Episode Transcript
All right, if you take God's precious words, speaking of Bibles, take God's precious words and turn to Hosea 8.
Hosea 8 and God willing will be expounding in verse 14 this morning.
Hosea 8 and verse 14.
The title of the message this morning is, Faith Infences.
Faith Infences.
Continue our study through the book of Hosea and we left off in verse 13 last week where God said He was going to punish Israel's iniquities because of their false worship.
And as we move forward into verse 14 this morning, God continues to peel the layers back of Israel's sin so we can see deeper into the sinful human heart and discover the innate problem of sinful man.
God said He was going to punish Israel if you look in verse 14 with me now.
For Israel hath forgotten His Maker.
For Israel hath forgotten His Maker.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank You for all You've done.
We love You so much.
And I pray, dear Father, Lord, that You'll take Your precious Word and I pray You'll teach us this morning.
I pray all eyes will be on You.
I pray, Father, there'll be no distraction in our heart or in the building.
And I pray, dear Lord God, that You will cause us to be open, Father, to what Your Holy Spirit teaches us this morning.
Give us the understanding we need that we'll be edified and You'll be glorified.
We ask it in Jesus' precious name.
Amen.
For Israel hath forgotten His Maker.
In Genesis chapter 1, verse 26, the Bible says, and God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness.
Let us make man.
Yet, God is saying here in verse 14, Israel hath forgotten.
They've forgotten their Maker.
Take your pens, if you would, and underscore that phrase, Israel hath forgotten.
There is a wicked thing in the heart of man, in that we are inclined to forget our Maker.
The original temptation of our parents in the Garden of Eden was for us to be as gods.
By eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and hoping to elevate themselves in their foolish pride, people today have a tendency, like our first parents did, to dismiss the notion of God out of their minds.
We're experiencing that right now in the United States of America.
You see, when people have no Maker, they have no rules, except the ones they make themselves.
It's kind of convenient when you don't have a God, if you don't want to serve God.
When they have no Maker, they have no accountability for their actions.
When they have no Maker, they have no guilt, because they have no sin, because there is no God.
When we have no Maker, we have nobody over us.
We are the ones in power, and that's why we have a tendency to conveniently forget the truth, that we have a Maker.
But the problem is, as convenient as it is to dismiss the fact that we have a Maker, if you want to live in sin.
When man forgets his Maker, he then faces two great needs, two great problems.
Number one, the problem of spirituality.
Number two, the problem of security.
And that's what Israel faced here in this text.
When people deny the truth of their Creator, they immediately create another problem for themselves.
When they deny the truth of their Creator, there is a question that they're immediately confronted with, and it's this.
If we have no Maker, then where did we come from?
We're immediately faced with that question.
Did you know you can go anywhere in the world right now?
Anywhere.
And somebody in any tribe, if they're in the jungle, or if they're in a highfalutin society, anywhere.
Every single culture of person will have some explanation of how they got here.
You can't live without that explanation.
It would haunt you until you answered that question.
And so everybody has an explanation.
If you don't know where you come from, then you don't know where you're going, what your purpose is, or what your value and meaning is in life.
It's that simple.
So every person in this world has a natural need and desire to know how they came into being.
Thank God the Bible provides the record of how we got here.
The very first words of the Bible, knowing that we have that innate need to know where we came from, the very first words in the Bible are, in the beginning, God created.
God knew we had to start with that.
To know the meaning of life, we must know how we got here.
So when we deny the record of how we got here, we then create the need to replace the record of how we got here.
That make sense?
If you deny the record, you can't do without the record, because everyone has to know how we got here, and so then you're forced to replace the record.
It's something that you create.
Here's the kingdom truth.
In order to put away religion, you must create religion.
Think about that.
Here it is again.
In order for you to put away religion, you must create religion.
The atheists try their very best to rid America of religion.
That's what they say their goal is.
They try their very best.
Not too many years ago, most of you all remember, there was a group of atheists that sued the Henderson County where I lived.
They sued the county because the county had a manger scene put up at the courthouse for Christmas.
The atheists called their organization freedom from religion.
But in an attempt to destroy religion, the atheists had to create a religion.
In an attempt to deny the record of creation, they had to replace the record of creation.
It's amazing.
The atheists denied the existence of God.
He did not make us.
And in denying the existence of God, they are then forced to explain the existence of themselves.
And that's how we got evolution.
So in denying religion, rejecting the religion, they then had to create religion.
Well, here's how we got here.
Here's the record.
This will be our explanation.
You see, when we put away our maker, we then become our maker.
Isn't that right?
We are the people, we are the highest order of creation in the world.
We can circumvent the globe.
We can perform brain surgery.
We can get degrees, doctorate degrees.
We can conquer the world and build buildings and structures and wax eloquent and write great speeches and all those things.
We are the most sophisticated creature on the face of this earth.
Most sophisticated creature known to ourselves.
There's no one higher than us.
So the moment you deny the existence of God, deny the existence of a power above us that made us, then suddenly we're left with a conclusion.
We had to have made ourselves.
There's no other explanation.
And it sounds ridiculous if you say we made ourselves.
So we come up with a fancy name for it, we call it evolution.
We call it natural selection.
That sounds a lot more palatable.
But basically it means we made ourselves.
We just swam right out of the ocean, grew legs, dropped the gills, got lungs, you know, dropped her tail, quit swinging from a tree.
And next thing you know, we're a nurse in the hospital.
Knocked our guest this morning.
That's how it works.
But when you put away your maker, you then become the maker.
That's what man did.
If we had no God that made us, then obviously we made ourselves.
That's the only explanation left for our existence.
And atheists do more to shove this phony religion that they created down our throats than any other religious organization in the world.
In the name of rejecting religion in the public school system, they now teach their religion in the public school system.
It's very hypocritical.
You see, when they kicked out Christianity, they did not rid the school of religion.
They simply replaced the religion in the school.
Does that make sense?
They didn't rid the schools of religion.
They replaced the religion in the schools.
When we deny God, we become the gods who made ourselves.
Atheists make the outrageous claim that we made ourselves, that we've been working on ourselves for many, many years, and that we're continually improving ourselves over time.
We, the creatures who can't make ourselves a single inch taller, no matter how hard we try, let's all just join forces together and see if we can.
.
.
We can't.
You can't make yourself a single inch taller no matter how hard you try.
But we, the people who can't do that, somehow created all life on earth.
We, the creatures who only recently discovered DNA, somehow billions of years ago, developed it.
Brother Shepherd.
.
.
Y'all know how cheap he is.
Brother Shepherd.
.
.
This is real.
He donated his body to science, to medical.
.
.
Is it right, medical school?
Not yet.
Not yet, though.
Yeah.
Pending his unfortunate departure from this earth, his body will be donated.
It's already.
.
.
All the papers are signed to be studied by students at a medical school.
So he can get a free funeral.
Yeah, that's what it's all about.
Now, I want you to think about the absurdity of that for a moment.
Not about him doing that.
I want you to think the absurdity about this for a moment.
The human body was created by people who were constantly trying to figure out how the human body works.
Think about that.
We came out of the ocean.
We evolved.
We went from this to this.
And all these sophisticated improvements that came over time.
And the people who did all this on their own are trying to figure out how they work.
And again, we've got nurses here.
Would you all agree, nurses this morning, there are so many medical mysteries we don't understand about our own bodies?
So many.
Yet somehow, that'd be like General Motors saying, well, now, we would like so that if your car ever gets totaled by the insurance company, we'd like you to donate that to the factory so we can dive deeper into figuring out how these automobiles function.
That makes no sense whatsoever.
But when you deny the maker, this is what the absurdity that you're left with.
This is the religion that you're left with.
We, the most intelligent creatures on earth, don't understand the mysteries of our own body.
We made ourselves, and we've been successfully duplicating what we don't understand over and over and over for thousands of years.
Atheism, in short, is the religion that denies its maker and claims we made ourselves.
And atheists will dig up what they claim is a piece of a small skeleton that looks like an ape.
And by the time they add their imaginative artwork to it, they end up with some crazy-looking, half-man-looking creature that they want everyone to believe is their long-lost grandparent.
By the time they get through with it, they know that creature's gender, they give it a name, and they praise our evolutionary process by which we have improved our own design since our grandparents' time.
Through a ridiculous, so-called fossil record that says we have made ourselves, the Bible tells us the truth in Psalms 100, verse 3.
Know ye that the Lord, He is God, it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.
That's so simple for us to understand.
We are His people, and we in the sheep of His pasture.
The truth is, God-hating 21st century scientists have become the prophets of one of the fastest-growing religions on earth, atheism.
While scientists with the same level of education, who stand on the record of God's Word, are being silenced.
Don't say, well, it's education.
If you get more education, you'll believe.
That's a bunch of bunk.
There's a man by the name of Doug Corrigan.
He's a biological physicist, I think.
Brilliant, brilliant man.
Scientist.
He actually worked on the International Space Station.
And he does a brilliant job of proving creation.
Brilliant job.
If you ever get a chance, follow him on Facebook.
Doug Corrigan, C-O-R-R-I-G-A-N.
Brilliant, brilliant doctor.
There's another one up out of Dallas.
He is an astrophysicist.
He wrote a book called The Ultimate Proof of Creation.
Have any of you all heard those two men before this morning?
Besides my wife.
And besides Abel, because I told him.
Why is it that someone who the government can trust to help develop the International Space Station and someone the universities can trust to give a doctorate degree to for astro, being an astrophysicist, how come we don't hear from them?
Because they're being silenced.
They're being censored.
So they can force their phony religion down your throats and deny the obvious statement that God made us and not we ourselves.
These God-hating scientists ridicule our faith in God, but they demand that we believe what they teach, which means we then have to have faith in them.
Yet unlike the Bible, what they teach, it changes and contradicts itself every 10 years, if not sooner.
Every few years they'll tell us, well, scientists used to believe, but with this latest discovery, we now have discovered they did all the time.
And we were scorned for not believing what they told us in the beginning, but a few years later, they tell us they don't believe what they taught us themselves in the beginning.
They even had to change it too.
We just beat them to it.
Like America, Israel had forgotten their maker.
They had put their maker out of their minds.
But remember to deny that God made you, you have to make a God.
Whether that God is an idol, or whether that God is yourself, look back in your text, Israel had forgotten his maker and buildeth temples.
Look at that.
You see what happened?
They forgot their maker and buildeth temples.
The moment you reject religion, you've got to replace religion.
The acknowledgment of their maker was going down, but the construction of their temples was going up.
It's no different with atheism.
Absolutely no different whatsoever.
No different with the increase in the different religions around this world.
Why?
Because when you deny the record, you have to replace the record.
It's just the way we were created.
If you deny God made you, then you must make a God.
Religion was going up because God's truth was going down.
When you deny your maker, you encounter a spiritual problem.
Number one, God created us with a spirit, and that spiritual part of us has to be satisfied.
It has to be.
We must have something to answer the questions of how we got here, where we're going, what we're doing on earth in the meantime.
It is much easier to accept the record that God has given us, but the moment we recognize our maker, that brings us back to the record of our beginning, which confronts us with the record of our sin, which makes us accountable to God, which is what none of these people want to be.
So they create a religion that soothes their mind without convicting their consciences.
Now, when we make ourselves our own gods, we become responsible for our own welfare, our own security, our own provision.
And so that's the other problem that Israel encountered.
They not only built temples, they had to replace the religion that they denied, but they also had to build fence cities.
They build temples, look back at texts, and Judah has multiplied fence cities.
Faith in fences.
Without God, they ran into the problem of spirituality.
How did we get here?
Without God, they ran into the problem of security.
Fence cities are a poor replacement for one's dependence on God.
Here's the kingdom truth this morning.
The lower the faith, the higher the fences.
Israel didn't need a fence city when they walked with God, but Jericho did.
Isn't it amazing?
Israel didn't have a fence city when they were walking with God into that promised land.
Jericho had a big fence city.
They were walled all the way around.
The problem is fences can't keep sin out, and that was Jericho's problem.
Jericho's real enemy was sin, and that's why the city fell.
America never needed a fence around the border when we were teaching children about God in school.
That is a truth you historically cannot deny.
Today, in the United States, security isn't an all-time high, and faith in God isn't an all-time low.
That is a truth you cannot deny.
You can hate the Bible all you want, but to deny that fact, you cannot do.
The safest place you will ever be is in the presence of God through faith in His word and obedience to His word.
That's the safest place you'll ever be.
God said they built fence cities.
Look back in your text, but I will send a fire upon His cities.
Fence cities don't keep sin out, so they won't keep God's judgment out.
God said He would send a fire, that is, He would destroy Judah's cities.
Look back in your text.
In it shall, that is, the fire shall devour the palaces thereof.
Now, the Hebrew word translated palaces here.
It means citadels, fortresses.
They were fortified places they had made to keep themselves secure.
Everybody that denies God has to have a palace.
They have to have a citadel.
They have to construct some means of protecting their own interests in their minds, especially their eternal welfare.
Again, you can go anywhere you want to in the world, anywhere, and they will all have an explanation of how they got here.
They will also all have an explanation of what's going to happen to them after they die.
And it will be some soothing explanation, whether it's going to heaven, whether it's going to go eternally fishing, like some silly so-called Christians believe, it will be fishing forever in heaven, whether it's going to be just coming back as another life form, or whether it's going to be just going completely out of existence and having the beauty of having their ashes scattered over a mountaintop.
And being part of the mountains for the rest of their lives.
Some kind of beautiful, colorful, soothing concept of what happens to them after they die.
There has to be an explanation.
Everybody has it.
That's their citadel.
That's their palace that they've constructed.
I thank God my security is built in Jesus Christ.
My citadel, my fortress, where I know that I will lose nothing when I die but gain everything, is in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
That's where I put all of my trust.
But not so for the Israelites.
They had to build earthly structures.
Maybe they build a palace that tells them there's no heaven or no hell.
Maybe they build a palace made of fortified walls around their earthly home to protect their earthly treasure and wealth.
Whatever they build on earth to make them feel secure in their minds for their future.
An earthly fortress will do no good without a heavenly father.
Psalm 127 verse 1 says, Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.
Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.
So if God's not protecting your country, if God's not protecting your city, you can have all the soldiers you want to.
You can put up all the fences you want to.
You can invest in your military all you want to.
But as Rome found out, as Greece found out, as Assyria found out, as Babylon found out, as Napoleon found out, and as we're going to find out one day.
Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain that build it.
What makes us so secure as Christians, the fact that God built the house we live in.
Jesus said, I will build my church.
The Bible says in the book of Hebrews chapter 11 verse 10 that Abraham never possessed the earthly land of Canaan as his home.
He wondered about intense.
Why?
He says, for he looked for a city which hath foundations whose builder and maker is God.
Abraham was a wise man.
Those who claim we had the power to make ourselves have no power to keep themselves.
How could we have the power to evolve and make ourselves into these fancy creatures and not have the power to sustain ourselves to keep going?
It's all a lie.
If you deny your maker one day, death will destroy the lies that you've placed your hope in and force you to face the truth of the God that you denied.
Be not deceived.
You can deny your maker and create any religion you like, but the word of God is the only fortress worthy of your faith.
That will go ahead and close.
Father, we thank you so much for your precious word.
Thank you, Lord, for the warning about denying your maker, about forgetting your maker.
Our nation has done that, Lord.
And as a citizen of it, Lord, I'm sorry for what our nation has done.
But I thank you, Father.
I'm a citizen of a country that has foundations whose builder and maker is God.
And we don't put our trust in the false religion of the vanity of man being his own creator.
We look to you.
We trust in you.
We believe the record of your word that you've given us.
And we put all our hope and faith in you.
And, Lord, if there's anyone here this morning who's been riding the fence on that, who's been wondering, should I believe in God?
Should I put my trust in Him and acknowledge Him as my creator?
And most importantly, His Son is my Redeemer from my sins.
I pray you'll convince them with your word that they will enter the house of faith that you have made and be safe inside the gospel of Jesus Christ.
In His precious name we pray.
Please bless the food we're about to receive next door as well in Jesus name.
