Matthew 1:18-25 - Nov 12, 2023

Truth, Postmodernism, and the Church’s Responsibility

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. Good morning, Matty. In case I haven't met you, I realize that I haven't talked to everybody. My name is Matty, and I am the pastor of Mount Zion Community Church.

And I've said a couple of weeks ago how excited I am to be here. So it's great to see each and every one of you. And it looks like we have even more people, and I realize that that's probably because there's food.

Some of you may have heard, may have heard there would be a lot of good food today, because I was blown away, frankly, by the last time we had a meal and how much food there was and how good it was. So that doesn't mean I'm gonna preach any shorter today, but I just thought I would put that out there.

So we spent the better part of the last two weeks talking about the genealogy of Jesus. So we're going through the Gospel of Matthew, and we're going to go through the entire Gospel of Matthew, verse by verse, to look at what the Bible has to say, first, about who Jesus is.

So that's our first task here. And at this point, we're looking at what Matthew teaches us. And we talked in the genealogy about how Matthew traced back a very specific lineage of Jesus in order to demonstrate that Jesus was, in fact, the promised Messiah that the Jews were waiting for, were anxiously awaiting.

And as we got through the genealogy, I was convinced that the passages that are coming up next, I was gonna have a little delay in looking at, because what's coming up next is about the conception of Jesus, and we're gonna get into the birth of Jesus.

And it's almost Christmas, right? So I thought that I would cut these off here, skip ahead, and then come back in a few weeks, because Christmas is coming a lot sooner than we think, right, we're already basically halfway through November.

And it's not because I don't wanna talk about this passage, because I do wanna talk about it. But when I started thinking about where I would go, and what verses I would skip to, I had a realization. You know, we could talk about the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, there's miracles of Jesus that we could look at.

But I realized that the way that Matthew has structured this it builds on itself. And the things that are at the beginning are necessary to understand the things that come later. So the genealogy is important to understand who Jesus is, but the birth is extremely important for what comes next as well.

Because when we consider the fundamental nature of Jesus, the fact that Jesus was fully God, as well as fully man, I started to realize that we can't properly talk about everything that comes in. We can't talk about the temptation of Jesus.

We can't talk about his baptism, because the way he was born is essential to understanding why these things took place. But before we get into that, I wanna take a short detour and talk about something else.

I wanna talk about the idea of truth. And what truth is. Because truth is something that's under attack in our society today. In a lot of different ways. And there's an idea that's known as postmodernism that has really shaken the foundations of a lot of what we once just assumed to be true.

Or what, if we were talking to somebody, we could have a reasonable expectation that we would be on the same page about these things. But that's not the way everything works anymore. And this might be a little bit of an oversimplification, but what postmodernism is, is the idea that there's no such thing as absolute truth.

And this stemmed from the idea of modernism. This was a philosophy of truth that came before that, which said that through man's reason, we could determine what was true. With science and with our intellect, we could figure it out.

And then postmodernism came after that and just blew all that up. And the way you start to see this is becoming critical of anybody who believes that they know something that's true. So a postmodernist will say to you, you can't know that's true.

There is no such thing as truth. And so rather than being just one single truth about anything at all, truth becomes something that's subjective. And this means that you can have your truth based on your lived experience, and I can have my truth based on my lived experience.

And you and I can come to a situation, it doesn't matter what it is, and after we look at it, we can have two completely separate and even two completely divergent conclusions about what that situation is or what that situation means.

And even though our conclusions might be completely irreconcilable, as in there is no way to match them up, we're both right. Because a postmodern view would require that both of our perspectives are considered equally valid since there is no absolute truth.

And when you play the idea of postmodernism all the way out to its logical conclusion, things get ugly and things get evil really fast. Now, if we're talking about something that really is subjective, maybe it's not such a big deal, right?

We don't have a big problem. For example, you think my tie is ugly. I think my tie is great, right? When it comes down to it, it doesn't really matter what either one of us think because I'm wearing the tie and that's all there is to it.

But what if we get into something that's a little less subjective? Like we consider math, the idea that two plus two equals four, right? A lot of us agree with that because two plus two is four. That's all there is to it.

But what if I think that two plus two is three or I think that two plus two is five and I want it to be five because that's what I feel like it should be. That's what I feel, I believe. You say it's four, but I say it's because you're old and you don't understand my generation.

You haven't lived my life. You don't know what I've been through. Two plus two is five. So obviously that's a ridiculous example, right? And surely nothing like that would ever happen in our schools or in our society anywhere, would it ever, no.

Of course it wouldn't. But just a moment ago, I said that things can get ugly and evil when you let postmodernism play all the way out to its logical conclusion. Because we're talking about the idea that there's no such thing as objective truth.

Your truth is your truth, my truth is my truth. And implicit in that idea is the fact that there can be no moral basis to judge right or wrong. If we all have our own individual truths, what happens when I think something's right and you think it's wrong?

Let's say that I have something you want. You want this bottle of water. Now, if you're bigger, you're stronger, you're faster than me, you can just come up and take it. You can come up and take whatever I have.

And I might not want you to do it, but as a committed postmodernist, I have no basis with which to insist or on which to insist that you shouldn't take it from me. Because now we're facing a situation where we have two competing truths.

I have this and I want it and you want it as well. And while I may feel very strongly that I'm right, your conviction that you're right cancels me out. And I use the bottle of water so as to not get too graphic with this idea.

But if there's no moral basis that we can take to say something is right or something is wrong, where does that line stop? So that's kind of a thumbnail sketch of postmodernism. Why was that worth taking up a few minutes this morning?

Because we haven't even gotten into scripture yet. We haven't gotten into Bible. We haven't exposited anything. But I think this is a valuable background because there's an important principle here that we all have to understand.

And that principle is this. The idea that there's no such thing as absolute truth is completely incompatible with Christianity. You cannot be a Christian and waffle on what truth is or where we get truth.

God is truth and God's word is truth, which means the things that we read in God's word are true. It doesn't matter what we think of them and it doesn't matter what society tells us about why they're not true.

John 14, six says, Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Psalm 119, 160 says, the sum of your word is truth and every one of your righteous judgments is everlasting.

And that should be a comfort to us. That should be a good thing to us because when we come to the word of God, when we get our Bible out and we sit down and we read it or we talk about it or we listen to somebody talk about it, we know that we're coming to the truth.

And therefore, we know that when someone brings you something that conflicts with what the word of God says, they are not telling you the truth. They are not giving you the truth. They're wrong. Now, that might have made some people mildly uncomfortable because what we're saying is that the word of God is uncompromisingly true.

But here's the thing. When we say that this word is true and anything else is wrong, we are saying that other people are wrong. We're saying that other people are headed down the wrong path. And that gets serious when it comes to something like our eternal life or our eternal destination or how we get there.

And maybe you're not uncomfortable because you don't believe that, but it's hard and it's strange to hear somebody say it out loud, right? It's strange to hear somebody say, if they don't believe the Bible, if they don't believe that Jesus is the way to salvation, they're wrong.

But this is what we're saying here. But here's the reason for this. It's because the church has been influenced by the spirit of the world in a lot of ways. Because here's the problem. Most of us don't like conflict.

And we know that we're gonna create conflict if we're standing up for the word of God and if we are proclaiming that it's true and we are unflinching in that assertion. And when we stand up for the truth of scripture in our world today, we find a lot of people that don't believe us and we find a lot of people that are gonna push back.

So in order to not offend other people, we start to take a softer stance on certain things being true. Or we take a little bit of a softer stance on what is a sin and what isn't a sin. Or even what a man is or what a woman is.

And we do that so that we don't offend people. And we make a lot of excuses for this too, right? We call this stuff like not hurting our witness, if you've ever heard that term. We call this loving our neighbor because it's not loving to tell somebody something that's gonna hurt their feelings, right?

We can't love somebody and not agree with them all the time. But compromising on the truth of scripture is ultimately doing eternal harm to somebody. I've had this discussion with people before. It is not loving to tell someone living in unrepentant sin that their sin is not really a big deal because their sin is separating them from God and their sin, unrepentant sin, is separating them from heaven.

So what is really loving? And let me ask you another question. If we don't want to cause conflict or cause confrontation, what's a piece of biblical truth that you can compromise on without giving up the rest of the Bible?

You got one? No, there isn't any. Yeah. And again, like that's uncomfortable because culture has infected the church with postmodernism. And by the way, I think that's a failure on the church's part because the church ultimately should be shaping the world.

The world should not be shaping the church. If we have truth, why would we be afraid of what other people are saying about it? Why would we be afraid if they disagree with us? Yet we are. Confrontation.

Right. And we have a monopoly on truth, but we're afraid to claim it because we don't want to offend somebody. But the worst part of this is not that people out in the world or people that don't believe Jesus is God or Jesus is the only way to salvation are out there.

It's not because those people don't believe that the word of God is true. But the worst part, the worst part is that there are Christians who will advocate. Christians from within inside the church who will say that we need to compromise on this principle or that principle in order to bring people into the church.

And I've sort of talked about some of this stuff already. But they believe that even if we don't go so far as to say these things are not true, we just don't talk about them so that people won't be offended.

So as a church, it's more important for us to defend God's word from false teachers who are claiming to be Christian and yet are willing to compromise the truth of scripture. Yes, we are to evangelize.

We are to bring Jesus Christ to the whole world. But we have to protect what's happening inside the church as we start. And our passage today is not from Jude, but I wanted to share a few verses from this short letter.

So Jude is only one chapter long. We're gonna read verses 17 through 23. And it says this. But you, beloved, must remember the words that were spoken beforehand by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ, that they were saying to you, in the last time, there will be mockers following after their own ungodly lusts.

These are the ones who cause divisions, worldly-minded, not having the spirit. But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life.

And on some who are doubting, have mercy. And for others, save, snatching them out of the fire. And on others, have mercy with fear, hating even the tunic polluted by the flesh. So Jude was one of Jesus' brothers.

And he was writing to the church, because even shortly after the death of Jesus, all kinds of heresies, all kinds of compromises, all kinds of arguments with the truth had come into the church. And he was writing to tell the believers at the time that they had to protect the gospel.

They had to protect the gospel from people inside the church. And Paul writes about this too. One of the big purposes of the book of Galatians was to warn against false teachers in the church there, and to chastise the believers in the church for falling for some of these teachings.

So Galatians 1 .8 says this. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to the gospel we have proclaimed to you, let him be accursed. Even an angel. And Paul has strong words for anybody who's trying to change scripture, and who's trying to change the message of the gospel.

And you can see that one thing he's not doing is compromising with them. I got one more warning on a topic related to this from Revelation before we move on. And that's Revelation 22, 18 through 19. So John writes this.

I bear witness to everyone who hears the words of prophecy of this book. If anyone adds to them, God will add him to the plagues which are written in this book. And if anyone takes away from the words of this book, of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city which are written in this book.

So this is specifically about Revelation, but it applies to the Bible as a whole. We are not to add things to scripture. Nor are we to take things away from scripture. But again, why this long rabbit trail when we're talking about the gospel of Matthew, right?

How is this related? Well, it's related because the passes that we're looking at today, there's controversy to it, right? So if you will turn in your Bibles, I'll give you a moment to get there. We're gonna read Matthew 1, verses 18 through 25.

The Virgin Birth and the Sinlessness of Christ

Matthew 1, 18 through 25. Now, the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph before they came together, she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit.

And Joseph, her husband, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her, planned to send her away secretly. But when he had considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife.

For the one who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. And she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. Now, all this took place in order that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet would be fulfilled, saying, behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which translated means God with us.

And Joseph got up from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him and took Mary as his wife, but kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a son, and he called his name Jesus. So we're obviously gonna start spending a few minutes talking about verse 18.

Verse 18 lays out something in such a simple and such a straightforward way. You would think that he was writing about the fact that all this happened on a Tuesday or something common, but what he's telling us has profound implications for everything that comes after it.

And not just everything that comes after it. It has profound implications for everything about who Jesus is and everything that Jesus did. So the fact that a baby is conceived and born is pretty remarkable all on its own, right?

The fact that God has designed man to work in this fashion, and if any of you have had children, the idea that it starts, that their child starts as just this little tiny creature with all the limbs, the eyes, the organs, and just grows and grows on the mother's stomach until it's born, that is miraculous.

It's unbelievable. And by the way, if anyone thinks that's just a result of like some kind of random, meaningless, evolutionary process that started from a Big Bang and took billions of years to get to the point where babies were all of a sudden being fabricated inside of other people, I think you're foolish.

I don't know how. That takes a lot of faith as well. But still, babies are conceived and born all the time. But usually, there's a very specific sequence of events and actions taking place by the parents that lead to conception.

But what we are looking at in these verses in Matthew is something that's totally different, something that is unique in all of human history, something that we saw one time, one time only, and that's what's known as the virgin birth.

Now, I've quoted J .C. Ryle before. He was a great, godly Puritan pastor. And he wrote this about the birth. He said, these are very mysterious subjects. They are depths which we have no line to fathom.

They are truths which we have not mined enough to comprehend. Let us not attempt to explain things which are above our feeble reason. Let us be content to believe with reverence and not speculate about matters which we cannot understand.

Enough for us to know that with him who made the world, nothing is impossible. And of course, he's talking about the virgin birth because I can spend as much time up here talking about this as I want.

But I can't explain it. I don't know how it happened other than God ordained it to be. It is in the Bible, so therefore it is. Again, I believe that the Bible is God's word and I believe that what's in the Bible is true.

So I believe this as well. John MacArthur lists five reasons that the virgin birth is significant. He says, one, the integrity of the gospel records rests heavily on the truth of the virgin birth, and that's absolutely true.

The virgin birth allows for the preexistence of the divine person in nature. This means that this shows God's plan. This shows how he was working out his plan for salvation in the world. Number three, the virgin birth is the only way to guarantee Jesus's sinlessness.

Because everyone born of a man is imputed with that original sin of Adam, had Jesus been conceived naturally and then somehow made holy after, there would be no way to guarantee that he was sinless. Getting rid of the virgin birth invalidates Jesus's life and ministry.

Because if he was not the Messiah, if he was not Christ, if he was not fully God and fully man, none of the things that he did are real. And finally, the virgin conception or birth is part of the Christian's confession of faith.

As we see this, I'm sure you're familiar with the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed is similar. The virgin birth is in there, and it's been a part of the confession of the church. It's been a part of the church for a long time.

And scripture has seen its share of miraculous births. There's been a lot of them. Births that shouldn't have happened or births that there's not necessarily a natural explanation for. One example is Isaac being born to Abraham and Sarah.

Another example is Samuel the prophet being born to Hannah. And these were acts of God. These were God opening a womb. But they were still extremely different, altogether different from what we're looking at here.

Jesus' conception is a miracle of God's design that only God could make happen. And the reason he did it is for the fulfillment of his plan for our salvation. Again, this is the only way it could happen.

So the fact that Jesus took on human flesh allowed him to fulfill these covenant promises of the Old Testament as a man. And the fact that he was conceived of the Holy Spirit allowed him to come into the world in sinless perfection, to ultimately serve as the perfect sacrifice for our sins.

And in this way, he fulfilled the Old Testament law. But again, I think this is so, it's so interesting that if we were gonna try to explain something like this, if we were gonna say, hey, you've never seen anything like this in your life, I gotta tell you about it.

We would probably spend hundreds and hundreds of pages, or we would study it, we would put together a whole bunch of notes, and we'd write just sheets and sheets of paper on it in order to explain it, because we'd feel like we gotta prove this, you know, it's crazy.

Matthew uses 33 words to get through this. And it's because there is just a level of acceptance of this. He knows that it's true, and he knows this is God's plan, so there's probably part of him, if I can speak for Matthew, which I probably shouldn't, there's probably part of him that just doesn't feel like this needs a huge explanation.

It is. Here's a couple of last thoughts on this before we continue on in the passage, because we have a few more verses as well. So if somebody rejects the virgin birth, then there's really no way to defend anything else that Jesus did.

None of his other miracles. None of his healings. All the stuff we see in the Gospels. But even more than that, if we deny the virgin birth, then there's no, there's no way to say that his resurrection is effective for us.

He's not God if he wasn't born of a virgin. If he was born the same way as everybody else, then he's just another person. Pastor Joel Beakey says this. He says, Christ's virgin birth shows that in Christ, God accomplishes supernatural salvation.

And another commentator adds this. The virgin birth of Christ is an unmistakable reminder that salvation can never come through human effort, but must be the work of God itself. So I think those things are extremely important to know.

This is why it's so important that the virgin birth is miraculous and that the conception is of the Holy Spirit and that it's not what some critics say that it was, just some kind of story that was fabricated.

Because I will tell you, not that we need to spend a lot of time thinking about things like this, but there have been schools of academics and people that have tried to tear down this idea. But even from the beginning, the early church, no one had a different explanation.

So we're gonna talk a little bit about Mary in this, right? So the bottom line here is that nothing that we place our hope in is possible apart from the virgin birth. Nothing. But there's more that we can take from this passage.

So let's look at verses 19 and 21, or 19 through 21. So that says, in Joseph, her husband, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her, planned to send her away secretly. But when he had considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the one who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.

And she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. So what we see as we get into verses 19 through 21 is a man who is in crisis. And it doesn't say that, but you have to sort of read between the lines here.

So Joseph has just found out that the woman that he is betrothed to is pregnant, and he knows that he didn't do it. And it's very clear, very clear, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, throughout scripture as a whole, that sexual purity is extremely important.

God designed sex to be between one man and one woman, and not only that, to be within the confines of a biblically sanctioned marriage. Anything else is sexual sin, anything else at all. It doesn't matter if you love each other, it doesn't matter if you're two consenting adults, it doesn't matter if you're too old to get married, because, you know, you just don't want to bother with it.

If it's not husband and wife, it's sin. So there's an assumption here, and that's that Mary was unfaithful. Mary was doing things she shouldn't have been doing during this betrothal. So there's no way that Joseph can marry her.

And we might think of betrothal as being similar to an engagement, right? That's kind of the way we look at it when we contextualize it for ourselves. But actually, it was different. One author I read said this about betrothal.

He said, it means a great deal more than the engagement today. It was legally binding, a contract signed by witnesses, and could be broken only by a writ of divorce. If the husband, he was considered such, were to die, the engaged or betrothed woman would be considered a widow.

So this is not just a, will you marry me? And a couple months later, you're like, you know what? Nevermind. This was legally binding. It wasn't just something casual that they entered into to test the waters and see if they got along and just make sure that it was all okay, make sure they're compatible, all the kind of stuff that we say.

It was a bigger deal because this would bring shame and dishonor on her family. It could even have financial consequences. She could have to forfeit her dowry to Joseph's family to make up for the shame and for the inconvenience of this.

And I thought I said this, but I don't, maybe I didn't. In that time, and if I, here we go, yeah. While it wasn't as prevalent in this time, if you go back to the Old Testament law in Deuteronomy, they would have been within their rights to kill her.

Adultery was punishable by death. They've stoned women for that. So this makes Joseph's reaction even more interesting. He could have been furious and he could have sought revenge or he could have just wanted to take all this out on her so he could put it out in public and disgrace her.

But the Bible doesn't say that. The Bible says that Joseph was a righteous man. And instead of doing that, he decided that he was gonna send her away quietly. So we see, Matthew is cluing us in to something else about Joseph's personality here.

He's showing us that this is part of why God had Mary and Joseph to be the earthly parents of Jesus. They're not perfect. Joseph's not perfect. Mary's not sinless. None of them are sinless. Romans 3 .10 says, as it is written, there was none righteous, not even one.

Only Jesus was sinless. That's a reference to Psalm 53 verses one through three. While they weren't perfect and while they weren't sinless, they were good people. And even though Joseph was feeling betrayed, he didn't want to disgrace her.

So he couldn't stay in this arrangement. That's obviously out of the question. But what he was gonna do is just send her away as quietly as possible. And people are gonna find out, people are gonna know what happened.

But he wasn't gonna make a big deal out of this. And as he's thinking over this, probably planning out how he's gonna do it, he's asleep one night and an angel of the Lord appears to him in a dream. And in the midst of trying to work his way through this betrayal, the angel of the Lord comes to him and says, it's okay.

He says, you have to go ahead and go through with this because the child is of the Holy Spirit and not the result of some kind of unfaithfulness. The angel also tells him what to name the child, explains that he will save the people from their sins.

Now this is worth a quick note too. Like I have all these footnotes in here. So Matthew's recounting what the angel told Joseph because they were expecting a Messiah to come and save them. They were expecting them to be saved out of their situation, right?

But what the Messiah is coming to save them from is their own sin that says, he will come to save them from their sin. One author says, we are not told that the son of David, the warrior king will rescue Israel from her Gentile enemies nor that the latter day Joshua will lead a crusade patterned after his forebears war against the Canaanites.

No, no. The purpose of Jesus is to save the people from their sins and that's captured in his name. So as we move on to verses 22 and 23, we see something different again. Matthew is making an appeal back to scripture just like he did in the genealogy.

22 and 23 say, now all this took place in order that was what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet would be fulfilled saying, behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a son and they shall call his name Emmanuel which translated means God with us.

So Matthew is calling back to the prophet Isaiah and he's making a reference to what we see in Isaiah 7 .14 which is essentially what we just read. Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin will be with child and bear a son and she will call his name Emmanuel.

And we already know that Emmanuel means God with us because that's in the passage here. So this is another reference that would have likely been familiar to Matthew's audience at the time but he still felt it necessary to make this very specific link because again, you can almost think of him, he was a tax collector but you can almost think of him like a lawyer building a case bit by bit to show who Jesus is.

So he's making this link back to the scripture and back to a prophet that they would have been familiar with. So last couple of verses, verses 24 and 25. And Joseph got up from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him and took Mary as his wife but kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a son and he called his name Jesus.

So verse 25, once again, we're sort of footnoting some of these things. Verse 25 says that Joseph kept Mary a virgin until she gave birth to a son. So the idea exists in the world that Mary was perpetually a virgin but this doesn't really have any scriptural basis.

There's no scriptural support for this, right? Particularly in light of the word until in this verse. This implies that they resumed normal marital relations after the betrothal and after all this happened.

They just postponed it until after the birth of Jesus in order to maintain Jesus' sinless perfection. And one more word on this. We see further evidence of this later and again, this is an implication but in Matthew 13, 55 and 56, Matthew's family is listed.

This is where they say a prophet is not without honor in his hometown. They say, how did he learn all this stuff? Is not his family these people? And it says, are not his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas and they also mentioned his sisters as sisters plural.

So it means there's at least two of them, right? So that's six siblings at a minimum and we don't see any other virgin births in scripture. So we have to realize that Joseph and Mary's marriage after the virgin birth of Jesus was probably very similar to every other marriage at the time.

So that's the passage in the verses 18 through 25. So what are our big takeaways? Or what are the lessons that we can learn from this set of verses? The first one is this. The birth of Jesus was a God-ordained miracle.

Completely unlike any birth before it or after it or ever seen at any other time in history. And this is something that we can't ignore. This is something we can't minimize, we can't argue about it. Because this is a scriptural truth.