Grace to You Weekend

John MacArthur: You can guarantee that you’ll die in your sin by just being self-righteous. Just be certain that you’re not a sinner. Just invent a lifestyle of religion that fits you. Don't admit you need a savior. Don’t pound on your breast and say, "God be merciful to me, a sinner." Trust your works, and I'll guarantee you, you’ll die in your sin.

Phil Johnson: Welcome to Grace to You Weekend, featuring the Bible teaching of John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson.

Charles Spurgeon, the renowned 19th-century British pastor, said this: "No one used stronger or more alarming language than our dear redeemer concerning the future of ungodly men. He knew nothing of that pretend sympathy which would rather let men perish than warn them against perishing. Such tenderness is merely selfishness, excusing itself from a distasteful duty."

Well, friend, today John MacArthur delivers a message that does not back away from what Spurgeon called "the distasteful duty." John is going to help you see the horrible consequences of sin, consequences that you'll face if you miss out on heaven. It's a critical conclusion to John's series called "The Sinfulness of Sin." So now, here's John.

John MacArthur: I want you to turn in your Bible to the eighth chapter of John. The eighth chapter of John. We've all heard the expression, "He has nobody to blame but himself." That is a biblical expression. It is an expression that the Spirit of God makes a number of times in Scripture with regard to the sinner. If you perish in your sin, you have no one to blame but yourself. And no passage makes this more poignant or clear than the eighth chapter of John.

John wrote this Gospel, he says in chapter 20, verse 31, that you might believe and that believing you might have life in the name of Jesus Christ. He wrote it so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God, the Savior, and that believing you might have eternal life. But for those who do not believe, John makes it clear again and again that they will die in their sins and they will never go where Jesus is.

Since many people choose this rejection, it's important for us to look at this text and to understand what John is saying here. And as we examine ourselves today, let's start at the bottom line and be sure that we are in the faith and not headed for a death with full culpability of sin and an eternity of punishment. "You shall die in your sin," verse 21.

How is it that that happens? Let me give you four ways to guarantee you will die in your sin. And I'm going to borrow them from the words of Jesus here. Four ways to guarantee you will die in your sin. Four ways to guarantee that the death of Jesus Christ on the cross is meaningless to you.

Number one, be self-righteous. Be self-righteous. That'll do it. The first guaranteed way to die in your sins is to be completely content with your own ability to please God. Believe that you can be good enough, or religious enough, or pray enough, or go to church enough, or be moral enough, or have good deeds that outweigh on some imaginary scale the weight of your bad deeds. Just be self-righteous.

Look at verse 22. "Therefore, the Jews were saying, 'Surely, He will not kill himself, will He? Since He says, 'Where I am going, you cannot come.'" What did they mean by this? What kind of a response was this? Well, they twisted Jesus' words to mean, "He must be going to hell. We're certainly going to heaven."

And he must be going to a portion of hell reserved for those who commit suicide. Why did they say that? Well, an orthodox Jew despises suicide, always has. According to Josephus, the Jewish historian, the person who committed suicide went to the darkest pit of Hades. That the most heinous crime one could commit was suicide. And the darkest, blackest part of Hades was reserved for someone who killed himself.

So mockingly, they are saying, "Well, maybe he's going to kill himself and go down to that black hole in Hades reserved for those who commit suicide, a place we certainly never will go." So they ridicule him. They stand there deaf to the warning that they are going to die in their sin with all the horror that that involves. And they turn it into a mocking joke about Jesus committing suicide and himself going into some black hole of eternal punishment, believing themselves to be going nowhere but heaven. How deceived they were.

Once again, as so often in his time on Earth, the Jewish leaders turned their venom on the Son of God. Yes, he was going to die. But his death was not suicide. Voluntary? Yes. Willing? Yes. Self-sacrificing? Yes, but not at his own hand, at the hands of men, at the hands of those very detractors who spoke to him this way.

Their ignorant mocking came about because of their self-righteousness. Do you understand that? They mocked him because they didn't think they needed a savior. The whole idea of them dying in their sins was ludicrous to them. After all, they were the spiritual ones. They were the religious ones. They were the orthodox. They kept all the laws and all the rituals and all the routines and all the ceremonies and all the traditions with exacting detail.

They had absolutely no idea that they would ever be going to any other place than heaven. They were so self-righteous that Jesus' warning was a joke. And they laughed until they died, and then they cried. And they still do. So confidently self-righteous they could mock a savior. So confidently self-righteous they could mock the idea that they could die in their sins.

I warn you, self-righteousness is deadly. It is a guarantee for dying in your sin. If you do not admit your inability to save yourself, if you do not admit that your good works achieve nothing by way of eternal salvation, if you do not admit that your religious activities, your ceremonies and rituals and church attendance and prayers and whatever else, produce nothing for you by way of eternal salvation, you will die in your sins. So, you can guarantee that you'll die in your sin by just being self-righteous.

Just be certain that you're not a sinner. Just be certain that you don't need saving. Just invent a lifestyle of religion that fits you. Don't admit you need a savior. Don't pound on your breast and say, "God be merciful to me a sinner." Trust your works, trust your religion, trust your rituals, and I'll guarantee you, you'll die in your sin.

There's a second gilt-edged guaranteed way to die in your sins, in verse 23. He was saying to them, "You are from below, I am from above." They missed the point. That really goes with the first point. They had it backwards. They thought they were of above and he was of below. They had it reversed. Above is heaven, below is hell. "You're from below. I'm from above. You've got it reversed." Then he says this: "You are of this world. I am not of this world." And here's the second way to guarantee that you will die in your sins, and that is, be worldly.

Be earthbound. Another guarantee. Be preoccupied with the world. Live for the world. Live for the temporal system. Live for the ideologies of this world system. What does he mean when he says, "You are of this world?" World is a very important word in John's Gospel, used repeatedly. And it's used with several different meanings. Sometimes it refers to people, sometimes it refers to ideologies. Here it has to do with those ideologies which engulf the minds of people, of course.

But when he's talking about this world, he's talking about the invisible spiritual system that dominates the world. It is a system of evil. Satan is the god of this age, the prince of this world. He is the one who has orchestrated a system of belief, a system of morality, a system of religion, a system of ideologies, a system of behavior, a system of materialism, and all of that, that is opposed to God. It's like 2 Corinthians 10. It's everything lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God. It's the whole cosmos, the whole invisible spiritual system of evil.

We use the word world in that way. We talk about the world of politics, the world of business, the world of medicine, the world of sports. What we mean by that is the environment or the sphere, um, in which those things dominate. And there is a world in which we live as human beings. It is the, it is the organized system of satanic lies and deception raised up against the knowledge of God, Satan's system opposing Christ. It is a lot of philosophies and psychologies and religions and ideologies that make up unregenerate, ungodly, unbiblical thinking.

And it is a world that will be destroyed. The world and all that is in it will pass away, John said. And that's why he said in 1 John 2:15, "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world, for anyone who loves the world cannot love the Father." Where there is the love of the world, the love of the Father doesn't exist. Jesus points out here this great contrast. He says to them in verse 23, "You are of this world. I am not of this world." We have two competing ideologies, two competing systems of thought.

If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. And friendship with the world, James 4:4 says, is enmity with God. These Jewish leaders, though they would say they were religious and that they were spiritual, were genuinely caught up and trapped in the satanic system of evil by which he rules the world, sinful, selfish, earthbound souls, who lived out a system controlled by the prince of this world and were separated from God and from Christ by an infinite gulf.

For a man to die in his sin, all he needs to do is just be earthbound. Just believe the lies of Satan that are in the system. Just love the system and all that is in it, and that will guarantee you will die in your sins.

There's a third way, and this is the crux of the passage, that you can guarantee to die in your sins. First of all, to be self-righteous and think you don't need a savior, you can save yourself or make some contribution to saving yourself, any contribution. Secondly, by being earthbound and that is being enamored with the world system and unwilling to let it go. And thirdly, verse 24, "I said therefore to you, that you shall die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am he, you shall die in your sins." Here's the third guaranteed way to be certain you will die in your sin: be unbelieving.

Be self-righteous, be earthbound, and be unbelieving. That's really all it takes. Be unbelieving. The only way to escape hell is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. And John again, quoting his thesis in chapter 20, verse 31, "These things are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ and believing, you might have life through his name." No one has to die in his sins or her sins.

But the one who persists in rejection will die in sin through unbelief. Now, what do we have to believe? Well, he says it right here: "Unless you believe that I am he." What he's saying here is the name of God. Unless you believe that I am God, that I am the one sent from God, the great I Am himself. He uses really what is the Hebrew Tetragrammaton, the name of God, the I AM that I AM.

Unless you believe that I am, but what does I AM mean? It means all that he is. Unless you believe fully the truth about me. That's what he's saying. How does one become a Christian? By believing the truth about Jesus Christ. This is the son question, and this is the big issue. It's astonishing to me. The question being asked, what must someone believe in order to genuinely be saved? There really needs to be no muddy water in regard to that. It is crystal clear in Scripture.

I can sum it up very simply by what Jesus said here, "You must believe that I am he." What does that mean? You must believe that Christ is who he is. Well, what does that encompass? I'll give you what I call the drivetrain of gospel truth, the absolute necessities of gospel truth. Here's where they start. If you're going to believe the truth about Christ, here's what it includes: First of all, you have to believe in an eternal Trinity.

Because Christ said he was one with the Father and that he was eternal, and before Abraham was ever created, he existed. So you must believe that he is part of an eternal Trinity. Anything less than a Trinity makes Christ something other than who he is. So the heart of evangelical faith, the heart of gospel truth is trinitarian, that God is three persons and yet one.

To say anything other than that is to misconstrue who he is. And he says, "You must believe that I am who I am." So you start with believing the Trinity. Those who deny the Trinity don't understand who Jesus Christ is. They do not believe that he is who he is. Secondly, you must then believe that he is incarnate in human form, that this member of the Trinity entered into human history and time and space in a human body. You must believe then in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. And that encompasses the virgin birth, which is God's definition of how this incarnation took place so that the Christ could be born into this world sinless.

And so, you must believe that he is God, that he is eternal, that he is a member of the eternal Trinity, that he was incarnated into the world through the Virgin Mary. Then you must believe in his sinless life, because that's true of him as well. That he lived a sinless life. He couldn't be born like normal people were born or he wouldn't be the God-man. And he could not have a sin in his life, or a weakness in his life, or a failure in his life, or he would not have fulfilled all righteousness, which righteousness is imputed to those who believe in him.

So you must believe in a Trinity, you must believe in the eternal Trinity, that Jesus Christ, a member of the Trinity, was incarnated, born of the Virgin Mary, came into the world and lived a sinless life, which in fulfilling perfect righteousness became the righteousness that can be imputed to those who believe. And then you must believe that he died on the cross as a sufficient substitutionary sacrifice and atonement for sin, and that he died there and paid the penalty for the sins of all who would ever believe.

Because that's indeed who he is, the Lamb of God. You must believe that his death satisfied God completely and that full atonement was made, and that's why God raised him from the dead the third day, and then took him and seated him at his right hand, where he sits as Lord. He gave him a name above every name, which is the name Lord. He sits at the right hand of the Father interceding for his own and ruling and someday will come again and establish his kingdom on Earth and bring eternal glory to his own beloved redeemed people. That's the heart of Christian faith.

If you don't believe that, you're not a Christian. Believe it, Christianity or Christendom as such is full of people who have a lot of information about what I've just said regarding the gospel, but who do not have that total trust in Jesus Christ alone being who he is and being the only and the complete sacrifice for sin, therefore trusting in nothing of their own efforts or works. Sad to say, many, many who name the name of Christ and say, "Lord, Lord, we did this, we did that," are not known to him and will die in their sins and where he has gone they will never come.

So Jesus says to them, "Unless you believe," in verse 24, "unless you believe that I am who I am, you shall die without your sins being forgiven, and you will therefore eternally pay the penalty." There is one final guaranteed way that you can die in your sins. And they exhibit this, obviously. Be self-righteous, be earthbound, or be unbelieving. Fourthly, be willfully ignorant, or obstinately ignorant.

Verse 25, this is so amazing. So they were saying to him, "Who are you?" This is absolutely unbelievable that they would say that after all they had seen, after all he had done, after all they had heard. Jesus said to them, "What have I been saying to you from the beginning?" Talk about thick. "I have many things to speak and to judge concerning you, but he who sent me is true, and the things which I heard from him, these I speak to the world." He says, "I've been speaking and speaking, and what I have been speaking is the very word of God." And to show you how thick they were, verse 27, "They didn't realize he had been speaking to them about the Father," even though he said that over and over again. "I and the Father are one. I don't speak of my own self, but what the Father shows me I speak." All of that he had been saying, all up to chapter 8. They'd heard it all.

They heard who he was many, many times. They saw ample evidence of it, but sin produces unbelief and unbelief produces obstinate ignorance. Jesus says in verse 29, "You should have known. He who sent me is with me. He's not left me alone. I always do the things pleasing to him." You should have seen God in me. You should have known, you should have heard, but you didn't. It ends on a good note. Verse 30, as he spoke these things, many came to believe in him. That would be my prayer this morning, that as I have spoken these things to you, as I have reiterated these words of Jesus, that many would come to believe in him.

Want to die in your sins? Just continue in your course. Just believe you're good enough the way you are. Just carry on with your love affair with human ideologies. Just refuse to believe the great truths concerning Christ. Love your sins so much that you choose the darkness and are willfully ignorant. But to do this, you're going to have to stumble over the cross. That's right. You're going to have to heartlessly, irreverently, trample Christ's blood because you know the gospel. So you're going to have to stumble across the cross.

Inconceivable, really. Why will you die when you can live? Why will you not be like those many who believed and didn't want to die in their sin? Why will you not accept an atonement for your sin? That's the all-encompassing question. And the answer is, you're self-righteous, you're good enough the way you are. You love the world too much, you refuse to believe, or you love your sin and you cherish the darkness and the ignorance that comes with it. In any case, the price is eternal.

Phil Johnson: You're listening to Grace to You Weekend, featuring the Bible teaching of John MacArthur. Today John showed you four ways to miss heaven, as he put the finishing touches on his study called "The Sinfulness of Sin." Well, a good question with which to end this study is this: What exactly should you take away from John's look at the sinfulness of sin? Here's how John answered that question.

John MacArthur: Well, for two reasons. One sort of secondary reason and then one primary reason. I would hope that people would take from this an understanding of how profoundly gracious the gospel is. If we understand how wretched and sinful we are, then we understand how wonderful the gospel is because the gospel comes and says, "You can be fully and completely and forever forgiven of all sin, past, present, and future." The grand reality of saving grace finds its beauty, finds its magnificence, and its magnanimity in the understanding of how sinful sin is, because grace overwhelms even the sinfulness of sin.

That's sort of a secondary reason. The primary reason is that so then subsequently, you can give glory to God. You are limited in your ability to worship God as he ought to be worshipped if you have a limited understanding of the gospel. And you have a limited understanding of the gospel if you have a limited understanding of sin. If you understand the massive horror and extensiveness of sin, then you understand the glory of the gospel, then you understand the glory of God, and you become a fully trained worshipper, you might say. So, it leads ultimately to our ability to worship and praise God.

Phil Johnson: That's right, friend, and to help you in your study of the Gospel, I encourage you to download John's series titled, "The Sinfulness of Sin." This study will help you see how impossibly high God's standard for holiness is, and how he graciously provided his Son as a substitute, so that we can escape his wrath. It's free to download in MP3 and transcript format. So pick up John's series on "The Sinfulness of Sin" when you contact us today. All six messages from "The Sinfulness of Sin" are available at our website, gty.org. Again, the MP3s, along with the written transcripts, are yours free of charge. In fact, all of John's sermons, that's more than 3,600 messages, are free online. Our web address one more time, gty.org. And thanks for letting us know how these radio programs are helping you grow spiritually. If you've never written or if it's been a while, write a quick note and share it with us. Be sure to include the call letters of this radio station when you write. That is a big help for us. Our mailing address is Grace to You Weekend, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. And our email letters@gty.org. That's letters@gty.org. Now, for our entire staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Remember to watch Grace to You Television Sundays on Direct TV Channel 378. And then be here next week as we help you start preparing for this year's Easter celebration with a compelling series on the cross and the resurrection. Don't miss the Divine Drama of Redemption when we're back with another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace to You Weekend.