The King of the Sinners

Our text for today is out of Mark chapter 2, verse 14 through 21, 2, sorry.

Then passing by, he saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting at the toll booth, and he said to him, follow me.

While he was reclining at the table in Levi's house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who were following him.

When the scribes who were Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples, why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?

When Jesus heard this, he told them, it is not those who are well who need a doctor, but those who are sick.

I didn't come to call the righteous, but sinners. Now John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting.

People came and asked him, why do John's disciples and the Pharisees' disciples fast, but your disciples do not fast?

Jesus said to them, the wedding guests cannot fast while the groom is with them, can they? As long as they have the groom with them, they cannot fast.

But the time will come when the groom will be taken away from them, and they will fast on that day. No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, otherwise the new patch pulls away from the old cloth, and a worse tear is made.

And no one puts new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost as well as the skins.

No new wine is put into fresh wineskins. So I want to put us in context.

Last week we talked about the paralytic who was healed, who was dropped through the roof, and we saw that the word of Christ went out everywhere, and he had his first confrontation with the scribes who were questioning his ability to forgive, and basically in a subversive way accusing him of blasphemy.

And then it's easy to get lost on this, there's a transition verse, which is verse 13, that links the two arguments here, and in verse 13 it reminds us that he went out by the seashore, and the entire crowd was coming to him, and he was teaching them.

Which we see a pivot between what Christ is doing with signs and wonders as he healed the leper, and he's casting out demons in the synagogue, and then in the house, and he's going from town to town, and he heals the paralytic man, and then maybe, maybe the most astounding verse in this chapter comes around in verse 14.

And I think we might be tempted to miss it because of our Americanism, really because of modernity, and we don't really understand the cultural context, but I want to read that verse, and then we're going to look at it.

Mark 2, verse 14 says, and as he passed by, he saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting in the tax office, and he said to him, follow me, and he stood up and followed him.

We cannot imagine the upheaval that this kind of event would have caused, and so we see as this argument goes on in the verses that we've picked today, verses 14 through 22, you're going to see that there's an unraveling, and he ends with a parable that Jake just read that no one that was listening to him would have understood at all.

So Jesus is in clear teaching, and then he ends today, and we're going to look at something that we understand, but that the audience of Jesus would certainly have not understood when he gives them the parable of the garments and the wineskins.

But back to this passage, back to this text, what's going on here? We have to follow a thread through Mark, and this is why

I've titled the sermon The King of the Sinners, because what we think internally and what the people in Jesus' day and the people that he came to minister to is that we believe intrinsically that we had something to offer to God, and so therefore he saved us, most of us, especially those of us who were blessed to grow up in a family who had faith, that we kind of just slipped into it in our mind.

I became a Christian when I was seven years old, so I've walked with the Lord now for 37 years, and I'm so grateful that that happened.

I'm so grateful that that's my story. But behind that can become this idea and this thought, kind of like the

Jewish leaders have in the time of Jesus, that I've always had this, like I've always been on God's team, and what a surprise it would be to find out that God's team is actually not the one that you grew up thinking that you were on based on your works, based on your heritage, based on your standing in the world, because there could not have been a more unlikely person.

So think of it, healing the leper, casting out the demon in the synagogue, healing the paralytic, going around the town teaching to everyone, those would have not been nearly as shocking to the

Jewish leaders as what happens in verse 14. And this is where Jesus goes to the worst person in the

Jewish province, and he asks him to be his disciple, the worst.

There is no one that the Jews looked at with more hatred, more scorn, more outcast, more rejection than the tax collector, and there's lots of reasons for that.

But this particular tax collector, we may lose a little bit of the impact of it in Mark, because he is named

Levi, but we know from the parallel account in Matthew 9 that this tax collector is indeed

Matthew, and so he is one of the 12 apostles. So let's look at Matthew a little bit, let's look at this

Levi, son of Alphaeus. He is a half -breed of the worst enemies of Israel, the

Edomites. If you know the story of the Edomites, they are the descendants of Esau.

Esau is not a man that the Bible has much kindness towards at all. He was the one who in the womb

God hated before he was even born. God despised him and cast him out because of his rebellious heart that was so fleshly and so worldly that he would sell all of his inheritance, all of his birthright for a bowl of stew.

That is the kind of man that Esau was, and so the Jews would see this tax collector, this particular one,

Matthew, a half -Edomite following. He is following the half -Edomite Herod, sorry about that,

Matthew's not, but Herod is. And so what Matthew has done is he has collaborated with this ancient enemy of the

Jews, Herod. And Herod was ruling the Jews with an iron fist and they hated him, probably worse than they hated the

Romans, and they really hated the Romans too. And so when you look at this tax collector, he's a parallel to the leper, an absolute social outcast.

In fact, the leaders of his day would have been thinking it would have made a lot more sense if Jesus had just gone into the brothel and just started making all of them his disciples.

They would have had an easier time with that than this collaborator, this enemy of the

Jews who has taken on paid position, going around fleecing his own people to enrich this king who was an

Edomite. You can't imagine the scorn. Matthew was likely a liar, a thief.

He was making the oppressive powers richer and he was doing it by extorting and stealing and lying to his own countrymen.

Jews in that day, Jews in that day, according to their law, were allowed to lie to tax collectors.

It was a holy thing in the Jewish kingdom to lie to tax collectors because the tax collectors didn't deserve your money.

And if the tax collector tried to be pious and to offer his alms to the synagogue, the

Jews were instructed to not take his alms. He was not good enough to even come in to step foot into the synagogue.

He was beyond forgiveness. He was beyond any kind of account whatsoever.

And this man, Revelation 21, 14 tells us, the wall of the city, and this is the eternal city, the wall of the city had twelve foundation stones and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the

Lamb. On one of those stones is the name Levi, son of Alphaeus, who will rule forever as an elder in heaven, this tax collector, this evil man.

And what we miss oftentimes in this context is we start to think to ourselves like, hey, you know, maybe

I'm not the first one picked in the line, you know, for the heavenly wiffle ball game, but I'm somewhere in the middle there.

There's a lot of people that are better than me and a lot of people that are worse than me. And what the Jews would have thought is there is absolutely no one worse than this guy and this guy who is the absolute worst is raised to be the highest of the high in the kingdom of heaven.

So how does that happen? How does that happen? The theme today is going to be that that happens because everything we are, everything we have, and everything we ever will have is based entirely on the mercy and the grace of our

God. Levi had absolutely nothing to offer to the kingdom of God, and yet Jesus calls him out.

And don't miss it. Was he sitting in the tax collector office, you think, thinking to himself, you know, what

I would really like to do is be part of this outcast band of Jews who have given up their livelihood to follow this rabbi around, who the scribes seem to not like very much?

No, I don't think that he was thinking that in the office. But when Jesus says, follow me, we see an example of the irresistible grace of God.

Then when Jesus calls, Matthew follows. And that has been the theme of the book of Mark over and over.

Jesus goes to a disciple, he says, follow me. They drop their career, they drop their tools, they even drop their family connections and their living situation to go out into the wilderness and follow this man who is teaching with authority and who is healing diseases and casting out demons.

The war is being cast against the enemy, and Matthew here understands that it's time to be on the right side.

And much like us, even if we've forgotten, when I was sitting by the pond down in Cedarville when

I was seven years old, and my mother asked me by the side of that pond, do you know where you're going to go?

And at that moment, I did know where I was going to go in eternity. Because just like Matthew, when

Jesus called, his people answer. John would say that his sheep hear his voice and they know his voice.

And so it's an inexplicable thing for us who are in the kingdom of God. How did that happen?

How did we come into the kingdom of God? And the answer is, he called and we answered.

He called and we answered. So if you struggle today, if you struggle today with your place, understand you cannot possibly be worse than this man was.

You can't be worse. You cannot offer anything more than this man offered.

And yet the grace and the marvelous grace of God is that he saw you and out of his kindness and out of his goodness, he has invited a people who offer him nothing to come into his kingdom.

And not only to have a status that's assured, but to also work and to go about the will of their father.

So that is Matthew the tax collector, the beginning taste of what this chapter is about, which is that Jesus is the king of the sinners.

So let's move on and let's talk about the strategy that starts to be developed because we understand from Mark already that the kingdom of God is at hand and it is extending to the undesirables.

It is a kingdom upside down from what the Jews were looking for. They were looking for the political power of a

Messiah who was going to throw off the physical rule of the oppressors. Now get this, he did, but it just took a few hundred years.

In the slowness here though, Jesus came because he first offered spiritual restoration and spiritual revival and renewal.

And so as he comes and the scribes start to develop their strategies because they can't attack him on his teaching, he teaches with authority.

You have to understand the jealousy of these men who were teaching in the synagogue every week.

And then Jesus comes in, they don't know who he is, he's from a backwoods town that is of no account, and he starts preaching and the people are going, man, this guy has authority.

We've never heard teaching like this. Brutal for them, right? And then he starts to go out in the countryside and if the teaching wasn't bad enough for them, he starts healing a bunch of diseases.

And he starts hanging out with a bunch of people who are the absolute undesirables and this thing is growing. Remember John had told them, the kingdom of God is at hand.

The ax is laid to the root of the tree. This thing is unstoppable and it's coming and it's here and it is growing and this is causing no small stir among the religious elites of the

Jews because there is something going on here that they didn't understand but that Jesus came to bring. And that was the division of family and that was the division of the old world into something that was new.

Verses 15 through 17, we see that Jesus is reclining at the table and the scribes and the

Pharisees are going to take an approach that we see often today and that is to attack the leader through the followers.

Have you heard that? I don't want to be a Christian. Everybody that goes to church is a bunch of hypocrites, right?

If you can't attack the leader, you attack the weaker followers. And what we should admit is we should say, yeah, we are weak.

We are very weak and yet he is great and he is faithful.

So what Jesus does as is custom, look, this is challenging in so many degrees to us,

I think, both in who the kingdom of God is, like we can think back and I was thinking this week back to the kids that I went to school with back in the day and there was social strata in the school, right?

You had the rich kids who were popular. You had athletes who could kind of aspire to the popularity of the rich kids because athletics was great.

You have the nerds who all kind of hang out. You got the stoners. You got people that are just, they smell bad and they look unkempt and those guys are sitting at the table by themselves.

And the shame is that many times in the hierarchy and the cruelness of people, it's the outcasts who get scorned, right?

It's the people who are sitting at that table who are a little bit off that people hurl insults at and that separate from.

And so you have to imagine that what Jesus has done is he's come here and you have these great smelling elite scribes and Pharisees who have been to school, who know how to read, who know how to write the text, astounding intellects.

And I don't say that tongue in cheek. These were the smartest, most powerful men in the day and they had hard bought it.

They were that. And yet Jesus comes in and not only does he call to Matthew to follow him, but he goes to Matthew's house and he is dining.

He has brought to the table all of the outcasts in the town and he's sitting at the lunch table with all of those guys.

And this is causing a ruckus. Because we know that this is a habit of Jesus, is that Jesus did not come to save that which already thought they were saved.

Jesus came to seek out and save the lost. And the lost are the people that are often the furthest from the social acceptance from a culture that hates

Christ. Understand that to trade in cultural acceptance in a culture that's worldly and hates

Jesus, you have to turncoat Jesus. You have to. The world is not going to like you if you stand against the world and preach the name of Christ.

Not merely a gospel as we looked at last week, but the gospel that has action after is accepted and believed.

It's not just love God, it is love God and follow his commandments. Not for salvation, but that is the outflow.

And so that's what Jesus is doing. He is showing how the kingdom of God works. And the way the kingdom of God works is by reclining at the table with sinners and tax collectors.

Unbelievable. It was a formal meal. And the word sinners here actually is better rendered as just social outcasts.

And if you really look into the text and context, this is really just a way of saying this is all the blue collar laborers of the day.

These are the people that because they were living a subsistence life and they had to work such long, hard hours that they were not able to go in and to follow all of the laws that the

Pharisees had heaped on. See, when Jesus says that the Pharisees have heaped burdens on the people, he's not speaking in an ethereal, figurative way.

He is saying that these Pharisees with their man -made traditions have put on such a weight of burden in law -keeping and rule -keeping that the common man couldn't even keep the rules.

And so they're outcasts because they're part of a system that they could never enter into because they have to feed their families.

Does that sound familiar today? Do we have a system set up where the learned man, because he comes from some kind of background where he's lived in a different era, and I'm definitely one of those.

I went to college and you get a job and houses were relatively affordable that day and now

I can be the learned man who spent some time studying and you start to understand that there is a group now where they don't have time to do that.

You have to work many hours of back -breaking labor to be able to get the job done today.

And so what we do is as older people who lived in a different world, it's easy for us to look down and to say, if you would just try harder, then you would be where I'm at.

But see, the culture changes, right? And we have to adapt as Christians and we don't whine about it, but what we do is we help each other and we understand that God has put this together for us.

So Jesus goes to the outcast and he's talking to them. And why are they regarded with such scorn?

We get it with the tax collectors, I think I've explained that, right? But why these other men? Why do the Pharisees look at them with such scorn, with such derision?

They can't believe that a man who could teach with authority in the synagogue would be eating with these people.

And I don't think we carry that. I don't think that anyone in the church would be wondering why

I had the roughneck blue -collar laborer over to my house to talk to them.

I don't think we carry that prejudice. We live in a different culture. But during this time, there is a reason, and I want to read out of the

Mishnah. This is the idea that the Jewish leaders had in this time. Follow with me.

This is what they taught. He that occupies himself in the study of the law is deserving of the whole world.

He is called friend, beloved of God, lover of God, lover of mankind, and it clothes him with humility and reverence and fits him to become righteous, saintly, upright, and faithful.

And it keeps him far from sin and brings him near to virtue. And from him, men enjoy counsel and sound knowledge, understanding and might.

There's one key phrase in there that I want you to understand and I want you to hear.

I think this cuts really close to the bone with people that are in our camp, and that is this.

He that occupies himself in the study of the law is deserving of the whole world.

What is the basis of righteousness for the scribes and the Pharisees? The basis of righteousness is the study of the law.

And what they have no concept of is the grace of God. You see, because the religious leaders of Jesus' day had forgotten the grace of God.

They had forgotten it. They understood that God had given them the oracles and that he had given them the scrolls to study, that they actually did have the words of God that they were to teach.

And the word of God is good. And the word of God is good to teach. But what they had forgotten was back where God says in the

Pentateuch that he did not choose that people because they were great in wisdom, but he chose them because they were small.

Why did he choose them because they were small? Because a small, insignificant country in Cana was not going to be able to claim for themselves, look how we became this world empire.

We just read through 1 Samuel. Is there any basis in 1 Samuel to believe that there's going to be the king of all kings that comes from that story?

No, it's pretty hard to believe, right? They're being besieged by a bunch of nomads on every side. They have a really hard time beating them back.

And when we fast forward to the time of Christ, we have religious leaders who believe that all of their holiness is tied up in their knowledge.

Do you see it? It's all in their knowledge. It has nothing to do with God.

In fact, God is a side character in their program. It's great to them that God had written the scriptures and given it to them, but now they've got it, no problem.

We don't need you anymore because we know what the scrolls say. And by learning what the scrolls say, then we're going to be kept in righteousness and people are going to ask us for our opinions.

Do you start to see the conflict coming around? It's there. The leaders have suppressed the truth of Christ's forgiveness of the paralytic.

And what they don't understand is they are looking at Jesus eating with these sinners and tax collectors, and what they don't understand is in the eternal economy, they are the sinners and Jesus is eating with the righteous holy ones.

It's all flipped upside down because the study of the law of God is a good thing, a very good thing.

You will never hear me indulging in the antinomian heresy that talks about how we should not be studying the law of God.

I love the law of God, and I make no apologies by saying that I love the law of God because the Psalms tell us over and over again that that's the mark of one of God's people, that we love

God's law. However, God's law is not the basis of our righteousness.

It's not. The grace of God is the basis of our righteousness. He's given it to us.

And so these leaders have seen Jesus healing the unclean and healing the paralytic and casting out demons, and their response to this is, how do we suppress this?

This is bad for us. How do we suppress this? But the response of the sinners and the tax collectors is elation at being invited to this gathering, because what they get and what separates the sinner from the righteous is understanding who

Jesus is, and it's always been that. It never changed. Understand also, this would be a little bit scathing, and it happens as our time, as many revelations have come out politically this week, right?

So let me stick that there, and look at this. It's funny that the tax collectors are hated so much, because they would have been seen as operators of regime religion.

What they're doing is they are carrying out the oppression of the Roman and the Herodian regimes on the people of the

Jews. And so the Jewish leaders will claim over and over again that they hate this oppression, but as we see

Jesus come on the scene, what's going to happen? The religious leaders are going to appeal to their allegiance to Rome in order to put

Jesus on the cross. They're going to claim that they are not in rebellion, that they've always followed

Caesar. So who are the real regime religious people? It's not the tax collectors who come to faith in Christ.

It's the Pharisees who want to hold up their power structures, and as the federal government this week has started to blow the lid off of a lot of the dark money that's going around, if you dig very far at all, you're going to see that we have a lot of regime evangelicals in our midst.

It's people that have taken the government's coin in order to increase their own power and to put strong, heavy burdens on the people in the pews.

And I've seen it happen for years now. Didn't know exactly where it was coming from, but knew it had to be coming from somewhere.

The putting heavy burdens of putting on the church that we need to look diverse like the world that we're in, as if God has decided that we have to have a certain kind of diversity quotient to be able to be a right church.

Does God not build His church? I know this, and I have to remind myself often that every soul who sits in these pews, whether you're a visitor or a member or a regular attender, every person is put here by God on this day.

And that's not a mystical idea, it's that God is working in ways that we can't possibly imagine.

And He's working in the hearts of men that I can only dream of and imagine. I don't know what

He's doing in your heart. I don't know what He's doing in your life specifically. But I do know this,

I do know that the object of our faith has to repeatedly and only be Jesus Christ, and it can never be the uptick and the holding on to our own religious and political power.

So what do they say? Why? Why are you hanging out with these sinners and tax collectors,

Jesus? And Jesus answers in a way that they would understand, but that would make them angry. It definitely makes them angry.

He's kind of sarcastic, because what He says is that those who are healthy do not have need for a physician, but only those who are sick.

I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners. Let's piece this all together.

Jesus, in last week's sermon, He claimed to be God, very clearly, right?

So this man who claims to be God, who teaches with authority, who can heal, who can cast out demons,

He now says that He, the Son of God, did not come for the righteous, but He came for those who are sinners.

Now, this has to start to cause discomfort for those who claim to be righteous, and it does for many of them.

And I know that we are very hard on the scribes and the Pharisees, and rightfully so with the sect of them, but many of them do come to faith in Jesus.

And the reason why is because this becomes a pebble in their shoe, right? How can we reconcile all this?

This man who's obviously doing miracles, this man who obviously teaches with authority, and he says that He's come here to bring the kingdom of God, but it's not for us.

We were the ones who inherited it, right? That's what they thought. It has to be for us.

And Jesus says, it's not for you, it's for the sinners. You, what He could have said is, I'm not here for you because you don't even know that you're sick, and you're the sickest ones of any of them.

You're far sicker than this tax collector because you are looking on the Son of God, and you're thinking, no, my study of the law is going to be greater in the eyes of God than following the commands of His own

Son. Do you understand the insanity of that position? And yet we are rife within the church today.

We think that we can add to our righteousness by studying and following the law. We especially in the reform camp think that what we can do is that we can calculate our doctrinal knowledge to where we've all got it in this tightly wound ball.

And by doing that, that makes us righteous. It does not make us righteous. It never made us righteous.

That makes us more knowledgeable. What makes us righteous is following Jesus Christ.

Now, do we have to know what He says to follow Him? Absolutely. And this is the way that's hard to explain, right?

And if you don't know this Jesus today, I'm praying that He would reveal it, but here's the thing. We kind of just don't know how it happened.

Isn't that true? There's something to that. I was talking to Brady about the preaching classes that are coming up, and I said, it's frankly difficult.

Like, I can teach the studying. I can teach the preparation. I can teach the tactics for how to look at the

Word of God and to see how it's structured and try to bring that out. But what I can't teach is that I don't know how this happens, right?

People sometimes will say, like, that sermon was very convicting, or that sermon was very encouraging.

And truly, truly, friends and family, I don't know how that happens. Because the thing about it is that the

Holy Spirit convicts His people through the Word. And the Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin through the preaching of Christ.

And the Holy Spirit gives us regeneration. And so we can't look at our lives and think, that's how

I did it. That's how I put my faith in Christ. And that's how I started walking this way.

We don't know how it happened. It happened to us. I heard that in several testimonies as we had new members the other day, that you're in church, you hear this stuff, maybe you're in a family, and then one day it hits you like a thunderbolt.

And sometimes you wake up after years of kind of walking and kind of being in this environment and you realize,

I just have unshakable faith in Christ today. How disconcerting for these tax collectors, and how scary for these scribes and Pharisees.

Understand also that Jesus is ripping away everything that they depend on. He is fulfilling the ceremonial.

And understand this, they thought that these sinners and unmentionables were sitting at this table, and they didn't learn the lesson of the healing of the leper, because Jesus is not made unclean by being with sinners.

Jesus makes the sinners clean. It works the opposite way of how the old covenant worked.

The way the old covenant worked was if you touched something that was unclean, you had to go ceremonially wash, because that thing that was unclean was much more powerful than you and much more powerful than the blood of bulls and goats, because the blood of bulls and goats were a shadow of what was coming, and they were forbearance by God.

They did not bring ultimate righteousness. The blood of Christ worked backwards and forwards. The blood of Christ was the only thing that was ever going to save anyone.

That goes, Moses, that goes to you today. And what Jesus is doing is he is starting to tear this whole thing apart, right?

This whole thing. And he shows, it's not these guys, I'm not a bad guy because I'm sitting with these guys.

These guys are all righteous because I'm sitting with them. Do you understand? To be in fellowship with Christ is to be made clean.

Unbelievable. Now it gets a little sad. Verse 18 is we look at the disciples of John, that they kind of join up.

Now the Pharisees, it's kind of weird, because it says that they had Pharisees, but the Pharisees in some way, like these are probably people that aspire to just be like in the end club.

The Pharisees didn't really have people following them around like we think of the disciples of Jesus and the disciples of John.

The Pharisees were kind of like, they had their office, right? And they were administering religion out of their office.

So they would have had hangers on, people that wanted to get in the cigar smoke filled room. They would have had people that were following them, oh, you're so wise in your decrees, oh,

Pharisee. Like how I long to hear your words all day long. You would have people like that because we always have sycophants in the religious world because human beings are drawn to power.

They love power. And these Pharisees had the power. But John's disciples, this is sad, John's disciples and the

Pharisees, they were fasting and they asked Jesus, why are

John's disciples fasting and you're feasting? Like aren't you and John together?

Remember that? Like John baptized you, right? You guys are on the same team, right? So are you defiling him by feasting while he fasts?

Understand that John the Baptist as a forerunner was really the last of the old covenant prophets. And John, because he was the last of the old covenant prophets, he was perfectly orthodox and he perfectly followed all of the rules of the old temple and yet he railed against it.

He was perfectly planted as that agent who was the end of this era, who perfectly followed all the laws and yet told them that your laws are tearing away.

And this way of doing things is over. And if you don't repent and believe in the one who's coming after me, who

I'm not fit to tie his sandal strap, if you don't repent and believe in him, then you're going to have your tree chopped down and it's going to be thrown in the fire and you're going to burn.

Really in less euphemistic tones, what John told the Jews was, if you don't follow Jesus Christ, you're going to burn in hell.

And everything you have is going to be torn to the ground and it's going to be turned to dust and it will be like it never existed.

And so it is. That's what happened. Because in mass, they did not repent. But his disciples are confused because John has been arrested and John's off the scene.

And John, at this point, is questioning as he would, like in these dank dungeons, he would be thinking, did

I have this wrong? Like, I did everything right. Did I have this wrong? And John's disciples are wondering, right?

And yet we see a burden here. We see a burden, okay? Because what had developed in this time was an idea of weekly fasting.

Weekly fasting. Now, the question that I asked is, did Jesus reject the law of Moses in this?

And the answer very clearly is no. According to Genesis 19, which is the only prescribed fasting in the law, would be that on the 10th day of the 7th month, which was going to be the day of atonement, that they would have to fast according to the law on the day of atonement.

There was no other prescribed day of fasting according to the law. But fasting had become a tradition and it had become a heavy burden.

And so, the pious people would fast. Where does that leave the fishermen?

Because what good is fasting if people don't see you doing it, right? And what good is your religious activity if you don't get to brag about it?

And how much does it help your standing and show how you are the friend to all mankind because of your study of the law if you don't ever get to show anybody how holy you are?

And then Jesus exposes it, he says, it really didn't matter anyway. You guys are lying.

You guys are grasping at straws. Matthew 11, 18 and 19, Jesus says,

John came neither eating or drinking. And they say, he has a demon.

The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they say, behold, a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners, yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.

So the first thing to understand is that Jesus is teaching that to those who are outside, to those who are blind to what

God is doing, to those that are blind to the Son of Man, it doesn't matter whether you fast or not, they're not going to believe anyway.

There is no amount of work that you can do. There is no amount of piety that you can display that is going to show people who are willfully blind to God's gospel, they're not going to repent.

That should be freeing for us in a way. Understand that even our sins, as grievous as they are, do not prevent our friends and our family and our co -workers from repenting of their sin and following Jesus Christ.

Because their salvation is not in our hands, it's in God's hands. And that's what Jesus is saying.

These guys aren't going to believe no matter what. You can fast and be pious all day long and they're going to say you have a demon.

Because they didn't like the content of the message. And it's always about that. We see tone police today, oh brother,

I don't like the way you said that. What they mean by that is I don't like what you said. And that's always been the case.

It's always been the case. Because what Jesus is saying here is the reason you said John has a demon is because he said that you are a brood of vipers, okay?

And the reason that you think that I'm a glutton and a drunkard is because I called you whitewashed tombs.

And the problem is that you don't believe the clear message of God that requires your repentance and it requires faith.

And so it doesn't matter how you package it up, okay? What matters is that you come. Remember back at the start of this argument, what did

Jesus say to Matthew? Follow me. Why did

Matthew follow Jesus? Because God made him. And did he choose to?

Yeah, he did, right? God gave him faith in that moment. Should help us in our evangelism endeavors, shouldn't it?

Do we have to carefully formulate a theologically precise treatise of how to repent and follow

Christ? No. We say, friend, you are a sinner. You have angered a holy God. But there is good news.

The good news is by placing your faith in Jesus Christ, you will be forgiven of all the sins and you will be brought into his family and you will enjoy all the riches of his table.

Because he loves to dine with sinners and tax collectors. And such were all of us.

No, he didn't break any law. He didn't break any law. And then what he does is he goes on to them and he talks about them not knowing the times.

These disciples do not understand the times because they don't understand that the greater thing is there with them right now.

When do you fast? We know this. When do you fast? You fast when you have heavy, difficult decisions ahead.

You fast when you're in mourning because something terrible has happened. You fast when you're grieving over your people or your country or your city or your family.

That's when we fast. It's a time of intense prayer and intense zealous calling out to God where we deny our base needs of wanting to eat in the temporary for spiritual.

We're depending on bread from heaven, essentially. That's what fasting is about. It would be extremely strange and disrespectful to go to your son's wedding and to fast.

No cake for me. I'm fasting. That's ridiculous.

When you go to a feast, you're going to look like a fool if you don't engage in the feast. That's why we're here, right?

And feasting is a part of the kingdom of God. Not gluttony. Feasting. Because most of the times that God has given us in season is where we sit together with loved ones and we engage in a feast.

And for our family, I remember Thanksgiving and Christmas where it rains drink and snows food, as Tolkien would say.

And what we remember is the food is really good, but the atmosphere and the conversation is a celebration and it's fun.

And it would be extremely weird to be in a time of mourning during that. And so what Jesus is saying in verse 19 is he says, you don't understand what you're even talking about.

Why are you fasting right now? I'm here. The son of God is here right now. Why are you fasting over bad times?

Why are you fasting to get God's approval? I'm right here. My people know this.

My people are eating and they are celebrating because I'm here. Because what do you have to be sad about right now?

You're sitting with the son of God. What do you have to be sad about? Cheer up. It's interesting too, because as he uses, he says, can the attendants of the bridegroom fast?

What that really means is the sons of the bridegroom. And Jesus is making a play for the family.

Is his family going to fast while he's bringing about the marriage?

And you know what marriage Jesus is talking about because he will use it later in a parable. Jesus is the bridegroom who has come to marry his church, right?

And his church is all of us. And his church is every believer who's existed from Adam until now and who will exist from now until he comes to judge the living and the dead.

It is a massive family and it's going to be a massive feast when it's consummated.

And there will be no one fasting. And at the time when he comes, no one should have been fasting then. But he will be taken away from them.

Walty, John 16 20, truly, truly, I say to you that you will cry and lament, but the world will rejoice.

You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned to joy. This works in two ways, right? You're rejoicing when the bridegroom is with you, but then when he leaves for a time, you will be sad and you will fast.

But then that sadness will be turned into joy. That works two ways, right? For Jesus' disciples, they fasted and they mourned and they were afraid, very afraid when

Jesus died on the cross. But when he rose again and came back to them, all of their sadness turned into an impenetrable, unshakable joy.

Did it not? These men turned the world upside down. And what was the basis on which they turned the world upside down?

They saw the risen Lord. He defeated death itself. They had seen him cast out demons.

They had seen him teach with authority. They had seen him heal the leper and the paralytic. They had seen him go face to face with the scribes and the

Pharisees. But what they hadn't seen until that moment was him rising from the dead. And this is what makes him different from Lazarus and other people who had risen from the dead at the call of God.

He rose from the dead after saying that he would do exactly that. How is that possible? How could a man predict his own resurrection?

That's insane. And when you see somebody do that and he rises again, you're not going to be fasting.

You're going to be excited and you're going to go out and press the news of this feast because you want everybody that is possible to be there.

Sons of the bridegroom, all sadness is going to be turned to joy. And then at the last bit here,

I've gone a little long. The last bit is the parable that they wouldn't understand.

And look, I had to limit myself in because I could wax long about this. I love this covenantal language. Understand that they didn't know what he was talking about.

They for sure knew what he was talking about with the bridegroom and the feasting. And they knew what he was talking about because you can go back to Hosea, to Isaiah, to Ezekiel, and you'll see that God himself was the bridegroom.

Over and over, remember he told Hosea to go marry the harlot, and he was going to show that Hosea was a stand -in for God's relationship with his people of Israel.

These scribes and Pharisees knew that. They memorized it. They understood this. And so when Jesus is saying, you're fasting when the bridegroom's here, they know what he's talking about.

And then he says something that's far more controversial, that they don't know what he's talking about. And that is this.

It's explained to us succinctly in Hebrews 8 chapter 13. Here's what it says. When he said a new covenant, he has made the first obsolete.

But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear. The people of his time, and frankly many of the people today, are not ready for the old covenant to disappear.

We love to latch on to this covenant of our own works and obedience and thinking that we can do religious activity to be right with God.

But God ripped all that away, and there's not even the temple worship anymore because it became obsolete.

And we saw this in Galatians. We see it in Acts. We see it in Romans. We especially see it in Hebrews, as I just read.

But the idea is this. You had the old wineskin and the old garment. This represents the old covenant.

When you put new wine, which is the sacrificial blood of Christ in Christ's ministry, when you put that in this old shell of temple worship and sacrifice of bulls and goats, what's going to happen is that old shell is going to blow up.

And when you put this new garment of his pierced side and the nails pierced in his hands in his resurrection, and when you try to stitch that on to the

Levitical requirements of ceremonial law, it's going to tear them apart. Not only does it tear away, it destroys the old thing.

Do you get that? That's part of this parable. It's not only that they don't mesh, that's true, but it's also that the new destroys the old.

Gone. What does obsolete mean if not dumpster stuff, right? When something's obsolete, like I was thinking about the other day, you know, you go into somebody's house,

I was at Sam's the other day, they were selling an 85 -inch TV for like 600 bucks. I'm like, man,

I remember when 85 -inch TV was A, unheard of, and B, if you could see one, that's like $14 ,000.

I mean, it's like the working man did not have an 85 -inch TV, okay? And now everybody's got an 85 -inch

TV. And you start to think about it, it's like, man, it's crazy to think about how things change over time.

And we can't imagine a world and things become obsolete. So when you look at your old, you know, I have one down in the, you know, sometimes

I hoard. There's one down in the crawl space. I think it's a 20 -inch box TV. You remember those?

It had a flat screen on it though. It was really advanced for its time. What is that worth today?

I'll tell you what it's worth. You couldn't pay somebody to take it. You say, hey, I'll give you $10 if you'll take this.

It's kind of like, I don't really want to carry that. That's what's going to happen, right? That's what it means to be obsolete.

And when something's obsolete, its only value is to look back and learn like, oh, that's where we were then, right?

But as a functional object, it's not worth anything. You can throw that thing in the dumpster.

So it is. Let me be careful and talk to what, what the analogy doesn't quite line up. The old covenant, much of it is obsolete.

Hebrew says that. That doesn't mean it gets thrown in the dumpster. But what that does mean is it is useful for us to look back at the shadows that it pointed to, to show

God's whole plan through time. Because the new wine blows up the old wide skin because it was never compatible.

Because Jesus was always going to come and he was going to make a new covenant that was going to fulfill the covenant of redemption, the covenant of works, and the covenant of grace.

It wraps all of those up. And it's the person and work of Christ that today has made us have new wine and new wineskins and new patches with new garments.

And these garments are better than the old ones. And this wine is better. We see it right at the wedding at Cana, that the wine that Jesus gives you is the best wine.

It's the absolute best, right? You don't want any of that other stuff when you have this stuff and they didn't get it because this new covenant, this new wineskin and new garment, it's based on greater promises.

It's based on a greater sacrifice. It's based on greater high priest who's not of Levi but of the line of Melchizedek.

In other words, this line comes from God himself. It's a priesthood without lineage. But his kingship has lineage.

And he is the king who protects the synagogue and the tabernacle by administering his law, by being the protector with the sword.

And he's the priest who makes permanent intercession for his people. And it's done and he sat down at the right hand of the ancient of days because his work is finished.

Just like on the cross when he said it is finished, the work of the new covenant is finished. And we live in it today understanding it's not something that we look forward to.

It's something that has happened. And it's so perfect that it happened in the past and it happened today.

And it's happened in eternity because when we sit around this table and we drink of this wine and we eat of this bread and we sit at this feast, what we're going to be thinking about is what

Jesus did right there. It's the pivotal point of human history. And to look at that and think, no,

I probably want a little bit of my own stuff. That's insane. It's foolish. That's like saying, you know,

I think I'm going to rip this TV out and I'm going to put that 20 incher back on the shelf. It's going to make your family think you're in nuts, right?

Why would you do that? Such it is with the scribes and the Pharisees. They don't understand this pulling away.

See how he says that the new garment's going to pull away. That's the same word that he uses up above to say that the bridegroom's going to be taken away, right?

All of this thing was based on Jesus dying, resurrecting, and being taken away, ascending to rule from on high.

So this applies in many ways to us. Jesus is not an add -on for your life. As much as we want to make him that way sometimes, we want to take a little bit of what we're doing and sprinkle some

Jesus on it and say, yeah, I'm a Christian, Bible verse, and then do whatever we want. Look, the church has been infested with that for too long.

Has it not? When we understand what Christ has done, that he's destroyed the old, and that means the old you too.

There is no mixing of Jesus with the old natural man. Paul would say in Corinthians that natural man is gone.

He's been put away. In Ephesians, he tells us that we take off the old stinky clothes of that old man and we put on the new clothes of righteousness.

And where do we get those? From Jesus himself. This has massive implications for us individually, but I fear that too often we stop there and we say, yeah,

I'm saved now individually. Did you know this also has massive ramifications for our families?

If we live in this way and understand that Jesus is the center and he is the power behind the

Christian life, it's gonna change our families and it's gonna change our church. Because it doesn't merely change individual piety, but it is a realization for us.

The scribes missed it, but the tax collectors got it. And Matthew understood that what he was about to do was to do the king's bidding at the ultimate cost to himself.

And he gave his life and all the disciples gave their lives to do the king's bidding because they were gonna press the crown rights of Jesus into every corner of their lives and the lives of those around us.

So I ask you, Christian, how are we doing? Are we pressing the crown rights of Christ into our family all the way into the corners?

And with the people that we live with all the way into the corners in our lives, do we believe that Jesus is the king or do we believe that he's a little bit of seasoning on top of what we already got going on?

There is no room for that. And if we want to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, we have to understand who holds our salvation.

And we also have to understand what that salvation does to us and what it demands of us. Man, it's a lot.

And I hope that we grasp it and grapple with it because he is worth it.

And he really has done away with what was old and he has made a new creation. And if you're a new creature, then we act like a new creature, not like the old thing.