Jesus the Glutton and Winebibber

Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind. This week on Renewing Your Mind, we have brought you portions of Dr.

R.C. 's Sproul series, Your Christ is Too Small. We've learned how Jesus described Himself, how God the Father identified Him. We've learned of His majesty and glory. But today we'll see how one group of people during Jesus' earthly ministry viewed Him, a way that is shocking and false.

But first, Chris Larson has stopped by the studio. He's our president and CEO. And, Chris, for those who are new to Renewing Your Mind and Ligonier Ministries, I think it's helpful to explain what our mission is here at Ligonier and what we're here to do. Ligonier Ministries exist to proclaim, teach, and defend the holiness of God in all its fullness. And something that by God's grace, I believe, has given Ligonier staying power, even after R.C. went to be with the Lord several years ago, is the fact that R.C. had integrity in his ministry that was not chasing the novel, but only sought to teach that which was enduring truth. So just listen to this testimony from Noel, who expresses just that thought.

Ligonier and R.C. introduced a holy God to me. That's what it did. And that's what it's doing. And that doesn't change. And that is going to be the thing that will continue this into the next fifty years, because God does not change.

If they continue with that message, Ligonier will not change. It will always be the right thing, because it's always saying the right thing, the truth. That's what it is for me, is it introduced a holy God to me. And by God's grace, we will continue doing just that. Let's turn now to R.C. 's message for today titled, Jesus the Glutton and Winebibber.

I'm going to do something a little different in this segment. I want to consider the question, how Jesus was viewed by His enemies and why. And I think before we look at that, we need to first of all identify who Jesus' chief enemies were. Let me ask you, when you read the New Testament, who is it that comes across rather obviously as being the chief enemies of Jesus from His own days? Well, members of the Sanhedrin, of the ruling body, the big hitters, the heavyweights of the ruling class, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees. If we want to lump those all together, the bad news is it was the clergy that Jesus had more trouble with the clergy than with anyone else.

And there were obviously some reasons for that. There was no particular group of Jewish people who had more to lose with the appearance of Jesus than the professional clergy because they were considered as the paragons of virtues, the supreme models of righteousness in the community. And when the perfectly righteous one came, they not only were displaced and brought low, but they were exposed.

They say the old cliché is that nothing exposes a lie more quickly than the truth when it stands beside it. And so the Pharisees had to lose their turf. They had to lose their status and their prestige, and people will go at great lengths to protect the status that they've worked very hard to achieve. And so these people, among all others, were the ones most critical and hostile toward Jesus. And those that were most comfortable with Jesus seemed to be the ones who were the most irreligious, the most impious, the most secular, as it were. Now part of that can be understood by Jesus' understanding of His own mission. He repeatedly said that the reason why He came into the world was to seek and to save the lost. And He made statements like those who are whole have no need of a physician, but those who are ill, they're the ones who need the physician. And so we see Jesus' public ministry and His style of ministry being very much shaped by a spirit of compassion. Jesus' ministry was simply this. He went where the pain was.

And He didn't come in a patronizing attitude. He didn't minister to the lowly and to the broken simply so that He could exalt His own wholeness. But there was genuine compassion.

His heart was breaking for people who were lost. And it was said of Jesus, a bruised reed would He not break, that Jesus was very careful to protect the dignity of the most heinous sinners. And that was another thing that caused great grief for Jesus in terms of His contemporaries. Because the Pharisees would have no dealings with Samaritans, Jesus would talk to the Samaritans. Jesus cared about the Samaritans. And some of the Jews of the day believed that they could be saved or sanctified by segregation. That is, by keeping themselves unspotted from any kind of close proximity with people who were living godless lives. Whereas Jesus went straight to the heart of godlessness and associated with the people who we would frown upon because He cared for them. And He didn't go there to destroy them or to break the people that were bruised but to heal them.

And that upset the establishment. Well, okay, we've identified now the enemies of Jesus, the religious establishment, the ones who were the strict moralists, the ones who had the highest reputation for righteousness, whom Jesus demonstrates to be people of external righteousness only. But let's see what some of the charges were that were brought against Him by His contemporaries. Before I read this one in Matthew 12, there's one that we're all familiar with, and that is that when Jesus performs His ministry of demon exorcism, we remember that the Pharisees accused Him of casting out Satan by the power of Satan. And so they said that He was in association with Beelzebub.

Do you remember that? So this is one of the perceptions that the enemies of Jesus had in His contemporary period of Him, that Jesus was in league with the devil. Who was Beelzebub? Do you know what the name Beelzebub means? The literal translation of the name Beelzebub is Lord of the Flies.

We've seen a novel in our own generation by that title, Lord of the Flies. And it was one of those awful titles given to Satan and his cohorts. And so here they're saying that Jesus is mixed up with Satan.

Now to understand that, we have to look at something else that was strange. When we examine the miracles that Jesus performed in the New Testament, they are astonishing to be sure, but if we would set them into different classes and different characteristics, we would see that almost every type of miracle that Jesus performed in the New Testament was also performed by somebody in the Old Testament. People like Elijah and Elisha and Moses and so did amazing miracles in the Old Testament. People were raised from the dead. There were miracles of nature with an axe head floating in the parting of the Red Sea and things like that that took place in the Old Testament. There was the widow's cruise in the case of Elijah.

There would be something like the water to wine. And almost everything that Jesus did had its duplicate in the Old Testament. But the one kind of miracle that really got the attention of Jesus' contemporaries was this whole business of casting out demons, because that was unprecedented. And Jesus Himself called attention to it as being of special importance. He said, if you see me casting out Satan by the finger of God, then what? Then you know that the kingdom of God has come upon you. Jesus said this sign, all the miracles were signs, but this sign is of peculiar significance. If you see this happening, then you know that a dramatic moment has taken place in the history of mankind, that now the kingdom of God is breaking into time and space in a way that no one was ever familiar with in the past. Now, instead of rejoicing in that, the Pharisees said He casts out Satan by the power of Satan.

That's heavy stuff. Now, we've all been criticized. Every one of us has had to learn how to deal with criticism, and I've been called lots of things, but I'm not aware of anybody actually calling me a real live, honest to goodness, devil. That's what they're saying about Jesus. And Jesus, did you ever notice how tolerant Jesus was of criticism? People would call Him all kinds of things, get all mad at Him, and He would open not His mouth. He would accept it.

He would smile or, you know, so on. He had a thick skin. But when the Pharisees called Him Satan, it's then that Jesus gave the most scary warning that He ever gives in the New Testament, do you remember? That was the occasion when Jesus spoke of the unforgivable sin. And He said, you can say a word against people, and you can speak against the Son of Man, but He who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven in this world or in the world to come. Now, notice He says in there, you can say bad things about Me, about the Son of Man, but don't blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. The tone or the thrust of what Jesus was saying to the Pharisees at that point was this. He was saying, hey, be careful.

It's one thing for you guys to call me this and to call me that and to be mad about this and be mad about that, but you be careful. You see, He had just told them that the power by which He was casting out Satan was through the finger of God. And biblically, the phrase finger of God is a technical term. It's a title that the Jews understood.

It's a reference clearly to who? To the Holy Spirit. And what Jesus was saying was, I'm doing this ministry through the power of the Holy Spirit, and you are saying that I'm doing it through the power of Satan. Now, you be careful, because if this is the Holy Spirit working here in history in a new and dramatic way, and you're saying that it's the work of Satan, you are coming perilously close to the unforgivable sin. But that's one thing that they said of Jesus, that He was in league with Satan, that He was demonic, that He Himself had a demon. The other thing, which I think is interesting, particularly for us, because in the Christian community, you don't find too many people saying that Jesus had a demon or that Jesus was of the devil. And you don't usually find it in the secular community either, because if they don't believe that Jesus was divine, it's usually because they don't believe in the supernatural and that it would be as repugnant to them to talk about the devil as it is to talk about a divine Jesus. So Jesus doesn't get that kind of attack in this day and age very much.

But let's look at the next one, which I think is particularly significant. We read it in the 11th chapter of Matthew's Gospel, where Jesus is responding to His contemporaries, and He says, To what shall I liken this generation? He says it's like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their companions and saying, We played the flute for you and you did not dance.

We mourned to you and you did not lament. Now that's a puzzling statement from Jesus, and I don't think anybody knows for sure exactly what He means. The research of New Testament scholarship is pretty confident that there was, in fact, a children's game that was commonplace at this time in church history where kids played little games like we played Release the Peddler or Kick the Can or Jump Rope little songs that we sang, and one of the things that the children sang was this song. And the gist of the song is, No matter what we do, we can't please you. If you want us to be happy and we play the flute, you won't dance. If you want us to be sad and we mourn for you, you won't mourn. And the complaint is here, in a very childish way, is there's no way in the world I can ever please you.

Do you ever feel that way about your critics? Damned if you do, damned if you don't is the mentality. This is exactly what that verse is saying here. And then Jesus illustrates it by saying this. He said, Now look at John the Baptist. John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say he has a demon. John was an ascetic. He was given to rigorous self-denial. No one could ever accuse John the Baptist of embracing a prosperity ethic.

Nobody could ever accuse John the Baptist of materialism. John the Baptist lived like the world's worst hermit, eating locusts and wild hunting and dressed like some crazy man, and he came out of the desert and he lived this rigorous life of self-denial. And so he came into town fasting, denying himself, an austere, stern, prophetic character, and everybody looked at him and thought he was nuts and said he was a demon.

Now listen to what Jesus says. The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, Look, a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. Some people looked at Jesus and said, There's the Messiah. Some people looked at Jesus and said, There's the Son of David. Some people looked at him and said, There's the Son of God. Some people looked at him and said, Here is our Lord.

Philosophers looked at him and said, He is the logos, the supreme principle of coherence in the universe. Other people looked at him and said, He's a drunk. He's a glutton. Was Jesus a drunk? Of course not. Was Jesus a glutton?

Of course not. But why did people call him a glutton and a drunk? And who were the people who accused him of that? The fundamentalists.

That's the only way I can read that. Jesus scandalized those people who had reduced the things of God to superficial external matters. And we see it all around us in the church today, people who major in minors and who want to reduce the kingdom of God to eating and drinking. That is not Christianity.

The same people who are that way in their mentality would have been the ones who were yelling at Jesus. Why did they call him a glutton? Because he went to festivals. He went to dinners. Why did they call him a winebibbers? Because he went to wedding feasts.

And not only did he go as a guest, but imagine today if a minister went to a wedding and they were serving champagne, and he drank the champagne at the wedding. He could get himself in big trouble, couldn't he? His piety, his spirituality, his Godliness would be brought into question. But he might be able to get away with it.

But what if he comes to the wedding and he tells his friends, he says, go out to the truck and bring in 15 cases of Dom Perignon for these people because we're going to have the best wine that we can possibly have. And if a minister did that, and a minister did that, he'd be crucified, wouldn't he? But that's what Jesus did. And you watch the gymnastics of people who want to say that Jesus never drank, that the wine that he drank wasn't wine, it was grapefruit. Let me tell you what, that is baloney. And anybody teaches you that, you know right away they don't know the first thing of first century culture, and they don't know anything about New Testament Greek.

Jesus made wine, and Jesus drank wine, and at times in large quantities, Jesus never got drunk. The wedding feast at Canaan, you think, well, in American terms, a wedding feast, we go to a wedding, we sit for 15 minutes while they tie the knot, then you go to the country club or you go to the meeting hall, and you sit there for 20 minutes for a half hour. And if it's a Polish wedding, it's three hours or four hours. If it's an Italian wedding, an Italian wedding, it may go six hours, but that's it, right?

You have a good time. In these days, a wedding would go for a week or two weeks, because it was a major economic transaction, like a Bedouin chic or a tribal leader. I mean, remember, they didn't have proposals and moonlight strolls.

This was an arrangement where they made an arrangement, and there were dowries involved, and so when the marriage took place, it was a major social event. And they would bring foodstuffs to have a party that would go on for a week or for two weeks, and the wine was flowing. And again, they didn't bring grape juice. They brought real wine. And Jesus goes to this wine. He's going to a party.

He's having a good time. And what happens, they run out of wine, and Jesus says, that's okay, I'll take care of it. His very first miracle of his very first miracle was to make wine, real wine, the same substance that he consecrated as a symbol of the supreme redemptive act in history. But there were people who were offended by that and said, that guy is a wine bibber. We're not going to trust him. The reason I labor this point, dear friends, is that I'm convinced that if Jesus of Nazareth came to him in the United States of America today, he would be rejected in some of the most zealous evangelical circles by his behavior. He would not be trusted. If you saw Jesus walk into a tavern, would you question his spirituality? But that's where the lost people were, in the taverns. And that's where he went to minister, in the tavern.

They're mad at him because he ate dinner with tax collectors, crooks. If ever a man could have been destroyed by the principle of guilt by association, it was Jesus of Nazareth. Now, we have to face that if we're going to have a biblical understanding of Jesus. Now, I am not saying that therefore Jesus is teaching the Christian church that the Christian church ought to go out and embrace worldliness and get as drunk as they can be.

No, no, no, no, no. Jesus never got drunk. Jesus never abused the flesh. Jesus never participated in adultery. Jesus was sinless, but Jesus associated with prostitutes. And Jesus was criticized for that sort of thing, but he did it. Now, how did Jesus react to these people?

Every person is different. The good shepherd knows his sheep, and he speaks softly to one sheep, and he speaks loud to the other sheep. He sits down and talks to a woman who is a confessed adulterer. She's had five husbands, and the one guy she's living with isn't her husband either, and how does he talk to her? He calls her woman. He treats her with dignity. He's kind to her. How does he talk to the Pharisees?

Ask no quarter and give none. Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You go over land and sea to make one convert, and after you made him, you make him twice the child of hell than you are yourself. Jesus comes on those guys like gangbusters. He is as hard as nails when He's dealing with the Pharisees. With the weak, Jesus is tender.

With the professionals, He's hard as a rock. That was His style because He knew people, and He knew what was appropriate, and He knew what He didn't have some simplistic little set of guidelines that He's going to treat everybody the same. He was concerned for the individual, but His critics hated Him because of who He loved and who He cared about and who He was willing to be seen with. But Jesus' whole life and mission was a matter of guilt by association because the only kind of people Jesus ever associated with was guilty people because that's the only kind of people there are. So take your pick, you know, whether He spends His time with tax collectors, spends His time with prostitutes, spends His time with drunkards, or spends His time with hypocritical Pharisees. Wherever He is, He's with sinners because that's who He came to minister to.

Guilt by Association. What a great explanation of the accusations brought against Jesus. This is Renewing Your Mind, and we're featuring Dr. R.C. Sproul's series, Your Christ is Too Small.

This is classic R.C. Sproul material and a great example of why we so appreciate his teaching. This series is available exclusively from our special ministry partner archives, a collection of sermons and messages available only to those who sign up to give a monthly gift to the ministry. Partners are a special group, and we serve them with exclusive resources and other benefits. Their stable monthly generosity also fuels everything we do here on Renewing Your Mind and through Ligonier.

If you have benefited from Ligonier through the years, I hope you'll consider becoming a monthly partner. It will have a generational impact like that of Bill and his dad. Back in the 80s, when I was a young teenager, my father listened to R.C.

and was a member of the Tape of the Month Club. And so I was introduced to R.C. 's teaching through my father as my dad would drive to wherever we might be going. But I was brought up in a Reformed faith, but kind of as years went on, I kind of got away from the truth over the Reformed faith and got back into listening to R.C. after my father's passing in 2010. And I've just been blessed through the teachings of R.C. and Ligonier, and I'm very thankful for what you guys do and continue to do, and I hope you continue to do it for as long as we're here.

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We are grateful for your support, especially in this, our 50th anniversary year. Dr. Sproul was never afraid to tackle difficult and often controversial theological topics. He did that because the Bible addresses them, for example, predestination. Next week we will bring you his seminal work on that doctrine, the series Chosen by God. So I hope you'll join us beginning Monday, here on Renewing Your Mind. you