Lord, Show Us What We Owe! Mark 12:13-17

We're going to turn now to Mark chapter 12.

Mark 12 · chapter mention

We are back in Mark.

It's been a while, huh?

It's been a while.

But we're back.

We're going to finish this spring.

Mark gives us the details of the last week of Jesus' life.

This is probably Tuesday before Good Friday that these events are taking place.

Hear the word of God.

And they sent to him some of the Pharisees and some of the Herodians to trap him in his talk.

And they came and said to him, Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone's opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the way of God.

Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

Should we pay them or should we not?

Bring me a denarius.

Let me look at it.

And they brought one.

And he said to them, Whose likeness and inscription is this?

They said to him, Caesar's.

Jesus said to them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.

And they marveled at him.

This is the Word of God, the precious, holy, infallible, inerrant Word of God.

We pray for the work of the Spirit.

Join me.

Lord, we thank you for recording this conversation in your scripture.

Lord, we all we confess that we have so much to learn about this.

We have so much to learn.

So teach us this morning by your Spirit.

We pray in Christ's name, amen.

You know, from the beginning of Jesus' public ministry until the end, he was beleaguered with temptation.

People were trying to trap him.

Forty days and 40 nights in the desert to begin his ministry.

There the devil was trying to trap him.

And it went to the last minute of his life.

People trying to get him to say the wrong thing, to do the wrong thing.

It seems as though temptation was always chasing him.

This morning we're going to look at the trap.

We're going to look at the teaching and the thinking required.

First of all, the trap.

We have some historical background.

The Pharisees and the Herodians, these were strange bedfellows.

The Herodians, they were the liberals of the day.

They were into just kind of buddying up to Rome.

They wanted to be on the good side of the Roman government.

And then you had the Pharisees.

The Pharisees, what that means literally is the set apart ones.

What were they set apart to?

What were they set apart for?

Holiness of life.

Close obedience to the scriptures of the Old Testament.

That's what they were all about.

Very different groups.

The Herodians you could call the liberals of their day.

The Pharisees were the conservatives of their day.

And they were sent by the Sanhedrin.

The Sanhedrin, the 70 that were made up.

The Sanhedrin was made up of three groups: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the scribes.

And they're plotting to get Jesus to say the wrong thing, to incur the wrath of the people around him, to incur the wrath of the government over him.

And they sent to him, to Jesus, this envoy to trap him in his talk.

We're going to see in the coming weeks, there's three traps that they're trying to set in the week before his death.

This is the first trap.

And they sent to him to trap him in his talk.

This is the only time in the New Testament where this Greek word is used.

Elsewhere in context, it means to catch a wild animal with a trap.

That's what they were trying to do.

To catch a wild animal, something you can't control.

How fitting.

The context.

Teacher, we know you don't care.

You're not swayed by people's opinions.

You're not like the politicians.

They're trying to butter them up.

They're setting the trap.

They said, you don't look at the face of men.

That's what it says literally in the language.

You don't look at the face of men when you talk, when you're with them.

You don't live for other people's approval, Jesus.

We've noticed that about you.

Oh, yeah.

Well, okay, it's true.

He didn't live for the approval of other people, but they're trying to butter him up.

Let me say this.

You don't have to hate Jesus to put him to the test.

Jesus asked them, Why are you putting me to the test?

You don't have to hate Jesus.

You don't have to be on the other side of the fence from Jesus to test him.

This is not the point of the sermon, but I think it's an application that's well worth paying attention to.

We also, those of us that are on Jesus' side, let's say, can I say it like that?

Those of us that are on his side, we can test him in wrongful ways.

We can pay lip service to Jesus.

We can either say with our lips or believe in our hearts, Jesus, we revere you in general, but when it comes to my personal life, hands off, when it comes to my personal morality or ethics, off limits.

When it comes to my personal life, please don't try to dictate to me how I live my life or the choices I make.

Is it coming close?

We also are very capable of testing Jesus and trying to trap him, almost putting him on the horns of a dilemma in a different way than they did.

Do we look for reasons to not follow him?

Do we look for reasons to not obey him?

I would accept.

What's the blank that we would fill in?

I would give him my full obedience, I would give him my whole heart.

Accept.

Well, you don't know understand what he's, the circumstances he's put into my life.

The things that we use as excuses for our disobedience.

He's not buying it.

He's not going to buy it from me, and he's not going to buy it from you.

Are we putting them to the test in ways that we're not aware of?

Here's the question from this envoy.

Teacher, we have a question for you.

Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

I love the introduction.

Ben wrote to the scripture reading that Athena read.

Because you know this passage from Romans chapter 13 is one of the closest corollaries that we have to this conversation that we're reading about now.

Romans 13 · chapter mention

Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

This tax refers to the annual poll tax in Judea.

Think of it as a head tax demanded by the Roman Emperor since A.D.

6, when Judea became a Roman province.

This tax was in the form of a denarius, a small coin.

This small coin was the coin with which you had to pay your tribute to the Roman government.

It was a denarius.

It was essentially one day's pay.

Now you could say out of 365 days a year, I mean, maybe it really wasn't so much the numeric value, it wasn't the cost.

It wasn't that they couldn't afford to pay this tax, many of them, but they despised, many of them despised the government over them.

They saw it as tyrannical, they saw it as oppressive, they wanted many of them wanted their freedom, and that's why they despised this tax, many of them.

And they're trying to trap Jesus.

Teacher, is it lawful for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

Please tell us.

What a bunch of hypocrites.

They didn't care.

They just wanted him, they wanted to bait him to say the wrong thing.

Something that would either offend Rome.

No, no, no, don't pay the tax.

Or something that would offend the Jewish people.

Oh, pay the tax.

Is he selling out?

Is he selling out to Rome?

Boy, it's some of the same questions today, right?

The coin for paying this tax, the denarius, had a portrait on it, the image of the Roman emperor, Tiberius Caesar Augustus, and the inscription on it, the son of the divine Augustus.

You know what that was saying.

This was all about Rome, emperor worship.

Very ungodly.

This was the Roman cult of emperor worship.

You can imagine how offensive this would be to the Jews of his day.

This was a graven image of a mere man.

But what does Jesus do?

Once again, brilliantly, wisely.

He says, Does anybody here have one?

Anybody here have a denarius on them?

Somebody brings him a denarius.

He looks at it, he says, Well, here, you look at it too.

Whose likeness and inscription is this?

It's a pretty easy question.

Well, that's Caesar's.

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's.

These were the same people, the Jewish people, under the Roman government, that drank from the Roman aqueducts, traveled the Roman roads.

There were benefits that were given to them that they were taking advantage of.

Jesus says, pay tribute to your government, pay the tax.

Sometimes we have to swallow hard, don't we?

In our politics today, no matter which side of the aisle you're on.

Sometimes we have to swallow hard.

Listen to what John Kelvin so wisely said about this topic centuries ago, over five centuries ago.

He said, we are not only subject to the authority of princes who perform their duties, who perform their office toward us uprightly and faithfully as they ought, but also to the authority of all who by whatever means have gotten control of affairs, even though they perform not a whit of the prince's office.

Did you hear that?

That's the challenge, isn't it?

Submit to that government, honor that government, because God put that government in place.

When you like it and when you don't like it.

When the head of the government, oh, the Caesar Augustus, there was nothing godly about him.

When he does his job as God wants him to do his job, and when he doesn't do his job.

This is, yeah, this is this is right out of also Romans 13 that was read earlier.

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.

Pay to all what is owed to them.

Taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.

Did you catch the last verse that was read?

Owe to no one anything except love.

To love each other.

For the one who loves has another, the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

Render to, okay, now that we're deeper getting deeper into the teaching.

That was the trap.

Now we're deeper into the teaching right now.

But render to God the things that are God's.

The government does have authority given by God, but it's not ultimate authority.

The government never has ultimate authority.

Clearly implied in Jesus' use of the word image.

If you're looking in your text, verse 16, that's the same word translated from the Hebrew to the Greek, image, just the same word that we find, the same word in Genesis chapter 1, verse 27.

Genesis 1:27

God made us in what?

His image.

Yeah.

Which is the same word of us being made in God's image.

So I asked you a question.

Whose image is imprinted on you?

Not Caesar's.

No government head, no government official is imprinted on your heart, Christian.

As the Heidelberg Catechism reminded us earlier, we belong to him and him alone.

We're not going to sell our soul to anybody.

Here, this is not a coin, but a human being.

Whose image do we bear?

Political power is never ultimate authority.

Jesus puts politics in its place.

It's been said.

Here is Jesus putting politics in its place.

Does politics have a place?

Of course it does.

But not the primary place.

Not the primary place.

We give our taxes to Caesar, we do not give our worship to Caesar.

We give our taxes to our government, we do not give our worship to our government.

It can never give us what we need ultimately.

The state has a God-given legitimate authority.

However, the authority of God is greater.

There are occasions when we must obey God rather than man.

The apostles reminded of that in the book of Acts, chapter 5, verse 29.

Acts 5:29

When the local government was trying to squash their gospel message and ministry.

Stop it.

And what did they say?

What did Peter and John say?

Peter.

We ought to obey God rather than man.

Our king, our head, our authority has given us a message.

He's given us a statement of fact and command.

You go, you Christians, you go out and you make disciples of all nations and don't let anybody stop you.

Because you bear the image of Jesus.

His image is inscribed on your mind, your heart, whatever you do, due to the glory of God.

The teaching is necessary today.

It's always necessary in every generation.

I want to close with the third point, the thinking that's required.

What are some of the implications of God's image being imprinted on us?

I think I mentioned the other week in one of my sermons that Sharon and I had the joy and privilege of attending the Messiah again this Christmas.

And if you've had that opportunity, you've had that experience when you get to the hallelujah chorus.

What do people do?

Stand up.

It said that that's what the King of England did the first time he heard it.

It wasn't rehearsed, it was a spontaneous response as he was listening to the text of the music, as we were listening to the grand structure of the music.

His heart response was to stand up.

People have been standing up ever since to the hallelujah chorus.

But that phrase and I heard it again just a few weeks ago the kingdoms of this world will be swallowed up by the kingdom of Christ.

Wow.

We need to remember that.

The kingdoms of this world, every kingdom, no exceptions, will be swallowed up by the kingdom of Christ.

You know where that comes from.

That comes from Revelation chapter 11, verse 15.

Revelation 11:15

Right.

Handel got it right from the scriptures.

The kingdom of God will break down the barriers of this world like nothing else can.

We see it.

We pray for it.

That the kingdom of God will break down every barrier that opposes the rule of God, that the kingdom of God will break down every barrier that denies the deity of Christ, that the kingdom of God will break down all the divisions, all the walls of hostility, all the walls that separate us from the power of God.

Isn't it interesting how Jesus formed his collection of apostles to illustrate this?

He chooses Simon the zealot.

He hated Rome.

They did everything they could.

In every week, waking minute, what can we do to overthrow this oppressive government?

Jesus chose him.

He said, You're going to be one of my twelve apostles.

I'm going to show you what real kingdom power looks like.

I'm going to show you what it really looks like to throw off the oppression of the tyranny in your life.

Simon Azalot thought, that'll happen when we overthrow our government.

Jesus said, no, no, no.

It'll happen when I overthrow the oppression of your sin and your guilt and your misery and your world and your life.

Are you discovering that to be true as well?

It doesn't come from the outside, it comes from the inside ultimately.

But he also chose us as apostle Matthew the tax collector.

Don't put these two guys in the same room, okay?

Jesus says, Oh, I will not only put them in the same room.

They're going to be part of my inner circle.

They're going to sleep together.

They're going to eat together.

They're going to listen to my teaching together.

And the barriers are going to come down.

I'm going to change them.

I'm going to transform them from the inside out.

They're going to become gospel buddies.

They're going to become gospel friends.

I'm going to show you.

I'm going to show them truth and grace.

I'm going to show them how to love, how to respect.

Even people that disagree with them.

I heard Jim Keller say years ago on this topic, this kind of a subject, because governments differ, Christians will be perceived differently in different cultures.

In a totalitarian government, Christians likely will be seen as more liberal than the culture around them.

Makes sense, right?

Yeah.

In a more democratic government, Christians likely will be seen as more conservative than their culture.

You got that?

That's generally the way it looks.

What our culture is made of, the values and the mores that our culture imbibes, ascribes to, is going to require, it's going to look differently as we Christians respond to it.

But we're not going to be one vanilla uniform monolithic script.

This is wisdom.

Pay to Caesar.

What is Caesar's?

Even if you have to swallow hard.

And maybe you don't.

Maybe you don't have to.

But never forget whose imprint is on you.

There's no government.

There's no political party.

There's no philosophy.

The very one who created you.

The one who made you in his image.

The one who saw you in your misery and redeemed you and rescued you from your sin and from your misery.

His likeness.

His inscription.

He alone is worthy of our worship.

May he receive all of our worship right now.

Father, we ask this.

Would you please bring us close?

Holy Spirit.

You know that there are things that we have to work through.

There's things that we have to think out.

But Lord, would you please?

Would you bring the kingdom of Christ soon?

Oh, we're going to be so ready when your kingdom comes in full.

We're going to be so ready.

It's going to be so good to be freed and liberated from tyrannies, from misery.

Lord, give us faith in the meantime to obey your word.

Give us faith in the meantime to grow in our worship of you and you alone.

This we pray, Jesus, in your name.

Amen.