"The Dangers of Being Close to Jesus" Matthew 11:20-24 Sunday Morning Worship Service

This morning though, in Matthew 11, verses 20 through 24.

Matthew 11:20–24

Then he, Jesus, began to denounce the cities where most of his mighty works had been done because they didn't repent.

Woe to you, Corzin.

Woe to you, Beth Seda.

For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.

But I tell you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you.

And you, Capernaum, would you be exalted to heaven?

You'll be brought down to Hades.

For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.

But I tell you that it will be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for you.

These are the words of the Lord, and I pray that he would seal them into your hearts, much like the song, Be Thou My Vision, which has gone through the centuries and is sung by people in every language, it transcends cultures and can impact us today.

This is the kind of warning Jesus gives us in Matthew 11, though he said it to a crowd of Jews from Khorazin 2,000 years ago, it echoes through the centuries and impacts our hearts here today.

If the word gospel means good news, what is the bad news?

What's the opposite of the gospel?

What's the bad news?

And R.C.

Sproul's testimony, I know R.

C.

Sproul's in heaven now, but he would often share his testimony.

And when he shared his testimony, which I'm sure many of you have heard, he was not a believer and was at college, and somebody began to witness to him.

I think it was in the cafeteria.

And this girl asked him, Are you saved?

And he quipped.

Saved from what?

And if you recall the story, she blinked at him and said, I actually don't know.

She had never been asked that before.

She may have failed the evangelism class right there, but long term she passed because that provoked Arcee's conscience to the point that he began to read the Bible and really devour it under the quest to try to find out what is a person saved from.

His search eventually led him to Romans chapter 1, verse 16, which says the gospel is the power of God to salvation, and that the gospel saves us from the wrath of God, which is about to be revealed from heaven against all ungodliness of man.

Romans 1:16

R.

C.

Sprill notes that with that revelation, saved from what was no longer the question, and now became a saved from who?

And the answer is saved from God.

The gospel saves you from God.

Our sins deserve punishment.

Our sins store up wrath in heaven.

God unveils the wrath from heaven on mankind according to his gospel.

We are punished for our sins in this life and in the next, according to the gospel, is what Paul says in Romans.

In fact, in the tribulation, when the whole earth is being shaken and destroyed, the trumpets and the bowls are being undone, the seals are being unrolled, the horsemen of the apocalypse ride forward in the earth, people are trembling, the earth is being demolished.

People will hide under the rocks and under the mountains, is the language in Revelation 6, 6.

And they are begging in verse 16 to be shielded from the wrath of the Lamb.

They even identify the tribulation wrath as coming from the Lamb who is in heaven.

You know, in Revelation, Jesus is the God man enthroned in heaven.

He is the lion of Judah and the Lamb who was slain, but it is from his throne, the eternal throne of the Lion of Judah and the Lamb who is slain.

From that throne is where wrath issues.

Wrath is something we deserve from our sin.

It is delivered by God through Jesus Christ, and it results in physical death and spiritual death.

The wages of sin is death, speaking of our physical life.

The wages of sin is death, speaking of our spiritual life.

When people die, their souls go down to Sheol in the Old Testament, or Hades is the New Testament word.

Their souls go down.

At the end of the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, for those who've died outside of Christ, he will resurrect their souls from the grave.

He'll bring them out of Hades.

He will resurrect their bodies from the earth.

He will recreate their bodies, even those who died before the flood.

Their bodies have decomposed.

The atoms and molecules have been cycled back through countless other creatures, but God will sort everything out, recreate the human body, reunite the souls of those who are in Hades, and join them back to their body, judge them at the great white throne, open the books of their works, judge them according to their works, and cast them into the lake of fire.

That's what hell is, where they will suffer forever and ever.

Revelation 20 describes it this way.

John is having a vision of what happens after the kingdom of God on earth.

He describes the dead, both great and small, standing before the throne.

This is Revelation 20, verse 12.

Revelation 20:12

And a book was opened, which is the book of life.

The dead were judged by what was written in the books, plural, according to what they had done, which is not the book of life, but the book of works.

At that moment the sea gives up the dead who were in it.

Death and Hades or Sheol give up the dead that were in them, and they're judged, each one of them according to what they had done.

Then death and Hades themselves were thrown into the lake of fire.

That's the second death.

That's the lake of fire.

And if anyone's name was not found in the book of life, they were thrown into the lake of fire.

The Bible begins with a warning about this.

Don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Adam and Eve ate from the tree.

God had told them, The day you eat from it, you will die.

That day they did die.

Of course, they didn't die physically that day, they lived another nine centuries, but they died spiritually at that moment.

They hid from God, aware of their sin, ashamed.

It would take their bodies a while to die as well.

The Bible ends with a warning about this.

Whoever adds to the words of the book of Revelation, which encompasses this judgment, whoever adds to that revelation, which stands for the entirety of the Bible and closes out the scripture, whoever adds to it, all of the contents of the curses of this book will be added to them.

That's how Revelation ends.

And so the Bible starts with a warning about eternal death.

It ends with a warning of eternal death.

And in the middle, kind of the Mount Everest of the Bible books is Isaiah.

And Isaiah ends with a very poignant warning about hell.

A description of hell, actually.

Again, describing the end of the millennial kingdom where the souls of those who have died have been resurrected, reunited with their bodies, cast in the lake of fire.

Isaiah 66, verse 24 says, Their worm will not die, their fire will not be quenched, they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.

Isaiah 66:24

And so the beginning of the Bible warns about hell, the end of the Bible warns about hell, and the middle of it provides a description of hell.

And all throughout the rest of it, by the way, is just littered with descriptions and warnings of hell.

Genesis chapter 6, God says, because of mankind's wickedness, he will blot out mankind from the face of the earth.

Genesis 6 · chapter mention

Job 21, 20 says the wicked are held for judgment.

Job 21, verse 3, destruction is designed for the wicked.

Job 21:3

That should remind you a little bit of Romans 9, where it says there are vessels prepared beforehand for destruction, speaking of human beings.

Psalm 9, verse 7, God's throne is established for the day of judgment.

Psalms 9:7

God's throne exists in heaven.

Jesus Christ is reigning from the throne.

The Son of God reigns over the universe from his throne.

And he does so ushering the nations to the point of judgment that he himself will unleash from them.

Romans 2, 5, sinners are storing up wrath for the day of judgment.

Luke 13, when the crowds are asking about the tower that fell over and killed countless people, Jesus asks them, Do you think something is going to happen to you?

You better repent, or you will likewise perish, he says.

That is the consistent teaching of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.

There is an observation about hell, though, that is not, I think, universally understood, but is clearly taught in the Bible, namely that not everybody suffers equally in hell.

There are degrees of punishment in hell.

Not everyone suffers equally.

That's a truth that is laid out a few places in the Bible.

One of them is Matthew 11.

Here Jesus begins to denounce the cities where most of his mighty works have been done.

Not all of his mighty works.

He did some stuff in Jerusalem, and of course he visited Jericho and did miracles there.

He went to Syria and Jordan, Lebanon, did miracles there.

But most of the miracles recorded in the New Testament took place in Galilee, around the cities that are listed here.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, but moved after the baptism of John the Baptist to Galilee, where he became the headquarters of his ministry.

Galilee then is called the light to the Gentiles.

It's where the highways crossed in Israel.

That's where Jesus set up shop.

He did his ministry there.

Most of his miracles took place right there.

There were massive crowds there.

The people there were not antagonistic towards Jesus.

Some of the religious leaders were, of course, but most of the crowds were at least interested in Jesus.

Again, huge crowds here for Jesus.

The crowds that had flocked to John the Baptist had now kind of shifted to Jesus.

There were massive crowds there.

They wanted the miracles, they wanted the teaching, they wanted the food.

All of that they wanted.

Jesus here cuts to the fog.

He had already hinted at the obstinacy of the crowd earlier by asking them, What did you come out to the wilderness to see?

Remember, did you come out to see a reed shaken by the wind, the manified clothing, all of that?

He then compared them to the kid who wouldn't play wedding because he wanted something sad and wouldn't play funeral because he wanted something happy, and observed that they're most likely just don't like to play.

And now he goes beyond that straight to the heart and he denounces the people that are next to him there.

Denounces them.

That's the word used in verse 20.

He denounced them.

He denounced the cities they were from, that are the cities where most of his miracles took place, and he denounces them because they did not repent.

So that gets right to the heart issue.

The people who were flocking to Jesus did not turn from their sin.

John chapter 2 says that these people believed in Jesus, but he, for his part, did not entrust himself to them because he knew what was in the heart of all men.

John 2 · chapter mention

There's a belief that people can have that's not saving faith.

It's a belief that is interested in Jesus, that is Jesus adjacent.

To use the language of Hebrews 6, it's a faith that is sprinkled with the effects of Christianity.

They're splashed on by Jesus.

They see the good things Jesus does, they're around it to get the benefits of it, but they do not repent from their sin.

That's the crowd.

Jesus lets you know that in verse 20.

They did not repent.

And so he goes on to give a comparison between six cities.

Three cities in Galilee, three Gentile cities.

Three cities in Galilee, not that well known because Galilee is very obscure.

The three Gentile cities, very, very well known.

And his conclusion is that it will be more bearable in hell for the Gentile cities than it will be for the Jewish cities.

He doesn't say hell will be better.

He doesn't use a positive word.

He doesn't say hell will be better for these people.

Again, he doesn't paint hell in positive light at all.

He uses a very unusual word.

A nectos is the Greek word.

This is the only use of it in the Bible.

I chased down some other uses of it in Greek literature this week, and I normally wouldn't bore you with this kind of word study.

But it was interesting to me that all the uses of it that I was able to find all are used in the same context.

To describe people that lived in Rome that could no longer bear Rome.

They could no longer bear the taxation, they can no longer bear the depravity, and so they left Rome and they fled to the Italian countryside.

Who wouldn't?

We have the similar concept here.

That's the word that's used here.

And translating it bare is a is a is a great way to translate it.

They could no longer bear it.

It's when the weight of living somewhere is so heavy on you that it forces you out.

That's what hell will be like.

It will be unbearable.

That's the English phrase, unbearable.

And he says hell will be more bearable for some people than it will for others.

Well, what's the distinguishing feature then?

Who will hell be more bearable for than others?

What determines if hell will be more or less bearable for you?

And the answer lies in these six cities.

Now, because we're Americans, these six city names, probably most Americans might recognize Sodom, but not the other five.

So I want to spend basically the rest of our time this morning talking about these five cities because I think it'll have an effect in how you understand these passages.

First he lists this is Korzin.

What do you Korazan?

Khorzin is a little city about two miles away from the Sea of Galilee.

It's up in the hills.

All the other cities in Galilee are basically along the Sea of Galilee.

They're all fishermen, not Korzin.

Khorazan was agrarian.

They grew wheat there.

And they didn't grow just any wheat.

They grew wheat that was used in the temple offerings, the wave offering in the temple, where you wave the wheat back and forth.

The Jewish purification rituals and laws said that you couldn't use the wheat that was grown in a field with manure or fertilizer to offer in the temple.

And so this place, Korzin, grew the wheat that would be offered in the temple worship.

Because of that, it was a wealthy place.

The people there were very, very wealthy.

Some of the ruins that have been covered are, you know, elaborate.

It's up on a hill that overlooks the Sea of Galilee.

They've uncovered much of the synagogue there.

It's got a flight of stairs that kind of go up this hill on the outside to the synagogue, which would have overlooked the sea from an elevated point.

It would just be incredibly beautiful.

That's Khorusin.

It's right at the base of Mount Arbel.

If you keep winding your way up that mountain, you're on the top of Mount Arbel.

It's most likely that this exchange in Matthew 11 was taking place on Mount Arbel, which means most of the people that came out to see Jesus were likely from Korus.

That seems to be the case because remember, he began responding to the messengers from John the Baptist by teaching for an hour and healing for an hour.

That's what Luke 7 says.

And he kept continuing after he sent John the Baptist's messengers home, he kept teaching and he kept doing miracles, and the crowd kept growing.

Korus's the closest place to this, so it's likely most of these people were from that town.

That's confirmed here in verse 21 because it says in verse 20, he's denouncing the cities where these works are taking place, and it begins with Khorusan.

This town is more or less forgotten after the life of Jesus.

Today some of it's been uncovered, and it's basically a parking lot for people that want to hike Mount or Bell.

Woe to you, Khorusan.

Woe to you, Besseda.

Besseda is a bigger place than Korazan.

Besseda literally just means fisherman's village, fish town.

That's where three of the disciples were from.

Philip, Andrew, and Peter were from there.

It's where Jesus began to call his disciples from.

He told them to come and follow him.

They left their nets and followed him.

This is the town in John chapter 12.

John 12 · chapter mention

Well, people came and hunted down Philip, one of the twelve, who is from Bethsaeda, and they said, Please, Philip, take us to Jesus.

They say to Philip, Sir, we would see Jesus.

The people in Bethsaida wanted to see Jesus.

They loved his teaching.

They hung on his words.

Bethsaeda, outside of Bethsaida, is where the crowds came for the healing of the 5,000.

I mean, the feeding of the 5,000.

Remember, Jesus was teaching, the crowds emptied out of Beth Seda came to him.

There were 5,000 men, Matthew says, and who knows how many thousands of women and children.

And they were going to send them home to get something to eat.

Jesus said, You feed them.

They eventually did the miracle of the multiplication of the fish and the loaves.

That's Besseda.

Lots of other miracles were done there.

That's where the blind man was healed.

The blind man who after Jesus healed him said, Can you see now?

And he said, Yeah, I see people, but they look like trees walking.

That's Betsaida.

Beth Saeda is the place where they often cross to and from the calming of the storm and the boat.

That was Bethsaeda, where they were on their way there.

Very well known in Jesus' ministry.

Jesus says, Woe to them, because they didn't repent.

In fact, John says the people from Betheda left Jesus when he stopped feeding them.

They loved the miracles, they loved the teaching, they loved the food.

They did not, to use the language of Matthew 11, verse 20, they did not repent.

Matthew 11:20

Jesus goes on to say, if the mighty works done in you, speaking of Corazon and Beth Seda, had been done in Tyre in Sidon, they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes.

Tyre, we'll spend a lot of time on Tyre.

It's has mammoth importance in the Old Testament.

That's just one of those names we scan over with our eyes now, but mammoth importance.

Amos chapter 1, verse 9, says those in Tyre were kidnapping the Israelites and selling them into slavery.

Amos 1:9

Tyre is just on the north side of Israel.

It's modern-day Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast.

People would go and kidnap Israelites, sell them into slavery.

Tyre got rich from this.

It became a very wealthy place.

Egypt used it as a port to import stuff to Babylon.

They send it from Alexandria, Egypt, across the river to Tyre.

Tyre had exports there to the rest of the Mediterranean basin.

So it became a massively powerful and wealthy city.

Tyre is the place when the Jews were annihilating the Philistines in the days of the judges.

Jeremiah chapter 47, verse 4, says, The day is coming when God will judge Tyre for giving the Philistines refuge.

Jeremiah 47:4

And so it became a place of safe harbor for the enemies of Israel, and God remembers it.

But the longest section about Tyre, there's many long sections, but the longest is Ezekiel chapter 26.

Ezekiel 26 · chapter mention

And I want you to turn there in your Bibles.

Ezekiel chapter 26, it's page 713 if you're using the Pew Bible.

Ezekiel 26 · chapter mention

You have three full chapters dedicated to Tyre.

And even if you just scan it chapter 25, you see prophecies against all these other places: Ammon and Moab, Seir, Edom, Philistia.

Those places get prophecies in one paragraph.

They're going to go down.

God will judge them one paragraph.

Not Tyre.

Tyre gets three whole chapters.

Begins in verse 2, Son of Man, which is how Yahweh's addressing Ezekiel, because Tyre said concerning Jerusalem, Aha, the gate of the peoples is broken, it's swung open to me.

I shall be replenished now that she's laid waste.

In other words, the people in Tyre said, it's okay for us to plunder the Israelites and sell them into slavery because God left the door open.

Perhaps you could use that kind of logic yourself.

If God didn't want me to sin, he wouldn't have made it so easy.

I feel like the Lord is leading me to sin because the door to it is wide open.

That's what the people in Tyre said.

God forgot to close the door.

That's why we got rich off of stealing them.

Verse 3, this is what Yahweh says Behold, I'm against you, Tyre, and I'm going to bring many nations against you as the sea brings up its waves.

This is fascinating when you understand how Tyre actually fell in world history.

Nebuchadnezzar attacked it, destroyed the city on land.

Many of the inhabitants fled to an island and rebuilt Tyre on an island.

Nebuchadnezzar let it go.

But for 200 years, other nations would come by and try to invade the island and erode and erode and erode them away.

Eventually, Alexander the Great built a pier out to Tyre, taking all the dirt off of the ground, inscripting tens of thousands of soldiers from the surrounding people to build a pier out to it, where they eventually annihilated everyone on the island.

God knows that's coming hundreds of years before it happens.

Notice he says, You're going to go down as the sea brings up its waves.

Verse 4 they will destroy the wall.

Of Tyre and they'll break down her towers.

I will scrape soil from her and make her a bare rock.

That sounds painful, doesn't it?

I'm gonna scrape you bare.

It's also literally fulfilled as the Persians and Alexander the Great took the actual dirt from the city to be used against them.

She thinks she's spreading nets, but I'm gonna plunder her, God says in verse five.

Verse six, her daughters on the mainland, in other words, not the ones on the island, but the ones left on the mainland, they will be destroyed by the sword.

Verse 7, this is what Yahweh God says: Behold, I will bring against Tyre from the north, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, the king of kings with horses and chariots, with horsemen and soldiers, the same people that took Israel into captivity will destroy Tyre.

He will kill your sword, he will kill with the sword your daughters in the mainland, verse eight says.

He will set up a siege wall against you and throw up a mound against you.

Historians tell us that siege took thirteen years.

But Tyre would fall.

Verse 18, the coastlands will tremble on the day of your fall.

The coastlands that are on the sea are dismayed at your passing.

For this is what Yahweh says.

Chapter 27, I won't drag you through all chapters 27, but it's more of the same.

You're all gonna die.

List more countries that are gonna come, and those countries that are listed in chapter 27 come over those 200 years between Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander.

You're all going down, and I'll use all the nations to do it.

The end of chapter 27 is another song about the destruction, but look at verse 32.

In their wailing, they raise a lamentation and lament over you.

Verse 35 All the inhabitants of the coastland are appalled at you.

The hair of their king bristles with horror, their faces are convulsed, the merchants among the people hissed at you.

In other words, your fall was going to be so gigantic that the other kings of the world, when they hear what Alexander the Great combined with the Persians, when they hear what they did to Tyre, the other kings will panic.

Their face will seize up, their hair will stand on edge, they'll have like a nervous breakdown, because if he if Alexander can do that to Tyre, he nobody's safe.

And that's exactly the message God was sending them.

Chapter 28, this goes on.

But I want you to skip down to verse 12 of chapter 28.

Son of man, raise a lamentation over the king of Tyre, and say to him, Thus says the Lord Yahweh, you are the signet of perfection, full of wisdom, perfect in beauty.

You were in Eden in the garden of God.

Every precious stone was your covering.

And now it's going to list the stones that are, according to Revelation, lining heaven.

Sardis, topaz, diamond, beryl, onyx, jasper, sapphire, emerald, carbonacle.

And crafted in gold were your settings and your engravings.

On that day you were created, they were already prepared.

You were an anointed guardian cherub.

In other words, a guardian angel, a powerful angel.

I placed you, you were on the holy mountain of God in the midst of the stones where you walked, and you were blameless in all your ways the day you were created, until unrighteousness was found in you.

What is this talking about?

This is clearly not talking about the king of Tyre anymore, even though it's addressed to the king of Tyre.

It's comparing the king of Tyre to Satan.

This is a description of Satan.

Satan was created good.

King of Tyre wasn't created good.

He's a product of Adam.

He's created fallen.

But Satan was created good.

Perfect is the language in the Hebrew there.

He had access to heaven.

He walked around heaven on the very streets of heaven.

He could walk next to the throne of God.

He was a guardian angel, it says in verse 14.

He was on the holy mountain of God in verse 14.

Blameless again in verse 15.

But then unrighteousness was found in him, and he was cast out of heaven.

Look at verse 17.

You were so proud because of your beauty.

You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.

Remember, Psalm 8 says that Satan was desired dominion over the earth.

He thought that he could be like God, and so he was cast down to earth.

By the multitude, verse 18, of your iniquities and the unrighteousness of your trade, you profaned the sanctuary.

So I brought fire out from your midst.

It consumed you.

I turned you to ashes on the earth in the sight of all who saw you.

All who know you among the peoples are appalled at you.

You'll have a dreadful end and will be no more.

Satan fell like lightning from heaven.

God cast him out to earth where he plunged mankind into sin.

You know this is talking about Satan because Jesus quotes it in Luke's gospel and applies it to Satan.

Satire, in other words, is so wicked and so evil that at the end of three chapters prophesying its destruction, the only way to capture how wicked they are is to make a comparison between their king and the devil himself.

It's as if the devil was a prototype for the king of Tyre.

That's how wicked they are.

So this is not one of the Gentile cities.

Could have substituted in Nineveh or something like that.

No, this is this is the city whose leader is compared to the devil.

You can flip back to Matthew.

Jesus says, those in Tyre would have repented if they saw the miracles Jesus did.

Sidon is the next city listed there.

I'll be very brief with Sidon.

Sidon was a massive port city right next to Tyre.

It's where Egypt shipped their wheat into.

Sidon enters the Bible in Genesis 10, where it's a Canaanite city just outside of where Abraham is going to get.

It's right across the border from Israel.

They're Gentile and idol worshippers.

They're pagan.

Throughout the Old Testament, Sidon basically is just synonymous with idol worshipers that you can't do anything about.

They're just over the border.

That's Sidon.

Satire, the most wicked city imaginable, whose leader is the devil.

Sidon, a pillar of idol worship.

And God says that they would have repented had they seen the miracles that Jesus did outside of Korus and to respond to John the Baptist.

They would have repented had Jesus had they seen the miracles Jesus did in Beth Seda.

And they wouldn't have just had some kind of mambi-pamby repentance.

They would have repented, he says, in sackcloth and ashes, goat hair woven together, designed to scratch the skin, piles of ashes heaped on your head.

Somebody who repents like this would sit in a pile of ashes to show that they deserve death.

They would put piles of it on their head, putting on sackcloth.

It's just letting you know they are cut to the heart over their wickedness.

That's what would have happened had they seen the miracles of Jesus.

Jesus goes on.

I'll tell you it'd be more bearable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you.

Now you, Capernaum.

Verse 23, Capernaum is Jesus' hometown.

He lived there for at least three years, if not longer.

It's where most of the miracles in the Gospels take place.

All the miracles in Matthew 8 took place there.

That's where he the leper says, Are you willing to heal me?

And Jesus says yes.

The centurion servant says, Are you able to heal my, or the centurion says, Are you able to heal my servant without coming into a Gentile's house?

And Jesus says yes.

He's willing and able.

He heals Peter's mother-in-law in Capernaum.

He preached in the synagogue in Capernaum almost every Sabbath.

He was a regular feature of that synagogue.

That's the synagogue in Mark 1 and 2, where the demonically possessed men started shouting out and crying out that Jesus is the Son of God.

He was first recognized by demons in the synagogue at Capernaum.

The man with the withered hands, he gets healed in the synagogue in Capernaum.

After preaching in the synagogue, he'd go to Peter's mother-in-law's house that's right across the street there, and the Sea of Galilee is right behind it.

Now there's a massive Roman Catholic church that looks like a spaceship built over Peter's mother-in-law's house.

It's got a glass floor in it so you can look down into the house where Jesus used to live.

That's this town.

They weren't opposed to Jesus there.

They flocked to his teaching.

They tolerated him for years.

He didn't run him out of town like the people in Nazareth did.

No, no.

They liked having him there.

Massive crowds.

The crowds were so big, remember?

The paralytic that they wanted to bring to Jesus, they couldn't fit through the crowds, so they drilled a hole in the roof and lowered them.

That's Capernaum.

If Capernaum today is anything like it was back then, then they were selling t-shirts and say, I heart Jesus.

Like you get off the buses in Capernaum and it's just line with people selling you t-shirts and Jesus fish and everything.

This is the place where Jesus asked a very interesting question.

He asked the people of Capernaum, do kings like to tax their friends or the foreigners, strangers?

And the people, of course, say kings, they don't tax their friends, they tax the people they don't know.

And Jesus laments, yeah, that's true.

There's always tax loopholes, aren't they?

There's always a cutout for everybody in your district.

They've got to figure it out.

And then Jesus says, Nevertheless, so that we don't cause people to stumble, we should probably pay the tax.

And he sends one of his disciples over to the Sea of Galilee, which is just right across the street from Peter's mother-in-law's house, and says, Go catch a fish and pay the tax with the coin that's in the fish's mouth.

That way nobody will be offended by this.

That's like classic Jesus right there.

Let's pay the tax with a coin from somebody's mouth so nobody gets bothered by this.

And of course, people are tremendously bothered by it.

At the end of his life, when he's betrayed and ultimately put on that sham trial, that's what they charge him with, remember?

Saying don't pay taxes to Caesar.

That's Capernaum.

Jesus says, Do you think you're going to heaven in verse 23?

You think you're going to heaven because of the miracles you saw?

Think you're going to heaven because you have the Jesus fish in your car?

Think you're going to heaven because you flocked to the teaching?

No way.

Nothing could be further from the truth, Jesus says in verse 23.

You're going down to hell.

If the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, Sodom would still be here.

Sodom is the sixth city mentioned here.

Sodom, it's the one you're probably most familiar with.

I won't drag you through all 40 Old Testament references of Sodom, although I could.

I want you to know that.

Sodom just represents unbearable evil.

You read Genesis 18 and 19, and it is so, in a sense, far-fetched, you think the people can't be that evil.

Sodom stands in for the pre-flood world.

Before the flood, people were filled with violence and wickedness to the point that God destroyed the whole earth, and then God says, I'm not going to destroy the whole earth again.

And now a city like Sodom rises up, and you wonder, what's God gonna do?

If he can't destroy the whole earth, is he gonna tolerate the Sodomites?

How can God get out of that?

Well, God believes in targeted airstrikes.

That's what God does.

He annihilates Sodom from the air.

It's inconceivable how wicked they were.

Homosexuals, rapists, murderers, thieves, they stole from everybody around them.

It is very common today, in some more progressive and enlightened circles, to say the sin of Sodom was a lack of hospitality.

Have you heard that?

It's not nothing to do with homosexuality, it's a lack of hospitality.

And I will grant that that's true.

They were not hospitable.

When visitors came, they raped them and murdered them.

That is not hospitable.

It's inconceivable how wicked they were.

And then Jesus says it will be more tolerable on the day of judgment for Sodom than it will be for you.

The main point is that hell, you go to hell because of your works.

But the degrees of punishment in hell are not based upon your works, but are based upon how much you knew about Jesus.

The more you know about him, the worse hell will be for you.

The more revelation you have, the greater punishment you receive if you reject it.

The people in Sodom did not have any revelation.

They had Lot, if you remember.

And Lot, who was himself not a pillar of courage, he was not a prophetic witness.

Remember, Lot was like, uh, excuse me, guys, you might want to know there's an angel here who's gonna destroy you.

I think we should get out of here.

Remember, Moses says that the people in Lot and the people in Sodom didn't follow Lot because they thought he was joking.

That was Lot's prophetic witness.

They thought he was actually joking.

Jesus says, if they would have seen what you guys saw in one morning, if they would have seen that Sodom would still be there today.

It is better to never have heard of Jesus than to have heard of him and not repent from your sins.

The most severe eternal punishment belongs to those who have heard the most and yet reject it.

This is not just taught here, there are other passages as well.

Hebrews chapter 10 makes the same point.

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

If you go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there is no longer a sacrifice of sins for you, only a fearful expectation of judgment.

In Hebrews 10, it says, somebody who set aside the law of Moses died under the penalty of two or three witnesses.

How much worse do you think will happen to you if you set aside the preaching of Jesus Christ?

And Hebrews is written to professing believers who are contemplating apostasy and going back to Judaism.

And Hebrews tells you it would be worse in hell for you if you go back to Judaism once you've heard the gospel than it would be if you were a sodomite.

In fact, a very well-known verse in Hebrews 10 we know the one who said, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, the Lord will judge his people.

It is a fearful and terrible thing to fall in the hands of the living God.

That's the end of Hebrews chapter 10, written to people who were associating with Christians who had not yet repented from their sins.

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

God will see your heart and will judge you.

And it'll be worse than anybody who died in the Old Testament.

You think it's going to be bad to go into eternity for people who rejected the law of Moses?

Wait until you hear what happens to those who reject Jesus.

The most severe eternal punishment belongs to those who reject Jesus Christ, having heard the gospel.

And this whole section here is inconceivable to the Jewish mind.

Could you imagine a Jew sitting here listening to this?

The people that grow the wheat for the temple offerings, the rabbis, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the religious leaders.

They had ornate synagogues.

This whole area, the synagogue in Magdala, has been uncovered.

Corazon has been uncovered, the epic synagogue with the stairs it overlooks.

These were very wealthy, very religious people.

And Jesus says it would be better to have been a homosexual sodomite who murders people than to be one of these rabbis.

And they didn't even reject Jesus, by the way.

They just didn't repent.

You can fast forward to today.

Where Jesus is making it pretty clear that it would be better to be some gay rights activist, some murderer in the world, than it would be to be somebody who's Christian adjacent, somebody who goes to church often and frequently, who has their kids in the church, who is around Christianity, but who refuses to repent from their sins.

The splash effect of Hebrews 6.

You've tasted the good news, you've gotten wet, you've gotten splashes of language in Hebrews 6 from the gospel.

The gospel where a fountain you got what?

You didn't go swimming, you didn't repent from your sins, you didn't get into it, but you just got around it enough to see, oh, Christianity is good and I like the benefits, but you don't repent from your sin.

Jesus said it would be better to be a sodomite than one of those people.

Better to be the devil himself than one of those people.

It is better to have never heard of Jesus than to hear of him and not repent.

He'll use positive analogies later.

The people in Nineveh, they repented.

When they heard Jonah, the queen of Sheba, she came and she repented when she heard of Solomon, way more than the Jews did.

Revelation 3.

Written to a church by Jesus, Church of Laodicea, Jesus says, I know your works.

You're neither hot nor cold.

I'm going to spew you out of my mouth.

I wish you were hot or cold.

I wish you were hot or cold.

Instead, you're lukewarm and it's over for you.

And they respond, remember, the Church of Laodicea responds and says, Oh, but we're rich.

We have prospered.

And Jesus says, You don't even realize you're naked, wretched, pitiful, poor, and blind.

And you're going to be destroyed.

What happened to these cities, by the way?

That Jesus curses here, they're all gone.

Corzin collapsed, destroyed, abandoned.

Now, like I said, it's just a parking lot.

There's some excavation that's happened.

It's basically a parking lot for people that want to go hiking.

Besseda was destroyed by a flash flood.

That's what archaeologists say.

It's got a lot of sediment compacted over a very short amount of time.

Looks like it was destroyed by a flash flood, never rebuilt, abandoned.

It was uncovered in 1967 when Syrian soldiers invaded Israel and dug up that place to make barricades for themselves.

They destroyed they ruined the ruins invading Galilee.

You can't even excavate it anymore.

It's gone.

Capernaum got destroyed by an earthquake, rebuilt, destroyed again, and now it's ruins.

So it will be with those who reject the gospel.

It would be better to have never heard.

Now, for you at Emmanuel Bible Church, that ship has sailed.

You have heard the gospel.

This passage should be a warning to those who hear the gospel but refuse to repent.

For those who follow Christ, this passage should be a little picture for you about how to evangelize.

How often do we enter evangelism with somebody who says, I'm not interested?

And you're like, oh, I'll pray for you to have a change of mind, kind of thing.

Which is fine.

It's fine to say that.

I say that.

But look at how Jesus ends this evangelistic encounter.

It's going to be better for Sodomite in hell than it will be for you having heard the gospel to walk away.

God, we're grateful for the words of Christ that convey so much meaning in so just four verses that have so much clarity and depth and power to them that we can't even unpack them in forty minutes.

Thankful for the truth of Christ, his heart for the lost, his love for the lost.

He's about to invite these people to come and follow him.

Those who are weak, he'll give them strength.

Those who are heavy laden, he'll give them rest.

For now, Lord, let this warning echo in our hearts as we go our way.

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.