Biblical Framework

Charles Clough

Lesson 120

Last time I mentioned that when we summarized the doctrine of the Trinity how the issue of the divine attribute of love is very much wrapped up with the doctrine of the Trinity and therefore when people begin to tamper with relationships of subordination and authority structures, such as marriage, government, family, and that sort of thing, that they tamper, by implication, with the Trinity itself. I mentioned there was an article I had seen in Bibliotheca Sacra, that Dr. Carson had given, and it’s interesting, he has this little footnote on his lecture where he’s talking about the distinction… if you look up how the Father loves the Son and you look up how the Son loves the Father back, you get a distinctly different pattern. They’re not the same, and the point there is that the Trinity has distinctions within it.

For example, he says “the distinction between the love of the Father for the Son and the love of the Son for the Father should be carefully noted. The Father commands, He sends, He tells, He commissions, He demonstrates His love for the Son by showing Him everything, so that the Son does whatever the Father does.” This is taken right from the Gospel of John. “The Son obeys, says only what He gives Him to say, does only what the Father gives Him to do, comes into the world as the sent one, and demonstrates His love for the Father precisely by such obedience. Not once is there any hint that the Son commissions the Father who obeys. Not once is there any hint that the Father submits to the Son, or is dependent on Him for His own words and deeds. Historically, in avoiding the trap of Arianism, Christians have insisted that the Son is equal with God in substance, or essence, but that there’s an economic or functional subordination of the Son to the Father.”

Then He has a little footnote. “Because this matter,” and I relate this to you just to show you that I’m not just making this up, this doctrine of the Trinity is very much related to these other issues that people talk about and never even once think about the linkage with the Trinity. So he has this footnote: “Because this matter is related to debates about the roles of men and women, currently such a delicate topic, extraordinary publications have appeared in recent years. Royce Gruenler denies that there is any…” this is one of those who has proposed sort of a feminine type agenda, “…any functional subordination of the Son to the Father on the ground that each defers to the other. The Father defers to the Son by granting Him what He asks.” This is a book published in 1986 called The Trinity and the Gospel of John. “But this is a vain attempt to bury under the banner of deference the massive differences in the description of the roles of the Father and the Son as depicted in the fourth Gospel. The request to pick him up at the soccer game does not mean he commands me any way I command him, or that my love for him is displayed in obedience to him. Gilbert Bilzekian argues that his opponents in the debate over women’s roles are flirting with heresy on this issue,” he’s coming from the feminist side, and he’s accusing the traditionalists of messing up with the doctrine of the Trinity. “…Bilzekian argues that his opponents in the debate over women’s roles are flirting with heresy on this issue, since he says subordination in the Godhead does not reach back into eternity past but is restricted to the incarnation, which teaches both men and women self-denial for the sake of others. This man’s article was hermeneutical bungee-jumping, by the way, subordination of the Godhead in the Journal of Evangelical Theological society.” Dr. Carsen comments on these two articles and he says in conclusion: “It is difficult to find many articles that so richly combine exegetical errors, historical misconceptions, and purple prose in so finely honed synthesis.”

What he’s talking about here is that these people insist, they’re thinking logically, but you can’t tamper with something over here without something tampering with something over there. It’s nice that the people who are thinking about this, it’s not just some superficial issue.

Tonight we want to leave all of that which we’ve dealt with, with the birth of the King, we’ve talked about that, I introduced the hypostatic union, which in turn we had to deal with the Trinity because we couldn’t digest the God-man nature without dealing at the same time with the Triune God, because if God the Son is talking to God the Father, and He was in His incarnation, then we’ve got a distinction in the Godhead or one of them isn’t God. That’s why we had to get into the Trinity, and that historically is why the Church got into the Trinity. The Church didn’t sit around and say gee, the Trinity is a nice idea, we’ll adopt that. That’s not quite how it happened. It happened very reluctantly over many centuries to synthesize the Scripture and get in some sort of coherent form.

We’re going to start with chapter 3, the second event, which is the life of the King. We’ve talked about the birth of the King, primarily the virgin birth, and we said that men react to the Lord Jesus Christ’s revelation, and they don’t embarrass Christ, they don’t demean God in any way, they think they are but they certainly don’t. All men do that reject the revelation of Jesus Christ, all they ultimately accomplish is they simply reveal the unbelief of their own hearts. That’s the approach we want to take in this series. On page 47 we start working our way through features in the life of Christ. We’re going to look at the appearance of the King and then immediately slide into the objections of this autobiography, autobiography in the sense that the Holy Spirit is the author of the New Testament.

We want to pick up on how unbelief handles Jesus Christ. We live in a world intellectually, culturally, in all ways that ultimately disbelieves. So we want to examine very carefully how the greatest revelation in human history occurred and then turned against Him. We want to study what is wrong with the human heart here, what is going on that when God Himself walks on this planet He’s not recognized. We’re taking a slightly different tact than just simply presenting a biography of Jesus Christ.

The point that you want to remember, and we’ll go over this dozens of times, here’s the crux of the issue with the life of Christ. The objections to the life of Christ primarily come from a disbelief in any revelation. In other words, Jewish people who rejected Jesus had already rejected revelation through Moses. It wasn’t some new thing that they suddenly had discovered. It was rather that they had already totally misread the Old Testament, and because they had totally misread the Old Testament, they had basically in function, in every day life, denied that God had spoken. Because of that they had become enmeshed in tradition, etc. So the issue here is the revelation of God in Christ is greater in degree than in the Old Testament, but it’s not different in kind, it’s more of the same thing. There’s a continuity between Jesus and the Old Testament. So a rejection of Jesus is a rejection of the Old Testament. We want to link those two together.

Remember when you read the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, when you read about the fights, the arguments and the debates that are going on, it’s not just over Jesus. The debates and the arguments are fundamentally over all revelation, the whole corpus of revelation. So by seeing those debates we can understand our own problem in that apart from regeneration we’d be doing the same thing. People who are in our families, our neighborhoods, and our work place who are not yet Christians, they’re thinking on the same frequency. This is the frequency of the world system. There’s a reluctance to believe that God can speak.

On page 47 the ultimate insult to this unbelieving position is that God can speak through an ass, that’s Numbers 22. It’s a neat verse to remember, Balaam’s ass, because at that point in Old Testament history God spoke through an ass. So if God can speak through an ass, God can speak through any other person. It’s easy to see, and it’s slightly a sarcasm, because it is, and the Holy Spirit has sort of a sanctified sarcasm in recording history and writing it; and He has sort of a humor to it, and it’s really a funny incident from the standpoint of the history of revelation. This man, the prophet Baalim, rejecting God, all screwed up, wandering around and God had to speak to this man through his pet jackass.

The ability of God to do that underscores His totality that He has control of that creation which He has designed. He has control over animals; He can speak through animals if He has to. But God has created man in His image, so if He can speak through an ass He should be able to speak through a man. In the garden what did Satan speak through? Satan spoke through something that we now call a serpent, except in those days whatever this thing was it had legs, and then it says part of the cursing was that zoological morphological change that happened because of the fall of man and that affected the animal kingdom, and particularly it affected whatever this thing was that Satan had basically incarnated himself in. In the New Testament demons can occupy pigs, showing clearly that demonic powers can occupy animal bodies, apparently to the degree that they have a developed central nervous system. This goes on so there’s no implicit reason why God can’t fully speak through a man. What we want to say is that the people who believed on the Lord Jesus Christ in the New Testament, many of the fine people that we meet in the Gospels, were people who were simply godly Jews to start with. Jesus wasn’t introducing anything basically and qualitatively new.

There are some vocabulary terms that we are going to use, two words, and I want to define these words because they are words that are tools to help us think precisely about the issues of unbelief and what’s going on in the Bible. We’re going to talk about what we call the historical Jesus. These are terms that I didn’t make up, these are terms that largely critics have made these terms up; this is the vocabulary of criticism. If your child goes to college or university this is what they’re going to here. If they go to a Christian college that’s sloppy, they’ll hear it there too, except they pay twice the tuition in a Christian college that they’d do in secular college.

The historical Jesus is a term that refers to (quote) “the real guy,” the carpenter that walked around Palestine. Then there’s another term that is thrown around, “the kerygmatic Christ.” What does that mean? The word kerygmatic comes from a Greek word meaning preached; it means “the preached Christ.” When you hear this term, “the kerygmatic Christ”, what you are hearing is the kerygmatic Christ is the picture of Jesus that we read in the New Testament; the kerygmatic Christ, the preached Christ, the Christ of the apostles, the Christ of the Church, the Christ that was preached throughout the Mediterranean world. The issue in New Testament criticism, attacks and assaults is whether one equals two. That fundamentally boiled down in a nutshell is where the argument is. Those who have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who have been led by the Spirit of God, whose hearts have been opened by God, know very well that one is two, that these two cannot be separated, that were we to go back in a time machine and observe the Lord Jesus Christ, we would have seen Him do many, many things not recorded in the Bible, but nothing that would say that the picture we have here isn’t the picture of the real historical Jesus.

Critics universally say that one is not equal to two, that the kerygmatic Christ is that which the Church created from the original historical Jesus. The historical Jesus might have been an ordinary Jewish carpenter that somehow got deified, somehow became a martyr, somehow people began to think of Him as God, etc. So two in the critical view is built up out of the raw material of one. In fact, some critics have gone on as record as saying they didn’t believe one existed, that Jesus was a pure fiction, just something that was made up. It’s marvelous how we know that, we have such a great command of history that we know all those details.

But the issue to track… keep your eye on the target as we go now through the forest and look at different trees; here’s where you want to focus. In all that we say and do and we read in the Gospels, we are reading the charismatic Christ through the pages of Scripture. The question is the historical Jesus that really lived the same person as the kerygmatic Christ? That’s why when we come down on page 48 to the unbelieving responses to the King’s life we want to watch the bifurcation. Here’s where it starts, here’s where there’s antagonism, there’s unbelief, and we want to see that. I’ve organized the material as the ancient response to the King and later the modern response to the King. So we’re looking at in time the ancient response, i.e. His contemporary Jewish peers and how they responded to Jesus, and how the modern critics respond to Jesus.

What infuriated the people of His time, we’re going to get into some passages but follow me on the bottom of page 48: “During the days when the King spoke and performed miracles, a Jewish backlash arose from His threatening challenge to their popular religious views of the day. Jesus’ threat can be seen in many areas: His assault upon Pharisaic legalism, His radical interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures (particularly His innovative picture of the Old Testament Messiah), and His stubborn, bold claim of implicit authority for whatever He taught.” I focus simply on those three issues, there could be more, there are probably dozens more, but for our sakes because we can’t go off on everything, we’re just going to track and discuss those three things.

The first paragraph, turn to John 4, Jesus social life. This was a terribly controversial aspect of Jesus. This is one of the things that profoundly offended the religious people of His time. This is said over and over in the pages of the Gospel, you can’t miss it. There are several places where this occurs. I’m going to show you two kinds of things about Jesus’ social life that bugged the contemporary Jew. One was his relationship to women, and the other one was his smashing of the bureaucracy around the sabbath.

In John 4:7 we have the woman at the well incident. This is particularly interesting because Jesus, when He’s getting the water from the well through this woman, He’s actually in a non-Jewish ghetto area. In fact this very place in John 4 where He’s doing this, Jacob’s well, is one of the places you read about in the newspapers where all the rioting occurs. This is where the Israeli’s are always pumping rubber bullets at the Arab Palestinians; this is where they’re always throwing rocks at the Israeli soldiers. So it’s to this very hour a non-Jewish area that’s very controversial, a lot of street demonstrations, people have been shot and killed within a hundred yards of Jacob’s well. It’s an area festering and seething with social chaos.

The Samaritans weren’t liked in the days of Jesus, and in John 4:7 “There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.’ [8] For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.” Verse 8 sets us up. John the apostle wants us to see the scene, so he’s very careful to describe something is abnormal about this from the standpoint of a Jewish rabbi. If Jesus was a genuine Jewish rabbi He would have never been caught socially alone with a woman, not in public, and probably not in private. They are very careful about that. So here all of His disciples take off, the rabbi is unchaperoned and along comes this woman and He starts talking to her. Not only is He close to this woman but He actually starts a conversation. And we have often preached from John 4 in our churches of this evangelism, and it was, Jesus was interested in winning this woman to Himself. This is an evangelistic passage; He’s sharing the gospel with her.

But what we want to look at is the dynamics that’s going on her about this Jewish rabbi without His disciples in an unchaperoned state with this woman, where nobody sees all this, it’s out in public but there’s nobody watching the scene here. And the conversation goes on; we’ve all read this passage. [9, “The Samaritan woman therefore said to Him, ‘How is it that You, being a Jew, ask me for a drink since I am a Samaritan woman?’ (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) [10] Jesus answered and said to her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.’”]

Verse 11, “She said to Him, ‘Sir, You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep; where then do You get that living water?’ [12] You are not greater than our father Jacob, are You, who gave us the well, and drank of it himself, and his sons and his cattle? [13] Jesus answered and said to here, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water shall thirst again, [14] but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst,” one of the most eloquent pictures of the gospel. No works here, there’s nothing that the woman has to pledge; she’s to freely drink of the water of life. What an eloquent picture of the gospel. It’s all us doing the receiving, we don’t give; the woman doesn’t contribute anything to this. He says “whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.’” In other words, I give you a drink woman, I give you the well, the well and the drink come with this. [25] The woman said to Him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so I will not be thirsty, nor come all the way here to draw.”

Then in verse 16-17 He has a dialogue with her because He has to show her, He’s not trying to humiliate her but he’s just trying to make her aware why she needs eternal life, that it’s not just a physical thing but she has a more deeply spiritual problem. [16] “He said to here, ‘Go, call your husband, and come here.’ [17] The woman answered and said, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You have well said, I have no husband, [18] for you have had five husbands; and the one whom you now have is not your husband; this you have said truly.’” Just like the modern people she’s living shacked up and she doesn’t have the IRS rules to justify it. Here we have a simple scene and she’s all of a sudden confronted with Jesus, this Jewish man who asks her for a drink and He begins to tell her her biography.

By the way, where do you suppose John got this conversation from. It says in verse 8 that none of the guys were around. So how do you think that John ever recorded this conversation? It must have been because Jesus shared the conversation. This tells you something else. Jesus was interested in teaching how to do things with His disciples. He probably shared this story to tell them and teach them how to be winsome in their conversations, how to lead people to Christ. He probably said let me tell you what I did with this woman, and he went on and told them the story. That’s the only way John would have known this, right? John wasn’t there; verse 8 tells us John wasn’t on the scene.

The woman gets into religious questions; you remember all the sermons on this. In verse 25 the woman admits that she has this Messianic awareness. “The woman said to Him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us.’” John in his eloquent gospel records this one sentence of Jesus to the woman, [26] “Jesus said to her, ‘I who speak to you am He.’” A clear identification of Jesus’ own Messianic claims.

Verse 27 is injected as a sandwich to verse 8. In verse 8 the disciples had left; in verse 27 the disciples come back. When the disciples come back and they see their rabbi in an unchaperoned situation talking to this woman, even the born again disciples, being good Jews, have a problem with this. This is not acceptable social behavior in their eyes. “And at this point His disciples came, and the marveled that He had been speaking with a woman; yet no one said, “What do You seek?’ or ‘Why do you speak with her?’” In other words, they were wondering about this but they didn’t quite have the courage to say Lord, I don’t think this is appropriate. That’s what they wanted to say, the disciples, and probably John did too because John’s the author here. [28] So the woman left her waterpot, and went into the city, and said to the men. [29] Come, see a man who told me all the things that I have done,” and she brought down half the village with her. We’re not looking at the story evangelistically, all we’re looking at is the scene and to show you that Jesus in His personal life made people uncomfortable.

He particularly made the religious people uncomfortable, so we want to look at another similar passage. Luke 7, another similar kind of thing. Evidently one of the Pharisees was very curious about the Lord Jesus. They weren’t all angry with Him from the start, and he decided he’d have a social event. And he invited Jesus to the party. So the Pharisee has a party in his house, a social gathering, and he invites the Lord Jesus, which shows that Jesus was the kind of guy that socialized. John the Baptist didn’t and the Gospels note that, two different personalities. Jesus says you people are very interesting people, you object to John because he’s an ascetic and he doesn’t go to parties, and you object to Me because I do go to parties; what’s your problem, no matter what we do, you’re always objecting.

Here the Pharisee throws a party, invites the Lord Jesus Christ, now in verse 37 an unnamed woman, who is probably is identified in John 12, it’s a parallel reference. “And behold, there was a woman in the city who was a sinner, and when she learned that He was reclining at the table in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster vial of perfume, [38] and standing behind Him at His feet, weeping she began to wet His feet with her tears and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing His feet, and anointing them with the perfume.” What has she done with her hair to be able to wipe His feet? She’s let it down. This is another thing, if you read in the culture of the time, for a woman to let her hair down… we use that expression “let your hair down” to be relaxed, and it’s a position where you’re socially relaxed and you know the person. So here this woman is and she’s letting her hair down and wiping Jesus’ feet, touching His body, and this Pharisee is sitting over here looking, what is going on here, I threw this party and I didn’t expect this kind of behavior, not from the guest of honor.

So the Pharisee who invited him says, verse 39, “Now when the Pharisee who had invited Him saw this, he said to himself, ‘If this man were a prophet He would know who and what sort of person this woman is who is touching Him, that she is a sinner.’” Now it’s interesting, notice in verse 39, does the Pharisee say this out loud? He says it to himself. Look at the next verse however. [40] “And Jesus answered and said to him,” notice the word “answered,” the Pharisee said it to himself but Jesus answers to him, Jesus looks over at the guy and He says Simon, I have something to say to you, “And Jesus answered and said to him, ‘Simon, I have something to say to you.’ And he replied, ‘Say it, Teacher.’ [41] A certain money-lender had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. [42] When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. Which of them therefore will love him more?’ [43] Simon answered and said, ‘I suppose the one whom he forgave more.’ And He said to him, ‘You have judged correctly.’”

[44] “And turning toward the woman, He said to Simon,” notice what He’s doing here. He turns physically to look at this woman who’s wiping His feet with her hair, but then He says to Simon, there’s a split focus going on here. He looks to the woman but He talks to Simon. “…Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has wet My feet with her tears, and wiped them with her hair. [45] You gave me no kiss; but she, since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss My feet. [46] You did not anoint My head with oil, but she anointed My feet with perfume. [47] For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much, but he who is forgiven little, loves little. [48] And He said to her,” now He turns, after talking to Simon and He makes one of these statements that really frosts the people, we’ve already kind of introduced why.

Remember when I was arguing why do we know that Jesus is God? What was one of the things, one of the proofs that Jesus claims to be God? Because not only is He substituted in Old Testament passages for Yahweh, but what was the second reason? It was because He does things only God could do. So here He has this conversation with Simon and then He turns and He talks to the woman, [48] And He said to her, “Your sins have been forgiven.” [49] “And those who were reclining at table with Him began to say to themselves, ‘Who is this man who even forgives sins?’” what is going on with this guy? I think you can see, the Gospels are yelling at us to notice that Jesus’ personal life was revelatory, not only in what He said, it wasn’t just that He gave great sermons, but when He lived His life out the very lifestyle that He chose bothered people. It really bothered people that He would do these things.

Another one, one of my favorite passages is in Matthew 12, this is kind of neat. You have to understand I’ve worked for the government for 20 years, watching all the intricacies of the bureaucracy from the inside. Here we find an example of Jesus dealing with bureaucracy because the Pharisees, and I can only compare them with lawyers because in our society the only people that deal with nitpicky technicalities are lawyers, and bureaucrats, and regulators of government agencies. They get into the minutia, the absolute minutia, and if you’re in the club and you see all this going on, you see that these guys major on minors and minor on majors. I had a friend who had a company in downtown Baltimore and he was in there one day and people showed up from the state OSHA group looking at fire extinguishers. They came in with their tape measures and they were measuring to make sure the fire extinguisher was the right height. The inspector noticed that there were two hooks on the fire extinguisher, one low hook and one a high hook. And he asked my friend why do you have two hooks for the fire extinguisher. He says it’s simple, the moment you go out of here I’m going to put the fire extinguisher up on the top hook because tomorrow the federal inspector is going to come and he’s got a different set of rules. He says whatever day it is, the fire extinguisher is up here, the fire extinguisher is down here, you name it. This guy was great to work with, he likes to make a joke out of the regulations, showing how stupid, how absolutely self-contradictory and stupid they are.

In Matt. 12 we have a similar type situation. The Lord who gave the sabbath… why was the sabbath given in the first place? What does it say in Genesis? It was a day of relaxation, a day of rest. The Pharisees had to define all of the legal niceties of what r-e-s-t really meant. They had thousands of regulations; you had to interpret the interpretations. I have a book called the Mishnah. You ought to read the section on the sabbath, it tells you how to fry eggs on the rocks in the street because if you do it with the sun beating down on the rock and you heat your food up that way, that’s like you spilled it and that’s not work, but if you go in your kitchen and heat it up, you can be stoned for that. You’ve got to watch the difference here; you need three and a half lawyers to tell you which one to do here. They’ve lost the big picture. Something is wrong here.

Matt. 12:1, “At that time Jesus went on the Sabbath through the grainfields, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. [2] But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, ‘Behold, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.” Now think about the humor of this thing for a minute. Who are they telling about the laws of the sabbath here? The Lord Jesus Christ. Who was it that gave the sabbath? He is the ultimate interpreter of the sabbath, He’s the one that gave it. But see the arrogance of these regulators, the arrogance of these attorney type people that think they can rule over everybody’s personal life in 18 different digits. Here it is, they’re telling Him what is not lawful. It reminds you of the lawyers today in court, telling us what the founding fathers of the Constitution meant. Alexander Hamilton, George Madison and the rest of them, I’d love to see a play someday where these guys come up from the dead and listen to this stuff going on in the courtroom about what the Constitution meant. They’d say hey, wait a minute guys, that’s not what we meant, didn’t you read this thing.

This is what’s going on here. Verse 3, what does Jesus say? Hey you guys, did you ever read what David did when he became hungry; “But He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did, when he became hungry, he and his companions,” interpret the Bible in context, [4] “how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? [5] Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath, and are innocent?” If He would have just stopped here He would probably caused a fever up to about 102 with blood pressures building. But Jesus didn’t stop here, He had to go on and say this next nasty thing, and this really freaked them out. He saying you guys profess to be students of the Scripture and apparently you haven’t even read it; you’ve read a lot about the Bible, you’ve read what Rabbi So and So said about Rabbi So and So who said something else about Rabbi So and So before him. But you haven’t read the Scripture. So in verses 3 and 4 Jesus indicts the religious authorities for their lack of Bible knowledge. He’s about ready to cut their legs off here. Verse 6, “’But I say to you, that something greater than the temple is here.” Think of the implication of what that statements says; David did this to the temple, now I’m better than the temple. Can you imagine if you were a Pharisee and you were locked into this kind of thinking, how that would sound to you? Who does this thirty year old guy from Nazareth think He is, what kind of a smart aleck is this guy?

[7] “But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. [8] For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” That’s got a lot of theology in it, we can’t stop to unpack what’s in that title. The “Son of Man” is a loaded term in Scripture. Jesus has just really offended them. Then in verse 10 you see the next thing, He’s going to heal on the sabbath. So now we get into deeper water. In verse 22 there’s a demon-possessed man that comes and now we get into a big argument about whether Jesus Satan or something to cast out the demons, so it gets really hot in here, this is a very controversial section.

So the first category we’ve looked at is His social life, His relationship with women, His almost trampling down under his feet the religious regulations of His time.

Now we want to look at the notes, page 49: “Jesus claimed that such traditions as the public behavior of rabbis and the detailed sabbatical regulations were mere human distortions of the original revelation given by God in the Old Testament. Only God’s Word, not man’s traditions, was the proper base of human actions according to Jesus. He insisted, for example, that the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament had to be recovered from obscuring tradition retaught once again in their original spiritual sharpness (Matt. 5-7). The fourth commandment (‘Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy’: Exodus 20:8) must be understood as establishing a day of refreshing rest for man rather than a day of further religious burden (Matt. 12:1-13). The fifth commandment (‘Honor thy father and thy mother’, Exodus 20:12) had to be rescued from the religious gimmicks,” turn to Matthew 15. This is a gimmick that was undermining the parent/child relationship in the name of religion.

This is a cute one; it’s called the corban gimmick, Matt. 15:4-6. What had happened was that the Jews had this deal where, for example… the best way to say this would be imagine a situation where your parents are relatively poor, and you’ve hit it off well. In this society they didn’t have social security or anything else, if the parents were impoverished they were impoverished on the children. So you would get a lot of money together, and to avoid giving that to your parents, you could use the corban gimmick which said I dedicate this money to the Lord, and you could put sort of a religious hedge around it. That’s what’s in the background of Matt. 15. Verse 3, “And He answered and said to them, ‘And why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? [4] For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother, and he who speaks evil of father or mother, let him be put to death.’ [5] But you say, ‘Whoever shall say to his father or mother, ‘anything of mine you might have been helped by has been given to God,’ [6] he is not to honor his father or his mother. And thus you invalidated the Word of God for the sake of your tradition.” That’s the corban gimmick, and apparently it was used in many, many families to disinherit, in the reverse sense, to excuse taking care of the elderly in your family, all in the name of religion and God and all the rest of it. Jesus didn’t put up with that.

“The sixth and seventh commandments (‘Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery,” Exodus 20:13-14’)” and in the Sermon on the Mount what does Jesus do? He takes it back to mental attitude. He takes it all the way back down. The killing one, remember what the rabbi’s were saying, don’t kill lest you become in danger of the court. Do you see the lawyer mentality there? In other words, you’ve got to watch out if you kill somebody because they’re going to come after you. Yeah, that’s true but that’s trivial isn’t it, if we’re talking about men made in God’s image and you wipe one of them out. We’re seeing this in Colorado, you keep on teaching kids that men are evolved apes and you keep demeaning the high Christian value of man and the people start acting that way and oh, gee, why does this happen. Come on, ideas have consequences.

It was the same thing in Jesus day; they had trivialized the Word of God. So it wasn’t the issue of killing, and if you had wiped out someone made in God’s image, that wasn’t the force of the issue, it was whether you’re going to get caught or not. That’s why Jesus said never mind getting caught by the courts, it’s not that issue, the issue is if you’ve sinned in your heart, it starts with hatred. Murders don’t happen, unless it’s a manslaughter thing or something. I don’t think murder is a sin that happens overnight. It’s bred through hatred, through loss of control, through lack of using one’s conscience to discipline their thinking; hatred runs deep and it’s nourished and it’s nourished again and again and again, and finally it bursts out in a murderous act. But it didn’t happen overnight. It takes days, weeks, months, years, to prepare to murder someone, by our behavior, by our thinking. This is why the Bible hits again and again on the inner mental attitude because that’s where it all starts. So Jesus went through and He said that the traditions of His time were basically obscuring the power of the original Word of God.

In Matt. 12:3-4, I want to show another little thing that Jesus did that angered the people of His time. What He did was He claimed that all of the Old Testament motifs were fulfilled in Him. We just saw this in Matthew when He said in verse 6, “something greater than the temple is here.” What He’s doing is He’s taking all that, remember we learned about the temple, it was the place of Jehovah, the Shekinah glory came to the temple, it was the place where they worshiped, the place where it became the unity of the theocracy, and He has the audacity to say that something greater than the temple is here. Do you see the power of what Jesus said? We’ve got to learn to read the Gospels, not just as biographies but you’ve got to the cues of the controversy. This is highly controversial material going on in the Gospels. It’s not just a normal biography.

Further on, in Matt. 12:39, “But He answered and said to them, ‘An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sigh shall be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet, [40] for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea-monster; so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” What is He saying? He’s saying that the whole book of Jonah, the whole motif of those three nights forecasts and is a pattern, it set up a pattern that He, the Son of Man, is going to fulfill. He fulfills the structure of the book of Jonah. He fulfills [blank spot].

Verse 42, “The Queen of the Sheba shall rise up with this generation at the judgment and shall condemn it; because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.” Remember we saw the golden era of Solomon in our Old Testament history, he was the pinnacle, he was the king of the culture, he was the picture, really, of the kingdom of God that would come culturally. And what Jesus says is I’m greater than Solomon; Solomon points to Me, the temple points to Me, the book of Jonah points to Me, David and all of his wonderings points to Me. Do you see why Jesus picked up a lot of enemies? Every time He said something like this He infuriated yet another group of people.

In Matt. 13:13 there’s another one of these passages. Matt. 13 is a transition, in all the Gospels you want to read if you want to diagram a Gospel, it builds up to a midpoint and then it falls away. Jesus becomes more popular, and then there’s this massive confrontation, in this case Matt. 12 is the boundary line in the Gospel and at that point the public turns against Jesus. Then after that Jesus begins a new tactic. He starts talking more intimately to a smaller group. It’s no longer the great public proclamations. In 12, that was the rejection; they’d had it, they turned on Him, they said He threw demons out with the power of Satan, so now in Matt. 13 Jesus starts what He explains in verse 13, “Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. [14] And in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says…” and He quotes a passage in Isaiah.

When did Isaiah write? Remember Old Testament history? He wrote during the fall of the kingdom period. What was the role of Isaiah the prophet? He was to what? He was God’s convicting and prosecuting attorney over covenant violations. So Isaiah had this passage in his book where he’s saying that God pronounces a sentence, you people have turned against the Word of God, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do? I’m going to preach more of it to you because I’ve found out something about you. Every time you hear the Word of God you turn against it. So do you know how I’m going to harden your heart? I’m going to give you more of the Word and more of the Word and more of the Word, and you’re going to get your heart so hard it’ll be like stone. So God actually in Isaiah curses by preaching the Word of God. He deliberately applies, turns up the content of revelation, the light, the intensity of the light, to blind the people.

Look what Jesus is doing in verses 13-14. What He’s saying by citing this Isaiah passage is that He is revealing God in the same way that God was revealing Himself in Isaiah’s day, and it’s having the same effect, it’s blinding people. It’s subtle but look at the analogy He’s doing here. He’s claiming that He is the same kind of awesome revelation that God was giving to the prophet Isaiah, and even more so. He’s compared Himself to the temple, He’s compared Himself to Solomon, He’s compared Himself to David, and now He’s comparing Himself to the end of the kingdom period when God was turning up the heat on revelation. This is what really irked people. In the notes on page 49, Jesus interpreted the Scriptures and “insisted that all revelation was fulfilled in Himself!”

On page 50 we’ll look at some quotes. This is a scholar that has done a lot of research on the life of Christ. “Dr. R. T. France concluded, ‘Jesus saw His mission as the fulfillment of the Old Testament Scriptures;’” now here’s the key, look carefully at the sentence. We just got through saying Jesus fulfilled certain prophecies; that He did, no question. He was born in Bethlehem, the prophecy said the Messiah is born in Bethlehem, but the passages we just read in Matt. 12, you couldn’t classify those as real prophecies. They were patterns. And Jesus had the audacity to not only claim that He fulfilled prophecy, but He claimed that He fulfilled the fundamental patterns of the Old Testament. Where did Ezra come from at the Exodus? He came out of Egypt. What does Matt. 2 say, when Mary fled the genocide to save Jesus, she fled where? Egypt. So Matthew cites, “Out of Egypt I have called My Son.” That’s an Old Testament passage, you would never have thought that was prophecy. That’s a pattern, the redeemed nation comes out of Egypt, yet Jesus in His personal life goes through the same structural pattern that Israel, the nation, went through.

That’s what France is talking about here. He says, “not just of those which predicted a coming redeemer, but of the whole sweep of Old Testament ideas,” a very important sentence, the whole sweep of Old Testament ideas. “The patterns of God’s working which the discerning eye could trace in history and institutions of Israel were all preparing for the great climax…which the prophets foretold. And in the coming of Jesus all this was fulfilled.’” Then he goes on to point out passages like Isaiah 53, Daniel 7, Psalm 110, Zech. 9-14, these are all the key Old Testament passages, we’ve covered those, remember Isaiah 53 the suffering servant passage; Dan. 7 that’s the Son of Man that comes before the ancient of days in heaven in Daniel’s vision; Psalm 110, David says “The Lord said to my Lord,” who’s the Lord of David that the Lord is talking to. So Jesus identifies Himself.

France, in His second quote on page 50 says: “In the Jewish world of the first century AD Jesus of Nazareth was a man apart…. While second to none in His reverence for the Scriptures, His diligent study of them and His acceptance of their teachings…He yet applied the Old Testament in a way which is quite unparalleled. The essence of his new application was that He saw the fulfillment of the predictions and foreshadowings of the Old Testament in Himself and His work…. Such a use of the Old Testament was not only original; it was revolutionary. It was such,” and here’s the key to response, “It was such that a Jew who did not accept it must violently oppose it. It is not surprising that a community founded on this teaching soon found itself irreconcilably divided from those Jews who still looked forward to a coming Messiah.”

The third area of what we’ll say is the offending things that Jesus did, not only was He socially offensive, but He was offensive in His interpretation of Scripture. This is why C. S. Lewis made the point years ago, talking to non-Christians, he said don’t come and tell me Jesus was a good teacher, don’t come and tell me He’s a good person. He says a person who says the sort of things that Jesus Christ said was either a lunatic on the level of a man who says he’s a poached egg, or He’s the Son of God Himself, but one thing He can’t be, He can’t be just a good person.

Don’t let some contemporary person try to tell you well I don’t believe that Christian stuff, I think Jesus was just a good person. You can turn to Him and say Jesus was a jackass and a lunatic and a bastard or He was the Son of God, but He was not a good person, period. Just throw that in the conversation and watch what happens. You’ve got to stimulate people because they won’t read the Bible if you don’t do something like that to anger them enough so they’ll say well maybe you’re right, I want to see that for myself… get them into the Word. And direct their attention to the fact that that is a stupid statement. Any person who sees this kind of text with these kinds of incidents, with this kind of almost arrogance, how do you explain this 32 year old Jewish man, relatively young, walking around and saying these things, that all the Old Testament is fulfilled in Me. Come on; it divides people, so that’s what we want to do. The Holy Spirit structured the New Testament to relate a story.

We have to remember that because we get uncomfortable sometimes when we offend people. None of us like to offend people, not when we’re walking in the Spirit. We don’t want to offend people. But yet there comes those times when the stamp of the truth in grace, even in your own family, you stand up for the truth and it’s tough because people peel out, and you suddenly become the black sheep of the whole operation and you just live this way, as the black sheep of the family, everybody criticizes you and finds all kinds of fault with you. But if you do it because you’re sticking to the Scriptural truth in a gracious way, not in a stupid way, in a gracious way then that’s a work of God, because God in the life of Christ certainly worked, didn’t He. Did Jesus offend people? Did He divide homes? Did He divide towns? Did He get people so mad they were willing to stone Him? Absolutely. Was it because He was nasty? No, it was because He had this quiet truth and grace personality, and He lived according to the Scriptures, and that was what offended people. They thought it was just a Jewish carpenter but it was deeper than that. The offense of Jesus is profoundly deep.

We want to conclude on the bottom of page 50, the third area that offended them is His authority. After He got through the Sermon on the Mount there’s this comment, two verses at the end of that sermon sort of summarize this characteristic of Jesus. After they had listened, by the way, this is really the second Sermon on the Mount. Remember what the first Sermon on the Mount was, in the Old Testament. What mount? Mount Sinai. Isn’t it significant… see, if you know your Old Testament you pick up the pattern. It’s very significant that Jesus goes to a mountain and addresses the people. He did that in the Old Testament, the Son of God spoke from Mount Sinai in Hebrew to a million and a half, two, three million Jewish people. That was the first Sermon on the Mount. What is the subject of the second Sermon on the Mount? The first one. What did Jesus do in the second Sermon on the Mount? He clarified His first sermon that people misunderstood. So you see that typology, that pattern, it all fits and you begin to tie Scripture together so you can see this. God is a coherent God.

After He got through the sermon, look at what the comment is. Remember Matthew is writing this. Matthew heard a lot of oratory in his day, he was a government official, a tax collector. Matt. 7:28, “The result was that when Jesus had finished these words, the multitudes were amazed at His teaching; [29] for He was teaching them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.” Why do you suppose that comment’s there? Why does He make a difference between “as one having authority” and a scribe. What would a scribe do that would give you the impression that he wasn’t a man of authority? He’d use other people. The rabbinical literature is filled with this, well Rabbi So and So says, and Rabbi So and So says, and the commentary says, and this says and that says, and they’d cite hundreds of these references to say hey, I’m just building on the guys in the past. Yet in this sermon the Lord Jesus Christ said “you have heard it said by those of old time, but I say to you,” boom, boom, boom. Where’s the references? He’s making Himself the reference?

I want to articulate this carefully because it has tremendous apologetic import. Jesus uses self-authenticating authority. Remember that term, self-authenticating authority. Why do I use the word self-authenticating authority? It gets back to presuppositions. Jesus does not appeal to a standard outside of Himself, ultimately. What Jesus says is that I say to you. He doesn’t justify it by referring to something else, some external authority that He Himself submits to. A self-authenticating authority means He is the authority. That is what is so offensive about Jesus Christ.

That’s what’s so offensive about this book, because it doesn’t offer a proof for God in terms of Aristotelian logic. It doesn’t offer a proof for God in terms of empiricism. The Scriptures say that you can’t prove anything unless you first start with God; God is the standard of the proof. God is the standard of truth, He is truth. Therefore it’s silly to say that God submits to some sort of external and higher proof; He is self-authenticating. The Word of God is ultimately self-authenticating. We can argue about it, we have different arguments going on, but ultimately when it comes down to the bottom line, the Word of God is authoritative and true because it says it is. That doesn’t set well with a lot of people.

The third area, beside Jesus’ social life, His interpretation of Scripture, is His self-authenticating implicit authority. People pick up on that, and this comment by an astute observer who had listened to many, many government officials speak in public, this little comment at the end of the Sermon on the Mount is repeated several times in the Gospels. It’s picked up in a number of cases. But the people who are there in Jesus day that observed Him said this guy, He keeps saying these things, and He keeps arrogantly insisting that He is who He claims to be and He doesn’t intend to offer proof in appealing to what Rabbi So and So says, He’s not like the scribes.

Next week we’ll move on to the modern unbelief. We’ve looked at the rejection of Jesus by His contemporaries, who were offended at these sorts of things. Next week we’ll go into the modern critics that you’ll meet in the universities, Time Magazine, Newsweek, etc. Then we’re going to tie both the modern and the ancients together and say look, what is it that’s common to all this unbelief? Something’s underlying this and we want to study what something is. What is the focal point where the battle is, because when we witness for Christ and we discuss the gospel, we’re on the battle line. We’ve got to have perception as to where the flack is coming from.

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Question asked: Clough replies: That’s the key I think we have to understand about Christ and I can remember as a non-Christian, I can still remember the way I was thinking as a non-Christian, is that I was always kind of embarrassed to deal with this issue, I sort of intuitively knew that I had to… I mean, this is a very respectable character of history but on the other hand don’t get too close to Him because then commitment is needed. So you kind of keep Him at arm’s length but you don’t really know what to do with Him. That’s why next week you’ll see what the modern critic tries to do. It’s a satanic maneuver to try to make sinners comfortable living this side of the revelation of Christ. It’s just a case where to talk about Christ is kind of very awkward in many social circles.

There was a class in university where some of our young people went and I think it was a business administration course or something the professor was teaching, and for the hour of the class they asked the students who would make the best leader. If you were to define a man who would be a leader, what characteristics would you have? So somebody would say something and the prof would write on the board, and they came down to the fact that they wanted a leader who was brilliant but who lived a normal life with ordinary people, and wasn’t so regal, someone that lived with people. Every Christian in the group kind of started looking at one another because what they were basically saying on the blackboard was a profile that could only be fulfilled by Jesus Christ, and it was kind of neat and the professor went on, and at the end and he was asking do you know of any people historically that met this pattern? People would say George Washington or they’d try to say somebody. So one of the guys was telling me, he says I just plopped it out just to see what would happen, and I said I think the Lord Jesus Christ did that, and he says it was like the temperature in the classroom dropped about fifteen degrees when he said something like that. That’s just the spiritual environment that we live in.

This is a dark world that has rejected Christ. He’s a discomforting person. He really is, and that’s the message we need to pick up for the gospel, because knowing that going into situations we won’t be knocked off balance, we’re know in advance that well, yeah, this is a very uncomfortable message and it really makes a lot of people very uncomfortable because Jesus won’t let you stay in the middle. What we’re trying today and next week is to show you the countermove that men have made. Tonight you’ve seen one set of countermoves. They couldn’t deny that he existed in ancient times, so that wasn’t an option open to them, so what they had to argue was that He fouled up the religious traditions of Israel. That was basically their claim, that He just didn’t fit the profile of the religious things, and we believe in the traditions. That’s why in the New Testament Paul keeps saying start with Christ, not the traditions of men. The whole motif here is you can’t start with human, man-made traditions and wind up in the end coming to Christ. Somewhere along the line the traditions are going to have to get chucked, and they’re going to be overhauled and thrown out, because Jesus doesn’t agree with that. Those traditions have all arisen from the fleshly heart of fallen man to encrust, to cake over, to obliterate the clarity of the Word of God.

Paganism arose because the gospel of Noah, the Bible of Noah became obscure, and that’s where all this stuff comes from. Why do we have blood sacrifices in the Aztecs and the Incas for example, human sacrifices? Remember in the paper two weeks ago, they found this child frozen as a mummy up in the Andes some place, and what had happened? This kid had been sacrificed, 13 or whatever the age was, perfectly preserved because of the cold, and here’s living evidence these people kill their children. I can’t imagine sitting there… like Abraham being called to slit the throat of your own child, holy mackerel. But in satanic religions that happens. The modern abortion movement, people have made the analogy with the worship of the god Molech, because Molech in the Old Testament demanded your children, and you went out and sacrificed them, because you were fearful of God and this is the only way to placate an angry deity. Part of that is true, God is angry, and He does have to be placated. So there’s an element of truth in all that paganism, and that’s what’s left out of that original Noahic Bible.

Tonight we saw what people did with the real Bible. Here they had, in addition to the Noahic Bible, Gen. 1-11, they had from Gen. 12 on thru Malachi and look what they did with it. They had so encrusted it with tradition that they missed the whole point, absolutely totally. It was an absolute failure, it was a farce. And what’s scary about that it there was no other people on the face of the planet that had more revelations than the Jew, not any group, yet the group that had the most revelation, nationally rejected Christ when He walked the face of the earth. So it’s a sobering portrait of the human heart. And if we doubt that we’re sinful, if we doubt that we’re fallen beings, we just have to look at the big picture here, this big drama that’s going on and see.

That’s the things to look at in the life of Christ, is the fact that why didn’t He, when God walked the planet why wasn’t it obvious, why didn’t people flock, why didn’t they accept Him as King of Kings? What happened? What went wrong here? Why do people still look for a Messiah? Well, they look for one that will fit the mold that they want, that’s why. They don’t want that other interfering Christ, He interferes. You bet He interferes, thank God He does.

All of this is just a way of looking at the life of Christ and then to be able to read the pages of those four Gospels, visualizing this young man, Jesus was a young man. I don’t know if you heard Chuck Colson this last week, but I think he was quoting Justin Martyr. OS Guinness has written a book called The Call recently and apparently he’s run across a passage, a very interesting passage in one of the church fathers that claims that in the second century men were still using wooden plows that had been made by Jesus. I find that fascinating, and Colson said that was a fascinating example, that we often think of Jesus spiritually, what He did on the cross, etc. forgetting that He was also a carpenter. You wonder, was He a good carpenter? The testimony is yes, He was so good that His plows lasted for a hundred years that He made, and men were using them. See what that does, it says yeah, there was a real Jesus. Who made the plows? It’s a fascinating little tidbit of history. A neat kind of thing to throw out at a part some time when some loud mouth is gassing off about that he doesn’t believe in Jesus. Oh yeah, what were they plowing their fields with a hundred years afterwards.

Question asked: Clough replies: One of the things she mentioned, and I’ve forgotten to do this myself at times, it’s a discipline you have to get into, they asked her why God would allow so much evil, they brought up the evil issue, and she said in response, the bigger question is why has God been so gracious with evil. She was redefining the question and in the very start of this series one of the things we kept saying, don’t but into the question. I do that, I still do that. Somebody asks you a question and you immediately think what’s my answer to that question, rather than thinking wait a minute, is this question the right question. If you redefine the question now you’ve ceased control of the whole thing, because now you’re defining the question. But if you allow them to ask you the question in their definitions, you’re responding, you’re on the defense, they’re on the offense. Whoever is asking the question is really on the offense, and whoever is trying to answer them is on the defense. So you want to change that. A way of doing it is redefining the question, or answering the question with another question. I try to do that sometimes because I’m not always sure where they’re coming from, so I want to know more about what they’re thinking, and the only way to know what they’re thinking is to ask them a question. Usually that flatters them because it shows you’re interested in what they think, but at the same time it gives you time to start evaluating, where is this person coming from, what’s going on here.

Plus the fact I think if we ask the question we do something else, we force some thinking to happen because now the other person is in the position of having to think through how they’re going respond and that causes them to think about their beliefs, and that’s what we want to do, because it’s not us and our clever little arguments that are ever going to win. It’s the Holy Spirit doing things that we wouldn’t even dream of thinking. He can take a word that we give and we’re thinking about this and we just happen to say that, and lo and behold, two months later it was that that the Holy Spirit used. And if you’ve had that experience you realize, hey, I’m not in control of this, the guy that’s really playing the piano here is the Holy Spirit, I’m just a key on this board. I thought I was doing this and he was over here doing that. It’s a healthy experience because it keeps you kind of oriented to what the Lord does.

There’s a long quote in the notes, Dr. Avrum Stroll many years ago gave this lecture, and it’s one of the finest lectures of unbelief I’ve ever heard. Like I said, if you want to learn unbelief, listen to a good one. This guy is good; he’s a slick historian who tries to destroy the New Testament. I’ve heard combinations and variations of this argument hundreds of times in the university campus, many times in literature you read about it, so watch that quote. As an exercise read through his lecture and see if you can answer him. If you were a student in that class, University of British Columbia is where he gave this, if you were sitting in the classroom, or your daughter or your son were sitting in the classroom, how would you want them to respond to this sort of thing. As a Christian, you can’t just sit there and close your ears, you’re going to hear this so how are you going to handle it. Read through Stroll’s lecture and think how you would respond.