Bhanu Gadde: As I was uh preparing for this sermon, I spoke to one of our interim pastors, Pastor Fred Zaspel, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, and he asked us, he asked me how uh the congregation was doing, and after everything he said, so he asked me what you're doing, and I said I will be preaching in three weeks.
Bhanu Gadde: And his own witty way, he said this make it biblical, don't start any heresies.
Bhanu Gadde: That was the second sentence he said.
Bhanu Gadde: So if you know Pastor Fred, that's him.
Bhanu Gadde: And this morning I was speaking to my dear friend John Egan, and he often accuses me that he is able to understand only every other word.
Bhanu Gadde: I think he needs to fix his ear hearing aid.
Bhanu Gadde: All right, so that's wonderful.
Bhanu Gadde: So this is uh yesterday I received uh as I was preparing for this sermon, I received an email from Mr.
Bhanu Gadde: Vincent Morgan explaining to me about the differences between Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians.
Bhanu Gadde: And that was very helpful.
Bhanu Gadde: And thank you so much.
Bhanu Gadde: Thank you for sending that.
Bhanu Gadde: And if you and he is a you know, for me, he's a scholar in Jewish, everything that is Jew, you know, uh all things that are Jewish, and especially uh messianic Jewish uh heritage.
Bhanu Gadde: And if you want to see anything from Israel or if you want to know more about Jewish history, speak to him.
Bhanu Gadde: And for more for more than a year we've been going through the book of Matthew, and for the past few weeks, the portions we are going through are getting more intense, if you will.
Bhanu Gadde: Because we are nearing the great event in the redemptive history of mankind, the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Bhanu Gadde: The way this would happen is coming into view more and more as we go through these incidents that have been unfolding.
Bhanu Gadde: The sermons we've been listening in the past three to four weeks occurred in the last days of our Lord Jesus Christ's crucifixion, before before his crucifixion.
Bhanu Gadde: Religious leaders and the powers to be have decided that Jesus must be eliminated.
Bhanu Gadde: In their quest to preserve the purity of the scriptures as they saw them, and that this populist rabbi, who in their minds is thinking of himself as the Messiah and must be dealt with decisively to protect their religion as
Speaker 1: they saw it.
Speaker 1: Well, to understand this, we must understand the dynamics of the society in which this scene is unfolding.
Speaker 1: There are very key players that this text refers to.
Speaker 1: The one is Sadducees, Pharisees and Herodians.
Speaker 1: Pharisees believed in the resurrection, but Sadducees did not.
Speaker 1: There are many among the Orthodox Jews today who refer to themselves as Pharisees.
Speaker 1: They follow the teaching of rabbis as they did during Jesus' time.
Speaker 1: Sadducees rejected the teaching of the rabbis, but they were very concerned that every word and every jot and turl is properly spelled, is properly placed.
Speaker 1: And these were the scribes.
Speaker 1: Now coming to Herodians, they were liberals who followed the secular Roman government.
Speaker 1: Well, there is no record of Sadducees or Herodians.
Speaker 1: This is the tech this is the email that uh Mr.
Speaker 1: Vincent Morgan sent me.
Speaker 1: There is no record of Sadducees and Herodians ever coming to faith in Jesus Christ, but many of the Pharisees did.
Speaker 1: Example, Peter, Paul, Gamaliel, and Stephan were from the Pharisees.
Speaker 1: The Herodians or secular Jews would describe would describe the most Jewish people today.
Speaker 1: They were more interested in making a living than in the religious values.
Speaker 1: And Matthew probably was that f was from that group, and as he was a tax collector.
Speaker 1: I think this seems to be one exception.
Speaker 1: Pharisees and Sadducees resented Jesus Christ for a number of reasons.
Speaker 1: One, the first reason is he taught contrary to their teaching, and that irritated them.
Speaker 1: And he was more popular than they were, had a bigger following than they did.
Speaker 1: And they were that that was hard for them to understand because their egos really needed to be supreme.
Speaker 1: He demonstrated, third reason is he demonstrated powers and abilities that they could not even conceive of.
Speaker 1: People were after Jesus Christ as he entered Jerusalem triumphantly on Monday as they hailed him, and on Tuesday he went to the temple.
Speaker 1: Rather than attacking the Romans, what did he do?
Speaker: He cleansed the temple.
Speaker: He attacked them.
Speaker 1: He attacked the leadership at the very heart of their nation.
Speaker 1: He attacked their false religious system and cleansed the temple throughout the money changers and buyers and sellers and who desecrated the God's holy temple.
Speaker 1: Now it is Wednesday, and after spending the night in Bethany at home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead, he is with his disciples, and he came back into the city, went back to the temple, and is spending the day teaching there and preaching the gospel of the kingdom.
Speaker 1: So here was a man who contradicted the teaching, who gained a greater hearing than they had, and who could do things they could not even imagine doing.
Speaker 1: And they wanted him dead.
Speaker 1: He was a threat to their position.
Speaker 1: In John 11, 47 through 48, we see.
Speaker 1: So the chief priests and Pharisees convened the sonhedron and were saying and were saying, What are we going to do?
Speaker 1: Since this man is doing many signs, if we let him go, if we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.
Speaker 1: And there it is.
Speaker 1: And they wanted to protect that.
Speaker 1: But the problem is there are a few hindrances in their quest to eliminate him.
Speaker 1: The first one is the Roman government has restricted their ability to execute their own criminals.
Speaker 1: And secondly, how do you get rid of a person who is so popular without experiencing a severe backlash and alienating the whole populace who followed him?
Speaker 1: Hence this effort to discredit him.
Speaker 1: And in the past two sermons we have seen two questions posed to Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: Well, to summarize, his teaching was different.
Speaker 1: He is very popular beyond anything that they could conceive of for themselves.
Speaker 1: And finally, he cleansed their temple.
Speaker 1: And what right did he have did he have to do that?
Speaker 1: And he cleaned out the place at the most lucrative time of the year, that is Passover, when they made their most money.
Speaker 1: At the end of chapter 21 and beginning of chapter 22, he spoke three parables that directly spoke to the leaders that they were excluded from the kingdom of God, and they knew that they were speaking about them.
Speaker 1: And that follows three attempts to discredit him.
Speaker 1: In verse 15, and it was the Pharisees along with the Herodians asked him whether or not they should pay their taxes to see Caesar.
Speaker 1: Pastor Doug preached on this on this two weeks ago.
Speaker 1: Because they were somewhat familiar with teaching, with his teaching, they were certain that he would say no.
Speaker 1: They also thought that the common people were against the Roman government, and they thought if he is who they think he is, and he would not want to be unpopular with the people, and they were certain that he would be against paying taxes to Caesar.
Speaker 1: Well, once he falls into their trap and says not to pay taxes to Rome, they would then send the Herodians to report him as an insurrectionist.
Speaker 1: And then, fearing his popularity, the Rome would put an end to him.
Speaker 1: Well, extremely clever plot.
Speaker 1: But the answer he gave, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's, because Caesar's imprint was on the money that was shown, and reminding them that they are and and also God's imprint is on the humanity.
Speaker 1: What an answer.
Speaker 1: Render unto Caesar's what is Caesar's and render unto God's what is God's.
Speaker 1: Give the money to Caesar's and give yourselves to God.
Speaker 1: And they were confounded, and that attempt failed.
Speaker 1: Well, now it is the turn of Sadducees who don't believe in resurrection.
Speaker 1: In the second question in verse 23, Chad dealt with it last week.
Speaker 1: And they wanted to know his view on resurrection.
Speaker 1: What they are trying to do, if they can't, you know, what now what they are trying to do is if they cannot discredit him politically, they wanted to discredit him theologically.
Speaker 1: And they wanted to discredit him as a teacher before the people.
Speaker 1: Well, and at least this is a step towards his you know elimination.
Speaker 1: And so they talk about the resurrection and they make up an absolutely bizarre situation.
Speaker 1: And they assume that if he says there is a resurrection, he's going to be stuck with this bizarre situation.
Speaker 1: And the people are going to see what an utterly inept and inadequate teacher he is.
Speaker 1: But again, his answer confounds and astonishes and amazes them.
Speaker 1: And that attempt also failed.
Speaker 1: And that brings us to the third.
Speaker 1: One more time they come to test him.
Speaker 1: In fact, it says that that was their purpose in verse 35, asking him a question, testing him.
Speaker 1: And their desire is that he would fail the test.
Speaker 1: In both attempts, he made them look absolutely stupid rather than the other way around.
Speaker 1: Well, when Pharisees saw that the answer that Jesus gave to Sadducees, and they shut him and he shut them up, and Pharisees were you know probably were glad because you know this question might have been asked uh of of uh you know uh by Sadducees to the Pharisees many times, and that question was answered properly by Jesus Christ, and it appeared as though he took their side, but the problem is Jesus posed them a greater threat than the Sadducees did.
Speaker 1: So what do they do?
Speaker 1: They came together with the Sadducees.
Speaker 1: It is so important for them to have Jesus discredited than the Sadducees discredited.
Speaker 1: Hence they met with them to pose a final question to test him.
Speaker 1: They tried to test him politically, they try to test him theologically with a major doctrinal issue, and now they are going to they are going deep into theology again, and they have one more shot that they want to give to try to discredit him with the people.
Speaker 1: And that brings us to today's text, Matthew 24, 22, 34 to 40.
Speaker 1: When the Pharisees heard that he has sighed he had silenced the Sadducees, they came together.
Speaker 1: And one of them, an expert in the law, asked a question to test him, Teacher, which command in the law is the greatest?
Speaker 1: He said to him, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.
Speaker 1: This is the greatest and most important command.
Speaker 1: The second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself.
Speaker 1: All the law and the prophets depend on these two commands.
Speaker 1: This is their last attempt before his crucifixion.
Speaker 1: In fact, in Mark twelve, a parallel passage in verse thirty-four, he says, When this was over, no man dared ask him any more questions.
Speaker 1: This is it.
Speaker 1: Verse 35, one of them, that is, a Pharisee, an expert in the law, and who is the same as a scribe.
Speaker 1: A scribe was the one who copied the law, who was an author who was an authority on the law, and who knew the law, who interpreted the law, who taught the law, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: Well, he may have been the one who stood out from many scribes as a real expert because they have selected him, because the previous attempts to test him have failed, and he is sent to ask the question on behalf of the rest of the Pharisees.
Speaker 1: When Jesus answers this question, the lawyer responds, This is in Mark.
Speaker 1: This is the Mark's account.
Speaker 1: You have said the truth, that is exactly right.
Speaker 1: And Jesus in turn said to him, You are not far from the kingdom.
Speaker 1: So while he was acting as an emissary for the Pharisees, well he does not seem as vicious as others, but in verse 35 he asked him a question to test him.
Speaker 1: Well, he's not totally honest, also.
Speaker 1: They wanted him to fail this test.
Speaker 1: We need to understand what kind of a test this is because if we just focus on the verse thirty-seven, you know, love God and love your neighbor, and we would have missed the whole context.
Speaker 1: And we would have missed the approach that they are taking in trying to discredit the Lord Jesus Christ?
Speaker 1: And we will have missed the whole plot with which they were targeting him.
Speaker 1: Well, if we look at the Old Testament in the Torah and uh we look at the Old Testament scriptures, who is the greatest hero for the Jewish people?
Speaker 1: It is Moses.
Speaker 1: Well, here is a man who spoke to God face to face as a man speaks to his friend.
Speaker 1: And that sets him apart from everybody else.
Speaker 1: And Moses was chosen by God to be the recipient of the Decalogue, the divine law of God.
Speaker 1: Moses, who penned the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch.
Speaker 1: Moses was their great hero.
Speaker 1: Pharisees believed that the teaching of Jesus attacked Moses' teaching.
Speaker 1: And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, I want you to know this.
Speaker 1: I have not come to destroy.
Speaker 1: Destroy what?
Speaker 1: Destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them.
Speaker 1: And not one jot, not one till shall in any case be removed from this law.
Speaker 1: If you look at the Jewish history and the Jewish law, and they have you know taken the Old Testament and the Mosaic Law and came out with an intricate set of laws.
Speaker 1: There are six hundred and thirteen different laws that they have devised.
Speaker 1: And there are two hundred and forty-eight affirmative laws and three hundred and sixty-five negative laws.
Speaker 1: And these were divided into light loss and the heavy.
Speaker 1: And he is going to give probably some law that comes out of his mouth.
Speaker 1: Thus we will know, and everybody knows, that he is apostate and he is a heretic.
Speaker 1: And that's where they were going with this.
Speaker 1: So, what is the great law?
Speaker 1: Just give us one.
Speaker 1: The greatest law that they as they figured he is going, he has got something new to say.
Speaker 1: And if it is something new, it cannot be old.
Speaker 1: This is one point that Pharisees and Sadducees agreed on.
Speaker 1: The Sadducees accepted Pentateuch, and Pharisees Accepted Pentateuch and all the Old Testament scriptures.
Speaker 1: For both these groups, Moses was the ultimate authority.
Speaker 1: They asked, What is the greatest commandment?
Speaker 1: And now Jesus answers.
Speaker 1: He said to them, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.
Speaker 1: And this is the greatest and most important command.
Speaker 1: Again, what an answer.
Speaker 1: An excellent comprehensive summation of what the law and what God has been speaking to them through prophets.
Speaker 1: This captures the spirit of the law that they profess to hold, but were only confined to the letter.
Speaker 1: But this response captures the spirit of the law.
Speaker 1: He quoted Moses, Deuteronomy 6.5, which was our call to worship this morning.
Speaker 1: They were not expecting that.
Speaker 1: They very much wanted him to contradict Moses or come up with something to undermine the authority of Moses.
Speaker 1: But he affirmed him, affirmed Moses.
Speaker 1: Not only did he quote Moses, but he quoted the most familiar thing that Moses ever wrote, the Shema.
Speaker 1: Listen, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
Speaker 1: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength.
Speaker 1: These words that I'm giving you today are to be in your heart.
Speaker 1: And this is the most familiar scripture to all.
Speaker 1: Those Jews.
Speaker 1: So if you enter any Jewish household, you will see this mezuzah in which is a handwritten part of this scripture.
Speaker 1: This little box which has a you which has a star of David on it, inside that is Deuteronomy 6, 4 and 5.
Speaker 1: And if you have seen an Orthodox Jew strapping to his forehead a phylactery, a box, and in that box is this verse.
Speaker 1: For every Orthodox Jew, and the Jew at the time, every Jew at the time of Jesus who was faithful to his religion had to stop and recite this statement twice a day.
Speaker 1: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength.
Speaker 1: Out of Deuteronomy 6.5.
Speaker 1: He quotes something with which they were all very familiar.
Speaker 1: And he says, I'm here to tell you anything.
Speaker 1: I'm not here to tell you anything that is different than what Moses told you.
Speaker 1: The same thing.
Speaker 1: The love of the mind, the love of action rather than love of the feeling or love of emotion.
Speaker 1: It is the highest kind of love.
Speaker 1: Not the love that you just feel, but the love of dedication, the love of commitment, the love that says, this is right and this is noble.
Speaker 1: No matter what I feel, and that's there is a word to describe that love.
Speaker 1: Agape.
Speaker 1: Godly love.
Speaker 1: So he says to them what they already know that the number one thing is to love God with your whole being, your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole mind.
Speaker: And they are all called to participate.
Speaker 1: And here there are four channels for the love to be perfectly balanced.
Speaker 1: It is an intelligent love.
Speaker 1: And it is a feeling love.
Speaker 1: It is a willing love and it is a serving love.
Speaker 1: It carries itself right out to how we act in our physical in our physical strength.
Speaker 1: And all our being comes together in this love to love God.
Speaker 1: It says literally that you are to love God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, with your whole mind.
Speaker 1: As if it is as if he wants to push them this the these these these faculties as wide as possible.
Speaker 1: To really love God, that is the great commandment.
Speaker 1: Well you see, God is not looking for people who go through the religious ritual who have this list of six hundred and thirteen laws and giving an appearance that they are following the law.
Speaker 1: God is not just looking for people who on the outside can go through the motions.
Speaker 1: God wants people with the whole being to love him.
Speaker 1: I mean when God loved us.
Speaker 1: He really loved us, didn't he?
Speaker 1: He must have, he gave us everything that he was.
Speaker 1: He gave himself in death for our sin.
Speaker 1: And he who gave us his whole hearted love does not want our half-hearted attempts.
Speaker 1: And that is the reason why you ought to love your God with your whole heart, whole mind, and whole strength.
Speaker 1: So that's what he told them.
Speaker 1: And it is not enough to believe in him, just believe in him.
Speaker 1: Well, in the scripture we see even demons believe in him.
Speaker 1: No one is ever right with God until his heart and soul and mind and strength manifest love for God.
Speaker 1: A person does not become a Christian just because they may believe.
Speaker 1: A person becomes a Christian when they demonstrate a consuming love for God.
Speaker 1: Paul says in Romans 7, even though he sinned, he said, the things that I do that that are sin, I don't want to do, but I find that in me is my flesh and it does these things.
Speaker 1: But that's not what I choose to do.
Speaker 1: And the essence of what he is saying is that I love God, and I love what is right, and I love what honors God.
Speaker 1: And even though I don't always do it, I love it.
Speaker 1: And even though sometimes I sin, I hate it.
Speaker 1: This was not so with Jewish leaders.
Speaker 1: This is an indictment against them.
Speaker 1: When he said to them, when he said this to them, they were exposed.
Speaker 1: What God wants out of you is your heart of love.
Speaker 1: He is saying to these leaders that you have never given that to God.
Speaker 1: How do we know that?
Speaker 1: If we go to Matthew 23rd chapter, just a chapter chapter 1, 1, the next chapter, 23 verse 13, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.
Speaker 1: And in verse 15, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
Speaker 1: Verse 16, woe to you, blind guides.
Speaker 1: 23, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.
Speaker 1: 24 again, he calls them blind guides.
Speaker 1: Twenty-five, the twenty-fifth verse, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
Speaker 1: Twenty-nine, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees.
Speaker 1: And in verse thirty-three, he calls them snakes, brood of vipers.
Speaker 1: They were going through the religious emotions for what they could gain out of it: self-satisfaction, pride, and appearance of righteousness.
Speaker 1: You say, Well, maybe this was new to them.
Speaker 1: No, it wasn't new to them.
Speaker 1: When he said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, that was not new to them.
Speaker 1: That is right out of Moses.
Speaker 1: Throughout the scriptures, this is not anything new.
Speaker 1: How why why how Jesus rebuked them?
Speaker 1: This is not anything new to them.
Speaker 1: Because throughout the scriptures and the prophecies, God time and again rebuked the behavior of his people while showing externally that they are following the law in a ritualistic manner, their hearts were far from him.
Speaker 1: This is the Lord, it is the Lord who is accusing them, then that it is not any different now with the Pharisees and Sadducees.
Speaker 1: While they were interested in guarding their religion, in their bitter pursuit of it, they have completely turned to externalities and have forgotten the true worship of God.
Speaker 1: And while reciting Shema twice a day, not only have they not loved God, but they have wandered far from what God has required of them.
Speaker 1: And let us consider our current society and how this plays out in what we are dealing with.
Speaker 1: This is the greatest and most important commandments.
Speaker 1: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your mind.
Speaker 1: There are consequences of not loving the Lord.
Speaker 1: Let's go a little bit deeper and explore this matter in relation to what we see in our current world.
Speaker 1: He is the creator and sustainer of this world in which we find ourselves.
Speaker 1: Everything that is in this world is made by God.
Speaker 1: You and I are made by Him.
Speaker 1: And it is He, He alone knows all about this world.
Speaker 1: Given all the problems in the current world, we must recognize that He has made us in a given way.
Speaker 1: And He has revealed us how we ought to live and we ought to conduct ourselves.
Speaker 1: It is given in His law.
Speaker 1: You know, if everyone only observes the law of Moses, right?
Speaker 1: The decalogue, the world would be in a perfect condition.
Speaker 1: And here Jesus continues his answer.
Speaker 1: And the second is like it love your neighbor as yourself.
Speaker 1: How do I love my neighbor?
Speaker 1: How do we love our neighbors?
Speaker 1: Go back to your Ten Commandments.
Speaker 1: If you didn't covet your neighbor's wife and his goods and his possessions and all these things, if you didn't kill him and steal and commit adultery and all the rest of it, well, all the problems of this world would be solved, wouldn't it?
Speaker 1: And God indeed has put it very plainly, plainly like this.
Speaker 1: And He has so made the world and so made men that they can only function truly and harmoniously as long as they live according to His laws.
Speaker 1: God has said it quite plainly and quite clearly that if we violate this design, there will be consequences.
Speaker 1: If we defy God as the world seems to do now, we will get what we see in the world now.
Speaker 1: In Romans Apostle Paul says, God gave them over to a reprobate mind.
Speaker 1: He withheld, he withdrew his restraints.
Speaker 1: He allowed sin in men to manifest it itself uncontrolled.
Speaker 1: And you are getting what you are getting in the modern society because men burning in their lust toward men and women toward a woman, putting aside their natural, becoming perverted, unnatural, and God has given them over to that.
Speaker 1: The wrath of God.
Speaker 1: In Isaiah 48 22, it says, There is no peace for the wicked, says the Lord.
Speaker 1: There is no peace to this modern wicked world.
Speaker 1: In spite of all our arrangements, all our devices, all our technological advancements, there is no peace.
Speaker 1: God has said, if you don't come back to me and be reconciled to me and live according to my laws, there shall be no peace.
Speaker 1: People are not interested in God, but they want peace.
Speaker 1: But you cannot have peace without God.
Speaker 1: Man is made for a relationship to God.
Speaker 1: And he understands nothing about the whole life until he is in right relationship with God, his creator.
Speaker 1: The Bible tells us.
Speaker 1: The man only discovers the truth about himself when he is in the right relationship to God.
Speaker 1: I am to love my neighbor as myself.
Speaker 1: How do I love myself?
Speaker 1: Well, I cannot love myself without knowing the truth about myself.
Speaker 1: What is the truth about me?
Speaker 1: The Bible answers by saying that man never knows the truth about himself until he comes into the right relationship to God.
Speaker 1: How can you love your neighbor if you do not know the truth about yourself nor about your neighbor?
Speaker 1: The fact of the matter is, the man does not know himself.
Speaker 1: He cannot know himself for a good reason.
Speaker 1: Jeremiah puts it like this in seven uh Jeremiah 17, 9 through 10.
Speaker 1: The heart is more deceitful than anything else and incurable.
Speaker 1: The only way in which humanity can ever know the truth about itself is when he can when it comes face to face with God.
Speaker 1: That is why to understand your neighbor and to understand yourself, we must first start with God.
Speaker 1: And man is created by God, and he was created in the image of God.
Speaker 1: What does this mean?
Speaker 1: It means that there was an essential righteousness about him, it means that he was upright, it means that he had a reason that he could think no, he had reason that he could think about himself and analyze himself and look himself, look at himself objectively.
Speaker 1: God made man in his own image, he made him a living soul, and he was made for God and to be in relationship with him.
Speaker 1: Well, why are things as they are?
Speaker 1: It is because man fell, it is because man rebelled against God, it is because man objected to the way in which God had made him and wanted to be a God Himself.
Speaker 1: It was because man deliberately sinned against God and broke God's holy commandment.
Speaker 1: And that's why things as uh things are as they are.
Speaker 1: Man, as a result of this, lost God and he became lost.
Speaker 1: He lost became he lost the awareness of himself and of his neighbor, and he lost his knowledge of God, he lost his fellowship with God, he lost his love for God, and he became a God hater.
Speaker 1: Not only that, having turned his back upon God, he set himself up as a as a God himself, and this is man is suffering from Lucifer complex.
Speaker 1: I decide what I think is right is right, and what I think is right I'm going to do.
Speaker 1: Set himself up as a God.
Speaker 1: And he became selfish, and he became self-centered, he began to live a life of lust and passion, a life of desire and envy and pride and malice.
Speaker 1: He put himself under the dominion of the devil, and that is the result of sin.
Speaker 1: This is the biblical analysis.
Speaker 1: This is what the Bible tells us about who we are.
Speaker 1: In our modern world, we have learned to sterilize all this, didn't we?
Speaker 1: Through social media and the technology that enables us to hear what we want to hear and to hide from everything that makes us uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: But how can the world hide from the consequences of sin?
Speaker 1: We are reaping God's wrath, which is being revealed against all ungodliness.
Speaker 1: Consequences of not loving the Lord our God as he ought to be loved.
Speaker 1: The condition of man is miserable, and the condition of the world is miserable, and getting deeper into misery.
Speaker 1: When we see all that is unfolding around us, we are crying out, What can we do to love our neighbor?
Speaker 1: We cannot love our neighbor because we do not know the truth about ourselves.
Speaker 1: But there is a way whereby man can be brought to love his neighbor.
Speaker 1: It is the only way that is taught here by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: Man cannot love his fellow man because of sin.
Speaker 1: Well, where do we go then?
Speaker 1: Thank God for the biblical doctrine of redemption.
Speaker 1: What is it?
Speaker 1: Man obviously must start by putting himself right with God.
Speaker 1: He has forgotten God, he does not love God.
Speaker 1: How can he?
Speaker 1: He is at enmity with God, he is his own God.
Speaker 1: He can be, what can be done for him?
Speaker 1: Man can do nothing about it, but God can, and God has done it.
Speaker 1: God so loved the world.
Speaker 1: The world that rebelled against him, that he gave his only begotten son.
Speaker 1: God in his eternal love has loved man in spite of his sin and has provided a way of forgiveness and of reconciliation.
Speaker 1: Man cannot reconcile himself to God, but God can reconcile man to himself, and he has done so in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, who went to the cross on Calvary's hill to bear humanity's sins and in his own body.
Speaker 1: And at the cross of Christ, man is given a new view and a new understanding of himself.
Speaker 1: There he sees himself as he is, in all his shame and his all his misery, and in all his worthlessness.
Speaker 1: There he sees himself as a wild sinner, unworthy of the love of.
Speaker 1: God and with no rights, deserving hell, deserving the world that he is getting, he sees himself as a miserable, wretched failure.
Speaker 1: But at the same time he sees others in the same light.
Speaker 1: This is how gospel brings men together.
Speaker 1: First of all, it brings me down.
Speaker 1: I must be put on the ground.
Speaker 1: And seeing myself as I do in the light of this teaching, I hate myself.
Speaker 1: The Job 42.6 that Ian read this morning.
Speaker 1: I have heard of you, Job is saying, I have heard of you, but I am my eyes now that my eyes see you, I abhor myself.
Speaker 1: I hate myself.
Speaker 1: And all that is evil within me.
Speaker 1: And then I look at others, and what I see them in is exactly the same as what I see in myself.
Speaker 1: They are the victims of the same thing, victims of sin, victims of hell, victims of the devil.
Speaker 1: And when I understand my neighbor in this light, I no longer hate him.
Speaker 1: I pity him.
Speaker 1: We are in the same predicament, prisoners of the same enemy.
Speaker 1: We are both miserable worms, wild sinners.
Speaker 1: We are both equally helpless.
Speaker 1: We are both equally hopeless.
Speaker 1: And so the gospel brings us to see what that we are all sinners, and no one is better than another.
Speaker 1: Thank God, the gospel does not leave us here without any hope at all.
Speaker 1: It brings us to the same Savior, the same forgiveness, the same God, the same everything.
Speaker 1: That is the way to love one another.
Speaker 1: We are brought to see one another truly.
Speaker 1: And then what else do we need?
Speaker 1: Well, you know, the Bible says we need a new heart.
Speaker 1: Thank God this is the God, the gospel tells us of a power that can take out the stony heart and give us hearts of flesh.
Speaker 1: Before we can love our neighbors, we need a new heart.
Speaker 1: And it is only God in Christ who can give it to us.
Speaker 1: The doctrine of rebirth.
Speaker 1: The doctrine of regeneration, thank God for it.
Speaker 1: Without the doctrine of regeneration, there is no hope for humanity.
Speaker 1: You'll never be right with God, nor your neighbor.
Speaker 1: Through regeneration, we are a new creation, new beings.
Speaker 1: In other words, God pours his love into our hearts.
Speaker 1: And he loved us in spite of our sin.
Speaker 1: He enables us to love others in spite of their sin.
Speaker 1: Love your enemies, he says, because I've loved you, loved you.
Speaker 1: And when I see that, who I am and who they are, I cannot refuse.
Speaker 1: And throughout the Bible we see this.
Speaker 1: When Isaiah saw God in chapter 6, the first thing that came out of his mouth, I am undone.
Speaker 1: I am a sinner.
Speaker 1: And same thing with Ezekiel.
Speaker 1: And same thing with John.
Speaker 1: When some when John saw the in pro in in um Revelation, when John saw the Son of Man, he fell on his face.
Speaker 1: And to see for who we are, what we are, and we need to see for God who we need to see God as who he is.
Speaker 1: God has given me all for nothing.
Speaker 1: How can I withhold him from from my neighbor?
Speaker 1: I see him as a victim of hell and of the devil.
Speaker 1: I cannot refuse.
Speaker 1: It's the only way.
Speaker 1: This thing happened, the thing that everybody said, so many people said cannot happen.
Speaker 1: The Jew and Gentile came together and embraced one another until Christ and his gospel came Jew regarded everybody else as dogs.
Speaker 1: And those Gentiles, especially the Greeks, despised the Jew because he lacked the Jews lacked philosophy and learning and they hated one another.
Speaker 1: And in Ephesians 2, 11 through 15 we see this.
Speaker 1: So then remember that at one time your Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcised.
Speaker 1: For he is our peace who made both groups one and tore down the dividing wall of hostility.
Speaker 1: He brought together people with the law and people without the law, together in one body.
Speaker 1: He both are lost.
Speaker 1: Jews were lost are lost without with the law, and the Gentiles were lost without the law.
Speaker 1: And we've been brought near.
Speaker 1: What we need is not just teaching.
Speaker 1: What we need is regeneration, a new outlook, a new heart, a new feeling, a new understanding, a new everything.
Speaker 1: And that's what exactly is given to us, offered to us through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
Speaker 1: Dear brethren, brothers and sisters, there is no other way.
Speaker 1: One must be made new and must be regenerated.
Speaker 1: That person will love the Lord his God with all his heart, with all his soul, with all his mind, and at that point he will love his neighbor as himself.
Speaker 1: Because in the light of the Lord, he knows for who he is and what he has received from the Lord.
Speaker 1: Thank God for the Christian doctrine.
Speaker 1: Thank God for the message about God.
Speaker 1: Thank God for the message about Jesus Christ coming in flesh, taking human nature onto him.
Speaker 1: Thank God for the doctrine that tells me that he took my sins upon himself.
Speaker 1: And God smote him, smote them in him.
Speaker 1: And thereby he can forgive me freely.
Speaker 1: The doctrine of atonement.
Speaker 1: Thank God for the doctrine of resurrection.
Speaker 1: Thank God for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 1: Thank God for the doctrine of rebirth.
Speaker 1: Thank God for the doctrine of the church.
Speaker 1: Thank God for the doctrine of second coming.
Speaker 1: And thank God for the doctrine of everlasting life.
Speaker 1: In trying to keep the law through externalities, what these teachers of the law forgot is that it is the matter of the heart.
Speaker 1: And though they thought they were protecting the doctrine, but they have missed all this doctrine, the cross looming large in in a week, they have completely missed the Lord of glory.
Speaker 1: And had they just have taken a little step back and have considered how Jesus answered them and considered his answers, they would have seen the King of Glory for who he is.
Speaker 1: Because at that point they would have seen him as the true fulfillment of the law and the prophets.
Speaker 1: And they would have found him as the fulfillment of all prophecies and all the promises of God came to fruition in him.
Speaker 1: Instead, they were plotting to discredit him and to eliminate him, and in doing so, as Jesus predicted in the parables, they have eliminated themselves from the kingdom of God.
Speaker 1: There is a hymn that we sing often.
Speaker 1: Who has felt the nails upon his hands, bearing all the guilt of sinful man?
Speaker 1: God eternal, humble to the grave, Jesus Savior risen now to reign.
Speaker 1: This embodies all the doctrines that we just heard of.
Speaker 1: Behold our God seated on his throne.
Speaker 1: Come let us adore him.
Speaker 1: Behold our King, nothing can compare.
Speaker 1: Come, let us adore him.
Speaker 1: In Philippians 1 9 through eleven, Paul praised this that your love will keep on growing in knowledge and in every kind of discernment, so that you may approve the things that are superior and may be pure and blameless in the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God.
Speaker 1: Loved ones, as we consider the greatest commandment, may God fill us with a love for Him that will keep on growing.
Speaker 1: May that be evident here among our body at New Hyde Park Baptist Church, and that we will be characterized by all consuming love for the Lord our God, that we may be a powerful witness for the gospel which is the only hope for mankind.
Speaker 1: Amen.