God Will Not Be Mocked
Standard;Gal 6:7 - “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.”
The word mocked in the Greek, is defined as what you see on the front of your bulletin. Imagine making such a face at the God who loved you so much that He sent His only Son to die for your sins.....even the sin of mocking Him. Seems kind of foolhardy doesn't it? Yet in His great forebearance His promise remains. Forgiveness of sin to all those who sincerely seek it.
This week Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. He made no bones during his campaign about where he stands on the issue of abortion. He is pro-choice. Unless he has a radical conversion to the pro-life camp, we can expect at least 4 more years of bad news for the unborn.
But think about it. If the issue is political, why wasn't Roe v Wade overturned when the Republicans were in power? Oh, there were some minor victories along the way, but abortion on demand still remains the law of the land. 49.5 million since 1973, 3300 every single day last year. Why? Something else must be going on here, and that something else I believe is tied into our text today.
God is not mocked. Whatever one sows, that will he also reap. The seeds of abortion are not sown in political ideaologies, they are sown in blaspemous deceptions from hell. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but flesh and blood that has been duped by demons. The seeds of abortion are lies from the devil that are believed by gullible men, who then persuade society and eventually persuade or wear down the church.
Isn't that one of the bylines of the Bible. God's people being influenced by the world and compromising God's truth, and God doesn't go about cleaning up the world....(He promised He would never do that again) He usually starts with cleaning up His people, calling them to repentance and to turn from the sinful habits and customs of the world that they have adopted.
You have rightly heard it said that judgment begins in the house of God! And I believe that this abortion mess isn't going to be cleaned up until the church of Jesus Christ returns to accepting all children as gifts from God, and then eagerly seeking to receive them as such, either through natural means or adoption..
Mal 2:15 speaks of one of the major purposes of marriage, “ Did He not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union” And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring.' He says, “Give Me some babies!” Is there any church other than the Catholic Church teaching this anymore?
If we as Christians refuse to see children as blessings from God, and seek to wrest the reproductive process away from His hands by artificial means, how do you think God views us as we shun His gift of children to us and pontificate against the abortions of others? I think He sees right through us. I think He sees the hypocrisy in that, and I think He will not be mocked, and that's why He allows abortion to continue in the land. Abortion is just the bumper crop that the church and society is reaping because of the seeds we have sown.
What are the seeds of abortion? If we can identify them, and stop sowing them, God will no longer be mocked, and perhaps this carnage would stop.
In the Book of Revelation chapter 9, beginning at v13, John was given a picture of what was to come in the last days. He saw four angels who had been bound at the great river Euphrates, and they were released. And when they were released, they killed a third of mankind.
There were 200,000 troops released, riding horses. Fire, smoke, and sulfur poured out of the nostrils of the horses, and it was by these three plagues that the third of mankind was killed. “For the power of the horses is in their mouths.”
So what has this got to do with abortion? First of all remember that much of the language in the book of Revelation is symbolic and that's the way we need to see these passages. This was not the literal Euphrates River, it is representative of the fountain of world dominance. That fountain moves according to where the power is at any given moment in history.
The fire, smoke, and sulfur pouring out of the horses is symbolic of the main exports of hell......lies, deceit, and false teaching. The large number of troops is used to emphasize the sheer volume of lies and false doctrine that Satan uses. These lies will be responsible for the death of one third of humanity.
And these lies were released at one particular hour of history.
Isn't it interesting to note that according to Fox News, in the year 2003, there were 31 abortions for every 100 live births! Pretty close to one third wouldn't you say? In Europe, which was the fountain of world dominance where the lies started, the number is exactly one third.
So what lies got started in Europe? It was in Europe that the “Age of Enlightenment” or reason took root. In the 18th century, faith in God was replaced by faith in nature and belief in human progress. Nature was seen as governing the universe, not God. People were free to be governed by their own reason and that was no problem since people were regarded as naturally good and would seek the happiness of others.
Accordingly both human righteousness and happiness required freedom from needless restraints imposed by religion or the state. I believe this was the deception released from the Euphrates as spoken of in Revelation that wound up killing off one third of mankind.
It was the worship of reason over the worship of God.
The seed of the “Age of Enlightenment,” gave birth to the work of Charles Darwin. And in 1859 Charles Darwin published his book, “The Origin of the Species.” This was perhaps the greatest victory ever for the philosophy of the world. Millions upon millions would be swayed by his arguments and millions continue to be swayed today.
When the subsequent seeds of the lie of evolution were bought, life was no longer sacred. Man was no longer construed as being created in the image of God, but rather something that evolved out of swamp slime.
The big breakthrough for evolutionism occurred in 1925 at the Scopes trial. The heavily publicized trial cast doubt upon the Word of God and did much to sway the general public on the merits of evolutionism and shortly afterward it was accepted as gospel truth and is still presented as such in public schools.
Meanwhile a young woman known as Margaret Sanger was working tirelessly to get the world to accept the idea of contraception and birth control. At first she was met with great resistance by Christians who held to the biblical understanding that children were a gift from God. In light of biblical truth and morality, this idea of contraception was unheard of!! But let’s face it, the acceptance of evolution by the general public helped her cause a great deal.
If life is not a gift from God, if we are just “products of evolution”, why not just take the matter of creation into our own hands. Then in 1930, the seeds of the lie of birth control took root in the Protestant church. The Episcopal church fell for the lie and endorsed the idea of contraception, and the rest of the churches fell in line shortly, and in 1936 most all legal restraints against contraception were removed in the United States.
Until that time, the Comstack Act was enforced which forbade the selling of contraceptives in the mail. The Comstack Act was repealed in 1936. With birth control at everyone's disposal, the hands of God which sought and still seeks to bless with chidren were pushed aside, and the seeds for abortion were sown.
With the acceptance of evolution and birth control, the next logical step would be to accept abortion. And what is so amazing about this, God even fired off a warning shot for us in the form of Adolph Hitler. As He allowed Hitler to rise to power, God was trying to show us where selective birthing leads, it leads to people deciding who has the right to live.
But we missed it, and so it was in 1973, that the United States Supreme Court legalized the killing of unborn children while in their mother’s womb. And the progression of death continues with assisted suicide, euthanasia, fetal tissue research, and so on. And unless we start uprootingthe seeds of abortion, it will get a lot worse.
Oh, we are dealing with a wise enemy, who has a plan for the diminshing of God’s shining crown of creation. Man.
Never forget the initial challenge of the serpent in the garden. “Did God really say?” That is the slogan of the serpent, that is how he wounds and sets up his prey for the kill. The Bible was mocked beginning in the age of enlightenment and it was really brought home to the American public at the Scopes trial.
Oh listen, the teachings of evolution and birth control are not some harmless differences of opinion among religious people! They have paved the way to millions of murders, and there likely are many more to come! Fight for the truth! Resist these lies from hell spoken by the lips of men! Remember, God really did say! Teach your children that truth at all costs!
Yes God created the world! Yes God made man in His own image! Yes, life is precious to God! Yes children are a heritage from Him! Yes, one of the reasons we are to marry is to be used by God to produce godly offspring!
In this matter of reproductive life, we need to return to the teaching of the early church fathers, let me give you some quotes.
“For us Christians, murder is once and for all forbidden, so even the child in the womb, while yet the Mother's blood is still being drawn on to form the human being, it is not lawful for us to destroy. To forbid birth is only quicker murder. He is a man, who is to be a man; the fruit is always present (pay attention now) in the seed,” Tertullian AD 197
Clement of Alexander 150-220 AD - “ “Women who make use of some sort of deadly abortion drug kill not only the embryo, but together with it, all human kindness.” Sounds like something Mother Theresa would've said.
St Augustine 354-430 AD “ Sometimes this lustful cruelty or cruel lust goes so far as to seek to procure a baneful sterility, and if this fails the fetus conceived in the womb is in one way or another smothered or evacuated, in the desire to destroy the offspring before it has life, or if it already lives in the womb to kill it before it is born.”
I could quote Luther, Calvin, Boenhoffer and others, even the liberal theologian Karl Barth has said “He who destroys a germinating life kills a man.”
The seeds of abortion are found in the deifying of man's reason, which led to evolution, which led to birth control, which led to abortion. And if we want to stop abortion, we must stop buying and planting these seeds.
Over the centuries the Church's message has been clear. It is clear that the message was derived from God's Word, especially that word relating to the doctrine of creation. If life is the work of God's creating hands, then life has intrinsic value, and therefore destroying life, including unborn life is a sin against God.
What do we do with verses like, Ps 100:3. “Know that the Lord Himself is God. It is He who made us, and not we ourselves.” (Who's suppose to be in charge of our reproductive lives according to this verse?)
Or Jeremiah 1:5, “I knew you before I formed you.”
or Ps 127:3 Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, The fruit of the womb is a reward.
Are we going to believe these verses or not.
Now I know that I make many of you uncomfortable when I preach on this issue, but God doesn't take kindly to shepherds who “dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious (Jer 6:14)
Failing to preach on this issue offends more people grievously than preaching about it. If the sin of abortion is never mentioned, then the Gospel which I have been called to proclaim cannot touch them in this area of theire lives. And nowhere is the gospel needed more today, than for the post-abortive person. .
Instead, they are stuck listening to Satan's lies, “This sin is so awful, even the pastor won't bring it up. How can Jesus forgive such a thing? And so I bring it up so I can tell you that there is no sin that He will not forgive. No sin that He hasn't paid for. He longs to put all our sins into the sea of forgetfulness, under the blood of Jesus where they will never be found again.
One more thing. The church has not been called to be the bedroom police in a marriage. That job is up to you and the Holy Spirit. The job of the church is to point you to the Word of God and invite you to believe it. God has given you precious promises concerning the gift of children.
Believe them, trust them. And remember this about God. He is good. Ps 119”68 says, “You are good and do good.”
Trust Him......you'll be amazed at how truly good He is.
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