It's Sunday Morning

Last in the series of Sunday morning messages for March.

Good Morning.

In Genesis 3 we read of God and Adam in the garden:

11 And He said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?"

12 The man said, "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate."

In 1^st Samuel 15 God commands

3 Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'"

… and later in verses

13 Samuel came to Saul, and Saul said to him, "Blessed are you of the LORD! I have carried out the command of the LORD."

14 But Samuel said, "What then is this bleating of the sheep in my ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?"

15 Saul said, "They have brought them from the Amalekites, for the people spared the best of the sheep and oxen, to sacrifice to the LORD your God; but the rest we have utterly destroyed."

In Matthew 25 Jesus says:

41"Then He will also say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels;

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45"Then He will answer them, 'Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.'

46"These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

And finally, while speaking about the doctrine of hell in a book that came out this month, a popular author and pastor writes:

“This is misguided, toxic, and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’ message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.”

“No one can resist God’s pursuit forever because God’s love will eventually melt even the hardest hearts”

Adam, instead of giving a direct answer points to the “woman whom You gave to be with me”. King Saul diverts from his disobedience by claiming to have “spared the best... to sacrifice to the LORD”. Today it's fashionable to deny God's wrath so as to spread the “message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy”.

They are all diversions to sidetrack, sometimes called a “red herring”. The term refers to the idea that a pungent smelling fish would throw tracking hounds off the scent. That's what we do when we change the subject or don't directly answer someone in conversation.

Don't look at my disobedience, look at somebody else, look at something good that I'll do. Don't look at God's wrath or His justice, it's His love that will sell the books. Don't look at me, let me blend in with the crowd, let my faults and sins look no worse than everybody else.

If we would read further in Genesis we would see that after Adam points to Eve she then deflects to the serpent. None of it does any good though and the results of sin are meted out to the guilty.

In 1^st Samuel Saul's disobedience is seen for what it is and the prophet answers the king in verse 22:

22 Samuel said,
"Has the LORD as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
As in obeying the voice of the LORD?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
And to heed than the fat of rams.

As for the pastor with the unorthodox beliefs he may be fooling himself and his flock but of course he can't fool God.

We can see it all around us in life, the politician specializes in obscuring and deflecting, the child cries, “Not me!”

So not only is it important to be on the look out for those red herrings that others may try to trip us up with, it's crucial that we don't let ourselves be deceived by our own imaginations and defense mechanisms. Don't let the world become your red herring that's there to take attention away from you.

We do can do this with our minds fixed on Christ, by giving no heed to the natural man, by confessing our sins and shortcomings to Him. Allow Him to be not only the light of the world, but a light to examine yourself.