Exposing the Doctrines of Demons - Daniel Willis

Exposing the doctrines of demons. Jesus plus nothing stands alone. This is where I get it from. Now, the Spirit expressly says that in latter times, some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies and hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron. When it says depart from the faith, I don't think these people are deliberately departing from the faith or even know they depart from the faith, that they're buying into doctrines of demons and they think they're walking with the Lord.

And in Titus 1:16, they profess to know God, but in works they deny Him, being abominable, disobedient, and disqualified for every good work. So in works, we can deny Christ or we can confess Christ. And what happens if we deny Christ before men?

Matthew 10:32-33, our King himself says this: "Therefore, whoever confesses me before men, I will also confess before my Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies me before men, I will also deny before my Father who is in heaven." So we can confess or deny Christ with our actions. If someone hits you on the cheek or is your enemy and you pummel them to the ground, that in my mind would be denying Christ with your action and not confessing Him. But yeah, if you turn the other cheek and you love your enemy, you're confessing Christ before men.

Exposing the doctrines of demons. Why do I have a passion behind this? Well, first of all, I was like a frog in boiling water, and so was my brother. And we were exposed to this constantly. And I believe that you guys are exposed to doctrines of demons often as well, not from this church.

But any time you go and look at any other message from some other churches, you get this bombardment of these messages. And after a long time, you start to boil and you don't even know that they're affecting you and then they're changing your life. And through my whole spiritual life, I battled between this tension of, can I please God? Is God pleasable? Is He just mad at me and have this wrath against me? And every time I try to please Him, it's like disgusting and filthy rags. Or can I please my Father? And it was like this battle. And sometimes I would, well, if I can't please Him, I might as well just join the world, you know, not stop believing in God, but it doesn't matter what I do because everything I do is disgusting to God anyway because He's so perfect and all my good deeds are imperfect.

So that was the one reason. The second was when I was trying to tell Jason about an obedient love-faith relationship with Christ, and I would call him every day, every day, or we would talk to each other and we'd talk about it. And it seemed like he would go two steps forward, and then my friend, our mutual friend, would call him and tell him all these doctrines of demons, like, "No, you're once saved, always saved." And he had all this different stuff, and he'd call me and tell me what he told my brother, and it would just irritate me so bad. And so then I would go call Jason again, and we'd talk about it again.

Church. And then not long ago, there was an Anabaptist man in our church that told me he left his church because he found the finished work of Christ. And it just bothered me. And so it made me want to talk about this again.

So exposing the doctrines of demons, separating works from faith. And there's another one. And I mean, there's a ton. I could tell you story after story. In China, a man would say, like, he would always say, "It's Jesus plus nothing. If you add anything to Jesus, you're going to hell." He'd always say that. And he would say, "It's Jesus plus nothing is everything, and Jesus plus anything is you're not right with Christ."

And so I'm going to expose these things. Satan wants us to think that faith and works are separate. He wants us to separate faith and works and make us think we cannot please God. What better thing is a whole people of God thinking they can't please God and that nothing they can do matters to God? And they say, "Well, God is so righteous that everything that we do, even if it is right, it's nothing like God's righteousness. So He's displeased and it's disgusting." I mean, think if I did something better than my son and it was good, but my son tried really hard and was doing good, but it wasn't as good as me, would I be like, "Oh, it's so disgusting.

You're not as good as me?" I mean, that doesn't make any sense at all. And then another one that God has mercy on whom He has mercy. And I believe that God can have mercy on whoever He wants to have mercy, whoever He wills to, and whoever He wants to. He'll harden whoever He wants to. But who does He want to harden and have mercy on? That's the question. And then the five solas, we're going to go through those.

So first, we're going to hit faith and faithfulness. When I realized that faith and faithfulness are the same word, and whenever you're looking to the Greek, the Greek reader wouldn't see a difference. But in the English, I would read the same English passage, and they would make it belief, like a mental ascent in some of the passages, or faith, like it didn't have works with it. And then sometimes it'd be faithfulness, but it'd be the same word. So I did what everybody would do, and I asked ChatGPT.

I said, "Can you look at all the Greek and the New Testament and look at all the times that this word's used and look at the context around it and tell me, how would you know when it would be translated as faith or faithfulness? And would the Greek readers be able to tell, or would they always see it as the same?" And this is what its response was to me. In the New Testament Greek, the concepts of faith and faithfulness are closely related and often intertwined, which reflect the broader meaning of faith in Koine Greek. This word encompasses both the act of believing and loyalty or faithfulness that stems from that belief.

While modern English tends to distinguish between faith and faithfulness, the ancient Greek concepts do not always make such a clear distinction. In many contexts, faith carries an implication of faithfulness, as in the inherent quality of faith itself. This is particularly evident in contexts where faith is discussed not merely as intellectual ascent, but as a lived reality that demonstrates itself in actions.

In the New Testament, while individuals are commended for their faith, it's not just for intellectual agreement with a set of beliefs, but also their steadfastness, reliability, and loyalty to those beliefs. For instance, the faith of Abraham discussed in Romans 4 and James 2 is not only about his belief in God's promises, but also his steadfastness in acting upon that belief.

Additionally, in passages where God's faith is discussed, it is often translated as faithfulness, referring to God's steadfast loyalty and reliability in keeping His promises. Therefore, in the context of the New Testament theology, faith and faithfulness are deeply connected, and one might argue that they are two sides of the same coin. Faith, belief, is expected to be lived out, and faithfulness, loyal action. They can be distinct in discussion, but they're not entirely divorced from one another and the underlining Greek concept.

And I want to prove that ChatGDP is true just by showing you some verses and their context. Well, we'll look at the Greek of the verses, I should say. So I put in KJV on here, the first one, just because all of them I think that I've got are from New King James Version. "He who believes in the Son has everlasting life, and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides in him." And I don't really appreciate how the people that translated the New King James translated not believe here. See, the first one, he who believes, and then in the second part, does not believe, this is what the Greek shows.

So I don't know Greek, but you don't need to to be able to see this. This is the first one. You see in the red, it says believing. And look at the English representation of the Greek, the P-I-S-T, you know, I don't know how to say that. And then this is the second one. You can see it's a very, very different word, and it's a different number. And below in red, it says not obeying. And when you click on the 544, well, first, here's the first one, the faith, the 4100. And the second one, 544, says to disobey, to rebel, to be disloyal, and refuse conformity.

So I think that a better translation would be, he who believes in the Son has everlasting life, and he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him. It shows here that if you believe that it's, you automatically assume that obedience is there, because the very next verse it says if you don't obey, you don't get this everlasting life. But if you believe, you get everlasting life. So belief and obedience are going to be together, and not believe or not obey are going to go together. And I'll prove it even more here.

In Hebrews, so that promised land, they talked about being in the complete rest of Christ, the land of promise series. And they use this verse, so I'm going to go through these verses and first show how faith and obedience have to go together, that they're inseparable.

And if they're not, it's dead. And then secondly, I'm going to show you how they misinterpret these passages. And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who did not obey? So you see that they could not enter because of unbelief.

So not obeying and unbelief are two sides of the same coin, just like faith and faithfulness or works is two sides of the same coin. They can't be separated. And interestingly enough, that's also the New King James Version, and that's the same word, but this time they decided to translate it as not obey, but the first time they said translated it as to not believe.

And then this is the second one, and if you look at the unbelief, and if you look at its Greek, I mean, its definition, it also can be unfaithfulness. So whenever you see someone not believing, they automatically would think of it as not being faithful as well, that they're two sides of the same coin.

And we'll look at it even further. For we who have believed do enter that rest. So the people who believe enter that rest, since therefore it remains that some must enter it, and those to whom it was first preached did not enter because of their disobedience. So people who believe get in, people who disobey don't.

Therefore, since the promise, now this is where it gets to, they don't read this verse, and then they stop at verse 10. But if you just read one verse down in the land of promise, you can see that this rest is something that we're receiving now, but not completely received, and that we're somewhat in the wilderness, and we're working toward the promised land. And they would say that we're in that rest, it's all completed, and there's nothing you can do, including obedience, so you don't need to be striving. So therefore, since a promise remains of entering his rest, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it. So why would we fear if we're in that?

And how can we fall short of it if we're in it? For indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them, but the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it. Skipping down to verse 11, let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience. So we must be diligent in our obedience to enter that rest. It's not something we're currently in that we can just not do anything anymore and not live for Christ. Here's the five solos.

Faith alone right now, I'm hacking at its roots. I'm going to keep going at it, but it's obvious it's not faith alone, that faith cannot be separated from obedience and work. And scripture alone, I could tell you that there's 45,000 different denominations who I would believe that the vast majority of them would say they believe only in scripture alone, and that they get all of their beliefs from looking at the scripture by itself.

But they come to all different conclusions. So it's obvious they have lenses. And I'll show you a lens that I had and that nobody taught me. Well, not they didn't mean to teach me this. I went to churches, I went to Baptist churches, Methodist churches, Presbyterian churches as a child. I saw lots of different Christians. And when I became 16 and I read through the Bible for the first time, first of all, I'd never seen any Christian anywhere ever wear a head covering, never heard of a head covering. It was some kind of, I never heard of it. It didn't exist in my brain. And so with the first time when I'm 16, I'm reading the scriptures and I read about the head covering, I automatically know instantly that, oh, it's not for today.

There must be, if the head covering were something that we were supposed to do, I would have seen it. But because I haven't seen it, I know that this doesn't mean what it says it means. So I automatically had a lens from growing up that the head covering isn't for today. If someone would have told me that, yeah, for 1900 years, everybody everywhere wore head coverings, especially in the assembly and in praying, it would be hard for me to believe.

But I had this lens because I grew up in all these churches that nobody wore it. And we all have lenses and we all have experiences that we look at the Bible through. And so that's why our church, as you guys know, we go to the historic faith. What did the first 300 years of Christianity see these different doctrines meaning?

And so it's not Christ alone. I mean, all of these things sound really great and good, but first of all, they all say alone, and so none of them can be alone if you have to have them all. So you at least have those five things. But then you have to have works too. Christ with works and righteousness, they'll say that you can't have righteousness of your own. You have to be under Christ's righteousness because all of your righteousness is disgusting.

And it's not Christ alone. Even they will point to this passage all the time when they're talking about this arbitrary mercy. They'll go to John 6:44, where it says, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I'll rise him up in the last day." So they admit themselves that the Father is a part of it. It's not Christ alone, that you have to come to Christ with the Father drawing you to him.

And then they'll say, "Well, this is the Father just picks at random who he's going to draw." But they always neglect to read the very next verse in John 6:45. It is written by the prophets, and they shall be taught by God. Therefore, everyone, and this is Jesus now speaking, therefore, everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. So it's not God doesn't just arbitrarily pick who goes to Jesus. It's people who have learned and heard from the Father who God sends to Jesus. And so it's still not arbitrary, and it's not Christ alone, and it's not grace alone. And I thought maybe the only one that was true was to the glory of God alone.

And I think we should have that attitude, that we should do everything for the glory of God alone. But even when you look up those verses, it has a bunch of verses that say that when we're raised in the last day, we'll be raised in glory, and he'll give us, there's glory that we'll get from God. It's from God's glory, but we're going to keep going. Back at hacking at faith alone. If someone says he has faith but does not have works, can faith save him? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe and tremble.

And the demons have faith. I mean, you can see their faith in their works. They actually tremble. But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead? Was Abraham, our father, justified by works when he offered Isaac the son on the altar? Do you see that faith was working together with his works? And by works, faith was made perfect or complete?

And the scriptures was fulfilled, which says, "Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness, and he was called the friend of God." You see then that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone or not by faith only. So the only time faith alone in the scriptures is right here, and it says that we're justified by works and not by faith only.

And if you read the first, the second, I'm not going to go through this. We don't have time. 2 Peter 1, and it says, "Add to your faith this, add to your faith that, add to your faith this."

It's talking about a complete faith, and at the end it says, "You will not fall if you do these things." And it says, "If you don't do these things, you won't have fruit." And as we learned this morning in our devotions and our communion, that if you don't bear fruit, he takes you off the vine. So you have to add to your faith these things or you're going to be fruitless and be pulled off the vine. But if you do remember to add these things, which I don't have on here, you can go home and look it up, then you will be fruitful and you won't fall.

But let's go to Romans 4. This is the passage where most of this is a passage I believe dearly, and a lot of people will take out of context, but I'm going to try to put it into context for you. What then shall we say that Abraham, our father, has found according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as a grace, but as debt. So grace here is gift. It's obvious that if you work for Breckbill Trailer for a week and he gives you a paycheck at the end of the week, you don't think, "Oh, he gave me a gift."

It was he was indebted to pay you that money. It was so when now him who works, the wages are not a gift. It's something you've earned. And who would say, let's see, first let's see when he believed. It says that when he believed, it was accounted to him as righteousness. So let's jump to the first time that Abraham and the Lord meet.

Now the Lord had said to Abraham, "Get out of your country, from all your family and from your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you, and you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

So Abraham departed as the Lord had spoken to him, and Lot went with him, and Abraham was 75 years old when he departed from Haran. So how did it say he believed there? Did it use those words? But do we know he believed there?

How do we know that? We know he believed there because he got up and left. If he'd never got up and left, I don't know if God would have given him these promises. And did he earn by him leaving his land that was God indebted to him? Did he earn to be a great nation? Did he earn to be for anybody who curses him or blesses him to be cursed or blessed, or that every family in the whole world would be blessed by him? Did he earn that? No, it's a gift. It would be silly to think that Abraham worked and earned that because he got up and departed, but his faith still had action.

It still had works, and it would be dead without it. There's no contradiction between James and Romans 4. And then just like I've told you before, my father-in-law bought us a house in China. And the first time he called us and he said, "I want to buy you a house in China." We said, we didn't believe him. Me and my wife got off the phone. I was like, "You think he's serious?" No, he's not serious. And then a few weeks later, he's like, "Hey, did you find a house?" And we're like, "Are you serious about a house there?" He's like, "I'm serious. Find a house." We're like, "We don't even know if you could buy a house in China.

We don't know the laws or anything." He's like, "You better figure it out if you want me to buy a house." So we go and we spend all this time going to figure out which banks you have to go. Certain banks as a foreigner, you have to buy certain homes as a foreigner. You have to send money three different times to three different people. You have to do all these things. And it took months to figure out, months to accomplish. And then we had to renovate the house. And we didn't go around saying we worked and earned this house, a $150,000 house just by a few months of, I mean, anybody would have, nobody would have said that was, everybody would have said it was a gift.

But if we would have kept answering that phone and said, "Yeah, I don't think we're going to look. We don't really believe you." I don't think he would have given us that gift. And so anyway, I went through this whole chapter and I was going to do a whole thing on imputed righteousness, but David did a great job and I have it anyway. But these words right here are all the same word. The second one's in a slightly different tense, but they're all the same word that they would have translated in just a few little spots, imputed.

But if you put their definition of what imputed is in all these spots in the same chapter, it doesn't make any sense. And if you put counted in for all those spots, it makes quite a good bit of sense. And anyway, I'm not going to go through that today, but I challenge you to go look at. They chose what they have this doctrine of imputation.

And if you don't know what that is, good. But it's made up. They just like took some the same word that they've used a ton of times in the same scripture, changed it to imputed, and then made a whole doctrine around it. And David can put you through that in the historic faith or scroll publishing. You can go through this lesson.

And 1 Timothy 4:16, we're going to keep moving. "Take heed yourselves into the doctrine. Continuing them for doing this, you will save both yourselves and those who hear you." So doctrine is really important, and that's why we're talking about doctrines of demons that will not save you and that will damn you, and doctrines that will save you.

And this fights against the solos. They say all these things, these are the only things that can save you and nothing else. But doctrine, it says doctrine can save you. It says in Mark 16:16, it says baptism saves, and 1 Peter 3:21, baptism saves. And then, I mean, if you want to go through the whole progression of it, it's Acts 2:38 and Acts 22:16, your sins are washed away through baptism, and you're clothed in Christ and baptism and colossians. Well, you're put in Christ and colossians too, and you're clothed with Christ and colossians in Galatians 3:27.

And but how do we get our sins washed away with baptism? I thought it was the blood of Jesus. Well, we're somehow connected to the death and burial and resurrection in Romans 6 through baptism. How does it work? I don't exactly know. But they will fight tooth and nail to say the baptism is completely assembled and does nothing. How does it work exactly? I don't know, but it does something. God wouldn't, I mean, it's still a mystery of Christ, but there's a lot of things that the Bible says it does, and you have to throw it out when all these alones are there and you can't add anything to it.

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. If it's something that's already completed and we're in the rest of God, why would we have to work it out in fear and tremble?

The use of the word grace has been redefined as synonymous with forgiveness in many times. It's also redefined as unmerited favor and often is spoken as a license to sin by the mainstream church, much like what Martin Luther once said, "No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day." Let's see if that's what grace sounds like in the verse below, or I guess the next slide.

This is how I read this verse. David and some others may correct me afterwards. "For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that." So the grace of God teaches us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lust, teaches us that, that we should live soberly and just keep doing that in your mind instead of me doing it, righteously and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearance of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself his own special people, zealous for good works. Grace can teach us these things, and it doesn't line up at all with a grace that's a license to sin.

And there's a lot more about it. Grace can mean gift and favor, merited or unmerited, and the historic faith and scroll publishing has this, and it's also a work of David's or the early Christians. So no one is righteous, no, not one. There is no one completely righteous, but all of us can be righteous and be upright, and I'll show you that later. But these are the people that the Bible says is righteous and God says is righteous. I guess it's similar or the same.

You got Abraham, Noah, Job, David, Jesus, all the way to Simeon and Cornelius. And just because there's one verse that says something doesn't mean that all these other verses aren't true. And just because these verses say something doesn't mean that verse is not true. Both of the verses are true, and there are righteous people in God's sight. Are they completely righteous? And there are pleasing people, and a lot of these people are said to be acceptable and pleasing and having the heart of, like, God didn't see them as filthy rags.

We're going to go over that right now. But we are all like an unclean thing, and all of our righteousness are like filthy rags. You meet him who rejoices. So we're going to go through just the context of this. The context alone should help you see that this, what they say this means. So filthy rags supposedly in Hebrew meant like menstrual cloth or something, something really disgusting.

And they will say that all of our, anything we try to do that's right and righteous and holy in God's eyes, it's just disgusting to him. It doesn't accept it. You meet him who rejoices and does righteousness. He's talking to God. So God meets the people who rejoices and does righteousness, who remembers you in your ways. So the people who remember God in his ways, he meets them. You are indeed angry, for we have sinned, Israel. This is Israel. And these ways we continue. So Israel is sinning and continuing to sin and not stopping.

And we need to be saved. But we are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are like filthy rags. We all fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. And there is no one who calls on your name. No one in Israel is calling on you.

We're all continuing and sin deliberately. No one who stirs himself up to take hold of you. No one's trying to grab you and get you and receive you and meet you. For you have hidden your face from us, and you consumed us because of our sins, our iniquities.

So if I were, I'm not going to use you guys as an example because you'll see why. If I were to be in an adulterous relationship, and I was openly in an adulterous relationship, my wife knew it, and I told her about it. And I told her I'm never going to change. And I told her that, and I went and bought her a dozen flowers, and I came to her, and I'm not going to change, but I love you.

Do you think she's going to take those and be like, "Oh, this is the most, this is such a loving thing"? No, it's like filthy rags. Like, this is disgusting. Why would I do this? Why would I, why would you give me this? And then I come to church and I'm living in an adulterous relationship, and I'm praising God. And do you think God's going to be so happy with me that I'm deliberately sinning and praising God? No, he's not. But if I was upright, if I was a man not in an adulterous relationship, and I went and bought those roses and I brought them to my wife, she would be very happy to have those roses.

And we're going to see that in scripture. When we get to how we know we can please God, part of this, you'll see that the people who are doing evil and try to give sacrifices to the Lord do not please God. It's the same thing. And the upright people are God's delight. If you know that he is righteous, you know that everyone who practices righteousness is born of him.

Little children, let no one deceive you. He who practices righteousness is righteous, just as he is righteous. There are so many people trying to deceive the whole world and saying that you can't have righteousness, that you can't, that your righteousness is gross, like I've said a ton of times today, and you can only have Jesus's righteousness. And if you try to have a righteousness of your own, that you're not right with God, that you have to be covered with Christ, and that God, when God looks at you, he only sees Christ because if he sees you, he's upset. They're trying to deceive you. These are doctrines of demons. Little children, let no one deceive you.

He who practices righteousness is righteous, just as he is righteous. In this, little children of God and the children of the devil are manifest. Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is he who does not love his brother.

What is righteousness? The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence. The thoughts of the righteous are just, but the counsels of the wicked are deceitful. A righteous man hates falsehood, but a wicked man acts disgustingly and shamefully. The heart of the righteous ponders how to answer, but the mouth of the wicked pours out evil things. The righteous is concerned with the rights of the poor, but the wicked does not understand such concern.

And reading and learning about what makes a person good and right could easily take a whole Sunday school lesson on its own. We're not going to continue in it. We got more things to cover. For which of you intend to build a tower does not sit down first and count the cost? So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be my disciple. Does this sound like that we're in a completed work of Christ and we have nothing to give and that we're in his rest? No, we have to give everything to be his disciple and pick up his cross and follow him.

Arbitrary mercy. Romans 9. For he says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion." For the scripture says to Pharaoh, "For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I may show my power in you and that my name may be declared in all the earth. Therefore he has mercy on whom he wills, and whom he wills he hardens.

You will say to me then, 'Why does he still find fault? For who has resisted his will?' But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, 'Why have you made me like this?' Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make the vessel for honor and another for dishonor?" And you could see how that could be misdrewed.

God hardens just randomly someone and gives mercy to someone. But we're going to go through this in multiple different ways, so just bear with me. So before God hardened his heart, he said he would harden his heart in chapter 4 and 7, and he didn't actually, it doesn't actually say he hardened his heart until chapter 9, halfway through, I think. We'll see it in a minute anyway. So all of these things happened at least once, except the very last one before God hardened his heart. The Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites. He ordered the killing of the Hebrew infants, throwing Hebrew baby boys in the Nile, increasing the Israelites' burden by taking away the straw and making them get their own straw.

Rejecting God's command, refusing to acknowledge the Lord, going back on his word multiple times, and holding the Israelites in bondage. And so we can look at these verse by verse in the New King James. And Pharaoh's heart grew hard. It doesn't say it was him hardening his heart or God at this point. And he did not heed them, as the Lord said. Then the magicians of Egypt did so with their enchantment. Pharaoh's heart grew hard, and he did not heed to them, as the Lord said. But when Pharaoh saw that there was relief, he hardened his heart and did not heed them, as the Lord said.

Then the magician said to Pharaoh, "This is the finger of God," but Pharaoh's heart grew hard, and he did not heed them, just as the Lord said. But Pharaoh hardened his heart at the time, at this time also. Neither would he let the people go. Then Pharaoh sent, and indeed, not every one of the livestock of the Israelites was dead. But the heart of the Pharaoh became hard, and he did not let the people go.

But the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh. So this is the first time we see it saying the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh. He did not heed them, just as the Lord had spoken. But then it goes back. And when Pharaoh saw that the rain, the hail, and the thunder had ceased, he sinned yet more, and he hardened his heart, he and his servants. And if you don't have chapter breaks and division, verse divisions in your Bible, this verse, 9:34 and 10:1 are right next to each other. So it's almost like a mutual thing. Like he hardened his heart and God hardened his heart.

Let's read it together. And when Pharaoh saw this, the rain, the hail, and the thunder had ceased, he sinned yet more, and he hardened his heart and he and his servants. Now the Lord said to Moses, "Go into Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his servants, that I may show these signs of mine before him."

So we're going to go through some things of mercy. And because it says he gives mercy to whom he gives mercy. And we're going to compare them to Pharaoh real quick. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace and help in time of need.

For you, Lord, are good and ready to forgive and abundant in mercy to all who call upon you. Do you think that the Pharaoh called upon him in a time of need and needed mercy? I thought not, but then I reread it.

Then Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron and said, "And treat the Lord that he may take away the frogs from me and from my people, and I will let the people go. Then they may sacrifice to the Lord."

And then again, another plague later. And this is both times it says Pharaoh hardened his heart, his own heart in these two times. So Pharaoh said, "I will let you go that you may sacrifice to the Lord your God in the wilderness. Only you shall not go far away. Intercede for me." And both times they interceded for him. And what did God do? God was merciful. He took away the plagues. He does what he said he would do.

And what was Pharaoh's response to God's mercy? He did not obey God and let the people go. He went back on his word. He hardened his own heart, and he lied about what he would do.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Was Pharaoh merciful? He was not. For as the heavens are high above in the earth, so great is the mercy toward those who fear him. Did Pharaoh fear him? So I searched the scriptures again, and I found this. So this happened after the first five plagues, ending with the cattles all dying. So the fish, the red, the seed, I mean the water turned to blood, the fish floating up, the gnats, all of those. And it says, "But as for you and your servants, I know that you will not yet fear the Lord your God." He didn't even fear the God after five of these plagues, all this death, all this tragedy.

And he wasn't fearing God. He wasn't merciful. He was going back on his word. He was hardening his own heart. He who covers his sin will not prosper, but whoever confesses and forsakes them will have mercy. Did he confess his sin and turn? Did he forsake them, his sins? No.

The potter and the clay, this, if that didn't convince you, hopefully this will. And I don't know what I'm trying to convince you of. I think you all understand it, but anyway. The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord saying, "Arise." So in Romans 9, I want to reiterate that Romans 9 talks about Pharaoh and hardening his heart and mercy and the potter and the clay. So we're going to go back to an Old Testament verse about the potter and the clay.

The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord saying, "Arise and go down to the potter's house, and there I will cause you to hear my words." Then I went down to the potter's house, and there he was making something on the wheel.

The vessel that he made of clay was marred in his hand, in the hand of the potter. So he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter. Then the word of the Lord came to me saying, "O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter?" So think about God holding this clay in his hand. God's the potter and Israel's the clay.

And if the clay is marred, he can make it into whatever he wants. And think about the whole time, this is the context that he's in front of the potter's house. God's holding the clay. "O house of Israel, can I not do with you as the potter?" says the Lord. "Look, as the clay is in the hands of the potter's hands, so you are in my hand, O house of Israel. The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom to pluck them up or put them down and destroy them, if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent from the disaster that I thought to bring upon it."

He's thinking about crushing this, and then they repent. He doesn't. He can make it into a vessel, a beautiful vessel, not a vessel of wrath. "And the instant I speak concerning a nation, concerning a kingdom to build and to plant it, if it does evil in my sight so that it does not obey my voice, then I will relent concerning the good which I said I would benefit it." So he was going to make this thing into a beautiful thing, but it wouldn't cooperate, and it wouldn't repent, and it went to evil instead. So he made it into a vessel of wrath. This is how I see it. Maybe I'm wrong. "Now therefore speak to the men of Judah and to its inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, 'Thus says the Lord, behold, I am fashioning a disaster and devising a plan against you.

Return now every one of you from your evil way and make your ways and your doings good.'" So we have a Pharaoh who's hardened his own heart. I don't think God just found some random righteous man and said, "I'm going to make him a vessel of wrath, and I'm going to make him, I'm going to show him how mighty and powerful and wrathful I am." He found someone who was already hardened and already a terrible man, and he used him. He used that vessel. And we can see that in Romans. I'm not going to read this, but in Romans 1:18 through 32, I made a G-rated version. I'll read it. "God's anger is shown from heaven against all the bad and wrong things people do, especially when they know the truth but choose to ignore it.

These people understand who God is, so they have no excuse for their actions. Instead of honoring God who made everything, they give that honor to things that he created, which is like turning the truth about God into a lie. They don't respect or give thanks to him, so God lets them follow their own evil desires, which will lead to punishment that they're aware of, but they keep on doing wrong. They even encourage others to do bad things alongside them." He's letting them become a vessel of wrath. He's not choosing to give them mercy because they don't even want to accept who he is.

And if you read it in context, it's more clear than that. I'm getting close to the end. I know that sometimes I'm long-winded. Doctrines of demons. "You cannot please God because your righteousness is filthy rags. No one is righteous, no not one. You all have sinned and fallen short. And whatever we ask, we receive from him because we keep his commandments." So first, before I say these verses, this is probably not a problem with you guys, but when you grow up going back and forth with every other sermon you hear, thinking that you can't please God, it's really hard. It's hard to live in a faith, a life of following God and thinking that you're just this disgusting thing to him all the time.

And you're always trying to figure out how these scriptures work together and how to fit in. That we can do nothing to please him. He's so right and awesome, and you want to please him. He did everything for us, and you're in this battle, and it's such a freeing thing. When you can see these, this is the stuff that if you can see and hopefully never unsee, that whenever you hear these doctrines of demons come up, the demons don't want us to please God. They don't want us to do what's right. They want us to be under his wrath and be ungodly. And so the demons want you to think that you can do nothing that's right and good.