PAUL TRIPP MINISTRIES, INC.

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1 PAUL TRIPP MINISTRIES, INC. The Gospel of the Pharisees March 28, 2010 Mark 2:18-27 What would Philadelphia look like if Satan took full control of the city? Hear this surprising answer by former Tenth Pastor Donald Gray Barnhouse. Barnhouse said that if Satan took over Philadelphia, all the bars would be closed, pornography would be banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing; the children would say, Yes, sir! and No, mam! and churches would be filled every Sunday where Christ would not be preached. You see, Barnhouse is saying something very, very important, something that I think is easy for us to miss; and it is that the greatest danger to the Gospel is not all those atheistic threats. You know, when we see those things, we rear up; we re aware and we defend the Gospel. The greatest danger of the Gospel has always been and continues to be a counterfeit gospel. It s a gospel that doesn't actually need Christ. And what's dangerous about this is its subtlety, that it exists with the same language; it exists in the same location; it exists amongst committed religious people. And when you hear that, you would like to think that, Well, that wouldn t be me. The fact of the matter is that the seeds of counterfeit gospel still exist in all of us. This struggle is not just the struggle of the pulpit; it's not just the struggle of the seminary classroom; it is literally a day by day battle in our hearts because the true Gospel of complete and total reliance upon Jesus Christ is always replaced by one thing: a gospel of self-congratulatory self-righteousness. And I would like to think that doesn't exist inside of me, but it does. Maybe that exists in your prickliness when someone comes to you to point out perhaps a wrong in you. And you can feel your inner lawyer being activated, and you're already, before you speak, you re rising to your defense, and you re quick to let that person know that you re not the only sinner in the room. Maybe that exists in parental impatience where you can't believe what your child would do. Well, of course you can; you're a sinner. In case you hadn t realized this, parents, you are much more like your child than unlike your child. Maybe that exists in a condemning heart toward people outside of this building who don't know the Lord. Maybe that's a spirit of criticism toward fellow believers who don't seem to get theology the way you do, or whose lives don't seem to be as ordered as

2 your life is. This is a clear and present danger, and you see that danger in this passage of ours because this was the religion of the Pharisees, and the religion of the Pharisees can't help but collide with the Gospel of the Kingdom and it does. I want to read one more set of words to you: We cannot simply assume that we have the Gospel. (What a wonderful warning!) We cannot simply assume that we have the Gospel unless we keep the Gospel at the center of the church, we are always in danger of shoving it off to one side and letting something else take its place. Martin Luther rightly warned that there is a clear and present danger that the devil may take away from us the pure doctrine of faith and may substitute it for the doctrines (now hear this) of works and human traditions. The Good News of the cross and resurrection must be preached, believed, and lived; otherwise it will be lost. The Church's greatest danger is not the anti-gospel outside the church; it is the counterfeit gospel inside the church. The Judaizers did not walk around the city in Antioch wearing T-shirts that said, Hug me, I'm a false apostle. What made them so dangerous was that they knew how to talk the way that Christians talk; they used all the right terminology; they talked about how they got saved; they told people to trust in Christ; they presented the Gospel, only they did not have the Gospel after all. We should expect, therefore, that the most serious threat to the one true Gospel is something that is also called the gospel. The most dangerous teachers are the ones who preach a different Christ, but can still call him, Jesus. Those are the words of someone you know, our Senior Pastor, Phil Ryken. Well, look in your Order of Worship to this passage. Christ is in these two accounts that Mark records in a collision with, if I could use this term, the gospel of the Pharisees. And as Phil writes, that that gospel that no longer needs Christ because it's really a gospel of self-reliance, has two foundation stones to it: The foundation stone of traditionalism and the foundation stone of legalism. And that's exactly what Christ collides with in these two accounts. Now remember what Mark is doing. Mark is beginning to report the collision that's taking place as Christ begins to lay out His identity and lay out His purpose, His ministry, in this call to repentance and faith that is the Gospel of the Kingdom. And the Pharisees begin following him around, and Mark records these five controversy narratives. It s likely that the two events that we re going to look at this evening didn't actually happen right together in the chronology of the life of Christ. We know that the Gospels give us selective history, purposeful intentional history that

3 we re not told everything Jesus did while He was here on earth. And so, Mark is writing the history in such a way to bring together these important collisions that are taking place between Christ and the Pharisees. Let me read again 18 through 22: Now John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. And people came and said to him, Why do John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast? And Jesus said to them, Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins--and the new wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins. (ESV) Christ is asked this question: Why is it that the Pharisees, the disciples of the Pharisees, and the disciples of John fast, and your disciples don't fast? Now, we need some background. There is only one place in the Old Testament where fasting is commanded; that's at the Day of Atonement. But fasting had become a tradition in the Old Testament, fasting at times of prayer, fasting at times of a particular need, fasting at times of mourning. The Pharisees had turned that tradition of fasting into a requirement. It's clear that John's disciples, as part of his call to repentance, fasted. The disciples of the Pharisees there probably weren't really disciples of the Pharisees, the passage using disciples in sort of a loose sense of followers - follow the tradition of the Pharisees. The Pharisees prided themselves in their fasting, those moments when they would not eat for the purpose of their religiosity. And they prided themselves that they fasted twice a week, on Monday and Thursday. And their rigid fasting began to be used as a way of building up their pride and a way of judging the spirituality of others. You were judged by the Pharisees by how much you fasted and how much you carried on their tradition of fasting. You get a real picture of how the Pharisees approached these things in Matthew 6. Listen to these three things that Christ warns against: Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. (Matthew 6:2) How about when it comes to prayer? And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and

4 pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. (Matthew 6:5) Look at what Christ says about their fasting. And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. (Matthew 6:16) Jesus is not here confronting the tradition of fasting. In fact, we have in Mark a time when Jesus fasted already recorded. What He's attacking is the traditionalism of the Pharisees. The Pharisees, fasting, in fact, if Christ is right, and He is in Matthew 6, actually had nothing to do with God. It wasn t an act of true faith. It wasn't humble seeking of God. It wasn't brokenness before God. It was done before men to build up me. It was part of that system of self-reliance, of self-righteousness, of pride. Fasting was meant to point people to me to prove to them that I m spiritual, that I have arrived, and that is an aberration of everything that fasting should be about. Fasting is when I give up the physical food that I would normally eat and to bring myself in brokenness and neediness before God. Fasting says, You and you alone are my only hope! And so the Pharisees would be quite taken back, quite outraged that Jesus s disciples weren't fasting. Their pride, their identity, are not rooted in God's work on their behalf, but on their work. Now look at what Jesus says; He gives three responses here. First one: Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as the bridegroom is with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. Jesus is probably not using the term bridegroom in that clear messianic sense; the people in this, who are listening to this moment, wouldn't have heard that connection to Christ in the way that is later developed in Scripture. And what He is saying is He s using that wedding metaphor; when the bridegroom is come, it's a time for celebration; and when that time of celebration is here, you don't fast. He s saying, I have come for my people, and my work is to unite myself to my people by grace. This is an amazing moment of celebration. Think about this, the Lord of lords, the King of kings, the Great Creator, the Sovereign God, the Savior, now His feet have literally touched earth; how could this be? Jesus has come; the Messiah has come; the King has come; the Savior has come; the Lamb has come. This is a time of great celebration. You guys have it all wrong. You re so bound in your tradition; you can't recognize this

5 glorious new thing that God has done. That's what traditionalism does. It keeps you from recognizing what God is presently doing. It keeps you from celebrating what God is presently doing. And that's exactly what happened in this moment. This is not a time for fasting; this is a time for celebration. And then Jesus has this first moment where He predicts His death. He says, The day will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. It was a moment when Jesus would suffer and die; that's a time for fasting, but not now. And then He uses these two illustrations, the one of putting a new piece of cloth that has not been shrunk over an old piece of cloth that needs to be patched, and the metaphor of pouring wine that was kept in leather bladders, new wine into an old, hard, cracked, leather bladder. In both of those situations, what would happen? Well, if you put that new cloth on old cloth, when the new cloth shrinks, it tears away and it's worse than before. If you put that new wine into that old cracked bladder, it will come apart and leak and the wine will be destroyed. I don't actually think that these metaphors are meant to be old-new metaphors even though that s the way they re told. They re metaphors of compatibility. Christ is saying, Your way of thinking about tradition is utterly incompatible with the Gospel of the Kingdom because your way of thinking about those things relies on human effort and human righteousness and human strength, and the Gospel of the Kingdom is going in a completely different direction, and you cannot combine those. If you put those two together, the Gospel will be destroyed. You cannot layer the Gospel over traditionalism. You can t layer the Gospel over that; because if you do, the Gospel will be destroyed. The Gospel must be kept pure. Our hope must be in Christ and Christ alone! And then Mark turns to the second issue, if you would look there in verses 23-28: One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields, and as they made their way, his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. And the Pharisees were saying to him, Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath? And he said to them, Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priest to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him? And he said to them, The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath. The way that the Pharisees interpreted the Sabbath law was case study number one of their legalism because their handling of the law was both prideful and burdensome at the same time.

6 They were not content just to keep Sabbath laws. What always happens in legalism is that the law is added to, and the teachers of the law interpreted and reinterpreted and interpreted and reinterpreted the law to a minutia of laws. Let me give you some examples. They would reason that because you couldn't work on the Sabbath, it meant that you could only take 1999 steps on the Sabbath. And so a good legalist would count his steps. You must not reach Well, if it's wrong to work on the Sabbath, then carrying something needs to be defined, and so the teachers of the law said that you must carry nothing heavier than a fig. You re wondering what I'm wondering, Why a fig? Who came up with a fig? Who was the teacher of the law who said, I know, a fig! We will preserve godliness with a fig. But that's where it goes. It goes on. You couldn't throw something up in the air if you caught it with the other hand. This is where legalism goes. Women were told not to bathe. You re wondering why. Well, I ll tell you, lest the water go down on the floor, and you would be tempted then to clean up the floor; that would be work. You d have to take a very dry bath! Women were told not to look in a mirror because you may look in a mirror, (Women, some of you may relate to this.) and you may see a gray hair and be horrified and reach and pluck out your hair, and that would be work. So it's better on the Sabbath not to know that you re aging. You couldn't wear jewelry if you were a woman unless (Do you know what I m going to say?) it was lighter than a fig. So the best kind of jewelry you would wear would be fake jewelry. I mean, this is where it goes; it goes in this minutia of laws. Now hear what's happening: legalism never elevates God's law. Legalism reduces God's law; it diminishes God's law. It has to do that because it makes God's law a humanly doable standard; and so we reduce it, and we reduce it, and we reduce it until it's something that all of us can keep; and as we keep it, we rise in pride, and we condemn all the people who don't. Danger! Danger! Danger! So, I can count my steps, but I may not have a heart that, as I m counting my steps, is worshiping the Lord God Creator of all things. If I m not worshiping Him as I'm counting my steps, I have broken the Sabbath no matter how many steps I have taken. You see how dangerous this is? It has nothing to do with what the law was meant to do. It's a distortion of the Sabbath because it moves away from this joyful, holy, merciful excitement that I would have, that God welcomes me to worship Him by His grace; He welcomes me into His presence by His work. I could never achieve being welcomed into His presence. He forgives my sin. He hears my prayer. He wants to commune with me. God wants to commune with me. What an amazing thing!

7 Say it in your mind right now, God desires communion with me. How glorious is that! And all of that is what the Sabbath is about, that I can rest from my labor and, shockingly, I can be welcomed into the presence of Almighty God, not because I'm holy, but because He is a God of grace. If you're weighing a fig against your bracelet, you re not worshiping, it's over! Now I think that's a danger for us. If you're sitting in preaching, and you're using your systematic theological prowess to criticize minor points of preaching, and your heart is not open to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, you're missing the whole point. If the things that God has taught you and the way He's worked by grace in your life is leading you to look down on others who are less mature than you, you're missing the whole point. And there is inertia in us; it s the inertia of sin to want to name ourselves as righteous. And so this passage is very, very important for us. Now as Jesus s disciples are traveling through Galilee on the Sabbath, they are plucking wheat, crushing the heads and eating the grains of wheat. The Pharisees would look at that and they would say, They are harvesting; they are farming; that's work, because of the way that they looked at God's law. And Jesus goes after that very powerfully. First, He tells the story of David. David was fleeing from Saul - you can find this in 1st Samuel 21 - who was after his life, and David and his men weren't able to take care of their own provisions, and they found themselves at the Tabernacle and Ahimelec, the priest, allowed them to eat the bread of the Presence. The bread of the Presence was twelve loaves of bread that were taken into the tabernacle hot. They pictured the twelve tribes of Israel and a symbol of God's provision and fellowship with Him, and they were replaced once a week, and the priest would eat the leftover loaves. It was forbidden for any one but the priest, because of the holiness of the ceremony, to eat that bread. Jesus is literally arguing this (it s shocking to the Pharisees), that the preserving of a human life is more valuable than ceremony. You get it wrong. You get it completely wrong, and if David was able to do this along with the priest, Ahimelec, without reprimand from God, then there is nothing wrong with what my disciples are doing. And then Jesus gives these two statements: The Sabbath was made for man, not man the Sabbath. The instituting of the Sabbath that goes back to creation, (Are you hearing me?) is a grace. This is God who knows two things about us. He knows the limits of our strength, and so He would give to us a day where, without being irresponsible, we can rest from our labor. What a sweet and gracious thing! You do not have to work 24/7; God knows your weakness; He loves you. Stop it. Rest. Celebrate His love. And He knows another thing; that that worship is a war for us, and so it's important that one time a week, we get rid of all other things, and we turn our hearts in a more intentional and more collective way to the worship of Him. That's a grace!

8 And when you turn the Sabbath into a burdensome system of minute, condemning laws, you've missed the point. Or, when the Sabbath becomes for you a keepable standard, that it's about your righteousness and about your neediness of the God you are to worship, you've missed the point. And then Jesus says this, Boys, here's what you need to understand: you re criticizing the Lawgiver. I'm the one that stood at creation and instituted the Sabbath. I'm the Giver of the law, and I have a right to interpret my law. And we know that this One, who was Lord of the Sabbath, is also the ultimate Fulfiller of the Sabbath. Scripture says that He has purchased, through His life, death, and resurrection, a Sabbath of rest for His people where we can rest from our labors. No longer do we carry the burden of the law; no longer, if we believe, do we carry the curse of the law because He has carried that curse; He has carried that burden; He has satisfied God's requirements, and His righteousness is now given over to our account! Praise Him! Praise Him! Praise Him! Why would you want to turn back to that other system? This is a new and better way. And yet, brothers and sisters, the seeds of self-congratulation, the seeds of self-reliance, the seeds of self-righteousness still live within us. And that's why we must not quit defending and clarifying and defining the true Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ that says, You have one hope and one hope alone: His life, His death, His resurrection - His forgiving, delivering, transforming grace. We thank God for the traditions of our faith, but we don't want traditionalism to replace trust in Christ. We thank God for the beauty of His law, but we don't want legalism to replace our trust of Christ. And that war is not just the war theology; it's not just the war of the pulpit; it's not just the war of the Sunday School class; it's not just the war of the seminary; it's a war that is fought on the turf of our hearts day, after day, after day. May God protect us by His grace. Let s pray: Lord, how deceptive the counterfeit gospel can be. It talks about the same things, often using the same vocabulary. It looks spiritual; it talks about You, but it replaces You with human self-reliance, pride and tradition, pride in the keeping of the law. Thank you for the liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ. Thank you that You are our hope; You are our righteousness; You are our forgiveness; You are our life. Draw our hearts ever close to You. May we abandon our righteousness and rest in You. In Jesus s name, Amen Paul Tripp Ministries