Seeing Jesus in Matthew - Winnowing

My wife just got back from the East Coast, and she's all jet-lagged.

And so for some reason, I'm also jet-lagged.

I don't know how that works, but I feel very tired this morning.

I've got my coffee with me.

Good to be here. So we're going to be going back into the Gospel of Matthew.

So you're going to need a Bible this morning because we're going to do a real Bible study.

There's so much going on here in the book of Matthew.

So just go ahead, and there's Bibles in front of you in the pews.

Pews, not pews, the chairs.

There's chair Bibles in the chairs. Go ahead and grab it and open to Matthew 3.

Because we're going through this series through the book of Matthew,

and we're calling this series, Seeing Jesus in Matthew.

It's pretty straightforward because our goal is to just like observe,

to see who Jesus is, to pay attention to Jesus, to listen to him, to see him for who he is.

Because what we see in the book of Matthew is Matthew is really trying,

especially in these introductory chapters, he's trying to give us a glimpse

of the surprising things about who Jesus is.

There's so much here, and he's really, in a very artful kind of way,

the writer, Matthew, is just painting a picture, painting a picture of who Jesus is, what he's like,

how he, as we'll We'll look along here, how he fulfills kind of these ancient

promises to Israel and how he does so in a surprising way.

And so there's lots of surprises as we go along here. So we're just coming,

wanting to see Jesus, asking for fresh eyes.

And so we're just going to pray with that in mind. Just ask the Lord to help

us to see him as he is here.

So if you guys would join me, I'd appreciate it.

All right. So Lord God, we come to you. We come to your word.

Lord, we know you speak to us and you speak to us with a purpose,

Lord. You want to be known.

You want to be known. You reveal yourself to us. And so, Lord,

we want to have eyes to see, ears to hear.

We want to see you for who you are, Lord Jesus. And so we come with all of our.

Assumptions, Lord, and we just want to put them down here before your word.

And Lord, we ask you to refine us and to clarify things for us and to reveal things to us, Lord.

You speak to us in your word. And so, Lord, we have open ears.

We want to hear from you, Lord. I pray that in Jesus' name. Amen.

All right. So these early chapters of Matthew, Matthew is giving us a glimpse

into Jesus's origin story.

And two weeks ago, when we were last here in the book of Matthew,

we did Christmas in July.

We were looking at the birth story of Jesus.

And we saw throughout that several references to the ways in which Jesus is

fulfilling ancient prophecies.

And this is like a major theme in the the book of Matthew, that Jesus is,

he's the keeper of ancient promises, promises given to God's people, Israel.

He is fulfilling them. And that theme just continues on. It is a very,

a very thick theme here in these early chapters.

And in the book of Matthew in particular, like just, it's just a huge emphasis

on the fact that Jesus was foretold in the scriptures and that he is fulfilling these promises.

And we see that continuing on here. So what we're going to do is we're picking up in Matthew 2, 13.

We're just going to wrap up the Christmas story and then move on into Jesus's baptism here.

So picking up Matthew 2, 13, please read along with me.

After they, and they being the Magi, were gone, the angel of the Lord appeared

to Joseph in a dream saying, get up, take the child and his mother,

flee to Egypt and stay there until I tell you.

For Herod is about to search for the child to kill him. And so he got up,

he took the child and his mother during the night, and he escaped to Egypt.

He stayed there until Herod's death, so that what was spoken by the Lord through

the prophets might be fulfilled. Out of Egypt I called my son.

Then Herod, when he realized that he had been outwitted by the wise men, flew into a rage.

He gave orders to massacre all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two

years old and under, in keeping with the time he had learned from the wise men.

And then what was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled.

A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her

children and she refused to be consoled because they are no more.

And after Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in

Egypt saying, get up and take the child and his mother and go back to the land

of Israel because those who intended to kill the child are dead.

And so he got up, took the child and his mother, and entered the land of Israel.

But when he heard that Archelius was ruling over Judea in place of his father

Herod, he was afraid to go there.

And being warned in a dream, he withdrew to the region of Galilee.

And then he went and he settled in a town called Nazareth to fulfill what was

spoken through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.

So chapter two wraps up here. This birth story of Jesus wraps up.

We are getting the resolution to the story.

And it's kind of like a thriller.

Like, you know, there's so many movies nowadays where everything starts off

so nice and so peaceful, and then things take a violent turn.

And that's how this story goes.

You start off with this cute little baby in a manger, and he's so sweet.

And, you know, he had kind of a rough time getting there. and it's a little

stinky, but it's such a nice little moment.

And then like something weird happens, right?

This is the form of a movie, like nice peaceful thing, something weird happens

and then people get murdered.

These weird guys show up and you know, we've kind of made the Magi really cute.

We talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but the Magi were weirdos. They were super weird.

They were like walking in, like they were warlocks essentially.

They're like, hey, would you like, can I give this baby some gifts?

And I feel like Mary would probably be like, no, thank you very much. We're good on the gifts.

But somehow, like she accepts him, like these people would not have been fitting

in in Israel, in Israel, like this nation devoted to the worship of God.

The Magi were like, we're pagan astronomer, like warlock type people.

Like they practice magic.

That's where the Magi part comes

from. So they show up and then as they're leaving, Joseph has this dream.

He says, you've got to leave. You got to go to Egypt because a bunch of soldiers

are going to come and kill every baby in this town.

And so Joseph takes his family, he hides in Egypt, and then after a few years,

after Herod dies, he ends up going back to Israel and then has this other dream.

He was about to go back to the town where he was at, back to Bethlehem,

back to the region of Judea, but he has this dream and he's warned that it's still dangerous there.

So he goes to this obscure town in the north of Israel called Nazareth.

And what we see throughout this time, in the course of these 10 verses that

we just read, There are three different references to the fact that the prophets

foretold something, and the way that Jesus'

early life plays out is fulfilling these prophetic things.

And we've got them listed here. In Matthew 2.15, there is this line that's quoted,

Out of Egypt I called my son.

And so Matthew is making this connection between Hosea 11.1, right?

And he's saying this was spoken back in the day by the prophet Hosea,

and it's pointing us to the fact that Jesus was going to live this kind of way.

It's helping us to identify Jesus

as the Son of God and to understand his significance a little bit more.

And so Matthew is reaching back into ancient Israelite history and claiming

that and saying this stuff is about Jesus.

Again, in Matthew 2.18, we hear this quotation, this long quotation from Jeremiah

31.15, starting with a voice was heard in Ramah, right? And we just read that a little bit.

So he's saying like, this is also related. And then there's another one in Matthew

2.23 that he would be called a Nazarene because he ended up moving to Nazareth.

And it's funny because he says, and this happened so that it would fulfill the

prophets, except no scholar can identify where an ancient, an Old Testament

prophet said that the Messiah was gonna be from Nazareth.

But Matthew seems really confident. confident, but they said it somewhere. They said it somewhere.

And I guess we have to believe him. He's probably more familiar with the texts

than we are, right? But it's an interesting thing.

His insistence throughout this book, no, this is about the completion and the

fulfillment of these Old Testament promises.

He's connecting Jesus's story to Israel's story.

He's doing it overtly and he continues to do it.

As we go along here, Matthew is trying to, and what he's trying to do,

and I think this is important, he's trying to say ancient Israel,

because he's writing to Jewish people, right?

We get to read it, but he's the original recipients of this gospel were Jewish people.

He's saying all of that hope that you had about what God was doing and who he

was, I want you to grab that up again, because you've been a people who've been in despair.

You've been under Roman oppression and you have these promises that came from God.

And you're probably at the point where you're thinking, ah, is God really going to fulfill them?

And what Matthew is trying to do is remind me saying, yes, he is.

He's doing that in Jesus. You need to actually fan that hope back into flame

and have it restored because it's all being delivered in Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ, Matthew is making clear, is the continuation and the culmination of the Israel story.

It's not, it is all a part of it. God is doing something uniquely in Israel

and he is revealing his Messiah and that is gonna be good news for Israel and the whole world.

It is a continuation of that story and a culmination of that story.

And we can kind of illustrate this. We're going to get a little bit deeper into

the second reference there, into Jeremiah 31.

So if you could actually turn in your Bibles to Jeremiah 31.

I'm going to show you how he's doing this, how he's developing hope.

If you have a pew Bible, it's page 699.

Isn't that helpful? Because, you know, yeah, I know, right? You're like,

Jeremiah, I mean, I think it's backwards, right?

There's a lot of it back there. So page 699.

Okay, so like, let's do a quick, just like a flyover of this passage.

Because, you know, he makes this sort of offhanded reference,

right? He quotes this little thing about Rama.

But the thing that we need to understand is that too, if you were Jewish,

like this book is your culture and you know, this book in and out,

you know, the old Testament scripture.

And so when he quotes these four lines from Jeremiah 31, you would hear that.

And you'd say, I know that chapter that's Jeremiah 31, except you wouldn't say

that because they didn't have the chapter divisions visions that we have,

but you'd be like, I know that section of scripture that's in my brain.

I have this idea about what is going on here.

And so like, if we go back into Jeremiah 31, we can kind of get a sense of what's

going on in this chapter because it is an extremely important prophetic chapter for Israel.

So it's just like, look at verse one, Jeremiah 31, verse one,

because this is kind of setting the stage for what's being talked about in this chapter.

It says this, at that time, this is the Lord's declaration, I will be the God

of all the families of Israel, and they will be my people.

So here in Jeremiah 31, Jeremiah 31 is a chapter pointing Israel to a time yet

to come when God is going to make good on these promises.

He says, I will be a God to all the families of Israel and they will be my people.

He's pointing to a time where there will be restoration because like we know

about these old Testament prophets is that they were always speaking in times

of trouble in Israel, in times where Israel was being disobedient,

in times where they were having a lot of social difficulty,

right? Where they were being oppressed by their enemies.

And the prophets come in, in the midst of these difficult times.

And what they do is they don't just talk about what the future is going to look like.

They call the people back to hope and obedience.

And what Jeremiah is doing is he's speaking to a future time that is going to

come to pass when God is going to restore all things.

In the middle of Jeremiah's writing, I mean, it's a difficult difficult time

in Israel's history, but he's saying in the midst of all this difficulty,

you should continue to hope in and anticipate God intervening in history.

And so we're not going to go through the whole chapter 31, because there's a

lot in here, but that's setting the scene for what Jeremiah is talking about in 31.

There's a time that's coming. Let's skip ahead to verse 15, okay?

Because that's the quotation that we've looked at.

So this is what the Lord has said. This is Jeremiah 31, 15.

This is what the Lord has said. And here's the quotation that we've heard.

A voice was heard in Ramah, a lament with bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for

her children, refusing to be comforted for her children because they are no

more. So that's like a bummer.

But then the following line is this. This is what the Lord says.

Keep your voice from weeping and your eyes from tears for the reward of your work will come.

This is the Lord's declaration. declaration, and your children will return from the enemy's land.

There is hope for your future.

This is the Lord's declaration, and your children will return to their own land.

What Jeremiah is doing throughout this chapter is he's entering into all the

pain and all the difficulty and all the hopelessness of Israel.

And he's saying, look to a time that is yet to come because you have still a future.

He's pointing them to the future when God is going to come in.

And what Matthew is doing is very deliberately stepping into that story.

He's saying that stuff that Jeremiah was talking about, this future event,

this restoration of Israel, it's going to be happening now in Jesus Christ.

And so Jesus' story begins with this painful event of a massacre of poor, innocent people.

What he's doing by quoting this verse is he's saying, the hope is right.

We're right on the cusp of hope. We're right on the cusp of restoration.

And interestingly, Matthew chapter 31 culminates, and this would be,

this is probably one of the the most important little sections in the Old Testament,

in the prophets, and Jews would have known this section,

particularly Jeremiah 31, 31.

So turn to the next page and read that with me here, because this is,

I mean, you'll see the pericope, the little title above that section is called the new covenant.

And so what Jeremiah is saying, yeah, God has a future thing.

Yes, yes, there was this pain, but look forward and understand that this new covenant is coming.

I'm just going to read this section, Jeremiah 31, 31 through 34.

Look, the days are coming. This is the Lord's declaration.

When I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house

of Judah, this one will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors

on the day I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt,

my covenant that they They broke,

even though I am their master, the Lord's declaration.

Instead, this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel.

After those days, the Lord's declaration, I will put my teaching within them

and write it on their hearts.

I will be their God. They will be my people.

No longer will one teach his neighbor or his brother saying,

no, the Lord, for they will all know me from the least to the greatest of them.

This is the Lord's declaration for I will forgive their iniquity and never again remember their sin.

So Jeremiah is very much knowingly making reference to this little section,

this little chapter of scripture, because it is the presentation of a major

hope that Israel is going to have.

He's trying to lay claim to this new covenant promise and locate Jesus's story

right as the fulfillment of all of this.

We just miss this stuff, right? Because we aren't deeply embedded in the Old

Testament like these ancient Israelites were. but Matthew is making it easy,

even for people like us, to understand that there's something going on here.

Not only is Jesus like this awesome thing, like he was born of a virgin,

how exciting, like people are coming from other places to worship him as a king,

even weirdos, bringing him gifts. Isn't that great?

Isn't that nice? What he's saying is, no, man, not only is that,

like, is Jesus so special? Like Jesus is the fulfillment of God's promises.

It's through Jesus' life and through his ministry, that these new covenant promise

that God has been laying out before his people for a thousand years,

that's actually going to happen in him.

And again, connecting the story, grabbing hold of all the hope of ancient Israel

and saying, it's in Jesus that these things are going to be fulfilled.

So Matthew is reminding his readers, you guys have been waiting for something,

this new covenant hope, and it's happening now.

Now he's priming them to understand that something big is happening in the person of Jesus.

And so it's with all that anticipation and renewed hope that he goes on to this

next scene, the baptism of Jesus.

So back in Matthew 3, I'm going to pick up in verse 1.

In those days, John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea and

saying, repent because the kingdom of heaven has come near.

For he is the one spoken of through the prophet Isaiah, who said,

a voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way for the Lord, make his path straight.

Now, John had a camel hair garment and a leather belt around his waist and his

food was locusts and wild honey.

Then people from Jerusalem, all Judea, and all the vicinity of Jordan were going

out to him, and they were baptized by him in the Jordan River, confessing their sins.

So Matthew has done all this work, making these scriptural connections between

Jesus' story and the promises that God made to ancient Israel.

He's making it clear, you know, Jesus is the fulfillment of these things.

And then here in Matthew 1, he also recognizes the role that John the Baptist

has to play in all of these prophetic promises that are now coming true.

See, John the Baptist was a well-known character in ancient Israel.

So if you were reading this at the time that Matthew was writing it,

one of the original recipients, you would know who John the Baptist was because

he was very famous in Israel.

Because he had this ministry, this ministry of repentance and baptism.

Before Jesus came onto the scene, before he went around teaching,

before he was crucified, John the Baptist, who's actually Jesus' cousin,

was out in the desert being a wild man.

He ate locusts and honey, which is not good food, by the way.

It's not like an ancient Near Eastern delicacy.

It's not like he ate escargot. It's bugs. It's bugs.

And bee poop. That's what he ate.

He ate wild honey, and he ate locusts, and he wore camel hair,

and he was out in the wilderness, and people were coming to him,

and he was telling them they needed to repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

And Matthew does this thing again, or he connects it to an Old Testament scripture, right?

A word of the prophet. Again, he connects it to Isaiah 40, verses three through

five, which I'm going to read the whole quotation, right?

So this is what Isaiah said was going to happen in the lead up to the coming of the Messiah.

And Matthew is saying, this is it. This is the fulfillment.

There's this guy out here. He's telling us these things so that we can recognize

that Jesus is the Messiah who God is sending.

And this is what Isaiah says this guy is going to say.

A voice of one crying out, prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness.

Make a straight highway for our God in the desert. Every valley will be lifted

up and every mountain and hill will be leveled.

And the uneven ground will become smooth and the rough places a plain and the

glory of the Lord will appear and all humanity together will see it for the

mouth of the Lord has spoken.

So John is a preacher. He's out in the desert.

He's basically presenting this message

that Isaiah was talking about in Isaiah 40 3

through 5 he is recapitulating it he's

speaking it again to the people he's saying God is

coming we need to welcome him in we need to make the path straight so that when

he comes like he's going to come right into the city we need to be preparing

for him to come because we will see the glory of the Lord appear and all humanity

is going to see it together and God has spoken these things and so so we can

anticipate them to be true.

And so John is out there, he's saying, this is happening now.

You people are gonna come to me and I'm gonna preach this message.

Repent, prepare the way for the Lord.

And I think it is worth pausing and thinking about what John is saying.

Because in the context of what was normally preached in Israel at this time,

John's message is actually unique.

There's some things about it that make it unique. he's not saying the way that

rabbis would typically go around teaching in israel he's not saying here's what

we need to do we need to just keep following god's laws we need to keep the covenant.

God is going to like, not smite us. You know, like that was,

that was the normal teaching of rabbis in Israel.

What he's saying is something different.

He's saying, God is showing up.

In fact, he's here, his kingdom, his Messiah, the kingdom of heaven.

It's not that it's coming.

It's that that it has arrived.

We are on the cusp of seeing this stuff that the Old Testament prophets were talking about.

He says, we're going to see it in our lifetime.

This thing that Isaiah proclaimed in Isaiah 45, the glory of the Lord will appear

and all humanity together will see it.

John's message is that the people of God need to welcome in their king and they

need to expect him to move and it's going to be soon and that they need to get ready for it.

It's not some time far off. It needs to be hope that we have right now because

God is going to fulfill it right now and we need to be prepared.

And so he says, and the preparation for that is repentance.

It's repentance. And we're going to talk about this as we go along here.

What Matthew does, and he makes super clear, is that there's a difference between

repentance and keeping the law, just as we're going to go along here.

And I think we normally think of this as sort of the same thing.

Like we think repentance, and I've talked a lot about repentance over the years.

I don't really want to do a whole thing on it again, but we think of repentance

as like feeling really bad for the stuff I've done and shaping up.

That's the conventional idea of what repentance means.

But as we'll go along here in of the text, I think Matthew messes with that idea a little bit.

Here's a good definition of repentance that I like, and it's by a guy whose

name I cannot pronounce.

It's something in German, so you can have fun with that.

Repentance means the radical recognition of God.

And so what he's saying, he's saying, okay, look, God is here.

He's fulfilling these promises. You need to repent. You need to wake up and

understand God is in our midst.

And of course, that's going to imply certain things, but Matthew and John are

going pains to not get too far ahead of themselves.

They're saying our preparedness for the coming kingdom, for God coming in our midst is repentance.

And it's just like recognizing he's going to do something. We cannot anticipate Anticipate it.

We don't know how to prepare it. We simply need to be waiting with bated breath.

And you think about how this is going to be looked like. Say you grew up in Israel, right?

Say you're a 30, 40-year-old person in Israel, right?

And you've been around the block, and you've heard so much preaching,

and you've been hammered at home all day long about how, man,

if we're going to be—if God's ever going to show up, if his kingdom is ever

going to come, if he's ever going to send his Messiah,

we just need to do better, and we need to obey more.

And in this culture, this time, it was very religious, and it was very clear

that those who kept the law the best were those who had authority to speak about who God is, right?

And if you were the sort of person who either you couldn't keep the law or you

had like sort of like some disability, like leprosy, like then you couldn't keep the law.

Or if you were just too poor to like afford to do all the sacrificial stuff

involved in worshiping the Lord, then you couldn't keep the law.

So you were like an outsider, right? So that's normal in the culture.

But the insiders were the law keepers, these people who are really doing really well.

And then imagine what happens is that this guy goes out into the desert,

away from all the ceremonial stuff of Israel, away from all the law keeping and all the rules.

And what he's just saying is, yeah, God has told us about all these things.

He's been telling us we need to keep his covenant, but something is about to happen.

And we need to wake up to the fact that God is going to surprise every single one of us.

Those who feel like we're on the outside and as we're going to look in here

in just a second those who feel like we're on the inside and we need to just

be standing at attention.

Not with all of our trappings and not trying to impress god but like like like

he is like an outsider just waiting for god just saying because he's about to

do something that's going to blow our minds and how different that kind of message

is from what you've heard all

your time growing If you were an ancient Israelite, it's amazing, right?

I mean, because to a degree, I think we experienced this even as people who

have gone to church, if you grew up in church, like God becomes an abstract idea.

And we sort of manage our relationship with God by doing the right things,

by making sure we're not sinning too much, right?

Too much. You're going to sin a little bit, right?

And then feeling appropriately bad when you do sin.

And so we have this kind of relationship with God where it's like, okay, he's out there.

He's distant. He's far away. And I have this relationship with him,

but I just kind of have to manage it. I kind of like muddle through,

right? And what John is saying is, no, no, God is no longer going to be abstract to you Israelites.

We're not going to be talking about the distant God who's far away.

We're going to be talking about a God who is near, who's close,

whose kingdom is very present.

And to prepare for this, we need to have a new mind. That's what repentance means.

It means metanoia, a new mindedness. We have to have a new way of thinking about

what it would mean for us to have a relationship with God. It says,

no longer is he abstract.

The coming of the kingdom, which is going to be this major theme that is playing

out throughout the book of Matthew, and we'll talk about a lot more as we go along,

it is God becoming very real and very present and not abstract any longer,

which is so different than the idea of, well, just don't do bad things and keep

the law and God will be good with you.

He'll be distant, but he'll at least be okay with you.

And this message, the presence of the kingdom, the presence of the Messiah,

God among his people becomes very divisive.

And that's what we see throughout the book of Matthew, is that some people are very disturbed by this.

And we see this foreshadowed here in the rest of of chapter three. Let's keep reading.

When he saw many of the Pharisees and the Sadducees coming to his baptism,

he said to them, brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?

Therefore, produce fruit consistent with repentance.

And don't presume to say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our father.

For I tell you that God is able to raise up children for Abraham from these stones.

The ax is already at the root of the trees. Therefore, every tree that doesn't

produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

I baptize you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I.

I am not worthy to remove his sandals. He himself will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

His winnowing shovel is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and

gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with fire that never goes out. Oof!

That's a fun... Let's close and pray.

Wouldn't that be fun? Wouldn't that be great? You'd love that.

You'd love that. I'd love that. It'd be fun.

So, like, we have this foreshadowing going on here. Like, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, right?

These are... You probably have heard of those before.

Sadducees were kind of... Pharisees

and Sadducees were the religious elite elite of Israel at the time.

They were the ones who kind of controlled both the government of Israel,

at least in its collaboration with Rome.

They formed pretty much the membership of the Sanhedrin, which is the governing

council of elders that works alongside the Roman governors to keep things in

order and decide religious disputes among the people.

They kind of had distinct ideas about different theologies, right?

But they had kind of this partnership where they were power sharing.

But everybody understood that the big shots in Israel were these Pharisees and Sadducees.

And while there might be disagreements about which ones were right,

everybody knew one of them is right.

Had to be one of them because these are really learned people and they understand what God is like.

They're the religious elites. And so the.

And especially the Pharisees are rigorous, like they're rigorous law keepers.

They have this whole way of living life.

They were like, you know, we know that there's like 300 and something laws in

the Old Testament, but we want to double it to have extra laws because we need

to be super careful to keep the law.

We don't want to get even close to risking law breaking.

So we have all these extra laws that we keep.

And John's message, as they come out, they come out to see them.

They're like, we got to hear about what John's doing out here in the desert.

It sounds a little intense.

And his message to them, it's not just, hey, you guys, even you religious leaders,

you also need to repent. He actually calls them names.

He says, you guys are like a brood of vipers, which is, I don't know a lot about

snakes, and I don't want to learn anything else about them, but it doesn't sound nice.

He's calling them names. times he tells them that with the, with the coming

kingdom, they really actually need to be concerned.

So it's because you guys can't, and this is the whole like second half of this thing.

It's basically telling me you can't rest on your identity as Jews and think

just because you're the children of Abraham and you like are people who think

you hold onto his tradition and the laws of Moses and you keep them really well.

He says, that doesn't matter with what's coming anymore.

When God shows up and his kingdom comes among us, that stuff isn't going to count for anything.

All your thoughts about how good of a person you are because of the way you

carefully keep the law or you do your best, basically he's saying none of this

is going to matter when it comes down to us.

And he tells them very directly, he says, instead of trying harder and doing

more and creating more rules and laws for yourself, you actually need to do something else.

You need to produce fruit consistent with repentance.

Which I am certain was very hard for them to hear.

And I want to have some sympathy for these guys, right?

Because if anyone has been trying hard to do the right thing by God,

it's the Pharisees, certainly.

They have spent their whole lives, like, it was not easy to become a Pharisee.

You had to study, you had to give your whole life to this task.

You had to live this kind of rigorous kind of life where there was a lot of

fasting involved and a lot of giving involved. and just like you had to do so much.

And here comes John. And what he's saying is you guys think you're impressing

God so much with all your stuff, but you are a brood of vipers.

And actually you think you're producing all this righteousness in Israel that

your righteousness is gonna bring about the work of God.

And what he says is actually you need to produce the fruit of repentance.

Like coming out of your life, you think there's holiness and there's righteousness,

says, but there's not, you actually need to repent. John is just a bubble burster.

See, you've been busy being productive for the Lord.

And what John says is, no, you're just like deluding yourself.

You're wasting your time. And this conflict set up here in the early chapters,

it just goes on and on through the book of Matthew, because these people do

not like to hear this message.

But John really just, He pulls no punches. He says, you need to rethink your

approach. And he explains to him the reason why.

He says, because with the coming of the kingdom, with this kingdom of God coming

among us, something is happening.

And someone after me, he says, it's not me, but someone who's following after

me, the one for whom I am preparing the way is going to come.

And he's going to do something that is so much more extreme than what I'm doing.

He says, I'm calling you to repentance, repentance to kind of had this kind

of new mind, to have this new perspective, to have this radical conversion where

you're just waiting on God and rethinking about what it could be.

And that's going to be, I'm going to baptize you in a way to prepare you for that.

He says, but then someone behind me is going to come and he's going to baptize you yet again.

My baptism is just like this preparatory thing where you have this mind so you

can recognize him coming.

He says, but then God is going to show up in the midst of you and he's going

to baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire, which sounds scary and was scary to them.

And he uses this image to describe what's going to happen. And it's just like,

this is what the nature of the kingdom is.

And he uses the image of winnowing. I'm sure you are all very familiar with

ancient Israelite agricultural practices, so I won't even talk about it.

No, I'm joking, I will. And so winnowing is something you would do.

So in ancient Israel, when you would bring in your harvest of wheat,

you'd bring it in and you had to do two things in order to process it and make it useful.

First, you would bring it to a threshing floor where you would thresh it.

And threshing would involve just like piling up your wheat on this big rock

that had been carved out of usually like a cliff face or like up onto a high place.

And then you would just roll a big stone over it. And the point of that was

to break up the wheat because the wheat stalks have the fruit at the end,

the little grain at the end. This is what I know about wheat.

I've never actually been involved in this at all, but through books.

So the fruit of the grain is at the very end, but the stalks are there and the

stalks really aren't useful.

You can't eat them. And so first off, you'd roll this stone over.

It would break up these things apart. part. It would break the little grain from the stalks, right?

But then there was still this little container called chaff,

this kind of light leafy thing that would wrap around the wheat.

And what you had to do was extract the wheat so that you could use it.

And you didn't want to go through individually picking it out,

right? Because that would take too long.

So yeah, bring it to the threshing floor. It would get crushed up.

And then you would take a winnowing fork or a

winnowing shovel and you would get all

your stuff in a pile and it's all the all the stocks and all

the chaff and all the wheat is all together and then you take

a shovel and you throw it up in the air like this guy's doing

right here and they would locate these threshing floors on like in windy places

so they're gonna throw up the stuff in the air all this light material the stocks

of the wheat and the chaff that surrounds surrounds the wheat the the wheat

itself the grain is like heavy be.

You're gonna throw it up in the air. The light stuff in the context of a windy

place is gonna be blown away and you're just gonna be left with the useful grain. Make sense?

I don't know. I think so. So you'd just be doing that all the time.

You'd be throwing it up and the wind would blow along and you'd be left with

the useful stuff. You'd be left with the fruitful stuff.

And so John is telling them, they're going to be baptized with the Holy Spirit

and with fire and it's gonna be like winnowing. He's using this analogy.

But we can miss the power of this analogy because this is the problem.

We aren't ancient Israelites.

We don't have their customs. But the Hebrew word for spirit.

The word used consistently in the Old Testament for God's spirit is ruach.

And it sounds a lot like the Hebrew word for wind.

And so there's this thing that we lose in translation where he's saying the

Holy Spirit is gonna come.

And just like the wind blows, when the winnower throws up in the air and the

wind blows away the bad stuff, he says, that's what's going to be happening to you.

This baptism that he's going to baptize you with this Holy Spirit and fire is

going to be like that sort of a cleansing process.

The Holy Spirit is going to come. The breath of God, the wind of God is going to sweep over you.

He's going to take away what is not useful, take away the things that are going

to burn up, not be of any value.

They're going to be blown away and then they're going to be lit on fire so that

what is good and what is fruitful and what is right will remain.

He says, you are about to enter into this process where God is going to come among you.

He's going to be present with you and he's going to winnow you.

He's going to separate out the fruit from what is not useful. faithful.

And so two observations just about this image, because it is really powerful.

First is what John is describing is the presence of God, not his absence.

He's saying, you religious people and even you unreligious people,

all you people are coming to me. I'm calling you to get ready for the Lord.

I'm calling you to repent.

I'm calling you to have a new mind about what it's going to look like for God to show up.

And what Israel has been saying, if we're good enough, then God will show up.

So it's like, we're making a deal with God.

And what John is telling them is that actually, no, you got it totally backwards.

God is gonna show up whether you are ready or not.

And you are gonna be thrown into this experience of baptism with the Holy Spirit.

And it's gonna either lead to your purification and it's gonna lead to your

good and to your fruitfulness or there will be like, Like if you don't like

participate with God in this thing, it's going to lead to this fire.

It's going to lead to destruction.

John is saying, it is such good news for you, Israel, that God is coming near

to you because he is going to bless you with his presence.

And as his presence comes among you, as the wind of his Holy Spirit will blow

upon you, it is gonna take away the things in your life and in your heart,

the sin, the stuff that is keeping you back from listening to the Lord and obeying the Lord.

It's not gonna happen as you obey the law for long enough and good enough and

you stretch out hard enough to impress God.

He says, that's not what's gonna happen. God is just going to come in your midst

and you are going to be baptized into this process of purification.

God is going to be near you. The Holy Spirit is going to be upon you.

John says, that is such good news.

So if you're like the sort of person who can't keep up with all the religious

expectations, John says, you don't have to.

God is going to be coming among you. It's such good news.

He's going to be doing a work. He's going to be the one who takes the initiative.

And does the stuff to bring about fruitfulness and to take away the things that

cannot remain, the things that need to be done with, the things that will burn up.

John sees that as good news because it means, man, God is present. He's going to do work.

But if you are the sort of person, and I sort of think these religious leaders,

I mean, because this is really a warning to them in particular.

If you're the sort of person who has been working really hard and succeeding

at managing God, at impressing Him and thinking, yeah, I'm doing all the right stuff,

then God coming down and being present is actually a little disturbing.

It's like, I don't know, when I grew up, I...

I have a very good father, but he was a normal father, right?

And so sometimes we'd be like downstairs with my brothers and we'd be fighting

and you'd hear dad shot down. Do I need to come down there?

And you'd be like, no, sir, you do not.

Sometimes your father coming down is not good news, right?

Particularly if you're like, no, we got this handled. Thanks,

dad. We don't need you. We don't need you to come on down.

We're going to sort things out because, you know, we don't know what you're

going to do when you get down here.

If you're the sort of person who

has prided yourself on managing your life if you prided yourself on impressing

god and then god says i'm gonna come down there and you can be like no no we're

good like it kind of becomes bad news that god's gonna show up for the holy

spirit to come come near you to be blowing among you it's it's it is bad news

if you are deeply invested.

In a relationship with god that's about you improving yourself and impressing god God.

Because then you're like, if you are really good at taking the initiative,

if you are really the sort of person who has your life together,

and God says, I'm going to come down and I'm going to winnow you,

I'm going to baptize you, I'm going to take away the things that are difficult,

that can be a hard thing to accept.

Because you're probably going to think, well, what have I been doing all of this time.

And it's funny, like, this little anecdote here in the book of Matthew,

it's just there to disturb us.

It's just there to bother us a little bit. He doesn't go on and explain further

what this is all going to look like just yet.

But what we see is that these religious people are hearing about God finally

fulfilling all these promises, and they're clearly not excited about it.

They have a lot of difficulty accepting the idea that God would come down and

God needs to do something for them because they think they've been doing it all.

And this becomes continually the problem that they face as the book of Matthew

goes on and as Jesus's ministry starts to pick up.

And so just ending up this scene here in book Matthew 3, let's just finish up this little section.

And then once we finish it up, worship team is gonna come up here and we'll

get ready to take communion.

So in the midst of that little disturbing little scene, this presentation that

God's gonna come here, he's gonna be doing some cleaning work,

some cleansing work. He's going to be judging what is bad and affirming what is good.

Then we are presented with Jesus. First picture of adult Jesus.

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him.

John tried to stop him saying, I need to be baptized by you.

This whole winnowing thing, Holy Spirit and fire.

And yet you come to me? Jesus answered him, allow it for now,

because this is the way for us to fulfill all righteousness.

And then John allowed him to be baptized.

When Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the water.

The heavens suddenly opened for him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending

like a dove, coming down on him.

And the voice from heaven said, this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.

So worship team can come up here. So Matthew has done this work.

He's set the scene for,

He's laying hold of these promises and he presents us here at the end of Matthew

3 with the person who has come to fulfill these promises.

It is the beloved son of God, the one brought from Egypt, the one who is going

to fulfill these new covenant promises,

the one who's a Nazarite, the one who is foretold by John the Baptist,

the one who's proclaiming him and all these other promises we have from before

in Matthew, we see Jesus being the answer here, right?

In Matthew, he's saying, this is the one who's going to deliver on these promises.

This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. It's interesting here in

Matthew, in other gospels, there's a more complete quotation,

which is, this is my beloved son with whom I'm well pleased, listen to him.

And so it's interesting, like, again, this doesn't resolve, this is an ongoing

story, but we're asked to just kind of sit with it.

We're asked to just sort of think about what is Jesus up to and how is Jesus's ministry,

this baptism with fire and spirit, this call that he has, like,

how does it challenge the way that I've normally been engaging with God?

Because again, Jeremiah's message is that God has been maybe a little distant.

Maybe you've been kind of trying to manage this relationship with God.

He says, but something is going to happen now through the person of Jesus,

and there's going to be this baptism that is coming, and it is going to be for God's glory.

It is going to take away the things that cannot remain, the sin and all this stuff.

And we're going to get to this later. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves

in the text, and we're just presented with the person of Jesus.

And right here, we have to reckon with the fact that for so long,

these religious people had been dealing in the abstract with God.

What's my growth plan?

What's my way to keep my life pure before God? And these are all good things.

And here we have the solution, the way forward for God. It's not a plan.

It's not greater a rigor. It's not like you taking the initiative and changing

your character. It's not you feeling bad enough for your sin.

It's the person of Jesus, the beloved son.

And we're told, how do you come into this relationship? You begin by listening

to him. You begin by listening to him.

You begin by trusting him. You begin by looking to him.

And so as we just enter into worship here for a little bit, I want us to just

sit with that and think about who he is.

We're always wanting to say, well, tell me what to do, Lord.

Tell me what to do, Lord. And here in Matthew, in the end of chapter three,

we're just said, oh, you don't know what to do yet.

But here we have the person, the one who's going to baptize you with spirit

and fire, he's revealed.

And so I just want us to sit with that. That's good enough, by the way.

You have this way of engaging with God where you, again, where you think,

I've got to do something for the Lord.

So I'm going to ask you to do something really uncomfortable and just say,

Lord, I'm not going to do anything for you.

Instead, actually, I want to do, I want to experience the fact that you come

to me, not because you're so impressed with me, but because you recognize my

need and you want to do something in me and you want to do what you said you were going to do here.

You want to baptize me with the Holy Spirit and with fire.

And I don't want to be afraid of that. And I don't want to let my desire to

impress you or to to manage you or to get ahead of you, get in the way of what you want to do.

So as we just worship here, I want us to just sit with that and just ask the

Lord, would you tell me, what do I do with you?

What do I do with the fact that you have come among us and you're not withholding, but you're present?

So I want to pray for us. And then we're going to spend some time in worship.

And then we're going to take communion in the second song, as we discussed.

I'm not going to get ahead of myself, Lord Jesus.

Music.