Psalm 12

Sunday, November 15, 2015 – Dr. James White preaches on Psalm 12 (at Apologia Church in Tempe, AZ):

Psalm 12 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

God, a Helper against the Treacherous.
For the choir director; [a]upon an eight-stringed lyre. A Psalm of David.

1 Help, Lord, for the godly man ceases to be,
For the faithful disappear from among the sons of men.
2 They speak [b]falsehood to one another;
With flattering [c]lips and with a double heart they speak.
3 May the Lord cut off all flattering lips,
The tongue that speaks great things;
4 Who have said, “With our tongue we will prevail;
Our lips are [d]our own; who is lord over us?”
5 “Because of the devastation of the afflicted, because of the groaning of the needy,
Now I will arise,” says the Lord; “I will set him in the safety for which he longs.”
6 The words of the Lord are pure words;
As silver tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times.
7 You, O Lord, will keep them;
You will preserve him from this generation forever.
8 The wicked strut about on every side
When [e]vileness is exalted among the sons of men.

Footnotes:

a Psalm 12:1 Or according to a lower octave (Heb Sheminith)
b Psalm 12:2 Or emptiness
c Psalm 12:2 Lit lip
d Psalm 12:4 Lit with us
e Psalm 12:8 Or worthlessness

Ten Lies

Jr., in an article entitled “Ten Lies of the Devil The World Believes About Bruce Jenner” writes:

The devil is resourceful and hard working. There is no temptation he will not use, no stratagem too tiny to try us with. He does, however, have a few areas he specializes in. He is called Satan because he is an expert at making accusations. He delights to accuse us when we are innocent, and when we are guilty. He is also a murderer and has been from the beginning. Those who hate Him, we are told, love death (Proverbs 8:36). He is also not just a liar, but the father of lies (John 8:44). When we hear a lie we ought to smell sulfur. Every lie has his hoof prints on it. Of late the broader culture has been rather frantic in telling and believing lies with respect to Bruce Jenner, and we Christians too often face the temptation to believe them. Here are ten we must never give in to.

10. Bruce Jenner has become Caitlyn Jenner. No, Bruce Jenner has hired doctors to mutilate his body and present the lie that he is now a woman. He is a man.

9. Gender is a social construct that can be chosen at will. No. From the beginning He has made us man and woman.

8. If our feelings don’t match reality, reality will have to change. I don’t dispute that Bruce Jenner wishes to be a woman. But what needs to change is his wish, not the immutable reality he has found himself in.

7. Having our desires “met” will make us happy. No, repenting and believing on the Lord Jesus Christ will make us joyful. The One who designed us gives us His law not to make us miserable, but to show us the way of life. His law is always and everywhere an invitation to joy, not a burden to be carried. If it feels like a burden to us, we must change, not it.

6. Failing to celebrate the mutilation of Bruce Jenner’s body, and failure to affirm the lie that he is now Caitlyn is mean-spirited, narrow and cruel. No, sin is never something to be celebrated, and to be against something is no more narrow-minded than to be for something. One wise friend recently pointed out the irony that it is Christians who prefer the real Bruce Jenner to the faux one, and his purported friends who prefer the fake to the real.

5. Bruce Jenner’s change is no one’s business but his own. No, public decisions have public consequences. It’s true enough that we have plenty of our own sins to worry about. It’s true enough that Christians have no need to hunt down hidden sexual perversion to shout it down. I am honestly not interested in what people wear in the privacy of their own homes. But Bruce has made his choices the world’s business by seeking the world’s attention, appearing on national television and on the cover of a national magazine.

4. Non-Christians are bad people who do this kind of thing and Christians are good people. No, apart from the grace of God in our own lives we’d find ourselves in the same mess or worse as Mr. Jenner. Even with his grace we yet struggle against and fall into sin.

3. Homosexuality is the same as any other sin. No, not all sins are the same. All sins are rebellion against the living God and are due His eternal wrath. But that doesn’t make them all equally rebellious or equally evil.

2. Homosexuals just want to be left alone to do their own thing in private. No, homosexuals insist that the rest of the world approve of their sin. And many are more than willing to use the force of the state to make it happen, whether through indoctrination at the government’s schools, or intimidation through its courts.

1. God will be mocked. No, God will not be mocked. The unsurpassed swift embrace of sexual perversion in the broader culture isn’t a surprise to Jesus. Rather, even as He ordained the rise of Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar for our good and His glory, so He has ordained even this. He will use it for His purposes.

We must guard our minds against the devil’s lies. And we must not lose heart. Jesus always wins.

The Two Religions

If you survey the religious landscape of modern culture, you will encounter an astonishingly diverse range of views. But beneath the surface, these seemingly disparate spiritualities share a common worldview, one that is radically opposed to the Christian faith. In the final analysis, there can be only two religions—worship of the Creator or worship of creation.

On September 30, in a Google Hangout, Dr. Peter Jones, the Executive Director of truthXchange, discussed his new Ligonier teaching series, Only Two Religions. You can watch this below.

A Reversal

“…the narrow majority of the Supreme Court doesn’t reflect the majority of our population. The Sexual Revolution has introduced assumptions and ‘givens’ into our thought processes today, making religious liberty objections seem increasingly odd or fanciful. Consider this. A generation ago, a person’s religious observance was a public matter, a defining characteristic of one’s identity, while a person’s sexual activity was something private. Today, this situation is reversed. A person’s sexual behavior is now considered a defining characteristic of identity, a public matter to be affirmed (even subsidized) by others, while religious observance is private and personal, relegated to places of worship and not able to infringe upon or impact the public square.” – Trevin Wax

The Gospel Is Not Chained

John_HendryxHow Should Christians Respond to the Changes in Culture?

When you behold the direction the culture is taking, do not ever let anger get the best of you. Recognize that not only does God have a specific purpose in it but that part of that purpose is to make a clear distinction between truth and falsehood. It may even have the positive effect of clearing out the false believers in our ranks. When the world sees more of the genuine article, by God’s grace, they will probably be more interested in what we are all about. So the political and social situation should never have us change the core message of the gospel. The Apostle Paul said, when in prison, “the gospel is not chained”. We can observe this phenomenon in more recent history when we see nations such as China who had the greatest revival in the history of mankind under the severe persecution of Chairman Mao. We should learn from this that no government or culture will EVER stop the advance of the kingdom of God. So while God would have us always to promote righteousness in every sphere, including the way we vote, our hope does not find its root there, not even by a long shot. Our hope is in Jesus Christ who is coming to judge the living and the dead.

Yet because of our hostile culture, many evangelicals may feel intimidated, and have decided to turn to the safety of “deeds not creeds,” in order to avoid being called judgmental. Do not let such philosophy persuade you. Words are the most critical part of the message of the gospel and faith comes through hearing. The proclamation of the gospel must include a robust declaration of the fall, a recognition of human depravity, a repenting of all self-righteousness and trusting in Jesus Christ alone. In these jars of clay God has deposited the message which is the only solution to the world’s problem. This is all by the grace of God. We are by no means better than others just sinners like them, pointing to the water of life.

– John Hendryx. monergism.com