You Can’t Fool God

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Transcript:

Well, turn with me to Hosea chapter 8 tonight. Hosea chapter 8. You know, people are kind of gullible.

If you don’t believe me, if you don’t believe me that people are gullible and easily fooled, look at the Internet. Everything that’s on the Internet is true, right? So the Internet says.

James and I went to the Arkansas State meeting last year at CBC, and one of the professors had a plaque or something on their door that said all quotes on the Internet are made up. Abraham Lincoln. Think about that for a second.

Everything on the internet is true. We get emails. You probably get them too.

I get emails from people in Africa wanting money, and they’re promising that if I will just wire them a little bit of money to help them get it out of their account, I’m entitled to a share. And I’ve thought for years, who falls for this stuff? But evidently there’s somebody out there who’s having the conversation with their wife where she says, are you sure your new business partner is reputable?

Should you be spending him money? And he’s saying to her, he’s got to be reputable. He says he’s the prince of Nigeria.

Somebody out there is falling for this or they wouldn’t keep doing it. Now they’ve even started sending emails, and I’ve gotten some of these too, where they want us to send Bibles to them. This is pitiful.

They want us to send Bibles to them. And I think, oh, we should help these people. Come to find out, you send the Bibles to.

. . And by the way, since he talked about Gideon’s working in Nigeria, I know that’s not what’s going on there because they were seeing the Bibles go into the kids’ hands.

But ship us a crate of Bibles to Nigeria, and they sell them and pocket the money. And it’s probably not just Nigeria. That’s the scam I’ve heard of, though.

But people fall for these things or they wouldn’t keep doing it. People are easily fooled. You can fool strangers.

You can send them an email and say, I’m the prince of Nigeria. Give me $500 and I will give you my cut of $500 million. We can fool people we know.

I found out how easy it is to fool people when I made my first foray into politics and ran for a party office at 19. And people were very nice to me. Some of the ladies that were in politics were very nice to me.

Only come to find out they were, whatever information they could get from me, They were feeding to the guy I was running against. I was fooled. I thought, these people are nice. These people are my friends.

I can talk to them. And all they were wanting was to dig up dirt. And they were getting mad when they couldn’t find any, thankfully.

I learned it in ministry. And the first people to come up to you, they want to be your best friend. And Judy may have experienced this, and Brother Phil and some of the rest of you may have experienced this.

They want to be your best friend, your closest buddy in the church, and come to find out they’re the ones who are keeping the phone lines hot talking about you. And they’re the ones plotting to get rid of you. And I found out real quick, everybody’s not what they appear to be.

People can fool you. And by the way, you don’t have to be, quote unquote, in ministry to see that happen. It can happen to us in the church where the person we thought they’re our friend, they’re talking behind our back.

It can happen to us out in the world, people are not what they appear to be. It’s easy to be fooled. We can even fool ourselves.

You realize you fool yourself? How many of you have had this conversation with yourself? I’ll just have one cookie.

I lie to myself all the time. My sister makes these incredible snickerdoodle cookies, and I think I’m just going to have one, and next thing you know, I meant one dozen. Yeah, we fool ourselves.

I fall for it every time. People are easily fooled, but you know, God is not fooled. I won’t even say God is not easily fooled.

Folks, God is not fooled. We cannot fool God. We can fool strangers.

We can fool friends and acquaintances. We can fool ourselves, but we cannot fool God. Here in Hosea chapter 8, God deals with people who, I believe we’re trying to fool him and points out the little tricks that he was not falling for.

Chapter 8 verse 1 says, Set the trumpet to thy mouth. He shall come as an eagle against the house of the Lord because they have transgressed my covenant and trespassed against my law. Israel shall cry unto me, My God, we know thee.

What he says here is to put the trumpet to their mouth. It’s talking about a warning. Send out a warning.

He shall come as an eagle against the house of the Lord. An eagle is a bird of prey. An eagle is a bird that swoops down, and you’ve probably seen this on the wildlife shows, swoops down with its giant talons and picks up whatever poor unsuspecting little mammal happens to be in its way and carries it off, and it happens without warning, and there is no escape.

The mouse or the rabbit or whatever it is, the dog, is powerless to get away from the eagle. And when it came to God’s judgment, the nation of Israel was powerless to resist God’s judgment. He said he will come as an eagle against the house of the Lord.

He’s not talking about the temple. He’s talking about the nation of people who had professed to belong to him. It says, because they have transgressed my covenant and trespassed against my law.

Because they had broken their word with God, they had broken their promises to God to follow him, and they had disobeyed him in just about every way possible. And it’s not that they disobeyed and God said, okay, you’re done, it’s over for you. They had disobeyed and disobeyed and disobeyed, and it was a pattern and a lifestyle of disobedience.

and of not caring about what God said, that God recognized, indicated they were not truly His. And they were just playing. They were trying to fool God.

He says in verse 2, Israel shall cry unto me, My God, we know thee. When God’s judgment came down on Israel, the people of Israel would cry out and say, But we know you, we’re your people. No, they didn’t.

Just like in the passage we talked about last week in Romans chapter 1, they chose not to retain God in their knowledge. They chose not to know God. They chose not to listen to God.

They thought it would spoil their fun. So they said, we’re not going to pay any attention to God. They said, we know thee.

My God, we know thee. Well, he’s God, but he wasn’t their God. For their gods, they had worshipped idols.

They had worshipped every false demon-possessed deity that the Middle East had to offer. They had worshipped everybody but the one true God. They had even worshipped themselves.

So they lie twice here, saying, my God. First of all, that’s a lie. He wasn’t their God.

to say, we know thee. I’m reminded as I read this of where Jesus says that one day people will say, Lord, Lord, have we not done all these things in your name? And Jesus will say, depart from me, I never knew you.

Verse 3 says, Israel hath cast off the thing that is good. Anything that was of God, they had cast off. They had said, we are not doing this anymore.

We’re not going to listen to God. We’re not going to follow his law. So Israel had cast off all that was good, and it said the enemy shall pursue him.

See, it was not by accident that the, or it was not because God had abdicated his throne that the Assyrians were going to come in and conquer Israel. It was because God allowed it. For all these many centuries that Israel had been safe and protected, it was only because God, by his own hand of providence, had held back the floodgates of the countries around them who wanted to destroy them.

And all God had to do was remove his hand. The nation was toast. It said, the enemy shall pursue him. They have set up kings.

He’s talking again of Israel. Israel has set up kings, but not by me. They have made princes, and I knew it not.

He says they’ve set up kings. There was a time earlier on when God had anointed David and his line to set up as kings of Israel. And so David was king, and Solomon was king after him, and Rehoboam was king after him.

But Rehoboam, folks, Rehoboam was stupid. Rehoboam, instead of listening to the wise counsel of people around him, got all his buddies around him and said, what should I do? And they said, grind the people into the dust to prove how powerful you are as the king.

He said, I think that sounds like a good idea. And he did it, and so ten northern kingdoms split off. Well, even if he was not a great king, he was still the one God had put on the throne.

And Israel said, no, we’re going to set up our own king. And throughout the history of the nation of Israel, they had not one good king. Now Judah, the southern kingdom, they had some good ones and they had some bad ones.

And the good ones were really good and the bad ones were really bad. But Israel had not one good king. And you probably heard the term banana republic, not like the store.

But a banana republic is a stereotype or a name of a kind of country, a tiny little dictatorship where there’s corruption and people are overthrown and they take over and then they’re overthrown and they take over and there’s just chaos. Israel, even though it wasn’t a republic, it was a monarchy, they had a king, they were like a banana republic because during the centuries since Solomon had died, they had just one king after another. There were times that they’d have three or four kings in a year because one guy would come on the throne, he’d last three months, and then his generals would kill him.

One of the generals would step up to the throne, and the other generals would kill him. One of them would step up and be king, and this would just go on and on. And Israel’s government was not determined by who God had put on the throne.

Israel’s government was not even determined by who would be a godly king. It was determined by who was the most powerful and who could take the throne by force. See, they ignored God’s setup for things.

So they’ve made princes, and I knew it not. They set up other governors over the people. and it wasn’t the way God had told them to do.

These were not the men that God had set up to rule over them, to reign over them. It’s not that God says here they’ve made princes and I didn’t know anything about it, as though it caught God by surprise. God knew what they did.

God knew what they were going to do. But what he says is, these men were strangers. These were not the men I had picked to rule.

And you know what? They would profess to rule in God’s stead. Up until the last century or so, all kings, or most kings, I should say, claimed divine right.

I’m here because God put me here. I speak for God. My authority is God’s authority, that sort of thing.

Well, these men were strangers to God. Of their silver and their gold have they made them idols that they may be cut off. The good things that God had blessed them with and entrusted to them were now the very things that they turned to to worship instead of God.

He said they’re going to be cut off. Thy calf, O Samaria, have cast thee off. Mine anger is kindled against them.

This calf in Samaria. Early on when King Jeroboam, I shouldn’t even call him king, except he was the first to take the throne after the rebellion. He said, we’re going to set up some idols here in the northern kingdom because I really don’t want people going to Jerusalem to worship at the temple.

You know, that just keeps them too tied to the southern kingdom. That keeps them too tied to King Rehoboam. We just want to sever ties and keep our people separate.

So we’re going to set up some golden calves up here. Again, what a great idea. That had worked out so well for the Israelites in the past. We’re going to set up some golden calves here so you can come and worship them.

It says, Thy calf, O Samaria, hath cast thee off. This calf you worship and say you’re worshiping the one true God through it can do nothing to help you. It’s powerless.

It’s an idol. It says, Mine anger is kindled against them. How long will it be ere they attain to innocency?

How long, how long will they claim to be innocent when they are not? How long? How long will they claim to be innocent when they’re not?

For from Israel was it also the workman made it. Therefore it is not God, but the calf of Samaria shall be broken in pieces. God sends them a little reminder as though they needed to be reminded.

There is a difference between creature and creator, a difference in the very nature that never can be crossed. Nothing that has been made can be God, and nothing that has been made can be equal with God. And only God is unmade.

I’ve heard philosophers refer to God as the uncaused first cause. You know what? That means he was the cause of everything and nobody caused him.

He just is and was and always will be. It’s a technical term, but I think it sums it up well. And what he reminds them of is that if it was made just like this calf was, it’s not God and it’s not a God because it was made.

It doesn’t matter what you’ve seen happen there. It doesn’t matter how ecstatically you worship it or what you feel like when you’re there. It’s made by human hands out of gold that was dug out of the ground that was made by God.

It was made and so it can’t be God. And the calf of Samaria, in addition to not being God, doesn’t have the power of God because it’s going to be broken in pieces. For they have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind.

It hath no stock. The bud shall yield no meal. If so be it yield, the stranger shall swallow it up. So what he tells them here is they, instead of sowing good things, Galatians, I believe, tells us we reap what we sow.

Whether we sow to the flesh, we reap of the flesh. or if we sow to the Spirit, we reap of the Spirit. I’ve heard people say, I’ve heard people simplify it in our terms and say people spend their life sowing their wild oats and then pray for a crop failure.

Folks, it doesn’t work that way. You sow wild oats, that’s what you’re going to get. You sow the wind, you’re going to reap the whirlwind.

He says that’s exactly what they’ve done. And so all the things that they want to have happen, the bud here, he’s talking about the plants, the wheat that sustained them, that they lived off of, and as an extension of that, everything good that they had worked for. said the bud will not yield anything.

They’ll get no grain. They’ll get no sustenance. And if any comes up, the enemy will come along and take it.

Folks, God was through, and he was about ready to pull the mask off of Israel. As I said at the beginning of the message, you can’t fool God. Three things in here that I see where they were trying to fool God, and they failed miserably.

First of all, God is not fooled by hypocritical pleas. God is not fooled by hypocritical pleas. It always amazes me.

And folks, I’m as patriotic as anybody. But it always amazes me when our country spends most of its time trying to push God out of every aspect of our public life, tries to push God even out of our private morals, and then when the first catastrophe happens, we’re out there on the steps of the Capitol, or we’re out there on the steps of City Hall and shaking our fists and saying, where was God when all this happened? At the time, at the time, I thought it was wonderful.

At the time, I thought it was wonderful when after September 11th, all of our legislators, I mean, all of our members of Congress and the Senate stood out on the steps of the Capitol and sang God bless America, asking God to bless our country. Looking back on it now, folks, I think it was just about the most offensive thing we could have done. Because there was no sincerity in it.

Half those people, maybe more, care nothing about God having any place in this country. But when there’s a catastrophe, we want to cry out and say, but God, we’re America, you can’t do this to us. Now, I’m not saying we as Americans should not cry out to God.

Please don’t misunderstand me in this. I’m not saying when there’s a catastrophe, we should not say God bless America. that when there’s a catastrophe, we shouldn’t pray for God to heal our land, that we shouldn’t pray for God to protect us.

Folks, we should not feel bad about calling out to God at any time, but we’ve got to make sure it’s not a hypocritical plea, where we spend our life saying, God, we don’t want you anywhere near here, and then something bad happens and we say, oh, God, where are you? We need you. Folks, God can use catastrophe, and God can use disaster to draw us near to Him.

But the test of that is, well, what happens in the days and weeks to come when life begins to return to normal? Are we still changed? Are we still near to God?

Or do we go back to our old way of doing things? Folks, time and time again throughout the centuries, every time catastrophe had struck, they cried out to God and said, we’re your people. Where are you, God?

And God would step in and save them only to have them return to business as usual. Again, I’m not saying we don’t pray for our country. What I’m saying is we don’t hypocritically ask God to bless our country. We don’t ask God to hypocritically, I’m sorry, we don’t hypocritically ask God to bless us, to bless our family, to bless our church, to bless our city, to bless our business, to bless any of it, when we don’t care for the things of God outside of catastrophe.

It’s all right to make pleas before God. It’s all right, as the Bible says, to come boldly before the throne of grace. We’ve got to make sure it’s because we truly love him and we truly care about his hand of provision and not just using God as fire insurance to get us out of catastrophe.

Folks, God’s not fooled. God was not fooled by people whose lips were near to him but whose hearts were far from him standing on the steps of the Capitol invoking his blessing, any more than he was fooled by the people who said, wait, wait, the Assyrians are coming. God, we’re yours.

We’re yours. Folks, that doesn’t fool God. And in our individual lives, we can’t stand there and say, God, I don’t want to do it your way.

God, I don’t care a thing about what you say about my life. God, I don’t want to follow you. I don’t want to listen to you.

But catastrophe comes in. God, where are you? I’m yours.

Help me out of this. Folks, there’s nothing wrong with calling out to God. But we’ve got to make sure it’s genuine because God is not fooled like we seem to think he is.

Second of all, God is not fooled by empty claims to speak for and serve Him. You go home tonight, you turn on the TV, and you will find no end of people who are claiming to speak on God’s behalf. A great number of them have never been called by Him.

A great number of people who profess to speak on His behalf, I’d submit to you, if I had to guess, don’t even know Him. And some of you all were older than me. Even back in the 80s, most of y’all were older than me, and that’s all right.

What I meant to say was, most of y’all, because you were older than me, remember better than I do back in the late 80s. I was still just a young little thing. But some of the televangelist scandals, where they were catching some of these men who professed to speak on God’s behalf, and they were catching them cooking the books, embezzling money from their ministries.

They were catching people having affairs with everybody on their staff. They were catching people professing to get words from God, and they were because of radio transmitters and somebody was reading a card. Folks, people can be fooled by people claiming to speak on God’s behalf, but God is not fooled.

God is not fooled. These people who sat on the throne of Israel and these people who were the governors in verse 4, I’m sure claim to the people that they ruled in God’s stead, but God was not fooled. He said, I don’t know anything about these kings.

Not as though God is not omniscient, but these men are strangers. I didn’t put these men here. They don’t speak for me.

Folks, God is not fooled by empty claims to speak for and serve Him. I am not a perfect pastor. I wish I were.

For your sake, I wish I were. I make mistakes. But I also try very hard to do what God expects of me and what I believe you all expect from me.

Notice the order I say that in also. And I try very hard to make sure if I’m going to teach something that I’ve got it right and that I’m speaking on God’s behalf, not because God speaks to me and I’m so special, but because I’m telling you what’s in here. I try very hard.

And that is a fearful responsibility to claim to speak on God’s behalf. I’ve told you before, one of the scariest passages in Scripture to me is that we will give an account for every idle word. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I know I do a lot of talking, and that frightens me.

Folks, there are going to be some people who have claimed to speak on God’s behalf, who have made millions of dollars and collected all kinds of perks claiming to speak on God’s behalf, who not only did not speak on God’s behalf, but spoke against the things that God has said and may never have even known him in the first place. And when the people, Jesus talked about people will say, well, we cast out demons in your name. And folks, they were speaking on Jesus’ behalf and there’s power in Jesus’ name.

But he said, depart from me, I never knew you. Folks, just claiming to speak on God’s behalf doesn’t make it true. And God is not fooled.

God is not fooled. Whether it’s a government, whether it’s a religious leader, whether it’s anybody. Folks, we’ve got to make sure if we say God said it or this is what God wants, we’ve got to make absolutely certain we know what we’re talking about.

Third and finally tonight, as we wrap up, God is not fooled by hollow protests of innocence. God’s not fooled by hollow protests of innocence. It’s very rare you go into a trial or you go into a hearing and hear the guy say, yeah, I did it.

I killed all those people. Yeah, I did it. I stole all that money from the bank.

No, everybody goes kicking and screaming to jail saying, you’ve got the wrong guy. I didn’t do anything. You know what?

Some of them are innocent. I’ll grant you that. But there are a whole lot of guilty people who say, I didn’t do anything.

I didn’t do anything. Sometimes we can do that as well, not with criminal things, but with sins, with things that God says are wrong and we convince ourselves, no, it’s okay, just a little bit, or, well, I’ve got extenuating circumstances, so it’s okay. And we can fool ourselves again and say, oh, it’s all right.

I didn’t do anything wrong. I was completely justified that God said to them, how long? How long will it be ere they attain to innocency?

They claimed to be innocent before God. And he says in a great rhetorical question that they had no answer to, how long will it be until they actually are innocent? Because once they were guilty, they never could be innocent again.

He said, how long will they claim to be innocent when they’re not? And folks, we can stand here today and tell God, no, I’m completely innocent. I’ve got everything under control in my life.

God, you and I are good. And know that we’ve got unsettled accounts with God. And people in the world in general can say, God and I are good.

We’re all right. I haven’t done anything wrong. I certainly haven’t done anything worthy of God condemning me to hell.

Folks, how long will we make these hollow protests of innocence before a holy God? God’s not fooled. We can say, I’m all right.

I didn’t do anything wrong. The world can say, we’re all right. We haven’t done anything wrong.

It’s not a sin, folks. God is not fooled. God doesn’t suddenly forget his word and what he has said.

Oh, did I say that was a sin? No, you’re right. I didn’t.

It’s okay. No, God doesn’t forget. ladies and gentlemen, how long are they attained innocency?

Folks, from time to time, as I said, we fool ourselves and say, it’s okay what’s going on here. It’s okay what I’ve done. I don’t need to deal with it with God because I was alright or I had extenuating circumstances.

And folks, I’m not telling you that you lose your salvation when you sin. What I’m talking about is having a long list of accounts with God, things that we’ve not come back and dealt with with God. Folks, God’s not fooled and God’s not confused when we protest that we’re innocent.

We didn’t do anything wrong. folks, he’s not fooled.