The Offense of Jesus: Challenging Traditions

If I were to go around and ask people here, the first word when I mentioned Jesus that came to mind, what do you think some of them might be? Love. Love. Richard, what do you think? Did he get your word? Peace. Peace? We want the women's side of it. Protector. Protector. Okay. I think those are generally what people would say if you said, what would you think people might say? Friend. Friend. I don't want to ask Mike, he'll come up with something really weird. I think that's what happens when we talk about Jesus. So when you read in the Bible that people were angry with him or that they wanted to kill him, your first reaction is, why would they want to do such a terrible thing to such a wonderful guy? And when you read this passage, I want to, from Matthew chapter 27, I want to read verses one and two. When you read this passage, you see the conclusion to something that's taken place. They've already had a trial, sort of a secret trial. They've already decided they're going to kill Jesus. These verses simply say, early in the morning, all the chief priests and elders of the people came to the decision to put Jesus to death. They bound him, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate, the governor. They bound Jesus and they decided to kill him. Why would you kill someone who loves you? Why would you kill someone who gives you peace? Why would you give someone who is helping you? See, I think one of the things we see in the Bible is we see a part of Jesus' life and we're oftentimes not clear as to what his whole life was like and about. Jesus did some things in his lifetime that offended people. In fact, Jesus was very, very offensive. I doubt if anyone here would have said that word about Jesus. He's offensive. But he was. When Jesus was starting his ministry, he left his family in his home and began his work. Pretty soon he became very popular. People crowded around him. One time the story tells us that Jesus was in a house and he was healing people and teaching and his family came along. The house was so crowded that they couldn't get in. So somebody passed the word on the inside to Jesus saying, Your family, your mother and your brothers are here to get you. Now, the scripture explains that they were afraid that Jesus was mentally unbalanced. I know that sounds odd to us. But you know, you parents here, if you had a son one day that came home and said, I'm the second coming of Jesus, you'd call the psychiatrist. You'd want to have them counseled. Because it's just not a normal thing for a person to claim to be God. And Jesus was claiming this. He lived a normal life up to starting his ministry. And all of a sudden he's taken an entirely different direction. They are alarmed at what's happened to him. Jesus turned to the crowd that was there. His family now is outside close enough to hear. And he looks around at this group and he says, My mother and brothers and sisters are no longer my family. You are my mother. You are my brothers and sisters. Even in the most loose-knit family, that would be a very shocking thing to say. In biblical days when families were so close and so close-knit, to renounce the place of your family in your life would have been scandalous and unbelievable. I'm sure that his mother went away sad to know that he was now saying that the women who had become followers of his and of God were now his mothers in place of her. That his brothers heard that the men who were there had now replaced them as the closest relationship Jesus had. I think that would have been offensive to his family. When Jesus was doing his ministry, he went home to his hometown, the church he grew up in where he went to Sabbath school and where he learned the Bible and where he was doing the teaching. He just started his ministry and the father had told him to begin. And he went in and he read a passage from the book of Isaiah that said there's prophecy about the Messiah. And he looked across the congregation and he said to them, today this passage has been fulfilled. Now, if someone came to you and said, have you read the scriptures that said in the end last days Jesus is coming back to judge the world? I want to tell you, I am the one that's going to do that. We would all be skeptical. We would all can think that something was really wrong with this person to make such a bold and audacious claim. The scripture says his friends and neighbors in his hometown, and we're talking a hometown not like where people move in and out, but these people have been there all their lives. They were offended at Jesus. That word is too small and too light. They got a crowd of people to go kill him. How dare you blaspheme God to say that you are the prophet prophesied in the book of Isaiah. They were offended at Jesus. His family, his whole hometown, they were offended at what Jesus had to say and what he did. We're so used to this. When we look back and we read those stories, we just brush past the human feelings and the pain that was involved in the ministry of Jesus as he just told the truth about who he was. He collected around him 12 guys. He poured his life into them. He taught them the truth of his ministry. He taught them the truth about the scriptures. He taught them how to be able to live. He was pouring everything into these people. But over and over again, they misunderstood what Jesus was doing. And one time he even said to the leader of all the group, Peter, when Peter was reacting to something Jesus said that he was going to die on the cross, Peter said, Oh no, the Messiah will never do that. Jesus said to him, Peter, you're the devil is in charge of your life. That's a hard thing to say to a fellow church member. I don't think I've ever said that to anybody. I don't mean I haven't thought it once in a while, but I've never said it. Jesus right out front said it. Over and over again his disciples, when they misunderstood, he let them know that they'd failed. He let them know what was wrong with them. They stayed with him because their commitment and devotion to him was so powerful that in spite of that, they stayed with him. Jesus was teaching the passages in John chapter 6. He was teaching about himself. Now we look back on the story he was telling. But when he was telling it, the crucifixion hadn't come, the resurrection hadn't come, the last supper had not been given to them. And Jesus said to the crowd, unless you eat my flesh and you drink my blood, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Now how would you like that sermon if you'd never heard of the last supper or the crucifixion of Jesus or the resurrection? That is an invitation to cannibalism. The disciples heard Jesus say this. Now their idea was, we're going to get a whole crowd of people, we're going to elect Jesus as the ruler of this nation, he's going to drive out the Romans, and we're now going to be in charge of our own land. We need people. They wanted to crowd a big crowd. That's what they thought would take place. They came to Jesus and said, you can't do this. People are not going to accept this kind of stuff. They called it a hard teaching. This is too hard for people to endure, like walking on rocks or carrying boulders. People will not endure this. And they were right. The scripture says from that moment on people began to leave Jesus. No longer did they want to come and hear him talk. Jesus told them in preparation for what was going to happen to him, who he was and who he was going to be for the future. I will be for you the bread of life. I will be for you the blood of life. But they weren't ready to hear that yet. Jesus turned to his disciples after they grumbled, the scripture says. They complained and grumbled. There were a number of times in the disciples' lives in which they listened to Jesus, went off by themselves, and shook their heads and grumbled at what Jesus was doing and saying because it just didn't seem right to them. Jesus looked at them and said, Are you going to leave me too? He knew that the ground was shaky for them. Jesus even offended his disciples, the closest ones to him. But the big problem for Jesus and all the community of Israel was what he did about the traditional beliefs that the people had. One of the big things for them was keeping the Ten Commandments. That's the central of the law. Everything else sort of comes out of the Ten Commandments and one of the keys to the Ten Commandments was the Sabbath day. That is what we call Saturday. And that day was to be set aside to remember God, to think about God, to think about who he was and what he did. And we were to get rid of every normal activity of life so we could focus intently on God. And so they made rules to help them do that. Everybody, you know, wants to say, well, how much can we do to get by with it? And so they kind of made a rule. Well, you can only walk so far. If you walk further than that, you're really breaking the Sabbath. And then you can eat food that's been prepared already for you but you can't cook it on Sabbath day. All the rules that they had to make sure that they kept this Sabbath day. The Ten Commandments now. We don't want to violate those Ten Commandments. Somebody came to you and said, I think you can forget that murder one. Kill anybody you want. We'd say, whoa, that's going a little too far. Jesus one day with his disciples was walking through a field of grain. We don't know how far they'd been walking. But what they did was they reached down and got the heads of some of the grain, rubbed it in their hand until it was simply grain, and then they ate it because they were hungry. They'd been on a ministry mission with Jesus. Immediately the experts on the law came to Jesus and said, your disciples have violated the Ten Commandments. It's like coming to a preacher and saying, you're not keeping the Ten Commandments. That's a serious thing. Jesus said to them, I am the one who made the Ten Commandments. And when I made the Ten Commandments, they are under me. They don't rule me. I rule them. How astonishing that would be for an ordinary human being to claim authority over the Ten Commandments. If you were to turn on the television and a preacher came on and he said, you know, God has written the Ten Commandments in the Bible, but really I'm the one that wrote them. And I want to tell you that one about stealing, you can forget that. Take anything you want, anywhere you are, any place you are, because that's my command to you, and I'm in charge. You'd turn the TV off. You wouldn't want to hear that. You can imagine the astonishment. I mean, the Sabbath issue was a central thing for the Jewish nation. And Jesus was saying, you don't have to worry about all these things you've been doing. I will tell you I am in charge of the Sabbath and I'll tell you how you can keep it. Besides that, the temple was one of the most important places in all of Israel. It was a place where God lived. Jesus came to the temple one time. There they'd set the inside of it up and people came from all over the world. Some people say as many as a million people would come to the festivals in Jerusalem. And when they traveled by boat and they wanted to make an offering of a goat, it's hard to get on a boat and travel for a month with a goat and keep it safe. So they would come with money, usually money from a foreign country. And to give money in the temple, you couldn't give foreign money, you had to give Jewish money. So when they got there, they needed someone to change their money for the offerings from the Roman coins to the Jewish coins. So in the temple, they had people whose job it was to help them do that. So they'd be able to worship God. They had people there who would sell any kind of animal you needed in perfect condition as it should be to be able to make the sacrifice that you'd travel for a long period of time and for many miles just to make. When Jesus walked into the temple and he saw lining the walls the tables of the vendors, he realized that it had become such a big issue that it pushed aside the real purpose of the temple, the purpose to pray. Jesus didn't write an article to the paper. He didn't simply notice that it was bad. He went over to the tables that were there and he turned them upside down. He got a cord, this man of peace, and he started beating the people who were there till he drove them out of the temple. Do you think they forgot that? Jesus offended those people. He drove them literally out of the temple with a cord or a whip. Jesus desecrated in their minds the holy place of God. You can imagine the stir that would have come if someone came into this building and tore the seats up, turned them over, broke out the lights. It would be front page news in the paper. And this is not even the holy ground. What Jesus did was beyond anyone's imagination that a person would do. They were deeply offended and angry because of what he did. Jesus offended the spiritual teaching of the people who were around him. He offended their doctrine and their instruction. But most of all, he offended the people who were leaders in the nation of Israel. I went through the Gospels when I was reflecting on this passage to find how many times and circumstances Jesus offended someone. I found 39. 39 times that Jesus offended either an individual or a group of people. The most dramatic offense that he gave was to the spiritual leaders of the nation. Now, we think of the word Pharisee as a bad word. We think of the word Sadducee as a bad word. We think of the word Scribe as a bad word because of the conflict they had with Jesus and we're on his side. So if they're enemies of Jesus, they're enemies of ours. But for the people who were in that country, the Pharisees were the experts in helping them know how to please God. The Scribes were the people who knew the law and could explain the Bible better than anyone in all the world. And if you had a question to know what was the right thing God wanted you to do or the wrong thing that you might do, you went to the Scribe and they could tell you exactly what pleased God. These were the spiritually elite people of Jesus' day. The Sadducees were the people who were in charge of the temple and kept everything going as it ought to go. They looked at these people as spiritual giants. I don't know if we have anything in our culture that would parallel who these people were. You might think perhaps of people like Billy Graham and maybe television preachers that you might watch every week and you listen to their words and you trust them and you find great spiritual direction from them. You might name some of those names that you think about. If you collect all that group of people in a room, Jesus was standing there talking to them and saying to them the things that he said to the spiritual leaders of his day, you would feel very, very uncomfortable at the offense that Jesus presented to them. In chapter 23 of the book of Matthew, Jesus starts a discussion with these Scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees. He is discussing with them their ministry and role in the world. He is getting ready to leave and he is saying to his disciples, these guys know the Bible backward and forward. And when you tune in to them, you listen to the things they tell you because they are telling you the truth. But I want to warn you, these guys don't live that way. Instead, they are very interested in being important. They want the chief place in the synagogue. They want everyone to recognize them. They are arrogant and proud. So pay no attention to their lifestyle. They are arrogant people. They have no humility. Now the Pharisees were right there listening to Jesus. Is it a wonder that they got mad at what he had to say? Even if you knew that it was true about you, would you want that to happen in front of a crowd of people, all of Jesus' disciples? The second thing that Jesus pointed out to them, he said, these people, when they go to find someone to help them and they proclaim the truth to them, when people start following them, they get worse off than they were before. You don't know the words of God because you don't live them. And therefore, you cannot make followers of God. So listen to what they say, but pay no attention to what they do. Then Jesus directed his attention to the Pharisees straight forward. He said, you guys work as hard as you can to make disciples of God. But the fact is that because you don't know what the truth is and you don't live the truth, you cannot make disciples. So when you say to someone, come and follow us and we'll teach you how to follow God, and they start following you, they actually get farther away from God than they did in the beginning. You make a worse person out of them by your own evangelistic efforts. Now if you can imagine a crowd of preachers, great preachers, world-known preachers in a congregation who heard that, they would be deeply offended, as angry as they could get. Jesus in his announcing curses for them, he said, you are blind guides because you've not been down the road of spiritual obedience to God. So because you've not been down this road, you don't know how to lead anyone else down that road. All you know how to do is to say what you've learned. You don't know how to live that or put it in practice. And because of that, your life and your ministry is cursed. That's what the word woe means. It's an announcement of a curse given to a person. He said, you're very careful when you're around people to act right so that they see you with your prayer gear on, standing on the street corner praying. They see the tassels that show that you pray on your sleeves. They see you go to the temple. They see you teach the words. But the fact is that your inside is rotten, filled with greed, with lust, with anger, resentment, and bitterness. You've just cleaned the outside of yourself like a tomb filled with a corpse that's rotted, painted white on the outside like a cup that has mud on the inside but the outside is washed sparkling clean. You need to clean the inside of your life. No one wants that kind of conversation at all. He said, you practice the unimportant things. You go out to your garden and you have some something in your garden of herbs. You pick a little bit of the herbs and you take one-tenth of it. If it's ten seeds, you get one seed and you take it to church and you put it on the table and you say, I've tied now how great a person I am. And you've left undone compassion and love and the things that are most important to God. You've done the things that show that are little but you've left undone the big things that God wants you to do. This list of condemnation to the face of the very leaders of the nation sealed this deal for Jesus. He made sure that they understood that their lifestyle was opposite of what He wanted. He said to them then one final thing. He said, you look back on the Bible at Isaiah the prophet Isaiah and Jeremiah and you know that in the ancient days when these prophets came preaching their message that the people killed them. Now you make statues for Isaiah and Jeremiah and the prophets that were killed and you celebrate how wonderful they are. But all they did was stop a message they didn't want to hear. When they killed Isaiah they were stopping him to say I don't want you to say this anymore. When they tried to kill Jeremiah they were saying we don't want your words to be spoken anymore. Here you are planning now to kill me because you don't want to hear what I have to say. On the outside you look like wonderful people on the inside you are just like your forefathers who were murderers. Well you can imagine how well that went over. The people who were standing there who had admired and respected these people had to hate Jesus with everything in their heart. And so the tone is set. They are trying their very best because Jesus drew a line in the sand. He said it's either you or me. All of you are going to have to decide what you do. The people on the other side of that line said it's not going to be us who's gone. It's going to be him. So they had a trial sort of kind of a secret trial in the middle of the night. They brought people in trying to find someone who could tell them something Jesus had done that would allow them to kill him. People came one after another to tell the story. They couldn't ever it was required that they investigate each story. They found loops in them loopholes in them. And one by one they rejected their testimony. This won't work. It's not the truth. So finally two people said we heard him say he was going to destroy the temple and restore it in three days. Now there was nothing in that that would allow them to kill Jesus or to send him to Pilate for death. But it was a serious charge. The chief priest had an idea. He got up out of his chair now eager to make Jesus hear what he wanted him to hear. I want you to tell me with an oath to God are you the Messiah or not? Are you the Messiah? Jesus said you have said it. He didn't even admit it. You have said it. He made his enemy actually declare that he was the Messiah. But Jesus now was ready. The Father had given him the word I think. And so he said to them but I'll tell you more than that. Whenever the day the last day comes and the end of the world is there and you look and you see God on his throne you're going to see me right beside him. He was claiming to be God's right hand man or connected with God. Now that's a word of blasphemy. Then he said and I'll tell you another thing. When you see the clouds come down for judgment I will be riding on the cloud coming to be your judge. Now that's something only God could do. The high priest was required anytime he was anywhere where anyone made a blasphemous remark blasphemy simply means to say that something is holy and divine is human or raise a human to the place where it says you're holy or divine. That's what happened. He was required to tear his robe from the top to the bottom and he did in front of everyone. You've heard it he said. What do you say? They said he's guilty. Blasphemy. He's to die. Now the passage that we have today they come down a formal session it's daylight. They can have that session for the trial. The decision has already been made. They've decided to kill Jesus. Jesus has offended them. He's offended many of them. He's desecrated their holy places and now they're going to kill him. Now when we read this story we think that's terrible for these guys I don't know why they didn't get it. But remember what Jesus said to them. You didn't kill the prophets but you want to get rid of the message that God has given you just like the prophets did. How would it be possible for us to do the same thing? Well I'll tell you this if you sit down and read the New Testament and you start reading through what it says if you're not convicted or offended by some of the things it says you are not listening to it. I heard this story and I don't know if it's true but someone told of Charles Wesley he used to send preachers out to preach young preachers starting out and when they came back he would always say how did it go? And they'd say well he'd say did anybody get mad at you? They said no he said you must not have preached the gospel because the gospel confronts us with our sin. It confronts us with our self-centeredness. It confronts us with our failure to be what God wants us to be. When you hold the picture of Jesus up before yourself and you look at that and you look at yourself you can't help but understand how far you are from what God wants you to be. And when you read the words of what Jesus says it confronts us with what He wants of us. It demands us to change. We don't want to change. We're living the way we want to live. And so we don't kill Jesus. But you know what we've made Him? He's sweet and loving and kind and patient and understanding. We've made Him a doddering grandpa. Someone who'll just put up with about anything we do. Who just loves us so much He'll never say anything bad to us. You don't know the Jesus of Scripture if that's how you see Him. He wasn't afraid to turn to His disciples and say the devil has control of your mind and your heart. If you don't turn around you're going to be in deep trouble. He wasn't afraid to say to a man unless you leave your family to take care of the dead people you can't follow me. He wasn't afraid to say to the rich man you must take everything you have and sell it and give it away to the poor. We kill the message of Jesus by taking the parts we like and we want and ignoring the demand that Jesus made for perfection. Be you perfect as my Father in Heaven is perfect. The demands on our life from Jesus regarding holiness and faithfulness and submission and obedience are clearly spelled out. Jesus knew that none of us could do that but it didn't mean that He removed us from the responsibility of focusing that as the goal for our lives. He also knew that if we gave Him our will or our lives He would slowly change us to where these qualities in our life begin to change and disappear. Jesus demanded of His followers their lives. Not only to walk with Him but to die for Him. Jesus asked more of people than most people wanted to give Him. If Jesus had come into the world saying I love everyone I'm going to be nice to everyone I'm going to be kind to everyone just come and join and do whatever you want to do as long as you feel good as long as you're religious as long as you read the Bible a little once in a while but instead He said go into all the world and make followers of Me. Now it's easy for us to consider ourselves good Christians if we read the Bible once in a while or regularly even or pray and attend the church regularly and have never made a disciple in our entire life. That's what Jesus was talking about. You take care of the little things but the big things you just leave them alone. What the people of Jesus' day did was they wanted to stop Jesus' demand on their life. So they killed Him. We don't do that because He's not here. But we read what we want accept what we want change around what we want till we can say we're followers of Jesus when we're really doing exactly what we want to do when we want to do it the way we want to do it. Jesus I think would say to us you're just like the Pharisees and those who killed the prophets. You want to stop the message of God. Would you bow your heads please for a moment. I want to ask you to talk to God in the quietness of this moment. I want you to ask God am I serious about obedience to you? The second question I want you to say what do you ask of me that I don't do because it's not comfortable enjoyable or pleasant. I hope for every one of us you heard God say I'm very pleased with your life. Keep on doing what you're doing. But if perchance God is brought to your mind again and when God has something to deal with us about He brings it there over and over and over and over again. He's brought to your mind something that He's been trying to get changed about your behavior your lifestyle your attitude you're hearing the Jesus of the Bible. You are not what I want you to be. What are you going to do about that? You kill Him if you push it away. You follow Him if you accept Him and say OK Lord whatever you want I will do. When God speaks to us He expects a response and you'll get one. Either you'll ignore what He says to you or you will do it. At the end of our service we open the doors of the church to anybody that God feels calling. They feel God is calling and say this is your church. People come and say God has asked me to be a part of this fellowship. We open the doors of the kingdom of heaven to anyone who knows that God wants them to surrender their lives in obedience to Him. We provide an opportunity for someone who wants to make a promise to God to pray with you that God will guide you to fulfill the promise you make. We're not going to sing a hymn of invitation but I want you simply to be talking to God. When the music plays I'll be at the front. Someone else will be here with me. If you want to come and pray you can come and kneel and pray. If you want to come and share a commitment you're making to God we'll pray with you. This is a moment in which the Lord is speaking. He may offend you but He's telling you the truth. He is your friend. Listen. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Would you stand please for a moment of benediction. We depend, Lord, on you telling us the truth all the time. We thank you that you are more concerned with our lifestyle than our feelings. We're thankful that you're more interested in our salvation than in our thoughts and our desires and our interests. As you've spoken to each of us, Father, we pray that you continue to guide us. Give us the wisdom to make choices. Give us the determination to be faithful. Give us a spirit of humility and servanthood. We live our lives that the world might know you through us. In Jesus' name, we give praise and thanks for this. Amen. Action. This is O Church Arise and you have number 663 in your hymnals. ♪♪♪ O Church Arise and put your armor on. Hear the call of Christ, our Captain, for the weak can say that they uniquely are strong in the strength that God has given. With shield of faith and belt of truth, we'll stand against the devil's eyes. An army bold whose battle cry is love reaching out to those in darkness.