Matthew 5: 17-20, August 25, 2024

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Every time I sit down to read and prepare and write one of these sermons,
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I get so excited. I want to come back and tell
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Amy every time, I'm like, man, this one is going to be so good. And it has nothing to do with me, right?
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It has to do with the fact that every time I crack open the Bible and I start to look deeply at what it says, I'm just amazed by what
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God has done. And I'm amazed what Jesus has done for us. And it's just so exciting to be able to look at it and to spend time in depth in it, helping us understand it.
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Thank you very much, Elvin. And because of that, because of that, we continue, we continue to go verse by verse through Matthew.
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I mean, some people, some people think that's crazy. Some people say you've been doing this there how long and you're only how far, but every bit of this
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I believe is profitable for us. So we're going to continue to go this way. So today we're in Matthew chapter five, and I've been,
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I've been working hard to put in the bulletin what the verses are for the sermon, because I do know them before we get in here.
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So we're in Matthew five, verses 17 through 20. So let me just read these verses to you.
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This is following on from salt and the light says, do not think that I came to abolish the law or the prophets.
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I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill for truly I say to you until heaven and earth passed away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the law until all is accomplished.
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Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.
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But whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
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For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.
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So believe it or not, as we move into this section of verses, we're still in what can be considered an introduction, or this is still a little bit of a transition from where we've been to where we're ultimately going here very soon.
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So what we've seen so far in the Sermon on the Mount is what a Christian's life should look like.
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That's what we saw in the Beatitudes. And then practically, if your life looks like what we see in the
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Beatitudes, we see what that should look like once you go out into the world. And that's where we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
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So these are the teachings that we've had from Jesus so far. But if you remember something that I've said all along, it's that the teachings that Jesus was giving were pretty shocking.
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They were surprising to people. They're just different, unlike anything that they had heard before.
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And possibly even more significant, they were very much unlike what was being taught by the religious leaders at the time.
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There was a lot of information that Jesus was giving that was very different from the
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Pharisees. And obviously the Pharisees are named in this passage, so we're going to look at them just a little bit.
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But the practical outcome of this, the fact that it was so different, the fact that it was in contrast to what they had heard, this was leading the people listening to ask questions about what exactly it was that Jesus believed and questions about what
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Jesus was teaching. But before we get to the questions they were asking, it's important that we consider some other things about Jesus as well.
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So we're looking at this, we haven't gotten to some of the other teachings or some of the other things that were said about Jesus and Matthew, because we're going this way.
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But you've read all of it before. You know what it says, so that will be a review. But we see stuff like Jesus was teaching with authority.
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Now at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, the very end, which we'll get to in several months probably, Matthew 7, 29, it says, they were astonished for he was teaching them as one having authority and not as their scribes.
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But what we have to remember about this is we know who Jesus is and we see Jesus as, you know, exactly who he is, the
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Son of God, but they didn't. He wasn't the traditional rabbi.
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He didn't have the education or the training or the background that any of these
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Jews would have expected him to have. In fact, he sort of came out of nowhere because his life was basically lived anonymously for 30 years.
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And then even when people started to know who he was, they just saw him as a carpenter before he started out in his ministry.
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He was nobody special as far as anybody there was concerned because he didn't train with well -known rabbis or anything like that.
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So he was something of an unknown quantity. So we have this kind of anonymous person from out of nowhere teaching things that were different from what was normal and even contradicting things that the supposedly righteous religious teachers were teaching.
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So that led to a lot of questions from the people who were listening to Jesus or a lot of questions from the people who encountered these teachings or who are now sitting and listening to the
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Sermon on the Mount. Because not only did he teach different things, and among these things were the idea of grace, the grace of God, the mercy of God, and the love of God.
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He showed that in the parable of the prodigal son. But he also didn't spend all his time on the law and the minutia of the law.
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So not only that, he taught different things, but he acted different too. So this is just so confusing for a lot of people.
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How did he act different? Well, we know this. We know that he hung around with all the people that the religious leaders didn't want to hang around with.
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He ate with sinners. And we know this because in our culture today, all the people who want to continue living in the sin that they are living in that they love will say this to us.
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They'll say, well, Jesus ate with sinners. And I'll tell you every time that Jesus did eat with sinners and Jesus went to sinners and Jesus took the message of the gospel to sinners so that sinners would be changed, not so that sinners would feel good about themselves because Jesus came to their house.
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So it's not an issue of Jesus telling people that you're okay just the way you are, because that's just not true.
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So he acted different by hanging out with the wrong crowd. But then he also, he also seems to have gone out of his way to violate a lot of the religious customs and traditions that people at the time associated with the religious leaders.
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Ceremonial washing, stuff like that, his disciples got in trouble for not doing that. Even healing on the
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Sabbath, I mean, that's a great story that we'll get to someday where he healed somebody on the Sabbath and he did it right in front of the
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Pharisees so they would see it and know that he was doing it. So once again, people looked at what he was doing and they had questions.
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So the questions they're asking are, what does this person believe about the Scriptures? Has he come to completely do away with the entire religious system and the traditions that we have?
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Is he completely dispensing with what at least the people had been taught was
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God's holy law? These are the things that they see. And it's not, it's not necessarily a weird question to ask because they are expecting a
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Messiah to come and really tear down a lot of the institutions that they were familiar with. Now they probably weren't expecting him to tear down the religious institutions, but instead the governmental institutions.
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But again, Jesus is not only teaching radical new concepts and acting in ways that rabbis aren't supposed to act.
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But another distinction that we make with him is he not only taught new things, but he went out of his way to criticize the wrong doctrine of the
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Pharisees. This is another place where we have to, we have to tread carefully.
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Remember, this all comes after the beatitude. So we've learned the foundation of how we are to do this.
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We come with humility, with meekness. We're peacemakers. But remember, meekness also involves standing up for what is right.
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It doesn't involve standing up for yourself or your reputation, but it involves standing up for what is right.
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So Jesus does go after the teaching of the Pharisees and he tells them how they're wrong.
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It is okay to call out obviously unscriptural teachings that are masquerading as Christianity.
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Now, Jesus, obviously he knows that these things are being said about him.
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So these are all, everything that's just so different about him. He knows the questions that people are asking.
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And that's why as we get into these verses, he states very plainly right up front, verse 17, he says, do not think, do not think that I came to abolish the law and the prophets.
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So he wants to make sure that everybody knows, look, I'm not getting rid of this stuff.
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Now, the phrase I have come is also very important. I mean, that is also, you know, a phrase that hints at, or not even hints at, it blatantly states that he has arrived to, you know, bring this new, new form of religion to them.
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This correct form of religion. But the point he's making is that he didn't come to get rid of the
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Holy Scriptures. He didn't come to get rid of the things that these Jews were familiar with.
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Instead, he says he comes to fulfill it. And he goes a step further in verse 18, where he reassures people, or he also probably threatens people, depending on where you're coming from, that not even the smallest letter or stroke will pass away from the law until the heavens or the earth passed away, which is essentially the end times that we're talking about here.
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And he's being a little bit hyperbolic, not exactly hyperbolic, but he's making sure that it's clear that he hasn't come to get rid of even what is considered to be the most insignificant part of the law or the
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Scriptures that they're aware of. He's upholding and fulfilling all of it. And that word fulfilling is something that we're really going to get into in a little bit.
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Now, verse 19, that one contains a little bit of a veiled threat.
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This is something else that'll be elaborated on in future passages. But he tells the people listening to him that if anyone annuls or ignores or cancels even the least of the teachings of the law, or they teach others to do the same, they will be considered the least in the kingdom of heaven.
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And the religious leaders at the time, one of the things that they would discuss and debate and have academic conversations about was which of the laws were more important than the others, because there were some that they saw as weightier than others.
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So these are the things they discussed. Jesus is telling them, look, no, the whole law is important. And you can't teach anyone that it's less important or even to ignore it altogether.
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And then verse 20, this is one of the most interesting ones to me, because it says that his hearers must be more righteous than the scribes or the
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Pharisees, or they won't enter the kingdom of heaven. And remember, these religious teachers were seen as the most righteous people in all of society.
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They were just experts at the law. Now, these four cases, or these,
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I'm sorry, these four verses are a case where the meaning of what's going on here, what
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Jesus says, it comes through pretty plainly, pretty plainly. And it doesn't require a lot of parsing individual words or looking too deeply into the
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Greek or exactly what's being said. But the real depth of the meaning comes from the context.
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It comes from the historical context. It comes from the religious context. It comes from, for us, the surrounding context of the rest of the scripture.
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So what we wanna do here today is look a little bit more deeply into this and look more deeply into how the religious leaders and their followers view the law.
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We wanna talk about what it means for Jesus to have fulfilled the law.
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And part of the reason this is so exciting is because I think, and I hope, that this is gonna answer quite a few questions that a lot of us have.
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And I hope that it will give us a better understanding and a better appreciation of the
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Old Testament. So let's get in first to the law.
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And kind of specifically what I wanna examine here is what they understood to be the law, because there's a lot of different things going on here.
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So first, we have to clarify. He says in verse 17, the law and the prophets,
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I do not think that I've come to abolish the prophets. Now, when he says the law and the prophets, he's referring to what we would consider to be the entirety of the
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Old Testament, all of the Old Testament books that we have in scripture. And these are the only holy scriptures that his hearers would have had access to.
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So we're gonna pull the prophets back into this in just a little bit. But first, we'll look at the law.
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So when Jesus refers to the law, he uses it often and he uses it as kind of a general term.
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And there's probably four different things that he could mean when he says the law.
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So the first one, often when he used the term, the law, it would refer to the 10 Commandments specifically.
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It could also have referred to the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses.
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So that's two. Three could have referred to the entire Old Testament. But the fourth meaning is the one that we're gonna get into here.
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Now, sometimes when he referred to the law, he also could have been referring to the traditions of the
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Pharisees, the rabbinical scribal traditions. And what these are, are things that had been added to scripture over time.
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And this is where we really get into something interesting and something that might start sounding familiar in a lot of ways.
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Because, well, when we think about the Pharisees, first of all, we talk about them badly all the time, right?
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We talk about them as the examples of just religion as an institution, maybe.
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And people who took advantage of others, people who loved the things that went along with the religion more than God.
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But one thing we have to give them credit for is that they were undoubtedly experts on scripture.
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They knew it inside and out. I mean, they knew all the trivia answers and they just knew everything about scripture.
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So you couldn't trick them with questions about doctrine or something like that because they were experts.
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They spent their lives, they grew up doing this. And in the law, which they probably were considering to be the first five books of Moses, they had identified 613 commandments.
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So they've gone into the scriptures and pulled out 613 commandments, 248 positive commandments, which are things that we need to do, and 365 negative commandments, which are things that we should not do.
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And then maybe they made a one -a -day calendar of 365 things that you shouldn't do and you could tear off one each day.
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But more important, they prided themselves on being familiar with the whole law. But then they took these things, they took an additional step further.
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If you get right down to what the law is and what is trying to be expressed in the
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Ten Commandments and in the whole Old Testament, it's really a document that shows you how to live a righteous life.
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The Ten Commandments are about your personal holiness, true righteousness. And it's a high standard.
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And it's a standard that no one can meet on their own, just like the Beatitudes.
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So the Pharisees knew that. They knew what it was for, and they also knew that they couldn't do it.
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So what they did, once they realized the implications, to compensate, they took all these laws and they took these commandments, and then they added additional requirements of their own.
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So they took what was in Scripture, what could be interpreted as a commandment or as a law or a requirement, and then they added additional levels to it or additional steps.
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I have a few examples of this. One of the first, we see this in the woes section later on in Matthew in chapter 23, but there's one particular one that he lists in chapter 23, verse 23.
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He says, So if they found a requirement to tithe, that's not enough.
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What they did to show how righteous they were was they applied that law to everything that they had, all the way down to the spices in their kitchen.
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So they're giving 10 % of every single little thing that they have to show their obedience to the letter or the word of the law.
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And there's a concept at the end of that verse that's super important for us, which is the weightier provisions of the law.
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But again, we'll get back there. There's another example regarding the commandment to keep the
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Sabbath. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. It says also a little later that on the seventh day, you shall do no work.
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So that's something that's clearly a commandment. What the
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Pharisees started doing was defining then what work was. In order to keep this law, we have to figure out what work was.
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And then one of the definitions of work was carrying a burden. So now we've defined work as carrying a burden.
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But now we have to figure out what a burden is. What constitutes a burden? How much weight constitutes a burden?
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So they did that. And it went down so far as to like a certain amount of liquid or something like that.
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So you can't carry anything that weighs more than a certain amount. Otherwise, you're violating the Sabbath law.
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I mean, they said interesting things like they had to argue over if a tailor went out of his house and he accidentally had a needle stuck in his garment, was he guilty of working on the
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Sabbath? Because he was a tailor and he's carrying this burden of a needle with him. They asked if moving a lamp from one room to another constituted a burden and therefore working on the
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Sabbath. A parent lifting up a child, is this too much of a burden to qualify for laboring on the
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Sabbath? These are the things they looked at. They're taking the commands and adding a lot of additional things to it.
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Healing was another thing that was determined to be a violation of the Sabbath law. And we sort of alluded to that earlier.
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Now, they would make exceptions for very grave situations, but only to the extent necessary to keep somebody alive until Monday or day one or whatever, you know, the day after the
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Sabbath was. So you aren't allowed to heal because that's work. But if somebody's going to die, you can do just enough to keep them alive until it's not the
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Sabbath anymore. And then you can keep on going. There was a rule to fast once a year.
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They brought this all the way into fasting two times a week. You get the idea. They're taking all these commands and they're making them even more burdensome.
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So the Pharisees were renowned and even respected, honestly, respected for their ability to argue about these additional requirements.
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But even more so, they were respected and renowned for their ability to actually maintain them all. They're well known for keeping the smallest provision of the law that they instituted.
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And some people even considered them righteous for this. Of course,
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Jesus didn't. Jesus wasn't impressed by this. And he didn't consider them holy.
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And he didn't consider them righteous. And why? Because as he said, they ignored the weightier matters for their man -made rules.
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They ignored the foundational underlying principle or idea of holiness and righteousness in order to keep their laws.
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And they violated the fundamental principle of the law.
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Because this principle, it goes deep. It goes all the way down to your heart. The reason they could keep all the silly little rules that they made up is because it was basically just a checklist.
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It was a checklist of behaviors. And if we all tried, we could all keep a checklist of little behaviors.
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We could all say, this is what I have to do.
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And that's easy. What's not easy is to live in a truly holy manner, to live like Jesus taught in the
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Beatitudes. And that's the very heart of their hypocrisy.
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The fact that they were posing as holy men based on this list of external activities and works and things that they have done and can do rather than truly pure internal motivations.
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Because as Jesus said, what we know about the Pharisees is that they loved, they loved the title.
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They loved being recognized in public. They loved wearing the robes, sitting at the head of the table, being called rabbi.
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They loved all those things more than they loved God. So when people thought of the law, getting way, way back to our original thought stream here, what came to mind was tied not only to the scriptures, not only to the 10
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Commandments, not only to the books of Moses, but people also thought of all these individual requirements.
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They thought of all these little tasks that the Pharisees did and that the Pharisees put on people.
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And again, Jesus's message of grace and forgiveness, repentance most of all, did not at all line up with the oppression of the law or at least the people's perception of oppression of the law.
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But people still held scriptures in very high regard, obviously, and rightly so. And this was why
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Jesus came and said that he had not come to abolish the law because there was a lot of confusion.
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And we just talked about a lot of different stuff and in a lot of different directions about what the law was and was not, but what people thought it was.
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But you know how we get attached to traditions. So even if people didn't like the rules or the things they had to do, they might say, well,
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I grew up doing that. So I don't necessarily wanna stop even if I don't need to do it, even if it's not actually part of the law.
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So they wanted to know, did he come to get rid of all this stuff? Because we might not like that. So he told them, no,
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I did not come to abolish but to fulfill the law and the prophets. Now, we're gonna take a brief interlude to talk about the prophets here.
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So basically, the people then considered everything after Deuteronomy to be the prophets, including obviously men like Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, those kinds of guys.
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And prophets had a very special role. Prophets were very unique in this society because what they were was they were recipients of direct revelation from God.
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They were people who God spoke directly to. And they were to pass on the message that was given to them by God to the people of Israel.
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And it's important to note another significant aspect of their role as prophets. Their role was to perpetuate
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God's law, the true law that was in scripture. If you think back to what you've read of prophetic literature, a lot of it involves calling out violations of God's law.
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It involves pronouncing judgment and condemnation on Israel for violating
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God's law, for turning against God. It involves calling people back to God.
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I was looking up just a couple of examples because these books, they're long.
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And we can't get into all of it even in one Sunday. But for example, this is a prophetic message in Jeremiah.
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Jeremiah 2, verses five through eight. Thus says Yahweh, What injustice did your fathers find in me that they went far from me and walked after vanity and became vain?
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They did not say, where is Yahweh who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, who led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought and of the shadow of death, through a land that no one crossed and where no man inhabited?
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I brought you into the fruitful land to eat its fruit and its good things. But you came and defiled my land.
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In my inheritance, you made an abomination. The priests did not say, where is Yahweh?
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And those who handle the law did not know me. The shepherds also transgressed against me and the prophets prophesied by Baal and walked after things that did not profit.
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So the kind of words that prophets were receiving from God are words like that.
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Jeremiah didn't walk around, at least if he did, it's not in scriptures, he didn't walk around to individuals and say, hey man,
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God told me you're gonna get that job. Hey man, I see that 2025 is gonna be a great year for you.
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That's not what prophets did. That's not the way that sort of thing happened. And we have people that use the title prophet now or use the concept of prophecy in that way.
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We have people that are calling themselves prophets on YouTube and they get on there and they say stuff like, 2025 is the year that the church is gonna thrive.
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It's a good time to be alive. And that's prophecy for some people.
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But they're prophesying for money is what they're doing. They're not prophesying an actual word from God.
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We see the lives of prophets as well. It's interesting that people want to be prophets.
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They want to have the title of prophet and they want to be in a position where people listen to them and look to what they have to say about what's coming.
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But biblical prophets like Ezekiel, he had to suffer.
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Ezekiel 24 verses 15 through 18. And the word of Yahweh came to me saying, son of man, behold,
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I am about to take from you the desire of your eyes with a blow, but you shall not mourn and you shall not weep and your tears shall not come.
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Grown silently, make no mourning for the dead, bind on your headdress and put your shoes on your feet and do not cover your mustache and do not eat the bread of men.
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So I spoke to the people in the morning and in the evening, my wife died.
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And in the morning, I did as I was commanded. God told him, I'm gonna kill your wife, you're still gonna prophesy.
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This is the lifestyle of a prophet if you want it, but you can't have it because it doesn't exist anymore.
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Because another thing that we see that's unique about this kind of direct word from God, prophetic revelation is that it ended toward the conclusion of the apostolic period.
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We'll discuss that soon, but in Acts, we see direct revelation from God.
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And as we continue through the book of Acts, we see it fade away.
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And part of the reason for this is explained to us in Hebrews. Let me find
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Hebrews here. I had too many scriptures this morning and not enough ribbons. Hebrews chapter one, verses one and two, and this is gonna get into the fulfillment part.
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But it says, God, having spoken long ago to the fathers and the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days, spoke to us in his son, whom he appointed heir of all things through whom he also made the worlds, who is the radiance of his glory and the exact representation of his nature and upholds all things by the word of his power, who having accomplished cleansing for sins, sat down at the right hand of majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels as he has inherited a more excellent name than they.
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So that's a perfect segue into this next section, which we're gonna talk about what
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Jesus meant when he said he fulfilled the law and the prophets. And this is also an overview because this is a massive topic, but it's obviously essential because Jesus brought it up and he says he'll fulfill the law and prophets in verse 17 and not the smallest bit of it will pass away until the world ends.
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So just reinforcing here the idea that he's not getting rid of the law, but fulfilling it.
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And this is the part that I hope will shed some light on some questions that many of us have had for decades of our
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Christian life or at least for a very long time. So the first thing we have to understand as we get started talking about this is that all of Scripture, the entirety of it, every bit of it ultimately points to Jesus.
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The Old Testament, all of it, even if it doesn't make sense and we don't understand it and we have to look deeply at it, it all points to Jesus from beginning to end.
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Sometimes, this is metaphorical, sometimes you see a shadow of Jesus there.
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Sometimes, we use that concept of typology that we talked about several months back to understand the reference to Jesus, but we always see
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Jesus in the Old Testament. Now, the next thing we have to do is make a distinction between different types of law that existed in the
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Old Testament and the purpose of those laws. So we are in the Pentateuch here, again, the first five books,
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Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And there's three categories of law that fall in here.
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There's the moral law, which is the Ten Commandments. These are your guidelines for life. Mostly, we see this in Exodus, it comes back in Deuteronomy.
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We also have the judicial law. This is also in Exodus. This is the stuff there that falls outside of the
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Ten Commandments. Stuff like if a man is gored by an ox and he dies, then the ox will be killed, but it can't be eaten, but the owner of the ox won't go to prison.
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We have all this kind of stuff in there. This is the judicial law. And then finally, we have the ceremonial law.
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This is related to the tabernacle, worship. And you find this in Leviticus a lot.
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And this is why so many people get stuck in Leviticus in their one -year Bible reading plan and never finish it, because it's hard to figure out what all this stuff is about.
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And all the minutia and all the little detail seems so irrelevant to us. And it's irrelevant to our worship service logistically or liturgically or whatever, but it's actually very relevant to us in other ways.
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So those are the three categories of the law. And Jesus talks about them not being abolished, but being fulfilled.
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In Romans 10 .4, Paul writes this, for Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.
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Now that can't mean that the law is just wiped out and it no longer exists and we don't have it anymore, because first of all, it's in the
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Bible. But second of all, Jesus talked about it and said that he didn't erase it.
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But rather, a verse like this is an affirmation of what Jesus said. Because Paul would never contradict
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Jesus. So we cannot look at scripture and say, well, that's just what Paul said.
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That's not God's word or that's not Jesus's word. Because first of all, everything that wound up here is the word of God, whether it came through Paul or whether it came through Jesus.
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But Paul is not gonna contradict Jesus either. So how did he fulfill the law?
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And what we're gonna do is take it category by category. So let's go with the judicial law first.
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And we have to understand the purpose of these categories of law to see how they become fulfilled.
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So the purpose of the judicial law, the reason the judicial law was given to the
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Jews was to make them distinct from other people. They followed these rules so that everyone on the outside looking in could see how
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God's people were different from everyone else. To see specifically in this case, how
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Israel, the people of Israel were different from everyone else.
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But what this means is that ultimately the judicial law was limited in its time and its place.
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Jesus tells the chief priests and the Pharisees this in Matthew 21, 43.
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Therefore, I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruit of it.
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So the time that the judicial law was in effect is limited. And the judicial law ended at the foot of the cross.
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It ended with the crucifixion of Jesus. Now, why do I say this?
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And how do I justify that statement? Because if it was to identify who
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God's people are, how do we now identify who God's people are?
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We identify it with a profession of faith. We identify it with baptism. We identify it with a life that aligns with the beatitudes.
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We don't identify it with how you respond when you're out to score somebody.
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Because what about those of us that don't have a place to keep an ox? But more important, let's look at a verse, for example, like 1
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Peter 2, 9 and 10. And I've read these before. But you are a chosen family, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
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For you once were not a people, but now you are the people of God. You had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
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So these are verses that are telling us who the people of God are. Again, if we look at the fact that only people in Israel were part of those covenants of God, now we see that it's not just the
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Jew. It's the Gentile, it's the Greek, it's everybody who has the opportunity to be part of God's kingdom through the new covenant, but it's not through circumcision.
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It's not through adherence to the letter of the law. It's through repentance and faith in Jesus and what he's done.
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Now, as another thing that we can't adequately address in the time that we have, what does that mean for the actual nation, the physical nation of Israel today?
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Because Israel is basically a secular nation. They're not really living by the judicial law.
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They're not Christians. So where specific people in the nation of Israel are concerned,
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I don't know. But what I do know is that God has promised to restore
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Israel, not our physical nation of Israel today, but the people of Israel.
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So he has promised. We see this in places like Jeremiah 31, 33.
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I'm gonna flip back to that one real quick because this is something that I've talked about with people before.
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It's like, what about the Jews? What about the Jews? 31, 33,
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God says, but this is the covenant which I will cut with the house of Israel after those days, declares
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Yahweh. I will put my law within them and on their heart, I will write it and I will be their
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God and they shall be my people, which means that God is clearly gonna save Jewish people.
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I just don't know all the details of it. But we see, we see this promise.
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So even though the cross ended the judicial law, God has still made promises.
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And since we see his promises in his word, we know they'll come to pass, even if we don't know how. But again, judicial law has been fulfilled in Jesus because God's chosen people are identified by their faith in Christ, by their baptism, by taking the
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Lord's Supper. These are the things that identify us. Now, that's the judicial law. Ceremonial law, these are all the details about worship, all the details about the priesthood, anything related to the tabernacle.
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Have you ever wondered why? I know some of you have.
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Have you ever wondered why we don't just go over there, grab a cow, chop it up, burn it in here and sacrifice it, sprinkle the blood around like we see in Leviticus?
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It's because Jesus fulfilled that with his crucifixion.
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I know that most of you probably haven't brought a single animal in here as a sacrifice in the entire time that you've been here, but it's because you don't have to.
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It's because every single tiny detail in Scripture, every act, every sacrifice, every piece of furniture all points to Jesus, is all represented somehow in the life, ministry, death, resurrection of Christ.
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Because what all those activities did were to temporarily cleanse people of their sin.
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They had to continually do these things. One sacrifice of an animal was not enough to permanently erase your sins, where one sacrifice of Jesus on the cross was.
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Book of Hebrews, again, chapter 10, verses 1 through 18.
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For the law, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things, can never, by the same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year, make perfect those who draw near.
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That's what we just said. They offer these things over and over, but it can never make you right with God permanently.
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Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered because the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have consciousness of their sins?
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But in those sacrifices, there is a reminder of sins year by year, for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.
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Therefore, when he comes into the world, he says, sacrifice and offering you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me.
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In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin, you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, behold,
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I have come. In the scroll of the book it is written of me to do your will, O God. After saying above, sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin, you have not desired, nor have you taken pleasure in them, which are offered according to the law.
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Then he said, behold, I have come to do your will. We're talking about Jesus here, in case you weren't aware of it.
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He takes away the first in order to establish the second. By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
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We'll just stop there. By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all.
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Jesus Christ, his blood on the cross does what none of the thousands or millions or whatever sacrifices throughout the entire time of the
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Old Testament could ever have done, which is a permanent reconciliation to God for the sins in your life, which Jesus accomplished.
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So the ceremonial law was also fulfilled at the foot of the cross. And we should note this as well.
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Whether it's the judicial law or the ceremonial law, Jesus kept all of those laws perfectly while he was living as a man.
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Regardless of how we think of that or how we look at that,
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Jesus was the perfect example of every bit of that law. But he didn't maintain the man -made parts of the law because those never came from God.
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But the rest he kept perfectly. So then that leaves us with the moral law. Now this is different because God intended the moral law, the 10
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Commandments, to be permanent. These are a perpetual standard for holiness.
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Jesus fulfilled this law as well, but in fulfilling this law, he did it by keeping it perfectly.
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Just like the judicial and ceremonial law, he kept it, but he also continued this.
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This continued in his teaching and it continued in the ministry of his disciples.
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And when you stop to think about it, the 10 Commandments or the moral law, they contain the biblical guidelines for living a holy life.
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That's what we said earlier because you see this all throughout the New Testament. In fact, the 10
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Commandments, they serve as an unchanging and unchanged foundation for all morality in our world.
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They undergird the entire foundation of everything in our society.
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Our justice system has no meaning, and it has no meaning apart from the 10
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Commandments and the law. Because if you don't have absolute foundation for that, absolute standards, how do you measure?
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Otherwise, it's just judges ruling how they feel. So the 10
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Commandments, they continue to this day. They continue to guide us and to frame how we live our lives.
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And this is what is the foundation for the New Testament as well. So if this is still confusing, just remember all of the
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Old Testament serves to point to Jesus. He completed, fulfilled the
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Old Testament in his life and in his death. One of the commentators I read put it this way. If in the process it may appear that certain elements of the law are for all practical purposes abolished, this will be attributable not to their loss of status as the word of God.
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It's still God's word. It's all here, we have it. That doesn't mean it's not God's word. But to their changed role in the era of fulfillment in which it is
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Jesus the fulfiller rather than the law, which pointed forward to him who is the ultimate authority.
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Jesus is the ultimate authority. So before we dive into some takeaways, I wanna highlight two ways that as churches, as Christians, we fall into error when we consider fulfillment of the law.
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We consider the idea of fulfillment of the law. Now on one hand, we have the idea that Jesus, since he came and he said,
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I did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. Well, some people think that means that we still have to live exactly by all those laws.
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That we have to use sort of the checklist of behaviors and that we are saved by adherence to that law.
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And this would be the very definition of legalism. The idea that you can work your way to salvation.
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And this would be to fall into the same kind of error that the Pharisees did, thinking that as long as externally everything looks right, then you're good.
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But that's not the way that works. And again, it's not that you have to tithe your, you believe you have to tithe your spices or stuff like that, but you believe in some kind of literal definition of the
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Sabbath that has to be, we laugh about the idea of carrying a burden being work, but a lot of us have ideas about what you can and can't do on the
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Sabbath that didn't necessarily come from Scripture. I know I have in the past for sure.
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But again, what this does is functionally ignores the role of the Holy Spirit in salvation.
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The idea that we can just keep a checklist of behaviors. Works are a result of your heart and your changed heart and they're evidence of salvation.
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They're not the cause of salvation. So that's one thing. And then on the flip side of that same legalism coin, just so you know, it's possible to do everything right.
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It's possible to follow everything that Scripture says and still not be saved. Because if you're just doing it externally and you're just doing it because you feel like if you do the right thing,
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God will approve of it, that's not the way it works. Just because you come to church doesn't mean you're good, doesn't mean you're good to go.
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Just be aware of that. This is, church doesn't save you as much as I love to see all of you every week.
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So it's not a checklist. So that's one error. But then the opposite error is assuming that because Christ died for our sins, that we live completely under grace and it doesn't matter how we act in the rest of our life.
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This is called antinomianism. And this is what you see in your universalist type of churches where it says everyone's saved no matter what.
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Doesn't matter that they live as a completely unregenerate sinner every single day of their life. Jesus died for their sins and they're going to heaven.
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I don't think the Bible says that either. In fact, Paul addresses that as well in Romans 6, one through two.
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He says, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be.
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How shall we who died to sin still live in it? The truth of the matter is the law shows us our need for grace and it shows us our need and it shows us how
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Jesus justified us. And for that, we can look at Galatians chapter three. There's a lot of detail,
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I know. Paul writes, why the law then? It was added because of trespasses having been ordained through angels by the hand of a mediator until the seed would come to whom the promise had been made.
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Now a mediator is not for one person only whereas God is one. Is the law then contrary to the promises of God?
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May it never be. For if a law had been given which was able to impart life, then righteousness would indeed be by law.
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But the scripture has shut up everyone under sin so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.
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But before faith came, we were held in custody under the law, being shut up for the coming faith to be revealed.
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Therefore, the law has become our tutor unto Christ so that we may be justified by faith.
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But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. For you are all sons of God through faith in Jesus Christ.
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For all of you who are baptized unto Christ have clothed yourself with Christ and there is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free man.
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There is no male and female for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, heirs according to the promise.
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And both of those errors above, legalism, antinomianism, they're both directly contradicted by what
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Jesus says in 18 and 19 about none of the law passing away. As well as a warning to people who annul any commandment or teach others to do the same.
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So you can't tell someone that that scripture doesn't apply to you, you've been saved by Jesus. So that leaves us with verse 20, which
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I'll admit is one that confused me for a while because again, the Pharisees were so knowledgeable.
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They were like righteous in quotation marks because they were so detailed and meticulous about following the rules.
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So how could we exceed their righteousness? But then it sort of hit me how obvious that answer is.
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And this is where we come into our takeaways here. The first one is this, righteousness is a heart issue.
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Despite how they and some of their followers may have viewed it, there was absolutely no righteousness to the religion of the
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Pharisees. Every bit of their religion was man -made. It was all works -based, it required following rules and it required the appearance, the external outward appearance of being godly.
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But in reality, it was not. It was all pageantry, it was appearances, it was being up in front of people telling them exactly how well they did things and that they should do them better.
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Does that sound like any other supposedly Christian traditions that you're aware of? I'll be gentle and not name them today.
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But the regenerate Christian will have, by the grace of the
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Holy Spirit, a love for God's law. And it will hurt when you break God's law.
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You will know and you will feel it. So Paul writes this in Romans 8.
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We got Romans 8, two through four. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.
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For what the law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did, sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.
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So that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the spirit.
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This means that Jesus fulfilled the law and that we are to do the same. We do this out of love and gratitude.
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This is our response to the grace and mercy that Jesus has shown us. And we can't just play church.
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We can't just think that because we show up and we say the right things and we do the right things, that everything is gonna be okay.
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Because Jesus says this in Luke 16, 15. And he said to them, you are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men, but God knows your hearts.
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For that which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God. So that's point number one.
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Righteousness is a hard issue. The Pharisees externally were righteous and internally were condemned.
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Number two, the second takeaway of these passages is that the Old Testament is vital to us.
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The Old Testament is important. And I know this seems silly to even have to say, but we're gonna say it because there's a movement in a lot of very popular and huge churches that we need to unhitch ourselves from the
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Old Testament. This has been said from the pulpit. We need to unhitch ourselves from the
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Old Testament, but I don't think it's going too far to call that a heretical approach to church. At the very least, it doesn't make any sense because the
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Old Testament provides the foundation for what's taught in the New Testament. If you look at how many times the
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Old Testament is cited in the New Testament, if you took away the Old Testament, you'd lose a lot of the context.
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And it wouldn't have made any sense at the time the New Testament was being lived out. So if Jesus himself said that he did not come to abolish the law and the prophets, how on earth would we think it's okay to abolish it in our churches?
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Now, what this stems from is a desire to make church just a little easier, to make it a little more palatable to people, to make it so we don't have to explain things that are difficult, but also to make people feel like they can live just any old way they want and still wear the label of a
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Christian. And any church that lets people do that is in bad shape.
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But I also know this, that I know that committed and well -intentioned people still struggle with the
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Old Testament. People that are truly believers, truly regenerate believers still don't always know what to make of the
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Old Testament. I get it. How do we process Leviticus? What do we say about all the weird stuff that happens in the
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Old Testament? What do we say about the violence? Well, I'll say two things without any of these being specific.
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And one is that I've used the phrase descriptive and not prescriptive before, if you recall that. That means that some of the things that we see in the
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Old Testament, polygamy, for example, they're described because they happened.
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This is part of the record of the people of Israel. It's not in there because we're, it's not in there because we're supposed to do it.
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That would be a misinterpretation of that scripture. And in fact, this is one of those things that just sort of adds to the credibility and the integrity of the
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Bible. If I had made it up, I might have taken out all the white, you know,
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I would have whitewashed all the stuff that really looked bad or that I didn't feel like explaining to my kids or that's explaining to you guys, but it's all still in there because it's part of the history.
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There's also things that serve as warnings to us. We see where the people are condemned for the way they've behaved.
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So there's a lot there. But again, prescriptive or descriptive, not prescriptive, excuse me.
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That's very, very important to get right. Another thing that we hear is,
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I've heard people say this here too, is that the God of the Old Testament is so angry. God's so wrathful.
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People even go so far as to say, I could never follow a God that's so wrathful. What about love? Jesus has love.
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Jesus has wanted to love everybody. And I'll just tell you that's a flawed view and what it's based on.
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And again, it's probably not an intentionally flawed view in a lot of cases, but it's based on an incomplete understanding of the
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Bible as a whole. I mean, what if I told you that the whole
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Bible actually shows a very patient God and it shows a God who desires repentance, but what it reflects most is a lack of understanding of some attributes of God.
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Attributes of God like perfection or justice. You see, what we like to do is define things by our own standards, not
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God's standards. And we like to judge God by our own standards. And we say he's wrathful. We say he's mean.
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We say that he's angry, but our standards aren't
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God's and they can never be God's because we're not perfect. And we're not just either for that matter. A just God would have destroyed a whole lot more people a lot sooner.
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A just God would have destroyed us no matter how good our intentions are. But what did he do instead?
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He sent his son to redeem everyone, everyone, so that we could be justified before God in a way that we couldn't do on our own.
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And that is love. That's not wrath. That's mercy. And the entire Old Testament draws this picture that leads you right there.
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And it leads you to the cross and what Jesus has done for you. So we've been given a path to salvation that otherwise would have been completely unattainable.
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And we've been given the gift of the Holy Spirit to bring us to it. God gave us all those things.
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And the final takeaway, number three, is to be careful how you interpret things.
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So there's a subject that every seminary student goes through. It's called hermeneutics. And what this is is the study or the process of how we come to understand things.
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And hermeneutics comes directly from the Greek word which is translated interpret. And what this means is we all come to the
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Bible with a lens that we view things through. And it's shaped by our family. It's shaped by our race.
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It's shaped by our age. It's shaped by our church. It's shaped by our culture. And we all have it.
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You can't avoid it. But what you have to do is understand it. What we have to do is be careful of interpreting
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Scripture through the lens of our experiences. We can't interpret Scripture based on things that have happened in our lives.
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You interpret things that happen in your lives based on Scripture. We gotta be careful about reversing that.
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First John 4, one reminds us, beloved, do not believe every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they're from God because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
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And the reason this is so much of a problem for us is because as a culture, we're very self -centered. We're very obsessed with ourselves.
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We're focused on us. And we're trained as consumers to do that. We're trained as consumers to place our views and our experiences above everything else.
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And this leads us to a lot of flawed ideas about the things of God. We have to remember the
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Bible's not about us. Maybe for us, maybe helpful to us, but ultimately the
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Bible is about Jesus. Your life experience doesn't justify or nullify the
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Bible, no matter who you are. So when we approach everything through the lens of Christ, we're far less likely to go wrong.
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I mean, we have to think about this as well. We look at what's happening in society today and it's only natural for us to conclude that we're in the end times.
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We're like, holy cow, Jesus is coming tomorrow. Look at what's going on in the news. But that's not, you know, just because some news anchor and even for those of us who fall on the conservative side, remember that the people that are shaping your worldview, they're not
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Christians, they're Jewish. And they have a different idea of things.
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But the point is we can't allow our hermeneutic to pass through our politics or our hermeneutic to pass through our preferences.
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The Bible was written for a certain people at a certain time, and it's helpful to us today and it guides our lives, but we have to understand it through the time that it was written.
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So the best way we can do this, the best way we can approach it through the lens of Christ is to focus on the beatitudes, go back to the beatitudes, shape your life by the beatitudes.
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And that's really gonna help the way you approach your life and the way you approach your life through scripture.
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So I wanna close with one passage from the
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Old Testament from the prophet of Joel. This is
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Joel chapter two, verse 32. And it will be that everyone who calls on the name of Yahweh will be delivered.
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For on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, there will be those who escape as Yahweh had said, even among the survivors whom
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Yahweh calls. It will be that everyone who calls on the name of Yahweh will be delivered. That sound familiar?
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It's all the way back from Joel. Please pray with me. Heavenly Father, once again, thank you for giving us your word that we profit every time we study and humbly come before the teachings of Jesus.
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And the Bible gives us the opportunity to sit at his feet and learn from your son.
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And we have questions about how we should live, what we should do. Is this true?
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Is this Christian? God, we can simply ask the Holy Spirit and we can turn to the words of scripture for him to illuminate for us.
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God, I pray that we continue to understand the focus on Christ, understand the focus on Christ and continue to do nothing but turn our eyes towards Christ, to not be so quick to look at our situation and wonder where you are, but instead to view the world through the promises that you've given us in the words of your
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Holy Scripture. God, we thank you for this gift. We thank you for who you are. Pray that the
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Holy Spirit would continue to open the eyes and change the hearts of all of us here in this congregation.
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Lord, I thank you for this opportunity and I thank you that we can gather today as a body of believers. We love you and we pray all these things in Jesus' name, amen.