Turning back in the Word of God tonight to the book of Ezekiel, and to the chapter 8. We'll read again verse 8 of the chapter Ezekiel, and the chapter 8, verse 8, and then also we'll read verse 12. Ezekiel 8 and 8, Then said he unto me, Some of man dig now in the wall. When I had digged in the wall, behold it over. Twelve, then said he unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark? Every man in the chambers of his imagery. For they say, the Lord seeth us not. the Lord hath forsaken the earth." With God's Word open before us, we'll bow together in a further word of prayer. Our Heavenly Father, we do thank Thee that we're not relying upon what man's wisdom can bring forth, but we are looking to what Thou, the Eternal God, has said, Lord may it ever be your guiding principle in life, thus saith the Lord." We need guidance in a world of confusing signals, in a world that is full of signage. We need clear direction in the path of the Lord. Help us to be as Moses counseled Joshua to be. Turn not to the right hand or to the left. Lord, help us to plough a straight course for the Lord in this world of sin because very soon our course is going to be run. We've heard of a number of deaths in recent days. But none of us know how short our time is. Very soon, those who know the Lord will set down the sword, will pass it on to others. But Lord, may we have stars in our crown. May we have the joy of the soul winner. Lord, we pray for those who are unsafe because all of us will die. Lord, when time is running out, may men and women take time to seek the Lord. For it is, the prophet Isaiah said, it is time to seek the Lord. Amos repeated the message. And Lord, we pray. that we will take heed to Thy exhortation. Come and answer prayer. Do us good tonight. Lead us into this passage. In our Savior's name we pray. Amen. The prophet Ezekiel is a captive on the banks of the river Kibar in faraway Babylon, but he catches sight of a hand coming out of the fire. That hand lifted him up, and it transported him from his position in and among the captives in Babylon right back to the court of the temple in the city of Jerusalem. What he saw when he got there drove a dagger right through his heart, set up in the sacred precincts of the temple. Ezekiel catches sight of the image of jealousy. That's a heathen shrine that was sure to draw down the rage and the righteous anger of Jehovah. That was bad, but worse was to come. Ezekiel noticed a hole in the wall of the inner court of the temple. That angelic guide who was conducting him here in the vision instructed him, see that hole? Make it larger so that you can pass through. He did. Then he came to a second wall. There was a door in that second wall, and through that door he passed into a large chamber called the chamber of imagery. The walls of this chamber were decorated. All of the unclean symbols and imagery that is part and parcel of heathen worship were there. And in front of these depraved and debauched scenes stood seventy elders of the nation of Israel swinging their censers, mumbling their adoration, shouting out their incantations. It was a most revolting and repulsive sight. The angel said to Ezekiel, Verse 12, verse 13 of Ezekiel 8, son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark? Every man in the chambers of his imagery. For they say, the Lord seeth us not. The Lord hath forsaken the earth. He said also unto me, turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations that they do. And again this angel is not exaggerating the scene because he's absolutely right. Shocked at this secret disclosure of the apostasy about the idolatry that already had been brought before his eyes, Ezekiel's spiritual system is now taking another shock. Greater abominations remain to be seen indeed. And so he follows the angel out of that chamber near the gate of the temple. He sees Jewish woman weeping openly for Tammuz. Historians tell us that Nimrod, that great rebel, early chapters of Genesis, married. From the marriage, a child was born. The child was named Tammuz. It was claimed by them that this child has been miraculously conceived, virgin-born. And out of that grieved deception, the whole concept of mother and child religion sprang up that we see today, of course, live and kicking in that false system of Roman Catholicism. All Babylonian priests wore chains around their necks with the letter T for Tammuz attached to them. The rites of this Tammuz worship were carried out with unrestrained licentiousness. It was utterly vile, totally inappropriate to describe from this or any other pulpit. Completing this morbid tour of the apostasy of the people of the Lord, Ezekiel is now shown twenty-five men standing close by the door of the temple, their backs to the temple, but their faces pointed towards the east, and they're worshiping the Son. It must have been, in this vision for Ezekiel, like what it was in reality for Martin Luther to go to Rome. and find with all of the licentiousness there that here is a city, that it's living up to the old proverb, if ever one was built over Helm, it has to be the city of Rome. Or check Rome today, because it hasn't changed very much. And you'll get the headlines, I noticed them again very recently, another Vatican-linked, paedophile ring. Not much has changed. It comes as no surprise when we are reading all of these details, God pronounces judgment upon these idolaters, and He gives His servant Ezekiel a very graphic picture of the retribution that is going to sweep in upon them. You'll find that in verse 18. And you'll find also that six men appear. They're all armed with a weapon of slaughter. They're followed by man number seven. And man number seven is a man clothed in white linen with the writer's inkorn by his side. This seventh man makes a tour of the city. He puts a mark up on the forehead of a man here, the forehead of a man there, and a woman over there, and so on. Everyone who's still loyal to Jehovah, who sighs and cries and mourns and laments because of the abominations that were being done in this city. And when this man carrying the inkorn completes his circuit, when he concludes the census, of the faithful and the righteous who remain in the city of Jerusalem, then the green light is given to those other six men beside Him to go out with their slaughter weapons, and they go out and they smite every single one of those who don't have the mark on their brow." A bit like Jericho in the days of Rahab. and Joshua, where there's no red cord, there's destruction. It's a most terrifying vision that Ezekiel received. But it was a vision in action, a vision with wheels if you like, a parable of life even. And the application here, first of all it is obviously to the national, to the spiritual condition of the nation of Israel. But there's something in here that we can't miss. And it's timeless, it's abiding, it's right up to where we are today. And so we look at this scene. And we find warning written all over it, and we find profit as well for us written over it as well, because we have in our world today this kind of lamentous, horrendous state of affairs going on. In the first place, you'll get a picture here of the, I was going to say progressive, I should call it regressive. nature of sin, the regressive nature of sin. The hole in the wall, that's the first thing. He's shown the hole in the wall. It wasn't large, but when it was enlarged, it opened right up to a large subterranean chamber of horrors. There's infamy in there. There's apostasy in there. There is shame in there. And the more the prophet traveled, it became decidedly worse. In fact, the angel beside him was saying, greater abominations lie ahead, greater abominations. There's even greater abominations that I am going to show you. Verse 6, verse 13, verse 15, that message is repeated. And I'm sure every time Ezekiel heard it, he thought, what next? It surely can't become any worse than what we've seen already, but it did. And that's true of sin at all times. It starts off as a hole in the wall. It opens up into a darker, deeper, and a more sinister thing. I think of Eve in the Garden of Eden. She looked. She desired. She took. I think of Achan, around about the rubble of Jericho, when he finds all of these things, and we're told he saw them, and he coveted, and he took, and he hid. It was the same decline. You can add hiding into Eve's sin as well because when God comes by His presence into that garden of Eden and He's conducting His investigation, we find that Adam and Eve, they ran to hide themselves in that garden, the same regressive nature of sin. One small spot or a focal point of infection somewhere inside the body. While it's ignored, not treated, will spread corruption right through the whole freum and tit and gobble up the internal vital organs as well. What is this hole in the wall of your life? I speak for a moment to Christians. Is there a weakness, that secretly indulged habit? That place where truth and light is held back and deviated. That steadily leading your soul down into the chambers of corruption, this charnel house of sin, bringing you into the crucible of a disastrous harvest. Is there a neglect of duty, an avoidance of service, a falling away from that daily walk with God that is certain to open up the door to something else and something worse? A man who had fallen into deep sin, who had absolutely staggered the minds of his friends by what he had actually done. He said, I fell when I stopped praying. He's not the only one. One old preacher said, backsliding begins at the closet door. When that door remains shut and you never enter in, and you're not interceding before God, the problems are going to stem from there. The gardener will come in and he'll periodically examine the bushes and the trees, and he'll prune, and he'll trim, and he'll cut away all the dead limbs and the branches, and he'll pour his black cement into the holes there, and all the spaces where decay and corruption have begun, and it's the same with the soul. Where there is a hole, investigate, find it, trace it out, repair it, or it will lead to something worse. It's surely significant that this vile sin in Jerusalem was being pursued behind doors, in the darkness, underground, if you like. That shows the deceitfulness and the hypocrisy of it all. I read in John 3, the verse 19 and 20, our Savior's words. He says, and this is the condemnation, that light has come into the world. But men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved." It's only when a nation or a person indeed loses its conscience that vile sins surface into the light, and they become practiced unashamedly in front of the eyes of men. But up until that point, they're hidden. Their deed's in the dark. And that's why people look back some years They can recall how things like divorce and adultery and living in sin and birthing children out of wedlock and sodomy and abortion, they were all matters of hush, hush, don't talk about them. They are deeds in the dark. Let's keep them there. People would have nudged each other, whispered about them. Those involved in those kind of sins, they tried to adopt the lowest possible profile and not draw attention to themselves. Now today all these things are right out of the dark into the light and promoted. Did you know that abortion to single one out was the leading cause of death right across the world in 2018? Forty-one million plus killed. As of tail end of the year, they were releasing their figures, 31st of December 2018, and saying there had been 41.9 million abortions in the course of this year. By contrast, and we always think cancer is a terrible killer, and it is. It's everywhere. So it appears. 8.2 million people died from cancer in 2018, 5 million from smoking, 1.7 million of AIDS and HIV. You take abortion? And you have more deaths from abortion in that one year than all the deaths from cancer and malaria and HIV and AIDS and smoking and alcohol and traffic accidents, more than that combined. Down in the south, as we know, in the last year we had the repeal of Ireland's Eighth Amendment. One of the last laws legislating for and protecting the right to life of unborn children. The United Kingdom Department of Health revealed in 2017, the year before, and that was the last year when it has revised abortion statistics for them. They said the number of UK abortions, and they've been telling you, you know, these are going down, these are going down. In 2017, it hit a 10-year high. Only last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill into law that legislates for abortion up until birth in many cases. That Democratic governor of New York, he directed that the One World Trade Center and other landmarks in the city should be illuminated in pink light. to celebrate the passage of what they called the Reproductive Health Act, but it's the BB Killing Statute. He called it a historic victory for New Yorkers and for our progressive values. What they do in the dark But they have now pulled through the hole in the wall and through the open dorm, and they're doing it all in the light. Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. Back in the days of the Second World War, over six million were murdered, 1.1 million of which were children. We must never forget. There were two kinds of worship being conducted here that Ezekiel saw in the city of Jerusalem. First of all, you had the official, the public worship. That was being engaged in in the courts of the temple. And if you came in and was a bit of a stranger to the place, and you looked around and you saw the worship that was going on, you would think, well, all of this is very regular. All of this is in order. There's nothing out of step here. Everything is perfectly fine. But down below, while the proper worship, as you would have thought, is going on in this place, down below, a private, secret, idolatrous worship was being energetically pursued. The fact of it is, the worship on top was just a sham worship. The real worship was being carried out in these chambers of imagery, where these 70 elders were swinging their censors before these unclean pictures of the heathen gods and goddesses. Now, I am well aware that Christians are not always what they should be or what they would be. On earth today, we are certainly not what we will be in heaven. in the life of everyone who genuinely sets out to follow Jesus Christ. There is bound to be a degree of failure. There is bound to be some inconsistency. As one has put it, his reach will always be higher than his grasp. We all fall short, sometimes far short, of those noble and those high aims, those targets that God by grace has set in our hearts. I'm not talking about that when I refer to hypocrisy here, because that is not hypocrisy. What I do talk about when I'm mentioning hypocrisy is the deliberate living of a lie. The worshiping above ground, or more accurately, the pretending to worship that which is godly, that which is holy, while underground, in the secret but in the real life, there is the worshiping of that which is altogether different. That is hypocrisy. And let me add, this kind of hideous practice is not confined to the scattered few. American preacher of the former generation, even century, Clarence Edward McCartney. I believe Dr. Pearsley was very fond of his writings and his sermons, and even told the students, if you've never read Clarence Edward McCartney, you've never preached. Well, he was visiting McCartney in a green Ormond church on the cliffs of Tint Angle, Cornwall, the reputed seat of King Arthur and his knights. And he recalled how he went to the church and the wind was bringing the spray up away from those iron cliffs, right up under the windows of that little church. Only a handful of people had assembled for worship, and Clarence Edward McCartney went in and he said, the sermon wasn't really much to write home about, to be perfectly honest, but there was one truth that he came away from that service with that day, and it was this, it was said in it, the real worship of life is in the desire of the heart. The real worship of life is in the desire of the heart, and he's right. There's no doubt about the wickedness of deliberate hypocrisy and insincerity. There can't be anything worse than that. Be who you are, show what you are, and then we'll pray that God in His grace and mercy will save you. Farmers will tell you the best of dogs will sometimes be taken over by the fever of sheep killing. Not killing, most often done at night. The guilty dog will almost always tempt other dogs to go along with him and, if possible, will be content to lay the blame at their door. And when this crease of sheep-killing is on him, the dog will assume during the day, in the house, around the barn, wherever, this unusually genial and friendly air. Very interesting. Even those animal natures seem to share in this hypocrisy that so riddles human nature. People. who declare themselves to be converted, who sit among the people of the Lord. Their conversation may be studded with pious terms and all of that. They have the language sometimes, the outward lifestyle as well, but they have never truly been saved. A generation of people who are pure in their own eyes, but who have never been washed from their filthiness. And this is guilty material. You know something? When all the hype and all the pretense and all the plastic and all the facades are pulled down and brushed off and all the tall talking is over, the life of a hypocrite is an existence of sheer guilt, the regressive nature of sin. But you'll notice how this picture in Ezekiel. brings before us the real nature, not only the aggressive nature of sin in the heart of man, but the real nature of sin in the heart of man. It lifts the lid on the thoughts, the imaginations of man's heart, on the lust, the imaginations that are going along in his mind. What I'm saying is this, a man is what he is in the dark. A man is what he is in the dark. We are inhabitants of two worlds, this outer visible world of form and speech and look and action, where everybody can trace and see what we're doing, and also the other world of the inner, the invisible world of thought and desires and imaginations. Where do you live? In a house of brick and timber and cement? On this thou road or that road or some street or some other park? You live in a house that men never see. The real temple is in your heart, and on the walls of your heart are painted pictures before which you really bow down and you really worship. One is described on the blacker side of this, something hidden from the eyes of men. gloomy cells which communicate with the infernal regions where monsters are kept in confinement and fed with all unwholesome material." Sounds like that quotation we referred to from Jesus this morning. In the book of Mark, chapter 7, verse 21, 22, for from Within, out of the heart of man, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness, and I'm pressing the point tonight, the hidden world of the imagination and the thoughts is the real life. and the real world to us, because it's the sincere and the actual life. And if all barriers could be broken down and boundaries passed over them, this is what we would do. If nobody could understand what we were at, if nobody could stand in our way, if nobody would see what we were going to be up to, these are the things we'd do. And one of those church notice boards at was designed to arrest and impress the casual reader as he walked past or as he drove past, there was this brief quote, "'You are not what you think you are, but you are what you think.'" There's a legend of an ancient despot, Gyges, and he would sometimes give someone who he favored a ring. That ring had the effect of making him invisible, so it sounds like a bit of a speciality in some video game. The man himself, given the ring, is real flesh and blood, but the ring makes him invisible unto others around, and sometimes we might wonder just what would people be like and what would they say and what would they do if they possessed the magic ring of Gyges? Get a grip on that truth and you'll understand why the Bible's focus is always on the heart. It doesn't deal with the surface. That's what man sees. Man looks in the outward appearance, God looketh upon the heart. Why does he look upon the heart? Why did Solomon say in Proverbs 4 and 23, keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life? Jesus said, condemned and punished the act, the visible deed, that which had evidence that people could see. But our Lord strengthened that law. And He should have it reach beyond the mere visible act to punish the thought and punish the desire. The law specifically speaks against the murderer. Jesus pulls in the man whose heart is filled with hatred, and He brings him under the censure of that same sixth commandment. The law of address, the adulterer, Christ's rest, the condemnation must include that man or that woman who was driven by impure desires. Matthew chapter 5, the inner life of thought and desire is the real life because it is the creative life. Everything that is evil, everything that is vile is fashioned in the workshop of the heart. A lot of people say, as a kind of a caveat and a get-out clause, well, you know, he or she made me do it. They put me up to it and, you know, I had little say in the whole thing. All the water in the world, the hymn writer said, however hard it tried, could never sink a ship. unless it got inside. All the evil in the world, the wickedness and sin can never sink the soul's craft unless it gets within. When a spark falls on stone or on ice, it goes out. But if it falls on gunpowder, you've got combustion and you've got explosion. And again, our Lord is underlining this very truth when He argues it's not so much the things going into the man, but the things coming out of the man, emerging from the heart of that man. That's what defiles him, Mark 7 verse 18 through to the verse 23. Think of it like this. When a man or a woman plunges into outward breeze and opens in, When they do things that shock and amaze and mortify and make the toes of men and women curl, do you think they just got up that morning and thought about committing that sin for the very first time in their lives? Was it all just spontaneous and immediate and impulsive? No way. There has always been a process leading up to that blatant sin. There's been a runway. led in. There's been a launching pad that's been put in. We're not talking or entertaining the thought here of a simple, sudden fall. All falls take place in slow motion. That outside form has been predated and prepared for by a fall in the hidden life. And if your inner life is taking you away from God today, there's no telling where you're going to end up. because it's not going to want to stop. Sin, a more modern hymn says, takes you further than even you will want to go. The regressive nature of sin in the heart, the real nature of sin in the heart of man. But this vision that Ezekiel received here, other mention is made here of The fact that sin, no matter how long it is hidden, it will eventually be brought out to the light. So we're talking about the revealing nature. of sin in the heart of man. How long, do you imagine, were these guys practicing their vile sins down in the basements of the temple, out in the chambers of imagery, in all of these other places that Ezekiel visited? How long were they at it? Well, we don't know. We're not told. One thing is sure. Those images were not made. Those chambers of defilement were not filled. Those pictures were not painted in an hour, in a day, or in a week. That worship had been going on for some considerable time, and though it started in the darkness, God brought it out into the light, and He punished it in the light. The unmasking of hypocrisy has been a favorite theme right down through the centuries of time of the dramatist and the novelist. Notice those on chat shows, not that I'm listening in to them, but they like to talk up about someone who, you know, they're a pillar of society, and they are this, and they are, ah, but look at, hmm, see what they've been doing all along there? Ah, you wouldn't have thought that of them, would you? Who can tell what goes on behind closed doors? Who can tell? As Ezekiel found out what is happening down there in the depths of the temple. Hypocrisy unmasked. Didn't our Savior flag that up in Luke 12? Verse 1 to 3, "'Beware ye,' he said, "'of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy, "'for there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, "'neither hid that shall not be known. "'Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness "'shall be heard in the light, "'and that which ye have spoken in the ear, in closets, "'shall be proclaimed upon the housetops. "'Sin gets out.'" But as Matthew 7, 21 to 23 declare, not everyone that saith unto me, here's the outward material, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven, many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not, you know everybody else knows we've been doing this, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? In thy name have cast out devils. In thy name done many wonderful works. Lord, the outside has been good and you know it." The Lord says, yes, but I know what's been back of it all, right down the line. Then will I profess unto them, I never knew you, depart from being ye that work iniquity, found out and sent down. Sin just refuses to be hidden. It has been said, coal's a fire. cannot be concealed beneath the most sumptuous apparel. They will betray themselves with smoke and flame. Nor can darling sins be long hidden beneath the most ostentatious profession. They will sooner or later discover themselves and burn sad holes in a man or woman's reputation. Sin needs quenching in the Savior's blood. not concealing under the garb of religion. It was an old elm tree. For many years, the pride and the adornment of Boston common. But like all other things, it came to an end one day. It fell. They found a flattened bullet. that had been concealed in it, they reckon, for way over a hundred years. The wound had closed over it but couldn't throw off the wound and couldn't conceal it at all times. It was eventually discovered, and so it is with the soul. A wound in there, not purged by Christ's blood, may be carried through youth, into middle age, into old age, almost forgotten in many minds, but it will have its effect and be revealed at last. The gloom of midnight may cover it. The silence of the grave may even prevail over it. Every eye that saw it may be glazed over in death. The lip that could reveal it may be silent forever, yet the sin of every transgressor will find him out. His own recollection may fail him, his iniquities may fade from his memory, yet they will turn up again. They all stand recorded in the book of God, and if not put away by the blood of Christ, they must be reckoned for in that day when the earth and the heaven shall flee away. And so, in Ezekiel's vision, the six men with the slaughter weapons move in. And they slay the elders of Israel who stood before the people, and they were masquerading all the time as being the upholders of the divine law. And yet at the same time, they're practicing hand over fist the foul rituals of Egypt and of Babylon down there, those deeds in the dark. The day is coming. when fearfulness will surprise the hypocrites, Isaiah 33 and 14, and when the hypocrite's hope shall perish, Job 8 and 13. How will you do in that awful day? You know tonight you're a sinner. You know what God has promised to do with unrepentant sinners. You have even a faint idea at least of what lies ahead. Don't try to ignore your iniquities, turn your back on the truth, somehow entertain the notion that things won't turn out to be quite as bad as you imagined or as this preacher painted. They will be worse. They will be worse. On the way to the uncooled and uncoolable center of perdition, you need to confess. Renounce your sins. Clear out the chambers of imagery. Turn to Christ. In some parts of Europe, you can view pictures today, and they depict scenes out of the Gospels. I don't like pictures personally about Christ, but scenes out of the Gospels that have been painted over. by heathen frescoes of unspeakable shame and indecency, but the brush of real and evangelical repentance can redecorate the chambers of the soul, can bring it back. Christ's blood can cleanse from sin. That's why the psalmist pleaded in Psalm 51, wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity. Cleanse me from my sin. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me. Take the old paintings down. Take the old images out. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow." Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we call upon Thy name tonight. We pray against these deeds that are done in dark, the chambers of imagery. The place is where the hymn writer said, "'Polluted things hold empire o'er the soul. Purge our thoughts. Purge our speech. Purge our activities. Purge our ambitions. Yes, as has been said, wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.