Jesus Loved God's Law

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Don't miss this powerful sermon as Jeff Durbin talks about God's law, and how it written on our hearts.

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So here we are, Matthew 13, Jesus is talking again and again and again about the kingdom of heaven.
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That's the theme, a major, a central theme throughout the entire Bible. It is not a peripheral thing.
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It's not a side issue. The kingdom of God, the rule of the Messiah in the world is a central theme from old and new.
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It truly is a treasure from God's Old Testament revelation and into his
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New Testament revelation. The kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven, synonymous. We're talking about the rule of the
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Messiah in the world. Jesus is talking about it. He's giving them examples. He sits down in the
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Sermon on the Mount and he explains the blessings, the divine happiness upon the people of God throughout all the ages and he explains the law of God.
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He doesn't give a new law. He gives the true understanding of the law of God. He corrects their misapprehensions, their misinterpretations of the law of God.
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Now you have God himself explaining the old and he's doing it with the kingdom of heaven narrative and dialogue.
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He's giving you all this treasure, all these truths that will transform the world, that have been transforming the world, that are transforming the world, that will transform the world.
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You see, in Jesus, the substance has finally arrived. That's why it's such a big deal to open up Matthew's gospel with the lineage of Jesus.
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We've talked a lot about this. The genealogies of Jesus show that Jesus has the royal right to the throne.
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Why start a book with something that most people think is completely and totes boring?
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Right? Don't you want to open a show up or a book up with the exciting thing, right?
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You want the edgy, the thing that's going to hook people, right? I mean, Stranger Things, right?
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There's a popular series right now. Everyone knows about Stranger Things and everyone talks about that beginning that they spent so much time and money on that nobody skips.
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You have to make it through that intro of that show, right? You think about that. You need the hook and there's actually a really great little mini documentary of this show,
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Stranger Things, and how they spent so much time and thought and energy and money in just this like 45 to 60 second long intro as the hook, right?
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To draw you into the show, just give it sort of a brand. Now, I'm not endorsing Stranger Things.
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I'm not telling you go out to watch Stranger Things. I'm telling you people invest in stories, right? And when you start a story off, you want the hook.
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Well, why, pray tell, if this is the message that's going to change the world, do you think it's important to start the message off with something that will turn most people off?
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It's not an important hook, it's not a brand, not in most people's eyes, but you see, when you understand that the substance of all that they had hoped for, the substance that actually created the shadow, the thing that was standing that cast the shadow in the
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Old Testament has finally arrived on the scene, you understand the importance of drawing out that theme.
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The rule of God has finally entered into the world. God promised to bring a kingdom. He said
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He was going to do it, He even told them when, and they were counting down the days. That's why there's this fervor in the first century, like, are you the
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Messiah? Who's the Messiah? Is He the Messiah? Who's the Messiah? That's why there's false Christs, false messiahs across the landscape in the first century because they were waiting in eager anticipation for the day when
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God was going to bring His Messiah that was going to set the world right again, who was going to bring justice and redemption and salvation.
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The promises made to Abraham that all the world would be filled with heirs of Abraham, that His descendants as numerous as the stars, all the nations blessed in Abraham, and so they're waiting, and then they're waiting, and now the substance has arrived.
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Everything you read in your Old Testament, even the peculiar things that seem so strange and sort of out of our cultural boundaries and just odd things in terms of even like the way they dressed and the way that they ate and the way that they worshiped.
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I mean, everything about the Jews was completely distinct and separated them from all the pagan nations and the
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Gentiles. I mean, they literally smelled different. When you went into Jerusalem, all the ways that God told them to worship created even its own smell, and so when you went to Jerusalem, you could smell the worship itself.
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The Jews were a distinct people, and they had this odd priest system with the animal sacrifices and Yom Kippur, a day of atonement.
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They have all these strange rituals in a temple, and they have all these stories of heroes, and the amazing thing about all of this in light of Jesus is that He's the substance that it was all pointing to in the first place.
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Here's the point. The message of Jesus, the Messiah, isn't some secret knowledge that one guy got by walking into the woods one day.
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It's not his own personal secret revelation. This is a revelation that's been broadcast in high definition throughout the ages to God's people.
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It's on full display. It's on record in history. God keeps His covenant promises.
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He's working with His people, displaying His glory and power, His covenant keeping,
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His loving kindness, His perseverance for His people, and He's giving them these acts of redemption all throughout the time that they're waiting for Mashiach, and here's the thing.
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All those things, all those events, everything ultimately pointing to Jesus. I mean, even these little moments, like we don't think much about them if we're
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Jews when it's happening. It doesn't seem overly interesting, but it is in terms of the substance.
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For example, Moses, he's a lawgiver. He's a prophet of God. He speaks to God and then to the people of God, and when he's a baby, they try to take his life, and he's rescued as a baby, and the people of God are in bondage in Egypt, and God rescues them from their bondage.
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There's this Passover lamb without spot, without blemish. They put the blood over the doorpost, and then the judgment of God passes over that house and they escape their slavery and their bondage to go into the promised land.
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He divides the Red Sea. You have Abraham and his story, Abraham with the son of the promise, the son of his love, his only son.
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God says, this is the one I'm going to change the world through, and then when he's older,
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God says to Abraham, take him to this mountain. It's a three -day journey, and sacrifice him there to me, and then
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Abraham takes Isaac and his companions, and then he says, we're going to go to the mountain to worship, and we'll both return to you, and he goes to that mountain.
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And Isaac says, where's the lamb, father? And then Abraham says, God will provide for himself the lamb.
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This is the place the Lord will provide it. And he aims with the Lord, stops Abraham, and he continues to maintain that promise.
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And then what we see is when Jesus arrives, the substance of that promise is that Jesus is
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God's son, his only son, the son of his love, and it was on that place, Mount Moriah, that God didn't withhold his hand from killing his son for the sake of his people, and the lamb of God, with no spot and no blemish, died that day in the place that the
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Lord said he'll provide it. Are you seeing? Are you seeing? The shadows all pointing to Jesus.
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Here's the substance. The Old and New Testaments, not the revelation of two separate gods, not the revelation of a confused
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God or a divided God, a God who is opposed to himself. You have the sort of often sort of embraced belief of the modern evangelical.
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We say things like the God of the Old Testament is this wrathful, vengeful God, and Jesus is sort of the one that keeps him in check.
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He's the one that reminds him he's got to be loving. You need to be loving, right? And so you have sort of like Jesus is the love of God, and the
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Father is this justice and vengeful God, complete misunderstanding of God and his revelation.
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You have the old revelation and the new revelation completely unified from the same
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God. And what do we know about God? He's immutable. He's immutable. What's that mean?
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It means he's unchangeable. God may change certain ways of administration of his covenant and what he calls us to do and how he calls us to act in certain times and ages.
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But God himself, he does not change. His character does not change. God is immutable.
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He says, I am the Lord. I change not. Therefore, you sons of Jacob are not consumed.
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That's how you know you can trust him, because I don't change, God says. And you have old and new, two treasures, all pointing to the single one that all of history is ultimately about.
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And this is the interesting thing about how we see salvation today. Salvation's about me. It's about my needs.
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It's about my relationship with God, when in reality, if you read the biblical revelation, it stifles the idea that man is the centerpiece of God's creation, that man is the centerpiece of all of God's work.
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Is man important? Yes. Men and women, image of God, valuable, worthy to be loved, all of that dignity is there, but we're not the centerpiece of God's revelation.
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What is the centerpiece of God's revelation is Jesus. He's the substance, everything else happening in the world, all things ultimately moving towards the glory of God and not of us.
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So the substance has arrived, and now Jesus, he just finished with these amazing parables that give us hope.
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He tells us about the word of the kingdom that goes on different soils. He tells us what to expect. There's false believers, and then there's genuine believers that God has prepared to receive this seed.
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Jesus warns the people in his day about the soon coming judgment. It's not new.
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It's not Matthew 13, it's Matthew 10. Jesus telling them they won't finish going through the cities of Israel before the son of man comes in judgment.
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Jesus warning them that they're about to be destroyed. John the Baptist saying to them, who warned you to flee from the wrath about to come?
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The ax is laid at the root of the trees. Jesus is now amping up the parables, telling them really explicitly that you're going to be destroyed, the law breakers, the covenant breakers.
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He tells us about the treasure nature of the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, about giving everything up you're holding in your hands when you see this treasure to embrace it, to sell everything you have, everything you own, to give away everything that you are for this kingdom of God.
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And Jesus promises victory. He talks about a seed that becomes a tree, talks about leaven in three measures of flour.
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It fills the entirety of the loaf. And now here we have Jesus saying, after it's all said and done, have you understood all these things?
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They said to him, yes. And he said to them, therefore, every scribe who's been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
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I want to point you to the fact that Jesus says, therefore, and we know the rule, right?
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Whenever you see therefore, you see what it's there for. So he says, have you understood all these things they said to him?
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Yes. Now, a little later on, it looks like they didn't, but they said yes.
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And he says, okay, therefore, because you've heard these things, because you understand them, he said to them, here's the promise.
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Every scribe who's been trained for the kingdom of heaven, read kingdom of God, is like a master of a house who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
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Imagine now the scene, you have guests, you have this party, this celebration, and here the master of the house brings out these amazing displays, these things that are worthy of glory, right?
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These things I want you to know about. I'm excited about them. Look at what I have.
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And Jesus, interestingly, calls his people that know these parables, they know about the kingdom of God, they've been instructed, he calls them scribes, which is interesting because we know about the
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Pharisees and the scribes. We see numerous examples in our New Testament witness of the Pharisees and the scribes, these professional scribblers of the law, these people who work on being wise in God's commandments and his truth.
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They work diligently at it. They went the wrong direction in many respects, but Jesus refers to his disciples that hear and understand these things as scribes.
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Every scribe who's been trained for the kingdom of heaven, which means that Jesus refers to his people in a way that they would've understood in their day as the professionals of all things that are true, right?
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I mean, the Pharisees and the scribes, whether ... Listen, here's what's important. As Christians, we know the end of the story and we know the little details in between, so when we hear about Pharisees and scribes, what do you picture in your mind, good guys or bad guys?
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Bad guys. Those are the bad guys. But don't forget, I've said this before, when the apostle Paul wants to really promote his resume and demonstrate just how solid he was the moment that he actually pulls rank on people in Philippians chapter three, what does he do?
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He doesn't diss the Pharisees. When he wants to prove that he had so much discipline and zeal about God and his law, he actually draws from his resume as a
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Pharisee trained under Gamaliel. He says, as to the law, I was a Pharisee.
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So we can't forget that in this day, the Pharisees and the scribes are revered as extraordinarily pious and disciplined believers in Yahweh.
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And so when Jesus says here to his people, look, if you understand these things, you are like a scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven.
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You are like the professional scribblers of the law, these people who detail things.
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They have wisdom. They work hard. They're diligent. You want to go to them for answers. You want to actually approach these people, hey, what does
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God say about this? How am I to understand this thing in God's law? How am
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I supposed to understand the world? What does God say? And Jesus says that his people, that would be his disciples, when they understand these things, they are scribes who have been trained for the kingdom of heaven.
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And he says that we are like a master of a house who brings out of his treasure what is new and is old.
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Notice that in this one section here, Matthew 13, Jesus, if we're to use his parables as a key, think about it, if we're to say what's a true interpretation of something, we want to go to Jesus first and say, what did
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Jesus have to say about it, right? So for example, if we want to know what the Bible, how we ought to view the
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Bible as Christians, we ought to say, how did Jesus view the Bible? That's the view we want to have.
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We want to have Jesus' view on the word of God. Well, if we use Jesus' own parables here as a key to understanding his own parable, he says every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
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He's already mentioned treasure in Matthew 13. In Matthew 13, 44, he says, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which a man found and covered up, then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
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Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls who in finding one pearl of great value went and sold all that he had and bought it.
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Jesus says, scribes, trained, you're like masters who bring out of your treasure.
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Here now Jesus, again, in the same chapter, the same passage, is pointing people to the true nature of the kingdom of heaven and God's truth.
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What is it? It's treasure. It's a pearl of great price.
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It's treasure you stumble upon and realize if I have that, everything else
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I have is of no real ultimate value. This is the real treasure. Jesus once again compares his wisdom, his truth with treasure.
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It's not the first time, by the way, that God has done this. In the longest chapter in the
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Bible, Psalm 119, all about God's wisdom, all about God's law, you just can't escape it.
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In Psalm 119, there's a famous section many people have memorized. It says in Psalm 119, 11,
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I have treasured up your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.
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Again, I'll remind you, Psalm 119 is this epic, epic passage about God's word being treasure,
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God's law being desired, God's law as being supreme. It's this entire section that ought to cut every single one of us because we don't think about it in this way.
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In Psalm 119, it says, your word I've treasured up in my heart. In this day, they used to store things by digging them, things that were valuable, they would treasure them up.
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They would dig them up so they could draw from it later. They would put something valuable that was a treasure away, maybe under their bed, they'd cover it up so they can take from it later.
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But that's what they saw as treasure. Take your treasure and you treasure it up, you store it up, you bury it.
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Another example here in Psalm 119, you don't have to walk far, is Psalm 119, 72.
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Look what it says. The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces.
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I was just speaking to Renew two weeks ago about this, and I was trying my best to challenge everybody there and myself with the fact that we don't really think that, do we?
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I mean, do we actually hold this word, the law of God, as more valuable than winning the lottery,
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Powerball, $350 million? Do you believe the law of God is more valuable than that?
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Do you believe the law of God is more valuable than thousands of gold and silver pieces?
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That's how Jesus views the law of God. You want to know what Jesus is like, how does he relate to God's law?
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Read Psalm 119. That's his heart on the law of God, and it ought to be our heart. But it says, the law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces.
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But we think other things are valuable. We have idols.
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We have things that we see are supremely valuable above God's word, more valuable than God's law and his word.
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We sacrifice to and glory in things that are not
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God, things that are not God's law, things that are not God's word. We give all of our time and money to what we see as supremely valuable.
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Start to put your life together and put it down on paper and say, where do
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I invest my heart, my mind, my gifts, my talents? Where do
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I give myself to? What do I give myself to? And it'll display where your
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God is. The psalmist says, the law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces.
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We constantly carry around in our pockets and in our hands things that cannot truly satisfy.
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False gods don't satisfy real spiritual needs. Bootleg wisdom is no wisdom at all.
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Man -centered wisdom is no wisdom at all. There's a story I just saw come up yesterday about a girl in England who is suing the lottery in England because she won.
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I'll say it again. She's suing the lottery in England because she won. This is a girl that's actually quite popular.
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She Instagrams. Is that the proper way to say it, kids? She grams? She instas?
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I don't know. I don't do that. She's super popular because she's always posting stuff about her life.
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She looks like her life is so great. And you know what? She's making everybody jelly, right? Everybody sees her.
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She won the lottery at 17 years old. I don't know how 17 -year -olds are allowed to play the lottery in England, but apparently they are.
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She won $1 .5 million in England playing the lottery and she's just posting, posting, posting her life.
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And it's fabulous and amazing. Look what I'm doing. Look what I'm buying. And now it's all coming crashing down.
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Now she's suing the lottery because she's saying that it destroyed her life. She's saying she just wishes that she can go without money.
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She wishes that her life was different. She wishes she'd never won, that the lottery destroyed her as a young woman because she should have never had that money.
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It wasn't really that great. And here's a woman who's getting a taste of the truth, that false gods don't satisfy real spiritual needs.
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You ever see the stories? I think there's actually shows on it of people who have won the lottery. They've won this great pile of treasure and then they go bankrupt, right?
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Like 200 million, 100 million, 50 million bucks, they go bankrupt. And what do they end up saying?
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Many of them end up saying, I wish I had never come into contact with this. I wish
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I didn't have it. Now many of us are saying, well, you're stupid. I would have done a lot better than that, right?
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Here's the point. Here's people who have tasted and seen that false gods don't satisfy.
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They've tasted and seen that that treasure is not really good. And God invites
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His people, He says, taste and see that the Lord is good. He invites His people to Him.
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He is the treasure. He's the substance of what makes something truly valuable and actually treasure.
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But we pursue false gods, false idols. We don't see it as treasure. And here's what
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I want to just say on this last parable, because we're really done in these parables. I mentioned it when we talked about the parable of the treasure in the field and the pearl of great price.
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I'm not always able to communicate in the way that I want to, but I do want to communicate this.
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Jesus has a view of the kingdom that sees it as truly valuable, as, listen, ultimately valuable, as worth putting your stuff down for.
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Now watch, you can listen to this message right now and you can hear it as platitudes.
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You can listen to this message right now and you can do the autonomic Christian response. What's the response?
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You know when you're at the doctor and you put your leg over, one leg, and they tap your leg and your leg kicks up as a reflex?
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The reflexes or the autonomic response is if somebody flicks your eye, what do your hands do? If somebody flicks you in the eye, where do your hands go?
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They go right up. That's the autonomic response. If someone gets kicked down below, what's the autonomic response, right?
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Your body goes down, your hands go down. Christians have autonomic responses, right? They're the kind of responses that get you to say amen.
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They're the kinds of things that when the preacher says something, you're supposed to say amen and pretend like you believe it.
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When you hear Jesus saying, watch, the kingdom of God is like treasure in a field that you sell everything to get.
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It's like the merchant who goes looking for something to invest in, right, to expand all of his territory and his capital, and he finds one in the market that's a pearl of great price and he sells everything for the one because he sees the value.
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Now the autonomic Christian response is to say yay and amen.
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The kingdom of God is a treasure to me and my heart and my family. You can see
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Jesus calling this all treasure. But here's the challenge.
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This is the rub to it all. Is it to you and to me?
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Is it the kind of thing, watch, where when you see something that is related to the kingdom of God or the word of God, treasure, old and new, is it the kind of thing that you see as more valuable than gold and silver?
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Is it the kind of thing that you're willing to give everything up for? Or do you not want pain?
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Do you not want pain? Pain and pride will block you from seeing the true treasure of the kingdom of God.
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Pain and pride. I don't want to feel pressure.
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I don't want to feel the difficulty. I want to be a part of God's kingdom.
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I want to serve Jesus and I want to do it with platitudes and cavalier statements and just the sort of pithy things that go on Christian t -shirts.
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But I don't want to sacrifice. I don't want to give. I don't want to hurt. Jesus says, the kingdom of God is more valuable than what you're carrying, so drop it.
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Jesus says that this understanding, this wisdom that you have as my people, you are like that person who brings out to display to everybody all of this treasure.
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Look what I have. This is valuable. You're showing it off as a display piece.
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And so the question is, to me, that I ask myself is, do I truly see this understanding and these truths as treasure to be put on display?
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Am I willing to give up my idols, my comforts, my pride? Am I willing to sell everything and give everything away to get this thing that God says is the true treasure?
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Now in Matthew 13, 51 through 52, notice that he says, like a master of a house who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
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Now watch this. Again, using Jesus as the key, Matthew 13, his own words as the interpreter, just move back to 13, 16 through 17.
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16 through 17, here's what Jesus already said. When he talks about God actually blinding people so that they can't understand the message as judgment to them, he says in verse 16, but blessed are your eyes for they see and your ears for they hear.
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For truly I say to you, many prophets and righteous people long to see what you see and did not see it and to hear what you hear and did not hear it.
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Now one thing I'll say about the first part of this, and I think that all of us fall into this trap, and I have to just confess to it.
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I do, and I have to check my heart and confess and repent. And I think especially kids, teenagers, young people raised in Christian homes, you are in the greatest danger of not seeing the true value and blessedness of what
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Jesus says here. Because watch, he says, blessed are your eyes for they see and your ears for they hear.
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You might be raised in a Christian home, beneficiary of everything Jesus.
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In youth group, in Sunday messages, under the hearing of the gospel, having your parents point you to Jesus, you might be the beneficiary of all of this blessing and you just become indifferent to it.
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It's just the way things are. I know about Jesus. I know about his truth.
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I know about his cross. I know about his love and his justice and his gift of eternal life through faith.
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I know it all. And you don't see the divine happiness in it, which by the way is blessed, divinely happy.
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May you be divinely happy because you see and you hear. Notice that there's a contrast.
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You see and hear, but they don't. That's judgment on them, discipline on them.
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But you do see, you do hear. I would to God that every young person in Apologia Church would never lose sight of the fact that it is a gift of God's love and mercy and his grace that you are under the hearing of the gospel at this moment.
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But notice he says this, for truly I say to you, many prophets and righteous people long to see what you see and did not see it and to hear what you hear and did not hear it.
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Now, Jesus says that this master comes out with treasures new and treasures old.
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And Jesus had just said, you see, you hear. He says that many people longed to see what you see and did not see it.
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Now, what's that referring to? You have people who have been waiting in anticipation for Jesus to show up.
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They've been waiting for the fulfillment of every promise of God and they didn't see it.
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Consider for a moment King David. He's a man after what? God's own heart.
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How about Isaiah? You think he's the righteous dude? Isaiah's amazing. How about Ezekiel?
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How about Jeremiah? How about all these amazing prophets of God that lived, I think, in many ways as giants and heroes far surpassing me or you?
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And yet they never saw it. They never got to taste it and see it in their lifetime in front of them.
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They never got to actually look back and say, all that's done now. God kept his promises and now
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I have Jesus. The atonement finished. They didn't see it.
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They couldn't taste it. They did not know it the way that you do. But it was a treasure old.
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They still have this treasure, but they didn't have the new. You see, the promise is in fulfillment now in the
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New Testament. Watch. In Romans chapter one, it's the long sentence of the apostle
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Paul in his explanation of the gospel. Let me just read this to you real fast. Watch. This is his letter to the church in Rome.
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He says this, Paul, a slave of Messiah Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God.
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Here it is. Which he promised God beforehand through his prophets in the
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Holy Scriptures concerning his son who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.
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Jesus Christ, our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
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So what's this saying? God promised beforehand in the
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Holy Scriptures in that old treasure that Messiah was coming, that his kingdom was coming, that salvation was coming.
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And what Paul is saying is now it's arrived. Jesus has finally arrived.
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There's that old treasure, the Old Testament. You see, the gospel of the kingdom is truly a symphony.
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It is a symphony. When you walk into a symphony, you have all these parts and pieces playing together, right?
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It draws you in. It brings tears to your eyes. It'll give you goosebumps.
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But it's every person with their different instrument playing an essential role in this entire symphony.
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And the good news of the kingdom in history is all of these pieces working together to build up to this amazing climax, this story about God and his glory and salvation, old and new, all together in this beautiful symphony.
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You know, Dr. White mentioned a truth that is further explained in the
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New Testament, the Trinity. It's not created in the New Testament.
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God reveals himself to us in old treasure, the Old Testament, and new treasure, the
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New Testament revelation. But in the Old Testament, God had told us that he was the only
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God. And yet in the Old Testament treasure, you have God saying in Genesis 1,
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God said, let us create man in our, plural, image, singular.
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God speaks like this, let us go down and confound their languages. You see the angel of the
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Lord appearing in the Old Testament and being worshiped, the messenger of Yahweh being worshiped.
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They see him as God and yet there's only one God, none before, none after.
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You see, watch, the treasure of the New Testament doesn't give us anything ultimately new and different.
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Dr. White says it's much like walking into a dark room. If you come into a room that's dark, it's dimly lit, you can generally still make out everybody's faces.
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You can see what's around you. Maybe you won't actually trip because you can still see the shapes. It's dimly lit, but the shapes are there.
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Some details of your faces are there. And when the light comes on in the room, it's not revealing anything that wasn't there before.
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Now the light has actually brought it into greater definition. Now I can see more details.
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It's not that it wasn't there before, now it's vivid, now it's bright. Now I can communicate better as to what it really is.
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And the treasure of the old and the new works like that.
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Both are valuable, both are needed, both are wisdom, both are beautiful, but the treasure of the new expands on and lightens up the treasure of the old.
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It's like that dark room lit up. In Romans chapter 1, verses 1 through 7,
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Paul says that this was promised beforehand in the Holy Scriptures. In Romans chapter 3, verse 21, after indicting all of humanity with sin, he says this, but now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it.
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The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. Here's my point.
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You have something entirely unique as a Christian that I want to encourage you never to let go of, never to lose sight of, and never to become indifferent to.
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Don't ever become cavalier to this. You have a revelation of God in history.
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This one revelation, 66 different books and letters, about 40 different authors, spanning a time period of about 2 ,000 years in composition.
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That's powerful. You have people writing in different time periods, different geographical locations, with different cultural settings, with different circumstances, and yet it's one unified revelation of the same
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God, and it's telling the same story over and over and over again.
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It's wisdom, it's truth, it's beauty, it's good, and you have details about Jesus in that old treasure about his person.
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Who is he? He's God. Where's he coming from? He'll be born in Bethlehem. What's he going to accomplish? He's going to be pierced through for their transgressions, crushed for their iniquities.
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He would justify the many as he'd bear their iniquities. He'd bring a kingdom that would never be destroyed.
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He'd be seated on his throne, putting all of God's enemies under his feet. He'd have his hands and his feet pierced.
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That old treasure is still treasure. It's still treasure, but as a scribe in God's kingdom, you have two treasures to present to people, treasures from the old and treasures from the new.
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And brothers and sisters, it is truly treasure. It's worth dropping everything for.
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You see, the revelation of God is treasure because it's true wisdom.
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It's real ultimate treasure. It's true understanding. It is power.
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It is truth. And you might be tempted to miss the glory of that because we live in a time with so much white noise, so many people calling out for their
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God, saying, no, follow my ultimate, follow my wisdom, follow my truth.
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We live in a time where the world has abandoned Jesus, a culture that was created because of Christ has abandoned that foundation that holds the whole thing up.
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And because of that, they think they have understanding, they think they have wisdom, but they can't even tell you what a boy is.
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They can't even tell you what a girl is. They can't even tell you what a mom is, what a dad is.
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They can't tell you what a family is. They say, my word and my
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God and my standard, that's the treasure. That's the thing to pursue.
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That's the thing to sell everything for and come and get this. But they can't even tell you right from wrong.
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They can't even tell you what justice is. People that claim that they're warriors for justice, social justice, can't even give you a definition of what that means.
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What does justice look like? What is truly good? What is not good? What's the standard
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I should look to? And the unbelievers of the world, they think they have treasure, but they have nothing on the treasure old and treasure new from Jesus.
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We are the ones that walk into the world with godly wisdom. We have something that is worth more than thousands of pieces of gold and silver.
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They can't even tell you what a law is. The world says no to Jesus, and then they open the floodgates to the sea of confusion.
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Men dressing like women, women dressing like men, having no standards of what is truly beautiful, promoting things that are actually quite ugly.
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They pretend to know about art, but they can't even develop a civilization around that art.
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Just consider for a moment the people of today in our culture and society that have inherited all of the blessings of a culture of Christ.
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They reject Jesus, and now they want his life. You see, unbelievers are like that.
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We hate God so much that if he came down and we could put our hands on him, we would kill him, and we did.
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We hate the culture of Christ so much that the unbelievers of today, the secular, cultural
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Marxists, the humanists of today, they want to revolt against Jesus and his authority and the culture that he created, and so they, as my friend says, they revolt against him.
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Their ultimate goal is him, and so they attack him via a proxy.
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The culture of the West, the culture of Christ that produced the culture of the
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West, not imperfection, guys, we have a lot of work to do, but all of the blessings we have today are truly, without question, from the wisdom of God in the scriptures, and the unbelievers of today say no to Jesus, so they attack him via a proxy, and that's the culture of the
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West. So what do they do? They say, not his treasure, we want our treasure, but they can't even establish a civilization.
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Christianity, the culture of Christ, developed architecture, science, beautiful art and music.
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Christianity created a culture, established justice and law, again, not perfectly.
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Jesus has some time to go while he puts his enemies under his feet, but the unbelievers say no, we have the treasure, but they can't even tell you what art is.
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When they say something is art, they throw paint up onto a canvas, something that my nine -year -old can do, and they sit and they stare for hours.
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You have a woman dropping paint from balloons at a museum in New York from her private area onto a canvas saying, that's beautiful.
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They can't even tell you what art truly should look like. They have no truth. The unbeliever says no to Jesus' treasure.
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They reject his law, his word, his wisdom, his understanding, and his truth, and so they say,
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I want my truth, not his, and you say, tell me about it. What is your truth? What's that look like?
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And they say, well, your truth is your truth, my truth is my truth. And there are no absolutes.
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Brothers and sisters, that's not true. That's not beautiful. That's not lovely.
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That's not good. That's perversion of the truth. That's chaos.
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That's not wisdom. The unbeliever says no to Jesus' wisdom and understanding.
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His treasure is old and new, and they can't even develop a meaningful ethical system.
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Do you know that up until 1992, up until 1992, homosexuality was against the law across the
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United States, and from 1992 till today, now we have gay mirage stipulated as good and lawful across these
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United States. And we go from one perversion to the next, where people now are suggesting that maybe pedophilia isn't so much of a perversion.
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They have no wisdom. They have no truth. They have no treasure old and new.
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They have no understanding. Unbelievers say no to Jesus' treasure, old and new, and they try to develop a meaningful worldview and culture, and yet it wasn't the unbelievers' position that gave us science.
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It wasn't the unbelievers' position. It wasn't their treasure that gave you your smartphone. Who gave you your smartphone?
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That was Jesus via a Christian named Samuel Morse, who was, by the way, a
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Calvinist and a post -millennialist. How do you like them apples? Your smartphone now exists today.
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Your internet exists today, not because of a culture of humanism and secularism.
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It exists today because of a man who was brought up in the Word of God, received the treasure old and new from his mom and dad.
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He was catechized. He saw the world in a particular way. He engaged the world in a particular way, and now you have your internet.
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Well, you're welcome, world. The unbelievers say no, no to Jesus' wisdom and his treasure, old and new, and yet they can have no meaningful standard of logic.
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They can't even tell you that A is A. They tell you, no, your thinking isn't unique.
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It's just the byproduct of chemical things happening in your brain. You're just simply fizzing chemical responses.
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You're not even thinking. You have no free will. Ultimately, you can't help thinking what you're thinking right now.
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You're just a bag of biological stuff with chemical reactions firing.
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They have no meaningful basis for logic or math or family.
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They can't even tell you what a family is, and we wonder why Jesus can say, you're like the master of a house with this understanding, a scribe who pulls out these things for display, treasures old and new.
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The revelation of God is truly treasure, old and new. And last thing
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I'll say here, why emphasize the old and the new? I think it's important to point out that Jesus doesn't dissect the revelation of God the way that many evangelicals in the
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West dissect it, where we say the New Covenant, the New Testament record, that's the new treasure, and the old is sort of fiat currency now.
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It's really not currency. It's not really capital in its entirety.
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Now we focus on this treasure and not this one. Notice that Jesus says his people, his disciples, you have wisdom like a scribe, and you have a treasure to put on display for your guests, old and new.
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You see, the New Testament revelation assumes the goodness of God's word, the goodness of God's law, and the consistency and abiding validity of his revelation in the new.
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But it's like that light that comes on in the dimly lit room. The new treasure ignites the old treasure and it gives all of it to you in all of its glory and full display, the treasure old and new.
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Believers have words from the living God. God says in Deuteronomy 29, 29, the secret things belong to the
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Lord our God, but what he has revealed belongs to us and our, what, children.
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God has given you revelation, he has given you treasure, he's given you wisdom.
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You don't know everything and neither do I. Some things are God's secret counsel, but what he has given is a gift from him to you and it is truly divine treasure worth putting everything else down for.
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It's the kind of treasure that gives you certainty. It's the kind of treasure that gives you understanding. It's the kind of treasure that gives you hope.
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Paul says in Romans 3 .31, do we then make void the law through faith?
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Because of the new treasure, do I do away with the old treasure? Because of the new treasure, do
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I void the old treasure? Paul says, no, he says, actually, we establish the law.
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We've got treasures old and treasures new. We have the treasure in the
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New Testament of the spirit of God indwelling his people with a new heart, with his law written within us, ignited, empowered by the spirit himself to obey
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God's law, to tell people wonderful things from God's law. And so I want to encourage you as your brother, as a pastor over these people, show your treasure.
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Show your treasure. Don't hide your treasure under a bushel.
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Don't hide your light. Jesus says, I want you to think about this, these truths, the kingdom of God, this wisdom.
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I want you to think about your understanding in this way, as the person who brags on his treasure, who brings it out as display pieces before the guests in their home.
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Do we see it like that? Do we so fear the world and their opposition that we don't actually treat the treasure of God old and new like the treasure that it is?
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Do you bring the treasure old and new out as a display piece to all your guests?
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Do you bring this wisdom into the conversation like it's the treasure that it is?
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Because Jesus says, this is my identification of you, my disciple. You're like a scribe with understanding, a master of a house who brings out treasures old and new, both treasure, set them out as display pieces.
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Brag on this treasure, not your understanding, but on the treasure itself.
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Put it out as a display piece. Preach the good news of the kingdom. Tell the world about the true treasure that is actually
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Christ. Put it on display for the world to see. Let's follow him as he's doing that in the world.