"Why They Want To Kill Jesus" - Mark 2:23 - 3:2

Be seated. We've got a Bible. We're going to be in Mark chapter 2 and chapter 3.

Mark 2 · chapter mention

When was the last time somebody made you so mad? You don't have to say it out

loud. You're good, Bo. Thank you. You don't need hands raised.

It's probably me. Don't need him to stare out the dirty laundry in here.

But as we've been seeing through the last, golly, I guess it's five weeks now,

in Mark to this tension between Jesus and the Pharisees has been building.

And we're going to see here in Mark that it builds to the point where we get

this verse in Mark chapter 3.

Mark 3 · chapter mention

Mark 3, 6 says, the Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel with the

Herodians against him, how to destroy him or how to kill him.

And the Herodians were not a religious group, really, they were a political group.

They were allies to the dynasty, if you will, of Herod the Great.

They had vested interests in Herod's interest.

And the Pharisees and the Herodians would never get along.

They, in fact, despised each other. And so what is it that would make the Pharisees

go to the Herodians and say, hey, listen, I know we don't like each other,

but you know what both of us have in common?

We'd really like to see this Jesus guy not exist anymore.

I would say one of the litmus tests for how you're doing spiritually is if you

have to go and ally yourself with some political faction just to get your way,

if that's the only way for you to get what you think God wants,

there's probably an issue, right?

There's a lesson for us there, right? Not that those things don't matter,

but that the Pharisees are going to get to a place by the end of what we're

studying this morning where they're so angry and so mad.

And they hate Jesus so much that they would rather ally themselves with a political

force who generally hates them so that they can get rid of Jesus.

So what is it that Jesus is going to say that's finally going to get them to

say, we need to kill this guy. We need to kill this guy.

We've been saying the last couple of weeks that we need to be careful when we

talk about the Pharisees because we often think of them negatively immediately.

Like the word Pharisee is just associated with negative things,

but that's not how the people of the day would have thought about the Pharisees.

I've used the example that the Pharisees would have been the ones with YouTube

channels and people would have been posting TikToks of them or whatever it is your thing is.

They would have had them on Facebook or MySpace, whatever your preferred social media is.

They would have been in news articles, right? The Pharisees were the religious

elites of the day in many ways.

And what they said out loud held weight.

Jesus even says to the crowd, hey, you need to listen to these religious leaders.

They sit in the seat of Moses.

Don't do what they do, but listen to what they say, because not everybody had a Bible.

Not everybody could go home and upload their Bibles. And so Jesus is understanding,

hey, listen, if you want to hear the word of God, you're going to have to listen

to these guys. They have it.

So we quickly associate them negatively, but that's not the case for most people.

And we would be wise to remember, especially as we near Easter,

that it is not only the Pharisees and the Herodians that yell,

crucify him when Jesus goes to the cross.

In Mark 15, he will tell us, and Pilate again said to them, who's the them?

The them is the crowd, the Pharisees, the crowd, the crowd at large.

He says, what shall I do with the man you call king of the Jews?

And they, the crowd cried out again, crucify him.

So it's not just the Pharisees. Now, the Pharisees are wrangling up this crowd,

but the crowd has their own choice to make.

And they look at Jesus and say, we would rather him be dead and let Barabbas go.

I say all that to say, again, this isn't the only time that someone will want

Jesus dead, but it is the first time.

This is the first group that wants Jesus dead.

At this point, the crowd's a pretty big fan of Jesus. At this point, he's healing people.

He's teaching on the Sabbath. He's forgiving sins. It's all positive things.

As we get deeper in Mark, again, we'll see what makes them hate him.

But in this situation, let's see what the Pharisees are going to say and what it is.

What's the final breaking point for them to say, we've got to kill this guy.

So Mark chapter two, verse 23 says, one Sabbath, he was going through the grain fields.

You have an older translation, it may say corn fields, but I think grain fields

is the proper translation. and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain.

And the Pharisees were saying to him, look what they are doing,

right? Look what they are doing.

It's not lawful on the Sabbath. And Jesus says to them, have you never read

what David did when he was in need and was hungry?

He's gonna quote a story from 1 Samuel 21. He and those who were with him,

how he entered the house of God in the time of Abathar, the high priest,

and ate the bread of the presence.

Which it is not lawful for any but the priest to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him.

And he said to them, The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.

So what is the Sabbath, right? Well, it's not a term that we use a ton.

I think most people know what it is, but it's not a term that we use a lot in churches.

I don't hear a lot of people talk about the Sabbath other than whether you think

you should work or shouldn't work, or there's just debates on,

should we meet on Saturday or meet on Sunday?

I've heard those debates, but it's not a topic we talk about a ton.

So let me just read what the Pharisees had in mind when they heard Sabbath,

right? All right, so this is Exodus 20, 8 through 11.

It says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

Now, distinction here, just so you know, it doesn't say, remember to keep the Sabbath day holy.

The Sabbath day is holy, and it's a command to God's people to, hey, keep it that way.

The command doesn't say, make it a holy day. It's saying it is a holy day, keep it that way.

He says in verse nine, six days you shall labor and do all of your work,

but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

On it, you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter,

your male servant or your female servant or your livestock or the sojourner

who is within your gates.

For in six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all

that is in them and rested on the seventh day.

Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and he made it holy.

So again, the Pharisees, once again, aren't technically wrong.

We've seen this again, four or five weeks in a row, where the Pharisees aren't dumb.

They know the law really well. They understand what the scriptures say.

It's not an issue of knowledge. And again, that's really important because you

often think to yourself at times, if I could just read the Bible more,

if I knew more verses, if I knew more things, then I would be more spiritual.

God would maybe bless me more. I'd be more of a help.

Well, the people who knew the most scripture at this point in time were the

greatest obstacles to people knowing the Lord.

Now, that's not an excuse to not read your Bible. That's a disclaimer, right?

So when somebody's like, hey, you should read your Bible. You're like,

well, the Pharisees read their Bible and they were the worst.

Not going to be an acceptable excuse, just so you know.

But it is true that your Bible knowledge, your theological knowledge doesn't

in itself qualify you to be a spiritual leader.

That is not the qualification because the Pharisees had no problem knowing it.

They're really just spiritual Sherlock Holmes at this point.

Thank you. And they're currently looking behind every nook and cranny, right?

They're following Jesus and his disciples around to see what can we find about this guy?

What dirt can we pick up on this guy to prove to everyone, to prove to this

crowd that loves him and not loving us so much that he's not who he says he

is, right? We've all known people like this.

Maybe you've been this before. Maybe you are this and you don't want to be.

But your first inclination when you meet someone at church or even in life is

to try and go, okay, what's wrong with them?

What's wrong with them? I wonder what it's like. I wonder what they're like

at home. Do you think they do this?

And every time you see them, you're just watching them. You think,

man, I need to find something on them.

And what you're really doing is saying, I need to find a way to make myself

feel better by making them feel worse or not even feel worse,

by making them worse in my mind. That's the Pharisees are doing.

This Jesus guy has come on the scene. He's got this following and the Pharisees

are going, we need to find some dirt on this guy, not so that we can really

help people understand that he may be a problem.

We need to find some dirt on this guy so that we can help people understand

that we're better than him.

We're more holy than this Jesus guy. We know more than he does.

We're more holy. We can do more than he can do.

What kind of nonsense does that lead them into? Well, it leads them into things like this.

If you were a first century Jew, like Jesus was, even though the Bible doesn't

say this, the Pharisees had some, we'll call them arbitrary ways of keeping the Sabbath.

In other words, ways that they had come up with to say, well,

if you're really gonna keep the Sabbath, you can do these things.

Again, we all know some of these man-made rules that we've either grown up with

or heard from other people.

You may still keep them, you may not keep them. but essentially what's going

on is Jesus is traveling.

That's his first issue. That's the first problem that Jesus has.

Now, what is traveling on the Sabbath? What does that mean?

Well, it means that you've taken more than 1,999 steps.

That's a real thing, right? Like the Pharisees are probably walking behind Jesus,

I can imagine, with like a pitch counter and they're just counting every step.

And they're like, he's at 1,500.

Like we're getting close here, guys. You know, and the second that Jesus hits

2000, you know that they come out of the wheat fields. They're like, got him. I got him.

2001 Jesus, straight to hell, right? There's just no way you can be who you

say you are because you've crossed this imaginary holy line that we've made for you.

Again, we all have rules like this, all of us.

And I'm not at all saying that you shouldn't set up boundaries in your own life,

right? Romans speaks a lot about the conscience that you have.

You should never deny your conscience.

If you consciously, God lays something on your heart not to do,

that's great. But what you shouldn't

do is say, well, because I feel this way, everyone has to do this.

Because I feel this way about a certain thing, everyone has to think the way I think about it.

And if they decide to do this, if they decide to raise their kids that way,

they decide to spend their weekends that way, they decide to use their time

to do these things, that doesn't make them sinful.

It doesn't make them not holy. It doesn't mean that they're off base.

It means they don't think of it the way you think of it.

For the Pharisees, this was even worse because they were the leaders.

They were in charge of people. And so what are they actually doing?

Well, they're taking something that was meant to be a blessing and they're making it a burden.

That's what Pharisees do. That's what legalists do.

They take blessings and turn them into burdens. I've said this every week.

I think it's important to know what I'm not saying is they're not taking the

commands of God and applying them. That's what we're going to see Jesus did.

And the reason I think that's so important is oftentimes I think when I talk

about grace and when I talk about mercy, when I talk about things like this,

a lot of times what people think they hear me saying is, well,

so we can just do whatever we want.

I can go wherever I want to go and do whatever I do. Me and Jesus,

man, we're just homies and we're going to go hang out. And as long as he's cool with me, I'm cool.

I said this last week, exact quote was, Christians should never feel bad for

holding other Christians accountable to Jesus' commands.

Christians should never feel bad holding other Christians accountable to Jesus' commands.

So we need to make that clear. The issue with the Pharisees is that they're

holding Jesus to their own commands.

Their own way of doing things, their own traditions, their own laws,

the way that their grandpa did it, and his grandpa before him did it,

and his great-great-great-grandpa did it.

And they're applying those things to Jesus, and by extension,

his disciples, and by extension, every single other Jew.

And Jesus' issue here is, your laws are not God's laws.

Your way of doing things is not God's way of doing things. You are not the arbitrator of God's truth.

You're supposed to be the proclaimer of God's truth. And you've taken this thing

that was meant to be a blessing and made it a curse.

So listen to Jesus' response. The first thing he says is, have you not read?

Now, I can't say out loud because it would be uncouth to say how mad that would

have made the Pharisees.

Looking at the Pharisees and saying, have you not read, read would have been

like me looking at my professor in college who wrote our church history book

and saying, have you not read this, man?

I think you're wrong, right? And he's looking at me like, you're an idiot. I wrote the book.

By the way, there's nothing worse than being in a class where the professor

wrote the book, nothing worse.

Because you know he's going to grade like a million times harder because now

it's personal. If you're like, I didn't really like that chapter,

he's like, oh, you didn't. Huh.

The person who wrote it really enjoyed it. But that's what Jesus is doing.

Jesus says, he begins by saying, have you not read?

He's setting a tone to say, if you had read and understood, you wouldn't be

acting this way, but obviously you haven't.

So he says, have you not read? And then he quotes this story about David from

1 Samuel 21. David's fleeing from Saul.

This happens in chapter 18 and chapter 19 and 20. He meets with Jonathan.

And essentially as he's going out, he's grabbing supplies. And so he stops by

the temple and he needs some food.

So he goes to the high priest and the high priest is like, listen,

we don't have any food except for the bread. They call it the bread of the presence.

It was placed before the Lord. And that is not bread that everyone's supposed

to eat. That bread is reserved for the priest to eat.

That's reserved for them. And so what point is Jesus making?

Jesus is simply saying, hey, listen, And that is a law.

That is a technical rule. That is a law. But David needed food.

David needed food. He hadn't just come from a meal and is passing through.

It's like, you know, you know what I didn't have in that meal? A good loaf of bread.

I'd really like a good loaf of bread. No, David is in a crisis situation.

And therefore, the priest giving him the bread is not a problem.

Again, Jesus' logic is clear. The high priest wasn't wrong in giving the bread to David.

And Jesus is not wrong, as the greater David, to allow his disciples to pluck this grain.

Even plucking the grain was a law. That was permissible. When they would sow

their crops, they would actually leave right next to the road a row of crops

so that people could walk.

As they walked by, they could pick grain off and they could rub it between their

fingers and they could eat it.

He says this phrase, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

Again, this is the crux of the Pharisees' issue.

They look at God's commands and they say, God has given us these commands so that we can bless him.

That's how legalists think. If you think that way, be prepared to be miserable

the rest of your Christian life.

If you think that the commands that God gave you are simply given to you so

that you can make God happy, you will be miserable.

Or that's really at best, at worst, you'll become like the Pharisees who Jesus

calls the synagogue of Satan, who he calls the sons and daughters of vipers.

He looks at these people and he says, you are just like your father, the devil.

Now, how could you look at someone who's memorized the Old Testament and say,

you're like your father, the devil? This is why.

Because the Pharisees take the laws of God and they go, this is how we're gonna make God happy.

And Jesus flips that on his head and he said, listen, this Sabbath was given

to man. The Sabbath was given to man.

It's a gift. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

In other words, God gives us this gift. He gives mankind this gift.

He doesn't make mankind so that they can follow rules.

He makes mankind and gives them blessings.

Exodus 31, 13 says this, you are to speak to the people of Israel and say,

Above all, you shall keep my Sabbaths. Why?

Why does God want them to keep the Sabbath? So he's not mad at them because

he hates them, because he wants people to know that he's in charge.

No, he says, for this is a sign between me and you throughout our generations

that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you.

The Sabbath is given and the law is given as a reminder that you will never keep this.

You'll never keep the laws. You'll never keep all the rules.

And in fact, what we tend to do is neglect the rules that we can keep and then

make up our own rules that we can keep.

That's the most popular way to do this, is we'll neglect things like be humble, be kind, be gracious.

And we'll go, you know what I can do? I cannot smoke.

That's what I can't. I cannot smoke. And you're like, well, why aren't you gracious

and kind? Doesn't matter.

I'm not smoking. And therefore God loves me more than he loves you. I just know he does.

Like nicotine has never touched this body. And I, how could you ever do that?

It's like, I guess every Christian that's ever lived before 1950 is going to

hell because I think that was a pretty common practice.

Right? I mean, you see this all the time. You see this the way people deal with

Jesus and like drinking wine.

They make it this massive ordeal. Well, it wasn't the same and it wasn't this

and it wasn't that. The truth is the wine's not the issue.

Who cares? That's not the problem.

That's not the problem. The problem is your heart, your sinful,

idle, factory producing heart.

And Jesus looks at the Pharisees and he says, you know why you're like the devil?

It's just like the devil, you would take a gift that God gives mankind and turn it into a curse.

And they have taken the Sabbath that was meant to remind the people of God that

I'm the one who sanctifies you.

I'm the one who saves you. I'm the one who delivers you.

I'm the one who redeems you. And

ultimately, Christian, I'm the one that gives you rest. You rest in me.

You don't rest in your Sabbath keeping. You don't rest in your law keeping.

You don't rest in your efforts. You rest in my efforts that I will do for you

what you cannot do for yourself.

When we come in here to celebrate the Sabbath day of Christ,

when we come in here to worship and to proclaim his name and to give him glory, honor, and praise,

one of the main things we should be doing is reminding ourselves as we sing,

as we pray, as we worship, as we open the word is to say, he has done it.

He has entered into the Holy of Holies. He has invited us into his family and

he has promised us that we will rest in him forever.

That no one can take that from us.

I love this quote. I may have even said it last week. I can't remember.

Gehardus Voss, it says, legalism lacks the supreme sense of worship.

It obeys, but it does not adore.

Legalism lacks the supreme sense of worship. It obeys, but it does not adore, right?

Do you adore Christ? Do you love him?

Or do you just want to do what he asks you to do so he won't be mad at you?

So he just won't be upset. He'll let you get home without popping a tire.

He'll help your bank account grow. You'll get that raise at work if you just

do what God's asking you to do.

This is how legalists think. And again, none of us likes to think of ourselves

as legalists, but the Pharisees weren't the only legalists. There were plenty of legalists.

They happen to be the ones in charge, but there's plenty of legalists that don't

do what they do for the Lord out of love for him, but in thinking that in doing

those things, God will love them.

This is a reversal of how God treats his people.

Before God gives his people the Ten Commandments, you remember what he says to them?

He says, behold, I am the Lord your God who has delivered you out of slavery to Egypt.

Therefore, have no other gods before me. He doesn't come to them while they're

slaves and say, do you not want to be slaves?

Then follow these rules and I'll let you out. He comes to them as his people

whom he loves, whose cries that he hears.

He says, I am going to raise up and deliver.

I'm going to take you out of slavery. And because I do that,

don't have any other gods before me. Keep the Sabbath day.

And the second we reverse that, we become no better than Pharisees.

Again, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be strong on the commands of God. Absolutely, we should.

I would argue there's no point in letting the world know all of those things.

It's really hard to convince an unbelieving world that God is good.

We need God to open their eyes. We need God to save them. Our job to the world is to preach the gospel.

But let us not become Pharisees because the Sabbath that was meant to be a blessing

is no longer a blessing, but something to do that appeases God.

Now, I don't think that's the sentence that kills him.

I think this last verse in Mark 2 is what kills him.

He says, so the son of man is Lord, even of the Sabbath.

Again, these men knew their Bibles. They knew that the Sabbath was a God given

command. that it's in Genesis. It's not even in the law to begin with.

It begins with creation.

And for Jesus to stand in front of them and say, the son of man,

that's me, is the Lord, is the sovereign Lord over the Sabbath,

is for him to say, I'm the one who's in charge of that holiday.

I'm the one that gets to decide what you do on the Sabbath and what you don't.

He says, I designed this day. I'm the creator of this day. This is exactly what John says.

In the beginning was the word. The word was with God and the word was God,

right? All things were created by him, for him and through him.

The Sabbath is not just a day that God created that Jesus is talking about.

It's a day that was created through Christ and that exists for him.

And Jesus is making it clear.

It was I who rested. It was I who ordained this day to be blessed and separated from work.

I am the sovereign Lord of this day.

I am the interpreter of the will of God for this day. He says to the Pharisees,

you don't rule the Sabbath.

You don't get to decide what goes on here. You don't set the standards of behavior for the Sabbath.

I do. I interpret God's word.

I interpret God's will. And yes, Jesus is that person.

But so, I mean, the Pharisees are seething with anger at this point for this brand new rabbi.

Think of all the things he's already done. In 2.5, he claims to forgive sins.

In 2.16, he has dinner with tax collectors and sinners.

In 2.18, he gives them a masterclass on what fasting is and isn't.

And now in 2.24, he's explained to them, I'm the Lord of the Sabbath.

Now that's good news for every person that rests in Christ. That's good news

for every Christian because we can know no matter what happens to us, God will be with us.

We read this this morning in 1 Peter, his benediction, right? He will strengthen you.

He will set up your foundations. He will guide you. He will lead you in the

way of salvation. That's what God will do.

So what does this culminate in?

3, 3, 1 through 6, and we'll close. My benediction, joking.

All right. And again, he entered the synagogue and a man was there with a withered hand.

They watched Jesus to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him.

And he said to the man with a withered hand, come here.

And he said to them, to the Pharisees, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good

or to do harm, to save life or to kill? But they were silent.

And listen, he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of

heart and said to the man, stretch out your hand.

He stretched it out. His hand was restored.

So as is Jesus' custom, he has an argument with the Pharisees about what the

Sabbath is and isn't, and then he's going to, in their faces,

give them an object lesson, as if to say to them, not only am I going to prove you wrong,

I'm going to put on display why you're wrong.

So again, if you read first century Judaism, what was allowed on the Sabbath

to take place? Well, it was only life-saving measures.

Literally, if a building were to collapse on a group of people and you were

to go in there, if someone was in there and their life was not threatened, right?

Maybe they had broken their arm, dislocated their wrists, but their life was not threatened.

The command was, leave them.

Leave them. You'll get them tomorrow.

Again, we think that's ridiculous, right? We think that's so stupid,

but think of all the dumb rules that we come up with for ourselves.

Think of all the things that we come up with, all the man-made rules that we've

come up with for ourselves that you know people will look back on 100 years and go, why?

Why were they doing that? Well, because we all have a little Pharisee in us.

We all think that we know what God would want from us.

We all have a tendency to look at God's rules, to look at God's commands that

were given to bless us and to go, God, I don't know that you went far enough with that one.

Again, we pick the ones that are easiest for us to follow and we start setting

these hedges up around them ourselves.

And then we judge the others around us by whether or not they keep our hedges, they keep our standard.

Do they have our level of theological knowledge?

We talk about this often now, church words, right? Do they know as many church words as I know?

They quote all the anthropomorphic visions that we've seen in the Bible.

You can't out, right? You want to give a theological test to people.

We want to make sure people know exactly what we know and understand what we

understand as if God himself wasn't the one that gave you the knowledge.

It's an incredibly prideful thing to look at someone else and go,

you should know as much as I know, because what you're saying is, I did it.

God didn't open my eyes. I opened my eyes.

God didn't give me this brain. I gave myself this brain.

You want to know why I understand these logical concepts and you don't?

Because you're dumb and I'm smart.

And until you're as smart as me, God's just never going to love you that much.

That's what Pharisees do.

Consider what Jesus does as he walks in on the Sabbath to the synagogue.

He sees this man with a withered hand, who most certainly people would have

assumed did some sort of sin, either he sinned or his parents sin, right?

The disciples actually asked Jesus specifically, whenever they come across people

like this, hey, Jesus, did he sin or did his parents sin?

And as was custom, when you pray in the synagogue, you would lift your hands.

And so every time this man would lift his hands to pray, everyone in the synagogue

would see that withered hand and go, something's wrong with that guy.

He's sinned in some way, shape, or form. That's why God's doing that to him.

Or he must come from a family that's gross. And again, you become Pharisees.

Look how great my hands are.

God must love me more. This is how we think.

So Jesus comes to this man. And again, like we've said again and again,

there's a ton of tension in this room.

Verse two says, they watched Jesus.

Verse five says, As Jesus looked at them, this is an eternal stare down as Jesus

is saying, listen, we're going to settle this right here, right now.

They're glaring at each other. And listen, we should expect this tension in

our lives at times if we're going to be Bible-believing Christian people who

think that Jesus paid it all. We should expect this tension.

That when we go into a world that's okay with every religion,

that's okay with every little thing that works out, everyone's going to the same place.

One of the things that we proclaim is like, hey, you may have the sevenfold

path or the ninefold path. You may go to Mecca. You may go to the Mormon temple.

You may go to these places that you consider holy, but guess what?

There's only one place that you can go that's promised you rest,

not because of what you've done, but because of what he's done,

and that's Jesus Christ.

And people will hate that message. They will hate that message.

They will also hate the message of Jesus is Lord.

Jesus is Lord. He is Lord of your lives. If you're a Christian,

he's the Lord of your life.

The same way that he's the sovereign Lord of the Sabbath, he's now the sovereign

Lord of every second, every dollar, every thought.

Everything in your life belongs to him now.

And if you don't like that kind of thinking, guess what? If Jesus isn't your

Lord, he's not your savior. You don't get one and not the other.

People will hate the way that that sounds. That's okay.

You know what our job is? Not to hate them back. Not to throw rules and regulations

at them. Our job is to preach the gospel.

Hey man, I know you think that your good works will get you into heaven,

but they never will. They never will.

So what does Jesus do? He has the man stand up in the assembly, reach out his hand.

As he reaches out his hand, again, he looks at the Pharisees and he says,

you tell me, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm?

Because every Pharisee in the room is looking at him like, you better not heal

this guy. You better not do that.

And Jesus looked at them and again says, I'm the Lord of this day and I'll do whatever I want to do.

And he heals this man's hand. I often think this showdown takes place inside of this synagogue.

I wonder what the man with his withered hand was thinking. Again,

we don't know, and this is all conjecture.

But if you've ever seen two people fighting, you rarely want to be someone that

gets in the middle of that, right?

If I see two people fighting and having an argument, I'm really not the type

of person that's like, you know what would be fun?

Yeah, if I was doing that. And yet Jesus asked this man, hey, stand up. Stand up.

There's some faith involved in what this man does. Stretch out your hand.

He stretched out his hand. His hand was restored.

Again, the Pharisees went out immediately and held counsel with the Herodians

against him how to destroy him.

Things. Number one, this is a great model of what should make you angry.

A great model of what should make you angry. It says that in verse 5,

he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart.

His anger comes from his grief. His anger comes from his sorrow.

He is looking at these people and he sees two things. Number one,

he sees leaders of his people who have turned his blessings into burdens.

Number two, he sees the epitome of what the fallen world does to people.

He's grieved at this man's disease the same way he's grieved at Lazarus's tomb that he's died.

And he's angry that these Pharisees would try and get people to earn their way to God.

What makes you angry? What makes you angry, religiously angry?

Is it when you don't get your way, right? Is it when people don't act the way

you want them to act? Is that when you get most offended?

Or do you get most angry when you see someone teaching and acting like their

works can get them to God? That's what made Jesus angry.

Not a lack of obedience, but a lack of understanding of the grace and mercy of God.

Because if a lack of obedience made Jesus angry, he would stay angry.

He would be angry every day as he walks around with his disciples and they continue to fail.

He would be angry every single second that he walked around this earth because

everywhere he goes, there is biblical godly disobedience.

But that doesn't seem to make Jesus angry. That seems to grieve him.

That seems to make him sorrowful. That seems to make him sad that people would

act that way, right? This is what Isaiah says about him, right?

He's a man of sorrow acquainted with grief.

Why is he acquainted with grief? because he wants people to understand that

God is gracious and kind.

He's angry in this story, not because of a disobedience as much as he is of

a pride and an arrogance.

These Pharisees would think that they're better than the guy with the withered hand.

Last thing, do you trust the Lord to be your Sabbath?

Do you trust the Lord to be your Sabbath or are you working for it?

This has really been the last point of every sermon, if you haven't noticed in the past five weeks.

This is the point that Jesus has made for five different weeks throughout the

whole end of chapter one, the whole of chapter two.

Every one of these showdowns with the Pharisees has come down to,

do you trust that God will save you or do you think that you will appease God?

Is the crux of the issue between Jesus and the Pharisees? Not the law,

not theological debates, it's just trust.

When he looks at the Pharisees, he sees, again, he will say he sees the sons of Satan.

In other words, he'll see what God calls in Genesis 3, the seeds of the serpent, right?

Because what does the serpent try and get Eve to do?

Take it, eat it. Because if you do that, you'll be the one that gets the knowledge.

You'll be the one that can take your own destiny into your own hands.

You'll be like God if you do that.

And we don't use the same language, but we act the same way.

That's what the Pharisees are doing. They're acting like God.

There's two ways to act like God. One is to be a Pharisee, to take God's commands,

broaden them, make up your own commands and hold other people to them.

That's one way. I think the second way that's just as dangerous is to try and

beat your own self up and not receive forgiveness that God has promised you.

Not receive forgiveness that God has promised you, right? You do your own penance.

So God comes to you. He says, listen, if you repent and believe,

I'll forgive every single one of your sins.

And you go, you know, God, I think that's true, but I really need to feel bad about this for a while.

I really need to do some penance here. I really need to kind of whip myself

on the back for a while for making that mistake or for doing that thing.

To understand that weaponizing God's commands is just as dangerous as not trusting them in our own lives.

It's easy to look at Pharisees and to go, man, those guys are so evil.

But it's a lot harder to look at ourselves and ask, do I really believe that

God's forgiven me? Do I really believe that God loves me?

Do I really believe that even though I haven't been as obedient as I should have been.

I haven't lived up to the standard that I should have lived up to,

that he really does welcome me into his home, that his mercies really are new every morning for me.

Again, Pharisees are miserable Christians, for sure. I'll be honest with you,

I don't really think we have a lot of that here. I just don't.

We're pretty gracious, right? We kind of let people do as they need to do.

I'm not saying it's non-existent.

What I am saying is, when you walk in the door.

We're not making a list of all the things we think you might have done wrong this week.

If you are, stop. Okay, don't do that.

But what I do think a lot of people

do struggle with is actually receiving forgiveness, not fake forgiveness.

Again, a lot of people have gone to church this morning, hoping that God will

forgive them for the week that they've lived out.

That's just being the opposite end of a Pharisee. You don't go to the Lord,

hoping that he will do something, you go to the Lord trusting in the promises that he's made to you.

And he has promised that if you will repent, he is faithful and just to forgive

you of your sins and to run around with your head between your legs,

mopey all the time because you feel bad for something you did is to neglect

the forgiveness and grace that God has offered to you.

And I would argue it's just as dangerous as what the Pharisees are doing here.

Again, not talking about fake repentance, not talking about feeling bad,

not talking about crying in worship or raising your hands and thinking that

that makes a difference. That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about in your heart

of hearts, in your soul, do you trust that Jesus is your Sabbath rest,

that he has fulfilled every single thing that God asked him to fulfill and he

has given you that righteousness and you trust him for your justification and

he will one day sanctify you and ultimately glorify you for eternity.

Are you trusting in that promise or are you being a Pharisee and going,

you know, maybe if I just did a little more, maybe if I just did a little more.

The people who accomplish the most for God are the people that are most convinced

that he loves them no matter what.

The people that are most committed to keeping God's commands are not the people

who understand them or who even memorize them the most. It's the people who

look at God and go, if he told me to do it, it must be good because I know that he loves me.

Do you trust that God is your Sabbath rest? Let's pray.