"A House Divided" Matthew 12:22-30 Sunday Morning Worship Service

I'll begin reading in verse 22 and I'll read through verse 27.

Then a demon-oppressed man who was blind and mute was brought to Jesus, and Jesus healed him, so that the man spoke and saw.

And all of the people were amazed and said, could this be the Son of David?

But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, It's only by Belzebel, the Prince of Dons, that this man casts out demons.

Rar.

Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said to them, Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste.

No city or house divided against itself will stand.

And if Satan casts out Satan, he's divided against himself.

How then would his kingdom stand?

And if I cast out demons by Belzebule, by whom do your sons cast them out?

Therefore they will be your judges.

This passage reminds me of a story that is told about a man who was convinced he was dead.

He tried convincing his wife and his kids he was dead.

He tried convincing his boss he was dead.

What a great excuse to not come into work.

Can't come in today.

I'm dead.

People tried arguing him out of his false worldview to no avail.

He finally went to see a world-renowned psychiatrist who specializes in just such a case, who tried giving him evidence of his life, and he argued, and so finally the psychiatrist said, I know what to do.

Dead people don't bleed.

So let's cut open your arm and see if you bleed.

And the guy, who didn't like the idea of being dead, eagerly embraced the experiment and said, Let's do it.

And so the psychiatrist cuts open his arm and he bleeds everywhere.

And the psychiatrist says, See, and the guy says, I have now learned that dead people bleed.

That is the picture of how people respond to evidence for Jesus.

People engage with evidence for Jesus through presuppositions that block evangelism, that really block critical thinking, but block evangelism, block them from processing what's in front of them because of their own presuppositions.

Presuppositions are things that people assume, and by those assumptions, they reason.

Presuppositions aren't proved, they're just assumed so you can process things.

Now, if you have a marketing degree or took marketing or business classes, you probably had a section on presuppositions.

In the marketing world, a presupposition is something that is said enough times that you just assume that the framework in which it's said must be true.

And an example from a marketing textbook that I looked at said Snickers is the world's best candy bar.

And it's repeated over and over again in advertisements and everything.

And so you hear that repeatedly, and eventually you learn to embrace some categories that you don't prove, you just embrace them.

Like you embrace a category of candy bar.

There's something called candy bars, there's a category of them, they must exist because otherwise these commercials wouldn't make any sense.

There's not any, you know, definition of candy bars or anything like that.

There's just this construct you eventually learn to believe in.

Snickers is one of those candy bars, and it must be a fairly good one because some people are saying it's the best.

So at least it has to be very good.

You see that at enough times, and you learn to embrace those presuppositions without much critical thinking at all.

When it comes to epistemology, how you how you know what you know, or to theology or philosophy, the concept of presuppositions, it's more important than it is in marketing.

When it comes to philosophy, you have presuppositions about how you reason and think about the world that you don't really actually defend, you just embrace them.

For example, two plus two equals four.

All right, that's not a presupposition.

That's something I can prove.

I can get two of one thing and two of the same thing and add them together, and you would have four of them, and you could see it in front of you, and yes, two and two, one, two, three, four.

Now two plus two equals four, I get it.

So that's not a presupposition, but the presupposition behind that is that there's something called math.

And that math works, and that math is effective, and it represents reality in some way.

And it's consistent across time.

If it's two plus two today equals four, then tomorrow it'll be more or less the same.

I mean, you woke up today and you didn't re-check the math.

You didn't get up today and say it's two plus two st equal to four.

You know, you just embrace this worldview that our universe is somewhat consistent one day to the next, that logic and reasoning work, that math is a category and all of that, and you live by that.

So I'm not saying presuppositions are bad.

They're a necessary part of life.

But they do color our reasoning.

And we perceive things through the lens of them.

Often they involve circular reasoning.

You know, two plus two equals four.

So that's circular.

It's not that that's bad, it's just the reality that you use circular reasoning to prove presuppositions.

My family goes skiing every year because skiing is fun.

I'll be in a chairlift at 30 below zero, and my left ear falls off.

And we're gonna go spend$12 on hot chocolate.

And as one of my kids is shivering on the chairlift, she might look at me and say, Why?

Why are we doing this again?

And I will say, Because skiing is fun.

It's circular reasoning, of course it is.

But you embrace the world by it.

If the kid next door, the 10-year-old neighbor to you, throws a rock through your dining room window.

You see him through the window, he runs to your house, and he throws a rock through your window, breaks your window.

You are going to run after the kid, not the rock.

Why?

Because you have the presuppositions that the kid is a volitional creature, he has his own free will, he makes decisions, he's the one who's acting.

The rock is an inanimate object, the rock was acted upon.

You're not reasoning through that every time.

Every time you see somebody do something, you're not, you know, examining your categories of knowledge and all that.

You're just assuming about the world that that kid is responsible for what he did, not the rock.

People have presuppositions about everything.

The story that's in front of us this morning is a great illustration, perhaps the best in the Bible, of showing you how people's presuppositions make them blind to the truth that's in front of them.

Let's look at this more closely.

Verse 22.

A demon-oppressed man was blind and mute.

And he was brought to Jesus.

Now, of course, he had to be brought to Jesus because he was blind.

Jesus is out in the wilderness if you remember.

This is not in a city, it's not in a readily accessible place.

He had been healing in the synagogues at Capernaum and Veseda and uh Magdala, Corzin.

He'd been going to all those cities, healing in the synagogues.

And remember, earlier in Matthew chapter 12, the Pharisees turned against him.

Matthew 12 · chapter mention

You see that in verse 14.

The Pharisees went out and conspired against Jesus, how to destroy him.

You know, from Mark's gospel, they conspired with the Herodians, who are the you know, the political liberals of Israel.

They were in line with Rome.

They were the descendants of Herod the Great.

Their loyalty was still to him.

So they were as liberal as you get, the Pharisees were as conservative as you get.

The Pharisees were the policing the Sabbath, the Herodians barely believed in the Sabbath, but the two of them partnered together to kill Jesus.

Jesus is aware of that, so he gets out of town.

He's no longer gonna be preaching and healing in the synagogues, he's gonna go out into the wilderness, he's trying to avoid the showdown with the Pharisees, he's trying, he's gonna die on his own schedule, not theirs.

So he goes away from them.

It says in verse 19, he's not gonna argue anymore in the streets.

He's not gonna have debates with the Pharisees in the streets.

You know, you don't want to argue with a fool because people won't be able to tell the difference.

It's that proverb.

So Jesus withdraws himself out to the wilderness, but the Pharisees are hunting him, they're following him out there, and so are the crowds.

The crowds are massive, and in the crowd comes this blind, mute man.

Now, a blind, mute, and demon-possessed man, in even in Jesus' ministry, was not that unusual.

He has healed lots of blind people, he's healed mute people, he's healed lots of deaf people, he's made the lame walk, he's risen people from the dead again, he's cast out demons before, even just in the few chapters around this, he's done that.

So, this in itself is not an unusual miracle, but something about it was unusual.

Something about it grabbed the crowd's attention in an unusual way.

The rest of Matthew 12 is going to be the fallout of this miracle.

Matthew does not let us know what that is.

He describes it in a way that's not a normal healing miracle.

You know, some of the miracles we know how Jesus did the healing.

Remember in John 9, he spits in the dirt and makes mud with his spit and wipes in the guy's eye.

And Mark 7, he heals the deaf mute by sticking his fingers in his own mouth and then putting his fingers in the guy's ear and going nose to nose with the guy, face to face, and heals him.

I mean, there's those other examples of how Jesus healed people we know about.

In the synagogue, he healed the guy by just willing him to be healed without touching him.

That's in Matthew 12.

This healing, we we get no insight into that.

So we don't know if it's the way Jesus healed and it was unusual.

Perhaps, and this is my own suspicion, it was the notoriety of the person.

He was very well known.

He was not always deaf and mute.

This is a new condition he has, which is evidenced by people attributing it to demonic activity.

Had he been born that way, they wouldn't accuse him of being demon-possessed.

But it's evident, whatever this guy was, it was evident that it was demons that made him this way.

And so he's brought to Jesus.

Jesus heals him in such a way that it astonishes the crowd.

He heals them, the guy speaks and sees.

Now that's verse 22.

And again, that's not unusual.

Jesus has done that a lot in his ministry.

In fact, if you look at verse 15, it says he was healing countless people in verse 15.

So that's not what's unusual.

But something about it is, and Matthew's not concerned to tell us what about that is, but we do see in verse 23 that all of the people were amazed.

That word for people there, it's the word for crowds.

It's not the Greek word for people, it's the word for crowds.

And it is plural.

So all of the crowds were amazed.

Crowd upon crowd of people heard about what Jesus had done, and they were astonished.

That word amazed, even is it's a particular Greek word that means flabbergasted, like shocked to the point of speechlessness, dumbfounded would be the English word.

There's a different Greek word for surprise, a different Greek word for scared, which is the one Mark uses as it's often translated uh afraid or amazed.

Here it's a different word, it's the word for just gobsmacked, like lost the ability to speak over how stunned you were about what you just saw.

That's this word.

So however this healing happens, people heard about it, and the guy is now going around telling everybody to happen.

It says he's speaking now, and everybody is shocked to the point of ridiculousness.

Which is going to be a theme through the rest of this chapter, all of Matthew, Matthew 12.

Jesus' works have made people unable to think clearly.

In fact, the crowds begin saying, Can this be the son of David?

Now, the way the question is worded, Greek has a way of saying a question that you know the answer is implied, and this question is implied the answer would be no.

English has the same way, but in English it's tone of voice, not grammatical structure.

Like if you hear you're not wearing that, are you?

You know what the correct answer is supposed to be.

Like, no.

Why would you think I'd be wearing this?

I mean, I know it's on my body right now, and my car keys are in my hands, but why would you think I would be dumb enough to be wearing this?

Of course not.

Of course not.

And I'm insulted.

I'm going to change right now.

The married people understand exactly what I'm describing.

I see some single people going, shaking their heads, but whatever.

This question is worded in such a way you know the answer is supposed to be no.

This couldn't be the son of David, could it?

Son of David is the messianic title for Jesus.

He's the descendant of David who will be the messianic king in Israel.

Remember, not all of David's biological sons were the son of David.

Absalom, for example, the promise didn't go to him, even though he was king for a hot minute.

He was not the true son of David.

Solomon was.

This is described in 1 Kings chapter 1, the rivalry between the kings and the uh promise gets passed down through Solomon.

1 Kings 1 · chapter mention

That becomes the line of David through all the hundreds of years, even to the wilderness wanderings, the exile.

Jesus is now born in Matthew 1, according to the line of David.

He's the son of David, he's the heir to David's throne.

It's just a messianic title.

It means he's the one who will be the king of the Jews.

The book of Isaiah describes what the Messiah will be like.

He's going to give sight to the blind.

He's going to cause the deaf to hear.

He's going to cause the mute to speak.

He's going to preach the gospel to the poor.

He's going to give liberty to the captives.

That's the time when the king is in their midst.

That's Isaiah, says that.

500 years before this encounter.

Isaiah says, You'll know the king is there when he's casting out demons and causing the blind to see and causing the deaf to hear.

Then the king is among you.

And Jesus obviously is the son of David.

He began his ministry in Luke 4, his first sermon was reading that passage from Isaiah.

Remember, he opens the scroll, reads that passage, that the dead will live, the blind will see, the lame will walk, the poor will have the good news preached to them, then rolls up the scroll and says, This is fulfilled in your hearing.

He's not being tactful here.

And then he goes out and heals everybody.

So if you're a student of the word, which the Jews were, and you read Isaiah, it says, When the Son of David comes, he's going to cast out demons, cause the blind to see, the mute to speak, and he's going to do it in the wilderness.

Remember, he's going to be up in Napoli and Zebulun, the light of the Gentiles out in Galilee.

That's where it's going to happen according to Isaiah.

So then you're out there 500 years later, and there's Jesus out there, and he says, I'm fulfilling that passage, and he's in the right place geographically, and now he's casting out demons and healing people.

You would look at that in a way that nobody else has done before for hundreds of years.

You would look at that and go, wait a minute.

This looks almost like it could possibly be.

If you squint really, really it looks like he's doing what Isaiah said he would do.

Maybe he's the one.

That would be a rational conclusion.

But instead the crowds are looking at it, going, hmm, I don't know about this.

I don't know about this.

The demons are possessing that guy.

Jesus is healing that guy.

But I can't quite figure out who's on which side.

That's because they're engaged with us through their presuppositions.

They're so hostile to Jesus.

Because Jesus has said that he's the Lord of the Sabbath.

If Jesus is speaking the truth, that means the Pharisees are essentially frauds.

The Pharisees are unwilling to give up their power.

They're unwilling to cede to Jesus the moral high ground.

So their starting position is that Jesus is false.

He's not of God.

He's certainly not the Messiah.

So that when Jesus reads the scroll of Isaiah and then does all the things it says and then says, I think I'm the son of David, they're like, oh, I just can't quite tell.

In fact, verse 24, the Pharisees go further than the crowds.

The crowds are like, hey, that almost looks like the son of David.

And by the way, the crowds didn't think he was really the son of David because they were expecting the son of David to overthrow the Roman Empire, to, you know, do all this, set liberty to the Jews, not, you know, be surrounded by fishermen in Galilee out in the wilderness.

So they're just, they're not ready for the kind of king that Jesus is, of course.

And that's described in a lot of other passages that we don't need to go into this morning.

But the Pharisees go even further in verse 24.

When the Pharisees heard it, so apparently they weren't close enough to see the deaf, uh the blind healed.

They weren't close enough to see it.

But the word is getting to them.

Perhaps they're on the outskirts of the massive crowd, or perhaps they're hearing about it back in their own cities.

We don't know.

But they deduce, oh, it's only by Belzebal, which is the name for the devil, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons.

So he's actually working through the devil right now.

In my preparation for this Sunday, I was thinking I would preach more than I am able to preach.

I was going to try to do this whole passage.

Um, but I'm going to take out all the demon stuff and all the devil stuff and leave that for next Sunday.

Uh so this will just focus on evangelism this morning and leave the demon and devil stuff for next Sunday, which is the first Sunday of Advent.

And so there's nothing more Adventy than preaching a sermon on the demons.

I'm sure we'll have great, great songs for it, Bill.

Yeah, it'll be exciting.

For this Sunday, though, I want to take this passage and wrestle with its implications on evangelism.

This is all about effective evangelism.

The first lesson about effective evangelism from this would be that presuppositions hinder people's evangelism.

They hinder people responding to the gospel.

The crowd here is overwhelmed with evidence for who Jesus is.

But they're unable to process it because their starting point is that he's not the Savior.

He's not the Son of David.

He's not God, certainly.

He says he's the Lord of the Sabbath.

He can't be that.

He says he can forgive sins and then proves that he can forgive sins by causing the man to stand up and pick up his mat and walk.

And so they're stuck with this.

He says he's the Lord of the Sabbath, and then proving it by healing a guy on the Sabbath, and so they're rejecting it.

They're not able to process what's in front of them.

The point of understanding presuppositions is not to win philosophical arguments, not to get, you know, degrees in philosophy.

The point of understanding presuppositions is to be an effective evangelist.

It's to win souls in evangelism.

My presupposition with this passage is that Jesus is a good evangelist.

Assuming that, there's some lessons from it.

Effective evangelism attacks false presuppositions.

Effective evangelism attacks false presuppositions.

It goes after them.

And that's where Jesus goes.

He goes right after the core of their argument.

The core of their argument is that Jesus must be the devil because he has power over demons.

Jesus goes right after that and says, every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste.

A city or house divided against itself will not stand.

Jesus quotes Abraham Lincoln.

That's why it's such a famous speech.

Mark's gospel actually says he's speaking in a parable to them.

Like imagine a kingdom attacking itself.

How long do you think it'll last before they start shooting each other?

You can't attack yourself and survive.

That's Jesus' story here.

Do you really think the devil is casting out the devil?

Well, let's engage with your logic right now.

The devil is attacking the devil, and he's the great adversary.

That doesn't make any sense.

And he's almost even break it down further, because we as Americans don't often talk about the devil or demons or whatnot.

So break it down just.

Here's a guy who is demonically possessed and deaf.

He's blind, sorry, blind and mute.

He can't see, he can't speak, and demons are making that happen.

Let's assume that that's bad, that what the devil is doing to that guy is bad.

And now Jesus comes and casts out the demons and lets him see and lets him speak.

And now he's has sight and now he's talking and leading a normal life.

Is that good?

Yes, that's good.

So does the devil do good things through people?

No.

So if Jesus is attacking somebody that is the devil is afflicting and setting them free and giving them a better life.

Than they had before is Jesus doing good things or bad things?

Well, good things.

So imagine how broken your mind has to be to look at that and go, I can't tell which side is good.

Like I'm struggling here.

I can't tell.

Or make it even more Americanized.

Take somebody who's, you know, a drug addict and his family has left him because he can't be trusted and he's stealing and all of that.

And that guy comes to faith in Christ, gets saved.

And his life has changed, and now he's on the straight and narrow and he's delighting in Jesus and he's growing in godliness.

And there are those who would look at that person and say, well, that's not good because Jesus is bad, and Christians are, you know, patriarchal and you know, have wrong views of immigration, and wrong views of women's rights, and wrong views of uh global warming, and Christians are responsible for all the wrong in our politics and all the wrong in our world, and you know, throw Ukraine in there also.

And so this is what what the change in this guy's life is actually bad because it's from Jesus.

That's what Jesus is dealing with right here.

Somebody who's looking at a person whose life was radically changed, and the crowds, the masses of the day are like, I think it's probably bad what's happened to the guy because Jesus did it.

And so Jesus goes after that and says basically how broken your brain is.

That you can't see the difference between good and evil, and that Jesus is helping people go from being captives of the devil to walking in the light.

Why don't people respond to presuppositions?

To the gospel because of presuppositions, because their mind, they don't have the right framework to process it.

They don't.

Their starting point is that it can't be true.

I want you to show a great passage that describes this as well.

Flip over to 1 Corinthians chapter, look at a verse in chapter 1 and a verse in chapter 2 in 1 Corinthians.

So go right in your Bible, you're in Matthew, go Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, 1 Corinthians.

1 Corinthians chapter 1, verse 18.

1 Corinthians 1:18

The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing.

The word of the cross.

The word there is the word Lagos, the whole concept of the cross.

That's what it means.

The whole concept of the cross is foolishness to non-Christians.

The concept of the cross is that God designed the plan of salvation, that God, the highest being in the world, the most glorious being in the universe, created the universe, his plan of salvation is that he would enter the universe, not as an angel, but as a human, the low the lowest.

You know, to go down as a human, and not even didn't come as like a king or a rich person, but came in poverty, came low, born in a manger, he would come down.

So God from up goes down, leads a sinless, holy life, subjecting himself to all the laws of Scripture and all the laws of God, being a servant to other people, dies, though he was innocent, murdered, dies, the death of a slave, stripped naked, put on a cross, the most appalling death you can imagine that society reserved only for the, he wouldn't kill even our citizen that way.

That was how the way slaves, the lowest of the low, would die that way.

Jesus dies that way.

In his death, he bears the punishment for people's sins that Jesus didn't commit, but that punishment is given him.

God pours out his wrath and anger on Jesus.

Jesus absorbs all of that wrath, pays for our sin, then dies, resurrects from the grave to show that if you put your faith in that, you too can resurrect from the grave and have eternal life.

That's the word of the cross.

Now, for those who are not Christians who don't, whose starting point is that Jesus is not true.

They hear that and it sounds stupid.

The God of the universe, there's so many galaxies.

Why would God come to this one?

There's so many galaxies, why would he choose this planet?

And so many things in this planet, why would he go to those people in those times and go that low?

It doesn't make any sense.

If I was God, I wouldn't subject myself to that kind of humiliation.

The gospel message is so dumb.

It's folly, is the word, but I mean, dumb is a fine translation of the word folly.

It's so silly.

In contrast to people who are being saved, they hear that same story.

And they think that is the most glorious plan imaginable.

Think of how much God's glory is magnified to go from heaven to earth.

Think about how majestic and wonderful the attributes of God are displayed by coming to a low creature like a human being and living out the kind of life Jesus did.

Think about how the wonder of God is on full display in Jesus Christ.

So it's two different, just two different starting points.

Now look at chapter 2, verse 14 of 1 Corinthians 2, 14.

The natural person doesn't accept the things of the Spirit of God.

Because they're folly to him.

That's the word folly again, same word we saw in chapter 1.

It's just so silly.

It's not acceptable to them.

They don't accept it.

And it says, why?

Because they are, he's not able to understand them because they're spiritually discerned.

The gospel is spiritual language to spiritual people.

Somebody who is not a Christian, their spirit is dead.

Now, non-Christians often say that they're spiritual.

Very common.

To hear somebody say, I'm not religious.

I'm not a Christian.

I'm not even religious, but I am very spiritual.

When somebody says that, what they mean by that is that they believe, I'm assuming what they mean by that is that there's more to life than just, you know, this life.

There's more to a human being than just the body itself, that there are souls and that there's a spiritual reality in the world, and the spiritual reality, that's what's important, kind of thing.

I assume that's what people mean when they say that they're spiritual.

That's not what Christians mean by that, although that's true.

What Christians mean by that is that we're born in this world sinners with our spirit dead, our soul essentially dead because of sin, and yet through faith our spirit is made alive.

We receive the good news of God through the Holy Spirit that dwells in us, who applies the scripture to our mind and gives us insight into God's Word.

That's what we mean by it.

So we're using the word spiritual in two different ways.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 2 is using it in the Christian way.

So the non-Christian hears the gospel and it's foolishness because their soul or their spirit is still dead.

It doesn't have the ears to hear what the scripture is saying.

It's like they don't speak the right language.

It's not saying that they're, when it says it's folly, it's not saying they're dumb or you know they have a low IQ or anything.

I mean, if I start, if I started speaking in Spanish right now and you don't speak Spanish, you wouldn't understand what I'm saying.

And it is not because you're dumb.

It's not a statement about your intelligence, it's just you don't know the language.

So when the scripture comes to us, somebody who's not a Christian doesn't have the right language to receive it.

And so they reject it.

They put it away.

You can flip back to Matthew chapter 12.

Matthew 12 · chapter mention

Back there, you see that they're rejecting the evidence is right in front of them.

One would imagine that when confronted with evidence, you would say, Does this evidence correspond to the way the world is?

Then it should be received.

If your presupposition is that Jesus isn't who he says he is, you see evidence of him healing people, forgiving sins, all of that, and you say, That I can't deal with it.

I reject that.

And Jesus in his evangelism goes right after that point and says, What you're rejecting means you can't explain anything in the world.

If you reject Jesus, you don't know the difference between good and evil.

You don't know the difference between God and the devil if you reject Jesus.

This is true in even in a more American sense.

What is good?

Can I steal you can I steal from people?

No, stealing's bad.

Why?

Why is stealing bad?

If you reject God and you reject his revelation, why is stealing bad?

Why is loving the poor and the immigrant a common thing to hear in evangelism?

Why are those things good?

If you reject God, what's the foundation of how do you assimilate everything you're seeing in the world if you've rejected God in his revelation?

You have different presuppositions.

Something is good if I think it's good, or if a lot of people think it's good, or if history declares it to be good, or whatever, and it becomes contradictory very, very quickly and doesn't actually line up with the way the world is.

That's what Jesus goes after.

You reject me, you don't even know who the devil is.

Another principle from evangelism we draw from this is the limitation of evidence.

Jesus recognizes the limitation of evidence.

He doesn't call up the blind mute and have him testify in front of everybody and prove that he's healed.

He doesn't appeal to evidence.

He recognizes that evidence is limited.

Evidence is not very effective.

You're witnessing somebody and they say, I can't be a Christian because how do all the animals fit on the ark?

And you say, Have you ever even been to the ark encounter?

You recognize it's not really an issue of diagramming how many different kinds of animals.

You need to know there's been kind and species, first of all, how many kinds they were and by their family and where they could fit in the ark.

And look, they can even they can do the food this way.

It's not an issue of how you feed the animals, it's an issue of the person is rejecting God.

Somebody told me a story between services about how they you were friends with somebody who grew up in the church and they they left their faith because they basically wanted to live an immoral lifestyle, but then every now and then they say, I can't be a Christian because of this or because of that.

And this person was telling me I texted them back and says, When did you start thinking about that?

Oh, just this month.

Yeah, but you rejected Jesus years ago.

Like those aren't reasons you're rejecting Jesus.

They come way after the fact.

People reject Jesus because they hate God.

Even though they wouldn't say that, you know, you share the gospel with somebody and they say, Oh, which I've had this experience.

I've shared the gospel with somebody and the person says, That sounds good and wonderful, and everything.

My problem is that I don't believe in God.

To which at the time, this is this is a true story, I told, I told the guy, your problem isn't that you don't believe in him, your problem is that you hate him.

And he got super offended.

He's like, What?

I don't hate God.

What God don't you hate?

I mean, do you not hate the real true God that you don't believe in?

Certainly, if you're saying there's no gods, you can imagine some gods that don't exist that you would hate, right?

That would be good to hate that kind of monster God, certainly.

So you can't say you don't hate a God you don't believe in.

Of course you hate God.

That's why you reject him.

I mean, we're standing on a planet that God made.

And there are those who would say, I can't believe in a creator, because there's no evidence of him.

There's not a lot I can do at that point.

There just isn't.

Here's the crowd of people standing in front of a dude who was blind five seconds ago and mute, and he's walking around telling everybody how Jesus healed him, and they're like, Yeah, I I don't know.

I don't know.

Evidence is very limited.

One of the reasons evidence is limited leads to my next point here that Jesus, effective evangelism, rebukes unbelief as sin.

Effective evangelism rebukes unbelief as sin.

And Jesus does exactly that.

He calls out the sinful nature of unbelief because it is moral.

People are confronted with the truth about God, they suppress the truth in unrighteousness, they reject God because they, you know, because they reject him, which is itself sinful.

When you give somebody evidence and you appeal to them to just think about the evidence, you're putting them in the position of the judge and the jury, and they're sitting in judgment over God, and maybe they even decide, yeah, you know what, the Bible is pretty persuasive, but they're still in the position of judge.

You know, what they need to do is repent from being the judge and see themselves as the defendant.

They need to confess that their lack of faith has been sin.

They need to cry out to God for mercy, and God forgives people who do that, which is very different than saying, you know, having considered the evidence, I think I'll follow Jesus.

You know, Virginia, Northern Virginia has all these rambler houses.

You know, the kind of houses where it looked like that you built a different room every decade.

And I asked a contractor, uh guy that I know, could you build a second story on top of one of those ramblers?

He's like, oh no.

I could just fall over.

If you want two stories, you've got to design it from the foundation up to be two stories.

And that's a pretty fitting illustration for people in evangelism.

You have to repent from your own worldview, from your own presuppositions, and ask God for forgiveness before the new house gets built.

You can't just be the judge and say, having weighed the evidence, I think I'm gonna add Jesus to my life.

I'm gonna live like I am and add Jesus to it.

He crushes, he crushes the whole thing.

The lesson from this story is that Jesus challenges people and tells them they will be judged for their unbelief.

Look at verse 27.

If you if I cast out demons by Belzebel, supposedly, like I'm out here the devil casting out demons, okay.

If I'm doing that, then who do your sons cast them out by?

In other words, there's by sons, he don't mean he doesn't mean literally, like the followers of the Pharisees.

They do their own so-called exorcisms.

Jesus isn't saying those exorcisms even work, by the way.

He's just buying into the argument for a second.

All these Pharisees run around and you guys are casting out casting out demons.

By what power are you doing it?

Then, if you're casting out demons and I'm casting out demons, and you're saying I'm doing it by the devil, what does that say about you?

You're gonna be judged for this.

He says, you are gonna be judged by your own standards, verse 27 says.

Uh the angels will judge you, of course, God will judge you, of course, but we don't even need them for now.

Right now, your own standards will judge you.

Again, to go back to the scenario at hand.

Here's a person whose life is wrecked by the devil.

Jesus heals him and makes him better, and you look at that and you say, I think I'm on the side of the devil.

Well, what does that say about you?

You deserve judgment.

Unbelief requires judgment.

It's common to think that all religions are more or less the same.

Christianity just happens to be true, and that's why we're Christians, but I'm telling you, all religions are not the same.

Christianity is the only religion that makes logical sense of the world.

The world as it is is explained by Christianity.

No other religion does that.

No other religion makes sense of the world that you're in.

No other religion reveals God, no other religion has an infallible book, and no other religion makes any sense about the world we're in.

Every other religion is logically contradictory and has books that contradict itself and just doesn't explain the world like it is.

And so the path to faith is confessing your sin, humbling yourself, and asking God for mercy.

And he always answers those prayers, he always gives mercy to those who come to him through Christ.

And it is common to say, I would come to Christ if I first understood this or that, and it just reminds me that understanding is a gift of faith.

It's not what produces faith.

You don't understand God and have faith.

You uh receive the gospel, you believe the gospel, and God grants you understand.

It's not blind faith.

Don't call that blind faith.

It's faith that makes the blind see.

Very different than blind faith.

God, we're grateful that you give faith to those who come to you through Christ.

You give faith to the humble.

I pray for anyone here today that has never given their life to you.

I pray today you would humble their hearts, have them call on you, and be saved.

We know you are a God who hears prayers and answers it according to your will.

We pray that you do that this morning.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.