The Ugliness of False Religion Part V Mathew 23:1-9

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over the last four weeks, we have been going through Matthew 23.
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This chapter is quite a shock to people's systems as they read it. Our world loves to think that Jesus is always gentle and lowly, but as we have seen through the
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Gospel of Matthew, not just 23, when He spoke concerning the
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Jewish religious establishment, He was never gentle. Always firm.
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Always telling them where they're wrong. Always words of condemnation for these evil people.
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What we have seen in Matthew and most recently in chapter 23 is that Jesus disapproved and condemned their false religion.
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The Jewish establishment thought they were following God, but they were really following their own way.
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They had the appearance of godliness, but was a counterfeit. The big idea of our five
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Sunday sermon has been to understand that counterfeit religion always receives condemnation from Jesus.
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To this point, we have seen nine ways how. I'm not going to list these at this time, but at the end of the sermon,
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I will be listing all of them as we close out this chapter. But our focus today will be the final condemnation of false religion that Jesus focuses on in verses 29 -39 of this chapter.
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So I encourage you to turn in a Bible with me to Matthew 23, where we will look at those verses closely.
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And I'm going to give you the tenth way how right now. The tenth way how counterfeit religion always receives condemnation from Jesus is through failing to understand they're in line with the heritage of the bad guys.
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Failing to understand they're in line with the heritage of the bad guys.
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Now, I'm a dad, so that's why you get that language. The bad guys.
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Why do we need to be more sophisticated than that? Now this one is interesting and it's very informative for us.
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Let's read what Jesus says in verses 29 -36, and then later on we'll look at verses 37 -39.
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These are the words of Jesus, 29 -36. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
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For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.
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Thus you witness against yourselves that you are the sons of those who murdered the prophets.
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Fill up then the measure of your fathers. You serpents!
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You brood of vipers! How are you to escape being sentenced to hell?
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Therefore, I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth from the blood of righteous
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Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar.
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Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation."
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Thus far in this chapter, we have seen Jesus use strong language.
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And he does that again here as he shows how much he despises the false religion of the
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Pharisees. In verse 33, he calls them serpents and a brood of vipers.
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Sometimes you hear people talk about someone they don't like, someone who is unpleasant, and they call that person a snake.
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We all know that to be called a snake is not a compliment. They are a slimy reptile that slithers and terrifies most people.
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I don't know about you, snakes terrify me. But this is what
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Jesus calls those who are dead in their religion, but have no life in them. They are serpents and a brood of vipers.
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Snakes are slimy and deadly, and the Pharisees were both. Jesus called them children of hell in verse 15, because in their wickedness, they were on their way to hell and would one day be residents of hell.
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He called them blind guides in verse 16 and 24, because they were leading people down the path to destruction.
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So the description of serpents and brood of vipers that Jesus gives fits them very well.
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What Jesus tells them in the second half of verse 33 is that they will not escape being sentenced to hell.
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This not only goes for them, but also for everyone just like them throughout all generations.
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All those who lived for their dead religion and urged others to follow that same path.
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These are the ones who think they are on their way to heaven, but in reality, are on their way to hell.
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As Jesus talks about the Israelites and their dead religion, He is not only talking about the first century
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Jews. It also goes for the ungodly Israelites of the past that Jesus includes in this condemnation.
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Earlier in Matthew, Jesus compared the Pharisees of His day to the godless Israelites of the past.
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In Matthew 15 -18, Jesus quoted what the prophet Isaiah quoted in Isaiah 29 -13, because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men.
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One of the things the godless ancient Israelites and the Pharisees have in common is that with their mouths, they would say the right things, but while they said the right things, their heart was far from the
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Lord. Now in one sense, the Pharisees were different from many of the
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Israelites from their history. In the history of Israel, the Israelites went after the gods of the foreign nations that surrounded them.
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But when you look at the Pharisees, they didn't do that. They swore allegiance to Yahweh and thought all
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Gentiles were lost forever. So they were not those who went after the gods of the nations that surrounded them, like their ancestors did.
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But they were every bit as bad. Because even though they looked religious on the outside, even though they looked loyal to the
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Lord, they were idolatrous. We have seen how they were idolatrous.
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They loved their own man -made religion. They loved to stress the precision of keeping the rules and pushing others to do the same.
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They didn't really love God. They didn't really love others. They loved their system.
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They didn't worship foreign gods like their forefathers, but they resembled their forefathers.
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And Jesus tells us in these verses how they resembled them. They resembled them by opposing the true teachers of God's Word just like the godless people of Israel in the past.
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They have that in common. God sends prophets. God sends messengers to speak the truth.
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They reject those prophets. Jesus says that this rabbinical tradition that started after the
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Old Testament period, because that's when all this corruption started, and continued strong into the first century, what they did is they built tombs for the prophets and decorated monuments for the righteous.
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These great figures from the past. These Pharisees celebrated. The Pharisees of Jesus' day and the rabbis before Him were blinded from the reality that they were in fact those who opposed the prophets of old.
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They opposed Moses and David and Joshua and Elijah and Daniel.
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All the great ones from the past, they opposed them.
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Now how do we know they opposed the prophets of the old? What evidence is there in the present from the
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Pharisees' life that showed that they opposed the prophets of old?
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The Pharisees of Jesus' day show this by opposing God's greatest spokesperson and the person who stood before them.
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The one who stands before the Pharisees is the Messiah. The Son of God.
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They not only did not like what Jesus said, they despised Him so much that they wanted to get rid of Him.
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As Jesus is speaking here, the Pharisees are plotting to kill Him. And we know how the story ends.
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They are the ones who deliver Jesus up to be crucified to the Romans. And this is why
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Jesus says in verse 31, you witness against yourselves that you are the sons of those who murdered the prophets.
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The Pharisees believed they were on the right side of history. You hear people say this a lot in our day, do you not?
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We want to be on the right side of history. We want to be the good guys.
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The Pharisees believed they were on the right side. Everyone does.
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That's a sobering thought. As Jesus quoted them, saying in verse 30, if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.
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But they are witnessing against themselves by plotting to kill the Messiah. Not only did they witness against themselves by plotting to kill the
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Messiah, they would witness against themselves again after Jesus left the earth. As they killed
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Jesus' followers. As verse 34 says, Jesus would send their way prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town.
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Church history records this. Eleven of the twelve disciples were martyred for their faith in Jesus.
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Verse 34 says that crucifixion was one form of that martyrdom. Church history records that Peter was crucified upside down.
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The Jews either did their own dirty work or approved of the dirty work performed on their behalf by the
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Romans. By killing Jesus and these other messengers of God, they would be filling up the measure of their fathers, as Jesus says in verse 32.
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And all of these evil actions would be on display from this generation, as verse 36 says.
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As the Jewish leadership did this, they would be in the ugly tradition, the ugly line of those who killed
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God's messengers. And their sin would be even greater than the sins of their fathers because they are the ones who killed the greatest of God's messengers.
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The Messiah. The Son of God. God in the flesh.
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That is the blood that would be on their hands. There would be innocent blood on their hands just as there was innocent blood on the hands of their forefathers.
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And Jesus lists two examples of this from the Old Testament. In verse 35, he said that the blood of Abel and Zechariah was shed by the wicked.
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The reason verse 35 says Abel to Zechariah is because these two men were the first and last of God's messengers martyred during the
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Old Testament period. Abel was of course murdered by his brother Cain in Genesis chapter 4.
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And the prophet Zechariah, who wrote the second to last book of the Old Testament, the book of Zechariah, was also martyred.
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Zechariah was murdered as Abel was, and the words of Jesus here is the only place
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Zechariah's martyrdom is recorded. But we know that this is the prophet
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Zechariah and not another Zechariah because Jesus calls him the son of Berechiah in verse 35.
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And Zechariah 1 .1 says that the prophet Zechariah was the son of Berechiah.
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There was a long list of mistreatment and martyrdom of God's messengers in the Old Testament.
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Godless Israel did not love the godly prophets who were sent as messengers from God to the people of Israel to call them to repent as they were plunging themselves into idolatry.
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When people love their sin and they pursue their sin, and then someone comes along and says, you need to repent.
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More times than not, the person being called to repent is not going to be happy.
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In one sense, the person is a bearer of bad news because what the person is saying is, you are dead to your sin.
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You need Christ. But in our sense, the person is bringing good news because this is the person's only chance of being rescued.
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To be freed from this sin. Jesus is making it clear that the
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Jewish leadership of Jesus' day was just like their forefathers. The blood of innocent men would be on their hands, and they committed the worst sin of all.
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Crucifying the Lord of glory. The line from history that they are in is the line that no one wants to be in.
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They're just like the villains from the history of Israel. Another way to say this is that they were the bad guys of the first century, right in step with the evil of the past.
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But they did not believe this, and their true identity was not spoken publicly. They said they were in the line of the great heroes of their history.
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As I mentioned, Moses, Joshua, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, women like Ruth and Esther.
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These are people you name your kids after. You don't name your kid
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Cain. You don't name your kid Goliath.
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Right? Nobody does. Why would you do that? And if you do, your kid will change his name when he gets older.
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Because nobody wants to be known from that history. They thought they were in the line of the good guys.
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But they were not. They were in the line of the murderers of God's messengers. The application of this abounds in our day.
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We see lots of comparisons in our day about what groups certain people would be associated with if they lived in the past.
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People in our day, of course, want to be associated with great men and women from the past.
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We hear these conversations all the time. We hear them about our country.
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Now there are some really crazy people who think that just about everyone from the past of American history is evil.
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But most Americans don't go that far. Most Americans would like to think that they are in the line of people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman to name a few.
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Most people would like to think that if they were alive during World War II, they would have opposed strongly
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Adolf Hitler. But Hitler did rise to power. And the only reason he rose to power is because many people wanted him in power.
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They wanted him to lead them. It was many deceived people who ushered him into power in the nation of Germany in the 1930s.
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Hitler and the Nazi party made promises to people and people were fooled by those promises.
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He was a charismatic figure. And charismatic figures can do that, right?
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They can deceive people into thinking that they're something when they're really another. Even churches were fooled by Hitler.
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They didn't understand how great a threat he was. Hitler's rhetoric to churches was, you take care of souls,
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I'll take care of society. How did that work? Churches did not stop
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Hitler and many Germans were fooled, ushering him into power. People in our day also usher other wiki leaders into power.
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And this is where people need to study history. And the place where it must be studied is with the
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Bible. This book. The Bible as the standard. We ultimately know right and wrong from the
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Bible. It is true that people can see right and wrong because people have common sense and people can see this is good and this is bad sometimes.
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But the sole authority for what is right and wrong is the Bible. We measure everything with Scripture and we measure the goodness and the wickedness of people from the past and the present based on the unchanging truth of Scripture.
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From Scripture's standard, when you compare evil from the past and then see that same evil show up in the present, it's alarming to see.
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There's an old saying that says history repeats itself. And it sure does. This is why we need to be students of history because those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it.
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These are horrors of the past and those things will happen again if people are not careful.
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As history moves on, there are new people on the scene and the centuries roll on, but the human heart is the same.
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What people tried to do years and years ago, people try to do today. And people will try to do in the future.
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That's what the human heart does. Jeremiah 17 .9 says, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick.
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Who can understand it? The same evil heart that did things in the past does those same evil things in the present.
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People at every point in history, if they're not careful, will be on the wrong side of history.
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When I say the wrong side of history, what I mean is God's history.
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The only history that matters. The only history books that will have any value are the history books in heaven that tell the accurate version of history based on God's unchangeable standard of what is right and wrong.
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It doesn't matter what a compromised historian says. This is what evil people do. They get historians to, for whatever reason, say what they want them to say.
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And it's sadly all too common for historians to have agendas to cover for evil people.
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They can present good guys who are really bad guys. These historians write the narrative that evil people want him to write.
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That person is not a true historian, but a political operative. A true historian reports the facts.
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And let me add this. A true historian understands what right and wrong truly is.
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A true historian is able to say that this person from the past was good and this person was evil and is able to say the movement was good and this movement was bad.
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Wise people study history the right way. They study it with the
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Bible as their focus because only the Bible is completely accurate in telling right from wrong and only the
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Bible gives the large picture of the history of the world. This is what we need to tell people and even unbelievers.
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Every person in the present is wise to study the
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Bible, which of course provides the way of salvation, how to live a godly life, how to follow
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God, but also to know what true morality is to accurately understand the past and the present.
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The study of history is measuring everything from the past and the present with the
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Bible as its standard. How do we know Hitler is evil? Because the Bible says he's evil.
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How do we know that George Washington was a good leader? Because the Bible endorses that.
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It doesn't mean we endorse everything about his life, but largely speaking we say, yeah, that's good leadership because the
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Bible is the standard. Many people today follow evil in the present and the question that needs to be asked is this, what makes people think that they would not have supported authoritarian leaders from the past who were charismatic, but were really selling people a bill of goods?
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In our day, powerful people are selling people a bill of goods in many places. These people want power more than anything and they will deceive to get that power.
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The West for centuries has been known as a place for democracy. More technically, the
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West is known as a representative republic. In other words, the citizens decide who represents them in government.
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What has governed these governments is the morality of the Bible. In the
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U .S. Constitution, the moral standard is the Bible, specifically the Ten Commandments. Even founding fathers who weren't
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Christians believed that true morality comes from the Bible. The Bible is the moral standard and what comes from this is that the citizens are protected.
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This book protects those who are doing good and it punishes those who are doing evil.
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That's what Romans 13 says. And that's the role, the God -given role of the government to promote good and to protect people from evil.
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But we live during the rise of authoritarian leaders and I'm not just talking about China and North Korea and Venezuela.
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I'm talking about prime ministers and presidents all over the world who push their agenda onto the population and the agenda they push forward always has them possessing lots of power because in authoritarian governments,
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God is not God. They are. Government has all the answers.
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Government is God. Yet as this has happened, the church has been asleep. There are a few well -known
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Christians who have rightly sounded the alarm with what is going on. One of those is a guy named
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Eric Metaxas. Now, he's a guy I don't agree with on everything, but I appreciate some things he has said.
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He has shown great courage during this time and many Christians have tried to distance themselves from him because of the things he's said.
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He wrote a book recently titled Letter to the American Church. Years ago,
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Metaxas wrote a lengthy biography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer sounded the alarm during the rise of Nazi Germany.
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He was one of the few Christians in Germany who did and Germany had a strong Christian heritage.
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That's what people don't understand about the rise of Nazi Germany. Germany had a strong Christian heritage.
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How does this happen? Bonhoeffer urged the church in Germany to rise up as Hitler rose to power, but far too many churches either did not recognize the threat or were silent because of fear of what might happen to them.
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As Metaxas sees the parallel from what happened in Germany in the 1930s to what is happening now in our world, he too is sounding that alarm.
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Now, people say that if you write a biography about someone, you kind of become very much like that person.
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I find that very interesting. Some churches ignorantly follow the evil agenda.
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Others are silent and a small percentage are actually doing what they're supposed to be doing.
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Doing what you're supposed to be doing is following Jesus. It's loving your neighbor.
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What you do is stand against evil and promote good. Metaxas sounds the alarm to be a
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Bonhoeffer, not the weak churches of Germany that let Hitler rise to power.
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And he was executed, by the way, in 1945 by the
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Nazi regime. But what an example from the past he is. As he stood against the evil, he was following Jesus.
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He put himself at risk for righteousness' sake and it cost him his life. But many people will not do such a thing.
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Many people will not stand up and be courageous and do what is right.
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And this is a sobering thought. But what I'm telling you is that this is happening before our eyes.
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People in their ignorance blindly follow evil people. And to support evil is to have some responsibility in the evil done by those in power.
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But our responsibility is to value the noble from the past and to preserve that in the present.
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That's why you study history. We take the best from the past, and the best from the past is judged by the standard of Scripture, which is unchangeable, and then we apply that to the present.
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George Washington was an honorable man. He didn't want to be king. He wanted a smaller government with a balance of power, just like the other founding fathers did.
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And if George Washington were alive today, many people would think he was a radical lunatic because our world is so far from that.
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In America, we celebrate good men and women from the past, but many Americans are not in the line of what made this country great.
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My grandfather, he lived in the greatest generation. The World War II generation.
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How sad how much has been lost from what they fought for in our land.
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But the point I'm making here is that you want to be tied to the great men and women of the past.
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You don't want to be in the line of the bad guys. You don't want to be in the line of the ignorant who helped push evil forward.
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You don't want to be in the line of those who knew something was wrong but did nothing about it. And there are many
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Americans today who are in the line of the villains and those who enabled the villains and they don't even know it.
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People say, we don't want to be on the wrong side of history. And I heard someone respond to that. But you're going to be on the wrong side of eternity.
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And that's the only history that matters. The history books of heaven, where God is writing every detail down.
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If you look at the end of the book of Revelation, it's not just the book of life that's there. It's also the books.
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And in those books is written everything everyone in this room and everyone in the history of the world has done to see what we've done, whether good or evil.
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Those are the true history books. And what you want in those books is to have spirit -generated works, true works of righteousness that are produced from a true faith in Jesus Christ.
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In the first century, the Pharisees thought they were good. They thought they were in the line of the great men and women of the
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Old Testament. These people that they built statues for. The household names.
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The people that you named your children after. They thought they were in that line. And as Christians, we want to be in the line of the prophets, the apostles, and most importantly,
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Jesus Christ. We also want to be in the line of the great men and women from church history.
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Down through church history, there have been many leaders who have not only proclaimed the truth, but also fought against the errors of their day that snuck their way into the church.
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Every person worth mentioning down through history hated false religion just as Jesus did.
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The same condemnation that He is giving in this chapter, the great men and women of the past would say amen.
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And they did it in their generation. They followed Jesus' example of condemning false religion.
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And we need to follow the Scripture to make sure we are in the line of the great men and women of the past.
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Weak Christians and weak churches. You don't want to remember those people. They don't make a difference.
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As you follow Jesus closely, you will be among the noble from history. I preached a sermon recently at a men's retreat, and the main idea of my message was expect the world to hate you as you follow
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Jesus closely. That's what the Bible says. The world's gonna hate you for following Jesus closely.
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All those who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. So let me just tell you, the secular history books, if you ever become well known, they will not say good things about you unless you get the rare honest person out there.
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But what does God say? That's what matters. There's always a remnant.
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There's always a group of believers out there that actually does what Jesus tells them to do.
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And may Eureka Baptist be that remnant as we stand against Satan's agenda and follow
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Jesus Christ. As people look back at our day, we want to be among the bright spots.
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At a large scale, no one may ever know who we were, but before God, we want to please
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Him. But the wicked down through history will not get away with their evil practices.
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Jesus knows the judgment that God will pour out on the godless of Israel from the
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Old Testament period to the Pharisees who stand before Him. Their rejection and the judgment that awaits them,
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He knows they deserve, but He weeps that they did not turn to God. He weeps that they went down the wrong path.
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He weeps that they're the bad guys from history. This is how He weeps. The last three verses here.
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Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.
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How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you were not willing.
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See, your house is left to you desolate for I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the
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Lord. As we look at the history of nations, lots of sad stories out there.
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The history of Israel is a sad story to this point.
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They rejected God repeatedly in the Old Testament and worst of all, they rejected the one that they longed for.
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The one that the Old Testament predicted. They rejected the Messiah. And Jesus weeps over this.
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He desired that they receive Him, but He was not the Messiah they wanted. They wanted a
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Messiah like them, but He was nothing like them. He rejected their corrupt religious establishment and as Jesus is about to leave this world,
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He has laid out the strongest condemnation against them. And as He says in verse 38, their house is left desolate.
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There's nothing there. It's pillaged. But the last verse leaves
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Israel with hope. The story of the history of Israel is a story of redemption.
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One of the great promises of Scripture is that God is not done with idolatrous Israel. There is a time in the future when they will receive their
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Messiah, but it won't come till the end of the age when the Messiah comes to the earth a second time.
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There will be Israelites who will be supernaturally preserved through the final seven -year tribulation.
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It will be one -third of the Israelites, as Zechariah 13 .8 says, and Zechariah 12 .10
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says, they will look on Him whom they have pierced. But that is in the future.
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As Jesus speaks here, He weeps, because judgment has come upon the nation for their unwillingness to receive
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God's messengers and their message. They chose their idolatrous religion over Him, the glorious Messiah, and the result of their choice is their house is left desolate.
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This is a sad tale of where false religion leads. It never leads to life.
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It leads to death. And in God's eyes, they are the evil from history.
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So over the last four weeks, we have gone through this large sermon in Matthew 23.
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And our big idea has been this. You are to understand that false religion always receives condemnation from Jesus.
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And we've seen 10 ways how. Let me run through those here. Through promoting burdensome rules while neglecting true godliness.
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Through living differently in public than in private. Through finding identity in their personal status in society.
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Through elevating themselves above God. Through believing mistakenly that they are a heaven -bound people.
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Through making disciples of hell just like them. Through declaring false oaths that do not fool
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God. Through neglecting bigger matters for smaller. Through showing cleanliness on the outside while only filthiness is on the inside.
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And what we've seen today is this. Failing to understand they're in the line with the heritage of the bad guys.
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In this chapter, as we have seen over the last five weeks, He has told us what
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He hates. And we must heed His words and run from it. The people who follow man -made religion are the tragedy of history, not the triumph.
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Dead religion Jesus hates and this we must run from. But a chapter earlier, Jesus told us what we must run to.
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You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
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And the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The Pharisees missed this, but make this your aim.
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And the result will not be condemnation, but blessedness as you are among God's remnant.
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We have seen that God and His Son Jesus hate religion that gives the appearance of godliness, but is really wicked.
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But God loves the remnant that truly, truly pursues Him. These are those, as we've read earlier today, of whom the world was not worthy.
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What wonderful words that is. Now next Sunday, we start the journey of hearing the end times according to Jesus.
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It's known as the Olivet Discourse where Jesus tells His disciples, this is what is going to happen before I return.
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These are the signs that are going to happen. We're gonna take some time going through this chapter and I can't wait to take this very interesting and very important topic very seriously as we look at it.
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But this time, let's bow our heads in prayer. Father in Heaven, we don't want to be the bad from history.
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And the only history that matters is your history. And help us to live lives of faithfulness now so that we are in the line of all the ones, all the faithful of the past.
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As we read today, as saints of old still lined the way, we're telling triumphs of His grace.
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We want to be in that line. And help us to live faithful lives personally, individually, and help us to live faithfully and be faithful as a church, a light in this community, a light in this dark world as we follow you by your grace.