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Sacramento Central SDA Church

The Whole Truth

Chris Buttery

Between Two Truths

For millennia, people from different countries, cultures, and backgrounds have found direction and encouragement in the inspired pages of the Bible.

In his day, Jesus directed listeners to search the prophecies of Scripture to find Him the only way of salvation.

2, 000 years later, as we stand on the break of eternity.

We no less need the purpose and hope God's Word provides Sacramento Central Church brings you receiving the word timely Bible messages presented by pastors Chris buttery and Mike Thompson Amazing Revelations await you in God's holy word, the Bible.

Well, this morning, I wanna talk to you a little bit about being between 2 truths.

Oftentimes you look at the Bible and there appears to be, what appears to be sometimes contradicting views, and yet they're not, they simply complement each other.

1 of the most famous trials in history was that of Benjamin François Curvasseur in London, 1840.

I don't know why all the good stories come out of London, England, Pastor Mike, I'm not sure.

Cuvassir was a Swiss valet who was accused of slicing the throat of his elderly employee, Lord William Russell.

What made his trial notorious was the argument for the defence.

The police had bungled the investigation, the evidence against Cuvassir was circumstantial at best, 1 of the officers had perjured himself, and the maid's testimony brought suspicion on herself.

Now the defense attorney, Charles Phillips, was convinced of the innocence of Cuversure and cross-examined witnesses aggressively.

At the beginning of the second day of trial, however, Curvasser confessed privately to his lawyer that he indeed actually had committed the murder.

When asked if he was going to plead guilty, he replied to the lawyer, Charles Phillips, no sir, I expect you to defend me to the utmost.'" So Phillips was faced with a dilemma.

Should he declare to the court that the man was guilty, which probably would have been the right thing to do, or should he defend Curvus Sir as best he could and not break the confidentiality of client-lawyer relationship, which would have been also the right thing to do, which is more important, telling the truth by turning him in or performing his professional duty, thus committing to his promise.

Phillips decided to defend the guilty man.

But despite Phillips' efforts, Cuvier was convicted.

When the dilemma was later made public, Phillips' decision basically to defend a murderer horrified British society and brought him a great deal of criticism.

Who would want to be in Philip's place in a case like this?

What do you do when you're faced with a tough choice like this.

What do you do when you're between 2 truths?

Thank God that when you come to the Holy Bible, you don't have to decide between what appears to be 2 contending ideas.

Jesus tells us in John chapter 10 and verse 35, we'll put it up on the screen for you here, John 10, 35, that the scriptures cannot be, well, friends, cannot be broken.

No 1 needs to decide, for example, between the Old and the New Testament.

They're not rivals competing for a prominent place.

They're not playing a game of tug of war.

They're 1 harmonious whole because there is 1 author behind them all, and that is the Creator God.

And we can confidently contend that God is not bipolar, and God is not schizophrenic, He's not Dr.

The God of the Bible is not a living, eternal contradiction.

He is the truth, he is the whole truth, and he is nothing but the truth.

So Why do Christians often get all mixed up over this?

How is it that we are accustomed to segregating and dividing what God has put together?

A story is told about the devil who was walking along with his cohorts 1 evening, they saw a man ahead of them picking up something shiny.

He found a piece of truth, the devil replied.

Doesn't it bother you that he found a piece of truth?

The devil said, no, I'll see to it that he makes a religion out of it.

This little story points out that humans are prone to fall to Satan's sophistry of believing part truth Lies if you have your Bibles turn with me to Genesis chapter 3 you recall way back there in the far-off Garden home of our first parents that sinister angel beguiled Eve by preaching 3 part truth lies.

And you look with me in Genesis chapter 3 and verse 4, he said, you shall not surely what?

The second 1 is found in verse 5 where he says, you shall be like God, that's right, and you shall know good and evil.

Those were 3 part truths the devil was preaching, and the part truth that he was preaching was God's grace apart from his justice.

You'll become like God, you're no good and evil, just no justice, just God's grace and His mercy.

Were His part truth, lies, actually true?

Did the pair die right after eating the fruit?

Well yes and no, they did die that day, So real was their death on separating themselves from the source of life that to live, they must be born again.

In choosing to worship self, they did not become like God, but they did become gods because self-worship is the basis of all idolatry.

They did come to know evil immediately, however, except for the miracle of grace, they would never know the good ever.

Now it's important to note that after the devil had assured the pair that there was no real danger in eating the forbidden fruit, he now with kind of a sinister gotcha charged them with sin and left them condemned before the part truth lie or the part truth of God's absolute justice apart from His grace.

The enemy of souls is always seeking, always seeks to pit 1 truth against the other, as if they were in conflict with each other.

He revels in dividing what God has put together, and so very often, human beings fall for it nearly every time.

Well, generally speaking, we're attracted to ideologies or things that complement or affirm our own personal lifestyles.

This may explain why, if we held onto any known sin in our lives, we would be naturally attracted to something that suits our experience, that makes us feel better about it and rationalize it somewhat like a bee is attracted to nectar.

Now, while the Bible doesn't present contradictory pictures, it does present twin truths that complement each other.

However, these are mistaken, oftentimes, to be at odds with each other.

Let's take, for example, the attributes of God.

Unfortunately, there are those who trip up over this apparent contradiction of the God of holiness and justice in the Old Testament and the God of love and mercy in the New.

However, notice that God does not, and I wanna take you with me to Exodus chapter 34.

Notice God describes himself to Moses when passing before him and how Moses responded.

Exodus chapter 34, I want you to notice how God describes himself.

Exodus 34, 6 through 9, notice, and the Lord passed before him, that is Moses, and proclaimed, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering and abounding in goodness and in truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation.

So Moses made haste and bowed his head toward the earth and worshipped.

Then he said, if now I have found grace in your sight, O Lord, let my Lord, I pray you, go among us, even though we are a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us as your inheritance." A point we need to grasp is that God is first holy and then he is everything else.

God is first holy and then he is everything else.

Often we like to focus on the forgiveness of God, on His love for us, attributes that typically make us feel very comfortable.

But forgiveness and love fade in significance when we don't have a clear understanding of God's justice and His holiness.

Some have also made a mistake in misrepresenting His mercy, to mean that God is tolerant of sin.

But this can't be because holiness and sin are polar opposites.

We simply can't appreciate that salvation is and what it is unless we grasp something of the meaning of the holiness of God.

On the flip side, if we understand the true awfulness of even so-called, or we misunderstand the true awfulness of so-called small sins, we won't be able to appreciate the majesty and the glory of God's holiness.

When we emphasize 1 component of God's attributes to the exception of another, or if we hang on to 1, leaving the other out, we are always going to be in grave danger of believing a half-truth, a concoction of the devil.

To split through the diameter of a sphere makes 2 opposite halves out of the whole, or 2 hemispheres.

The same thing happens when the sphere of truth is divided.

It creates 2 opposites, 2 or part truth opposites or hemispheres.

Yet both parts are required to make a complete whole.

If 1 speaks a half-truth, they convey a vital part-truth, but each part-truth is isolated and insulated from its complement of truth.

Leroy Moore, in 1 of his books he wrote, describes this half-truth, full-truth concept.

He refers to 2 languages that are spoken.

He says 1 is, and we're gonna look at some technical terms, 1 is paradoxical and the other is dialectical.

When referring to paradoxical language, he is always referring to that which appears contradictory, yet in reality is not, I'm quoting now.

Paradoxical thus refers to truth, not philosophy, truth that seems to involve contradictory ideas.

Between Two Truths Again

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪ ♪ Isn't that beautiful?

Thank you, Sabrapina girls, much appreciated.

And a happy Sabbath to you, good to see you.

And I trust everyone is well and everyone is doing okay and that you know in your hearts that God is good and that He has been good to you.

We are—this morning I'm continuing a little series that I started before our Righteousness by Faith Symposium entitled Between 2 Truths, And for the next couple of weeks, at least next week, Dr.

DeRosa will be here, and then the week after I'll be up at the camp, but shortly thereafter we'll resume a few points and continue on by looking at certain twin truths in the Bible and how they need to be kept in healthy tension to each other in order to believe the right thing from the Word of God and have the right experience in our lives.

The message this morning is entitled, Between 2 Truths Again.

You know as well as I do that life can sometimes be a balancing act between 2 competing ideals.

1 simple, often 1 simple act, such as casting a vote, can involve us in a dilemma.

Should we vote for the candidate who takes the right moral stand but clearly isn't capable for the position, or the candidate who is far more competent yet has some ideas you can't agree with.

Sometimes the decisions can be even more personal.

I read where a certain family had been approached by their precinct captain virtually begging for their vote.

It looked like the party-backed candidate was going to lose, and if he lost, that meant the captain precinct would lose his job, unless he could show that he delivered the vote in his precinct and could transfer that loyalty to the other candidate.

Should the family then vote for the candidate they prefer, or help a man save his job?

If they voted as they hoped, they might even get the trees they requested a year earlier.

By the way, the notice that the trees would be planted arrived on Election Day.

Dilemmas aren't limited to only these issues.

You only have to open the newspaper or turn on the TV to hear competing ideas vying for our loyalty.

Many of our laws and court cases are attempts to find balance between, for example, security and liberty.

Both are human basic needs, but they exist in tension with each other.

For instance, the freedom of the press and the interests of national security clash continually.

Curfews and search warrants, Drug testing and surveillance are all practices that promote security, but sometimes at the expense of liberty.

Yet unbridled liberty would make us victims of others, thus destroying our security.

The solution to these things is keeping these things in healthy tension to each other.

And we'll talk about what that means in a moment.

Every biblical truth we know is basically balanced by another truth that seems to be moving in the opposite direction.

For example, the gift of God's grace does not come without requirements.

You have grace and you have responsibility.

Freedom is not given without responsibility.

And in Christ, in Jesus, we deal with more than 1 reality at a time.

Our faith is often lived out between 2 truths, neither of which can or should be given up.

Now Christians have often wrestled with this fact that our faith gives us 2 or more realities that must be held in tension to each other, that the issue has dominated theological thinking throughout church history.

We affirm both the humanity and the divinity of Jesus Christ.

We also affirm the sovereignty of God and the free will of man.

That humans are sinners and yet made in the image of God.

Throughout Christian history, heresy has resulted not necessarily from someone wanting to be evil or wanting to be heretical, but from someone taking a piece of the truth to an extreme and not doing justice to the other truths as well.

In reality, the devil is the mastermind behind part truths.

But he even gets more bold by promoting part truth lies.

Turn with me to Genesis chapter 3 just for a way of review.

We talked about this when I discussed living between 2 truths before, but go over with me to Genesis chapter 3 verses 4 and 5.

You recall in the Garden of Eden that Satan beguiled Eve, and he did that by preaching 3 part-truth lies.

Look at Genesis chapter 3, verses 4 and 5.

He said, the serpent said to the woman, you shall not, what?

Surely die, for God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you'll be like God, knowing good and evil.

You shall not surely die, you shall be like God, and you shall know good and evil.

The devil was preaching the part truth of God's grace apart from His justice.

God's not going to do what He really says.

He's too gracious, He's too loving, and so He separated the truth of God's grace from the truth of God's justice, you see.

And then after Eve succumbed and Adam as well, the devil just kind of left them in their sin and condemned them with the part truth of God's absolute justice apart from his grace.

You know, Sometimes the devil does that to each 1 of us, doesn't he?

Oh, it's okay, just a little bit of that.

And when you just go ahead and succumb, what does the devil do?

God's not gonna express and issue grace to you.

The devil is a master in promoting part truth, part truths and part truth lies.

The enemy of souls always seeks to pit 1 truth against another as if they were in conflict with each other.

He revels in dividing what God has put together.

1 author wrote, he said that there are a great number, a great number of truths which seem contradictory and which all hold together in a wonderful system.

I shared with you a couple of examples that I got from a couple of books that I read.

To split the diameter of a sphere makes 2 opposite halves out of a whole.

It creates 2 opposite yet part-truth hemispheres.

Yet both truths are required to make a whole.

So if 1 speaks a half truth, they convey a vital part truth, but each part truth is isolated from the complement of truth, its complement of truth.

The Bible often brings 2 principles together.

For example, the sovereignty of God, the free will of man, revealing that they are not in opposition to each other, but they are in harmony, forming a complete whole.

There was another example I shared with you, the ellipse.

The ellipse is a stretched out circle, kind of like a football.

1 circle has 1 center of focus, but an ellipse actually has 2 points of focus, not pushed too far from each other.

And this, the perfect, if they are pushed far enough from each other the perfect ellipse breaks and it no longer exists also if 1 Emphasizes 1 focus over the other the ellipse simply becomes 2 circles It's as simple as that So I shared with you how we get water from this ellipse.

Water doesn't exist with unless the circle of hydrogen and the circle of oxygen are brought into the ellipse.

If someone asked what would be more important, The answer would be equally important, especially if you were thirsty, especially if you wanted a drink of water.

Much like asking whether we could live without the heart or without the brain.

Both are equally important to life, and Truth is the same way.

Truth must be looked at in the form of an ellipse.

To oppose or to ignore, under-emphasize 1 truth against the other would make 2 circles and you destroy the ellipse.

Now I want to talk to you about biblical tensions, keeping 2 truths, twin truths, in healthy tension to each other, because this is where we're gonna launch off from here this morning.

I'm gonna ask Demetrius, are you there, Demetrius?

Demetrius plays the guitar, and he plays the guitar very well.

We could use the same illustration with the harp here.

We're gonna have Demetrius share with us here.

The strings on a guitar are anchored at 2 points, are they not?

I don't even know what these things are called.

They're anchored here and they're anchored up here in this area.

Now, if 1 of those strings were not tightened adequately, if there was no tension on that string, Demetrius, would you mind playing a chord for us?

Sinner or Saint?

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪ ♪ All are to thee, O Christ, all are to thee.

With love and prayer I've made you, Unending dear.

This is my earnest plea, For love of Christ to thee.

I love Thee, I love thee, I love thee, I love thee, my Lord.

I love thee, my Savior, I love thee, My God.

Thy grace shall bestow both my heart and my soul.

Thy name be my view and thy love be my song.

♪ And I love thee, my soul ♪ ♪ A deadly joy I pray ♪ ♪ Some peace and rest ♪ ♪ Now thee alone I see ♪ ♪ In what is best ♪ and rest.

And shall my every prayer sing out your praise.

This be the only song my heart shall raise.

More love, oh, Christ, to Thee, More love to Thee, More love to Thee.

Well, this morning's message is entitled, Sinner or Saint?

Over the past few weeks, we've been talking about living between 2 truths.

This is under the the sermon series, The Whole Truth.

Often, the Bible presents truths that appear, appear to be going in opposite direction from each other.

Some might even suggest that they would be contradictory to each other, but they really aren't.

The Bible, as we know, is 1 harmonious book with 1 divine mind behind the many books within the Bible.

As Jesus tells us in John chapter 10 and verse 35, the scriptures cannot be broken.

For example, there are some who view the, or see the Old Testament, and they see the New Testament to be in conflict, at odds with each other.

If the scriptures cannot be broken, that can't be right.

Others view the biblical truth, let's say, of God's sovereignty, His rulership over the world and over the universe, and orchestrating events and affairs behind the scenes to bring about His glorious end and purpose for His saints.

Some see God's sovereignty and the equally important biblical truth of man's free will, our ability to freely choose.

God has given us the ability to choose whether we want to serve Him or not.

He would wish that we would serve Him, but we have the ability to choose.

So some see the truth about God's sovereignty and the equally important truth about God's free will as being at odds with each other.

But if we understand these 2 important biblical teachings as hemispheres that when held together make up a complete sphere of truth, then it becomes very difficult for us to see these truths, for example God's sovereignty and man's free will, being at odds with each other.

We would see them rather as being complementary to each other.

We also talked about the ellipse of truth.

Each ellipse typically has 2 focal points, whereas a circle has 1.

You've got an ellipse that has 2 focal points, and when they're kept close together, it makes an ellipse.

When these focal points, however, are separated and you extend them out, if I just held up my fingers right here and you were looking at my fingers and you were closer to me than where you are, and I move them further and further apart, how much easier does it become to see those, my 2 fingers, those 2 focal points?

The ellipse only works when those 2 points are kept relatively close to each other as in the picture up there.

Series

The Whole Truth

One Hand Clapping

Transcript

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