On Whose Authority

The scripture reading this morning is found in the Gospel of Luke.

Luke 20:1–8

Chapter 20, verses 1 through 8.

I'm actually going to start a little bit earlier from verse 45 of chapter 19.

But you should find that if you don't have a Bible of your own in the Pew Bible, that should be on the shelf right in front of you on page 879.

Page 879.

If you don't have a Bible, again, there should be one located there.

And if you don't own a Bible or you don't have ready access to one, please take that Bible with you.

We'll replace it for next week.

We would love for you to have it and to keep it as your own.

Going to begin in verse 45 of chapter 19 and read through verse 8 of chapter 20.

As he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them, It is written, My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers.

And he was teaching daily in the temple.

The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him.

But they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words.

One day, as Jesus was teaching the people in the temple and preaching the gospel, the chief priests and the scribes with the elders came up and said to him, Tell us, by what authority you do these things, or who is it that gave you this authority?

He answered them.

Now tell me, was the baptism of John from heaven or from man?

And they discussed it with one another, saying, If we say from heaven, he will say, Why did you not believe him?

But if we say from man, all the people will stone us to death, for they are convinced that John was a prophet.

So they answered that they did not know where it came from.

And Jesus said to them, Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.

Have you ever talked to somebody and they just don't listen?

That it's like you're not even there.

Now, all of you wives are nodding your heads right now.

I don't know why.

And if you have children, you know what I mean.

Not my children, but everyone else's children.

You talk and it's like you're not even there.

You're speaking and they're not even hearing.

You wonder if you're invisible, if you've lost your voice, if you're going crazy.

You just you talk and you speak and and it falls on deaf ears.

Sometimes it's out of inattention, just not paying attention.

And sometimes it's willfully ignoring what is being said, what is being spoken to you.

That's not only true in the physical realm, it's true in the spiritual realm as well.

What is God trying to say to you?

What is God trying to get your attention in, and you're just not listening?

Maybe you are so distracted or so focused on something else you don't even hear it.

But maybe you know God is speaking to you and you are just willfully choosing not to listen, not to hear, not to respond.

Is God trying to get your attention?

What will it take for you to hear Him?

When you're confronted about areas in your life, do you see it as an opportunity to grow in your relationship with God, to grow in your walk with Christ, to grow and becoming more like Christ and to have some of those rough edges, some of those sinful tendencies confronted and addressed?

Or do you try to find fault with the person correcting you or find a reason why you don't have to listen?

By nature, we want things our own way.

We want to be in control, we want to be independent.

The technical term for that is autonomy.

We want our independence, we don't want to be told what to do, we don't want to be under the authority and the control of others, we want to be autonomous.

And our in our sinfulness, we even want to be autonomous from God.

We don't want God or anyone else telling us what to do.

Will you hear what God is saying or will you ignore his word?

We see this in this passage here.

We need to recognize that what Jesus is doing, even at these last moments, he is challenging the people to see who he is and to turn to him.

Jesus is asserting his authority as God over his temple, over the house of God.

And he is coming as that prophet, priest, and king to lead his people, to save his people.

And the religious leaders, those who were the most aligned with God in the eyes of others, were the ones that were the most dull and unwilling to hear what God was saying.

And yet there were some we find that were hanging on every one of Jesus' words.

And where are you?

Well, let's take some time.

I want us to go back and look at a few different aspects of what we talked about last week in Jesus cleansing the temple, and then see the application of that in the reaction of the Pharisees, and then ask ourselves, what's the reaction in our own lives?

We saw when Jesus cleansed the temple in verses 45 through 48 in Luke chapter 19, he was asserting his authority.

Luke 19 · chapter mention

The religious leaders got it.

They understood what Jesus was doing, they just rejected it.

Jesus said, This is my father's house.

This is the house of prayer.

My house shall be a house of prayer.

We saw that Jesus fulfilled prophecy intentionally when he, in his triumphal entry, uh fulfilling prophecy and hear.

Clearly revealing to anyone who had ears to hear who he was, that he was the Messiah, he was the Lord of heaven and earth, the Lord of the temple.

And this was both a rebuke to the leaders and a call for reformation.

A call for people to recognize and see where they were and to see where God wanted them to be.

But would they hear?

He says, My house shall be a house of prayer.

And we we looked in depth last time at the passages this came from Isaiah 56, verses 6 and 7.

Isaiah 56:6

And we saw there, let me just read what it says there.

It says, And the foreigner who joins themselves to the Lord to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it, and holds fast my covenant, these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer.

Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar.

For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.

You see, the temple represented something.

It represented several things.

One of the things it was to remind God's people of was that God was for the world, that he had called his people to reach the world.

In fact, when uh when Solomon dedicated the temple, the very thing that he prays for, he says, when a foreigner comes, for they will come from a far country.

They shall hear your great name, they shall come.

The temple was to be a place, a reminder of the mission that God had given them to reach the world.

It was a place of worship, a place of prayer, a place of service, a place of crying out to God.

And it was God's desire, it was God's heart to see people from every tribe and tongue and nation come to him.

That has always been the heart of God.

God's heart is a missionary heart for all people.

It's never changed.

That has always been the heart of God.

But did his people hear that?

Did they see that?

Did they understand that?

Did they recognize that?

And the very things they were doing were stopping the nations from coming.

They had set up all of the tables and all of the money changers and the court of the Gentiles, the place that had been set aside for the Gentiles to come and worship God.

By their inattention, by their callousness, by their hardness of heart, and a variety of other reasons, the very thing that God wanted for them, not only were they ignoring, but they were positively challenging it.

By putting all of these things in the way of people coming to worship God.

The second quote is from Jeremiah, chapter 7, verse 11.

Jeremiah 7:11

Let me read it again.

Has this house which is called by my name become a den of robbers in your eyes?

Behold, I myself have seen it, declares the Lord.

This famous sermon by Jeremiah, one of two that he gives in the temple, calling God's people to repentance, to recognize the sin and the hypocrisy in their lives, and to come back to the living God in true worship.

Earlier in that passage in chapter 7 of Jeremiah, he says, For if you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you truly execute justice one to another, if you do not oppress the sojourn or the fatherless or the widow, or shed innocent blood in the place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own harm, then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I give you of old, to your fathers forever.

The temple was to remind them of their call to show justice, to show mercy, to show compassion, to demonstrate the heart of God to those who were most in need.

To not oppress people, to not hold them down and hold them back, but rather to care for the fatherless and the widow and the orphan.

To see the privileged position that they were in and to see that as a call to help those around them for the sake of the glory of God.

That was their mission.

Every time they came to the temple, they should have been reminded of what God was calling them to do.

But they were doing the very opposite.

They were stealing and murdering and committing adultery and swearing falsely and worshiping false gods.

And Jeremiah says, Then come, they come and stand before me in this house which is called by my name to say, We are delivered, only to go and do these abominations.

You see, they thought if they had a veneer of religion, it didn't matter what was underneath.

It didn't matter what was in their hearts as long as they looked good on the outside and they followed the prescribed patterns that were expected of them.

And that was what was happening in the very place where God had called them to remember his presence and his purpose.

The temple was to be the very presence of God manifested on earth, a reminder that God is with them.

It was to show the power of God, the purpose of God for them as his people.

And we see in Jesus' day, what are they doing?

These money changers are exchanging money, pennies on the dollar.

They're selling sacrifices, and what are they doing?

They're charging exorbitant rates for these sacrifices because they knew they had the people where they could take advantage of them, and so they did.

Instead of showing justice, instead of showing mercy, instead of showing compassion, the very people that God was telling them to demonstrate the gospel to, they were taking advantage of.

They were robbing.

The poorest of the poor, the people who would have been the most vulnerable.

Those who were who were sojourning here for this time of worship during the Passover, who were who were uh couldn't have brought their own animals oftentimes or or didn't want to, and they would purchase them there.

Oftentimes, people who were uh the poorest of the poor.

I told you that the that the doves were were sold for fifteen times what they were sold for outside of this area.

What should God's house be about?

What should the temple be about?

What should God's people be about and be reminded of?

Jesus is telling them prayer.

Prayer, but prayer that that remembers that God is for the nations.

How many of us here are Jewish?

Just out of curiosity.

Jewish blood few, maybe?

We're all Gentiles.

Most of us here are Gentiles.

Most of us here are the very people that God was telling them to reach, and they weren't.

We are the product of the missionary efforts of the people who have gone before us, and God calls us to be the missionaries to this generation.

And God was calling his people to be people of prayer, but prayer to remember evangelism to reach the nations.

The temple was to be a place of learning, of growing in grace and knowledge, of learning about God and his purposes, of learning about God and his holiness and his call for us to be holy as he is holy, and to go to the temple and to offer sacrifices and to remember the sacrifice, to remind them of their sin and their need for atonement, to remind themselves of how much they needed sacrifice, how much they needed forgiveness, and that that forgiveness should be extended to others.

To learn about God and His grace and His goodness and His mercy and His provision for sin.

It was a place of compassionate justice.

To care for the poor and the powerless, to demonstrate the gospel of grace.

God's purposes for his people have not changed.

God's purpose for his people have not changed.

This reflects the missionary heart of God.

God is seeking true worshipers who will worship him in spirit and in truth.

We don't often think of the symbolism of the temple, and how does that apply to us in the New Testament?

How does that apply to us, this side of Calvary?

Now keep in mind what the imagery of the temple was supposed to be, what it was supposed to represent, what it was a type of.

The temple was the house of God.

That's what we see here, that's what we're reminded of.

My house shall be called a house of prayer.

It was to be, in a sense, the house of God, the place where God manifested his presence, where God inhabited the temple in a way that was distinct from how he inhabits the rest of his creation.

So how does the temple imagery come into play for us?

This side of Calvary and this side of Pentecost.

Well, we're reminded in the Bible the imagery of the temple is used in the New Testament.

The imagery is used in the New Testament of Jesus, first of all.

In John's Gospel in chapter 2, verses 19 through 22, it's early in Jesus' ministry, Jesus tells them, in fact, Jesus cleansed the temple before.

Early in John's Gospel, Jesus cleansed the temple.

They didn't get it.

They didn't hear what was said at the beginning of Jesus' ministry.

This is the second time Jesus is cleansing the temple.

At that first time in John's Gospel in chapter 2, Jesus says, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.

The Jews said, It has taken 46 years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?

But he was speaking about the temple of his body.

When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the scripture that the word that the word that Jesus had spoken.

In chapter 1, verse 14, of probably a verse most of us know very well, you know, it says, And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten, full of grace and truth.

What we don't really recognize here, it says, When, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

The word there for dwelt among us is a is a Greek word.

Um for those of you that know Greek, the word is skina'o.

Um doesn't mean anything to us.

But what it's translated is tabernacle or tent.

And what it's what John is saying, and the word became flesh and tabernacled or tented among us.

Jesus Christ was the very presence of God.

He is Emmanuel, God with us.

He is the very presence of God.

He has come for the very demonstration of the purpose of God to seek and to save the lost and provide salvation for us.

So the Bible uses the imagery of the temple of God to describe Jesus.

The Bible also uses the imagery of the temple to describe the church.

And I want to show you this in uh 1 Corinthians chapter 3, verses 16 and 17.

1 Corinthians 3:16

So turn there.

I want you to see how this is used in the New Testament.

1 Corinthians chapter 3, beginning in verse 16.

1 Corinthians 3 · chapter mention

And I want to unpack this for a minute.

It says this: it says, Do you not know?

Paul here is speaking to the to the church, to the Corinthian church here, he says, Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?

If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him.

For God's temple is holy, and you are that temple.

Now, one of the things we need to see now in English, we do we don't often distinguish between the you singular and the you plural unless you're from the south, and then you have y'all.

And if it's a big group, you have all y'all.

Um Well, in here, so there's a you singular, you individually, and you plural.

Here it is y'all.

It is you plural.

Collectively, collectively, you are God's temple.

The church collectively is God's temple.

But what do we mean when we use the word church?

And I think sometimes we use that word so uh in so many different contexts, we don't really recognize what the word really means.

The word only has one meaning.

The word for it means assembly or gathering.

God's called out ones.

Um the church is not this building.

Uh we we sometimes we use words we really shouldn't use because I think they're confusing, and but we do, and unless I'm gonna change everybody's, you know, word choices and all the world, it's not gonna help.

But we call this building the church.

This building is not the church.

It's a building.

It's brick and mortar.

This building is just a building.

We call this room the sanctuary.

This isn't a sanctuary, it is a meeting place.

Because this building isn't the church.

You are.

People are the church, not a building.

This we could this building could burn down.

I've said this before, it could burn down, and the church would have would would still exist because the church is not this building.

This is this is a building, this is uh merely a place where God's people meet.

In fact, the Puritans didn't like calling uh the building uh a church because they knew it would confuse people, and people would say, Well, you know, I'm going to church, I'm in church, um, you know, this is the church building, we need to be careful about God's house.

Um, you are God's house.

You are the church.

Uh for 300 years the church didn't have buildings.

They were it was a Christianity was illegal.

They they they met from house to house.

Look in the book of Acts.

They they didn't have buildings because this isn't the church.

You are.

And so so Paul here is reminding us that you are the church.

He says the church is the temple of God, it is the place of God's presence and God's purpose for this world.

Now, if you're in Corinthians, turn to chapter 6 for just a moment.

You remember I said the distinction between you and y'all?

Um, in chapter 6, by the way, that other, you could also look in 1 Peter chapter 2, verses 4 and 5 if you're taking notes.

1 Peter 2:4

1 Peter 2, 4 and 5, the same imagery of you as uh as God's spirit.

In fact, let me read 1 Timothy, as you're turning to 1 Corinthians 6, let me read this other passage.

It says, as you come to him, a living stone, rejected by men, but in the sight of God, chosen and precious, you yourselves, like living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

The presence of God and the purpose of God among his people.

The Old Testament temple represented that.

Now look in 1 Corinthians chapter 6, verses 19 and 20.

1 Corinthians 6:19

He's talking about sexual immorality.

He says, this is why it's so bad, why sexual immorality is so bad.

He says, sexual immorality, every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexual immoral person sins against his own body.

Verse 19, 1 Corinthians 6, 19.

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?

You are not your own, for you have been bought with the price, so glorify God in your body.

He says that you individually are the temple of God.

So you individually are God's temple.

God, the Holy Spirit, the moment that you accepted Christ, the Holy Spirit indwelt you.

God himself is living in you.

You are his place of residence.

You are the temple of God individually, and collectively, as we gather together, we are God's people, and God dwells among his people to reveal his presence and to execute his purpose.

So the temple stood for so much more than just a building.

It pointed forward to Jesus, it pointed forward to the church, it pointed forward to you.

And in this economy, God's purposes have not changed.

In fact, Jesus came back in Luke chapter 20 now.

Luke 20 · chapter mention

Jesus now is doing the very things that the religious leaders ought to have done and weren't doing.

They were false shepherds.

They should have been seeking the lost.

This is what it says in Ezekiel 34.

They should have been seeking the lost.

This is what God indicts the shepherds of not doing: seeking the lost, bringing back the strayed, binding up the injured, and strengthening the weak.

That was the purpose of the shepherds, but they weren't doing that.

They were self-serving shepherds.

No one likes to be rebuked.

No one likes to be corrected.

Jesus' words and actions here seem harsh, but they were a severe mercy.

He was calling his people to repentance.

They could still repent, they could still turn to him.

But what did they do?

We saw the authority of Jesus demonstrated.

Now we see the authority of Jesus challenged.

If you don't like the message, you kill the messenger.

If you don't like what you're hearing, uh you either attack or withdraw.

And one of the ways you withdraw is just by not listening.

You don't have to leave a room to withdraw from another person.

You can just stop listening.

You can go on the attack, you can withdraw.

It's fight or flight.

And we see this is what they were doing.

They couldn't find anything that they could do.

They were impotent, but they were seeking to destroy him.

They had withdrawn from listening to the words of Jesus, and now they're going to attack.

So what do you do when you're confronted?

What do you do?

Well, look at it.

Let's just very briefly and then apply it to our hearts.

What did they do?

Jesus becomes the shepherd that they weren't.

You know, look in verse uh in chapter uh 19, verse 47, and he was teaching daily in the temple.

Here he is teaching daily in the temple, chapter 20, verse 1.

It says, and one day as Jesus was teaching the people in the temple and preaching the gospel, telling the good news of what God is doing and what he is going to do for them, that he is the Lamb of God who is going to take away the sin of the world.

And in chapter 21, verses 37 and 38, at the end of this section of confrontation with the religious leaders, Luke writes, and every day he was teaching in the temple, and at night he went out and lodged on the mount called Olivet.

And early in the morning all the people came to him in the temple to hear him.

Early in the morning, all the people gathered because they wanted to hear the words of Jesus.

And what a contrast.

You have the religious leaders that they are not only ignoring, but they have willfully chosen to reject the words of Jesus.

And then others were hanging, it says at the end of verse 48 of chapter 19, hanging on his words.

Literally, they were hanging on Jesus.

They were listening to and hanging and trusting on Jesus.

So how about you?

How do you respond to the words of Jesus?

How do you respond when God is speaking to you about an area in your heart?

An area in your life that God is calling you to repent and to turn back to Him to find grace and forgiveness.

They weren't concerned about the truth.

They didn't really, even when they asked Jesus this question in chapter 20, they didn't really want the answer.

They were finding a way to trap him because they had already made up their minds.

Their heart was so hardened from continual rejection of Christ, they had made up their minds.

They were only looking for a way to trap him so that they could kill him.

They were angry, they were humiliated, they were threatened, they were challenged, they were insecure, they were offended, and so they wanted to attack and destroy the messenger.

Now we miss the point here in chapter 20 if we think this is saying, well, you guys, you know, the point of this is you just, Jesus was really clever and you need to be clever.

Jesus was the smartest man who ever lived, the most wise man that ever lived.

This isn't about being uh clever.

That's not the point here.

What Jesus asked them is to expose their hearts.

What Jesus is doing is he's going underneath the surface of what's happening and what they're saying, and what he's trying to do is expose their hearts.

He wants them to wrestle with the reality of the true motivation that's moving them forward in asking this question in the first place.

He's trying to get them to see what's really going on.

Why are you asking this?

What are you thinking?

What is moving you beneath the surface?

It was a softball question.

It really was.

I mean, all the people got it.

I mean, this was you know, this was a softball.

I mean, just lobbed underhand.

This is this should have been one that, well, oh, it's from heaven.

That's all they this wasn't a trick question.

It was for them because of the hardness of their hearts.

It was for them because they didn't want to repent and hear the word of God.

But it really wasn't a trick question.

It wasn't meant to stump them.

It was because of where they were that they found this so challenging.

And notice they were concerned about truth.

They didn't say, oh, we need to really think about this.

Who was John?

Let me think about this.

Let's go back and search the scriptures and see what the Old Testament says about the prophecies of the one who's to come before the Messiah.

And did John fulfill those prophecies?

And if he did, then he's a prophet.

Uh then his baptism was from God, it was from heaven.

Or, oh, you know, we've searched the Old Testament and we've seen that John didn't line up with this, and so we've come to the they weren't concerned about truth.

They weren't concerned about really finding out who John was.

Look at the pragmatic thoughts that they have.

And why do they have this?

Because they didn't want to deal with their hearts, they they didn't want to deal with what was going on, and so they had to find an excuse.

They had to try, they're trying to figure out how we can get around this without dealing with our true motivations of our heart.

And so they say this.

They say, well, if from heaven, well then he's gonna say, Well, why didn't you believe me?

They don't want you, now they really don't believe it's from heaven, but they're saying, well, you know, we could lie and say that.

We could just, we could, because this isn't a matter of truth.

It's a matter of pragmatism of just saying what's going to be useful and convenient for this time.

We'll we'll say what we think the people want to hear, but they realize if they say what the people want to hear, and they say, because all the people thought John was from God, if we say that, well then we're then we're trapped because, okay, if we say Jesus is from that John is from God, and John says, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, and John believed that Jesus is the Messiah, and we're testifying that John's a prophet, then we have to accept the testimony of John and recognize that Jesus is the Messiah.

Okay, so we can't go there.

And if we say that he that John's baptism isn't from heaven, they're gonna kill us.

And we don't want that either.

So they're on the horns of a dilemma.

And so they give the only answer that they can give, they they lie.

They don't even say their convictions because, in fact, earlier, uh, earlier in John's, in uh Luke's gospel in chapter uh 7, verses 29 and 30, it says, when all the people heard this, and the tax collectors too, they declared God just, having been baptized with the baptism of John.

This is Luke 7, 29 and 30.

And then it says, But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected the purpose of God for themselves, not having been baptized by him.

They had already rejected John, they just don't want to say it.

So they say, we don't know.

And by saying that, by rejecting the truth, they're left with no answers and no hope.

When we're confronted by truth, we don't want to deal with it.

When we're confronted with things in our lives, when God is speaking to us, when when God is trying to get our attention, our priorities are off, our purposes are off, our focus is off, or maybe there's sin in our lives, and and God and his goodness and grace continually reminds us and brings it up and brings people into our lives, and and and we're dull of hearing, or we willfully reject the word of God, and so we attack the messenger, we disregard the message, maybe we become angry or we come up with excuses, maybe we justify our behavior or we minimize it.

But the fact is, is we don't want to deal with what God is saying, and so we reject.

It hurts to admit your sin and your shortcoming.

Facing truth is humiliating because you have to admit that you're more sinful than you think you are.

It confronts our pride because we we in our minds want to either we think we're at a certain level or we want to portray an image of being at a certain level of spiritual maturity, and when we have to admit our sin, we have to recognize we're not where we think we are, or we're not where we're pretending to be.

God's purposes haven't changed for his people.

God's priorities haven't changed for us.

This side of the cross.

He wants us to be people of prayer, of worship and service, of evangelism, of reaching the nations, of learning, of growing in grace and knowledge, of becoming more conformed to the image of Christ, of our holiness.

He's not concerned about our portfolios and the type of car that's in our driveway, the things that we pursue aren't the priorities of God.

And God in his grace and his mercy continues to woo us and call us and speak to us, but are we listening?

Do we hear the voice of God through his word and through his people?

We want autonomy, we want independence.

Jesus meant to expose their hearts.

Jesus means to expose our hearts so that we can see what's in our hearts, so that we can come to him and repent in faith, of recognizing our sin, of calling it for what it is, of turning away from it, of coming for cleansing, coming for restoration, coming to rest in the gospel, coming to rejoice in our salvation and to move out in the purposes that he has for us, for the priorities that he has for us.

But are we listening?

Has God been trying to get your attention?

The Bible says God is a jealous God.

He he, as one author said years ago, he will brook no rivals.

You are his, you have been bought with the price.

We, as God's people, are his.

We are the dwelling place of God for the purpose of God in this world.

You are his property, you are his temple.

How will you respond?

Will you respond in defensiveness?

Will you respond in anger?

Will you respond by ignoring God?

Will you respond by willfully rejecting the very things that God is saying to you?

God is speaking to each one of us every day.

Are you listening?

Let's pray.

Father God, as we wrestle with your word, as your word wrestles with our hearts, it goes beneath the surface of how we look and how we act and how we appear, to what really is in our hearts, what motivates us and moves us and drives us.

And Father, you tell us to guard our hearts above all else, that we should protect nothing more than our hearts.

We should be more concerned about our hearts than our paychecks.

We should be more concerned about our hearts than our families and our children and our friends and our future.

You tell us to guard our hearts above all else, for from them flow uh the issues of life, the wellsprings of life.

Everything comes out of our hearts.

And you're trying to speak to us.

Lord, give us ears to hear, give us eyes to see.

Soften our hearts, Lord, that we may listen and turn to you.

We pray in Christ's name.

Amen.