"Banned from Baptism" Matthew 3:4-12 Sunday Morning Worship Service

For our scripture reading this morning, we looked at Naaman, who is the Syrian military leader who had leprosy.

The story of Naaman is somewhat well known and factors into the story that we read this morning in Matthew chapter 3.

Matthew 3 · chapter mention

If you recall, Naaman was a very important and influential person.

You know that about him because he says so himself.

He had uh won all kinds of military victories, and he was well thought of by the king of Syria.

In fact, if you recall uh 2 Kings chapter 5, verse 1, commander of the army of the king of Syria, he was a great man with his master and high in favor.

2 Kings 5:1

All the Syrians thought so.

Uh he was the um military leader who had led them to a series of victories over Israel, uh, and so because of that the king esteemed him.

Now the text lets you know a little bit behind the curtains there.

The truth is that he was victorious because by him Yahweh had given victory to Syria.

God was using Naaman, this uh Syrian leader, to punish Israel.

Now, Naaman doesn't know about Yahweh, he doesn't know the first thing about Yahweh.

If you were to tap Naaman on the shoulder and ask, what's the secret to your military victories?

It wouldn't even dawn on him that God was using him to punish Israel.

He would say, Oh, it's you know, it comes down to the war college, the things I learned there.

Really, it's just personal instinct.

You can't coach it, you just have it or not, and you know, in all humility, I have it.

That's Naaman.

And so you're supposed to chuckle a little bit when you read this, and it has present-day implications as well.

Uh, whenever the Bible says that somebody is really great in their own eyes, it should make you laugh a little bit.

Present day implications, we look around the world and we see people that are in power and authority, and we see people with money and wealth, and you know, they have it all together, and you look at them and you think, that guy is just such a loser.

That guy is like, why is the Lord blessing that person?

Why does that person get authority?

Why does that person get wealth?

And the simplest answer is, I mean, you don't know, but oftentimes God gives people like that authority and power and wealth to punish the rest of us.

It's true.

And that's the shortest and the most simplest explanation, and usually the simplest explanation is indeed true.

Why do some people have authority and power when they don't deserve it?

Because they're a judgment on us, and that's the way it was with Naaman.

Why was he so well thought of?

Because God was using him to judge Israel.

And you should smile at this when it says, oh, he was he had so much favor, and everybody esteemed him.

He was a mighty man of valor, also a leper.

You gotta like how the author just drops that in there.

Uh, lepers unclean, nobody would touch them, they had to announce they were unclean, people stayed away from them.

This strong and mighty person himself was a leper.

And so he has a servant girl.

You know the story, we read it earlier.

The servant girl had been kidnapped from Israel.

She was Jewish, she was a slave, basically in Naaman's house, and she saw that her master had leprosy.

She appeals to her master's wife.

Not to her master himself, but to her wife.

And you see compassion in this little Israelite uh slave.

You see her have compassion, not necessarily on Naaman, but on Naaman's wife, and says, Man, if only Naaman could go to Israel, there is a prophet in Israel that heals lepers.

And so the word gets to the king who dispatches Naaman to Israel to be healed.

And the story is supposed to be a little bit amusing.

He comes with all of his gold and all of his changes of clothing and the letter from the king of Syria to the king of Israel saying, Hey, here's Naaman, he's the guy that's been owning you for the past few years.

He has leprosy.

Can you heal him?

What an outrageous request.

But did you notice all the gold?

And so that's the idea behind this.

And you remember the king of Israel gets the letter and rips his clothes and says, Am I God that I can heal people?

At this point in Israel's history, they are pagan.

They are practically apostate.

It doesn't even dawn on the king of Israel.

Maybe I should pray?

Like that's no.

It is more, it is literally more likely in this era of history that a Syrian military leader would seek Yahweh than the king of Israel would seek him, of course.

But that's what happens.

The king of Israel says, I don't know, this is a trap.

Elisha hears about it, the prophet, and says, Send him my way.

And so the whole entourage, the whole lot of them show up at Elisha's door with all their gold, all their silver, all their changes of clothes.

They ring the doorbell.

Elisha doesn't even answer the door.

He sends his own servant around back.

Not at all what Naaman was expecting.

And Elisha's servant says, Go and wash yourself in the Jordan River seven times.

And you and your flesh will be restored and you will be clean.

The Jordan River, that we mentioned this last week as we started our study in John the Baptist.

The Jordan River goes to the Dead Sea.

It backs up.

There's sediment in it.

It is muddy.

It is gross.

It is not the kind of river you would willingly go bathing or swimming in.

Unless you are an American tourist, you would stay away from it.

Naaman gets these instructions and was angry.

First of all, he wasn't received.

He thought that he would be treated as if he were important.

He says that.

Behold, I thought he would surely come out to me.

Doesn't he know who I am?

I thought he'd answer the door.

And I thought this is what Naaman in his own mind was picturing.

Naaman thought that because he had appealed to an intercessor, the king of Syria, Naaman thought that Elisha would respond to the intercessor.

Elisha would come out and, you know, would be so moved by Naaman's importance that he would stand and call upon the name of Yahweh his God and wave his hand over the place and say, Heal the leper.

Isn't that exactly how non-Christians often think prayer works?

Like, isn't this the way it's supposed to be?

Can't we do something to get God's attention?

Can't God recognize how important and influential I am?

Can't I have this gift to get God's attention?

And then a priest or somebody godly or whoever should come out here and wave his magic wand and boom, and because my gift was good enough and I'm important enough, God and the person who's praying for me is important enough, and I have an intercessor over there and this other guy that God is going to have to answer.

That's the way people often think.

Heal the leper.

And then he points out that he has better rivers in Damascus, cleaner rivers.

If he wanted to wash in a river, he could have done it in Damascus, not walk all the way over here and go to the Jordan, and so he walks away in a rage, it says.

In a rage.

And his servants ask him a question.

And the servant's question is if you remember in the text, uh, isn't it a pretty easy thing to do, to go wash in the Jordan?

Why don't you do it?

You're the one with leprosy.

There are cleaner rivers in Syria, that's true.

Do you remember when the man was lowered to the roof and Jesus said, Your sins are forgiven, and the Pharisees got upset?

And Jesus said, What do you want?

Is it easier to tell someone to pick up their mount and walk?

Or your sins are forgiven?

It's kind of a riddle, isn't it?

Which has more syllables.

Like, is one, strictly speaking, easier to say?

Could Naaman have washed in a river in Damascus?

Well, of course he could have.

Of course there's better rivers in Damascus.

Of course, it would be easier for Naaman to wash in a river in Damascus than to go all the way to Israel to wash in the dirty, stinking Jordan River.

Of course.

However, he didn't wash in Damascus because he didn't trust the Lord.

The Lord didn't tell him to wash in Damascus.

The Lord's not impressed with his power and his authority.

The Lord is telling him to humble himself under the authority of the God of Israel and then be cleansed.

By the time you get to Matthew chapter 3, you see the same story going on.

Matthew 3 · chapter mention

The characters have been updated, but it is the same story.

First of all, you have Elisha, in this instance played by John the Baptist.

In verse 4, John is wearing a garment of camel's hair and a leather belt around his face, and food and locusts and wild honey is what he's eating.

He's wearing Elisha's jacket.

Now, it's not literally Elisha's jacket.

It wasn't kept in like a school of prophets' museum or anything, but you remember Elijah had a jacket that was made of that camel hair.

He gave it to Elisha when Elijah went up in the whirlwind.

2 Kings chapter 2 says Elisha took that jacket and wore it with him.

2 Kings 2 · chapter mention

It was his prophetic mantle.

And now John the Baptist is out there wearing the same kind of jacket Elisha wore.

He's standing in the same river Elisha stood in.

This is the river Elisha left Israelin, and the river Elisha came back to Israelin.

It is the same river and the same spot where Elisha told Naaman to go bathe.

That's where John is, wearing Elisha's jacket.

So this is not subtle.

It's not like you need the Bible clothing to figure out what they're reenacting here.

It's pretty obvious.

He's dressed like Elisha.

He's at Elisha's river, and he is baptizing people in the river.

He's eating locusts and honey.

I don't know why he chose locust and honey.

They're not wealthy people food.

This is what poor people meet, eat.

This is what you eat if you're living out in the wilderness and there's not a 7-Eleven around.

You can eat locusts, I guess.

If you go to Israel today, you can buy bags of candied locusts and you can even get the variety pack.

It's got locusts and bees and grasshoppers.

And I've seen some with like carpenter ants in them, and you can eat them.

I have done it.

And I, you know, anything tastes good if it's candied, I guess is my main lesson from that.

But John is out there and he's got his own candied locusts because he's dipping them in honey and eating them, which is going to just leave like locust legs stuck on your face.

It's going to be quite the, I guess, if you combine honey and locust, I don't know, but it's a mess.

And that's where John is, out at the river.

All of Jerusalem and all of Judea and all the region about John, were uh around the Jordan were going out to him.

So he's having people from Syria.

He's having people from Jordan.

He's having people from Judea, which is Israelites, Jews from Jerusalem, are coming out to him.

Jews from Galilee are coming down to him.

Thousands upon thousands of people are flooding out to him to be, verse 6 says, baptized by him in the Jordan.

Baptized in the Jordan is an unusual event for sure.

Baptized in the Jordan would mean that they are being submerged in the water.

The Jews had a concept of mikvas.

They would wash each other, uh ritual washing.

Um the mikvas are built in the mountains around this area, the Judean wilderness, there were all these religious sects that had these uh like modern-day, I mean, we would call them monasteries today, but these enclaves up there, and people would have these mikvas, and they would ritually purify themselves by going down in these pools.

These pools are all over Jerusalem.

Rich people up in Galilee have them.

Rich people outside of Judea had them.

If you go to Israel today, you can see some ruins that have been covered with them there.

They were very common things, and Jews uh would ritually wash themselves in them.

They had seven steps going down, seven steps going up, so that your unclean feet, your pre-immersed feet, wouldn't walk on the same steps as your clean feet going out.

That was the idea.

Now I know and you know, that's not the way water works, right?

But that's the way they did the mikvas.

So you would walk in, you would be not wearing any clothes when you walked in, because the idea of any clothing touching your body meant that part of you was unclean.

There was nobody touching you when you went under because any place that hand was touching you would be unclean.

So you would strip down, walk into the mikveh, immerse yourself, even immerse yourself seven times, I suppose, and then walk back up on the other steps out, and you were ritually clean.

This is something Jews did all the time.

That is not what John is doing in the Jordan.

Uh think of the ritual purification that goes into a mikveh.

Think of how dirty the Jordan River is.

So this is not the same family of actions here.

Gentiles might be baptized in the Jordan, so to speak, if they wanted to convert to Judaism.

So a Gentile that wanted to become a Jew, so to speak, he could be washed in a mikveh.

I suppose he could be washed in a Jordan, like Naaman was.

There's not a lot written about that, so nobody really knows what that kind of baptism would be like, but supposedly it was something that they could do based upon how Naaman was told to wash himself in the river.

The point is, here's John the Baptist out in the river.

People are being baptized by him in the river.

I don't think he would be touching them, but who knows?

I don't think they'd be wearing any clothes because, again, that's not how the Jews did it.

And they'd be in the gross river, and there were massive crowds out there, and this is a humiliating and humbling ritual, especially for a Jew.

For a Jew to go through this ritual, it's their way of proclaiming that all of their righteousness, all of their works, all of their relationship with God has not brought them closer to salvation.

They are stuck out there in the wilderness.

They need to repent from their sins and become like a Gentile.

They need to start over like the Gentiles, as if their conversion was right now.

That's what this baptism is proclaiming.

They are confessing their sins, humbling themselves like the Syrian enemy of Israel, baptizing themselves in the river to emerge with a repentant life in expectation for the Savior.

That's what's happening out there.

For a Jew to do that would be insane.

And yet it says there were thousands of them.

Verse 5 says everybody was coming out there to do this.

This lets you know this expectation in the human heart.

People are so burdened by their sin.

I mean, it's exhausting to try to be a good enough person to earn salvation.

It's exhausting to try to elevate your intellect above the word of God and to sit in judgment on the word of God.

And, you know, very few people would say that they're going to heaven when they die because they've earned it.

But most people would say they're going to go to heaven when they die because God knows they've been a good person.

God knows they've tried to do as best as they can do.

God knows that they have just lived with a clean conscience and done their best.

That's where most people are, which is not an honest accounting of most people's lives.

Most people have not, in point of fact, done as best as they could do.

They have not led relatively a good life.

They are sinners in their heart.

They have harbored sin.

But most people say, listen, I'm just trying, okay?

It is exhausting to bear that burden on their back.

And so to have somebody like John come along and say, you can turn from all of that righteousness, all stop trusting your deeds.

Take that burden off of you and start over.

Come into the water and be reborn.

I mean, that's basically what he's offering them.

And it is so inviting that thousands of people are coming out there to be free of the burden of their own works.

And the same is true today.

It is so exhausting to try to lead a good enough life and have it together enough to feel like you can earn a good relationship with God, or that God will hear your prayers because of how disciplined you are and how much integrity you have and how strong you are.

It's so exhausting to have the kind of mind that says, listen, I'm the one that's sitting in judgment on the word of God.

I decide what's true and not true.

It is so freeing to turn from that and place yourself under the authority of the word.

Say, I want the Bible over me.

I don't need to try to figure this out.

I'm placing myself in submission to it.

I'm not going to try to be good enough to go to heaven.

I'm placing myself under the word of God.

It is liberating.

Liberating.

And that's John's invitation, and thousands of people are taking him up on it.

But then things change in verse 7.

Many of the Pharisees and Sadducees were coming to his baptism.

Now, before we get into John's response, it is, I think, important for me to pull the car over and have a little talk here about the Pharisees and the Sadducees and who they are for you to understand John's response to them.

And in order to kind of pull the car over and then back into our Pharisee and Sadducee parking spot here, you have to really start with what the law is.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees were different groups of people because of how they're related to God's law and how they're related to the prophets in the Bible.

So I want to walk you through for a second what the law is in the Bible and what the prophets are in the Bible, and then we'll get back to the Pharisees and Sadducees and back to our text.

So first, what is the law?

When the Bible describes the law, what is the law?

Well, first, law is Torah.

So when the Bible uses the phrase the law of God, it's often describing the Torah, which is the first five books of the Bible.

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Sometimes it just means Deuteronomy, which is the summary of the law, but generally it means the Torah, the first five books of the Scripture.

The Bible also uses the concept of law to apply to all of God's commands.

Anything God commands you to do is law.

It's something God is compelling action from you by giving you a mandate.

So the commands of God.

That is law.

So that's kind of how the concept of law works in the Bible.

In the first five books in the commands of God.

What is the function of the law?

And there's three functions of the law, three main functions of the law.

God is doing 10,000 things with the law.

These three are not inspired.

But this is generally the best way, I think, to describe the three main functions of law.

Again, understanding the law is doing so much in the world, an infinite amount of things God is doing in the world through the law.

But here's the three main ones.

God uses the law to convict people of sin.

So you come across law in Scripture, or even the Torah in Scripture, and you are convicted by sin because of it.

The losses don't covet, and you see yourself as somebody who covets.

The losses don't steal, the eighth commandment says don't steal, and you see yourself as somebody who is stolen.

That convicts you of sin.

You recognize that your greed is a violation of the commandment to not covet, the tenth commandment.

You realize that your theft is a violation of the eighth commandment, and so forth.

All the law is like that.

It convicts you of sin.

Secondly, the law restrains you from sin.

Like you are at the point where you want to covet or you want to steal, and you remember the eighth commandment, and so you say, okay, I'm not going to steal.

It restrains your sin.

And thirdly, the law promotes godly living.

A mature person engages with the law in a way that tells them what to do.

So you recognize, okay, I'm not going to steal, but I am going to give things away.

It's promoting godly living.

I'm not going to covet, but I'm going to be generous with my money.

It promotes godly living.

You can do that with every command of the law.

You can break it into those three functions, but that's what God is doing with the law.

Now you can say it differently.

This is the way I memorized it back in the seminary days.

The law is a mirror.

It shows you who you are.

It shows you that you're a broken sinner in need of a savior.

The law is handcuffs.

It keeps you from sinning and ties you back.

And the law is a cattle prod.

It makes you go do godly things.

I like my outline better.

Or you could say it this way the law shows your need for Christ.

It shows your need for peace.

And it shows your path to godliness.

And by the need for peace, I mean the law shows, first of all, your need for Christ.

You recognize that you covet and you steal, so you need a savior.

That's the first use.

Your need for Christ.

It shows the need for peace.

Hopefully, it restrains your neighbors.

You don't want your neighbors to steal.

Like even if you have questions about God's word, you definitely want your neighbors to believe in the eighth commandment.

And that shows you the path to godliness, how to lead a life that is pleasing to the Lord.

So that's the positive aspect of the law.

Or you could even say it like this: the law is a preacher telling you you need Jesus.

It's a policeman to rescue you when you sin.

And it's a parishioner, somebody who's just trying to lead a godly life.

It's all three of those.

I didn't make a slide for that one because I thought I'd give you time to write those.

The prophets is a different set of books than the law.

The prophets is uh, you know, the major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the minor prophets, the twelve.

Sometimes the language of the prophets even includes Kings and Samuel, those books.

They are also in the Old Testament.

The Jews recognize them as the prophetic books of the Old Testament.

What is their function?

They also have a function, a threefold function.

First of all, the prophets call you to repent.

When you read the prophets, this is what they're telling you to do.

Repent.

That's the we talked about this last week.

That's the main message of the prophets.

Turn from your wicked ways.

Secondly, the prophets call you to the law.

They point you backwards to the law.

You're supposed to repent from your current sin, look backwards at the law, engage in those three functions of the law.

That's what the prophets are telling you to do.

And thirdly, the prophets point you forward to Christ.

The prophets prophesy the coming Savior.

So when you take these together, you see how the law and the prophets function together, don't you?

The law convicts you of the sin, the prophets point you to Christ.

The law shows you to restrain you from holy from sinful living.

The prophets come and tell you you're not living a godly life because you're ignoring Torah.

The law tells you how to lead a godly life.

The prophets tell you you can't do that without Christ.

That's how they partner together.

Now to the Pharisees and Sadducees.

They are two different groups of people.

The Pharisees believe the law and believe the prophets.

But the Pharisees love the law.

They are all about the law.

They build their lives around it.

The Sadducees are more liberal.

The Sadducees are aligned with Herod and the Roman Empire.

The Sadducees are the ones that have authority over the temple.

The Roman government lets them run the temple.

The Sadducees don't really believe in supernatural things in the Bible.

The Sadducees accept reluctantly the law and completely reject the prophets.

The Sadducees reject the prophets altogether.

I'll paint it out to you this way.

The Pharisees love the law.

They memorize the law.

They can write the Torah from scratch.

They know how many commands are in the law, how many positive commands, how many negative commands.

They know how many syllables are in the law.

They know how many letters are on every scroll of the law.

I mean, they love the law.

At least two-thirds of the law.

They don't like the part of the law that's supposed to convict them of sin.

They reject the mirror.

They move the mirror out of the house.

But they love the part of the law that restrains you from sin.

They build their life around that.

Here's a very helpful analogy for that.

The Old Testament says, don't boil a goat in its mother's milk.

Alright, that's the command.

The truth is, nobody really knows what that means.

And so the Pharisees develop a whole system to keep you away from accidentally breaking that rule.

They won't serve meat and dairy at the same meal together, for example.

That way they're not prepared alongside you can't accidentally, you know, break that law.

That's how extreme they are with the second role of the law.

They will do anything to avoid sinning based on the law.

That's what I mean by they love the law.

But they're not looking at it to be convicted by it.

They don't get convicted, they don't repent of their brokenness because they don't let the law break them.

They just use it to live by, not to be broken by.

The Sadducees, on the other hand, they recognize the law, or at least one-third of it.

They're okay with the law for like leading a godly life, more or less.

The law helps us all get along.

Can't we all just get along?

That's the Sadducees' approach to the law.

Like they're not into the details of the law, but they would definitely say, you know, don't steal.

Sure, don't steal.

When you get more into the nuances of the law, the Sadducees aren't that stoked about it.

You see a difference done with the prophets.

The Pharisees recognize the prophets, or at least one third of the prophets.

What third of the prophets do the Pharisees like?

The part that points you back to the Torah.

They love that, remember?

Oh man, when the when the when Isaiah tells people to keep the Torah, the Pharisees are like more.

Preach.

When Isaiah says the Savior's coming, the Pharisees are like, what?

New phone.

Who this?

The Sadducees reject the prophets.

They want nothing to do with the prophets.

All of them.

The Pharisees are modern-day fundamentalists, you could say.

The Pharisees are trusting in their works.

Jesus says this.

Jesus says, you use the deeds of men to nullify the words of God.

The Pharisees believe that they are pleasing to God because of how fastidiously they keep the law.

The Pharisees want nothing to do with the politics of the day.

They don't care about Rome.

They hate Rome and wish it went away.

They are separatists.

They don't like intermingling with non-Jews.

They're isolationists, separationists.

They reject the politics of the day, and they use the law to regulate behavior, thinking that obedience to the law defines your righteousness.

A Pharisee might argue and say, I don't believe in works righteousness.

I just think that my righteousness is merited by my works.

And I would say, that's works righteousness.

You can get lost in the semantics of the thing, but Sadducees are the modern-day liberals.

Sadducees are those that look at the Bible's teaching on sexuality and say, you know what, that's not the point of the law.

I mean, the law can't regulate sexual immorality because after all, that's who we are in our hearts, you know.

I mean, I believe in the law, but it I that doesn't mean that the law says I can't actually, you know, love who I want to love.

After all, that's my own heart we're talking about.

That's the Sadducee.

That's why they're always sad, you see.

And the Pharisee ain't fair, you see.

I have a better description than that, though.

The Pharisees would be the modern day, like King James only separationist fundamentalists.

You have an uncle that's one of those, probably.

The Sadducees would be the modern day Methodists with a lesbian minister.

That's their two camps.

And don't come up to me afterwards and say, my King James only uncle and my lesbian aunt are the godliest people I know.

How dare you?

Just I'll spare you that conversation right now.

These are the two camps.

They may dress differently today.

Certainly they do.

They don't have the same uniforms.

The Pharisees don't have the long robes and the big hats, but I would bet you can still identify them by their dress or their hair color, perhaps.

They still exist with different names.

But this approach to God, that, you know, religion is good because it helps me be happy and helps us live a politically connected life, that's the Sadducees.

Or religion is good because it teaches me what righteousness is and I can have God's ear if I do that way, that's the Pharisees.

Those two people are the ones that show up.

They have nothing in common, those two groups.

They don't like each other at all.

They have nothing in common.

But you see them together twice in the Gospels.

Once here, and then once at the end of Jesus' life when they conspire to trap Jesus in his words, they partner with the Herodians, the political party of Herod of all people.

The three of them get together to murder Jesus at the end of his life.

Here they are at the start of Jesus' ministry.

The Sadducees and the Pharisees are together.

They come out to the water of John in verse 7, coming to his baptism.

I seriously doubt the Pharisees would be baptized.

It would require taking off all their robes in front of everybody, which is far-fetched to me.

Maybe they just came to see John doing baptism.

Who knows?

They came out there, though, because everyone was going out there.

And John sees them lined up for the baptism, and look at what John tells him.

You brood of vipers.

He doesn't even call them vipers.

Literally, it's you children of snakes, you children of vipers.

You're not even a viper yourself.

You're the offspring of a viper.

He goes right at their own identity.

You're the children of snakes.

This is another way of calling children of the devil, by the way.

You hypocrites.

Snakes are so hypocritical.

They look so docile, don't they?

And like snakes, never trust a snake.

Never trust a snake.

Jesus calls these people vipers, children of vipers.

And then he asks them a very good question.

Who warns you of God's wrath?

So if John is filling Elisha's role and the masses here are filling Naaman's role, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, they're filling the role of the king of Israel.

They're filling the role of Gehizi, the greedy scribe, the greedy priest, who just wanted money from Naaman.

They're filling the role of the hypocrites.

And John says, Who told you to repent?

What a good question that is.

Because remember, the law, the first use of the law, is to tell you to repent.

And that's the use of the law the Pharisees reject.

The Sadducees, they reject the prophets who tell you to repent.

So John's question is straightforward.

You're up here to be baptized for the forgiveness of sins.

Who told you to repent?

Where did you learn what sin was?

Why do you think you need to be converted, you who stand on your righteousness?

Why do you think you need to be converted?

You who stand in your own fall morality, you know, your own fake morals.

Why do you think you need to be converted?

If you have this all figured out and you're better than everybody else, who told you to repent?

That's his question.

And then he reads their mind.

Verse 9, don't presume to say to yourself, we have Abraham as our father.

Because in their mind they're going, don't talk to us like that.

We are from Abraham.

This in the Jordan River is for the dirty Gentiles.

We are from Abraham.

And John reads their mind and says, Don't you dare say you're from Abraham.

God could carve a rock to look like Abraham if he wanted to.

He doesn't need you.

Even now, the axe is laid to the root of the trees.

God will cut your tree down, Pharisees.

Right now, the axe is at the root of your tree.

You've got this whole empire built up, Pharisees.

God is going to take an axe to it.

Sadducees, you love your temple so bad.

I'm going to tell you this one thing.

Jesus is going to come and you're going to kill him, and then God is going to tear your temple down, rip it apart brick by brick, and no one is ever going to meet a Sadducee again.

And that axe is at the root of the tree.

If you don't bear good fruit, he tells them you're going to be thrown into fire.

This is back to verse 8.

Bear fruit in keeping of the repentance.

Why don't you guys go repent?

Then come back.

I think in this passage, whenever somebody says, you know, evangelism always has to be winsome.

You brood of vipers.

John says, verse 11, I'm out here baptizing with water for repentance.

Someone is coming after me that is stronger than I.

I'm not even worthy to untie his sandals.

He'll baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

We'll look at that verse next week.

Verse 12 The winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather wheat.

The winning fork is this three-pronged thing, like a pitchfork, and you would take the wheat, you'd harvest it, you'd throw the wheat in the air, and the chaff would blow away, and the wheat would fall down.

You have what's valuable here, and the chaff is just blown away.

You would then go get the chaff and sweep it up and burn it.

That's what John says is going to happen to you.

You Pharisees and Sadducees, that's your religion.

God has got the pitchfork in your religion.

All of these people that have been baptized are going to be picked up with your own Pharisees and Sadducees' religion, thrown into the air, and those that repented from sin will fall to the ground into relationship with Jesus.

You, Pharisees and Sadducees, will blow away.

That's how little your religion matters to God.

It will blow away, it'll be swept up and burned in the fires of hell forever and ever, it says in verse 12, unquenchable fire.

That's where you're headed because you will not repent from sins.

You will burn in the judgment of hell forever because you think you can stand on your own righteousness.

That's his response to them showing up for baptism.

You have never seen a speech like that in the waters of baptism here.

Both of these parties miss the gospel.

Both of these parties miss the gospel for opposite reasons, and both of them should be warnings to us.

You can miss the gospel because of liberalism.

You can miss the gospel because you just think God's commands on people's lives are too strict, and a loving God wouldn't do that, so I reject it.

You can miss the gospel because of legalism.

You can miss the gospel by saying, I don't need to repent for my sins because I lead a pretty good life.

You can miss the gospel for politics, like the set like the Sadducees.

You can miss the gospel for separationist reasons, like the Pharisees.

You can miss the gospel by denying God's word, like the Sadducees.

Or you can miss the gospel by trusting your ability to keep God's word like the Pharisees.

You can miss the gospel by diluting the law and denying the prophets, like the Sadducees.

Or you can miss the gospel by keeping the law and diluting the prophets like the Pharisees.

The Sadducees would not repent to keep the law, and the Pharisees would not repent to trust the prophets.

They both denied the very books they said they accepted.

They both were left Sadducees saying, I trust my own ability to navigate this world, and the Pharisees saying, I trust my own ability to navigate God's law.

Both of them were sitting in judgment over God's law, and both of them missed the gospel.

John sends them both away.

They're going to rendezvous again at the end of Jesus' life to trap him.

You know what Jesus tells them when they ambush him?

He says, I'll answer your questions if you answer me this.

Did John's authority come from God or man?

Jesus appeals to John the Baptist and says, He owned you a few years ago.

Certainly you remember.

I pray you don't miss the gospel for any of those reasons.

Lord, we're grateful that you have made the path of salvation so clear to us to turn from trusting ourselves, to confess our sins, and receive the free grace that comes from trusting in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We look forward to seeing him in the next part of this chapter.

Until then, Lord, seal our minds with these truths.

Help us avoid the hellfire that comes to the legalists and the hellfire that comes to the liberal.

Help us embrace the truth of the Word of God instead.

We ask us in Jesus' name.

And now, for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, DC 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.

And 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.