Apostles Again Before the Council (Cont.)

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You'll turn your Bibles, please, with me to the fifth chapter of the book of Acts.
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Acts chapter 5. We continue this week in sermon series we've been doing for quite some time, and we are in Acts chapter 5.
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Before we look to God's Word, let us ask Him once again to bless our time together. Heavenly Father, now as we quiet our hearts, and as we open
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Your Word, we ask that You would do what only You can do. By Your Spirit, You would meet with us,
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You would free us from distractions, the things that are coming in this next week that we have much preparation to do, pressures, disappointments, whatever it might be.
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Lord, that You would allow us to hear Your Word and be focused upon it. Minister to us now by Your Spirit, we pray in Christ's name, amen.
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Those who were here last week know that we stepped out of our series on Papyrus 45 to address another subject.
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It was the Lord's Supper in the evening, and we had basically a single topic that we addressed at that time, the unity of God's people.
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And so in going back to the series based upon that very ancient papyrus manuscript of portions of the
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New Testament, and looking at what we had covered before, I became somewhat convicted, and this happens frequently, it is just simply an element of public speaking, but I considered the depth to which we had covered the very last portion of our text the last time together, and I felt it was just too rushed.
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I wanted to spend a little more time unpacking some of what was said before we move on into the next section, especially because the next section, which
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Lord willing we'll look at this evening, is a lengthy section. You sort of have to cover it all in one shot, and it's the counsel given by Gamaliel to the people, and it's a text that is
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I think misused a lot, and I think it's misunderstood, but it sort of changes subject, shall we say.
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And so I would like us to to look back at the encounter between the
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Apostles and the Jewish leadership beginning at verse 27. I know that we went over this text before, but we focused upon the first part, and that didn't leave sufficient time,
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I think, to properly take note of the content of what it was that Peter and the other
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Apostles say to the Jewish leaders. I think it is important for us.
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You might say, you know, I've got a lot of things going on in my life, I'm not sure how important this really is. Well, in my experience, the more deeply grounded we are as believers in the real marrow of our faith, the heart and soul of our faith, then the wiser we can be in making application to a broad spectrum of things that impact our lives.
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And one thing I'm certainly seeing today is we can see those who seemingly at one point had a firm foundation, but when great pressure is brought upon them, not so much in the sense of persecution.
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The devil learned long ago, and especially with the early church, you hang a sword above someone's head, and in that moment they can be very, very firm and very, very brave in what they believe.
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But when you do the water and the sand thing,
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I don't know if any of you saw this, I saw a fascinating video online about two weeks ago.
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There was some flooding, I think, down in Australia or New Zealand. No, South Africa, I'm sorry, it was
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South Africa. I knew it was in the southern hemisphere. And there was some flooding, and this guy just happened to be on the edge of this river that was flooding, and it's right next to the ocean.
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And he happened to catch just the first drops of water as they sneak across the sand and fall down and start going across the beach to the sea.
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He just happened to be there. He had walked over, you could see his footprints and stuff, and so he's recording all this.
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So now it becomes a rivulet, and it starts carrying more and more of the sand. Over the course of about 15 minutes, all of a sudden, an entire new entrance to the sea develops.
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And the speed is astounding, the power of that moving water.
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And eventually, of course, everything that was there is just going to be moved right out to sea, and that's going to be the new mouth of that river going out to the ocean, at least until the flooding ends, and then we'll see what happens with the topography and everything else.
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The point was, it wasn't some big, huge tsunami of water that came rushing over and blew everything out of the way.
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You could watch. It was not your garden hose on more than one quarter. Just dee -dee -dee -dee -dee -dee -dee -dee.
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And then it went dee -dee -dee -dee -dee -dee -dee, and the whole thing just gets washed out to out to sea in a very short period of time.
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That is the most effective way of impacting the Christian Church as well.
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Islam learned over time that what you do is, if you want to kill something, you tax it.
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Yeah, in other words, day in, day out, the little bit of a grind, the little bit of a, you know, making people put up with inconvenience and difficulty over and over and over again, that's how you change the course of river.
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That's how you wear people down over time. And so, from our perspective, what you need is a firm bedrock faith to resist that kind of slow erosion that is, we're seeing, taking place all around us.
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And so, we look at something like this and go, well, you know, I don't think I'm gonna be brought before any Jewish leadership in the near future, and is that really relevant to me?
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Well, I think that it is, and I think if we dig a little bit deeper, you'll see just how important the words that the
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Apostles said to the Council were. But let's remind ourselves that the section beginning in verse 27, when they had brought them, they stood them before the
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Council, and this is, of course, you know, they've been found in the temple, they had been released by the angel, you know, the miraculous background of this, saying, we gave you strict orders not to continue teaching this, name it, you have filled
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Jerusalem with your teaching, and intend to bring this man's blood upon us.
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But Peter and the Apostles answered, we must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom you had put to death by hanging him on a cross.
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He is the one whom God exalted to his right hand as a prince and a savior, to grant repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.
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And we are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.
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Now, we recognize that what happens after this is, you'll notice in verse 13, but when they heard this, they were cut to the quick and intended to kill them.
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So whatever it is that was, and obviously this is a brief summary of the answer that was given by the
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Apostles, the point is that the Apostles gave a very straightforward and powerful reply, even in a context that certainly would have tempted me to give a different kind of response.
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I don't know about you, but you have to have thought of this. You've been freed from prison by an angel, who's told you to go back and to teach the people in the temple, you've been obedient and that's what you've done.
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And now they've come to take you before the council, which is what they were going to do initially, that's why they threw you in prison in the first place.
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And the council's first words to you are, we told you not to do this.
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My temptation would have been, hey, have you noticed we're not in prison anymore? And you know, the guy that let us out, like this angel type thing, you know, like they can wipe out entire cities, you know, and things like that.
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He told us to go do that, so I'd take it up with him, if I were you. I mean, that would have been my temptation.
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Thankfully, that's not what the Apostles did, but that would have been a pretty strong temptation, would have been really hard for me to have resisted.
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Just a little something along the lines of, so how are those prison doors doing these days?
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You know, something along those lines, but that's not what they did. It makes us wonder, not only at their self -control, but it also made us wonder a little bit at the council, that they could continue with this attitude, and they don't have any answers as to how these men have ended up in the temple.
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They don't know how they got out of prison. You would think that maybe that might cause them to sort of stop and go, hmm, maybe we should think about this, maybe we should, you know, consider this, and some people think that's what's going on with Gamaliel.
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We'll get to that at another point, but this is the situation that we're seeing, and there is clearly in the objection of the
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Jewish leadership, you intend to bring this man's blood upon us.
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And we did note a number of weeks ago, when we covered this text, the irony and the sadness of those words, because if there was an iota, a scintilla, the smallest microgram of conviction going on in the hearts of these men, this would not be how they would speak.
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You do not, if you are truly feeling any kind of the work of the
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Spirit of God in your heart, in regards to guilt as to the role you played in the delivery of an innocent man over to the
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Romans, and standing there outside with Pilate saying, I don't see, why?
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I see no guilt in this man, and you're crying out, crucify him, crucify him, which some of these men were either doing themselves or had been involved in encouraging others to do.
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They knew their guilt. What you see here, what you see here is something, unfortunately, that I see very, very often in many, many different contexts, and it is the blindness that comes from dedication to falsehood.
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In this case, it is not falsehood in the sense of some other religion, some other religion's scriptures, or whatever else it might be along those lines, though I've certainly seen this kind of zeal on that level.
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But here you have the blindness that comes from tradition, and Jesus had spoken to these very men about this very thing.
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Go read the 23rd chapter of Matthew. Blind guides, blind guides, blind guides.
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Ever thought about what that phrase means, blind guides? Because these are the direct, these are the same men, the very same men that Jesus had addressed those words to.
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Blind guides. Think about what that means. It is, it is a contradiction in terms.
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The guide is supposed to be the one who is able to give you direction, is supposed to be able to be one of the shepherds of Christ, of God's people in the
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Old Testament, and yet they are lacking the very thing necessary for them to fulfill the function that they claim to be fulfilling amongst the people.
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They are blind guides. They are not able to do what they are claiming by their actions and their position to be able to do.
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Called them blind guides. And so now the same Peter and the same
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Apostles who undoubtedly flinched at times during Jesus' ministry, especially, you know, we don't have a videotape of this, but I do wonder what the disciples looked like in Matthew chapter 23 when
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Jesus finally goes off after the hypocrisy of the
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Jewish leadership with such incredible words of condemnation. Doesn't it seem probable that there was still a hope on their part before then, that there might be some rapprochement, some getting together, some, you know, we're gonna bring our own leaders along, right, because we want to, you know, we want to sit and judge the peoples of Israel, and so we're gonna have to bring these guys along somehow, and you've got all that type of stuff going on, and yet Matthew 23 hits, and they must have realized, well, that's the end of that.
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And they must have flinched, and then they must have been concerned, and these are the ones hiding after the crucifixion but before the resurrection and the coming of the
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Holy Spirit, and now with the Holy Spirit dwelling within them, they are brought before this council, and they speak with great wisdom and directness and knowledge and bring great conviction in the process.
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That's the difference when the Holy Spirit comes and indwells the believers.
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And so we've already looked at what they said, we must obey a God rather than men, but what we didn't have time to do, we just sort of looked in a surface way at the theology that underlies their answer.
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I just felt like it was not appropriate to skip over some of the important things to see that these very, very early
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Christians, this is before the vision that Peter's gonna receive about the
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Gentiles and all the rest of that, this is still what's going on in Jerusalem, even
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Stephen hasn't even been chosen yet, we're gonna see that in the next chapter, chosen to be one of the deacons, and so this is very, very early on, yet we're told, and if you go to your local community college, your local university, whatever else it might be, what you're gonna see and what you're gonna hear when you go to the classes on religion or whatever else it might be, is that all of this theology that Christians believe today, it developed over time, you see, it was an evolutionary process.
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Now on the one hand, there is no question that as we look at the book of Acts, we see development.
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I mean, God doesn't just drop a big 1 ,400 page systematic theology down on the day of Pentecost and everybody would say, read, we're gonna have a quiz next week and you're ready to go.
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That's not what happened. So in the sense that God had to lead his people to come to understand the full nature of the gospel and the mission of the church, the fact that the
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Gentiles are going to be included in fullness in the church, what that meant as far as what the church is gonna look like and what worship is gonna look like and all the rest of that stuff, and you know, we have apostles right now, we don't have elders yet, we don't have deacons yet, we end up with deacons before the elders in essence, and there is development in the book of Acts, there's no question about that.
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But what you're normally told is that those key doctrines and teachings that make the faith both unique and authoritative, and that's what bugs the world.
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What bothers the world is not that we say that Jesus is unique, but that part of his uniqueness makes him
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Lord of all, including Lord of them. When you read
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Acts chapter 17 and you hear Paul preaching to the
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Greeks there at Mars Hill, the Areopagus, and he specifically lays out
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A, the resurrection, which they found to be just utter foolishness because that was against their understanding of man and what salvation was, but then the idea that God was going to judge not just the people of Israel, not just Christians, but all of mankind by this one man,
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Jesus. That's when the wheels fall off as far as the seeker friendly movement goes, and the
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Apostles discover very quickly there aren't any of those folks. It is up to God to build his church, and there is a tremendous pushback.
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There are a few who believe, but the majority are like, we'll hear from you again sometime, that's just too much.
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It is that claim of authority on Jesus' part presented by the Apostles that is so offensive to the natural man today.
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And so it is that element that we see coming out in what is said in response to the
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Jewish leadership, you're trying to bring his blood upon us. The Apostles don't even argue it, they just simply state historical fact.
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First, we're not going to go back over we must obey God rather than men, but I want to look at the substance of what is said, the
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God of our fathers raised up Jesus. So by using the term our fathers, the
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Apostles are saying we are all the descendants of Abraham, we are our
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Jews, we are under your authority as far as that is concerned, however you and I together are all under God's authority, and they are going to hold these men accountable for the very scriptures that they pretend to know so well and to expound to others.
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And so he says the God of our fathers raised up Jesus. Now that like I pointed out last time, they wouldn't use
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Jesus' name, but Peter does, the Apostles do very very quickly, and say it's a
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God of our fathers raised up Jesus, that the one that you claim to be one of the most visible important representatives of amongst his people today, that one raised up Jesus.
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Now there's, you cannot undo someone's efforts any more than raising up someone they've killed, someone that they had been plotting to kill for a great deal of time, someone that they had such deep hatred for because Jesus exposed their hypocrisy and the true nature of the religious devotion that was theirs.
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So the God of our fathers raised up Jesus. You want to know why we have to keep proclaiming his name?
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Because God raised him from the dead, and if God has raised him up from the dead, then that is the ultimate truth by which everyone must engage in, the
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Apostles must engage their ministry. So the God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom you had put to death.
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You want his blood to be put upon you? That's easy, you're the ones that killed him.
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You had put him to death. Now we did briefly talk about the fact that we could spend the rest of our time just profitably discussing this issue of who killed
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Jesus, because we already looked at Acts chapter 4 and we saw there the recognition on the part of the early church of the large number of people.
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You had Herod, and you had Pontius Pilate, and you had the Romans, and you had the
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Jewish leaders. There's four different groups and they all had completely different motivations, they had completely different intentions in their involvement in the crucifixion, but God used all of them.
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In fact, the church saw in all of those varied purposes the very hand of God.
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God had control over all of those things, he predestined the events that took place. But here you have specifically the role of the
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Jewish leaders whom you had put to death by hanging him on a cross, it's literally on a tree, hanging him on a tree.
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You did this, you slew him, you're the ones that did this, and God has undone your action by raising him up.
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And so there there is no detour into self -justification, into the
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Apostles saying, hey you put us in prison and now we're out, straight to the issue.
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We must obey God rather than men, God told us to go do this, God's given us the message, and here's the message, the message is that God has raised up Jesus whom you had put to death by hanging him on a tree.
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So the cross is the central aspect, the cross and the resurrection, central aspects of what
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God has done, and since God has acted in time, therefore if we are to be faithful witnesses to him we must speak of what he has done.
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So the guilt of these individuals is clear, but it's also just as clear that this wasn't some kind of a disruption of God's purpose or plan, it was a part of God's purpose and plan.
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Are they still guilty? Do they not feel cut to the quick as a result of this?
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They do, and the Apostles aren't going, oh hey by the way guys, don't let that bother you, don't you know, don't feel a bunch of guilt and stuff, because you see, as long as God predestines it, then we don't have any role.
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That's not how they view it. I know that's the misrepresentation that we have to deal with almost all the time, whenever we are talking to friends and family and co -workers and people and we profess our belief in the absolute sovereignty of God, well if God decreed it then, and it's like yeah, there goes
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Romans 9 again, you will say to me how then can he judge who can resist his will, this is the very nature of mankind to think of himself in this fashion.
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But the Apostles, and I would say even their Jewish, the
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Jewish Council would not have been thinking in the kind of humanistic, secular ways that those in our society do and even those in the church today do as well.
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What they are hearing is that these men are asserting that the
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God they claim to worship has raised up, has undone the chains of death which they thought they had successfully placed upon Jesus.
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And so his blood is upon them, there is no question about that, they had even said that, let his blood be upon us.
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But then there is the rest of the message, a message that they are going to be struggling with until they either come to profession, because we are going to see in just a matter of verses, that many priests, many of the
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Jewish leadership did come to believe in in Jesus as the Messiah in the coming weeks and months there in Jerusalem.
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So maybe some who were staying in that room that day heard this message and would eventually bow the knee to Christ.
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We know that the whole leadership as a whole didn't do that, but there may have been some who specifically did.
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But then we have the church's understanding of who Jesus is now.
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He is the one whom God exalted to his right hand. Now was there, and this is what we didn't really have time to cover before, when you go to seminary, it's interesting,
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I wish someone had, and maybe somebody did and it just didn't click, I don't know, it's been a long time now, but I wish there was sort of an introductory sermon or something that would help you to understand that the classes that you are required to take were not determined by a casting of lots.
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They were not a roll of the dice, it was not the professor sitting around, how can we make these guys lives as miserable as possible for the next couple of years so they'll be so happy to get out of here.
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Sometimes you get that idea. That's changing. Sadly, you want to see one of the greatest signs of the degradation of the educational system in our day.
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When you design your curriculum based upon what the students want to do, they're there to learn, you're supposed to be the smart guys.
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You know, you're the older folks, you're supposed to have the experience, you're supposed to now be able to look back and go, oh man, to really be successful I needed to know this, this, this, and this, and so you design things that way and now it's going the opposite direction.
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Now the leadership is going, well what would you guys like to do? Wow, that leads to absolute disaster, especially in theological contexts as well.
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And when I was in seminary, there were these certain classes that, just quite honestly, if you've ever been there, you know they were the classes that people just struggled to stay awake in.
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Old and New Testament backgrounds especially. And the reason I know this is,
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I was wide awake in them because I was already involved in apologetics. And so I already knew that, where did these
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Pharisees come from? Why did they believe the things they believed? There are all these things, this is to the context and stuff, that I already knew because the work
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I was doing at that time primarily with Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. I already knew this stuff was really, really important, but most other folks didn't.
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And so when you take those classes, one of the things that you spend forever on was the messianic expectations of the
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Jewish people at the time of Christ and in the centuries developing up to that.
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Because it's really hard, to be honest with you, to handle the text of the Gospels and really even some of the of the epistles as well.
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Because there's clearly something going on here about what is expected of the
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Messiah. What's the Messiah supposed to be like? And there's all these false ideas about what the
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Messiah is to be like. Even in this chapter, Gamaliel is going to talk about some of the false Messiahs that have come along.
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And well, why did people follow them? How was it they were able to get such a following? And things like that.
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And what was the expectation at this particular time in history? That's not the most exciting stuff to read, though.
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And so it can be a little bit difficult. But one of the things that you would know in looking at the text, such as Psalm 110 .1
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and in the book of Daniel chapter 7, is there was this emphasis upon this one who is at the right hand of God.
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This highly exalted one. And so it's very, very important to see in verse 31 that the
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Apostles are hitting upon themes that would communicate with the
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Jewish leaders. They well knew what the rabbis had been speculating upon literally for centuries in regards to the
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Messiah. And there was a problem. I mean, if you were an early witness of Jesus in that day, and you're talking to Jews in the temple, there's some really smart people that know a lot about the
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Scriptures. Maybe more than you do. And they're asking you questions. Well, wait a minute. Isn't the
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Messiah supposed to do this? Isn't the Messiah supposed to do that? And when the Messiah comes, aren't all the nations streaming into Jerusalem?
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And isn't he supposed to be victorious? And look, the reality is a crucified
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Messiah was about as far out of the mainstream as you could possibly come up with for these individuals.
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There were serious objections. You can have objections that are born out of tradition. And then you can have honest objections that are just completely born out of a misunderstanding or a false assumption as to what the
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Messiah is supposed to be like and things like that. And we need to be able to give an answer to those objections.
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And so you can see that that process has begun by the language that the
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Apostles used. He is the one whom God exalted to his right hand as a prince and Savior.
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Now it's interesting, in the original language, now word order is not in Greek, it does not reflect
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English word order, but the first thing that is said is this one
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God as a prince and Savior has exalted to his right hand.
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So there is a an emphasis upon the dignity and majesty and power of this individual.
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See, in English, because the Greek doesn't use a definite article here, so most of translations will say as a prince, as a
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Savior. When we put it later in the sentence like that and use the indefinite article, it can be like, oh, just like a little description, you know, maybe not all that important.
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But that's not how it was said. As Luke recorded the words, this one
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God, a prince and a Savior, exalted to his right hand.
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And so there is a an emphasis upon the regal character of the one whose blood these men were guilty of shedding, and that this blood was upon them.
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But then that phrase, exalted to his right hand, now that was, again, already a concept deeply ingrained in Jewish understanding of that day.
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Being exalted to the right hand of God, this is where the Messiah is the anointed one, the one that has
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God's authority to rule and to reign, and so he is the one whom
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God exalted to his right hand. So he's raised him from the dead, so he's vindicated him from the false charges by raising him from the dead.
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They knew there is an empty tomb, the Apostles knew there is an empty tomb, but it wasn't just that he has been delivered from death, but he has been exalted to God's right hand as prince and Savior.
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And so not only negatively have the cavils, the disrepute cast upon him in the mockery and the shaming of him been removed by his being released in the chains of death, but he's exalted to the right hand of God as prince and Savior, and he's not just standing there smiling.
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There is a reason for this, that he might grant repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.
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Now, once you have the Messiah at the right hand of God the
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Father in heaven, then when you see that he is active there,
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I mean here is one, when God raises you from the dead and exalts you to his right hand, obviously that is approbation, that is approval of everything you've done and said.
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If you were a sinner, if you had over exalted yourself or made claims for yourself,
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God's not going to bring you to that position. So if you are now at that highly exalted position, then everything you taught about yourself has
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God the Father's approbation, it has his approval. And so there you are and you're still active.
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He's not just one of the dead saints that's gone to heaven and is one of the greatly honored ones there, no.
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He is at the right hand of the Father and he's doing something. Now you're going to get a much deeper and fuller description of this.
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Where? I remember we went through Hebrews together and you have the mediator who's at the right hand of the
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Father and because he holds his priesthood permanent, he's able to save forever to the uttermost those who draw nigh unto
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God by him. And then in Hebrews chapter 9, he has gone into the holy place having obtained eternal redemption.
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So we have this mediator in the presence of the Father. Romans chapter 8, all these things here
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Peter preaching at the very beginning, you see more fully explicated, but it's the same teaching later on in the
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Apostle Paul. There is great consistency and again you end up at the local university, the local college, you're gonna be told, ah just all this complete contradiction between Paul and Peter.
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That's just because, I'm sorry most of those folks have never done serious study of the New Testament or they've done it with an extreme bias, but if you just step back and think and listen, you see the consistency that is found between what the
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Apostles taught. And here you have the Messiah, he's at the right hand of the Father, he's a prince and a
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Savior, and he is there to grant repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.
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Now that opens up a whole can of worms, who's Israel? Who is
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Israel? Are we talking only to ethnic
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Israel at this point? Because you know Peter hasn't, he hasn't had the vision yet and don't call anything
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I've called clean, unclean, but when you think about it, there is an expansiveness to this work.
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This Israel, you know, as Paul's gonna tell us, who's true
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Israel? We are the true Israelites who worship God in spirit and truth. And I think there's an element of it here, he says, you know, the
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God of our fathers raised up Jesus, but you don't bow the knee to Jesus, and can you truly be of Israel?
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A repentant Israel? A forgiven Israel? Who receives repentance?
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Who receives forgiveness of sins? When you think about what the mediator does in Romans chapter 8, he's the one that brings these gifts to fruition in our lives, and if God has given us his son, then certainly he will will not withhold from us anything else.
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But this also causes us to think about repentance. Grant repentance?
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We've had a lot of discussions, I'm sure you've had a lot of discussions with your non -reformed brothers and sisters in the
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Lord that struggle with the issue of the will of man, and they've imbibed deeply a non -biblical view of man's will, as if it can be some autonomous thing apart from our fallen nature and things like that.
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But it's interesting, you get into repentance, and for a lot of people, well, repentance is something
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I do, it's an attitude I have. I turn from my past sins, and I turn toward God, and it's all just me, me, me, me, me, but why does it have to be granted, then?
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Can't it be something that anyone just does of their own free will? And yet,
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Paul's gonna say in Romans chapter 2, he's gonna talk about, don't you realize that the kindness of of God leads you to repentance?
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Granting gifts of repentance grant repentance to Israel? Clearly, a truly repentant heart does flow from the work of the
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Spirit of God, and is directly related to the forgiveness of sins, and all of this is done through the mediating presence of our
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Lord and Savior in heaven as well. He is the one who, because of his finished work, the very work of the
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Spirit of God is then promised to us, that Spirit of God then comes, and in his work gives to us the ability to repent and to believe.
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And so, this one who they tried to kill has an exalted place, and obviously is central to God's purpose in the restoration of Israel and the forgiveness of Israel's sins.
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What a tremendous condemnation of these men's blindness in their condemnation of Jesus.
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Can you imagine? There is a reason when it says, when they heard this, they were, you know, the term, cut to the quick, you know, okay,
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I get it, most of us get it, it's sort of an idiomatic phrase, but it means they were furious.
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It's that veins popping, face red, spitting, angry, furiousness that some people just aren't really even capable of doing it, and others don't seem to be able to not do it.
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You've met some of those folks that just have those hair -trigger tempers, but they get this.
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They hear that if Jesus really is risen from the dead, and God raised him up, and he has exalted him to his right hand, which was standard expectation language of the
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Messiah, the exalted one, straight out of the Old Testament, there were, for a couple centuries at this point, this had been part of the discussion of how the
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Messiah would be recognized, or the nature and power of the Messiah, and so they've crucified the
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Messiah, but God has undone their work, exalted him to the position where he is there to grant repentance to Israel and the forgiveness of sins.
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That's good news if you want to repent and receive forgiveness of sins.
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It's not good news when you're the one that killed the one that God had sent, and you are not plainly, by your actions, cognizant of your need for repentance and the need for your forgiveness, and so they are furious.
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They fully understand the weight of the language that the Apostles have used, and don't think that the
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Apostles were naive about this. They had clearly not read how to win friends and influence people.
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I mean, they were doing this on purpose because they had to.
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There was no sugarcoating the role that these men had played in the death of Messiah, and so we are witnesses of these things.
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Remember, they had just been told, not very long ago, by an angel, go be witnesses.
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Speak everything. Speak in the hearing of the people. We are witnesses of these things.
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We saw him, we walked with him, we ate with him, after you killed him.
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He's risen from the dead. We are witnesses of these things, but so is the
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Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him. Now, two things, two things, and we'll be close to wrapping up.
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Two things. So is the Holy Spirit, so our testimony of your guilt is not just ours, but the
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Holy Spirit of God testifies these things are true, and therefore to your guiltiness. And then you have the description, and we can't just jump over it.
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Whom God has given to those who obey him. Now, how many times over the years have I said there's two ways of reading the
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Bible? Not two valid ways, but there are two ways that people read the Bible. There is the prescriptive and the descriptive, and so if you're someone who sees the gospel as primarily a message to mankind, that gives mankind stuff to do, a prescription, you do this, you do this, you do this, and then hopefully you get this at the end.
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You're gonna look at something like that, and you're gonna be tempted to read that, whom God has given to those who obey him.
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So if I'm obedient to God, then as a reward for my obedience,
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I will receive the Spirit of God. That'll be sort of an extra gift that, you know, you get a certain number of points and you get the
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Spirit or something along those lines. And if you just look at the words, you know, whom
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God has given to those who obey him, you could understand that in such a sense as to make it prescriptive.
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You could. There's nothing in the language that says that's not how to understand it. But you obviously have to cut apart the text of Scripture to come up with that kind of an understanding.
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But it still says whom God has given to those who obey him. So what is the descriptive way of understanding this?
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Well, you and I both recognize that for me to even be desirous to obey him, not for the right reasons, not for the wrong reasons, there are times when people will obey
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God's law because that's the best thing for them. It's a self -centered reason why they keep the law, because if I don't,
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I'm gonna get hurt, it's gonna be bad, and so I will keep these precepts, but primarily just for me, myself, and I.
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So there is a, but if you want true heartfelt obedience that comes from a broken heart, you go back to the
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Psalter and you read those Psalms that speak of that true brokenness, having a heartfelt obedience, where does that come from?
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Well we know it comes from the Spirit of God. So you'd need to have the Spirit of God to have the attitude to get to obey enough to earn the
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Spirit of God, which wouldn't make any sense. So it is a description whom
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God has given to those who obey him. In other words, put it in the context in which it was spoken. Here's the great
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Sanhedrin, here's the great counsel, here's these unlearned men. You killed the
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Messiah, we are witnessing for him, and remember how this talk started? We must obey
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God rather than men. You're the men, you're not speaking for God.
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We're speaking for God, we are obeying him, and therefore we have been given his
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Spirit, which you don't have. You don't have the
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Spirit. So the Spirit testifies, we are testifying, but we're just men.
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But God's Spirit is testifying that these things are true, and that's the
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Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him. That's us, not you.
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You are disobeying the God you pretend to be representing, not only in the crucifixion of his
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Messiah, but now in the persecution of his people. That's what's going on here.
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And see, people have taken that, skipped the context in which it was originally said, and developed a whole theology based upon man's ability to do things to then please
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God and therefore earn stuff from God, and that's not what the text is saying at all. Instead, the text has a pretty heavy condemnation, which is why the next words make so much sense.
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When they heard this, they were furious. And when you're furious, what do you want to do?
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You want to kill something. And so they wanted to kill them.
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Now God wasn't going to allow that to happen. It's interesting the methodology he uses, we'll see this evening, to keep that from happening.
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But the fact is, this is a strong condemnation, and it's a condemnation filled with theology.
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It helps us to understand what was going on at that time, but it's also vitally important for us today to know, what is it that we have to be focused upon?
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And who Jesus is, is absolutely definitional of that. When we think of our
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Christian, of our Chinese brothers and sisters, if you didn't see that statement that they wrote, at the time 116 different ministers, many of whom
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I'm afraid are probably already in prison. Statement they wrote, calling on the
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Chinese government, not only to allow them to worship God properly, but warning the
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Chinese government that if you do not allow us to worship properly, God will judge you. They were bold.
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They were just as bold as the Apostles were before the Sanhedrin. And what gave them that, that boldness?
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The central claim is, God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. And so they were bold in saying
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Jesus Christ is Lord over the Chinese Communist government, and he will also grant forgiveness and repentance and grace and mercy and love to anyone who bows the knee to him.
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It was a wonderful statement. If you didn't read it, take the time to track it down, it's only a couple weeks old.
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The point is, the ishy -squishy liberal
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Jesus of places like Union Theological Seminary and many of the mainline denominations will not make you bold to do this, because they've already given up on that.
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They don't believe in that Jesus anymore. They don't believe in a Jesus who was literally raised from the dead, a Jesus who literally had the right hand of the Father.
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So why should they risk themselves for something like that? Why is it important?
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Because it's Jesus who has given us our mandates for what we're to believe about men and women and marriage and society and goodness and what's evil.
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It's because he is Lord, really is Lord, not just some nebulous feeling, he really is
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Lord, and he will be the judge of all of mankind at the last day.
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And if he's not who he has always said he was, we don't have a message. And that's why the world isn't offended by those folks, but it is offended when we proclaim the
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Lordship of Jesus Christ. So I wanted to go a little more in depth on that. I just felt like we had gone over it too quickly, that was my fault, certainly not yours, and hopefully that is useful to you.
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Let's close our time in prayer. Our Heavenly Father, indeed, we know that our
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Lord and Savior is exalted to your right hand. We thank you that that remains true to this day.
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He continues to rule and reign. His kingdom has been expanded even this day.
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Lord, may we be good subjects of that kingdom in this coming day. And if any are amongst us that do not know that message and have not bowed the knee to him, may you reveal the true and living
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Savior to them even this day, convict them of their need, grant them repentance and faith. Glorify yourself, we pray in Christ's name.