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Amazing Facts

Joe Crews

Grace or Disgrace

Grace or Disgrace Part 1

Grace or Disgrace Part 2

Grace or Disgrace Part 3

Grace or Disgrace Part 4

Grace or Disgrace Part 5

Grace or Disgrace Part 6

State governors have often granted reprieves and even pardons to criminals on the eve of their execution. Do such men recover from their lawless past after being fully pardoned by the state? I'll be back in a moment to talk about condemned people and pardons. We ended our last broadcast by describing that wonderful scene right outside the Garden of Eden. Of course, it was terrible in some respects. Adam had been driven out of his beautiful garden home, but God came down to tell him a way of escape had been made from that sentence of death. The way Jesus sent his death, of course, according to Romans 6.23, but God had provided through Christ a means by which he could have his life and his beautiful home back again. When God slew that lamb, Adam saw death for the first time, and in the death of that lamb he realized the way of escape was symbolized. The lamb, of course, represented his Savior who would come, and the coat of skin taken by God and given to Adam as a covering for his own nakedness showed that he could be spared and saved by sacrificing the life of that lamb, which, of course, represented a coming Savior. Yes, it's just outside that beautiful Eden home that we find the altar of sacrifice set up. The lamb and the altar stand in the shadow of the cross of Jesus. Every one of those sacrifices in Old Testament times and every one of those meat and drink offerings and the yearly Sabbath days even, all were rituals pointing forward unerringly to the coming of Jesus Christ. Even the incense offerings pointed to Christ our Passover, sacrificed for us. Every part of the Old Testament services was a symbol of the coming Redeemer. Though living in the shadow of the cross, those people were saved by the cross. Don't forget that, friends. And every time they brought a lamb or a turtledove, an even flower if they couldn't afford anything else, they accepted the merits of a Savior, a Redeemer who would come and die in their stead. 4,000 years after that first animal sacrifice in Eden, Jesus gave his life on Calvary. When he cried out, It is finished, he meant that he had paid that price. He had canceled the debt of all those of Old Testament times, and he consummated the sacrifice and paid the price of redemption for everyone for all time because the cross pointed in both directions, you see. Those in the past look forward and those in the future would look back in faith, believing and know that Jesus had died for them on the cross. They look forward, we look backward. That's the only difference. All are saved by the same grace of Jesus, for there's none other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved. I think of the way the Apostle Paul puts it in Romans 4. He says, You think that Abraham had something in which to glory, being saved by works? But he said, No, no, he was saved by faith just like we are. David also the same way. Can he glory that he was saved by his works? No, no, he was saved by faith in the righteousness of Jesus. Every soul who's ever been saved was saved through the grace of Christ. In Revelation 5, the redeemed are pictured standing there before the throne of God. Those from Old Testament times, those from New Testament times, all of them singing glory to Christ the Lamb because they say, For by thy blood thou hast redeemed us from every language, from every kindred, from every tongue and every people. Now there's another thought, too, here in Revelation 15. The redeemed are pictured in that great coronation ceremony of Jesus around the throne of God. There are the redeemed, of course, from all ages, Old and New Testament, and gathered before the throne singing, first of all, the song of Moses, and then the second half, the song of the Lamb. Justice and mercy meet in the cross of Christ. The law and the gospel, obedience and grace, they meet in one person, the person of Jesus and His sacrifice. How many times I've heard Christians boast that they don't care about the law of God. You see, they're hiding behind Romans 6, 14, and it says, For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under the law, but under grace. Now a great many Christians say that since they're saved by grace, they don't have to keep the commandments of God at all. Now I mentioned it in our last broadcast and even the day before also we talked about it, but I want to say it again, friends, so that we'll never forget it. Does grace annul the law of God? Does our faith in the saving blood of Jesus cancel off the claims of God's Ten Commandment law? What does Paul say about that question, friends? He says in Romans 6, 1, What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? And the next verse answers, God forbid. And then verse 14, For sin shall not have dominion over you. Sin is not our ruler. We're not under to be under sin. We're not to be under the condemnation of the law when we obey God because we've been saved by grace. Now friends, when an individual is saved by grace, he is under greater obligation than ever before to keep the Ten Commandment law of God. As it says in Romans 3, 31, Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid. Yea, we establish the law. You see, we don't have any license to break it just because we've been saved through faith in His grace. The law is even more firm in our lives when that has happened. And right here, I'd like to stop a moment to find the New Testament definition of sin. We read it, of course, the other day in 1 John 3, 4, Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law, for sin is the transgression of the law. Now that's very clear, friends. Every sinner has broken the law. Every sinner is under the law. When we sin, we're transgressing God's Holy Ten Commandments. So there has to be a law, and where there's a law, there's bound to be transgression. So Paul asks, Should we sin or break the law just because we're saved by grace? And his answer is, Absolutely not. We have no license to do that. The governor of the state has great power, even the power of life or death, over a prisoner. You think of a prisoner now that's been sentenced to death. His friends intervene for him, presenting evidence to the governor. And so special factors seem to be involved, contributing factors as to why this man was involved in this particular crime. So the governor reinvestigates the evidence, and he begins to feel that this man deserves clemency. So he uses his official prerogative as the head of the state, and taking his pen in hand, he dips it in the ink and writes, Pardoned, across those papers that would condemn the man to the electric chair. Then he signs his name, Governor Smith, or whatever that name might be. Now friends, that condemned man has been saved by grace, hasn't he? Not by any works or by his own goodness. He was really doomed to die. And being ever so good in that death cell would never in the world save him. Only in the words and by the grace of that governor was he granted full pardon to be freed, no longer under the condemnation of that law. Well, friends, we've all sinned and come short, haven't we? We're all under the sentence of death, and there's only one way of salvation, that is through the pardon of Jesus. Now let's get back to the man who was pardoned. He can hardly believe his eyes as he sees the kindness and the stroke of generosity of that governor. He's rescued, pardoned. He can go out now a free man. You meet him a little bit later and you talk with him, and you say, well, I understand the governor pardoned you. He certainly did, comes back the answer. How do you feel about life now that you're pardoned? Wonderful, wonderful, this new freedom of mind. Listen, I can break the laws of America now all I like. The governor set me free from the law and the sentence, and I'm saved now by grace. Well, friends, is that what the governor set him free to do? Should the governor pardon him so that he could go out and become a greater lawbreaker? Paul declares, God forbid. How shall we that are saved by grace continue breaking the law? No, no. On the contrary, Paul says, we establish the law. The individual saved by grace, pardoned by the governor, is under greater obligation to keep that law than anyone else because of the special work of grace done for him. So you and I come under greater obligation to keep the law of God because we're saved by grace. Now many individuals seem to picture heaven as sort of divided into two great camps, the Old Testament crowd in one place and the New Testament people in another. I can't think of heaven as being two different camps, friends. Can you? You'd see some over there and ask them the question, I wonder how you folks got here? Would you mind telling me how you got to heaven? And they'd answer, well, we got here by our works. We did this and we did that and we obeyed the commandments and because we kept all those Ten Commandments on stone and kept them perfectly, we're now saved by our works. Tell us, how did you get here? Oh, ours was an entirely different setup. We were saved by grace and faith. You mean you didn't have to keep any of the commandments? Oh, no, I should say not. We didn't stoop to keep those old commandments. We were just saved by grace, that's all. Of course, friends, that's a very, very imaginary conversation that will never, never take place in heaven. Believe me, everyone there will have been saved by the same formula. They will have entered into life by the same wonderful process. First, Jesus said, keep the commandments and then follow me in every way. Both of those things are necessary and imperative to follow to the very end. And so, we follow Jesus, that means we accept him by faith. And faith without works is dead. So for an individual to just claim love and love alone without any obedience is to talk about something that's absolutely useless. Faith without works is dead. That's pretty strong language, isn't it? Now in Romans 8, verse 7, we read this, the carnal mind is at enmity against God for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So the carnal mind, the sinful mind, finds fault with the Ten Commandments of God. It quarrels with the law of God. It's at enmity, not subject to obedience at all. So when you find people who claim to be Christians yet do not like God's law or commandments, perhaps it's because they still have a carnal mind, a carnal nature. At least that's what the Bible says. And here's another important point to remember. The law of ordinances, the commandments contained in ordinances, in other words, who wrote those anyway? Well, we found that Moses did. And where did he write them? In a book, the Bible says. Never fail to keep that difference in mind, the difference between the Mosaic law and the law of the Ten Commandments. God wrote the Ten Commandments on tables of stone. Moses wrote the ceremonial law in a book. Also there's another use of the word law. It not only applies to the Ten Commandments on tables of stone, but it can also apply to the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch. Paul tells us clearly that the commandments of ceremonies and ordinances and rituals were nailed to the cross and came to an end when Jesus died. But this is not true of the Ten Commandments, friends. You remember John the Baptist preached by the River Jordan, and he kept talking about a coming king and appealing to the people to turn from their sins. Now that's not a very popular thing to do, incidentally. And by and by there came a day when he stopped short in his preaching, and he pointed and said, there he is, he's the one I've been talking about. Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world. And the eyes of the world were turned on that man. The true Lamb of God had come. And all the Old Testament prophecies about lambs and deliverance and salvation had come to pass in the life of this one person, the Son of God, even Jesus Christ. Well friends, this shows that Jesus was a fulfillment of all of those ceremonial laws. But the Ten Commandment law is something else. It never changed. It was just as wrong to break the Ten Commandments a day after Jesus died as it was the day before. And yet that could not be said of those ceremonial laws. They were not binding the day after Jesus died, even though they had been on the day before. And now this is Joe Cruz saying goodbye for today.

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Grace or Disgrace Part 1

Grace or Disgrace Part 2

Grace or Disgrace Part 3

Grace or Disgrace Part 4

Grace or Disgrace Part 5

Grace or Disgrace Part 6

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