Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Romans.  Tonight is study #15 in Romans 3,  and we will read Romans 3:7-8:

For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner? And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just.

We were on verse 8 last time, and we spent some time discussing how the unsaved (especially the professed Christians in the congregations that are not true Christians at heart) slanderously report and affirm that God’s people have said certain things, but they are not correct.  It is not really the teaching or the doctrine that the people of God are declaring.

Now this goes all the way back to the early days of the church age.  The Bible tells us in John 6 that when Christ spoke of the need to “drink His blood, and eat His flesh,” it was reported within certain areas of the Roman Empire that these early Christians were barbarians that drank blood and ate flesh like cannibals do, but it had no basis in fact.   However, the news spread, and at that time the Christians were despised.  It is very common in the world for lies and falsehoods and gossip to spread, and people repeat it and slanderously report and affirm it: “This is what that sect of the Christians teach.  Can you imagine that they drink blood and eat flesh?” 

And, again, the problem is regarding spiritual truths as opposed to physical truths, as Christ was not speaking of drinking literal blood or eating literal flesh, but through the salvation He wrought for His people, He must be “partaken of and consumed daily,” the daily bread of the Gospel, His Word, the Bible.  But there is that severe limitation that the natural-minded sinner has, which is that he is dead in his soul, and dead to spiritual things.  He does not understand spiritual things. 

Remember that Jesus pointed this out in Matthew 13 when He responded to the disciples question about why He spoke in parables, and it says in Matthew 13:11-16:

He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.

And the last verse can only refer to those God had chosen to save and predestinated, His elect.  “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven…”  That is, you will hear them and understand them.  You will “see” them.  You will see the truth of them.  And the definition of a parable is “that which serves to hide truth,” and that covers the whole Bible.  All Scripture is the Word of God, and Christ is the Word, and He spoke in parables in order to help us properly understand the Word, the Bible.  So in the entire Bible one must look for the deeper spiritual meaning, which is the hidden meaning, the parabolic meaning.  And God’s people will know it and understand it when they hear it, while there are those that are not God’s people, and it is not given to them to understand.  They will fail to understand.  They cannot understand.  So they will often go with the literal, plain, historical, and grammatical meaning of a verse or word in the Bible.

Yes, I know that covers most of the New Testament churches’ hermeneutic for arriving at biblical truth.  So it is not surprising that would also be the explanation for why the natural-minded individual cannot find the truth.  It is their refusal to look for the deeper, parabolic meaning of Scripture, so their very hermeneutic guarantees what Jesus said here – they will not understand.  And they prove their natural-mindedness through their lack of understanding.

But God’s true elect are given ears to hear and the Spirit of Christ, as God moves in us to cause us to find truth through the proper biblical hermeneutic of comparing spiritual with spiritual, and Scripture with Scripture, and harmonizing our conclusions with the whole Bible, and then the Holy Ghost teaches.  We are guided by the Spirit into truth and understanding of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, as the mysteries are the hidden truths that God placed in His Word.  It is a tremendous reservoir of truth that no one has ever come to the fulness of, or plumbed the depths of, as it has unlimited potential to reveal understanding and truthful information about God and His kingdom and about God’s salvation plan or God’s judgment plan.

God’s elect people delight in searching the Scriptures, utilizing the proper biblical methodology to arrive at truth, and we receive the truth as given by the Spirit as He opens our eyes of understanding to see it, and to know it.  This is what the Lord Jesus is saying here.  Now, again, the insurmountable problem of wicked individuals that remains in their sins (and, therefore, dead in soul and lacking the Spirit of God) is that they cannot know spiritual things with any deeper understanding than their own intellect.  They will fail, again, and again, to understand because it is not given to them.  Even if they gave an appearance of understanding…and we are aware of that because at the time of the end, so many people over the course of the Great Tribulation and into this time of the world’s final judgment gave the appearance of understanding, and they even walked along with us.  We thought we were in agreement as we walked together following the Lord Jesus.  But God has been trying us and testing us all through doctrines that He has revealed at the time of the end, and these people have shown themselves to be unable to understand, and understanding is key. 

For example, they may have had an angry reaction to the teaching that there is no literal place called “Hell,” but that “hell” is the grave, and that there is no eternal suffering for the wicked.  And their vehement (negative) response to that teaching should not cause us to miss the fact that the main problem is that they do not understand the Bible’s “correction” on that matter.  They do not understand the thing that God revealed at the time of the end.

Or as God opened the Scriptures to reveal the end of the church age, and that the church age had its time as God saved the firstfruits in the early rain, but the church age ended at the specified time, and God opened up His Word to reveal that end, and He issued the command to depart out of the midst (of the churches). 

And, once again, there was a failure to understand, so many in the churches and congregations were stunned and shocked, and they were angered by the teaching of these “nobodies” that were Family Radio listeners who listened to a man like Mr. Camping who never went to seminary.  He was uneducated in their eyes.  Yes, he studied the Bible, but they thought he needed a seminarian education and he needed to be instructed by “doctorates,” and Mr. Camping lacked that.  “He is teaching people these things, and he does not even have the church’s hermeneutic, and he does not follow the plain, literal, grammatical, historical interpretation, and he is always talking about spiritual things.”  So they warned their congregations against “spiritualizing,” which is an unbelievable thing!  How can they warn against spiritualizing the Bible?  Have they not read the Gospels where it says that Christ spoke in parables, and without a parable He did not speak?  Do they not know that the Bible says to compare spiritual with spiritual?  And Romans 17 declares that the Law is spiritual, so how can we fail to spiritualize?  How can anyone not spiritualize when the Bible itself is spiritual?  Well, they managed to do it.  They emptied the Bible of its glory, and they robbed God of His honor, and they made it a dull, lifeless book, like something wooden and unexciting.  No wonder people fall asleep in church.  And no wonder they teach in seminaries, “Do not teach for more than fifteen or twenty minutes because people have a short attention span.”  But what is “short” is the way to come to proper understanding by those that are doing the teaching.  If they would teach the truth of the Word in the manner God described it should be taught, using God’s way (and not their way), then they would have unlimited things to teach because as you go into the Word, there is just more, and more information, and they would be growing in grace and the knowledge of God.  Instead, they are stuck in place because they believe the “high water mark” of truth was during the Reformation hundreds of years ago, and that we cannot go beyond it, and we had better not say anything contrary to it.  Better not dare to contradict the Reformers.  You can contradict the Word of God, but you better not dare contradict the Reformers or the church fathers – that is blasphemy!  But they have it all upside down and backwards.  These poor people are in blindness and darkness in their understanding because it has not been given to them to understand, and they just cannot grab hold of the truths of the Bible because it lies in the spiritual realm of things, and they do not have the ability to access it or perceive it. 

This is why God says of His elect people, that a wise man’s heart (only the elect) discerns “time and judgment.”  It is no wonder that the corporate churches speak in unison saying, “No man knows the day or hour.”  And “day” and “hour” are synonyms for judgment.  So they are saying you cannot know the judgment or the time of the judgment.  And, of course, it is true for them because they are not wise men.  God declares in Proverbs 28:5:

Evil men understand not judgment: but they that seek JEHOVAH understand all things.

It is God’s elect that seek JEHOVAH because God puts within our hearts an ongoing desire to do the will of God, and a big part of the will of God is seeking God.  So God’s elect understand all.  God has given us the proper tools and the right biblical hermeneutic.  We go to the Bible and God will measure out to us the fulness of understanding of all the information that He would have His people to know before He ends this world.  Not that we will understand everything about the Bible, but there is an eternity to come when God will be teaching us about His Word – and Christ is the Word – into eternity future, and we will go ever further into depths of understanding about the Word of God forever and ever.  But that is for our eternal future when we will be better enabled to receive it in our spiritual bodies.  But now we have limitations of the flesh, and we are only able to receive limited things, so God has measured out a portion that He is going to fill up, as He has been doing especially at this time of the end.

So the people of God will understand, but evil men will not understand judgment.  And judgment does identify with judgment on the churches.  Did about two billion professed Christians that stayed in the churches understand that?  No, and that is why they failed to hearken, and they stayed behind, and they were bundled as tares for the burning.

Do wicked men understand the judgment of God on the world, and that the door is shut, and the wrath of God is actively falling upon the inhabitants of the earth?  No.  And they cannot understand.  They are troubled.  They are disturbed, but they cannot know the truth of what is happening.  Only God’s people can know the truth of these things.  Wicked men cannot do so.  And this is why…and we will close with this verse…it says in Daniel 12:9-10:

And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end. Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried; but the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand.

None of the wicked will understand.  They will do wickedly, which means they will not understand.  What do the wicked do when they do not understand?  They will speak evil of the people of God and the things we are saying.  They will slanderously report against those things and the people that identify with the things of God, and they will affirm that we are saying things that we are not truly saying.  That is the way of the wicked because they cannot understand.  Understanding has not been given to them.