Introduction John 4: Samaritans

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This evening, we will be working out of the Gospel of John, John chapter 4.
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Gospel of John, John chapter 4. I mentioned briefly this morning, but as by way of introduction,
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I need to explain why is it that when we began our series on manuscript
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P45, we started in John chapter 10. Well, primarily because, as you saw in the handouts that I gave to you, that of all the remnants of P45, John chapters 10 and 11 are the fullest.
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Those are the largest fragments of the manuscript that we continue to have to this day.
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Everything else is going to be smaller and less full and less readable than those particular sections.
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And of course, when I think of John chapter 10, when I think especially of the section around the
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Good Shepherd part, that's one of the most incredibly compact, in -depth summaries of Christian belief.
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The deity of Christ, atonement, election, everything, it's all there. So, that's a good place to start, there in John chapter 10.
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Well, we only have John chapter 10 and 11. There aren't any fragments of chapters 12 and beyond.
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But, there is one other small fragment of the
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Gospel of John. We could have gone, I could have gone from here to Matthew, gone to Mark, gone to Luke.
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There's entire sections there. And there's chapters in Acts. And we'll get there, eventually, in the same way that we'll eventually finish church history in Sunday school too.
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Eventually. But, there's one little, teeny, tiny fragment of the
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Gospel of John. I'm going to lose this. There we go. I added it up today.
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In fact, I don't even have a picture that I could present to you as a nice little bulletin handout.
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I'm sorry. It's not in. This little fragment is separated from the rest of the manuscript.
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So, it's not at the Chester Beaty Library in Dublin. I believe it's in Europe someplace. And I added up today.
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I looked at my sources. And I added up today. There are a grand total on the two sides of this little, teeny, tiny fragment.
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A grand total of 58 letters. Fifty -eight letters.
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And they're found from the end of John, Chapter 4, beginning between verses 51 and 54.
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And then, in the middle of John, Chapter 5, beginning at verse 21. Fifty -eight letters.
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And they don't impact any textual readings. There are no textual variants that it's cited in.
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But, I did make up the rules for this sermon series.
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And if P45 contains any portion of a chapter, then we get to preach on that chapter.
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And so, since it has a section of Chapters 4 and 5, and there's some really incredible stuff.
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Especially in Chapter 5, but also here in Chapter 4. The interaction with this
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Samaritan woman is extremely useful. Then, we will go ahead and we'll cover John, Chapters 4 and 5 as well.
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Just to make sure we've covered everything. And if you're ever challenged on whether, in your church, every chapter of P45 was ever preached from.
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Like, you're ever going to be challenged about something like that. You can say with honesty, we covered it all.
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We soldiered through the entire thing. So, John, Chapter 4 is where we will be working for a while.
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And then, of course, trying to get through John, Chapter 5 is going to be a real challenge. Because there is just so much in -depth theology that is to be found in that chapter.
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But let's remind ourselves, just by way of introduction this evening. Just an introduction to get us oriented and going for, basically, next
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Sunday morning. Because, Lord willing, we will continue with this text next
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Sunday morning. I was scheduled to speak next Sunday evening.
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But an opportunity has opened up to where I will have the opportunity of doing a debate on the subject of the crucifixion.
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With a Muslim apologist and speaker in Birmingham in the
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United Kingdom. And if you're familiar with Birmingham, Birmingham is a heavily
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Islamic area there in the UK. And it will be the first time
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I've had the opportunity of ministering there. And to get there on time, and the trains, and so on and so forth,
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I need to leave next Sunday evening on the British Airways flight out of Sky Harbor.
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And so, Brother Callahan will be ministering to us next Sunday evening.
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So, I'll be in the morning. Evening, Pastor Fry is supposed to be back, as you know. So, that is the plan as it stands right now.
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And so, introduction to John chapter 4. You probably, when you think once again of this chapter in the
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Gospel of John, immediately your mind turns to the encounter with the
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Samaritan woman. And you also sort of recognize that in the
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Gospel of John, while still early on, it comes after probably the most well known portion of the
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Gospel of John, and that is John chapter 3. And the connection between 3 and 4 is somewhat difficult to necessarily establish in most people's thinking.
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But when you do consider it, you remember that there is some discussion as to whether the end of John chapter 3 should be in red letters or not.
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And what I mean by that is scholars disagree as to whether the final portions of John chapter 3 are what
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Jesus said to Nicodemus, or they're John's commentary on what Jesus said to Nicodemus.
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Now, of course, whether it's printed in red or black doesn't make any difference. It's theanoustos.
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It's God -breathed. It's authoritative. We don't believe in hyper -red -letterism around here.
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But that is something to keep in mind when interpreting that particular portion of Scripture.
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And in that, you have the enunciation of, in essence, what it means to believe in Christ, why we need to be focused upon Him, and the fact that this message and the work and ministry of Christ is going to be for the entire world.
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And so when a Jewish person would hear that, what would the thought be for them?
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Well, on one level, you could say that for the Jews, you had the
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Jews and the rest of the world. The Jews and the rest of the world. But there was one sort of exception to that rule.
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And it's something that I think will be helpful to us as we seek to understand
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John chapter 4, is to remember a little bit about the history that brings us the people who are called the
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Samaritans. The Samaritans. Where did the Samaritans come from? Why is it that down here a little bit later on in the text, in verse 9 specifically, when
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Jesus begins speaking to the Samaritan woman and asks her to give him a drink, her response is that she is a woman and a
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Samaritan, and then you have the commentary for the Jews had no relations with, no interaction with the
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Samaritans. And so when you would look at a map, you would be able to see that Samaria is situated between Galilee and the area of Judea around Jerusalem.
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And hence, it was the practice of the Jews in Galilee when they went up to Jerusalem, which actually wasn't going up to Jerusalem, it was going down to Jerusalem, but everything's up to Jerusalem.
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Biblically, everything's up to Jerusalem, whether you're going uphill, downhill, north, south, east, west, doesn't matter.
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Jerusalem's the center, and so you go up to Jerusalem and you go down from Jerusalem, whether you're going up or down, doesn't matter. So when the
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Jews in Galilee would go to Jerusalem, they would go a circuitous route.
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Now remember, it's not like flying in an airplane, it's not like, well, we'll go 20 minutes out of our way in the car.
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You are walking generally by foot. And so to cross the
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Jordan and to go through the desert and then cross back over to enter into Judea was an extension of your trip.
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It would have been much easier to go through Samaria, but the pilgrimage routes didn't do so.
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Why? Because from the Jewish perspective, the
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Samaritans were half -breeds. They were a religious abomination to the pure worship of Jehovah God that took place in Jerusalem.
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Why? Well, this is where we need to know a little something about history, a little something about what happened in the past.
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You recall that in the history of the
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Jewish people, there had been the division between the northern and southern kingdoms after the days of Solomon.
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His foolish son ends up dividing the kingdom, and so you have
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Judah and you have Israel, the northern tribes and the southern tribes.
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And in the 8th century, the Assyrians come against the northern tribes and they destroy the nation.
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They carry the nation away captive. And one of the mechanisms that they had designed to control their conquered territories was to bring people in from elsewhere and to encourage intermarriage.
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It was always a problem with ancient civilizations and ancient empires when you would conquer a new area.
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The real trouble was you needed your front -line troops, you needed your military power to continue that expansion.
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And if you had an area where there might be, primarily due to religious zealotry, problem people, well, leaving a legion here for the
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Romans and a legion there ends up sapping all of your strength. So what do you do?
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Well, different empires found different ways of doing things. The Assyrians were a particularly brutal people.
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And so they didn't mind dragging people out of their homes and dragging them hundreds or thousands of miles a different direction and forcing them to live someplace else and prohibiting them from going back to their native homeland.
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It didn't really matter to them. You might say, well, why not just slaughter everybody?
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Well, that then leaves the entire area ruined and you can't get any taxes out of dead people.
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And so there was an economic reason as well. And so what had happened, when the northern kingdom had been conquered by the
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Assyrians, they engaged in this activity and they brought in non -Jewish people.
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They brought in people who were not of the tribes of Israel to intermarry with the people they allowed to stay.
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And hence, in the Jewish mind, remember, the southern kingdom does not become taken until the
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Babylonians do so quite some time after the northern kingdom has already fallen.
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And so the northern area around Samaria, Samaria being, they were called
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Samaritans because Samaria is the capital there, had been the capital before it was taken by the
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Assyrians. From the Jewish perspective, these individuals become unclean.
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Now what happens is a hybrid form of Yahweh worship develops there in Samaria.
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And in fact, part of the background to the discussion between Jesus and the
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Samaritan woman goes back to the fact that you have a competitive development of religious centers of devotion in the northern kingdom.
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And the development of a whole new, not so much theology, but a theology of worship.
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So much so that traditions begin to develop that the proper place of worship is not
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Jerusalem, but it's actually Samaria. And there was Mount Gerizim, and they actually had places of worship that they established in these areas and developed an entire theology
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And it's very clear that Jesus was aware of this, not just simply because Jesus was aware of everything, but because in that day, there had been warnings amongst the
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Jewish people, okay, this is what these Samaritans will tell you, they'll tell you that the actual place of worship should be here, it's not should be at the temple, in Jerusalem, and they've got their own traditions and things like that.
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And so clearly there was tension, religiously speaking, between these two populations, and hence the idea from the believing pharisaical perspective is these are in essence apostates.
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And when you think about it, when you think about it, who do we have the most focus upon when we think, you know, as far as the amount of attention that we invest in theological controversy, it's not the
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Hindus, okay, it's not the Buddhists, it's certainly not the
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Muslims, even though we hear much more about the Muslims, and you probably know more about Islam than most congregations do, thanks to what
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I do, but still, those are folks out there. First people we think about are the
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Armenians. And from the world's perspective, that's because, well, you know, they're pretty close, you know, or maybe it's the
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Presbyterians. Oh, get a good old baptism debate going, right, you know?
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And of course it's the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, so what are we thinking about?
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We're thinking about Roman Catholicism. And it's generally the religious movements and traditions that look much more like yours but are different in particulars that draw our attention and that frequently draw our ire and condemnation more than the ones that are just completely different, often because we're not having much in the way of interaction with those perspectives that are way out there someplace.
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You might know a Buddhist at work or something like that, but it's not like you're having a regular interaction.
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But we have regular interaction with Armenians and Presbyterians and King James -onlyists and all sorts of people like that.
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And hence, very often, we have much more of a focus there than we have upon those that have much greater differences with us when it comes to our beliefs concerning God.
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And so that's the case today. Back then, in light of the reality of travel being so much less a possibility, so much slower, so much more difficult, takes so much more time, obviously when you have an entire religious body that has developed similar but alternative traditions about Moses and about where certain things happened.
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And they're just... we've got to go around. It would be so much easier to get to Jerusalem if we could just go through Samaria.
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We'd cut off days of travel, but we won't do that because these people are just despicable.
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Now that gives you a little bit of a background, not only to what happens here, and also sort of gives you some idea that I don't think the disciples were overly comfortable in this situation either.
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I mean, if even after the Resurrection, Jesus is still having to correct misapprehensions they have about the nature of the
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Messiah. I mean, even if at the Resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, God has to send down visions to Peter to smack the guy around so that he would start sharing the
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Gospel with Gentiles, obviously, these folks were deeply, deeply entrenched in these
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Jewish traditions, and so they were not enjoying the fact that Jesus had said that it was necessary to go through Samaria.
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Necessary to go through Samaria. We're not told why. Why was it necessary? Well, in the sovereignty of God, it was necessary because Jesus needed to have this conversation with the
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Samaritan woman, so we could learn a lot from it. But as to the specifics that required this particular route, we are not told.
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But I'm sure that the disciples were not comfortable as they crossed those imaginary lines, those imaginary borders, and felt their religious identity being challenged by having to go, and for example, buy food from people that they, well, they just don't want to have anything to do with them and vice versa.
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And so what you have here is a situation where because of, well, we've studied through Nehemiah.
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We know that Nehemiah did not allow those who had married other people outside of Israel to be priests and to enter into the temple precincts and to join in the rebuilding and things like that.
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Well, this had eventually led to, over time, a tremendous, well, wall.
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It wasn't a wall that you had to climb over. It was a cultural and religious wall that had developed.
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And it seems to me that right after this tremendous annunciation in John 3, that God so loved the world that the first barrier that had to be overcome was right there dividing the
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Jewish people between Galilee and Judea, and it's called Samaria.
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And here's the first place where you have God breaking down the barriers that men had erected culturally and religiously and saying, no, remember, even the
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Messiah himself walked straight into Samaria and ministered to that woman and brought repentance and faith to that woman there in Samaria.
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How come Peter didn't remember that? How come the apostles didn't remember that? Well, it's not that they didn't remember that.
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It's that when we have our religious traditions, it's so easy for us to reinterpret everything, even when
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God pours out his grace in abundance, to reinterpret things in such a fashion that we don't see their significance.
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We don't see their significance. And so when we think about what had happened and we start to listen to Jesus' conversation, he's going to say to the woman, he did not say, oh, well, you know what, you have your views and we have our views.
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He didn't say, let's have a kumbaya moment. Let's just put our differences aside.
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He actually said, salvation is from the Jews. He actually did specifically repudiate the false traditions, the false narratives that had developed amongst the
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Samaritan people that initially were a rejection of what
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God had led Nehemiah and the others to do, and that is to maintain the proper understanding of God's law.
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Their traditions were in error. But isn't it amazing how easy it is for us to look at someone whose traditions are in error and become hardened in our own dislike of them and start to, well, what's the parable that Jesus told?
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A lot of you are probably already thinking about it. The parable of the Good Samaritan. We have hospitals named after the
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Good Samaritan. And very often we don't realize just how harsh a phrase that was when
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Jesus told the story. It was a rebuke of the people who had the truth.
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Jesus said, no, you're right. We are right. Salvation is from the
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Jews. But the attitude that so often comes from being right is a holier -than -thou,
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God -dishonoring attitude that the Bible condemns over and over and over again.
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And when you see the attitude that the Jews had developed toward even those who were the closest to them, the
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Samaritans, they were their, well, what does Jesus teach? Their neighbors. But they had shunned them.
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They would have nothing to do with them, let alone the
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Gentiles, let alone those outside of that area. It is a difficult balance to maintain, to be zealous for God's truth, to be zealous to honor
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His law, to not compromise, to not give in to the spirit of the age that says, here is
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God's divine truth. That's the one side.
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But so often in our sin and in our fallenness, we can have the pure motivation to stand firm on the truth, and it results in an ugly, pharisaical, uncharitable, unkind spirit on the part of those that possess that truth.
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You know the story when the disciples come back, they're like, what is Jesus doing? What is this guy doing?
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Doesn't he know? Doesn't he realize? And it shows that even amongst the disciples, and yes, this is earlier on in the ministry, and they hadn't heard a lot of Jesus' preaching yet,
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I suppose. We could make excuses all along, but the reality is, the disciples are scandalized.
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They're scandalized at the fact that the Messiah would show such love and concern and mercy for those that, even though they would not necessarily have said this out loud, they came to the conclusion because of their experience and their culture and their religion, these people were not worth
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God's grace. You see, it's real easy to see it in the
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Pharisees. The elite Pharisees talked about the Amhaaretz, the people of the land, and the people of the land were beneath them because only those who had the robes and the tassels and had memorized all the laws and did everything every single day, they were the only ones that truly had
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God's grace and mercy, looked down upon the people of the land. Even if they followed them in their teachings, they're just not as blessed as I am.
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It's so easy for us to see it, and Jesus condemned that kind of attitude with no uncertain words.
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Look at Matthew chapter 23. It's easy to see that. It's not quite as easy, or maybe
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I should say it's more uncomfortable for us to look at how that same kind of Pharisaical attitude could exist amongst us ourselves.
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Yeah, folks, it can happen to us. Believe it or not, it can happen to us. Now, maybe no one in this room has ever experienced this, but I'm going to have to confess it's pretty easy for us to look down upon that poor, benighted
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Arminian and to think that, oh, I'm so glad that God has, in his mercy, revealed to me the great truths of the tulip.
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Ever had that feeling? Maybe on a bad spiritual day, that maybe
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God loves you just a little bit more than he does that poor Arminian? It's very easy for us to do that.
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It's very easy for us to slip into those types of attitudes. I don't think
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God's pleased with that attitude. If we really do confess and profess that outside of God's grace, none of us would have anything, then what do any of us have to boast of?
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And how often has God's truth been maligned because of the spirit with which it was communicated to others?
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So I know if someone is in their own tradition and you bring the word of God to bear, they may accuse you of all sorts of things, but I'm talking to us.
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I'm talking in our situation. How often do we recognize in our more honest moments an inappropriate kind of reformed pride that is not appropriate in God's eyes?
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But let's move outside of that realm. How often is it that we look at those in the world and again we struggle between the two sides?
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We want to walk in purity. We cannot compromise on God's truth. We must say this activity, this mindset, this worldview, it's sinful in God's sight.
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And then we use that as an excuse to look down our noses at those who engage in that kind of thinking, those who remain trapped in that way of thought.
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And rather than having compassion, as Jesus had compassion for the Samaritan woman, as the good
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Samaritan had compassion for the man who had fallen amongst the thieves, instead of having compassion and living as redeemed individuals, recognizing that unless it were for the grace of God, we would be in exactly the same position they are in, we use that as an excuse to draw our robes around ourselves and to go by on the other side of the road, the other side of the hallway, the other side of the lunchroom, whatever it might be, lest we become dirtied by having interaction with those, those people.
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It's a hard balance, but we know our own hearts. We know our own hearts.
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And we can always pray to God, give me wisdom, I do not want to put myself in a situation where in any way
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I would compromise your truth, but at the same time, I have to be one that is willing to communicate your truth, and I want to do so as a vessel of mercy,
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I want to do so as a redeemed person, I want to do so with true love in my heart. And that really is the question.
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Do we have love in our hearts? When we engage in whether it's theological dialogue with people that we identify truly as Christians, or whether it's in any other situation that we face, with people that we recognize have an ungodly worldview, have an ungodly theology, whatever it might be, what is the attitude in our heart?
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Is it one of, well, I've been taught I sort of have to do this, and so I'm going to give you a tract, or I'm going to say something to you?
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Or do you really desire to see this person come to know the truth? Only the
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Spirit of God can give us that balance and give us that passion. We dare not.
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We dare not. When you look at the New Testament and you ask the question, what attitude does
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God condemn most strongly? The attitude he condemns most strongly is those who have the truth, and they hold on to it like it's their own personal possession, and they refuse to show mercy and grace to those who do not have the truth.
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That's what is condemned. That's what Jesus identifies those people as, whited sepulchers and hypocrites and children of wrath.
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We want to avoid that, and I think as we consider what happened with the development of the division, the wall, the religious wall that developed between the
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Jews and the Samaritans, and how Jesus simply walked right through the middle of that wall, just knocked a big old redemptive hole right through it.
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Maybe we can ask the question of ourselves, Lord, do
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I often have the wrong attitude? Do I often have an attitude that is displeasing in your sight?
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Help me to remain absolutely firm and committed and passionate about your truth, but may that passion never become something that makes me passionless about the lost.
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If your passion for the truth makes you passionless for the lost, it's lost its way. It's become misdirected.
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It's become misdirected. I think that's the first time that I've only read two or three phrases out of a couple of different verses, but there's so much of the background that ends up coming out in subtle ways in the conversation between Jesus and the woman there at the well,
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Sychar, that we need to know what those things are, and I think just considering those background issues will help us greatly, not only in understanding the text, but also in making application today.
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We need to be salt and light, and we need to be passionate people. We should not be known as the chosen frozen.
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We should be known as those with a living, loving passion for the gospel of Jesus Christ and a willingness to present it to anyone when given the opportunity of doing so.
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Let's pray together. Our great heavenly
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Father, we do thank you for your word, and we do thank you for the warnings that it provides to us, and as we think of what happened long ago in the developments historically with the
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Samaritans and the Jews, Lord, may we never be people who draw your truth around us in robes of righteousness and look down upon others.
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May we always see ourselves as the ones who have been so graced by you that we simply desire to share that message with others and to see you pour that same grace and mercy into their lives as well.
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We do ask that you would use us in this coming week, that we would be instruments in your hand, that you would be honored and glorified in our lives.