There are numerous similarities between St. Paul’s epistles to the Romans and the Galatians. In the 5th chapter of Galatians he discusses this same issue. He writes, “Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, 20 idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, 21 envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Here he catalogs “works of the flesh” which would be equal to the “deeds of the body” from Romans. Then he contrasts a life according to the flesh with a life according to the Spirit: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. 24 And those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.”

Some of the Church Fathers had some excellent insights on contrasting the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit. Here is one description as to how this might work in the Christian life. Love is a fruit of the Spirit but hate is a work of the flesh. Therefore, when hatred springs up in you, you are reminded by the Spirit that you are commanded by God to love your neighbor. To walk according to the Spirit would be to love rather than hate. Peace is a fruit of the Spirit but dissension or discord is a deed of the flesh. Therefore, one who is led by the Spirit will seek to walk in peace rather than in discord. Each of the works of the flesh has a contrasting fruit of the Spirit. The one who walks according to the Spirit will live; the one who walks according to the flesh will die.

As Christians, we cannot continue to live a life characterized by sin. If the Spirit of God dwells in us He will “drive us into the wilderness” to engage the flesh. The Spirit equips us to engage in this battle and to overcome the power of the flesh. Just think about the metaphor that is used here to describe this—he says that we are to “put to death” the deeds of the body.” This should impress upon us that sin is not to be tolerated in our lives. What would help us is if we would learn to hate sins as much as God does. The problem with us is that our tendency is to minimize our sins. We love saying things like, “I’m only human;” or, “at least I am not as bed as old so and so is.” We will begin to hate sin when we see how destructive it has been in our lives and in the lives of those whom we love. We can grow in our hatred of sin by meditating on Jesus Christ—the perfect Son of God, bearing our sins upon the cross. May we grow in our hatred of sin and in our love of righteousness.

A true church, one marked by Truth, is clear as to authority, theology, priorities, and lifestyle.
A) Authority comes from the Word of God. On the basis of the Word of God, what does the Lord want for the church today?
I Kings 18. The church cannot waver between 2 opinions.
Romans 3:4.
B) Theology is derived from the Authority of Scripture.
C) Priorities must be distinct from those of the world. The preaching of Christ crucified, risen and coming again is to be our number one priority. When hearts are changed by the operation of the Holy Spirit, then the social ills of society will be rectified.
D) Lifestyle must be in accord with the Word of God.

In all this, the one thing that really stands out in Jacob is his faith. God wasn't the distant “Man Upstairs” for Jacob. Jacob has a real sense of God's presence with him – a great enough sense that he lived by God's promises. His faith didn't grow up overnight. He had to learn a lot of things the hard way, but through it all God had made himself real to this man and now we see him in close fellowship with his saviour. He was able to rest his heart on what God had done for him, and knowing that God had worked in the past, he could just as easily rest on what God had promised him for the future. Faith is always founded on the Word of God, and faith always finds its nourishment, its encouragement, its inspiration, and its power in that Word. The believer who can put his trust in God is someone who has learned that God can be trusted because he embodies perfect truth and speaks perfect truth. The only response we can give to that divine faithfulness is our own faith. Like St. Paul, Jacob was able to live confidently saying, “I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told” (Acts 27:25).

When Jacob blessed Joseph and his sons, he described a God who was everything to him: “The God before whom my fathers walked,” “the God who has led me all my life long,” and “the angel who has redeemed me from all evil.” Jacob was truly grateful for what God had done for him. Sometimes he forgot, just we do. When he stood before Pharaoh he described his days as “few and evil.” But here he remembered the blessings and he reminded his son of God's grace. When we're walking through hard times it's easy to forget that God's still at work. We forget that he's holding us in his hands, because all we see are the difficulties he's allowing us to experience – we can't see the even greater trials and tribulations we could be going through because his divine hands are shielding us from them. We need to remember that his hands are there all the time. Even though we may not see them now, God has a funny way of showing us things in retrospect when it's all over and done, and then we can look back and see what he was doing. We need to get into the practice of showing our gratitude during the hard times, knowing that when he tells us he will keep and care for us that he's telling us the truth.

It was Jacob's faith that allowed him to move beyond the present and put his hope in the future. God had worked in his life in order to make himself real to Jacob, but his ultimate purpose wasn't just to give Jacob temporal blessings. God's purpose was to give him a reason, based on what he was doing now, to believe that what he promised for the future would be done. Jacob's faith gave him hope enough to tell Joseph, “I am about to die, but God will be with you, and will bring you again to the land of your fathers.” Hope is at the centre of the Christian life just as much as faith is. St. Paul reminds us that faith and hope are linked together. Faith directs our eyes upward, but hope makes us look onward. Faith accepts, hope expects. Faith is interested in what is promised now, hope is interested in what it is that is promised. Faith appropriates, hope anticipates. Faith is always occupied with the past and the present, hope lives for the future. The Christian life can never be lived fully if our faith doesn't lead us to hope.

If you are not a Christian, you are according to God’s definition a sinful rebel who needs to experience God’s salvation through the work of Christ on the cross. It might be that your life is ticking along just fine and that you would say that there is no mess, no difficulty. In some ways I am glad, I wouldn’t want to wish bad things upon you. But on the other hand if your life is a mess and falling apart it is probably a sign of God’s grace and mercy. He is prepared to stop you in your tracks, bring you to your senses, help you realise your need of him before it is too late. As Jonah rightly says “Salvation comes from the Lord” (2:9) and his salvation is offered to you today through Jesus.

If you are a Christian but are currently living as a rebel in some way, it is again possible that God has brought you to a place where his judgement on your sin is obvious. Your salvation is secure because of Christ, but God has given you over to the consequences of your sin in a particular area and you have yet to turn back to God and call for help. In Jonah’s experience it doesn’t take a lot of movement on your part for God to exercise a great deal of saving action. The prodigal son walks back along the road and the father runs to great him (Luke 15:20).

Perhaps for instance you are in a bad way spiritually at the moment because you have been pursuing a career at the expense of your church involvement. Perhaps you are in a bad way because you have not been following God’s will for sex within marriage. Perhaps you are in a bad way because you have been stealing and have been found out. Perhaps you are in a mess because a small amount of sin has been having its corrosive influence on the whole of you’re being.

Again I am not talking about the situation when we go through bad times because our world is affected by sin. I am talking specifically about the times when you and I experience the consequences of a specific sin that we have persisted in, in rebellion against God, and therefore experience his judgement. The right response in such a situation is the response that Jonah makes in a very limited way – to come to your senses and turn to God to save you. You need to know that God still loves you, he has not given up on you, he wants you to turn back to him. God is gracious and compassionate – quick to respond.

But you know, I also need to emphasise that God does not always rescue us from the consequences of our sin. God did take Jonah out of the water, but he probably smelt awful for weeks. You can imagine him stinking of fish and seaweed for months. Even as he walked up and down the streets of Nineveh he was maybe trying to get the water out of his ears. It is not that God always delivers us from the consequences of our rebellion – whether that is the broken relationships, the health implications, the general fall out. God didn’t make it as if Jonah had never been in a storm or swallowed by a fish. There were still consequences of his past rebellion, but God did help him to get back into relationship with himself.

I suppose though as I finish, the challenge that I want to leave you with is to go a step further than Jonah. Simply realising that you are in a difficult situation and crying for help is not quite the same as having a heart transformation. Jonah’s heart was still rebellious. What you and I need is the ongoing transforming work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We trust in Christ for the forgiveness of our sins and to rescue us from our rebellious ways. And God does rescue us because he is the God who saves. But we need more than just a rescue. You and I need a transformation.

Transformation requires true repentance, a deep understanding of why our particular rebellion was so much against God’s will, and a persistent longing to go God’s way and not our own way. Perhaps you have been rescued, but are you truly penitent? Do you understand why you are at fault? Is sin abhorrent to you?

The prophet Ezekiel speaks of God putting a new heart in to his people – a heart of flesh rather than a heart of stone. The promise is of God putting his Spirit in his people and moving them to follow his decrees and carefully keep his laws (Ezek 36:26-27). That is what we need and what you and I need to pray for.

What Is Propitiation?

The phrase "atoning sacrifice" in 1 John 2:2 in the New International Version is an interpretation, not a translation. The Greek word is hilasmos, which the King James Version translates correctly with the word "propitiation." But what is propitiation? What is this hilasmos that we read about in 1 John 2:2 and also in 1 John 4:10? Most people today are not familiar with this word, which comes to us from the language of ancient religious practices.

There are a number of words that describe our salvation. One is redemption, which comes to us from the world of commerce—of buying and selling. The second word is justification, which comes to us from the world of law and the courts. Then there is propitiation, which comes from the sacrificial system found in the ancient religious world.

In the Greek, the word "to propitiate" is hilaskomai, which means to appease, to placate, to avert, to turn aside the wrath of an offended person by means of a sacrifice. Four things are involved in propitiation: First, there is an offended deity; second, an offending sinner; third, the offense committed; and fourth, the sacrifice which removes the offense and causes the offended person to be gracious to the one who offended him. Salvation, in the Christian sense of the term, requires one very definite type of sacrifice, namely, propitiation. It is directed toward God to turn away his wrath, which is revealed against our offense, that he may be gracious to us.

Throughout the Bible, and especially in 1 John, we find two descriptions of God, two foci on the nature of God. First, in 1 John 1:5, we read that God is light; second, in 1 John 4, we read that God is love. Both of these are important aspects of God's nature, but of first importance is the truth that God is light. That means God is truth and God is holy and there is no sin in him.

What is sin? Sin is transgression of God's law. Sin dishonors and offends God. Sin is against God's person and glory. What is God's reaction to sin? The Bible clearly tells us the wrath of God is revealed against sinners. "The soul who sins is the one who will die," we read in Ezekiel 18. "The wages of sin is death," Paul wrote to the Roman church.

Thus, if sinners are to be saved from God's wrath, there has to be a propitiatory sacrifice. Propitiation means a sacrifice offered to God to turn his wrath away from a sinner to a substitute. The purpose of it is that God may be gracious to the sinner by forgiving his sins and restoring him to fellowship with God and others.

A Wrathful God

For the past century and a half, the idea of a God who is wrathful and opposes sin and sinners has not been accepted by unbelieving theologians. They readily will choose the conception of God as love but want to forget about the idea that God is holy. The notion of an angry God, they say, is not Christian, but pagan. They say the God of Christianity, in their highly evolved conception of it, is always a loving, nice God. When they translate the Greek word hilasmos, as found in 1 John 2:2 and 4:10, they reject the word "propitiation," preferring to use the word "expiation," which has to do with the cancellation of sin, but has nothing to do with a sacrifice offered to God to turn away his wrath.

Expiation means that God has canceled our sin and now there is nothing to worry about, but it is not the same as propitiation. One scholar wrote, "Those who hold to the 'fire and brimstone' school of theology, who revel in ideas such as that Christ was made a sacrifice to appease an angry God, or that the cross was a legal transaction in which an innocent victim was made to pay the penalty for the crimes of others as a propitiation of a stern God, find no support in Paul. These notions came into Christian theology by way of the legalistic minds of the medieval churchmen." We must ask: If Christ's death on the cross was not propitiation, if this sacrifice was not offered to God to turn away his wrath that he may be gracious to us and forgive us our sins and restore us into his fellowship, if the liberals are right that God is love all the time and never angry at sinners, then what is the need for Christ's death even as expiation? It is doing nothing to God. Why doesn't God, being nice and loving, just forgive our sins almost automatically whenever we commit them?

The only problem with these theologians is that these ideas are wrong and unscriptural. When we study the Bible, we discover that the Old Testament alone uses this idea of wrath about 580 times. When we read about the great flood in Genesis, we see that because of the tremendous amount of violence on the earth, God destroyed all but eight people. In Genesis 19 we read about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Again, this happened because of sin. In Exodus we read about the plagues God sent on Egypt. The Old Testament is full of sin and full of the wrath of the Lord being revealed against sin.

But we also find the idea of the wrath of God pervading the New Testament. For instance, in John 3:36 we read, "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him." In Romans 1:18 we read, "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all godlessness and wickedness of men, who suppress the truth by their wickedness."

In Hebrews 10:30-31 we find another reference to the wrath of God: "For we know him who said, 'It is mine to avenge; I will repay,' and again, 'The Lord will judge his people.' It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God," and in Hebrews 12:28-29 we read, "Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful and so worship God acceptably, with reverence and awe, for our 'God is a consuming fire.'"

The truth is, God is holy, and we cannot willy-nilly reject the revelation of this perfection of God in favor of another perfection called love. God has a settled opposition to all evil. He is not arbitrary, capricious, or vacillating. It is the nature of God to oppose evil.

To understand this book you have to understand four things about its teaching on God. First, God is, verse 9:

"the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land."

He is the creator of the universe; so, of course, he can work miracles. Yes, this universe is orderly - Genesis 8.22:

"As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease."

That is why science is possible as the rational examination of an orderly world. But modern science with its experimental principle evolved against a Christian world view where order and regularity is normal but miracle or the irregular is possible.

Of course, in the world's mythologies and religions there are all sorts of fake miracles, many of which are quite bizarre. And sadly in the history of the church there have been (and no doubt still are) claims to "fake" miracles. But the fact that there are fakes presupposes the real. You have a fake picture because there is a genuine painting. To reject fake miracles is right. To reject true miracles is wrong and foolish. So what is believable simply depends on the facts. And a Christian believer is someone who believes the historical fact of the miracle beyond all miracles - the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Romans 10.9 says:

"if you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."

If the Resurrection happened, all else is possible. And the evidence is that the Resurrection did happen. You cannot read the Bible without seeing that the God of the Bible is a miracle-working God. But he is not a God of the "bizarre miracles" you read in some mythologies or other pagan literature. His miracles are completely in line with his character and purposes. So Jonah's God is a miracle working God.

Secondly, Jonah's God is a moral God who reveals his moral will. Look at verses 1 and 2:

"The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: 'Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.'"

God hates wickedness. And Nineveh, the great city of the Assyrian Empire, was anti-God and proverbial for violence and cruelty; sexual immorality and the occult; and ruthless greed (you read about that in the Old Testament book of Nahum, especially chapter 3). And Jonah was called to denounce all this. For God did and does and will bring judgment on those who are violent, sexually immoral, involved in the occult or are ruthlessly greedy. So all this is relevant for today.

Why should this country escape God's judgment - with its violence and sexual immorality (now promoted by the Government and even some in the church), with its occult (now allowed in our prisons and the armed forces allowing even satanism), and with the increase of ruthless greed.

But, thirdly, God is a also a God of mercy and forgiveness who wants people to repent. The provision of the great fish to save Jonah was a sign of God's mercy to Jonah for his sin. And in chapters 3 and 4 you read about God's mercy to the people of Nineveh when they repented. Chapter 4 verse 2 says:

""you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity."

Fourthly, Jonah's God uses people to reveal both his judgment and mercy. Supremely he used the person of Jesus Christ - the second person of the Trinity - his divine Son who came in human form. But God also used Old Testament prophets like Jonah and New Testament Apostles, like the Twelve and Paul. And God now uses the Church - and so you and me. That is why Jonah is so relevant to us all. That is why we need to understand Jonah's God, who is the creator God and the God of miracles; he is also a moral God who hates and judges wickedness; but he is a God of mercy and wants people to repent. And he uses people like us to communicate his judgments and mercy.

Outward conformity to rules is legalism, not holiness. It promotes salvation by works, justification by my behavior. True holiness is always God-directed, God-centered, God-focused, God-oriented. What does it mean to be a saint? To be sanctified? A saint is one who has been saved by grace, through faith in Christ. The saints are “the called out ones.” Those who make up the Body of Christ. To sanctify is to set apart for a holy use and that use is to live a life of holiness before a watching, sinful world.

What is Biblical preaching? Biblical preaching seeks to convey the Word of God rather than the words of men. To be truly Biblical preaching must be driven by the text. This means that our preachers need to avoid using Scripture as a pretext. All too often preachers determine what it is that they want to say in advance and then bring Scripture into the sermon to support their topic. Topical preaching isn't always a bad thing, in fact the lectionary is arranged thematically, but the preacher needs to address topical or thematic preaching with great caution to ensure that Scripture is the focus of the sermon.

Our preachers need to take St. Paul's charge to Timothy and make it their own. Charles Simeon, the great 19th Century preacher did just this. In his introduction to Evangelical Peaching, an anthology of Simeon's sermons, John Stott writes of the great preacher:

“His over-riding concern was so to expound Scripture that his congregation would receive it undiluted and uncontaminated by worldly wisdom. To him “Biblical exposition” meant opening up some part of Scripture so that the people could feed upon it. 'My endeavour,' he wrote to his publisher, 'is to bring out of Scripture what is there, and not to thrust in what I think might be there. I have a great jealousy on this head: never to speak more or less than I believe to be the mind of the Spirit in the passage I am expounding.' Those words seem to me to be the clearest statement ever made of the expositor’s goal. Would that more Preachers could wholeheartedly echo and endorse it today!” (p. xxxiii)

In fact, Simeon established a test and insisted it be applied to his own work. In capital letters he wrote in the preface to Horae Homileticae, “Does it uniformly tend TO HUMBLE THE SINNER? TO EXALT THE SAVIOUR? TO PROMOTE HOLINESS? If in any one instance it loses sight of any of these points, let it be condemned without mercy” (p. xxi). Preachers need to understand that to preach is to communicate God's inspired text faithfully so that God's voice is heard and his people understand and obey. Simeon was right in condemning any sermon, even his own, that failed to faithfully communicate God's own Word. Every sermon must communicate the holiness of God, the sinfulness of man, and the mercy of our Saviour and move us to greater spiritual maturity and holy living. This is the clear agenda of Scripture itself. The preacher's agenda is to communicate the same.

That brings us to our temptation in the wilderness. If you think about the Christian life within the grand picture of the Exodus, you will see that we have not arrived in the Promised Land yet. The Christian life begins with our own personal exodus as we pass through the waters of baptism—being united with our Lord Jesus. We are given God’s Word as our guide and we are fed with the Bread of heaven—the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ. But we are on a journey through the wilderness. This world is a wilderness. It is a place where the devil continues to roam. His future doom is secured, but for some reason, in the providence of God, he is allowed to continue roaming the earth where he would seek to devour us.

Our life in this world as Christians includes testing similar to what the Israelites went through during those forty years. It is through this period of testing that God wants to prove us and purify us. He is continually working in us to make us fit for heaven. To put it another way, the path to the Promised Land (in this case, heaven), leads right through the wilderness. And in this wilderness, there are dangers, toils and snares.

As the pilgrim Church which is traveling through the wilderness, I would like to point out two lessons for us to take with us on the journey. First, we need to remember that Christ is with us in the wilderness. Before He ascended into heaven, He told his disciples “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” To know that Christ is with us should encourage us because He has already walked this path. He has shown us the way we are to walk. But if we are going to follow Him, it is going to be the way of the cross. He said, “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me.” Following Jesus is going to involve sacrifice and suffering. It means entering into His battle with the devil. The devil sought to defeat Him and he will also seek to defeat us if we are following Him. If we were left on our own in this battle, we would be in trouble. But as Luther said in his famous hymn, we have “the right Man on our side—the Man of God’s own choosing.”

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