Topic: Social Justice

In a Q&A session held at Grace Community Church, John MacArthur was asked about social justice. His response provides a good understanding of the difference between biblical justice and social justice.

**Used with permission of Grace to You – GTY.org.

*This transcript was originally published at GTY.org.

Let’s turn back to Ezekiel chapter 18 for the next in our series on “Social Justice and the Gospel.” While you’re looking up that chapter, I just mention to you two things. If you haven’t checked the Grace to You website you should at gty.org, because there is a series of five articles, five blog articles on social justice and the gospel. We’ve completed that series as of Friday, so that’s available to you. There also is a statement called “The Statement on Social Justice,” you can Google that and find it; and it is a doctrinal statement that delineates clearly the biblical perspective on these particular issues. I think you’ll find both the statement on social justice and the articles on the Grace to You website very helpful to you.

We will continue in our look at chapter 18. I thought for a while I might be able to get through this time, but we’ll have to save the finish for the next time. But I want to remind you of what we’ve learned from this chapter. You heard it read in its entirety earlier, so you know the flow and the significance of it.

But I would remind you that my concern about the issue of social justice and the gospel, as I’ve been saying for the last couple of weeks, is the evangelical church is putting itself in a very difficult situation to preach the gospel by affirming the social and sort of political and ideological perspective of the social justice movement, because the social justice movement is based on the fact that there are in the world victims, victims, victims of other people’s choices, victims of other people’s sins, victims of other people’s transgressions. Those people may be in a family. Those people may be in current society. Those people may have lived a hundred, two hundred years ago, and may have lived thirty, forty, fifty years ago; but that we’re all victims of things that other people have done. This is a basic human delusion that man is good, that I’m basically good, and if there’s any bad in me it’s because of what somebody did to me. This victim mentality has literally taken over our entire society, and it’s sad to see the evangelical church accepting the fact that all these victims seems to deserve legitimate consideration for their victimhood.

The Bible does not define us as victims, it defines us as perpetrators of crimes against God, as criminals, as culprits, as blasphemers, as haters of God, as enemies of God. We have basically amassed a lifetime of sin and transgression, iniquity against God for which judgment has been pronounced on us. That judgment is physical death, spiritual death, and eternal death, which is conscience punishment in hell outside the presence of God forever. This has always been throughout all of redemptive history and church history the message of gospel preachers, that people are not victims, they are sinful.

Now remember that dominant human sin is pride. The dominant human sin is pride, love of self, self-preservation, self-protection. So man spends a lot of his energy convincing himself that he is good, and if something’s wrong in his life somebody else did something that caused it, not him.

But when you come to the Word of God the Bible describes all of us as human beings in this world, all of us being sinners, in language that is anything but good. We are evil, there’s no good in us, we have no capacity for good; even the good that we think we’re doing is filthy rags. John Bunyan once said, “The best prayer I ever prayed had enough sin in it to drown the world.”

Mankind minimizes the doctrine of sin, the doctrine of total depravity; and when man does that he then cuts himself off from understanding how desperately he needs the good news of the gospel. That is why faithful preachers always preach on sin and death and judgment. The Holy Spirit convicts of sin and righteousness and judgment. We are called to warn sinners of coming judgment and everlasting hell; and we learned in Ezekiel already, and echoed by Jeremiah, that if we don’t do that the blood of the sinners who are judged is on our hands.

When God speaks of the condition of humanity He uses terms like death, and darkness, and blindness, and hardness, and bondage, and slavery, and incurable sickness, and alienation, and ignorance, and condemnation, and judgment. But the world of sinners does not want to hear that language, that is why that has largely disappeared from the evangelical world, which is so busy trying to make the world like them that they have stripped out all that offends.

As we saw last week, man as a sinner, has a default position. His default position when confronted with his sin has always been to blame someone else. The first sinner was Eve, she blamed the snake. The next sinner was Adam, he blamed not just the woman, but God who created her.

This is the default position of all sinners: they find someone else to blame, and ultimately they blame God. “God made the world the way it is. God made me the way I am. God put me where I’ve been. God subjected me to this course of history that now has turned me into a victim.” And as long as sinners think they are good people who have been victimized, there’s no interest in the gospel, particularly if they have been victimized by God. Why would they run to God to be delivered from their sin when He’s the one that made them victims to start with?

“If Christians preached there’s only one true and living God, and God is absolutely sovereign, and God is the author of history, and God determines everything and every life, and every event is within the framework of His sovereign purpose, then I am what I am, where I am, in the midst of the circumstances I’m in because of God. It’s His fault.” Though you not only blame the sinners around you, you not only blame the sinners in your house or those who gave you birth, you not only blame the sinners of past generations, but ultimately you blame the larger context, which is who you are, where you are, when you are in the world; and that’s when you start blaming God.

That’s not new. It was Eve essentially blaming God for the snake; He created him. It was Adam essentially blaming God for the woman; He created her. This is what sinners do. So at the very outset of gospel preaching what you want to do is deliver sinners from the delusion that they are victims of the sins of anyone else. They are on the way to being victims of their own sin and their own sin only. And when the church embraces this victimhood and validates it, it is cutting people off from the pathway to the gospel.

The current social justice frenzy has become a new way that sinners can blame somebody else – past generations, present powers, people they know, people they don’t know. Everybody is a victim. The status then lets them shift blame: hate other individuals; resent other individuals, other groups, other generations. They feel like they’re victims of certain racial attitudes, attitudes toward gender, attitudes toward sexual preference, attitudes toward economic status, toward culture, plethora of other victim categories. And nearly everyone now is searching for some kind of victimhood. Psychologists would tell them that they probably were victimized as children but they can’t remember it, so they would go into repressed memory just for the sole purpose of uncovering some supposed victimhood so they can have someplace to belong in this completely victimized culture.

If you’re not a victim of anything you have no moral authority and nothing to say, get out of the conversation. Everybody needs to have had at least a microaggression. You’ve got to have some category of victimhood to divest yourself of the responsibility for the fact that your life is what it is because of your own sin. All this blame-shifting and unwillingness to face sin and rebellion and rejection of God’s Word and God Himself and the gospel keeps people from coming to salvation.

Now we can’t allow this to happen. Evangelical church is so caught up in affirming everyone’s victimhood that they are cutting off the opportunity to bring them to the gospel. The sinner must be confronted with his own and her own desperate condition before God, and it’s all on every individual.

Now that is the message of Ezekiel 18, individual responsible. That is his point. Verse 4 we saw, “The soul who sins will die.” Verse 20, “The person who sins will die.” That’s the theme here. People are sinful, they die in their own sins. That is a truism that cannot be denied, because everybody dies. There’s the proof, everybody dies. The wages of sin is death, everybody dies, therefore everybody’s a sinner; and everybody as a sinner is in rebellion against God and under divine judgment, headed for eternal hell, unless they believe the gospel, unless they repent and their life is marked by righteousness.

Now that is what Ezekiel wants us to understand. He’s a judgment preacher; he refuses to allow people to see themselves as victims. Ezekiel is a prophet, he’s over in Babylon. He’s preaching to Jewish exiles who have been taken there as essentially captive slaves, and what happened was in 605 the Babylonians came and began to conquer the land of Israel. What was remaining was still the southern part of Israel, the area of Judah.

And the Babylonians came in 605, took some people away, a first deportation. They came back in 597, took more Jews, tens of thousands of Jews back into captivity. Ezekiel was with that group in 597. And still there will be another deportation in 586 B.C., and at that time Jerusalem will be destroyed and so will the temple. That hasn’t happened.

So Ezekiel is in that second deportation. He’s over in Babylon. He’s preaching to the exiles there warning them that more judgment is to come, and that it’s coming not only on the land of Judah, not only on Jerusalem, not only on the temple, but it’s going to come on the lives of all who do not do righteousness, who do not live righteously; and Ezekiel is preaching repentance and calling people to turn from their sin.

This sermon in chapter 18 is a remarkable, remarkable gospel sermon. Gospel means good news; but in order to get to the good news, you have to accept the bad news; and this is the bad news, at least at the beginning, and the good news comes toward the end.

Now we said it’s divided into three sections. Section Number One: The sinner’s delusion and God’s reality. The sinner’s delusion and God’s reality.

What is the sinner’s delusion? You remember it, don’t you? “The word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘What do you mean by using this proverb concerning the land of Israel, saying, “The fathers eat the sour grapes, but the children’s teeth are set on edge”?’” That’s the sinner’s delusion. “We’re suffering, but our fathers sinned.”

That same expression exactly, that same proverb – as I called it last time, a meme – that same statement was addressed by Jeremiah who was preaching back in the land of Israel. So Jeremiah’s a prophet at the same time; he’s back in Israel. He’s saying, “You’re saying the same thing: ‘We’re suffering for the sins of a prior generation.’” That is what the exiles were saying: “We don’t deserve this, we’re good people. The Lord is punishing us for something that our ancestors did.”

God’s reality speaks then to the sinner’s delusion, verse 3: “As I live,” declares the Lord God, “you are surely not going to use this proverb in Israel anymore. Stop saying that, it is not true. Behold,” – verse 4 – “every soul is Mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is Mine. The soul who sins will die. No one is the victim of another person’s sin, everyone has an individual account with Me; and the soul who sins will die. Your spiritual death, your physical death, and your eternal death are related to your own sin.”

I told you last week about Proverbs 19:3, which says, “The foolishness of man ruins his way, and his heart rages against God.” Man ruins his own life and blames God.

Yes, it is true, our conditions, the conditions in which we live in the world are affected by other people. We’re all in this sinful condition because of Adam’s sin. But there have been past generations who have messed up this world significantly, and we’ve inherited the world that they gave us. And there is a worldly culture existing now that is corrupting this world at a rapid speed that’s almost breathtaking; and, yes, they cause levels of corruption that we have to face and we have to endure. It is true that corruption is passed down to us from past generations, and spread among us by present generations. But no individual person will ever be judged on the sin of someone else.

Whatever the culture you live in and whatever its corruptions, you’ll be judged for your own sin and your own sin alone. God says, “No more tolerance for you saying, ‘We are suffering because somebody else sinned.’” God doesn’t operate that way. “You’re suffering because of your own sin.” In a sense He’s saying, “You know better than your ancestors.”

So having made the statement of His reality as against the backdrop of their delusion we come to Point Two in verses 5 to 20. And we started it last time, we’ll go through it quickly this morning. This is God’s reality illustrated. We saw God’s reality stated, here’s God’s reality illustrated. We saw the sinner’s delusion stated, and here’s the sinner’s delusion defended.

So God says, “Let Me help you to understand.” This I’m going to give you a series of illustrations, really a three-part illustration. The point is this: the soul who sins will die, the nephesh, the person who has committed the sin dies for his own sin. God judges every person individually, and here’s His illustration. And there’s, first of all, a grandfather, then a father, and then a son. So it goes through three generations of sinners.

And we’re going to learn what passes from one generation to the next. Does sin pass from one generation to the next? Are children held responsible for their parents sin? Does righteousness pass from one generation to the next? Are sinners benefitted by the righteousness of their ancestors? That is what we’re going to see in this text.

Now I want to give you an insight as we start. It’s all about the works that people do. This is all about the works that they do, and we’re going to see them all laid out, certain behaviors; God judges on behavior.

Now let me say this so you understand it. We are not saved by works, we are saved by faith, we are saved by grace. We will be judged by our works because our works are the manifest evidence of our nature. We are not saved by works, we will be judged by our works. That is why you see in Romans chapter 2 this very same kind of judgment.

Verse 5 of Romans 2 talks about the righteous judgment of God. Righteous judgment of God says in verse 6, “who will render to each person according to his deeds.” He will render to each person according to his deeds: to those who by perseverance in doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, He gives them eternal life. To those who are selfishly ambitious, do not obey the truth, obey unrighteousness, He gives them wrath and indignation.

Judgment is based on works. The unbelievers will be judged on their works. God is keeping a record of every work, every deed, every thought, every action of every unbeliever; and in the end when they come before the great white throne to be judged they will be judged on the record of their deeds.

The same is true of believers. In the day that we see God we will be judged by our works. Our works are the manifestation of the transformation of God in our lives. Righteous people do righteous people, unrighteous people do unrighteous things, and therefore the behaviors give evidence of the nature. So judgment is always on the basis of works, that’s why God keeps a record of those works.

Now let’s meet the righteous grandfather in verse 5: “A man is righteous.” Okay, he’s righteous. How did he become righteous? We know the answer to that: “Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness.”

When you believe God – and now, of course, with the gospel and Christ having come – when you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, God grants you righteousness. His righteousness is imputed to you. Paul says, “That’s why I don’t have a righteousness of my own, but the righteousness of God imputed to me through faith in Christ.” This is the great gift that God gives a believer: He grants him his own righteousness, covers him with His own righteousness.

So here’s a man who is righteous. As a result of being righteous by faith he practices justice and righteousness. Those two are together nine times in this text, they go together. His life is marked by justice and righteousness, justice meaning he does right with regard to everyone else.

Righteousness means he does right in his own life. And here are the illustrations: “He doesn’t eat at the mountain shrines.” This is a hypothetical grandfather. “He doesn’t eat at the mountain shrines, doesn’t lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, defile his neighbor’s wife,” – that’s idolatry and then adultery; he doesn’t do that – “doesn’t approach a woman during her menstrual period,” – that was forbidden for the sake of keeping her from unnecessary diseases in ancient times – “if a man does not oppress anyone, restores to the debtor his pledge,” – when you loaned money to someone you took some goods as a pledge – clothing, tools, whatever it was – you gave it back when he paid you back; he doesn’t keep his pledge – “doesn’t commit robbery, gives bread to the hungry, covers the naked with clothing, if he doesn’t lend money on interest or take increase,” – you couldn’t lend to another Jew with interest, you had to loan him the money without interest; and increase mean usury, exorbitant, high interest – “if he keeps his hand from iniquity and executes true justice between man and man, if he walks in My statues and My ordinances so as to deal faithfully,” – that is with integrity – “he is righteous” – there it is again.

Verse 5, “A man is righteous.” Verse 9, “He is righteous,” stated again. How do we know he’s righteous? Because of this kind of life. “That man will surely live,” declares the Lord God. He’ll never know divine punishment, he’ll never know spiritual death and eternal death.

Now notice, there are all kinds of things that manifest a righteous life, and they are practical things. He doesn’t worship idols. He doesn’t commit adultery. He’s taking very good care of those in his charge, particularly his wife. He doesn’t oppress anybody. He gives back what he owes. He doesn’t commit robbery. He feeds the hungry. He covers the naked. He loans money without interest. He keeps his hand from iniquity. He executes true justice between man and man. Divine justice – he operates according to God’s laws. This is not some kind of socialistic ideology, he operates according to God’s laws; and they’re laid out explicitly in Leviticus, you can see them, some of these laws related to man to man even in the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus. He executes true justice.

In general, verse 9, “He walks in My statues, My ordinances.” He live with integrity. “He is righteous, he will live.” There’s the first point that the Lord wants Ezekiel to make. This man’s going to live because he’s righteous, and it shows up in his life.

But what about the next man, verse 10? This is the father, from the grandfather to the father. “Then he may have a violent son who sheds blood and who does any of these things to a brother (though he himself did not do any of these things).” The grandfather didn’t do any of these things, but he has a violent son who murders people and does all the rest of those things that his father didn’t do.

“He eats and the mountain shrines,” – verse 11 – “he defiles his neighbor’s wife, he oppresses the poor and needy, commits robbery, doesn’t restore a pledge, but lifts up his eyes to the idols and commits abomination, he lends money on interest and takes increase; will he live? He will not live! He has committed all these abominations, he will surely be put to death; his blood will be on his own head.”

What is the point? The point is simply this: having a righteous father did nothing for him. Righteousness does not cross generational lines. Having a righteous father does nothing for the son. When the son lives a violent, murderous, adulterous, oppressive, corrupt, selfish life, his blood will be on his own head.

Now I want to remind you of a parent. If you have warned your children like a watchman, given them the gospel, told them about judgment, confronted sin, you’ve done your duty; or perhaps to a spouse, or perhaps to a family member or a friend, you have committed the gospel to them, you have warned them. As we saw earlier in Ezekiel, you have to be a faithful watchman and warn of judgment, or the judgment falls on them and their blood’s on your hands if you haven’t warned them. But even as a parent, if you have done that and your son rejects the gospel and does all of these things that are the very opposite of what you did, there’s no blood on your hands. His blood is on his own head. He is held responsible for what he has done, or she, as the matter may be.

The righteousness of parents is not passed to the next generation, not through any kind of rite or sacrament or baptism or anything. The righteousness of one generation is not passed to the next. That next generation is judged by its own life and works. Having a godly father doesn’t protect, the credit doesn’t pass down. He will die, because he has committed all these abominations. He will surely be put to death, his blood will be on his own head. He will die in judgment, fully guilty, fully responsible.

Now what if that person has a son? Verse 14, “Now behold, he has a son who has observed all his father’s sins which he committed, and observing does not do likewise.” He follows the pattern of his grandfather, not his father. “He does not eat at the mountain shrines or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, or defile his neighbor’s wife, or oppress anyone, or retain a pledge, or commit robbery, but he gives bread to the hungry and covers the naked with clothing, he keeps his hand from the poor,” – that is he doesn’t abuse the poor and defenseless – “does not take interest or increase, but executes My ordinances,” – the Word of God – “and walks in My statutes; he will not die for his father’s iniquity, he will surely live.”

There’s the main point here. No person is being punished for somebody else’s sins; not a prior generation; not even your own family, your own father’s sins. “He will not die for his father’s iniquity, he will surely live.”

As I said, no one is a victim of anybody else’s sins. We all stand responsible for our own sins, we stand responsible for God, and the only criteria by which we will be judged eternally is the record of our own behavior. God would not punish a son for the sins of his father, and God would not withhold punishment from a son for the righteousness of his father. So here is God’s truth stated in verses 1 to 4, and then God’s truth illustrated.

How did the sinner’s respond? Well, they defended their delusion. Verse 19: “Yet you say,” – now I’m going to go back to what I said at the beginning. This is the default position of sinners; they don’t give up this territory very easily. These are exiles who know the law of God, who have been preached to regularly by this prophet Ezekiel. They know the Old Testament, they know what it says, and yet they cling to their own sense of innocence. And so, this is a remarkable response.

“Yet you say, in spite of what I have told you, in spite of what God has said, you say, ‘Why should the son not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity?’ In spite of what I’ve said, in spite of that truth, you’re still clinging to the idea that the son is bearing the father’s punishment, and you actually say, ‘Why should the son not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity?’”

Why do they say that? It seems like a strange thing to say. Aren’t they criticizing God for doing that? And then why are they justifying it and saying, “Why should it not be that way?” Answer is very simple: this is fatalistic, cynical sarcasm directed at God. What other explanation is there?

“We don’t deserve it.” They fight to hold onto that delusion. “We don’t deserve it. So this is how it is. Why should it not be this way? We’re trapped in this fatalism. We’re trapped in this fate that You, God, have placed on us. You have predetermined our destiny and there’s no way out. How else can we explain our sufferings?”

They will not let go of the idea they are victims, so it has to be that they just cynically, sarcastically say, “Well, huh, this is on You, God, this is on You. This is You, You did it. You made the world this way.” Their predicament is proof they are good people being mistreated by history. And who’s in charge of history? God. They yield to their hopeless fate, and they decide that this is God’s fault, and they’re going to keep saying it.

They become more bold, if you look at verse 25 – we’ll see this next time. “Yet you say,” – same introduction as we saw in verse 19 – “yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not right.’” Then verse 29, “The house of Israel says, ‘The way of the Lord is not right.’”

Now get the picture here; they are blaspheming God: “God, You’re not righteous, You’re not just. We don’t deserve this.” They cling tightly to their innocence. “There’s no other explanation in the universe for the situation that we’re in except You did this to us.” They would eagerly declare the Lord God unholy, unrighteous, unjust, before they would admit their own wretched wickedness.

You see how strong the sinner’s resistance is? Strong, strong resistance. The sinner will shake his fist in the face of God before he’ll yield up the delusion of his own goodness.

Now here again we’re brought to understand the basic starting point of the gospel. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. And the wages of sin is what? It’s death. Stop blaming the world. Stop blaming who you are, where you are, the circumstances you’re in, and thereby blaming God.

And if you are being told that there’s only one true God and it’s the Sovereign God of Scripture, then it’s the Sovereign God of Scripture who got you into this mess, and you’re going to shake your fist in His face and deny your culpability, He’s certainly not going to be the one you go to for salvation. You’re not going to see Him as a God of love and mercy and grace and tenderness and compassion. In fact, you’re actually going to think that He gets some pleasure out of this. That would be consistent that, “Hey, You must like doing this, God, because this is how You operate in the world.”

That’s why God later in the chapter makes very clear, wonderful statement, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked,” verse 23. Verse 32, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked. It’s not what pleases Me. It’s not what pleases Me.”

And then God responds by reiterating the truth, verse 19, middle of the verse, “When the son has practiced justice and righteousness and has observed all My statues and done them, he shall surely live. The person who dies” – verse 20 – “is the person who sins. The son will not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son’s iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself.” You must stop playing the victim. You are the criminal, you are the rebel; you’re facing judgment for your own sins.

There’s a third section. I’ll just introduce it to you briefly and then we’ll look at it next time. It starts there in verse 21. We saw God’s truth stated, first point; God’s truth illustrated, second point. Here is God’s truth offered, here’s the invitation. It’s full of pleading, full of pleading. Notice just glancing down how many question marks there are here as God questions the direction that sinners go.

So God’s truth was stated, illustrated, and now offered. And we saw the sinner’s delusion declared, and we saw the sinner’s delusion defended, and here we see the sinner’s delusion retained. Verses 20 to 29 are just amazing, because they show how even when God lays out His truth again, sinners cling tightly to their transgressions.

Just the first three verses, starting at verse 21, “If the wicked man turns from all his sins which he has committed and observes all My statues and practices justice and righteousness, he shall surely live; he shall not die. All his transgressions which he has committed will not be remembered against him; because of his righteousness which he has practiced, he will live. Do I have any pleasure in the death of the wicked,” declares the Lord God, “rather than that he would turn from his ways and live?”

God is pleading here. This is God’s truth offered to them. “If you turn from your sins and turn to observe My statues and practice justice and righteousness, you will live and not die; and all the transgression of one who turns, all which he has committed will not be remembered against him. Because of his righteousness which he has practiced, he will live. That’s what pleases Me.”

That’s the good news. The goods new is that when you turn from your sin and you follow the path of righteousness and obedience, your sins are completely forgiven, and they will never be remembered against him. You heard Psalm 103 earlier, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.” We can never forget His benefits because He can never remember our sins.

That’s the gospel. And now we know what Ezekiel didn’t know, that all of this is possible because Jesus Christ has borne in His body our sins on the cross, taking the wrath of God on behalf of all who believe. Your sins can be forgiven if you come to Christ, because He paid for them on the cross. That’s the gospel. Doesn’t help sinners to coddle their sense of self-protection, their sense of being victimized by someone else.

God is pleading now with Ezekiel’s generation and every other generation, including ours. Forget what you don’t like about the world you live in. You might not be fully satisfied with who you are, what you are, where you are, when you are. But that isn’t the issue. The issue is, “Turn from your sins and obey the Word of God, and you will live and never die; and He will never remember your sins again, they will all be forgiven; and you will live forever.” That’s what pleases God.

The church is in the process, sad to say, of moving rapidly away from that message, the message of sin and death and judgment and hell, to agreeing with the world that people are just victims of somebody else’s iniquity. And as long as we keep affirming that we push them away from the gospel.

You say, “Oh, yeah, but people who are into social justice today, they’re not against the gospel.” They will be. They will be, because they’ve already decided they’re going to give the world what the world wants to hear. They’re not going to be satisfied with this, they’re going to want to hear even less. And that means the gospel will disappear.

The good news is you’re a sinner on your way to hell, but you don’t have to go there. Turn, repent, come to God through Christ. He will make you righteous. He will enable you to live a righteous life. You will be the possessor of eternal life. When you face Him in judgment, He will grant to you the fullness of joy in His presence forevermore, and you will really live forever. More to come, but that’s for next time.

Lord, thank You again this morning for such a blessed time of fellowship and worship. Thank You for the encouragement of time in prayer, as well as music, fellowship, all that’s gone on here even this morning. We’re deeply grateful that You loved us and sent Your Son to be the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but the sins of the whole world. Thank You for providing a sacrifice that could satisfy Your just requirement, one who could take our punishment so You would be free to forgive us.

Lord, may there be many this day who recognize that they are the criminal, they need to repent, turn, seek Your righteousness, seek – as he says later in the chapter – a new heart and a new spirit, which only You can give, and cry out to You for forgiveness and salvation and eternal life through Jesus Christ. That’s our prayer. Do that work in hearts we pray in the Savior’s name. Amen.

*This transcript was originally published at GTY.org.

I don’t like battles particularly, especially battles with other Christians; but they seem to be necessary for the protection of the truth. The apostle Paul warned the Ephesian elders that of their own selves men would rise up to lead people astray. The church has suffered through the centuries attacks from the outside from unbelievers, but the most devastating attacks have always come from the inside. And in all the years of my life, now many, many years in ministry, it seems as though there has never been a time when we aren’t engaged in some battle for protecting the truth, clarifying the truth, a battle waged as a kind of civil war, even inside the church. In fact, not just in my lifetime, but there’s really never been an era in all of church history when the gospel was not under assault, under attack usually from within the church.

The truth is that we would expect that, because the gospel is the only way of salvation. It is the gospel that delivers men out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. And naturally, Satan, as the prince of the power of the air, as the ruler of the kingdom of darkness, wants to hang onto all that he possesses; and so he wages endless war against the gospel. Now sometimes there are direct attacks against the gospel; but the more formidable ones and the more subtle ones are those that seem innocent enough and they come generally from the inside of the church.

The apostle Paul, as you remember in our study of Galatians, was very clear in saying that if anybody preaches another gospel, if anybody alters the gospel, let him be damned, and he repeats that twice. And Jude reminds that we have to earnestly contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Paul comes to the end of his life and says, “I have fought the good fight.” He said to the Corinthians there’s a wide open door, and there are many adversaries.

Proclaiming, protecting, and defending the gospel is the duty of every preacher and every Christian believer. The gospel is under assault at all times. The current dangerous attack, as I pointed out last time, has the potential to do more damage than any other attack on the gospel I’ve seen in my lifetime. It is the return of an old enemy, an old enemy that basically decimated churches across Europe, across America, and even around the world. The old form of this enemy would take us back to the early twentieth century here in the United States. It would take us back even earlier into Europe.

We sung a hymn this morning written by Martin Luther, obviously a force that brought about the great Reformation and drew the church in the sixteenth century out of a thousand years of Roman Catholic darkness by rediscovering and reaffirming the gospel. Churches developed and flourished in the early years of the Reformation, but it wasn’t long before great state churches, great denominations across Europe began to be assaulted and attacked by what was then social concerns, social concerns that eventually became known as the social gospel.

The same thing happened in the early twentieth century in the United States as the major denominations in this country began to collapse and die. This corrupted gospel, this social gospel has taken down entire churches, entire denominations, with all their schools, all their pastors, and all their people into, essentially, the darkness of death. Tens of thousands of churches are nothing but rock piles across Europe and even across America. And here it comes again, another version of this social gospel, and people are embracing it without critical thought, without biblical discernment; and we’re about to relive another disaster of epic proportions.

Sadly, many evangelicals have welcomed it back as if it were a needy friend. The enemy has seduced this current generation to follow him down the very same track, the same sinkhole all over again.

If you don’t know history you don’t learn much from history, of course. This time it isn’t called the social gospel, it’s called social justice. And like last time and every time, it is predicated on some legitimate issues in society that elicit concern and compassion and a desire for justice. These are legitimate concerns society. The advocates of social justice have a right to be concerned about inequities in society. They should demonstrate compassion, concern, and care for people who suffer and are treated unfairly, unjustly. But the effort now is to make this an essential part of the gospel, or in some cases to replace the gospel with this preoccupation with social justice. As I tried to make clear last time, the problem with tying social justice to the gospel is the same problem with tying the social gospel to the gospel.

Now the social gospel, the previous form, going back into the early twentieth century in America and the end of the nineteenth century, the previous form even in Europe was there were people suffering, there were people who were poor, there were people who were needy, and the church needed to take care of that. They needed to do social work; and eventually the social work replaced the gospel. Well, this is another form of that. We are being caught up in what is socially needed in our society. We don’t deny there are social needs. I wouldn’t deny for a moment that there are inequities, they’re all over the place in a fallen world. But the question is, “Is it part of the gospel?”

History would tell us that when it begins to make inroads into the church it doesn’t stop until the gospel has completely disappeared. The problem with social just being part of the gospel is it does not belong there, and did does severe harm to genuine gospel efforts. I’ll say that again: it does severe harm to genuine gospel efforts. And you say, “Why?” and I’m going to try to help you to understand that from Ezekiel 18 again this morning.

Social justice is this idea – just for a definition. Certain groups of people due to race or gender or sexual preference or economic status or personal choices, personal ideology, have been and still are abused by our society. That calls for a realignment in our society because that’s unjust. So we need social justice. We need to adjust our society so that people of all races, all genders, all sexual preferences, and all economic status, and all personal ideologies are all treated equally. In particular, there is a concern for those that are weak, those that have been and still are oppressed by those in power.

We understand all of those social inequities do exist, they’ve always existed. Even our Lord Jesus said, “The poor you’ll always have with you.” It is the nature of life in a fallen world that it’s never going to be perfect, as I wrote in a blog article a few weeks ago. No government will ever dispense justice perfectly, it’s not possible in a fallen world. There will be difficulties, there will be challenges. “As sparks fly upward, so man is born unto trouble,” says the Bible. You’ll never be in a perfect world, a just world, a righteous world, until Christ comes and sets up His kingdom. But what is happening is this understanding of the dispossessed or the oppressed or those who have been treated in some ways unjustly because of one of these things that we mention are now being defined as a kind of victim class. They are victims of societal injustice.

And the victim class keeps growing larger and larger and larger. Every time I turn around there’s a new class of victims. The latest one that I’ve heard is what’s called Christian privilege. If you are a Christian you are a part of a privileged class that has been for centuries oppressing non-Christians. Non-Christians have become victims then of Christians.

This is a new victim class. Anyone who is offended by someone’s words or someone’s looks or someone’s actions or someone’s clothing or someone’s opinion can designate that offence as a microaggression, and they can claim that they’re being victimized by that microaggression, victimized by offensive words, which become labeled as hate speech. This dominates university campuses in a massive way. They whole culture is rushing into victim status. Everybody wants to find victim status in some way, because only victims are empowered in the culture, only victims have moral authority. If you’re not a victim you have no moral authority. So everybody’s got to find a victim status.

Am I surprised at this? Not at all, not in the least. It is the most natural thing for sinners to designate themselves as victims. This is the default position of all fallen human beings. It’s the most natural thing for us to do, blame someone else for our condition, blame someone else for our issues, blame someone else for our troubles. This is exactly what happened in the very beginning.

If you go back to Genesis chapter 3, mentioned this last week, I’ll just reiterate it. The Lord confronts Eve who sinned. And what does Eve say? “The serpent deceived me, and I ate. Not me, a talking snake deceived me, and I ate.” And the man, when God confronted him, Genesis 3:12, “The woman You gave me to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.”

Only two people existed, both of them blamed someone else. It wasn’t either of them, it was really God. “God, I don’t know anything about creation, but You made a talking snake; it’s Your fault. And then You made a woman, and that’s Your fault.” This is the sinner’s default position. Sinners most naturally blame someone else, and ultimately blame their circumstances. And since God is the sovereign over all of history, they blame God.

People believe that they are good, but other people mess them up. You have to be a victim, because sinners need to pass blame off, because it has a superficial way of salving their guilty conscience. So they hold tightly to the deception that they are good, but someone bad influenced them, or some bad group influenced them, or some oppressive race, or all men, or all heterosexual people, or all rich people, or whatever.

Here’s the problem with letting sinners think that way. You’re aiding and abetting their disavowal of their sinfulness. This is why it assaults the gospel, because that’s the entry point of the gospel. You don’t come to the gospel until you have come to the full realization that you are the reason you have problems, that you are who you are, the race you are, the gender you are, and even the economic status you are, because God providentially put you there. And the reason you have problems there is because not only are there sinners all around you, but you’re a sinner of equal guilt.

The problem with letting people redefine themselves as victims is they disavow responsibility for their own sins. People don’t come to true salvation. I say that again: they don’t come to true salvation until they realize that salvation is about being delivered from their sins.

Now I understand that this generation of evangelicals has truncated the gospel in really serious ways by saying, “The gospel is designed to make you happy,” or, “The gospel is designed to make you feel better about yourself,” or, “The gospel is designed to give you purpose in your life.” No, the gospel is designed to save you from your sins, which will put you in hell forever. That’s what the gospel is designed to do. It is not designed to tweak your life and make you more successful or more prosperous; that is a lie. It is designed to rescue you from hell and to take you to heavenly glory.

If we justify the idea that people are victims and then doubly justify their bitterness and anger over being victims, we are allowing them to push their sin away onto someone else. To do that is to agree with the sinner’s deluded comfort, that he or she is a victim, “Somebody did something to me,” or, “Some group did something to me,” or, “The government did something to me,” or, “My school did something to me,” or, “The world did something to me.” I’ve heard it so many times. “If that is true, and I’m not responsible for my sin, and God rules the worlds, then God got me in this mess. And why would I ever go to that God to get me out of it when He got me into it? If God is at all responsible for the mess that I’m in, then why would I go to Him? He’s already demonstrated His injustice. Why would I look to Him as a Savior?”

So conceding to sinners that they are victims is a very dangerous thing to do. And I’m not saying that they aren’t, in a human sense, fighting in a very tough, fallen world; we all are. But when it comes down to sin, each of us is personally responsible for our sins and the complicated mess that they make out of our lives. The conversion of sinners depends on their recognition that they are not victims of someone else and they are not victims of an indifferent or hostile God. When you concede to sinners that they are victims of other people’s wrongs you put up a barrier to the necessary full responsibility for sin that drives the broken sinner to God for deliverance from sin and death and hell. The gospel doesn’t open up until the sinner takes full responsibility for his sin; that is where the gospel begins.

Now we began to see last week, Ezekiel’s message is critical to our understanding of this issue. He was a judgment preacher, and the foundation of his message is the fact of personal sin and personal guilt. He preaches about accountability, he preaches about guilt, he preaches about punishment, he preaches about death, and particularly does so in chapter 18. So look now at chapter 18. This is an evangelistic message. This is a gospel message. This is like the Old Testament gospel.

It is true, as I said last time, that our lives are affected by the sins of others. Yes, that’s true; Adam sinned and we all fell into death. Yes, our forefathers sinned certain sins and left us certain characteristic corruptions in our society. Yes, we are living in a vile culture right now and it has its external effect on us. But their collective sins, though they create corruption, they are not the cause of our judgment. God does not punish any sinner for someone else’s sins, not Adam’s or anybody else’s.

Here’s the point. We will all pay for our own sins, and it’s time for the church to make that clear to this society, as to every society. As long as sinners are allowed to blame someone else for their life conditions, they are cut off from the gospel starting point; and all sinners do that naturally. So here we have a message that they will love.

Look, the world liked it when we changed the style of the church to give them what they wanted stylistically. And now they want us to change the substance of the church, the message of the church, to give them what they want; and what they always want more than anything else is for us to acknowledge that they are all victims, when God defines them as perpetrators, criminals, culprits. The church has to preach the bad news, “You are not a victim, you are a willful sinner.” The church cannot create this victim status and move from that to the gospel, it will cause them to have to preach a superficial gospel to attract those people.

All sinners deserve death; all sinners will die. Spiritually they’re dead already; physically they will die and they will live in hell in a kind of living eternal death. In order to escape that, by the gospel to be saved, the sinner must be overwhelmed with the sin of his own heart, repent, seek mercy from God before it is too late; and when death comes, it is too late. We cannot fix society, it is fallen. We cannot fix the world. But we must warn sinners; that’s why the church exists.

Now here in chapter 18, the point, the main point you see at the end of verse 4: “The soul who sins will die.” The soul who sins will die; that is our message.

Here in Ezekiel 18 we’re going to see the impenitent, proud sinners claiming they are innocent, claiming they are being punished by God for some other person’s sins, namely a previous generation. They are going to want to transfer their guilt to someone else. They are so good at this that they have hardened their hearts. They are delusional in their minds, and their delusion has set them against God. They are fighting for the false comfort of blaming someone else. And Ezekiel’s trying to get the message across that God will not accept their pushing off the blame or their victim status. And in this great gospel sermon, Ezekiel strips away their false protective covering.

Now just a word about the context. Judah the southern kingdom has been taken into captivity through deportation 605, 597, 586. The third deportation 586 along with the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple hasn’t happened yet. But Ezekiel and his wife went in the second deportation by the Babylonians. They are now, as it were, slaves in Babylon. It is there that Ezekiel prophesies to the captives, to the exiles, and he warns them about the judgment of God on their own sins, because they think that God is punishing them for sins their father, their previous generations committed. That’s the setting. And rather than look at their own sins, they’re angry at God, they’re blaming God, they’re accusing God. “Our fathers sinned, and we suffer. Our fathers are guilty, and we’re getting punished. We’re victims of somebody else’s sin.” So Ezekiel unleashes a powerful, divinely-inspired warning that God judges every person individually based on his own life.

Now I’m going to break this into three sections, we’ll see how far we go. Number One: Sinners delusion and God’s reality. Number One point: Sinners delusion and God’s reality, or God’s truth. Verses 1 to 4: “Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘What do you mean by using this proverb concerning the land of Israel, saying, “The fathers eat the sour grapes, but the children’s teeth are set on edge”? As I live,’ declares the Lord God, ‘you are surely not going to use this proverb in Israel anymore. Behold, every soul is Mine, literally; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is Mine. The soul who sins will die.’”

Now I want you to look at those opening verses. “Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying,” – now this is characteristic of Ezekiel. This is repeated again and again, and again, and again, starting back with his call in chapter 3. He says in verse 4, “Then He said to me, ‘Son of man, go to the house of Israel, speak with My words to them.’” So we know what’s coming in the prophecy of Ezekiel is from the very mouth of God.

Down in verse 16 of chapter 3, “At the end of seven days the word of the Lord came to me, saying.” Over in verse 27, the end of the chapter, “But when I speak to you, I will open your mouth” – says God – “and you will say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God.’” And that’s how the flow of the book goes.

Chapter 6, verse 1, the Lord speaks. Chapter 7, verse 1, the Lord speaks. Chapter 11, verse 14, the Lord speaks; 12:1, 13:1, 14:2, 15:1, 16:1, 17:1, 18:1 all begin with the same statement: “The word of the Lord came. The word of the Lord came.”

So we’re hearing from heaven. And God speaks a question: “What do you mean by using this proverb concerning the land of Israel? What are you intending to accomplish with this?” Not, “What do you mean by what it says, but what do you mean by using it? What do you mean by saying, ‘The fathers eat the sour grapes, but the children’s teeth are set on edge’?” You know what He’s saying, “You’re attacking Me. You’re attacking Me.” Think about it. “You are attacking Me with your proverb. Do you really mean to attack Me?”

“The fathers eat the sour grapes, but the children’s teeth are set on edge” That’s a proverb. Today we would say it’s a meme. It’s repeated so often it becomes a byword, it becomes a belief. And it was their belief: “The fathers eat the sour grapes, the children’s teeth are set on edge.” Unripe grapes could cause your teeth to set on edge. It’s a sour, sour taste. It could even be related to the term “teeth on edge” to a toothache. “The fathers eat the grapes and we get the toothache.”

What is that supposed to say? It’s their way of saying, “We’re suffering for something another generation did. We have all this problem because of what happened a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, thirty years ago, fifty years ago, whatever.”

The tone is cynical, definitely cynical. It is sarcastic. The tone of this meme or this proverb is fatalistic. It is a kind of deterministic, fatalistic mantra. It accuses God of cruel injustice. There’s a kind of inevitability in this. “Yeah. Well, what could we do about it? The fathers ate the sour grapes and our teeth are set on edge.”

And by the way, it wasn’t just the exiles who were saying this. Jeremiah the prophet was still back in the land of Judah when Ezekiel was in Babylon. Jeremiah was still back in Judah, and Jeremiah was also preaching to the people who were still in Judah. Listen to what he says, Jeremiah 31:29, “In those days they will not say again, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’” They were saying it back in Judah as well as in Babylon. “But” – says Jeremiah, verse 30 – “everyone will die for his own iniquity; each man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth will be set on edge.”

“It’s not true; stop saying that.” It is a cynical way of mocking God and His system of judgment. He punishes people for sins they didn’t commit. One generation is judged for the iniquities of a previous generation.

By the way, not just true in Babylon among the exiles or in Judah among those still there, it was a common notion in pagan religion. The Jews had been so involved in idolatry that they had picked up pagan fatalism. It was a part of common ancient Middle Eastern paganism, fourteenth century document, fourteenth century B.C. about a Hittite king, and the Hittite king was complaining to the god of storms. And this is a quote: “My father sinned and transgressed against the word of the storm god, my lord. But I have not sinned. My father’s sin has fallen on me.” End quote. That is from pagan religion.

The Jews in their attachment to idolatry had picked up pagan theology, and they saw God as this indifferent kind of force, this immovable kind of unfeeling object that they were stuck with, a pernicious, heretical delusion that made them treat God with cynicism. They had become victims. Like the pagans all thought, “We’re just victimized by these unfeeling deities.” They accused God of being unjust, vengeful, caring only about retaliation without regard for the persons He was retaliating against.

Lamentations 5 – and you should read the book of Lamentations if you think you’re mistreated. Read the whole book of Lamentations and you’ll feel like you have never been mistreated the way Jeremiah was. Lamentations 5:7, “Our fathers sinned, and are no more; it is we who have borne their iniquities and guilt.” I mean, this was common idea. Write it down, put it on a post-it; it’s how the life in this world goes. Somebody else sins, fatalistically, deterministically we are victims. God just wants vengeance, and He takes it on whoever’s around. John Calvin said this: “We desire to throw off the blame as far from ourselves as we possibly can.”

That this is a direct act against God, that this is a direct attack against God, the holy, righteous God is clear. If you go down to verse 25 – getting ahead of ourselves, but I want you to see it – this is what they say to God, “The way of the Lord is not right.” Verse 29, “The house of Israel says, ‘The way of the Lord is not right.’” There’s no question who they blame.

“If God is the Creator, as Christians say, and if God is sovereign over everything, as Christians say and as the Bible says, if God is the author of history, if everything that happens in history is within the sovereign purpose of God, then God is to be blamed for my trouble. Don’t tell me God is good; look at this messed up world. Why would I go to that God for deliverance or salvation? I’m a victim of that God already.”

So the delusion is that hard troubles are the fault of past generations. But beyond that, ‘They’re God’s fault; and doubly His fault, He let them happen. And now He’s punishing us for what somebody else did. This is not a God that I want to go to to find peace and joy and comfort.” As long as people feel they have been victimized by history and you tell them God is the sovereign over history, you’ve put them in a position to not want to go near the God they need. So the delusion is to pass your guilt onto someone else and feel you’re just inevitably under some inexorable divine law from a God who doesn’t even care about you.

Proverbs 19:3 says, “The foolishness of man ruins his way. The foolishness of man ruins his way, and his heart rages against God.” Did you get that? Proverbs 19:3, “The foolishness of man ruins his way, and his heart rages against God.” That’s the sinner’s default position. And if you acknowledge the sinner’s rage against God as some noble thing that deserves your attention and your compassion, you have stopped Him from the progress toward the door of the gospel.

Another illustration of this, and you will recall it, is back in Exodus 32. This is so typical it’s almost humorous. Moses comes back down the mountain, and Aaron has led the people while he was gone to get the law; and they’ve made a golden calf, right? So Moses comes near the camp, verse 19, he sees the golden calf and dancing. His anger burns. He threw the tablets from his hands, the tablets on which written the Ten Commandments, shattered them at the foot of the mountain; took the calf which they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to powder, scattered it over the surface of the water and made the sons of Israel drink it. Wow, pretty dramatic.

And then Moses said to Aaron, “What did this people do to you, that you have brought such great sin upon them? What in the world, Aaron?” Aaron said, “Do not let the anger of my lord burn; you know the people yourself, that they are prone to evil. For they said to me, ‘Make a god for us who will go before us; for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” I said to them, “Well, whoever has any gold, let them tear it off, peel it off.” So they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.” Really?

That is the default position, “Don’t blame me, I just threw some gold and out came this calf.” People will do that, and do that, and do that, and do that. And if you buy into that as an evangelical Christian or as a preacher of the gospel, if you let people get away with blaming someone else, you have caused them to become angry with God, because God if He is sovereign has gotten them into this situation, and you have made it impossible for them to want to go to the God they’re angry with to receive grace and help when they need it; and He’s the only source.

So, verse 3, “As I live,” declares the Lord God, “you are surely not going to use this proverb in Israel anymore. No more blaspheming My name. No more misrepresenting Me. As I life,” – that is a decisive oath, that is God swearing by Himself. “I swear on My own life. I am absolutely determined to stop the common accusations thrown against Me. Stop accusing Me,” declares the Lord. “You are not going to use this proverb in Israel anymore.”

Sinners are not victims of an unjust sovereign God. They’re not victims of an indifferent God. They’re not victims of another generation. They’re not victims of God as if God had tampered with genetics or God had fiddled around with history to make them who they are, turn them into victims. But again, that’s always where sinners want to go. You can’t let them go there. When you let them go there, they’re off the hook and God becomes the enemy. They will ruin their own lives and rage against God.

God will not tolerate the delusion that disavows personal responsibility and personal guilt. None of us is innocent, none of us. We all deserve what? Death. We all should be dead. You say you have troubles; you should be dead. And it is because – listen to this – of His mercies that we are not consumed. Lamentations 3:22 in the King James, “It is because of His mercies that we are not consumed.” Great are His compassions.

So that’s the sinner’s delusion. Here’s God’s reality in verse 4: “Behold, all souls are Mine.” Literally, “Every soul is Mine, every person is Mine. The person of the Father as well as the person of the Son is Mine. The soul who sins will die.”

“Behold,” – this is exclamation – “every soul is Mine. I know every human being.” Listen, “Every human being belongs to Me, they are My possession. No one is a victim of fate. No one is a victim of some inexorable cosmic laws. No one is treated unfairly. No one is treated unjustly. No one is ignored. No one is outside My knowledge, My possession.”

Every single human being belongs to God, every soul, every father, every son. Every person belongs to God. Every person is known by God. Every person will be treated by God according to his own life. And the soul that sins will die.

No one is a random victim of historical sins. No one is a random victim of genetics. God didn’t make you a man, but you’re a woman in your head, so you need to be transgender. God didn’t miss with you. If you’re a woman, you’re a woman. If you’re a man, you’re a man. If you’re Asian, you’re an Asian. If you’re Hispanic, you’re Hispanic by God’s design. If you’re European, by God’s design. If you’re African American it’s by God’s design. It’s all wonderful; it’s all God’s design. He made you exactly the way He wanted you to be to fit into His purposes for history.

You belong to Him, and all you need to know is this: if you sin and die in your sins, you’re going to perish forever in hell. We all die because we all sin. That is the ultimate argument no one can deny. But people say, “Well, I don’t believe in sin.” The Bible says, “The wages of sin is death.”

If you die, you sinned; plenty of proof. We all die. We all sin. “The soul that sins will die.” We all die because we all sin, and we receive judgment for our own transgressions. Whatever your racial identity, whatever your gender – and that’s pretty simple, there are only two – whatever your economic status, whatever your social challenges, be thankful you’re not dead and judged. And recognize your own wretchedness and the danger you are in; and you’re headed for a just punishment because you have violated the law of a Holy God. You are a perpetrator, you are a criminal, you committed crimes against the one true God to whom you belong. You are a rebel sinner rejecting your Creator and your only Savior. Stop blaming others; face your own sin. No more delusion that you’re a victim. Stop saying that. God says, “No more will you say that. The soul who sins will die. No one to blame but you.”

So that’s the first point: sinners delusion God reality. Point Two – and we’ll just kind of get into this: God’s reality illustrated and the sinner’s delusion defended. Now going a little deeper, God gives Ezekiel illustrations to show exactly what he means, and then we see how the sinner’s delusion will be defended against God’s clear illustrations.

Sinners, by the way, not easily convinced that they are responsible, that they are guilty, not easily convinced. They will fight to the death to blame somebody else. But the Lord gives Ezekiel a three-part illustration. And it’s kind of an interesting illustration. It starts with a grandfather, and then a father, and then a son; so three generations. It’s reminiscent actually of three kings of Judah who follow this pattern: Hezekiah, Manasseh, and Josiah. So they may have been in the back of the mind of God or the mind of Ezekiel even.

All right, so we start out with God judges every person for his own sin, and here’s how he illustrates that very, very dramatically. And I want to make one footnote here and see how far we get. One’s judgment – listen carefully now – one’s judgment before God will be on the basis of conduct. Okay? Listen carefully, because all of us will be judged according to our works.

You say, “Well I didn’t think you were saved by works.” You aren’t saved by works, you’re judged by works. What’s the difference? If you’re saved your works will manifest your salvation. God has ordained that you walk in good works, right, Ephesians 2:10. So you’re going to be judged by your works, Romans 2 says that. Romans 2:5 to 11 lays out specifically that we will be judged by our works.

God is keeping a record of our works. God is keeping a record of all the works of the unsaved, the unconverted, and the unbelievers, and they’ll be judged by their works, which is the manifestation of their unconverted nature. We’re going to be judged by our works, which are the evidences of our conversion, of our transformation, of our regeneration. So don’t be taken off guard when you see so much here that defines a righteous person by his works.

How else can you know a righteous person, right? “By their fruits you shall” – what? – “you shall know them.” This is how you know regenerated people, righteous people, because of their conduct.

So we’re going to meet a righteous grandfather, verses 5 to 9, a righteous grandfather. “If a man is righteous,” – I love that statement – “if a man is righteous and, consequently, practices justice and righteousness.” You cannot practice or do justice and righteousness unless you’re righteous, right? So the assumption is we’re talking about a righteous man.

How was a man in the Old Testament righteous? How did someone become righteous? Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. By faith in God, the righteousness of God was imputed to him, credited to him. So he is a righteous man, and therefore practices justice and righteousness. A righteous man does what is just, does what is righteous.

By the way, those two things, justice and righteousness, are together nine times in this chapter. He is righteous by faith and divine imputation; and as a result, he lives a righteous life. Righteous people practice justice and righteousness. And God gives Ezekiel eleven ways that it shows up, eleven ways. Follow in verse 6.

The first pair have to do with idolatry: “Does not eat at the mountain shrines or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel.” Now eating at the mountain shrines and lifting up your eyes to the idols of the house of Israel was just idolatry. Mountain shrines were set up to worship false gods. There was only one mountain to worship God and that was Mount Moriah, right, in Jerusalem. There was only one shrine or one altar to worship God, and that was the temple in Jerusalem. There was only one place to make sacrifices and that was in Jerusalem.

But the Jews had set up idols all over the place on all kinds of mountains as they were engulfed in paganism. And to lift up your eyes, that phrase “to lift up your eyes to the idols” means to look to them for your help. The way you lift up your eyes to heaven you’re symbolically looking to help from God. There were those people who would lift up their eyes to idols, looking for idols to help them; and they were making sacrifices at mountain shrines designed to be worship to idols. The word “idol,” by the way, comes from a Hebrew word that relates to the word “excrement.” That was God’s word for an idol.

There’s only one place to worship, only one God to worship, only one place to sacrifice. You don’t do that if you’re righteous, you only go to the place where God says to worship Him, and you worship Him in the way He wants to be worshiped. So a righteous man does not involve himself in false religion.

Second pair, “He is pure in his sexual life.” It says he does not defile his neighbor’s wife. That is adultery. He does not commit adultery. And then this, “or approach a woman, any woman, during her menstrual period.” And this even includes a wife. You can read about it in Leviticus 15, Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20.

There’s some interesting discussion about not having a relationship with a woman during a menstrual period and quite interesting literature from Jewish doctors in the past. They have written extensively on the fact that this act would increase the possibility of infection; and some of them would say it could even lead to cervical cancer. It had a similar preventative quality to it that circumcision did, which also caused cervical cancers to be minimal among Jewish woman. And in a day before antibiotics, before any way to deal with infections, this was a way to protect the women. This was a way for husbands to lovingly care for women, protect their wives. So this righteous man follows the law of God in the moral sense, and even in the sense of even caring for his own wife.

This righteous person, in verse 7, “does not oppress anyone.” This is now social virtues of love and mercy, compassion, generosity. “He doesn’t oppress anyone, but restores to the debtor his pledge.” When you borrowed money from somebody, you’d give that person from whom you borrowed the money something as a pledge.

And I can tell you what they did in the ancient time. They used jewelry, sometimes perfume. They used tools. They didn’t use money because if they had money they wouldn’t give them money to borrow money. They actually gave them livestock. So you took somebody’s jewelry or tools or livestock, you took something precious to them. A righteous man, once the money had been paid back, would give back what the debtor gave him as a pledge. He wouldn’t hold that. That was an honorable thing to do.

“He doesn’t commit robbery, gives his bread to the hungry, covers the naked with clothing.” You can see here that this kind of life, the life of a righteous man, does address social issues, right? These are all social issues. It addresses social issues absolutely. They are avoiding adultery. They give the highest level of care. They don’t oppress anyone ever. They restore to the debtor his pledge. They don’t commit robbery. They give bread to the hungry, cover the naked with clothing. This is what a righteous person does. This is the result of salvation. This is the result of the gospel changing a life.

Job 31: Job’s friends who said nothing for seven days, and then opened their mouths and all wisdom went out. They were smarter when they were silent. They accused Job of all kinds of things. And so, Job defends himself. Listen to how he defends himself, Job 31:16, “If I have kept the poor from their desire, or caused the eyes of the widow to fail, or have eaten my morel alone,” – not shared a meal – “or the orphan has not shared it, if I have seen anyone perish for lack of clothing, or that the needy had no covering, if his loins have not thanked me, if he has not been warmed with the fleece of my sheep, if I have lifted my hand against the orphan, because I saw I had support in the get, let my shoulder fall from the socket, and my arm be broken off at the elbow. For calamity from God is a terror to me.”

Job defends his righteousness in those kinds of deeds that he did on behalf of people who were suffering. Yes, of course, we care for people in that way. Yes, of course, we reach out in love, feed the poor, clothe those who are naked. Of course, we do that.

Verse 8, “If he does not lend money on interest.” It was forbidden in the Old Testament law to loan money to a fellow Jew and charge interest. If he was desperate enough to need the money you didn’t charge a Jew interest. You didn’t take increase, that’s usury, that’s an undue amount of interest.

If somebody lives that kind of life, he is a righteous person and he is meeting all those needs of needy people. That’s what righteous people do. And it’s summed up in verse 9: “If he walks in My statutes and My ordinance so as to deal faithfully – he is righteous and will surely live,” declares the Lord God. How obvious is that?

Summing up the conduct of the righteous man, he says, “He walks in My statutes and My ordinances. He deals faithfully.” That means he has integrity dealing justly and righteously with all according to God’s Word. Why does he do this? Because he is righteous, verse 9. “He is righteous,” – his conduct proves it – and shall surely live.” He will escape divine judgment. He will live in God’s blessing on earth in the eternal kingdom.

Now you notice what our Lord has told Ezekiel; and what Ezekiel’s telling us is that this man will live because of his righteousness, that righteousness manifesting the righteousness that God had granted to him by faith. So this man is judged on his own life. Every person is judged on his own life. This man is not anything other than accountable to God for his own life. He came to God; he cried out to God; he sought God in his sin. He was declared righteous by faith, and he lives a righteous life.

The plot thickens in verse 10 because he gives birth to a violent son. And we’ll find out about that next time.

Father, again we are so blessed. Your Word is light. It is truth. It is joy. It is light. Thank You for all that You have given us in Christ. We possess eternal life; we rejoice in that with grateful hearts.

I pray that You’ll work in every life here, those that are still blaming someone else for their transgressions. Deliver them from that, Lord. Bring them to the full awareness that they stand guilty before You, and they will be judged forever without mercy if they reject the gospel, the forgiveness that You offer those who repent and put their trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. Work a work of salvation in hearts even now, we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.

*This transcript was originally published at GTY.org.

Our text is going to be the eighteenth chapter in the book of Ezekiel, and I would encourage you to turn to that chapter. I do understand that talking about the subject that I’m talking about can be a little bit controversial, and that’s fine. I am the first one to want to help clarify things that folks might be confused about. And I’ve been asked by many people if I would talk about this issue of social justice, which is such a big issue in our society. So that’s what we’re going to do. I don’t want to give you my opinion or any body else’s opinion, I want to show you what the Word of God says, so that we can understand this particular movement that’s going on around us. Now, my goal is not to talk about politics or economics or sociology or any of those things, I just want to address the issue of social justice and the gospel, social justice and the gospel.

Our culture, our society has been talking about social justice for a couple of years. Social justice has been around for a long, long time. It’s part of classic socialism. But we have in recent months and recent years seen social justice become an issue in the evangelical church where there are many people saying social justice is an essential part of the gospel; and if we don’t understand that it’s a part of the gospel, we don’t have the true gospel at all. That is a pretty significant claim.

I was reading one writer this week who said, “We have never had the gospel until we understand social justice.” And the question that I want to answer for you is, “Does social justice belong as an essential part of the gospel?”

Now let’s define our terms a little bit. When we’re talking about social justice we’re not talking about legal justice, we’re not talking about the law, we’re not talking about things that are lawful and unlawful, good and bad, right and wrong, sinful and righteous. And so, we’re not even talking about divine justice. Divine justice says, “God meets it out will be perfect justice on all levels.” We’re not even talking about biblical justice. What the Bible has to say about justice is also clearly revealed. We’re talking about something different than any of those things.

You don’t find social justice as such in the Bible. Social justice is a term that describes the idea that everyone has the right to equal upward mobility – everybody in a society: equal upward mobility, equal social privilege, equal finances or equal resources. And if you don’t have those rights and you don’t have those opportunities the society is, by nature, unjust.

And I just want to rush right in to say, of course, society is unjust; nobody would argue that. The government is flawed because it’s run by sinful, fallen, corrupt human beings. And try as it will, collectively it lifts itself up a little bit, but it is still fraught with injustice, inequity, discrimination. We aren’t arguing that at all.

But what has happened in this new effort to gain social justice is the demand of various groups of people for circumstances and consideration very different than what they think they have received. They believe that they have been treated unjustly, and now it’s time for the society to treat them justly. And I would add as well, wherever anybody has been treated unjustly they ought to be treated justly. Where anybody has been treated cruelly, they ought to be treated kindly.

But what social justice is saying is that we have been deprived of privileges in the culture. We have been deprived of power; we are the unempowered. We have been deprived of position. We have been deprived of property, of status, of prosperity; we don’t have what the powerful people have. And consequently, there is no social justice for us, those of us who are the deprived.

One word sort of sums it up and that is the word “victim.” Each of these segments of our population who are crying out for social justice believed that they have been victimized by others in this society. This word, more than any other word, describes their self-designed condition. The self-perceived victims of social discrimination today are women who believe that they have been long abused by men, not only personally, but sort of collectively. There are the poor who believe that they have long been abused by the wealthy. There are the ethnic groups who believe that they have long been abused by other ethnic groups who have more power. And there are the sexually deviant, homosexuals in particular, who have been abused by heterosexuals.

So you have these victim categories: women, certain ethnic groups, the poor, homosexuals. And then there is a growing group of victims who would just simply categories themselves as those who have to endure hate speech; and hate speech in our society seems to be anything you don’t agree with. Anybody who says something to you that you don’t agree with you find as hate speech, or anybody who says something that you don’t agree with has imposed upon you a microaggression, and they’re acting aggressively on you because they said something that you did not like, maybe a word, maybe a phrase, maybe an epithet, or maybe an idea, maybe a viewpoint.

So we have a growing category of victims of all kinds of microaggressions. And these are the people that are demanding social justice, and by that they mean they want to stop being oppressed by all the oppressors in society. And the more victim categories someone is in, the more empowered that person is, the more important that person is, the more truthful that person is, the more authoritative that person is. If you’re in multiple groups this is a new idea called “intersectionality.” All the segments of victimization come together for you, and your multiple victim status makes you the most authoritative person, the one to be listened to. But if you are not in any victim group, you have nothing to say, “Shut up, and sit down.” That’s where we are. We have an ever-increasing belligerent mass of victims who are defining their lives by what other people have done to them.

Now listen, I do not doubt that people are victims. We’re all victims in many ways. You know, fundamentally, we’re all victims of Adam’s sin. We’ve all been victimized just by being born into this world. We’re a part of sinful, totally depraved humanity, so I get that.

Most of us have suffered at the hands of someone else. Most of us have been treated unjustly, unfairly, unkindly, sometimes brutally and sometimes mercilessly. Most of us have been misunderstood. Most of us at some point have wondered, “Why do the wicked prosper and the righteous struggle?” We understand that in a fallen world. That’s humanity, that’s life in the world. It isn’t going to be the way everybody would like it to be; that’s why we’re longing for the New Jerusalem in the millennial kingdom when our Lord sits on the throne and righteousness rules the world. It’s a tough world to live in.

I read that in the 20th century alone 170 million people died in genocide. That’s not war, that’s just slaughtering a race or a tribe of people, 170 million. Something like 1.64 billion are believed to have died in modern wars.

The world is full of victims – victims of war, victims of genocide, victims of crime, victims of terror. The world is merciless for all of us on many levels. But lately this victim status has been embraced by the evangelical church; and I’ve seen it coming now for a couple of years, and it’s landed with full force recently. And this is the idea that it’s an essential part of the gospel to understand the importance and the need for social justice.

Now social justice, by its very definition, is a temporal sort of economic concept, not a spiritual concept. So on its face injecting a temporal economic sociological concept into the gospel is injecting something alien into the gospel. But without regard for that, there is a very loud cry being raised that we’re not even Christians who have the gospel if we don’t include the social gospel, which means earthly temporal equity for everyone.

Now that’s the question: “Is it a part of the gospel, or is it not a part of the gospel?” And that is the question that I want to answer, because it’s my responsibility to always make the gospel clear.

Through the years, I have been fighting the battle for the gospel, whether it’s The Gospel According to Jesus, The Gospel According to the Apostles, Ashamed of the Gospel, The Gospel According to Paul, The Gospel According to God – all of these books through decades of my life trying to clarify the gospel. So here we go again with some people saying that something must be part of the gospel, and we need to know whether that is accurate or not. So that is my intent.

Now, just as a foundation, social justice is nowhere included in any New Testament passage about the gospel. Social justice is nowhere included in any passage in the New Testament about the gospel. So on its face it’s not included as a part of the spiritual gospel. It is also not a part of any Old Testament gospel, as we will see in the eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

That is not to say that we’re not to love people and live justly, and care for them, and minister to the people who have been treated unfairly and unkindly and mercilessly; we are as Christians. Of course, we are. We are to be known by our love, love to one another and love to the whole world. And we are to be as Christ was to them, caring for them, meeting their needs, ministering to them, loving them. That is a result of salvation. The question is, “Is the social gospel a part of the saving gospel, or is caring for people a result of the gospel?”

Now here’s the thesis: “Social justice is not a part of the gospel.” Social justice is not a part of the gospel. I’ll go one step further: “It is a serious hinderance to the gospel.” It is a serious hinderance to the gospel. And that is why I am so concerned about it. I’m not saying that people haven’t been mistreated, they have. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be treated better, they should. I’m only asking, “Is this treatment of certain people in society part of the gospel or not?” and it is my conviction that it is a serious hinderance to the gospel. That is why it’s never included in any biblical passage on the gospel.

So let’s go to Ezekiel chapter 18, and I’m just going to make a reference to one verse here, and then we’re going to have to wait till next week to look at it, because I have a lot more things I want to say before we get here. In verse 4, there is a statement at the end of the verse: “The soul who sins will die.” The soul who sins will die. That is the thesis of this chapter: “The soul who sins will die.”

Now before we talk about that a little bit, let me tell you about Ezekiel. Ezekiel is a prophet; he is a prophet in the exile, in the Babylonian exile. His name is only mentioned in his prophecy, nowhere else in Scripture. His names means “strengthened by God.” Let’s look at his call. Go back to chapter 3, Ezekiel chapter 3.

He is called son of man frequently: verse 1, verse 3, verse 4, and again through this passage down in verse 10. He is called son of man; and the other person called Son of man in the Bible is Jesus, another preacher. But let’s listen to this text, starting in verse 4.

God speaks to Ezekiel. He says, “Son of man, go to the house of Israel and speak with My words to them.” That’s any preacher’s task, that’s every preacher’s task. “Speak My words to them. For you are not being sent to a people of unintelligible speech or different language. I’m not sending you to foreigners, you’re going to the people whose language you speak. You are sent to the house of Israel, your own people, nor to many peoples of unintelligible speech or difficult language, who words you cannot understand. But I have sent you to them who should listen to you; yet the house of Israel will not be willing to listen to you, since they are not willing to listen to Me. Surely the whole house of Israel is stubborn and obstinate.” This sounds a lot like Isaiah’s call, doesn’t it, in chapter 6. “You’re going to go and you’re going to speak, but they’re not going to listen because they’re rebellious and stubborn and obstinate.

“So,” – verse 8 – “I have made your face as hard as their faces and your forehead as hard as their foreheads. You’re going to butt heads with them and you’re not going to give in. Like emery harder than flint I have made your forehead. Do not be afraid of them or be dismayed before them, though they are a rebellious house. Ezekiel, I have made you a rock. You are a rock. You’ve got a flint forehead. You don’t back down, even though they hate what you say.”

Verse 10, “Moreover, He said to me, ‘Son of man, take into your heart all My words which I will speak to you and listen closely. Go to the exiles, to the sons of your people, and speak to them and tell them, whether they listen or not,’ thus says the Lord God.

“Then the Spirit lifted me up. I heard a great rumbling sound behind me, ‘Blessed be the gory of the Lord in His place.’ I heard the sound of the wings of the living beings touching one another and the sound of the wheels beside them, even a great rumbling sound. So the Spirit lifted me up and took me away; and I went embittered in the rage of my spirit, and the hand of the Lord was strong on me. Then I came to the exiles who lived beside the river Chebar at Tel-abib, and I sat there seven days where they were living, causing consternation among them.”

So he receives this call. He’s going to be hardheaded and resolute, preaching the message to the people that God gives him. They’re not going to like it, they’re not going to listen, they’re going to be obstinate and rebellious and stubborn. But to confirm his call he has a vision of the glory of God, and then he is dropped into the place of Babylon, essentially 20 miles or so south of Babylon, to the bank of the river Chebar, and he sits there seven days, causing consternation among them. They knew he was a prophet of God, they knew he had a hard message, and they were disturbed that he was in their presence.

“At the end of seven days the word f the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Son of man, I have appointed you a watchman to the house f Israel; whenever you hear a word from My mouth, warn them from Me.” And we’ll stop there for the time being. All right.

Ezekiel was 25 years old when he was taken captive with 10,000 other Jews. He was taken captive in 597 BC. You remember the story; the southern kingdom Judah was still in existence, and the southern kingdom was attacked by the Babylonians, and the first attack came in 605, and that was the first deportation. They conquered the Jews and hauled thousands of them off into captivity. They came back again in 597 in the second deportation, they took about 10,000 more Jews captive, and Ezekiel and his wife were in the second deportation in 597.

So now he is living in Babylon by the river Chebar south of Babylon the city. His wife dies. We don’t exactly when, but there’s a record of her death in his prophecy. And he lives on through the whole prophecy, obviously, and writes it. He lives till about 560, the rabbis said, when he was murdered by a Jew whom he confronted about idolatry. He confronted a fellow Jew about idolatry and he was slaughtered by him, according to rabbinic tradition.

But during the time of his ministry – most say his ministry probably went for about 22 years. He began it when he was 30; that’s how the book begins, chapter 1, verse 1, “In the thirtieth year.” So he’s five years in captivity before he begins his actual ministry. And about halfway through his ministry Jerusalem is destroyed in the 586 siege. So for half his ministry he’s warning the Jews that more judgment is coming, and the warning chapters are chapters 4 through 24. He is a preacher of judgment, preacher of judgment.

Now how did they get into captivity? You remember the people of Israel wanted a king. They had judges, they wanted a king, so the Lord gives them a king. They have three kings in the united kingdom; they have Saul, David, and Solomon. After Solomon the kingdom splits. Ten tribes go north and form what is known as Israel. Two tribes stay in the south and form Judah. They coexist.

The unified kingdom lasted about, I’d say, 110 years, and then it split. The northern kingdom fell first in 722 to the Assyrians, and God used them to judge His idolatrous northern kingdom. And they went into captivity from which they never returned, 722. The southern kingdom survived another 135 years. At the end of that period time God brought judgment from Babylon and it came in three waves: 605, 597, 586.

Now just prior to that, 609, the Egyptians came and killed King Josiah – good king Josiah. The Egyptians killed him 609. And immediately there were bad kings, four of them in a row, really wicked, corrupt kings plunging the people after the good reign of Josiah into sin and iniquity and idolatry. And so God brings the Babylonians to judge them. And Ezekiel then is dropped into the captivity to preach to these captive Jews that God is not yet finished with His judgment. There’s more judgment to come, including the 586 complete destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

He is then a judgment preacher, and all his sermons pronounce judgment, not only on the people back in the land, but on the people listening to him who are hard-hearted, stubborn and obstinate, and will not hear him. He is a judgment preacher, and he has one foundational, basic principle of divine judgment, and this is it: “The soul that sins will die.” That’s his message. “The wages of sin death,” in the language of the apostle Paul. The soul that sins will die: physically, yes; spiritually, yes; and more importantly and ultimately, eternally. So he’s pronouncing judgment on those who sin. This is the foundation of the gospel.

Now where did Ezekiel get this? Let’s go back to Deuteronomy, back to Moses, back to the law. Deuteronomy chapter 24. And in Deuteronomy chapter 24 God is laying out His law. You come down to verse 16. Deuteronomy 24:16, “Fathers shall not be put to death for their sons, nor shall sons be put to death for their fathers; everyone shall be put to death for his own sin.”

There’s nothing ambiguous about that, right? Everyone will be put to death for his own sin, whether you’re talking about capital punishment under the Mosaic law or whether you’re talking about physical death in general or whether you’re talking about eternal death, everyone experiences death, any kind of death, because of his own sins. That is the foundational gospel principle. And here it comes, we say it all the time, “You” – Jesus says – “will die in your sins. And where I go you will never come. You will die in your sins.”

This is the law of individual responsibility. It found its way into the life of God’s people Israel, and it shows up in an interesting illustration in 2 Kings chapter 14. If you want to look over to 2 Kings – 1 and 2 Samuel, then 1 and 2 Kings chapter 14. There’s a king named Joash. Joash is murdered. He is murdered by two officials. Amaziah the son of Joash becomes king. The murder of Joash is in chapter 12.

Chapter 14, his son Amaziah becomes king, he’s twenty-five years old. He reigned for twenty-nine years in Jerusalem, verse 2 said, and he did right in the sight of the Lord. He did right in the sight of the Lord. Not everything right; but still, that’s the epitaph: “He did right in the sight of the Lord.”

One illustration of him doing right is down in verse 5: “It came about, as soon as the kingdom was firmly in his hand, he killed his servants who had slain the king his father.” That was according to Mosaic law. And it says, “You take a life, you forfeit your life.” He killed the ones who slew the king his father.

But notice verse 6: “But the sons of the slayers he did not put to death, according to what was written in the book of law of Moses, as the Lord commanded, saying,” – and it quotes back in Deuteronomy 24:16 – ‘The fathers shall not be put to death for the sons, nor the sons be put to death for the fathers; but each shall be put to death for his own sin.’” So this was law in Israel. You didn’t kill somebody else for another person’s sins. People would be killed for their own sins; that is the foundational principle of the gospel: “You will be judged for your own sins.”

Several generations later now and we come to Ezekiel. Let’s go back to chapter 3. And Ezekiel knows this Mosaic law and he knows that it was upheld in the life of Israel, certainly by King Amaziah. So in verse 18 Ezekiel is instructed by God, “When I say to the wicked, ‘You will surely die,’ to the wicked, ‘you will surely die,’ and you do not warn him or speak out to warn the wicked from his wicked way that he may live, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand.” That is some serious statement. This is called blood guiltiness.

“If you, Ezekiel, you’re a preacher. I you don’t warn the wicked, their blood is on your hand when I take their life.” Amazing. It doesn’t mean that Ezekiel was going to go to hell, it simply means that he had sinned severely by not warning them.

Verse 19, “Yet if you have warned the wicked and he doesn’t turn from his wickedness or from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but you have delivered yourself.”

“You are a watchman,” – verse 17 – “you’re a watchman, you’re a guardian. You operate with vigilance; that’s your calling. You tell people danger is coming, you warn people; and the danger is the judgment of God.”

Verse 20, “Again, when a righteous man turns away from his righteousness and commits iniquity, and I place an obstacle before him, he will die.” “If somebody starts out doing the right things and ends up wicked, he’s going to die. Since you have not warned him, he’ll die in his sins, and his righteous deeds which he had once done in the past shall not be remembered; but his blood I’ll require at your hand.” This is the primary responsibility of the preacher to warn the wicked that they will die in their sins.

Verse 21, “However, if you have warned the righteous man that the righteous should not sin and he does not sin, he shall surely live because he took warning; and you have delivered yourself.” No wonder James says, “Stop being so many teachers, for theirs is a greater condemnation.” This is serious business. You fail to warn the wicked of their sin and to warn them that they will die for their own sins, and you have their blood on your hands.

Back in Joshua chapter 1, verse 18, it says, “Anyone who rebels against your command and does not obey your words in all that you command him, shall be put to death; only be strong and courageous.” This is to Joshua, “Be strong and courageous. The people who don’t listen to you when you speak for God, they will die.” This is the universal responsibility of every preacher, otherwise we’re blood guilty.

Now I want you to go to chapter 14 of Ezekiel, chapter 14. Now remember, we’re right in the middle of his judgment section, all these judgment sermons, and I just want to read starting in verse 12: “The word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Son of man, if a country sins against Me” – now you say, “Yeah, doesn’t God punish countries?” He does.

But let’s read what He says: “If a country sins against me by committing unfaithfulness, and I stretch out My hand against it, destroy its supply of bread, and send famine against it and cut off from it both man and beast, even though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in its mist, by their own righteousness they could only deliver themselves,” declares the Lord God. The only people He spares are the righteous, all the rest die in their own sins. Even when God judges a nation with famine, those that are under that judgment are those who die in their own sins; the righteous are delivered.

He said if it’s not a famine, maybe wild beasts, verse 15. If I were to cause wild beasts to pass through the land and they depopulated it, and it became desolate so that no one would pass through it because of the beasts, and though these three men” – same three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job – “were in the midst, as I live,” declares the Lord God, “they could not deliver either their sons or their daughters. They alone would be delivered, but the country would be desolate.

“Or if I should bring a third possibility, a third disaster, sword or war on that country and say, ‘Let the sword pass through the country and cut off man and beast from it,’ even though these three men were in its midst, as I live,” declares the Lord God, “they could not deliver either their sons or their daughters, but they alone would be delivered.

“Or” – a fourth – “if I should send a plague against that country and pour out My wrath in blood on it to cut off man and beast from it, even though Noah, Daniel, and Job were in its midst, as I live,” declares the Lord God, “they could not deliver either their son or their daughter. They would only deliver themselves by their righteousness.” Four possible severe judgments referred to even in the next verse.

When God sets to judge He judges those by their sins, even in a collective judgment. The best illustration of that is the universal flood in Genesis 6. He judged the whole world. But it wasn’t that He drowned the whole world because of the sins of a few, He drowned the whole world because the whole world was sinful. He looked and He saw that everyone was corrupt, and all that was in their hearts was only evil continually. Even God’s collective judgments come at the ungodly and sinful people, and the righteous are spared, but not those related to the righteous, only the righteous. Every person responsible for his own sin.

Yes, there are times when God may delay judgment because there are some righteous people. We saw that in Genesis 18, didn’t we, in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. God said, “If there are just this many righteous, or this many, I could withhold judgment for now.” But when judgment does come, it comes on individuals. Another say to say it: “No one dies for someone else’s sin.” No one dies for someone else’s sin.

Now, chapter 33. I wish I had time to read this, but I don’t. But I’m going to just give you a little of it, and I want to show you the consistency of this, Ezekiel 33, the opening twenty verses. But just want to start at the beginning with you.

“The word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Son of man, speak to the sons of your people; say to them, “If I bring a sword upon a land,” – again, very much like 14 – “and the people of the land take one man from among them and make him their watchman, and he sees the sword coming on the land and blows the trumpet and warns the people, then he who hears the sound of the trumpet and does not take warning, and a sword comes and takes him away, his blood will be on his own head. He heard the sound of the trumpet, didn’t take warning; his blood will be on himself. But had he taken warning, he would have delivered his life. But if the watchman see the sword coming” – the judgment coming – “and doesn’t blow the trumpet and the people are not warned, and a sword comes and takes a person from them, he is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require from the watchman’s hand.” Now as for you, son of man, I have appointed you a watchman for the house of Israel; so you will hear a message from My mouth and give them warning from Me. When I say to the wicked,’ – verse 8 – “O wicked man, you will surely die,” and you do not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require from your hand. But if you on your part warn a wicked man to turn from his way and he does not turn from his way, he will die in his iniquity, but you have delivered your life.’”

This is the job of the preacher. The Lord punishes everyone individually for his or her sin. Judgment comes because of what the sinner has done.

You say, “Now wait a minute, I thought it said in Exodus 20 verse 5 that the sins of the fathers, or the iniquities of the fathers are visited on the children to the third and fourth generation.” It does say that. It’s repeated in Deuteronomy 5:9, “The sins of the fathers” – or iniquities of the fathers – “are visited upon the third and fourth generation of children and grandchildren. It says the same thing in Exodus 34, verse 7, that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation.

What is that saying? It’s simply saying this: “Fathers,” plural. That’s a generation of leaders, a generation of influencers, the fathers of the nation. People talk about the fathers of our nation. That generation of fathers, leaders, if they are iniquitous their iniquity creates circumstances that go through the subsequent generation. We understand that, right? I mean, we’re living in as wretched a time as human history could ever have experience because of the vile character of the Internet. Evil is everywhere at a level never known in human history.

This is a vile, corrupt culture. The fathers of this culture, the architects of this culture, the educators of this culture, the people who are giving birth to this culture, the choices that they have made will go on for generations. You understand that. You’re afraid for the world of your children. You’re afraid for the world of your grandchildren. You’re afraid for the world of your great-grandchildren, you can’t even imagine what that’s going to be like, because you know the corruption of this generation will go right on through subsequent generations. And that’s exactly what those verses are saying.

So we understand that, that the sins of a generation create a kind of condition of corruption in which subsequent generations have to live. We’re living in the corrupt generation now that was set in motion by the last generation. So the principle there is one generation, based on its leadership and educators and influencers, creates an environment that is passed on to subsequent generations. We’re living in a very, very difficult, wretched world passed down to us from those before us.

I’ll go even beyond that. The sin of one man, Adam, affected all of us. As in Adam, we all die. So we come into this world affected by the sin of man named Adam, and his sin causes us to be conceived and born in iniquity, totally depraved, unable and unwilling, rivals against God, operating on the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life. We are wretched sinful. There is not one who’s righteous, no, not one. That’s because of Adam.

So, yes, Adam sinned and passed on a condition to everybody. Past generations have sinned and their sins had consequences. This generation is probably more corrupt than any generation. This corruption will have consequences in future generations.

However, no one will be sent to hell for the sin of Adam, and no one will be sent to hell for the sin of anybody else. You will die in your own sins. The context, the conditions, yes, the result of others. But my sin is my sin, and your sin is your sin, and God holds us personally culpable and guilty. No one has ever been sent to hell because of the sin of Adam. “You will die in your sins because you believe not on Me,” Jesus said. No one has ever been sent to hell because of the sin of a past generation, or the sins of a father, mother, family, or the sins of people around them.

Let me make it clear. In God’s eyes – listen – no one is a victim. We are all perpetrators of open rebellion, scandalous, blasphemous sin against God. We are all rebels, we are all obstinate, we are all stubborn. Sure, the exiles, they were in Babylon because of bad choices kings made, because of bad choices that their ancestors made to bring the idols into the land. They were in captivity because of those choices. That created the context in which they live. But Ezekiel says to them, “The soul that sins shall die.” Here we have the critical fundamental principle of the gospel; no one is a victim. From God’s viewpoint, no one is a victim.

Even the conditions that we live in today fit into God’s purpose. God has ordained you for this time to be who you are, in the family you’re in, among the people you’re with, in the place you are, all within His sovereignty. And if you say, “I’m a victim, I’m a victim, I’m a victim because I’m this or because I’m that or because of something in the past, then really you’re joining Adam.

You remember that God came to Adam and said, “Adam, why did you eat?” He said, “The woman You gave me.” He wasn’t blaming Eve, he was blaming God. “The woman You gave me. I went to bed single; I didn’t even know what a woman was. And then she showed up and all hell broke loose. You did this.”

That is absolutely how human nature operates. “Oh, I’m the victim of other people’s choices. I’m in the situation I’m in because of what this person did, what that generation did, what my ancestor did, what somebody else’s ancestors did, what the culture has done.” And a faithful watchman, does he say, “Oh, yeah, you’re right”? Does he say, “Yeah, that’s right. You’ve been abused, you know, you’ve been treated unjustly. We sympathize; we see that. We want to embrace all that. We want to have a conference to make LGBTQ people feel welcome in the church. We want to start elevating women, make more women preachers. Yeah, we’re sorry you feel bad.”

Is that what a preacher does? Or does a preacher warn that person, that wherever you are in this world and whoever you are, you are here within the purpose of God’s sovereignty, and the only thing that you need to be concerned about is your own sin? That message is the absolute foundation reality of the gospel.

All who die under the judgment of God die for their own sin and not somebody else’s. That is clear and unambiguous. But it is human nature to fight against it to say, “I’m a good person. I’m a good person. There’s just bad people around me who have done bad things to me,” sometimes two hundred years ago, sometimes two generations ago. Sometimes it’s just part of the dominate male chauvinistic culture. Or sometimes it’s just homophobia.

“All this has been done to me.” And so, hashtag, “Me too. I’m a victim.” “Me too, me too. I was abused, I was abused, I was abused.” “Somebody offended me. Somebody made a micro-aggression against me.”

So I’m a victim of certain regional attitudes or gender attitudes, or sexual preference attitudes, or hate speech, or economics, or education. I’m just a victim of intersecting prejudice and oppression, and I’m victim.” I’ve go so many categories I ought to be given a medal of honor for all my categories of victimization.

Everybody’s offended me, people I don’t know. Dead people have offended me, living people have offended me. You offend me. I’m a victim of past injustice and inequity. and present rejection, discrimination, offense. And most of you don’t even know how much you offend me, it’s unconscious. And by the way, if you’re not a victim, then you’re a part of the oppressor group. You must repent. I’m not surprised that exists in the culture, because that’s what Adam said. I mean, that’s how fallen people react. They don’t take responsibility, they just blame somebody else; and they’re perfectly happy to blame God.

But that notion has gone to church now. It’s taken over the evangelical movement. All the victims now expect the church to take up their victimization cause, and they’re demanding social justice. How did this go to church? How did this get into the church? How did it push its way to a point where people are saying it’s part of the gospel? I can give you a quick answer. Don’t have much time, just real quick.

A few decades ago the church decided in order to win the world they had to become like the world, right? Out went the organ, out went the choir, out went the orchestra, out went hymn books, and we got rock-and-roll lights and mirrors and smoke, and every form of worldly entertainment.

“Well, hey, we didn’t change the message, we just changed the method. We didn’t change the substance, we just changed the style, you know. We’re trying to reach people, and they don’t like hymns, they don’t like long, drawn out expositions of Scripture; so we’re not going to be able to win the world if we don’t change. So we’ve just made an adjustment so we can win the world. And we’re now doing what they like. We’re giving them what they like. We’re giving them what they’re used to, we’re giving them what they want; we’re giving them the style they want.”

Let me tell you something. I wrote a book back in the 1990s called Ashamed of the Gospel: When the Church Becomes Like the World, and I said we’re on a slippery slope, and that’s like over twenty-five years ago. “We’re on a slippery slope.” And I warned this: “The world will accept you changing your style for them, but pretty soon they’re going to demand that you change your substance. They’re going to demand that you – well, they liked the fact that you’ve taken their method, but they’re going to demand you change your message.” And now if in courting the world – all these evangelicals have been courting the world, and they have gotten the world convinced that they really want to make them feel comfortable, and the world is now so aware of their complete commitment this, that the world has decided, “We’re now going to shift from style to substance, from method to message.”

And so, you have these people literally embracing all of this victimization stuff, and now the church has to do this or we are – we’re out. We’re to be rejected. We’re anathema. You can’t believe anything else, you’re not supposed to believe anything else. You’re supposed to fully embrace all of this and be sympathetic to all the victims. This is just pragmatism.

And, oh, by the way, they’re still saying, “Hey, we’ll give them their style, but we’ll keep the message.” And then they’re saying, “Hey, we’ll give them their social substance, but we’ll still keep the message.” Next step, out goes the gospel, because the gospel is the stumbling block and it’s a message they hate.

And it’s going out anyway, because in this new style of evangelicalism you don’t preach like Ezekiel was told to preach. You don’t preach that individuals are going to die in their sins and go to hell forever, you don’t preach that. That’s what the watchmen should be warning. Forget what your societal deprivations are, you will die in your sins. You don’t need to worry about what happened in the past or what’s happening collectively to your group, you need to deal with your own sin before God, because you’re going to be held accountable.

Look, I know people have suffered injustice, I get it; that’s a fallen world. But I also know the Bible is explicit. If you are a preacher, regardless of what people’s social condition is, you have one job, and that is to warn them of wickedness and the coming judgment of God.

Is it our duty to affirm that people are victims of the sins of somebody else? You know where that leads? They’re going to blame God. And if they blame God for their condition, how are they going to go to God because they think He’s merciful? You acknowledge that somebody got a bad deal in history; you’ve indicted God, because He’s the author of history. That’s a slippery slope.

What is this, part of the gospel? Clearly not, absolutely not. The gospel says whatever your condition in the world, however you’ve been treated, whatever’s gone wrong is a small issue compared to your own sin.

Should we make homosexuals into victims? Rebellious, disobedient women into victims? Adulterers, aborters of babies, liars, thieves, criminals victims of society? Should we let people think that it was what somebody else did to them? No.

“Ezekiel, no. No, don’t let them do that. Confront their own sin and tell them this: ‘Repent, or you will die. You will die in your iniquity.’” And He says that over and over and over in chapter 18. “His blood will I require at your hand if you don’t give that testimony.”

The preacher who is negligent in his duty to preach the severe deadly and eternal judgment of God to sinners has blood on his hands. Now, we’re going to see how this all is laid out in Ezekiel chapter 18. Let’s bow in prayer.

Father, we’re so grateful for Your Word, it speaks to everything around us and everything in us. Thank You for the clarity of divine revelation. Help us to give our lives in the name of Jesus Christ to care for all those who suffer; but at the same time to warn them that they’re going to be held accountable before You, not for what somebody did to them, but for what they have done against You. Give us the boldness and the courage to be faithful to preach essential starting point for the gospel. Confirm these things to our hearts by Your Holy Spirit in Christ’s name. Amen.