Recognizing God Beyond Religion and Politics

In chapter 27 of the book of Matthew, the trial of Jesus before Pilate is not a surprise to us. It doesn't surprise us that this Roman emperor would look at Jesus and find him guilty of the charges against him, or would be willing to crucify Jesus, even if he didn't think he was guilty because of the political pressures on him, because of the circumstance that he was faced with. So we see Pilate, and we see here's a man who's politically motivated, and he's probably willing to do whatever needs to be done to make sure that he has his job, and the people around him look up to him, and he furthers his own kingdom. The real puzzle, as Jesus' whole ministry takes place before us in the Scriptures, is the reaction to the religious people of Jesus' day. How is it that people who know the Scriptures, how is it that people who are dedicated to living in obedience to the Scriptures, how is it that people who are people of prayer can come to the place where the very Son of God can come to live among them, and they would not recognize him at all? Now, I think we dismiss this issue because we look at the Pharisees, and we see they're so much different than we are, and were led by the teachings of Jesus to see how far off they were from what he said was the true and right things to do. But these were religious people. Some of them were hypocrites, it's true, but some of them were very honest, sincere people trying to live out the faith that they had inherited from their parents and from the generations of people. How is it that someone who thinks they love God, prays every day, reads the Bible, and is sacrificially involved in following the Scriptures to the very letter can come face to face with the God that they worship, the God to whom they've pledged their lives, and never recognize him? This is a real tragic story. It's tragic on the part of two people, one Jesus and then those people who were his enemies in the Jewish religion. We dismiss, I think, Pharisees in a way that lets us say, well, they were just, you know, hypocrites, and they were just people who didn't get the point. But the real issue was that they were the religious people, like who would be here. Not just casually religious people that read the Bible once in a while, and went to church periodically, but they were the people who read it every day. They were the people who tried to do every single thing the Scripture said they should do. And yet, they end up the very powerful enemy of God. A greater enemy of God than the pagan Romans would end up. When you read this story, you see that there are some things here that cry out to us to help us understand what took place in the minds of those people as warnings to us to be careful, because our religion doesn't guarantee us that we're going to be able to see God as he is, nor that we will be able to follow him correctly. Our religion does not guarantee that we'll be able to see God as he is, or that we will be able to live in obedience to him. Because these people were very, very religious, and they missed the point entirely. We should have sympathy for the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the religious leaders of that day. For most of them were sincere in what they were doing, who believed what they were doing was right. They believed that what they were doing was so right that someone who stood in the way of what they were doing needed to be, in the name of God, killed. They did not kill Jesus for a flippant reason. They sincerely believed that Jesus was standing in the way of God and was an enemy of the Lord God who ruled the world. They were so far offline as we see now, but they never once caught a vision of where they were. How does a person get to the place where certain things happen in their life, as to where they cannot even see God, even though they pray, even though they read the Bible, even though they go to church? Well, this scripture lets us see a couple of things that caught in the lives of these people, because here they were, people trying to be faithful to God, and they find themselves led astray by the very things that they thought were leading them to God. Chapter 27 of the book of Matthew, I want to begin reading at the first, at 15, verse 15. Now, it was the governor's custom at the feast to release a prisoner chosen by the crowd. At that time, they had a notorious prisoner called Barnabas. So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, which one do you want me to release to you, Barnabas Barabbas, or Jesus, who is called the Christ? For he knew it was out of envy that they had handed Jesus over to him. While Pilate was sitting in the judge seat, his wife sent him a message. Don't have anything to do with that innocent man, for I've suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him. But the chief priest and elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus executed. Which of the two do you want me to release to you, asked the governor. Barabbas, they answered. What shall I do then with Jesus, who's called the Christ, Pilate asked. They answered, crucify him. Why, what crime has he committed, asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, crucify him. When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. I'm innocent of this man's blood, he said. It is your responsibility. All the people answered, let his blood be on us and on our children. When he released Barabbas to them, he had Jesus flogged and handed him over to be crucified. The contest between Jesus and Barabbas was a contest of political dimensions. Barabbas was a leader of a revolt, it seems, who were trying to lead the people of Israel to revolt against the Roman emperor. He had led this crowd and they had actually murdered some people as part of their crusade. The Jewish people did not find it difficult to murder Romans. In fact, there was a group of people who went around in the group, they were a radical group of people and they would carry knives up their sleeve and walk up behind someone who was a Roman soldier or a Roman governor, government official, and as they walked by, pull their arm up like this, pulling this knife out from under their hand and they would stab him. One of the disciples was called, a part of that crowd of people, a zealot. The zealots were people who were murderers, but they only murdered the Romans who were controlling the land of Israel. And the people of Israel saw these zealots and the people who killed the Romans not as murderers, but they saw them as patriots, people who were devoted to the country of Israel and people who they saw as helping them overthrow the burden of the Roman government. It was beyond their thinking that God wanted the Roman government to be there. It was beyond their thinking to feel like that anything other than a Jewish leader in the country was God's will. Now, the people of Israel came to the place where they were focused on the political concerns of their country as a primary interest for them. When God started the people of Israel, you remember, all the way back, it was never his intention for them to have a government, a king. What he wanted was to be able to have personal contact with the leadership of the nation and to direct them himself. He thought in the beginning that if there was a king, people would look to the king instead of him for the things that God would do in the land. And that the king and the government would become so important to the people that God would sort of get pushed out of the way. Indeed, that's exactly what happened. You had kings who were very good and reflected the character and nature of God, and you had many kings who were not. The kings who were not tended to look around in the same kind of political way that other kings did and said, We have a great fight to fight. Who are we going to get to help us? We don't have enough soldiers. Get that. We don't have enough soldiers. You remember what God did during the day of the judges before they had a king? He asked that soldiers would come, fight a battle. And he said, You have too many. Have them stoop down here at the water and take a drink. Those that drink like a dog can fight and those that don't can go home. You have too many soldiers. No military person ever says that. No political person ever says that. What God wanted, he wanted to show the people of Israel, I am the one who gives you the victory even on the battlefield. And when David decided one time that he would count how many soldiers he had, how many young men he had the age to be able to fight, and he sent out to have a census, God was irate at this. He came to David and said, You have a choice. I'm going to send famine on the land or I'm going to take the life of one of your children. Which do you want? Because you have said by taking this census, If we have enough soldiers, we can win the battle. The transformation of depending on God for victory and depending on military power for victory. What this did in God's eyes was to say, You've stopped trusting me. And as the political nature of Israel's kings took place, more and more power shifted to the authority of the military and the authority of the political structure than to the spiritual presence of God as their protector, guide, and defender. Now the nation of Israel was fully engaged in this political trust. They believed that the Messiah who would come would be what? A military commander. They no longer saw the Messiah as a spiritual person who would come to energize their spiritual lives, but someone who would come and be a great warrior. They were so convinced that this was the truth that they rejected Jesus because of their political assumptions about who he was and what they wanted to have happen. They were so blinded by their own understanding of the kingdom of God in terms of a political entity that they could not recognize the spiritual person Jesus. Even Jesus' own disciples had difficulty with this. They couldn't see Jesus for what he was as a spiritual leader. They were so ingrained with this that when he talked to them about dying, they were overwhelmed with the idea that the Messiah would come and not give them victory over the Romans, but instead would allow the Romans to kill him. They were so unable to see past the political circumstances to see the genuine faith that God wanted them to have. In our own country, when it was settled, many of the people who came here from England came because they were protesters in England. They were separatists. They wanted to have churches like they thought the Bible said you should have churches. The state church in England required everyone to be a part of that church. And there was great suffering and persecution to those who were not willing to be a part of the state church. And so the separatists wanted to find a place where they could sit down and form their church the way they thought the Bible said it should be. So they came to this country, set up places of worship. They didn't want to have everybody come and worship in whatever way they wanted to. They wanted people who believed like they did to come and set up communities. And if you didn't believe like they did, they didn't want you in their group. When the early Baptists came, they ran them out because they weren't like us. They didn't interpret the Bible the way we interpret it. And so you had small communities of people all along the East Coast who came to set up their communities based on how they interpreted the Scripture. But as soon as they came, they had to begin to organize governments and someone to take care of the streets and someone to build the structure that they needed. And as our country has grown, there has come a time all the way along when our country has felt like God's hand was on this place. And many people cannot distinguish the difference between the kingdom of God and our own country. It's very difficult to go into any church here in the United States and not see an American flag somewhere because we so identify our country, the United States, with the kingdom of God that they seem to be indivisible. In fact, you'll find in some places if you don't have an American flag in the front of the church that the church is irate about it. We have sort of folded Americanism into the Christian faith just like the Pharisees did. It's hard for us to imagine the kingdom of God without being a democratic country where everybody gets to vote and you have freedom of religion. There was no freedom of religion in the Jewish nation. You had to believe the way they did or you were out. That was the only way it was. What is easy to do is to identify our country and its political structure with the kingdom of God. People still do that. I heard someone not long ago who was just very upset when someone said this was not a Christian nation. Now, the early settlers in this country, they only brought over here people who were willing to risk their life to worship the way they believed they should. And when they got here, they established a community where it was against the law not to go to church on Sunday. You had to believe like the church that had established that community believed. And if you didn't, they kicked you out. You weren't allowed to be there. So they could say that in that community, they had a community of believers. Things have changed in our country. Surveys that you see say 40% of the people in this country even go to church. 40%. That's not even half. Only 20% go to church regularly. That's 80% of our population that doesn't go to church regularly. Now, I don't know how you'd figure this, but if my wife came home two days out of ten, I would think there was something radically wrong with our marriage. I imagine God thinks that there's something radically wrong with the population that does that. 47% of the people say that they read the Bible, but more than half of the 47% read it when they go to church one day a week. There are 47 million people in our country who belong to no church, 25% of our population. Of the 75% that do belong to church, many of them don't go at all. When you go talk to people and they say, and they'll say I'm a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or Baptist, or Catholic, and many of them don't go to church at all, and their joining, their identification with those groups has to do with who their mother and father and grandparents were really identified with. Not a personal commitment on their part. We get upset because the morals of our country reflected in our laws do not reflect the scripture. Well, our country does not reflect the scripture. We live under the illusion that our country is a Christian country and a Christian nation. It's never intended to be that. The church is intended to be the place where followers of Christ live and function. And we must be careful not to make the mistake that the Jewish people did in Jesus' day and get our idea of who the kingdom of God is tied up with the political entity where we live. If we do, then those things begin to color the way we see God and the way we understand the church and understand the kingdom and understand what God is supposed to do. God's intention never was that people would stop doing evil things because of the laws of the land. His intention was that people would live a righteous and moral life because they trusted their lives to him. They believed that what he said was right and they would be impassioned to live it. What he really wants from us is to accept his word, the scripture, as the guide for our life, not our constitution, not the laws of our country. We are foreigners in this land. This is not really our home. That's what Peter said. He said, you are aliens in the land in which you live. This is not your home. You've pledged yourself to the kingdom of God that supersedes this world. The Jewish people could not see the kingdom of God separated from the Jewish nation. And I think many of us in this land have difficulty differentiating between the kingdom of God and our country because we see them connected together. They're not. God is not in this world to save a country. He's in this world to redeem and care for his children who may or may not be citizens of any country. And whenever we become blinded by the political structures around us, it keeps us from being able to see the real nature of the kingdom of God. What is God doing in this world, and what does he want us to do? The kingdom of God is not equal to the United States. It's not equal to Canada. It's not equal to China, which soon may have more believers there than are here. The kingdom of God is an entity separated from any earthly political structure. The Pharisees, when they saw Jesus and they had this great picture of who he was supposed to be, could not see what God was doing because they had an expectation that he would be their political ruler. The blindness that this caused to them caused them to see Jesus in terms of a political creature. In politics in our country, it's very common at election time for our political leaders to identify themselves with the Christian faith and to identify the fact that there are followers of Christ. They believe in God. They believe in the Bible, and they want to live that. But political leaders who live very faithful lives as followers of Christ are never well received. If they say they are, they can get received. But practicing the Christian faith doesn't necessarily mean they will be able to keep their jobs. When I lived in Arkansas in the days of the integration controversy, one of the senators there was a very faithful advocate of accepting all people of all races as children of God. The political temperature of Arkansas at that time was not very open to that idea. And even though he may have thought in terms of the scriptures and what the Bible has to say, he was soon gone. And when you have people who take political office and try to stand for the things of God, it's very difficult for them to hold their office. We haven't had very many presidents in my lifetime that were faithful to what they thought the principles of the scripture taught. Jimmy Carter taught a Sunday school class almost all of his life when he was governor of Georgia. And when he came into the office of the president, he was very faithful to read his Bible and to be a person who prayed and to see the hand of God on his life and even taught a Sunday school class while he was the president. But most of the Southern Baptists that I knew who were pastors were adamantly opposed to him as the president of the United States, but instead favored Ronald Reagan, who had a divorce and didn't go to church, but talked very religious language. Why is that? It's we see past the spiritual nature of a person to the person whose political ideas are closer to ours, and we choose to endorse that as opposed to the spiritual nature of the person. Many of the presidents and leaders that we have who claim themselves to be followers of Christ, if they came to our church, we would think they were not very good church members. They don't come, they don't attend, they don't participate, they don't read the Bible, they don't pray, but they talk religious. We have to be careful whenever we're following Christ not to be deceived by the political world that wants to attract us to support them by appearing to be followers of Christ. The Bible makes clear the definition of a follower of Christ. It's a person who commits their life to Christ and is faithful to those principles regardless of the consequences to them. Very few political people are willing to hold office very long if they stand on their principles regardless of what happens, because a political structure requires compromise and it requires people to meet with all kinds of other people and have them support them. The people in Jesus' day found Jesus unacceptable because they saw they could not differentiate between the political structures of their nation and the spiritual structure of their nation. They were people also that were blinded by their own tradition. They could not separate the things that they believed were right from the things the scripture said. Every denomination and every group of people likes to point to the Bible and say we take the Bible just as it is and we build our church on that. The fact is though that if you look back in the New Testament times, there were no Southern Baptist churches. There were no Presbyterian churches. There were no Lutheran churches. All the denominations that we see did not exist. None of them did. When Paul and the people who were in his churches were going about the work that they were doing, not a one of those organizations could be identified with exactly what we see as churches today. So what happens is you have a group of people who see a peculiar way of interpreting the scripture and they begin to look in the Bible and find these principles on which they build their group. And as time goes on, things change and change and change and change because culture changes. And the churches as they exist today, some of you have been around a little while and been members of Southern Baptist churches, know that Southern Baptist churches as they are today function differently than they did even 50 years ago. There's a big, big difference. And it's true of every denomination. But what happens to us is we look at what we're doing and we assume that everything we're doing is exactly according to the scriptures. I grew up in church where the preachers preached every week that Southern Baptist just followed the scriptures. And we were the only denomination that just followed the Bible. And I believed what they told me because they were spiritual guides for me. And when I got into seminary, I took a job selling Bibles door to door. And I went to Alabama. That was the first place I was assigned to go. And there were many, many denominations there. And many of them very committed to Bible, living the Bible and preaching and teaching the Bible. So I go knock on the door and what you'd say and people come to the door and they'd say, can I help you? I said, well, I'm out here showing Bible material to the people in this community. And I had several of them say, now, what denomination are you? I said, well, I'm Southern Baptist. They said, well, you know, we're not like Southern Baptist. We just take the Bible exactly as it is. I thought that's what my preacher had been telling me all my life. Who do you think you are? Stealing our stuff here. And then you go to the next house and it'd be a different denomination. Knock on the door and say, here we have some Bible study books and Bibles to sell. Well, now, you Southern Baptist, you know, you take the Bible and you call your Sunday school board, print your material and you have these Sunday school lessons and books. But we just take the Bible and only the Bible. I found many, many denominations who believe that that was the truth about them. That they just took the scriptures without any interpretation or without any change. And yet every one of those churches were radically different in their organization, structure, doctrines and practices. If you write a grocery list down, it has 12 things that you're supposed to get and you go to the, and you hand it out to five people and they go to the grocery store and read that list and buy all the things on that. When they come back, they should all have the same things. I mean, one 12-ounce can of peas is one 12-ounce can of peas. You don't come back with corn when you're supposed to get 12 ounces of peas. We can't look at the Bible and say that we're the only ones who believe it correctly. Many other people are trying hard to put the Bible into practice. The Jewish people were so attached to their interpretation of the scripture that when Jesus talked about it, now this is God, the Son of God. When Jesus talked about it, they didn't even recognize the scripture. And yet they believed with all of their heart that they were following it. I believed after that summer was over that there were a lot of people out there in the world who genuinely, honestly believe that their church was the only one that believed the Bible exactly like it was. But that every one of them believed it differently than the other groups. How could it be? You see, when we isolate ourselves like I was and all those channels of hearing only Southern Baptists talk about what they believed and how ours was so true and we were the only ones that were right. And when you hear that all the time, you believe it. But when you step outside, you discover that there are many other people with sincerity and honesty that are trying to live in obedience to God. When Jesus taught the scribes and the Pharisees the truth of God, they could not accept it because it was different than what they believed. They thought they were taking the Bible strictly the way it was. But you know what happened to them? The Sabbath, for example, the Bible is clear about Sabbath principles, but they said, OK, we don't want to violate the Sabbath. What are the things we can do to keep from violating it? And so their great spiritual teachers would say, well, you shouldn't make a meal on Sunday because that's working. You shouldn't walk. OK, how far should we walk? Well, let's say a half a day's journey. You can only walk a half a day's journey. And if you walk more than that, then you're working. So they made these rules to interpret the scripture. So by the time Jesus came doing the things of God, healing people who were sick suddenly became an offense to God. And yet not walking very far made you a friend of God. Jesus said to them, do you think God would rather have bad things happen to people on the Sabbath or good things happen to people on the Sabbath? He wasn't worried about how far you walked or whether or not you harvested grain with your hands. He was interested in the purpose of the Sabbath, which was to bring the presence of God into the lives of people. Sometimes our denominational structures and teachings keep us isolated so that we learn those things. And when we read the Bible, we can only hear out of the scriptures what a Baptist would hear. We're so colored by what we're doing that we can't read what the Bible actually says. I suppose you've noticed this. If you put on pink tinted glasses, a whole lot of the things in the world look pink. And when you put on your Baptist glasses and you read the Bible, a whole lot of things in the Bible seem Baptist. And amazingly, the things that are not Baptist, you don't even see them. They just skip right by you. What God wants us to do is to open the scriptures and be careful how we read them. It's very important. Don't lose your doctrine. But read the scriptures carefully to listen to what they say instead of reading the scriptures, listening for what affirms what you already believe or heard. If you read a little bit of the passage of scripture and think about what it means, without all the other things that you've heard people tell you what it means, you may begin to see a different picture of God than you've heard before. The Pharisees could not do that. Their own doctrine blinded them to the reality of God. And the greatest curse we can do to each other is cause each other to pick up the Bible and read it only looking for the things that tell us what we already know. God is interested in communicating himself to us. And we must be careful not to get locked into the same things that we always have heard and always believe. For sometimes the things that our doctrines have taught us or the pastors have taught us or the books have taught us are not necessarily the literal words of scripture. And by that we get blinded to what God wants to do. I had my grandmother grew up in the South and she firmly believed that the mark of Cain, it was given to Cain, was the mark of being black. And that every black person had the mark of Cain on them as a cursed person. Now the Bible does say that God put a mark on Cain. I don't know exactly what that means. But her interpretation of that scripture did not come from the Bible. It came from her culture and probably the church she grew up in. And so it blinded her to the reality that people whose skin was a different color than hers were not real people. She believed that. Black people are not people like us. They're a step lower. Now we see that. We look back on it from our perspective now and we say what a terrible thing. But remember, we can be blinded in the same way. We can be blinded when we don't listen to the scriptures and make sure that this passage does not say the mark of Cain was a color of a person or a race. You read that now and it's clear. But because of her mind when she read that, if she ever read the Bible, she couldn't even see it. What God wants to do is break us free from the prejudices we have, from the political structures we hold on to, and even from our own denominational teachings. So that what he teaches us is the pure, simple truth of God. Now when you do that, you will find yourself sometimes at odds with people around you. Because once you have caught yourself, I mean my grandmother, if you, and I tried to talk differently about her, I mean she just got raging mad. You know, I mean she was just irate and she wouldn't have anything to do with that. She wouldn't want me to be her grandson anymore. It was so ingrained in her that she could not even see anything differently. We're not free from all this, but God can set us free from it. And the key is the Word of God clearly presented to us. We have a great advantage. There are many translations of the scriptures. And sometimes when you pick up one you haven't used before and you begin to read it, there's a different way of saying it, that all of a sudden it jumps out at you, a great truth of God that you never really saw before. So I encourage you, you have a Bible that you love to read, read it. But I encourage you to find another one sometimes and begin to read that too. For it helps us be able to hear the truth of God because it's a little different and it makes us think about it differently instead of the well-worn paths that we've traveled down so many times. When you see the story of Jesus and his crucifixion, you have to realize that being a religious person can be dangerous. We can get it mixed up with our politics until we lose sight of the spiritual side of this. You can get it mixed up with your denomination and you can miss the spiritual side of it. But underneath all of this, there is God, his Holy Spirit and the truth. Jesus never left it. And the Spirit of God inside of you can teach you the truths no matter how many times you've heard the wrong things. He can teach us the truth. So we are to live in a time when the truth of God is more important to us than our country, is more important to us than our denomination. For it is the truth of God that brings life. Read the Bible, but be very careful not to simply read it through the eyes that you've always thought about it. Read it in short sections and stop and think about what you've read. Read it in other translations so that it causes you to stop and think about what it says. For we're trying to break through all the human barriers to allow the Spirit of God to come in and teach us who he is. Let's pray. We read the story of Jesus and how difficult this was, how painful all this was for him, Father, to be faced with people who were very religious and yet his mortal enemies. None of us want to be that way. Help us not to see the kingdom of God through the eyes of America. And help us not to see the kingdom of God through the eyes of Southern Baptists. But help us to be able to see it through your eyes that we may know the truth. For it's the truth that sets us free. Amen. You do the same. I believe in you. Well, I've got three sisters. You know, they even have some good country in the West here, man.