The Lord's Doing is Marvelous

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Sermon by Cory Platt from Mark 11:27-12:12.

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starting in Mark chapter 11, verses 27 through 12, 12.
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And then they came again to Jerusalem. And as he was walking in the temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the elders came to him and they began saying to him, by what authority are you doing these things?
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Or who gave you this authority to do these things? And Jesus said to them, I will ask you one question and you answer me.
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And then I will tell you by what authority I do these things. Was the baptism of John from heaven or from men?
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Answer. And they began reasoning among themselves saying, if we say from heaven, he will say, then why did you not believe him?
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But if we say from men, they were afraid of the crowd for everyone was regarding John to have been a real prophet.
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And Jesus, and answering Jesus, they said, we do not know. And Jesus said to them, neither will
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I tell you by what authority I do these things. And he began to speak to them in parables.
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A man planted a vineyard and put a wall around it and dug a vat under the wine press and built a tower and rented it out to vine growers and went on a journey.
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And at the time of harvest, he sent a slave to the vine growers in order to receive some of the fruit of the vineyard from the vine growers.
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And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty handed. And again, he sent them another slave and they wounded him in the head and treated him shamefully.
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And he sent another and that one they killed. And so with many others beating some and killing others, he had one more, a beloved son.
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He sent him last of all to them saying, they will respect my son. But those vineyard growers said to one another, this is the heir, come, let us kill him and the inheritance will be ours.
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And they took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard. What will the owner of the vineyard do?
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He will come and destroy the vine growers and he will give the vineyards to others. Have you not even read this scripture?
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The stone which the builder rejected. This has become the chief cornerstone. This came about from the
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Lord and it is marvelous in our eyes. And they were seeking to seize him and yet they feared the crowd for they understood that he spoke the parable against them.
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And so they left him and went away. Our passage today is gonna be Mark 11, 27 through Mark 12, 12.
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There's a little bit of context to build here so that we can kind of understand what we're talking about, especially when you hear the audience members say to Christ, who gives you the authority to do these things, right?
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We kind of wanna have an understanding of what we're talking about here. I'm gonna do a little bit of legwork to build us into that context and then we're gonna dive into the text, okay?
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So let's start at the beginning. Who is speaking to Jesus in Mark 11, right?
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So we see that scripture tells us that some are chief priests and we can assume what those are but let's just kind of dive in a little bit for clarity.
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Chief priests are gonna be of the Sadducees and some of them might even be previous high priests.
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You see, the high priest office was supposed to be an office that you would serve for for life but it was so corrupt by the time of the second temple
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Jews under Roman authority that the Roman governor would commission and decommission high priest at will, muddling the temple.
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Jesus had 10 high priests in his lifetime, 10. That is crazy.
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So these Sadducees are the ruling elite over the temple. They also denied the oracles of God after the first five books known as the
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Pentateuch because they're stupid. Not good to deny the oracles of God.
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You should consider them, right? This is what brings me to the Book of Mormon. No, I'm just kidding, that's heresy.
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So ever since Alexander the Great took over Canaan, we have a muddling of the high priest.
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It's bad under the Seleucids, it's really bad after the Herodians. These are, this is basically the people who would become kings and priests at the same time and becomes at its very worst under Rome, the very worst state of the temple under Rome and how much the government interferes and selects who they want to control the population.
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The last thing to know about these people is that they made extreme wealth from the temple and their family bloodlines were protected within this.
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The next part of the audience, scribes, these are gonna be Pharisee lawyers. Think of these as like counselors to help interpret the law and hard issue cases of judgment that the temple's participating in or maybe even the
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Sanhedrin's participating in. These are not elites, right? These, this would be the beliefs of the common man, but they held moderate power, not a great amount.
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And then lastly, we get to the elders that are the audience here. These could be members of the Sanhedrin, which is a 71 -member ruling body.
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This composes both Sadducees and Pharisees, mostly Pharisees. Some of them could be business owners, some of them could be magistrates.
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But like I said, they're of either class. Now, let's get to these classes that I'm kind of talking about. We've heard growing up Sadducees, Pharisees.
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Sadducees are sad because they deny the resurrection, yada, yada, right? So let's dive into that.
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Just real quickly, Sadducees deny the oracles of God past the Pentateuch.
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They look to preserve the temple and the nation's need for it and their own self -preservation.
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They're the elite ruling class. Pharisees added many traditions and interpretations onto Scripture.
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They created a very narrow lens to understand, right? But this was the interpretation of the masses or the party of the masses, right?
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They preserved the law, they had narrow interpretations, and they also wanted to preserve their own power as well because a lot of Pharisees were in the
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Sanhedrin, right? So they kind of had some crumbs on being able to have some power.
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Again, party of the people. So we kind of know the context of who is speaking to Christ.
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We need to dive into something else real quickly, the temple. We kind of hear the temple.
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We have a lot of assumptions about the temple. In order to know what
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Christ has done, you need to know what the temple does or what it's supposed to do.
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So the temple, the first and primary reason for the temple is to worship the living
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God. We see that in Exodus and Chronicles. It is to be God's throne where heaven overlaps earth.
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And this is why it's a perfect cube in the Holy of Holies. It's to represent perfection. It's the idea of God's throne room, right?
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This is the idea of it. The people are to approach with worship and fear. The second point of the temple is to offer sacrifices for sanctification, cleanliness, and forgiveness.
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We see that in Exodus and Leviticus. Third point, priests were to serve as mediators between God and man.
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We can kind of see where this one's failing, right? Instruction on the law of God and rulings on difficult judgments.
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We get this from Deuteronomy. And then the last point of the temple, to be a light to all nations, not this ethnocentrism that the
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Jews are obsessed with, right? So we get that from 1 Kings 8 and Isaiah 56. Last part of context, we're almost through it, guys.
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We're gonna get there, okay? Last point, these things, right? When he says these things, who gives you authority to do these things?
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We're talking about verse 28. This refers back to Jesus in the temple yesterday, okay?
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They remember clearly the disruption that he causes in the temple.
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And there's a couple of different ways to approach the temple here. It's titled in your
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Bibles most likely as the cleansing, right? So I'll touch on that real quickly.
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The cleansing's under the idea that Jesus went in and cleansed it the first time, and then he went in again this last time.
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And when a building is corrupted the first time, you go in and clean it. And then when the building's corrupted another time, you clean it one more time, and then you destroy it.
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You get rid of the rocks. You put them outside of the city. They're corrupt, they're polluted, right?
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So there's that framework. I wanted to give nod to it. That's definitely not where I'm going today, okay?
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So Jesus doesn't give instruction, and this is why
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I don't look at it so much as a cleansing. We don't see repentance. What was to clean here?
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He gives proclamation. You've made my house a den of thieves, right?
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We're gonna revisit that in just a second. Some interpretations say, well, Jesus was upset with the money changers because they were using unequal weights and were charging extortionary prices for people to get their sacrifices to have forgiveness of sins and thankfulness, sacrifices of gratitude and such and such.
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We don't see proof of it. Could it happen? Absolutely. Some say they would be cheated out of their sacrifices, so someone would come with their baby goat that looked perfect, and then a
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Pharisee or, well, a priest would say, eh, that's got spots on it that doesn't work.
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You need to buy one of ours. That could happen too, but there seems to be a bigger point in this text rather than just minor assumptions.
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Oh, you know what Jesus was mad at? He was mad at the money changers, and then he got in there and he flipped a table, and yeah, there seems to be something bigger.
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What happened just before? Jesus comes in like a king for his triumphal entry, and then he sees a fig tree that's not bearing fruit and curses it, and then he comes to the temple, and we're gonna see that he curses it.
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So Jesus came into the temple angry that there is no fruit, just like when he saw the withered fig tree, right?
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He cursed the fig tree. There's no fruit when it's supposed to be bearing. There's no fruit there.
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The temple's supposed to be bearing fruit. There is none, right? So this is setting up context for us.
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What's the point? Right, I'm getting there. Jesus is about to reject the
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Jews in mercy and then wrath. This is what's about to happen. More on that soon.
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So my first point in the text, 1127, I've named this point
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Whose House Is This Anyway? So we start with what authority to do these things that the
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Jews ask him. They asked Jesus at the temple about his actions yesterday. We mentioned that.
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Jesus is the only one in the temple with authority instilled by God.
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Think about it. Jesus is walking in a place that he owns, and people are supposed to be bearing fruit for him, and he's the only one who has the authority of God there.
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Right? And then the chief priests we see are at the climax of their corruption.
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So Christ is there in the temple, God with them.
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The chief priests are at the height of their corruption and self -preservation, and then we see that the owner speaks and the unfaithful servants do not recognize his voice.
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Jesus has inspected the fruit of his garden and found it wanting.
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So Jesus posits a question back at them. The answer to his question is actually the answer to their question.
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By whose authority do you do these things? And then Jesus said,
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John the Baptist, heaven or man? The same answer for both.
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Heaven, the authority of heaven, right? So the problem for them, if they answer from heaven, we already understand.
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Why didn't you believe, right? But for them, you also have to see another point.
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If they accept the baptism of John, then they're accepting that the temple is being circumvented because John is offering a baptism of repentance because he's the forerunner for Christ.
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So if John the Baptist was not of God, it would be proper of them to beware of him and to denounce him.
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But the problem is that he was of God and he was offering a baptism of repentance. So this is a problem for the temple, for people who want to preserve their power, their authority.
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They don't want any threats on the table. Then we get to this.
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If people can be baptized for sin, what's the need of the temple? And then how much further does it go?
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Because John the Baptist called Jesus Christ the
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Messiah, the anointed one coming. He baptized him. He got to see the fullness of the trinity be held into him.
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He saw the father say that he was well -pleased with the son and the Holy Spirit lay on him like a dove.
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So Jesus, when he proposed this question to them, it reveals their hard -heartedness and blindness and this threat of blindness we've seen carried from the rich young ruler to blind
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Bartimaeus to now. They have blindness. Even when the answer is obvious and apparent to them, they reject it.
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Jesus asked this question also to shame them knowing their hearts. So now we get to the old covenant temple versus the new covenant temple.
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This is really the meat of the sermon today, the theological meat, and then we're gonna get into a lot of application.
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John the Baptist speaks of a baptism of repentance, and it's made clear by Jesus when he says that John the
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Baptist was the greatest man to ever live, yet the least in the kingdom will be greater than him. He then calls him
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Elijah, knowing that he's the forerunner that's prophesied to come before the
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Messiah. John the
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Baptist proclaimed Jesus as Messiah. If John the Baptist is affirmed, so must his testimony of Jesus the
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Messiah. Now, before we get to the fullness of Jesus fulfilling the temple obligations, we're gonna talk about the temple's position now.
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That temple that they love so much and have so much pride in was built recently by a man named
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Herod the Great. Not very much great about him. He really just bought that title.
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That's really what happened there. He spent so much money on civic projects while being one of the most wicked men to ever rule on earth.
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He was a wicked Edomite who was already an enemy of God. He builds the temple and throws a lot of money at the
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Jews, murders his wife and his son, and then brings shame to the
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Jews. So wicked that Caesar said, it's safer to be Herod's pig than his son.
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That's how wicked he was. So this temple that they're so proud of, built by this man, funded by this man, is about to be supplanted.
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Jesus is the new temple. Why? Jesus goes in his ministry forgiving sin, which we know, as we talked about, is one of the priorities of the temple.
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But he cleanses lepers, he heals the deaf, he opens the eyes of the blind, he heals the lame, he raises the dead, he preaches good news to the poor.
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All these fulfillments are talked about in Isaiah 26, 35, 61, and Christ is fulfilling them in real time.
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This is how he answered John the Baptist when he doubted right before he was martyred. Are you really the
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Messiah? Yes, let me tell you what I'm doing, prophesied in Isaiah. Jesus is completely circumventing the temple by offering these things to people which was previously uniquely done by the temple.
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Jesus is the king coming to conquer and overthrow what has been. So we jump to the bottom part of that first passage of Jesus' authority of being challenged.
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When they fear answering correctly, or actually,
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I'm sorry, rather they fear giving their answer because of the crowd. Here we talk about the fear of man.
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So Jesus exposes their fear of man and hard hearts as they do not fear
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God. These men show their great disqualification as priests in that alone.
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You cannot have two masters, but church, are we disqualifying ourselves in these areas?
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Do we fear man more than God? Let us examine ourselves in light of this.
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Where do we fear man more than God? Maybe that's the easier answer, or easier question to answer.
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Do we allow gossip in our midst for fear of man? Do we compromise on truth for fear of man?
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Do we mitigate consequence of our sins for self -preservation?
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Are we afraid to eat that crow so that we can self -preserve when we confess our sin?
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Do we harden our hearts to pet sins or sins that we decide are little, yet all have fallen short of the glory of God?
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Repent today, beg for faithfulness, and walk in the light of the Lord. Now we talk about a broken covenant.
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So we see in Mark 12 that a vineyard is talked about.
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This is symbolic of God's kingdom. It's mentioned in Isaiah. But there's more to it.
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Vineyards and gardens are kind of seen as the same in scripture. They're interchangeable, and these are places of God's dwelling.
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We see a garden in Eden. We see it, oh, I'm jumping ahead of myself.
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We see it in Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah, John, Revelation. These are often portrayals of God's temple dwelling with his people.
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God stewards these to men so they can bear fruit and faithfulness and repentance, just like Psalm 1.
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We also know that God is the great maker, tender, and restorer of these garden temples.
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So we know that the vineyard in this temple, or the vineyard in this story is obviously the temple they're standing in, where Jesus, our
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God, sees no fruit. Gardens are a place of delight of the
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Lord, to see his people be faithful in all he has given them dominion over since Genesis.
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They're to bear fruit and faithfulness and repentance, like Psalm 1 says. In Revelation, we're told we'll walk in the garden on this side of heaven and the other side of heaven.
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Where on earth is life more glorified and cherished than a garden?
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So I'm gonna assume that you guys are like the Pharisees and that you don't understand the parable, even though it seems very hard not to understand the parable.
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Maybe this is the light of the spirit in us and it just made us really smart when looking at this text. But if you didn't know, the
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Father is God. The tenants are the audience that Jesus is speaking to, the high priest, the scribes, the elders.
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But it's also the historically corrupt temple leaders. The servants are prophets of old and John the
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Baptist. Matter of fact, there's kind of seems to be a nod to John the Baptist when it talks about the servant that was struck on the head, which is likely an allusion to John the
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Baptist being beheaded. The son is obviously
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Jesus Christ who will be killed. The murder of the son is an obvious prophecy in this passage.
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But it has greater consequence than the face value. A covenant is between two parties.
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God has been completely faithful on his side and Israel has been quite unfaithful on their side.
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But never before has Israel decided to murder their
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God. But now they have. For the murder of their
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God has broken the covenant, but praise the Lord that covenant was fulfilled completely in Jesus Christ before they did that.
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So we see this story where these tenants, they're beating the servants that the father is sending to collect fruit to be born to them.
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They beat servant after servant after servant. He finally says, let me send my son. And if you kind of think like me, feels a little sacrilegious, but you might think, why does he keep sending people?
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Like, doesn't he kind of already know? Why would you send your son? They killed your servants. The long suffering of God seems foolish, but it's full of grace and mercy.
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How long do we have to repent, church? Praise the Lord, he is slow in wrath.
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So the question is asked, what will that father do to those tenants who murdered his son?
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Interestingly enough, we have a parallel passage in Matthew. In Matthew, the audience reads, they say, he will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits and their seasons.
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That's how the audience responds to Jesus. In Mark, we see that Jesus takes credit for those words because he agrees with them, obviously.
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Those words are right. The interesting thing here that we see is that Jesus responds to this with a passage from Psalm 118.
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He says, the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the
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Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes. This is prophecy of the new covenant.
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This is the God who was rejected, and then here comes the new covenant, which is cornerstone, and the
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Lord has done this all by himself, and it is marvelous in our eyes.
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Church, just like your salvation is not in your hands, so much of your sanctification is done by the
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Lord. We're just told to be faithful and repent and be faithful and repent and be faithful and repent over and over and over again, and the
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Lord does a marvelous work in our lives on sanctifying us. Praise be to him.
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So there's more here from the Matthew passage and the Mark passage that I wanna share with you.
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After Jesus quotes Psalm 118, he reads, therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits, and the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.
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As if the blinders fell from their eyes, they knew Christ spoke about them, and they planned to arrest him.
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Instead of seeing opportunity of repentance, they choose to preserve their power, their wealth, their status, and remain dug in to their sinful lives.
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They do not repent. Interestingly enough, we know by the end of this passage that what these chief priests, scribes, elders, what they say about what the
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Father will do, God surely does do, unfortunately for them.
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The Father will put those wretches to a miserable death and give the vineyard to others.
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Their only mercy will be repentance in Jesus before God rains sulfur on Jerusalem and totally annihilates the temple in 70
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AD. Destruction. So I've had three points so far.
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I have a central proposition to give you. I am not calling that my fourth point because I am a Baptist, even if I'm hypocritically a
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Baptist right now. So not my fourth point. My fourth point, just to give you an idea of where we're going.
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Jesus has come to condemn the Jews and their leaders because of their unfaithfulness.
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He prophesies their murder of him, breaking the covenant. He heralds their doom in response to them killing the
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Holy Son. Jerusalem will be completely leveled and the temple decimated.
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Mothers, or what will happen from this wrath is a series of atrocities.
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Mothers will eat their babies. Thousands will be crucified. Starvation will pang at them.
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Most will die and millions will be sold into slavery. This is to come.
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This happens within 40 years. Yet there is hope.
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The hope is the finished work of Jesus when he resurrects. He offers the free gift of grace to all who repent and believe in Christ as King.
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The old has passed. The new has come. The long shadow of corruption, the long shadow of hopelessness, the long shadow of temple priest exploiting people and the
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Jews providing no fruit to their God is over. Some of them double down in this.
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When Christ is being crucified, there are people who yell, his blood be on us and our children.
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And then they release Barabbas, a murderer, a revolutionary, and his blood surely was on their heads.
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They would soon pass. He came back in fury and destroyed them. But like I said, there is hope.
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Peter provides hope in Acts 3, led by the Spirit. This is a long text.
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But you denied the holy and righteous one and asked for a murderer to be granted to you.
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And you killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses.
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And his name, by faith in his name, has made this man strong, whom you see and know.
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And the faith that is through Jesus has given this man perfect health and presence of you all.
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And now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers.
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But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled.
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Repent, therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the
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Lord, that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all things about which
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God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago. Moses said, the
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Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you, and it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people.
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And all the prophets who have spoken from Samuel and those who came after him also proclaim these days.
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You are the sons of the prophets in the covenant that God made with your father, said Abraham, and in your offspring shall all the families of earth be blessed.
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We come to this perfect, ordained point in history.
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We see that the temple has come to its utter worst in corruption, the most barrenness in fruit that it's ever been.
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It puts the exile at shame. The exile is a light sentence for what's about to happen.
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At the same time, we see Christ come, perfectly fulfilling the law, preceded by John the
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Baptist, who is Elijah. We see these two points coming together. The worst of Israel in the holiness of God, and they meet, and in the midst of God completing and fulfilling the covenant, they murder their
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God. This is truly the deep roots of the gospel.
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You see covenant breaker and covenant fulfiller. If this doesn't bring us to our knees on how wretched we are and how holy our
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God is, to kill your own God. All right, church family, let me get to application because it seems like, wow, that's a lot.
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I don't really know what to do with that. There is a lot of application here. Buckle up. So we're gonna start with this.
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How am I doing on time? I have totally lost that. All right, all right, cool. So is your personal worship throughout the week, thinking about your time in scripture, your time in prayer, your obligations to your family from the word, your examination of your heart, asking the
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Lord to examine it, your singing praises to the Lord, your confessing your sins to the
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Lord, are those being done in the week? If those are being done, you are bearing fruit.
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Praise God. If you lack in those things and come to church on Sundays, what fruit do you offer?
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What are you doing? You should be bearing fruit all week long in faithfulness to the
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Lord and repentance to the Lord. And then we come here on Sunday. And this is the culminative point of our worship throughout the week.
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But we should come bearing fruit. If we come empty, who are we worshiping?
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We worship God on no other day than Sunday? Not possible. When you approach the
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Lord's day and gather with the body of the church, you offer fruit or do you offer chaff?
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The church body is a picture of a temple for the dwelling of the spirit.
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It is the spirit that empowers the body. It's the spirit that makes the body holy.
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Christ is head. Spirit's the power. We are the body. The church should be the most important place of apex moment that you worship in the week.
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Yes, you have your private devotions, but we're called to sanctification. We're called to confession.
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We partake of the Lord's supper on Sunday. And many times we harden our hearts and take that, raining down curses on ourselves.
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Church is about worshiping our holy God, not about our preferences.
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Just as worship was offered in the temple, worship is offered in the church. We must love our church and other churches better and treat it with more reverence, more urgency and more priority than we do.
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The Lord's supper is bountiful with blessings every week, whether you recognize it or not.
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Remember though, church, the church is the body here. It's not this church building.
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So points of application from here. One, love deeply. John 13, a new commandment
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I give you that you love one another just as I have loved you. By this, all people will know you are my disciples.
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Romans 12, love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo each other in showing honor.
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That was my first point, love deeply. Second, be humble, patient and forgiving with other believers.
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Serve one another, encourage and build up, pursue peace and unity, rebuke and restore with gentleness.
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Treat others as members of your own body. Lastly, love the church beyond social benefits.
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Love the church through your own painful sanctification. Love the church as you worship the holy
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God of the universe. I'll pray and then invite Josh to guard the table. Lord, thank you so much for your kindness and grace.
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Lord, we ask that if people here do not know who you are, Lord, that you would save them, that they would repent of sins and that you would snatch them from hellfire.
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Lord, for brothers and sisters in here, I ask that you would encourage, Lord, that we would love this church deeply as we are called to do.
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The main point of application today, Lord, to love the church. Father, help me love the church.
40:27
Help each other love the church. Would we have reverence for you when we come here?
40:32
Would we be ready to sing praises? Would we give you honor and glory? Lord, you are majestic.
40:39
Father, we know that this is your doing and it is marvelous in our eyes.