The Most Dangerous Sinner of All

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church.

Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern Minnesota.

We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg.

The Holy Gospel according to St. Mark, chapter 1, verses 14 through 20.

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.

The time has come, he said, the kingdom of God is near.

Repent and believe the good news.

As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were

fishermen.

Come, follow me, Jesus said, and I will make you fishers of men.

At once they left their nets and followed him.

When they had gone a little farther, he saw James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John in a boat, preparing their

nets.

Without delay, he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed

him.

In the name of Jesus.

The text I'll be preaching on this morning is the beginning portion of our gospel text, which reads,.

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.

The time has come, he said, the kingdom of God is near.

Repent and believe the good news.

Now, I'd like you to consider for a minute the juxtaposition between our Old Testament

text and our gospel text.

Our Old Testament text tells the story of Jonah preaching repentance to

the Ninevites, while our New Testament text tells us that Jesus, the Son of God, in first

century Judea, was calling the people of Israel to repent.

Which kind of begs the question, what on earth did first century Israel have in common with the Assyrians

so that they were being called to repent just as the Assyrians of Nineveh had been

centuries earlier?

We're all familiar with Jonah and the fish story.

Now, if you look at merely the surface of things, this doesn't quite make sense.

Consider the differences.

The Israelis of Jesus' day were religious, while the Assyrians of Nineveh were

pagan, idol -worshipping terrorists.

Now, I want to give you some idea of just how cruel and brutal the Assyrians of Jonah's day were.

In order to do that, I'm going to have to enlist the help of Will and Ariel Durant.

They are Pulitzer Prize winning historians, and the authors of the multi -volume series

entitled The Story of Our Civilization.

In volume one, they actually describe the Assyrians.

These are the people of Nineveh.

And I'm not trying to be over the top.

This is just how they were.

You need to understand what these people were like.

When the Assyrians captured a city, it was usually plundered and burnt to the ground.

Its site was deliberately denuded by killing its trees.

The loyalty of the troops was secured by dividing a large part of the spoils among them.

Their bravery ensured, by the general rule of the Near East, that all captives in war

might be enslaved or slain.

Soldiers were rewarded for every severed head they brought in from the field, so that the

aftermath of a victory generally witnessed the wholesale decapitation of fallen foes,

most often the prisoners who would have consumed much food in a long campaign

and would have constituted a danger and a nuisance in the rear, were dispatched after the battle.

They knelt with their backs to their captors, who beat their heads in with clubs or cut

off their heads with cutlasses.

Scribes stood by to count the number of prisoners taken and killed by each soldier and

apportioned the booty accordingly.

The king, if time permitted, presided at the slaughter.

The nobles among the defeated, those who were the people of higher standing, they were given more special

treatment.

Their ears, noses, and hands and feet were sliced off, or they were thrown from high towers, or they

and their children were beheaded or flayed alive or roasted over a slow fire.

And stone reliefs at Nineveh show men being impaled or

flayed or having their tongues torn out.

Impaling, by the way, is an awful way to die.

Basically, you take somebody, run a stake through them, and then put the pole up high

and just leave their bodies hanging there.

It was a very terroristic technique and kind of a precursor of crucifixion.

So tongues torn out, one king.

One shows a king gouging out the eyes of prisoners with a lance while he holds their heads conveniently in place with a

cord that passed through their lips.

That gives you just a wonderful picture of what the Ninevites were all about.

They made ISIS look like a bunch of upstarts.

You know what I'm saying?

Because ISIS doesn't quite get their hands as dirty as the Ninevites do.

So we all know the story of Jonah and how when the Lord commanded him to go to Nineveh, how Jonah

disobeyed, boarded a ship heading for Tarshish, and how Jonah was returned ashore after spending

three days in the belly of a large fish.

We all know the story.

Now, is the reason that Jonah fled because he feared for his life by preaching repentance to the men of

Nineveh?

Nope.

Jonah chapter 4 records Jonah's reaction to Nineveh's repentance that we read in

verse 10 of our Old Testament text, and it also reveals the reason why Jonah disobeyed

God and headed away from Nineveh.

In that chapter, we learn that Jonah, rather than praise the Lord for the revival that took place in Nineveh

and rejoice along with the angels who rejoice when sinners are brought to repentance, he didn't rejoice at their

repentance.

Instead, Jonah was very unhappy that the people of Nineveh had repented and that

God had mercy on them.

Let me read to you Jonah chapter 4, verses 1 through 3.

But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry.

He prayed to the Lord, O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home?

That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish.

I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger

and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.

Now, O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than live.

So Jonah didn't want to preach repentance in Nineveh because he knew God was

merciful and he didn't want those murdering pagan terrorists to be forgiven.

Because when you read in your Old Testament, you'll see that Israel and Assyria

oftentimes were at war with each other.

And when Assyria would get the upper hand, all those things I described the Assyrians doing, they did

that to the Jews.

So Jonah had a grudge, if you would.

So he didn't want those guys to be forgiven.

Jonah would have preferred that the Ninevites were punished for their sins, the city of Nineveh

overthrown, and its inhabitants thrown into the eternal fires of hell.

But, you see, God is merciful.

And when he calls people to repent and to turn from their sin, he does so because his

desire is to forgive and to pardon and save those whom he has created

and loves.

So now let's return back to our Gospel text.

In our Gospel text, Jesus, the Son of God in human flesh, second person of the Holy Trinity, born of the Virgin

Mary, is now an adult.

And John the Baptist has been arrested.

And Jesus, get this, just like Jonah, is preaching what?

He's preaching repentance.

But this time, God's messenger is none other than God himself.

And this time, the nation that he's preaching to is not a nation of pagan terrorists who

torture and impale their victims.

Nope.

This time, it's a nation that is very religious.

Not only is this nation religious, this nation claims to worship the one true God.

Yet, Jesus' message to them is the same as Jonah's.

His message is repent.

This is a mistake, right?

No, it's not a mistake.

In fact, note how in the book of Jonah, how there's not even a hint that Jonah feared for his life in the

preaching to the Assyrians of Nineveh.

His only fear was that God would forgive them.

But Jesus' mission is actually taking him into a region that is far more dangerous than Nineveh

because the sinners he's calling to repentance are not merely pagan terrorists.

Those are easy to deal with.

The sinners he's calling to repentance are religious sinners, those who have all kinds of pious

works, but inwardly have no faith, no true fear or love or trust in

God.

Now, how do we know that they don't have faith?

Well, if they did, then they would have worshiped Jesus as their God because he is their God,

right?

Now, to give you an example of just how off these religious sinners are, I would

remind you of the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and we'll pick up halfway through the

story so as not to belabor the point, and then look at the reaction of the Jews to Jesus raising a man from the

dead who'd been dead for four days.

In the Gospel of John 11, starting at verse 32, we pick up in the middle of the story.

It says this,.

Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my

brother would not have died.

When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and

greatly troubled.

And he said, Where have you laid him?

And they said to him, Lord, come and see.

Jesus wept.

So the Jews said, See how he loved him?

But some of them said, Well, could not he who opened the eyes of the blind also have kept this man from dying?

So then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb.

It was a cave, and a stone lay against it.

Jesus said, Take away the stone.

Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, Lord, by this time there will be an odor.

Or the King James saith, He stinketh.

Usually corpses dead for four days sitting in caves don't smell too good.

There will be an odor for he's been dead for four days.

Jesus said to her, Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?

So they took away the stone.

Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, Father, I thank you that you have heard me.

I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around so that they may believe that you sent me.

And when he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, Lazarus, come out.

And the man who died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips,

his face wrapped with a cloth.

Jesus said to them, Unbind him and let him go.

Wow, a man dead for four days, raised from the grave.

You'd think revival would have broken out, right?

We've never seen anything like this.

Well, listen to the response.

John continues.

Many of the Jews, therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him,

but some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.

So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council.

Beware of councils, beware of councils.

They gathered the council and they said, What are we to do?

For this man performs many signs, and if we let him go on like this,

everyone will believe in him.

And this is a bad thing.

Why?

He just raised a guy from the dead.

But listen to their reasoning.

If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.

They don't want to lose their power, do they?

But one of them, Caiaphas, who was the high priest that year, said to them, You know nothing at all, nor do you understand that it

is better that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.

He did not say this on his own accord, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, and

not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.

The passage ends this way.

So from that day on, they made plans to put Jesus to death.

Kind of takes that saying, you know, no good deed goes unpunished, kind of to its ultimate thing.

I mean, think about this.

Who are the ones leading the charge to put Jesus to death?

The religious leaders, the ones who claim that they love and serve and obey God.

And there's God in human flesh, raising a guy from the dead who's been dead for four days, and their response is, kill

him.

Yeah, the Ninevites had nothing on these guys, right?

So the God the Pharisees claimed to worship was standing right in front of them.

He had just called Lazarus from the grave, and their response, rather than worship and praise, is to make plans to put

Jesus to death.

So this begs the question, what is going on here?

Well, let me give you Jesus' diagnosis from Matthew 23, a rough passage.

This is another one of those passages of Scripture that obliterates that idea that Jesus is kind of like that

precious moments guy, that he's all about making people feel good.

This will be rough if you've never read it.

Let me read.

Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, the scribes and the Pharisees, they sit on

Moses' seat.

There's an office that they hold, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but do not do the works they do, for they

preach, but they do not practice.

They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are

not willing to move them with their finger.

They do all their deeds to be seen by others, for they make their flacketerries broad and their

fringes long, and they love the place of honor at the feasts and the best seats in the synagogues and

greetings in the marketplaces, and they love being called rabbi by others.

But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers.

And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father who is in heaven.

Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ.

The greatest among you shall be your servant.

Whoever exalts himself will be humbled.

Whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

And here it comes.

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, for you shut the kingdom

of heaven in people's faces, for you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to

go in.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, for you travel across sea and land to make a single

proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

Woe to you, blind guides, who say, If anyone swears by the temple, it's nothing, but if anyone swears

by the gold of the temple, well, then he's bound by his oath.

You blind fools, for which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the

gold sacred?

And you say, Well, if anyone swears by the altar, that's nothing, but if anyone swears by the gift that's on the

altar, well, he's bound by his oath.

You blind men, for which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred?

So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and everything on it.

Whoever swears by the temple swears by it and him who dwells in it.

And whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin

and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faithfulness.

These you ought to have done without neglecting the others, you blind guides, straining out a gnat

and swallowing a camel.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, for you clean the outside of the cup and the

plate, but inside they are full of greed and self -indulgence.

You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and the plate, and that the

outside may also be clean.

And he continues.

So this is quite the sermon, right?

Yeah, this is not a good church growth sermon, by the way.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs,

which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all

uncleanness.

So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of

hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Wow.

Like I said, these guys had nothing on the Ninevites.

Jesus saw right through their pious performances and called them out for their sins.

And if that wasn't bad enough, Jesus even likened himself to Jonah

and even compared the men of Israel of his day to the Assyrian Ninevites.

Listen to this from Matthew 12, starting at verse 38.

Some of the scribes and Pharisees answered Jesus, saying, Teacher, we wish to see from you a

sign.

But he answered them, Well, an evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except for

the sign of the prophet Jonah.

For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and

three nights in the heart of the earth.

The men of Nineveh, listen to this, the men of Nineveh will rise up

at the judgment with this generation, and they will condemn it, for they

repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.

That is a grenade of a bombshell.

Jesus is in Israel, surrounded by religious people who say they worship the one true God.

And he says of those pagan terrorists that they're going to rise on the judgment day

forgiven and justified, and they will condemn the religious Jews.

Why?

Because they repented.

These guys are not.

The murdering, pagan, idolatrous, Gentile terrorists, they're forgiven and saved by the

kind and merciful God of Jonah.

Yet the Pharisees in their self -righteousness were so blind to their sin that they

refused to believe that they even needed to repent.

The men of Nineveh confessed their sins, repented in sackcloth and ashes, and hoped for

God's mercy.

And they received it.

The religious leaders of Israel believed themselves to be righteous because of their obedience to the Torah and the

tradition of the elders.

In their way of thinking, good, righteous law -keepers don't need to repent.

Yet the very God whom they claimed to worship and obey was the one looking them in the eye

and calling them to repent and believe the good news.

But rather than confess that their righteousness was nothing more than a religious facade and rubbish,

as the Apostle Paul would someday confess about his own righteousness as a Pharisee, and rather than

confess that they were sinful just like the prostitutes and the tax collectors and received God's mercy and

forgiveness like the men of Nineveh, the Pharisees instead, like the Assyrians who impaled their

victims for all to see, they had Jesus impaled on the cross so that all could see what happens

to those who oppose their self -righteous religion of works.

But while they were mocking Jesus, while He was bleeding on the cross, and telling Him to come down from the

cross, Jesus was dying for their sins, and the sins of prostitutes, tax

collectors, Assyrian terrorists, drunks, thieves, liars,

cheats, murderers, drug addicts, gossips, wife beaters, fornicators,

homosexuals, abortionists, shady businessmen, crooked politicians, long

-winded pastors, and sinners like you.

And just like Jonah was three days in the belly of the great fish, Jesus died and then emerged victorious from the grave

on the third day.

Yet, knowing that Jesus had raised bodily from the grave, these Pharisees still

would not repent.

Which begs the question, are you blind like the Pharisees and self -deceived?

If you say you have no sin, the Apostle John writes, you deceive yourself, and like the

Pharisees, the truth is not in you.

Now, a simple way to know if this is you is if you believe that you are a good person.

If you believe that God's going to let you into heaven because of your good deeds, and because you believe that your

good outweighs your bad, or because you came to church regularly, or because you read your Bible five days a

week, or because you voted for the right party's candidates, or because you never smoked a cigarette, or

because you never allowed a curse word to come across your lips, don't get me wrong for a second, there's nothing

wrong with these good works.

But you are just like the Pharisees if you believe that a right standing before God is due to your

obedience and your good works.

This is why the Lord had the Apostle Paul, a man who was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, pen these

words in Philippians 3.

Paul writes,.

Look out for the dogs, look out for the evildoers, look out for those who mutilate the flesh.

He's talking about the Pharisees and the Judaizers.

For we are the circumcision who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh,

though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh.

If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, well then I have more.

I was circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as to

the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law,

blameless.

But whatever gain I had, I count it as a loss for the sake of Christ.

Indeed, I count everything as a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

For His sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them, all of my good works as a Pharisee, I count

them as rubbish, in order that I might gain Christ and be found in Him, listen to this, not

having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but a righteousness that comes through faith in

Christ, the righteousness that is from God that depends on faith.

So if you say you have no sin, you deceive yourself, and like the Pharisees the truth is not in you.

But if you confess your sins, like the men of Nineveh, God who is faithful and just will forgive your sins and cleanse

you from all unrighteousness.

Repent, therefore.

Repent of your sins.

Repent of your self -righteousness.

Repent of your religious sinfulness and be forgiven.

Your right standing has been established for you by Christ, not by your good works.

For Jonah was right.

God is gracious.

God is compassionate, slow to anger, an abounding and steadfast love, and a God who

relents from calamity, even the calamity of hell.

In the name of Jesus, Amen.

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