Matthew 22:34-40 | "A Treacherous Interrogation Part 3"

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

You take your Bible with me and turn to Matthew 22.

Matthew 22.

We've been working our way through Matthew's gospel for quite some time.

It's my intent to get through Matthew this year, although some doubt my capability to do that.

We're going to try.

But we are in Matthew 22 this morning, in the third of three successive questioning elements, challenging elements, traps, if you will, that the Lord Jesus is presented with.

However, we might rank them, three Bible passages are among the top three or four or five most well-known passages in the Bible.

First, we would have to include John 3.16 in that list, right?

Even if somebody doesn't know what the verse says, they at least have seen the reference on television at a sporting event.

The largely misunderstood and misapplied Matthew 7, verse 1 would probably be on that list.

Matthew 7:1

Judge not lest you be judged.

We might also include our section for this morning among the top three, four, or five passages that are most well known.

For here, Jesus tells us the most important of all of God's commands.

Commands about loving God and loving our neighbors.

Would you look with me at Matthew 22, beginning in verse 34?

I'll read through verse 40 if you'd like to follow along.

But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together.

And one of them, a lawyer, asked a question to test Jesus.

Teacher, which is the greatest commandment of the law?

And he said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

This is the great and first commandment.

And the second is like it.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

Amen.

This is the third challenge Jesus has faced in this chapter.

The first, beginning in verse 15, was about attacks.

The second in verse 23 and following was about the resurrection and marriage.

And now in verse 34, we have this question about the commandments from God's word.

These challenges come in the form of treacherous questions.

They're treacherous because they are intended as traps.

And in this last week of Jesus' life, the week of the crucifixion, the Jewish leaders are planning to find a way to eliminate Jesus.

The first attempt at trapping Jesus failed.

The second attempt failed.

And now there is a final attempt to catch Jesus in his words.

First, the Pharisees sent their disciples with what we might say is an unlikely ally, the Herodians.

Then when that failed, the Sadducees tried to trick Jesus, and now, in a final effort, the religiously serious Pharisees gather together as an intimidating group to ask Jesus a trick question.

But this isn't the last question.

Because Jesus will ask the last question in the next section.

That question from Jesus is a question about faith, which the religious leaders lack.

Now, our passage this morning, verse 34 through 40, we might say that a common expectation among churchgoers would be a sermon about love, about loving God and loving others, and maybe the practical ways that we should love God and how we should express our love for our neighbors.

And that's not an inappropriate expectation, but if that's your expectation, I'm sorry to disappoint you.

Well, no, no, not really.

I'm going to swim upstream against the current this morning.

We're going to touch on those elements about loving God and loving our neighbor.

But I want us to focus our attention differently.

Because this is such a familiar passage to us.

At least the commandments are familiar to us, and Jesus' statement about the commandments, this is the greatest, and the next one is like it.

Since those are so familiar to us, I want us to focus our attention differently by noticing aspects of this section that are often overlooked.

And my reason for this approach is that we neglect Matthew's inspired intent for including this section out of a desire to hear Jesus' words on love.

And Matthew's intention gives a distinctly different color to Jesus' comments about love.

I'd suggest to you that we often miss at least four identifiable elements when we go straight to the commandments about love.

First, we often miss that this section is not about us.

And love.

It's about the Jewish religious experts.

Jesus is not speaking to us, he's addressing a group of people sent to trick him, to trap him.

Now there is an application for us in these love commands, and we'll see that in a little bit.

But this is a question first about Jewish law expressed and established in the Torah, those first five books of your Bible.

And we can observe this through a particular distinction that Matthew makes.

The Pharisees, we're told, are gathered together, apparently in an intimidating kind of factor, gathered together as a group to confront Jesus about a question of the law and in order to trap him.

But only one of them asked a question.

And that person is identified as a lawyer.

Matthew recorded it, though, as a play on words.

In the Greek language in which Matthew wrote, lawyer is the word namikos.

And a little bit later in the next verse, we see the word for law, which is namas.

So you can see this is a play on words.

Matthew is intending to highlight this is a namikos who's coming and asking a question about the namas.

Now, if you're not a namikos, would you know about the namas?

If you're not a lawyer, do you know all of the law code of our county?

If you're not a law lawyer, do you know constitutional law?

So you can see how this is a trap.

And Matthew's highlighting that fact.

Here's a group of experts, and in particular, an expert among the experts, asking Jesus a question about his area of expertise.

So when we combine these elements about questions of the law and experts, we understand better what's going on here.

This isn't a desire to know God's word.

The lawyer and the Pharisees are not coming to Jesus asking to be taught, to be instructed, to be encouraged.

Because they already know it.

This isn't a desire to understand better the law of God or even to know the lawgiver.

Instead, it's a desire to humiliate Jesus.

This is a challenge from the know-it-alls to the upstart teacher.

These seriously religious people think that they have all the knowledge of the law that they need.

They believe they possess all the training, all the expertise, and all of the understanding of God's word that they need.

They are the challengers and Jesus is the uneducated.

They are the experts and Jesus is the upstart rabbi.

You know, anytime you see someone addressing Jesus as teacher in the Gospel of Matthew, you know it's not genuine.

It's not genuine.

They're not interested in believing in Jesus.

That means that the direction of Jesus' answer is not towards you.

It's not towards me.

It's not towards us as his church.

The direction of Jesus' answer is at them.

It's at the challengers, specifically at the lawyer, asking him a trick question.

So Jesus is not directing these commandments about love to us.

He's directing these commands at the lawyer and his collection of religious experts.

Jesus.

Jesus' return challenge is a confrontation of their arrogance.

I could illustrate the intensity here in this confrontation.

With a controversial example from our own times.

We've experienced life in a pandemic for the last three years or so.

Throughout the course of those years, various claims have been made by experts.

We've heard claims about the effectiveness of treatment, of isolation, of masks, of vaccines, among other kinds of things.

These claims come with a sense of authority, of power, even, and command, because they come from experts.

Now when we hear those those statements made by someone claiming to be an expert, whether they are or not, we all receive that differently, don't we?

We feel something.

We either feel, yeah, yeah, that's that's what we need to do, and I need to get behind that, or we we feel, who are you to tell me what to do?

Who made you an expert?

We feel that, don't we?

That's some of what's going on here.

It's that kind of feel.

The Pharisees and the lawyer are coming as the experts.

And there's this underlying assumption, we know.

Jesus, you're a teacher, but you don't you don't know.

You don't know what's going on.

In their minds, Jesus is the upstart teacher who ought to step down, listen to them, and obey their authority.

But in the end, they are the ones who who step down when Jesus speaks.

And you know, I can't help but think that there is some application for us there.

If if we are willing to hear it humbly, we we evangelical Christians can get so so hard-headed and yeah, even arrogant about our convictions.

Oh boy, now I'm stepping on toes, aren't I?

It got quiet all of a sudden.

It's true.

The longer we walk with Christ and the longer we sit under accurate biblical instruction and preaching, and the more we we learn and understand who God is and we know his word, the more we act like experts who don't have anything more to learn.

We have scripture all figured out, don't we?

From beginning to end.

And all the way in between.

Even the parts that God intentionally omitted, we know those too.

I'm not suggesting, friends, that we can't be dogmatic about certain things.

I'm not suggesting that we can't hold convictions and hold them strongly.

We ought to know what we believe and we ought to know why we believe it.

We ought to be able to open our Bibles and to walk somebody through what we believe and why God says something and why we should stand firm upon it.

We ought to.

What I'm saying is that we are called disciples for a reason.

Disciples are learners.

That's what the word means.

Disciples are students of the master.

Who's the master?

Not me.

Not your elders.

There's only one chief shepherd.

That's the Lord Jesus.

And if we are learners, if we are students and we never lose that title, then we have no place to be arrogant.

We have no reason to act as experts in the law, as experts who know it all.

Learners are continual students, and that factors into our love for God, who knows that we have much to learn.

Even the 12 disciples thought they were ready for life without Jesus after three mere years.

Factors into our love for our neighbor and how we treat them.

How we speak to them.

Do we speak to our neighbors arrogantly as though we have all of the answers?

Friends, we don't.

But we can point them to the one who does.

Again, it doesn't mean we can't have convictions and have answers and know the path to take.

Disciples have no place to say, why do I need to hear that preached on again?

I've heard that so many times, I know it all.

Not that I've ever heard that before.

There's always more to learn, friends.

Learners, learners have no place to fight arrogantly, to resist arrogantly the Lord's providence in how he teaches us and in what he teaches us.

And so we display our love for God by submitting to his lesson plan.

We ought never to say, I've learned all I need to learn.

You know, we can even be arrogant.

We can be even be experts like this lawyer in the things that we're against.

Remember how adamantly the Pharisees were against Jesus' disciples picking and eating grain on the Sabbath?

Now, in that situation, they didn't understand that the Lord of the Sabbath was right there in their midst, did they?

Sometimes in the things that we're against, we don't understand all of the circumstances.

We don't understand all of the situations.

Maybe we aren't there and we can't see things like God sees them.

I'm gonna step out on thin ice here for a minute.

There is currently what is called a revival going on at Asbury University.

Maybe you've heard about it.

What are we to think about that?

Depending on who you listen to and who you who you talk to, and maybe who you follow on social media, you'll get all excited about it.

And you'll be all in favor of it and say, yes, God's moving.

Let's pray for that, let's champion that.

Then you then you'll find others who say, no, absolutely not.

Because there's there's no evidence of of confession of sin and of repentance and of people coming to Christ, and and there's there's no evidence that this is a revival like we see in the days of Jonah.

What do we do with that?

Can we have convictions?

Yes.

Should we be able to open our Bibles and to be able to walk through it and say this is what a biblical revival looks like?

Yes.

But do we know all of the ways in which God works?

No.

Might I be uncomfortable saying that God might be working there?

Yeah.

Can we say that by by its fruit we will know it?

Yeah.

Well, that means we have to be humbly patient, doesn't it?

It means we have to kind of wait and see and pray.

Yeah, Lord, do what you're gonna do, do what's right.

But our nature is to be like the legal expert, isn't it?

Our nature is to jump into the middle of the fray and express that we know exactly what's going on.

Thanks for not walking out yet.

Notice I said yet.

Disciples, disciple learners.

Uh they they have no place to arrogantly assume that our our Western Christianity is the only way to follow Jesus.

Learners have no right to assert that we know the correct way to love our neighbor and that that's the only way, and that other methods are faulty.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't hold a conviction about which way is better.

But if we're going to hold convictions and if we're going to think that we are experts, we better at the very least do that with humility and gentleness.

Because the teacher might come along and say, um appreciate your genuineness, but you're wrong.

Second thing we miss about this section is that it is about the understanding of scripture.

We get now that a legal expert challenged Jesus regarding Jewish law, but but we need to remember that the Jewish law is in your Bible.

You've probably read it.

Jesus, which is the greatest commandment?

Teacher, which is the which is the greatest commandment in in the law?

That's like asking, what's the single most important verse in your Bible?

Um, yes.

But the question is a little more nuanced than that.

Remember, this is a trap set by the Pharisees and their perceived expertise in the Bible.

And we don't have all of the answers that we'd like to have, and we don't have a definitive timeline, but somewhere along the way, the the teachers of Israel started writing down the commands of God in the law.

And they started making a list of all of the things that were commandments.

And while there's some disagreement and some dispute even amongst the teachers, then they've kind of concluded there are there are 613 commandments.

Wait a minute, I thought there were only 10.

Yes.

As you go through from Genesis 1 to the end of Deuteronomy, and you write all of the things, write down all of the things that God said, this is what you must do, they concluded there are 613 of them.

They're called the 613 mitzvot, or the commandments that are found in the law of Moses.

And that's that's a lot.

And I've tried to figure out a way to demonstrate how many there were and are.

They're all in your Bible.

There are references to each of them.

And the only idea that I could imagine was making a scroll.

I'm thankful for my staff that helped me.

Get this all figured out.

So I printed out these 613 commandments.

No, I did not write them by hand.

Not that patient.

I have a scroll with the 613 commandments in typed script.

About 11-point font.

Kyle, would you come up and help me, please?

I need an assistant here, and you'll see why.

As we unroll the scroll, you'll see, just from the way we do things today, what these 613 commandments amount to.

This is in your Bible, folks.

That's upside down.

Oops.

Just know it's upside down.

That's what happens when you unroll it backwards.

That's in your Bible.

Now, over time, what happened is they didn't just make this list, they started categorizing these 613 and putting them in categories of rules, of commandments.

So the simplest way was 248, make sure I get this right, 248 positive commands and 365 negative commands.

That's kind of how it started, the positive things and the negative things.

But then, thank you, Kyle, as time went on, you don't have to roll it up, that's okay.

As time went on, they started working a little bit harder and saying, well, there's other ways that we can categorize it.

So there are some that are specifically about faith, about believing God.

There are others about idolatry, there are others about morality, about acts of violence, even about business activities, how you should function in the business world, about ritual law, about temp the temple sacrifices.

Boy, it's so long I'm even stepping on it.

613, folks.

Now this is important because Matthew records the lawyer using a specific word that refers to the kind of law.

He's not asking which is the greatest commandment.

He's thinking about their categorizations.

We don't know which categories they're referencing, but Matthew uses a word that says, Jesus, which is the which is the greatest kind of law.

That's like asking us, which is more important?

The gospels or the pastoral epistles?

Which is more important?

The commandments about worship or the commandments about reading your Bible?

Do you kind of get what I mean?

They're asking Jesus, Jesus, set apart for us which is the most important kinds of commands that we are to follow.

And that's a trick question.

Because they didn't necessarily believe that there was one category that was greater than another because all of God's rules were important.

And you know, we we are always better off realizing sooner rather than later that you cannot trick God.

You can't do that.

And so Jesus replies, yeah, I'm not going to be tricked by this.

He replies by pointing out that the law is intended to be internalized, to be put inside of you.

It's not merely meant to be an external set of rules to be followed as though some are more important than others.

It's designed to change the heart, and as the heart is changed through faith in the God of the law, it begins to love God and to express itself in love for neighbor.

That's what the Apostle Paul argues for in Romans chapter 13.

Romans 13 · chapter mention

I wish we had time this morning to look at that.

The Apostle Paul deals with this very same issue for the Roman church.

And he says, love fulfills the law.

But let's not miss the point.

These experts in the law were wrapped up in determining how they could check off the boxes of their religious obedience chart.

And in so doing, they missed the point of Scripture.

They were so distracted by their expertise in the law code that they missed the intent of God's word.

It's not that the rules, the commandments are unimportant.

They are.

They're in your Bible, friends.

They were given by the divine lawgiver, and they're repeated positively in the New Testament.

The issue is that good religious intentions often become so focused on one element that the broader intent is missed.

They missed the forest by studying the individual trees and getting so focused on trees, they missed the forest.

So Jesus says near the end in verse 40, on these two commandments, all the law depends.

It's a word that means hangs or dangles.

So this scroll now dangles from this tube.

So Jesus says that the commandment to love the Lord your God and to love your neighbor, all the other 600 and some laws, they dangle down from these two.

So he doesn't dismiss the laws.

He says, you can summarize all of those laws.

You can describe them all, and you can fulfill them all.

If you just love your God and love your neighbor.

Do we have to follow all those rules?

Are all those laws important for the church?

We're in the new covenant, not in the old covenant.

Let me ask you a question.

Are you to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind?

Are you to love your neighbor as yourself?

If you do that, then you're keeping all those commandments.

Next time you read your Old Testament, think about the fact that Jesus says everything then there dangles from loving the Lord your God and loving your neighbor.

So the Lord's answer to the question is not that one kind of commandment is more significant than another, it's that they're all significant, and the way to honor them all is to love God with all of your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor.

But there's a third thing that we often miss, and that is that Jesus is aiming here for conviction.

He's aiming for conviction because following even those two commandments is impossible.

I don't know about you, but it is a relief to me to know that all I have to do is follow two commandments.

This?

Yeah, no thanks.

Give me two.

Give me two.

I can handle that.

That kind of thinking, though, is frighteningly common.

And it generally takes one of two forms.

One common form is social religion, where we focus on the second commandment.

We have the first commandment down.

We love God, but we really need to work on loving our neighbors.

And so social religion has a righteous intent to love our neighbors in practical ways, to carry out that command.

But the outward expression of that love for others belies the belief that social love of neighbor is all that I need to sort of top off my religion.

The reality is that social religion alone fails at loving God.

Second common form, don't worry, I'm not done stepping on all of your toes yet, and try to get everybody.

The second form.

One form it takes is social religion.

The second form that it often takes is fundamentalism.

A fundamentalism which fails to consider one's neighbor appropriately.

Told you I'd get you all.

Oh, we love God.

Boy, do we love God.

Let me show you the ways we love God.

The fundamentalism that ignores the neighbor is a serious but pharisaical faith.

Now let's assume for a moment, let's assume for a moment that we can divide our attention between loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourselves.

Let's assume that we can do this.

But even if we can do that, we still have a problem.

And our problem is in the expansiveness of these two commands.

First, consider the as yourself.

As yourself.

Jesus assumes that we love ourselves.

He assumes that we will do everything we can to care for ourselves, to pamper ourselves, to provide for ourselves, to give ourselves the very best advantage in life, to make sure that we've set ourselves up for success.

He assumes we are going to do that.

That's the common nature of human beings.

So to fulfill the law of Moses and the prophets, we must do the same for others.

For our neighbor.

Okay.

I might be able to do that.

But then we start to think about well, who is my neighbor?

You've heard this before, haven't you?

Our neighbor is anyone we come in contact with through the course of our days that needs assistance, that needs help, aid, comfort, grace, or mercy.

And the way Jesus describes neighbor is most often by the kind of person that we are least likely to want to help.

So all of the things that we do for ourselves, we now need to do for those that we don't like and we don't want to help.

That's loving your neighbor as yourself.

Jesus said to the rich young man, Go and sell all that you have and give to the homeless, and come be homeless with me.

No thanks.

That impacts my comfort.

That Samaritan helped a Jew.

But even a Jewish priest wouldn't help a Samaritan.

Do we love our neighbor?

Maybe we should ask the other way.

Do we fail to love our neighbor?

You better believe it.

We can try to soothe our consciences by giving our time and our money to social causes, but we still fail to love our neighbor.

Well, let's assume for a moment that you can't love your neighbor correctly.

Can you also love the Lord your God with your heart, soul, and mind?

Of course I can, preacher.

I love God deeply.

I love him in the depths of my being, and I love him with my mind after all.

I listen to your sermons.

Thanks for laughing.

But then we realize that Jesus included three other words.

With all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind.

Do we always and with all of our being love the Lord our God?

Do we ever at any moment love something else more than we love God?

I know I do.

Do we ever at any moment consider something or someone else more important than God?

I know I do.

Do I ever use my mind in ways that do not bring glory and honor to God but only serve my own interests?

I know I do.

Let's not forget now that the Lord's declaration is that whoever is guilty of breaking one law is guilty of it all.

Friends, we often miss that Matthew is not championing two laws instead of 613.

Instead, he's using Jesus' interaction with this lawyer to show us that we often argue for our own innocence before God while being consistently guilty of breaking the whole thing.

We are without excuse.

Oh, Pastor, but I love my neighbor.

I love God so deeply.

I'm sure you do, friend.

Sure you do, but sadly, the road to hell is filled with loving people.

God cannot overlook even one instance of failing to love.

Last, we often miss.

This is not about the need to love.

It's about the need for faith in Jesus.

The lawgiver and the law keeper.

Do you remember?

You probably don't.

It's been a long time ago, so I'll refresh your memory.

Do you remember that I said a common expectation among churchgoers about a sermon on this text might be about what it means to love and practical ways to love God and our neighbors, and that's not an inappropriate thing to expect.

But I'm going to go upstream and touch on some other unexpected elements.

And along the way, we'll see what it means to love God.

My reason for this approach is that we neglect Matthew's inspired intent for including this section, this interaction with the Pharisees, out of our desire to hear Jesus' words on love.

But if we're going to hear Jesus' words on love, we need to hear Matthew's intention because that gives us a little bit different flavor.

So I'm not preaching on the great commandment and the one like it this morning.

I could.

We would spend time in Deuteronomy chapter 6 and in Leviticus where those commands are stated.

Deuteronomy 6 · chapter mention

And there would be nothing inappropriate about preaching those commands, but Jesus didn't preach on those commands, and neither did Matthew write on those commands.

Instead, they are answers to a question.

So we must look beyond the immediate appeal of the commandments that we love to hear about if we desire to grasp what Matthew intended his readers to understand.

And when we do that, we find that far too often we are the lawyer.

Because our hearts want to treat the Word of God like an obedience chart.

That we can show to our Father in heaven to say, look at what I've done.

And so be rewarded with entrance into heaven.

But when we hear that God's requirements are perfect love for Him and perfect love for our neighbors, we find ourselves unable to respond because we're without excuse.

And that would be terrible if that was the end of the story.

But it's not.

Jesus responded to his questioner with, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

Interestingly, in Mark chapter 12, verse 32, the questioner responds affirmatively that Jesus is right.

Mark 12:32

And even though he knows Jesus is right, he still misses the point.

You see, when when the when the Greek language began to be the common language of the world, much like English is today, around the time of the conquering of the world at that time by Alexander the Great, Judaism started to have to adjust.

And one of the ways that they adjusted was by starting to use the Greek language in their religious setting instead of Hebrew or Aramaic.

And so they began to use the word Lord or Kyrgios in the place of the name of God, what we often refer to as Yahweh or Jehovah.

So if you go to Deuteronomy chapter 6 and verse 5, the passage that Jesus quotes, you will find the word Lord in all capital letters in your English Bible.

Deuteronomy 6 · chapter mention

That tells you it's the personal name for God.

You shall love the Yahweh your God with all your heart.

Nothing surprising in that.

So when Matthew records the Lord your God, the Jewish experts would nod their head in agreement saying, Yes, you shall love Yahweh your God.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but you're going to have to return next Sunday to get the rest of the story.

But I'll leave you with this.

In the next section, beginning in verse 41, in Jesus' return question, he reveals that he is the Lord.

That we are to love with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind.

Jesus is the Lord God who gave the law to Israel.

Jesus is the lawgiver that the lawyer is to worship.

Jesus is the lawgiver whom the Pharisees are to love with all of their heart, with all of their soul, and all of their mind.

And he is the lawgiver who knows that human beings are utterly incapable of keeping even two commands.

Everyone descended from Adam is without hope in this world.

Because everyone descended from Adam cannot keep even one of the two commands.

That's why the scriptures tell us that Jesus came as a second Adam to give life to all who would believe in him.

Jesus obeyed the law perfectly, as only the lawgiver could do.

So the lawgiver came to be the law keeper.

Sorry guys, I missed my last slide up there.

Jesus knew.

They might give everything in attempting to fulfill the law, but Jesus, as the lawgiver, knew you cannot do it.

And so too, each of us must come to the point where we know and we feel and we sense at the core of our being that we are unable to love rightly.

You cannot do it.

And I stand condemned before the lawgiver.

And then we must cast ourselves at the feet of the law keeper, whose righteous and perfect obedience can and will be applied to our account if we place our faith in him and him alone.

You didn't know that you were singing the sermon when you sang his robes for mine.

Matthew's expectation is that we just stand amazed in the presence of Jesus.

Because of his obedience and his fulfilling of the law, and through his payment for our sins, the guilty, the ones unable to keep even one law are made righteous in the eyes of God.

For the lawgiver fulfills his own law so that through faith, his death cancels my debt by nailing it to the tree.

And then God goes a step further and applies the lawkeeper's obedience to my account.

That's what we often miss.

Let's not miss it today.

Lord Jesus.

Rend our hearts, tear our hearts like you tore the temple curtain.

So that we might be humbled before you and brought to our knees as poor in spirit, needing your life for ours.

And then may we stand in the presence of your glory, not having a righteousness of our own, but the righteousness that comes through faith in Jesus.

So that the Father might look on us and not see our sin, but your perfect obedience instead.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.