Radio Broadcast Wednesday 10/12/2022

Classic Christianity – A Closer Look at Law & Grace P12 (10-12-22)

How Can We Be Righteous Before God? Only By Faith in Jesus, the One Who is Righteous.

~ “But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;” Romans 6:21-23

~ “And God says, Wait a minute, you missed the purpose. I showed you these things in order to show you your total inability to ever live up to that law. And also to tell you very clearly, that even if you did, you’d never be declared righteous in my sight through obedience to the law, that righteousness is going to have to be imputed to you declared to you.

Now it says in verse 21, but now a righteousness from God, apart from the law has been made known to which the law and the prophets testify. So it’s saying, wait a minute, if I cannot be declared righteous in His sight by observing the law, from the law, how is an unrighteous person ever going to go into the presence of a righteous God? And so God says, I will make you righteous, I will declare you righteous, but it will be by faith and by faith alone in the righteous one, and that’s Jesus. See, there never was a righteous one, except Jesus. He’s the only righteous one that was ever here. None of us none of the righteous no, not one. All of sin all have fallen short of the glory of God. So he says, through your identification, and coming to the righteous one, I will declare you righteous. So now our righteousness from God, apart from the law, not from man, but from God has been known to which the law and the prophets testify and this righteousness from God again, comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe, there is no difference. In other words, Hebrew or Gentile, slave or free doesn’t make a difference. Whether you are a Hebrew that is steeped in the law or a Gentile that even know what the law was, it doesn’t make an ounce of difference, both of you will come and be declared righteous in the sight of God through faith in the righteous one, and that’s Jesus. It doesn’t make any difference at God, that kind of declaration of righteousness is to the Catholic, to the Gentile, to the Hebrew, to the Gentile to any human being, who receives the Lord Jesus Christ by faith and accepts him into their hearts by faith will be declared righteous in the sight of God. All of these manmade handles we put on ourselves, God doesn’t even know what they are. He doesn’t save Catholics. He doesn’t save Baptists. He doesn’t save Methodist, Presbyterians. He just saves those who come to Him by faith in His Son, Jesus Christ. period.”

Listen in to today’s lesson with more in-depth teaching, from the Bible study booklet, A Closer Look at Law & Grace, available for purchase from our online Bob George Ministries ecommerce store.

Jesus asked how does God love and accept us? And how does he expect us to live the Christian life? To answer those questions, this insightful study explores a vital issue at the heart of the Christian experience, the biblical relationship between law and grace, understanding their role in our relationship to God will bring joy, freedom and spontaneity to your Christian life. Now, let’s take A Closer Look at Law & Grace.

Bob George 0:38
So what are we doing for him? What are you doing all of this for? righteousness, self righteousness is an abomination to God makes him sick of the stomach. Now, we get a lot of pats on the back from one another. But the people that we’re getting pats on the back from are going to end up in decaying in the ground someday that you could take their ashes and put it in a little jar and put it on the shelf. About like, crumbling up above that shell is left there, you know, she just crumble it up and it just falls into the dust. So we strive to get patted on the back by people who are fading away and ignore what God has to say about what righteousness is, is all about. So folks, what you’re what you’re dealing with here is we say, well, okay, so I’ll observe the law. I’ll certainly save myself from a lot of problems. That’s possibly so you might live a little bit better life here on this earth in some instances. On the other hand, the Pharisees were the ultimate in self obedience to the law. They were so obedient, they hung the King of Kings and the glory and the Lord of lords on a cross. So what did that produce in them? love. I don’t think so. So you say, Well, what am I? What is this purpose of this law for? Well, I just got through saying it’s make you conscious of sin so that you do what? turn to Christ, to live a new life, not a life under the bondage of the law, but to live a life led by the Spirit of God that is alive living in you, and is your only hope of glory, your only hope of ever revealing God in you is through the grace of God. It’s through the mercy that you show to others. And someone says that mercy has to come from God, through the forgiveness that we show through others, because people say that kind of forgiveness after what those people did to you, that has to be from God. As someone once said that, that sinning is is very human, but forgiving is divine. And so when you see a forgiving, merciful, loving person, you say, That’s God’s characteristic, you see a vindictive mean, person who wants to go out and to hurt people and expose people and you say, do you look at that and say, oh, there’s God’s glory shining right through? I don’t think so. You see, it’s very easy to spot the source of that type of a mindset. And so you’re dealing here, folks with the purpose of the law. Now, as we have done with everything else God gives us, we pervert it. We stand at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and evil and say, God, that’s not good enough. Is that unusual? What takes place today? I don’t again, think about it, folks. God comes along, and God comes along and gives a sugar man comes along says that sugar stuff that God gave His bad for you to try my sacrum. It’ll really help you a lot. And so what do people do? Why they give up on what God gave us and eat a bunch of chemicals and say, Praise the Lord. God comes along and and gives you parts of your body. And we come along and say, No man says, I can make a better part in that. So we take out the real and put in the artificial and say, Oh, praise God. We come along with all kinds of things along that line that that God said is good for you. And he gave to us. And we had to go into a chemical factory and make substitutions and then substitute that for the real thing. It’s crazy. And but that’s the way we do think about it, folks in your own life. How many things have you substituted a chemical for? And substituted that for what God literally gave you? Because somebody came along said that’ll put some weight on you? We come along and God says, I’ll bring you peace. And the cigarette people say no, no, you buy my cigarettes, it’ll just it’ll make you so peaceful, you won’t be able to stand it yourself. See, and we buy those things. God says I can bring you joy. The booze manufacturers come along, say no, no get get a little this Budweiser. It’ll make you joyful. And all of those things, and we buy all of the substitutes, and ignore the reality of the real thing. Now we do the same thing, God gave the law for a purpose. It wasn’t for us to look at and say I’ll do it Lord, like the Israelites did. And we’re having orgies before it ever got off the mountain. It was to show a man that these are what the minimum righteous standards of God would be. In other words, these are things that God said that God doesn’t do. These are my standards for my creation down here. And man looks at him and says, oh, we’ll do them or man looks at him said, Oh, that’s nice, but I can so I’m going to ignore it.

And God says, Wait a minute, you missed the purpose. I showed you these things in order to show you your total inability to ever live up to that law. And also to tell you very clearly, that even if you did, you’d never be declared righteous in my sight through obedience to the law, that righteousness is going to have to be imputed to you declared to you.

As we pick up in chapter three and verse 21. But now our righteousness from God, apart from the law has been made known to it’s the law and the prophets testify and this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. There’s no difference for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God. All have sinned and fall fall short of the glory of God and are justified, freely, no cost to it, freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ. In other words, we were bought out of the slave market by Christ Jesus, the risen Christ, who came that justify the ungodly. All of us of sin, everyone is put in the same category, it makes no difference where you are who you are, we were born into this world dead spiritually. And all people who are dead have no need except life. To those who refuse the life they remain dead, the wrath of God remains upon you, it does not come upon you, it remains upon you. Not once again, with the teaching, that legalists teach whether it was a Hebrew Legalist or a Christian legalist is irrelevant doesn’t make a difference. Both of them are legalists in the teaching of the law, and you grew up under that I did not I grew up, I probably learned more about the 10 commandments in school than I did in church, because I never heard much about that in the church that I went to because it’s very liberal, but you went to and evangelical. When you saw the law, did anyone ever tell you that the wages of sin was death that the violation of that was death? Not at all? What were we taught? What what what were we kind of taught you in the evangelical world which is where legalism is the legalism isn’t in the liberal church. You know, there’s there’s another heresy there. I mean, they just don’t believe in anything or they believe in everything, which in essence is believing in nothing. But in the evangelical church like you grew up in, man, God’s laws are there. And Jesus is also there. Right? Don’t know why but he’s there. Now, what under the law when you violate it, were you taught God was going to do? get you out of fellowship with God. So all of those things, were what was taught that when you messed up with that law, God’s gonna get you. God’s gonna zap you, God’s gonna take to the woodshed, God’s gonna punish you some way. And if you keep doing that for long enough, you’re gonna die one of these days when you do you’re gonna go directly to hell, and that now that’s what the law now is there anything in the scripture that deals with that? No, in the Scripture, it says that if you violated the least of these my commandments, in other words, any of them in your entire lifetime, so whenever you did one, you’re a goner, that the wages of that sin is death is not a paddling. It’s not out of fellowship. It’s not Him turned his back on you. It’s not taking you to the woodshed. It’s not beaten the daylights out of you. It’s not ignoring it. It’s not sending you to hell is death. And he can’t send you to where you already are. So until we have come to Christ for when he came to give you life, we’re already under the death penalty. And when you’re dead, you can’t be made dead. You’re already dead. So that is the perversion that has taken place in the Christian world, not only the perversion as to annihilating and minimizing what Christ did at the cross, but literally annihilating the meaning and the purpose of the law. So we’re messing both of those who were messing up what the purpose of the law was, and we are pooh poohing the purpose of what the cross was. And in both of them, instead of the wages of sin being death, it’s out of fellowship, or the wages sin as a paddling or the wages of sin as a woodshed. And the gift of God is not life, the gift of God is in fellowship, or the gift of God is God is approving you, not life. And because we don’t deal with those constants, then we deal with all of the manmade things that come up. But from God’s vantage point, the wages of sin is death, and the gift of God, His life, not a temporal life, like some people teach or that you can choose to walk back into darkness. Folks, think about this for a minute. If you’re in the light of Christ, Jesus has delivered you from darkness into the light and you are in the light as He is in the light, that you are in Christ. And God is light and in him is no darkness at all. And Christ lives in you and you live in him. How are you going to get in darkness unless he gets in darkness? Is he going to walk over in the darkness? No, he’s all light he had made there anything dark about him. So how you gonna get there if you’re in him, and he is in you? And where you are was dependent upon what he did not what you did. You were transferred. You were bought, you redeemed you were bought out of darkness into life you’ve been bought with a price. You’re a brand new child of God, you’re an adopted child that call it’s called. And it’s interesting under Hebrew law that an adopted child was prohibited from ever being disowned.

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Where you say well this kid overnight he can choose to walk over in darkness he can’t get over there because Christ isn’t and Christ isn’t going to go in darkness. So you’re gonna have to find a way to get Christ out of you if you’re gonna walk in there by yourself because otherwise you’re not gonna You’re never walking by yourself. So how are you going to get Christ out of you when he said I’ll never leave you nor forsake you just say I don’t want you there anymore. You think God’s gonna say Oh, well, okay, then I’ll just I’ll just leave? He said, I’ll never leave you. I’ll never leave. So wherever you go, I’m with you, but you cannot go back in the darkness, again, any more than a butterfly can go back to being a caterpillar again, he may crawl around like one he may act like one, but it’ll never be one again. And so folks, this thing, it’s not a theological issue with me, it hinges on heresy of people teaching that you can walk away from the God that you live in, and who lives in you. Now, can you walk away from where you’ve never? Can you walk away from where you were on the edge of In other words, if you walked up to the edge of a building? Can you walk away from that building? Yeah, you never went in it. And that’s what John talks about is, they went out from among us, because they were never a part of us. So you can walk away from what you were never a part of you were there, but you weren’t a part of it. It’s kind of like the law we’re talking about it was there. But it wasn’t a part of it. Just just never paid any attention to it. You can go sit in a church building and you’re a part of the religious community, but you’re lost, you’re not in Christ, you’re just in a religious community. And so you can you walk away from that? And of course, you can walk away from that you never were a part up. But if you were a part of Christ, Jesus, and Christ is in you, and you’re in him. You can’t walk away from him, and he refuses to walk away from you. So you’re in Christ eternally. That’s what kind of life he gave, he could have given a kind of life, he wanted eternal life, temporal life, no life, he chose eternal, he could have chosen, I’m not going to give these people any life. If we were God, that’s probably what we do until we had to deal with ourselves. And then temporal life, he didn’t choose temporal life, he choose, he chose something eternal. Folks, there’s a reason for that, for you and me to function properly, in this world, we have to function with some constant in our lives. And when we don’t have a constant, we’re like a chemistry professor trying to produce an experiment without a constant. You can’t produce an experiment with variables, you have to bounce the variables off of a constant. And the constant in our life is Christ Jesus. And until we come to Christ Jesus for a life that is eternal, we don’t have anything constant in our life. If my spiritual life is temporal, then it is just a step above what I have here on earth. Because everything here is temporal. Everything’s gonna pass away. The Word of God remains forever. That’s your constant, the word is Christ Jesus, He is your constant. Everything else is a variable. Folks, you can’t live without a variable in your life, you can, but you’re going to be the most unstable person on the face of this earth, as all lost people are. They’re unstable, because there’s nothing secure. That’s why people strive for the wealth that they strive for. Strive for the positions that they strive for, strive for the acceptance that we strive for is where we’re trying to gain with something permanent. If I can get enough money that I can, that my money will outlast my life. Boy, I’ve got some consistency here. I’ve got some security, and then all of a sudden, it’s gone. Boy, if I can just get enough acceptance, why then listen, that acceptance will come and go in a New York minute. So if you don’t have a constant in your life, you’re going to be a double minded man that is unstable in all ways. You have to have a constant. And that constant that we have is Christ Jesus, the eternal Christ Jesus, who gave me a constant, eternal life, not a temporal life, but a constant life. I feel sorry for people who do not understand their salvation being life as being an eternal, because there are people without still playing the religious game, but still without any constant in their life.

When it talks about the New Covenant, it talks about that we have been made perfect, complete in the sight of God, that the old sacrificial system where you had to get forgiven over and over and over again, could never make perfect those who draw near to worship. Now, when we think of being made perfect, we think all of a sudden our behavior is perfect. There’s only one person on the face of the earth that that was ever true. And that’s Jesus, not you and me. It’s talking about being made complete. Whenever there’s something left to do, we’re not complete. There is nothing left for God to do for you and me. He’s done at all. He’s giving you life. He’s giving you total forgiveness. He’s giving you total salvation. He’s given your your justification is total, your sanctification is total. Your glorification is so total that it says we’re already seated with Him in the heavenlies with Christ Jesus. That’s total. That’s consistency. I don’t have to wonder if that’s going to happen. It’s already happened. What does that enable me to do? Bounce this variable life that we have here on this earth off of that constant. And all of a sudden, this experiment of life starts making sense for the first time.

We’re talking about this unbelievably important subject of the fact that we come to Christ we receive righteousness as a declaration from God, as a result of our faith in the righteous one, and the fact that all of us have sinned and all of us have fallen short of the glory of God. But we were justified freely by this grace through the redemption that came through Jesus Christ. Now in verse 25, Chapter three goes ahead now to say God presented him. And in the NIV translation, it says, a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood, look down at the footnote, and you’ll see what that really means. It says, God presented him as the one who would turn aside the wrath of God taking away sin. You wonder sometimes why don’t translators just write that out? Instead of using the word atonement as an example, that is not in the New Testament. Atonement was the way and means that God had for covering sin through the blood of bulls and goats. Jesus did not come to atone for sin, He came to take them away. And it is strange to me how many times people who are supposedly involved in translation and supposedly acquainted with the teaching of the Word of God will carry over words like that, when the fact of the matter is, is in the Greek language, that word is not used. The word atonement is not used in the New Testament. The word atonement was what was the way that God covered sins. Jesus did not come to atone for sins. You’ll hear that word all the time, the atoning death of Christ, Christ didn’t come to atone per day for our sins. Now, do you believe that there’s healing in the atonement? No, I don’t believe in atonement period. Atonement was Old Testament covering of sin, Jesus came to take away your sin, propitiation took place whereby God said, it’s finished, I’m satisfied, the sacrifice was greater than all the sins of the world. So many times if you look at your footnotes, you’ll see what something means. You say, Well, why is this word atonement brought over like this by a translator? Well, if you look in some commentaries, it’ll say that through continual theological usage it the term has become acceptable, so in other words, the only thing that makes something acceptable is continual theological usage. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s theologically correct or not. It’s just the illogical usage. But folks there I don’t want to be nitpicky here, but I want to tell you something. When you think of atonement, I think of Old Testament covering and the type of forgiveness that is over and over and over and over again, which the whole book of Hebrews is trying desperately to explain. That is an incomplete type of forgiveness. There’s something left to do. I go to the atonement, the Day of Atonement and I get my sins forgiven. What? from that day backwards. I go back next year get my sins forgiven from what? that day backwards I go again to the Day of Atonement get my sins forgiven from what? that day backwards I go the confession booth to get my sins forgiven for what? that day backwards I go back to the confession booth to get my sins forgiven from what? that day backwards. I go to my first John one nine to get my sins forgiven from what? that day backwards I go back tomorrow with First John one nine to get my sins forgiven. What? that day backwards. It says any one of those is totally incomplete and will never enable the believer to draw near to God in perfect worship. In other words, to be able to make made perfect, complete. Why? Well, your forgiveness isn’t complete. If I have to get forgiven today for what I did yesterday, my forgiveness is not complete. Now if I am in Christ, Jesus who didn’t come to cover sins came to take them away, then I realize I’m already complete. And if I’m already complete, the most intelligent thing I can do if I’m going to walk by faith and what God said, not what man says but what God says. All I can do is to thank him for that forgiveness. And to thank him for the fact that his Spirit is living in me and directing me and teaching me to live a lifestyle that is different than under the law whereby the wages of sin is death and that I’m under a curse. So I’m going to live in a newness of life where God is going to get underneath the skin and say, Bob, the adultery was as a result of lust, that if you nevertheless, did you never commit adultery, but the fact that you can lust is the same as committing adultery. So I’d like to deal with your lust. You see, you get what. So he’s dealing with those type of things, and to be able to explain to us why you don’t have to live in that kind of a less full environment, you can be free from that type of thing. If you’ll get your mind concentrated on the truth of Christ Jesus. He’s dealing with this that, that anger, murder, you don’t have to murder, but I’m gonna tell you something. Anger is the same as murder. And so what I want to deal with is the anger because if you never got angry, why you wouldn’t be murdering somebody. So I want to deal with with that kind of a thing. You sit back and say, Well, gee, I’d rather deal with murder, because I’m not gonna do that. And he said, I know but you get mad, you could do it. And so I’m gonna I want to deal with you with the fact that you don’t have to live in anger. As a matter of fact, that anger of yours that you’re going through, is as a result of fear. Because and, and perfect love is what casts away fear because that anger is a secondary response to fear. And so I’m going to deal with even a route deeper than the anger and that’s the fear that’s going on and you don’t need to live in fear. And so why don’t you accept my love? He’s constantly renewing our minds teaching us truth that is doing what? Well, it’s setting us free. It’s what he said he came to do is to set us free. So we’re dealing here now, in regard to the fact that God that we now that God presented him as a sacrifice as the one who had turned aside His wrath, no more wages of sin for us, there’s no condemnation, taking away our sin, not covering it, taking it away. Through faith in his blood, not faith in what I’m doing faith in him and what he did.

Thank you so much for tuning in to Classic Christianity, with Bob George. We hope you’ve enjoyed today’s program. We truly hope that today’s message has inspired you to walk a life of faith in the Lord, find more information online at shop.BobGeorge.net. There you’ll also find available CDs, DVDs, and bible studies available for purchase. It’s through your help that we are able to spread the good word of Jesus Christ. Until next time, walk in faith, be good to one another and praise the Lord. Amen.