Cosmic Treason
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The greatest distortion in our thinking, dear friends, is that God owes us mercy, that God is somehow obligated to be gracious to us, because grace by its very definition is voluntary. God is not required to be merciful.
Have you ever had a conversation with a non-Christian, and after explaining the reality of sin, the justice of God, and hell, their response is essentially, if there is a God and I meet Him when I die, He'll forgive me because that's what God is like. That's terrifying and fatal thinking, totally misunderstanding grace and mercy. This is the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. As we close out this week's study, R.C. Sproul will help us understand the gravity of our sin and the difference between God's justice and His mercy. But before we hear today's message, don't forget that you can own this series and Dr. Sproul's book, The Holiness of God, when you give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.
This offer does end at midnight, so be quick. Here's R.C. Sproul with a message titled, Cosmic Treason.
Several years ago, I was working on the staff of a church and we received a new curriculum for junior high school Sunday school that the denomination had sent down to us. And I was asked by the session of the church to read through the curriculum and see whether we wanted to use it. And as I was reading the curriculum, it began to talk about some of the things we read in the Old Testament where God seems so fierce in the manifestation of his wrath, where he kills people instantly and things of that sort. And the curriculum was teaching the children this. It said, when we read these stories in the Old Testament, we have to remember that things didn't really happen like this. that these were myths that were articulated by the Old Testament writers because these were Jewish people who were warriors and they were somewhat fierce and so on, and they were primitive, pre-scientific people who didn't really understand the love of God.
And so we have to understand these passages in light of what we know about God from the New Testament, that He's a God of love, that He's a God of mercy, that He's a God of grace and a God of kindness, and not anything like this mean God of the Old Testament. Well, needless to say, we didn't use that curriculum. But you hear this attitude voiced all the time. like there are two different gods, a New Testament God and an Old Testament God, and we just have a difficult time relating to the God of the Old Testament because of certain narratives that we encounter therein. And I'd like to call attention to a couple of those stories that we read in the Old Testament that cause people to react so negatively to to the character of God.
The first one is found in the book of Leviticus in the 10th chapter, where I'll be reading verses 1 through 7. And this is the story of what happened to the sons of Aaron, the high priest. We read in verse 1 of chapter 10 of Leviticus, Then Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it, put incense on it and offered profane fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them. And so fire went out from the Lord and devoured them and they died before the Lord. And Moses said to Aaron, This is what the Lord spoke. Now, before I read what Moses said to Aaron, let's reconstruct the story. Here are the two sons of Aaron who have followed in their father's footsteps.
They have become consecrated to the priesthood, and they are attending the altar, and they bring this strange fire, fire that was not part of the regular ritual of the altar, and they're sort of playing around and experimenting with profane or secular, unconsecrated, unholy stuff. And they bring this stuff, and they put it on the altar, and as soon as they do, the fire from the altar gushes up and consumes them and burns them to death on the spot. Now, you can imagine how Aaron felt when he hears that God has just executed his two sons for this prank at the altar. And so what does Aaron do? He goes to Moses, and the Bible doesn't tell us what he says to Moses.
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