Experience TRUTH - #18

Hey, this is Mike Zwick from If Not For God Podcast. Our show, Stories of Hopelessness, Turned into Hope. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network.

This is the Truth Network. Luke chapter 20 in our journey through the book of Luke, and what a journey it's been. We left off last time when God came to church.

Jesus Christ cleanses the temple. We talked about things like, what would happen if he came to your church? Would we even recognize him? Would he feel at home? Would he feel at ease? Would he feel like he was the star, which he is the star of every church, because the church is his body.

He is the head. So this week we get into chapter 20 of Luke. Robbie Dilmore, the Christian car guy, is at my side. It's always fun journeying through the Word with somebody. I hope you have someone you read the Bible with, you study the Bible with. We study the Bible with a bunch of guys at Dario restaurants all over North Carolina. Every Wednesday morning a bunch of men get together for Wednesday in the Word, and what you hear on Experience Truth is just kind of the outgrowth of that journey together, and we love to bring you in, and we love to just go through the Word of God together.

It's so powerful. Robbie, read this week's passage, will you, and then we'll jump right in these questions. So it's Luke 20 verses 1 through 8. Now it happened on one of those days as he taught the people in the temple and preached the gospel that the chief priests and the scribes together with the elders confronted him and spoke to him saying, tell us by what authority are you doing these things?

Or who is he who gave you this authority? But he answered and said to them, I also will ask you one thing, and answer me. The baptism of John, was it from heaven or from men? And they reasoned among themselves saying, if we say from heaven he will say, why then didn't you believe him? But if we say from men all the people will stone us, for they are persuaded that John was a prophet.

So they answered that they did not know where it was, where it was from. And Jesus said to them, neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things. The Word of God, Luke 20 verses 1 through 8. The Word of God, there's one word, there's one a-word that changes everything, absolutely everything, and that word is authority. And really this gets into the point of the first question, which kind of hails us back to the context. What's going on in the book of Luke? Robbie, hit us with it, will you? What about the temple cleansing and teaching led the religious leaders to question Jesus' authority?

Wow. So in the fulfillment of Psalm 118, which we went into weeks ago, and I hope you'll get those messages, Jesus Christ comes in, the conquering King, the Prince of Peace, comes on a beast of peace. When you're coming in peace as a King, you come on a donkey, an unridden, unbroken colt, coming into the city of peace Jerusalem to proclaim the peace of the Gospel, the peace of the Kingdom. This isn't a political type peace or conquer or conquest, but it is a peace of soul.

It's a peace of Colossians 3.16, let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. And so Jesus Christ came into that. Well, he comes in and then he starts doing things. He goes in the temple, his heart breaks.

It says in Luke chapter 19, he wept over the city. He comes into his father's house, he sees it in disarray. He sees the merchandisers, he sees the materialism, he sees how they have been gripped with making a buck and a coin and not with worshiping Christ. And he just turns over the tables, Robbie.

He got pretty radical. This is the second time he'd done this, by the way. We see the first time earlier in St. John's chapter 2. So when you do something that drastic and you set up your teaching podium in the temple, the first question is, who are you and by what authority?

And that issue of authority goes way, way, way back. The very first sin. We're sitting here attacked by and gripped by sin and our sin nature today in a fallen race that's been full of holocaust and disease and cancer and death and world wars and all that for centuries, for millennia, because of sin and because of what brought it in, and that is the authority issue. Satan said in the garden, Genesis 3, to the woman, hath God really said? Hath God really said? Satan said to Jesus, well, doesn't God's word say?

Just throw yourself off this building. Earlier in Luke chapter 4 and in Matthew chapter 4, his temptation, the enemy always comes at the authority. Our children, our kids go to college.

The first thing the professor does is everything you are ever taught. How do you know this is the Word of God? Has God really spoken? And this is exactly what these Pharisees, religious leaders, who have been rattled.

They have lost a lot of money thanks to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, whose house they had, whose father's house they had contaminated. And now they want to know, you come in here, you teach these things. You come in here, you turn these tables over. From whence do you come and by what authority are you doing it?

So that's what they asked. It happened in those days. This is the height of Passover week. The grand entrance of Christ has just happened. We call it Palm Sunday.

We celebrate into the palm branches. He taught the people in the temple and preached. Verse 1, Jesus Christ was a preacher. He preached what? The Word of God. Matthew Henry says Christ was a preacher of his own gospel.

He not only purchased the salvation for us, but he published it to us. And where does he preach? In the temple.

This was his father's house. This is the height of of Passover. And who's he preaching to?

Well, who's coming to him? He's preaching to the people, but suddenly the chief priest, the scribes, together with the elders there in verse 1 of chapter 20, confronted him. So that represents the different strata, the different layers of bureaucracy, of power, all the way up from the elders to the chief priest to the scribes. Which was actually the struggle that Jesus was picking a fight over. Because to them, they were the authority. They are the authority.

That's exactly right. It wasn't God. That he had broken their idea of what the established authority was in the temple, which was clearly them, as opposed to what Jesus knew, which was the real authority, was his father. And it's a beautiful thing. I was actually looking in Ezekiel, I think it's 23, where Satan's falling. You know, the whole passage where that's going down. And I always had the impression before I read that this morning that Satan had gotten all, you know, pumped up by his own glory and his own beauty. But when you look at that, it says the reason that God confronted him was because of his trading. And what he was actually trading was a lie for the truth. In other words, Eve and Adam, since Adam ate it too, traded Satan, the kings to the kingdom, for a lie. Yeah. And trading was what Satan was doing.

Well, these people here had traded the authority that God had over the temple for a lie. That's something. Yeah, this is eternally, there are two forces. There's evil, there's good. There's truth, there's lie.

And Robbie, you nailed it on the head. And really the question is, whose authority am I under? Am I going to listen to him?

Am I going to be under the safety? That's why the fear of the Lord is beginning of wisdom. That's why there's safety in a multitude of counselors who are giving truth, because that's where God protects us under His hand, under His authority.

And so you have these two, really this immovable object, right? The Lord Jesus Christ, the Rock of Ages, coming against the man-made authority that had turned God's Word into their traditions, traditions of men, which Christ really castigated earlier, and we see that in 17 and 18 of Luke. And He's going to come against them again here in chapter 20. And this, of all things, to heighten this, this confrontation happens. It says they confronted Jesus directly. Now, they were confronting prior to this His disciples. Hey, don't let these people do this. Hey, how dare you accept, tell your master not to let this sinful lady into the house, this and that. Well, now they're confronting Jesus directly.

They did it in 19. They said, don't let your people, let all these people worship you. She said, hey, they don't worship me. Stones, rocks are going to cry out, right? Here they're confronting Him again. So they're getting a little bit more empowered. They're getting a little more direct with Christ here, coming all the way to the point of His execution, which we'll see here in the coming chapters of Luke.

But the fascinating thing is we're in the epicenter. We're in the capital city of the center of the only theistic, monotheistic, God-ruling land in the whole world. This was supposed to be the light, the shining light on the hill right here from the Word of God. And here Jesus is confronting their authority, their people.

And so they want to know one question. Verse two, tell us by what authority you are doing these things. Or who is He who gave you this authority?

Now ask question two, Robbie. We've already kind of covered it, but I want to keep track on this. So what's eternally important about the issue of authority? Matthew 7 29. How does it affect everything before and after this incident from Genesis 3 all the way to Revelation? This is a great question. Ask this of your unbeliever friends.

Ask this of your agnostics, your skeptics. It's interesting, by the way, I just read this Ray Comfort quote. He says, atheists don't hate the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, and the leprechauns. They don't hate those people. They don't hate Santa either.

Yeah. They don't believe in them, and they say God and Jesus is the same fairy tale as those things, but for some reason they loathe Jesus. They hate Him. And so really the question we ask of everyone is, by what authority is Jesus? I am going to surmise. I'm going to position Him. I'm going to to put forth Jesus as my authority. And by what authority does Jesus have power and reign and superiority?

You just ask that question. And just like they did, right? That's a game changer. And it's also a game changer in church, as He did. Because it's unfortunately so often we in church begin to look at things as authority that are clearly...

Right. We ask ourselves, why are we doing this, and how does this... And God puts, by the way, authority in church is wonderful. Our leaders, our pastors, our elders, our deacons, God puts these leaders in that position, but they have a high standard. You know, James 3 says, don't many of you be teachers, right? They have a really high standard.

We're going to get this in the book of Acts when we get to that after Luke, because they are beholden to the authority of God. And that really comes down to some pretty serious stuff. I love these next questions. I really do. I mean, these are awesome.

Why? And I love, questions are what disciples do. Why did the Lord employ these questions, especially in the face of unbelief? Very good. So these questions were aimed at somebody's heart.

Someone's heart. So here, what they say, they say, tell us by what authority you do these things, or who gave this authority. Now, what they asked Jesus was not disrespectful. They disrespected Christ.

They blasphemed him. But what they were asking was not disrespectful, because anytime someone would come and speak, even Paul, when he was defending himself, he said, I am under Gamaliel. They want to know what house, what tribe. It's very true. You know, the Eastern thought, it's either, even in like martial arts, when you go to a certain dojo, you say, my dojo is such and such.

I'm from the Korean art, and you've got to name some names of people that taught you who taught them. Suddenly you have cred. Suddenly they're like, okay, we understand that.

Now, it's not in our discipline, but we understand that discipline. And of course, we know Jesus came from God. He's the only begotten of the Father. You know, he says, if you've seen the Father, you've seen me, which is the greatest authority, which also really messed them up. So Jesus turns around and asks them, I will also ask you one thing, and answer me. The baptism of John. Was it from heaven, or was it from men?

So why does he invoke the baptism of John? And what kind of rumbling, and what kind of real feathers are going to be ruffled with this question? Well, the beautiful thing is, and that's just a beautiful question, Stu. I mean, that really just takes my breath away. The question itself is just phenomenal, because what happened, obviously, is they come to him asking him what college he went to. Yeah, pretty much. And he answers them with a question that puts him on the real subject.

It's a mic drop. Right. It's like, here, let's ask the real question here.

That's exactly right. And let's get real. And what happens next is real, and Jesus Christ is driving the ship, and we'll probe deeper into that next time, right here on Experience Truth. This is the Truth Network. One of our generous sponsors here at the Truth Network has come under fire.

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