SPEAKER_00: One of my uh heroes from church history is a man named Athanasius.
SPEAKER_00: Athanasius was in the 300s, early 300s.
SPEAKER_00: His name means uh literally no death, never die.
SPEAKER_00: And he's aptly named, though he has physically died, he spiritually still, in a sense, is with us through his writings.
SPEAKER_00: He was a pastor in North Africa who was leading the charge for Christians to recognize the deity of Jesus Christ, which was still very much a debated doctrine during his lifetime.
SPEAKER_00: He came to have such a position of influence because he was what we would call today an associate pastor or an intern or what have you at a prominent church in North Africa.
SPEAKER_00: The bishop of the church was receiving lots of correspondence about the deity of Christ, and the bishops of the years had figured out how to, you know, say things without saying them, how to answer the mail, so to speak, without contributing to the controversy.
SPEAKER_00: But he had Athanasius start to answer his mail for him, and Athanasius was not as circumspect.
SPEAKER_00: Athanasius went right for, you know, like writing letters like if you don't recognize the deity of Jesus, you're a heretic, kind of things.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, which nobody would care what the youth pastor says.
SPEAKER_00: So he signed it with the bishop's name, which caused no small controversy, as they say, in North Africa.
SPEAKER_00: Led to all kinds of church councils, led to Athanasius' imprisonment.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, when the bishop died, Athanasius took his spot as the pastor of St.
SPEAKER_00: Thomas's Church in North Africa.
SPEAKER_00: Uh Athanasius was persecuted by the government, persecuted by riots by other pastors uh countless times throughout his life.
SPEAKER_00: It's estimated he spent 17 years in exile, spread over five different exiles, the second of which was the bloodiest and the most severe.
SPEAKER_00: He had been back at his church, St.
SPEAKER_00: Thomas, uh, preaching.
SPEAKER_00: He had been leading a communion service, a midweek evening communion service.
SPEAKER_00: It was dark outside when soldiers arrived at the church to capture him because of his constant advocacy for the deity of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: They burst into the center doors of the church, they sliced their way through the crowd, killing people.
SPEAKER_00: Athanasius was smuggled out the back door of the church and ran out into exile where he remained for years.
SPEAKER_00: The church, by the way, was singing Psalm 136, his love endures forever while they were being killed.
SPEAKER_00: Athanasius used his time in the wilderness to write treatise about the deity of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: He spent his time in exile.
SPEAKER_00: It's so ironic.
SPEAKER_00: The persecution gave him an opportunity to write and to think in a way that magnified the very doctrine for which he was being persecuted.
SPEAKER_00: One of the passages that captured his attention about the deity of Christ is Matthew chapter 12.
SPEAKER_00: And I want to turn there this morning.
SPEAKER_00: And as you think about the deity of Christ, you know, if the Jehovah's Witness or the Mormon knocks on your door and asks you, where does the Bible teach that Jesus is God?
SPEAKER_00: You probably all have your own go-to passages.
SPEAKER_00: You might think of the passage we read this morning in Colossians, for example, or John chapter 1.
SPEAKER_00: Those are the places I would go to most naturally.
SPEAKER_00: But I want you, through our study this morning, to add Matthew 12 to your list.
SPEAKER_00: My argument this morning is that Matthew 12 is one of the clearest places where Jesus claims that he is God.
SPEAKER_00: He gives a series of proofs of his own divinity here through this exchange with the Pharisees.
SPEAKER_00: The text begins in verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: At that time, Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: That time is after the events of Matthew 11, where he's been preaching out in that Galilean countryside on Mount Arbel, that area.
SPEAKER_00: He's now walking back to Capernaum on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: That is a long walk, but it's doable in one day.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, if you've been to Israel and the parking lot of Capernaum is full, your tour bus probably parked somewhere around where Jesus started walking from.
SPEAKER_00: It's a walk that you can easily manage, just along the Sea of Galilee.
SPEAKER_00: He would have passed through Magdala, probably the place where now there's the uh the chapel for the fish and the loaves.
SPEAKER_00: He would have passed through that area.
SPEAKER_00: It's a Capernaum, which was his main city.
SPEAKER_00: Capernaum is the town he spent most of his ministry in.
SPEAKER_00: He preached in that synagogue on more Sabbaths than any other place.
SPEAKER_00: It's where he lived these three years of his life with Peter's mother-in-law in that place.
SPEAKER_00: So this is where he's headed.
SPEAKER_00: It's familiar territory.
SPEAKER_00: He's there most Sabbaths.
SPEAKER_00: He's on his way back there now at verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: His disciples were hungry, and they begin to pluck heads of grain and to eat.
SPEAKER_00: This is a foreign world for us as Americans to understand how the Jews viewed the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: Central to the Jewish identity is the Sabbath, the Sabbath restrictions, the Sabbath celebrations, the Sabbath keeping.
SPEAKER_00: You know, we think of the Jewish identity sometimes in terms of clothes and in Torah and in food, which is all true.
SPEAKER_00: You know, they ate different food than the nations around them, even than the aliens and the immigrants inside of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: They ate different food, they dressed differently, they spoke a different language, all that gave the Jewish identity.
SPEAKER_00: But Tadma, like the chief of the things giving the Jews their identity was their Sabbath keeping.
SPEAKER_00: Sabbath in the Jewish world begins Friday evening at sundown and goes all the way until sunset on Saturday, because the Lord had evening and morning, the the you know, each of the days in Genesis.
SPEAKER_00: God created the earth in six days, rested it on the seventh.
SPEAKER_00: And so the Jews were supposed to work for six days, rest on the seventh day, and the Jewish people had developed all these restrictions to guard and to keep the Sabbath special, to keep it different.
SPEAKER_00: Like I mentioned, for American Christians, even uh for American Jews, even American Jews today do not keep or celebrate the Sabbath for the most part, like Jews in Israel do, even to this day.
SPEAKER_00: If you've been to Israel on the Sabbath, you you know what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_00: I mean the country shuts down.
SPEAKER_00: Everything is a half day on Friday because you have to, you know, leave work to prepare for uh for the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: You have to prepare the food before sundown on Friday because you're not supposed to work on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: And so the fruit food for Saturday and all that is prepared on Friday.
SPEAKER_00: It's what you're doing Friday afternoon.
SPEAKER_00: You go to the market, you buy your stuff, you cook, you prepare, because you don't want to do any work on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: And what's defined as work is very intricate.
SPEAKER_00: All kinds of rules.
SPEAKER_00: William Barclay in his commentary lists many examples of the rules around the Sabbath during Jesus' lifetime.
SPEAKER_00: You weren't supposed to wear sandals with two straps on them.
SPEAKER_00: One strap, yes, two straps no, because of the doing the extra work and moving clothing.
SPEAKER_00: You weren't supposed to carry clothing on the Sabbath unless you were wearing it.
SPEAKER_00: So, kids, no putting away your laundry on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: Unless you were wearing it.
SPEAKER_00: You couldn't carry enough ink to write two letters.
SPEAKER_00: And by letters, I don't mean like script letters, I mean like Aleph, bet, gimmel doll, like two, like A, B, C.
SPEAKER_00: And the idea is that if you're carrying a pin with you, which you should not on the Sabbath, but if you were, it could be reasonable to think there was some residual ink in there.
SPEAKER_00: That's okay.
SPEAKER_00: But if you have enough ink in there to write two letters, you're probably trying to circumvent the Sabbath restriction.
SPEAKER_00: So don't do that.
SPEAKER_00: You weren't supposed to carry uh food that weighed more than the weight of a dried fig.
SPEAKER_00: Unless it was on a spoon, that would be about its normal course of movement anyway.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, you could, you don't have to wait how much food you bring to your mouth at a time, because that spoon's in its normal course of movement.
SPEAKER_00: But you can't be moving food around your kitchen on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: Everything has to be set up, otherwise, you're working on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: There's rules about spitting.
SPEAKER_00: You know, your spit's not supposed to turn up dirt on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: So things like spitting on the softball field kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00: Keep that in the back of your mind when Jesus is going to heal people by spitting into mud and making it on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: He's intentionally flaunting that kind of restriction.
SPEAKER_00: Rules about travel from your house on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: You weren't supposed to go more than a certain distance from your house unless it was to the synagogue, of course.
SPEAKER_00: You were supposed to stay home, stay in your house.
SPEAKER_00: And over time, those developed to more, you know, extrapolated restrictions, like when they invented outhouses kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00: You would tie a string from your house to the outhouse, showing that it was confined.
SPEAKER_00: It was one, you know, one building.
SPEAKER_00: It was still an extension of your house because it was connected by the string.
SPEAKER_00: Over the course of years, this is after Jesus' lifetime, but over the course of the years they invented or developed a concept called the Aruv, which is a border around joining lots of houses together.
SPEAKER_00: Like in English, you might call it a compound.
SPEAKER_00: If you had like six houses all inside one fence, that's an area where you could move freely on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: Your home is defined, by the way, as where you have your food for your Sabbath meal.
SPEAKER_00: So you would set your food for your Sabbath meal in a house and you would eat there on, you know, Friday night or Saturday, and that's your home for the Shabbat for Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: That's your home there.
SPEAKER_00: And so people would store food in a place because that would be their home for the next day.
SPEAKER_00: Very, very common to do that.
SPEAKER_00: Today the Aruve restriction has grown and grown and grown.
SPEAKER_00: You know, before I was living here, I was living in Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_00: Los Angeles has the largest Aruve in the United States.
SPEAKER_00: It runs up the median of the 405 freeway, down the 101 freeway, over the hills.
SPEAKER_00: It's a Kevlar cable, and it embraces a huge portion of Los Angeles City.
SPEAKER_00: So inside of LA City, you can move freely on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: There's an Aruvin, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: It's a cable that runs under the Key Bridge and connects part of Arlington to DC.
SPEAKER_00: And so Jewish people can, that's all their home.
SPEAKER_00: And today Jerusalem is surrounded by an Aruv, so you can move freely inside of Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00: But the idea is that you would settle in a house and be there and stay there all of Shabbat, all of Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: By the way, when I lived in LA, I had a text message alert set up on my phone.
SPEAKER_00: So the Aruv would be patrolled on Fridays, and if like a car crashed the median or something, which happens more than you would imagine in Los Angeles, yeah, it would be an alert that would go out to everybody, like the Aruva is down.
SPEAKER_00: So I'd get an alert on Friday, Aruv is down.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, you're stuck where your food is for the next 24 hours.
SPEAKER_00: You know, there's just so many restrictions about the Sabbath, and a lot of them involve what you eat, where you go.
SPEAKER_00: The um Talmud, which is a Jewish uh book of, you know, basically teaching on the Torah, says this.
SPEAKER_00: Let me read it for you.
SPEAKER_00: Quote, in case a woman rolls wheat to remove the husks, it is sifting.
SPEAKER_00: If she rub the heads of wheat, it's considered threshing.
SPEAKER_00: If she cleans off the side adherences, it's sifting of the fruit.
SPEAKER_00: If she bruises the ears, it is grinding.
SPEAKER_00: If she throws them in her hands, it is winnowing.
SPEAKER_00: So if you're messing around with wheat on the Sabbath, you are breaking all of these restrictions.
SPEAKER_00: And these restrictions are not incidental to the Jewish identity.
SPEAKER_00: They are the heart of the Jewish identity here.
SPEAKER_00: They really are.
SPEAKER_00: The Sabbath celebration, in a sense, the Jews had their, like I said, they spoke Aramaic, Hebrew had faded away by Jesus' lifetime.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't have their own currency, but they had they believed in Yahweh, they had the Torah and the Shabbat.
SPEAKER_00: The Sabbath is what gave them their centralized cultural identity.
SPEAKER_00: We don't have a lot like that as Americans.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Thanksgiving was what I was thinking of.
SPEAKER_00: Like you would go and you'd spend that a day at somebody's house on Thanksgiving.
SPEAKER_00: You go to somebody's house for Thanksgiving, you get there at like noon or one or whatever, and you spend, you watch football there and you play games in the yard and you spend the day there.
SPEAKER_00: You even eat like leftovers later that night there, like it's a full thing.
SPEAKER_00: That's every week in the Jewish culture.
SPEAKER_00: Do you understand that?
SPEAKER_00: Every week.
SPEAKER_00: It's a huge deal to them.
SPEAKER_00: And it is guarded with all of these restrictions.
SPEAKER_00: One commentator, a Christian commentator, writes, quote, because of the thousands of man-made restrictions regarding it, the Sabbath was more tiresome than the six days devoted to one's occupation.
SPEAKER_00: It was harder to rest than to earn a living.
SPEAKER_00: And there's some truth to that.
SPEAKER_00: If you were to talk to a Jewish person about that, they would probably grant that.
SPEAKER_00: That is true.
SPEAKER_00: But that's not that's a feature, not a bug in their mind.
SPEAKER_00: Like it is designed to be work to protect it because of how persecuted the Jews are.
SPEAKER_00: Like, this is what binds them together.
SPEAKER_00: They're bound by this.
SPEAKER_00: You know, that's how think of the attacks last October.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they happened on the Sabbath for a reason.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody's home.
SPEAKER_00: You know, there's a story in 1 Maccabees about how the Jews were killed by an invading Greek army that invaded them on the Sabbath because they wouldn't fight back.
SPEAKER_00: They wouldn't pick up their swords.
SPEAKER_00: And they were slaughtered.
SPEAKER_00: That's the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: That's the day that Jesus is cutting through the grain fields with his disciples.
SPEAKER_00: And if you look at verse 1, they begin to pluck heads of grain and eat.
SPEAKER_00: Mark says they were rolling the grain in their hands.
SPEAKER_00: So they're cutting through the grain field, plucking grain, rolling it, and eating it on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: As far as the crowds are concerned, they may have had as well have had a combine out there.
SPEAKER_00: This is flagrant Sabbath violation.
SPEAKER_00: And people notice verse 2.
SPEAKER_00: When the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, Look, your disciples are doing what's not lawful for them to do on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: You know, the Pharisees are there.
SPEAKER_00: Now, what in the world are the Pharisees doing there?
SPEAKER_00: By the way, what are they out there for?
SPEAKER_00: They're hunting Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: They have his life under a microscope.
SPEAKER_00: He has made claims to deity.
SPEAKER_00: Earlier in Matthew 8, he identified himself as the Son of Man.
SPEAKER_00: The end of Matthew 11, he identifies himself as the Son of God.
SPEAKER_00: He has made claims of deity.
SPEAKER_00: He says, No one knows the Father except the Son.
SPEAKER_00: That's the end of Matthew 11.
SPEAKER_00: All that the Father is, the Father's existence, has been given to the Son.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, the doctrine we would call eternal generation.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is claiming that he is the eternal Son of God.
SPEAKER_00: He is God, the very God.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody knows he's claiming that.
SPEAKER_00: God doesn't sin.
SPEAKER_00: And so the Jewish mind here, the Pharisees, the rabbis, the Sadducees, even the Herodians, which is the most liberal Jewish party there is.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they're in partnership with Rome.
SPEAKER_00: They are stalking Jesus because they know if they can catch him sinning, if they can catch him breaking Torah, if they can catch him breaking the Sabbath, for example, then all of his claims are undone.
SPEAKER_00: He's not the Messiah if he's breaking Torah.
SPEAKER_00: By the way, the claims of the New Testament and the Apostles that Jesus is sinless should be read in that light.
SPEAKER_00: They're not retroactive claims like ten years later, the disciples were like, you know, do you remember Jesus sinning?
SPEAKER_00: I don't either.
SPEAKER_00: Let's say that he was sinless.
SPEAKER_00: No, during his life, his enemies stalked him and watched every movement he made, listened to every word that he said.
SPEAKER_00: His enemies had him under a microscope, and so they were trying to catch him sinning.
SPEAKER_00: At the end of his life, do you remember his enemies got together and looked for something to charge him with, and they couldn't come up with anything?
SPEAKER_00: They invented a lie about them and they couldn't even get two lives to agree.
SPEAKER_00: So when the scripture speaks of Jesus as sinless, it's his enemies who declared him to be sinless.
SPEAKER_00: It's his enemies who said, we can't find anything wrong with him.
SPEAKER_00: Well, here in this instance, they think they found something.
SPEAKER_00: They say, aha, in verse in verse 2, your disciples are doing what's not lawful to do on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you were Jesus, how would you respond to that?
SPEAKER_00: If I was Jesus, I likely would have gone to Exodus 20 and read the Sabbath command and argued that it doesn't say anything about grain.
SPEAKER_00: Like there's nothing about plucking grain.
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing about walking through a grain field.
SPEAKER_00: It's not there.
SPEAKER_00: So I would argue from that.
SPEAKER_00: That's not what Jesus does.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus has something bigger in mind.
SPEAKER_00: He's less concerned about the intricacies of the Sabbath restriction, and he's going to do a bigger argument about the nature and the identity of Jesus himself.
SPEAKER_00: You can follow his argument here.
SPEAKER_00: It's three proofs that Jesus is God.
SPEAKER_00: And these proofs are telescoping, they're building, they're cumulative, in other words.
SPEAKER_00: The first one starts, and you might think the first one's not a clear attestation of deity.
SPEAKER_00: I know where it's going, but you could see it a different way.
SPEAKER_00: The second one becomes harder to navigate, and the third one becomes irrefutable.
SPEAKER_00: That's what I mean by telescoping.
SPEAKER_00: They fold in on themselves and they expand back out again.
SPEAKER_00: The first proof of his deity is found in verse 3.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus said to them, Have you not read what David did when he was hungry and those who are with him?
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is a little bit of sarcasm from Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: When he is addressing the scribes and the Pharisees with the statement, Have you not read?
SPEAKER_00: the scribes and the Pharisees have the Torah memorized.
SPEAKER_00: They know how many words are in each scroll of the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: They have read the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: So when Jesus says, Have you not read, it should make you chuckle a little bit.
SPEAKER_00: And he follows it with a story that's not obscure for the Jews.
SPEAKER_00: It's not a Sunday school story for us, it's not a well-known story for us, but it was a Saturday school story for the Jews for sure.
SPEAKER_00: It's a very well-known story about David taking the bread of the presence from the priest at Nob.
SPEAKER_00: And the point Jesus is going to make, and this let me put on the screen before we get back to the story, is that Jesus is like the priest.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is like the priest.
SPEAKER_00: David was hungry, and those who are with him, he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priest.
SPEAKER_00: So this story, if you recall, David was the rightful king of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: God had appointed him king of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: Samuel had anointed him as king of Israel, and yet Saul was the actual king.
SPEAKER_00: Saul was reigning.
SPEAKER_00: And David was happy to be underneath Saul and to honor Saul, to recognize Saul as king, because Saul had earlier been ordained as king.
SPEAKER_00: David likely received his ordination as king.
SPEAKER_00: As for when Saul dies, he's next in line.
SPEAKER_00: That's how Jonathan understood it, who was Saul's son.
SPEAKER_00: Saul did not want the kingdom to go to David.
SPEAKER_00: He wanted it to go to Jonathan, his own son.
SPEAKER_00: But David and Jonathan were friends, and all was well until Saul turned against David.
SPEAKER_00: Remember the people are singing the song, David killed his tens, thousands.
SPEAKER_00: Saul killed his thousands.
SPEAKER_00: David is tens of thousands.
SPEAKER_00: Yay! Every time Saul heard it on the radio, he got upset.
SPEAKER_00: So he turns his animosity towards David.
SPEAKER_00: And David tries to tell Jonathan this.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, David and Jonathan are best friends.
SPEAKER_00: He tells Jonathan, hey, I think your dad's trying to kill me.
SPEAKER_00: Like I'm picking up a little sign, it's like him trying to kill me.
SPEAKER_00: Jonathan says, No, no, no, it's a misunderstanding.
SPEAKER_00: They work out the covert sign, remember?
SPEAKER_00: I'll go talk to my dad, and if he's trying to kill you, he'll shoot an arrow over you.
SPEAKER_00: He goes and talks to his dad, and his dad tries to kill Jonathan.
SPEAKER_00: So Jonathan puts it together, shoots the arrow.
SPEAKER_00: David and Jonathan hug and cry, and David sneaks out in the middle of the night.
SPEAKER_00: He goes and gathers his mighty men, and they're gonna go live in hiding for the next several years.
SPEAKER_00: But they don't have everything to eat.
SPEAKER_00: It's the middle of the night.
SPEAKER_00: So David goes to the tabernacle.
SPEAKER_00: This is the bread that the temple hasn't been built yet.
SPEAKER_00: This is the bread that's always supposed to be before the ark.
SPEAKER_00: It's supposed to, it's the holy bread.
SPEAKER_00: It's always there.
SPEAKER_00: But only the priests get to eat it.
SPEAKER_00: Other people can't eat it.
SPEAKER_00: It's it's designed for worship.
SPEAKER_00: It's the bread of the presence, represent representing the presence of God.
SPEAKER_00: David goes there.
SPEAKER_00: On the wall, if you remember, is Goliath's sword.
SPEAKER_00: David killed Goliath.
SPEAKER_00: He wants the sword back, and what are you gonna do?
SPEAKER_00: Say no.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he killed Goliath, he can take the sword.
SPEAKER_00: And David also asks for the bread.
SPEAKER_00: And the priest says in 1 Samuel 21, I can't give you the bread, it's not lawful to do that.
SPEAKER_00: But I guess if it's like an exigent circumstance, if you're like on the run, if you could die, if you're on a special mission, and David's like, of course I'm on a special mission.
SPEAKER_00: All of my missions are special.
SPEAKER_00: How much more this top secret mission from the king?
SPEAKER_00: And it was a top secret mission from the king, if you know what I mean.
SPEAKER_00: The king definitely is not allowed to know about it.
SPEAKER_00: And so the priest gives David enough bread for him and his men.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, somebody saw this?
SPEAKER_00: Doeg the Edomite and told Saul, and you remember what Saul did?
SPEAKER_00: Slaughtered the priests, killed them and their families.
SPEAKER_00: So when Jesus says, haven't you read this story?
SPEAKER_00: This is the story he goes to.
SPEAKER_00: That Jesus, in the analogy, if you trace this analogy down, what's the comparison here?
SPEAKER_00: Why does Jesus use this story?
SPEAKER_00: Because his point is that it was not lawful under normal circumstances for David to eat the bread, but these were not normal circumstances.
SPEAKER_00: The Jewish leadership was trying to kill the rightful king.
SPEAKER_00: And the priest of God can give access to the presence of God to people who come through him, regardless of what the Jewish leadership says.
SPEAKER_00: You don't get to God through the Jewish leadership, you get to God through the priest.
SPEAKER_00: And he can give the bread of the presence as he sees fit.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, Jesus compares himself to the priest.
SPEAKER_00: And the point here is that Jesus gives access to God.
SPEAKER_00: The priest could give the bread of the presence to David and his men, the priest can give access to God.
SPEAKER_00: The Jewish leadership kills the priest.
SPEAKER_00: In the analogy here, Jesus is the priest, and he can give access to God to those who come through him.
SPEAKER_00: And what's the Jewish leadership going to do, by the way?
SPEAKER_00: They're going to kill him.
SPEAKER_00: They're going to play the role of Saul.
SPEAKER_00: And this is true, by the way, in every generation of Jewish leadership.
SPEAKER_00: The Jews often Fancy themselves and proclaim themselves the keepers of the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: But truth be told, every generation of Jewish leadership killed the prophets that called them to keep the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: And then the next generation build a monument to the prophet.
SPEAKER_00: It's insane.
SPEAKER_00: That's what happens.
SPEAKER_00: Saul goes after David and tries to kill him.
SPEAKER_00: Generation after generation of Jewish leadership takes the place of Saul.
SPEAKER_00: They kill, they they banish Jeremiah, they throw him in a pit.
SPEAKER_00: They saw Isaiah in two.
SPEAKER_00: From Abel to Zechariah, they've slaughtered the prophets one after another while the next generation claims that they're the keepers of the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: That's Jesus' point here.
SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, the Pharisees, notwithstanding, God gives access to the very bread of life through the high priest.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, in this analogy, is the high priest.
SPEAKER_00: His body is the bread of life.
SPEAKER_00: He gives himself an eternal life to those who come through him.
SPEAKER_00: He controls access to God, not the Pharisees, not the Jewish leaders, not the Sabbath, certainly.
SPEAKER_00: He is in control.
SPEAKER_00: He is the priest.
SPEAKER_00: He is the one who directs people to God.
SPEAKER_00: David did not sin and eating the bread reserved for the priest because he's Israel's real king, rejected by those in power, greater than the law governing the bread.
SPEAKER_00: The irony here is that Jesus and his disciples do not sin by eating grain on the Sabbath, because Jesus is Israel's real king, who's being rejected by those in power, and Jesus is greater than the law that governs the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: That's the irony here.
SPEAKER_00: That's the irony.
SPEAKER_00: And notice the text doesn't say that Jesus ate the grain, just his disciples.
SPEAKER_00: We'll look at why next week.
SPEAKER_00: We'll save that observation for next week.
SPEAKER_00: But first, Jesus is like the priest.
SPEAKER_00: Second, Jesus is greater than the temple.
SPEAKER_00: He's greater than the temple.
SPEAKER_00: So this just gets getting more and more intense here.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 5, have you not read in the law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless?
SPEAKER_00: Profane is a very fascinating word here in the Greek that's used.
SPEAKER_00: It's the word that's used in the Septuagint for the abomination of desolation, for the Antichrist who profanes the temple.
SPEAKER_00: That's this word.
SPEAKER_00: And this is what the priests are doing, in a sense, on the temple.
SPEAKER_00: They're slaughtering animals in the temple on the Sabbath, every Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: The priests don't get to rest on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: The priests work on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: The priests are doing work on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: They get up early to go to the temple on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: They are butchers all Sabbath long.
SPEAKER_00: And you wouldn't say the priest is breaking the Sabbath by offering sacrifices that he's commanded to by the Torah on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: Of course not.
SPEAKER_00: Why not, though?
SPEAKER_00: Why not, is the point.
SPEAKER_00: Because the priests are facilitating temple worship on the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: That's why they're not really breaking it.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, they're slaughtering animals.
SPEAKER_00: You can't bring more food than the weight of a dried fig, and the priests are butchering sheep.
SPEAKER_00: But they're doing it to facilitate worship.
SPEAKER_00: They're doing it to facilitate worship.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus here is identifying himself as something greater.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 6.
SPEAKER_00: I tell you, something greater than the temple is here.
SPEAKER_00: The pattern here is that God grants access to heaven through first a priest and now through the temple worship.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says he is greater than the temple worship.
SPEAKER_00: The sacrifices in the temple point to something else that's beyond the sacrifice.
SPEAKER_00: And you know this, the sacrifices are done every year because they can't effectively take away the sins of the people.
SPEAKER_00: They're only in that sense symbolic.
SPEAKER_00: If they could truly atone the sins of the people, they would be offered once and for all.
SPEAKER_00: But instead, the very nature of their, the very recurring nature of the sacrifices shows you they cannot actually change the heart.
SPEAKER_00: They're anticipatory.
SPEAKER_00: They're anticipating the Lamb of God who will be the final sacrifice once and for all to end all sacrifices, to take away the sins of the world.
SPEAKER_00: That's the point.
SPEAKER_00: They're pointing forward.
SPEAKER_00: They're done at the temple.
SPEAKER_00: The Jews, the temple is just a central part of the Jewish religion.
SPEAKER_00: It's where the high priest enters once a year to make atonement for sins.
SPEAKER_00: Worship takes place at the temple.
SPEAKER_00: The temple is the pinnacle of the Jewish religion.
SPEAKER_00: In Israel, right now, there's no temple.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, this is the reason a lot of the Jews wear black now.
SPEAKER_00: It's because mourning of no temple.
SPEAKER_00: They're mourning their lack of a temple.
SPEAKER_00: The temple mount is there.
SPEAKER_00: And you know the wailing wall, the temple where the Jews come with their prayers in and they wail and all that.
SPEAKER_00: That's you know, the holy of holies.
SPEAKER_00: You can go in a tunnel underground there and be even closer to the center.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they do that wall because it's as close to where the temple once was that you can get.
SPEAKER_00: It's gone now.
SPEAKER_00: The Muslims control the top of the temple mount.
SPEAKER_00: So the Jews worship, every time a Jew goes on the Temple Mount, they do sometimes to pray and walk around today.
SPEAKER_00: They're, you know, they have to be followed by soldiers.
SPEAKER_00: But they can go to the wall, which is as close as they could get.
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' lifetime, there wasn't the wheeling wall.
SPEAKER_00: There was the temple.
SPEAKER_00: Do you understand that?
SPEAKER_00: There was the actual temple that was there.
SPEAKER_00: It's the focal point of their religion.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't have their own country.
SPEAKER_00: They were a province of Rome.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't have their own language, and most of them spoke Greek and Aramaic.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't have their own currency.
SPEAKER_00: They were allowed to use their temple tax inside the temple, but they had to use the Roman currency with Caesar's face on it.
SPEAKER_00: That bugged the sandals right off their feet.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't have anything.
SPEAKER_00: But they had the temple.
SPEAKER_00: That was theirs.
SPEAKER_00: Pilate stayed out of it.
SPEAKER_00: Rome stayed out of it.
SPEAKER_00: That was theirs.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus is asked why you're plucking grain on the Sabbath, and he says he's greater than the temple.
SPEAKER_00: It's hard for us to get our minds fully around how confrontational that is.
SPEAKER_00: How confrontational.
SPEAKER_00: Imagine if a candidate for office said that he's greater than the Washington Monument.
SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean, just something like that.
SPEAKER_00: Even something at that level would jar you.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says he's greater than the temple.
SPEAKER_00: The object of their worship.
SPEAKER_00: His point by that is that he himself is the object of worship.
SPEAKER_00: He's the one who's worshipped.
SPEAKER_00: That's the only way you can take that kind of statement.
SPEAKER_00: Something greater than the temple is there.
SPEAKER_00: Then he says in verse 7, if you had known what this means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice, you wouldn't have condemned the guiltless.
SPEAKER_00: That's a reference, it's a common phrase in the Old Testament, but Jesus' language here is closest to Hosea 6.6, where it says, I desire steadfast love, covenant, like Hesse said, covenant love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
SPEAKER_00: God desires the heart and worship of his people more than the ritualistic law keeping.
SPEAKER_00: That's the point of Hosea 6.6.
SPEAKER_00: Hosea, you know, they're persecuting the prophets, is what's happening in Hosea.
SPEAKER_00: They're persecuting the prophets, but telling God, don't be angry with us, because we keep the sacrifices.
SPEAKER_00: And God says, I don't want your sacrifices, I want your worship.
SPEAKER_00: The first time you see that line, by the way, is in 1 Samuel 15, where Saul was king and he was supposed to wait for Samuel for seven days and then make a sacrifice.
SPEAKER_00: He didn't wait the full allotted time.
SPEAKER_00: He waited to the right day and then got sick of waiting for Samuel, made the sacrifice himself and left.
SPEAKER_00: Samuel confronts him, rebukes him, and Saul says, Listen, I didn't want to wait for you, I just made a sacrifice.
SPEAKER_00: What's the big deal?
SPEAKER_00: And Samuel tells Saul, God doesn't want your sacrifice, he wants your obedience.
SPEAKER_00: He wants your worship.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't need your sheep.
SPEAKER_00: That's Jesus' reference here.
SPEAKER_00: The Pharisees are cornering him in a grain field, accusing him of breaking the Sabbath, and he says, I'm greater than the temple, okay?
SPEAKER_00: God doesn't want your Sabbath-keeping restrictions.
SPEAKER_00: He wants you to worship him.
SPEAKER_00: The temple wasn't given to you in this sense to give you all of these restrictions on how to worship.
SPEAKER_00: The temple was given to facilitate worship.
SPEAKER_00: The temple for man, not man for the temple.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't understand that.
SPEAKER_00: Again, Jesus uses another reference that compares him to Saul, another reference that compares him to the Jewish leaders who killed the prophets.
SPEAKER_00: He's not exactly being obscure here.
SPEAKER_00: He says he's greater than the temple.
SPEAKER_00: But that's nothing compared to what comes next.
SPEAKER_00: Third, he claims to be Lord of the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 8.
SPEAKER_00: The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: This is about as clear and unvarnished as it gets.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is saying that he is the Lord who created the universe.
SPEAKER_00: You really need to see this with your own eyes.
SPEAKER_00: I encourage you to flip over to Exodus chapter 20.
SPEAKER_00: Exodus chapter 20 in the Old Testament Genesis, Exodus.
SPEAKER_00: Because part of this is visual.
SPEAKER_00: When you see the Ten Commandments, it has a way of solidifying your thinking how really outlandish it is what Jesus is saying.
SPEAKER_00: Ten Commandments.
SPEAKER_00: Just look at how short commandments five through ten are, by the way, starting in verse 12, 12 through 17.
SPEAKER_00: They're one verse long.
SPEAKER_00: A little one phrase.
SPEAKER_00: Honor your father and your mother.
SPEAKER_00: Don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't bear false witness, don't cover your neighbor's house.
SPEAKER_00: You get a little bit of description on your neighbor's house, like it includes wife and servant and slaves, all that.
SPEAKER_00: But for the most part, this is very short and pithy commands.
SPEAKER_00: The first four commandments are also similar to that.
SPEAKER_00: Look at the first commandment in verse 3.
SPEAKER_00: No other gods.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 2, no idols.
SPEAKER_00: And you get another verse about, you know, don't but worship them, don't make them, don't bow down to them, and God will punish you and your children.
SPEAKER_00: Third commandment, verse 7, again, back to one verse.
SPEAKER_00: Don't take the Lord's name in vain.
SPEAKER_00: But the Sabbath, if you're playing the Sesame Street game, which one of these is not like the other?
SPEAKER_00: Like this is why I wanted you to see it, because it's one thing to say the Sesame Street line, but it's another for you to see it with your eyes.
SPEAKER_00: The fourth commandment is just fundamentally different.
SPEAKER_00: It's longer, it's more developed, it gives a reason inside of it.
SPEAKER_00: It begins in verse 8.
SPEAKER_00: Remember the Sabbath day, keep it holy.
SPEAKER_00: Six days you'll labor and do all your work.
SPEAKER_00: But the seventh day, that's a Sabbath to Yahweh, your God.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, Lord, when you see it in all caps, it's the word Yahweh.
SPEAKER_00: It comes into English as the word Lord.
SPEAKER_00: It goes into Greek as the word Adonai, but it's the name Yahweh.
SPEAKER_00: All right, sorry, Kurias in Greek, but it's the name Yahweh.
SPEAKER_00: On it you shall not do any work.
SPEAKER_00: You or your son or your daughter, or your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who's within your gates.
SPEAKER_00: That's where the Aruv concept comes from, by the way.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 11 In six days Yahweh made heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.
SPEAKER_00: He rested on the seventh day.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, Yahweh blessed the seventh day and made it holy.
SPEAKER_00: The fourth commandment has the reason packed into it.
SPEAKER_00: The reason is given to you in verse 11.
SPEAKER_00: In six days, the Lord of the Sabbath made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all that's in them, and then rested.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, Yahweh, or curiosity, again into the English as Lord of the Sabbath, blessed the Sabbath and made it holy.
SPEAKER_00: Why a Sabbath restriction in Israel?
SPEAKER_00: Because the Lord of the Sabbath made the heavens and the earth in six days.
SPEAKER_00: He separated light from darkness.
SPEAKER_00: He made the ground and separated the water from the ground.
SPEAKER_00: He made the sky and the stars and put the sun in it.
SPEAKER_00: He made the fish.
SPEAKER_00: And then he made people.
SPEAKER_00: He did all of that himself in six days.
SPEAKER_00: So you get to work for six days.
SPEAKER_00: And you work so hard, you know.
SPEAKER_00: You're a carpenter, you labor to make a chair.
SPEAKER_00: You're a farmer, you labor all week to make a thing of grain.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you're doing work to try to make something.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus just gets to say it and it's there.
SPEAKER_00: They people have to work for it.
SPEAKER_00: You work for six days, and your work is never ever done.
SPEAKER_00: You're never ever done.
SPEAKER_00: We're all like the postman, you know.
SPEAKER_00: My mailman whined to me one day and says, I asked him if he likes being a mailman.
SPEAKER_00: And he says, Oh, there's things of it that are fun.
SPEAKER_00: You know, he came at like 9:30 p.m.
SPEAKER_00: last night.
SPEAKER_00: He's like, There's things that are fun, but there's other things.
SPEAKER_00: It's like no matter how hard you work, there's more work the next day.
SPEAKER_00: Not on Saturday, I guess, but there's more work the next day.
SPEAKER_00: You're never done.
SPEAKER_00: The Sabbath restriction is to teach you that you're all mailmen.
SPEAKER_00: You work and work and work, and you are never ever done.
SPEAKER_00: So you get to spend one out of every seven days resting to remember that God made the universe not you.
SPEAKER_00: And you can work six more days.
SPEAKER_00: And then take another day to rest to remember that God made heavens and earth, not you.
SPEAKER_00: And then work six more days.
SPEAKER_00: And then take another day off to remember that God made the heavens and the earth and you are not him.
SPEAKER_00: Do you have it now, or do you need another six days?
SPEAKER_00: Oh, you get another six days, great.
SPEAKER_00: And then on the seventh day, you can remember that the Lord of the Sabbath made the universe and you are not him.
SPEAKER_00: And then do it again and again and again, your entire life.
SPEAKER_00: That's the fourth commandment.
SPEAKER_00: I go back to Matthew 12.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus ends in verse 8 by saying, Son of man is the Lord of the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: He already identified himself as the Son of Man in Matthew 8.
SPEAKER_00: The foxes have uh, you know, holes and birds have nests.
SPEAKER_00: Son of man is no place to lay his head.
SPEAKER_00: That's that's son of man, he is the son of man.
SPEAKER_00: At the end of chapter 11, he identifies himself as son of God.
SPEAKER_00: He is not obscuring his identity.
SPEAKER_00: He's claiming to be the Messiah prophesied by Daniel.
SPEAKER_00: He's claiming to be the eternal son of God.
SPEAKER_00: And here he says, that son of man, that son of God is in fact the Lord, the Kurios, the Yahweh who made the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: The day is his day.
SPEAKER_00: He is the one.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying here that he created the fish, that he separated light and darkness, that he created the earth, he created the birds and the moon and the sun and the stars and all of the animals and you and the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: He made all of it for himself.
SPEAKER_00: That's his point.
SPEAKER_00: He is the creator.
SPEAKER_00: When I was a kid, a little kid on my birthday, well, me and my brother, whenever it was one of our birthdays, we got to choose where we would go out to eat for dinner that night.
SPEAKER_00: It was like our birthday gift from our parents.
SPEAKER_00: And you know, when I was a little kid, I would always choose chunky cheese pizza.
SPEAKER_00: You know, go play skee ball, and I'm sure my parents enjoyed that.
SPEAKER_00: You know, they could get a pitcher of beer and cardboard pizza for two bucks or something and be happy.
SPEAKER_00: And there's me with skee ball and getting the little tickets.
SPEAKER_00: You get a thousand of them, you can buy, you know, stuffed animal or something.
SPEAKER_00: What a racket, that place.
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's where I would go.
SPEAKER_00: And it was when I got older, I got my taste more refined and you know, would hold out for a steak dinner.
SPEAKER_00: But imagine I was a little kid and I want to go to the pizza place.
SPEAKER_00: But my brother says, No, I would like to go to Burger King.
SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, who do you think you are?
SPEAKER_00: It's not your birthday.
SPEAKER_00: Zip it and play skee ball.
SPEAKER_00: It's my day.
SPEAKER_00: I get to choose where we're going to go eat.
SPEAKER_00: This is Jesus' logic in Matthew 12.
SPEAKER_00: The Sabbath exists for him.
SPEAKER_00: It's his day.
SPEAKER_00: He can plow a whole field on it if he wants.
SPEAKER_00: It's his day.
SPEAKER_00: How dare you corner him in the grain field on the Sabbath to accuse his disciples of plucking grain when it's his day.
SPEAKER_00: The whole function of that day was so that when you met the Lord of the Sabbath, you would recognize him.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, they meet the Lord of the Sabbath and they're criticizing him, confronting him, critiquing him, upset about what they're eating.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus tells them, I am that person.
SPEAKER_00: I am the creator.
SPEAKER_00: I am the sustainer.
SPEAKER_00: I am the bread of life.
SPEAKER_00: I am the high priest.
SPEAKER_00: You come to God through me, and I give you the bread of life.
SPEAKER_00: I am the object of worship.
SPEAKER_00: I'll build a greater temple than the one you have because I am greater than the temple.
SPEAKER_00: Tear this thing down.
SPEAKER_00: He's going to say that in a few years.
SPEAKER_00: Tear this thing down brick by brick.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to build a new and better temple.
SPEAKER_00: Speaking of his own body, when he resurrects from the grave in the church, we're the temple of the living God.
SPEAKER_00: And here, I'm the Lord of the Sabbath, he's declaring.
SPEAKER_00: The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying, I created the universe.
SPEAKER_00: The law exists for me and to point to me.
SPEAKER_00: I don't point to, I don't submit to the law because it points to me.
SPEAKER_00: Now Jesus does fully submit to the law, he fulfills it from the inside out, but he doesn't submit to it by necessity.
SPEAKER_00: He submits to it like the author has integrity with his work.
SPEAKER_00: He submits to it because it's his.
SPEAKER_00: He is the one who wrote the law.
SPEAKER_00: He is the one who fulfills the law.
SPEAKER_00: How obscene is it to critique him for breaking the Sabbath?
SPEAKER_00: When it points to him.
SPEAKER_00: He proved the whole thing by dying on the cross, bearing the penalty for sin, being the final sacrifice, the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world, rising from the grave.
SPEAKER_00: Do you think the Jewish leaders responded to this when he said, I'm the Lord of the Sabbath?
SPEAKER_00: Do you think they repented?
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 14.
SPEAKER_00: The Pharisees went out and conspired against him how to destroy him.
SPEAKER_00: They had put so much work into the Sabbath, they didn't want to let it go.
SPEAKER_00: So much work into the restrictions.
SPEAKER_00: Their life was invested into the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: And now for Jesus to come and say, mission accomplished, I'm here, they couldn't let it go.
SPEAKER_00: They wouldn't let it go.
SPEAKER_00: Like I said, it's a foreign world to us.
SPEAKER_00: We don't we're not Sabbath-keeping people here.
SPEAKER_00: Even the American Jews are this is a different world to them, even.
SPEAKER_00: But you know what's not different from us is the insistence of Jesus that he reorient your life around himself.
SPEAKER_00: Americans can be so clutched so tightly to their own sense of identity and their own symbols and their own, you know, you have your own you have your own reasons.
SPEAKER_00: Each of you is different.
SPEAKER_00: You have your own reasons why you live in life and what you want out of life and all that.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says your point in life has to be to worship him, and it has to be to honor him.
SPEAKER_00: You have to let go of all the other things you're living for.
SPEAKER_00: They're just shadows.
SPEAKER_00: And you have to live for him.
SPEAKER_00: He is the author of life, and your life should be unto him.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we're grateful that you are the Lord of the Sabbath.
SPEAKER_00: Our calendar points to you.
SPEAKER_00: Our week points to you.
SPEAKER_00: You rose from the grave on the Lord's Day.
SPEAKER_00: You are the one who created the heavens and the earth.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we want our identities to be rooted in you.
SPEAKER_00: We want to live around you.
SPEAKER_00: We pray for the salvation of Jewish friends, Jewish people.
SPEAKER_00: You know that by and large they have rejected you.
SPEAKER_00: As Paul's prayer in Romans 9, he prays earnestly for their conversion.
SPEAKER_00: And so do we.
SPEAKER_00: We pray earnestly that you would open the hearts of Jewish people to see you, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the Lord of the Sabbath, the object of their worship, the fulfillment of their sacrifices.
SPEAKER_00: The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
SPEAKER_00: We pray that you would do that.
SPEAKER_00: We know one day you will.
SPEAKER_00: We long for that day in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_00: If you're in the Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.
SPEAKER_00: For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.
SPEAKER_00: For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: location, go to TMS.edu.
SPEAKER_00: 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.