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FBC Travelers Rest sermon from January 22, 2023 by Pastor Rhett Burns.
If you have your Bibles, you can go put it in Mark 12. We have Mark chapter 12 today, verses 1 through 27, continuing on in our series. Through the gospel of Mark, the victory of Jesus according to Mark.
Let's read Mark chapter 12, verses 1 through 27. And the word of the living God says this. He began to speak to them in parables. A man planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a pit for the wine press and built a tower and leased it to tenants and went into another country.
When the season came, he sent a servant to the tenants to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty handed. Again he sent to them another servant and they struck him on the head and treated him.
Shamefully.
And he sent another and him they killed. And so with many others. Some they beat and some they killed. He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them saying, they will respect my son.
But those tenants said to one another, this is the heir. Come let us kill him and the inheritance will be ours. And they took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard. What will the owner of the vineyard do?
He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others. Have you not read this scripture? The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord's doing and it is marvelous in our eyes.
And they were seeking to arrest him but feared the people. For they perceived that he had told this parable against them. So they left him and went away. And they sent to him some of the Pharisees and some of the Herodians to trap him in his.
Talk.
And they came to him and said to him, teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone's opinion. For you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?
Should we pay them or should we not? But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, why put me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me look at it. And they brought one and he said to them, whose likeness and inscription is this?
And they said to him, Caesar's. Jesus said to them, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's. And they marveled at him. And Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question saying, teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but leaves no child, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.
There were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and when he died, left no offspring. And the second took her and died, leaving no offspring. And the third likewise, and the seven left no offspring. Last of all, the woman also died.
In the resurrection, when they rise again, whose wife will she be? For the seven had her as wife. And Jesus said to them, is this not the reason you are wrong? Because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.
For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.
He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong. These are the words of God to us this morning. You know, in Colossians 2, 3, it says that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ.
And in this passage, what we see is a glimpse of the wisdom and knowledge of Jesus. For in this passage, three times we see Jesus challenged. And three times he responds with superior wisdom or superior knowledge.
Three times he shuts down his opponents. And three times, if we have eyes to see, we see and are taught important lessons for life and godliness. So let's take these three challenges in turn this morning.
The first challenge is actually a continuation from Mark chapter 11. We didn't really get to the very end, the last section of Mark chapter 11 last week. So let me just back up there for one moment. The chief priests and the scribes and the elders come to Jesus, and they're asking, by what authority is he doing these things?
They're trying to trap him, but he will instead trap them. By asking if the baptism of John was from God or man. Knowing that whichever way they answered, it would present a negative outcome for them.
And so they refused to answer, and therefore, so did Jesus. And he asserted his authority here by keeping the conversation, keeping the discussion on his terms. He then goes on, where we pick up in verse one of chapter 12.
He then goes on to speak in parables. Now, if you remember from earlier in our series on Mark, we talked about how parables are connected with judgment, and how often they conceal as much as they reveal.
Well, here, there's still the connection with judgment, especially coming on the heels of Mark 11, where Jesus just cleansed the temple and prophesied judgment on the temple. But this particular parable is crystal clear.
There's no hiding its meaning. He even tells us in verse 12, they perceive that he told this parable against them. And so what we have here is a parable that is clear, where the vineyard is Israel, the owner of the vineyard is God.
The tenants are the leaders of Israel, the chief priests and the scribes and the elders, the servants whom the tenants beat and mauled and killed. These are the prophets that God had sent to Israel, and the son is Jesus.
The religious leaders of Israel, the tenants of the vineyard, they have not been faithful. Now, whereas in Mark 11, Jesus cleanses the temple there in connection with the cursing of the fig tree because he didn't find fruit, the fruit of righteousness we said last week.
In this parable, the problem is that the tenants are keeping the fruit to themselves, and this connects with them denying access to worship to the Gentiles. They're denying the Gentiles access to God, and they're exploiting their own people.
They're not being faithful. And in so doing, they fall right in line with those who had come before him. For God had long sent prophets to Israel to teach them and to warn them and to correct them and to point them and to point their way toward God.
And Israel had long abused the prophets. Hebrews 11 tells us, others suffered mocking and flogging and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword.
This is what they did to the prophets. Stephen finishes his speech in Acts chapter 7 like this. You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears. You always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you.
Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the righteous one whom you have now betrayed and murdered. They beat and killed the prophets.
And now they will beat and kill the son, the holy one sent from God, the righteous one sent from God. And God will take the vineyard from the tenants. It's what we were talking about last week with the judgment on the temple.
He won't destroy the vineyard, but he will destroy the tenants, and then he'll give the vineyard to others. He will judge the temple Jerusalem and leaders, and he will give the vineyard of God's people to the apostles in the Christian church.
And then we see there in verse 10, the chief lesson we're to learn from this confrontation is who Jesus is. Jesus is not just a prophet in a long line of prophets like the Muslims say. And Jesus is not just a wise teacher or philosopher like the most charitable of the secularists might say.
And Jesus is not just a charismatic religious leader like the historians might say. No, Jesus is the beloved son of God. He is the heir of the vineyard, and he is the heir of the entire world. He is the cornerstone of a new temple, made of living stones of people who have faith in him.
And as cornerstone, he holds this whole thing together. The unity that we share in this church, and the unity that we share with the church, the universal church, all believers of all time and all places.
That unity is unity in Christ. We share in Christ, who is the cornerstone. That's the first challenge. The second challenge has to do with paying taxes. Beginning there in verse 13, we see this challenge take place.
The Pharisees and the Herodians team up again. We saw this early in Mark, where they came together to try to trap Jesus. And here they are again, and they ask him if it's okay to pay taxes to Caesar. Now this is a hot button issue at the time for Jerusalem, and so the trap is sprung.
If he answers yes, then he will be seen as a compromiser with Rome. And the mob of Jewish zealots and revolutionaries will want him dead. And the Pharisees will be the ones who give him over to those guys.
But if he answers no, then he will be seen as seditious to Rome. And the Roman authorities will be the ones who want him dead. And it'll be the Herodians who give him over to those guys. And so he's in this trap.
But he escapes it with superior wisdom. He asks them for a coin, for a denarius. It's a Roman coin with Caesar's image on it. And he asks them, he says, whose likeness and inscription is this? Caesar's, they answer.
Well, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. And verse 17 says they marveled at him.
And they should.
They ought to marvel at him because he completely blew up their plan. He evaded their trap. He could not, with that answer, he could not be charged with betraying Israel, God, or Rome. So they marveled.
We can also marvel there because in that one statement, he packed a ton of what we would call today political theology. By saying, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, Jesus legitimizes the state, or the civil magistrate.
And by saying, and to God the things that are God's, he limits the state. For he asserted that there are some things that do not belong to the state. And so we see Jesus, both he legitimizes the state and he limits the state there in one verse, one sentence.
And so I want to double click here. I want to focus in here for just a moment because the question of the state is a hot button issue in our day. The role of the state is a hot button issue in our day.
How should we think about Caesar? Well, first, we're not anarchists. We believe the civil magistrate. We believe the state is a legitimate authority in earthly affairs. The state is not the only authority, but it is one of them ordained by God.
And so I want to back up and just give us a little bit of a picture of the authorities that God has put into this world. He's ordained three spheres of government to order our lives, all of which are to be in submission to Jesus Christ and his word.
So there's three spheres of government. The first is the household or the family. And to the household, God has given the ministry of health, welfare, and education. These are things that properly belong to the family or to the household.
Second sphere of government he's given is the church. And to the church, he's given the ministry of word and sacrament or of grace and peace. And the church has jurisdiction over these things. And then third, another sphere of government that God has ordained is the state or what we might call the civil magistrate.
And to the state, God has given the ministry of justice. Now, by good and necessary consequence, we can make a case for government having a role in various things for the right ordering of society. And so one trivial example, maybe not so trivial, is somebody's got to decide which side of the road we're going to drive on so we don't have chaos on the roads, right?
And so we can talk about those things. But the one specific duty given to the state as specified in Scripture is justice. To punish the evildoer. That, that is the role that God gives to the state. Romans 13 says that the civil magistrate is God's deacon.
That's the word there, diakonos, servant. It's God's deacon to carry out wrath on the wrongdoer. And so the general rule is that we are to be in submission to our governing authorities and we are to honor them.
This is the teaching in the New Testament. For God not only recognizes and legitimizes our ruling authority, He also ordains them. But, He also limits the state. And so what Jesus says here, by implication, that there are some things that do not belong to Caesar.
You are to give Caesar what belongs to him, but you're not to give him what doesn't. Therefore the state does not wield unlimited power. And so the question rises, is it ever okay to resist the civil government?
Now we don't have time for me to show all my work on this. I'd be happy to have that conversation with you. But I do want to give a summary answer. Yes, it is sometimes okay to resist the civil authorities.
The Protestant tradition has affirmed the right of resistance under certain conditions. And so when the government commands you to do something God forbids, you may resist. When the government forbids you to do something God requires, you may resist.
In other words, when a ruler makes an unjust law, citizens are under no obligation to obey it. For that law, he made that law not in accordance with his office, which God has ordained and has the authority of God behind it.
But he has made that as a mere man. Therefore resistance is justified. This is the Protestant tradition. And then a third condition would be, a third condition allowing resistance, is when a ruler acts beyond the scope of his jurisdiction.
And so for example, if the governor of California sent you a letter, you know, a tax bill, or sent you a letter ordering you to wear a purple shirt on Tuesdays, you would be under no obligation to obey the governor of California because he has no jurisdiction over citizens in South Carolina.
Just disregard it. In a similar way, even rulers that have jurisdiction in South Carolina, they can go beyond that which is their jurisdiction by commanding things that do not properly belong to them.
And so we're to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, but we are not obligated to render unto Caesar's that which is not Caesar's. And Jesus is very clear that not everything belongs to Caesar. Some things belong, especially, to God.
Now granted, all things belong to God. But he specifically says, they're rendered to God the things that are God's. And what does do God? We could probably answer that a lot of different ways. I'll answer with one specific thing, and that is worship.
Worship is do God. Psalm 96, we give God the glory that is due his name. And so the state has no jurisdiction over worship. The state cannot tell us if, or when, or where we can meet for worship, or what we can do when we're there.
It might as well be Gavin Newsom telling you to wear a purple shirt. Now there's a lot more we could say here. To be honest with you, there's a lot more I want to say here. But I want to leave it with the main point.
Jesus brilliantly, wisely, both legitimizes and limits the state. And thus he escapes the trap. That's the second challenge. The third challenge comes from the Sadducees. Sadducees, they're a group, they deny the reality of the resurrection.
They deny the teaching and the doctrine of the resurrection. So they come to Jesus, and they're going to trap him too. They present to him what they think is a real gotcha situation to Jesus. They tell about a woman who marries seven times, each time with her husband dying before they have children.
Whose wife will she be in the resurrection, they say. This time, Jesus, he doesn't answer with superior wisdom, cleverly evading their trap. He answers with superior knowledge and demolishes the trap.
Verse 24, Jesus said to them, Is this not the reason you are wrong? Because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. He doesn't mince words there, does he? For when they rise from the dead, they will neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.
And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.
He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong. You see, the Sadducees, they made this doctrinal error for the same reason that lots of people make doctrinal errors. They're ignorant of both God's word and God's power.
The Sadducees, you see, they made a big deal that they believed in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.
And so what does Jesus do?
He goes directly to the heart of the Torah. He goes to Exodus chapter three, to the passage about the burning bush, and shows them that they are wrong. Shows them that God is the God of the living, not the God of the dead.
Because if he, long after Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have died, if he says that I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then there must be an afterlife, there must be a resurrection. Further, the Sadducees, they ignored other pointers to the resurrection from the first five books of the Bible.
They ignored the power of God in creating the entire world from nothing. And missed the fact that if God can create everything from nothing, then he can resurrect what he has made. They ignored that Enoch was taken up from life to life in Genesis chapter five.
Or that Abraham believed that if he killed Isaac, or sacrificed Isaac on the altar, that he would receive him back. Or the national resurrection of Israel being delivered from Egypt. Or that Abraham was looking forward to that city whose designer and builder is God.
And Jesus defeats this challenge quite abruptly in verse twenty-seven when he says, You are quite wrong. Now his answer does raise some questions for us, especially about heaven. Namely, what about our spouse?
And what does it mean by be like angels? Well the principle that we need to work with is this, grace doesn't destroy nature. Grace perfects nature. Grace glorifies nature, but it doesn't destroy it. And so we will still be humans in heaven.
We will not be transformed into angels. We're not transformed into angels, we're still humans. We will have at the end of time, resurrected bodies, first Corinthians fifteen tells us. Right now those who die, their souls or spirits go to be with the Lord, to be absent from the body, to be present with the Lord.
Our bodies remain here on earth and await that final day of resurrection. So we will not be forever ethereal spirits floating on clouds, but we will have heavenly glorified bodies. We will still be male and female.
Grace does not destroy these things. I agree with Randy Alcorn in his book, Heaven, that we will also not lose our relationships in heaven. And so even though there's not marriage in heaven, as Jesus made clear, I do believe that Shannon and I will still have a close relationship and the memories of marriage will still be there.
And that all of this will be an advancement in relational joy, not a step backwards. I don't know how it all looks and all works out, but I do believe it will be an advancement in joy, not a step backwards.
And that we'll still have those relationships intact at some level. Now the reason there's no marriage in heaven is because marriage serves a certain purpose in this life. And that purpose will have been fulfilled in the resurrection.
And so we could list out a number of purposes of marriage. I want to mention two right now. One of those is procreation. Filling the earth with image bearers. Being fruitful in multiplying and filling the earth.
That is one purpose of marriage. And the other is to point to Christ and His church. You see, earthly marriage is the shadow. The marriage of Christ and His bride, the church, is the real thing. And so at the marriage supper of the Lamb, when Christ takes His bride, all earthly marriages will, as Alcorn says, having fulfilled their noble purposes, they will be assimilated into the great marriage.
And so marriage here is like the Super Bowl coming up, right? And all day long there's a Super Bowl pre-game festivities. It's very fun. You like to watch it. But once the game starts, you don't want to go back to the pre-game.
You want to watch the game.
You want the game itself. You want the real thing. You don't want to hear the echo. You want to hear the singing voice. You don't want the shadow. You want the object. You don't want the copy.
You want the original.
And that's what's coming in the resurrection, the real thing. And so if you read what Jesus says here to the Sadducees, and you're kind of bummed because you would like to stay married in heaven,.
You will be.
You'll be a part of the greatest marriage ever, the marriage of Christ and His church. You'll have the real thing. Or maybe if you're not married but you long to be, heaven is coming and you'll be a part of the greatest marriage ever, the marriage of Christ and His church, and you'll have the real thing.
Or maybe if your experience of marriage on earth has been terrible, maybe your spouse was abusive or unfaithful, in the resurrection God will wipe away those tears and you'll get to experience the greatest marriage ever, the marriage of Christ and His church, and you'll have the real thing.
But what about being like angels?
What does that mean?
We'll be the new heavenly hosts, the sons of God. The angels do not marry, they do not reproduce, and they do not die. And in the resurrection neither will we. That's the third challenge that Jesus took on.
Today, as I mentioned earlier, is Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. And so what I want to do is end by making a few applications from this passage in light of Sanctity of Human Life Sunday and connect these ideas to the Sanctity of Human Life.
I want to do that in four ways. First is that human life is holy because God is holy. And we bear the image of God. We might even more accurately call it the sanctity of God's image. You see, we render to Caesar what has Caesar's image on it, what has Caesar's likeness on it, and we give to God what is God's.
And what has God's image and likeness imprinted on it? Every single person. And so people belong to God. This means at least a couple of things for us. One of which is that we are to be totally committed to Him.
Render to God the things that are God's. You have God's image and likeness on you. Give yourself to God. We devote our lives to God. That's one application. Another is this, that every life from conception is holy to God.
That the smallest embryo is made in God's image. And we ought to honor that. We ought to protect every life. People are different from the animals and every other aspect of creation. For this reason we bear the image and likeness of God.
And so we give God what is His. A second application we want to make is this. The state is the minister of justice punishing the evil doer. Romans 13 tells us. The state is the minister of justice punishing the evil doer.
Abortion, being the unjust killing of another human being, is evil. Therefore, the state should punish or hold accountable everyone responsible for the abortion of a child. Currently, our state, South Carolina, does not provide equal justice and equal protection for pre-born babies.
That is we treat people who are not yet born, who are made in the image of God. We treat them differently than we treat people who have been born. With the only differences being size, age, and location.
They bear the same image of God. But our current laws treat pre-born, not yet born, people differently than born people. Now there is currently one bill that's been filed in the South Carolina House that would establish equal justice and equal protection for pre-born children.
And it would criminalize abortion for all responsible parties. It will be opposed, but it will not only be opposed by the Democratic Party, which cherishes this right to death. But it will also be opposed by your mainstream pro-life groups, the ones we trust by default, they will oppose it to.
And the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention will oppose it. And spokesmen from the South Carolina Baptist Convention will oppose it. Because they do not believe in equal protection and equal justice for pre-born children.
And I say that because they refuse to support any measures to hold both mothers and fathers responsible for their actions. They can only conceive of abortive mothers as victims. And I will readily grant that sometimes they are victims.
But women as a class are not automatically victims, no matter their actions. And ultimately what this kind of mainstream pro-life position against equal protection and equal justice is ultimately misguided compassion and weaponized empathy.
And honestly it is cruel. Because it denies justice to pre-born children and their blood still cries up from the ground. And it denies the gospel and offer of forgiveness to the mother. Because you can't tell someone that they're a victim and it's not their fault and tell them to repent of it.
And so they're left in their guilt. And that is cruel. A third application dealing with the sanctity of human life is that marriage, sex, and procreation go together. We said earlier that one of the purposes of marriage is procreation.
And so let's dig in here for just one moment. In the Bible, childlessness was always an affliction. It was sometimes a curse, but it was always an affliction. And you can ask anyone who has struggled with infertility and they can attest to it being an affliction.
But we live in a time, however, where we've imbibed the spirit of the age that hates the image of God. And we have turned chosen childlessness into a celebrated lifestyle choice. And due to various technologies, we have been able to divorce the sexual act from procreation.
And the results have been horrendous. So-called same-sex marriage, the breakdown of the family, plummeting birth rates. We have been below replacement levels in the United States since the 1970s. Abortion.
The results have not been good. One thing, however, that doesn't get talked about in evangelical circles very much. So I won't talk about it. Is that chemical and hormonal birth control is abortifacient.
Meaning it doesn't always prevent conception, but rather prevents the implantation of a conceived embryo, thus starving the baby to death. And so in our desire to go against God's design, what have we wrought?
I don't bring these topics up because they are pleasant, but because they are important. The last application has to do with the doctrine of the resurrection. And this teaches us that it's not only the soul that is important, but the body as well.
We are, as humans, we're body and soul. The body is not just an unfortunate accident, something we've got to shed on our way to heaven. No, we, when we die and we're separated from our bodies, we're going to be longing for them.
Those who are in heaven now are longing for their, and waiting for their bodies. Their resurrected, heavenly, glorified bodies that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15. And so what we do with our bodies is important.
We are not Gnostics who believe that physical things are bad or unimportant. That God has given us our bodies and what we do with our bodies matters. So this is why sexual righteousness is important, what we do with our bodies.
It's why how we treat the bodies of our dead is important. Because our bodies are not incidental to us. We are body and soul, and on the last day, we will be resurrected as body and soul. The human body has dignity, we might say.
I think I've touched on enough lightning rods for one day. So I want to end here, but I want to say this. Life is full of hard questions and hard situations. And hard things to think through, difficult things.
Now we're not going to shy away from those difficult things here at First Baptist. But we're going to go to God's word, and we're going to submit ourselves in those situations, and those questions to what has God said.
But as you wrestle through these, you may have questions. You may have a need for some clarification. You may want to express some friendly disagreement. I want you to know that I welcome that. I would love to have a follow-up conversation with you.
On Wednesday nights, we've started in the last few weeks, where we have a time for follow-up questions, or follow-up thoughts from the Sunday sermon. And so that's an option for you as well. But you can always call me, or come by my office, or I can come to you.
But let's work through God's word together on these hard issues, and submit ourselves to what God has said. Let's pray. Our Father in heaven, I pray that you would help us as we wrestle through hard questions.
Sensitive topics. Lord, I pray that you would lead us into wisdom. We know that the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are found in Christ, and so let us seek Christ that we might have wisdom. Let us submit to your word in all things.
Subordinate our opinions, subordinate our feelings, subordinate our emotions, subordinate our experiences, all to your word. And grant us the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to protect and honor and love all who are made in your image.
And Father, we ask that you would have mercy upon us. In the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.
