Coming Down the Mountains

The Difference Between Mount Sinai and the Sermon on the Mount

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg.

The Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, the 8th chapter. When Jesus came down from the mountain, great crowds followed Him. And behold, a leper came to Him and knelt before Him, saying, Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.

And Jesus stretched out His hand and touched Him, saying, I will be clean. And immediately His leprosy was cleansed, and Jesus said to Him, See that you say nothing to anyone, but go show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded for a proof to them.

When He entered Capernaum, a centurion came forward to Him, appealing to Him, Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly. And He said to him, I will come and heal him. But the centurion replied, Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed.

For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, go, and he goes. To another, come, and he comes. And to my servant, do this, and he does it. And when Jesus heard this, He marveled and said to those who followed Him, Truly I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith.

I tell you, many will come from the east and the west, recline at the table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown out into outer darkness.

In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. And to the centurion Jesus said, Go, let it be done for you as you have believed. And the servant was healed at that very moment. This is the gospel of the Lord.

In the name of Jesus. Amen. I am not ashamed of the gospel. The gospel is the power of God unto salvation. And today in our gospel text, we're going to do a little parallel work if you don't mind. And that is, you'll note that our gospel text begins with these words, When Jesus came down from the mountain.

Have you noticed that in the Bible, mountaintop experiences sometimes are super-de-duper important? And super-de-duper, that's a very tight and very precise theological term that we use. Right. You guys don't look like you're buying it.

Okay. But the idea here is that you'll remember, God was at Mount Sinai. That's where the children of Israel received the law. Now, does the law save you? Yeah, no. Not even close. The law condemns you and shows you your need of a savior.

So mountains are kind of important. And if you remember when God gave the law, it was like there was thunderings and rumblings on the top of Mount Sinai. And the people, basically, after hearing God say, Thou shalt have no other gods.

I almost kind of see Tim doing this thing. You know what I'm saying. Those are you Monty Python folks. Anyway, you kind of get the idea. And when the people heard the voice of God and the law giving, they said, You talk to God, Moses.

And let us know what he says. And Moses ascended Mount Sinai and he disappeared for like 40 days. And God was giving him the law. And if you remember, Moses originally received those stone tablets with a handwriting of God on them.

And while he was up there, the children of Israel, well, they got a little antsy. You know, something like that. If you look back at Exodus chapter 32 with me, I'll start at verse 1. It says, When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron, and they said to him, Up, make us gods who shall go before us.

What a stupid sentence. Make us gods? Any god created by a human being isn't a god. This shows you just the magnitude of sin and how it completely blinds us. They don't even recognize it. Like, hey, wait a second.

If I made a god, it wasn't really a god. They're just not connecting 2 plus 2 here. So, up, make us gods who will go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we don't know what's become of him.

So Aaron said to them, Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, your daughters. Bring them to me. So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron.

He received the gold from their hand, fashioned it with a graving tool, made a golden calf, and they said, These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. And then when Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it, and Aaron made a proclamation and said, Tomorrow shall be a feast to Yahweh.

This is no way to worship Yahweh. This is idolatry. It's just rank, and it's stupid on its face. But thus are the consequences of sin. So they rose up early the next day, and they offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings.

Next sentence, And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play. You can kind of think of this like a Burning Man festival. You know, maybe a first version of Woodstock. You know, sex, drugs, rock and roll with a golden calf.

And so the Lord said to Moses, Go down, your people whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, they have corrupted themselves. Notice that God's pawning these people off on Moses. They've corrupted themselves.

They've turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They've made for themselves a golden calf, and they have worshipped it and sacrificed to it and said, These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.

So Yahweh said to Moses, I've seen this people, and behold, it's a stiff-necked people. Now, therefore, let me alone so that my wrath may burn hot against them, and I may consume them in order that I may make a great nation of you.

But Moses implored Yahweh his god and said, O Yahweh, why does your wrath burn hot against your people whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say with an evil intent did he bring them out to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth?

Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self and said to them, I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.

And Yahweh relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people. Verse 15, Moses turned and went down from the mountain. So here comes Moses coming down from Mount Sinai and do you think this is going to go well?

This is like my mom showing up when I haven't done my chores and I've been dawdling and whoops, yikes, I'm in trouble. That's kind of the point. The law condemns us. The law kills us. So Moses turned and went down from the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand, tablets that were written on both sides, on the front and on the back, they were written, the tablets were the work of God, the writing was the writing of God engraved on tablets.

Could you imagine if they found even just a couple of fragments of this thing today? If they found it? It would be a sensation around the world. People would flock from all over the world to come see this.

So when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, there's a noise of war in the camp. But he said, it's not the sound of shouting for victory or the sound of the cry of defeat, it's the sound of singing that I hear.

And as soon as he came near the camp, he saw the calf and the dancing and Moses' anger burnt hot and he threw the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. He took the calf that he had made and burned it with fire, ground it into powder, scattered it on the water and made the people of Israel drink it.

So coming down from Mount Sinai with the law, well, that didn't really go so well. Very condemning. But in our Gospel text, you know, Christ, it says when Christ came down from the mountain. What mountain?

Well, in the preceding context, in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus has delivered his inaugural sermon called the Sermon on the Mount. Now did Jesus come to give us a scolding? Did Jesus come to wield his sword and slash and kill and burn the evildoers?

Did he come to punish us? No, it says in Scripture that God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. And so you'll remember in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says words like, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are you when people persecute you. Christ came and he declares blessings, and these blessings are only through the Gospel because of why he came and what he came to accomplish.

And so Jesus coming down from the mountain is met not only by crowds, he's also met by a leper. And I will remind you, the Mosaic Covenant required lepers to socially distance. This is not Fauci who gave this order, it's God.

And you're going to note that there were very, very strict rules. This leper, by being a leper, would have been declared unclean by a Levitical priest. He would have been required to live outside of the village in a leper colony.

He would have been forbidden from attending church. And you cannot touch other people as a leper because if you touch, anybody who's clean who touches a leper becomes unclean and there's a whole Mosaic Covenant set of rigmarole rights in order to reestablish being clean.

And the other part of this is that before there were face masks and personal protection, lepers were required to cover their mouths with their hand and create a mask and say to people, I'm unclean, unclean, unclean.

So you'll note that God understood a thing or two about communicable diseases. All of that being said, the story on its face is amazing. This leper is bold. If I can use a term from Stephen Furtick, he's exercising audacious faith.

And audacious is kind of the right word here because he's breaking a few of the Mosaic Covenant laws by being around this crowd in the first place. And what does he do? He boldly comes and he kneels before Jesus.

And you gotta note that any Torah observant Jew is going to be looking at this going, whoa, right? And he says to Jesus, Lord, if you are willing, if you will it, you can make me clean. This guy has faith.

He has true, honest to goodness faith. It just shows up in this one sentence like you wouldn't believe. Number one, he calls Jesus Lord. He is Lord. But number two, you'll note that true saving faith always trusts God according to his will.

Do we not pray in the Lord's prayer as Christ has taught us? Your kingdom come, your will be done. True saving faith trusts and has confidence in the goodness of God to the point that even if God says no to your request, you recognize that God has your best interest in mind.

Have you ever noted that sometimes the things we ask for in prayer can actually hurt us? I think of it like this. This is an illustration. This is not family history. If when Joshua, my son, was three years old and we asked him, what do you want for your birthday?

If he had said, I want a machete, at three years old we would have said, not on your life. It ain't happening. Because we know what would happen as a three-year-old with a machete. You would cut yourself.

You'd kill your sisters. The cat and the dog would be dead. It would be a murder scene and we'd go to prison for giving you a machete. But later in life, if he asked for a machete now, sure, you want a machete?

Go for it. You think that's going to be something that's helpful? His wife says no. But you get the idea here. Sometimes what we ask for from God can actually hurt us. And so true saving faith prays that God's will would be done even if the thing I'm asking for is not going to be granted.

David exemplified this in the book of 2 Samuel when Absalom, his son, was in the middle of the coup d 'etat to get his father's kingdom to topple so that Absalom could become the king of Israel. Poor David had to skedaddle.

He was strategically in a non-defensible position because if he stayed in Jerusalem all Absalom had to do was surround Jerusalem and wait him out. And so he had to get out of Jerusalem. And so as David is leaving Jerusalem, we read these words in 2 Samuel, David says carry the ark of God back into the city.

If I find favor in the eyes of Yahweh, he will bring me back and let me see both it and its dwelling place. But if he says I have no pleasure in you, behold, here I am. Let God do to me what seems good to him.

And so this leper, if you will, if it's your will, you can make me clean. Now it's at this point I need to take a little bit of a dig on today's modern charismatics and the NAR. Because they claim that we have authority to speak to diseases and things.

And that the proper thing for us Christians to do is never to pray your will be done because according to their theology, if you pray God's will to be done, then apparently you don't have faith. Faith that Jesus has given you authority over diseases.

But here's the thing, he hasn't. So you'll note the leper doesn't say, hey Lord, check this out. Leprosy, I command you to leave my body. Okay? He doesn't do that. And anybody who would teach you to speak to disease has you praying to the wrong thing.

Leprosy can't hear you. Cancer can't hear you. Whatever is ailing you can't hear you. In my case creeping old age. It can't hear me. But Jesus can. And so here in our first example of faith in our gospel text, this leper he's worked it out.

He's figured out from the reports the little information that he has. Jesus, the crowds are following him. He's healing people. He's forgiving sins. He's changed water into wine. The reports are getting out.

And this guy has sorted it out and said, that's the Messiah. That's the one Isaiah prophesied would be able to heal lepers and to make them clean. That he's the one who would be able to give sight to the blind.

Hearing to the deaf. And knowing his Bible he's put two and two together and he properly identifies Jesus for who he is. Messiah and Lord. And so he knows that Christ can hear his prayer. And here's the thing, kneeling before Jesus, he's praying.

Now if you want to sit there and say, yeah okay sure I'll grant you that he's praying but it's different for me than it is for him. And the reason it's different for me is because I can't see Jesus. But this guy got to see him.

Isn't it funny how our sinful nature always wants to cast doubts like somehow there's a difference? Do you really think that there is a qualitative difference between you praying on your knees or seated down or standing that you praying to Jesus that there's a difference because you can't physically see him?

Of course not. Christ is omnipresent. There isn't a place where he isn't. You can't hide from him, from Jesus. In fact, he would be the worst person to have to hide from and hide and go seek because he knows exactly where you are.

And he's there with you the whole time. I will never leave you or forsake you. So when you pray to Christ, when you pray to Jesus it doesn't matter if you can see him. He hears you just as loudly as he heard this petition from this leper who had faith.

And so he humbly says, Lord, if you will you can make me clean. And I always have to point this bit out. Let me give you the contrast first. You remember in our Old Testament text, the leper Naaman from Syria.

Did Elisha come out and touch Naaman? No. Naaman shows up with his entire entourage, which had to be quite impressive, with chariots and soldiers and all this kind of stuff. And he's got 10 changes of clothes.

That's a big deal. He's loaded with money. He's dressed regally. He shows up at Elisha's house. And you can almost see how this goes down. He arrives. He expects the door to come open and for Elisha to come out and wave his hands and do something impressive.

Does Elisha come out? No. He sends his servant Gehazi. You can almost see it like the door creaking open and out comes Gehazi. Are you the prophet? No. I'm his servant. Go wash in the Jordan seven times and you'll be clean.

Elisha doesn't come out, right? Why? Because if Elisha is in the presence of Naaman the leper, guess what happens to Elisha? He becomes unclean. Elisha's flesh is not life-giving flesh. As a result of it, you are in the presence of something unclean.

You touch the unclean, you become unclean. And everybody knows Torah requires that you don't touch anything unclean. So I always picture this like if there was a movie. If I could film this, this is the way I would depict it.

So here you got the guy, this leper kneeling before Jesus. Lord, if you will, you can make me clean. And you can almost see Peter taking advantage of the moment going, maybe this is a good time to maybe have a swig of water from my canteen.

So he's drinking his water and the text says, and Jesus stretched out his hand. I almost see Peter dropping his canteen and going, and then everything goes into slow motion, right? No, Jesus, don't. As he reaches out his hand and he touched the leper.

Awkward pause worked. Cool. You kind of get the point. Is Jesus now unclean? But Jesus says, I will it, be clean. And guess what? Immediately his leprosy was cleansed. And then Jesus said to him, now you see that you say nothing to anyone.

Jesus was trying to keep things on the DL because the crowds were following him. They wanted to see the miracles maybe and have people healed. Jesus doesn't want to do miracles apart from also preaching the gospel to them.

So see that you say nothing to anyone. You go and you show yourself to the priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded them for a proof to them. This is a great example of prayer. And so you'll note that in the epiphany season, the revealing of Christ.

Here it is revealed that Jesus is the one who answers prayer. That makes him God. That's the best bit of all of this. And note, unlike Moses, Jesus coming down from the mountain isn't condemning and judging and losing his mind and getting angry.

Instead, he's coming to the very people that the law condemned. Lepers. And he's cleansing them rather than casting them into outer darkness. The contrast is stark and it's quite amazing. But our gospel text gives us a second example of Christ answering prayer and somebody having faith.

And of all people, it's a Gentile Roman soldier. Now we learn from the gospel of Luke. And this is kind of fun when you do the cross-reference work. We learn from the gospel of Luke that initially what happened is that the Pharisees and the people from the synagogue in Capernaum, they went on behalf of this Roman soldier to try to smooth things out with Jesus.

And they said that he was worthy to have Jesus heal his servant because he built the synagogue in Capernaum. Let me ask you this. Do your good works merit anything from God? No. Like, no. And so what happens in the gospel of Luke, he changes his mind and says, no, no, no, I'm not worthy.

And so that's an important bit of all of this. We learn that this guy has real saving faith. So you can kind of connect the dots. Roman centurion, probably stationed. He got his orders from the military top brass.

We're going to station you in Israel. And he gets there and he hears the word of God. And he becomes a believer. He's one of these guys who honors the word of God. He sacrificially builds the synagogue.

This is a guy who we can see has faith by his works, but also by his true faith humility. And so we learn in this, in our gospel text, that the centurion appealed to Christ and said, Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering terribly.

And Jesus said, I'll come and heal him. But then the centurion thought the better of it, said, Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. Stop there for a second. I'm not worthy to have you come under my roof.

That's a good confession. He recognizes that he's a sinner and that Christ is holy. He recognizes here also that Jesus can be prayed to. And we can see from his response and his understanding of the authority that Jesus has, this guy has sorted it out too.

Christ is the Messiah. He's God in human flesh. He's Emmanuel. He's God with us. And he is praying not for himself. He's praying for his servant. He's not praying for his own benefit. He's praying for the benefit of somebody else.

And so we learn from our gospel text that you can bring your petitions to Christ for yourself. You can and you should bring your petitions to Christ on behalf of other people. And here we learn that when you pray for somebody else, Jesus, our great God and Savior who is kind and merciful, he answers prayers on behalf of other people.

And he answers prayer on behalf of the faith of the one making the petition. Do you think prayer then for others is important? Indeed it is. So he confesses that he's not worthy to have Jesus come under his roof.

But he says, I too am a man under authority with soldiers under me. I say to one, go. He goes. Another comes and he comes. And to my servant, do this. And he does it. And then when Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him.

And note here, he is not focusing in on, well, this guy built the synagogue. Wow, this is a great man of works. No, he says, I tell you, no one in Israel have I found such faith. Now, this is kind of an indictment.

It's an indictment on Jesus' disciples first and foremost. And we'll see next week in the gospel, for next week, they haven't quite sorted out who Jesus is. But this is also a huge indictment on the religious establishment of Jesus' day.

The high priest, the Sanhedrin, the Pharisees, the scribes and those people. Jesus is pointing to this Gentile Roman centurion and says, this guy has great faith. It's greater than anyone in all of Israel.

Yeah, well, that's the thing, isn't it? Now, this doesn't mean that later on the disciples will not also have great faith. They will. But the point is that this fellow recognizes who Jesus is, the authority he has.

He understands his own unworthiness, does not dare to hold up his good works as somehow they are meritorious and earn things from God. And instead, he recognizes who Jesus is. And in faith, he says, Lord, if you just say the word, he'll be healed.

And so Jesus says, I tell you, many will come from the east and the west and they will recline at the table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. And we too have been invited to recline at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, even though some of us come from the great nort.

Isn't that the way you say it? The nort? Even the great nort people will come to worship and to recline at table. While those who are genetically Jewish who do not believe and trust in Christ, who do not have faith, they'll be thrown into outer darkness.

In that place, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. So the centurion Jesus said, go, that'll be done for you as you have believed. And it's interesting to note here that when somebody comes to me for pastoral counseling and they have a sin that they want to be unburdened from, and so they will engage in what we call private absolution with me.

One of the things I ask them at the very end is I'll ask them this question, do you believe that the forgiveness that I speak is not my forgiveness but Christ's forgiveness? And they say, yes, I believe.

And then I say, let it be done for you then as you have believed. Instead, and by the command of Christ, I forgive you all of your sins. And so you'll note then that faith is not an insignificant thing.

Faith is practically and is everything. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. And so we've noted now two different coming down the mountain experiences. But how is it possible that Jesus wasn't behaving at all like Moses when he comes down from the Sermon on the Mount and from that mountain, he's not swinging his sword of judgment, but he's acting in mercy and grace and kindness, answering prayer and basically giving to people the petitions that they've asked for, for themselves and for others.

How is this even possible? Well, it's possible because Christ himself had to go to a different mountain himself, and he's on his way to that one. It's called Mount Moriah, sometimes referred to as Mount Zion.

That's the place where he had to climb. He climbed up, and he initially began that climb by carrying his own cross, but he buckled under the load and somebody else had to help him. And on that Friday afternoon, that Friday morning, Jesus bore your sins and mine, carried them to the top of Mount Moriah, otherwise known as Golgotha.

And there he was nailed to his cross, and he bled and died for your sins and for mine, so that you and I can be forgiven and pardoned, so that God would not act in judgment against us, but by what Christ has done, we would be reconciled to God, and rather than judged, we would be forgiven and pardoned.

And as a result of it, Jesus coming down from Mount Moriah, from Golgotha, he now bears the gifts of salvation that he won in his word, in the absolution, in his body and blood, given and shed for the forgiveness of his sins, his blood which he adds to the waters of baptism.

Each and every one of us, rather than getting what we receive, receiving what we have earned, we instead receive from Christ forgiveness, mercy, grace, pardon, and, like these two men of faith in our gospel text, a God who hears our prayers and acts in our best interest, and mercifully hears us and grants the petitions at times that we pray for.

All of this because Christ, when he went up to Mount Moriah, when he came down, he came down having won the forgiveness and mercy of God. Mountaintop experiences, a big deal, super-de-duper important, if you know what I mean.

In the name of Jesus, Amen.

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