The Soul of God, Part 2, Sub Part 1

Faith Life Church (Praise and Worship Team sing He Turned My Captivity) ♪ He turned my captivity ♪ ♪ He gave new life to me ♪ ♪ He turned my captivity ♪ ♪ Oh how He set me free ♪ ♪ He set me free ♪ ♪ He set me free indeed ♪ ♪ He set me free ♪ ♪ Oh how He me free ♪ ♪ He turned my captivity ♪ ♪ He gave new life to me ♪ ♪ He turned my captivity ♪ ♪ Oh how He set me free ♪ ♪ He turned my captivity ♪ ♪ He gave new life to me ♪ ♪ He turned my captivity ♪ ♪ Oh how He set me free ♪ ♪ He set me free ♪ ♪ He set me free indeed ♪ ♪ He set me free ♪ ♪ Oh how He me free ♪♪ In Deuteronomy 30, we looked last week at this and begin a new series and I want us to go further. Deuteronomy 30:15. The Lord said this, God is speaking, and He says, "See, I have set before you this day life and good, and death and evil; In that I command you this day to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments and His statutes and His judgments, that you may live and multiply: and the Lord your God shall bless you in the land where you go to possess it." Was that His will that they possess the land, that they enjoy the land, that they prosper in it, that they live long - was that His will? Verse seventeen, "But if your heart turn away, so that you will not hear, but shall be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them; I denounce unto you this day, that you shall surely perish," was it His will for them to perish? No, what was His will? Go into the land, prosper, live long and do well. But that's if you hear what I say, He said. If you received My Commandments, if you do what I tell you. But if you don't, "You shall not prolong your days," you'll perish. Verse nineteen, "I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both you and your seed may live." Who is going to choose? The people. Right? And God said I'm setting before you a choice - "You can do this and it will go good with you, and I'll be able to bless you and prosper you and cause you to live a long time. Or, you can do this, and you're going to be cut short and it is going to be hard, and you're not going to live long, you're going to perish." Did He give them a choice? And you'll see this kind of thing over and over in the word of God that He is saying, "You choose. Life, death. Blessing, cursing. Choose." Has God given man a choice? He has. And this is very, very big. A lot of folks have come up with things that actually contradict this in their versions of their beliefs. There are some phrases and beliefs that are commonly held by millions of churchgoing folk. And a lot of them are partial truths, with some other things added in and changed. And we have to watch about that. And you have to watch about taking any truth that is a truth and trying to make it the only truth. All the word agrees, do you believe that? The Bible talks about rightly dividing the word of truth. It all has to agree. There are some phrases I want to mention to you, we talked about it last week, but we'll review a little bit and go further, that you hear commonly. And I want us to examine them to see what we believe about it and then examine what we believe in light of the word. One of the phrases is, "God is in control." God is in control. You hear it a lot. And people are adamant about it and they'll get tiffy with you if they think you're implying anything different from that. And so I'd like to ask the question - okay, of what? God is in control of what? And a lot of folks would quickly and adamantly say, "Everything. Everything and everybody." Is He? Is He? God is in control. I had a fellow, come challenge me one time after I was speaking along some of these lines and he said, "I want you to know preacher, God is Almighty. And if He wants something, He wants you to do something, then by golly you're going to do it." Really? Really? Let's just start with you and yesterday. Are we going to say that everything you said and did yesterday was the preordained, perfect will of God? Every word you said was God's choice, God chose every word you said? Everything you ate yesterday, God chose it? Everywhere you went, everything you bought, everything you didn't do, God was in complete control of everything you said and did all day long, all night long - it was His perfect foreordained, plan and will? Are you going to say that? Or is it possible that some things happen one way because you chose that way, and some things happened another way because you chose that way? Do you have to do what God wants you to do? You do not. You can choose something completely opposite to His will and plan for your life. Will that affect what happens in your life? It will. Why? Because all your friends and family know, you have a mind of your own. Don't you? God created you like that, He gave us that freedom. He gave us that. Go with me to Isaiah please. Isaiah 65:12. Number of things going on here, but I want you to look at this truth in the latter part of the verse. He said, "...when I called, you did not answer," God's talking here again. "When I spoke, you did not hear; but did evil before My eyes, and did choose that wherein I delighted not." Is it His will for us to listen to Him or not listen to Him? To respond to Him or to ignore Him? To choose what pleases Him or choose what displeases Him? This is not confusing. Is it? Does He force us to make the right choice? Does He force us to do what pleases Him? No, He said, "I called but you wouldn't answer me. I spoke, but you wouldn't listen to me. You wouldn't hear me. You did evil in My eyes, and you did choose that which I delighted not." The NIV says, "...you chose what displeases Me." God's Word says, "...you chose what I don't like." I don't want to do that, how about you? I don't want to choose things that God doesn't like. I don't want the Lord looking at me and my life and saying, "Don't choose that... Don't choose that... Why did you choose that?" Right? No. The Living Bible says, "... chosing to do what you know I despise." Can a person, can a man or woman choose to do something that they know God despises? You can. Why? You have a mind of your own. Look in the sixty-sixth chapter, just the next chapter here. Isaiah 66:3. He said in the latter part again, there's a number of things going on, but He said, "They have chosen their own ways, and their soul delights in their abominations." They have chosen some things - among some the things they had chosen, they chose to worship the Baals, and part of some of the worship they had gotten into was burning babies on the altar. And God said about that at one point, He said, "That never came into my mind," that kind of thing. Of course, whose babies are they? They're His. And He said, "You are delighting in things that I find abominable, that I despise, and you like it." Verse four, "I will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them," why? Because of what they've chosen. Does what we choose affect what God is able to do for us? Does with us, how He deals with us? Can His dealings with us change, depend on what we choose? Now this is big, friends. Is it true or not that God's dealings with us can change depending on what we choose? There are some folks that don't believe that, but it's in the Bible plainly. We're going to go to more than one Scripture right now. Why? "When I called," again, He says the same thing we just got through reading. When I called, "None did answer; when I spoke, they did not hear..." Now friend, this is serious. The Almighty, the Creator of heavens and Earth is calling and folks not listening, to the Creator. How many think when the Creator calls, you ought to hold all the other calls, right? When the Master speaks, it doesn't make a difference what you have planned or what you have going on, everything else should be set aside, paused. And say, yes Lord. What is it? Speak. Your servant hears. I'm here. Right? "And chose that in which I delighted not." They chose something I did not delight in. Go with me to the Book of Genesis please. The Book of Genesis the sixth chapter. Genesis 6:5. "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." This was right before the great flood that came in Noah's time. Verse six, "And it repented the Lord that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart." How are we to understand that? Let me bring this verse up, you may wonder why I did, but I'll bring it up and then you'll see why. Stay where you are but in Numbers 23:19, you may remember this. It says, "God is not a man, that He should lie; neither the son of man, that He should repent: has He said, and shall He not do it? Or has He spoken, and shall He not make it good?" So that verse says the Lord is not a man that He should repent and we just got through reading here it said that God repented. That's how some people take things. "See, the Bible contradicts itself." Just because you don't understand something doesn't make it wrong. When you find something in the word and you go, "That doesn't make sense." Straighten yourself up; it makes perfect sense. You just don't have enough sense yet to know it. Anybody that's been walking with the Lord very long is finding this out. I know there's been so many things in the word that I read years ago, and decades ago and I'd just scratch my head and I would think wow. And then you would read this and you would think man this just directly contradicts that. And it might be ten years, twenty years, thirty, forty years later and you go, "Oh." I think for the first century in heaven that's what we're going to be doing. I think the first couple of hundred years in heaven every other day we're going to be going, "Oh. That's why. Oh. No wonder. Oh. That's what He said. Oh." But down here, we see through a glass darkly, don't we? There's just a whole lot of stuff that hasn't clicked for us yet because just lack of understanding. When the Lord calls us His little children, it's not a figure of speech. We are little bitty babies to Him. Right? And there are some questions a three-year-old can ask you that you just can't answer them. You can tell them, you could talk to them for two hours, and they wouldn't know any more when you got through than when you started because they just don't have the knowledge and understanding to relate to what you're saying. But you tell them the same thing when they're sixteen, and they can get it, right? Rest your eyes on the pages, on the verses. The words. Not what you thought they meant, not what somebody said they meant, what do they actually say? It said in Genesis six, God was grieved that He had made man. It repented the Lord. Now, these two verses that we're talking about right now there's great revelation if we get the understanding. God is not a man that He should lie. He's not neither the Son of Man that He should repent. You could take that and say, "God doesn't repent, He never changes." And then you read verses like this to where it says He repents that He had made man on the Earth. The Bible said concerning Saul, do you remember him? He said it repents Me that I made Saul king. First Samuel 15:11. Go ahead and put it up so we can glance at it. "It repents Me that I have set up Saul to be king: for he is turned back from following Me, and has not performed My commandments. And it grieved Samuel..." Now you'll see this connection - it repented the Lord, and it grieved the man of God. You see that connection. And if your heart is right and you're walking with the Lord closely, a lot of times something will grieve you because it grieves Him. It bothers Him and you're picking that up. "...and he cried to the Lord all night." What does it mean the Lord repents? When we hear that word we think about repenting from sin, and of course that doesn't apply to God, but what does it mean? The word literally means "to sigh." In the Hebrew it means "to sigh." To breathe out heavily. To sigh. You know what He's talking about, don't you? He saw the wickedness that's on the Earth and God went...(Sighs) God went... (Sighs) And it grieved Him at His heart. Now if as some would try to tell us, that nothing happens except it is the perfect will of God, then all these people being evil on the planet was always His plan to start with and why would He be sighing over it? And He's about to pronounce judgment and the flood to come, everybody and everything no matter what they want, then it was foreordained for these people to be evil before they were born. And so how could God be just in being grieved with them and pronouncing punishment over something that He caused them to do, that they had no choice but to do? God has a soul. What does that mean? Let me read some Scriptures to you. Jeremiah 32:41 God says, "I will rejoice," well, you'll remember this from the New Testament. Verse forty He said, "I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; but I will put My fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from Me. I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will plant them in this land assuredly with My whole heart and with My whole soul." God is talking. He refers to His soul. What does that mean? God has what we might call, I don't know if it's the best word for it, we might call them "feelings." Listen. The Bible says that God gets weary. Jeremiah 15:6 he says, "You have forsaken Me, saith the Lord, you have backward...I am weary with repenting." God says I am weary with repenting. Now when you've worn on the Lord, that's not a good thing. Right? When God looks at you and goes... (Sighs) It said it grieved Him at His heart. That word means "to carve" or "to cut" or "to hurt." Can God hurt? The Scripture says yes. He can be agitated, He can be troubled, He can be disquieted. Ezekiel says, "You have fretted Me and all these things." Judges says, "His soul was grieved for the misery of Israel." Ezekiel 6:9 says, "I am broken with their whorish heart which has departed from Me." God said, "I'm broken..." Isaiah 63:9. "In all their affliction He was afflicted." God has a soul. God laughs. God sings. God gets angry. Folks hear this and they think, "Well you're just trying to make God into a man." Actually He made us like Him. We are made in His likeness and image. We already know a lot about Him and His makeup, because we are made in His exact likeliness and image, minus the sin and junk. Right? Which we added ourselves. Which was not an improvement on what He did. God has a soul. He looked over the planet at that time before the flood and sighed and said, "It hurts Me to see what they've done. So I'm just going to wipe this thing out." But Noah found favor - if it hadn't been for Noah and his family, I guess that would've been the end of it. No. God is touched. Look in Psalm eighty-one and let's read this. To me this is a good picture into these things. And if you read this with eyes open, you start seeing things in the word that you didn't see before. Because a lot of people have left the impression and idea - people that don't know God have taught what He is like. Did y'all hear that? People have taught Who God is and what God is like that don't know God. People that are even born again have written books and did papers and studies and taught classes and seminary about, "God is sovereign... God is this... God is that..." and don't even half know what the word means. You can't find that word in the Bible. But they picture God is sitting on the throne, old, old, and pretty cranky. Long white beard. And He is sitting there and He's just got this look on His face - and really, He's above emotion. He is beyond feelings. And He is not up or down, or sad or glad, or any of that. He's just... But it ain't so. I said it's not so. The Bible paints a very different picture, doesn't it? First of all, He's not old. He's not old. He is life itself. He does not age. He is amazing. He is so awesome no human being can look at His face and live. You're talking about being blown away? If you looked at God in your body, your Earth days are over. Just one look. And God is amazing. He's fire, He's life, He's power, and He gets happy and He sings. I am so looking forward to the day when we are in heaven later on and we're doing something and the Angels go, "Shhh. The Father is about to sing." And we go oh! Stand back! Brace yourself. How many think the Most High could hit some notes? You think you heard some notes, you think you heard some tones and sounds.