Hope for the Helpless, Danger for the Disobedient (Rom. 10:18-21)

 

The Prophet Isaiah, image from WikiMedia Commons

What do you think of the Old Testament?  How important is it to your faith?  I begin by asking these questions because as we come here to the final verses of Romans 10, the first thing that I want us to notice is the fact that these verses are almost entirely nothing more than quotations from the Old Testament.  What the apostle is doing is supporting the case he has been making from Scripture.  And what’s interesting here is that he quotes from the Law (Deut. 31:32) in verse 19, the Prophets (Isa. 65:1-2) in verses 20-21, and the Writings (Ps. 19:1-6) in verse 18.  I don’t think that was random or coincidental.  Each of these sections comprised the three main divisions in the Jewish Bible (and still do today).  Our Lord, you may recall, refers to them in Luke 24:44.  Paul is teaching us that he is saying nothing new here.  It is all in the Old Testament.  The Old and the New Testaments are a coherent whole.

What is the case that he is making here?  It is that the pervasive unbelief of Paul’s kinsmen in his day was a sin.  It is that they were accountable to God for their rejection of the gospel.  And his argument is basically two-fold.  First, they could not plead ignorance.  This is the point of verse 18: “But I say, Have they not heard? Yes verily, their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world.”  The “they” there are the Jews who are the main subject of chapters 9-11.  In chapter 10, Paul is explaining why he is praying for his fellow Jews to be saved (1).  They are not saved because they have not believed the gospel (2-4, 16).  But they could not argue that they were off the hook because they hadn’t heard it.  No, says Paul, they have heard the gospel, because “their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world.”

Now those of you who know your OT may wonder what Paul is doing here, because this text in Psalm 19 is not about God’s word but about God’s creation.  It’s about the witness of the sun and the moon to the reality of the glory God.  The witness of the sun and the moon are truly universal.  But Paul is not referring to the general revelation of the natural order here; he is referring to the special revelation of God in the proclamation of the gospel.  Nevertheless, this is still a fitting text for the proclamation of the gospel for two reasons.

First, according to the apostle, the gospel had gone out everywhere.  Writing to the Colossians, Paul writes of “the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister” (Col. 1:23).  So Paul viewed the proclamation of the gospel in universal terms. Now that doesn’t mean that Paul intended us to think that he believed everyone on the planet had already heard the gospel.  We know he didn’t mean that because in this letter he tells the Romans that he wanted to preach the gospel in Spain because they hadn’t yet heard the gospel (see 15:20-24).  Rather, I think he meant to refer to pervasive influence of the gospel in much of the Roman Empire and surrounding parts.  And we know that even in the first century the apostle Thomas went to India, and there is evidence that the gospel reached China very early, along with much of Persia and parts of Africa outside of the empire.  And certainly the Jews who lived predominantly in the Roman Empire lived in places where the gospel had come.  So they had heard.

Second, even if the gospel in terms of the explicit witness to the person of Jesus Christ and his death, burial, and resurrection were still unknown to some Jews, that doesn’t mean they hadn’t heard the gospel.  They had.  We can say this because they heard the OT read in the synagogues every Sabbath day.  And the OT is a witness to the gospel.  Our Lord said, “Search the [OT] scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me” (Jn. 5:39).  He said of Abraham, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad” (8:56).  In fact, Paul himself says that the gospel was preached to Abraham: “And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed” (Gal. 3:8).

I think it was Sinclair Ferguson who tells of when, as a young man, he was asked to read Isaiah 53 in church, and when he invited the congregation to turn in their Bibles to the passage, he said something like, “Please turn with me to the gospel of Isaiah.”  It was an unintentional turn of phrase, but very appropriate!  For Isaiah 53 gives us an account of the atonement that is almost unmatched even in the New Testament itself.  The gospel is in all the Bible, both OT and NT.  Even if you never heard the NT and had only heard the OT, you had heard the gospel, though in a less-focused form.  Indeed, the gospel goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden in the promise that the Seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent.  It’s not that the gospel comes into being in the pages of the NT, it’s that it comes into perfect focus in the pages of the NT.

So they couldn’t plead ignorance.  And then in verse 19, Paul continues his argument by responding to the revulsion of the Jews to the gospel over the fact that so many Gentiles were receiving it.  He writes, “But I say, Did not Israel know? First Moses saith, I will provoke you to jealousy by them that are no people, and by a foolish nation I will anger you.”  Paul is saying that they should not be surprised that the Gentiles are receiving the gospel and being welcomed into the new people of God in Christ, because God is just doing what he promised to do all the way back in Moses’ day.  When Israel sins, God will provoke them to jealousy by a foreign nation.  Paul will take this up in detail in the next chapter, when he says, “I say then, Have they [the Jews] stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy” (11:11).

Now the entrance of the Gentiles into the church was a real stumbling block to the Jews and the reason why many of them would have nothing to do with it. You recall that when Paul was giving his defense in the temple precincts that the audience of Jews listened to him right up to the point when he said that Jesus commissioned him to preach to the Gentiles.  It was at that point that they stopped listening and went berserk!   But again, the apostle is reminding them that if they had paid attention to their own Scriptures, they shouldn’t be surprised that such a thing is happening.

What verses 20-21 is simply to reiterate all this, although in reverse order.  Verse 20 corresponds to verse 19 and verse 21 to verse 18.  Verse 20 is about the inclusion of the Gentiles into the people of God, for they indeed were not seeking after God.  This is very similar, remember, to what the apostle says at the end of chapter 9: “What shall we say then? That the Gentiles, which followed not after righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness which is of faith” (30).  But then in verse 21 of this chapter, Paul reverts to the sin of the Jews in rejecting the gospel which they had heard (19), which was predicted all the way back in the prophesy of Isaiah.  They should have known that this would happen, that the Gentiles would come in and they would go out for this is exactly what Moses and the prophets foretold would happen.

So that is the flow of thought here in these verses.  And of course there are a lot of things here.  We can’t deal with them all, so what I want to do is to pick one idea that I think is very prominent in these verses, especially in verses 20-21, and focus on that.  The thing I want us to focus on is the teaching that God is sovereign in salvation and man is responsible in salvation.  It is a fitting conclusion to the main emphases of chapters 9 (sovereignty of God) and 10 (responsibility of man). These verses give us a unique opportunity to look at them together, side by side, for what we have in verse 20 is the sovereignty of God and in verse 21 man’s responsibility.  However, I don’t just want to survey these things but also to appropriately apply them to us before we move into the next chapter.  In other words, I want us to approach these things pastorally.  In particular, I want to preach these realities insofar as they provide hope for the helpless and warn of danger to the disobedient.

Hope for the Helpless (God is sovereign over man in salvation)

In verse 20, the apostle describes how the Gentiles were being saved by a quotation from Isa. 65:1: “But Esaias is very bold, and saith, I was found of them that sought me not; I was made manifest unto them that asked not after me.”   Now if you go to Isaiah itself, here is how the verse reads that Paul is quoting from: “I am sought of them that asked not for me; I am found of them that sought me not: I said, Behold me, behold me, unto a nation that was not called by my name” (Isa. 65:1).  The fact that the prophet is speaking of people who were a nation that were not called by God’s name indicates that Paul was correct to apply this to the Gentiles.  You can see this by the way he quotes the following verse: “But to Israel he saith. . .” (Rom. 10:21).  To the Gentiles, verse 20; to Israel, verse 21.

Now what does Isaiah, or rather, God through the prophet Isaiah, say about the Gentiles?  God was discovered by them even though they weren’t looking for them and he was made known to them when they weren’t asking for him.  Now how does that happen?  

In fact, think of the situation in Paul’s day.  What was the characteristic of Gentile society?  It was idolatry at all levels.  Idolatry was baked into the very fabric of society.  It was baked into politics; it was baked into the trade guilds; it was baked into buying groceries.  You couldn’t throw a dead cat without hitting an idol’s temple.  These Gentiles were religious, even very much so, but they were chasing the wrong gods.  The true God, as Paul points out, was yet unknown to them.

Now Romans 1 tells us that this was not the result of neutral men making the best of their situation.  Idolatry stems from hearts that don’t want to trust in and obey the true God.  Idolatry is the rejection of the true God.  They were, as I say, chasing the wrong gods, and when you are going in the wrong direction, it can be deadly, and in this case it was.  They were not seeking God because they were hostile to him.  In their wisdom they replaced the knowledge of the true God with fabrications of their own mind.  This same thing of course is going on today, not so much in the form of polytheism but in the form of secular humanism.

In other words, these were the last people that you would have imagined becoming a part of the people of God.  They weren’t seeking God, they weren’t asking after him.  Actually, as Paul will put it to the Corinthians, they were worshipping demons (cf. 1 Cor. 10:20-21).  How much farther from God can you get?

And yet God was found of them; he was manifest to them.  How did this happen?  Well, the Bible tells us, doesn’t it?  As Paul will put it, “of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption: That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:30-31).  They were Christians because they had heard the gospel and believed it, but their faith was not something that they could congratulate themselves for.  It was a gift of God (Eph. 2:8).  God took people devoted to demons and made them trust in the Son of God and embrace him as their Lord and Savior.  It was the powerful summons of God through the Holy Spirit that effectually led them to faith in Christ by whom they were saved.  God saved them; salvation is of the Lord.  The Gentiles could not ascribe the origin of their faith to themselves.  God opened their eyes; God changed their hearts; God led them and drew them to Christ.  The explanation of their salvation was the grace of God from first to last.  It was the fact that God chose them in Christ before the foundation of the world; because Christ died for them and sent the Hoy Spirit to enlighten them and bring them to faith and repentance.  It was God’s will, not their own will, which was the decisive factor in their salvation.  That is what this verse means.

I love the way John Calvin, the 16th century French reformer, described his own conversion because it illustrates perfectly what Paul says here.  He writes in the introduction to his commentary on the Psalms, “And . . . since I was too obstinately devoted to the superstitions of Popery to be easily extricated from so profound an abyss of mire, God by a sudden conversion subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame, which was more hardened in such matters than might have been expected from one at my early period of life.”  Calvin wasn’t looking to understand the gospel rightly; he was “obstinately devoted to the superstitions of Popery” (by which he means the Roman Catholic Church).  How did he come to faith?  “God by a sudden conversion subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame.”  This is what Paul is talking about here in Rom. 10:20.  God can take people who are devoted to lies and cemented, as it were, in an abyss of false teaching and thinking and by a sudden conversion turn their worlds upside down!

Now, how should we respond to this?  Well, if you are a Christian and you have faith in Christ, you should respond fundamentally in thanksgiving to God.  You don’t pat yourself on the back for the fact that you are saved because you can’t.  Only God gets the glory!  “He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.” Beware of thinking about salvation in any way that would give man any of the glory and the credit for it.  Soli Deo Gloria!  To God alone the glory!

This is in fact what we see happen in heaven. People don’t praise themselves for their salvation, not even one part of it!  They don’t credit it to free will or good works.  All the glory goes to God, Father, Son and Spirit.  Here, for example, is what the apostle John sees in heaven: “And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; And hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth” (Rev. 5:10-11).  Jesus Christ is the only one in heaven or on earth that can bring about the salvation of men.  

It also means that we can trust him to keep us to the end.  You see, if my free will is the decisive thing that determines my salvation, then there is no reason to think that my free will can sever me from that salvation.  But if God is the one who saved me in the first place, then I can believe that he will keep me to the end.  And you know what?  The Bible itself makes this connection – the connection between sovereignty of God and the security of the believer in many places.  We’re familiar with them, right?  We should be!  “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day. And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day” (Jn. 6:37-40).  Christ will hold us fast!  No matter where you are at, no matter what you are facing, the fact of the matter is that if you are a believer, then Christ loves you and he sees you and he will hold onto you.  He is bringing you to glory, and he is not going to lose even one sheep of his.  You can trust in him.  He is your refuge and your strength.  

It also means we should be utterly devoted to him.  If my salvation is owing completely to God, if the most important thing has been given to me by him, and at great cost to himself, how can we not freely give ourselves to him? How can we not respond like the apostle Paul responded: “For whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God: or whether we be sober, it is for your cause. For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: And that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again” (2 Cor. 5:13-15).  Look, if we really believe that Christ died for our sins and saved us from hell, that he purchased for us eternal glory in the presence of God forever, how in the world could we be more interested in the things of the world, or worse, be okay with wallowing in sin?  It is impossible!  “Shall we sin that grace may abound?  How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?”

This truth is not only medicine for us when it comes to thinking about how God saved us; it is also hope for us when we think about the salvation of people that we love.  Parents, I know some of you have wayward children, and it may seem hopeless at times because they are in a place where they are not even interested in the things of God or seeking him.  But look again at verse 20.  God can reveal himself to people who aren’t seeking him.  He seeks us, and he can turn things around in a second.  Like Jacob in the Bible, God finds us in a waste-howling wilderness.  We may not understand why God waits to do his work; we have to wait on the Lord and be silent before him.  Remember that the apostle Paul was not converted until after he had done great damage to the church.  He was a persecutor!  But it was not because Paul was out of reach; it’s because it wasn’t God’s time yet: “But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me” (Gal. 1:15-16).  So don’t look at the present state of things and despair.  Keep praying for your loved ones, your children and grandchildren, as Paul did for his kinsmen (Rom. 10:1).  

It’s also encouragement when it comes to evangelism.  Listen, we have to be careful that we don’t swing to extremes.  One extreme is using God’s sovereignty in salvation to relieve ourselves of any responsibility to share our faith. That’s wrong.  But the other extreme is the extreme of thinking that God it utterly dependent on the church to get his elect to faith.  It is true that the church is the means through which the gospel goes out by which people believe and are saved.  But the church is an instrument in the hands of God, no more and no less.  It is not God that depends on the church but the church that depends on God!  He has given us a work to do; that work is to be a light and a witness wherever and however we can.  But we must not think that if we don’t say the right word or do exactly the right thing that somehow God is not going to get his elect saved!  That is not a burden we are meant to bare.  

So when the Lord puts someone in our way, a friend or a co-worker, and he gives us the opportunity (which we should be looking for) to share the gospel with them, let’s not be afraid to share the gospel with them because they seem too hard a case, or too hardened, or too closed to the gospel.  They may not be seeking God, but God is the God who can open the eyes of people like that to his truth.  We must believe that.  Miraculous conversions are not a thing of the past.  God is still at work, building his church, advancing his cause, extending his kingdom.

We can praise God that he is sovereign in salvation.  This is not just a doctrinal position to defend; it is life to our souls.  It is hope for the helpless.  It is encouragement for the church seeking to be a witness in a dark and troubled time.  For God is still the God who is seeking those who aren’t seeking him.

Danger for the Disobedient (the responsibility of man in salvation)

This is not all Paul has to say.  Verse 20 is important for us to hear, but so is verse 21: “But to Israel he saith, All day long I have stretched forth my hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people.”  There are two things I want us to see from this verse. 

The first is the posture that God takes even towards those who don’t believe the gospel.  It is described as God stretching out his hands towards these people.  This is clearly an inviting stance, at the very least.  It is a posture of welcome, of invitation, of summons.  This is just how Paul and the prophet Isaiah describe it.

There are a number of things we can deduce from this.  One is that the gospel summons is not just directed at those who will end up believing it, or just at those who already believe it.  It is even directed towards those who don’t believe it, or this text wouldn’t make any sense.  That means that the gospel is aimed at all men.  That is to say, it means that the gospel is meant to be proclaimed to all men and women, and that the response demanded of the gospel is a response demanded of all men.  Again, let this verse speak for itself; that is what it is saying.  

And this is not an isolated reference.  We’ve seen that in the Great Commission in Mark 16, our Lord commissioned his apostles with these words: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned” (Mk. 16:15-16).  The fact that our Lord talks about those who believe not shows that the gospel is meant to be preached to all (“every creature”), including those who end up not believing it.  We’ve seen that in Acts 17:30, Paul says that God commands all men everywhere to repent. 

Now I feel compelled to say this because some people think that you can’t believe in the doctrines of grace and that Christ died for the elect only and at the same time believe that all men are to be called to faith and repentance.  But this is not at all a contradiction.  One response called for by the gospel is not to believe that you are elect or even that Christ died for you in particular; the response is to repent of your sins and to believe the truth that you are a sinner, and that Christ is Lord and Savior, and that the only way a sinner can be saved is by faith in Jesus.  The promise is that all who believe in him will be saved. There is nothing in that which even remotely is inconsistent with any of the doctrines of grace.

In any case, it’s what the Bible teaches.  We have to be careful that we don’t warp the Bible to fit our own preconceptions.  Let God be true but every man a liar.  God calls all to faith and repentance through the gospel, and it is an act of grace and mercy that he does so.  

But then I want you to notice the corresponding posture of these people toward God.  God’s posture is one of come and welcome to Jesus Christ; their posture is one of disobedience and resistance.  The idea here is to show that the rejection of the gospel is not seen by God to be a take-it-or-leave-it sort of thing.  According to Paul, it is rebellion against God to reject the gospel.  It is sin. To refuse to believe in Christ is sin.  To refuse to repent of the sins that God’s word condemns is wicked.

Now there are some theologians who will respond that the gospel cannot call the unregenerate to faith and repentance for the simple reason that they cannot believe and repent.  They will argue that because the unregenerate are dead in sins, they cannot believe and cannot repent.  And of course on one level they are absolutely correct.  The Bible does say that the unregenerate are dead in sins.  It does say that the natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God.  It does say that no man can come to Jesus unless God the Father draws him effectually.  

And we must insist on this, because the Bible insists on it, and because until people come to see the depth of their need – they are not just sick but dead, not just lame but impotent – neither will we see the comprehensiveness of the salvation by which Christ saves us.  He doesn’t just give us a second chance, he gives us a new nature, a new birth, new life, a resurrection life.  That is what we need, not just advice and encouragement, but life from the dead.  As our Lord put it to Nicodemus, “Ye must be born again!”  Have you been born again?  Have you received something from God that is more than just self-improvement, that cannot be explained apart from the sovereign grace of God in your life?  For we are not saved unless it is so!

But does that mean that the unbelieving are no longer responsible to turn from their sins and put their faith in Christ?  No!  It cannot mean that because of texts like Romans 10:21.  We must not silence the Bible with the Bible.  It is true that sinners by nature are dead in sins with all that entails.  It is also true that the same sinners are accountable to God for their unbelief and unrepentance.  But here’s the thing: we all recognize that there are instances where inability and responsibility don’t cancel each other out.  Take Jacob’s sons in Genesis 37, for instance.  There we are told that, “when his [Joseph’s] brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him” (4).  Notice the language there: it is one of inability – they could not speak peaceably to him.  They were unable to do so.  But did that relieve them of their responsibility to speak peaceably to Joseph?  Of course not.

Let me give you an illustration that might help us to see how you can have both inability and responsibly at the same time.  When I was growing up, people asked me all the time whether or not I played basketball.  I guess it was because I was generally taller than other kids my age.  Having to hear that question all the time got to be annoying, if I’m honest with you, because the fact is that I never played basketball on a team, and there is a good reason for it.  I have no athletic ability.  I have no prowess in that direction.  Now it’s not because I lack muscles and bones and the things needed to play; it’s because I’m lacking something rather intangible, that something we call talent.  Now if I were on a team and played, that would be bad because the fact of the matter is that I can’t even do a basic layup.  I imagine that the coach of that team would get upset with me and be frustrated on multiple levels.  Would he have a right to do that?  Yes, he would!  But now suppose that another kid showed up with a cast on his leg.  Would the coach have a right to be upset with him if he couldn’t do a layup?  No, of course not.  He lacks something necessary to play.  Nevertheless, even though I don’t lack the necessary physical equipment needed to play, I still am just as unable to play as if I had had a cast!

In the same way, the unregenerate don’t lack the furniture of the soul needed to believe and repent. They have a mind, they have affections, they have a will, and that makes them accountable to God for the failure to use their mind, affections, and will to obey the gospel.  Their inability does not lie in a lack of mental and physical equipment; it lies in a complete absence of real love to God.  Our inability is rooted in a heart that is hostile to God and turned in on itself.  Our Lord said, “Ye will not [do not desire to] come to me that ye might have life” (Jn. 5:40).  And that is not a metaphorical inability; it is a real inability. The grace of God is absolutely essential and necessary to sovereignly remove the hatred of God and the love of sin.  But that kind of inability is not the kind that removes responsibility.  Deadness in sin results in a moral inability that nevertheless leaves men even more, not less, guilty in their refusal to come to Christ.

So if you’re an unbeliever this morning, it is my duty to tell you that it is not okay for you to remain in that posture.  It is sin!  It is not a good thing to be disobedient and gainsaying against the gospel.  It can only bring down the judgment of God upon your life.  To remain in unbelief is to remain in a state separated from God, from Christ, and to be left in a hopeless and graceless state.  To die in such a state is the most terrifying prospect any human being could possibly face.  So I call to your attention this morning to the words of verse 20 of our text that God’s arms are stretched out to you in the gospel.  As Paul will put it to the Corinthians, “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God. For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. We then, as workers together with him, beseech you also that ye receive not the grace of God in vain. For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 5:20-6:2).  If you receive Christ, the gospel is the savor of life to life; if you reject it, it is the savor of death to death.

May the Lord find all of us and seek us so that we will seek him.  And let’s hold these two things together: God is sovereign in salvation so that he gets all the glory – not just most of it but all of it.  And man is responsible to repent and believe the gospel, so that those who die in unbelief and perish have only themselves to blame for their damnation.  I’ve heard it put this way, and I think it is right: salvation is all of God, and damnation is all of man.  No one in hell is going to be blaming God for their being there.  But no one in heaven is going to be patting themselves on the back for being there.

Let me say it again: salvation is all of God.  He seeks us when we weren’t seeking him.  That is the universal reality for everyone who is saved.  If you’re seeking the Lord today it’s because he was already seeking you.  Do you feel the pull of grace upon your heart this morning?  Do you feel God calling you?  Do you see yourself in verse 20?  Praise God if you do!  Come to Jesus and find rest for your souls!

On the other hand, do you find yourself in verse 21?  Do you hear the gospel and inwardly scoff?  Do you mock at it?  Do you make light of it?  Are you are the gainsayer – are you speaking against the gospel instead of believing it?  My friend, then you are in a place of judgment, not judgment from man but from God.  Verse 21 is a quote from Isaiah 65:2.  But I think it’s good for us to hear how the following verses go:

A people that provoketh me to anger continually to my face; that sacrificeth in gardens, and burneth incense upon altars of brick; Which remain among the graves, and lodge in the monuments, which eat swine's flesh, and broth of abominable things is in their vessels; Which say, Stand by thyself, come not near to me; for I am holier than thou. These are a smoke in my nose, a fire that burneth all the day. Behold, it is written before me: I will not keep silence, but will recompense, even recompense into their bosom, Your iniquities, and the iniquities of your fathers together, saith the Lord, which have burned incense upon the mountains, and blasphemed me upon the hills: therefore will I measure their former work into their bosom” (Isa. 65:3-7).

May the Lord deliver you from that!  May you find yourself with the apostle Paul stopped in your mad career of rebellion and disobedience, struck down before the Lord to recognize him no longer as your enemy but as your Lord so that you repent of your sins and turn in faith to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.