Matthew 22:41-46 - What Do You Think About the Messiah

To the Gospel of Matthew.

Matthew twenty-two.

Going through this gospel together, we're in Matthew twenty-two this morning.

And our text comes from the end of this chapter, the first book of our Christian New Testament, verses 41 to 46.

We'll be considering this portion this morning.

I'm going to read that for us.

Matthew 22, verse 41 down through verse 46.

Matthew 22:41

This is God's word.

While the Pharisees were together, Jesus questioned them, What do you think about the Messiah?

Whose son is he?

They replied, David's.

He asked them, How is it then that David, inspired by the Spirit, calls him Lord?

The Lord declared to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.

If David calls him Lord, how then can he be his son?

No one was able to answer him at all, and from that day no one dared to question him anymore.

Let's pray again.

Human power is nothing that can change a heart, but the Spirit's power does that.

We pray that Christ would be ruling in the midst of his people, even through his word, even through the text for this morning.

We thank you that your son has indeed been exalted, and we are longing to hear from him today.

So please, O Christ, speak through your word we ask.

In the name of the all-glorious one and for the Father's glory.

Amen.

Jesus loves to ask questions.

Have you noticed that in the Gospel of Matthew?

He's constantly asking questions.

He loves to ask questions that touch the heart.

What do you think about the Messiah?

That's a question that should grip our hearts.

We need a Messiah.

We should want to have an answer for that question.

We must grasp hold of God's Messiah.

We must do that.

This text this morning says, What do you think about the Messiah?

Or maybe you're looking at a translation that says, What do you think about the Christ?

Remember that that term Christ is not really so much a last name, it's more like a title.

That's why it says there the Christ or the Messiah.

That actually goes all the way back to the Old Testament and it speaks of an anointed one.

Both of those English words, Christ Messiah, speak of an anointed one.

Throughout the Old Testament, God had various people that were anointed for different tasks.

But there was coming a greater anointed one.

There was coming a greater anointed prophet, a greater anointed priest, a greater anointed king.

That was the anticipation and expectation.

And Jesus asks, What do you think about the Messiah?

Friends, what do you think about God's Messiah?

That's not a word that we use especially often in our own day and age.

You'll hear it used occasionally.

Sometimes you hear someone say they have a messiah complex.

It's a negative way of using that word.

I ran into someone online, I saw this, I had never heard of this person, Richard Bach, but he has a book from a number of years ago, and the title of his book is Messiah's Handbook, Reminders for the Advanced Soul.

Now you can tell by the subtitle, it's probably not going to be a book about humility.

I didn't read the book, but I saw one quote from it where he says this.

Being true to anyone else or anything else is the mark of a fake Messiah.

Who wants a fake Messiah, right?

I don't know if he works for Disney.

It sounds like he does.

Maybe not.

But that message of be true to yourself, we're constantly having that pushed on us.

And while the word messiah is not always used, that's kind of the upshot of all of that advice is you can be your own messiah.

The Bible says actually just the opposite.

If we want to really grasp hold of God's Messiah, we have to look away from ourselves and to God's provision of a Messiah.

If we want to address the question of who the Messiah is, if we want, and we should desperately want to grasp hold of the true Messiah, then according to our passage, we have to do two things.

We need to read the scripture carefully and receive the Savior completely.

Read the scripture carefully, receive the Savior completely.

Let's look first at how we're called from this text to read the scripture carefully.

In verse number 42, Jesus asked this question about not only what do you think about the Messiah, but then Jesus asks more specifically, whose son is he?

And the Pharisees answer, David's son.

Where did they get that idea?

Do they get that from extra-rabbinic tradition?

No, they get that from the Old Testament itself.

It's actually there in the Old Testament.

Here's a few passages, Jeremiah 23, 5 and 6.

Look, the days are coming.

This is the Lord's declaration, when I will raise up a righteous branch for David.

He will reign wisely as king and administer justice and righteousness in the land.

In his days, Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely.

This is the name he will be called.

The Lord is our righteousness.

Isaiah 11, 1 and 2.

A shoot will grow from the stump of Jesse, a branch from his roots will bear fruit, the spirit of the Lord will rest on him, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and strength, a spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

All of these various prophetic expectations about a coming Messiah, a coming son of David, they're built on the backbone of God's promise to David, which Banu read from earlier today.

So I won't read that entire passage again, but you may want to mark it down and just look at it again later on this afternoon or this week.

2 Samuel chapter 7, where God promises to raise up a son to sit on David's throne.

2 Samuel 7 · chapter mention

And then the prophets look back on that promise to David and they reflect on that and expand on that.

So the Pharisees got something right.

Mark it down in your calendars.

The Pharisees are not always wrong.

When Jesus asked whose son the Messiah is, and they answered David, they were a hundred percent correct.

But in order to know that, you have to know your Bible.

You have to read scripture carefully.

Hear ye, hear ye, a future Messiah is coming, and he will be a son of David.

It's not given with repeated directness like that.

Think about that passage I read in Jeremiah, the first one that I read there.

It says that God will raise up a righteous branch for David.

You've got to read scripture carefully.

When we think about raising up a branch, what does that mean?

Is it like putting up a Christmas tree?

You know?

Well, it says it's a righteous branch.

We don't really usually think of trees as righteous or unrighteous.

So there's a clue there.

And we have to use our imaginations.

I don't mean by that, just make up something and whatever you think it might mean, fill it in.

But God's given us a capacity to make comparisons, to take concrete things like a tree and learn an abstract lesson from something concrete.

In scripture, often trees and vines in the Old Testament are compared to people, to families, to kingdoms.

We don't speak a lot like that today.

I don't see James and Betty's newborn and say, oh, that's quite a branch you guys have there.

Well done.

But we do have the concept of a family tree that we still have today, right?

So there's a clue there that when God speaks about raising up a righteous branch, he's talking about a person, not some uh arboretum in David's palace courtyard.

And then you have to know, or reading scripture carefully, Jeremiah prophesied long after David was dead.

So he couldn't have been talking about a royal advisor in David's court or even David's own immediate son, Solomon, because this is years and years later.

And there's another clue there in Jeremiah: God will raise up a righteous branch.

That's the same exact term that God spoke through the prophet Nathan to David back in 2 Samuel 7.

God will raise up a king after you.

And you don't have to know Hebrew.

Most of our translations, they use the same phrase in 2 Samuel 7 that Jeremiah does in Jeremiah chapter 23.

Jeremiah 23 · chapter mention

And there's a common theme on top of that in the Old Testament of an unrighteous king and the need for a righteous king.

So that passage in Jeremiah about God raising up a righteous branch.

We have verbal clues, we have conceptual metaphors, we have running theological themes that all contribute to helping us understand Jeremiah's prophesying about a coming Messiah who will be a son of David.

And you say, Micah, that's a lot to put together for one passage.

It is.

So we have to read scripture carefully.

We want to read it thoughtfully and completely.

And yes, with all of our minds.

We don't need to brag about how little we know scripture.

There's nothing to brag about.

We want to, wherever we're at, we're at different places in our lives.

We don't all have the same amount of Bible knowledge or ability to read and think about and grasp things, but wherever we're at, let's just take that next step to long to read scripture carefully.

We'll find part of Christ if we don't read scripture carefully.

When we read scripture carefully, we'll see the glories of Christ expand and grow and these connections.

And we don't want to limit ourselves to the New Testament.

That's where Christ is most fully displayed in gospels like Matthew.

But the whole Old Testament builds towards who he is and helps to create an expectation for what he's going to do and accomplish.

Joshua 1.8, this book of instruction must not depart from your mouth.

You're to meditate on it day and night.

Jeremiah 15, 16, your words were found and I ate them.

Your words became a delight to me and the joy of my heart.

Read scripture carefully.

We put a lot of scripture in our services.

There's a call to worship, sometimes a confession of sin, an assurance.

We have a scripture reading that's separate from the text for the sermon.

We read both of those things.

We explain, we think about it.

And we're not looking to rush through that.

We want to linger over God's word because it's good and deep and profound.

Read scripture carefully.

Here in Matthew 22, after the Pharisees correctly answer that the coming Messiah is David's son, Jesus asks a follow-up question in verse 43.

How is it then, he says, that David, inspired by the Spirit, calls him Lord?

And then in verse 44, Jesus quotes from Psalm 110.

With most of your Bibles, you can see it's a quote because they either put it in bold or they set it off as a different paragraph.

So you can see that Jesus is actually quoting from the Old Testament.

So Jesus himself was a careful reader of scripture.

He wanted the Pharisees to look and think even more definitively about who this was and what he's going to accomplish.

And then in verse 46, it says no one was able to answer Jesus.

Why does that seem kind of strange to you?

So David called the Messiah Lord.

Don't we call the Messiah Lord?

Shouldn't we call the Messiah Lord?

What's so unusual about that?

Why would that be so perplexing for the people?

Well, that brings us to our next major heading for this morning.

If we're going to grasp the Messiah, we want to read scripture carefully, and we need to receive the Savior completely.

The Pharisees had a partially correct understanding of Messiah.

They did correctly grasp that he was going to be David's son.

They got the first part of the question, but then the second part, they weren't willing to respond.

So let's dig into this question for a moment.

Why did David call the Messiah Lord?

That does not sound provocative to us, but we have to understand that culture.

In the world of the Bible and Jewish culture, there's a definite family pecking order.

Dad's at the top.

And then when dad has a son, dad's still at the top.

And then when the son grows up and becomes a man, dad's still at the top.

You understand?

I have some family friends in South Carolina, and the dad owned a cabinet shop.

Beautiful wood cabinets he designs for homes.

And some years ago, his two sons had been working for him, and he turned the business over to one of his sons, but he still works for the business.

He wanted to give his son more responsibility.

And he's getting a little older and wanted to, you know, still work but have less responsibility.

Most of you hear that and you think, that's really nice.

If I had a time machine and I brought a Jewish person from the world of the Bible to today, and I was trying to explain that situation to them.

Well, the dad had a cabinetry shop, his son's worked for them, but now the son is the boss and the dad works for the son.

If I tried to explain that to them, they'd be mystified, offended.

Dad works for the son?

What kind of a messed up world do you live in?

Dad is working for the son?

Oh, oh, oh.

I want to go back.

And some of you might come from cultures more like that.

Dad's always the boss.

Even if he's at an age where he's only able to push the broom around the shop two times a day, he doesn't report to anyone.

He's still the boss.

Now, do you understand a little more the conundrum Jesus is proposing?

When you call someone Lord, you're calling them the boss.

So how could David call one of his descendants the boss, his son or a future son?

That's almost like abandoning his position as the patriarch.

If the Messiah is a son of David, how could David ever call him Lord?

Turn back to Psalm 110.

I want you to see this.

So hopefully you have your Bibles.

Hold your finger here in Matthew.

We'll definitely be back in Matthew.

Go to Psalm 110, because this Psalm is key to Jesus' whole argument here.

In fact, this Psalm, Psalm 110, is actually quoted more than any other passage in the Psalms in the New Testament.

It's quoted a number of different times in different places.

It's ascribed to David, and notice in Psalm 110 and verse number one, there's a declaration of the Lord to my Lord.

So we have Lord speaking to Lord.

Notice that in your Bibles, the first Lord is in all capital letters, and the second Lord is not in all capital letters.

That's a clue from the translators that here it's two different Hebrew words.

The first one in all capital letters is Yahweh.

That's a name exclusively for the one true God.

The second word that's not all capital letters, it has an L but then a lowercase O R D.

That's the Hebrew word Adonai.

It can be used for the one true God, but it can also be used for human authority figures.

For example, in the book of Ruth, Ruth calls Boaz at one point Adonai because he owns the field that she's gleaning in.

If you want to hear more about Ruth, come back tonight.

We'll hear more about Ruth.

Exciting.

So we have Yahweh speaking to Adonai.

Who is this Adonai then?

Is it a human Adonai?

Is it someone else?

Whoever he is, you see in verse one, David says he is my Lord, my Adonai.

So Yahweh is speaking to this Lord, David's Lord.

And as the psalm moves forward, we see that David's Lord is a messianic figure.

He's a conquering king.

But verse six says he will crush leaders over the entire world.

That's an incredibly expansive reign, more than what David himself had.

He's also, he's not only a king, he's a priest.

In verse 4, you see that.

How could Yahweh, the one true God, how could he declare anyone to be both a king and a priest?

That didn't happen in the Old Testament in merely human categories.

Priests and kings were two separate offices with different people.

So David is writing about God, Yahweh's words and declaration to a future Messiah.

And the Pharisees had read Psalm 110, but they hadn't grasped the true significance of all that was going on in Psalm 110.

And Jesus is trying to bring that out and expose that.

They hadn't received the Savior as he was intended to be completely.

They saw him as David's son, but this other aspect they were missing.

So turn back to Matthew 22, that's just a very brief look at Psalm 110.

It's a glorious Psalm.

As you're turning back to Matthew 22, just bear in mind Psalm 110 is a song.

That's what the Psalms are.

It's a glorious portrait of the Messiah.

One of the ways that we drive home great theology about the fullness of Messiah and his work is through singing.

We want to sing songs like this psalm that are just rich with the truth of Jesus Christ.

We teach one another through songs.

There is.

Some of the psalms are more simple and shorter, but we should also crave songs that are robust and give a fuller vision of the person and work of Jesus Christ.

If we just constantly sing I love you, Lord, and I'm not criticizing I love you, Lord, it's a nice song.

Happy to sing it.

It's a beautiful song.

But if nine out of 10 of our songs are just I love you, Lord songs, we're missing an opportunity to teach.

I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice to worship you.

Great.

What does it tell us about the Lord?

It says He's the King.

That's wonderful.

That's true.

Well, the Pharisees also thought of Christ as a king, but they were missing the fullness of all that he was as king.

Think about another song we sing, Jesus Messiah, and how that begins.

He became sin who knew no sin, that we might become his righteousness.

He humbled himself and carried the cross.

Jesus Messiah, and goes on to say, Blessed Redeemer, Emmanuel.

You hear that's expanding our vision of what the Messiah accomplishes and who he is.

He's Emmanuel, he's God with us.

Or another song that we sing, Ferris Lord Jesus, it says in those, in that song, beautiful Savior, Lord of the nations, Son of God, and Son of Man.

So he's the Lord, he's king, but he's king not just of us, he's king of all nations.

And he's not just a son of God, he's a son of man.

He's both of those things together.

So we're expanding our our understanding of who Christ is, and we got more fuel to praise him and to worship him.

Okay, theological advertisement for songs over.

Back in Matthew 22.

So we've seen in one in Psalm 110, David does indeed call this future Messiah his Lord.

And that's the conundrum that Jesus poses.

How could David, great king and patriarch that he was, how could he ever speak of one of his descendants as his authority, as his boss, as his lord?

And they don't answer him.

How would you answer that question?

Wow, David was pretty progressive for his time.

No, that's not the answer.

If you go away from this passage thinking, isn't it great that we live in a world where it's okay sometimes for the sun to be the boss?

No, that's not the point here.

The point is that David, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, recognized that his future descendant was more than just merely a man.

He was more than just a son, a human descendant.

He was a Lord from heaven, a Lord of glory.

He was God Himself come down to humanity.

A merely human son couldn't be the true Messiah we need, because a merely human son can't be the Savior.

We're, as humanity, we're we're plagued with sinfulness, each and every one of us.

So we need a true human as our Messiah, yes.

But we need someone who's more than that.

We need the eternal God to rescue us.

And Psalm 10 gives us this majestic insight into the counsel of the divine Father and the Divine Son to bring about eternal salvation.

Christ has come to live a perfect life.

Only the Lord from heaven could do that.

Christ, the Messiah, came to offer an infinite sacrifice.

Only the infinite God of gods could lend an infinite quality to the sacrifice for sins.

And I suspect that one of the reasons that Jesus quoted Psalm 110 is that they might be poked and prodded and induced to consider Psalm 110 again.

And as I pointed out from Psalm 110, it speaks of the Messiah not only as king who's going to crush the enemies, but as a priest.

And as the messianic priest, Christ brings forgiveness from sin.

That's the true and great deliverance that we need.

The Pharisees had a part of the picture, but they were viewing Messiah through the lens of, like David, an earthly kingdom with earthly political priorities and get the Romans off of our back.

And they missed their fundamental need, their greatest need, not just for human deliverance from another empire, but forgiveness for the bondage of sin in their own hearts.

The Messiah is indeed David's son, but he is not merely David's son.

That's why when Christ is baptized, the Father's voice from heaven rings out, This is my beloved son.

At the transfiguration, when the curtain is pulled back and they see the glory of Christ resplendent and revealed, the voice from heaven again cries out and identifies, This is my beloved son.

Not only David's son, but the son of God.

Philip Brooks says that we find in Jesus Christ something astonishing and beautiful.

We find both the condescension of divinity and the exaltation of humanity all in one person.

That's how glorious he is.

And sadly for the Pharisees, their problem was not primarily an intellectual problem, but a moral problem.

They didn't want to receive the Savior.

It wasn't merely that they didn't understand all these things from the Old Testament.

When he's presented right before them, as Matthew has been presenting him already in this, they had that opportunity to hear him teach, to see his miracles.

They had an opportunity right there to see the Messiah, to understand and know he is the Lord from heaven, and they didn't grab hold of it.

We're going to see in the next chapter in Matthew 23 that Jesus is testing them here, and he's going to go on in Matthew 23 to speak very harsh words about the Pharisees, very confrontational words, and he doesn't accuse them of having an IQ problem.

He accuses them of having a heart problem.

What about us?

When we think about the Messiah, do we have only a partial view of Messiah?

Do we want a kind of Messiah that that fulfills certain needs we think we have, or are we ready to embrace all that he is as true Son of God and man?

Sadly, both Pastor Doug and I have books in our libraries of people that, in some sense, have read scripture carefully, but for some of those people, they haven't actually received the Savior.

They can offer profound insight into the Jewish culture and background of the Bible and Hebrew and Greek, but they haven't actually embraced Christ as the true God from heaven who is their Messiah.

And that's the important invitation for all of us today.

What will you do with him?

He's been exalted to God's right hand, Matthew tells us, and he's reigning until he puts all enemies under his feet.

The last enemy to be destroyed is death itself.

Are you afraid of death?

There should be a healthy kind of recognition that we're temporal people.

We can be as healthy as we want, but we're not going to live to be 150 or 200 years old.

We're going to die.

And then what's going to happen?

Fear of death is in some ways a good thing, but Christ gives us hope.

When we fast forward to the end of the story in the Gospel of Matthew, we see him risen and we see him speaking to his disciples.

We look into the book of Acts, we find Peter, when he preaches, he also quotes this same idea of Christ being resurrected, conquering death, being exalted to God's right hand.

And Peter says, Christ himself is pouring out the Holy Spirit.

He's pouring out the Spirit who brings conviction and transformation and heart change.

Even again, some of those things that Bana talked about last week that we desperately need a heart change to be able to recognize the Messiah.

Christ as the ruler is pouring that out.

He has poured that out.

He will pour that out.

And what that means also, when we grasp hold of God's true Messiah, He's not merely the Messiah for our own lives, although we must submit to Him as Lord, we must embrace and enjoy God.

He's the one that's right now reigning over all nations.

And so when we pray for people like the Kunis, we're not just praying for them and their strength, we're praying that the risen Christ would be at work through their word and testimony and work that people might see and hear, ah, true son of David, true son of God, true, true, perfect human man, true Lord from heaven.

That's what we want and desire.

That's what Christ is at.

That's what our heart should be excited about, the expansion of the gospel, not just from this church, but into our community, to Jerusalem, to Judea, to the very ends of the earth.

Read Scripture carefully.

Receive the Savior completely.

That's how we grab hold of God's true Messiah.

In conclusion today, I want us to think for a moment about the example of Mary.

So here's the earthly mother of Jesus, who also had the wisdom to know to call her son Lord.

Here's a woman not educated in the way some of the Pharisees would have been educated, not of great significance in the world's eyes.

She and Joseph stayed in a lowly place, not well off to have the most luxurious accommodations for that birth.

But she was someone who clearly read scripture carefully, perhaps had just heard it and remembered it and meditated on it day and night.

If you look at her prayer, you don't have to turn there, but Luke chapter 1 offers us her prayer.

Luke 1 · chapter mention

And her prayer is full of language from the Old Testament, resonance there.

She speaks of God fulfilling his word and his promise to Abraham.

So she's someone who's who's reading scripture carefully, and she's in a position to receive the Messiah who happens to be her very son.

And she says this my soul magnifies the Lord.

My spirit rejoices in God, my Savior.

There's a robust recognition that her true Son is yet the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings.

He is God the Savior.

And may we, like Mary, read scripture carefully and receive the Savior completely.

Let's pray.

Lord, we have this longing to know the Son.

We have this desire and awaken in us not just an occasional thought, but the regular reality of how much we need a Messiah, not ourselves as Messiah, but your Messiah.

We praise you that Christ has come to fulfill all the scripture.

He has come to meet every true, real need that we have.

So we we long to believe him more.

We long to share his fame with others, even amidst opposition, even against enemies that would mock the cross of Christ.

Yet we persevere through the testimony of who he is, through his work in our lives.

Oh Lord, give us a hunger to love Scripture, to know it intimately, to want to consider it carefully, slowly, to read it thoughtfully.

Lord, please keep us from the temptation to receive a half savior, to receive a savior who merely is in our minds affirming our identity or our culture or our whatever we could fill in the blank, but that we in turn would radically change our lives, that we would receive all of Christ for all that he is, ready to submit to him in every way, acknowledging that his yoke is easy, his burden is light.

He is a tender and gentle Savior.

He doesn't break a bruised reed or quench a smoking flax, but he does send out judgment to victory.

So we're praying even now that you'd be sending out judgment and victory into places in the world like Indonesia, places in the world like Central Asia.

Oh Lord, we're longing to see this reign of Christ expand, that others might see and embrace your Messiah.

So please accomplish this purpose, we pray, for your own glory's sake.

Amen.