164 - Necessary Temptations? (16 Sept 2023)

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. Hey, a lot of people have heard about Jesus saying about cutting off our own hands.

And worse than that, plucking out your own eye. Oh, does he mean that literally? Well, what is he talking about? I think we need to figure that out, and that will be in the passage today on More Than Ink. Yes, indeed.

This is More Than Ink. I'm Jim. And I'm Dorothy. And we are again. So glad you're with us. We hope you've been following through with us as we've been reading through the Gospel of Matthew. And if you recall, when we introduced Matthew, Matthew is sort of written not for the Gentiles as much as for the Jews because of his references.

You can tell the Old Testament and stuff. So that's where we are. We are hip deep in Matthew. In fact, we're sort of at the end of the whole Galilean part of the story. Well, one of the things that helps us understand that this is written with the Jews in mind is that there is this tremendous emphasis on the kingdom. And so Jesus has told this whole series of parables, and we're gonna come back to one toward the end today about the kingdom. Or maybe not till next week.

Yeah, next time. The kingdom of heaven is like. So the king is among us, and where we're at in the book right now is Peter has just made his proclamation a little while back.

You are the Christ, the son of the living God. And then there was the transfiguration on the mountain, right? Where Peter, James, and John saw the man they knew as Jesus transfigured before them in all of his heavenly coming again glory. Just a little bit of affirmation that he is who Peter says he is. And then he said, now don't tell anybody.

Don't tell anybody. Right? Until... After the resurrection. After the resurrection has raised from the dead, yeah. So we're in that period of time when they're beginning to understand a little more deeply what it means that he is the son of the living God. Exactly, yeah.

Yeah. And some rubber meets the road, some friction may come about in the midst of the following Jesus, and that's sort of what we're gonna look at a little bit today. So if you're following, grab your ESV Bible so you're not tripped up by the grammatical differences between the translations, although they all say the same thing. But we're in chapter 18 of Matthew, verse 7, and we're gonna be talking about temptations. Well, yeah, but the reason we're talking about temptations here is because at the beginning of chapter 18, we talked about this last week, that the disciples had come to Jesus and said, well, who's greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And he had called a child and put him in the midst and said, you must humble yourself like this child.

And then he said, in verse 18, chapter 18, verse 6, whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin or to stumble. Stumble's the word. Right. And so that word is gonna show up again and again and again in this next passage, but it's not always translated as stumble. So I think it's important that we point that out. So that's what leads us into this conversation.

Yeah. And in fact, that stumble word, you introduced it last time in Scandalon in Greek. And in fact, I was curious after you'd mentioned it, you can find the Greek Old Testament, which they translated about a century before Jesus.

And so they used a lot of Greek words in the Old Testament, so you can kind of link that use of that word, Scandalon, in the Old Testament. And I found, there's one in Leviticus 19, I love it. It says, you shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block, that's it, before the blind, but you shall fear your God, I am the Lord. So he's saying, don't curse the deaf when they can't hear you. Don't do something that a blind person can't see and cause both of them to stumble. So it's about being actively engaged in causing someone else to trip and fall. Yeah, and the idea in the New Testament of causing your brother to stumble is to set them on a course of action that would lead them to ruin, to spiritual ruin, to not becoming all that God has in mind for them to be. And just to remind you that it's the baited trigger of a trap, right?

When you reach for the bait, you trip the trap and you're ensnared. So let's see how it applies here. Yeah, okay.

Okay, here we go. So now we can start reading, but I'm going to point out this word every time it occurs. So starting in verse seven, woe to the world for temptations to sin, for it's necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes. Okay, those three temptations are this word.

Scandal on three times. Yep. And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It's better for you to enter life crippled or lame, the two hands or two feet to be, wait a minute, it's better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It's better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire. Okay, the two times the word sin appears here is this same word, meaning that it causes you to stumble.

So I think that's important that it gets translated a variety of ways. It encompasses this idea of tempted to take the bait and be trapped, or something you do or see causes you to trip up. Yeah.

And be entrapped. Yeah. And the consequences of that tripping, he says at the very end, is hell fire.

It's eternal fire. Right. So this is a serious thing.

Right. So if you go back to beginning in seven, he says, you know, it's going to be, we live in a place where these things will be inevitable. We live in a dirty sinful place, so it's going to come to you. But woe to the person who's involved actively in bringing that stuff to bring someone else to ruin.

That's a really big deal. And there are people indeed that do that. In fact, it made me think the other day, I was reading a newsletter from a friend who has a ministry called Sexuality Unmasked, Jim Anderson. And he talks about the fact that a lot of the people that he ministers to who are having difficulties in terms of sexual identity and all that kind of stuff, in his estimation, about 80% of them have been abused, sexually abused when they were younger. And so it's a gross example, but it's very much like this where they were abused and as a result, it's put them on a course of sin even in the rest of their life. It has set them up for a course that leads them into unbelief, leads them into ruin, leads them into an inability to believe God. So woe to the person who involved them in that at a young age.

It's really very much this. And the consequences are severe. That's why when he goes on from verse eight, he talks about the consequences, you know. And you know, we read the Bible literally, but this doesn't literally mean to cut your hands off and poke your eyes out. But it does mean something literal that's not that physical. And that's really important because Jesus very often uses very blunt pictures to portray something that's really important. And if you think about, I wonder if this connects back to what he had said to them in chapter 16 about dying to yourself, denying yourself and saying no to self-interest. So wherever your hand or your foot leads you into disobedience or unbelief, cut it off. It's that serious.

Yeah. And it is a sacrifice, but it's basically the idea of cutting off that that's going to lead you to total destruction. It's better to get there without something than to be whole and go to hell. So it's just a serious consequence. And he's saying it's worth you sacrificing something in order to avoid hell.

And he just does it in a very graphic style right here. So again, I want to say don't cut your hands off or poke your eyes out, but he's saying if the issue is to save something about your wholeness and it costs you damnation, well, then let that thing go. It's worth the sacrifice. I'm still thinking about the stumbling block, right?

The scandal on. And back in chapter 16 when Jesus, when Peter had said, Lord, this is not going to happen to you. Jesus had said to him, get behind me Satan for you are a stumbling block to me, right?

You are that which causes me to misstep into ruin. Right. And so I think that probably is still in view here when he's saying this is deadly serious business that the behavior of believers can lead not only themselves into ruin, but lead others into ruin. Enabling them or encouraging them to reject the truth to unbelief. Yeah, it's a big serious deal. And he really amplified that too when he talked about children in that sense. If you lead them to sin, boy, it's better for you if you have a millstone put around your neck and dropped in the sea. I mean, it's a big, big deal. So it's one of the first calls he's made in all of his teaching about not only just the problem of sin with us and where it leads us, but the problems of us actually participating and leading other people in sin. It's really quite a sobering thought.

It is. I was looking for another reference here too that I had jotted in the column, something about how important it is that we not lead others into sin. Let's see if I can find this verse. Oh, so Jesus referred to himself as a stumbling block. The Old Testament refers to him as a stumbling block. And Peter says in 1 Peter 2.8, and he's quoting that Old Testament reference, a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense, for they stumble because they are disobedient to the word. So that stumbling has to do with disbelieving what God has said, right?

Right. It's basically to put something in your path to cause you to trip. So whatever direction you're going, you're going to do something to stop that. And Jesus' presence stops that in people who are committed to sin.

And people who are committed to righteousness here, it stops them from pursuing righteousness. So yeah, it's a stumbling block. Okay, there's a lot more we could say, but we need to press on. Let's press on. Let's press on. I spent a lot of today thinking about this passage. Well, let's go to 10. I'll read a little bit in 10.

Here we go. So, see that you do not despise one of these little ones. Is he talking about the children again, I wonder? Well, the children are still there, I think.

They're still part of the conversation. Well, let's just presume it is. So, see that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven, their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven. So what do you think? If a man has 100 sheep and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the 99 on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?

And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the 99 that never went astray. And so it is, not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish. Yeah. So he may still be talking about the literal children. He might be. But he might also be talking about the young easily impressionable new believers.

Young believers, yeah, because he uses that metaphor a lot. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But you know, it's interesting when we hear this parable quoted a lot, right?

The 99, leaving the 99 going after the one. But when he comes back in verse 14 to saying, so it's not the will of my Father who's in heaven that any one of these little ones should perish. I think that hearkens back again to setting our hearts on man's interests not on God's interests. And where this whole chapter began was, who's greatest in the kingdom? So he said to them at that time, be humble yourself, right?

God's interest, God's heart is to pursue and care for the weak, the little ones. To regard them as important instead of disregard them. Yeah.

Yeah. And so these lost sheep, you could even say that maybe these lost sheep he's talking about are the results of what we just read in terms of people who lead others astray. Maybe these are lost ones. So don't despise them.

You need to pursue them. And it's an interesting comment he makes at the end of 11 that even these lost ones have their angels always see the face of their Father who's in heaven like they've got advocates. Yeah. Made me think of the beginning of Hebrews 1 where he talks about what angels do in that sense. Oh, what angels do. And some people have taken this verse and said, you know, that means we all have a guardian angel, right, that represents us before the Father. I really don't see that in the scriptures.

I wouldn't go that far. But there is the important thing here is that there are angelic beings who stand face to face with the Father who are also charged with watching. Yeah. Here's what I referenced in Hebrews 1.

It's in 14. Right. About angels. Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation? So what he's saying right here is here's these little lost ones. Don't despise them because there's even angels that are watching out for them. And if you're a godly person, you'll be watching out for them as well.

And so if they're lost and the 99 are there, you need to go out and in your love, seek them individually. It's just a great picture that that's the way God is. That's the way his angels are. That's the way we should be if he's made us. Yeah. So it's not the will of my Father who's in heaven that any one of these little ones should perish. So it shouldn't be your will either. That's right.

If you also are sons of your Heavenly Father. That's kind of the between the lines. Yeah. What he's saying. Yeah. And there's a section in Luke 15, the lost things.

And there's a lost sheep section in there. And it says kind of the same thing. It's slightly different though. But so I would recommend you if you're a good Bible student is to go and just compare this statement right here with the one in Luke.

It's in Luke 15 verses three through seven. And see how they're different. They're just slightly different. But it's saying pretty much the same thing. And Barclay who's an old commentator on the New Testament. I looked up some stuff he had said.

He did a wonderful summary. And I'm just going to quote him here really quick about the kind of love this illustrates about God's love. He says God's love is an individual love. Not a group love. It's an individual love. It's a patient love because they've gone astray and wandered out someplace. And you know he's patient and he lets them go. It's a seeking love, which I really like.

It's not passive. It's a rejoicing love when the one is found. And then finally he says it's a protecting love. So this is just in a little picture such a great illustration of what God's love is like and therefore what our love should be like. And how diligent and faithful that is to pursue what's lost. Just to circle back to those Luke 15 parables. You know Jesus tells three lost parables. The lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son.

So yes, I would underscore that. Go and read those three parables and look for what it's saying about the love of God and the pursuit of what is lost. Who is lost. And my chief example in terms of narrative characters in the New Testament is Zacchaeus. Because remember after he gets Zacchaeus out of the tree and they have dinner together and Jesus comes under a little bit of criticism because of getting chummy with Zacchaeus and all the sinners. Jesus says to them, this is in Luke 19, he says, look, today salvation has come to this house since he's also a son of Abraham.

For the son of man came to seek and to save the lost. Bingo. There it is. There we go.

Yeah. So it's funny because pressing on in this Matthew 18 passage, Jesus seems to go on without a breath moving right from seeking the lost and not neglecting the little ones. Moving right into verse 15, if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you've gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Can we stop there?

Okay. Because this sin is different word. It's not that scandal on word, that stumbling. This is the word that means missing the mark.

Missing the mark. It's the more classic word for sin in the New Testament. So if your brother sins against you, don't we hear this passage a whole lot and people say, well, this is where we learn church discipline. Well, maybe.

But really, it's interesting. I'm just thinking about the process we see in the one who is sinning, who is consistently missing the mark. If you go to him by yourself and confront him and he listens to you. But then in verse 16, if he does not listen, so he doesn't listen. And then in verse 17, when you bring in the whole church, if he refuses to listen twice. So we see this kind of hardening against the corporate voice of the community of the redeemed.

Yeah. Which gives him the idea that it isn't just a personal affront. We're talking about a general sin issue. This is a life that is on a different trajectory than a redeemed person born again in Christ would be.

And even at step one, the step one in this is not what we normally do. When someone offends you, when they step on your toe or do something deliberately to hurt you, you get mad, you see, you get bitter in the background, you start saying nasty things about them to someone else, you gossip. I mean, you do all this kind of retribution-y stuff, even dream about retribution. But you and I both know when people come to us and talk about how they've been offended, the first thing we say to them is, well, have you gone and talked to them about it?

Have you confronted them? Because for us, that's so foreign. It's like, no, I want to sit here in my offense.

I want to be offended and I want to glory in my offense. No, you need to gain that relationship back because you've turned them off. And that's what he says. Because the goal is restoration. It's restoration. The goal is gaining your brother.

And you have gained your brother, he says in 15. So restoration is all about confronting that sin because many times that sin might be inadvertent. You and I cause harm all the time with people and we don't even know it unless they say something. So if they come to you and say, you know what you said, that really hurt me. I go, oh, I had no clue.

Let's fix this. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. And boom, relationship is back on the table. Yeah, because you just used the word confronting. And I think I maybe would soften that a little bit by saying, Jesus says, go and tell him his fault. Call his attention to the fault.

Because when we use the word confrontation, that kind of implies raised voices and face to face anger. Now, there might be that. But very often, especially if the sin was inadvertent, it can simply be enough to say, did you realize that this is the effect on me? Yeah, you just did reflect that. And can we can we work this through? Yeah, yeah.

I've used that a lot in some marital counseling, the very same thing. We do that ourselves. Right. No, you said this.

Yeah. And this is how you responded. Did you ever tell him?

Did you ever tell her? I'm talking about you and me. No, no, no, I know.

I know. So you need to reflect that. The other thing that's kind of a captain obvious observation here, though, is that instead of going to that person and saying, you're a jerk, right? He says, tell him not that he's a jerk, but tell him his fault. Stay on the fault. Don't stay on the issue.

Yeah. And then you can regain that person back in fellowship because injuries like this separate us and turn off relationships. So it's all about redemption. So the first step is to go to them personally and privately and say, look, this is what happened. And if they, you know, if they listen to you, great, there you go.

And that's all the farther and we're done and you've gained them back. But if that doesn't happen, you move to the next step. You take a couple of people with you because he says, quoting an Old Testament standard, you have to have, you know, witness two or three witnesses. And so one or two witnesses.

So puts that up. And then if that even fails to it, then you have to go and tell it to the church, which seems pretty severe actually. And if he refuses to listen there, you need to consider him as basically an outsider to the believing community. And it's something that Paul did in First Corinthians five. If you go read the beginning of that, there was a severe sin right there. And he, and he likened it.

He says, you know, you need to put that person out and you need, it's like yeast, you know, if you let the yeast stay here, it's gonna, it's gonna infect the whole loaf. Right. So that's kind of what he's talking about here as well.

It's partially preventative for the, for the body. Well, it is, but it's also to gather the wisdom of the entire body, the kind of the corporate voice, this whole community who is living a life that is consistent with a redeemed character, a forgiven character. Right. And so when he says, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax gatherer, well, in to Jewish ears in the first century, Gentiles were those who were outside the covenant and the promises of God.

They were separated from God. And as a tax collector, that's somebody who serves the enemy. Right.

So the, if the corporate voice of the body of Christ agrees, this is a person who is not functioning within the community and who seems to be serving another master. That's a really important factor here. Yeah. But he doesn't say don't love them.

No, because you love Gentiles and you love tax collectors. Right. Love them, do them, but don't assume that they are a redeemed one yet.

Well, yeah. And at this point their sin is willful. It's been confronted and they've talked about it, but it's willful. They embrace it.

Because they've refused to listen. Yeah. So they embrace it now. So you need to consider these as people like tax collectors who embrace their sin. Right.

And so that's a whole different kind of thing. Doesn't mean stop loving them, but it does mean, you know, don't be fooled. They're still embracing sin. So that's helpful when we read on cause he says, truly I say to you in verse 18, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again, I say to you, and he's explaining it, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my father in heaven.

For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them. So he's not saying the church necessarily has power to bind up or to loose, but corporately functioning in the abiding presence of Christ to recognize this one, to determine they're either bound to Christ or not. Yeah. Or they are bound to sin or not.

Yeah. And I mentioned this once before. This is a common phrase that was used by the rabbis when they talk about the law. So if you were doing something that they considered against the law, they would bind you under the law. In fact, they'd use the law to tie you up or to put you in handcuffs with the law. That's what the binding is all about right here.

But if they found that you were innocent, then you'd be loosed. So really, this is a statement about having spiritual discernment about sin is what it's all about. And if you guys see someone and you say that's sin, well, you've got it right because you've been connected to Jesus and you understand what sin is about.

So that's all he's saying right here is that. And in fact, it's an interesting thing because in Matthew 23, we'll get to it. He talks about the Pharisees and about the fact that they tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear. And that means the tie word is the same as the bind.

It's the idea that they've taken the law and they've very brutally tied people up with the law. So this is about discerning sin is what this is all about and then what you do about it. Well, and I think there's definitely this corporate sense of it because he's talking in the context of the whole ekklesia, the whole gathered community of Christ.

And he says two or three of you agree on earth about anything they ask. Don't pull that out of context and make it apply willy-nilly because he's talking here about the discernment. Lord, we want to understand the character and the spiritual condition of this person in question. He says there, if two or three of you are gathered in my name, I'm there among you. Jesus said in John 15 seven, if you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. So when we are genuinely seeking the will of the Father, the heart of the Father, the face of the Father, he will make himself known.

Yeah. And when you're seeking his will, you're not seeking your own. So even in this two of you agree thing and Jesus in your midst, it's clearly an unselfish motivation. We're talking about something much larger than just you, which would be our temptation at the beginning of this when someone sins against you. And that's a really selfish retribution kind of response we normally have. He says it's really not about that. It's something much bigger than that. So if the two of you get together, Jesus in your midst, and when you determine sin, you're right. That's it. And we're gonna keep talking about this issue of forgiveness and personal offense because next week we come right into that very famous parable about forgiveness.

Yeah. So yeah, yeah, forgiveness is going to be on the center stage as we come back about that kind of way. In fact, the theoretical question is, if someone offends you, how many times do we let them get away with it? Do you be a doormat or what do you do? How do you respond to that?

So it's a really practical question. Peter will bring it up and we'll answer it. So come back next time as we look exactly at that here 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. What did you say? I don't know. Let's listen to it. I just said... This has been a production of Main Street Church of Rhythm City.