Episode Transcript
If you take God's precious word and turn to Proverbs chapter 14, verse 32.
Proverbs chapter 14, verse 32.
We've got a healthy crowd online tonight as well.
So good to see y'all on there.
Hello, Crystal.
Still praying for you.
The title of the message tonight is Hope When It Matters Most.
Hope when it matters most.
Bible starts off with the two words, the wicked.
The wicked.
In the Hebrew word translated wicked here, it means to be wrong Just plain and simple to be wrong.
So the wicked are those who are not right with God.
In Matthew chapter 12 verse 30, Jesus said, he that is not with me, that would be right, is against me, that would be wrong.
And the wicked are those who are against the Lord.
People say, well, I'm not against the Lord.
There'll be a lot of people who are going to be in hell who would tell you that right now.
I'm not against the Lord.
Well, they are against the Lord.
They're not against so-called Christian religion.
I was watching a press briefing last night.
Boy, I tell you what, if you want a misrepresentation of Christianity, just watch a press briefing.
You'll have these liberal people.
They like having these collars on or some kind of shawn or something.
They'll have something on them And they'll get up and they'll speak as a Christian minister.
And they're not speaking for me.
And they're not speaking for God's word.
But these wicked people, they're not against the Christian religion, so to speak.
They're not against calling themselves followers of Christ's teachings.
They're not against attending the church even, but they are against God's word.
God's authority, God's purpose for creation, and they're against the redemptive work of the gospel of Jesus Christ They think and live in opposition to God, though they may claim to know and serve God.
Having rejected God's purpose for their lives, they are the enemies of God.
And their presence in God's kingdom is counterproductive to God's kingdom purpose.
And for that reason, they must be driven out of it.
Therefore, Solomon says, the wicked, what?
Go back in your text, is driven away.
Is driven away.
They're driven away from God.
They're driven away from his kingdom.
They're driven away from his creation.
In this word uh translated driven away, it has the idea of being pushed down.
Now yesterday there was a a creature in my backyard that I have declared war against a few years ago.
It's the red wasp.
I used to want to get along with all the creatures in my backyard, and I thought I will be a good neighbor to them.
I'll let them build nests here around my house.
It's not going to bother me.
I won't bother them.
Maybe they won't bother me.
They do help pollinate some.
Not much, but they pollinate some And a few years ago, I was in my backyard minding my own business.
And one of those walls crawled into my ear and stung me.
I was done with it.
I was so done with it.
And they started getting violent and chasing after me, and but the ear, I was done with it.
So now when I see those red devils, I kill them And there was one yesterday on my mulberry tree.
How many of y'all ever eaten a mulberry?
Who has not eaten a mulberry?
Well how about that?
All around the mulberry bush?
That happened at my house.
Yeah, they're like almost kind of like little blackberries on a tree.
But uh one yesterday got on my mulberry tree and he was I think drinking some of the moisture off the leaf And I slapped that devil down, and when he went down, when I slapped him and when he went down the ground, I just took my foot and crushed him.
Well, that's the idea behind this word.
To to press down in the sense of destroying.
And so when I put enough pressure and press down on him, what happened?
It ended that wasp life.
He's crushed.
And so I put him out of existence.
And that's what happens to the wicked.
The wicked are crushed down.
They're pushed down and will forever be put down.
Well we say that when we uh uh you know uh euthanize an animal.
We had to put phido down, put down.
It's the same thing.
And so it has that idea of being crushed and destroyed when Satan Rebelled against God, his rebellion was overthrown, and he was what?
Driven away The wicked are it says here is driven away.
So when Satan rebelled against God, he was driven away.
When Adam rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden, he was driven away from the Garden of Eden.
Genesis chapter 3, verse 24 says, so he drove out.
The man.
He drove out the man.
Ever since men began to multiply upon the face of the earth, there have always been men attempting to conquer and rule the world.
And no matter how powerful men and nations have become, death has ultimately driven them from the earth Think of Adolf Hitler, a little mustache, he's up there, he seems so powerful, so angry and pounding and and all.
He's gone.
Think of all the powerful people in the world that once ruled and destroyed and crushed, and death has driven them from the earth.
Death doesn't miss a single wicked person.
No matter how bad that person wants to hang on, death drives them all away.
And you cannot separate being driven away from death.
Because remember that the word driven away here, it means to be crushed.
So they're driven away through the crushing, through the death itself.
Death itself drives the wicked away.
It's God's minister of justice. to cast them out.
That's the same idea behind the the the the the the wicked that brother shepherd was talking about in Job Which I found fascinating when Brother Shepherd was quoting the scripture which talks about man that's crushed before the moth.
And I tell you what, sometimes our bodies seem so frail because we can seem so strong, and the the slightest little thing can really threaten our lives.
But we're crushed before the moth.
And again, that's the same idea as the wicked being driven away.
They're crushed.
They're put down.
They're pushed down.
You see, when a person is driven away, they're found to be so pathetically insignificant, like the man before the moth.
When it comes down to it, it doesn't take much to break us at all.
You've seen those big old bodybuilders and big old wrestlers and stuff.
And uh and then you hear one day, they're they're just just big walking around like then you hear one day, all of a sudden so and so they passed away.
Hey, they had a had a cardiac arrest.
Just so simple And that big old guy's gone.
The Bible says in Psalm 1.
4.
Remember, the wicked is driven away.
Now listen to this, Psalm 14 says, ungodly people, quote, are like the chaff. which the wind driveth away.
The wind's like them off.
Well we don't go outside scared of the wind.
We walk out and say, well, that breeze was nice, unless it's a tornado or something like that.
But the chaff driven away by the wind is not driven away by the storm, it's driven away by the gentle breeze.
And they just winnow the grain, and after after they they beat the grain that it loosens the chaff from the grain.
Then all they do is just winnow it, just throw it up in the air And that gentle breeze just drives that chaff away.
The chaff is the hole of the grain, if you didn't know.
And so the ungodly are like that.
They're like the chaff.
What is chaff?
It's a light.
It's insignificant.
I've had a chaff in my hand.
You can take chaff and just go, and it just Scatter.
And once it drives it away, it's gone.
That's the way the wicked are.
But they're driven away.
And though the wicked think themselves to be very important people, the fact is they're like chaff.
They don't benefit the kingdom of God any more than chaff benefits us.
Why do we want to get rid of chaff through the winnowing process?
You can't eat it There's no benefit to you.
It's just waste.
It's just waste.
And people waste their lives by not following the Lord who made them.
And God is going to drive them away through death, like used chaff.
They serve no purpose.
They have no root.
And again they're driven away by a breeze.
Now wicked man's expulsion from the presence of God is experienced, look back in your text, in his wickedness.
That's how the expulsion from God is experienced in his wickedness.
Now the word wickedness here is a different Hebrew word than the word translated wicked at the beginning of the verse.
And I'm glad it's different.
I like this because we learn something from it.
The the Hebrew word translated wickedness here, it comes from uh uh a Hebrew word that uh that has the idea of being broken to pieces.
By the way, if you push down, it does break to pieces, doesn't it?
Being driven away broken to pieces.
It has the idea of something spoiling.
Because when something spoils, it's breaking down, right?
The elements are breaking down.
Now, remember the Hebrew word that the word wicked is translated from.
It means to be wrong.
We learned that when we first started our message tonight.
So the word wicked comes from a Hebrew word that means to be wrong.
The word wickedness comes from a Hebrew word that has the idea of being broken to pieces. and rotting.
Brother Richard, why do you spend so much time telling us that?
It's because the two words go hand in hand and you cannot separate them.
The two concepts combine give us a marvelous truth, and it is this.
It is that wrongness is rottenness.
You see, the word wicked means to be wrong.
The second word wickedness means to be rotten or means to be broken to pieces.
Wrongness is rottenness.
Wrongness is brokenness We think of sin, the world has this idea that if it's sinful, it's got to be really, really good.
It's got to be so good that we don't deserve it, so God says don't have it.
That's why they'll say, oh, it's sinfully delicious And uh it's so good it should be a sin.
I've heard that before too.
No, no, no, no.
In the beginning, everything God made was good.
It was taub.
It's sin that is bad, and bad is rotten.
Bad is broken.
Wickedness is rottenness.
Wickedness is brokenness.
And so the problem is Is our desires of our flesh have been so Uncalibrated, I think would be a good way to put it.
I tell you, I've got a treadmill at home I wasn't thinking about my my daughter and grandkids watching tonight, but my grandkids came over One day to visit and they got on my treadmill.
And they found there's something even more fun than walking or running on a treadmill.
And that's using the incline-decline function to write it up and down, up and down, up and down.
Well, they got on there and they broke that thing And so I had to work on it.
And I finally got it fixed so that I could finally get it to go down.
And then I told my wife, said, don't touch that incline.
We don't want it stuck again Well now the calibration's messed up.
So I have to go by my watch when I run, and it tells me roughly how far I've run.
But the belt is not it's not going to be correct.
When I look up there and it tells me how many miles, it'll make me think I've gone really far and I haven't.
So the the the calibration's messed up.
When we were creating now originally the designer made it so that calibration was correct, but now it's broken.
Our designer originally created us so that our calibration was correct.
All of our desires were good.
All of our desires were right.
It wasn't until the tempter came, put a thought in Eve's mind, and she started looking at it and thinking about a lie.
And so now her mind not going off God's word, which calibrated her desires, but going off a lie Now she's miscalibrated and her decision was off.
Make sense?
Our desires are off.
We desire, we crave things.
And understand, our cravings were given to us so that we could crave that which was Tob.
We could crave that which was good.
We ought to crave every craving that God gave us to crave was to long for something that he created that was good for us and then to be satisfied by his goodness when we indulged in it.
But now that our calibration is broken through sin, our flesh craves things that are unnatural.
And that are destructive.
And we can't see the destruction.
Eve could not see the destruction.
There's no way her and Adam, of course, by God's word, he said, the day you eat thereof you'll surely die, but there's no way.
That they could have perceived the vastness of what that all entailed.
And so we crave it thinking it's good.
We indulge in it thinking this seems satisfying to me when actually we are indulging in destruction itself.
Y'all ever seen those people?
Man, I've seen them.
It makes me sick.
I've gone to the hospital before.
Do you see someone outside and a in a chair with a uh you know their their lungs are all messed up and they're dying from emphysema or what have you but if they can get outside they're gonna smoke that cigarette I talked to a man one time who had lung cancer.
I went to his house to see him as he was dying.
And he said, Brother Fulton, I'm not supposed to smoke.
He said, but my wife lit up a cigarette in the house the other day and I smelled it I said, sweetheart, could I have just a little puff off of that?
He said, I put that in my mouth.
I took a drag on that.
He said, it tasted just as good as a beefsteak.
And I'm looking at him thinking, that's what's in your lungs killing you.
But to him, it's like eating a beefsteak.
That is a broken system.
And so the wicked, it says here, will be driven away Will be broken in his wickedness.
When we partake of sin We're partaking of poison.
We're partaking, we're indulging in our own destruction.
But watch this here.
In his wickedness, Earlier this week, I was out checking my garden.
For the first time I'm growing acorn squash.
It's fun to grow.
And picked some beautiful acorn squash for Tammy to cook for us.
And there was one that got detached from the plant.
And it had mold all over that little squash.
And so I picked it up and I threw it out of my garden so that mold wouldn't spread anything else.
But you know that that mold to the plant that had been to the fruit that had been separated from the plant is like sin to the man that's been separated from God.
It destroys him.
And then God has to, through that breaking down process, He drives them out.
Drives them out of his kingdom.
Underscore the words in his wickedness.
In his wickedness.
There's a pause a popular teaching.
You've probably heard it before.
If not, just listen to people teach and you'll probably hear it again.
There's a popular teaching that claims that man only dies from one thing.
Yeah, that's unbelief.
I've heard many, many popular teachers teach this.
They teach that Jesus died for all of our sins.
So we won't go to hell for our sins.
We'll simply go to hell because we rejected the gift.
That's not true.
It's not true any more than the the Passover lamb being slain in his bloodshed, and you say, well, they won't die for their sins.
They'll just die. because you know they they rejected the lamb or whatever.
It's that the lamb's blood on the door that there's the whole point in the in the In the sacrifice on Passover Day.
The Bible explicitly says that Aaron confesses the sins of the animal, putting them on the head of the goat.
That way they get off the people onto the goat.
And then the goat is carried away.
Sent away is what it says.
The word sent away, that's what the word forgiveness means to send away.
And then the blood of that other goat that dies is put on the mercy seat, and so the people obtain mercy.
But if we don't accept Christ, our sins are not sent away.
There is no atonement.
There is no mercy.
And so we actually die in our sins, in our wickedness.
The Bible says he's carried away how?
In his wickedness.
Listen to what Jesus told unbelievers in John 8.
24.
Jesus said, I said therefore unto you that ye shall die How in your sins, plural.
For if ye believe not that I am He ye shall die in your sins.
Your sins, why?
Because if you believe not that Jesus is the Christ There is no forgiveness of your sins.
Your sins still abide on you.
That's why the Bible says, he that believeth on the Son. hath everlasting life.
He that believeth not the Son of God hath not life, and the wrath of God abides on him.
Wickedness, sin causes men to die, and then their death drives them away But the righteous, look back in your text, but the righteous, Solomon said.
The righteous have been made right.
Remember, the word wicked in the beginning came from a Hebrew word that meant to be wrong The word righteous, it didn't take a rocket scientist to see that the word right is the root word for righteous.
That's the opposite of wrong.
This is someone who's been made right with God through the sacrifice of Christ.
So their sins no longer remain.
They've been washed clean by the blood of Jesus who died for them.
And because Jesus has washed their sins away, death cannot drive them away from God.
It's just the opposite.
They die.
They're driven away in their wickedness.
Why?
Because they believe not that Jesus is him and they die in their sins, and in their sins, their death drives them away.
But the righteous Those who have been justified by faith and have received the righteousness which is of by faith, as the Apostle Paul puts it.
We die, yes, but our death does not drive us away.
Our death does not step on us and crush us and put us out of existence.
Our death doesn't drive us from God.
Our death drives us to God.
Death becomes divided. to which the believer in Christ leaves the body and is clothed with heaven The righteous escape destruction.
The righteous shall not perish and be crushed. but have everlasting life.
So because of Jesus' death on the cross, the righteous have hope.
Because of Jesus' resurrection from the tomb, we have hope even in our death Solomon says, a righteous man has hope, look back in your text, in his death.
Now this is a powerful statement here.
This is a far-reaching statement when you understand what Solomon is saying How can you have hope in your death?
How can you say, oh man, I've got hope in this death I have confidence in this death.
Death removes all hope from the spectator's point of view.
When you look at someone dying and you watch them die, so there's no hope now.
They're gone But Solomon says the righteous have hope in their death.
And this there is absolutely no way that Solomon could have said that we have hope in our death without his knowledge. of the resurrection from the dead.
There's no way.
Because if you died and you stayed dead, that means there is no hope But Solomon says we have hope in our death.
And that is hope when it's needed most.
We can have hope maybe that we'll get over the illness that we have.
We can have hope that someone will survive a car crash.
We can have hope that maybe we'll be able to pull ourselves out of debt.
Maybe we'll be able to reconcile with a family member.
We can have hope. in life.
But for the righteous, those who have been made right with God through faith in Jesus, we have hope when it matters most.
When to the world there is no hope at all, in the time of our death, we have hope.
And that word hope does not mean I hope so.
It means a strong expectation, a strong confidence waiting on something to come.
Man, that hope is Jesus Christ.
First Timothy chapter one In his letter to Timothy verse 1, Paul introduced his letter this way, Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the commandment of God our Savior.
The Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope.
And the Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope.
I'm not sure I said hand.
So because of Jesus' death, we now have hope in our own.
Because of Jesus' resurrection, death is not our end.
And the Bible says to be absent from this body is to be present with the Lord.
So we have hope not just in the bad times, not just in the good times, but we have hope in the pangs of death itself.
Because death cannot drive us away.
It can only drive us back to God.
Father, we thank you so much for your precious word.
Your precious promises.
Thank you, Lord, for being so candid with us, so descriptive, so precise.
To not talk in vague terms about when we have hope.
To not hide things, Lord, and find print.
In a large document that we can't immediately see, but to clearly in a single sentence tell us that when it comes our time to die.
It's not just going to be okay.
It's going to be a time of great hope of great confidence, and because of Jesus of great victory.
There is no need to fear death, for the righteous have hope in it.
It in fact Lord is in a sense our friend, taking his father from that which is broken.
And delivering us, Father, to that which heals forever.
In Jesus' name we pray and we thank you.
Amen.
