Anatomy of a Wicked King

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Sermon by Josh Rice from Mark 6:14-32.

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Our text this morning is out of Mark chapter 6, 14 through 32. King Herod heard about it, because Jesus' name had become well known.
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Some said John the Baptist has been raised from the dead, and that's why miraculous powers are at work in him.
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But others said he's Elijah. Still others said he's a prophet, like one of the prophets from long ago.
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When Herod heard of it, he said, John, the one I beheaded, has been raised. For Herod himself had given orders to arrest
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John and to chain him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, because he had married her.
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John had been telling Herod it is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife. So Herodias held a grudge against him and wanted to kill him.
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But she could not, because Herod feared John and protected him, knowing he was a righteous and holy man.
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When Herod heard him, he would be very perplexed, and yet he liked to listen to him.
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An opportune time came on his birthday, when Herod gave a banquet for his nobles, military commanders, and the leading men of Galilee.
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When Herodias' own daughter came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests. The king said to the girl, ask me whatever you want, and I'll give it to you.
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He promised her with an oath. Whatever you ask me, I will give you, up to half my kingdom.
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She went out and said to her mother, what should I ask for? John the Baptist's head, she said.
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At once she hurried to the king and said, I want you to give me John the Baptist's head on a platter immediately.
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Although the king was deeply distressed because of his oaths and the guests, he did not want to refuse her.
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The king immediately sent for an executioner and commanded him to bring John's head. So he went and beheaded him in prison, brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl.
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Then the girl gave it to her mother. When John's disciple heard about it, they came and removed his corpse and placed it in a tomb.
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The apostles gathered around Jesus and reported to Him all that they had done and taught. He said to them, come away by yourselves to a remote place and rest for a while.
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For many people were coming and going, and they did not even have time to eat. So they went away in the boat by themselves to a remote place.
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Father, we thank you for another Lord's Day where we can come to gather in your presence with your people. Lord, we pray that your spirit would work in our hearts and our minds as we encounter your word.
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Lord, that we would be shaped by it, taught by it. Lord, that conviction would come and that where conviction comes, that we would repent and be restored to you.
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God, that is a mighty gift that you've given us, the gift of repentance and restoration. So Lord, I pray for Pastor Josh as he teaches this text to us, that your word would be given power through his voice.
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Lord, that hearts would be shaped, that attitudes would be adjusted. Lord, that we would live lives of action in response to your holy word.
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Lord, that you don't ask us to sit still and just fill our heads with knowledge. Lord, but to take that knowledge and to put it into action.
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Because you are a king who is conquering. And so God, we put this all in your hands, knowing that you give sight where there's blindness,
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Lord, that you give healing where there's sickness, Lord, that your word is illuminated by your holy spirit. So God, just illuminate your word to us this morning.
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It's in your name I pray, amen. Good morning, if you guys will turn in your
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Bible to Mark 6, when we go through a story with a lot of pieces like this, I'd like you to be able to follow along.
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We're going to be jumping around because the way I've structured this sermon is to look at the characters in the play.
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And so there's going to be overlap and backtracking and then looking a little bit ahead and trying to make those things pay off at the end.
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Where we start though, is that we have to look back and what we remember is that Jesus had sent his disciples off without going to acquire anything, just go.
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Go by twos, go to every city around and proclaim the gospel, the kingdom of God is at hand and you will be given authority to cast out demons and to heal.
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And so they go and apparently it causes quite a ruckus. There's a lot of talk going on and we know that the healing and the demon casting out ministry of Christ has brought multitudes everywhere that he goes.
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And so the king hears of it, the king hears of it. And I didn't get past those words this week before I started to think, when is the last time that the king heard of the message of the church in our country?
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And this should be a first point of rebuke to us, is that the conditions have to be right. The ministry of making disciples, we must pray that we would make disciples, that we would go out in ministry such that the king would hear of it, maybe the mayor would hear of it, and even greater, maybe the governor would hear of it, and your senator would hear of it.
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And we'll talk much about magistrates this morning, but before we do that, we understand that King Herod hears it and he's very interested, and he's very interested for a reason.
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And that's because King Herod has done something really, really stupid and evil. What he's done is he has killed the man of God, and he knew that he was the man of God.
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And so when Herod hears these rumors and these talks, and people are asking the question, you know you would be today, if this kind of ministry was going on, you would be asking the question, who is this man who is going around casting out demons?
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The word had to have been making its way around even on the other shore of the Sea of Galilee, where the people of the
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Gentiles had heard the testimony of the demoniac, and they've seen demons cast out in the synagogue, and people who have been lame from birth are healed and they're walking around, and blind people are seeing.
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And the question starts to gather, as the mob is talking, who is this? Who is it?
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And the answers become along a right string, but not quite there. Because the first thing that people are saying is,
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John the Baptist has risen from the dead, so let's put a pin in that, we're going to come back to that one. They also say, he's
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Elijah, and the disciples will repeat that to Jesus later. Who do people say that I am? Some say that you are
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Elijah. Others say that you are one of the prophets. See they understood that Elijah would be the forerunner of the
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Messiah, so there was great hope. When people said, he's Elijah, the idea was, the Messiah is coming.
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We're in the right time, we're right on the cusp and there's excitement going on. Others say that he's a prophet.
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What's obvious to all the people of Israel, and this comes back to their condemnation later, what's perfectly obvious to all of them is that Jesus is from God, that Jesus is of God, that his message is about the kingdom of God.
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But Herod goes in a different direction. Because when Herod hears of this ministry of Jesus Christ, his thought is,
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John the Baptist is resurrected, and he's coming to get me. That's what he thinks.
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John the Baptist, I knew I should not have listened to that woman. And that should take us right back to the garden, should it not?
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And so let's look and let's unpeel the layers because Herod is a man who fools many Christians today if he was brought to our time.
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See in our time, it's easy for us to look back when the whole book is written on dead men and we can go, that was an evil tyrant, that was an evil king.
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But today, every day, Christians are fooled by magistrates who cloak themselves in a type of interest in Christianity, in a type of adjacent posturing and ideas like, oh yes,
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I love some of this stuff, I love the Christian ethic that comes in. I just don't want to bow the knee to Christ.
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We hear that, we have a man who is, I'm thankful for much of what he's done, but Elon Musk has famously said, we need to have some
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Christian ethics in the country. Where do you get that without bowing the knee? This is just how Herod Antipas is acting in this text.
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I like what John's saying, but I don't believe it. And in fact, I will be damned to hell because I don't believe it and I will not believe it.
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And Herod, unlike his mirror in Judges, a guy named Jephthah who does a very similar thing by making a rash vow,
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Herod has a very different end than Jephthah and we have to see it. This is a rich text. He's afraid, he's in prison,
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John, he's done bad, but let's start looking and what I want to do first is I want to start with the good stuff first and the most challenging for us.
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I want to look at a man of God. This is John the Baptist. There's two times in Mark, two times that Mark writes about anything other than the central figure of Jesus Christ.
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And both of those times, both in chapter one and right here in chapter six, he goes and he leaves
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Christ for a time to talk about the story of John the Baptist. And that's because John the Baptist is an extremely important figure in the
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New Testament. He is the herald that had been prophesied to be the forerunner of Christ who was going to give the message, wait, listen, the kingdom of God is near.
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The kingdom of God is near. And when Jesus comes on the scene, Jesus says, repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.
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We've learned already in Mark that Jesus is the kingdom of God, that he is the manifestation.
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He is the God man, the word who became flesh and lived among us so that we could see the light, the very light of God.
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And what the light does is exposes our evil deeds and it draws us to repentance or further rebellion and condemnation.
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That is the message of John the Baptist. And John the Baptist comes on the scene just like Elijah. And what he starts preaching is a flaming on fire message, repent and turn back to God.
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Be baptized to be cleansed for sin, the baptism of repentance. And today we proudly carry the name
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Baptist, Baptist in honor of that great sacrament and ordinance of baptism, which is the initiation of the kingdom, the showing of being dumped under the water, death and raising to life, the cleanliness and the remission of sins.
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But also there is a nod to the baptizer, the baptizer, the herald. And my call to arms this morning when we look at this man of God is we need in the church to produce men like this.
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We need men like John the Baptist. I remember from my very early days, I was probably five years old.
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There was a costume party. You know, we didn't do Halloween because it was a church deal, right?
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But we had a fall celebration and there was a costume at it, right?
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Costume party. And I dressed up as John the Baptist. I had cotton puff beard.
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And here's the thing, I'm almost probably ugly enough to look like John the Baptist. But here's the thing, John the
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Baptist would have been a man who would have been a stench to the people around him. He would have looked crazy.
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And the world would have looked at John the Baptist and they would have thought, man, that guy's nuts. I don't want to be around that guy.
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Because what John the Baptist was doing was he was on fire with the message of God and he would not swerve left or right.
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Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. This guy from an early age had taken the Nazarite vow, so he lived out in the wilderness eating locusts and honey.
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He was totally ceremonially pure. He followed the law of Moses because he is the last prophet of the old covenant.
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Jesus is the last true prophet and the last great prophet in the line of Deuteronomy 18, like the prophet like Moses was, like Elijah was, like Samuel was, and like John the
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Baptist was. And Jesus comes on the scene and he brings in the new covenant. The new covenant, the end of the old and the beginning of the new.
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John the Baptist is a very important man. And what does he do with the magistrate? He does this.
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He had been saying to Herod, it is not lawful for you to have your brother's life.
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John the Baptist took his life in his hands to go to the king, much like Nathan the prophet did in 2
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Samuel chapter 12, and pointed the finger at the king and said, you are the one that is sinning against God.
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You have done evil in the sight of God and God will require it of you. And Herod was afraid of John.
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John was a terrifying guy. John was a dangerous man who people would have been afraid of because he was righteous and holy.
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Righteousness emanated off of him. There was nothing that you could rightly reproach John for because he lived his life loving his neighbor and loving his
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God. And so Herod wanted to listen. He didn't like what John said here, but he was fascinated by it and he liked to listen.
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He was perplexed. He didn't understand the kingdom of God, but he wanted to hear more. And here's what we say about John the
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Baptist as we start to look at the modern application. We know Jesus said this famously, he said it in two places, but I'll read in Luke 7, 28.
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Jesus said, I say to you, among those born of women, there is no one greater than John.
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Yet he who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he. If you read the
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New Testament, we had this taught beautifully this weekend, that there was a shadowy tension of not yet that's going on right here, that we're living in it, that we struggle and we fight against sin, but there is a greater city, an unshakable city.
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And we look forward to it and the least denizen in that kingdom is greater than the greatest one in this kingdom because that person has lost sin.
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They are glorified in the sight of their creator and there is no sin and no struggle and there is perfect stability.
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I heard the preacher this weekend, he said, and it was thought provoking, he said, there's no faith in glory.
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There's only sight. There's no faith. We don't need faith in the presence of God.
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We only need sight and God will give us that. So John the Baptist, he gives us a message of challenge.
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The challenge for us when we look at John the Baptist as an example, the challenge is there is no one greater than him born of woman.
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There has never been a greater man than John the Baptist. He is the model. He's what we should look to.
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And yet at the end of the day, he is a man. He is a man. And James 5 tells us that Elijah prayed and God would bring the rain and it rained.
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And yet Elijah was a man just like you, a man just like you. Because the power of God is not about the ability or the strength of man.
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It is about faith in God's power. So John the Baptist, the man that we should emulate.
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So let's identify Herod's evil. Herod's a bad guy, right?
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And we can identify. He has committed adultery. He has stolen his brother's wife.
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And now he is having his niece dance lewdly in front of a group of his captains.
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And we see a window into the culture that Herod Antipas has created around him. It's a culture of debauchery.
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And John the Baptist goes in and he points the finger and he says, you must repent. And it makes the king shake.
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The king is put off of his back foot and he wonders and he's thinking, what's going on here?
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He's perplexed. He doesn't understand. Do we have this today? I submit that we lack men who can stand in this way to our magistrates.
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And I'm not talking about Washington. I'm talking about right here, right here in Springdale, in Washington County.
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Because we have not cultivated these men. We have not cultivated them. Instead, what we do is we complain and we whine about not having these type of men.
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I was telling someone at the retreat this weekend that according to Ecclesiastes, right there is a time to tear down and a time to build.
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And I sense very strongly that the time for us as CBC is the time to stop tearing down and the time to build.
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And so let's not complain, but let's look at the problem and let's start changing what has gotten us there to try to build these types of men.
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The type of men that will look more like John the Baptist than like Herod Antipas. That will look more like John and Peter and less like Judas.
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Less like Alexander the Coppersmith. Less like Demas, who loved the world and left Paul because he loved the things of the world more than he loved the eternal treasures of the gospel.
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What do we do? How do we build up men like John the Baptist? Well, I think first we have to recognize our cultural moment.
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And I'm going to tell you a story right now that is a brag or a boast in my parents, but we have changed so much in the 40 years or so, you know, since this story took place that we almost would look at my parents as being irresponsible in this idea, right?
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This is where we are. We cannot cultivate men of John the Baptist because we fundamentally do not trust that the
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Lord, the author of life, has our lives and our children's lives in his hands. This does not make us stupid, but it does make us faithful.
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We will draw breath when God says we will, and we will end our final breath at the time that is appointed for all men, that God knows.
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And he holds us in his hand. And so when I was a young man, a young whippersnapper, I was given my first BB gun.
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I think I was six years old, and I got in trouble. It snowed one day, and I shot like 20 birds off the bird feeder.
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It was mass carnage. And the carnage was equal. Retribution came when my father found out about this.
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And what I learned was not, oh, you can't go out with a gun anymore. It was, you don't shoot birds off the bird feeder.
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Those are not game birds. We're not doing that. And so from my childhood, we had acreage in the woods.
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It was a mountain out in Lincoln, stinking Lincoln. And it was oaks, and there was a cave, just a hole in the ground.
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And I remember really from like ages eight to probably 14, 15, when it would be okay that I was running around out there with guns with my friends.
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We would camp out there. We would wander through the woods. We would run into all kinds of stuff. Find treasures out there.
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Stay out there just all day. The treasures we had, you know, rusted metal, it was amazing. We had envisioned a society that had died out there.
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You know, that's not the way it was. But when I think today, I'm reminded of an event that happened this week.
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We were having a meal at Cosmos on Thursday night, and Abby had forgotten something in the back of the van, and Kelsey, who was better than me in this instance, said,
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Abby, just go get that out of the back of the van. And I remember I was watching her out the window just staring to make sure that she wasn't going to get run over in the parking lot of Cosmos.
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It was probably a walk of 30 feet. And I rebuked myself. I rebuked myself.
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If we treat our boys this way, we will not get bold, courageous men.
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We will get cowards who are afraid of everything, who are afraid fundamentally of death, but are also afraid of losing the approval of man.
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We have to take off this suffocating idea of safety.
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God holds their fate in his hand. We have to pray. I don't think we've prayed in the church that God would raise up men like this, because for too long in the church, we've been afraid of God raising up men like this.
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Because let me tell you something, men like John the Baptist, they break stuff. They really do. They break stuff.
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They hurt your feelings. They get out ahead sometimes, and they have to be reined back in. And we've forgotten what the apostle
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Paul told us in Titus 2, where he gives instructions in the church, and he says that we need to have older men who are venerable, who are wise, and we need to have younger men who are strong and are full of zeal, because old men don't have strength, and young men don't have the wisdom.
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And so together, we grow together. And old men don't restrain young men, but they direct young men.
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And young men should be taught that they should go out with their strength, and they should make mistakes. And sometimes they're going to break things, but at the end of the day, the church does not survive if we don't have young men who are going out to break things.
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I'm sure that in today's day, John the Baptist pastor would have told him, hey, look, it's not going to do any good for you to go to Herod anyway.
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Pagans are going to peg. You don't need to worry about him. You need to focus more at home. You need to deal with what's going on here in the church.
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And John the Baptist says, no, I am the man of God who's going to proclaim the message. I'm going to go to the king because a great evil is being done, and if that evil festers in the palace, it will inevitably make its way down to the roots of the culture.
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And friends, that's what we see today. We have lost men that break things, and the evil festers in our culture.
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It pumps by the metric ton out of Washington and out of Little Rock, and it infiltrates.
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And we think, oh, well, I guess we're just going to have to pray that we can get 51 % of people to agree with me to go against this.
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It's foolishness. It's absolute foolishness. It's not how God has ever worked, and it's not how
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God works because God has designed the world with hierarchy, and with hierarchy comes responsibility. Romans 13, so loved to be quoted,
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Romans 13 tells us that the magistrates are a deacon of God. That means they are his minister.
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That means they are responsible to carry out the commands that he has given, and if they don't do that, they will be held responsible.
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All of our magistrates are responsible to God because their power is given to them by God. Jesus tells us that explicitly when
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Pilate says, are you not afraid of the law? And Jesus says, you would have no power if it was not given to you by God.
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He tells Pilate that. We will look at that next week. We pray that God would raise up these men, and then we pray that God will give us older men of wisdom who take an interest in these young men and try to cultivate them.
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We pray that we would have family and church culture that emphasizes courage while casting off that safety bubble
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I talked about. We have to understand that Christians have to live a life, this is young men, this is my appeal to you, boys and young men, do not fall into the traps that our society and our culture has laid for you, but listen, you don't walk alone.
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These traps have always been there. If you don't believe me, read the story of Samson and Judges. It's the sin of youth, the sin of youthful sexual immorality will cripple you, it will hamstring you, and it will take you out of the battle.
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We have to have young men that the world cannot revile rightfully. First Peter gives us that in chapter 2 and 3.
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He tells us that we will be reviled by the world just like Jesus was, but do not let their reviling have a basis in the truth, because we have to be righteous men.
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We don't conjure that up ourselves, we pray that God would give it to us. We pray that God would help our unbelief, and that we would be men, young men and old men that understand that we will be reviled in the public square just like Jesus was, but it should not be with a basis.
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We must not be immoral sinners. We must be men that watch to ourselves, that watch to our lives, and are careful to follow the teachings of Christ.
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We have to teach the proper interaction and implications of the law and gospel in the church. We've forgotten the law in the church.
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We're afraid of the law, because we're afraid of saying, oh, that's legalistic, or, oh, are you saying that you have to follow the law to be saved?
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No, we're not saying that. We all understand this, right? You cannot follow the law to any degree to be saved.
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Our salvation is based entirely on the blood of Christ and His work. However, however,
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Ephesians 2 .10, multiple other places in scripture tell us that He has laid out works for us.
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We are His workmanship, prepared for works to walk on the way that He has prepared for us beforehand.
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So what do we do? We walk in them. Not so that we would be saved, but so that we would show something that we must show every day, gratitude to our
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King, gratitude to our Savior. We walk in them. The law is critical for the church, because the magistrate doesn't care about grace.
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The magistrate cares about law. They are deacons of the sword, and the sword is based on transgression of the law.
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How are they going to know the law if we don't teach them? And we need men that have that kind of voice that can teach them.
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We need to teach church partnership. Did you know that 10 churches bound together are much stronger than one country church with 70 people in it?
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Our megachurches are doing nothing. We see it happening in Colorado right now.
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Right now, they are about to pass a bill that will take children away from their parents to mutilate them, and the megachurches have said nothing.
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It's been a groundswell of the small churches whose pastors have written letters and are putting the pressure on these magistrates, and the role is starting to turn.
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The pressure is starting to work. Even the Democrats are starting to turn on them in Colorado. We cannot depend on the huge numbers in the big tent.
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There's too much to lose in that there's a perception, right? If we go too far, we're going to get our tax exemption status taken away, and that will cripple the multimillion -dollar megachurch.
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It's a cross that they have to deal with and they have to bear. But if we have partnership, if there are 10, 15, 20 in Springdale, why not 50 churches in Benton, Washington, Madison, Carroll County?
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What if we could band together? What if we could unite? Then there is a million heads of the snakes to cut off.
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You can't go after one centralized thing, and there is power. John the Baptist represents the man of God who stands up so that those apostles later would stand up, emboldened by the resurrection of Christ.
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We have to understand, just like John did, that God calls people into tasks.
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John was born for this mission. He was born, I believe, that he was given the
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Holy Spirit in the womb. That gives us Baptist fits, right? It shouldn't. We should not flinch from the
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Word of God. John was saved in the womb, and he came out, and he was the forerunner of Jesus Christ.
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He was a voice crying in the wilderness, because Jerusalem and Israel had become a wilderness.
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He was a voice crying in the wilderness. John understood his task, and he embraced it.
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And when task and calling meets up with the energy and the talent and the giftings that God has given, there is a fire and there is power.
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That's what John's life did. Young men, you've been told too long in the church that the only way to be a proper
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Christian is to be a pastor. And we sit weak, because that message is not of Scripture.
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It's not of Scripture. You are called to be met with the task and the calling that God has given you, and to give it everything you got.
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Everything you got. Whether that's being a politician, a business owner, a lawyer, a teacher, a pastor, a father, a husband, everything.
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We meet it with full effort. We give it everything we got, and we pray to God that he would give us the courage and the faith and the steadfastness and the perseverance to keep going on the task that's been given.
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See, John knew this. He knew this. And so he went out like a crazy person, baptizing in the
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Jordan. And the Pharisees themselves were afraid to say a word against John, because he spoke with power and authority.
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Do we have anything different today? Do we have more or less than John the Baptist had today, brothers?
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We have more. We have more. We have the book of Hebrews. John did not have that.
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We have the book of Revelation. We have Jude. We have the epistles. John didn't have that.
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We have it today. Can we speak with authority? The answer is yes, we can. It's not our words, it's the words of Christ.
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It's the word of Scripture. That's what a holy man looks like. And when John questioned in solitude, and he wondered, because if Jesus was not really the
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Messiah, John knew that all of his work was in vain. And so John asked the question. It was not about losing his life, but it was, did
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I pour out my life for a worthy cause? At the end, when John was in prison, when he was low, and he asked, is Jesus really the
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Messiah? Is he really the one? And the answer graciously that Jesus gave back is,
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I am the one. You know I'm the one. And I think John dies in peace at the hands of Herod, and John is a witness that testifies today, he testifies through this story, and when we are in glory, we will see
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John the baptizer, and we will thank him for his witness, and we will thank him for the ministry that he had.
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The voice in the wilderness, the voice today in glory, who speaks a greater word, a greater word even than he did here.
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All right, a turn towards darkness. We need to look at a vindictive, adulterous woman,
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Herodias. John had been saying to Herod, it is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife.
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They have broken one of the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not commit adultery. They have broken Leviticus 18, 16, you shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife.
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It is your brother's nakedness. Herodias had divorced her husband, Herod Philip. This is
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Herod Antipas, this Herod, that's his brother. She had divorced him, he had divorced his wife, and they got together, but she had a child with Herod Philip, and that is the woman who comes into this story dancing.
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But what we know is hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and she hears the proclamation of John, and her response to it is not lawful what you've done, her response is murderous rage and malice, murderous rage.
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This is the spirit of the loud woman. This is the spirit of the feminist.
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I am woman, hear me roar, and the roar that you will hear is death, malice, destruction of character, strategizing, hatred, trying to usurp.
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She wants to be the king. She wants to rule through her hand puppet,
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Herod Antipas, and we see that she schemes, and her words here, her response is that she can't attack the law of God itself because the law of God is perfect and it's pure, but what she does is she attacks the messenger, she hates him, she hates him so much.
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She can't live in a world where John the Baptist lives, and think of the evil, dark heart that that is.
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This most righteous man, the best man ever born of woman is absolutely hatred because Herodias hates
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God. She hates John the Baptist, but she really hates God worse because she has sinned and she has suppressed the truth in her unrighteousness, and she has been given over, and the person that we should think of when we hear the name
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Herodias is another person, Jezebel. Jezebel, who ruled with Ahab and who coaxed him into murder all the time.
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It was about rooting out the men of God and murdering them. It was about ruling through Ahab, a weak, cowardly man.
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Terrible, terrible, and this applies everywhere today. Let me ask you just a simple question. Do we have wicked magistrates who surround themselves with wicked women?
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Yeah, yeah, I think we do. I think we would say that characterizes our situation in this culture.
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We are ruled by wicked men who surround themselves with wicked women, and then we step one step further, we're just ruled by wicked women today.
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Wicked women everywhere. This applies in every sphere of authority. The nice guy husband who has a crazy wife, let me tell you something, they are one, the husband and the wife, and the nice guy husband is a rotting, stinking coward who's worse than she is.
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If you see a woman who's ungodly and immoral, the husband's worse every time. Every time, because he's done nothing about it.
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He should at the very least go sleep on the corner of the roof, so that he would signal to his neighbors, here lives a shrew,
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I can't even stay in the house with her, I'm going to sleep on the roof. That's what that proverb's about, do you understand that?
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Public shame in the house. That's what it is to marry a sniping, malicious feminist, and we are infested with them.
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We are absolutely infested with them, and if you want to poke our culture's idols right in the eye, this is the one.
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This is the one. Pastors, we will cow tail to gossips and shadow elders, our wives at home, who rule the church, because we fear strife at home more than we fear filthy to God's commands.
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I see it happen all of the time, and this thing is tolerated. This thing is tolerated. We tolerate pastors who are ruled by their wives.
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We tolerate shadow elders. We tolerate the matriarchs of the church who spread gossip like poison throughout the body and infect the body, and what that is, is that is tolerating that woman,
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Jezebel. And Jesus will absolutely take the lampstand away from that church. If we have a root of that here, it needs to be rooted out.
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Thanks be to God, I have not seen much of that. It is a besetting sin of women.
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Men have their other types. We're all sinners, and that is a message not often preached in our time, is that women do indeed sin, and they sin in ways that are peculiar to women, specific to women.
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We kill people in churches today, privately, all the time, because we want to avoid the messiness of public church discipline.
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If someone is unrepentant in their sin, they must be brought before the entire congregation. Not because I want to, but because there are two witnesses that have interacted with them, and they will not repent of their sin.
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And so what we do is we bring them up, and those two witnesses make their case, and we decide as a body what to do.
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And we say, oh, but won't that blow up the church? Let me tell you, better to chop off the head of the snake than to get poisoned over time, and to have everybody leave anyway, because you cannot respect a man who is a shepherd, who lets the whole flock get infected with disease and does nothing.
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That's where we are. Friends, hold me to it. Hold me to it. We cannot have unrepentant sin in this place.
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We will not foster the kind of men that we need, and we will not have the daughters that we need who make good wives, who are the glory of their husbands.
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Women are beautiful. Women are the glory of their husbands. They are the mothers who bring up the new generation.
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Critical, critical stuff. All of our wicked leaders, they surround themselves with wicked women because they have an insatiable lust and a thirst for what women provide them.
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None of this happens. None of this story happens if Herod simply stays married to his first wife. Do you understand that?
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None of this. So Herod breaks the command, and he marries this woman. Do you know what happens?
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Let me tell you the story. He goes through this, and he kills John, and then he's given another chance later in the
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Gospels because Jesus is brought before this very same man. In the Gospels, it says that Herod had been waiting to see
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Jesus, but do you know what he does? He washes his hands of it and gives Jesus back to Rome because he is a steaming coward.
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He is a coward. He will do nothing. None of this happens. He loses his whole kingdom because of this event.
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Because meanwhile, when he divorces his first wife, his first wife was the daughter of the king of Arabia, and the king of Arabia doesn't like this very much.
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So what the king of Arabia does is he musters up an army, and he comes, and he destroys the armies of Herod Antipas to where Antipas has to go into exile, and he's bailed out by Syria.
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And then you know what? That's not enough. That humiliation's not enough. One of their relatives gets a greater province and a greater kingdom, and so Herodias convinces
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Herod Antipas to write a strongly worded letter to the emperor of Rome saying, why would you do this?
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And you know what the response is? Emperor Caligula says, you're exiled, you and her. You can live on love by yourself with no power in exile.
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That's what his adultery brought him. It looks sweet, right? Oh, she's pretty.
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Oh, I'm going to consolidate power. I'm going to put one over on my brother here, sick pervert that he is.
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And at the end of the day, what happens is that everything he has is stripped from him because sin promises a honey taste, it promises sweetness, and what it is is a stinking carcass of death.
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It's a stillborn baby. It is all this potential that has decayed flesh, and it's horrible, and it's horrifying.
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That's what Herodias brings in. Do not listen. Do not listen to the vindictive, adulterous woman.
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We are given many proverbs about it. Let's look at the lewd daughter, the lewd daughter. A strategic day came, verse 21.
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Look at it, a strategic day came. Who was strategizing? Herodias, Herodias.
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A strategic day came when Herod, on his birthday, gave a banquet for his great men and military commanders and the leading men of Galilee, and when the daughter of Herodias herself came in a dance, she pleased
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Herod and his dinner guests. And the king said to the girl, ask me for whatever you want, and I will give it to you.
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Do you see the culture that Herod's created? It's the very culture we walk in today. It's the sexual revolution.
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That's what it is. Herod decides to get all of his generals and all of his good guys together and have a strip tease with his niece in front of them all.
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That's what he does. It's disgusting. Our most high -status women today in our culture are made high -status by stripping in front of all the chief important men of our day.
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Think of who they are. Think of who our society uplifts. We were inundated with it trying to watch
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NCAA basketball. It was Beyonce, right? Advertising for Levi's jeans.
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A married woman playing the part of the harlot, flashing her goods in an immodest way across TV for every man in America to see over and over and over again.
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Beyonce is at the pinnacle of our culture, or Taylor Swift, and what they do is they are in a race to see how many men they can sleep with and how much clothing they can take off.
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That's what we've done, and that has come from the top, and we accept it because men in our particular type of sin, we are willing to deal with this kind of sin, right?
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We love it. We love the lust of our flesh. And so Herod is happy that his niece has come in and she's borne all of the goods.
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She's a high -status woman, and this is weird. Even the countries around this would have thought, this is perverted. A princess comes in here and acts like a pole dancer?
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That is not normal, but that's the world that Herod has set up, and that's what she does.
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She does. The power of women, when we give in to wickedness, the power of women devolves into a counterintuitive play.
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I want you to understand this. We saw it with one of the horrible songs that rose to the top of the charts a couple of years ago.
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It's one of those things that we can't even speak of as children of light, right? Here's the thing. Here's the counterintuitive play.
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The way to be a powerful woman is to be able to have sex whenever you want based on your whims.
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And do you know what the men of an immodest, disgusting culture say? Bring us on, all that kind of feminism.
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We'll take that all day long. And so it's the situation that women, in their grasping for what they don't have, what they gain is slavery to men.
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Slavery to men. And that's where abortion comes in, because there has to be a way out of the slavery.
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There has to be a way out of, oh, I don't need no man, except when I'm having his baby. Guess what? I kind of need him. So what do we do?
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Kill the baby. Evil women. Look at this girl. Look at this girl. She's immodest, but then her feet are swift to shed blood.
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She is given up to half the kingdom. She can have anything she wants. And what does she do? She runs to mom.
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Do you think her and mom have been talking? Oh, yeah. They've been talking. Right? What do you think they've been talking about? Not really the finer points of Calvinism.
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They've been talking about something else. So she comes running in there, and her mom has been waiting for this day.
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Think of this malicious woman. She's been waiting for this day. And the girl says, hey, I've been offered up to half the kingdom.
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I can ask for anything I want. And without hesitation, Herodias says, John's head on a platter in front of all the guests.
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I want to humiliate God. I want to decapitate the man of God.
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It's not enough for him to be slain in prison. I want him to be publicly paraded around for all the men so that no one would get the idea that they can call me unlawful.
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That's her play. That's her play. The girl is an agent of her mother, and she's so degraded in her sin that she doesn't even see any issue with bringing a man's head on a platter.
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You would think in polite society that that might cause a little bit of a problem. Like really? Really? Decapitate the guy?
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Bring him into the party? What's that about? But sex and violence, they go hand in hand.
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They go hand in hand. We've already made the connection between free sex and abortion, but what about free sex and rootless deracination?
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That is, men and women have no roots. They have nothing to tie them down. They have no connection and no family because free sex severs what sex in marriage is supposed to give, which is rooted intimacy.
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It's beautiful. That's why we're told not to defile the marriage bed, is because it's dangerous to do so.
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It's because sex is given by God as a gift, as a gift in covenant marriage to direct and point the covenant marriage towards Him.
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Not in a weird way, the intimacy of Christ in the church, but in a mysterious, shadowy way, sex shows the intimacy that Christ has with His people.
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Complete intimacy. Intimacy that's greater than we can imagine. Free sex and family destruction, we are reaping the whirlwind of that, are we not, brothers and sisters?
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I know, as a teacher of high school students, that what we have is family destruction.
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Fathers not at home, mothers working the night shift, and kids who have no sense of belonging, no rules, no response to authority, and the reason why is because they've never been taught.
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What they've been taught, what they've been taught, is when a pretty woman walks by, you can leave your children, who cares?
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Or when he doesn't make me happy, I'll just throw him out of the house. What does that train a child? It says, if you make me unhappy,
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I'm going to kick you out, too, right? If you want something bad enough, who am
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I to tell you, no, you just take it. That's what our kids do, and then we wonder, how are our kids monsters? It's because they don't know anything.
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It's because we are utterly unrooted, destroyed. Free sex also gives us godless, evil leaders, evil leaders who want to dismember our most innocent, who want to cut the generals off of small children, evil leaders, making up evil, inventing new kinds of evil, and that's because what we did culturally is we decided to have free sex, and what we do, our churches, we know this, we know this.
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Our churches have been characterized by the people who party in orgies on Saturday night and come to church on Sunday morning and come right up here, right up here, and partake of the blood and the bread, seeking their oneness with Jesus Christ and defiling
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Him, and our elders have done nothing because we don't want to have a hard conversation.
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Free sex destroys everything. It is nuclear power. You know this, married people, it's nuclear power.
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It binds you to your spouse. It's a beautiful thing. It's a godly thing. But it's nuclear power that when put in the wrong place, it destroys cities, and it destroys countries, and we have worshipped it.
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Cowardly men today are ruled by women because they are not self -controlled, and men who have no self -control lead to societal upheaval.
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So goes the men, so goes the country. So goes the men, so goes the church. So goes the men, so goes the family, and that's where we are, and it's time to build up.
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So how do we build? How do we build? We build understanding that we have to build men that are self -controlled and courageous.
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Let's look at Herod in more detail, last character. Herod likes listening to the stories of God.
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He likes, him and John, I imagine, you know, getting a little red wine, maybe, and a goblet, and sit there and talk, and John's telling him everything he knows.
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John knew a lot, right? John knew a lot about the kingdom of God. John knew the prophecies, and he is calling
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Herod to repentance. I imagine that that was happening with some frequency, and Herod didn't understand because God is using
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Herod terrifyingly as a vessel of destruction. That's what Herod Antipas is.
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He shows God's glory in righteous judgment, and he listens, and he's confused, but he likes listening to it.
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He's adjacent. He's like Jordan Peterson. We're like, oh, he's so close. How do we know? We don't know. We don't know.
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He likes some things of God without bowing the knee to the creator of everything. Don't you see how insane that position is?
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How can you say, oh, I like some of the things you say, Jesus, except for the part where, you know, you bled your own blood to draw people to yourself that you can't even make flesh?
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There is no Christianity outside of that, none. There's no appearance of Christianity outside of the gospel.
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Quit getting fooled by it. Luke 23, to his ultimate condemnation, it says, now when
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Herod saw Jesus, he rejoiced greatly. Oh, that's great, right? For he had wanted to see him for a long time, because he had been hearing about him and was hoping to see some sign performed by him.
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And he questioned him at some length, but Jesus answered him nothing. Jesus sees this man for who he is.
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He will not answer Herod. The door is shut. Do you see the terrifying effect there?
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The door is shut for Herod Antipas. He wants to see a parlor trick from the Son of God. Do you see the blasphemy?
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Hey, Jesus, Son of God, I've heard you've done some cool things. Will you conjure up a magic trick for me to dazzle the men of my court who like watching my niece strip dance?
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Jesus says, not a word, not a word. Wicked leaders like to cloak their evil in flirtation with righteousness, flirtation.
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We have presidents and magistrates who say, you know, I don't agree with abortion in my private life, but it's not a matter of public policy.
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Absolute foolishness, absolute foolishness. Let's just replace the words. I don't hold with incest in my private life, but like I don't want to make laws against incest.
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That would be legislating morality, and the people would say, you're crazy, and we would be shocked by that, but it takes much more to shock us every day when we are fooled over and over.
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Herod is superstitious when confronted with the gospel. He's superstitious. He's afraid of John, but he has no true fear of God, and what we have to do is understand with magistrates like Herod that we have to examine the fruits and not the rhetoric.
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We have to examine the fruits and not the rhetoric. We have to be discerning, and we have to be shrewd in dealing with magistrates.
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They will lie to you, especially wicked ones. They will lie to you, so we have to be shrewd, and we have to stay on target.
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We have to call leaders to fear God and not merely fear voters. Now, the pragmatic reality is that politicians fear voters, but the true reality is that they should fear
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God and then fear the voters, but mostly they should fear
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God because we are not going to be held accountable for how many people voted for us. We're going to be held accountable for our fear of God and whether we followed his commands faithfully.
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The books will be open. We have to understand that Herod is superstitious, but he's not a Christian. He has no fear of God.
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He's a blasphemer and a defiler. Look at the works, not the words. Look at the works.
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Herod is also a pervert. He's divorced and remarried. He's allowed a strip show. He values sexual gratification more than righteousness.
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Do you get that? Almost the most disgusting part of this story is that Herod, overcome with his emotion and lust at seeing his niece do this lewd dance, that's the basis on which he offers this gift.
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I've been so lust filled and aroused by this incestual display that I'm going to give away up to half my kingdom, but he said some nice things about John.
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He was like knocking on the door. No, we have to be smarter than that. We have to be more discerning. He's a pervert.
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Do we see this scenario today? We have to be careful. Now, I think the last point here is Herod is rash in his vices.
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He's rash. Wicked men are rash. They make quick, snap decisions. They make sweeping proclamations.
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He swore to her, whatever you ask of me, I will give it to you up to half my kingdom. Remember, I talked about Jephthah. In Judges 11,
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Jephthah prays to God and he says, God, if you will give me victory over my enemies, then I will make a burnt sacrifice of the first thing that comes out of my door when
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I arrive home. And the first thing that comes out of his door is his one and only child, his virgin daughter, his virgin daughter.
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And Jephthah carries through with his rash oath. And he compounds sin with sin.
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And he offers a human sacrifice to God. It's blaspheming. Do you know what, though?
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There's amazing, incomprehensible hope in this. Do you know whose name is in Hebrews 11? Jephthah, Jephthah.
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He is listed as a man of faith. Because you know what? God does not look at our wicked deeds.
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They have been covered by the blood of Christ. And when God sees Jephthah today in glory, he sees the righteousness of Christ looking forward by faith.
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Because what Jephthah did is he destroyed God's enemies. He destroyed God's enemies and he had faith.
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And he sinned greatly, just like Abraham, just like David, just like every other man in that cloud of witnesses that's come before us, and just like I will, and just like I have, and just like you will, and just like you have.
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Rash bow. But when wicked leaders fear looking dumb more than lawful, they will do terrible things.
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Why kill John? Why not say, hey, hey, girl, I said half the kingdom.
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I'm not going to murder for you, all right? I'm not going to murder for you. Ask for something else.
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Would it truly, would truly the men around him have reviled him had he said that? I don't think so.
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But this is the deceitfulness and the foolishness of pride, is that he said, public perception becomes his weather vane.
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Public perception. He is afraid of looking dumb in front of his men. I've promised her this. I guess I got to just behead the guy and parade him around.
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I don't think his generals like John the Baptist very much either, because John the Baptist would have been a well -known preacher of the gospel at this point.
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But public perception drives wicked leaders, not the good of their people, and certainly not the delegated power of God. Fear of God is wisdom.
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Fear of God is wisdom. Wicked leaders are blind to the author of the natural consequences of their wickedness.
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Herod sows the seeds of his own destruction, both temporally, but much more importantly, eternally.
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Herod Antipas will not be among the cloud of witnesses that we have. He is a byword and a warning sign.
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This is the result of sexual immorality and cowardice. Don't go down this road, brothers.
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Don't go down the road of Herodias, sisters. Don't be immodest in your apparel.
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As Peter writes, don't be immodest. Don't let your holiness be adorned by your external trappings, but let it be the gentle and quiet spirit that you have.
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And men, we know this, that's the most beautiful woman, isn't it? The most beautiful woman is the gentle, quiet woman in spirit, who does not adorn herself on the outside, but God grants that.
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And when she doesn't work on her outside trappings to bring her beauty, you know what she does? She becomes the most beautiful.
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The most beautiful women I've ever seen are the godly women who with their grit and their character raise godly children and are godly encouragers and are the glory of their husbands.
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And I heard a lot of that this weekend, I did. You would think in a worldly sense there would be a bunch of men getting together, bagging on the old lady back home.
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That's not the case. That's not the case because Christian men love their wives and wives are a glory to them.
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Herod acts in a meta sense like the shameful city of Jerusalem. This is kind of a weird story, right?
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Because what happens is this king, who's probably like a Macedonian, this king kills the prophet.
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Do you know what we're going to learn? It's usually not these pagan kings that kill the prophets.
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It's usually their own people that kill the prophets. Herod plays a hand in the death of Jesus. And this whole story, to bring it to a close, this whole story is written in the greatest detail of all the gospels by Mark.
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And that's because Mark wants to show us something. And what he's showing us is that John was the forerunner of Christ in message and in life and in death.
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The death of John is going to be very similar to the death of Christ. The ministry of John is a forerunner of the greater ministry of Christ that follows the same thing.
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Repent for the kingdom of God is near. Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. And then at consummation, with that crucifixion and resurrection that we will look at in detail next week, it is finished.
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The full wrath of God satisfied. And now the kingdom of God is not near.
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It's not at hand. It's established. It is sealed.
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It is complete. And we wait for that day in glory. And then the big reminder we should get out of this is it's all
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God's plan. It's all God's plan. John's buried in dignity by his disciples, right?
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In dignity. And many of his disciples now join the one who John himself said when his disciples were leaving.
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They said, John, your men are leaving and they're going to this Jesus. And John says, he must increase while I decrease.
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The whole ministry of John was to burn out. He was a forerunner. He was not the real thing.
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He was the beginning of the real thing. And the real thing comes on. The one who John himself was not great enough to tie the straps of Jesus' sandals.
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John was obsessed with Christ. Obsessed with the coming of the new covenant. He couldn't even understand, he longed to understand the promises of this new covenant that he hadn't seen realized.
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And brothers and sisters, we see it realized today. We see the throne of God established. We see the throne of God in all of its beauty and its glory.
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And it was all God's plan. And so when we come back to the main thread here, we've had this parentheses, right?
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In Mark, we've had this parentheses where we see the fate of the forerunner of Christ. And we see the foreshadowing.
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Here's what's coming. This man, Herod, he's going to play a similar role. He doesn't repent. And he's going to do the same thing to Jesus.
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And Jesus is going to be brought up by wicked men. And he's going to be put in a show trial. And then Jerusalem himself, although Herod had a hand in this, you know who the main one that kills
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Christ is, the one who mainly takes responsibility, is the scribes and Pharisees who have followed around with murderous intent in their hearts.
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And they will stir up the hearts of the mob of their own people to kill their greatest prophet.
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And they think there won't be consequences for that. Oh, there are consequences. As the old covenant doesn't fade away.
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The old covenant is burned away in fire as the armies of Rome march against Jerusalem and tear down every stone of the temple and slaughter those within.
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There are massive consequences for covenant breakers. So where do we leave this morning as Jesus, as it all comes back together,
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Jesus hears of this and we set up for what we're going to do in two weeks, which is one of the greatest miracles, the feeding of the 5 ,000.
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Jesus removes to desolation to pray with his disciples. And I think we should take a note of that.
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The power of Christ's kingdom on display in the feeding of the 5 ,000, but the kingdom of Christ, his power is activated by the prayers of the saints.
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It always was. And it always will be while we are here as Jesus removes. And I don't want us to be discouraged today by the evil that we see around us.
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I want us to be encouraged that it's in God's plan. And I want to leave you with a reading here and then we will conclude. Romans 16, 17 through 20.
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The apostle Paul writes, now I urge you brothers to keep your eye on those who cause dissensions and stumblings contrary to the teaching which you have learned and turn away from them.
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For such men are slaves, not of our Lord Christ, but of their own stomach. And by their smooth and flattering speech, they deceive the hearts of the unsuspecting.
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For the report of your obedience has reached to all. Therefore, I am rejoicing over you, but I want you to be wise in what is good and innocent in what is evil.
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And here's what I really wanted to emphasize this morning. And the God of peace will soon crush
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Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you.
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Let's pray. Lord, what a story. It's interesting how you give us a window into the schemes and the designs of your enemies.
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Lord, I pray that we would learn from them. But more than that, I pray that we would learn from the witness of John, the baptizer.
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Lord, what a man that we should long to meet someday. He has made many friends in heaven, many spiritual friends.
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Lord, as he laid out his life, as he ran the good race, as he was faithful, though he wavered, your grace kept him on the straight and narrow and you provided him an answer.
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Lord, but more, more than that, we affix our faith and our vision, our sight to the
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Lord Jesus Christ, the author of our salvation, the author of our faith,
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Lord, the king crowned in glory, our great high priest, our great prophet,
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Lord, we fix our eyes on him. And we pray, Lord, that we would not be wicked, that we would not give in to the sway of the culture that presses around us, but instead,
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Lord, that we would hold one another accountable, that we would, that we would stray away from those who have smooth talk, who want to fill their bellies.
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Lord, I pray that I would not be one of those. Lord, I pray, brother, your grace, that I would be a faithful man who is not about filling my belly, but is about serving the feast of your word to a people who are hungry.
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Lord, your word is our life, it is no trifling thing, it is the difference between life and death.
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And, Lord, I pray that we hear it, I pray that we receive it, I pray that we accept it, and I pray that we walk according to it.
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Lord, by your grace and by your mercy, we pray that we would do that, that you would hold us fast to the course that you have laid out for us, and that we will arrive at the end, not by our effort, but by your grace and your power and your mercy.