Linked text to accompany the third in a series of videos about God's gifts and callings for people, which he sometimes gives to notorious evildoers. Discusses Moses, King David and Saul of Tarsus, who literally got away with murder. Or did they?
Video presentation which this linked text accompanies:
Slide 1: 1 Timothy 1:15. God Making Peace with the World through the Most Notorious Sinners—and the Apostle Paul called himself the “chief,” a leader among sinners, the worst of the worst!
Slide 2: Romans 8:33-34a. Who will bring any charge against me? Who is the one who condemns? His is a rhetorical question and the standard answer is “no one.” But I would suggest that, as long as I remain in this world, the realistic answer is potentially about 8 billion people, and growing every day. Anyone can accuse me, and other people will listen, with potential for consequences. It is only God who is certain to ignore the charges.
Slide 3: 1 Peter 3:16-17: These verses make the same point. I can expect people to say bad things about me, with real consequences following. It is better if I keep a clear conscience, so that their accusations are all lies, than if their words have some truth behind them.
Slide 4: Romans 2:21-24: Here again, I should not give people cause to speak against me, and speak against (blaspheme) God in the process, by doing, or profiting from, the very things I, or those Christians with whom I am publicly associated, preach against. But I have been in this place in times past.
Slide 5: Ecclesiastes 10:1. Here, I return to the fly in the ointment. Merely repenting of my sin—fishing the dead fly out of the perfume bottle—does not completely fix the situation. The perfume still smells like the rotting fly. God forgives me, but he doesn’t change history for me. The bad act still happened. Anyone I hurt is still hurt. The worldly consequences remain. And people are still talking. As we will see, God can and does over time do something the perfume industry can’t do. He reformulates the perfume of my life so that it once again smells good, even with the note of dead fly in it. But this takes time, and the results are not just the same as if I’d never sinned.
Slide 6: I Timothy 3:2, 7: Now the explanation of these verses should be clearer. The devil’s trap is “justified” slander—slander that is actually based on some truth, even if that truth is exaggerated (as it always is)—that causes people to slander God at the same time they slander me. God can, over time, restore a bad reputation. But there are in every society or culture always lists of sins—lists which are different in different cultures and in different times and places—that any “society” says it will “never” forgive. I would not say that God always respects these lists, or that he has bound himself to do so. Occasionally he flouts them. He is God. But usually he respects them, because he has to work with the people in a culture starting from where they are in their understanding of him and of his grace.
Slide 7: Romans 8:33-34a. We have returned to the question who can condemn me. We have seen that anyone on earth may condemn me for the world’s purposes while I am here. And God has to take this into consideration when reaching out through me to others.
Slide 8: Romans 8:34. Still, the standard answer, “no one,” is correct in the most important sense. No one can accuse me before God, with Jesus, his Son pleading my case. Though anyone on earth may accuse me, God will not hear the charges.
Slide 9: We now come to the three best examples of great sinners through whom God, nonetheless, did great works, while simultaneously attending to his own reputation. Moses committed murder in the heat of passion. David committed rape and conspiracy to commit murder, and did so with calculated premeditation, abusing his office as King to do it. And Saul of Tarsus abused both the Law of Moses and the legal system of his day to have many Christians killed or imprisoned. Surely these are people God could never touch again, right?
Slide 10: Exodus 2:11-15a. We’ll start with Moses. The story is fairly familiar. Moses was born a Hebrew slave in Egypt at a time when the Pharaoh was having all male Hebrew newborns killed. Through his mother’s acts in faith and the intervention of God, Moses was rescued by the Pharaoh’s daughter and raised as a prince. In the present passage, when Moses had grown up-he was about 40—he went out and saw an Egyptian taskmaster abusing one of his Hebrew secret kinsmen. He became angry—which was a correct emotional response—but then did something foolish. He tried to do God’s job, delivering justice his own way. He killed the offending Egyptian taskmaster on the spot. This was murder, what would be called today “heat of passion” murder. His crime was witnessed by another Hebrew, who responded to his attempt to end a quarrel the next day with the words “Who made you a ruler and a judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?” The accusation of his crime made him a fugitive from justice. Perhaps, by modern concepts of justice in an ordered legal system, God ought not to have allowed him to escape. But God allowed him to escape across the Sinai desert to Midian.
Slide 11: Romans 8:6-7. Moses’ problem was that he did not yet know God. He had a concept of justice God places in everyone—he knew that he taskmaster’s mistreatment of his fellow Hebrew was wrong. And he tried to hide the body—so he obviously also knew murder was wrong. But his mind was still governed by his flesh, his old sin nature, and that is death. It led him to follow the immediate impulse, the leading of his righteous anger, by taking justice into his own hands. Before God could work through him, Moses had to meet God and learn to submit to him.
Slide 12: Acts 7:30-32 and 34. Here we have a summary of Moses’ introduction to God, as told by Stephen during his defense before the Sanhedrin. We might think that, since God showed mercy by letting him escape Egypt, that was all the mercy he deserved, and God should then just have let him live tending his father-in-law’s sheep in the desert for the rest of his life. That wasn’t God’s plan. God still had an unrevoked calling for Moses—to lead his people out of Egypt and to God. But God couldn’t do this until he had dealt with Moses’ impatience and short fuse, and, just as importantly, with God’s own reputation. Another passage points out that, during the 40 years Moses was in Midian, the Pharaoh who wanted Moses dead had himself died—so, in the justice of those times, the charges had been forgotten and God’s reputation was preserved. But God let Moses tend someone else’s livestock in the desert for forty years, without even trying to speak to him. Then, as the words in red on the screen say, “after forty years had passed,” God came to speak to Moses for the first time, and to commission him. And I note that, if there is anything special about a period of forty years, as there certainly appears to be, the forty years since my own great failures are now nearly over…
Slide 13: Numbers 12:2-8. This slide makes the important point that one of the reasons God kept Moses in the desert tending someone else’s livestock for 40 years was to break his proud impulsiveness and his tendency to respond in anger. After 40 years in the desert, Moses was the “humblest”—some translations say “meekest”—man on earth. He did not rise up in anger or attempt to defend himself even when his brother, his sister and some other leaders of his people directly challenged his authority. He did not respond. He let God defend him—and God did defend him. Now Moses, an ex-murderer, is the one of whom God said, out loud and before all of the people, that he is “faithful in all my house.” He was the only person of his time to whom God spoke “face to face” and who “sees the form of the Lord.” This was quite a change!
Slide 14: Acts 7:35: These words of Stephen speak for themselves, so I will simply read them: “This is the same Moses they had rejected with the words, “Who made you ruler and judge?’ He was sent to be their ruler and deliverer by God himself, through the angel who appeared to him in the bush.”
Slide 15: 2 Samuel 12:7-10, 13-14. Now we move on to King David. David’s great sins were raping his friend and lieutenant Uriah’s wife Bathsheba, then arranging for Uriah to be killed in battle. There was nothing impulsive about these sins—they were calculated and deliberate. David sent his servants to summon Bathsheba to come to him, and the plot to have her husband killed was carried out by way of a formal military order. And David even tried to ignore his sins in the matter until God sent a prophet to point them out to him. Psalms 32 and 38 are David’s own account of how well that worked for him. But David repented when confronted by Nathan, and God forgave. Many today would say that, given the severity of David’s sins—particularly the glaring sex crime—God should never have forgiven. But he did. Still, in forgiving David, God took care of his own reputation before the people. The baby born as a result of the rape died seven days after birth. And, much more important, God let the natural consequences of the sword David had unleashed in his own family have its full effect. This started rather promptly with Amnon raping his half-sister Tamar, and Tamar’s full brother Absalom then slowly nursing a grudge, murdering Amnon, and raising an armed rebellion against his father that almost cost David his life. It then affected all of David’s descendants who succeeded to his throne, including Jesus, who had to be proclaimed King in mockery by a foreign governor, crowned with thorns and die on a cross before he could rise to take his kingdom!
Slide 16: Acts 13:22. But, even with that said, God’s forgiveness and restoration of David was complete. David continued to rule as King, with success, he continued to speak with God, and he even continued to be given Scripture to write after his great sin. Psalm 51 is David’s prayer of repentance after Nathan confronted him. And, as Paul said a millennium later, God continued to declare David to be a man after God’s own heart, even though he had sinned.
Slide 17: John 16:2-3. Now we will move on to Saul of Tarsus. Jesus had predicted that Saul, and others like him, would arise to persecute his followers, saying “the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God.” As we will see, in the years following the martyrdom of Steven, Saul of Tarsus certainly thought in this way. But Jesus also said, “they will do such things because they have not known the Father or me.” Saul didn’t.
Slide 18: Acts 26:9-11. This is Saul’s testimony toward the end of his life, when he was himself on trial for preaching Christ. It shows that Saul’s actions, before his encounter with Christ, and his motivations were exactly as Jesus had predicted. And it also shows that, in what he himself called an obsession with persecuting the Church, he willfully perverted the law and the criminal justice system of his time to obtain the execution of many believers. It was not, technically, “murder,” in the modern judicial sense, because it was all done with the proper legal formalities. It was something worse—corruption used to legalize mass murder. And he admitted he was guilty of it. Yet God did something very unusual for the murderous Saul of Tarsus—
Slide 19: Acts 9:4-6. While Saul was on a trip to Damascus to persecute Christians there, God appeared to him in radiant glory. [here read passage]. In persecuting the Church, Saul was persecuting Jesus, and Jesus told him so. He then sent him on—blind—to Damascus to await instructions.
Slide 20: Acts 9:7-14. God had chosen Ananias, a believer in Damascus who is not mentioned anywhere else in the New Testament, to introduce Saul to him. God prepared Saul by giving him a vision in which a man named Ananias—mentioned by name in Saul’s vision—would lay hands on him. He sent Ananias by speaking to him directly, telling him where to go and what to do there. But notice Ananias immediate reaction: he reminded the Lord of Saul’s reputation as a persecutor of Christians—including Ananias himself!
Slide 21: 1 Timothy 3:2, 7. Though Paul was still the unconverted Saul at this point, and would not write 1 Timothy until many years in the future, certainly this would have been a good time for Ananias to invoke the underlying principle that God only works through the saintly, those of good reputation, if this is what this passage means. But notice God’s response to Ananias objection—
Slide 22: Acts 9:15-16. God told Ananias to “GO!” God had chosen Paul—the name Saul took after his conversion—to proclaim his name to the Gentiles and to Israel, despite his well-deserved reputation as a murderous persecutor. But God also told Ananias that he would attend to his own reputation in doing this through Saul’s sufferings: “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”
Slide 23. So, in review, God let Moses, David and the Apostle Paul literally get away with murder, in that he forgave them, preserved their lives, and did great works in and through them even after their sins. But God also attended to his own reputation by making Moses tend Jethro’s sheep in the desert for 40 years before he commissioned him, by permitting David’s rebellion to affect his own sons during his lifetime and all of his later descendants up to and including Jesus, and by showing Paul how much he would suffer for the Gospel—and telling Ananias (and the Church) that was what he was doing.
Slide 24. Romans 3:22-25. I will not attempt to unpack everything that is in this passage. For present purposes, it is enough to ask you to listen for Paul’s explanation of the way in which God’s patience with us, leaving some sins unpunished to give us time to return to him and believe, is not unfair but actually demonstrates, not his unfairness, but his perfect justice:
21 But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, 22 but it is the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for there is no distinction, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in God’s merciful restraint He let the sins previously committed go unpunished; 26 for the demonstration, that is, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Romans 3:21-26 (NASB)
Slide 25. Colossians 1:21-23. This slide is a reminder of God’s eternal purpose for making forgiveness possible. We were hostile toward God, incorrectly thinking that our sins made him hostile toward us, too. But he reconciled us TO himself in Christ, so that we might be presented to him perfected. This is the hope that is preached in the Gospel!
Slide 26. We are now ready for the full explanation of why God’s gifts and callings are irrevocable, as applied to his first covenant people Israel:
26 and so all Israel will be saved; just as it is written:
“The Deliverer will come from Zion,
He will remove ungodliness from Jacob.”
27 “This is My covenant with them,
When I take away their sins.”28 In relation to the gospel they are enemies on your account, but in relation to God’s choice they are beloved on account of the fathers; 29 for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.
Romans 11:26-29 (NASB)
Just as we had declared ourselves God’s enemies because of our bad acts, so now for a little while Israel has declared themselves our enemies because of the Gospel. But God gave the Patriarchs promises to make Israel his chosen people, which he will keep by reconciling them to himself, in just the same way he is now reconciling us to himself. Though they have declared themselves enemies, God never declared them his enemies, and they remain his beloved. Their gifts and callings will never be revoked. And, ultimately for the same reason, neither will mine.
