Word of Salvation Vol.48 No.3 – January 2003

 

The Pillar and Support of the Truth

 

Sermon by Rev. J. Rogers on 1Timothy 3:14-16

Scripture Reading:  1 Peter 2:1-10

 

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We all know that the Church is not really a building. The Church is the people of God themselves. Together they are the temple of the Holy Spirit where Christ lives in this world. As we read in 1 Peter 2:5, “You (plural), as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house, for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” So it is believers in the Lord Jesus Christ who are the real Church of God in this world.

But what is the purpose of the Church in this world? It could be, and actually it had better be first of all, what Peter speaks about in the text I just quoted: that we may “offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” And as Peter says further down, in verse 9, “that we may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called us out of darkness into His marvellous light.”

That is the first thing we, as Church in the world, must do. We are to gather together here Lord’s Day by Lord’s Day and worship God. We are to praise Him and give Him glory. We are to offer sacrifices of praise to God, “the fruit of lips that give thanks to his name,” as Hebrews 13 puts it. And that, congregation, is spiritual warfare of the first order. Don’t let anyone scoff at that, as people are sometimes inclined to do, as the waste of a good day.

For by our praise and our singing and our prayers we make known the manifold wisdom of God not only to people in this place, in this world, but to “the rulers and authorities in heavenly places” (Eph 3). By our worship we flaunt the victory of the living God over all His and our spiritual enemies, in particular, the devil. And the devil hates it. He cringes at it as he is reminded of his defeat at the cross and resurrection and of the lostness of his cause.

But it is the second main purpose for which Christ has established his Church in this world that I want to speak about this morning – that, as spoken of in our text in 1 Timothy 3. I want to pick up especially on that line that speaks of the Church of the living God as being “the pillar and support (or foundation, if you like) of the truth.”

It is rather a tall statement – that the Church is the pillar, the support and foundation of the truth. But that is what Paul says. Brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ, if there is going to be any truth about God in this world, then it will only be as the Church, the people of God, hold to it and believe it and proclaim it.

So, over against God then, we have an awesome task: to maintain His praise and honour and worship in the world. Over against our fellow men and women, we also have an awesome task: to uphold and proclaim the truth of God and the Gospel. I want to say three things about that today.

1. The church must speak the truth about God and the world

And here we need to say something very important straightaway. We live in what is often called the ‘post-modern’ world, in which not only do people not know the truth anymore, it is even denied that there is any such thing as truth. Or if there is, we cannot be sure we can know it. We can only have a perception about it. You will see or read or hear something and it will say something to you. I will see or read or hear the same thing and it may say something quite different to me. And who knows if it may not say something quite different to both of us tomorrow?

Congregation, that is completely foreign to the whole way the Bible speaks. Jesus said, “I am the truth.” I am ultimate reality in this world; I am the visible manifestation of the Word, the truth of God, in this world. And therefore, because I am the Word of God, anything I say is a correct statement of the reality of God and the world.

Furthermore, the Bible speaks as God’s Word, indeed the Word of Christ, to mankind. And as God speaks to us in his Word, He seems to speak as if He intends us to understand what He is saying. E.g., Jesus said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

This is basic Christian teaching. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved,” said Paul to the Philippian jailor in the book of Acts. To become a Christian and be saved requires that we know the truth about God and the world and ourselves and our sin and the saving power of Jesus Christ. But if it is not possible to know truth, then this whole business is a farce. The Bible is a farce and we should all just pack up, eat, drink and be merry because God, whoever He is, is just playing games with us.

But that is not the way the apostle Paul understood it. He said, referring to Jesus Christ, “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep my life safe against the day of judgment.” In other words, he believed, by his knowledge of the truth, that he was free of sin and judgment and death.

Congregation, there is such a thing as truth in the world and we may know it. And our problem with coming to know it is not intellectual, neither that we cannot understand it nor that God has not spoken clearly. Jesus said, “If any man is willing to do God’s will, he shall know of my teaching, whether it is of God” (John 7:17). But that is the problem, isn’t it? As the old prophet said, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way.” We want to do our own will; we want to live independently of God.

There is truth in the world and we may know it if we want to, if we are willing to accept God and live in obedience to Him. The problem is not, in the first instance, with the head. Nor is it with God’s Word. The problem is with our sinful hearts. The problem is moral.

In addition to all this, there is another important thing we have to say. There is, on any point of knowledge, only one truth. There are certainly different aspects to the truth. There are certainly different facets to the truth. But there is no such thing as truth for you and truth for me and three other truths for every other Tom, Dick and Harry.

The reason I say that is this. Our text says: it is the Church that is the pillar and ground of the truth in the world. And the Church is many people called together to be one body. Therefore, there is one truth and that one truth is known by many people. And so, therefore, when Paul starts to spell out some of what that truth is in a minute, he speaks of it as a “common confession.” We, many people, confess this body of truth in common, together. Paul doesn’t talk about your perception and my perception. He speaks about it as being sufficiently clear that we can all see and read it as saying the same thing. That actually is the literal meaning of the Greek word behind this phrase, “common confession”. It means, to say the same thing.

Now congregation, God has given us a mission as a Church in this world and that is to uphold this truth and be the foundation of this truth in the world.

“Ah! What is truth?”, Pilate asked Jesus. And he shrugged his shoulders and walked away. “I find no fault in this man”, he said four times. But because of political necessity and to save his own skin, he washed his hands and gave Him over to be crucified. Is that not the world we live and work in every day? What works is right. What feels good to me at this moment is right. And it is in politics and science and medicine and business and education – in everything. Isn’t that what all these big revelations in these large US businesses recently have been about? Can not news stories be made up because a message must be got across, a ‘higher’ truth than the facts of the case?

The world desperately needs the truth – and especially the truth about God Himself, and mankind. Our world is tossed about on a sea of relativism because it doesn’t believe there is any such thing as truth. And relativism leads inevitably to all that the world suffers today. It leads to breakdown and misery and suffering and despair and destruction. The Church must speak the truth about God and the world.

2. The church must speak the truth about itself

“…the Church of the living God (is) the pillar and support of the truth. And by common confession, great is the mystery of godliness…” A mystery, as Paul uses the word, is something that we would not have known unless God had revealed it to us, and He has revealed it to us. Essentially, the mystery of godliness is all those truths about Jesus Christ that Paul mentions in the rest of verse 16 (and which we’ll look at in a minute). It is what we believe in to become and be a Christian.

But what is the point of knowing these things? What is the point of knowing these truths that shall make us free? First of all, salvation, of course. “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep my life safe against the day of judgment.” But Paul speaks about it here in a different way. He calls it “the mystery of godliness”. Now godliness is god-likeness of behaviour and character. It is simply practical godly living.

People of God, why should the world believe our message if we don’t live according to it? If Christianity doesn’t make a difference in our lives, why should other people believe it will make any difference in theirs? We know that we will not be free of sin until Jesus comes again and brings our salvation to completion; that in this life, the work of God in our lives is only a beginning work. But there is to be a beginning, and a noticeable beginning!

There is to be a difference in us. We should be growing more and more, stumblingly and slowly for sure, but nevertheless truly, growing more like our Master day by day. Although we are saved by our knowledge of the truth, this is not just an intellectual exercise. Much less is it some sort of spiritual escape, a spiritual-mystical ecstasy trip. It is to make a real practical difference in our lives. And when we do fall into sin, the first thing we will do is be straightforward about it. We will not cover it up. We will confess it and immediately work to put it right and seek forgiveness. In other words, let’s be real people and acknowledge our faults. And let’s be real Christians and grow more like our Father in heaven.

There is one other aspect about this. We need to be prepared to put our necks on the line. Our world is, in many ways, becoming increasingly like the Roman world in which Christianity was first planted. How did Christianity win out over all the other religions that were around in its day and which also said that truth was only relative, if it could be known at all? How did Christianity win out in that great three-century long battle against the Roman Empire? When Nero used to cover Christians with tar and hoist them up on poles and lit them for lampposts for his evening garden parties? When numerous others suffered all sorts of brutal torture – fire, wild beasts in the arena, and so forth? Yet they died with praises on their lips?

Christianity won because in the face of such torture, they still refused to worship the emperor. When given the choice, they simply said, in the words of Justin Martyr, “No one who is right-minded turns from true belief to the false.” And all the emperors, Marcus Aurelius, along with all the others, could do was rant and rage, because, while philosophers all around him spoke beautiful words about the art of dying, almost only these Christians knew how to die.

It sounds like our world, doesn’t it? This great gap between talk and walk? Never has there been more talk about ethics, and every profession has its code of ethics. Never has there been such unethical and immoral behaviour, and all the world knows it.

Professor Ethelbert Stauffer has said, “A Church which took the truth so seriously in a relativising age was bound (to win out against the other philosophies and religions of the day. And so it also) became the refuge of the spirit and the nursery of learning… And the oldest university in the world was founded by the Church.”

Well, education is another subject. But we have a mission. To be the testimony to the truth in this world – the truth of God which alone can make men and women free. But the world will only believe us when we take it that seriously ourselves. When we tell the truth about our own failings and sins and seek to put them right in open honesty. And when, if called to do so, we are willing to suffer for the truth. And many of our brothers and sisters in many parts of the world are doing so still today – as bloodily and gruesomely as in the days of Rome.

3. The church must speak the truth about Jesus Christ

There is such a thing as truth in this world that may be grasped and understood by mankind. That truth has been committed as a sacred trust to the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. We must live it. And, if necessary, we must die for it.

And when called upon to do so, Christians have been able to do that because it is a truth about everlasting life, life beyond death. A truth bringing freedom from death and therefore the fear of death. The great Athanasius says, “When you see men naturally weak hastening to death, unafraid at the prospect of corruption, fearless of the descent in Hades, even indeed with eager soul provoking it, not shrinking from tortures, but preferring thus to rush on death for Christ’s sake, rather than remain in this present life? …if you see with your own eyes men and women and children, even, thus welcoming death for the sake of Christ’s religion, how can you be so utterly silly and incredulous and maimed in your mind as not to realise that Christ, to whom these all bear witness, Himself gives the victory to each, making death completely powerless for those who hold his faith … doubt no longer, then, when you see death mocked and scorned by those who believe in Christ, that by Christ death was destroyed, and the corruption that goes with it resolved and brought to end.”

That is the truth about Jesus Christ that the world so desperately needs and which we must boldly proclaim.

What is it again? “The mystery of godliness is: He who was revealed in the flesh, was vindicated in the Spirit, beheld by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.”

Well it sounds very nice, but what does it mean? Briefly, this:

Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of the living God who is spirit and therefore no man can see. But Jesus of Nazareth, an ordinary man in human flesh, was the revelation of that eternal Son of God to the world. And the Son of God was revealed to the world in human flesh for a particular reason – to die on the cross of Calvary bearing the punishment of the sins of the world. And so He did at the hands of Jew and Gentile, the whole human race.

That He rose again from the dead proved He did not die for His own sins, but was a perfect man who died for others’ sins. That God raised Him from the dead in the Spirit, or by the Spirit we might better say, was God’s declaration to the world of his Son’s personal righteousness. It was His vindication.

He was then beheld, or seen, by angels. The angels witnessed His ascension into heaven as the reward of His work and suffering on the cross. Thus He was taken up into glory. After that, in obedience to His last command, the disciples went out and proclaimed his Gospel among all the nations of mankind and so He was believed on in the world.

And what is this Gospel that was proclaimed and believed in the world? Simply that this man, Jesus of Nazareth, was God’s eternal Son, come into the world to bear the punishment for our sins by dying on the cross and rising again from the dead to give us new life. A life free from the binding, the crippling power of sin – even though not completely yet. An eternal life which frees us from the fear of death in this world.

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, that is the truth of God that is set out straightforwardly in the Bible; and which we as the Church must uphold and support in this world. And it is set out in a book claiming to be the Word of God Himself with the clear intention that we should be able to understand it and receive it with a common understanding of it.

Let us own it ourselves. Let us be quite straightforward about sin – our own sin especially. We are not here because we have any righteousness in ourselves. We are here only because we are acknowledged sinners. So when we fall, let us not cover it up. Let us just confess it again and get up and carry on with the struggle in the truth that has freed us from the binding power of sin. And let the rest of us help the others with a particular struggle today because it might be us needing their help tomorrow.

And congregation, in a world sinking in a sea of relativism. – no, a sea would be too good, too clean; it is a mire and filth of relativism – the world has no idea of truth anymore. So much so, it does not even believe there is such a thing. And, consequently, it has no idea of what is right or wrong anymore. Your money is not safe in the hands of your lawyer anymore. A woman is not safe in the hands of her doctor anymore, or at the local police station. Your children are not safe with their school teachers anymore and maybe, we shudder, not at Sunday School either! They are not safe in their own homes. And they are not safe in their mothers’ wombs.

Why? Because the very idea of truth, ultimate truth, understandable truth, absolute truth, saving truth is not believed anymore. If we, the Church, do not uphold it, the world has become hell.

People of God, that is what the Lord has established his Church for in the world. To praise His great and glorious name. To flaunt Christ’s victory in the devil’s face every Lord’s Day again. And to bring this wonderful, saving, freeing, life-giving truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a world lost in ignorance and darkness and sin and misery so that it might be saved! That it too might join with us in singing our Lord’s praises for all eternity. So that others too may know some of the joy of heaven even now, in this life, on this earth. May God help us.

Amen.