Bible Talks - Sunday Night Church
Series: A Mountaintop Experience · Talk No. 2
The Difference Is God
Sunday, 30 July 2006
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1. Different to the max
There are many examples of Christians who have chosen stand out and be different because they were committed citizens of the Kingdom of God.
One such person was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Christian and Professor of theology at the University of Berlin in Germany in 1930’s. At that time, Christians in Germany were divided over Hitler.
One group allied themselves with Hitler, they wanted a "pure" German nation. They formed an official German church which supported Hitler and banned Jews from holding official positions in the Church. Bonhoeffer was among those who could not go along with Hitler’s anti-Jewish, radically German vision. With others he set up an underground church which explicitly refused to ally itself to Hitler’s Third Reich vision.
It was dangerous.
In 1937 Bonhoeffer was sacked. He flees to London. Two years later he’s faced with a choice. He’s been offered one of the most prestigious theology appointments in the world - lecturing at Union Seminary in New York or returning to Germany to head up an illegal, underground Bible college for the churches who refuse to go along with Hitler.
He decides his faith is meaningless if he takes the easy option. He heads back to Germany and finds Hitler so evil that he abandons his commitment to non violence and gets involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. The plot fails and in 1943 Bonhoeffer is arrested. In prison he leads church services for his fellow prisoners, and leads many to Christ until the day in April 1945 when he’s executed by the Nazis.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was committed to being salt and light in a world that desperately needed both.
Last week we heard about the first disciples and the start of their training to turn them from being fishers of fish to fishers of men. In order for them to do that , they had to become salty. That is, they had to be different, to be distinctive. Unmistakably, obviously different – like light shining in the darkness, like a city on a hill, you cannot cover it, you can’t conceal it, and so the disciples of the new king Jesus have to stand out as different.
And this difference will have two consequences:
a. That they will be persecuted (5:11). This is what anyone who follows the suffering servant king Jesus., the king who went to the cross. But this only happens if the disciples are salty. The bland are never persecuted, because they are indistinguishable from the world.
b. The second consequence to the world is that they are glorifying – and this is actually what most of our passage tonight is about. It’s there in v16 “In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” (ESV).
When the world sees your good works, they will be tempted to glorify you and tell you what a lovely person you are… But Jesus is talking about giving glory to God when people see our good works, not us!
Now, if that is to happen, it means that the good works Jesus is talking about here will be unusual good works. They are God-glorifying good works, they are the good works that actually come from God. They are the good works that actually mark the disciple out as different. So what they are doing is not normal or natural – it’s abnormal and supernatural! So again, it means that as disciples of Jesus we have to become so much salt and light that we can’t be hidden, so that our very presence in the community will mean that people will see us, and feel our effect.
Now there are lots of ways we can be different. You can dress differently, you can be different in you opinions about things, and those differences may mean you are insulted, mocked, etc, but they aren’t the differences that get people to glorify God.
So… what are these God-glorifying good works?
What is it about us, about our beings, our persons, that will at one level alienate the world, but at another level help the world to realise that what we are, comes from somewhere else?!
Well, Jesus spells out the meaning of all this in the rest of chapter 5 and then 6 and 7. In fact, in many ways, 5:16 is the topic sentence of the whole sermon. The rest of the sermon spells out v16 – talks of the good works that you and I will do that will mark us out as different, in such a way that people will say ‘ the difference is God’.
I have to say, this is a real challenge to me, and I assume to you as well. We don’t really like to stand out. Australia is a very conformist society - and when people do stand out, we often cut them down quite viciously – the tall poppy syndrome.
But what Jesus is calling on us to be is non-conformist, counter-cultural – and at a deep, profound, personal level, so that the very way we live is counter cultural in a way that the world admires and hates simultaneously.
So, from now on, we are looking at Jesus spelling out what it means to live this way. And he starts with the Law and the Prophets.
2. Counter culture 101 – the law and the prophets. – 5:17-20
Here we have Jesus’ fairly famous comments concerning the Law and the Prophets. There are two issues here:
a) the abolishing and b) the fulfilling
Not abolishing the law.
Jesus is clear that what he is saying and doing is not negating the O.T. He’s clearly saying here that he is upholding the O.T. and well as bringing in the New Testament, the new relationship with God, the new Kingdom.
Fulfilling.
But he goes one step further.
Not only is Jesus not abolishing the law, he says he is here to actually fulfil it.
The law, right from the start was focused on the future. It was prophetic. It pointed forward to this time that Jesus is ushering in! Jesus is the climax, the goal of the law.
We think of ‘the law’ as just a bunch of rules of regulations. The ten commandants, and the like. But of course the law was the whole first five books of the Bible. It’s a detailed description of how the people of God were to live. And those first five books point towards the future, and the prophets who came afterwards, took the law and built on it, filling in more of the prophetic details as they went along. The prophets all longed for the time when the law would be fulfilled, and here Jesus is saying ‘that’s me!’
An obvious example was the system of sacrifices and the temple worship in the O.T. They weren’t the ideal way for the people to relate to God, but they did show us the pattern, the things that were necessary for sinful man to be in relationship with a perfect God. But they we only ever seen as a temporary measure. In Jesus, a permanent, final sacrifice puts everything straight. It’s the sacrifice that needs no other sacrifices. Sin is paid for once and for all. And as for the temple – well you don’t need a fancy building to meet with God, when you have Jesus – God in human form!
Jesus is the fulfilment of the law and of all the prophets stood for and taught. He is what the law and prophets were pointing top for centuries. And because that’s true, he makes the law and prophets obsolete, and so effectively renders them abolished.
But notice, this isn’t just left as a nice little comment about O.T. history and Jesus. V20 has a most significant statement about whether you are actually in the Kingdom of God or not.
And this statement by Jesus was a jaw-dropper to his original audience.
Who are the Pharisees?
Why? Well to understand this comment, you have to understand who the Pharisees were.
Most people who hung around a church for a while will know that the Pharisees are the bad guys. So to say was Jesus says here appears not be mean much – I mean church people knows that the N.T. paints the picture of the Pharisees as out and out hypocrites.
The fact is, the Pharisees were the separatist party in the first century. They are often lumped in with the priests, but they were a powerful and influential lay movement of middle-class, uber-religious people. They were not unlike many people who fill Anglican Churches on Sundays in Sydney today! They were moral, upright people, probably a bit more North Shore than Toongabbie, but if Rotary had existed then, they would have all been members. They were the “good” people of the day, the hard working middle class, family, business people who keep a society running.
They did have a particular quirk about them: They were fanatical nit-pickers when it came to the law. They believed that if the Jews, the people of God only kept the law, then the Kingdom of God would come. And so they had, over the years, developed hundreds and hundreds of laws from the original Law of Moses, often going down to absurd detail in an attempt to make the people keep the law.
For example, you weren’t allowed to look in the mirror on the Sabbath. Why? Because you might spy a gray hair or some other aspect of your appearance that needed correcting and if you plucked that hair, or squeezed that blackhead, that was work! And as work was banned on the Sabbath, they also banned looking in the mirror on the Sabbath! They were the moral police of first century Jewish life!
So with that in mind, look at v20 and what Jesus says:
“For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (ESV)
It was an absurd thing to say.
The idea that anyone could beat the Pharisees at their game and be more righteous than them was just ridiculous! To the mind of the disciples, if the only way you could be in God’s kingdom was to be more righteous than a Pharisee, then heaven was going to be a very quiet place! Because it sounded like Jesus was saying that being in the Kingdom would involve more law keeping than the Pharisees!
It would be like saying that you had to swim faster than Ian Thorpe in order to gain a place in the Toongabbie Anglican Swimming Team. It would be a very small team!
Now, Jesus doesn’t appear to answer the obvious question this verse poses: IE: how can you be more righteous than the Pharisees?
Or rather he does, but indirectly, because what follows is a series of examples that illustrates how Kingdom righteousness is different. And it is different. Not by a little bit. It is, in fact hugely different, dramatically different. It’s as different as Ian Thorpe’s swimming ability and mine. Jesus’ kingdom righteousness is completely and totally different to the Pharisee’s righteousness.
3. New kingdom righteousness
So the rest of this chapter and beyond, is all about this new kingdom righteousness, a righteousness that exceeds the fanaticism of the Pharisees.
This was very radical thinking for the disciples, and I think it’s no less radical for us, but to understand what Jesus is getting at we need to understand a principle he is working from. Jesus doesn’t talk about it directly, he just shares the illustrations that follow, but we can glean this principle by working backwards from the illustrations, and it’s the principle of:
Minimum Requirements.
The Pharisees approach to law keeping was that of minimum requirements. What they did with the law was to analyse it and pull it apart in minute detail and wrote it all down to work out what the law actually required of them.
Then they set out to fulfil that law by ticking off the box against every little detail they had written down. This meant they could maximise every loophole possible and only do the minimum required to keep the law.
I used an illustration about paying tax last week, and again it fits here well.
Lots of people use tax consultants. Why? To maximise their tax return and minimise the amount of tax they have to pay. To find out what is really required to satisfy the tax law.
We pay tax consultants to find every possible loophole in the tax law - which consists of hundreds and hundreds of pages of legal gibberish – and that every possible deduction has been deducted. All so we only have to pay the absolute minimum requirement.
Why do we do all that? Because we don’t want to pay any tax at all do we? We really don’t want to obey the tax law at all? We know we have to, so we will, but we’ll only observe it as little as possible, and we will avoid as much as possible.
So it is with the Pharisees. They didn’t really want to obey the law, they were really trying to dodge obeying the law. All the rules and regulations were actually ways of making it possible to avoid obeying the law. To minimise the requirement of the law.
That was what it was all about. Because in their hearts, the Pharisees were just sinners like us, hating the law of God and not wanting to keep it.
Now you can see why Jesus called them hypocrites, because they looked like law keepers when in their hearts they are law-avoiders.
Now the alternative that Jesus is presenting here is:
Maximum observation
And it’s based on really wanting to do what the law requires. So we don’t break it down into tiny bits and write hundreds of pages about it, rather we look to see how it can be applied to the max!
It’s the attitude that grabs hold of the law of God and says: ‘This is terrific! How can I apply it in all my life?’ Now that’s the opposite approach to the Pharisees. So to use the tax illustration again, the person who wants to pay tax looks around for ways he can contribute to the community life of our nation so that the government burden can be reduced! Not many people around like that! But if there were, there would be no need for tax consultants. And if everyone was like that, and wanted to obey the law, the hundreds of pages of tax law could be reduced to just one!
And Jesus is looking for people who want to obey the law – which is why he could reduce the whole O.T. law down to: Love God and love your neighbour. Because if you did that, you would be keeping the law!
So let’s see how Jesus illustrates that principle and continues to train his disciples in what it means to be a member of the Kingdom of God.
Murder v21.
This is very simple, in Hebrew it’s two words: ‘no killing’.
But what does that mean? If you were a Pharisee, you would say: “Well, we can’t take it at face value, because the Bible speaks about certain situations where killing another human is permitted (Gen 9). God even sends his people to war on occasions.” And so you change the words to ‘Do not murder’, murder is wrongful killing, so that narrows it down a bit more. But you ask: what does wrongful mean? When is it wrong, and when is it not wrong? And so it gets more and more complex, and being a good Pharisee, you start writing all these exceptions and clauses down as fast as you can.
But Jesus isn’t into thinking like a Pharisee. What is the O.T. Law that says ‘no killing’ really about?
Well, he says here it’s all about living in harmony. It’s about not wishing anyone dead. So it’s not really about murder as such, but rather it’s all about the hatred in your heart that leads to murder. For every real murder that takes place, there’s probably a thousand that don’t happen – because we are afraid to act in that way, or perhaps just because we are incompetent as killers! The famous author and atheist Bertram Russell tried on three occasions to murder people. In his own words, he failed because he was incompetent! Bizarrely, he claimed publically to be a pacifist, but privately tried to murder some of his critics!
So murder is really an expression of hatred. When we hate or vilify someone we are really murdering them, and that comes under the same commandment.
So Jesus says, be reconciled to your brother, make peace with them, and don’t live in hostility and anger.
The Pharisee will try and turn the Word of God into something else, in order to avoid dealing with what the Word is really saying. Jesus cuts through that and gets to the core of the law. He’s talking about being a different kind of person, of standing out and being a person who takes the word of God seriously in their heart. And who seeks to live it out. And if we seek to be like that, we will be like salt and light in this world.
What about :
Adultery
Again, the commandment was simple: ‘No adultery’. But people who think like the Pharisees twist that and redefine it. For example:
Eight years ago this week Bill Clinton, the then Pharisee - er President of the U.S.A. said these famous worlds “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” It was in response to the expose of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He did things with her that he wouldn’t do with his wife. But he claims he did not commit adultery because there was no genital intercourse. He did all kinds of other things we won’t mention tonight, but in his eyes: no adultery.
Which brings back to me all the questions that used to be asked in youth group about this kind of thing: ‘How far can you go?’, ‘Is it still sex if you don’t do this, or don’t do that?’, ‘Is fornication the same as adultery?’ and so on. Jesus cuts right through all that nit picking, and goes to the heart of the commandment: The desire of God is our sexual purity. That’s what the commandment means, and it applies to all our lives and all our relationships. The language is important here: the ESV is better: v28 “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (ESV) This is not talking about normal sexual responsiveness – nothing wrong with that. You notice a good looking girl or man, good, – it proves you have a pulse! No, what Jesus says here is ‘Don’t look in order to generate lust – especially in the other person’ so don’t go looking to flirt with the other person and encourage a response that might lead down a path to adulterous behaviour.
A heartfelt desire to please God
And so Jesus goes on, and I want to encourage you to read through the rest of his illustrations carefully and see how in each case, Jesus cut through the tangle of complex rules and regulations that the Pharisees had set up over the years and shows clearly all that needs to be done, if his disciples have in their hearts a genuine desire to please God and live his way.
And that is the challenge to these fishermen: To live so differently that people will see the difference, see it as being supernatural, right and godly. But those who live in the darkness do not like the light. Because the light exposes the evil of their lives and their deeds. What they will do is try to put the light out, so they can continue in darkness.
To be called a bible bashing wowser is not an insult to people who seek to live by the word of God, but rather it’s evidence of a guilty conscience reacting to those who are living differently, and morally and rightly.
Many people accept the moral truth of this part of the Bible. They just hate it when people actually seek to live it out. But that’s what fishers of men must be, what you and I must be like – people who live so differently that there is no arguing with the fact that God is at work in them.
