Two Stupid Questions

Covenant Baptist Church

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Then they sent some of the Pharisees and the Herodians to Jesus to trap him in his words.

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When they came, they said to him, Teacher, we know you are truthful and don't care what anyone thinks, nor do you show partiality, but teach the way of God truthfully.

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Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay or shouldn't we?

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But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, Why are you testing me?

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Bring me a denarius to look at. They brought a coin. Whose image and inscription is this?

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He asked them. Caesar's. They replied. Jesus told them,

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Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are

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God's. And they were utterly amazed at him. Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him and questioned him.

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Teacher. Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, leaving a wife behind but no child, that man should take the wife and raise up offspring for his brother.

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There were seven brothers. The first married a woman and dying, left no offspring.

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The second also took her and he died, leaving no offspring. And the third likewise.

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None of the seven left offspring. Last of all, the woman died too.

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In the resurrection, when they rise, whose wife will she be?

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Since the seven had married her. Jesus spoke to them.

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Isn't this the reason why you're mistaken? You don't know the scripture or the power of God.

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But when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

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And as for the dead being raised, haven't you read in the book of Moses, in a passage about the burning bush, how

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God said to him, I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.

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He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. You are badly mistaken.

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Let's pray. Father, we can confess that it's incredible to think of the power of the resurrection, that you,

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O God, who have created us, have formed us from the dust.

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And then, because of our fallenness, you have redeemed us, you bought us back with a great price.

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And, Lord, you, with a mighty power to save, you,

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O God, with a mighty power to cleanse and sanctify, you,

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O God, too, are the God with a power to raise the dead and bring us to glory.

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Lord, here we are to worship. Here we are to bow down and say that you're our

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God. May the words that come from this message stir our hearts and burn within us to live a life that glorifies you.

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Have your way with your messenger today, I pray, in Christ's name. I want to start by, as is customary, taking a look back.

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And there is a pivotal section to this part of Mark that we're in, and that is the fig tree.

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So, if you will remember, back a couple of weeks ago, we saw that Jesus was walking with the disciples, and he saw a fig tree, and he was hungry.

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And so he wanted to get fruit from the fig tree, but the fig tree had no fruit because it was not in season.

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And Jesus cursed the fig tree, and when they came back later, it had withered up and died. And its fruit was not there because it did not have fruit for its

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Lord whenever he came to collect. And the parable is that it relates, it corresponds to Israel, who was in season.

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Their king has come. We saw with Palm Sunday that the king had come into their midst, and the season is high, and yet they have no figs.

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And so, as we see it play out, there is a judgment motif that's going. And Corey touched on that last week as we saw that Jesus went into the temple, and he turned over the tables, and he called it a den of thieves.

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It was the place where robbers go in to haul their plunder and sit on it. That was the holiest place of Israel.

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It was a den of thieves. You might call it a den of iniquity. And we saw that Jesus had given the parable of the vineyard to the

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Pharisees, and the Sadducees, and all of the religious leaders, and they hear it, and the Holy Spirit gives them insight, and they understand what he means by it.

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And what he means is that your time is over. That the God, the

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Father, the one who owns the vineyard has sent his son, you will kill him, and he will take the vineyard away, and he will crush you.

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And so what we would think is that when you are given a prophecy by God, by this teacher, when you are given this kind of parable, and the

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Holy Spirit gives you understanding, what you would think is that the sane response is to fall down on your knees, repent of your hard -heartedness, and call out to God for salvation, as they had done over and over in judges, when they would fall away, and the cycle would complete, and they would get the natural consequences of their sin, and they would cry out to God, and he would raise up another judge to restore them, and they would sin again.

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But this time, there is no such repentance. And so instead of repenting, what the leaders do is they devise a cowardly, horrible, ridiculous plan to ask two insanely stupid questions.

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That's what they do. And they cloak it in all kinds of sophistry, and words that seem very tricky, and what

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Jesus does is he gives stupid answers to stupid questions. But his stupid answers are very wise, but they're not what the people that ask the questions are looking for, because Jesus is the fount of wisdom.

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He is the wisest, and he has all of the treasury of wisdom because he is the

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Word of God. So why are they so stupid? Why are the questions so stupid? Well, I think number one, what we have to understand, and Christian, this is important for us to know, that trying to trick or trap

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God is stupid by definition. Do we do it though? Lord, if you will just get me through this thing, then

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I will obey you. You're trying to trick God. You're trying to trap him, and that is ridiculously stupid.

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You should not do that. Another thing, another part of this is that why are there stupid questions is that wickedness is stupid, and wickedness will get you.

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I think a man, a guest, stood in this pulpit a year ago, and he said, be careful, the devil is out to get you.

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And he was right. But also be careful, because your flesh and the wickedness inside of you is trying to get you.

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It's trying to take you down, and it's trying to smother you, and it's trying to separate you from the Lord your

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God. So wickedness is stupid, and it will get you. If you're hiding it right now, it's going to get you.

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It's going to bloom out, and the fruit that you're going to get is poison fruit. And number three, the wicked are oblivious.

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This is why it's a stupid question. The wicked are oblivious to their own peril. See, this type of rebellion that's displayed by these

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Herodians, and these Sadducees, and these Pharisees, this rebellion is futile, and it will end in their destruction.

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See, next week, we're going to look at a good question from a man who's close to the kingdom of God. But this week, we look at two ridiculous, preposterous questions that are made by people who have been banished from the kingdom of God and whose destruction is at hand.

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The axe is laid to the root of the tree. Remember, we started there with John the Baptist, and in many ways, the

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Gospel of Mark and all the Gospels unravel this old covenant, and they show it's fraying, and it's coming apart.

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And then they pinnacle and climax with the crucifixion, the passion, and the resurrection, because that is the ushering in of a new covenant and a new way, because Jesus fulfills everything.

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Understand this, in Mark, and I believe today, because we are in the new covenant, and the

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Holy Spirit is poured out in great measure upon God's people, that the time of fruit inspection is at hand.

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It's always at hand for God's people. Did you know that? Jesus is inspecting you. The time of inspection is here.

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The season is in. Jesus says that if you do not bear fruit, that you are a branch that will be torn off of the vine, taken away, and burned in the incinerator.

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So you can act like you're this thing. You can act like you're one of the branches, but the time of inspection is here, and Jesus comes, and he expects fruit.

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A tree is known by the fruit it bears. That works individually, that works in a family, that works in a church, and that works in a nation.

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A tree is known by the fruit it bears. We know this, I'm an agriculture teacher, and we know in agriculture that you never plant apple seeds and get orange trees, never.

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It will never happen. But many Christians believe that they can sow worldliness and wickedness and gain righteous fruit.

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Cannot happen. It's just as impossible, if not more impossible, than planting apple seeds, hoping to get orange trees.

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See, these men, their desire is to kill their own God, and to take away the inheritance of the

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Father from the true Son. That is the heart that these questions come from, so let's look at them. Question number one,

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God or Caesar? God or Caesar? Verses 13 through 15, they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians, very interesting.

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We'll talk about that, very interesting alliance, to him in order to trap him in a statement. And they came and said to him,

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Teacher, we know that you are truthful and defer to no one, for you are not partial to any, but teach the way of God in truth.

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Is it lawful to pay a tax to Caesar or not? Shall we pay or shall we not pay?

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Look at the seething hatred of the men from last week, seething hatred.

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See, the first thing we understand, and that Corey ended on, is that the leaders of the temple had a tremendous fear of man.

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They were afraid of the crowds that followed Jesus, but they were also very afraid of the Romans. And they should have been afraid of the

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Romans, but they also should have been afraid of the people that John the Baptist had brought about and that were now following Jesus Christ.

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They were afraid of them. And so, what they do in their seething anger and their hatred, they hate that he has come in and turned over the tables.

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They hate that he has given them the parable of the vineyard that they completely understand. And so, what they do is they go to him to engage him.

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No, they don't do that. They send their underlings to go to him, and I can almost hear it.

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In this cloaked language, we almost hear them. Hey, teacher, you are so great. You're amazing.

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But I hear a lot of people saying this thing. I can't tell you as a pastor how many times, a lot of people are saying this.

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And the question is, who's saying that? Because the answer is, you're saying this, right? You're saying this.

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So, this is what they do. They fear him because they fear the people. They watched him. Luke, in the parallel passage in Luke 20, verse 20, it says something very interesting.

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It says, so they watched him and sent spies who pretended to be righteous, so they might catch him in some statement.

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Imagine trying to catch the creator of all things in a false statement, the stupidity, in order to deliver him to the rule and authority of the governor who they hate.

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You understand that? They hate this guy. At least the Pharisees do. The Pharisees are no friend of Rome.

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But, strangely enough, the Herodians are big friends with Rome because that's their seat of power.

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They love them some Roman authority. So, what we have is they hate Jesus so much that these...it's

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basically, you know, Kamala Harris and Trump get together to form an alliance to destroy this guy.

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Can you imagine this happening in our context? How bad would the enemy have to be for those two to start meeting and to start conspiring and then to send out a couple of their disciples to trap somebody?

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No, this is the level of seething hatred that's in place. All the political differences that are to the death for many of these people, all of these political differences are put aside because there's a greater enemy and this enemy is

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God, and they just don't get it. So, they spy and they're creepy little weirdos watching him walk around.

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Did you hear what he said? That's what they're doing. They're watching every move and they're looking just like the bad guys in Daniel did.

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They were looking for a way to entrap. And what they got Daniel for was prayer. You know what they get

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Jesus for? Nothing. Nothing. They just lie. They just lie.

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And we see their lies right away. They flatter while death is in their hearts.

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You are truthful, you defer to no one, you are not partial. Do you know what it means to say you are not partial?

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That's the way of saying you are the righteous judge. You rule with equal weights and measures. You are the man of the law, the man who can dispense judge of it.

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You're the good guy. That's what they say to Jesus, all the while trying to kill him. The paraphrase is you are an authority and you deal justice well.

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So, answer us this question. Do you see how this question is soaked in cowardice, hypocrisy, and malice?

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They hate him. They want to kill him and they present themselves as something that they're not to try to lull him to sleep, to make him think that they're his buddies, so that he'll say something that they will then go back and get him executed for.

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Do we see this in the church today? This is an aside. It's not a main point. But I want to ask you, do we cloak malice and hatred in churchy language?

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Brother, I love you so much. You're a brother in Christ. Everything you said, you're so knowledgeable in Scripture.

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But, you know, you got a few things wrong and I'm going to tell you about them, right?

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Or let me ask you a question. We do this all the time. We say the most hateful things to people cloaked up in flowery, lifeway paragraphs.

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And if we're really good at it, we might put five or six Bible verses in it, right? We're all supposed to be in unity.

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And now I'm going to just cut your knees out from under you. You are like the

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Pharisees and the Herodians when we act that way. We are told by our Lord that our yes should be yes and our no should be no.

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We should speak much more directly and much more bluntly than we do. We do not have to couch destructive, violent words in flowery language.

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Then we act like the enemies of God, who we know. Profuse are the kisses of the enemy. Soft as butter are their words.

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And they make you feel like they're honey drizzled, right? But at the end of the day, their words are violence.

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It's always the man who draws the lightning rod. It's the one who speaks directly and bluntly who's mean.

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He seems mean, but his words bind up and they encourage. And such is the case with Jesus here.

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Such is the case. These guys don't like each other, but they really hate

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Jesus. And so here they come and they think they've got him in a great trap. So here's the trap. Let me give you a little context.

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Caesar has put on a head tax. In fact, the tax that's used in this passage really is a word that's synonymous with census, okay?

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It's a census. And this tax is a head tax on everyone. And this tax is not to raise money for the

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Roman Empire. This tax is to show dominion over this region. It's not that much money.

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It's not that much money. For us today as a middle class American, it would be the equivalent of about a $300 tax, okay?

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Once a year, a $300 tax. So understand, it's not the amount, right? It's the principle behind it.

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And there has been a revolution about this. In the year six, when this tax was put on, the zealots in Israel had killed people and put them on display and were loudly proclaiming, throw off Roman rule.

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And that kind of message that people are willing to die for, it pulls people to their side and their flag.

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And so we have a precarious position here that Jesus is in. There are the zealots who have gained power and they're gaining prestige because they're willing to die for their beliefs.

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And we've seen what the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the chief priests are willing to do, right? They're willing to steal your money.

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And not only will they steal your money, they'll kind of like punch you in the stomach while they're doing it, right? And then tell you it's for your own holiness that they did that.

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So the people are upset, right? The people are upset because the Romans are imposing dominance and saying, we own you.

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In fact, we're gonna make you submit to us. You're gonna take a census. You're gonna pay this tax every year.

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And we're showing you that you are under the Roman boot. And the zealots say, no way, no way.

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We will die. We will throw them off. Come on, brothers. If we join together, we can throw them out of here.

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And then you have the traitors, the Sadducees and the Herodians who are benefiting off of Roman rule and are totally in with them.

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They love the Roman government because it makes them rich. The Herodians have been given their Tetrarch seat of power because the

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Romans say, hey, you could be the governor in this area. And the zealots hate them, right?

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It's really rough. It's a tumultuous time. It's really bad, okay? So there's political unrest.

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We can understand this. There's political unrest around the world. And what happens is political unrest, the radicals grow in support because they believe in their cause.

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And people who believe in their cause are always going to defeat people who wanna be left alone, right?

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So the Herodians and the Sadducees wanna be left alone because they've got it good. The zealots wanna overthrow it and more and more people are coming to their banner.

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And then you have the Pharisees who are kinda like the Tim Keller third way, right? They're right in the middle. They don't really like the

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Romans, but they don't really wanna do too much about it because they like the stability a little bit too much, right?

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So they will say with their mouths, oh, these Romans, they're oppressing us, these terrible Romans.

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And then there'll be like, you zealots, you're way far out there. We don't need any of that. So that's the political situation.

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And so they think they've really got him in a trap because if Jesus says that you're not to pay taxes, he has now publicly declared himself to be the most powerful leader of the zealots.

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And now he becomes public enemy number one to the Romans who will kill him, right?

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That's the plan. But on the other side, on the other side, if he says, don't, if he says, well, we have to pay the tax.

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Now he's the enemy of the zealots who are growing in political sway and he's also a Roman bootlicker to the people who are following him around.

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That's the position. And they've thought about, I can imagine the leader sitting up at night. Their shop, it's like a writer's table, right?

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Where they're trying to think of these questions. How are we gonna get him? We've watched him. How are we gonna trick him? And this is what they come up with.

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And this is their best shot today. I'll just give you a spoiler. This is the best shot. The next question is so insanely stupid that Jesus doesn't even pretend to answer it, okay?

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So this one, it's pretty good. It's a good trap. What does Jesus say? He, knowing their hypocrisy, he knows exactly what they are.

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We know from the early stages of John that many were following Jesus, but he did not give himself to them because he knew their hearts and he knew why they were there.

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He knows their hypocrisy and he says, why are you testing me? Can you paraphrase that? They know, right?

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Why are you testing God? What happens when you test God? Do you guys know? What happens when you test

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God? You get banished to the wilderness, right? You get judgment. That's what happens when you put the

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Lord your God to the test. Bring me a denarius to look at, and they brought one. This is interesting, right?

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Don't miss it. They bring this denarius. For the Pharisees to have this denarius is showing their acquiescence to the

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Romans in the first place. They have this coin. This was a chief thing that was going on in the temple, right?

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Remember with the money changers? They didn't want these dirty coins, and I'll tell you why they're a dirty coin. It's because they have the picture of the

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Caesar on them, and it has an inscription that says, the divine son of God. The Caesar is the divine son of God.

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Do you understand that Jesus and the apostles, they completely stole and appropriated all the language of the

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Roman Empire? That's where gospel comes from. The gospel was the gospel of Augustus Caesar. He had the

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Evangelion. The good news of Roman peace was transitioned and became the good news of the king, the king of peace, the prince of peace.

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He took it all, and he destroyed the Roman Empire because the Roman Empire, dominant force that it was, was nothing to the power of God, nothing.

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They're a byword in history, right? A lot of guys like to think about them every week. They were very powerful, but Jesus was more powerful.

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So they bring this coin which shows that they've already compromised themselves, and he asked them, whose likeness and inscription is this?

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And they're like, Caesar, okay? They don't know the trap that they're walking into, and he says, render to Caesar the things that are

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Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. Why were they amazed at him? Well, because they knew what he was doing, right?

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They came to him with their churchy words and he saw right through them. He didn't do the rabbinical type of argument.

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The rabbinical argument would have been to see what we see in the next question is that Jesus would have involved a dialogue with them where they start asking lots of hypothetical questions.

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That's probably what they expected out of a smart teacher was that he was going to get into a philosophy discussion with them and that they would make him look like, oh, he's unclear.

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They didn't expect this. They're utterly amazed, not because he's God, understand this, they're not utterly amazed like the people were in the temple when they heard him teach as one with authority.

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That's not how they're utterly amazed. The reason they're utterly amazed is because they thought they had him dead to rights and he completely destroyed their question, destroyed it.

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What are they gonna do with that? They can't say that he's a Roman bootlicker because he's just told them that all

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Rome owns are these coins, but they also can't say that he's a zealot because he said you can give the coin to Caesar.

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It has his picture on it, it's his. What do you do with that?

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What do you do with that? Well, what he did and what they know he did is he invoked, I hate to say it's one of, if you had five most important scripture verses in the entire

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Bible, let me submit this one to you. I can't explain it today, but Genesis 1, 27 is without a doubt one of the five most important Bible verses in scripture.

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And here's what it says. God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him.

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Male and female, he created them. Why is that so important? Well, it tells us the purpose of all creation.

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It also tells us the purpose of why Jesus is here, why he is coming to dissolve this old covenant with its rebellion, because God had come back to claim what is his.

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Because you're made in God's image means that you are owned by God. And it also doesn't only mean that.

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You're not owned by God in the sense that you might own a clay pot. You're owned by God in the sense that in his ownership of you, he requires a duty of you.

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And that duty is that you are to reflect his glory, that you are to give everything you have back to him in gratitude for how he has wonderfully and fearfully made you.

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But if you don't believe, if that's not enough, let me give you a little defense. And we see this connection. One of my very favorite texts in scripture,

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Colossians 1, I'm gonna cut it a little bit short, but verses 15 and 16 say, Jesus, who is the image of the invisible

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God, do you get this? The image is important. The image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

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For in him, all things were created, both in heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him.

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Understand who they're talking about. Jesus tells them, this image of Caesar, that's his.

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Does this coin really mean anything? No. Anybody have a coin like that today?

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Have you guys got one that says Caesar on it, has his picture? No, it's gone. Is the image of Christ still here?

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Yeah, it is because he is the head of the church. He is the firstborn among creation. And we in the church image him all the time because he's bought us and he's brought us here.

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And he is the image of the invisible God. God came as man and he showed us the light and glory of the

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Father. And so when these men stupidly are testing their God, what they don't understand and what they refuse to see and what in their hardheartedness they refuse to accept is that they are talking to God and they are refuting their very scriptures because he is the image of God.

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And when they look at him, they disagree that God owns everything because they think they own everything.

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Remember, they think that they're the tenants in the vineyard that own the whole thing. They wanna kill the son and take the inheritance for themselves.

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What is the inheritance if not God's people, right? We are his inheritance. We inherit from Jesus, but in a way that is very hard to understand.

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He inherits us. Did you know that when he died, he inherited us?

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And that's what he delights in. He loves us because we are his, right?

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He has bought us and he has redeemed us and he has taken us. This is not a treatise on taxation.

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In 2020, we saw a lot of that as Christians, as we struggled with government outreach and we struggled to understand how the government relates to the church and all that sort of thing.

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You would see this verse and it would be used all the time to say, see, you have to give to the government what's the government's.

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And when you harmonize that with Romans 13 that says that we are to submit to all earthly authorities, now you start to build this weird hermeneutic, this weird connection where we're saying, see,

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Jesus didn't say to disobey the tyrants. He said to give them a coin. Understand, and I hope I'm proving this in context.

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Jesus was not making a treatise on taxation. We don't build a theology of government on this verse because what

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Jesus was doing was he was making a claim of ownership and he was saying something much bigger than you have to pay taxes to Rome.

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He was saying, Rome is piddly. They can take their little coins. What is that in the context of inheriting the kingdom of God?

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God owns everything. The Caesar, the Caesar who calls himself the son of God, Tiberius, the son of Augustus who calls himself the son of God.

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Do you know what he is? He's a puppet in God's hand. Jesus would explicitly tell Pilate at his trial, he would say, you have only the power that God has given to you.

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You are playing out a role, and this is hard for us too. We know as the righteous that we are Jesus' workmanship, that we are walking in the works that he has given us before we were born, so walk in them.

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But understand that even the righteous, the unrighteous and the wicked, they are also walking in the works that God has given them beforehand to his glory, and that's why they crucified the

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Lord, is because God had ordained a rebellious generation to kill their God. God had ordained these men to ask this question so the disciples would understand what man they were following.

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They were following God. So how are we doing? We have an application point here, and it is this.

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God owns you. Look at the mirror. Do you know what you see?

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You see a man or a woman who images the firstborn of all creation, and you were created for him and through him.

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What does through him mean? Through him means that the Father decreed it, and the Son executed it, and the

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Holy Spirit animated it. The Holy Spirit brought life, but Jesus executed the decree of creation.

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He is the creator God, and he is the redeemer God, perfectly following out the decree of his

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Father and perfectly executing it through the power of the Holy Spirit. It's a

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Trinitarian work, and so if you look in the mirror and you see the face of a human being in that mirror, then know not only that you were created by God for a purpose, but that he expects fruit.

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So what is the fruit? Do we have, do we acknowledge the total ownership claim that God has?

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Do we trust him with our money? Are we holy and disciplined with our money? Are we spending on frivolous worldly pursuits, or are we being stewards of it?

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And none of us are there, we need to grow in it. We need to deny self, and we need to be disciplined with our treasure.

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Where your treasure is, there your heart is. Are we careful with our time? Are we focused on our time?

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Are we generous with our time? Do we give it to others and then focus on them? Or do we sit with our kids and look at our phone while they're talking to us?

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That's not disciplined, it's not generous. The most important resources that we have on earth that we can't get any more of is time.

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And we show our love to our brothers and our sisters with our time, that we focus on them when it's time to do that, that we listen, that we speak salty words of wisdom, not churchy expressions, salty words, direct words.

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And then we can love each other, and with our talent, are we cultivating our talent? This is a huge point of emphasis for me.

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Young men and young women, you have to cultivate your talent. Don't spend your time wasting away doing things for recreation that don't build your skills and your talent.

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Play an instrument, work with your hands. Learn art, learn something that is gonna make you more valuable, and use it, shepherd it, curate it, and then give it away.

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That's what we do. We seek use with our times, with our talents, and with our money. If we don't do that, then we're making the claim that we own all the coins.

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That's what these guys are doing, right? They want their power. That's why they're asking the question in the first place. They want to hold on to their treasure.

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And what happens is, because they wanna hold on to it, what happens to them, they are utterly destroyed.

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Utterly destroyed. Question number two. Whose wife is she in a heaven we do not believe in?

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That's the question. I don't think there's a heaven, but when you go to heaven, whose wife is she?

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Some Sadducees who say there is no resurrection came to Jesus and began questioning him.

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And what they do is they question out of a Levirate law that was basically trying to protect inheritance.

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This was very important for a people who had tribes, for a people that was nationally located in a place with enemies all about them.

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All the laws of the Old Testament are about preservation of a family and a people. That's why there was the year of Jubilee, where no matter who owned the land, that on year 50, that land went back to the original family because families, through the stupidity of their sons, could not lose their family heritage.

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It was super important to the Old Covenant. And similarly, if you couldn't create, if you couldn't produce an heir, then your family dead ended.

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And so the law provided in its mercy, the law provided a way to tutor and to teach the people to keep the family going on because people died in young age a lot back in those days.

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We lose that in cultural context, right? There was lions and bears out there. There was unmitigated spread of disease and people would die.

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There was nasty food, all right? Food crawling with pathogens. They didn't know how to do these things.

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So there was cleanliness laws. There were things in place to try to protect the people. And so the question comes in, and these guys have workshopped this one too.

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In fact, this one is a little bit more scholarly because I'll tell you what was happening. The Sadducees were actually arguing with the

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Pharisees and the Sadducees had developed this line of rhetorical question to try to trick the

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Pharisees. That's what's going on here. So they've workshopped this. And what the Sadducees would go to do is they would talk to the

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Pharisees and they'd say, well, you believe in a resurrection. It wasn't a spiritual resurrection. It was a really materialistic thing and it wasn't biblical either, but they would present them this and it would be a real brain bender for them.

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Oh man, I don't know. I don't know. Oh, what is it? So the

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Sadducees don't even believe what they're talking about, but get this, and this is helpful for us.

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The Sadducees, by their question, they admit the weakness of their own position, right?

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Because by this question, they show that the crowds around them actually do believe in the resurrection.

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So it's a loser argument as well as being ridiculous and stupid, okay? It's a very stupid argument.

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The Sadducees don't believe in angels or spirits. This is important because Jesus is going to just assume it and invoke it, right?

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Because Acts 23 tells us, not only do the Sadducees say there is no resurrection, but also no angels nor a spirit, but the

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Pharisees acknowledge them all. So they have a disguise on here, and this is the disguise. Don't miss this.

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This is what false teachers do, okay? The Sadducees all day long would have said, we believe in the

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Pentateuch. We believe what it says, those first five books, and they're kind of iffy on the rest of it, right?

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They don't really believe the prophets. They don't really believe the other stuff, but they believe those first five, but the question has to be asked, do they really?

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Are there angels and spirits in the Pentateuch? Yeah, just for a short example, you remember how

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Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, right? You remember how the Passover happened, right? So what the

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Sadducees are really saying is they'll have a cloak, much like the stupider ones that came with the coin deal.

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The cloak that they put on is they say, hey, we believe in the law of God, except for these parts.

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So do you believe it at all? Is it the word of God or is it not? And if you don't believe that it's the word of God, then you're in a really tight spot because you either believe that God made a mistake and then he's not

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God at all, or you don't believe it's the word of God, you just wanna act like you do because it gives you an authority claim, and we are littered with people like that in our church today.

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People who like to give lip service to the word of God while believing very little that's in it. Or maybe they believe 90 % of it, but they just don't like the parts that come into contact with the zeitgeist of our culture.

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And I would say to you at that point, are you gonna drink the water that just has a little bit of bleach in it, right?

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Like a gallon of water with an eighth of a cup of bleach, you gonna drink it? No, I don't think you're gonna drink it.

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It's gonna kill you, okay? And so it is, if you handle the word of God that way, it brings death and destruction.

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The Sadducees don't believe anything that they say. They are grifters. They love the

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Romans and they love their riches, and so they will say anything to keep their riches, and this is what false teachers do.

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They love their money, they love their status, and they will say anything to keep it. They will manipulate you, they will bend you to their will, they will say falsehoods, and they will make it sound like the best thing you ever heard in your life.

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They will be kind to you and talk about how much they love you, but they do not believe what Scripture says, and when pressed on it, they will lash out and devour you like the wolves that they are.

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Some of you guys probably know that. You've experienced it. They're very, very friendly. They're very loving until you get to the point where you challenge and then they will bite and they will ravage and devour.

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That's what the Sadducees are doing. Make no mistake and never miss this. It's the key point of this text this morning is they want to kill.

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They have murder in their hearts and they cloak it this way. So they ask this question, and the premise of the question denies their whole belief system, and they assumed, once again, that Jesus would answer like the

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Pharisees do, and they would say that he would say she is the wife of the first because he was the one who needed the heir.

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That's how the Pharisees had devised the answer to this question. She's the wife of the first one in heaven because the first one is the one who had the claim to the heir, but that's not what

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Jesus does, and the reason he doesn't answer the way that they want is because they don't understand the scripture.

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They don't understand it at all. They twist and omit at their pleasure, and just listen, this is critical.

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If they don't understand the scripture, they certainly don't understand who God is, right? Would they ever admit that?

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No, they're pragmatists who support the Romans. They are naturalists who deny the supernatural.

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They are cowards who cloak their malice and sophistry. They are fools who try to stump the God who is the resurrection by asking a ludicrous question to the author of the whole book.

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If you doubt me, John 11, 25, Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life.

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He who believes in me will live even if he dies. We don't believe in the resurrection is the same thing as saying we don't believe in the

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Son of God. There is no difference between those two things. There's not an afterlife. You don't believe in Jesus.

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That is damnable heresy. We don't get to carve out that space. There is absolutely a resurrection because Jesus is the firstfruits of that resurrection and to deny the resurrection of the body is to deny the firstfruits of the resurrection, which is to deny who

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Jesus is himself. We can't sit there. So what does Jesus do?

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He answers a fool according to his folly and essentially the way he does that is that he doesn't answer the question at all.

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In fact, he insults them. Does he answer who? No, he doesn't say that at all. Look, is this not the reason you are mistaken that you do not understand the scriptures nor the power of God?

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He's not answering their question, is he? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

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He's provoking them with that. You understand that? He's not actually answering who's wife. He's provoking them.

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They're like the angels who you also don't believe in. But regarding the fact that the dead are raised, have you not read in the book of Moses in the passage about the burning bush how

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God spoke to him saying, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not the

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God of the dead, but of the living. And these words should sting. And I know when dad read them before the sermon, they used to tell me, you are greatly mistaken.

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What are they mistaken about? They're mistaken about everything. That's why they're greatly mistaken.

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They're not mistaken about little bits of theology. They're not mistaken about little bits of the political situation.

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They are mistaken about everything. Because if you, hear this, if you don't get the son of God, if you don't have faith in the son of God, you are greatly mistaken about this whole life.

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You think that it's in it for you. You think that by your good works that you can present God with something that he has to pay you for.

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You are greatly mistaken. The wages of sin is death. There is none righteous, not a single one.

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And non -surprisingly, Jesus perfectly aligns with the rest of scripture, with his answer. See, Paul in 1

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Corinthians 15, which I think is the climax and the resounding triumph of that letter, which

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I'm excited to get to. We're going there next. He describes the shadow here, which is the seed of an eternal reality, which is the plant.

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That's what the resurrection is. Do you get this? Your bodies right now, they are real. They're real, right? You can touch each other.

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You can feel it. They're real. But do you know what they are? Is they are a shadow. They are a seed of a greater reality.

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Your body, when resurrected, will still resemble the plant that it is, but it will be a fully flowered, mature plant, not a seed.

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You will be different. You will be changed. You will be recognizable. And I don't know exactly how that works, but I do know that you will be essentially the meta -human.

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Okay? You will be the human before fall, with no fall, immutably righteous.

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Do you understand that? You will never sin again, and there is nothing that can make you sin again. That's who you'll be.

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It's a mystery, but our bodies will be incorruptible. They will never die. They will never decay. We will not be married and given in marriage.

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This, actually, I know it makes us sad sometimes, right? When we think about this, because, you know, it might be a newsflash to you.

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I love my wife, right? My wife is my favorite person on this earth, and it's not close.

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Okay? She's my favorite person. And so when you think about how can it be heaven, how can it be this glory and not have this thing, and let me tell you what it'll be.

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We already know from Mark 10 that we will gain a hundred times as much as we had here.

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This is inconceivable to me that my relationship with Kelsey in glory is going to be a hundred times better than it is here.

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It won't be given in marriage, but we will have the intimacy of no sin, the intimacy of truth, the intimacy of shared mission and non -corruptibility, and we will have that how long?

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Forever. Forever. The flower of manhood and womanhood forever with no corruption.

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And I feel a lot of corruption today. You know, when I wake up and I slept wrong and I got a crick in my neck, or I'm sore from sleeping,

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I feel the corruption. We will never have that again. We don't understand. But see, understand this, people.

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Just as God owned everything with a coin, our spiritual friends in the resurrection will make our friendships here look crude, unfulfilling, frustrating, and dull.

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Your best friend here who five hours can slip by and it feels like 15 minutes, we know what that's like, right?

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I had a conversation with Brady and Lauren last Saturday and we're sitting there at the pizza place. It's like two hours slid by and it felt like we hadn't talked about anything.

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It's like 10 minutes. That's gonna be dull in glory. We don't even understand what's coming.

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So what's the big idea that Jesus gives them? Well, God is the God of the living, not the dead, but also the dead.

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Did you know that God is the God of everything? But they are greatly mistaken because what they don't understand is that Jesus tells them when he's talking to Moses and he says,

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I'm the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, what he's saying is they're all alive right now.

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I'm the God of the living Abraham, the living Isaac, and the living Jacob 400 years after they died.

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And he's saying that because they are alive with him. John 8, 56, your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day and he saw it and was glad.

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Abraham saw the day of Jesus Christ and he was glad because he was alive.

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Any doctrine of annihilation, the void, non -eternity, naturalism is greatly mistaken.

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It's no small matter. It goes to the character of God and his word, specifically his covenant keeping.

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In the new covenant, he says that there will be no corruption, no fault, that no one will have to teach us, that his word will be on our hearts and that we will be his people forever.

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The promise and the word of God is given here. See, he's not identifying himself to dead men, but with men who are in their highest state of living.

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You understand in God's economy, when God today even says that he's the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, what he means by that is that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are living in a way that they never lived when they were here.

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We can't imagine how they're living today. Paul saw a glimpse of it as a man that he knew was taken into the third heaven and he saw the halls of glory.

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And what Paul came back and he said was that everything here is rubbish compared to what's coming.

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Press on towards that. Keep pressing on towards that because anything you lose here, you will gain a hundredfold in heaven because it's so much greater than we can imagine.

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See, what the Sadducees didn't have in their murderous, stupid hearts that they had, they had no hope, no hope at all.

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And people are not gonna follow someone who has no hope. The Sadducees, they had a self -defeating belief system from the very start.

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So here's our hope today, Christian, and this is for you. Understand this, if you're sitting there and you've had a rough week, it's been a grindy week, if you've had disappointment, if family members are sick, if people have died, if people have betrayed you, if people have lied to you, if you are enslaved to sin, there is hope for you, and this is the hope, is that God is the

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God of the living. You can trust what God has said. The race is difficult. It's grueling, it's frustrating, it's perilous.

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But do you know why it's so grueling and frustrating here is because when we see that, we will not cling to it and it will make ultimate victory so much sweeter.

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Isn't it great when you do something and you struggle in it and it's so hard and then you get a little glimpse of victory out of it?

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It's the thing you hold on to, it's the greatest. The harder it is, the more tasty the success is, is it not?

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And that's this life, Christian, it's for you. You struggle and you lead your children and they scream and they're terrorists when they're three years old, right?

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And they are just yelling at you and people spit in your face on the street when you try to save their children, right?

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And people will lie to you about the sin that they're holding under and you're like, man, what is gonna happen here?

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And what happens is this, God will not lose a single one of his own, he gives you hope and the difficulty here is going to be pale in comparison with the glory there.

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God is with us, he is currently preparing a place for us while sustaining us on the path to get to that place.

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He's not only preparing the place, he's leading us along by the power of the Holy Spirit to that place. We have a destination and we will surely arrive there.

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The resurrection is real, not only for Jesus, he is the first fruits, the resurrection is real for us.

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And our relationships in glory are a thing that we can't even imagine. But I will tell you this, Christian, and this is where I'll leave it today, all the time that we spend in our relationships here, in some way,

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I don't understand how, but I know it because Jesus has said it. In some way, the investment that we're making here, we are making those spiritual friends who will be even better friends of ours in glory.

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And church, when we see that day, we're not going to see a bunch of people that we didn't know.

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Do you know who your neighbor's gonna be? It's gonna be your best friend here. And it's gonna be this church.

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And I think the local expression is a beautiful thing, and I think that we will gather together in glory and we will, without veiled faces, but as seeing

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Christ with us, that we will sing praises together as our spiritual friends that we've invested in.

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And friends, that is something that I can get behind. And that is something when you have a hard day during the week, that you can look up and you can see this amount of time, this small breath right now, it is growing into something that's far greater than you can imagine.

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Keep pressing on, keep fighting, keep going. Let's pray.

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Lord, what encouragement you bring to us. Lord, that the hard -hearted, they will not believe, they will not bend the knee, and yet at the same time,

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Lord, they are doing exactly what you have ordained and put into place for your glory. What an amazing thing that even by losing, we win.

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Lord, help this church. If we are to live lives that are set apart, if we are to pursue the mission,

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Lord, we know that we have to have the hope of the resurrection. It is the driving force behind the

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Christian life. Lord, that we were bought with a price, but we are also bought with a purpose. And we are sons and daughters who long to sit at your table, who long to work with hands that are not corrupted, that don't get sore.

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Lord, that the tilling of the ground is not gonna be toil. We're not gonna sweat with our faces. There's not gonna be thorns coming out of the ground,

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Lord, but bountiful harvest. Lord, help us to see that. Help us to fix our eyes on heaven so that we would hold the things on the earth with an open hand.

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Lord, so that we would not be tempted to worldliness, that we would not be tempted to be distracted, that we would cast off all of the things that make us weary, and that we would strive with great passion and great zeal towards the ends that you have set out for us.

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And Lord, knowing that we will surely achieve them because you have laid out our works beforehand. We are your workmanship.

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So Lord, we trust you. We trust your word, and we love you, and we are grateful for everything that you've given us.