. But we'll look at just verse 8 this morning. By the way, if you want to grab a Bible, there's still a couple Bibles there. Feel free at any time to get up and grab it.
[4:23] You won't interrupt me whatsoever. But if you can, follow along. Verse 8. Yet in like manner, these people, also relying on their dreams, defile the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones.
[4:39] If you remember last week, verse 8, I briefly touched on it, but verse 8 is an interesting verse. There's verses in the Bible that act as a summary of everything that has gone before, while at the same time point to what will be talked about in the verses that will come.
[5:01] Verse 8 is one of those. It looks back, but it also simultaneously looks ahead. And we'll see here that blasphemers will indeed prove to be false prophets.
[5:12] If this is the first time in the Jude series, you missed the first couple weeks, Jude was planning to write a letter to the church. We're not sure exactly which church it is.
[5:24] It was supposed to be, at least we kind of gather an encouragement to them. But it became very clear that there were some false teachers in the church, and he had to address the issue because they were causing a lot of harm and disrupting the life of God's people.
[5:39] So when he says, yet in like manner, these people, he's referring to these false teachers. These false teachers are blasphemers who make up their own type of religion.
[5:56] It's like a curated religion. And in the case here, it is all freedom, no law. It is all liberty, but no rules.
[6:10] God has freed us to be whoever we want to be. We don't have to obey him, or at least not the laws that we don't like. They've created and curated their own religion.
[6:26] And as a result, they are benefiting. The purpose of what they have done is to engage in their own selfish and self-serving sensuality.
[6:39] It does not see pleasure as a gift from God, but rather an ultimate end in itself. They're greedy. They are corrupt. They see people as a means to an end.
[6:51] They're not serving the congregation. They're abusing the congregation. They are constantly rejecting divine authority. And this is blasphemy against God and his word.
[7:06] Look with me at verse 9. But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said to Satan, the Lord rebuke you.
[7:24] This is a bit of a bizarre story. Jude here is quoting a book that is not in the Bible.
[7:34] Most likely it's called The Assumption of Moses. And he is, Jude quotes a number of different books that aren't in the Bible. So if you remember last week, he almost certainly touched on this book called Sirach.
[7:49] Now it's The Assumption of Moses, later on in our text, he will quote, First Enoch, all not in our Bible. Jude isn't trying to make a case that these books need to be in the Bible.
[8:05] But what he is doing is quoting, most likely he is quoting books of the Bible, or sorry, books that aren't in the Bible that are well known to his readers.
[8:16] They were likely in common circulation at the time, and they would have wisdom. They would have lessons. They would refer to the Bible in some bits and pieces, but they weren't the Bible, a part of the canon itself.
[8:28] It would be like if I quoted to you, say, C.S. Lewis, to make a point, or drew on a story from, say, Lord of the Rings, something that, maybe not all of you guys know this stuff, but at least the majority of you would be familiar with certain stories that would contain truth, biblical truth, that would emphasize a point.
[8:51] In a way, Jude is speaking the vernacular to his people, and this is kind of the vernacular story of first century people in the Church of God, interestingly enough.
[9:03] So we don't have this full manuscript of the assumption of Moses, and what's interesting is that scholars say we actually don't have this portion that Jude quotes in this extra-biblical book called the assumption of Moses, but scholars have kind of pieced together hypothetically what it might have said, and it would go something like this, or at least the narrative would go something like this.
[9:26] Satan comes to accuse Moses of being a slanderer. He is not fit for heaven, Satan says. He belongs in hell. On one hand, Satan is right.
[9:38] I mean, Moses was not squeaky clean. Moses, he struggled with obedience, he struggled with faith. In the desert, he struck a rock rather than looking for water, feeling pressure from the people who were grumbling rather than looking to God.
[9:55] Moses, actually, because of his sin, did not see the promised land. Moses, in a sense, does not belong in heaven.
[10:09] Satan is right. But the archangel Michael did not leave his God-ordained place of authority as one of God's key angels, unlike the fallen angels that Jude mentions, again, if you remember, in verse 6 last week.
[10:29] refusing, he refuses to put himself in the judgment seat of God. Michael is not blaspheming God by presuming to be God himself.
[10:47] This is what is referring to, this is what Jude is referring to when he says that Michael did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, and that is upon Moses, but said, the Lord rebuke you.
[11:05] He simply pushes back against Satan. He is faithful to God, and Jude is drawing our attention to this to convey the truth of the matter, of what blasphemy really is, and how, at its core, blasphemy is downstream from idolatry.
[11:24] That is, idolatry puts ourselves in the place of God. It looks to uproot God from his throne, of his authority, of who he is as creator over all things.
[11:37] And it says, actually, we know what's best. I mean, we can put our faith in other things, so it's not just putting ourselves in God's place, but it certainly does include that.
[11:51] And what blasphemy ultimately does is it speaks slander against God. It speaks an ill word against who God is. It denies God's claims of who he is and what he has done and who we are in relationship to him.
[12:07] It says that his decrees are not final and his judgment is not just or universal. It calls blasphemy BS on God's word.
[12:22] And yet, it's only God who is the ultimate judge. Only God who has the ultimate authority. Only God who has the power to decree all things.
[12:34] And in this story, Michael, the archangel, refuses to sit in the judgment seat of God and as a result, Jude says that he did not pronounce a blasphemous judgment.
[12:45] It's a good thing. He did not engage in blasphemy. But Jude is saying this because there are false teachers, remember, that are blasphemous. They're doing the opposite of this.
[12:56] They are claiming divine authority, divine judgment. They are the ones who are saying, listen, God's word isn't to be followed.
[13:07] At least not this part. This part, excellent. liberty, pleasure, sensuality, live and let live, do your own thing. In fact, we know how to really live our lives according to God's word.
[13:22] Follow us. Pay us. Do the things that we say. And we see this in verse 10. Look with me here.
[13:34] But these people, that is the false teachers, but these people blaspheme all that they do not understand and they are destroyed by all that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively.
[13:53] The blasphemous false teachers do not seek truth. Their agenda is greed and selfish ambition and it takes predominance over any biblical doctrine of God.
[14:06] It's only the parts of the Bible that fit into their agenda that are, those parts of the Bible that are green-lighted, that are deemed okay. Earlier, in verses 3 and 4, Jude says that they pervert God's grace by neglecting obedience to God's word.
[14:26] Instead, they embrace illicit sensuality. They embrace a cheap grace that neglects obedience. They are ignorant of the variety that stays in the dark and does not seek out the light.
[14:42] They do not care for truth. So how do we combat such false teachers? As Jude says in verse 3, how do we contend for the faith against such teaching?
[14:54] we must be like Bereans and the Athenians from Acts 17. If you remember that story, these are people that, they didn't take Paul's, the Apostle Paul's word on face value, but they wanted to search the scriptures.
[15:11] They wanted to make sure that they understood truth, that they submitted to God's word and wanted to ensure that there were aspects of God's word that they were a bit loose on.
[15:25] They were diligent truth seekers. The false teachers, they bank on their people not knowing God's word. I mean, in some ways, because I've developed some trust with the congregation, I could slowly slip in certain things, certain parts of the Bible or certain parts of my own agenda that aren't biblical or I could get fuzzy on aspects of scripture.
[15:57] And this isn't like an issue of, you know, I've just made a mistake, but this is like a willful attempt at trying to subvert your gaze from God to something that I want, some kind of reputation or extra dollars in my pocket or whatever it may be.
[16:18] I could slowly, slowly introduce something like that. If you guys weren't diligent in searching the scriptures, if you didn't read God's word, if you weren't students of the Bible, if you didn't dig deep.
[16:34] And for us, it is a challenge that we need to be people of God's word. One of the reasons, and I've said this in the past, one of the reasons why we recite the creed, whether it be the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed, isn't just to affirm our faith together, which is very important, but it's to act as a check against me, that I won't preach from God's word something that is contrary to the faith that is handed down.
[17:03] I don't have the liberty, no teacher has the liberty to be new with the Bible. originality isn't something that I am trained for.
[17:19] I'm, in a sense, trained to pass on the faith that I've received to you, you pass on the faith to the next generation, and so on, and so forth.
[17:31] Now, there's aspects to it where it's very contextual, or maybe how does the Bible apply to this? Yeah, but by and large, it's still the same scriptures. We need to be people of God's word.
[17:41] We need to make sure that false teaching doesn't come in and take root in our lives because there are false motives from false teachers that really is a form of blasphemy.
[17:58] But these false teachers, they don't just blaspheme the parts of the Bible that they do not understand or they have no desire to pursue, but they also get wrong the things they do understand, understand, which is, in a way, to say that they also don't understand the things that they do understand.
[18:18] What do I mean? The false teachers, verse 10, tells us that they understand things at an instinctive level, a base level, which implies that they view life through their stomach, through their appetites and passions and feelings.
[18:36] things. That's their hermeneutic. That's the lens by which they read the Bible, they proclaim the truth. That's their whole reason for being.
[18:48] Reason and wisdom are discarded for a subjective way of living and reading God's word. Their consciences are seared, so lies seem like truth to them.
[19:01] You tell a lie enough times, it seems awfully truthful. Proper moral discernment is impossible for these false teachers.
[19:13] They think that what they're proclaiming is life to our souls, but what it is is decay setting in and rot setting in.
[19:26] It is a gangrene that seeps deeper and deeper in and deeper into the hearers. It needs to be cut out, it needs to be dealt with. An easy way to understand these false teachers is that they're antinomian.
[19:44] What does that mean? Anti, against, nomos is law, it's a way of saying that they're against God's law. They're antinomian, they're anti-law. They're all grace.
[19:57] The Bible very clearly in a way to be in a simpler reductionistic way, but I think it still stands. The Bible preaches law and grace.
[20:09] That law leads us to grace, but also grace helps us to follow God's law. This beautiful back and forth between life. God's love and love and love and love and love and love.
[20:21] We're all in a freedom. We are motivated, not out of fear of damnation, but out of gratitude for salvation. We obey God. It's back and forth between law and gospel.
[20:33] These guys are all gospel, which really is no gospel at all. We must remember, God's good design for life includes limits and boundaries, not to destroy or frustrate us into servitude and slavery, but to save us from servitude and slavery.
[20:54] To be all about your appetites, all about pleasure, all the time, is a life that is shackled. It's not free.
[21:06] It is a life that lacks self control, that's enslaved by the things that are easily met with food or screens or relationships with pleasure.
[21:21] Pleasure becomes an end in and of itself. God's law leads to life. It leads to grace. And he provides us with limits and boundaries and, in a sense, laws to obey for our benefit, for our flourishing.
[21:43] But don't we know this to an extent, whether we're Christians or non-Christians? We know right from wrong, deep in our consciences. Is this not proof that there is a God and that he is a good and real, but also very fierce judge?
[22:03] God has done it. Where does this moral imperative come from? Why is it that we deep down know right from wrong and that wrong will be punished?
[22:17] The Bible would say it's an aspect of what it means to be made in God's image, as image bearers. Ecclesiastes 3 says that God has put eternity on the hearts of men.
[22:30] That we know instinctively, deep down in our souls, that there must be something greater than the here and the now, and that here and now, or that something greater than here and now, it must be good, whatever it is.
[22:46] But also, the Bible says that God has given us revelation through his created order, that God has made himself known through the world.
[22:59] So, in a sense, to deny this reality is to push back against God's truth and claim something, anything, other than his good and beautiful and true reality.
[23:11] And it says that this is blasphemy. So, we see that blasphemy isn't saying Jesus is not the Son of God, or the Holy Spirit is not a part of the Godhead, or, you know, you say something that is against maybe an aspect of what we read about in the Creed, or something contrary to God's Word, which is blasphemy, but blasphemy runs deeper than that.
[23:41] It always pushes God to the margins, and diminishes God, and saying that we are greater than God. And this is what Jude is warning us about. This is the shape of blasphemy.
[23:56] So, is God indifferent to this? Look with me at the beginning of verse 11, just the first three words of verse 11. It says, woe to them.
[24:08] apart from Jude, the only person that says woe to, pronounces woe to anybody in the New Testament is Jesus himself.
[24:26] And this woe that he is pronouncing Jude, that Jesus pronounces in the Gospels, and also in St. John's Revelation, is a woe that is pointing to an everlasting and eternal judgment of God.
[24:43] It's heavy. You say woe to them, it's like saying they're damned to hell. I mean, there is no, there is nothing that can be said in the Bible that carries more weight.
[24:57] Jude says to these false teachers, woe to you. This is the shape of blasphemy.
[25:09] This is, we'll begin to see the end of blasphemy after our next point, which is the activity of blasphemy. So what does blasphemy look like even more than what we've seen already?
[25:21] Look with me verses 11, look at with me at verses 11 to 13. Once again, Jude employs a triplet. Jude, he likes doing things in threes.
[25:32] So he has another triplet of examples to highlight what this kind of blasphemy looks like. We'll actually just look at verse 11 first. Woe to them, for they walked in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam's error and perished in Korah's rebellion.
[25:52] Cain, Balaam, Korah. We don't have the time to recount each story, but in all three cases we see biblical characters who willfully rebel against God's word, and in all three cases the rebellion pollutes not just themselves but others all around them.
[26:14] All act as a prototype of how blasphemy works out amongst individuals and spreads amongst God's people and how these false teachers are in line with these Cain, Balaam, and Korah, these blasphemers.
[26:39] In fact, Jude uses an increasingly strong series of words to describe each successive story. So if you look with me again at verse 11, Jude says this, for they walked in the way of Cain, and then they abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam's heir, and then finally they perished in Korah's rebellion.
[27:03] It is a gradual growing towards rebellion that ultimately leads to perishing. If you're familiar with Psalm 1, we see that progression as well in Psalm 1, how the wicked people, they first stand, or first they sit, they stand, they walk.
[27:25] It's this progression into greater and greater amounts of blasphemy, greater and greater amounts of rebellion towards the Lord.
[27:37] In all such cases, Cain, Balaam, Korah, this rebellion is the activity of blasphemy, and in every case, the rebels, they knew God's will, yet they denied God's power and God's judgment as if God was some neutered, powerless, weak force, as if God couldn't see their scheming that somehow God was not who God claimed he was.
[28:09] Unbelief replaced faith, generosity is replaced with greed, God's vision for goodness, truth, and beauty is replaced with a distorted, perverted, and bent goodness that becomes a type of hellscape.
[28:24] There is no neutrality apart from God. Either we are enjoying and following and obeying truth, beauty, and goodness according to God, or we are going in the opposite direction of that.
[28:43] These rebels, they are acting in such a way, and these false teachers are following suit. Like I mentioned before, such rebellion never affects an individual alone.
[28:56] In all three cases, ending in Korah, many people die as a result in the biblical stories. False teachers do not care for the souls of those they serve.
[29:08] they don't. They see them as fodder, and a means to achieve their distorted and sinister ends. What does Jude say to them at the beginning of verse 11?
[29:19] Woe to them. In his commentary on Jude, Thomas Manton, he was a Westminster divine, and he was a chaplain to Oliver Cromwell.
[29:31] He compares Christ and the false teachers like this. For Christ souls are a precious commodity, Christ thought worthy of his own blood.
[29:44] But seducers count them cheap wear. For their own gain and worldly interests, they care not how they betray souls. The difference is unmistakable.
[29:56] True teachers and leaders in Christ's church mimic Christ. How? By laying down their lives for his people, for the sake of their souls, giving of themselves, emptying themselves, blessing themselves, being patient with, or not blessing themselves, blessing other people, being patient with people, walking with and guiding people that are put in their care, having a desire to equip God's people to do the things that God has called them to do.
[30:29] They are under-shepherds to the one true shepherd who is Christ. And how do they do this? By sticking to God's most holy word.
[30:41] They cannot be rebels, for rebellion is blasphemy, and such a blasphemous activity never produces what it promises. We can see that in the next two verses.
[30:53] Look at verses 12 and 13 with me. These are hidden reefs. Another translation talks about them being stains.
[31:05] They pollute. These are hidden reefs at your love feasts as they feast with you without fear. Shepherds feeding themselves, waterless clouds swept along by winds, fruitless trees in late autumn twice dead uprooted, wild waves of the sea casting up the foam of their own shame, wandering stars for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever.
[31:32] these examples hit home the point that the activity of blasphemy is not a source of blessing, for it unplugs from the source of light itself.
[31:44] Instead, it plugs into power death. Fruitless trees in late autumn twice dead uprooted, the image of stars leading people astray, stars were the source of navigation in the ancient world.
[32:01] stars moving directions. How do they lead people to the right ports?
[32:11] They can't. The number of pictures that Jude paints here are people that purport to bless, but ultimately they curse.
[32:24] Jude reminds us that such blasphemous activity will not go unpunished. but will have a total and final end. But what will that punishment look like?
[32:37] Will it look like the two brothers opening fire on a dozen journalists in 2015? Let's take a look, verses 14 to 16, and we'll see the end of blasphemy.
[32:50] once again, Jude uses an example from a non-biblical source, this time first Enoch. And we'll begin in verse 14. It was also about these, that is, the false teachers, that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousand of his holy ones.
[33:11] We'll continue, sorry. to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against them.
[33:28] These are grumblers, malcontents, following their sinful desires. They are loudmouthed boasters, showing favoritism to gain advantage. Jude is connecting first Enoch with Deuteronomy 32, verses 2 and 4, which is very similar in content and speaks to God's judgment in a comprehensive way.
[33:54] It says that God is the all-powerful judge and that he misses not one aspect of human experience that he will not judge.
[34:07] We will all stand before the just judge. notice how Jude here emphasizes ungodliness. Verse 15, he mentions four times ungodliness in verse 15 is understood as the total moral and spiritual breakdown, an unrepentant impiety in thought, word, and deed.
[34:32] It blasphemes God as creator, sustainer, savior, and judge. It denies his word, it leads others astray, it is the antithesis of who God is.
[34:44] Literally, it is ungodliness, it is the opposite of who God is. We ought to expect ungodliness in the world to those that have not embraced the Christian faith, that have not had their sins forgiven and strived by the Holy Spirit has helped to live a godly life.
[35:07] We ought to expect it. And I don't mean that in a we are better than them type of way, but the church is the group of people that God has saved, called out of darkness into light, and he expects us and we ought to expect of ourselves that we would live godly lives.
[35:29] Not perfect lives, but godly lives. Lives that when we fail, we are honest about our failure and our sin before God asking for his forgiveness and receiving that and knowing that we have been forgiven on the cross once and for all.
[35:48] But when ungodliness takes root in the congregation, it's a problem. When unrepentance takes root in the congregation, it is a problem.
[36:02] When baptized members of the visible church have grown very cold towards the Lord and the things of his word, it's a problem.
[36:14] And it doesn't mean woe to you, but it does mean today is the day to get back to it by God's help, by God's strength.
[36:25] God's love. But especially woe to them if they are teaching something that is ungodly. Our section concludes with verse 16 and describes a people that are utterly selfish and deeply worldly.
[36:43] They are not doing battle with the flesh. They do not feel the pressure to resist the cultural and societal temptations that are always against God's people.
[36:55] They have embraced such realities. In this case of false teachers, they have baptized them into the church. They are not contending for the faith. They are living for their own type of faith.
[37:08] Friends, either God will pardon because we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ and we have embraced that by faith, or punishment awaits those who are ungodly.
[37:22] There is no in between. It is an old-fashioned type of message of talking about judgment, but Jude is reminding us that there is the righteous who are clothed in Christ, and then there is the ungodly who push away God's salvation.
[37:40] God will not stand by idly. So if we look at verse 16, if we are honest with ourselves, have we not all committed some kind of blasphemy against the Lord?
[37:57] Have you gone through a season of your Christian life where you're just not trying to repent, you're making excuses, you're making allowances, you're finding nuance where there is none, you are acting in an ungodly way?
[38:13] Have you been blaspheming? And if so, what hope do you have? What hope do I have? I'll end with this.
[38:24] Matthew 26, 59, and following, Jesus stands arrested, beaten, before the high priest, the entire Sanhedrin, that was the ruling party, the ruling religious party in the temple in the first century, and they are looking to find a lawful reason to execute Jesus.
[38:48] Finally, they get out of him what they wanted. He would be accused of blasphemy. I'll read verses 59 and following. Now the chief priests and the whole council were seeking false testimony against Jesus that they might put him to death, but they found none, though many false witnesses came forward, at least two came forward, sorry, the last two came forward, and said, this man said, I am able to destroy the temple of God and to rebuild it in three days.
[39:18] And the high priest stood up and said to Jesus, have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you? But Jesus remained silent and the high priest said to him, I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.
[39:37] Remember, Jesus is beaten. He is dragged away in chains, blood is dripping from his body, he is weak, he is broken. He says this to them, knowing full well what's going to come about because of what he is saying.
[39:53] Verse 64, Jesus said to him, you have said so, but I tell you from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power coming on the clouds of heaven.
[40:06] Then the high priest tore his robes and said, he has uttered blasphemy. What further witness do we need? You have now heard his blasphemy. What is your judgment?
[40:18] And this whole Sanhedrin, they answered, he deserves death. Then they spit on his face and struck him and some slapped him saying, prophesy to us, you Christ.
[40:29] They're not calling him Christ. They're not calling him the Messiah. They're mocking him. Who is it that struck you? Christ Jesus is falsely accused of blasphemy so that we who are rightly condemned for blasphemy may turn to him to be forgiven.
[40:50] He suffers the judgment and punishment of a blasphemer so that we may go free. You see, even a blasphemer who turns from his or her wickedness and puts his or her hope in Christ's all sufficient work on the cross may be forgiven.
[41:09] What is the Christian response to blasphemy? I'll tell you what it is. It is not to shoot up a magazine that publishes pictures of your prophet.
[41:23] It is not to cancel those that speak an ill word towards the way you feel or your identity. It is the gospel. The good news that Christ has died on the cross for all your sins, including a lifestyle of blasphemy, so that when you repent and believe and you turn from your wickedness, there is judgment, judgment, but it is not on you, it is on Christ.
[41:51] He has taken it upon himself so that we may now enjoy the benefits of what it means to be a son of God. I say son because it has in view firstborn status.
[42:05] In the ancient world, the firstborn, he was the one who enjoyed the full benefit of being a son of his father and we get to enjoy that ourselves when we are made right in the salvation of Christ.
[42:25] The punishment that we deserve, it is doled out on him. If we push back against it and we say, to hell with you God, there is punishment for us and we do not enjoy the salvation of Christ.
[42:46] So friends, let us be honest about our sin, not because we want to wallow in perpetual sadness, but so we can enjoy life and life to its full.
[43:00] In Christ Jesus our Lord. Let us pray. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.
[43:10] Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.