You Thought I Was Just Like You
FROM THE STUDY
“These things you have done and I kept silence; You thought that I was just like you; I will reprove you and state the case in order before your eyes. Now consider this, you who forget God, Or I will tear you in pieces, and there will be none to deliver. He who offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving honors Me; And to him who orders his way aright I shall show the salvation of God.”
Psalm 50: 21-23
Dear friends,
Psalm 50. God is speaking, and He summons the entire earth before Him. All eyes may be upon Him, but His eyes are on Israel – and the visible Church. He is speaking to the wicked among the people of God and His declarations are to the person who has kept up appearances, kept the rituals of every Sunday and said all the right words, and God says, “These things you have done, and I kept silence; you thought that I was just like you.”
You thought I was just like you.
That’s the whole problem, and it happens every Sunday. In a local church, the man in the pew had not stopped believing in God. He made one. In his mind, a professing Christian, perhaps a leader in the local fellowship, had replaced the living God, the God of holiness and unimaginable purity, who even today strikes men down in death at His good pleasure, with a shaved-down version of Him until He fits comfortably into his carnal mind. A god who overlooks what we overlook and is moved by the same sentiment that moves us. His false god grades on the curve, because surely, surely He understands. The man is concerned with morality not holiness. The man thinks little of his sins and tossing them behind and forgetting them, he continues to sing hymns during the service as though all is well with his soul. With his lips he professes Christ as Lord and Savior, yet with his life during the week he declares to the world he belongs to it.
And for a long time God says nothing. “I kept silence.” Now that is the mercy that folks often mistake for approval. The silence of God does not mean God is inactive, nor is it His consent. It is His patience, and patience at some point always has an end. How dark is the heart of a man creating in his mind a false god, and practicing that idolatry while believing all the while he is safe from the wrath and coming judgment of God?
The false god is always a mirror. What we won’t surrender, he’ll permit. Whatever we love, he’ll bless. He’s greatly offended by the sins of other people and winks at our peccadilloes. He asks nothing that would cost us anything. A lost, unbelieving, deceived man or woman will gladly sit under a god like that for fifty years and call it saving faith. A god like that has never saved anyone, and never will. And this is a reminder that the Gospel never promises unbelievers what their heart desires. It promises what they do not desire. Things like holiness and righteousness, and yes, Christ Himself. No unbeliever ever desires these things, much less Christ Jesus.
But look at Who the one, true God of Scripture is. The same holiness that makes Christ Jesus repugnant to the man hiding behind his rituals is the very thing that makes Him precious to the man who comes with empty hands. A god soft enough to wink at your sin would be far too weak to save you from it. It is because the true God will not call your evil good that His mercy, when it comes, is mercy and not a pleasant lie. What is substitutionary atonement but that the God who says I will tear you in pieces is the God who was Himself torn, in the body of His own Son, so that you would not have to be?
The true God does not stay silent forever. “I will reprove you, and set the case in order before your eyes.” He will lay it all out before such a man and make him look at it. Though God be silent, He is neither deaf nor blind and judgment has not yet been executed. To be shown one’s sins before judgment is a fearful mercy, but it is still a mercy. It is better a man see it now than discover it on the last day when it is too late.
Then comes the twenty-second verse, and there is no softening it. “Now consider this, you who forget God, lest I tear you in pieces, and there be none to deliver.” Consider this. God warns, so a man might turn to Him for salvation and forsake his false god and empty Sunday rituals. How complete and humiliating will be the destruction of the wicked among God’s people – in church on Sunday! “Consider this…..lest I tear you in pieces.” That is the God of the Bible. It is not the God of many a church member.
The God you worship on Sunday, is He the God of the Bible, who truly is, or a god you have made to be just like you? They are not the same. And only the former can save anyone from His wrath and judgment to come.
A VOICE FROM THE PAST
Stephen Charnock saw this three hundred years ago and put a name on it. We’re talking about the unbelief that lives in the heart of a man who would never deny Him with his lips. “A secret atheism,” he wrote, “is the spring of all the wicked practices in the world; the disorders of the life spring from the ill dispositions of the heart.” (The Existence and Attributes of God, p. 13). We don’t announce that God is absent. We just live as though He were, or as though He were small and pleased with, or indifferent to, what He in fact hates. The profession stays intact (false as it is) but the heart has already emptied the throne. In short, their god is too small and their man is too big.
His point is not that such men are unusually wicked. It was that this is the natural condition of every one of us, and the only remedy is to know God as He has revealed Himself, and not as we would prefer Him to be. That revelation cannot be mustered by mankind. It is a gift of God to His elect unto salvation. A god whittled down to our own liking is no God at all. He is the oldest idol there is, and he is worshiped in more pews than we can imagine.
A PASTORAL WORD
I am not writing this to trouble the true believer. “Examine yourselves,” Paul said, “whether you are in the faith.” Better to ask the question now, with the Scriptures open, than to assume a positive answer.
At some point many will ask that and many other questions: “Am I worshipping the God of Scripture?” “Is our worship service in our church biblical and pleasing to God?” “Am I even a Christian?” Ask that question. Not first about the person beside you in the pew, though this Psalm may make you wonder. Ask it of yourself. What is your disposition towards the God of the Bible? Do you really know Him? More importantly, does He know you? Is the God you love the God who is? If you find God holy beyond your comfort zone and merciful beyond your deserving, and if that God has met you in the blood of His own Son, then rest. He is not like you and that’s good. He is far better than you dared hope, and if you are truly in Christ Jesus, He is yours, and you are safe.
In His Service,
Joel
