Transcript of a Sermon on Matthew 12:1-8

The Need for and the Promise of a Kingdom Bringer:

Hey guys, we are going to be in Matthew 12:1-8 tonight if you got your copy of the word you can flip there. Tonight we are going to be looking at Jesus doing something that he does a lot in Matthew, talk about the Kingdom. Now, the kingdom is how Christ is fulfilling his role as Gods sent rescuer and ruler. It is how God engages with his people and ho he is returning all creation back to his rest, his perfect order. You see God has always been about reconciling humanity back to him. Ever since our parents Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden God has been violently appealing to the nations in different forms through different people in order to gather his wayward humanity back to him. One of the biggest ways God did that is through the nation of Israel. Israel was intended to mirror and display God through Gods commandments in order to initiate Gods redemption of the entire world. He begins it with Abraham. Abraham was pagan from Mesopotamia who God saved in order to establish Israel. He promised that Abraham’s offspring would number the stars in the sky and his descendants would bless the nations. It would be through Abrahams off spring that Israel would be formed and Christ would be born. Israel was governed by laws which were there to show Gods Characteristics. However, throughout the whole old testament we begin to see that there is a greater prophet then the others coming to declare THE TRUTH to the world (Deuteronomy 18:18), there is going to be a greater King who was coming to rule finally establishing Gods Lordship and quelling the dominance of Sin and death in the world (Matthew 1:1; Psalm 2:7-9), and a greater Priest who can intercede for us to God, bringing us into his presence (Hebrews 7:11-18; Psalm 110:4).

So when Jesus comes to Earth as promised through prophets he comes preaching and proclaiming his fulfilment of all these things. He comes preaching and showing that all of these Laws, all of these prophets, all of these priests, all of these Kings have come before him to prepare for him, to foreshadow him. It is in him that God would establish his kingdom to the nations and Gods great work of reconciliation would be finished in Christ’s work. In order for this to work though, Christ needed to show that his kingdom would operate under different paradigms then the old ones. These new paradigms didn’t conflict with the old ones but fulfilled them and illustrated Gods complete plan with the old Law as a component of the new one. It’s kind of like when a professor gets sick right in the middle of the semester and a new professor comes and takes their place and doesn’t use the old syllabus. Rather substituting a whole new paradigm, a whole new way of engaging with the text, with the teacher, and with each other. This is what Christ did when he came to earth; he set up a whole new paradigm for engaging with the father. And it all centred on Jesus dying, being buried, and raising again in power over it all and how that not only affects how our sin is dealt with but everything, its all based on that worldview, that Jesus is Lord. We will get to this.

Now, to Matthew 12. This is what Christ is doing in this text. He is laying the groundwork for his kingdom. The book of Matthew works as a declaration of independence, outlining and showing what Gods kingdom on earth looks like. Everything that he does is to inform us on how this new paradigm, this new idea works. That is why Jesus always is the most frustrating person to ask questions from. You ask him why he chose the elevator instead of the stairs and he will say “so there is this sheep right? And this sheep gets lost. What does the shepherd do?” everything comes down to him and how he can reconcile you back to the father. But that is how committed Jesus is to the Gospel and the mission of God. It just bleeds out of his pores. Everything he does is for the Gospel. In light of that we should pause and ask ourselves if that is what we look like? Are we that devastated by the Truth of the Gospel. Are we living out life in such a way that the back drop of our personality is the fact that Jesus lived our life and died our death so that we could be united with the father? Do we love God to that extent? We need to ask ourselves if everything we do is oriented around the mission of God. Is everything we do centred on how we can follow in our saviour’s model of humanity and proclaim the Gospel? Is that how you tailor your life?

Anyways, back to the text.

12:1 At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. 2 But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.” 3 He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: 4 how 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 priests? 5 Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? 6 I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. 7 And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. 8 For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”

What is happening in this passage is that Jesus has just preached a mini sermon which is going to kick off a series of other sermons for the next two chapters. As Jesus was walking away from this sermon he and his disciples cut through a wheat field. (Something that we can relate too) His disciples began to pick off the tops of the wheat stalks to eat them. (One thing we got to remember is that our God was homeless and living off of other people’s charity so there were probably a lot of time’s that he and his disciples were hungry) Seeing this, the Pharisees began to accuse the disciples of not honouring the Sabbath by gleaning and eating the wheat on the Sabbath. Jesus turns to them and rebukes them with two examples and then one truth. Now remember, what Jesus is doing is establishing his kingdom. This is the new way, the fulfilled way of worshiping the one true God. This is what he is about. In order to understand what he is saying about this kingdom we must understand what he is rebuking the Pharisees for.

(Dialogue here: what is Christ rebuking them for?)

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The Pharisees were the religious enforcers of the day. They were the elite of a theocratic society and in many ways they were seen as the most holy and the most devout individuals in their society. Everything they were about was built off of the foundation of morality approving or devaluing you. They expected the Messiah to usher in a nice and tidy moralism. Jesus instead provided a messy, overt supernaturalism which required you to be born again. It promised forgiveness for sins and a life of reckless sacrifice. It was their council that would decide if you were worthy to hang out with the “good people” or not. The clean people. They were all about morals. In fact, at the heart of moralism is a goal, that goal is to be approved. There is always bar in the back of the head of the religious person which tells you if you are a good person or a bad person- or even worse, if you are a good Christian or a bad Christian. It says that we are defined by what we do. It sets up the deadly structure of “I do therefore I am”. This is what lay at the Pharisees heart. However what Jesus does here is undermine their entire worldview and contrasts it with his kingdom.

The way he contrasts their ideas is with a simple idea. His big idea here is summed up in the phrase “I desire mercy and not sacrifice”. It is in this six letter sentence that all of the Pharisees ideas are thwarted. It is as if he is saying, “You would understand if you knew what this meant”. “You would have never accused us if you knew what this meant”. The whole passage orbits around it. Based on what we know about Jesus and the whole bible it is very safe to say that if we know what this phrase means we can understand what the kingdom is about.

What he means by it is this. Instead of offering sacrifices in order to earn your way into my love, I want to give you mercy. There is nothing you can do to earn back my love because you already have it! This is cataclysmic to the Pharisees! If this is rubbing you the wrong way here, if this really grinds on your heart then i want to ask you to dwell there. Investigate it. Does it coorespond with the truth of the Gospel? If not repent and start to kill it. Back to the Pharisees: It goes against every bone in their body to say this. In order for us to grow deeper in our understanding of why Jesus offers this up as such a bombshell to morality requires us to go to where he got it from. Hosea

o    Jesus quotes from a minor prophet named Hosea. Hosea is about a prophet who God calls to marry a whore. God does this to show, you (the nation of Israel) are like a whore to me. And just like this woman is unfaithful to me. So are you to me (Hos. 1:2-3). He causes Hosea to fall madly in love with her. She stays with him for a little while but she goes out and begins to have sex with men for money again. Hosea is then forced to go out into the market and buy her back (Hos. 3:1-5) Hosea then pleads with her to come back and repent. So is it with us and God.

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God desires to love us because he is merciful not because we have earned it! There is no possible way to sin or work harder for him so that we can alter any feelings he has for you. None! If you are a Christian you cannot swear enough, Drink enough, have sex enough, hate enough, cheat enough, fight enough, steal enough, lust enough, gossip enough, be unfaithful enough, or kill enough people to separate you from the love of God. Some of you have been here right? Christ’s sacrifice was too big, God dying is way more weighty then your sin. God did not purchase you with his blood for you to be bought back with sin. Do not turn to religion. Don’t cheat on God and have sex with people who are not your husband.

So what keeps us from sinning?

o   One simple thing, love. What did Hosea say (Hos. 2:14-15)? The only thing that God uses to bring back Hosea is he woos her.

Who has heard the lie that God releases his spirit from you if you rebel for too long? Is that how it works for Hosea? No!

14 “Therefore, behold, I will allure her,

and bring her into the wilderness,

and speak tenderly to her.

15 And there I will give her her vineyards

and make the Valley of Achor [5] a door of hope.

And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth,

as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.

God takes us out into the wilderness where there is going to be no other lovers to speak to us. And he woos us there. The only joy to be not had there is when we are frantically looking over God to find our adulterer.

The fact of the matter is that when Jesus is laying out his new kingdom for us he contrasts it with morality. And what is his kingdom:

•             His kingdom is the Gospel

o   If we are truly believing the Gospel, our lives start looking like the one Jesus is describing in Matthew 12. Let me show you what I mean. Intrinsically, the gospel screams unconditional father. There is no room for condition in that statement. It does not say that Jesus lives part of our life and dies part of our death so that we would be expected to work ourselves into Gods love if we mess up! No! We are always Gods children.

o     Now some of you might be getting the lie that i am offering up a cheap grace. A grace that is trite and handed out. How could God be just and still give us this. NEVER. This grace was never cheap it took the only perfect man and God to die so that we might experience it! Your sin was so disgusting and that the creator of the universe had to be snuffed out in order to absorb it.

o   What keeps us from sinning

·                     Our love for God. If we are truly loving God then righteousness will simply blossom out of our love not our obligation.

·                     2 Corinthians 5:14

o             Every single one of our sins is a love issue, not a control, obligation, or moral one.

             John 21:15-19

o   Do you love me.

What does our life start looking like when we begin to believe the gospel? I am going to give you three quick examples and then we can get out of here because of time but we could go on forever because the gospel is meant to be brought to bear on every part of our life.

We no longer feel the need to punish ourselves; we are freed up to obey.

We are freed up to be missional

We can forgive