152 - The Lord of the Flies? Really?

You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?

Is there anything here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink. Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages.

Welcome to More Than Ink. Wow, we sin all the time, but hey, God forgives us, right? Well, he does, but you know, Jesus said there's one thing that God will not forgive, not now, not ever. Do you know what that is?

He will never forgive? Never. Let's find out what it is today on More Than Ink. Well, yes, this is More Than Ink. I'm Jim. And I'm Dorothy.

And we're glad that you joined us. We are reading our way, walking our way, wandering our way through the Gospel of Matthew. Which is all about Jesus, the Son of God, God in the flesh. And it's written, it's authored, it's penned by a guy who was a tax collector, we found out some time ago.

He used to sit on the streets and demand money from his friends and neighbors as they walked by. And Jesus pulled them out of that, radically changed them, and here he is penning the life of Jesus and his ministry. And we're in the middle of it, we're in chapter 12, and this is where Jesus is very active up in northern Galilee, doing a lot of public events, healing people, speaking, and actually getting in some hot water.

We got in some hot water last time when we were here. Well, yeah, when this passage opens, it's because it's right after he had healed that man in the synagogue with the withered hand on the Sabbath, right in the face of the religious authorities. And they said, God is more interested in compassion than he is in your ceremonial sacrifice. He is defiant against the Pharisees. So they made a pact at that point, and it says right there in the last verse we were in, in chapter 12, verse 14, the Pharisees went out, they conspired against him and had to destroy him. And here we are in chapter 12, it won't be until chapter 26 that Jesus is arrested. So from here until the end of this gospel, Jesus is gonna be in hot water with the Pharisees with everything he does and everything he says.

And the tempo and the opposition increasing against him. So the conspiracy doesn't go away. Right. Well, let's see where we are today. If you're following more of this, we're in chapter 12 and verse 15.

And why don't you read for us and let's see what's happening. So Jesus, aware of this, now that's a reference to their conspiring against him back in the last passage of the judgment. Aware of this, he withdrew from there and many followed him and he healed them all and ordered them not to make him known. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah. Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my spirit upon him and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. He will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break and a smoldering wick he will not quench until he brings justice to victory and in his name the Gentiles will hope.

Okay, that's interesting. So we get a big quote from Isaiah. From Isaiah. Isaiah 42 actually and it is verbatim. It's very close. It's quite remarkable.

And what strikes me most about this passage is this quotation from Isaiah is that twice the Gentiles are referred to. The nations. Remarkable. The outsiders.

The outsiders. Right. So Matthew's gospel is written with an emphasis on a message toward the Jews because he quotes from Isaiah, he quotes from Deuteronomy, he quotes the Old Testament. It's all kind of pointed toward the Jewish ears. But here he quotes from Isaiah 42 which is emphasizing that this one has come for everyone. Yeah, yeah.

The outsiders, the Gentiles, the nations. That's right. But he introduces it. Again, we said Matthew is the one who is penning this. But he introduces it because he says Jesus' reaction to this conspiracy to take him down fulfilled this. It fulfilled Isaiah 42. So it will take us a second to figure out why this is really a fulfillment because it says in verse 16, he ordered them, the people around, not to make known what was going on.

Right. Had to go low key, sort of undercover, don't spread the word too fast. And we've said this before that in the timeline of Jesus' public ministry he knew that if he stuck his neck out too soon or too publicly, let's put it that way, that it would cause a reaction from the Pharisees too soon and he wouldn't have a full three years of ministry.

He might actually get arrested way too soon. So this is the way for Jesus to say, well, let's chill a little bit, let's cool a little bit. I mean he's still as active as he was going to be but he just didn't want it to be promoted and talked about too widely. It's interesting because he had already sent out the 12 to do exactly that. To do that, yeah.

A couple chapters ago. But he still seemed to be controlling the speed at which the message was going out. That's it.

The speed that it's being known on a wider scale. And so that's why in Matthew's mind, why would he quote Isaiah 42 as a fulfillment? This kind of going undercover, why would that be a fulfillment of Isaiah? And that's when if you look at Isaiah 42, it talks about his servant, behold my servant. And of course we're talking about Jesus here. We're talking about the promised Messiah from the Old Testament perspective. And the beloved one in whom my soul is well pleased. So we're clearly talking about Jesus. I'll put my spirit upon him.

Okay, that makes sense. And he'll proclaim justice to the Gentiles. Well, that's this amazing thing that this Messiah, who is the Messiah of Israel, now will actually be the hope of the Gentile world as well in terms of bringing justice. But it's when he moves into verse 19 here is where you start to see this sort of undercover, don't broadcast it too loudly. And he uses some metaphors that may not be really familiar to us.

But he kind of talks what it means in 19. He says he won't quarrel or cry aloud, which means he won't be loud, brash, outspoken. Like John the Baptist was? Like John the Baptist was, yeah. And so, nor anyone will hear his voice in the streets. He's not going, he's not in an overpowering way, marching down the streets and proclaiming with a big bullhorn and just being really noticeable. He's not going to be like that.

And so he uses these other two metaphors to kind of talk about what that looks like. Well, they're very tender. They're very gentle. He's not going to break off a bruised reed or stamp out a smoldering wick. Right. Right. And a bruised reed, if you think about like a piece of grass or something like that, it gets bent over.

You're not going to just break it off. So what you're seeing is like a very tender shoot of a plant that's been, it's been bumped and broken over. Well, and this is in reference to his healing ministry, right?

Here are these bruised and broken ones. He is healing and there's still a smoldering little bit of life in them and he is fanning to flame the life that is there. But what I find very interesting that kind of the central piece of this Isaiah passage is that I will put my spirit on him. And in the next, in the rest of this chapter, we're going to see, Jesus is going to talk about the Holy Spirit and the inability to recognize the work of the spirit and inability to distinguish the works of the spirit from the works of other kinds of spirit, the Holy Spirit. So I think that might be in Matthew's mind when he quotes this particular passage. But also in Isaiah 42, if you look at Isaiah 42 and you read on past the quoted part, in verse seven, Isaiah says, 42, to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the dungeon and those who dwell in darkness from prison. I am the Lord.

That's my name. God is the one who opens the blind eyes, who frees the captives, right? And so we're going to see that kind of unfolding through the next couple of works that Jesus does. So in this quoting of Isaiah 42, this is one of the most profound descriptions that created such excitement in the Jewish community about the coming of a Messiah, the coming of a Messiah.

It wasn't a vague kind of thing. And here we understand he's God's servant. He'll be filled with his spirit. His message will be for Gentiles as well as Jews.

What a surprise that is. And yet instead of being like a loud braggadocio bully marching down the streets and bragging, there's going to be something extremely soft and tender and gentle about his approach. And according to Matthew right here, that matches with Jesus sort of pulling out of public visibility and doing what he's doing, sort of undercover and gently with those who need gentle healing. So indeed, this is the Messiah, but not big and loud, but gentle and tender and behind the scenes. Okay, but there's one more thing here and that is twice Isaiah refers to justice. Yes, big deal. The putting right of what is wrong.

Yes. And so that is an earmark of what Messiah will do. So we know that the Jews expected justice to come in a warlike manner and to put the Romans in their place. But Isaiah is talking about a different kind of justice, doing right by those who are blind, imprisoned, not seen, not allowed in. He will bring justice to victory and the Gentiles will hope.

It's those lowly ones who feel like they've been dispossessed and done dirt to. And so this Messiah is the one who's going to come and be the champion for the lowly, which is what's really exciting about it. When I checked out the translation in the Old Testament, it says this really clearly in the fourth verse of Isaiah 42, he will not grow faint or be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth and the coastlands wait for his law. So it's just a really great picture of hope in terms of justice that finally now will be pervasive rather than rare. And that's what the Messiah does.

Yeah, great stuff. But he won't do it shouting from the rooftops. That's John the Baptist's job.

No, but we need to press on. Okay. We talked about the Holy Spirit. Verse 22.

Okay. Then a demon oppressed man who was blind and mute was brought to him and he healed him so that the man spoke and saw. And all the people were amazed and said, can this be the son of David? Okay, so that's a messianic title. Very messianic. But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, it's only by Beelzebul and the prince of demons that this man casts out demons.

Knowing their thoughts, he said to them. Well, let's, let's stop there for a second before Jesus responds to them because they see this thing that just very, very much to them, it's supernatural. It's clearly supernatural. Clearly, this is them testifying to the supernatural nature of what he did. And of course the people make the conclusion and ask, hey, maybe this is the Messiah.

Son of David. But now that really tweaks the Pharisees. You don't want to claim that Jesus is Messiah when they're sure this guy's just an imposter. So their snappy comeback is, well, he is doing it by some supernatural power, but it's not God.

Yeah, it's Beelzebul. What's amazing to me is that they're totally unable to distinguish the works of God from the works of Satan. Right. And that the here in the, in the healing of this man who was blind and mute, so he couldn't see and he couldn't communicate, but it doesn't say he couldn't hear. He probably could hear. Yeah, the Pharisees could hear, but they formed the wrong conclusion from what they heard.

They were the blind ones, right? Well, it's, it's only the natural conclusion for them. If you see something supernatural and you're convinced by your prejudice that Jesus is not from God, well, the only other supernatural source is the devil himself. And by the way, just as, just as an aside, did you know that Beelzebul means Lord of the flies? Yeah, I did know that actually, but our listeners might not.

They may not. Yeah, that very famous novel written by, I think it was William Golding, but I mean, this is really interesting, Beelzebul. So he's saying, he's saying, they're saying Jesus is, is, is garnering some kind of supernatural power, but it's not God.

And that, that just doesn't logically make sense. Oh, so Lord of the flies, right? That indicates King of rot, King of death, King over things that are going backwards in terms of, of growth and life, right? Which Jesus is doing obviously the opposite of that. Obviously.

It's not, yeah, it's not decay, we're healing. Their, their inability to recognize this just, just amazes me. And I just thought earlier today about what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, 4 about how the God of this world blinds the minds of the unbelieving so that they can't see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, right? Their eyes were so blinded because they were determined to find a Messiah who was after their own expectation. Yep.

Yep. And they only want to see what they want to see. So Jesus has his, has his comeback to this crazy, this crazy assertion that it must be being done by the power of Satan. So he goes on in verse 25, so knowing their thoughts, knowing their thoughts, and he knows what they're thinking. He said to them, every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste and no city or house divided against itself will stand, which is quite logical. It's obvious.

It's common sense. And if Satan casts out Satan, he's divided against himself. How then will this kingdom stand? And if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out? Talking about the other Pharisees. Therefore they will be your judges. But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

Or how can someone, let's just stop right there because he continues his thing. So he makes a lot of sense here. Well he's made reference to the kingdom. The kingdom of God is here, right? And the people had said, is this the one, the son of David?

Is this the king? Right. Right. So Jesus is saying, yep. Yep. And it's an ominous statement he says, because he says if that's true, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. Right. And there's a very strong implication of imminent justice when you say that.

Like, you know. It's overcome you. Here it comes. Here comes the kingdom. Here comes the judge.

Here comes all that stuff. So he's kind of calling him on the carpet here in a very strong fashion. And then he continues his argument and talks about Satan as the strong man. Or how can someone, this is 29, or how can someone enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man?

Ah. Then indeed he may plunder the house. So what he's saying is that if I'm plundering the house by throwing out these demons, how is it possible for me to throw out the demons unless I actually have overpowered Satan himself? Right.

I'm stronger than they are. So this is an extraordinary, extraordinary claim of the authority and power over all things in the spiritual realm by this man, Jesus, who is indeed the Messiah, who is the tip of the spear of the coming of the kingdom of God. And we've said before that the demons knew who Jesus was.

They are the only people in the early accounts of the gospels who actually are the only beings who actually verbalize, who recognize, you are the Son of God. What do you have to do with us? Right. Right.

And remember that one time he says don't tell anybody because he was trying to stay undercover. Right. So it didn't get spread. But yeah. But they recognized who he was instantly.

They knew who he was. So Jesus makes a powerful claim about the fact that what you just said about me coming from the power of Satan does not make sense. It's just logically stupid. But then he gets very personal in verse 30. Yeah.

This is pretty pointed. Yeah. Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. Yeah.

This is serious stuff right here. So you know, when I was a young believer, there was a lot of conversation about us who didn't understand, well, what is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? Why is that the only thing that can't be forgiven?

And so that's really important here because they have attributed the works of God to Satan. Yeah, yeah. Now, well, go ahead. Say what you're going to say. No, no, go ahead. You finish your thought.

Well, my thought here was that it should raise the question, why? But Jesus has drawn this line in the sand back in verse 30. He said, if you're not with me, you are against me. If you are not gathering with me or to me, you are scattering. So he's saying to those who considered themselves the leaders, the gatherers, the shepherds of Israel, if you are not with me, you are working against the kingdom of God.

Yeah, yeah. So there, put in the modern vernacular, in the spiritual realm when it comes to who Jesus is, there's only a bipolar response. Right, a binary response. There's only two positions.

There's only form or against him. And yet the Pharisees themselves, as they stand here in front of Jesus, consider themselves God's people, God's spokesman. They are pro-God. They are not anti-God. But what Jesus is saying is if you're going to claim that what the Holy Spirit is doing is actually not the Holy Spirit, but it's Satan himself, then I'm sorry. You can't call yourself pro-God.

That's just an idiot kind of statement. You're either with me or you're against me. And so Jesus, as he had mentioned before, has come to bring that division in people. You're either with him or you're against him. And he used the idea of a sword a couple of chapters ago. I didn't come to bring peace.

I came to bring a sword. Dividing, there's a very sharp dividing line. You are either with him or against him. So in this case here, face to face with the Pharisees, he's challenging their presumption that they are the pro-people, the pro-God people in this discussion. He's saying, you're not. And if you go so far as to confuse what the Holy Spirit does with what Satan does, well, that's just unforgivable. I mean, that's so fundamental.

You can't go away from that. Okay, but why? That's the question that I think is worth talking about. Why is it that this refusal to recognize the work of the Spirit as the holy breath of God, why is that the one thing that can't be forgiven?

I've thought about this a lot. And if you look at what Jesus says in the Gospel of John about the ministry and the work of the Holy Spirit, he calls him the Spirit of truth who guides you into all truth. If you reject the truth, that can't be forgiven, right?

There is only the one true truth that Jesus said in John 16. He convicts of sin. He convicts of righteousness. He convicts of judgment. Well, if you refuse the conviction of the Holy Spirit regarding sin, there is no forgiveness.

The way to be forgiven is to acknowledge sin and repent. So Jesus also said in John 16 that the Holy Spirit glorifies Jesus. He bears witness about me. Recognizable and worthy. Recognizable as worthy of the glory of God, right? Or the glory of God recognizable in him, as we said from 2 Corinthians 4. So if you refuse or misidentify the work of the Holy Spirit, God cannot, will not forgive that because it is through his Holy Spirit that our sin is convicted and we repent. Well, yeah. How can you ask forgiveness of God's Holy Spirit when you don't believe the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit?

You know what I'm saying? If you actually confuse the Holy Spirit with the power of Satan. So it's just dumb. It just doesn't matter. That's the fundamental thing.

And in all of judgment, the real issue that Jesus highlights, especially in the Gospel of John, that in the end, judgment is all going to be about who you consider Jesus to be. That's right. That's right. That's the thing. So that's not forgivable if you get that wrong.

You got to get that right. But here, fascinatingly, here Jesus is doing remarkable public miracles. Right.

Clearly. Clearly the Holy Spirit at work. Supernatural and it's meant to glorify and to set a foundation of who this man is in front of their eyes. And it's supposed to be unmistakable and yet in their prejudice they're saying, nope, it's Satan instead. Well, and they refuse to recognize the healing and the goodness and the health and the life-giving nature of his ministry.

God is all about giving life to those who are dead. Which is why to claim this is beelzebul is just, it's astonishingly stupid. Well it's not just, it's willfully blind.

It's willful. And that's the terrifying thing. Like you said before, beelzebul, you know, the Lord of the Flies.

We're talking about, think of a decaying, rotting animal with flies around it. And we're talking, they're saying what we saw you do in terms of freeing this man from these demons or previously, just previously healing this man's hand. We don't see that as being healing and constructive.

We see it more consistent with what Satan or beelzebul would do. Right. It's rotten.

It's rotten. And that's just like, no, no, absolutely not. No. So every sin in blasphemy will be forgiven people. But boy, you blaspheme me against the Holy Spirit.

That won't be forgiven. I mean, to actually say that the Holy Spirit is not the Holy Spirit and is Satan himself. It's the core assertion you see more in the Old Testament about people calling evil good and good evil. And that's exactly what you see going on here.

And that just won't be forgotten. When the Holy Spirit has come here in Jesus, according to Isaiah 42, clearly to demonstrate the presence of God and the coming of the kingdom right now has come upon you. And the Spirit being the very breath of God. And God had made that visible at the baptism of Jesus when in that visible form, there was something representing the anointing of the Holy Spirit being placed on Jesus. It just makes me so sad. And yet it just demonstrates this blindness of the mind that refuses to acknowledge the glory of God in the face of Jesus.

Right, right. Well, we know at this point, because where we left off back in just a few verses ago, after healed the man with the lame hand that they went off to, they conspired to figure out how to destroy him. They have already determined in their heart that he's the enemy. He's clearly the enemy.

We're out to destroy him. So it seems as though that that concept of Jesus being evil, concept of Jesus being an imposter, the concept of Jesus being the false Messiah, is something that from this point on, they're not going to be able to see their way around. Now, well, it tells us that I mean, you said they saw themselves as God's people, but they clearly were not God's people, right? Because God's people recognize his voice. They recognize his work.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, amazingly, Isaiah 42, which Matthew quotes right here should be something that they know so well. I'm sure they did. That they should be able to take the picture in your minds from Isaiah 42 and look at what Jesus is doing right in front of them and say, you know, maybe this guy is the son of David. Maybe he is the Messiah because we're seeing supernatural things happening. So as we know, there were a few who did. Now, Matthew doesn't recount it, but in John's gospel, we have Nicodemus who was one of them comes to Jesus at night and says, Now, we know nobody can do the stuff you do unless God is at work in him. Yeah, yeah. So there was not only Nicodemus, but probably a small handful of others who, who recognized what was going on.

Yeah, yeah. But by and large, we have a gigantic determined conspiracy against Jesus. And it's, it's really falsely conceived because they see Jesus not as the Messiah, but as an imposter Messiah. And there's nothing as dangerous as an imposter Messiah. And you know, if you fast forward to we see the Apostle Paul, when he's named Saul at the beginning of Acts, he's convinced that Jesus is a false Messiah. And so the best thing he can do is persecute the people that are spreading the word about the fact that Jesus is no actually the true Messiah.

He says, No, we got to nip that in the bud. So, so right here, Jesus doesn't just doesn't just confront them about their error. He says, If you're not with me, you're against me.

And you're not pro God, you're actually anti God, and you're actually blaspheming the very Holy Spirit of God himself. If you're not with me, it's all good from this point on in the Gospels, it's all going to be about who do men say that I am, because that's the key issue. If he is the Messiah, you line up with him because the kingdom of God has come upon you.

If he's not the Messiah, look out because you're against him and you will actually be actively involved not in gathering together a harvest of people to follow God, but you'll be actually dividing people against God himself. You do not want to be there. Well, we're out of time. That's a sobering place to stop.

It's a sobering place to stop. But as we come back, and we'll still be in Matthew here in chapter 12, as we come back, we're going to see this ongoing continued sparring between Jesus and the Pharisees because they just can't handle what they're seeing. The religious leaders have decided it's time to destroy this man. And that story will continue on as we continue in the rest of Matthew 12. So I'm Jim, and I'm Dorothy, and we're delighted you're with us. Please read ahead and get a preview before we start talking about it. And we'll have a fun time just discussing it. So we'll see you here next time on More Than Ink. There are many more episodes of this broadcast to be found at our website, morethanink.org. And while you are there, take a moment to drop us a note. Remember, the Bible is God's love letter to you.

Pick it up and read it for yourself, and you will discover that the words printed there are indeed more than ink. Now or ever. Ever.

Ever. This has been a production of Main Street Church of rhythm city.