REFORMED CHURCH BELLVILLE: SUNDAY SERMON 7 NOVEMBER 2004 MORNING SERVICE

REFORMED CHURCH BELLVILLE: SUNDAY SERMON 7 NOVEMBER 2004 MORNING SERVICE

Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. Beloved grace and peace be to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, through the mighty working of God the Holy Spirit.
Amen

Psalm of Praise: 84:1+5
Confession of faith: Apostolic
Law
Psalm: 51:6
Prayer
Psalm: 89:12
Scripture: 2 Timothy 3
Text: 2 Timothy 3:5

“… Have nothing to do with them."

There are many people who are perfectly satisfied with life as it is but who live a wrong life. Our text reveals these people to us.

In this sermon we examine the following:

The nature of man in the last days.
Mankind of the last days and the church of the Lord.
The nature of man in the last days

The passage we have read tells us what the nature and desires of the people living the last days will be. The Lord wants to warn us against these people – while we are living in a time when His Word is still preached.

The Lord describes those days as a time of depravity and rejection of God.

For the unbelievers this will be Paradise but for the believers it will be a time of horror. The people will reject:

the command of love;
the Word of God (1 Timothy 1: 6+7; 1 Timothy 4:1)

[The passage we have read deals specifically with the last days (cf Isaiah 2:2, Acts 2:17, 2 Peter 3:3) whereas 1 Timothy 4 refers to another period.]

The people of the last days will commit terrible sins.

It is especially the Second Tablet of the Law that they will transgress.
The Lord reveals that they will become totally lawless – they will reject all the Lord's commands and all morality as taught us by the Word of God will be rejected (cf Matthew 24:12, 38, 39; Daniel 7:25; 2 Thessalonians 2:3, 4 + 8).

There will be exceptions, because the true believers will always be different from the unbelievers.

That is why the Lord reveals His concern with and His guidance for the true believers.
That is why this chapter opens with the command: "But mark this:"
His command emphasises the atmosphere and the seriousness of the end of time.
It also prepares the faithful who are going to experience those days for it and warns them to understand what it is about.

The nature of the people of the last days is revealed to us for a purpose.

To fully appreciate the extent of the depravity of the people of the last days one has to go back to creation and see what man was like when created.
Firstly, the Lord said: "Let us make Man in our image, in our likeness" (Genesis 1:26). The Lord did so and Adam and Eve were the perfect image of God.
But they injured the image of God in them when they fell into sin. The Lord punished them for it and cursed the earth because Adam had disobeyed Him.
Thereafter Adam's progeny became steadily worse and their sinfulness injured the image of God more and more.

This passage in 2 Timothy 3 is one of the passages that shows us whereto the final development of man's fall into sin takes him.

The people of the last days are so deformed by sin that they are more like the image of Satan than the image of God.
Adam and Eve were created good but as the fall into sin developed in mankind the end product is a person that lives a life of total moral depravity.

Moral decay will not be here and there only. It will be the way of life.

Remember that this will the time of the beast, the anti-christ on earth.
Bearing this in mind we see that Revelation 13:8 speaks of the same people as our text. The point of view differs. There it is written that all whose names are not written in the Book of Life will worship the beast.

In 2 Timothy 3 the extent of the depravity is described extensively.

What is prominent is that there will be no love except love for the self (Romans 13:10). Love of God and of fellow men will disappear.

The result of such egotism is selfishness and avarice.

Avarice – a wrong love of oneself results in a love of material goods to have. Today we call it materialism, what Paul warns against.
Self glorification – such people are boastful, they brag and are haughty. They abuse the spiritual gifts God bestowed on them.
Where there is no true love, hate of one's fellow man is not excluded. Such people will easily slander others. There is no family bond and children defy their parents.
People are ungrateful to God and their fellow man for the good done to them.
The result is that the people of the last days take everything for granted, rightfully theirs.
They will demand what they want and claim it as if right and rightly earned.
We know these things because we live with them everyday.

The Lord's warning is a serious matter. He reveals how the lovelessness of these people eventually leads to their total depravity. The love they should have is totally extinguished.

Hence they will be unforgiving. Is it not true that people today are more and more truculent The image of the devil presents itself more and more – quarrelling, slandering and gossiping shows the absolute power that the devil eventually acquires over people.
More qualities are demonstrated by the people of the last days – they will also be without self control.
Without self control means that they have no control of their own will and are without direction – because the devil controls and directs them.
They have become the slaves of the devil.
With it comes brutality – that is without civilisation, without any manners, like a beast of prey.

The Lord warns against these qualities because people who become like this are completely loveless.

As against this the Lord desires of us loyalty and trustworthiness. These people do not have it.

The Lord tells us that when this happens all restraint is broken.
It is therefore not strange that the people are treacherous and rash because they plunge themselves into evil and will end up in hell.
All common sense and reflection will be driven out – caused by their pride and conceit which clouds their intellect. (1 Timothy 3:6 and 6:4)

Mankind of the last days and the Church of the Lord

It is not difficult to recognise these people if your own principles are clear.

You will soon see that in all they do they are driven by wrong passions and a physical desire to do wrong.
They have exchanged their love of God for a love of pleasure.

The trouble is that these people are found not only outside the church but that they are inside the church as well. Many of them are members of the church.

It is written in verse 5 that they have a form of godliness (Romans 2:20).
They remain members of the church but deny the power of true belief because they are involved with all kinds of wrongfulness.
With their bad influence they infect others in the church.

This is a serious warning to the elders especially because they must govern the church of the Lord and see to it that it is kept pure in the Name of the Lord.

The spirit of the anti-christ introduces itself into the church in the guise of belief and in that way finds its victims.
Hence the Lord's command – have nothing to do with them!
To put it in terms of the church ordinance – the Lord commands His church council to maintain a clear boundary between His church and such people.
The church council must see to it that such worldliness does not enter the church.

As church members we are also warned against such people.

They go from house to house to spread their influence. It is written here (verse 6) how they visit homes and entice women who have not long been Christians back into heathendom.
The consequences are obvious – if the women return to heathendom there will be difficulties in their family.

What the Bible tells us here is true – we are not all equally able to deal with temptation. The desire to sin, which is in all of us, lets us fall into sin.

In the case of the women of which the Bible tells us here their evil desires let them fall back into heathendom.
In any church there are people who do not stand so solidly in their belief and in controlling their desires.
If the congregation does not remove these people who have become so depraved out of its midst they will extend their harmful influence in the church and so cause the church to fall into decay.

We are not powerless against such people because the Lord Jesus gave us the ability of discernment so that we are able to identify them.

The Holy Spirit was given to the church for this purpose.
The Holy Spirit also protects us against falling into such spiritual decay and in so losing the image of God.

A person who lives in the love and reconcilliation of the crucified Jesus does not become a lover of himself.

He does not because of his lost love for God and his fellowman become a worldly person.
He does not decline to such an extent that he presents the image of the devil because he has lost the image of God.

With His death on the cross Jesus cut the ties between us and sin, so that we have become free from the burden of sin. That means that we have in us desires that are higher than the natural desires for pleasure and sin.

A born again person, and we should all be born again people, is not so fixed in in his desires that like Jannes and Jambres, Pharoah's two magicians, he persists in opposing God.
The true believer knows that the day of judgment will come and that all will then see how foolish you were in opposing God. The true believer knows what happened to Jannes and Jambres.

We do not have a worthless faith. We have a powerful faith because of the working of the Holy Spirit. Our lives must show it.

We can do it if we obey the Lord.
This is where the revelation of mankind in the last days fits in.
The Lord is gracious to us by telling us of what to expect.
And also to enable us to identify such people and to stay away from them.
Hence introspection before Holy Communion is important and that we come to true repentance for our sins.

The truth is that we who truly believe will proclaim the praise and glory of God until the moment when Jesus returns on the clouds because we live in it.
Amen

Closing Prayer
Psalm: 144:1+6

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the Father and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
Amen

Dr MJ du Plessis, Reformed Church Bellville
7 November 2004
NIV