<TITLE>08. Par 34-38</TITLE>L-34 Now, man has tried to achieve though all along. Now, we think of Nimrod. When he thinks of one time that God destroyed the world with water, this great prince of Babylon, he said, "I can get by that." See, he's trying to find something. It's his nature. Man does that.
He proved his nature when Adam taking his bite from the tree of knowledge, separated himself from God; he tried to make himself a way back to God by covering hisself with fig leaves: a religion, making hisself... He was trying to make salvation without an atonement.
And we find that man's still doing the same thing today: joining church, putting his name on a book, trying to find a way of--of saying a few prayers a certain way, or repeating a couple of creeds, trying to find salvation without atonement. You cannot. You've got to have an atonement for sin. And sin is unbelief. There's no other sin but unbelief.

L-35 I've often said that drinking, committing adultery, and swearing is not sin. That's the attributes of sin. You're a unbeliever, the reason you do it. But if you did believe God, you would not do that. See? You could not do it, if you're a believer.
Now, we find then that man has separated himself from God and always trying to use that same tree of knowledge to get back by, and taking hisself farther away, all the time.
Therefore, we find Nimrod, immediately afterwards tried to build him a tower, a religious tower, that if God did destroy the world again, what would he do? He would climb up and take his people and go above the flood. Up on the--up on the--the tower. And he'd get above it.
What did they come... What become of it? Of all of his achievement, make hisself a great name, he perished with his tower.

L-36 Later on, there was a man named king Nebuchadnezzar. And he thought he could build a city, put the science on the inside of there, his great workers. And what would he do? He put a wall up around this certain city called Babylon, that they could run a chariot race on top of it.
The gates... I think they were seventy feet wide. And they were so big that it'd taken almost a company of soldiers to swing the gate open. No man could approach that.
And as soon as he thinks he has achieved something, he just indulges that much more in sin.

L-37 And when a church begins to think that because we are such and such, "We are the great church. We're the big church," they let their people loose to sinning, disbelieving: "The days of miracles is past. We don't need that no more." As soon as he thinks that he's done something, made an achievement, instead of coming and taking God's provided way for it, he tries to find a way by himself, something that he can say, "I done something."
Man cannot be saved by one thing that he does. Salvation is by grace, not by works, but by grace. It's something God gives you.
Now, we find that Nebuchadnezzar, as soon as he found that he'd made a great achievement. He walked out upon his porch one day and said, "Look what I have done." And God changed his heart and made him a beast in the field.

L-38 His grandson come on... upon... Belshazzar, which was the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar. And he took from what his grandfather, the great organization or whatever it might be, that his grandfather made. And he was living luxurious on it.
Which many of our churches today, upon the foundation of the great reformers in the beginning have made a church and... We try to go into a, just a social, instead of a salvation program, in to say, "We--we are... belong to such-and-such a church. We are members of such-and-such a church." That don't have one thing to do with salvation. Salvation is a new birth that comes by the Blood of Jesus Christ that cleanses us from all unbelief and separates us as peculiar people to God.
Salvation, it is not something that we achieved. And we only make... Well, we only make fools of ourself, thinking that we could do it.


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