And His Own No.8 The Things the said about Christ

Please would you find Matthew chapter 12. We're going to pick up the reading at verse 14. This is just after Jesus had healed a man's arm and in so doing on the Sabbath had engendered the anger of the Pharisees.

So we're going to read from verse 14 to verse 32. But the Pharisees went out and plotted how they might kill Jesus. Aware of this, Jesus withdrew from that place.

Many followed him and he healed all their sick, warning them not to tell who he was. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah. Here is my servant whom I have chosen, the one I love in whom I delight.

I will put my spirit on him and he will proclaim justice to the nations. He will not quarrel or cry out. No one will hear his voice in the streets.

A bruised reed he will not break and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out till he leads justice to victory. In his name the nations will put their hope. Then they brought to him a demon-possessed man who was blind and dumb and Jesus healed him so that he could both talk and see.

All the people were astonished and said, could this be the son of David? But when the Pharisees heard this they said, it is only Babi Elzebab, the prince of demons, that this fellow drives out demons. Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined and every city or household divided against itself will not stand. If Satan drives out Satan he is divided against himself.

How then can his kingdom stand? And if I drive out demons by Babi Elzebab, by whom do your people drive them out? So then they will be your judges. But if I drive out demons by the spirit of God then the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or again, how can anyone enter a strong man's house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can rob his house.

He who is not with me is against me and he who does not gather with me scatters. And so I tell you every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men but the blasphemy against the spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either in this age or in the age to come.

Amen. Please be seated. Be glad if you had your Bibles open at Matthew's Gospel.

And the 12th chapter for those of you who are visitors once again I repeat the welcome that's been given by our brother Alan Bush who's one of the one of our elders here at the tabernacle. You may have had chance to read notes and news and therefore you'll have slotted into place my earlier reference in prayer to the home call of brother Graham. We look forward to the Thanksgiving service tomorrow.

Details on the back page of our bulletin. I wonder how you interpret life. I mean what sort of back cloth do you have in mind as you think through some of the issues that confront us today or do you ever think? I guess that question is a little improperly placed here because the majority of folk who come to such a church as this or who come to church per se in itself are folk who do think.

It's not however the habit of the 20th century person to engage in much profound thought. That's not my sort of comment wanting to be hypercritical of the generation this last part of the 20th century. It is the fact of the matter.

Our forebears never had television. The last generation only just about were tuned into radio and our ability to project sound was well the old gramophone record which required you to wind the thing up just to last for a few minutes. But now we've got the media.

We've got music. We've got television. You come home.

You switch the box on. Conversation tends to erode and the opportunity to think things through seems not to be afforded at least to Europeans. You even get music played you in some dental surgeries.

Well that's a quote that I've used before. Bells on her fingers and rings on her toes. She shall have music wherever she goes.

Anything to stop you thinking. Well here is my question. How do you interpret life? What's your back cloth? What are your anchor points? Do you have some anchor points? Do you think that life is capricious? That means to say that there's no order? We're not moving to any particular goal? Or do you have a philosophy of history? You see that's what the Bible proclaims, a philosophy of history.

It tells us that history is controlled, is conditioned by the preordained purposes of God. We are not lost in the quagmire as human beings. We're not just sinking in some mud, but rather all things ultimately shall come to the point that God has predetermined.

One day this world will be filled with His glory. But until this time, or until that time occurs, the Bible presents to us a back cloth in which it says you can interpret life only this way. There is the incarnation of evil and there is the incarnation of good.

The former resides in the person that the Bible refers to. Well, it has several terms to describe him, but more frequently than not as Satan. And as for the latter, well there's hardly any need for me to inform you.

The Bible says that the incarnation of goodness is our blessed Lord Jesus. The Bible goes on to tell us in the almost the final verses of the last chapter of John's first epistle that the whole world, this present world order, lies in the hands of the evil one. Satan has squatter's rights upon this earth.

Charles Colson, who since his remarkable conversion following the disaster of the latter part of the Nixon regime in the United States of America, edited a very compelling book which he entitled extremely well, Kingdoms in Conflict. There are two kingdoms. There is the kingdom of darkness and there is the kingdom of light.

There are two leaders. There is Satan and his hordes. There is our Lord Jesus Christ and His emissaries.

And the Bible literally understood, and I don't see how you can take it in any other way, says of mankind that they are members of one of the two kingdoms. They either follow the Lord Jesus or they find themselves plunged into the kingdom of darkness. There is no neutral position.

You are either a Christian or you are not a Christian. You are either a determined disciple of Jesus Christ or de facto, as a result, by conclusion, by neglect, you are a servant of Satan. You say, I don't like such talk.

Well, it's not my talk. It is the revealed Word of God. I challenge you to ransack Scripture and to find me any statement that disproves these conclusions which I'm bringing to you right now.

So, we explain the problems, the terrible discord that there is in our world, especially in European society, as being attributed to those evil forces that seem sometimes to reign supreme and unchallenged. And over against these problems and difficulties and the consequences of human sin, there is the unstoppable force – I select my words carefully – of the church of Jesus Christ, the greatest organism, the greatest power in the world today. God help the world if the church, as she should be, is not functioning, acting as salt, acting as light.

You say, why are you saying these things? Well, you will never grasp these rather somber verses that call our attention as we make our way through the twelfth chapter of Matthew's gospel without understanding what I've referred to as the biblical philosophy of history. Here, you see, is our beloved Lord, and we have been warmed by what He has had to say today when in the last verses of the eleventh chapter He has appealed to those who are restless and burdened and led astray by religious leaders who should have known better in His generation, come to Me, all you who are labored and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My alternative, take My yoke upon you, learn of Me, I'm meek and lowly of heart, and you, if you follow Me, will find rest for your soul.

And then coupled with that grand declaration is one that's equal to it, a quotation from the Old Testament depicting the demeanor of our blessed Lord, verse 20 of the twelfth chapter, a bruised reed He will not break, smoldering wick He will not snuff out, till He leads justice to victory, till the end time when all nations shall have seen His glory and the redeemed of Judaism and the Gentile college of nations will put their hope in Him. Then, verse 22, then they, the people who had just evacuated from the synagogue and followed the Lord Jesus, then they brought a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute, and our Lord, the one who establishes the kingdom of God, the one whose power is the force behind the unstoppable message of the church, our Lord heals him so that he could both talk and see. There is something fantastic about the Lord Jesus, something that is utterly unique.

And some of you may have seen that documentary on Maurice Serrello last Sunday evening, this American Jewish evangelist and the claims that he has made for a healing ministry in London. I've got no problems with a claim that within the church, in the sovereignty of God, healing can come for those who are sick. Where Serrello is wrong is in his use of sensationalism, in his use of the miraculous to attract people to hear the gospel, in the acts of the apostles and in the gospel narratives themselves, it was the other way around.

The miracle occurred, the people started to talk, and then they came. He's wrong in the theater, and the sensationalism. He's also wrong, I humbly submit, in his understanding of the prosperity so-called gospel.

But he is not wrong in this, that the Lord who I believe he sincerely tries to follow, though I reckon him to be mistaken in some of his applications of truth, or his distortions of truth, is the Lord who is sovereign over life and death, over evil forces, the Lord who is the King of history. So, these people come and they propel this wretched, mute, blind, demon-possessed man in front of our Lord, and with no psychological tricks whatsoever, he's healed, and they can see, not through some gasping noise that he emits, but through articulate language. Not because he tries to convince himself that those still dim eyes are seeing when they're not, but because vision has been restored, for our Lord's miracles are 100 percent fully able to bring the person back to the sort of health and strength and the sanity that they ought to have, or he, in this case, ought to have.

And verse 23, all the people were astonished and said, could this be? This man who has performed such an act, could this be the Son of David? Not only is it necessary for thinking people to have a philosophy of history as one of the essentials to go through life, it is also the requirement of a man or a woman who reckons that they think to consider and to answer the question, who is this Jesus? There is no more important issue in this world than that question, who is He? And you see this growing audience of people who are following our Lord Jesus in His itinerary through Galilee and into Judea and inexorably to Jerusalem, they are people who are being confronted time and time again with this dilemma, who is He? Could this be the Son of David, that expression depicting Jewish hope for the Messiah who will come into the world and, according to modern interpretation in those times, rid them of the jackboot of Rome? Could this be? Now the problem is for the critics of our Lord, of whom there are as many today as there were yesteryear, if He is who they say He is, then they're in trouble. So they deny that the people are right, and instead of confronting our Lord Jesus to His face as they did earlier on in these two chapters, they now go behind His back. If they cannot liquidate Him, they will libel Him.

There are more ways to kill a man than just to assassinate Him, as I painstakingly argued some weeks ago from this pulpit. Libel? What more absolute libel could there be than to suggest that this One who is healing the sick and who is swaying such vast multitudes does so as a result of evil influence? When the Pharisees heard this, they said, it is only by Beelzebub, the Prince of Demons, that this fellow drives out demons. I told you in my little introductory preamble that there are many designations for the evil one, not just Satan.

Beelzebub actually is a development of the word Beelzebale. If you track it back in the Old Testament, and I haven't time to do this, but you can take it for granted or I'll supply you references later, you will find that Beelzebub was the title given to a particular god that was supposed to be able to control flies, uncomfortable things, the protector against nuisance. There were occasions when Israelite people who were told never to worship another god committed spiritual adultery, and they went after the Baals.

And in the development of thought, the word Beelzebub was pulled in as a title of the one who opposes God. And if you go back into the tenth chapter of Matthew's gospel, you will discover that our blessed Lord realizes what is going to be said of Him. He says in the twenty-fourth verse, as He addresses His disciples, a student is not above his teacher nor a servant above his master.

It is enough for the student to be like his teacher and the servant like his master. Now, if the head of the house, our Lord referring to Himself and the establishment of His kingdom, if the head of the house has been called Beelzebub, how much more the members of His household. Jesus knows of the slanderous intent of these Pharisees and what will be said of Him.

And they are not just suggesting that He is a man affected by a demon. They are saying that He is the epitome of evil. It is only by Beelzebub that this fellow, you can hear the wrath, you can hear the scorn, not just in the mouthing of Beelzebub but the selection of this term to describe the incarnation of God on this earth.

Beelzebub, this fellow, drives out demons. Now, Jesus knows their thoughts. You see, this is another incredible aspect of the being of our blessed Lord.

I can fool you and you can fool me. You can see into my personality in a measure you cannot see into it in its depth. But you can never fool Jesus.

It's said of American presidents that they can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. But never all of the people all of the time. You can never fool Jesus once.

He knows your thoughts. And let that not put you off because our Lord does not primarily come into the world this side of the second advent to judge the world, to condemn the world, but to save the world. You see, He is on a mission to establish a kingdom, the kingdom of light over against the kingdom of darkness.

And He commissions those who have committed themselves to Him to continue the work He established. That's why when Paul, after he has become a Christian and towards the end of his life, standing in front of Agrippa, refers back to his conversion experience and he says, Oh, King Agrippa, I was given a commission from the Lord to take the gospel to the Gentiles in order to turn them from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. Jesus has come to establish a kingdom.

So in Mark's gospel in the first chapter, when reference is made to the blessed Lord, you find Mark saying, Jesus came preaching the gospel of the kingdom. Now, if our world is pervaded by evil forces, if one of the glorious angelic beings sinned against God in an eon gone by and was expelled from the heavens and took up residence in this world, if He beguiled Adam and Eve and all their followers, all their progeny, and if God incarnate comes into the world on a mission of recovery and retrieval and reclaiming, what do you expect? That there will be a collision, two worlds in collision, two forces against one another, no possibility of compromise whatsoever. And so, here is Satan's fling.

He's tried several against our Lord. He gets those who are witting or unwitting servants of Him to scandalize Jesus, interpret this miracle, which to quote the Hebrew, the Aramaic in a colloquial fashion, has gobsmacked the people. They are utterly astonished.

They are utterly amazed. There's no way that you can get it into the English language. They brought Him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute, and healed him so that he could both talk and see.

All the people were, fill in whatever word you want, astonished. It's not adequate. It's not sufficient.

And the Pharisees say that this naked demonstration of the love and power of Jesus is to be attributed to the devil himself. Now, Jesus knows their thoughts. And so, He puts up an argument, which in its logic, as you would expect, is utterly flawless.

I must proceed rather quickly through it. He brings to their attention the absurdity of their claims. Run on into verse 25, every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined.

Every city or household divided against itself will not stand. If Satan drives out Satan, he's divided against himself. What does he mean? Well, he means simply this, that if the emissaries of Satan in this world are not just men, but also demons, and they have, in obedience to Satan, invaded the mind and the heart of this man and reduced him to his demonized state so he cannot speak, he cannot hear, he cannot think, he behaves presumably like an animal, he is utterly out of control.

The complete opposite of the image of God as man was made in the beginning. If then someone who represents Satan exorcises these demons who've been doing Satan's job, the logic collapses. Satan is working against himself, says our Lord, on the basis of your own reasoning.

The whole notion is utterly absurd. How can you possibly credit to the evil one a force which has worked health and brought sanity back to this demonized man? Our Lord proceeds. It's not just absurd, it's utterly inconsistent.

Verse 27. You see, within Judaism, there were presumably well-minded people, and not everyone was like the traditional picture of the Pharisee, and indeed there were some very good Pharisees. Let's not get a distortion of Judaism.

There was a great deal that was good about it. The perversion was basically at the temple in Jerusalem. There were those who were working within the confines of the priesthood of the Old Testament system, and they too endeavored to help demonized people.

The Pharisees did not condemn them. When success attended their mission, they did not get up and say, you're doing it through an evil force. So our Lord says, if I drive out demons by Beelzebub by whom? Do your people drive them out? Be careful.

What's your logic? You see, our Lord is always embarrassing His critics. I love the skillful way in which the Savior marshals His arguments. At times He will put His critics for whom He has no respect whatsoever on the spot.

Jesus always deals tenderly with sinners, always deals tenderly with the inadequate person. He never diminishes a person standing in front of Him. I mean by that, He does not try to make them look idiots.

The only contempt our Lord has is for those who masqueraded as servants of God and bound bundles on people's shoulders that they could not bear. Our Lord had no time for the hypocrite. And on another occasion when they come in Matthew's Gospel, you read it in the 20th chapters, and they try and baffle and trap our Lord Jesus.

He said, all right, I'll answer your question, but you answer this one, John's baptism. And he's got them hooked. Was it John and the ministry of John? Was it valid or was it invalid? And they couldn't answer the question.

He's got them in a corner. He drives them in a corner here. I drive out demons by Beelzebub.

By whom do your people drive them out? So then they will be your judges. The language of Wimbledon, game, set, and match to Jesus of Nazareth. Absurdity, inconsistency.

Really, He says, what you're doing is veiling what has happened. How does our Lord theologize? How does He explain this phenomenon which is in front of them? And they cannot deny it. If I drive out demons, verse 28, by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

Our Lord is the man of the Spirit, baptized in the Spirit. Having been baptized in the waters of the Jordan, the dove comes upon Him. He's now in the wilderness.

The devil comes along, tries to trap our Lord. Our Lord rebuffs Him, rebukes Him, as He will be doing all the time. And our Savior, the man of the Spirit, empowered by God's Spirit, addresses the demon that has caused this man to be mute, that has caused this man to behave in such an animal-like fashion.

And He says, you know how to interpret it? The kingdom is coming. And that is one of the most wonderful pieces of news that this world has ever known. The kingdom has come.

Our Lord gives us a homely picture. For one or two of us, it's a little painful. We have to imagine a burglar.

Now when a burglar comes, he doesn't knock at your door for you to open it and give him a cup of tea, show him around and say, help yourself. If you happen to be there and you disturb him, he either shows a clean pair of heels or he disables you and then plunders your goods. Now our Lord has got the latter picture in mind.

Here is the burglar entering the strongman's house. And our Lord is using this illustration actually to depict the evil one as the strongman. And the ministry of our Lord when He was on earth was the gradual disabling of Satan.

You see, He did this in the temptations. The devil comes along, he puts his invective out and tries to inject Jesus with the poison of misusing his power. And our Lord sends him away.

Not once, not twice, but three times. But the devil comes back again and again. And throughout the ministry of our Lord, there is this conflict between Him, the incarnation of good and the evil one, Satan, the incarnation of unrighteousness.

And when our blessed Lord dies on the cross of Calvary, what happens? Well, listen to Paul writing to the Colossians, he despoils principalities and powers. He disables the devil even more. Later on, there will come the great missionary work of the early church, stretching out onto the century so that now in the 20th century, the greatest expansive force in the world, even though not in Europe, is the church of God as men and women are responding in their thousands in Southeast Asia and also in Africa and Latin America.

And every time a man is one for the Lord Jesus, it shows the enfeebling of the empire of Satan. And the day will come when all his power shall be utterly eliminated, when he shall be turned into the lake of eternal fire, and when this world will be transformed into the glory that ascended it when it was fresh from the hands of Almighty God. Our Lord binds the strong man.

You remember when the disciples, as recorded in Luke chapter 10, go off on their missionary journeys, the 70 of them, they come and they report what's happened. There are people who were saved. There were people who were healed.

And Jesus, as he's lifted up in an ecstasy, a most remarkable description of the psyche of Jesus at this point, he says, I saw the devil, the angel of darkness, fall from heaven and onto the earth. And the language indicates the enfeebling of the evil one as a result of the successful missionary enterprise of the 70, preceded by the mission of the 12. What is happening? The Spirit of God has come upon you and our Lord Jesus is redeeming humanity for himself.

Now, as a result of this, there is the utter destruction of atheism, of agnosticism. Look at verse 30. He who is not with me is against me.

He who does not gather with me scatters. In other words, there is nothing such as a neutral position as far as I'm concerned. You see my activity.

You've heard what I have to say. Now, how are you responding? And the same applies today. If you're not with him, you're against him.

That's the bluntness of my introduction. I'm not too sure that I agree with all the theology, but there was some truth in the chorus I was taught to sing as a kid. What will you do with Jesus? Neutral you cannot be.

Someday your soul will be asking, what will he do with me? I'm not too sure that I can barter with the Lord Jesus, but what I am sure is that I cannot be neutral. He who is not with me is against me. He who does not gather with me scatters.

In other words, if you're not as a Christian involved in the evangelistic ministry, reaching out, telling others of this great and glorious Savior, if you're not gathering with him, then you're defective in your Christianity. You have to gather those who are scattered. That's why Jesus came into the world, to gather the lost sheep, to gather the lost coin, to gather the lost sons, so to speak.

If you're not gathering with our Lord Jesus, then you don't really understand the nature of the kingdom and the nature of his ministry and the responsibilities that are yours as you have committed yourself to the King of the kingdom. Now, finally, our Lord deals in a most somber fashion with those who have been critical. You see, every sin is capable of being forgiven by one.

Now, when Jesus talks about the unforgivable sin, you listen to him with your ears very tuned in because our Lord does not come to condemn, as I mentioned. He comes to save, and it's not often that he speaks the language of judgment, though he does on occasions direct such language towards those who are hypocrites. But here he is speaking about sins that can be forgiven.

Every sin, verse 31, and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. I can think of few instances of multiple sinning at such a disgraceful level as that of King David.

He knocked down at least four of the Ten Commandments in one go when he had his affair with Bathsheba, and ultimately there's blood on his hands, but there's forgiveness for David. I can think of no greater disgrace than the profanity that left the lips of the fisherman Peter when he said, I do not know this man, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, and yet on the seashore of Galilee, Jesus and Peter were fused together in an unbroken relationship of love and forgiveness and ordination. You can have done the most damnedest deed.

You may have a guilt problem, the like of which you feel no one has got in this tabernacle. Hear me, for God's sake, there is forgiveness for you. The blood of Jesus Christ, God's own Son, keeps on cleansing men and women from every known sin, but there is a sin with which Jesus Christ, I speak with love and reverence, cannot cope.

It is the sin of attributing to the evil one the manifest work of the Holy Spirit. You can have blasphemed this God in a general sense, and He can cope with that, but allow the Word of God, when you hear it, to harden you like clay is hardened in the sun instead of like wax in the sun being melted. Then, I tell you, you are risking the same sort of category as these Pharisees were in.

When they dared to suggest of the Christ, they were scared to rob His life at that moment and try to liquidate Him through their slander. You are in danger of being in that category of saying that He, the Son of God, was working in the interests of Beelzebub. You say you're troubled as to whether you've committed a sin.

I remove your trouble immediately. If you had, you wouldn't be here. These men were never penitent.

These men, never at the end of the human life of our Lord, uttered one word of remorse. That same envy which had been there as they dug His footsteps down the whole of the three years of His ministry is there at the cross. He saved others.

Himself He cannot save. It was for envy, it was for malice that they connived to bring about the death of our Lord on the human level. And for them, there is no absolution, there is no pardon, for they attribute to Him the Christ of God, the works of Satan.

But for every man and woman who is prepared to acknowledge who Jesus is and move from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, to move from the pay and the and the coattails of Satan into the benefits of the community of those who are in the entourage of Jesus, then I tell you to do that is to engage in the most blessed shift in your life and to be a member of the most wondrous kingdom. There are two kingdoms, the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness. And one day the kingdom of light will cause the darkness to be eliminated and this Christ of God shall return and set up His government.

This world, this universe shall be renewed. The glory of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. What you must now do, respond to the message of the gospel which the King of the kingdom has brought.

Let's pray. You can't be neutral. Agnosticism is not an option.

Atheism perhaps is, but I think it's indefensible and scripture says it's absurd. You're either a member of the kingdom of darkness or the kingdom of light. You move from one to the other by submitting and surrendering yourself.