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A follower of Jesus

ignorance

2 Corinthians 4 – Teaching #3: The Gospel of Christ (pt2 of 3)

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Sin makes us crave darkness. It produces ignorance because we think we know something because our minds are puffed up with pieces of knowledge. Yet, all we have are vague approximations. Opinions. Our knowledge is piecemeal. It’s full of holes. We see dim outlines on the walls of a cave. Because we don’t have the true light, we lack true knowledge that only comes from being in the light.

3) Third, sin causes us to pursue self-glory.

It just dawned on me this past week that you could divide human life into 2 major stages. The first stage is education. Knowledge acquisition. You go to school from pre-kindergarten to senior year in high school, then college, then grad school. Many of you here are still in stage 1 of your life and you’ve been learning for the past 22, 26, add a residency or an internship or a post-doc and you have spent nearly 30 years or more on education. Then you get your degree. Now what? Stage 2 of life is the pursuit of glory.

Back in the day, great empires increased their storehouses of knowledge. They learned how to acquire wealth. They learned how to build impressive structures and how to build strong militaries so that they could conquer other weaker nations. So that the glory of the emperor, or the dictator or the empire could expand. This is where we get the expression, they lived for the glory or grandeur of Rome.

What will you do with your education? Well, in a sense, you will use it to glorify yourself. You will use your education to get a job with a fancy title. So that you can receive approval from your clan. And respect and admiration from everyone else. So that you can look yourself in the mirror and be proud of yourself. Look at who I’ve become. We may not be conquering territories to expand the glory of an empire, but don’t we want to excel and push out others from the spotlight and carve out a little corner of the universe where we can be glorified? After 30 years of education, we spend the second half of our lives, the next 30, 40, years or whenever we are forced to retire, living for self-glory.

You might be an academic purist who says, I am like Plato. I pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. I’m not in it for glory. Test yourself. If you don’t become a professor because God closes the door and you are seeking His glory and not your own, then not becoming a professor would not be the end of the world. Failure in whatever pursuit in your career would not be the end of the world. Unless you were really in it for your glory and not God’s glory.

Test yourself. Would you seek to advance knowledge in your tiny field of expertise if you were alone on an island and there was no university to grant you a degree? Would you pursue a PhD if a PhD was valued in this country as little as we value our elementary school teachers? Would you pursue a career in medicine or law or investment banking if those were not lucrative careers? If you are honest, I would bet that there is some degree of self-glory in most of our vocational pursuits.

Because we acquire knowledge, our minds get puffed up, we become proud and we end up seeking self-glory. What’s worse, this pride and glory seeking is not limited to secular endeavors. Spiritual pride among Christians and esp. Christian leaders happens to the great detriment of the church and it stains our witness to the world. Spiritual pride must be one of the most offensive things to God when we can look at another brother or sister at our church or at another church and think we are better or we are doing it right and they are not.

This is the whole reason why Paul is writing this letter in the first place. He has been placed in the uncomfortable position of defending his apostleship before false teachers who have strayed from the gospel, but are too blind to see it, and yet, they are confident enough in themselves to be judgmental toward Paul.

Paul calls out the false teachers in 2 Cor 4:5–

2 Cor 4
5 For we are not proclaiming ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your slaves because of Jesus.

Instead of preaching Christ, they are proclaiming themselves. This is self-glory at its worst. The leaders have made themselves the center of attention. If the leaders here ever begin to take center stage and you begin hearing more about how the members are more thankful to me or to the leadership than Jesus Christ and the leaders here don’t do anything to stop it, then we risk falling victim to the sin of spiritual pride. We need to keep the gospel at the center and Jesus as our focus.

But while we may preach Christ in our messages, what are some warning signs that can indicate a departure from Jesus and a moving toward man-centeredness or self-centeredness or self-glory? Besides being more thankful for the leaders than Jesus, let’s turn to 2 Cor 11:19-20 to discern more warning signs. READ.

Another sign that a community has moved away from Christ and toward human leaders is feeling enslaved. If a Christian leader seeks self-glory, the members of the congregation will feel enslaved because they have to work really hard in order to feed the ego of their leader. You should never do anything in the church out of guilt or fear. Never. Christ came to set us free, not to put us into bondage. You should obey God because you want to please Him. You should obey because you love God, not because someone is pressuring you to do something.

The rest of the warnings signs are similar. You should never feel devoured or captured or dominated by a mere man or woman. I hope no church leader ever hits you in the face, as it sounds like fists were thrown at Corinth, or else, why would Paul mention it? But sometimes our words can inflict more damage than a fist. Sometimes we are chewed out by our boss because we messed up and we feel like we have been devoured by his rage and ripped apart by his words. And because of that kind of encounter, we are captured, we are dominated by his authority because if we mess up again, we are out. We are out of a job or out of a program. We are enslaved. This happens in the world and that’s understandable because the world is led by the god of this age, Satan. But may it never be in the household of God. As Christians, may we never lord it over one another. Pursuing self-glory in the church or in ministry will leave the congregation in a state of bondage.

We have just covered the first half of the main thesis. If sin makes us crave darkness, produces ignorance and causes us to pursue self-glory, then what does the gospel accomplish? It accomplishes the complete reverse. Now we are ready to tackle the second half of the main thesis: The gospel shines light, illumines minds and frees us to pursue the glory of God.

4) The gospel shines light.

Key verse: 2 Cor 4
6 For God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ.

Commit this verse to memory. Here, Paul is quoting from the first chapter in Genesis. The universe had a beginning. It had to be created. Prior to the universe, there was nothing. Not sure what it looked like. Just blank nothingness. Only God existed. Nothing else. Until God created the universe, he created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, darkness covered the surface of the watery depths and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

Please turn with me to John 1:1-5. Listen to John’s version of the creation account. READ.

In the beginning, it wasn’t just God the Father creating, it wasn’t just God the Spirit hovering over the waters, in the beginning was the Word. Who was the Word? God the Son, Jesus Christ was there as well. God said, let there be light and there was light.

In John’s gospel, John mentions light and life and truth over and over again. In John 1, Jesus was the Word and life was in him and that life was the light of men. In John 8, Jesus says, I am the light of the world. Light vs. darkness is a recurring theme in John’s gospel. The light came into the world. Yet the darkness did not understand it, but another translation is, the light came into the world, yet the darkness did not overcome it. The darkness did not overcome the light.

This translation is important because darkness cannot overcome the light. There is much darkness in the world. But even a small flicker of light will conquer darkness every time. Even in a pitch black cave, a tiny flicker will roll back the darkness. Actually, as the darkness grows and becomes darker and darker, even pitch black, the light, even a tiny, tiny amount of light will seem much brighter. Because there is a high degree of contrast. If things are only slightly dark like at dusk and there is still some amount of sunlight peeking over the horizon and you pull out a flashlight with a weak bulb, then the light will not seem that bright because there is not much contrast. But in a world like ours with pitch black darkness, even the light from a flashlight with a weak bulb will shine brilliantly.

I know this is a bit elementary for most of us here, but kids, listen up. I want to teach you how light works. Did you know that the orange fruit has no color? You might be thinking, really? Really. Try this at home – go home and get an orange and turn the lights off. What color is it? Orange? No, it will be black. Orange as a color is not inherent in the fruit. Orange is orange only when the light is on. Colors belong not to things or objects. Colors are not inherent in objects. Colors are found in light. Light hits the surface of an object and it reflects some colors and absorbs all the others. We perceive only the reflected colors.

Last week, we talked about the old covenant of Moses. If you recall, Moses in the book of Exodus would go to the top of Mt Sinai and commune with God. Then, he’d descend the mountain and Moses’ face was shining so brightly that the people asked Moses to put on a veil. People saw Moses’ countenance and they saw glory. He was glorious. Like the orange which has no color orange in it, Moses did not shine because he had any intrinsic glory. He was shining with a reflected glory. There was no source of glory within himself.

Jesus, on the other hand, has intrinsic, internal glory. Glory is who He is. When Jesus is on the Mount of Transfiguration, the deity of Christ burst through the veil of his humanity. Isaiah prophesied that people who are walking in darkness have seen a great light. That great light has come in the person of Jesus. When Paul witnesses the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, he was blinded by a flash of light from heaven. Jesus is the light of the world. He is the complete antithesis of darkness.

In the first book of the Bible, Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, empty, void, darkness was over the face of the earth. There was nothing but formlessness and chaos. Formlessness, emptiness, darkness–these are negative, ominous words in our vocabulary. The very first act of God after he created the heavens and the earth, God says, let there be light. Instantly, the light came on. The very first act in creation was bringing light to a universe filled with darkness.

In the last book of the Bible, Revelation, John describes the vision he received on the island of Patmos of the new heavens and the earth.

Please turn with me to Rev 21:22-27. READ.

John describes the interior of the Holy City. There will be no external light source needed. No sun. Because the glory of God and the Son of God, the presence of God radiates light constantly. The glory of God and the blazing purity and brightness of God and the Lamb comes to us in the form of light and provides light for the Holy City.

Back to our key verse, 2 Cor 4:6–

6 For God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the LIGHT…

When you hear salvation testimonies, like the one we heard today from Brother Matt, you will hear Christians share about the moment when they’ve seen the light. Previously, they had been blinded to the things of God. They lived in darkness and engaged in shameful things in secret. Religion seemed unnecessary, irrational, fanatical. Then, all of a sudden, when you see the light, your eyes are opened, you see the glory of God and everything changes. You see what you never saw before. The gospel shines light into darkness.

2 Corinthians 4 – Teaching #3: The Gospel of Christ (pt1 of 3)

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Main thesis: Sin makes us crave darkness, produces ignorance and causes us to pursue self-glory while the gospel shines light, illumines minds and frees us to pursue the glory of God.

I want you to be able to walk away from this sermon with this one line. Sin does 3 things and the gospel does 3 things. [SLOWLY] Sin 1) makes us crave darkness, sin 2) produces ignorance and sin 3) causes us to pursue self-glory. While the gospel 1) shines light, the gospel 2) illumines minds and the gospel 3) frees us to pursue the glory of God. Before we unpack this thesis statement, I want to provide some introductory comments.

1) First, sin makes us crave darkness.

2 Cor 4
1 Therefore, since we have this ministry because we were shown mercy, we do not give up. 2 Instead, we have renounced shameful secret things, not walking in deceit or distorting God’s message, but commending ourselves to every person’s conscience in God’s sight by an open display of the truth.

In these 2 verses, there is mention of shameful things, things done in secret, and deceit. All of these–shameful things, things done in secret, and deceit–are forms of darkness. I don’t think you have to be convinced by me or take my word for it when I say that the world is dark and is continuing to get darker by the day. On a small scale, if you haven’t heard of the name, Dr. Kermit Gosnell, then I invite you to google his name, not right now please, but later on tonight and you will be horrified by the evil that went on at an abortion clinic in Philadelphia since its opening in 1979. I would give you some of the details now, but because we have kids here in the service, it wouldn’t be appropriate. It is shocking to hear about the evil of one man in this country, which is still considered a Christian nation.

There is darkness on a small scale and there is darkness on a much larger scale. The Chinese government recently admitted that over the last four decades, the country has aborted 336 million unborn children, many of them forcibly. This is due to their One Child Policy. You want to guess which gender most of those abortions were? 336 million babies murdered.

To put the numbers in perspective, the 336 million deaths in China are more than the entire population of the world at the time of the Crusades (1100 AD). 336 million is equal to the entire combined populations of the United States and Australia right now. 336 million is more than all the people killed in the 10 ten deadliest wars in human history, which include World War I and II. 336 million is more than all the children that will be born in the entire world over the next ten years.

When you hear about what Dr. Kermit Gosnell did for which he is on trial right now, or what China did regarding a single moral issue–abortion–it is inconceivable for me that you can conclude that the world is fine, or that we are getting better as a human race over time, or that with the advances of science and knowledge, we are becoming more civilized and less barbaric. I just see darkness. And darker days are coming.

If there is no God and there is no absolute morality and there is no such thing as right or wrong, then we are free to do whatever we want. If Dr. Gosnell wants to use scissors on a baby that has reached full term, then who are we to judge? If China aborts 336 million babies, that’s their prerogative. Not true. No matter what position you hold about abortion, you cannot read the accounts of Dr. Gosnell without wincing. Without a righteous anger being stirred. Something in us wells up, this must stop. Evil must be stopped. Why is there so much darkness in the world?

When it comes to actual life and death and an actual person, relativism as a worldview or as a philosophy simply doesn’t work. It’s a nice concept–do what’s good for you and I’ll do what’s good for me. Relativism doesn’t work in our day to day ethical lives when real people are involved. Because we know deep down inside, killing babies is wrong.

There is right and wrong. There is such a thing as absolute morality because it comes from a God who created a moral universe with absolute moral standards. He didn’t create a universe willy nilly and it’s fine, do whatever seems right to you. There is an absolute standard of right and wrong and so we must answer to the One who established that standard.

Sin causes us to crave darkness, secrecy and deceit. Because we are ashamed of sin. What did Adam and Eve do when they had sinned against God? They hid. Sin causes you to hide because you’re either afraid of the consequences or ashamed and so you hide in order to preserve your image before others.

Where does this darkness come from? Joseph Conrad, wrote a novel entitled, Heart of Darkness, and in it, he explores the relationship between the “savages” and the civilized Europeans who came to colonize the “uncivilized.” But through the process of colonization, Charles Marlow, the main character sees the savagery, not in the other, but the savagery and darkness in his own heart and his peers. The darkness stemming from a corrupt heart came forth in the form of racism and imperialism and pride and brutality toward others. And it dawns on Marlow that our hearts are the source of darkness.

We might not be killing babies to make a living, but all of us have things in our private lives that we want to keep under wraps. In secret. In darkness. We know some of the things we do are shameful so we need to keep up the act. On the outside, we seem to be good, decent people. We are cultured, civilized. We don’t think we are barbaric. But you know, there are secret and shameful things that are enslaving you and me, either in deed or in thought.

When that happens and there is a disconnect between our internal and our external, we call this a lack of integrity or wholeness. When the inside and the outside don’t match, this is a sign that the gospel hasn’t penetrated deep enough. Thus, we walk in deceit because we have to keep the shameful things hidden and only project the positive things about us. Sin makes us crave darkness.

2) Second, sin produces ignorance.

2 Cor 4
3 But if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. 4 In their case, the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelievers so they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

When the world is dark and we stay in darkness long enough, our eyes adjust. That’s why it’s painful when we are deep in sleep and somebody suddenly turns on the lights. We become accustomed to darkness. What ought to be obviously dark becomes normal. Everyone’s doing it. What so bad about that? You’re such a prude. You got to live a little. What’s right for you may not be right for me. Don’t impose your standards on me. Christianity, the gospel, Jesus Christ–to you, it might seem like a treasure. But for me, I got other things to pursue.

How come some people can recognize the glory of God in the face of Christ and others can ignore it? Sin makes us crave darkness and the god of this age, or Satan, will do everything in his power to keep you in darkness. To a Christian, the gospel is glorious, Jesus is the glorious Son of God who created you and me and the whole universe. But to a non-Christian, their reaction is, Jesus, who’s he, what’s the big deal? He’s just a teacher. Christianity is just a religion. It’s okay if you want to go to church because at least you can learn some good moral lessons so that you can treat others better. But I don’t know why some Christians seem like such fanatics. The god of this age has blinded that unbeliever’s mind so that he or she cannot perceive the greatness of the gospel message.

Notice that Satan’s strategy is to keep a veil over and to blind our minds. Why the mind? It’s because the Achilles’ heel of man is his mind. Eve fell into sin when she was deceived in her mind. And at the core of Satan’s deception was an appeal ultimately to her pride. Satan tells Eve, God knows that when you eat of the fruit of the KNOWLEDGE of good and evil, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. See! God is holding out. He wants to keep you low and in your place. Don’t you want to become like God? The temptation came through the mind and appealed to human pride.

The mind is the Achilles heel of man because we are so prone to pride. Pride, if you think about it, involves our minds because when our minds get filled with all kinds of knowledge, we get puffed up. Our minds become like inflated balloons. We become proud. And because we think we know more, we think we are better than others. When we become gods in our own eyes, when we are the ultimate end and arbiter and judge, the Bible says, we have become truly ignorant.

Plato in his work, The Republic of Plato, discusses knowledge and he uses the famous analogy of slaves chained and confined in a cave. The only light is a vague light that comes from a fire behind them and an opening above. The light reflects shadows on the sides of the walls of the cave. Thus, the slaves can only see dim reflections and vague outlines. They don’t have a clear view of reality. Shadows dance on the walls of the caves. He calls these shadows–Opinion. I am not sure what that object is because I can’t see it clearly enough. I think it’s rock. I have an opinion. You might think it’s an old loaf of bread that has turned rock-like. You have your opinion. To acquire true knowledge, the slaves need to get out of the cave and into the noonday sun. There, he can finally see things as they are. Only in the presence of light can you have true knowledge. Otherwise, all you have is vague approximations. Opinions.