Stubborn Inflexibility (Part A)

If you take a pastor who over many years has made marginal notes in his Bible and then you take those notes and you publish them into a book, that would not be a bad thing. But if you then took those notes and had those notes be the centerpiece of your religion, now you've got a big problem. This is what was taking place with rabbinical Judaism. We are in Mark's Gospel, chapter 2.

If you have your Bibles, please turn there. We'll take verses 13 through 28. It's a little long. Two minutes and 45 seconds to read out loud. But it's a difficult section to split.

It belongs together, so we'll try to get it all. Verses 13 through 28. Then he went out again by the sea, and all the multitude came to him, and he taught them. As he passed by, he saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting in the tax office, and he said to him, Follow me.

So he arose and followed him. Now it happened, as he was dining in Levi's house, that many tax collectors and sinners also sat together with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many, and they followed him. And when the scribes and the Pharisees saw him eating with the tax collectors and sinners, they said to his disciples, How is it that he eats and drinks with tax collectors and sinners?

When Jesus heard it, he said to them, Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick I did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. The disciples of John and of the Pharisees were fasting. Then they came and said to him, Why do the disciples of John and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast? Jesus said to them, Can the friends of the bridegroom 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 will be taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days. No one sews a piece of untrunk cloth on an old garment, or else the new piece pulls away from the old and the tear is made worse. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins, or else the new wine bursts the wineskins.

The wine is spilled and the wineskins are ruined, but new wine must be put into new wineskins. Now it happened that he went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and as they went the disciples began to pluck the heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, Look, why do they do what is not lawful on the Sabbath? But he said to them, Have you never read what David did when he was in need and hungry? He and those with him, how he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathah, the high priest, and ate the shewbread, which is not lawful to eat except for those priests, and also gave some to those who were with him. And he said to them, The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Therefore the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. It's difficult to split because of the confrontation.

It flows one to the other. These religious leaders at the time, they would not let up because they were inflexible in a very stubborn way. They were wrong in each case, and Jesus stood up to them.

He would not put up with it. These religious leaders had crushed their own faith, their own religion, with their own brand of religion. That's where the trouble was. They went outside of Scripture. They became the authorities. Scripture became subject to their interpretation.

Someone needed to stand against them without apologizing. John the Baptist, he started. And then, of course, the Lord Jesus, as we're considering this. If you take a pastor who over many years has made marginal notes in his Bible, and then you take those notes and you publish them into a book, that would not be a bad thing. But if you then took those notes and had those notes be the centerpiece of your religion, now you've got a big problem. And this is what was taking place with rabbinical Judaism.

It was sort of like hate speech to disagree with them. They were the authorities. And, of course, it took a man like the Apostle Paul, following the practice of Christ, to lock horns with them. And Paul did that wherever he went in all the synagogues that he attended. It took a man with right theology, with an iron will, and a readiness to suffer, as it was with the Apostle Paul, to disentangle the Gospel from rabbinical Judaism. And this is what the letter to Galatians, one of the letters, for example, is all about. Paul is disentangling. He's saying, hey, don't tie these up together.

They're not reconcilable. Christ and the Gospel has come, and the Old Testament ceremonies, not the moral law, not the laws concerning the person of God, but the rites and the rituals, they're now obsolete. And it cost Paul a lot of pain. It cost Christ his life. So the point behind all of this is that religion is serious business.

And if we're going to be involved with it, let's be right. Let's be in line with what the Bible says, with what the Scripture says. And we can do that with a spirit of love and peace, but it may, of course, cause a lot of problems.

And I know a lot of you know that because you have people in your families who may be religious, they may even be Christians, or professed Christians, and still very difficult. So let's look now at verse 13. Then he went out again by the sea, and all the multitude came to him, and he taught them. Yeah, he taught them the word of God, because man should not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. And he was very serious about this, of course. Always the crowds came to him, and here by this lakeside sermon, they're eager to listen, but they also want to see miracles.

Well, you can't blame them on a human level. Who would not want to see the Lord do miracles? Christ was eager to impart some insight and lessons from the word of God for this reason.

He wanted the people to know more and more about their Maker. Jeremiah put it this way. There's a verse that I think I read a few weeks back. But let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am Yahweh, exercising lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth, for in these I delight, says Yahweh.

That's interesting. Exercising lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, and the Pharisees knew nothing about it. Yet, they thought that they were the authority when it came to God.

They oppressed the people with this. In verse 14, Mark continues, he says, as he passed by, he saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, follow me. So he arose and followed him. The designation Levi could indicate that this man was from the tribe of Levi, because we know his name is also Matthew. Here he goes by Levi. Luke says the same thing, but Matthew calls him Matthew, and we believe it to be Matthew, whose name is on the first of our Gospels, the book of Matthew, or the Gospel according to Matthew. But this tribe of Levi was set apart to minister the things of God on behalf of the people. And if he was a Levite, why is he collecting taxes from his people? I think a lot of those men that were Levites and in the line of Aaron wanted nothing to do with the mainstream priesthood and Levitical system because it had become so corrupted. Jeremiah was a priest, but we never read of him serving as a priest. John the Baptist was a priest.

We never read of him serving as a priest. And in both cases, those were in the days when the priesthood was corrupted. It wasn't doing what it was supposed to do.

The interest of the people was not at heart. When Jesus shows up at the temple, he braids a court of a whip and he drives people out of the house of God for their behavior. It needed to happen. In fact, it happened twice. Twice Jesus drove people out of the church. And obviously, Matthew had been listening to Christ preach, had witnessed the miracles. It would be outside of, you know, the laws of reality to think that he was just sitting there and Christ just walked by randomly and said, follow means okay, I'll follow you.

There's more to the story than that. Perhaps listening to this seaside sermon and afterward as everybody went about their business there in Capernaum that he is sitting by the office and Christ may have made eye contact with him. I'm just filling in some of the scenario and walks by and he says, come follow me and Matthew is probably saying to himself, I thought you'd never ask. Christ always sees what's going on. He sees those who are drawn to him and he does something about it and that gives us the ability to encourage others when they sense the Lord working in their lives, when they sense that it is the voice of God speaking to them through the scripture or through events even. Mark, as I mentioned, he calls him Levi here but in chapter 3 and verse 18, he'll call him Matthew.

So we know it's the same person. Matthew's gospel, I'm quoting from chapter 9, the parallel story behind this is the same story but Matthew's telling it, not Mark. As Jesus passed from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office and he said to him, follow me.

So he arose and followed him. Now it happened as Jesus sat at the table in the house, both many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with him and his disciples. So you see it's a parallel story and the only thing that's different is the name and it's not uncommon, it was not uncommon in those days to carry two names. John Mark, for example, he had a Gentile name and he had a Hebrew name. Matthew has two Hebrew names. Nathaniel and Bartholomew, the same person.

Joseph and Barnabas, by the time we get to the book of Acts, the apostle Paul started out as Saul of Tarsus and becomes the great and beloved apostle Paul. The Hebrew names, when they were given to the children by the parents, the parents intended those names to be a prayer and a sermonette. The name that you gave the child was to preach, it was to say something related to God. In Matthew's case, it was to speak about the grace of God. It was a parental hope and I think that when we name children after characters in the Bible, we do so because we admire that character and we would like to see some of that rub off on our child.

And that's just a good practice. The son of Alphaeus, it says here in verse 14, interesting that another of the disciples, James the Less, his father was named Alphaeus too. Were they brothers? Probably not because something like that gets pointed out in Scripture. You know, you learn a lot by the omissions that are in the Bible. For example, if Peter were 50 feet tall, wouldn't the Bible point that out? If anybody else was sinless, wouldn't the Bible point that out?

That's bigger than being 50 feet tall. The only person in Scripture sinless is Jesus Christ. Everybody else is born under sin, they're born into sin. We're not sinners because we sin, we sin because we're sinners.

We're born that way. Born in iniquity, says the Scripture. That's what we got out of Eden. Therefore we need a Savior. So we see, for example, even Mary in the book of Acts, praying with the disciples, not being prayed to. It's an important part.

We don't want to miss these things. It's what the Bible teaches. They're not malicious in our stance on this.

We're firm though. The fishermen had to have known that Matthew was a tax collector, working for Herod Antipas in that part of Israel to collect the monies and send off a great portion of that money off to Rome, which is what caused a tax collector amongst the Jews to be despised. He was working for the enemy, they would say. And he was an outcast from society. Jesus makes him, if I can make up a word, an incast. He brings him in. He says, follow me. Again, not a random event because that would put it outside of the ways of Christ and human reality.

Things don't work that way. And there's no need to read a miracle into this. As Jesus, when he called Nathanael, he saw him already. An Israelite indeed, as Nathanael approached him. In whom is no guile. Christ had already vetted that man, as he did with this man.

But the record just shows up. He shows up and he says, follow me. And he drops everything and he follows him just like that. We read it, especially when we're new to the Bible. We read it and we say, that was quick.

That was impressive. And then as we learn, we say, okay, there is more to it. There is the man, Matthew, listening to the Son of Man preach. He's aware of him performing the miracles.

And inside of his heart, already at work, is this desire for more. And Christ picks him out of all the people that were in Capernaum. He singles out Matthew and tells him to follow him. And then he ends up at his house. And all the friends of Matthew join in. Verse 15, Now it happened, as he was dining in Levi's house, that many tax collectors and sinners also sat together with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many, and they followed him. First it was Peter's house. Now it's Matthew's.

These two men would never forget that. I think that you would never forget Christ is in your home also. Those of us who were born again know that Christ is in our homes.

No matter what goes on, the struggles that we may face, it doesn't mean he agrees with everything, but we try to get it that way. This calling of Levi led to a trilogy of complaints against Christ, and that's why this section is hard to divide, the verses that we have from verses 13 through 28. Because out of this calling of Matthew comes division, comes conflict, because these religious leaders were so stubborn and inflexible. They were looking at the miracles, they were listening to the sermons, and they refused to receive it because they were so stuck on trivia that truth meant nothing.

And it is loaded, it is fraught, we might say, with instruction for us. Verse 16, And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eating with the tax collectors and sinners, they said to his disciples, How is it that he eats and drinks with tax collectors and sinners? The first time when Christ forgave the sins of the paralytic man in chapter one, well that was chapter two, they were silent in their opposition. They did not verbalize it. Jesus read them like a book. He called them out on it.

Here, they mouth it off. When the scribes and the Pharisees saw him eating with tax collectors and sinners, they said to his disciples, Now at this point, they're not coming to him face to face, they're going to the disciples. This is a different group of Pharisees and scribes than Jesus had already dealt with in Jerusalem. Mark again picks up the story almost a year into the ministry of Christ, and so when he gets to his ministry in Galilee, John goes back further into the ministry in Jerusalem, where it says Jesus knew what was in every man, because when they were all saying, you know, they were all impressed by Jesus, but John says, Yeah, but Jesus knew what was in men. He knew that many of them were not interested in his teaching. They just wanted a miracle.

He still knows the difference. Well, this time they verbalized their protests to his disciples. You see, the scribes were the custodians of the scriptures. They were the ones that kept them in print and circulation by writing, you know, by handwritten copies of God's word down through the ages. The Pharisees, they were the custodians of the traditions, the oral traditions that had eclipsed the scripture in time, in this time of Christ.

Together, these two were the part of the leadership, spiritual leadership. You had other groups like the Sadducees and then the lawyers, of course, but here it is, the scribes and the Pharisees that are singled out. And they isolated themselves from such people like the tax collectors and sinners. The very people that needed to hear the word of God the most, they refused to be around.

You could say they buried their talent. This is a rookie mistake for us today, to be isolated from those who need us. There's a huge difference between outreach and fellowship. You know, sometimes you have to get close to people and to minister to them. It doesn't mean you agree with them. You may even sit down and have a meal with them. It doesn't mean you agree with their theology. Certainly there are boundaries to that. You would not go with them to their church and pray with them to their gods and things like that. That's not what's happening here. Christ has called Levi to follow him.

He sort of has this big gala to celebrate his exit from tax collecting and his entrance into public ministry. He calls all his friends to come and Christ is just sitting there with them all and says they followed him. He wasn't casting pearl before swine. These people were not hostile to him. The Pharisees were hostile to him. These people were not inflexible because of stubbornness. Sometimes we have to be inflexible, but not because of stubbornness, because of truth. That is not the case with these scribes and Pharisees, these custodians of the Scripture and the traditions. They were just stubborn. They wanted Christ to help Judaism along.

And he had come to make it obsolete. And they just weren't interested in this. And sometimes in ministering the gospel to the lost, not until you find someone. Once you identify somebody's not receiving it, they're not interested, you move on. You don't make them your pet project to overcome.

God has somebody else for you. You don't want to be those who try to jam the gospel down somebody's throat. We win souls because the Holy Spirit's doing all the work and we're just showing up to close the deal.

And it's a good system. So the gospel, when you isolate yourself, is actually buried. It is not out there for people to receive. And the Pharisees and scribes were habitual in this. And they were not willing to understand what was going on. They never gave Christ the benefit of the doubt. I mean, we read it in Nicodemus, he did. Joseph of Arimathea, and there were probably others unnamed. But the bulk of them, they never looked to say, well, maybe he is the Messiah.

Maybe this is the right way to do it. The capacity for human beings to be stupid is big. And, you know, whenever we say that, of course, we have to include ourselves in that humanity. Well, not me, of course.

That would just be a waste of time. But, overall, the essence of this Pharisaical religion was self-righteousness without righteousness. And Christ called them out. Matthew, chapter 5. For I say to you, unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.

That's pretty severe stuff. He's saying, those guys are doomed. They're going to hell.

If you want to behave like that, no matter what your position is, no matter what you call yourself or what others call you, if you want to be a nasty customer, then you will not go to the kingdom of heaven. They were meticulous in keeping countless man-made rules and regulations and added to the 613 commandments of the law of Moses were this pile of rules and regulations. At least 39 things you couldn't do on the Sabbath, and they would just add to that. They knew better. They couldn't attack Christ on his miracles. They couldn't say, ah, that's not a miracle. It's just a fluke.

They couldn't do that. Too many people were getting healed. So they attacked his morality. He's with sinners. How can he possibly be a messiah if this man knew what kind of woman that was that was touching him?

And they were just stubborn. We say as we consider these men, am I this way? What happened when Jesus said to his apostles the Last Supper? He says, one of you will betray me. And they all said, is it I? They cared.

They didn't want to be that guy. Go, is it me, Lord? Just let me know. I have to change anything.

Just tell me. Are we supposed to retain some of this? We come to the description. We read about these things. We're supposed to say before the Lord, is it I?

Am I doing this? Am I this narrow-minded that I cannot receive the light from heaven? And I believe the great many Christians are not narrow-minded, that they do receive, that they listen to these lessons and they embrace them, or else Christianity would have been long gone. Thanks for tuning in to Cross-Reference Radio for this study in the book of Mark. Cross-Reference Radio is the teaching ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia. To learn more information about this ministry, visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com. Once you're there, you'll find additional teachings from Pastor Rick. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of each new edition of Cross-Reference Radio. You can search for Cross-Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. That's all we have time for today, but we hope you'll join us next time as Pastor Rick continues to teach through the book of Mark, right here on Cross-Reference Radio.