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Who Can Be Right With God? Part 2 A

Grace To You / John MacArthur
The Truth Network Radio
January 8, 2025 3:00 am

Who Can Be Right With God? Part 2 A

Grace To You / John MacArthur

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January 8, 2025 3:00 am

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The true religion, the religion of Scripture, the true way of salvation says you cannot, by your own effort, your own self-righteousness, your own morality, or your own religiosity, or spirituality please God in any way, therefore earn acceptance with Him. Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. They are cliches you've probably heard for years. You can do anything you put your mind to. The only thing holding you back is you. And to be truly fulfilled, you must believe in yourself, love yourself more, become the master of your own destiny. Now, advice like that may sound inspiring, but as Charles Spurgeon said, anything which leads to self-esteem leads to the utmost jeopardy.

And why is that so? That's John MacArthur's focus today as he continues his series titled, Who Can Be Right With God? Now here's John with the lesson. Let's open the Word of God to the eighteenth chapter of Luke's gospel, Luke chapter 18, and we are looking at a beloved and familiar parable which our Lord taught, the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. This was certainly a jolting, stunning idea conveyed by the Lord Jesus in this story.

When He came to the punch line and said the tax collector went down to his house justified and not the Pharisee, He put Himself 180 degrees away from the prevailing Jewish theology of salvation. And for that matter, the theology of all world sin. Jesus was saying it is not the man who is good who is justified, but the man who knows he is wicked that is justified.

The dominant religious idea in Judaism at the time of our Lord, the dominant religious idea in the world always, then and now, is the idea that good people go to heaven, that if you are moral and religious, you can achieve salvation, escape from divine judgment, become acceptable to God. It's a matter of how good you are, how moral you are and how spiritual or religious you are. This is frankly the big lie that dominates the world, that people can earn heaven by being good enough.

It is to such people that this story is directed. Look at verse 9, He told this parable to certain ones who trusted in themselves that they were righteous. This is for everybody who thinks that you get to heaven by being good enough, who trust in themselves, says our Lord, who believe that they can achieve a relationship with God through their morality and their spirituality and their religiosity. Now we know that leading the parade of self-righteous people, people who think they can be good enough to enter heaven, was the Pharisees, this group of Jews who were fastidious lawkeepers because back in chapter 16 and verse 15, Jesus said to the Pharisees, you are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men. You are those who make yourselves righteous in the sight of men but God knows your hearts.

They led the parade of those who live with the illusion that you can earn salvation, that you can be good enough for God to accept you. This parable is told for the benefit of anybody who thinks that way. That's why I say it is a comprehensive audience in view here because the whole world of people in every religion but the true one think that way.

There are only two possibilities in the world. Either you can be good enough to achieve a right relationship with God, or you cannot. Either you can earn salvation by morality and religion, or you cannot.

That's all there is really to discuss. Whatever the religious label is, it is either a conviction that you can, or you cannot. The true religion, the religion of Scripture, the true way of salvation says you cannot by your own effort, your own self-righteousness, your own morality, or your own religiosity or spirituality please God in any way, therefore earn acceptance with Him. Every other religious system in the world is a system of human achievement to one degree or another that assumes that you can do something to achieve a right relationship with God. In this story you have the Pharisee who is the epitome of achievers in morality and religion. He is the most fastidious, careful law keeper on the planet. And he's associated with the Old Testament Law and so he's very close to the revelation of God, not as if he were in some pagan religion, but this having to do with actual Old Testament divine truth.

And so he's as good as it gets, but not good enough. The self-confessed sinner, on the other hand, is as bad as it gets, the most despised of all outcasts and yet he is the one of whom Jesus said He went down justified, or just, or right, or righteous with God, acceptable and approved by God. That idea to religious people in the religions of human achievement, that idea to a Jew in the Judaism of that day and particularly that idea to a Pharisee would constitute a kind of outrage. In fact, they might deem it blasphemy because they would tend to see it as a lowering of the divine standard. It would be an attack on the holiness of God, in their view, to say that the worst of sinners is justified and the best of righteous men is not.

That would not only be an upside down inverted theology, but that would constitute a kind of blasphemy against God, tainting His holiness to accept such an evil person into His Kingdom. That poses the question then of who gets into the Kingdom and how do they get in? Who is a part of that spiritual Kingdom will therefore participate in the earthly Kingdom and live forever in the eternal Kingdom?

Who is qualified? Who is acceptable to God in the Kingdom? Jesus answers that question here and He answers it contrary to the conventional religious wisdom of the time and the place in which He said it and frankly of all conventional religious viewpoint throughout the history of religion. The conventional answer is not what our Lord says. If you just take the word justified for a moment, it means to be held as righteous, right. It means to be declared guiltless, forgiven, acquitted, cleared of all charges. And that is necessary for someone to enter into God's Kingdom. You have to be acquitted, you have to be forgiven, you have to be cleared, you have to be declared not guilty and human religion says you can achieve it on your own and Scripture says you absolutely cannot. The issue is simple then again, I say, either you can or you can't and if you think you can, whatever the religious label you wear, you're on the wrong side of reality. The first point, the comprehensive audience means that the story is directed at anybody who thinks that he can earn salvation, or that she can earn salvation, or make some kind of personal contribution by morality, spirituality or law-keeping or religious ceremony.

We move from the comprehensive audience to the contrasting analogy. Verse 10, two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax gatherer. There were two times a day when the people of Jerusalem would ascend the steps on the south side of the temple where you can still go and climb those very same steps even today. They led to the temple mount. It was nine o'clock in the morning and it was three o'clock in the afternoon when the morning and evening sacrifice were held. It had been ordained by God in the 28th chapter of Numbers that there would be a morning and evening sacrifice and that at that event there would be an offering of the burnt offering as defined in Leviticus 1 as a sin offering and as atonement for the sins of the people.

There would also be a time of priestly blessing there would be an offering of incense symbolizing prayer to God and this ritual was attended with other components and elements as well. At one of these such morning or evening sacrifices, the crowd ascends into the temple and in the crowd there are these two men. They couldn't be more different.

They are polar opposites. The Pharisee is the most religious, the most respectable, the most honored revered man. And the tax collector is the most hated, the most despised, the one who would be treated with the utmost contempt. One, the Pharisee is a self-confessed righteous man. The other, the tax collector is a self-confessed unrighteous man. And we already met the first one, the Pharisee in verse 11.

Let's just go back and look at it briefly. The Pharisee stood. He stood, that is a legitimate posture for prayer, even Jesus talked about in Mark 11, when you stand to pray, pray this way. It was legitimate to stand and pray and the typical posture to do this was to stand with your eyes uplifted to heaven and your hands uplifted as well. It's sort of like the prayer that the Apostle Paul instructs the church through Timothy that holy men are to pray with uplifted hands. This is a typical posture. You are open-faced before God because you have a right relationship to God. You come into His presence with arms uplifted, ready to receive that which God provides for you as well as to offer up your praise. The Pharisee took a posture then that was a legitimate one, but in particular they would take this posture probably in a very, very visible place apart from the people because they didn't dare touch a common person.

The habarim, the holy ones, didn't touch the amharitz, the unholy and the unclean. And so it would be at a distance but in full view. Jesus, remember, condemned them in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6, 5 because they loved to take the place of prayer in public view and stand where everyone could see them. And that's what He did. He stood there in good visibility for all the crowd to be able to see what a holy man looked like. And then it says He was praying thus to Himself. This is a soliloquy and not a prayer. He has no relationship to God, no connection to God. God doesn't have to listen to anything He says nor respond to it. This is nothing more than a sort of self-induced spiritual soliloquy in which He talks to Himself. And He offers Himself congratulations for His moral and religious achievement and five times in two verses refers to Himself, I-I-I-I-I, and pretty clear who He worshiped. He invokes the name of God because that's the respectable and expected thing to do, although He asks God for absolutely nothing because in His view there's really not anything that He can think of that He needs. He has no lack. He is like the rich young ruler who did a little inventory in his life and couldn't think of anything that he really lacked.

Here is that kind of man. His thanks is really not thanks to God, for why would He thank God for what He Himself had achieved? And so in His soliloquy to Himself, He affirms how righteous He is, first of all on the negative side, verse 11, I thank Thee that I'm not like other people.

Unequivocal confession of His worthiness and His righteousness and His utter superiority to everybody else. And He even names some people which He is not like, swindlers, unjust adulterers, and very likely on the surface, He was not an open and over-cheat, dishonest, corrupt swindler. He was not someone who was unrighteous on the surface, probably like the Apostle Paul who said of his own pre-salvation life that based upon the Law he was blameless. And he was probably not an adulterer, even though he had a corrupt heart and even though he had wicked thoughts and wicked intentions and even though he had surely committed adultery in his heart, he did not conduct his life on the outside the way those swindlers and unjust and adulterers in that society did.

And then he makes an easy attachment, he says, or even like this tax gatherer. That would be an easy jump because tax gatherers were the most despised and despicable people in the culture. They had purchased tax franchises from the occupying Roman idolatrous people. They then paid the Romans what the Romans wanted from them each year and anything they could make over that they kept and so they extorted money out of people any way they could with thugs and strong-armed petty criminals. They were surrounded therefore by society sinners and prostitutes and the riff-raff of the culture. They couldn't go to a synagogue, they were the most hated and despised of people in the society.

And so he says, I'm not anything like that bottom rung of society. So by negative illustration he shows what he's not like and then he turns the table and by a positive illustration in verse 12 he shows what he is, I fast twice a week. Only one fast a year was prescribed prior to the Day of Atonement, he fasts twice a week.

It was typically on Monday and Thursday because that was market day and that was the day you wanted to fast if you wanted to be seen because there were more people in town than any other days. And he gives tithes of all that he gets, down to the seeds that he gets, the tithe of mint and cumin and anise that Jesus referred to, fastidiously religious, avoiding all kinds of external sins and manifesting this kind of detailed allegiance to performance law. And so he celebrates his righteousness. But in the eyes of God, as we remember from chapter 16 verse 15, he wasn't getting away with anything because God knew his heart and so the Pharisee is introduced to us as the confessed self-righteous man. Now the story changes and we get to the serious realities that our Lord wants us to understand in verse 13 when we meet the second character in the story. But, the tax gatherer standing some distance away was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast saying, God be merciful to me, the sinner.

Here is a very different approach...very different. The tax collectors were the most hated people in Israel, cut out of all religious activity and social relationships because of what they had done as traitors to their religion and their nation. They are the most defiled. They are, in the eyes of the people, the farthest from God. And it isn't just the profession that bothers people, it's how they carry it off.

They were corrupt, they were swindlers, they were unjust, unrighteous and they were surrounded by the scum and the riff-raff and the adulterers and prostitutes of society. And so this is the worst sinner Jesus can portray in this brief story as He has already used the Pharisee to present the most righteous man He could portray. Now let's look at this tax collector. First of all, his location, verse 13, standing some distance away, makrothin, macro means far away, distant, far off. Where the Pharisee is as close to the holy place as he can get, he's in the inner court, he's as close to the location symbolically where the presence of God resides as he can get because in his own mind he belongs there, that's where he should be, that's where he wants people to see him and he thinks he's attained that, he's earned it. On the other hand, this man is far off. He is makrothin, he is way off on the fringe, on the outer edge.

Why? Because he knows he doesn't deserve to be in the presence of God, or even the presence of those who are righteous. He is rejected, he is a traitor, but more than that, he is a sinner, he is a pariah, not only to the society but he is a pariah to God. He is a pariah in his own mind and his own heart. He has no right to draw near to God and he knows that.

This is humility. This is a sense of alienation and it's revealed in his location. But secondly, it's revealed also in his posture. Please notice, he was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, contrary to the Pharisee who was happy to stand with his arms up open faced looking to God, assuming and manifesting that he would certainly be acceptable to God and could look eyeball to eyeball with God. This man will not even lift up his eyes to heaven, meaning toward God. He is overwhelmed with guilt, he is overwhelmed with shame and it shows up in his posture. He knows he is unworthy, he is a swindler, he is unjust, a cheat, corrupt, immoral, irreligious, he is a law breaker, he knows it, he feels it, he believes it and he confesses it.

And there's not even a hint of the attitude that might say, well I know I'm a sinner but at least I'm here at the temple so I'm better than most tax collectors I know. He feels the full weight of his alienation from God. It's not just about being alienated from the society because of his profession, it's about being alienated from God because of his sin and disobedience and lawlessness. He has that sense of alienation. He feels that weight of sin and brokenness, that accompanying conviction and remorse. He experiences pain and fear and dread of deserved punishment and judgment. His location says it and so does his posture. Thirdly, so does his behavior.

His behavior is frankly quite unique. It says he was beating his breast, or beating his chest. A study of Jewish history, a study of Jewish social life, a study of the way Jews behaved themselves in ancient times as well as even up until modern times in the Middle East will tell you that one of the ways that people prayed was to put their hands over their chest and put their eyes down. This historically, according to Edersheim, the great scholar of New Testament times, was a posture of humility, crossing the hands, bowing the eyes. But this man goes beyond that. This man does something that is unusual, a gesture familiar in Middle Eastern culture even today as it has been for millennia, but still unusual.

His hands on his chest, his eyes down, he begins to turn his hands into fists and pound his chest rapidly and repeatedly. This is a gesture that is used to express the most extreme sorrow, the most extreme anguish. We find it in Jewish history, we do not find an illustration of it in the Old Testament. We find references to it in Jewish commentaries, ancient Jewish commentaries, but not in the Old Testament. Jesus has this Pharisee do it here in this story, but there's only one other place in the New Testament where it happens.

Turn to the twenty-third chapter of Luke...the twenty-third chapter of Luke. It is at the cross of Christ. Just after Jesus died and verse 48, all the multitudes who came together for this spectacle, the crucifixion of Christ, when they observed what had happened, began to return, beating their breasts, pounding repeatedly and rapidly their chests. There has never been a more horrific event than the cross. There therefore could never be a place where there would be more profound anguish than at the cross.

And there men and women who were there to see that reacted in this dramatic way. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. John's current study here on Grace To You is titled, Who Can Be Right With God? Well, as John noted today, the tax collector was on the lowest rung of the first century Jewish society. He was a despised outcast. And yet many times it was precisely those kinds of people, the rejects of society that Jesus commended in his parables and that he extended grace to in his personal interactions.

So, John, what's a takeaway from that? Yeah, well, that's the whole picture in the Gospels. You have the religious elite, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scribes, the rabbis, the priests, the religious establishment, and they're all basically outside the kingdom of God. You have, for example, two people that would be considered a part of the religious establishment by name that actually come to Christ—Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and nobody else.

You have the Apostle Paul, who's sort of the lone Pharisee. They just didn't come to Christ because their system of religion was based on their self-identification as righteous, as righteous. So they hated Jesus. They hated Jesus. Jesus even said in the Gospel of John, they hate me because I tell them they're evil. That's why they hated him. He told the people who followed that religious leadership in his own town of Nazareth, essentially, that they were sinners.

This is his own hometown where he grew up, his own synagogue that he attended through his whole life before he started his public ministry. And when he told them that, they tried to stone him. His own community tried to stone him for telling them they were sinful.

That was always the issue. Tax collectors and prostitutes and riffraff sinners and thugs and criminals and lowlifes, they had already been thrown out of the synagogue. They'd been thrown out of the system. Jesus found them open because they had nothing to protect. They were known to be sinners. And that's why the Gospels say they were coming to him. Even one of the apostles, Matthew, was a tax collector.

Zacchaeus was a tax collector. So the point is this. Until you realize the wretchedness of your own heart and your spiritual bankruptcy, you're not willing to confess your sin and inability and come to the Savior. That's why they were open to coming to Jesus, because they knew they were sinners. Thanks, John. And, friend, what about you?

What would you say is your spiritual condition? Are you certain that you're right with God? And if you don't know the answer, or you want to be better equipped to explain the Gospel to others, download John's study, Who Can Be Right With God?, when you get in touch today. You can download the MP3s and transcripts of Who Can Be Right With God? from our website, gty.org. That's our web address.

One more time, gty.org. And for even more help answering critical questions like who can be right with God, let me encourage you to get a copy of our flagship resource, the MacArthur Study Bible. It's an all-in-one theological library containing more than 140 maps, charts, timelines, illustrations, along with 25,000 study notes from John, all designed to help you understand Scripture in its proper context.

It comes in multiple English translations, including the English Standard, New American Standard, and now the New Legacy Standard text of Scripture, and it comes in many non-English translations. To order the one that's right for you, visit our website, gty.org, or call us at 800-55-GRACE. That's our phone number one more time, 800-55-GRACE. Well, friend, if a co-worker asked you what sets Christianity apart from other religions, what would you say? Keep that question in mind and join us again tomorrow. For John MacArthur and the entire Grace To You staff, I'm Phil Johnson inviting you back for another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.
Whisper: medium.en / 2025-01-08 05:51:09 / 2025-01-08 06:00:41 / 10

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