Of Sin, of Righteousness, and of Judgement

I think many of us have read books or watched movies, documentaries about the Holocaust. It's Mr. Kosmalski and I didn't touch base on today's subjects, but we're going to overlap a little bit on it.

There's been a lot done to demonstrate the horrors and the atrocities that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s with the Holocaust and many other things that happened during World War II. Some of us have visited the Zekelman Memorial Center and I believe it's Farmington Hills. Not too far from us.

It's a very sobering place to visit, just like watching a lot of the movies about what happened in the concentration camps and the different elements of World War II. I think for any of us, and I'll just speak for myself, I think a lot of us have had similar experiences, but when we watch a movie or we visit a Holocaust memorial or Holocaust Center, one of the things that is just shocking and you can't really cleanse your mind of is just how did this happen?

When we consider just the severity and the loss of life, not just looking at, like Mr. Kosmalski mentioned, from just war itself, the number of lives lost, but then those who were persecuted, who were sent over to concentration camps, who were abused, who ultimately were murdered, and you look at the lives that they lived, you look at the ways that they were treated, you look at the hatred that was focused in towards them, and you just can't wash your mind of the fact of, like, how could this even possibly happen?

Because I live in circles with a lot of friends that would never even consider something even remotely as destructive and as damaging as that, right? So when I walk through the Holocaust Center or we watch a movie or something, I think most of us do one of two things. We naturally, asking that question, how could this happen? We put ourselves into a category, which I consider all of us in, of people that we interact with, people we live in, our communities outside of these walls, even our neighbors, and we're like, I know people that would never ever consider broaching something, these lines, and going to the degree of having this type of hatred where you would want to see another race or another group of people annihilated, right?

So if you and I put ourselves into that group of people, right, where we naturally want to put ourselves, then we have to then put the people who did these things in another category. And when we do that, we're now separating out humanity and deeming that these other people are subhuman and not really deserving of being in the same category with the rest of us, right?

That's one train of thought that I think often in considering this subject and going through a memorial, that's one camp that maybe we, one train of thought we might have. The other is kind of on the other side of the spectrum, that when you go through someplace like this and you realize that humanity did this to ourselves, that human did this to one another, humans that were made in the image of God, who have the potential to be in his family, the ability to understand things beyond the ability to reason.

We're not like any other animal or any other part of God's creation, right? To recognize that our fellow human beings did this, then it has to, we have to pause and consider and ask ourselves a question or come to the realization, I inherently, in who I am, in my brokenness and my struggles, I inherently have the same ability to do this atrocity.

That's someplace we don't want to let our minds go, right? Because we really believe in the heart of our hearts, we would never ever do something like that. But recognizing that this was human who did this to fellow human, and because we are human, and we have our own nature, our own struggles, our own problems, inherently, we have the capacity to do the exact same thing.

I often, I think I've shared this with you before, I've thought about when we talk to one another, and we get to know each other, and we see somebody commit like a sin, or they say something that we wouldn't say, or we see a level of their own brokenness because we know them as family, right? And there's times where we think like, well, I can't believe this person would do something like that, or say something like that, or treat someone that way, like, ugh, it's just not what we should be doing. And that's fair to say, right? We can call a sin a sin. God gives us, we can see those things, and we can recognize that about one another. But what I've tried to do over the years, as I've matured and recognized my own problems, more and more, I try to put that person into a category that if I was raised as they were in their household, in their generation, if I went to the school that they went to, if I had the parents that they had with their parents' problems, right? Because none of us are perfect. If I was raised in the level of brokenness, if I associated with the people that they associated with, like, if my life was placed into their sphere that they grew up in, the likelihood is that I would probably be making very similar decisions to what they are doing. Because so much in life, we are a product of our upbringing.

We are a product of what we're exposed to. We're a product of the good and the bad, of the relationships around us. We're a product of the brokenness of our parents, of our siblings, grandparents, neighbors, all the influences that we've had around us. Often, we're a product of that. And when we start to recognize that I'm not that much different from the person sitting next to me, yeah, sure, maybe my brokenness is different from your brokenness, and maybe the sins that I have, you don't have, and vice versa. It helps us to start to understand more deeply just how much we need God individually, how much we need His Word to lead and guide us, and how desperate this society around us, creation itself, mankind itself, needs so desperately God. Going back to this example of recognizing what occurred during World War II and the atrocities that occurred.

This is a society that was lacking God in a lot of ways. No matter where you were at on this planet, people were struggling and people had succumbed to our adversary, as we again heard during the sermonette, which ties really nicely into this message. I acknowledge and admit this is a heavy way to start a sermon today, but I want us to pivot and to be so thankful and recognize that even though we are products of our upbringing, we are sometimes stuck in our brokenness, we are not left short-handed. That's the beauty of what we've gone through with the Spring Holy Days and then concluding with Pentecost two weeks ago. We've talked a lot about God's mercy, His forgiveness, His direction that He's given us. We've talked a lot about His Spirit, which is the Helper, the Comforter, the Supporter, the Encourager, the one that motivates and moves us from the inside out and leads our lives forward. God Himself has made the impossible possible in our lives.

That's not because of our greatness or our goodness. That's not because of something you and I woke up one day and just said, hey, I should be a better person. God started the process in a beautiful way of making the impossible possible as His Spirit resides in our hearts and our minds.

There's a passage I shared with you a few weeks ago in a sermon that deserves a little bit more time, I believe, as we continue exiting out of the Feast of Pentecost and continuing forward in our journey with God. Let's open our Bibles today in John 15 and verse 18.

We're gonna... the heart of the message is going to be found in John 16, but I want to kind of get the context and build a bridge between John 15 and John 16 as we get to the kind of the core of our messaging today. When we really look at the life of Jesus and we understand the depth of His life and what He came to do, He was really a stranger in a strange world, right? He stuck out. His messaging didn't always blend with the common thought of the theologians, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the teachers. He challenged them on a lot of things and He challenged the listener, the multitude, on a lot of things and in turn He's challenged us on a lot of elements of our lives. His ways and His teachings, they didn't fit the value system of the world around Him and the value system of our world seems to be driven by one who instilled by our enemy and our adversary, again, as we heard in the sermon at. This is why our journey as Christians is often so hard. And then as God brings us through our brokenness, as He brings us forward on a better path to go with instructions to live a better life, with the desire to change inwardly, and by giving us His Spirit, He's put us into a category of where Jesus was during His time and how Jesus stuck out and how Jesus didn't always blend in with society around Him. And so, before His death and His crucifixion, John captures this account from Jesus Himself in his own words, John 15 and verse 18. He says, if the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you.

If you were of the world, the world would go of its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, a servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.

If they kept my word, they will keep yours also. But all these things they will do to you for my name's sake, because they do not know Him who sent me. If I had come and spoken to them, they would have no sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. This is how Christ was setting apart right and wrong, building upon the principles that they were holding dear to our hearts, and said it goes much further than just commandment keeping. It goes much further than just not hating your enemy or killing your enemy, but if you hate them, that's the same as killing. Jesus was building on this, and He's saying they have no excuse for where they're at. And then He says in verse 23, He who hates me hates my Father also. And so we find ourselves often in a category of this hatred and this being directed towards us. He goes on to say, if I had not done among them the works, which no one else did, they would have no sin, but now they have seen and also hated both me and the Father. But this happened that the Word might be fulfilled, which is written in their law, they hated me without a cause. But then He starts to pivot a little bit here in verse 26, leading on into chapter 16. He says, But when the Helper comes, which I will send from the Father, the Spirit of truth, which proceeds from the Father, it will testify of me. It will speak of the words that He shared. It will speak of the things that He taught. It will speak of the example that He said. The Holy Spirit will do these things. And He says, And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning. And so there's no chapter breaks in the original Greek in which this is writing. So let's just keep right on reading into verse 1 of chapter 16. He says, These things I have spoken to you that you should not be made to stumble.

They will put you out of the synagogue. So He's saying, persecution is going to come in. Their hatred is going to become a physical form at times. They will put you out of the synagogues. Yes, the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that He offered God service.

And these things they will do to you because they have not known the Father nor me. But these things I have told you that when the times come, you may remember that I told you of them. And these things I did not say to you at the beginning because I was with you. But now I go away to Him who sent me, and none of you ask me, where are you going? But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. It's a heavy message, right, to receive from Christ and for us today to even read through. But we get to an aspect of hope, and we get to an aspect of transition here as we keep reading. And this starts to get into the core of what we'll look at today. He says, nevertheless in verse 7, I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away. For if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I depart, I will send it to you. And when it has come, it will convict the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment. And this is what we're going to dive into today. Of sin because they do not believe in me. Of righteousness because I go to my Father and you see me no more. And of judgment because the ruler of this world is judged.

The Feast of Pentecost in A.D. 31 is much more than the inauguration of the church. It represents the widespread public proclamation of the gospel to the world. The Spirit of God would convict the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. And this is what we have dubbed in the church over the years the work of God. This is His work. This is His doing. It's His messaging. And it's His conviction of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment that He is doing. He has determined the work. It's not our work. It's His work. And this is the work that He is doing in the world. Each item that Christ shared here in John 16 is an aspect of His life that would be magnified upon His coming death. The Holy Spirit would be poured out to convict the world of sin when those around had rejected His life and His teachings. The Holy Spirit would convict the world of Christ's righteousness and innocence, even though He would be charged and crucified not for His own sins, but for the sins of the world. And the Holy Spirit would convict the world of judgment as the death of Christ was a judgment on Satan himself. It's through the power of God that we receive the help to convict our own lives of sin and draw us to repentance, for us to be able to even understand God's righteousness and to live accordingly, and to also discern the things going on around us in our lives and to recognize who the author of that sin is, our Advertary Satan.

It's interesting that the way that Jesus set up this phrasing, because His use of the word convict, obviously, was not an accident. It's a word that many times we can read over in the passage here and maybe even miss the magnitude of that one word alone. But the word convict is one that we should do that kind of paints and creates a courtroom imagery in our minds and that we've seen in society around us, where a person stands accused of something that they've done in a case is being heard, and so that the wrong can be exposed. The word convict from Thayer's definition here means to refute, generally with the suggestion of shame of the person convicted, or by conviction to bring to light or to expose something, to find fault with, can also mean to represent severely or to chide or to admonish or to call to account to show one his fault or to demand an explanation. It's a lot of depth to this word convict. From the word study dictionary, it says something similar to shame or to degrade, to degrade, disgrace, to convict, to prove one in the wrong and thus to shame him. The word convict here is an important aspect of the verse. We could easily read over it and miss the magnitude of what the Holy Spirit does in a person's life and more greatly as Jesus explained what it does for the world. The Holy Spirit was not poured out just to point out wrongs in the world and to create a contrast, but rather to hold court in a way of the sins of the world, to recognize the magnitude of what's going on and for it to be exposed and then in turn to convict us and move us to recognize the magnitude of what sin has done and the cause of that sin being, again, our adversary. So let's consider these three aspects that the Holy Spirit convicts from John chapter 16 starting in verse 8, the first aspect being of sin because they do not believe in me.

I'm going to ask a rhetorical question. Have you ever been in a situation where you said something and immediately you knew I should have never even said that? Am I the only one? No hands. What about this one? That you actually did something? An action? Something physical that you did and then immediately recognized, yeah, that had no business being part of my life at all. Or maybe it was an emotion that you were harboring in your heart. You didn't say it out loud. You didn't tell anybody it, but you just kept thinking about it and thinking about it and thinking about it and letting it get you more worked up, more frustrated, more angry. All these other emotions that then come with it and then recognize that all of it was against everything that God has called us to be.

I know. I'm the only one. I know. This is how the Holy Spirit convicts us of the sin in our lives.

When these things occur and we immediately or shortly recognize, what am I doing?

I've done that. I've hit the desk before. I've hit the steering wheel before. And I'm like, are you kidding me, Mike? Really? The beauty of what God is doing through His Spirit is unmistakable because it's easy for somebody else to just say, hey, that wasn't a great book that you just put on. Those words you said probably weren't the best choices today. And then we have to say, yeah, you're right. That's right. But when God does it internally, and then it's not just guidance. It's not just God's words saying, hey, you said something. There's a feeling that comes with it, a conviction that what we just did was guilty. We're guilty. We're found wrong for. Like, if we were standing in a court in front of a judge, and the prosecutor saying, Mike, you just said this, and I'm sitting there saying, yep, you're right, I just did. That's the beauty of what God is doing and what Jesus said the power of the Holy Spirit does, not just in our lives, but in the world. Because it's not just like Jesus didn't come just for those who would believe. He came for the world. And his way didn't just shine a light to just those who were able to talk with him, see him, and to walk with him. His light was the greatest lighthouse that ever existed, and the beam encapsulated the entirety of the earth. And so the beauty of what Christ used in picking that word convict is breathtaking. To recognize that God in his love and his desire for his creation to overcome our weaknesses and our adversary, he said, I'm going to give you a helper that is going to not only just point out your wrongs, but it's going to put an emotion inside of you that you have a choice to listen to. But it's going to talk, it's going to grab you at times. And it's going to make you come face to face with yourself. Not just point it out and you're like, yeah, I know that was a bad book. I shouldn't have said that. It's going to make you stop and consider how broken we are at times and how stuck we are at times. Matthew Henry's concise commentary says this about sin. It says, the Holy Spirit convinces of the fact of sin, of the fault of sin, of the folly of sin, of the filth of sin, that by it we have become hateful to God.

It convicts us of the fountain of sin, like this flowing fountain, the corrupt nature, and lastly, of the fruit of sin, that the end therefore is death. The Holy Spirit proves that all the world is guilty before God. The Holy Spirit doesn't just just point it out and say, hey, that wasn't such a great look, but we get into all of these aspects and we start to see just how it wasn't just one thing that led to a thought, led to an action, led to a word.

It was a series of emotions and attitudes and behaviors and choices that we've made over time that led to the fact that we would actually do these things. And God's Spirit just helps us to see more deeply the root of our sins. We only know about sin because God Himself has revealed right and wrong through His Word. And there's many people in society around us that know the Ten Commandments. Some of them even have it memorized. They don't go into a church. They don't talk about God a lot in their lives, but they know these principles because they're good principles.

They're going to lead to a happier life for them. They recognize, I want to be on that side of the spectrum, on that side of the balance, when people think about me when I die. They may never walk into a church. They never may proclaim to be a Christian, but they have these principles in mind.

But there's something else that has to occur that convicts and motivates our hearts to then follow God. And this is where God's Spirit comes into play. Romans 2, verse 4, we've looked at this passage several times over the past several weeks, so you can just put it in your note. But it says it, it's God who moved our heart to come to Him and to repent of our sins. God is in the details of the entire process of making us aware of our sin and then bringing us out of our brokenness. Romans 2, verse 4, Paul says, or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance? His grace, His mercy, led us out of our brokenness and to a better path to go and to recognize our sin. So, being led to repentance is a very personal act that God performs on a one-to-one basis in man's lives. He doesn't gather us all together and then collectively teach us and say, okay, everybody, I'm going to bring you all to repentance now as a group. He does it on a one-on-one level, on such an intimate, personalized journey with us. Your journey was different from my journey, and my journey is different from the next person who will someday give their life and commitment to Jesus Christ through baptism. That is the beauty of what God is doing, is He didn't make this just a global churchwide repentance. He said, it's between you and me, one-on-one. And I tell everybody that when I counsel for baptism, this, I'm not a middleman. I may counsel with you. I may talk about God's principles. I may serve as your pastor. But this is a one-on-one relationship that God is doing with you and you alone. And it doesn't involve me. I'm not a middle party to this.

I'm not really involved other than a spiritual guide to walk along and point out the aspects so that you know in the bottom of your heart that what you're doing is sincere and this is what you want in your relationship with God. And this is the beauty of what God is doing. And while He works selectively today, not everyone in society, not everyone is being called in these days, there is a plan that He has in place to give this opportunity to everyone. Everyone. And we can never lose sight of that. And this is part of the aspect that when Jesus gave His life and the Holy Spirit was poured out, that it would convict the world of sin, the entirety of the world, the entirety of the population that has ever existed, it will convict the world of sin. And so you could just put in 2 Peter 3 verse 9, but that's where it says, the Lord is not slack concerning His promise to some count slackness, but His long suffering towards us and towards all the world. I'll add that in. Not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. This is God's plan. This is what He wants. And so God's Spirit is working in human lives today and will continue to work in the future to convict people and to convict the world of sin. The second aspect that the Holy Spirit convicts is of righteousness because it says, I go to my Father and you see me no more. Thayer's definition of righteousness is a state of Him who is as He ought to be.

We know how we ought to be. I love this definition, so I've said it before, but it's as if one should be. The condition acceptable to God is another definition. Another is the way in which man may attain a state approved of God. And then it goes on to define a little bit of outlines or a little bit more detail of what this means. It says, it uses these words, integrity, virtue, purity of life, rightness, correctness of thinking, correctness of feeling, correctness of acting. The word study dictionary shares a little bit of a couple paragraphs about this passage we just read of what does righteousness entail. In both the Old Testament and New Testament, righteousness is the state commanded by God and standing the test of His judgment. It is conformity to all that He commands or appoints. Since God Himself is the standard of the believers, the righteousness of God means the righteousness from which belongs to God. So righteousness belongs to God. It's His standard, and it's always existed as His standard. Before mankind was ever created, God was righteous. Before mankind was ever given a way to live our lives, God was righteous. He owns righteousness. It is everything that He is righteousness.

And it goes on to say, thus righteousness in general is God's uprightness or standard without reference to any particular form of its embodiment to which man is expected to conform.

The righteousness of God is a claim which God has upon man. In order for man to recognize and fully submit to that claim of God upon his life, he must receive God as He offers Himself and His righteousness to Him as a gift. Man can only accept the claims of God upon his life as he repents of his sin and receives Christ as his Savior by faith. Thus he becomes a child of God, recognizing God's claim upon Him by the miraculous regenerating action of the Holy Spirit.

So again, that was from the word study dictionary on this subject. Obviously, the Holy Spirit reveals the standard of God's righteousness to anyone who believes and is willing to follow after Christ. Again, going back to what I shared earlier when we talked about how the Holy Spirit would convict the world of Christ's righteousness and innocence, it did it even though He was charged and crucified not for what He had done, not for His sins that He had to repent of, not of His actions that were wrong, but for the sins of the world. And through Christ's righteousness, all evil that has occurred in the world will be accounted for because He was innocent and He died for sin. As Christ died and was resurrected and was presented before God as our Savior, He showed how we may be accepted as righteous in God's sight. And it's 100% not through what you and I do, 100% not through what we were able to overcome or the choices we made, but rather what the Father and the Son have done to bring an avenue for righteousness to the world. That is what it's about. Without His ascent and acceptance by the Father, we would be without hope. But through Christ's righteousness, we can each be justified before our Father. This is why the conviction of sin and the conviction of righteousness go hand in hand as we are convicted of sin, then we know the alternative is God's righteousness. It's easy to consider that if we know that stealing is a sin, I'm going to go into a store and I'm going to steal a candy bar. If we know that that is a sin, then what's the opposite? Not stealing is righteousness. So we can see the counterbalance on sin and righteousness. We can see what one is wrong and the other is right. One is darkness, the other is light. If we know that coveting our neighbor's things is a sin, then being content and at peace with what God has given us on the other side is His righteousness. So in the beauty of what God has done, He has easily shown us the two sides so that we're not stuck confused. Like, well, I don't know what being righteous in God's sight means. He's made it very plain by showing us the the brevity of our sins and how low we can go, that the counterbalance of not doing those things is His righteousness. And so the feeling of guilt is that acknowledgement that we ought to be righteous, as Thayer's definition provided. And with Jesus being received as our atonement for sin and with the giving of the Holy Spirit, we can see the contrast more clearly between sin and righteousness. So God's Spirit is again at work in human lives today convicting the world of righteousness. That third aspect that we will look at next is that the Holy Spirit convicts the Holy Spirit convicts is of judgment because the ruler of the world is judged.

While Jesus took our judgment upon Himself, His death was clearly a judgment on our adversary, Satan the devil. I want to go back to our opening analogy in the story of World War II and the Holocaust. As D-Day occurred and as the war progressed and as Europe was liberated, allied troops started to see with their own eyes firsthand the horrors of a concentration camp.

Stories had kind of leaked out earlier. Some people who escaped and had shared stories.

There were some ideas that these things existed, but I believe a lot of people said it can't be that bad. Who would do that to another? Did they really take all the Jews away and take them out of Poland? Did they really and are they really are they just holding them in places? Are they actually and so stories were leaking out about this, but nobody, none of the allied troops, had seen it with their own eyes until the liberation came. And when they came upon these, you might have seen this in some different movies or heard documentaries about it, but when they first saw it with their own eyes, they couldn't believe what they actually were seeing.

Some became physically ill, violently ill because of it, because it was just so disgusting.

I don't want to get too graphic, but like the smell, they some people have said you'll never they'll never forget that. The sights, the sounds, everything that God has given us, senses to be able to to enjoy this life where we're being exposed to the atrocities, these horrors that they were having to witness. And because we're human beings with with emotions and and people put themselves in other people's shoes through empathy and empathetic hearts, some of these soldiers, upon seeing these crimes that they felt were crimes in their own mind, which it was, they felt that it was their duty to rid the earth of these people, these Germans, soldiers. And so some of the some accounts from early on in these concentration camps being found and exposed, ended with the death of many German soldiers because of the desire and the need that these soldiers and others felt that this problem needs to be eradicated. It needs to be fixed right now.

In finding some of these stories and some of these accounts, I did a Google AI search about, I was curious, how many people, how many German soldiers actually lost their lives because of this type of reckoning that was coming? Google AI search came back with this. It says, while there's no exact total for every camp, it is estimated that hundreds of German guards were killed in spontaneous localized reprisals. The most documented events took place during the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald. And then it goes into specifics about these two camps. It says that Dachau, which was April 29, 1945, it says, overwhelmed by the sight of masked corpses and rail cars and thousands of starving survivors, horrified US troops and liberated prisoners killed between 30 and 50 SS guards. Official US Army investigations and eyewitness accounts from commanding officers confirmed this localized reprisal, dispelling exaggerated rumors of mass executions. And so it gets more into the light of what happened. And at Buchenwald, which was in April, similar timeline, April of 1945, American soldiers and freed prisoners watched and in some cases aided by providing weapons as inmates took vengeance on around 80 former guards hiding in the forts or among the prisoners. And so that was from Google AI. While the atrocities committed in these concentration camps are hard to even put into words, and I'll save us from the details, we've seen movies, we know what happened there. I believe the killing of these German soldiers played even further into Satan's own hands. Because when we consider that, again, going back, God has made humanity in his own image, and that includes everybody. And this desire for mankind to battle against mankind, as Mr. Gizmalski mentioned again, World War II was not the first time. It went many battles before, many wars, many atrocities have been committed before the Holocaust. More battles will come in the future as humanity continues about. If we go all the way back to the beginning of our Bibles, this happened in Adam and Eve's own family, didn't it? Brother against brother, and deciding that one no longer deserved to live. So inherently, this is Satan's plan to demolish and to attack God's family, God's creation, and he's been really good at it, really good at turning us all against one another. Satan's involvement in the rise of Adolf Hitler is easy to see, and the crimes that were committed against humanity have Satan's fingerprints all over them. But then the allied soldiers killing German guards further played straight into Satan's hands, because ultimately, from God's vantage point, it's human killing human. It's his creation killing his creation.

And it continued going on, all made in the image of God, bringing each other's lives to an end, and Satan was having a field day in all of this. I can't help it when I was studying this subject and composing the message. 2 Corinthians 4, verse 4, popped in my head, whose mind the God of this age has blinded. That's what it comes down to. It ultimately comes down to the God of this age, our adversary, Satan, blinding the eyes of each other to now—and granted, wrong is wrong, and we're allowed to hold each other accountable and to point out that level out of love it should be to hopefully steer someone back to the right course, right?

So we're allowed to point out a wrong, but Satan has taken it to where we go after each other to the point of bringing each other's lives to an end, whose mind the God of this age has blinded, who do not believe lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is in the image of God, should shine on them. And see, that's what it is. You've got the dark ruler of the age versus the light of our Savior. And in His grace, He's brought that light to us to show us and to lead us and to guide us. But that doesn't just remove the darkness. That doesn't remove the adversary.

We still are under His sway and His challenge. You and I have been shown so much by God that we can't even begin to list it all or to account His grace in our lives.

But considering the circumstances that occurred in this war, the decisions that were made to create these camps and to do these horrible crimes against fellow human beings, going back to that original kind of opening illustration, and considering whether we put these people, these subhumans, into a group, or whether we acknowledge that we inherently have the capability of doing the same, I go back and I think, what would I have done if I would have been born in the 1930s in Germany under the oppression and the challenges, economic challenges, that that country had at that time. And we can point the finger at why that was and whose fault. And sometimes we're a product of just being there, right? And then somebody rose of power saying, I can help you out of this situation. I can bring you prosperity. I can put food on your tables. I can give you jobs.

And then I go to school and I'm hearing this from my teachers. And I'm hearing this indoctrination, which is what it was. But to me, it makes sense. Or everybody says this is the right thing.

And then they say, and when you graduate, or when you get a certain age, you're too enlist in the military and to serve your country. This is for the good of the nation.

And then I enlist. And then find myself in a situation where I'm being told this is okay.

I think if we will pause and recognize that if we grew up in this entire environment, there's a likelihood that we could have done the same exact thing as those German soldiers.

When I shared this in Flint, I paused to collect myself. And somebody in the back, I appreciated, they said, it's just a bad situation. And I thought it was spot on.

Because there are bad situations occurring all over this planet at different times and in different ways. Why? Not because of Jesus's goodness and His mercy and His grace and our Father who loves us, but because we have an adversary who wants nothing more to bring His destruction upon all of mankind.

And He wants to bring His evil into our hearts. And He wants us to turn one against another.

He wants us to hate one another. He wants us to divide ourselves into different groups and say, this group is dehuman, they do not deserve to go on because, can you believe what they've done?

And what they've done at times have been horrible.

But this is why judgment is being reserved for the one who deserves that judgment. The Allied soldiers believed judgment was warranted and that the atrocities committed deserved instant judgment. So they took judgment into their own hands. And in doing so, they missed the mark on whose feet the judgment really should fall.

I'm not here to say what was right and wrong and how the court system should play out or how man's justice should play out there.

That's a much bigger subject than I'm going to act like I'm an expert at. But what I do see from Scripture and what I think we all understand is that this was not God's plan for man to destroy each other. Ever. And I know this was just one war, one series of events, one horrific set of crimes. But what humanity has done to our fellow humanity over time cannot be mistaken. The reality is we all deserve to be judged for our crimes against God. That's the reality of it. And we all technically deserve the same punishment.

But God will ultimately hold responsible the one who truly deserves that judgment. Satan is a liar, and he's been the deceiver of mankind from the earliest moments in the Garden of Eden. His destructive forces have been felt for thousands of years, and no one has ever lived that has not been under his sway, under his force and his influence.

And the only one who has been able to overcome his tactics is our own personal Savior. This is why he alone will judge Satan for his evil and hold him accountable. In John 8, we have a passage where Jesus Christ is in the temple teaching. But the scribes and the Pharisees were only interested in challenging his teachings and his authority. And in this passage, Christ gets through the crux of the issue, pointing the finger at the source of the temple.

The issue of pointing the finger at the source of where their wrong attitude and their behaviors and their train of thought were stemming from. John 8 and verse 40. Jesus says, But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God. That word truth is critical because he's going to paint the contrast here in a second. Jesus is not just sugarcoating and saying, well, you've got your sins, but that's okay because I'm going to pay the price.

He's letting them know that what they're doing is wrong. Their actions, their attitudes, that they were wrong in thought and wrong actions. And then notice the contrast, verse 44. He says, You are of your father, the devil, and the desires of your father he wants to do.

And then he gets into the crux of the heart and the motivation and the attitude. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it. But because I tell you the truth, you do not believe me. From the moment that man was created on the earth, Satan's influence has been around God's greatest creation.

Often when I speak on the day of atonement in the fall each year, I like to kind of paint that contrast in our minds. What will it be like to have Satan's influence removed? We've talked about that a lot of times, right? And I've shared that with you before. But to imagine, what would that be like? And I struggle because I've only lived in existence with my adversary's influence around me 24-7. I've never had a moment of break. I've never had a day I wake up and I'm like, hey, no influence today.

This is pretty nice. I don't know what that feels like. I can imagine. And it's pretty good. But that would be like me imagining what's it like to fly a bird in the air. I think that would be really, really cool, by the way.

I don't know if Ian's probably falling asleep already, but that'd be pretty cool to be able to fly. Ever since being a kid, I've always thought flying like a bird would be one of the most amazing things to be able to do. I can imagine it, but it pales in comparison to what it actually would be like to be able to soar in the sky and to just glide like some of the eagles and the majestic birds are able to do.

That's what it's like to try to imagine Satan's influence being removed from our lives. We can picture the beauty of it and the greatness and the goodness of that, but to really feel the depth of it, it just falls short because we don't know what that feels like. Because Jesus Christ overcame the world, which includes overcoming Satan's temptations and his tactics, he alone stands as the one who can judge the enemy, Satan the devil. So God's Spirit is again at work in human lives today as Satan has been judged for his crimes against humanity.

John 16, verses 8-11, it's a simple passage that we've read before and we can read through in about a minute's time. There's not a lot of depth to it as far as length. It doesn't take us a long time to read. But I hope in the time that we've had together today, we see and appreciate a deeper level to what Christ left behind for us to internalize.

The depth of what's in this small passage is life-changing, and we can spend the rest of our lives exploring how God's Spirit, the Spirit that he has chosen to place within us, convict the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. These are huge topics that we will continue to pore over and study for the rest of our lives.

Jesus was not understood by the majority of people around him. While he brought this message forward and while he expounded on it in different ways to a perfect degree, mankind struggled to internalize it because of our own nature and because of our adversary. And this message that he brought forward continues to be understood by many people still today.

There's a concept or a philosophical paradox that says that we gain by our losses.

We gain by our losses because in my world, I gain by getting more. I gain by what I acquire. I gain by my wealth. I gain by my family.

I gain by these things that I get. And that's why this is a philosophical paradox that we gain by our losses.

It's only in adversity, in failure, in letting go, in losing things that we can often see ourselves more clearly and understand our own selfish motivations more fully.

I put myself back into the disciple's shoes when Jesus is sharing these messages. He's talking about how he's going to go away.

And they didn't want to let him go. Nobody wanted to let their Savior go. They didn't want to let their Master, their Rabbi, their teacher go. Nobody would want that. If I was living at that time and I was his disciple, I wouldn't want to let him go either.

But by him going, it opened the door for God's Spirit to be poured out onto those who would follow after.

And so by letting go, they gained in their loss. And it was actually good for them that he would go away.

Because when he left, obviously we know that the Holy Spirit was given by the Father from that point forward to all who would believe and follow after his Son. Jesus himself stands in the gap of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. He alone stands in that gap. And that's why the Holy Spirit convicts the world of these elements.

And because he stands in the gaps, we are all beneficiaries of his profound act of love and sacrifice.

And through the Holy Spirit dwelling in our human bodies, the work of convicting the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment is occurring daily.

So as we exit now, and we've exited this Holy Day season, I hope that we recognize it's not the end of our journey, right? We all know that. I'm preaching in the choir here.

We continue going forward with the knowledge that we have fallen short, that we have a Savior who died for our sins, and that we can be justified and made whole between us and our Father.

And that is just the beauty of the promise of God and his plan, and we should never lose sight of that.

But then as we go forward with the indwelling of his Spirit, let us never lose sight that this is part of our calling, through the Holy Spirit being poured out and dwelling within us, that God himself is convicting the world of these things, of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment.

It's a beautiful thing that often we internalize, and we should, personally, because this is a personal calling and a personal job that he's doing in each of our lives.

But God doesn't see just on the macro or micro level, he sees on the macro level, and he's seeing how this is convicting the world of these elements.

And it's beautiful when we see this, and it's beautiful when we understand this.

I hope as we continue forward individually that we will allow God's Spirit to not only convict us, but the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment.