"God's Inalienable Rights" (Psalms 5:1-12)

Transcript:

Our scripture reading this evening is from Psalm 5. Psalm 5. We read the entire psalm.

It's found on page 529 in your Pew Bibles. Psalm 5. The Psalmist David writes, give ear to my words, O Lord. Consider my groaning. Give attention to the sound of my cry.

My King and my God, for to you do I pray, O Lord. In the morning you hear my voice. In the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you. And watch. For you are not a God who delights in wickedness.

Evil may not dwell with you. The boastful shall not stand before your eyes. You hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies. The Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful men.

But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love, will enter your house. I will bow down toward your holy temple in the fear of you. Lead me, O Lord, in your righteousness. Because of my enemies, make your way straight before me. For there is no truth in.

In their mouth their inmost self is destruction. Their throat is an open grave. They flatter with their tongue. Make them bear their guilt, O God. Let them fall by their own counsels.

Because of the abundance of their transgressions. Cast them out, for they have rebelled against you. But let all who take refuge in you rejoice. Let them ever sing for joy and spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may exalt you. For you bless the righteous, O Lord.

You cover them with favour as with a shield. Psalm 5. We look in particular at these words, verses 4 and 5. You are not a God who delights in wickedness. Evil may not dwell with you.

The boastful shall not stand before your eyes. You hate all evildoers. The word of God. Thanks be to God. Beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Last week I had to come up with a title of what I was going to preach on this week for the Bulletin. And after looking at Lord's Day 4, it came to me that God has certain rights. God has rights that we his creatures cannot question. God has rights that we his creatures cannot take away from him. And so I came up with this really cool thing for a title, God's Inalienable Rights.

Well, as I sat in the consistory or the session room waiting for the service to start, someone asked, what are inalienable rights? And I have to admit that I asked them to ask that question so that what I said would be true. But they asked, what are inalienable rights? Well, in 1791, just a few years after the Declaration of Independence was signed. Congress passed the Bill of Rights.

And that document declared that citizens of the United States have certain rights guaranteed to them, regardless of who is the president, regardless of what Congress does, regardless of how many policemen surround your house. You have certain rights guaranteed to you. Those are called your inalienable rights. You have the right to freedom of speech. You have the right to freedom of religion.

You have the right to defend yourself and your property. And that list goes on. There's a whole lot more. These are the inalienable rights of a US Citizen. And there are a lot of countries where people do not have those rights.

They do not have a freedom of speech, they do not have freedom of religion, and so on. And this year, this country is going to celebrate its 250th anniversary, and we ought to celebrate the rights that we have. Unfortunately, we often take those rights for granted. And the same thing can be said about our Creator. God has inalienable rights that are his, and for the most part, we pretty much take them for granted.

In fact, we even protest that God should have these rights. Well, Lord's Day 4 presents an answer to our protest to God's inalienable rights. The three questions that we have before us this evening basically ask, does God have the right to require of us something that we cannot do? The second question, does God have a right to punish us when we don't do something because we cannot do it? And the third question, does God have the right to.

To be merciful? God's inalienable rights. The first one again, does God have the right to require of us something that we cannot do? And to answer that question, the catechism gives to us a little bit of a history lesson. It takes us way back to the very beginning of when God created man.

Well, how were we created? The catechism says God created man with the ability to keep the law. And what does the law what does the Lord require of us? That we love God and that we love our neighbors. God called this world into existence for his glory.

And his desire for the human race was that we live in a relationship with him, that we live in harmony with the very one who created us. And we also live in harmony with one another. CONGREGATION God put the stars in the sky so that they would light up the evening sky. And that's what they do. God gave the birds their song in order to sing that song, giving praise to our God.

And that's what they do. God put man in this creation. He put him in the garden and he expected him to live in harmony and in fellowship with him. And we don't. And we have to be very, very clear on this congregation.

It is not God's fault that we fell. God certainly cannot be expected to lower his standards and. And his expectations for us simply because we fell into sin. Now comes the point that the catechism is trying to make. If God created us good, but nonetheless, we by his own, by man's own willful disobedience, robbed himself of the ability to love.

And if man willfully followed after the devil, the very angel whom God himself cast out, we willfully followed the devil so that now, instead of love, we are inclined to hate God, we are inclined to hate our neighbor. How can you blame God? How can we possibly blame God for our condition? We did this to ourselves. God does no wrong when, from his side, from his point of view, when he still demands of us that we love him and that we love one another.

God has every right to demand that of us because that's the way he created us. He created us to bring glory to Him. To paraphrase Paul in Romans 9, if you're at the potter's wheel and you make this nice tall cylindrical item in order to use that as a garbage can, does that tall cylindrical item have the right to complain that it's a garbage can? That's what you made it for. You made it to be a garbage can.

Do you have the right in having made it to be a garbage can to require of it that it is a garbage can? Of course you do. That's what it was made for. Just because we don't want to do what God created us to do does not mean that we are not responsible to do it. God, then, is acting in full accordance with his justice when he demands of us today that we keep his law.

That leads us to the next question. In this Lord's day, the next inalienable right of God, does God have the right to punish us?

When God placed Adam in the garden, he told Adam that he could eat from any and every tree in the garden except for one. Adam and Eve did not have the right to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God even told him, the day you do that, you will die. That's the punishment. You will receive death.

And remember, Adam was created to have fellowship with God, to love God and to love Eve. And how? How do you show that love? Well, you show that love by doing what you were created to do. We have seen, as we go through this first section, of the catechism, the sin and misery section of the catechism that now, instead of love, we hate.

Adam and Eve ate from the tree that God explicitly told them not to eat from. But. And now we pursue our own desires, often to the exclusion of God and pretty much to the exclusion of one another.

God, on the other hand, is love. His desire for his creatures is our happiness. And so how are we the happiest? Some people say that when you are happy in your work, then you are happy indeed. And I agree with that a hundred percent.

But then I have to ask, so what is our work? If I were to ask you what your work is, some of you might answer. Well, I'm a nurse, or I'm an architect. I'm a carpenter. I'm a truck driver.

I'm this. Well, that's all well and good. That's what you do for a living. But work, what were you created to do? Our work is to bring glory to God.

God placed us in a perfect place, the Garden of Eden, where we could be happy in our work. When sin came into the world, it poisoned us to the point that we really don't know how to be happy anymore. Well, I should say we no longer know how to be truly happy. And so we look at it. We look for happiness in all kinds of different places.

We look for happiness in wealth. We look for happiness at the local bar. We look for happiness engaging ourselves in all kinds of video games or in promiscuity. And on and on that list goes. And instead of finding happiness, we find pain and we find tears and we find death.

On a larger scale, we see that very thing happening in the world. It's filled with strife, it's filled with injustice, it's filled with cruelty. We will never be happy in life until we find the very reason for our existence. And that is doing what God created us to do. Glorifying God, to love God and to love one another.

Sin robs us of this ability to know how to love. And by doing so, it robs us of the ability of pleasing God. Instead. Hatred abounds in us. We're filled with wickedness, which is something that God will not and cannot tolerate.

If you listen again to the verses that I, I read in Psalm 5, you are not a God who delights in wickedness. Evil may not dwell with you. You hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies. The Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.

Look at it in terms of that cylindrical item that you Made to be a garbage can. Does it have the right to complain about the way you use it?

And what will you do if somehow it could refuse to be your garbage can? And if it said, no, I don't want to be your garbage can. I want to be the centerpiece on your dining room table. I want the glory. I want the world to admire me, not be a garbage can.

I dare say that since you made it to be a garbage can, and it doesn't serve that purpose, you have absolutely every right to get rid of it. You just. You can throw it away, cast it out of your sight, and no one would blame you for doing it. And yet, when God makes us good and he makes us to love and places us in this perfect garden, and he gives us every good and perfect gift, somehow we still want to say, well, God is not fair when he punishes us and casts us out of his sight.

No, congregation, God has an inalienable right to punish those who willfully disagree and rebel against him.

And then finally hearing that God has the right to expect us to do that which we are not able to do, and acknowledging that, yes, he does have the right to punish us for not doing what we were created to do, then we ask the question, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But isn't God also merciful? I mean, we certainly would want him to be at this point. After all, we are hopeless and we are helpless before God. And here, once again, the catechism, after explaining the horror of who we are and what we deserve, brings a hint of the gospel.

Yes, God certainly is merciful. And then the catechism starts to set us up for that next section of the catechism. We're in the sin section. The next section is. Is the deliverance section.

And we're yearning to get to that part because we really don't like this part. And it says, but he's also just. Oh, he's also just. And his justice demands that sin committed against his supreme majesty be punished with the supreme penalty, eternal punishment, body and soul, death.

And then you say, well, wait a minute. That's really not all that comforting, is it? No.

But what does God's justice demand? His justice demands that we keep the law. God has kept the law, the law of love, from the very beginning of creation, even before the law of love, God has kept it. And he continues to keep that law down through the ages. And the truth is, he loves us so much, he sent his only Son into this world.

The second person of the Trinity came into this world, and He Took upon himself the form of a human being. God the Son. Jesus Christ in his humanity kept the law perfectly. Then in keeping with his inalienable rights to require that the law be kept in keeping with his inalienable right that God has the right to punish. God punishes our breaking the law in his perfect keeping the law son.

So God punishes our law breaking into the law keeping his son. And then he takes the law keeping son the law keeping ness of the Son. And that's what he applies to us.

Those who believe that that's what Jesus did when he was on the cross understand that that their sin was imputed to Christ when he died on the cross. And we have been set free from question 10. He's terribly angry about our sin and as a just judge punishes our sin with a just judgment. Oh, the curse is true. It's true.

Cursed is everyone who does not observe the law and obey all the things written in the book of the law. That's true. Certainly true. And then look at question answer 11. They will be punished with the supreme penalty, eternal punishment of body and soul.

But that's all been taken care of. It's all been taken care of. Our chains are gone. We have been set free. The curse has been taken from you and put on Jesus Christ.

Christ. Our curse was placed upon him, so our guilt has been removed from us. Placed upon Jesus Christ. He paid the debt. Through his death upon the cross, God's wrath has been turned away from us.

And he receives us once again as his children declared righteous because we're clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Yes, we still sin. We don't always do what we are created to do, glorifying God. But the Lord through the Holy Spirit is working on that in us. Sanctification.

But God loves us. He loves us and calls us to be his children.

Last week, again, knowing that I was writing this sermon, I came up to a young woman who has a little 2 year old toddler and I said, do you love your two year old child? Well of course I do. Well, does your two year old child ever disobey you? Yeah, of course. Does that make you love him less?

Oh, of course not. That's how God loves you, as his own child. Going back to that illustration of that round cylindrical thing that you made. It was made a garbage can. It doesn't work.

It fails miserably at holding garbage for some reason. What can you do? You can most certainly throw it out. You have every right to throw it out. But what if.

What if Instead, you say, no, I'd like to keep that. I'd like to keep it. I'm going to do a little bit of work on that thing, just like the Holy Spirit does a lot of work on us. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna make it look a little nicer.

I'm gonna. Oh, I go to the blacksmith and I have it plated with gold. Oh, it really looks nice. Now I'm gonna put some flowers in it and make it the centerpiece of my table. Do you have the right to do that?

Yeah, you most certainly do. Well, that's what God has done to you and to me. He has every right to punish us, every right to cast us into hell forever. But he loves us. And he has every right to show us mercy and redeem us, which he does.

Only it's not with silver and gold as Peter says. He did it with his own precious blood. Rather than leave our sin on parents, God the Father punishes our sin and his Son, Jesus Christ, through the bitter and shameful death on the cross. And when you place your hope, you place your trust in Jesus Christ, acknowledging him as your Savior, recognizing that the work that he accomplished for you on Calvary's cross, then you truly know the mercy of God. It's the cross where justice and mercy come together.

Justice as sin is punished and mercy as the sinner is forgiven. At Golgotha, God maintains his inalienable right to punish sin and his inalienable right to show us mercy. Oh, how necessary is then for us to place our hope in and our trust in Jesus Christ. Because without him, we are still dead in our trespasses and sins. And God still has every right to be angry with you.

In addition to that temporal punishment that you face already, he has every right to punish you for eternity. But with Christ. With Christ, there is the assurance of forgiveness. With Christ there is the promise of eternal life. Trust him.

Trust him. The same psalmist David who says, you are not a God who delights in wickedness. Evil may not dwell in you ends with these words of comfort. But let all who take refuge in you rejoice. Let them ever sing for joy and spread your protection over them.

That those who love your name may exalt you. Let us exalt in our God, glorifying him and enjoying him forever. Amen. Let's pray. Father, we come to you and we truly recognize that as we go through the sin and misery section of the catechism, that boy that sure does talk about us, because we are filled with sin and it does bring us a lot of misery.

But oh Lord, we thank you that we've come to the end of that and enter into the deliverance section where you do show mercy. We thank you that already here we get a hint of that and that and in your mercy you sent your son into this world to take upon himself our unrighteousness. And then we are clothed with his righteousness. O Lord, we pray that we may truly place our hope and trust completely in him and not in ourselves. We pray that we may be comforted therein and that we may rejoice in you, that we may exalt you and glorify you, and that we may enjoy you each and every day of our lives.