Morning. As many of you have possibly been many places in this world, I've been to a few different countries around the world to Germany, where things are very rigid, to Italy, where things are not so rigid, to Mexico, where things are not so rigid. I'm wondering sometimes if we're not an Italian church. So I hope you don't mind, as they do often, that if the meeting starts late, it runs way over. May God help us. May God help us. If you would turn in your Bibles to Exodus chapter 20, Exodus chapter 20 in verse 22. Exodus 20 verse 22, And the Lord said unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel, You have seen that I have talked with you from heaven. Ye shall not make unto me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold. An altar of earth shalt thou make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt offerings, and thy peace offerings, thy sheep, and thine oxen. In all places where I record my name, I will come unto thee, and I will bless thee, and If thou will make me an altar of stone, thou shall not build it of hewn stone. For if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it. And then we turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 3. Read a long passage. Beginning in verse 1, And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat, and hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither now are ye able, for ye are yet carnal. For whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men? For while one saith, I am of Paul, and another, I am of Apollos, Are you not carnal? Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers thy whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth anything, neither is he that watereth, but God that giveth increase. Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one, and every man shall receive his own reward according to his labor. For we are laborers together with God, ye are God's husbandry, and ye are God's building. According to the grace of God which is given unto me, a wise master builder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. For other foundation can no man lay, than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, every man's work shall be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is. If any man's work abide which he hath built thereon, he shall receive a reward. If any man's work shall be burnt, he shall suffer loss. But he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire. Over the next five weeks, starting today, five weeks in October, we'll be looking at some thoughts on what has been entitled Christian Ethics. And today will be just a foundational or an overview of that subject, and toward the end we'll list and enumerate the other four more detailed teachings on that area. But so I chose those first two scriptures, one from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament, about worship and idols and ideas and thoughts that men have about how they approach God. So we see in the Old Testament in Exodus 20, God said, look, Moses, if you guys are going to build an altar, I don't want the imprint of your hands upon it. He said, just pile up a bunch of stones and do it. Don't carve it. Don't make images on it. Don't square the corners. Don't make it look good and tidy and appropriate as the heathen around us or around you do. Just pile up a bunch of rocks and worship me thereon. Because those things did not please God. The work of men's hands generally have not pleased God. Only the work of one man has pleased God and that is Jesus Christ. And then the portion from the New Testament. where we see that Paul is laying out this whole idea of foundation, this whole idea of everything that men believe, and he says there's really one foundation, and it's Jesus Christ. The man Christ Jesus. That is the basis of all ethic. The basis of everything that men will be judged by is the blood and work of Jesus Christ. So that We want to get that out in the open at the very beginning of a lesson on Christian ethics. First and foremost, ethics, we know, is a heart matter. It is a heart matter. From the heart, from adulteries, fornications, idolatries, evil speakings, that's where those things originate. Sorceries, robberies, thefts, hate, envy, malice, all the things that are contrary to the fruit of the Spirit, those come from the heart. So from the heart is what we believe. And at the very heart, sooner or later, there's kind of a corporate or a kind of a collective heart of a civilization or a culture, and out of that collective heart comes his ideas about ethics. So we'll need to understand that it is first and foremost a heart matter, the Christian ethic. The danger of foundations is foundations sometimes will hold many idols. We may have a foundation or an idea, and someone comes along and smacks that idol off, falls to the ground, and someone else comes along and builds an ice or one on top of it. That's the problem with foundations. But the foundation of the Scripture and the Word of God will not allow God to have any thing to do with idols. There's nothing that can and will be allowed of God to compete with His Word and law and ways. We must understand that as Christians, because there's a temptation in our culture to try to amalgamate all the good little things and virtues that men can come up with, the works, and all the things that we lift up and say, oh, he's a good man, or oh, she's a good woman. But the measure is Christ. To the Christian, the measure is Christ. This is no small thing. The measure being Christ's overthrown civilizations. It overthrew Rome. We were discussing at one of these tables last week during the meal that Paul was martyred, crucified, killed. Was it because of his faith in Jesus Christ? Yes. But what was the legal reason he did it? He said there is another king besides Caesar. It was a political problem that they got him in court, that they got him in the right position, tried him, and killed him. So Christianity, while many attempts have been made to make it look palatable, to make it look pretty and cute and peaceful in the society, it is radical. The beliefs of the gospel are radical against the ideas of men. The altars built by men, hewn up and stacked up all neatly, that say, this is the way we should live. It is radical. So it is against that that I will teach. And it is against that that the gospel comes and says, thus saith the Lord. So we start at the beginning. That was the introduction. The word of God in Genesis lays out the sequence of events of of creation. I'm not going to read all these scriptures, there are numerous ones on the paper, so we're going to move quickly until we get to some particulars. So in Genesis 1, we see all these things laid out. The creation in Romans 1.20 and Colossians 1.16, the creation is all that we see and know to be the seen and the unseen. This is all there is. God made it, the entire creation. He spoke it into existence. The seen and the unseen. The spiritual realm. The things we don't understand. All these things before the foundation of the world, God spoke into existence. God created all things and declared them to be good, the things that we see. God created man in his image, in his own image. We are like God in finite ways. We see with our eyes physically, and we see with our eyes spiritually, the mind's eye. You know, I see an idea, well I can't touch it and feel it. I see in that way, we describe those things with sight, a physical thing. We hear, we can hear a baby's cry and we can hear the Spirit of God in a still, quiet voice. We feel with our fingers, we feel with our emotions. We think as does God, though we think narrowly and incompletely. We are in many ways living a veiled world. We are His image makers. His eyes are upon, His marks are upon us. The image of God is upon us in the same way that your children's eyes might be yours in some way, or the shape of their ears, or their hair, or lack thereof, or all these things. We have the marks of God upon us both physically and spiritually. We are like Him. No other creature can claim it or attain to it. It is unique. And nothing else other than man is declared by God to have such an elevated position. We see in Hebrews 2, 5 and 9. We see in Psalm 144, 3. Please write these down if you're writing and review them later, because these are the basis of the statements I might make. That what is man that thou art mindful of him or the Son of Man? God placed him in a very special place. He placed us here for a purpose. And we as Christians hold Him to be sovereign in all things. He is above His own law. He is not subject to His own law. He is not subject to the physical laws that we are bound by. If I ram my head into that wall, it will hurt. But Jesus walked through one. He is not subject to those laws as we are subject to those laws. He is transcendent, he is otherly, he is seekable, he is findable, and he is knowable, though elusive and mysterious in his ways and doings. God is a spirit and we know him by his spirit that is in us. That would be in Romans 8, 1 and Romans 11. So over the next several weeks we'll explore, we'll seek to answer some more questions about God, which we find many more questions than answers in our souls as we mature, about ourselves and about our responsibility before God, before men, and before the created order. These specific areas, they're sometimes entitled Christian ethics, though I find that a little bit too confining. I think I was talking with one of the brothers last week that there is a danger in taking any subject that might have some biblical content and isolating that subject into an understandable system of its own without considering all of its tendrils. I think it challenges to try to codify Christian ethics. It challenges the warp and woof of what we are, what we're becoming, what we are before God. It puts it in some type of narrow academic shell that is impossible for us to understand completely because of this reason. We believe that God is a triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit. He's invisible in the persons, without distinction in the persons. God is one, yet three. And so are we. We're one, and we're three. Body, spirit, mind. Body, spirit, soul. I'm not sure how much science has advanced, as I am a student of science, but I don't believe they've separated those three yet, and still have what we would call a living soul. So we cannot separate. our spirit, our emotions, our mind, from this animated thing we call a body that seems to get us in some trouble sometimes, and which is the real fleshing out, no pun intended, of ethics in a society. When we think of ethics, it's mostly to do with behavior. But Jesus attacked revealed that it's not just behavior, it's that there's something that perceives behavior, and it's our thoughts and what we believe. Out of the heart, the mouth speaks. Out of the abundance of the heart, we do this or we do that. So we see If we try to get this down too narrow, we will confine ourselves as we try to ape out our imitation of God in life, the very God of the universe. So we say that God's sovereign decrees, beginning, God's sovereign decrees emanate from himself, from what he is. He is truth. You would agree. He is life. He is eternal. He is spirit. He is just. He is mercy. He is love. He does not merely demonstrate and model these things to us. He is those things. This is hard for us to wrap around, to get our minds wrapped around that God is love. That God is life. This is hard for us to grasp. But they're only understood, as in 1 Corinthians, these things are only understood by the spiritual man. The carnal man, the scripture says, understands nothing. Because this truth is spiritually discerned. So we have to ask God and pray God. He would give us a spirit of understanding. as we approach these things. These things demonstrate Him to our finite and clouded understanding, and they form the foundation from which all ethic flows. That is the foundation, that God has declared certain things to be so, and they are so. As much as men would dash their heads against the craggy shores of ideas and philosophies, as much as men would challenge those things in the mainstream media, as much as men would come up with ideas about how men should live, God's Word, the eternal Word of God, challenges those things and says, these will come to nothing. Because we as Christians believe that we are on a beeline We're on a beeline for one great event in eternity. It's not some circular thing that comes over and over and over, but we have an appointment with the God of the universe. It's a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful thing for the believer. In Colossians 1, 16 and 17, it says, For by Him were all things created that are in heaven and in earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and by Him all things consist. That's a big God, yes. That's a big God. A really big God. An infinitely big God. So in order to begin, that's the second introduction. In order to begin, we have three ideas, elementary assumptions for you to meditate and consider. One, the idea of sovereign work. God sets forth and sustains the principles of all things. That passage in Colossians 1 sets that out. All things. The physical visible universe as well as the invisible heavens. These include all parameters of what is good and evil, what is pure and impure, what is light, what is dark. So God would claim exclusive authority over His creation and the laws and commandments by which it is governed. This is a blessing for the Christian. This is a blessing for the true child of God. God claims these things, because in claiming these things, He claims us for His peculiar possession. So these we call the precepts or the laws of God. They are shadows or images of all that God is and expects. So by hearing, obeying, believing, internalizing, meditating upon, we're made wise unto salvation, in 2 Timothy 3.15. His laws, they're not arbitrary and fluid. They are exact and permanent. This is good in the day in which we live, where everything seems to be in flux, and changing, and expanding, and contracting, the things that are around us that weigh upon our physical existence, or our sense of well-being. If we are rooted and grounded, being an electrical guy, I understand the importance of proper grounding. And nothing works like you think it does in the electrical world if there is no proper grounding. Because that is the reference to which all things are measured. And that is the reference by which all things eventually pass through. The grounding. We are rooted and grounded in God. So this idea of sovereign order being exact and permanent, they are not contrary to our inner joy or outward contentment. God blesses and preserves His promise to do this to those who call on Him, those who walk in His ways, those who love and meditate on His laws. Psalm 55, 22. Psalm 9, 17. Micah 4, 2, and 3. This idea of sovereign order is foundational to an understanding of Christian ethics. The very idea of an ethic It requires permanence. It requires an unmoving standard by which to measure things and judge things and make determinations as to what we should or should not do. The second idea that is fundamental to an understanding of ethics from the scriptural perspective is the fall of man. The fall of man. The first man, Adam, created by God, created innocent. He fell from that original state in which God made him, with that capacity to fall. And that has passed on to all men, even today. It affects us. The evidences of the fallenness of the created order, the fallenness of men, the wickedness that surrounds us if we are such tuned to feel and sense those things, this is a big thing, the fall of man. In Genesis 2.17, Genesis 3.3, Hebrews 9.27, Job 30.23, So this is a second foundational issue to Christian ethics, is sin. Sin and its consequences. If standards, if ethics are fluid and movable, then we have no way to determine what sin is. What is right, what is wrong. There's a lot of aspects of death we could go into. Let me just quickly get into them. It's that Adam passed from life to death. No one else has done that. We did not do that. We were born dead spiritually. We have not passed from life to death. We never knew life before death. We only knew life after death. This is not a small thing, this is not a small idea, this fall of man. It permanently affected men. Now man is spiritually and morally dead. He is unable to do true good works without external pressure, force, laws, regulations to do that which is good. And none of these things that he can do under those parameters is of any eternal consequence. So, Adam's body still remained breathing, animated and useful, but God had declared him dead. He had passed out. The spiritual death came first, and years later his body died. When you think Adam was forever changed, his understanding was darkened. First example of his understanding being darkened. He decided he could hide from the living God. So he hid himself. That's pretty dumb. So his understanding was darkened. Now man finds himself in his understanding darkened. He's incapable of doing any true good. that which flows from an inner purity or an inner peace or an inner standard that is right. So we know that clean fountains produce clean water and dirty fountains produce varying degrees of less than clean water. So men are capable of some doing good things. Adam did divorce Eve. He went ahead and had some children, right? Probably provided for them. took care of others that came after. He lived a long time, so he saw a lot of people. He saw a lot of expansion of people in the earth. And he did this all to the benefits of the covering that his father had made for him. So we see that death, the idea of the fall of man, has affected us. And then the third idea for us to ponder in ethics is redemption. The idea of redemption, one, that God took upon Himself to remedy man's situation. God took it upon Himself. At the fullness of time, the Scripture says, when it was time to do it, when God says now, God Himself sent His Son, taking on flesh Jesus Christ, paid the penalty for sin, which was blood, In Adam we die, in Christ we live. Christ conquered the power of death and the resurrection. The bondage to it was broken. This is no small thing either. And the invitation goes out to all who believe, come and find life. This is the good news. God has made a way to himself. Matthew 1.23. Galatians 4.4, Matthew 11.28. The payment for sin by blood is at the core of Christian ethics. Without redemption, ethical behavior in a society is legal. Only legal. It's just a matter of, yeah, it's good or it's bad. The society decides. But after redemption, from the heart, from a regenerated heart and conscience, our ethical standards are derived in self-regulation, self-government, self-control, and selflessness. That is the core of the Christian ethic. It's a Hindu rite for the right reason. So these ideas will form the core of the foundation and the lens through which we'll focus in our ethics. The idea of sovereign order, the fall of man, and redemption. So do these three kind of show you the pattern of your own life and experience with God? Aren't we more cognizant every day that we are in control of nothing? And that there is God who is controlling and orchestrated and has predetermined all things because of the expanse and might of his infinite mind. It can be no other way. As one brother says, if there's a random molecule in the universe, God's not suffering. So there's the idea of randomness is pushed away in the Christian view of ethic. Doesn't this, this is our experience. Aren't we daily falling, failing, sinning, only to have God come along and say, confess your sins to me. And he lifts us up. The idea of him sovereignly acting, us falling, and him redeeming us and our time. We find this pattern in our own lives every day. So finally, there's some crags that we have to crawl through. This being a study of ethics is not, there is no, this is a disclaimer, there is no claim for it to be exhaustive. And there are many men whose minds are far superior to mine and whose understanding is far superior to mine that have traversed this world before, this idea before, and done very well. So, I do not challenge them. I only just say that there are a few things that we have to be careful of. One, men have a tendency to create idols. Substitute for the simple rigors of gospel demands. extra-biblical rules and standards that they are somehow amalgamated into some pattern of scriptural truth. The golden calves of ideas, philosophies, virtues, these are set up and held as moral equivalents to the Word of God. What say of the scripture? We have to ask ourselves. Point us back to the Word of God. What say of the scripture? Men tend to attempt to separate the secular from the sacred and attempt to exclude Christian ethics from social order. This reduces the scripture of the Christian belief system to an element of philosophy, a personal thing that one holds, a personal idea to be held quietly and let us not disturb the public conscience with our ideas and our thoughts. And our thus sayeth the Lord. But what sayeth the Scripture to those things? Third, men tend to compare themselves, their better parts, with the other God's worse parts. But there's a great inequity in this. The standard is the scripture, the standard is Christ. Let us, as men, in our ethic, compare our thoughts and ideas to the word of God, to the life of Jesus Christ, our Savior. So what sayeth the scripture? And another side of men is they tend to scoff at the scruples and the beliefs of others as legalistic or overzealous. Many times an attempt to soothe their own consciences. Let's not be judgmental of our brothers who God has maybe placed under a little stricter standard for whatever reason that we do not know in our study of Christian ethics. We have to ask, what sayeth the scripture? So in conclusion, there are five sections to this study. The reason there's five sections is because there's five weeks in October. It is not exhaustive. We could probably stand on this for a long time. But the first week was an overview of foundational understanding. You saw those pictures. The second week is going to be entitled, The Fear of God vs. The Fear of Man. The third week will be thou shalt not steal and just weights and measures. The fourth week, the prayers of the saints and deliverance from evil. And finally, we'll close it up and wrap it up with a section of entitled ethics and foresight. Question being, does our ethic give us understanding of what may be coming our way, and how, as the scripture says, a wise man sees the danger far off and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are punished. God has given us wisdom. He's given us His Word. This is a priceless treasure we find as our guide for Christian ethics. So let's pray. Our Father in God, we are thankful for your great and good mercies. They are new every day. They were as fresh this morning as they were when you first spoke the creation into existence. And we're thankful for that. We're thankful for the blood of Jesus Christ, which soothes our hardened conscience, which softens our hardened hearts. Oh God, open the eyes of our understanding. I hear your voice. Help us forsake that which is evil and cling to that which is good. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.