Authority is everywhere. It's inescapable.
You can't get away from it. If you walk out your door and
continue on foot or get into your car, it will not be long
before you come to a stop sign or red light telling you to
cease your motion. By what authority can this sign
or light tell you to stop? Who put it there?
Another example of authority being everywhere.
I took my three daughters to a UNC women's soccer game this
last week in which they defeated Alabama 4 to 0.
We were looking for a parking spot along Stadium Rd.
Nothing there. All the parking spots are taken.
You know, we, we go on this little side Rd. that kind of
cuts toward the stadium. There's all these open spots,
but they all say parking restricted 24 hours for visitors
to the Sports Science Center or something or other.
All these open spots, but I can't take it because it is
restricted 24 hours. Thankfully, at the very bottom
of the hill, tucked away, there's this little spot for,
you know, a daytime service worker.
And it ended at 5:00 PM. And it was open so we could go
to the game. How can UNC do that to us?
Well, they own the land, they own the property.
They get to decide who parks there.
I'm just a humble supplicant trying to get to a soccer game,
not knowing where to park. If you've got parking secrets
for Dorrance Field, let me know, because I won't be the last
soccer game I take my girls to. In those minor ways, authority
puts a stop to things you might want to do or plan to do.
It's that confrontation with your desire or effort or long
held ambition that when authority confronts you in some
more significant way, that's why you don't like it.
We don't like it when an authority tells us we don't want
to do something or we we can't do something we want to do.
We don't like it when an authority makes a claim on us to
make us do something we don't want to do, pay this amount in
taxes or pay this ticket that got snapped on your car when
you're on the freeway, etcetera. There's a clash between the
desires of our heart and the things that authorities often
require or forbid. And one of our most natural
responses then is to question the legitimacy of that
authority. Well, who says, are you really
in charge? Maybe this authority is
illegitimate. Maybe it's maybe it's overreach.
And of course, in some cases it is.
In some cases there are legitimate grounds to question
authority or lodge an appeal about a given authority.
But all that I'm trying to highlight right now is that
we're often motivated to question authority because of a
previous desire or commitment, something deeply rooted in our
hearts. In our passage this morning,
we're continuing our series in Mark's Gospel, Chapter 11,
verses 27 to 33, a whole gathering of religious leaders,
really representing all the main religious authorities of Israel
during Jesus time, headquartered in Jerusalem, get together and
challenge Jesus about the nature and source of his authority.
That's what our whole passage is about.
It's in response, as we'll see, to what Jesus did just
previously in the temple where he he brought everything to a
halt and called the whole show off.
So then actually come to him and say, where'd you get off doing
that? Who says you can do that?
This is what happens when Jesus's authority is challenged.
What does it reveal to us? Please follow along as I read
Mark 1127 to 33. And they came again to
Jerusalem. And as he was walking in the
temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the elders came
to him. And they said to him, By what
authority are you doing these things?
Or who gave you this authority to do them?
Jesus said to them, I will ask you one question, Answer me, and
I will tell you by what authority I do these things.
Was the baptism of John from heaven or from man?
Answer me. And they discussed it with one
another, saying, If we say from heaven, he will say, Why then
did you not believe him? But shall we say from man?
They were afraid of the people, for they all held that John
really was a prophet. So they answered Jesus, We do
not know. And Jesus said to them, Neither
will I tell you by what authority I do these things.
Now that Jesus has entered Jerusalem, the last week of his
life has begun, and the Gospel of Mark is going to be dedicated
for about the next chapter to a series of conflicts between
Jesus and the religious authorities.
Conflicts over his authority, Conflicts over the nature of
what it means to be Messiah, conflicts over who has or has
not been a rightful steward of the leadership of the people of
Israel. This passage is kind of an
introduction, an entryway to this whole series of conflicts
that, Lord willing, we'll consider in our next few
sermons. Here, the point is simple to
kind of summarize the text in one sentence.
Jesus refuses to defend his authority on terms set by
unbelief. In other words, divine authority
does not submit to human scrutiny, just like we saw a few
moments ago in that reading from Job 40.
So the question we can ask that will frame our study of the
whole passage is this. What happens when human unbelief
challenges divine authority? What happens when human unbelief
challenges divine authority? What's revealed?
What do we discover? What does it show us about
ourselves? What does it show us about the
right way to relate to God? So our outline's going to have
two parts, human unbelief and divine authority.
We're going to consider 3 aspects of each.
So if you are a note taker or you really want to keep the
outline clear in your head, two points.
Each will have 3 sub points point #1 human unbelief.
So in a sense, we're going to consider the question from the
religious authorities and kind of study all that that implies
from them and their response. We're going to focus on them in
the first half, then on Jesus in the second-half.
So human unbelief .1 The first aspect of it we see is human
dishonesty. Sub .1 human dishonesty.
Look again at verses 27 and 28. And they came again to
Jerusalem. And as he was walking in the
temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the elders came
to him and they said to him, By what authority are you doing
these things or who gave you this authority to do them?
The context is likely Wednesday of the last week of Jesus life.
He's come back into Jerusalem, he's walking around, he's likely
teaching as he has been customarily kind of out in the
open in the temple to whoever wants to come.
And so he's accessible to the religious leaders.
We see that the chief priests, scribes and elders came to him.
This represents the full Sanhedrin, which is a technical
name for 71 religious authorities who sort of all
acting together had authoritative oversight of the
life of Israel and the city of Jerusalem.
So the chief priests in particular were over the temple
and its worship and sacrifices. Describes were kind of highly
trained religious experts that you would go to to understand a
matter of the law or kind of resolve a a dispute and
interpretation, maybe tell you if something was permitted or
not. Is it OK for me to do this or
not? The elders function kind of like
civic community leaders, sort of like informal magistrates,
judges, that kind of thing. You put it all together and this
is the entire combined official power of religious leadership in
Jerusalem. They're all together come and
ask Jesus or to 71 verses one this question about his
authority. So when they ask by what
authority are you doing these things or who gave you this
authority to do them? The occasion of their question,
the grounds of their question, is Jesus's dramatic act from
just a couple days ago. When he goes into the temple, he
prohibits people from selling doves, from exchanging money.
He pauses anybody from being able to carry vessels throughout
the temple, as we saw last week. That's to put a pause to the
whole sacrificial system, all the operation of the whole
temple in this hugely busy season when pilgrims have come
and they're offering sacrifice upon sacrifice as upon
sacrifice. Jesus stops it in its tracks.
It's a bold assertion of authority.
How can you come into the temple and stop it?
How can you come and just, you know, find the little pause
button that's going to turn off the whole temple and go dink,
and all religious activity ceases.
It is an audacious act. It's natural they'd go.
Who does this guy think he is? It is, in one sense, a
reasonable question. But what are they looking for?
What are they hoping to find? In asking him this question,
they hope to find something in Jesus's answer as a pretext for
arresting him. That's what we learn just a
little bit afterward in chapter 12, verse 13, some of the
Pharisees, some of the Herodians came to trap Him in his talk
1215 knowing their hypocrisy. So we we know, and I'll give you
one more detail that'll really lock it in.
But their question is not an honest one.
It's got ulterior motives. It's got a hidden agenda.
So they asked him about who gave you authority to do these
things. It's in the plural.
These things might refer to the kind of whole complex of actions
he performed in the temple, but it might also go back to his
entering the city on a cult, a royal symbol, a messianic
symbol. It might even go back to his
other miracles, the things they've seen.
What's the source of Jesus authority that enables him to
cast out demons, to forgive sins, to raise the dead?
Who gave him that authority? So we know this is a trap just
from verse 28. And here's the decisive evidence
for that. If you go back to verse 18 of
this chapter, the immediate response of the chief priests
and the scribes, two of those three groups named here, Chapter
11, verse 18. And the chief priests and the
scribes heard it. They heard what Jesus was saying
and doing and were seeking a way to destroy Him, for they feared
him because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching.
They were afraid of Jesus. They wanted to destroy Jesus.
They felt his powerful pull on the crowds and they didn't like
it. So we know this is envy over his
influence. We know they're already plotting
against him. The text just told us that.
So when we hear this question, this is not humbly seeking an
answer. This is not good faith trying to
remedy ignorance. They already have a plot and
they're looking for a kind of device to insert into the plot.
This sounds like an honest question, but it's not.
And I think actually Joe helped me see this in kind of studying
the passage this week. I think it kind of summarized it
nicely. Basically what they're after is
if he claims a kind of high enough authority that sort of
somehow puts him on a footing with God, well then they can
charge him with blasphemy. I think in particular, given the
huge nature of what he did in the temple, what's an authority
big enough to measure up to that if he somehow claims a divine
authority, they can go, aha, he's blaspheming, he's treading
on God's territory. He's claiming as a human being,
an authority that only God can have.
So I think the specific kind of target they have in their trap
is grounds for charging him with blasphemy, which is ultimately
what they will do in his trial. If he says his authority is from
heaven, poof, blasphemy. If he says, oh, I don't know,
just human messianic authority, something like that, well then
they can say, well, you don't have authority to do what you
did. You're you're trapped.
What right did you have to smash up the temple?
Zoom out a little bit. Think about how to apply this.
There is such a thing as an honest question for God.
There is such a thing as honest seeking for God, but it's more
rare than you might think. Some people sincerely think of
themselves as open minded, open to persuasion, willing to
believe if they get sufficient evidence, when actually deep
down in their heart of hearts they're committed to unbelief.
Not so much for intellectual reasons As for simply wanting to
keep living their own way, not wanting to give up being their
own master and Lord. If you aren't willing to give up
being your own master and Lord, there's no way to come to God as
an honest seeker. There's no way to ask God an
honest question, because the presupposition, the basic step
one, is your willingness to submit to anything he reveals,
anything he says, anything he demands of you.
The Sanhedrin might have thought that they were suspending
judgement, keeping an open mind, as we say, but in reality they
had some measure of skepticism, unbelief, and cowardice.
If you're not a believer in Jesus, what questions for God do
you have? Are those questions something
you're willing to ask and wait for his answer and consider it
changing your mind and heart and your fundamental commitments in
life? If you are that open, then I
really think those are honest questions.
When we think about verse 28, apart from their intent to trap
Him, who gave you this authority is a good question.
It shows us that the impression Jesus made on his contemporaries
was someone doing things that you can in no way account for on
normal human terms. He is not just good teacher
Jesus. He is not just radical prophet
Jesus. The impression he made on the
religious leaders who knew Israel's scriptures and
traditions inside and out, but their whole life studying them,
is there is no way to account for the things he's saying and
doing in normal human terms. So who gave Jesus this
authority? It's a good question.
If you're not committed to faith in Christ, how would you answer
it? What kind of things does he do?
What kind of things does he say? Where does he get his authority?
Do you think that Jesus has any real authority?
So that's their question. That's the setup, the trap
they're trying to lay for Jesus. Now when we look down, Jesus
refuses to answer their question.
We'll come back to that, but then they discuss basically
Jesus gives them this dilemma. This question they have to
answer. Was the baptism of John from
heaven or from man? You have to answer that.
Then I'll answer your question. So they discuss it verses 31 and
32. If we say from heaven, he will
say, why then did you not believe him?
But shall we say from man? They were afraid of the people,
for they all held that John really was a prophet.
Another word for their problem in verses 31 and 32 is
hypocrisy. They're pretending they're play
acting. Their outward words don't match
their inward thoughts and desires and intentions.
They're not motivated by the truth.
They're motivated by what's going to have a potential
backlash with the crowds that they need to keep on their side.
They didn't believe in John. I think it's important to
recognize that when they anticipate Jesus's question and
response, verse 31, he will say, why then did you not believe
him? Meaning they must not have
believed in John because the people who believed in John the
Baptist message got baptized by John And at the beginning of
Mark's gospel, we learned that virtually everybody in Judea and
around Jerusalem was going out and being baptized by John.
So the the Sanhedrin, all the members who made it up would
have known. Well, they didn't actually get
baptized by John. That'd be fairly sort of public
knowledge. Pretty obvious.
You kind of keep tabs on what the religious leaders are doing.
Well, were they baptized by John?
No. Jesus could check.
Jesus could verify. If they say his authority is
from heaven, well, he can stick them.
Why didn't you get baptized by him?
So, kids in the congregation, I want you to notice something.
These religious authorities who were entrusted with the
knowledge of God and teaching the people and leading the
people, they rejected the prophet that God sent them to
prepare for Jesus. They didn't accept it, and their
rejection of this earlier revelation made it harder for
them to accept Jesus. When he came, they had already
rejected the revelation God had given them, so they were not
motivated to accept this further revelation.
What your parents are trying to do when they're teaching you,
training you, having family devotions, helping you memorize
Scripture, is put revelation from God into your mind and
heart as early as they can. The more of that you accept now,
the better off you'll be when you get more and more and more
later. The less of it you accept now,
the more you reject God's teaching you through your
parents, more spiritually dangerous it'll be for you
later. A second point here of human
unbelief. Human disordered desire.
Human disordered desire, underneath their unbelief is a
disordered desire. We see that in verses 31 and 32.
They were afraid of the people. They desired to preserve their
position more than to submit to the truth.
They desired to save face more than to serve God.
They prioritized politics over truth, power over goodness,
staying in charge over faithfully stewarding their
charge. Their only legitimacy is leaders
derived from their faithful stewardship of God's word.
And they failed at this. They failed to receive God's
prophets. They failed to receive God's
Messiah. And in terms of substance,
whatever happened politically, whatever happened with their,
their kind of followers and the common people, their inability
to discern spiritual matters with reference to John
invalidated their standing as spiritual leaders of Israel.
What are you tempted to choose over truth?
What are you tempted to prefer before truth?
Whether you're a a believer or not, you know, it's common
today. I think because we have a
relatively affluent society, modern medicine can have all
kinds of marvels to buffer us from death, advance teams that
it sends out through illness, through sickness.
It's tempting to just kind of go through life and think, you know
what, it doesn't really matter what I think about God.
Doesn't really matter what I think about is there a life
after this or not. A lot of people are not so much
opposed to God. That's just indifferent.
Yeah, I don't really know. Not really concerned about what
happens after I die. It doesn't really seem to matter
very much to me. I would just want to point out
that life is short and life is uncertain.
I would want to point out that the intuition you have deep in
your heart that some things are really right and really wrong
for everybody, doesn't just point out there to other people
about how they should change or how the world should be fixed.
It points in here. To convict you of things you've
done wrong. And if you follow that down,
you'll see you haven't just done wrong, you are wrong.
I'd want to suggest to you that it's folly not to care about
ultimate questions like is there a God?
What happens when you die? Are you in a good spiritual
position before the God of the universe?
A third element of unbelief that we see in this passage is human
fear. Human fear again, verse 32, it's
a distorted desire, specifically because they're afraid.
Verse 32, What are they afraid of?
They were afraid of the people, for they all held that John
really was a prophet. In this case, popular opinion
was correct. John really was a prophet.
Jesus knew that, the common people knew that.
And so Jesus's countermeasure, which we'll talk about more in
the next point, is he's putting them into a place where they
know what the people think and they know there's going to be a
consequence if they go against that.
They're going to lose standings, they're going to lose faith,
they might lose favor. It's a delicate and highly
charged time politically, because Judea exists under Roman
governance and there's always tensions.
They resent that. They don't want to be under
Roman governance. They want to have full autonomy
in their own land. Rome is always a little bit
uneasy. What are these strange people
who have these strange customs and worship only one God and
refuse to sacrifice to the other gods?
There's a weird, tense relationship between Rome and
Judea. And so there's a weird tense
relationship between the Jewish governing authorities always
have an answer to Rome and trying to stay in good touch
with the people. They're always caught between a
rock and a hard place. So what is Jesus pushing on?
Jesus pushing on their fear. They fear losing power.
Why? Because they love it too much.
We fear losing what we love. They should have had a higher
allegiance to God and His truth, but instead they feared losing
favor with the people. What you love, you'll fear to
lose. What you'll love you'll fear to
have damaged. And of course, a healthy,
rightly ordered love will lead you to care for that person you
love. It'll lead you to seek to
preserve that good you love. You will work to see good come
to a, a school or a family or a church that you love and you
care for. And so there's a kind of natural
anxiety over its well-being and what you can do about it that
leads you to pray, it leads you to act.
It leads you to to mobilize resources to protect and
preserve well. That's a healthy way that love
leads to fear within limits, that can then lead to good
action. But there's an unhealthy way.
If you love it absolutely, your fear will take over.
Your fear will distort your loyalties.
If you love this child so much, you're willing to say, well, you
know, I used to thank God, thought that was a sin.
But now, well, I don't know. I've evolved what's happening.
Yes, it's good to love your child.
No, it's not good to love your child more than you love God.
And if you compromise something God says out of a kind of what
you think is a loving accommodation to a child, you're
showing that your love is disordered, Your fear is
disordered. The scribes, the Sanhedrin,
we're not willing to believe in Jesus because it would mean
losing control. They feared giving up control.
So dishonesty, disordered desire, and fear, all these
things motivate their unbelief. Their unbelief is not some sort
of neutral, pure scientist, scientific skepticism, just
going into a lab and weighing up evidence and doing experiments.
Dishonesty, disordered desire, fear, those are all underneath.
Those are all under the hood. Those are all motivating their
rejection of Jesus's authority. Their rejection was a spiritual
blindness both to Jesus and to John and Lord willing, as we'll
see next week, to the whole series of prophets God sent to
His people to bring them to repentance.
What's the evidence of their unbelief that it comes from
spiritual blindness? Again, it's back in verse 18.
They've already formed a plot to destroy him.
From one angle, the essence of unbelief is rejecting God's
authority. What are some of the realms in
which we do that? One is rejecting the authority
of Scripture. Scripture is breathed out by
God. What Scripture says, God says.
Every word of it is true. And yet we're often tempted to
reject its total claim on us to think, well, maybe I could
believe most of it. I would carve out these little
pieces here that would be convenient for my pre-existing
scientific beliefs or moral commitments.
But in and of itself, a partial rejection of the authority of
God's word is actually a total rejection of the authority of
God's word because you're putting yourself in authority
over it. If you say I'll keep these
pieces and I'll get rid of these, your own reason becomes a
higher authority than God's word.
We're tempted to reject God's claims on us in terms of our
ethics, our morality, our way of life.
It's tempting to push back on God's reign over your
conscience, to try to kind of put up boundaries, put up
defenses, put up a firewall. If you're hearing from
Scripture, if you're hearing from someone godly, if you're
hearing from someone where you really should be thinking, yes,
I, I know that's what God says. I know that's what God wants.
I know that's what I should do or shouldn't do.
Any effort you make to build up a wall against that is a
rejection of God's authority. And of course, there's the most
fundamental decision. Will you repent and turn from
sin and believe in Jesus or not? A right relationship with God,
made possible through the sacrifice of his Son, begins on
our part with repentance, submission, total surrender.
But why should we submit to God's authority?
We've considered a detailed human unbelief.
Now we turn to divine authority .2 Divine authority.
As with our first point, there's going to be 3 sub points.
The first one is divine testing. Divine testing.
That's one expression of divine authority.
Again, they come to him. They ask by what authority you
do these things. Now we'll focus on Jesus
response, verses 29 and 30. Jesus said to them, I will ask
you one question, answer me, I will tell you.
Answer me and I will tell you by what authority I do these
things. Was the baptism of John from
heaven or from man? Answer me.
So we want to consider first the fact that Jesus doesn't answer
but poses another question, the fact of his counter question.
Even in doing that, he's asserting his authority rather
than submitting to theirs. Now in rabbinic debate of the
time, it was understood as a legitimate debating move.
It was a card you could play. If someone asks you a question,
you can ask them a question in return.
So it's understood as kind of Fair play in an argument like
this. But at the same time, given that
the question is about Jesus very legitimacy, kind of the whole
basis of his teaching, his refusal to answer is a kind of
deliberate sidestep. He's not going to do this on
their terms. He has an authority that is
unique, that's not on the same playing field as theirs.
Instead of allowing them to test him, he tests them.
Instead of him being on trial, he puts them on trial.
A faint analogy of this is a story by my wife Kristen, just
reminded me of from her college days this week.
She was in a high level anthropology class as an
undergrad. They had to take turns preparing
A lecture based on a signed reading that the whole class
had. So everybody reads the book.
One person gives a lecture and leads a discussion.
Kristen, I don't know, just want to kind of hunch A Spidey sense.
Before she began her lecture, she just asked everybody in the
class who have you actually read the book?
And very few hands went up. And her classmates were not
entirely pleased with her because then they're not
reading. The book was exposed to their
teacher who adjusted their grades accordingly.
Their refusal to do the assignment was exposed in a way
that it would not have been otherwise.
The Sanhedrin was putting Jesus to the test, but actually it
turned out he instead would put them to the test.
Just like we saw in the reading from Job 40.
When we put God to the test, we might think we're testing him,
but he's actually testing us. And the very fact that you're
putting him to the test means that you're failing.
What does it mean to put God to the test?
Practically, I would say it's any approach to God that takes
the form of God. If you do X for me, I will do Y
for you. Now, there's a sense in which
and some of the Old Testament context, you know, somebody
could make a vow. They could say, Lord, if you
deliver me, I'll offer you the sacrifice.
That's not putting God to the test.
That's just saying there'll be a kind of expression of
Thanksgiving and outpouring of recognizing God's deliverance.
So I don't mean in the sort of Old Testament sense of making a
vow and following up on it. I mean more in the sense of
putting a condition on God where he has to do something for you
first before you will agree to trust him, believe in him, obey
him, submit to him. Again, this could be something
you would do as a non believer if you're really thinking
seriously about following Jesus. It also could be something where
you sort of bargain with God in your heart, where if you're
convicted, if you're aware of something you really need to
change, you kind of put a condition on God first.
So that's the fact of Jesus. Counter question, He's testing
them. God tests us.
We don't test him. We just want to consider the
content of Jesus. Counter question, was the
baptism of John from heaven or from man?
Answer me. When Jesus refers to the baptism
of John, he means his whole ministry.
John was preaching, John was baptizing.
If you agreed with John's preaching, you'd get baptized by
him. It's a it's a package deal.
So to understand what Jesus is getting at, I think the key we
need to keep in mind is that John's whole ministry pointed to
Jesus as its fulfillment. John was the forerunner.
John was the voice of one crying in the wilderness.
John is the one saying make way of prepare the way of the Lord,
make his path straight. John is a giant pointer finger.
That's his whole ministry. That's how he gets represented
in Christian art throughout the centuries.
He is a finger pointing. That's the nature of his
ministry. So you go back really quick to
the very beginning of Mark's Gospel chapter 1, verses 7 and
8. This is about John the Baptist
and he preached saying after me comes he who is mightier than I,
the strap of whose sandals I'm not worthy to stoop down and
untie. I have baptized you with water,
but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
In a nutshell, Jesus point is if you believed John's message, you
would believe Jesus authority. John pointed to one who's so
much greater than him he's not even worthy of stooping down and
untying A sandal. John pointed to one who's so
much greater than him, he's going to baptize with the Holy
Spirit. Not just water.
Only God can pour out the Spirit.
Only God can baptize with the Spirit.
If you paid attention to John, if you heard him, if you
accepted him, you would accept me.
I'm the whole point of John's ministry is what Jesus is
saying. A decision about John is a
decision about Jesus. That's the dilemma.
Jesus is forcing back on them, and so he denies them standing
to ask their question. He's saying, oh, this is kind of
a prerequisite to enter into this particular court case, this
particular trial. If you are not on record about
John the Baptist, you do not have the standing to come into
my court and ask me about my authority, because John has
already told you all you need to know.
So Jesus turns the tables and tests them.
He exposes their unbelief. He exposes their rejection of
God's prophet. They come trying to expose
Jesus. He turns it around and exposes
them. What are some of the ways in
which God tests us throughout our lives as believers?
1 is through hard truths in Scripture that make us work.
They make us pray. They make us rack our minds and
hearts to understand them. And sometimes then even when we
understand them, there's still more work to do emotionally, to
embrace them, to submit to them. You can say all things work
together for good for those who love God and are called
according to His purpose. But do you know it?
Do you rely on it? Do you feel it when you most
need it? There are hard truths in
Scripture. Another way God tests us is
through providential appointments in which He inserts
us between a rock and a hard place.
In Psalm 139, verse 6, David says, you hem me in behind and
before you lay your hand upon me.
If you've not suffered very much, you might just think
that's God's care, His provision, His presence, His
guidance. He's before and behind us.
He's holding us, but the language of being hemmed in is
like God putting you between a rock and a hard place.
Being hemmed in means there's nowhere for you to go.
There's nowhere for you to move. Go forward.
You get scraped by a rock as sharp as a knife?
Go back. You fall off a Cliff.
God sometimes double parks us by his Providence.
He puts you in somewhere, then He comes and shuts you in, and
then you're stuck and all you can do is submit.
All you can do is trust. The only thing you can apply any
strength or effort to is endurance.
He's testing you. What do you do when you can't
move? What do you do when the Lord of
Heaven double parks you in? God also tests us by requiring
us to continue to ask and ask and ask in prayer for an answer.
It's a test. He's strengthening our faith.
He's withholding for good reason.
We don't know why. We trust He has his reasons.
He tests us through suffering. He tests us through a sense of
his absence or his silence or his distance.
Believers have very different experiences of this.
Some live most of their days with a sense of kind of God's
love, smiling down on them like sunshine.
Some genuine believers feel abandoned by God, deserted by
God, convinced that God has set his face against them.
In what ways has God tested you? What has he revealed to you
about yourself through that testing?
That's a good topic to discuss over lunch.
Divine testing Another element of divine authority we see in
Jesus response back to Mark 11 is divine hiddenness.
Divine hiddenness. Here we come to the the sort of
payoff and punchline of our passage, verse 33.
So they answered Jesus. We do not know.
And Jesus said to them, Neither will I tell you by what
authority I do these things. They won't commit themselves to
an answer, so Jesus won't commit himself to them.
Those who cannot be honest with themselves will not be honest
with Jesus or about Jesus. They haven't been travelling
with Jesus. They haven't been learning from
him. They haven't sought him
honestly. They're not seeking to engage on
fair terms. So Jesus cuts them off.
Jesus refuses to reveal himself as God.
He does not owe them an answer. He's invoking a kind of divine
prerogative and divine privilege not to answer, not to reveal
himself to those who are set against him.
Jesus answer would be, and we'll explore this more soon, that his
authority is from God and even in a way from himself because he
is the divine Son Incarnate. But he doesn't give him an
answer here. He hides himself.
He drops the veil and keeps it between him and them.
Now sometimes this is obviously a kind of confrontation with
people who are fundamentally not believing.
But even as believers, sometimes God hides himself because we ask
with wrong motives. James for three says you ask and
do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your
passions. There is a way to ask for
something from God with such distorted motives that it's
better for us not to get it. And so God refusing to answer
God in that sense, hiding himself is actually doing us a
mercy because our hearts are so distorted we would further harm
ourselves. But the main point here that we
see in Jesus divine hiddenness is that he's content to let
somebody walk away. He's not going to argue somebody
into his Kingdom. He knows their hearts are hard.
Only God can soften a hard heart.
He knows they have hearts of stone.
Only God can give a new heart, a heart made of flesh.
God is powerful to do that. He answers prayers to do it.
And we should seek to persuade people and reason with them,
yes. But ultimately, what gets
someone into the Kingdom, what gets someone into belief is the
omnipotent power of God giving them a new heart.
So it takes wisdom when you're, when you're sharing the gospel
with someone, when you're having long running conversations with
a friend or a family member. It takes wisdom to know, am I
feeling anxious or timid because of fear of man and I should
really push through? Or have I really laid it all
out? The good news?
God's claims, ways they're going wrong, Have I laid it out as
fully as I can and it's really over to them.
That's a hard judgement call. It's easy to excuse fear of man
and think, Oh yeah, I've kind of done all there is to do.
But prayerfully consider that. Prayerfully pursue that.
There is a limit to what we can do and say.
We can't change people's hearts. Revelation is God's sovereign
prerogative. He is not obligated to reveal
himself. He chooses to whom to reveal
himself. Revelation does not follow from
our demand, but from God's freedom.
God's revelation is not a given, it's a gift. 3rd element of
divine authority we see in our passage, particularly the way it
kind of points back to the rest of the gospel, is divine
evidence. Divine evidence.
Jesus has given evidence in answer to their question.
He's just done it already. He's done it throughout the
whole gospel. He's done it every time he
performed a miracle. He's done it through his
teaching. He's done it every time he cast
out a demon with a word. He's done it by raising people
from the dead. He's done it by walking on
water. He's done it by the
Transfiguration. All of these miracles show a
divine authority that he is both authorized by God and has in his
own person God's own authority. So if Jesus's powerful deeds so
far have not convinced the Jerusalem religious authorities
of his divine power, then nothing will.
It's not that he's given no evidence, it's that he's given
abundant evidence. He's given so much evidence, you
just turn any page back into Mark's Gospel and you'll see
evidence for his divine authority.
The problem isn't too little evidence.
The problem is hard hearts that aren't willing to see it.
So the evidence he's already given convicts them of their
unbelief. They had no good reason for
rejecting John. They have no good reason for
rejecting Jesus. Their unbelief is obstinate.
It's hard hearted. It's persistent in the face of
overwhelming evidence. Jesus isn't giving them more
evidence because he knows that's not the problem.
He has given evidence of his divine authority all along.
So on Jesus's side, we've seen divine testing, divine
hiddenness, and divine evidence. All of that reveals his own
divine authority. All throughout Mark's Gospel
this has been implicit but consistent.
It's been beneath the surface, but ever present.
Jesus speaks and acts as God Incarnate.
His. His authority is from God in the
sense that he's a faithful prophet.
He is the Messiah. He's carrying out God's plan of
salvation as a human being. He is authorized by God to
fulfill the mission of the Messiah.
And yet also at the same time, he has in himself divine
authority. He is himself the Lord, He is
himself the eternal second person of the Trinity.
That's the only full and adequate and right answer to.
By what authority do you do these things and who gave you
this authority? Ultimately, God the Father has
given him this authority from all eternity as he has given him
his own nature, given him his own life.
So the biggest thing Jesus authority isn't is just from
man. The dilemma he forces on them is
if they say John his authority was just from man, then John's a
charlatan, John's a charade, John's a false prophet.
You don't get to go call all Israel to repentance just
because you thought that was a good idea.
If John's authority is quote UN quote from man, then it's fake.
It doesn't hold up. He's a false prophet.
Similarly, Jesus does not leave us with the option of just
saying, Yup, good teacher, Yup, inspiring moral figure, Yup.
You know, I'm a secularist, I'm an atheist.
But boy, I prefer the fruits of Christian culture over the
disaster that it sort of came from in the Roman world and the
disaster we seem to be headed to in many respects in our society
today. When nobody can say what's right
and wrong, you can't just say good moral influence.
The question remains, by what authority?
By whose authority? What authority does he have?
He has authority as the master of the house, the Lord of the
temple, the judge who has come to inspect and evaluate his
people. He has authority not just from
God, but as God, He has come to wield that authority to preview
judgement and accomplish redemption.
The reason we fear authorities is because we're not convinced
that they will act in our own true best interest.
We are afraid of ways that they will knowingly or unknowingly
harm us. We are afraid of ways they will,
willingly or unwillingly, no, wittingly or unwittingly, damage
our lives, harm us from experiencing true flourishing
and fullness and freedom. We're afraid of authorities
because the bad things they can do to us, whether legitimately
or illegitimately. So we have to ask, what did
Jesus do with his authority? What does he do with his
authority? He's told us all along, He tells
us in the beautiful one sent in summary in Mark 1045.
The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give
his life as a ransom for many. This contest between unbelief
and God's authority has defined human existence since Genesis 3.
The very first sin was a rejection of God's authority.
The very first sin was a refusal to live on His terms.
And we've done that ever since. We've rejected His authority.
We've run from Him. We viewed the authority of God
Himself as if were bad for us. That's the essence of sin.
That's the deep, sick heart of sin.
And what did Jesus come to do? He came to bear the penalty, the
punishment that we all deserve for all of our rejections of
God's authority. He came to make the most pure,
the most perfect, the most selfless exercise of authority
in the history of the universe. That's what he does with his
authority. No self seeking, all other
seeking, no vengeance, all forgiveness, no lording it over
people, but all submitting to incalculable cruelty and pain
and suffering to redeem you. That is what Jesus uses his
authority to do. And I haven't told the whole
story because if you want proof, you just ask what happened next
in our text. Today is Wednesday.
Thursday he'll be betrayed. Friday he'll be killed.
Saturday he'll like hold in a tomb.
Sunday he gets up out. He slips from death's authority
because death had no authority to hold him.
He got himself up out of the grave.
It's true to say God the Father raised him.
It's true to say he was raised in the power of the Holy Spirit.
It's also true as he says in John's Gospel, I have authority
to lay my life down and I have authority to take it up again.
Jesus authority is to take his life up again and to take yours
up with him if you trust in him. From the beloved Puritan
commentator Matthew Henry, commenting on the conflict in
this passage and the question Jesus refuses to answer said let
them wait but three or four days and his resurrection shall tell
them who gave him his authority. Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, we praise You for this confrontation that
exposes our sins. It exposes our unwillingness to
submit to You, our unwillingness to trust You, our desires for
the wrong things or desires in the wrong ways, where we love
things and more than You and put them in Your place.
Father, we thank you that Jesus came to exercise his divine
authority to bear the curse and give life and rescue from death.
We pray these things in Jesus name.
Amen. To respond to God's Word, we'll
sing a beautiful, touching modern hymn that celebrates how
Jesus exercises all of his authority with the tenderest
love. Jesus, strong and kind, let's
stand and sing.