The Multiplication of Christ's Kingdom

This morning, we're going to be looking at Mark 1, verses 12 through 20.

I'm going to read that for us, and we'll pray and get going. In verse 12, the

Word of the Lord says, And immediately the Spirit drove him to go out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan.

And he was with the wild beasts, and the angels were ministering to him. Now, after John had been delivered up into custody,

Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent, and believe in the gospel. As he was going along by the Sea of Galilee, he saw

Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting a net in the sea, for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them,

Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men. And immediately they left their nets and followed him.

And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, who were also in the boat, mending the nets.

And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and went away to follow him.

This week, I wish I could claim it, but I can't. I was quoting Better Men, I just can't remember who

I was quoting. I was talking to Corey Platt, and I told him that I had heard it said,

Mainstream evangelicals are intent on evangelizing the lost, and Reformed churches are intent on evangelizing mainstream evangelicals.

And so today, I wish I'd come up with that, I didn't, and I can't remember who said it, but it's good, and I think that we do see that stuck in our little corner of evangelicalism that's called

Reformed Baptists. We are small, but we are aggressive, I think

I would like to say. Today, when we look at the prologue of Mark's gospel, I think we're going to try to, if this sermon is effective, and try to blend two things together.

One of those is going to be something that's red meat for Reformed people, and that is a lot of really deep theology.

But what I want to end it with is showing the connection that this deep theology which we love translates into ferociously evangelizing the lost and making disciples, which we must love, and which has not been characteristic of us,

I think, as a tribe within evangelicalism. And so to start with, to look forward, we're going to look back for a little bit, as Gandalf said, and we're going to look at a vaguely familiar route to the throne.

So last week, as you go back a couple of verses, you would see that the heavens opened, and the

Lord declared, you are my beloved son, and you I am well pleased. And so there's a lot of things that are going to happen here that Mark writes with really breathtaking brevity.

It's so quick and punchy, and he keeps using this word immediately, immediately. And he uses that word, and he writes the same way, that these things are just firing off one after the other.

And what I want to do is slow down a little bit and examine the theological part of this passage this morning, which is the temptation of Christ in the desert.

But what matters, before we get into the desert, what you have to understand is Mark is pushing us towards something.

It's in the background. It's that Jesus has to be something for the temptation in the desert to even matter.

It's not that he's a regular man. If a regular man was to go in the desert and be tempted, it wouldn't matter.

It might be a nice story to tell around a campfire, but who Jesus is, is what gives the significance to the temptation in the desert.

And so I think that Mark has led us there. And so in order to understand that, I want to look back. The first thing is the one who is going to reverse the curse of Adam has to be the king.

He has to be the king. Adam was given the dominion mandate. He was told to go, be fruitful, multiply, and to take dominion over all the fish of the sea and all the birds of the air.

That meant that Adam was the king of the world. And he was anointed the king of the world because he was to image

God and to place his seal everywhere he went. That's what it meant to be made in God's image, is that he was like the seal of the king that showed this stamp goes everywhere where he is.

And so in order for the curse of Adam to be removed through this temptation in the desert, Jesus has to be the king.

And we see here that he is coronated in the first part of Mark, where it says, the

Lord, the Father speaks. And Barth mentioned this morning, this is the first time until, this is the last time until late in this book that Jesus accepts this declaration.

In fact, he will tell people over and over who decry him to be the son of God, he tells them to be quiet.

And he binds, okay? And he tells them to not let that out because the time has not yet come. But he does not tell his father not to say this.

So his father comes with John the Baptist baptizing him and he coronates him, and this matches very closely with the decree that's given in Psalm 2, which is quoted here often.

Verses 7 and 8 say, I will surely tell of the decree of Yahweh. He said to me,

You are my son, today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will surely give the nations as your inheritance and the ends of the earth as your possession.

Now we have seen this verse, these two verses often used in eschatology. But I think the more near meaning and the more important meaning is to say that this decree of the father that says, you are my son in whom

I am well pleased. The father is declaring before everyone, before those witnesses, this is the king of the world.

My decree goes forth. Jesus is coronated. And so very clearly, we see that Jesus is the long -awaited king of Israel.

And he has the potential to be the king of kings and the king of all the world. But he has to go through some things like the first king of Israel, the first true king of Israel, David, had to go through.

There was a long path to get there. And I think we're going to see parallels. The second thing we see is that there is an identification of the mission.

And so we're going to see that after this baptism, Jesus is driven out. The word in the

Greek actually means expelled. The Holy Spirit expels Jesus into the desert.

He's driven out of civilization. And he's driven out for 40 days. This should clue us in.

There's a couple of numbers, a couple of 40s. One of them is about Moses and the Hebrews. But the other one that's more closely significant here comes from 1

Kings 19, which is about Elijah. And what Elijah did was he went to Mount Horeb, and he fasted for 40 days to hear from God.

And he eventually does hear from God. And we get all kinds of bad theology from how he hears from God, because there's a tornado, and he hears a small, still voice.

And so we've transliterated that into thinking that's how God speaks to people, which that's not what that story is doing.

What that story is doing is showing that Elijah is another true prophet like the kind that was promised in Deuteronomy 18.

Deuteronomy 18 tells us, Yahweh your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you.

This is Moses. From your brothers you shall listen to him. This is according to all that you asked of Yahweh your

God in Horeb on the day of assembly, saying, let me not hear again the voice of Yahweh my

God. Let me not see his great fire anymore, or I will die. And Yahweh said to me, they have spoken well.

I will raise up a prophet from among their brothers like you, and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.

And it will be that whoever will not listen to my words, which he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him.

Moses, Elijah, I argue Samuel's in there. And then we get John the Baptist, and the

Lord Jesus Christ. These are the prophets of this type. The prophets where the Lord speaks judgment to them, and to not listen means that the

Lord himself requires it. And so it's important for us to note that this is a parallel. When Jesus is driven out into the desert for 40 days, it's to fast, and it's not so he can hear the voice of the

Lord, it's so he can be tempted by the enemy of God. Because Jesus is the greatest prophet. He is the highest prophet.

And he brings the words that John the Baptist is on the scene warning all of the

Jews. He's warning them, the ax is laid to the root of the tree. If you don't repent, the tree is going to be cut down.

And so if you don't listen to the prophet, the one who God has put the words in his mouth, then the Lord will require it of you.

And if you don't listen to John the Baptist, the Lord will require it of you. And we know to this day, because Jesus is the eternal highest prophet, that if you don't listen to the words of the prophet, the

Lord will require it of you. To not listen to the warnings that Jesus speaks, to not listen to the words and the commands of Jesus' mouth is death.

And there is no other way. That's Jesus' office of prophet. And now we know today,

Jesus, the son of man, the son of God, there is no mediator between us and God other than the

God -man, Jesus Christ. He is the lone mediator, which means he is also a priest. And we see that with the story of Moses.

As Moses crosses the Red Sea, the water is parted, and they live in the desert, in the wilderness among the beasts for 40 years.

And that's because of judgment. That's because they don't listen. That's because they don't want what

God has laid out for them. Are you seeing the word picture? The Hebrews, they sit in the wilderness because they don't believe the promises of God, because they would rather go back to Egypt, because they like the cucumbers.

They like the stability of living in the civilization. And so they're driven out, and they don't get to go into the promised land.

And therefore, similarly, if you don't believe the words of Jesus Christ, then you are in the wilderness, and you will never enter into the promised land because he is the one who has made the way.

And he made the way, and we saw it last week. It's a simple word picture. Moses was able to cross through the

Red Sea with the people. But Jesus stands in the Jordan, and he doesn't cross through the

Jordan, but instead, he symbolically dies in the Jordan. And that's how we're saved, by the

Spirit, and by water, and by blood. When Jesus is baptized and buried under the

Jordan, he is showing that this way out, this rescue mission, is going to be a different one from the people in Canaan, from the people who inherited the land by crossing the

Red Sea. This time, the mediator, this time, the man of God, this time, the prophet that's like Moses, he would die to enable his people to come into their own, to come into what

God has promised. So Jesus is the prophet. He is the priest.

He is the king, and this is critical because Adam was all of those things. Observe, Adam was the king.

He was given dominion over everything in the world. He was made in the image of God. Adam was the priest.

Eden was the sanctuary. He was in there. He was to go and commune with God in the sanctuary and to keep it free of all enemies, like the priest had to do, you had to be holy to enter into the sanctuary.

And Adam was the prophet because he walked with God in the cool of the day and he heard directly the words of God every single day.

Adam was all of these things, and for Jesus to not be all of these things and even more than this temptation in the desert means nothing.

And so now we get to the point. Tired of looking back, we will look forward and we will see that the

Holy Spirit expels, drives Jesus out into the wilderness and he's there for 40 days being weakened by not eating.

He's fasting. And can you imagine the position that you are in as a man being in the desert among the wild beasts, not eating for 40 days?

I'm just going to imagine you're not in very good shape. It's pretty rough. And so Jesus at the lowest of the low is visited by the great tempter, the cunning enemy, the prowling lion who roars, the one who shoots fiery darts and the one who has spent all of his time for millennia studying mankind, studying the promise that was given in Genesis 3 .15.

He knew that God had pronounced that his head would be crushed by the seed of the woman and he has schemed and studied for millennia trying to figure out how to thwart this prophecy, how to get around this decree.

And so in his study, he finds that the time is ripe. And what he doesn't understand is this time was appointed for him because Jesus is driven out by who?

By the Holy Spirit. God, the Godhead, the triune God, the creator and sustainer, the omniscient one, has sent

Jesus out for this time, for this appointment in the desert after being perfectly weakened for 40 days.

And here comes the temptation. Mark doesn't give us much, but we see it in the parallel accounts.

Then in Matthew, there are three series of temptations. And the first one is that Satan comes to Jesus and he tells him, turn the stones into bread so that you can eat.

Now why this one first? I think there's a couple of reasons. The most obvious one is that Jesus is hungry. Very hungry.

And can you imagine how good bread would taste if you haven't tasted anything for 40 days?

You're famished. But on a deeper level, I think that this temptation is the same or a very similar one that was given to Adam and Eve in the garden.

The fruit of the tree, remember, it appealed to the eyes and the desires of the flesh. They saw the fruit and they saw that it appeared good for eating.

Similarly, to turn the stones into bread would make them appear good for eating. And so Jesus answers in the way that Adam should have.

And he answers and he says that he lives only on the word of God. In other words, what

God told him to do is life. And to disobey God is death.

Do you believe that? We live by the good pleasure of God's decree and God's will.

It's not bread that sustains us. Bread is the means by which God sustains us. But life is a mysterious thing that human beings are unable to replicate.

We can't create life. We can't build it in a lab. Life is given by God.

It's given by his decree, by his sovereign will, and by his purposes. And Jesus understands that and he believes that with faith better than anyone who has ever lived because when

Jesus sees the temptation of the devil, he says, I would die if I was to take this bread.

Even though I'm starving, the Lord is going to sustain me. It really recalls the faith that Abraham had when

Isaac was sacrificed, when he was required of him, is that Hebrews 11 tells us that Abraham believed that Isaac was going to be resurrected by God.

In other words, God's promises overrode every single thing that Abraham could see with his eyes.

And similarly, Jesus in the desert, he's got to be near death after 40 days. Got to be near death.

Wasting away, emaciated, and yet he knows to take this bread is to depend on the physical, to depend on disobeying, disobeying the promises of God.

And I will believe what God says. And this is the greatness of Christ, is that when

Adam was given this temptation and failed, he was in the middle of paradise with the best food, with food that we can't imagine.

It was not stained by the corruption of sin and he ate as he wished every day and yet he was tempted by this fruit.

And Jesus, who has not seen food, who's living among the jackals, denies this temptation and depends on the promises of God.

Amazing. This next temptation, I think, might be the most devilish, though. And Adam never got here.

And I believe he would have. I believe that if Adam had passed the first test that there would have been more testing.

Because I think that what we see is that God is working in redemption. He's working with a purpose.

And to be the king of the world and to be God's image and the one who goes and spreads

God's news everywhere and who rules over everything, you have to be holy.

So Jesus proceeds into new territory. Man has never seen this before. This is a new kind of temptation.

And Jesus dwells among the wild beasts and Satan tempts Jesus to jump off of the pinnacle of the temple, assuring him that he was safe in the arms of Yahweh above.

In fact, he quotes Scripture at him. Psalm 91, Satan says, For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.

On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone. You will tread upon the fierce lion and cobra, the young lion and the serpent.

You will trample down. Jesus says the Logos. Jesus, as the Word, knew this

Word. And Satan comes to him and says, All you have to do is trust in God, Jesus.

Trust in the promises of God and jump off of this pinnacle and we will see a mighty spectacle as the angels of heaven bear you up and you don't even bruise your foot.

Do you see the symbolism there? And in a weakened state, this temptation is especially brutal.

And yet today, even still, we find that Christians are consistently led astray by the twisting of Scripture.

It's one of the devil's greatest tricks. And it's one of his most subtle deceptions is to take the plain meaning of Scripture and to twist it around for our own ends.

Even to not necessarily make it mean what it doesn't mean, but to twist it and use it in the wrong situation.

And that's what Satan wants to do is he wants to test Jesus by making him listen to the promises of God in a self -promotional, presumptive way.

It's kind of like saying you don't have faith unless you're going to climb out on the limb and cut the limb off behind you.

Can God not save you? Of course he can. And when Jesus looks at this, are not all the promises of God in Jesus based on his immortality and his resurrection from the death?

Jesus says this over and over again. And so Jesus knows that he's not going to die from flying off the pinnacle of the temple.

That is true. But Jesus also knows that his time has not yet come. And that's where it goes full circle, right?

His time has not come to declare this aspect of his ministry. And yet we're going to see a foretaste of it in this section, right?

What Jesus responds with is he quotes another Scripture that's more timely, Deuteronomy 6 .15.

And if you read Deuteronomy 6, it's a text that we look at a whole lot because Deuteronomy 6 is the instructions for the people of God to not forget what

God has said and to disciple their people over and over again by putting the words of God everywhere they go.

And in Deuteronomy 6 .15, it says, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.

That was issued as a warning after God had commanded Israel to love him with all their hearts and that they would enter the promised land.

And yet the people of Israel tested God over and over again. We sing a song, well, Jake wants us to sing a song, that has this line in it about how

God was giving them manna and giving them meat and they just kept testing them. Are you going to give us more meat?

Are you going to give us something else? And they put the Lord God to the test. And that's exactly what Moses was telling them not to do.

And that's exactly what Satan is doing here. He is putting the Lord God to the test. Yes, you said this,

God, are you really going to do it? And Jesus' heart is different because Jesus says, I know the plans that God has and I know what

I'm sitting here to do and it's not to make displays of grandeur by jumping off the pinnacle of the temple in a totally self -indulgent, self -promotional scheme, which is what

Satan wanted him to do. Jesus never forgot, as Israel did, that God was with him and that all authority came from his

Father. He says it over and over again in the Gospel of John. I do what the Father has sent me to do.

There is submission to the Father in his earthly ministry. And so there's a parallel again.

Jesus is the true Israel. Have you heard that said? There's a reason that we say that. And that's the reason that at every turn where Israel failed,

Jesus succeeded. Every turn. And that's why it's important that Jesus is the seed of David.

Right? That's why it's important that he has gone through the lineage from Abraham because he is the true and better Israel.

That's not just a pithy thing we say. That's a thing that's true in every sense of it. He's the true

Israel because every single time Israel fails, Jesus is given the same opportunity and succeeds.

And this is no exception. The final temptation is Satan offering Jesus what he already owns.

He says that he will offer Jesus all of the kingdoms of the world. Everything your eyes see,

Jesus, this will be yours. It would be an appeal to take at the wrong time.

You remember I said this is a vaguely familiar approach to the throne, right? Jesus has to go through this temptation to be the reversal of the covenant of works.

Right? The covenant of works, if you'll remember. Do this and you will live. Adam is told, you will have all of these blessings.

Just do not eat from this tree. Adam eats from the tree and those curses are given to all mankind through him.

For human beings to have any hope, any hope, to be with our God, one of two things has to happen.

Number one, we would have to live perfect lives and be born perfect.

So that's impossible. Number two, we would have to have that curse removed by the fulfillment of the covenant of works, which is what

Jesus did. Jesus lived a perfect life. He was not born with the stain of sin because Adam was not his father.

Remember? He was born of a virgin. And so because he was born of a virgin and he lived a perfect life, he could remove the curse that Adam brought on us through the covenant of works.

That's why our kids reflexively sin is because they're born in Adam. That's why it's not hard for us to tell lies.

We're born in Adam. It's natural for us. And so Jesus has taken that curse away and this is truly his moment of testing that we see in that tragic chapter in Genesis 3 where Jesus goes into the desert and he's tempted to an infinite degree higher than Adam ever got tempted and he passed the test because he's alike us in every way yet with no sin.

And that's how Jesus has saved us. And Jesus answers this and he sounds like his father

David. Remember David every single time. Take Saul. We got him right now. Remember we just read it.

We can take him. No. Will you not touch the Lord's anointed? David waited on the

Lord time and time again for his throne, what had been promised to him to be delivered to him through God's action and not through his own action, not through his presumption.

And Jesus here echoes it to a much greater extent because Jesus owns all the nations of the world and the devil offers it to him because the devil did own all the nations of the world because God had given them to him.

And Jesus says, no, in this time is the fiercest rebuke to Satan. Jesus says, go Satan for it is written you shall worship the

Lord your God and serve him only. Can you worship the

Lord your God by disobeying his commands? No. We know that that's preposterous.

Over and over in the New Testament we are instructed and we learn that there is no way to worship God by disobeying him.

If you love your parents you will obey your parents. If you love your God you obey your God. Our salvation is not placed in our obedience but our ability to obey has been placed in us by our love for God that's been given to us by the

Holy Spirit. All Christians agree with that. To disagree with that is a false gospel. And so what happens is we get great hope and there's a cool tie up to this passage.

When Jesus gives this command it's interesting and it's very critical to notice what

Satan does. Jesus says, go and what does Satan do? He leaves.

He leaves. He flees. And then we do get a shadow of this fulfillment of Psalm 91 is that the angels do come and minister to Jesus as promised.

So Jesus obeys God. Jesus trusts the decree. He trusts his mission.

And the angels come and minister to him in the desert and Satan flees. But Mark shortens this account because as we're going to see in the coming weeks and months we're going to see if this battle is not over and that Satan is going to rejoin time and time again.

And Jesus is going to be tested over and over again but what we're going to see is Jesus when he's not fasting in the wilderness

Jesus is going to be making war with Satan. And the tide gets turned. The tide gets turned.

This is definitely Satan on the attack, is it not? Jesus weakened. Satan comes to him. Satan comes in his weakest moments and he brings his best stuff.

When we turn it around and we see in Mark Jesus is going to be stamping out the kingdom of Satan over and over again until it culminates in Jesus owning all the nations because he finally binds up Satan and destroys his power over the nations.

That's what the resurrection did. Whatever you believe about when that occurs in history one thing you have to understand is that in a biblical theological sense the resurrection of Christ destroyed

Satan's plans. There is no way to thwart the promise in Genesis 3 .15

right now because it has happened. Because Jesus has secured victory over his enemy.

And we're going to see it over and over again. Alright, last part here. This is a two -parter.

Could be short for me. We'll see. And this is where we got the title of the sermon.

I'm calling this The New Adam's Expanding Kingdom. And first of all we see in verse 14 that John is taken out of the picture in Mark's gospel.

John has been the forerunner. And John we see manifest what is mentioned in other gospels is that John has declared that he must increase while I decrease.

That's what John has said. And so John is taken away into captivity by Herod for prophetically speaking to the magistrate.

And he's eventually going to be beheaded in a very unlawful way. In a murderous rage. In a ridiculous decree by a tyrant.

But John is given into custody and he's out of the picture in Mark. And Jesus comes into Galilee and he's wasting no time.

Because what Jesus is doing is what Christians have been called to do in his name ever since he came and rose back up and ascended into heaven.

And that is to preach the gospel of God. The gospel of God. And it's interesting what he says in verse 15.

He says, The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe in the gospel. There's an indicative. The time is fulfilled. That means the time is here.

All the time that you've been waiting for all of the history of Israel has culminated in this moment.

And the time is ripe. It's ready. Everything has been put in place.

And so now what? What's going to happen? The kingdom of God is at hand. Because the time has been fulfilled the kingdom of God is at hand.

And then what do we do because of that? Repent and believe. This is such a simple thing that is our message.

And it's a thing that's been clouded and almost lost in obscurity in the church in America. Because what we want to do is entice people to come in the door.

Right? We want to entice people to be able to listen to us. And so we might say things like believe but we rarely say things like repent.

Because to repent is the forerunner of believing. And that's not because it's our work but it's because from this pulpit

I think we've been taught thoroughly from 1 Samuel that repentance is a gift of God. Human beings are not looking around trying to get themselves right with God.

Human beings are looking around trying to make themselves as fat and happy as they possibly can. That's what motivates us.

We want to be comfortable. We want to be powerful. We want to be wealthy. And we want to have what we want when we want it.

But God breaks into our life and he gives us repentance through the Holy Spirit. And when we repent we turn from that way of looking at things and now we live for God.

And that is the gospel. That's the nuts and bolts of the call of the kingdom. So what has happened is the time is ripe.

Jesus comes on the scene and he says this. A new king is here. The king has arrived and the orders of this king are repent and believe.

And the rest of the New Testament is basically telling us how we do that. It fleshes it out for us.

What does it mean to repent and believe? Well that's where we get the commandments of which there are far more in the

New Testament than there are in the Old Testament. Did you know that? God didn't change but when

Jesus came and now he has revealed what was hidden before what is revealed is that God is even more holy than we thought before.

And it's unthinkable that in his holiness in his unapproachable light and splendor that he has manifested himself through the person of Jesus Christ so that we can enter into the holy places through the blood of Christ.

And Jesus has made a way. The time is fulfilled. And what we do is we shortchange the

Bible when we say things like God loves you, love him. Well in our culture look that's true but in our culture the problem that we run into is we have stripped the word love of any meaningful definition.

Because according to God's word loving is obeying his commandments. So if we love one another then we obey his commandments.

If we love God we obey his commandments and there's no way that we can love his commandments and obey his commandments without repentance.

And so the church we have to basically get courageous and tell people that they are dying in their sins but there's good news.

That's what the gospel is. That's what the word means. Good news. For everybody that's going okay the way they are and they just need a little bit more they don't need good news and they're not ready to hear good news.

And so what we do the most tried and true way of fishing for men is we help people to understand that they are in a bad situation.

A very bad situation. Because they are at odds with the king. And you know this.

We know this internally. If you're at odds with the government it's a stressful place to be, isn't it?

Because they're powerful. And in our modern age we can see it even more. They can probably hear you.

They hear you right now. Okay? And they can bust in and we know that every average

American commits like a felony or two a day because our law is so complicated. Right?

And so we can be nervous. And if you're explicitly at odds with the king you are in a dangerous position.

And so to be at odds with the king of kings who knows every thought who knows every word that proceeds from your mouth and who is going to judge you for every thought and every word that comes out of your mouth and every action to be at odds with him is a terrifying thing indeed.

And so the good news is that you don't have to be at odds with him. That we can pray to not be at odds with him.

And for us in our reform camp we start asking stupid questions about verses like this. And one of the questions that we ask is when is the kingdom of God is that present or is it future?

Does Mark give us any illumination? What does he say? The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.

What does at hand mean? Does that mean in 4 ,000 years? Could it possibly mean that?

That would mean that the Bible is written in such a way that it's like Lucy pulling the football out from under you when you're trying to kick it and you fall down.

God does not play games that way with us. When he says the kingdom of God is at hand he means it's right here.

Jesus is the kingdom of God. Jesus is the king of the kingdom of God.

And so today when we start to get in our little arguments and our little theological dust -ups and we're well, when is the kingdom of God?

Is it present or is it future? No, the kingdom of God is. It just is. He's the king of it right now.

We are living in it today. And so that should show the futility of the people who fight against the kingdom of God because they will surely lose.

And when they lose the consequences will be severe. It's so simple.

It's so simple. Repent and believe. And there's urgency to it. Isn't it?

The king is here. What does the king do? He administers his law. That's the first thing they do.

I heard this week that Trump's baked up like 100 executive orders his first day in office. Isn't that what the magistrate does when they enter into office?

They start administering law. Now we can argue about whether that's law or not. And I think we're so far down the trail

I don't want to get into a constitutional that's not in the scope of this sermon. But I will say that when the king comes he administers his law.

And so do you want to be at odds with that? The urgency is here. And I say to you today repent of your sins.

And then when you repent of your sins thank God that he has forgiven your sins and that he has given you repentance.

He has spilled out the blood of his own son on your behalf. And know this there is no easy believism in the kingdom of God.

If you repent of your sins and you believe you are forgiven. And you are surely forgiven.

And how do we know that we're forgiven? Because our knee bows to Christ. And it bows forever.

And if your knee does not bow to Christ you are in a dangerous place. You are at odds with the king.

How do we know that our knee doesn't bow? It's because we love the world still. It's because we still live every day to get what makes us comfortable to make us happy in the moment.

We don't care about the people of God. We care about our own friends who are living like us in licentiousness and in gluttony and in alcoholism drunkenness sexual perversion.

That's how we live when we don't bow the knee to the kingdom of God. It's easy to tell.

Listen this is not brain surgery. If you love God and you follow his commands and his commands break you you have bowed the knee.

If you don't care about God's commands and you try to get away from them and you don't want them to dominate your life and you try to escape them and lie about them and suppress them congratulations or not congratulations

I'm so sorry you need to repent and believe because you are outside of the kingdom of God and you are in tremendous danger.

Tremendous danger. This is what gospel preaching is. Is it not? Did you know you can know and I know that there are brothers and sisters in here who struggle with that.

Who struggle. Because the sin is still here. Am I really am

I really in the kingdom? Do I really believe? And I think the litmus test is very simple.

Do you respect God's commandments? Do you love him? Do you try to follow him?

If the answer to that question is yes that is not natural. That is supernatural and you are his son.

So be comforted. God did not save us so that we can relentlessly doubt and be tossed around and think that his forgiveness is not good enough for us.

It is good enough. It is more powerful than you can ever imagine. And we don't need to be tied up in guilt.

But on the flip side of it there are some in here. I know it. There are some in here who will take the promises of God and they will use them as a cloak to make people go away so that they can indulge the lust of the flesh and do what they wanted to do anyway.

And you are a fake Christian. And that is even worse than being no Christian at all.

Because you have invaded the church of the living God and you are blaspheming. And you need to stop.

You need to repent. Man, I got going. Here we go. How does the kingdom of God grow?

That is really the main point of this sermon. And the way that the kingdom of God grows is that God grants repentance and belief and then he sends his people to make disciples.

To fish for men. And this is very interesting indeed. Notice the zeal of these men. First, Andrew and Peter.

Right? He calls to them and what do they do? They drop their career and walk away. They drop their career.

They drop their livelihood and they walk away. And then James and John, the sons of thunder.

What do they do? They leave their dad. They drop their livelihood and they walk away.

Amazing. And it's even more amazing when we see the plan of God unfold through time that this fishers of men, this is another greatness of the king who has come because this is inversion of the way that fishers of men is used in the

Old Testament. Okay? I'll give you two examples. Fishers of men in Habakkuk 1, 14 -17.

Listen to this. You have made men like the fish of the sea, like creeping things without a ruler over them.

The Chaldeans bring all of them up with a hook, drag them away with their net, and gather them together in their fishing net.

Therefore they are glad and rejoice. Therefore they offer a sacrifice to their net and burn incense to their fishing net.

Because through these things their portion is rich and their food is fat. Will they therefore empty their net and continually kill nations without sparing?

Well, the answer to that question is no. But why is the answer to that question? Why will the

Chaldeans not be able to continually worship the net that they're using to bring in riches from enslaving other nations?

Well, the answer is because there's a new king in town. And the Chaldeans are a byword in history, are they not?

They are. They're gone. There's no Chaldean empire today. There's a bunch of contested ground in the

Middle East where people can't get it together. They're constantly fighting. And so one of the ways that a fisher of men, see, this is why this is all woven together, right?

And reformed people geek out of this and they like it. But here's what happened, right? Jesus is the king. Jesus is the new

Adam. And so what Jesus does as the new king is he has supplanted the old kings that used the nets to gather in the fish of the sea, the men who were in the sea to gather them in for their own riches and for their own evil.

That's what the kings of the world that Satan offered to him, that's what the kings of the world were doing is they saw all the men out there, they were fish in the sea, and they would gather them into their nets so that they could build their wonders of the world on the backs of slave labor and make their country richer.

But what does Jesus do? Jesus is the king who enables people to come into the net.

Why? So that they can eat at his table and enjoy his riches. To be slaves of Christ, but to be slave of the

Most High God and to be an adopted son and heir to where we come into his kingdom and we're brought in and we're given everything.

We're given everything. Were the Chaldeans giving the enslaved nations anything? No. No.

And they were worshiping the net, which is their military power, which is their prowess. That's what they were worshiping.

But then even more importantly than that, that's a big deal, right? That the kings of the earth are tread underfoot and that Jesus, the new king of the earth, brings in fishers of men to eat at his table.

Even greater than that is the promise that there is a reversal of the divine judgment of God. Jeremiah 16.

16 through 18. Behold, I am going to send for many fishermen, declares Yahweh, and they will fish for them.

And afterwards I will send for many hunters and they will hunt them from every mountain and every hill and from the crevices of the rocks for my eyes are on all their ways.

They are not hidden from my face nor is their iniquity concealed from my eyes. I will first doubly repay their iniquity in their sin because they have profaned my land.

They have filled my inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable idols and with their abominations.

What does Jesus do? Jesus comes in and he makes fishers of men and when you get caught in his net, does he not hide your iniquity away from the face of Yahweh?

That's what his blood has done is his blood has covered your iniquities. And so you were brought into the kingdom.

And yes it's great that the reversal of the fishing of men from evil kings has been trampled underfoot but even greater than that the divine judgment of God to where he was looking out to and fro and sending out his nets to clean up the land of all the idols that were an offense to him that he sends out his son, the messenger, who now casts a net to forgive people for their detestable idolatry and for their rebellion and their abominations.

Jesus makes fishers of men to forgive them. What an amazing thing. What an amazing picture that Jesus is giving in this text.

What about us? What's this mean for us? There's the theology. I hope that you can see that it's very beautiful and that God has been planning this through redemptive history.

But there is fishing. And the fish don't just jump into the net like in a different story.

Right? That's not what happens here. And so this fishing, as we will see through the gospels, the fishing was not a lazy day at the lake with a grandpa bringing his grandson out to throw a bobber out there and, you know, what does a grandpa and a little boy drink?

Milk. At the lake. Maybe not milk. Water. Ice water. Lemonade. They're out there drinking, just relaxing, enjoying a day.

That's not what this is about. This is actually more like dangerous catch or the deadliest catch. Because what we're not doing is throwing bobbers out.

You're casting nets. And in order to cast nets you have to be on the boat. And in order to be on the boat you are in the waters and it's dangerous.

And so this fishing, Jesus is calling fishermen to be fishers of men.

And he's saying you have a new vocation now. Where your livelihood did come from catching fish, your livelihood now is going to come from making disciples.

Fishing for men. And this fishing requires some things. Here's what it requires. Expense. We see right away they drop their career and they walk away.

And they trust God for their bread, do they not? Full circle, right? It takes time.

It takes time. To make fishers of men, for us to go and make disciples, it has to be a priority for our time.

We have to steer conversations that way. And we have to live our lives with care knowing that people are watching us.

And knowing that there will be opportunities and that we need to take those opportunities. It takes commitment to fish.

This is not a thing you go out and figure out in 20 minutes. They're out all day. All day. Every day.

It's a grind. Being a fisher of men takes commitment. It takes wide nets.

We don't use the same tool for every type of waters. Sometimes we're specific and focused.

And sometimes we cast a broad net. We have to be wise. We have to pray for the guidance of the

Holy Spirit in how to fish. We have to scout. Do fishermen not scout? Yeah.

They go out and nowadays they have crazy underwater cameras and all this kind of stuff where they know exactly where the fish are hanging out.

I think that's kind of cheating. But back in this day, you would go out and you would scout and then you would keep family secrets about the fishing holes because this is your livelihood.

So for us, we scout. Where is it that we want to cast our nets? Some places we have to dust the dust off of our robes and forget them because they're hard -hearted.

But in some places we cast nets. And I'm going to tell you, just an aside, I can't do this long. One of the places we have greatly neglected is the deplorables of our country.

And I'll just name them. Poor young men. And the waters are rich there because people are angry and people are low.

People have been brought to the end and this is a good place to cast nets because people will listen. They will listen.

And we want to cast our nets where we scout it out. Fishing takes faith. Much like farming, you can't make the fish jump in the net.

So we use faith. And we have faith in our preaching and in our proclaiming. And we have faith that God is going to bring the increase and the growth and that we are going to be faithful people who proclaim.

We use wisdom which means sometimes it's better to be quiet and sometimes it's better to be very aggressive. And sometimes we're going to mess up.

But did you know that when we are proceeding faithfully, when we're trusting the Lord, even our mess ups are furthering

His kingdom. Forget not that Jesus was appointed to meet with Satan in the wilderness. God is controlling all of it.

It's not on you to be perfect. It's on you to trust and be faithful. This was vital life work for these men.

And ultimately, I want to free you in this is that we depend on God for the outcomes. We cannot save people.

We cannot. But what we can do is be courageous and we can proclaim the gospel of repent and believe.

And what's the outcome for these men? These disciples became elders who are seated on thrones for eternity.

They are among the 24 on thrones because they are the new tribes of God's people.

So you today, if you believe this gospel, if your knee is bent to Christ, you have already been caught in the net.

And so the salvation that you have not earned but have been given, it has a call for you.

And that is to go catch others in the net and go cast the net. And some days might be empty and it's frustrating.

And some days there might be bountiful catches. And whether it's empty or whether the net is full, we give thanks to God who is the only one who can save souls, the only one who can save sinners.

And if you have not been caught in the net, let me cast it one last time this morning and tell you this. You must repent and believe.

Do you hear the urgency? You must. There is no life outside of repent and believe.

If you are walking around through life hopeless, not knowing what the next steps are, I can tell you, the next steps are believe in the

Lord Jesus Christ and repent of your sins. There's no life in them, only death.

And believe it. Take it from me. There is life in the words of Christ. And there is satisfaction. And there is great joy in his kingdom.

Because he is not a stingy God. He is not a miserly king. Ephesians tells us that he lavishes his riches on his people.

He doesn't feed us through a straw. He opens the fire hydrant, an Arkansas -type fire hydrant, not a

California one, and he blows our heads off with the gush of water coming through it. That's what it's like to be in the economy of the kingdom of God.

Bountiful catch, bountiful blessings, bountiful riches, and you get to enjoy them for eternity.