"The Sons are Free" Matthew 17:24-27 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Matthew 17, verse 24, when they came to Capernaum, the collectors of the two drachma tax went up to Peter and said, Does your teacher not pay the tax?

Matthew 17:24

And Peter said, Yes.

And when he came into the house, Jesus spoke to him first, saying, What do you think, Simon?

From who do kings of the earth take toll or tax?

From their sons or from others?

And when he said, From others, Jesus said to him, Then the sons are free.

However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea, cast a hook, take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth, you will find a shekel.

Take that and give it to them for me and for yourself.

This is the word of God.

This is an odd passage, isn't it?

I believe it was Craig Bloomberg in his commentary on Matthew described this as the oddest passage in Matthew's gospel.

When I read that, I thought, really?

But then I spent some more time thinking about it.

And it's hard to even come up with the second place in that contest.

It is an odd passage.

This is the only place in the Bible this account is.

It's not in Mark or Luke or John.

It's here, and it seems somewhat oddly placed, but it truly is a bridge from the transfiguration in Matthew 17 to the lesson on humility in Matthew 18.

And at its heart is an issue that is perennial in Christianity, and that is the church's relationship to taxes and to government.

I preached at a, I did a wedding at a church in Michigan a while ago, and the pastor there uh was having problems in his church.

There's a lot going on, but in my two days there, it quickly became apparent one of the issues is that the pastor was uh convictionally driven that the church should not register with with the state.

So most churches you know have to fill out a business registration with the states.

In Virginia, it's$25 a year, and they send us a form that we sign and they put in a pile until next year when they send us the bill and$25, and that's what we do.

And this pastor felt convictionally driven that you shouldn't register your church with the state because the church belongs to God, not to man.

Amen.

And there's a certain appeal to that, I understand, until the end of the tax year comes around, and you have to send out the tax, you know, deduction forms to your congregation for giving, which you cannot do if your church is not registered with the government.

And so that's where your convictions, the rubber meets the road.

Like, you know, how dare that government want a registration from us?

But December 30th, maybe I can just put it in a form real quick.

Real quick.

The rest of the year you say Fairfax County can take a hike.

Sorry, that was just in the inside came out there.

And this is an ongoing issue, it's not unique to Michigan.

I mean, at Emanual Bible Church, we always wrestle through what can the government tell us to do and not do, and they tell us to build a bus stop on Braddock on our property, and we're like, sure, maybe people will take the bus to church.

We don't mind building that for you.

There you go, and being a good neighbor.

And they say, but a bike lane on Backlick, and we're like, okay, we'll put a bike lane in.

Then the tree guy says, Don't you dare cut down a tree, and we're like, well, how do we put the bike lane in?

And it was a thing.

Like, we went to court and we found out in Fairfax County that the tree guy has more authority than the bike guy.

So file that away.

The tree guy won that fight, and so we have no bike lane, but we have trees that the power line people came and cut down, so I guess they win.

Uh after after all.

And you're always trying to navigate those those issues, you know.

So uh, you know, we the way we've drawn the line before is that the government doesn't have a right to interfere with or regulate worship, which seems like a far-fetched thing in our world, but in a lot of the world, the government tells churches you can't preach on this topic, or they give them a prescribed book of prayer or a liturgy calendar they have to follow, that you teach on this text on these dates, and you don't teach on this topic on on those dates.

That's very common in the world.

You know, the closest we ran into that was during COVID, where they, you know, they said certain things, and we're like, okay, for the sake of being a witness, we can do those things.

But then they said you can't, you know, sit together.

You have to have the space within the worship, and you can't use woodwinds.

You remember that executive order?

No woodwind instruments.

And like, well, that's I mean, no.

Uh, when it comes to worship, we're gonna worship in the freedom of the Lord, but we'll do all the things in the parking lot you want us to do.

We played the whole spaced-out games for a few weeks to be, you know, as a peace offering, but then we decided no, you don't get to regulate worship.

So that's how we navigated that.

But it didn't start five years ago.

This has been a this story shows you this has been a tension in Christianity since the very beginning.

Since the very beginning.

This is a story that belongs in two worlds.

It's overshadowed by the mountain of transfiguration in Matthew 17.

And that was a lesson to us if you remember that God's glory is at home in creation.

God's glory, God made the world to glorify himself, and God's glory can dwell with mankind.

In fact, I'll one-up you on that.

And not only can God's glory dwell with mankind, God's glory can dwell in mankind.

Because it's at home in Jesus, the God man.

God's glory can dwell in a sinful human being who has been glorified in heaven.

You see Moses and Elijah transformed, radiating.

You see Peter and the disciples dumbstruck.

God's glory revealed itself on the mountain in this world.

But then they had to go back down the mountain, didn't they?

And they had to go back into the world in which they live.

And there is a time period in Matthew 17 between where Jesus says in this chapter that he is going to go to the cross and die, and in the previous chapter where Jesus said, I'm gonna build my church.

There's a time period where Jesus is with them in the flesh and is not glorified.

And there's a time period after he's glorified that the church is still stuck here in this mundane, everyday world.

That's what Matthew 17 is about, the end of it.

They come back down the mountain, remember, and they're wondering, why can't we cast out demons?

When we were with Jesus, he gave us the authority to cast out demons, and Jesus was preparing them for a world where they don't have that authority anymore.

They can pray to him, of course, at all times.

That's what Jesus says.

This time, this kind comes out by prayer.

You can always pray to the Lord, but the church is going to be built.

Matthew 16, Jesus says, I'm going to build my church.

First, I'm going to die, be buried, resurrect, ascend to heaven, and then the church is going to go to the world.

You're going to be there, and we're stuck.

We've seen the beatific vision in Matthew 17.

We've seen the glory of the Lord unveiled.

But then we walk back down to a world where there are demons.

We walk back down to a world where there are taxes.

Where the devil opposes us.

That's the first narrative after the mountain.

And the governments tax us.

That's the second narrative.

Like you're back into the muck of daily life.

This is no ordinary tax in verse 24.

The collectors of the two drachma tax, it's a tax that was instituted in the Old Testament.

Exodus chapter 30, verse 13.

Exodus 30:13

Every time the Israelites take a census, they are required to tax every Israelite, basically a day's wage, to fund the temple.

That's what this, that's the design of this tax.

It wasn't levied by the Roman Empire.

Oh, the Roman Empire embraced it.

Remember, the Roman Empire built the temple.

They let the Jews use their own money in the temple.

The Jews collected it through this tax.

It was not the tax collectors that collected this tax.

So Matthew never would have collected this tax.

It's not the Roman tax collectors that collected it.

It's more like the, you know, the association of the temple.

I get a phone call every now and then from the volunteer fire department.

And they say, hey, you live in the Bailey's Crossroads Response District, and don't you want to give to our ambulance?

And I'm like, no, thank you.

And they say, well, if you have a heart attack, what do you think is going to happen?

And I say, I live across the street from the Edsel fire station.

You guys are like two response times away.

Back off.

No, I say thank you for your service.

That's what's happening here.

It's like the normal tax, like the normal tax collectors collect a Roman tax.

These are just the normal guys that are associated with the temple, that are going around and listen, they know who's in their books.

They know who pays and who hasn't.

And so they go up to Peter and say, by the way, does your teacher pay the tax?

It's kind of confusing how it's worded in the ESV here.

ESV, what does it say?

Does your teacher not pay the tax?

And so it's confusing.

Like, is he asking, do you or do you not pay?

Like, what's they actually asking?

In Greek, it's not that confusing.

There's a way of structuring a Greek sentence where the implied answer is yes.

So they're they're asking Jesus, your teacher pays the tax, right?

Because he hasn't yet.

I'm going to show you how earthly this kind of conversation is.

One more example, we go to the dentist and we give them our dental insurance.

Our dental insurance changes often, and so they always just run it and then we don't pay anything there.

They run it and they'll send us the bill later.

But I get the bill and I never know.

Is this the bill before you ran the insurance or after you ran it?

You guys have had this experience, right?

And so I do the only sensible thing, which is ignore it.

I mean, right?

If they really want the money, they'll call back, you know, and they do.

Well, I'll get a phone call a week or two later.

It says, hey, just checking to see if you got the bill.

What a nice way of asking it, isn't it?

I love my dentist.

Just checking to see if you got the bill.

Like the last few times I had to call.

Yeah, yeah, I got the bill, and I'll pay over the phone, and there, there you go.

That's this kind of conversation.

Hey, Peter, just checking.

We've noticed on the list that you and Jesus haven't paid the tax.

You're next up on the list.

So when you when you get a moment, that's all they're saying.

When you get a moment.

Remember, Jesus and the disciples have been out of Israel for several months now.

They went to Lebanon and Jordan and Syria.

They've just circled back in at the Mount of Transfiguration.

This is his last time in Capernaum, by the way.

He's just he's heading to Jerusalem.

He's gonna die in like five months here.

And the tax collectors are saying, before you die, you know, come on.

And so they asked Jesus, they asked Peter, does Jesus pay the tax?

Now, this is a very complicated question.

I don't think they realize how the tax collectors are just trying to get paid.

But there's a lot going on here.

Do you know who doesn't have to pay this tax?

Rabbis.

Licensed rabbis are exempt from this tax.

If they graduated from a rabbinical training school, a rabbinical seminary, they do not have to pay this tax.

They're tax exempt from the temple tax if they are a certified and authorized rabbi, ordained clergy, so to speak.

Jesus never went to seminary.

Jesus didn't graduate from any rabbinical training school.

Everybody calls him a rabbi, but he doesn't have a degree on his wall.

So is he exempt from the tax or not?

It's a very interesting question.

He is a better rabbi than their rabbis, for sure.

Even their own rabbis notice that.

Do you remember at the end of the Sermon on the Mount?

Their own leaders say, whoa, we've never heard somebody preach like this.

But Jesus has never presented himself as an ordained minister, you know, from the Jewish synagogues.

So is he exempt?

Moreover, this tax is used to build the temple.

But Jesus said that if the temple is torn down, he'll rebuild it in three days.

And he said that something greater than the temple is with them when he's walking among them.

Do you remember when they accused him of sanctioning breaking the Sabbath when his disciples were plucking grain in Matthew 12?

And Jesus basically said, How dare you?

Don't you know that the priests work in the temple on the Sabbath and they're guiltless?

You don't say, Why are the priests working on the Sabbath?

Of course they work on the Sabbath.

It's their busiest day.

And then Jesus says, I tell you something greater than the Sabbath.

Something greater, well, than the Sabbath.

He's the Lord of the Sabbath, he says.

And then he says, I'm telling you something greater than the temple is here.

So Jesus has declared that he's greater than the temple.

And that if it gets torn down, he'll build it back.

Is he really going to pay a tax to fund it if he's greater than it?

You don't hit the fire chief up to pay for the ambulance at Bailey's Crossroads, you know?

It works for him.

So that's the question.

There's a lot of layers of complexity there.

And notice that Peter ignores all of those layers of complexity and just says, yes, he pays.

Get out of here.

I love Peter for lots of reasons.

They asked him this very complex question.

He's like, yes, go away.

But then Peter goes home and he walks in, and Jesus brings it up.

Peter does not come in and tell and ask Jesus, hey guys, asked about the tax, just so you know.

You know, is your wallet a little light, Jesus?

Peter does not bring this up.

Jesus, it says, in verse 25, when he came into the house, Jesus spoke to him first.

Before his jacket's even off, Jesus says, question for you, Simon.

I love that he calls him Simon again.

Think you should have asked before you ran your mouth there a second ago?

And now he asks Jesus a question.

Let me walk you through a bit of an outline this morning.

There is an outline.

It's walking down the mountain, I think is what I called it.

And I think my PowerPoint was just raptured.

But walking, what if I go back?

Aha.

Life down the mountain.

Life down the mountain.

What does life look like when you're down at the bottom of the mountain?

We've seen the transfiguration, and now we're back in the world where there's demons, and we're back in the world where there's taxes.

What does life look like in that world?

Well, first, life looks like walking in freedom with the Son of God.

Walking in freedom with the Son of God.

What do you think, Simon?

From whom do kings of the earth take toil or tax?

From their sons or from others?

The word sons, there it is, the word for sons, but in the context of royal families, it's bigger than just sons.

It's, you know, any of your family members and all of their servants and slaves.

A king does not tax his children.

A king does not tax his children's slaves.

And I can explain why.

If a king taxes his children's slaves, who do you think pays the tax for the slaves?

Obviously his children.

And if his children are taxed, who do you think pays the tax levied on his children?

And all the parents of college students know the answer to this question.

You pay the tax.

And a king is not going to tax himself.

He's going to tax people that aren't in his own household.

And in the Roman government, this gets even more extreme.

The Roman government was famous for levying additional taxes on areas that rebelled, that they made Romans exempt from.

So there's a lot behind this little parable, but it's not designed to be confusing.

This is not a complicated question.

This is not an SAT question here.

This is a pretty straightforward, easy question.

Do you think kings make their children and their servants pay the taxes?

And the answer is obviously not.

Obviously not.

Of course they're tax exempt.

They're related to the king.

Well, from others, Peter says.

Of course, Jesus is the eternal son of God.

He is greater than the temple.

The temple facilitates worship to God.

Jesus is God.

That's the logic here.

Jesus is not going to build the temple to facilitate worship to himself.

You can go directly to him.

That's why at the cross the veil in the temple is torn.

You don't need temple worship anymore.

He tore the temple down.

He built it back up in three days by resurrecting from the grave.

His body is now the temple.

And by extension, that's the church.

Every believer is built into the temple of God, which is his body.

So the Son of God is greater than the temple because he's the object of temple worship.

Of course, he's exempt from the temple tax.

That's the point.

The sons are free, and Jesus is the greatest son.

He's the son of God.

Christ is not bound to pay this tax.

As a true son of God, he is not a taxpayer.

There's a sense in which the glory of the transfiguration continues.

He's not bound to pay this tax.

Because he's related to the king.

He is not exempt because he's a rabbi.

That was the implication, right?

Would Jesus take a tax exemption because he's a rabbi?

And he says, forget that.

He's taking a tax exemption because he's wisdom incarnate.

Rabbis study wisdom, Jesus is wisdom.

He sees your tax exemption and one-ups that.

There's no IRS form for are you exempt from taxes because you're the creator of the universe?

But that's what Jesus is availing himself of.

Rabbis study him.

In one sentence, Jesus reveals something astonishing about himself.

He's the true son of the true king whose house is the temple.

The whole tax system, even though it was inaugurated by Moses, it was designed to support temple worship, but the son does not need to pay rent in his own house.

So according to Jesus' divinity, he is exempt from the tax.

As a son of God, he is truly God, and he does not pay a tax.

You cannot tax God.

God taxes us, not the other way around.

But this gets bigger because Jesus makes it plural.

The sons are free.

When you place your faith in Christ, you're adopted into his family.

You become a brother or sister to the Lord.

That means that Jesus has fulfilled the law in your place.

All of the commands given through the Torah and through Moses have been fulfilled and completed by Jesus Christ in your stead.

So you're adopted into his family.

The law is completed on your behalf.

You have a new identity.

You are truly the son of a king.

Jesus is the only begotten son of a king, but you're adopted as his brother.

And Jesus, Paul tells the Hebrews, is not afraid to call you brother or sister.

He's not ashamed to call you his brother or sister.

Because of your faith in him, you're joined to him.

This is another example in Matthew's gospel of how Jesus reorients family around himself.

Do you remember Matthew 13?

They said, Hey, your mother's outside calling for you.

And he says, Who is my mother?

Who's my brother or my sister?

Those who do the will of God, they're my mother, my brother, or they're my brother and sister.

He reorients family around himself.

And here he says, if your faith is in him, you are in his family.

Old loyalties give way to new ones.

As faith reorients your basic family identity around Jesus Christ.

And this is happening in the most mundane of circumstances.

Taxes.

In fact, we'll talk about why he ends up paying the tax in a second, but first I want you to see the other evidence of his deity here in verse 27.

Go to the sea, tells Peter, and cast a hook and take the first fish that comes out, and it'll have a shekel in it.

And the word, it's not the word shekel, it's I don't know why it's translated that way, but it's a four-drachma coin.

It's like, you know, they didn't have a they didn't even have a drachma coin at this point, but they had like a four-dollar one.

It's like we don't have two-dollar bills.

You recognize they exist somewhere, but you don't, the vending machines don't take them kind of thing.

But a five-dollar bill.

That's what the Jesus says, go to a fish and find the four drachma coin in it.

That's enough to cover the taxes of two people.

Commentators, like I've read a bunch of liberal commentators this week that tell you there are catfish in the Sea of Galilee, and it's quite common for them to have coins in their mouths, so there's nothing unusual here.

Okay.

Nothing to see here.

Move along.

Yeah, the Jews always use fish as their ATMs.

I don't know.

This is another evidence of the deity of Christ.

That in his deity, he knows where the fish is and he knows where to find the money.

The Son of God is free and sovereign and glorious, even in the mundane things of life.

What does life look like off the Mount of Transfiguration?

You still are related to the Son of God.

Even in the normal daily affairs of life.

I know many of you, I don't even know how paychecks have been processed yet with government workers, but I know after first hours, some people told me they have not yet been paid.

It's going on, what, six weeks or something?

Crazy like that.

I mean, this is the most mundane part of life.

How do you pay your mortgage this week?

And the answer is don't lose sight of the fact that even in the most mundane act of bill paying, that you are related to the Son of God who is above it all.

And yet we're still stuck in this world, which leads to the second point.

Not only are we walking with the Son of God in freedom, but we're walking in humility with the Son of Man.

We're walking in humility with the Son of Man.

Jesus says in verse 27, however, not to give offense to them.

That word offense is scandal on.

So you don't make people stumble.

It's a word that is used elsewhere in the New Testament to say the Jews stumble over the cross.

The cross is a stumbling block to the Jews.

So Jesus says here, I don't want to cause the Jews to stumble, and the implication is over taxes.

He's happy to have them stumble over the cross.

But he says to keep the stumbling for the gospel, I don't want them to stumble over the cross, so go pay the tax.

Go to the sea, cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up.

There's four coins, or one coin that's four dollars basically.

That's enough to cover two people's tax.

He's paying Peter's tax for him.

Jesus is paying it for himself.

He does not need to pay it.

He is truly exempt from it according to his deity.

But according to his humanity, he will pay the tax.

This is Galatians 4, verse 4.

Galatians 4:4

That Jesus came born as one under the law.

So he comes to this world, and though he's holy, he keeps the law.

According to his divinity, it's impossible for Jesus to sin because sin is something that's contrary to God's nature.

And Jesus is truly God, and so according to his deity, it is impossible for Jesus to sin.

According to his humanity, he is also sinless, but for a different reason.

According to his humanity, he is sinless because he perfectly kept the law.

The law that he is exempt from, he keeps anyway.

To demonstrate that he is the true and better Adam, the perfect human being.

He's a citizen of heaven, so he doesn't have to pay their silly tax.

But he's a citizen of Israel, and so he will to avoid stumbling them.

In his deity, he's worshiped.

But in his humanity, he doesn't want to cause offense.

This is 1 Corinthians 9, verse 20, where Paul says in evangelism, if you're evangelizing someone under the law, you can become under the law for the sake of winning them.

1 Corinthians 9:20

You're not truly under the law, of course not.

But you can act like one under the law for the sake of winning them to Christ.

That's the idea.

When Paul says that to the Corinthians, he's getting that from this.

Jesus doesn't want the whole not paying tax for the temple to become a thing.

If you have ears to hear, you understand he's greater than the temple.

He's not paying the tax to help build the temple.

He's only paying the tax to not interfere with his ministry right now.

It's not his time to be crucified yet.

This is the last time we see Capernaum, by the way.

He bounces after this and goes to Jerusalem where they will kill him.

By the way, what do they charge him with?

Saying he's not going to pay taxes to Caesar.

It's insane.

But to keep that from becoming a thing now, he humbles himself to pay the tax.

This, by the way, is a model for Christian liberty, isn't it?

As a son of God or a daughter of God, you have freedom from the law.

The law that came through Moses, the Torah, you're freed from that.

And yet you don't exercise your freedom in a way that's a stumbling block.

Jesus exercises charity over privilege.

He exercises love over liberty.

He humbles himself to pay a tax that he does not owe to avoid being a stumbling block to other people.

And like all Christian liberty, this is rooted in the Kenosis in Philippians 2, where it says, Jesus, though, being equal with God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped or held onto, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, becoming obedient to the law, obedient all the way to the point of death and death on a cross.

He's truly God, but he emptied himself.

And I'm sure you understand this that emptying himself doesn't mean he cast off his deity.

It's a subtraction by addition, not a subtraction by a subtraction, if that makes sense.

He emptied himself by taking on humanity.

He's omniscient.

He knows all things according to his deity, but by becoming man, he's having to learn how to speak.

He's omnipotent.

He can do all things according to his deity, but by becoming man, he needs somebody to feed him as a baby and to help him as he grows up.

He's omnipresent according to his deity.

He's in, and this is the easiest one to understand, he's omnipresent according to his deity, but in humanity, he robes himself by taking on a human nature and localizes himself.

That's what it means, he humbles himself.

Or to put it this way, to use the tax the text in front of us, he is the glorious recipient of angel worship through all time.

And by becoming man, he has to pay a tax to build a temple.

Like that is the highest of high to the lowest of low.

That's his humiliation.

It's kind of sad in a way.

It's hard for us to even imagine the gulf that is fixed.

And yet he bridges it.

He's the eternal, tax-exempt, divine son who becomes the humble, tax-paying human son.

For the sake of the gospel.

And understand this that both of those natures are present in one person.

He doesn't have to pay the tax according to his deity, he pays it voluntarily according to his humanity.

But he doesn't pay it because he owes it.

He pays it as an act of charity and kindness to avoid offense of the gospel.

And notice who else he pays it for?

Peter, who does owe it.

And I love this about you get you get a lesson in taxes here.

Jesus is going to pay Peter's tax, but what does Peter have to do to pay his tax?

He has to work for it.

And what's Peter's job?

He's a fisherman.

If he was a baker, Jesus would have told Peter to go take a loaf out of the oven and find the two drachmas inside of it.

But Peter's a fisherman.

So he has to go to the sea and use a hook.

This is the only time in the New Testament that somebody fishes with a hook.

They fish with nets because they're fishermen.

You can catch a thousand fish or hundreds of fish with a net.

If you fish for a living, you fish with, you get a whole boat of people, you cast a big net, and you scoop up a bunch of fish and you sell it.

You know, this is so humiliating for Peter.

I feel like it's his punishment for mouthing off before asking Jesus.

He's got to go to the dock where all of his friends that he grew up with are out there in boats with slaves and big nets and everything, and Peter's there with the, you know.

But the lesson is you have to work to pay your taxes.

And Peter is going to go to work.

Also, this is a lesson about atonement.

Don't think this is just about taxes here.

Jesus is making the prototype here for atonement.

Jesus is going to bear our sins in his body.

He does not owe his own life for sin.

But he voluntarily takes our debt upon himself, which he then pays.

And he does not pay it for the sins of everybody in the whole world.

He pays it for his own children.

He goes to the cross and gives his life as an atonement freely for his own children.

So that we don't have to pay for our sins.

Because Jesus pays it in our place.

He pays it in our place.

As a gift for us, as a substitute for us.

He takes, and he does it voluntarily.

He says in John chapter 10 that he comes on this mission of redemption on his own accord, his own will.

John 10 · chapter mention

He comes to earth to be our Savior voluntarily.

It's the eternal plan of redemption that he takes willingly on himself.

Nobody's making him pay Peter's tax here.

Jesus does it on his own initiative.

And also notice this one more moral quandary you might not have thought of.

Is it okay to use money that was given to Jesus for his ministry to pay his tax?

Do you think the people who are giving money to Jesus for his ministry are giving it to him to build the temple with it?

Of course not.

So it's a it's another level of a moral dilemma.

Is he going to take money that was given to them to pay his tax and Peter's tax?

It's morally ambiguous at the very least.

But he solves that riddle too.

He pays the tax not with money from a widow.

He pays the tax, not with money from somebody who's excited that Jesus cast a demon out of his son.

He pays the money.

He pays the tax with money he found in a fish's mouth that he made.

He solves a complex moral dilemma with such ease and clarity and brevity in a way that becomes a prototype for atonement and a pattern for our own Christian liberty.

We are stuck in this same world.

We are all citizens of two kingdoms.

You have a passport that says heaven, but when the tax guy comes, you can't tell the tax guy, oh no, I'm a Christian, I'm a citizen of the king.

So this will hold up in tax court.

No, it will not hold up in tax court.

It will not.

So out of your humility, you pay your tax.

This becomes a solution for government, an image for the pattern of the church and government.

That we, you know, we are under the authority of the true king.

When government does things that help us, we receive that.

You know, when they give us a fire code for church, we're like, thank you for the fire code.

That helps us worship.

That's we're so thankful for fire codes and egress rules and even bus stops they make us put in.

You know, that's we're happy to do that kind of thing.

That helps us.

When the government regulates worship, we avail ourselves of our other passport.

We don't want to be a stumbling block to people, of course not.

So we live in that place where it's wisdom.

It's not an either-or, it's a both and.

We walk in wisdom, knowing that the mount of transfiguration is real.

But knowing that we have to descend the mountain and live in this world.

The gospel frees our conscience from anything not commanded by Christ.

We have true Christian freedom and liberty.

And yet we live as peaceful, respectful citizens.

This is what Paul says in Romans 13.

You have to obey the law, not even because it's morally binding on you.

Some of the laws the government passes are just so silly.

They're not morally binding on you.

But you should keep them anyway so you don't go to jail, silly.

Or as Peter tells believers, live in such a way so when you get arrested, it's for preaching the gospel, not for something dumb like not paying your taxes.

That's what Jesus is doing here.

When they kill him, it's going to be because he keeps saying he's a sinless son of God, not even though they lie about it, not for saying don't pay taxes.

We obey civil authorities for the sake of neighbor love, not because they have authority over our worship or standing before God.

And that becomes a distinguishing feature.

We have obligations to society and public life that are different than our obligations to God.

Keeping them distinct in your mind helps you maintain the supremacy of Christ over all things.

Jesus is Lord of our government and he is Lord of our world.

But that lordship looks different in both places, doesn't it?

According to his deity, we are, we have the nature of God that dwells in us.

And according to his humanity, we are walking in newness of life, making peace with those around us.

So how do we relate to government?

Well, government as an extension of politics is the second greatest commandment.

If you view government and politics as an expression of love towards neighbor, of checking evil, punishing the wrongdoer, protecting life and property and food and all that, then it's an expression of love towards each other.

But that is only the second greatest command.

It's not the first.

The first greatest commandment is worship, to love the Lord your God.

And that's what the church is for.

Somebody asked me last election, I shared this before at the election with somebody, said, you know, all those liberal churches, they're lining up buses and taking everybody in their congregation to go vote.

Four times probably.

We should do that.

We should do that.

And the answer is no, because that confoting is great.

It's the second greatest command to express love for a neighbor.

But it's not the first greatest command.

The first greatest command is to love the Lord your God.

And where those two intersect is where you walk in wisdom, living peaceably for Christ in this world.

Lord, we're thankful for the pattern and practice of our Lord Jesus Christ.

What wisdom, what virtue, what efficiency.

There's an ocean of truth.

There's infinite applications from this passage.

And yet it's distilled in this small three-sentence conversation.

I pray that as we leave this place, we leave in humility.

We know the next passage.

In front of us is Jesus calling the children to himself.

Spiritual humility.

Let that resonate in our hearts.

We have hearts filled with humility because you humbled yourself.

And we humble ourselves as well.

I give you thanks for this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, ibc.church.

If you want more information about the Master Seminary or our location here in Washington, D.C., please go to TMS.edu.

Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.