Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
More Than They Asked For (Matthew 22:15-22)
56 Plays4 years ago
More Than They Asked For (Matthew 22:15-22)
--
Sunday Message recorded 06 June 2021
by Stephen Mick
First Baptist Church
1700 Milam
Columbus, TX, USA 78934
http://fbccolumbustx.org/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Mercy
00:00:00
Speaker
Well, good morning again. It's nice to see everybody again. I hope over this past week that you've been able to put mercy into practice. We talked about it last week. We've sung about it again today. And it is truly amazing and remarkable and refreshing how merciful God is. And no matter who you are or where you've been or what you've done, you're not beyond God's mercy.
00:00:27
Speaker
And I hope that not only have you experienced His mercy this week, but you've been a conduit for His mercy to your family, to your friends, and to your community.
Who Owns You?
00:00:39
Speaker
I want to start this week with a question. The question might seem like it comes out of the blue, so I'll give you a moment to digest it and to think about it. And hopefully through the course of the next few minutes, we can arrive at an answer. The question is this.
00:00:56
Speaker
Who owns you? Who owns you? Well, you can do a Google search, and you can find all sorts of uses of that phrase. And that's not what I mean. I'll give you an example. You could say that if you're an athlete, and you're constantly competing against a different athlete who's taller, faster, stronger, better, that every time you compete, you lose, and they own you.
00:01:26
Speaker
I'm not talking about that. And it turns out there's actually this very interesting and kind of ominous and scary thing that's happening.
Social Media and Ownership
00:01:36
Speaker
You could imagine being part of a social media network. Maybe you upload pictures to Snapchat or Instagram or Facebook. Turns out some of these companies are working, this is cool but scary, working on making 3D models of you from your images.
00:01:54
Speaker
so that they can superimpose you into ads they send to your friends, showing, like, Josh, maybe they know, I follow you, and I like Jeeps, so they show you in a Jeep and target the ad to me. And the question is, well, who owns you? Who owns those images?
00:02:13
Speaker
That's actually a coming question that our society will have to deal with. And there's also a book called Who Owns You, and it's about who owns your DNA and your RNA. Suppose you leave your fingerprints somewhere in a restaurant and a scientist scoops it up and makes a clone of you. Who owns you? I don't mean any of those things. What I mean is like who owns the you who is right here right now? Who owns you?
00:02:41
Speaker
It could be that you say, nobody. I own me. I own my car. I own my house. I own clothes. I own my appliances. Nobody owns me but me. Or maybe you feel a weighty sense of obligation, like, well, my obligations own me. My family owns me. There are things I would like to do, but I can't. Maybe your job and your career own you.
00:03:12
Speaker
Maybe your past, maybe your regret, shame, mis-opportunities, own you because they haunt you. But who owns you? If any of these answers resonate with you, then we're in for some good news today.
Biblical Challenge from Matthew 22
00:03:31
Speaker
I invite you to turn with me to Matthew chapter 22.
00:03:36
Speaker
We're going to intersect a time where Jesus has been doing his ministry for several years, and the religious leaders of the day, they're wanting to put a stop to it. So Matthew chapter 22, we'll have it up on the screen for you. If you wouldn't mind, would you please stand in honor of God's word, we'll read, we'll read the passage, and then I'll pray for us. All right, Matthew 22, starting in verse 15,
00:04:05
Speaker
The Pharisees went and they plotted how to entangle him, how to entangle Jesus, in his words. And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying this, teacher, we know that you are true and teach the way of God truthfully, and you do not care about anyone's opinion, for you are not swayed by appearances.
00:04:30
Speaker
Tell us then what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not? But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin for the tax. And they brought him a denarius. And Jesus said to them, whose likeness and inscription is this? They said, Caesar's.
00:04:56
Speaker
And then he said to them, therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's. And when they heard it, they marveled and they left him and went away. Let's pray. Lord, I pray that you help us today to think through these verses and understand what it is that you taught and why they marveled. Lord, I pray that you would make us marvel as well in Christ's name.
00:05:23
Speaker
All right, so we'll start, you know, last week when I was up here, I said, what we always do in the youth department, we'll read a passage, then we just go back through it and make sure we understood what it was that we just read,
Trapping Jesus: The Tax Question
00:05:34
Speaker
right? The Pharisees, they went out and they were trying to figure out how to entangle Jesus in his words.
00:05:43
Speaker
They're trying to create a situation where Jesus has to give a technical answer to something and they're hoping to trip him up to show that he's not as smart as the crowd believes him to be. Have you ever been tripped up by a question? Somebody asked you to defend something and you start an explanation and then you're like, wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on. They're trying to catch Jesus on the spot.
00:06:12
Speaker
In verse 16, you see that there's this unlikely alliance. It tells us there's two groups, really, that are involved in this particular plot. There are the Pharisees and their disciples. And there's another group called the Herodians. The Pharisees were a group that were pro-Israel. To their credit, they were pro-Scripture. They were in favor of holiness and having a right and true connection with God.
00:06:39
Speaker
And sadly, they simply happened, they were anti-Jesus. Where the Pharisees are pro-Israel and the group they go along with, the Herodians are pro-Rome. And these two groups should be natural foes. But you see here, the true nature of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And together, they both hated Jesus enough that they team up to try to trap him.
00:07:09
Speaker
So they're unlikely allies in this case. And we only know in scripture of one other time these two groups got together and that's in Mark chapter three. What had happened there is Jesus on the Sabbath day went to church to the synagogue and there was a man there who needed mercy. He had a withered hand and Jesus had the audacity
00:07:36
Speaker
to heal a man with a need in church on Sunday, on the Sabbath. Wow. Well, they were so enraged by this, it tells us at the end of that passage that the Pharisees and the Herodians got together to plot, quote, how to destroy Jesus.
00:07:56
Speaker
Right, so these natural foes came together with the intent here again to get rid of Jesus. And notice how they start their engagement with Jesus. They're using flattery. They say, oh, teacher, we know that you teach truthfully. Well, just because it's flattery doesn't make it wrong, because Jesus does teach truthfully. And they say, you're not swayed by other people's appearances. Well, that's true, he's not.
00:08:25
Speaker
Right, but you can almost imagine them in your mind's eye rubbing their hands and going, hee hee hee. You're not afraid of anyone. You don't care about outward appearances, but we're about to ask you a question that's sure to offend someone. You better care. You need these people. And the question they're about to ask, you see in the next verse, is about paying taxes.
00:08:51
Speaker
And they form it in the phrase of a yes, no answer. You either say yes, it's okay to pay taxes, or you say no, it's not okay to pay taxes. Yes, well that puts you in trouble with the Jewish people you're trying to reach because they hate Roman, they hate taxes. But if you say no, well that puts you in trouble with the Romans. And it's not like the Romans are like IRS.
00:09:17
Speaker
where you get a tax fine. No, refusing to pay taxes and inciting people not to pay taxes was a punishable offense, prison or death. And if you fast forward, when Jesus is on trial, one of the charges that's brought against him is that he was inciting people not to pay the tribute, a false charge. So
00:09:41
Speaker
We see the trap being set up. They're asking them this yes or no question. They're thinking that they can get him entangled in his words and from this same account but in Luke, not in Matthew, we know they're hoping he will say no to taxes so they can deliver him to the authorities. That's what it says in Luke. So the specific tax here, just for your information, this is free.
00:10:06
Speaker
It refers to a poll tax or a tribute and the best consensus on what it was is a wealth tax. So if you owned a house, you took a portion of the value of the house and you had to pay it to Rome. You owned a boat because you were a fisherman, you owned nets, took a portion of the value and had to pay it. And all of this tax had to be paid in Roman currency, not in Jewish currency.
00:10:28
Speaker
So it's not only overbearing, as you might know as a property owner who has to pay taxes on your house and such. For them it was overbearing because they also had to transfer their currency into the Roman currency at the time.
00:10:44
Speaker
So verse 18, Jesus understands the situation. He's not trapped by it. He's not confused by it. And he's not overwhelmed by their flattery, because what does he tell them? Well, it's pretty direct. Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Because Jesus saw their heart in the matter. And it says here that they approached him with malice. And the question they ask, it's a legal question.
00:11:09
Speaker
Right, notice what it says. Is it lawful to pay taxes? I mean, it'd be easy for that word to just go past us and not recognize what they're actually asking Jesus. But when Jewish leaders ask a law question, what they're asking Jesus to do is to respond with an argument from the first five books of the Old Testament. Right, so what they've basically said is Jesus,
00:11:39
Speaker
issue of taxes to Caesar. Prove to us, from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, whether it's lawful. So that makes the problem narrower, but also harder. Because remember, unlike us who considered a computer and type and watch people do sermons on a text and listen to blogs and research the meanings of words and have access to everything, they had their memory.
00:12:10
Speaker
So the law experts, the Pharisees, Herodians, they had the books memorized. They were experts in the law. They could make the case. So let's get to Jesus' answer. Verses 19 to 20, the first part of it.
Jesus and the Coin: Profound Teachings
00:12:27
Speaker
What does he say? Show me the coin. So they brought him one of the coins at Daenerys. And Jesus asked them whose likeness and inscription is on it.
00:12:38
Speaker
I've got a picture for you of the coin, the most likely use. This is the denarius. The picture on your left is the head of Tiberius Caesar. You can see the inscription around the right side. It says Ty Caesar, and that refers to Tiberius Caesar. This was his coin. It was made in Lyon, France at the time.
00:13:06
Speaker
And then the troubling part of this coin, you notice he's wearing like this laurel wreath, and near his forehead are the four letters D-I-V-I, D-V. It's making the claim that he's God. So the Jewish people objected to using this coin because on it Tiberius Caesar is making the claim that he himself is God.
00:13:30
Speaker
And in the backside, the image presumably is of his mother posing as the goddess of peace. And it says pox on the backside of the coin. So the likeness, in Roman times, the likeness of him with the claim of deity, it actually made a claim of ownership on all who transacted in the coin.
00:13:54
Speaker
which isn't too unlike what happens even in modern day. I've had to take a lot of classes with the company I work for. And it turns out, any transaction anywhere in the world that's done in US dollars, the US government claims jurisdiction over. So how does the US prosecute money laundering in Chile or a crime in Morocco? Well, if they use US dollars, they claim jurisdiction. With the currency comes power.
00:14:23
Speaker
And it was more so under Tiberius Caesar. When he had his image claiming to be God, he was delegating a micro amount of his power with each coin, but he maintained control over all of his subjects. That was his thinking. With money came power. Money and power, they went hand in hand. And I think we'd have to admit it's not that much different today. Money and power go hand in hand.
00:14:52
Speaker
And it's this power and control that come with money. It's really, I think, true that we attribute that to money. We expect it of money. And we even want it from our money. I mean, we want ease and comfort. We want to take the burden off ourselves, and that costs money. We want peace of mind. We want to accumulate, to retire.
00:15:20
Speaker
When there's a run on toilet paper, we want a stockpile, right? But there's this temptation. We attribute having money to being a good thing, and it can be. It is a tool. I'm not anti-money, but there's a danger that comes with it. The danger in accumulating, the danger with attributing control and power to it is that we can forget to depend on God.
00:15:49
Speaker
Life is fragile and it doesn't matter how many millions you have, it can be gone in an instant. And money doesn't buy the things that matter most. Yeah, money can buy a house, money can buy a lot of houses, but it can't buy a home. Money can buy a crowd, but it can't buy friends. And money can buy experiences,
00:16:18
Speaker
but it can't buy meaning. Right, in all of this, this transfer of power, the deceptive power and control of money, all of this was wrapped up in the coin of Caesar and worse, it claimed him to be God.
00:16:38
Speaker
And so the Jews, they objected to using this money with his image and his description, his inscription, well, because of the Ten Commandments. They objected to these false teachings of money and they objected to him being claimed as God. Exodus chapter 20, verses three and four is the first two of the Ten Commandments. And it says, there you shall have no other God before me. And there Tiberius Caesar thumbing his nose in the face of God, claiming himself to be God.
00:17:05
Speaker
And the next one says, and you shall have no graven images. And there you have a graven image. So this coin was horrifying to the Jews on two counts.
00:17:20
Speaker
And it's for those reasons that the coin wasn't even allowed to be in the temple. It shouldn't have been, which is why you find in the previous chapter, Jesus go in, goes into the temple and he clears out the money changers, the people who were trading Roman currency for Jewish currency, because the Jewish taxes you had to pay in Jewish currency. And the people there that should have been performing a service were taking advantage of their fellow countrymen. All right.
00:17:49
Speaker
All right, so how then does Jesus actually answer the question? We'll come back to that. Verses 20 and 21, let's read that again. It says, Jesus said to them whose likeness and inscription is this, and they say Caesar's. And then he said to them, therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's. So we'll get to the answer in just a second. But notice part of the answer is in Jesus purposely using two words, image and inscription.
00:18:19
Speaker
They have the coin in front of them and it might be easy to think he's only referring to an object. But his statement, give God what is God's, is also linked to these two words, image and inscription. The Jewish leaders, they would have understood that.
00:18:42
Speaker
because they're legal experts. They've just asked Jesus, use the first five books of the Bible, and Jesus, on the spur of the moment, gets presented a question, has the wherewithal to ask a question or to ask for an object. From that object picks two features out of it that make them remember the Torah. Image and inscription. What would they have remembered? Well, they would have remembered this.
00:19:13
Speaker
that God's image is within us and his inscription is upon us. Genesis 1, verse 26, it says, God said, let us make man in our image after our own likeness. That's repeated throughout Genesis 9-6. Genesis 9-6, it says, whoever sheds the blood of man by man, shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.
00:19:44
Speaker
The whole concept of God's image and the power that conveys and the creativity we experience because of it, they understood when he used the word image, it was part of their way of life, understanding the image of God. And there's the coin, and Jesus is essentially saying, sure, Caesar has his image on this coin, but God has his image on you.
00:20:14
Speaker
and the inscription they would have known, and we can learn now, that the inscription referred to God's law. And God's law, if you study it, is not just rules of do's and don'ts. It's a showcase of God's promises and our hope. And I wish we'd have time to go into it, but we don't. But God's law is not just do's and don'ts, it's His promises encapsulated. It's our hope.
00:20:45
Speaker
It's his inscription. In Exodus chapter 31, 10 commandments, Moses receives them from God and it says, when the Lord finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the covenant law, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God.
00:21:06
Speaker
In Deuteronomy 27, verses one through eight, as they're going to enter the land, they're told to set up two gigantic stones, cover them with plaster, and inscribe on them the words of the Torah. And that's so that everybody in the land would have access. It would never be hidden, always available, but again, inscribed. It was the rule of the land, the way of life, the inscription.
00:21:34
Speaker
And in Deuteronomy chapter six, verses four through nine, there's a famous passage that has a title. It's called the Shema. It's a section of scripture that the faithful Jewish people repeat even to this day. It says, here, O Israel, our Lord is one. The Lord our God is one. And it goes on to say, take these commandments, take this inscription and write them on your hands, bind them to your forehead, write them on your doorposts, inscribe, inscribe, inscribe.
00:22:06
Speaker
because God is with you. Right, so Jesus, it's amazing, he sees a coin, he picks out two features, the image and the inscription, and they know. It's irrefutable to them, God's image is in us and his inscription is upon us.
God's Ownership of All
00:22:29
Speaker
So they get more than they wanted.
00:22:32
Speaker
They try to trap them. They ask a question about taxes, and he's essentially telling them, yeah, go ahead, pay taxes, because paying the poll tax doesn't validate Caesar as God. It acknowledges God's authority. God made every person, including Caesar, and God's inscription is on every person. Caesar's not exempt.
00:23:00
Speaker
but they also got a rebuke. In part, they objected to paying the tax because of the image and the inscription on the coin, but they also objected to paying taxes because of their situation. And what they would have remembered, I'm sure of it, is that God owns everything. This too is found in the Torah.
00:23:23
Speaker
You see it in Exodus 23 and Deuteronomy 32 is repeated for us by Paul in Acts 17. If you're on the gospel project, we studied it a couple of weeks ago. But I'll read to you Leviticus chapter 25 verse 23.
00:23:37
Speaker
If you're taking notes, I'll say it again. Leviticus chapter 25 verse 23. Here's what God says to his people. He says, the land is not to be permanently sold because it is mine. And you are only foreigners and temporary residents on my land. That's what God told them.
00:24:00
Speaker
And as they think through their history and what God had told them, his image is upon them, their inscription is in them. And God is the owner of everything. They got a rebuke from Jesus in the simple phrase. We also are made in God's image. And his word is inscribed on us. And he's still the owner of everything and everyone.
00:24:30
Speaker
and these truths of God's image and his inscription and his ownership. They don't stop with just the Torah. They carry through to the rest of the Old Testament and into the New Testament because they remain true. But there's more. They become intensely personal and intimate. And we see in Colossians chapter one, verse 15, talking about Jesus, it says, he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
00:24:59
Speaker
Jesus is the image of God. And we see in 1 Corinthians 15 that by faith we ourselves can bear the image of Jesus. It says, just as we have borne the image of man made in the dust, we will also bear the image of the heavenly man. You see, you could be sitting there and recognize, like we all should, I might once have had the image of God upon me.
00:25:30
Speaker
but it's pretty hard to see because I have defaced it, corrupted it, betrayed it, rebelled against it. And Romans 8, 29 says we can be conformed into the image of Jesus. God's mercy is more.
00:25:54
Speaker
We have corrupted his image on us. We have defied his image on us. We have tried to stamp perhaps our own image on top of his. Right, Calvin, who sits on the throne of your heart? Right, whose image is upon your heart? It's like in Tiberius's day, a common practice for the Caesar of the day was to collect all the coins, melt them and recast them with their own image.
00:26:24
Speaker
And God's saying, I've got something better for you. I can take the image on your heart and recast it and remake it. You don't have to stay where you are. And then the inscription. So notice in the Old Testament, when we went through the Torah, it was about writing God's law on objects. In Jeremiah, God gives us a fantastic promise. The heading you'll see in your Bible says, New Covenant.
00:26:54
Speaker
A new promise, and here's what it says, instead of this covenant, I will make with the house of Israel after those days, the Lord declares, a new covenant. I will put my teaching within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. God promises a time when his words aren't just external, but they're resident within us, written on our hearts.
00:27:23
Speaker
That's repeated again in two places in Hebrews. In Romans chapter two, verse 15, it tells us that the people that don't believe in God and people we might think are unreached by knowledge of Jesus, it says this about them, they show that the work of the law is written on their hearts. Their consciences confirm this. Right, God with the new covenant through Christ
00:27:54
Speaker
will remake your image to what it should have been and to write His law on your heart. And then we hear this great promise that there is a specific inscription that God promises. It says in 2 Timothy 2.15, God's solid foundation stands firmed, sealed with this inscription, the Lord knows those who are His.
00:28:19
Speaker
And for ownership, you see this concept in many places. I'll just read one verse to you, 1 Corinthians 6, verse 19 and 20. It says, don't you know, your body is a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, you are not your own, you are bought with a price, therefore honor God with your body. God owns everything, his imprint now with the new covenant through Christ's image,
00:28:47
Speaker
is remade within us. His inscription is within us. And he still owns everyone, everywhere. We're all owned by somebody. Someone's image and someone's inscription is on your heart. So I ask you, who owns you? Well, God extends to you the offer to let it be him. Let's pray.
00:29:21
Speaker
Lord God, I thank you so much for just the marvelous response that you gave to those who were trying to trap you with words and technical arguments. And I thank you for what we can learn by thinking about what it means in God's image and God's inscription. I pray, God, that you'd want, you'd help us to want desire to plead for your image to be remade on our hearts.
00:29:50
Speaker
Lord your inscription to be rewritten on our hearts. Help us God to give ourselves to you in Christ's name. Amen.