God took an entire ethnic group to deal with them in a very special way, but this is not the whole picture. You could say they were a kind of batch sample, a sample of humanity, through which God would show certain things. For instance, today, people say, ‘If God were to show us some miracle, we would believe in him. If God were to somehow show himself, then we could believe, Why does he keep himself invisible? If he were to do really dramatic things for us, then we would know he is there.’ But of course God has done all that. He took a sample people, and he gave them demonstrations of power, miracles, astonishing things in their history. He defended them, and he kept them, he gave birth to the nation, and he miraculously preserved that nation. He delivered them from Egypt in a totally wonderful manner. They were able to defy the power and the armies of Pharaoh in Egypt and go free, and he kept them through the desert wastes for forty years, and fed them with manna – miracle after miracle. And what was the result? Did they all believed in him? No, they murmured against Moses, and have would take his life if God had not intervened. Man is always the same. He says, ‘Oh God, if you show me this, and do this, and do that …’; it wouldn't make any difference. The heart of human beings is hard against God. We resist him and oppose him.
So the Jews were God's for centuries special people, a batch sample, and he blessed them, and he pleaded with them, and showed them non-stop kindness, and yet they rejected him, and turned away from him. They went after idols and any alternative, as we do today. We listen to anyone who can spin us a yarn or a thousand theories to try to show us that the world could have come about by purely rational means, that chance events brought everything into being from nothing, that completely inanimate, unintelligent forces combined to produce the human mind, and all its complexity and sophistication, the power of reason, and the existence of beauty. It is sheer accident, we are told, and we are ready to believe it, because we want an alternative to God.
What happens today? There are people who say, ‘I believe in God, I believe in the word of God, the revelation of God’, but they don't obey his call to repent of their sin, they don't obey his call to come to him and give their life to him and seek his forgiveness and his complete remaking of them. They don’t walk with him and follow his commandments seriously; they are not men or women of prayer. They perhaps come to church once a week, but it's a formality. They are like the Jews. It is all on the outside. It’s all a sort of outside Christian respectability, a nominal belief. ‘We believe in the Scriptures and the way of worship, but we don't believe all the details. We want our own lives, our own moral liberty to do as we like, to go our own way, to have whatever we want, to be whatever we want. We don't want the guidance of God and the help of God. You can believe both things together.
The Catholic church is the same. ‘We believe the Bible’, they say, but then they say something completely contradictory at the same time. They say, ‘but we also believe in the traditions of our church and what the leaders and the popes and the councils have said down the centuries.’ Yes, but the traditions, the doctrines made up for the church of Rome, completely contradict the Bible, and where they do, so much the worse for the Bible; the tradition always wins, it's always more important. So the Bible says you can only be saved by believing in Christ, that he came to suffer and die to take the punishment of sin for those who repent and who appeal to him for life, and then by his Spirit he will remake them and draw them to himself to know him and to walk with him. It says that you have got to believe in him, and that's the only way. Your works cannot do it. Once you are a converted Christian you voluntarily try to perform good works to please God, but it's not a way of salvation. But the Roman Catholic church says, nonsense, to that. You are saved by being baptized, by coming to mass, receiving absolution from the priests, from mother church; a church must give it to you, the church is all important, not Christ alone, but you and your works. You have got to earn it, deserve it by being very Catholic and very religious.