Eclipes of Sinful Pleasure

I wonder if we could start this morning with just a little bit of history review and see how many of you might know, if I give you a date, what it was that happened. I wonder if there's anybody 20 years old and younger who could tell me what happened on April 14, 1912. Does anybody have any idea? April 14, 1912, if you're 20 years old and younger.

Anybody know what might have happened on that date? You're welcome to cheat and talk to your people beside you. Titanic, okay. Yeah, the Titanic sank on April 14, 1912.

1,500 people died or so on that disaster. How about this one? December 7, 1941. Does anybody know what happened on that date? Pearl Harbor.

Do you know how many people died in Pearl Harbor on that date? Around 20... What's it? I thought it was around 3,500. I have down around 2,400, but I think that might have been the military. So was there civilians that died as well? I'm not sure.

How about this one? I think we're getting easier as we go forward. September 11, 2001. Twin Towers.

Twin Towers collapsed when some airplanes hit them, and also the Pentagon and a few other things. And there was almost 3,000 people that died in that event. How about this one? August 21, 2017.

Eclipse. That's right. August 21, 2017.

Now, if you look at these events and ask which one was the biggest, you know, we could go by how many people died, but in a sense, that eclipse was a far bigger event than any of those other things. We're talking about a moon and a sun and those little Twin Towers, that little Titanic boat. Everything was real small compared to the moon and the sun.

So we're going to talk about an eclipse here for just a moment, a few minutes maybe. And what is it that makes an eclipse? Does anybody know what causes an eclipse or that causes the kind of eclipse we saw on that day? There's a couple different kinds of eclipses, but what caused that? Does anybody know? The moon got in the way of the sun. Very simple.

Okay. So we're going to just talk about that for a little bit, and I'm going to draw some things up here on the board to kind of illustrate how this looks. If we were to draw a moon up here on the chalkboard, and we'll just make it about an inch in diameter.

This quarter is roughly an inch, so make it nice and round. Okay. That's the moon.

Right there you go. Up there in the sky. And we look at it, it looks a lot bigger than that, so that's obviously, but there it is.

You can all see it from probably from where you're sitting. Now, compared to that moon then, if we were to draw the earth up there where we reside, where we live, how big would the earth have to be? So I've got this other circle that we're going to make the earth. Now this, the moon is roughly 2,000 miles in diameter across, and so this, the earth, needs to be four times the size to, and so this comes, this is about four, so you've got about one inch more or less.

This is four inches more or less. And so, let's see if we can do this. We've got this four inch circle and a broken piece of chalk.

And, okay, so that's the earth, and there's us standing there looking out at the moon. Okay? So, and the moon looks pretty big in the night sky. You know, it comes up and it's big and orange sometimes, then it turns white as it gets higher in the sky, and so that's a little bit to scale what's going on.

So now we need to draw one more ball up there on the blackboard, and that would be the sun. And the question is where, how big would we need to draw the sun if the earth is four inches and the moon is one inch, how big would the sun be? Well, let's give it a try. I'm not sure how this is going to go, but I think it would look something about like this.

Now, that's a circle that's 36 feet tall. It would go up, say, 26 feet into the sky. This moon here blot out the sun.

When it's that size, here we are on this earth, and we're looking out there, and this moon comes around and it sits right there in front of the sun, it seems like it would be really easy to see the sun, even if the moon is in the way. It's like, how is that possible for it to blot it out? Well, the answer is, it's way, this is to scale to size, roughly. This is the size of the earth, the size of the moon, the size of the sun.

But it's not to scale the distance. Distance would be, but put the sun way, way, way, way further out there, so that they look about the same size. The moon and the sun from the earth look roughly the same size one to another.

Not because they are the same size, the earth is, the sun is, you know, in diameter 400 times bigger than the moon in diameter. Now, if you say, if you take the actual volume of it, I don't know how you calculate that, but it's millions and millions and millions of times bigger. Okay, because you take that 400 and then you got to take it, you have to cube it maybe, I'm not sure.

But it's way, way, way bigger, but in diameter, it's about 400 times bigger. Okay? And, is this not working? No? I mean, it says green. Anyway.

But it's 400 times further away. So, when you take the moon that's 400, that's, the sun that's 400 times bigger than the moon in diameter, but it's also 400 times further away, now you can have an eclipse. Now, you can have the moon pass in front of the sun, and it just perfectly fills up that, that, that, that, the diameter looks roughly the same from where we sit.

You can do the same thing, if you want to, with, let's see, I have one other thing here that I was going to dig out. Well, I had a penny up here, but you can do roughly the same thing with a penny. Here it is.

You can create your own eclipse, if you want to. So, now, in order to do this, you need to have either, like a, and your arm would need to be about seven feet long, that would be one way to do it. So, if you're that tall, you could do it, or figure something out.

But if I had my arm seven feet long, and I could stretch out this penny like this, and go out into the night sky, and I could move the penny there, and close one eye, and the penny would just perfectly fill up that moon, and blot it out. And, is that because the penny is the same size as the moon? No, it's nowhere near the size of the moon. But, the reason is, it's way closer than the moon.

Seven feet is a lot closer than the distance of the moon, which is about 240,000 miles away. And, the moon is way closer than the sun. The moon is 240,000 miles away.

The sun is 400 times that, about 93 million miles from us. So, if the penny, by bringing it up that close, can actually blot out the moon, if the moon, by bringing it up that close to the earth, can actually create a solar eclipse, then, what can we learn from that? You say, well, this is interesting stuff here, but how does this apply in, you know, I thought you were going to be preaching a sermon here this morning. Well, I am.

You know, we have God created, I kind of think He did that on purpose. I really believe God wanted the moon and the sun to be roughly the same size, so there could be solar eclipses. I think He wanted them to be roughly the same size.

Again, I don't know why exactly. But, there's other things that we run into in life that have some parallels. Now, I'm going to stop in just a moment.

We're just going to leave that whole illustration. You can just forget about that for a moment. We'll come back to it after a little bit.

But, I'd like to talk about this issue of sin. Sin is an ugly thing, and we talk about it being ugly. But, in spite of all the talk about how ugly sin is, more and more people are going into sin in a huge way.

I read an article here just this past week about this issue of pornography, and especially now that online pornography is a thing over the last, I don't know, 20 years or 30 years or whatever it's been, 68% of people have admitted using this regularly. And, that's like 75% men and 40% of women. But, that was not the most shocking thing.

The most shocking thing was that 54% of Christians admitted using it. And, only 14% expressed a sincere desire to eliminate it from their lives altogether. Now, how is that possible when there's so much warning about it? I mean, I know growing up I would hear the word about porn and how ugly it is and how wicked it is.

Not just porn, but drunkenness. It's ugly, it's wicked, it's gross. Not only that, gambling.

Not only that, drugs. We'd hear about drugs. We'd hear about tobacco.

We'd hear about marijuana. And, all this stuff is painted in ugly pictures. Okay? It's ugly.

We don't want anything to do with it. And, I sometimes wonder if our children grow up hearing those things. As they come up, little up, they hear those words.

This is ugly. This is gross. This is disgusting.

But, there's another side to sin that they never hear. And, that is that there's pleasure in sin. And, as they grow up hearing about these things and how ugly they are, they stumble across it.

Maybe somebody gives them a drink of alcohol. Maybe somebody gives them drugs. Maybe they get exposed to pornography.

And, they discover something that mom and dad never told them. They discover there's pleasure in sin. And, this shocks them.

They think, well maybe my mom and dad don't know that there's pleasure in sin. Maybe the preachers don't know that there's pleasure in sin. Maybe I'm the only one who knows this.

And, they discover this and it creates, you know, they feel maybe cheated because they weren't told. And, they get hooked on it. And, now what are they going to do with this? And so, I want to take this opportunity this morning to tell all of us, most of us already know this.

But, especially anybody who is growing up in our circles, who has heard the warnings and the ugliness of sin. I want to tell you there's pleasure in sin. There is.

I don't want to be dishonest about that. There's pleasure in sin. The Bible admits there's pleasure in sin.

Hebrews 11.25 says, choosing rather to suffer affliction, this is Moses, with the people of God rather than enjoying the pleasures of sin. So, there's pleasure, for a season it says. And, then Proverbs 9.17, stolen waters are sweet and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.

Titus 3.3 talks about the pleasures of sin. It says how we are, well, I'm going to try to quote it, but I'm going to read it. I think it would be better if I would just go ahead and read it here.

It says, in former times we were enslaved with all these diverse lusts and desires. Titus 3.3, for we ourselves were also sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving diverse lusts and pleasures. Living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another.

So, there are pleasures in sin. And, you know, we could talk about so many different kinds of sin. We could talk about, like I said, we talked about drugs and alcohol.

We could talk about witchcraft. I mean, people get into these things for a reason. There's pleasures involved.

Adultery, greed, lying, stealing, covetousness. Those things bring pleasure. They do.

There's gluttony, you know, drunken, even things like anger and revenge have a measure of pleasure behind them. And when people discover it on their own, they think, well, you know, again, I've been lied to. I haven't heard that there was pleasure in sin.

Okay, so that's point number one. I wanted to tell you there is pleasure in sin. And I don't want you to be in the dark about that.

But I have another thing I'd like to share with you. Sin brings pleasure, number one, but sin brings consequences, number two. And those consequences, sometimes they're short-term.

A person sins and then their conscience starts to bother them. Or they get caught and they've got to pay a fine. Sometimes those consequences are long-term.

Long-term relationships disintegrate as a result of sin. And sometimes those consequences are eternal. The consequences of sin often stay with a person forever.

And so we heard a sermon here by Brother Jeremy here, what was it, a week ago, two weeks ago? He talked about hell. He talked about the torment of hell. And, you know, that's one of the consequences of sin.

And, you know, this horrible place that God prepared for the devil and his angels, and it's one of the consequences of sin. And now we have these two things that are absolutely true. And I want you to know that they're true.

I want you to know that sin brings pleasure. I want you to know that sin has consequences. But now here's the question.

Are those two things equal, the pleasures of sin and the consequences of sin? And look up here on the board for just a moment. Here's the moon. Here's the sun.

Are they equal? They're not equal at all. And yet the moon is close enough to the earth that for a brief three and a half minutes back on August 27 of 2017, they looked equal. The moon was able to blot out the sun completely.

You saw just a little ring of fire around there. But other than that, it was completely blotted out. And that's how these pleasures of sin act upon the consequences of sin.

If people know that there's consequences of sin, why would they ever choose the pleasures of sin if the pleasures of sin are so much smaller than the consequences? The reason is because the pleasures are so much closer. They're that much closer to our eyes that just like this penny could blot out the moon if I hold it right there, even though it's much smaller. People are choosing the pleasures of sin.

They're so close to my eyeball that it looks just about the same. I don't know. Do I choose the pleasures of sin or don't I? I don't know.

They go back and forth. Do I follow sin or do I respond to the fear of God? And one of these consequences of sin is the giving up of all the pleasures that God has for you. At thy right hand, there are pleasures forevermore, God says.

And we're giving that up. That's one of the consequences. But somehow those consequences of sin are—the pleasures of sin are blotting out the consequences of sin.

So why is it this way? Why does God allow us to live in a universe, a world, where the pleasures of sin can blot out, at least in our vision, the consequences of sin? And I don't know the answer to that. But just like He created the moon to be the perfect distance from the earth and the sun, so it's able to create an eclipse, I wonder if God said, pleasures of sin, I could take them away. He could make sin utterly disgusting, even the first taste to be disgusting to all of us.

He could have made it that way. A lot of times you go—people down in Belize, when we were down there, there was this poison that they had called gramoxone. I'm not sure how to say that, but it was a common herbicide.

And it would very quickly, way quicker than Roundup, it would just burn back the plants. As soon as you'd spray it just within hours, it would be dead. And people sometimes would commit suicide by drinking this stuff.

There was a neighbor man just up the road who tried to commit suicide. He grabbed some of that, or maybe he was drunk and he thought it was something else in there. I'm not sure.

But I think they managed to get him to the hospital in time to save his life. But that kind of stuff typically doesn't taste good. These poisons that are out there that will kill people instantly, you smell them from a mile away and they smell like poison.

I mean, they don't smell good at all. So for someone to actually pick it up and drink it, either he's got to be drunk or he's got to be so depressed that he's willing to kill himself something. But sin is not that way.

Sin actually has a good taste to it at the very beginning. And then you go on and you read through Proverbs and you read like, at the end though, it bites like a serpent. It hurts.

The consequences of sin are so much greater than the pleasures of sin. But back to the question of why did God set it up this way? Why did God make it so that the distances are so great that it almost looks the same? From our standpoint, the moon and the sun, they look roughly the same size. I'll make them round here, but let's just pretend those are the same size.

You know, the sun has a few more, you know, it's a little brighter than the moon. But, you know, from our standpoint, that's how they look. But that's not reality at all.

And it's not that reality when people look at the pleasures of sin and the consequences of sin, it's not reality either to say that the two are even close to equal. But God has set it up, I think, part of the reason was He wants us to choose. He wants us to have a clear choice.

And we can either exercise faith in Him and what He says. Or we can, you know, believe our own passions and our own lusts and our own desire. We can follow everything that the world has to offer.

And, you know, when you're in the middle of an eclipse and this moon is, you know, so close that it's blotting out that entire sun. You know, I suppose nobody was deceived this way. Everybody knew the sun was still there.

But, you know, during the eclipse, you could probably start to think, yeah, I wonder if the sun even really exists. I wonder if, you know, I can't see it anymore. The moon is blotting it out.

Maybe it's not really there after all. And so that's the way it is with sin, too. The pleasures of sin, you know, we can start to ask the question, well, does these consequences that God talks about, is that really true? Is it really a hell? Is there really a, you know, will this really ruin my relationships? Will it really have the consequences that God says it will have? And we have to exercise faith.

We have to believe God that, yes, what he says really is true. And Moses had to exercise that. He had to choose.

He says, I can enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. Or I can choose to accept the reproach of Christ with the people of God. And he chose to forgo the pleasures of sin for a season and to reject the pleasures of Egypt.

He chose to follow God and suffer with the people of God. And I would encourage us, let's do the same thing. Look around that moon.

Don't let the moon, the pleasures of sin, blot out your vision of the consequences of sin. Don't let it blot out the glory of God and all the things that God has for you if you can forgo that and follow him. And so the first point, again, I want to be sure that you know that there are pleasures in sin.

I don't want you to find that out on your own. I want a preacher to tell you. I want your parents to tell you.

I want Christian people to tell you that there are pleasures in sin. But I also want those same people to tell you that there are consequences to sin. And the consequences are so much greater than the pleasures.

We have examples of people in the Bible who had to make that choice. David was faced with the temptation with Bathsheba and he had to make a choice. Do I take the pleasures of sin? He did.

And then he got hit with the consequences. And the consequences were so much greater. Solomon and all his wives and the idolatry he got into.

There was a story I listened to the other day. It was called Rescued. George actually sent me a link to it.

And this church group was on a submarine. They were off on the Bahamas or someplace. They were on this submarine.

A church group, the pastor and about a dozen or so of the people in his church. And this submarine got hit by another boat and it sank. But it had air trapped in there so they could keep on talking and breathing for a while.

But the oxygen was getting less and less and less as they were down there. And they had communications down there. They could talk to the people even all the way back in their home congregation.

And some of these people that were trapped in the submarine were sincere Christians. But some of them were hypocrites. The pastor himself, a year or two before, he had divorced his wife and married his secretary.

And he had even justified it. He called it just God's best. And as the story unfolds, and this is obviously, well, maybe I shouldn't say obviously.

But it is fiction. It wasn't a true story. But he was shocked when he woke up in hell after the oxygen had run out.

And he came to in hell. And here he sees one of his good buddies who was a good church member. But, you know, just kind of pulled some shady deals and given into sin.

And he was there. And, you know, he saw all these people. They didn't expect to be in hell.

And he himself felt this terror. And now while he was there having this, I guess you could call it a near-death experience, somehow his son, who had not been in the submarine, was able to get down there and resuscitate him, at least temporarily. And so after he had resuscitated him and he came to, he came back from that experience, he talked to his people back home again and talked to them about how he had sinned.

And he had sinned against them and talked about how he had not been a true Christian. Even as a pastor of their church, he had done things that God had forbidden. And one of them was, again, this divorce and this remarriage.

And so, again, this warning, the sin that they were in, this pleasures of sin. Don't let it blot out these consequences. Look past that.

Even if the moon happens to be just perfectly aligned with the sun for three and a half minutes on a nice, clear, sunny day. Look past it. Look at the sun.

Look at the consequences. Look at what God has for you. Let your faith overcome the pleasures and look at what really is going on.

Change your focus. That's my challenge here. Instead of looking at the moon full of pleasures, look at the consequences of sin, which are much, much, much larger.

And look at the pleasures that God offers you. At thy right hand there are pleasures forevermore. We had a taste of that this morning while you all were singing to me.

I was listening. I almost felt like I could concentrate on the words better, even though I would have loved to be singing, but I just couldn't. And it was, you know, can you imagine just the pleasures at God's right hand forevermore, singing and singing with a perfect voice.

All of us, you know, in that context, every one of us, I think, will have probably singing abilities we don't have now. And that'll be a wonderful thing. But it's for those who are faithful.

It's for those who forego the pleasures of sin. And, you know, they say, you know what, I recognize what God says. Even though I don't like these consequences, they're there.

And the thing about the consequences of sin, you know, they grow. A person who sins, he brings consequences on him the moment he sins. But then that thing starts to earn interest and it starts to double in size and triple in size.

And the longer it goes from the time that he sins until it gets exposed, you know, he waits a day and then he waits a week and he waits a month and a year. And it just keeps growing, the consequences of sin. It's so much better to stop those consequences from growing to confess immediately.

Stop it now. Stop the, you know, to repent immediately. Because the longer it goes, the more the consequences grow.

Here's what Jesus said. Matthew 16, verse 24. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

That's what Jesus said. Deny yourself. It's not fun to deny yourself.

But Jesus said to do it. If you all would turn to Galatians 5, I'd like to read some verses together here. Galatians 5, and let's read these verses all together.

Starting with verse 16. And we're going to go up through verse 25. And I'm reading in the King James.

So if you have one that's hopefully that or something close. Galatians 5, verse 16 through 25. Let's read all together.

This I say then, walk in the spirit and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. And these are contrary the one to the other.

So that ye cannot do the things that ye would. But if ye be led by the spirit, ye are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these.

Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like. Of the witch I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.

Against such there is no law. And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. If we live in the spirit, let us also walk in the spirit.

You can read the last verse if you want. I said let's go through 25. What is the last verse? I don't have it written down here.

Let's go ahead. You guys read it. Verse 26.

There we go. That's a good one too.