Sermon: Jesus and the Rebellious Son

Contradiction Judgment
#1784-PM
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 03-Oct-24; 77 minutes 2024-10-03

There is such a thing as the generation gap. Adults think young people are rebellious, ignorant, and profligate in every way. Conversely, youth think adults are old fashioned, staid, unenlightened fuddy-duddys.

And it happens all the time. This is not a modern phenomenon. In fact, it has occurred in every generation of humanity because of human nature. And also because of the antagonisms that build between people who grow up in different times with different aims, and they go through different events and circumstances that they are required to deal with. Put it all together, it is just that they have a different outlook on life. One generation, older, wiser, looks at things quite a bit different from a young generation that is just full of vinegar.

But like I said, this is not a new thing. Greek philosopher Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century BC, wrote in his work, "Rhetoric," "Young people are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life nor have they experienced the force of circumstances. They think they know everything and are always quite sure about it." The Roman poet Horace wrote in Book Three of his Odes, "Our sire's age was worse than our grand sires. We, their sons, are more worthless than they. So, in our turn, we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt." And then finally, we will jump ahead many centuries to the English clergyman Thomas Barnes, who wrote in his 1624 book, The Wise Man's Forecast Against the Evil Time, wrote, "Youth are never more saucy. Yea, never more savagely saucy. The ancient are scorned, the honorable are condemned, the magistrate is not dreaded."

You can go on the Internet and find many such quotations because this is a favorite thing for older people to write about, how much the youth have taken the civilization that they have built down the drain. It is just a reality. It is something a lot of people mark as just a fact of life and it is a reality most of all because, face it, young people, youth, are immature and impulsive and experimental. They tend to go where angels fear to tread.

Some of it is innocuous, innocent, but a good portion of their learning process is fraught with danger and rebellion, especially as they engage in things with their equally immature friends. Peer pressure starts to work and they go hog wild. And as we saw in the 1960s and successive decades after that, the rebellion of youth here in America was on full display.

Now, the subject may be strange to you in terms of the Feast of Trumpets, but there is a connection and I want to publicly thank a Baptist pastor. His name is Mitch Chase. He lives in Louisville and teaches at the Baptist Theological Seminary there. But he wrote an interesting article about one section of the Old Testament that piqued my interest and I thought, "Man, that would make a great Trumpets sermon." So what you are going to hear today is based a little bit on what he said. I am not going to use his words, but he made a connection between Deuteronomy 21:18-21 and Christ.

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 is the biblical or the Torah's, the law's, instruction about what to do with a rebellious son. So it deals with the extremity of youthful rebellion and believe it or not, we can draw lines between Deuteronomy 21:18-21 and this law about how to deal with the rebellious son and various subjects that are pertinent for this day and for life in general.

But things like the Old Covenant, the fatherhood of God, the destruction of Israel and Judah, the life of God's Son, which is where Mitch Chase was going mostly, and also Christ's second coming, as well as our own lives and our own judgment. All of these subjects touch on aspects of righteous judgment.

Now, we can know that God's judgment is always just, it is always right. He never errs when He makes a judgment and we can be really happy about that because we could then live in faith under His judgment and move forward toward the Kingdom knowing that He is judging us now and He is working with us to bring us to the right end, which is the Kingdom of God.

But human judgment, meh, that is a tough one. Unless you know somebody really well, know the standards that he judges upon, you are not likely to trust human judgment very much. You are going to want to prove it for yourself. And then when it comes down to evaluating our own judgment, we have to think about our human nature and is our judgment biased by this, that, and the other thing, and the answer is yes, we are. We have biased judgment that skews us off one way or another.

But ultimately, we have to think about the individual judgments we make every day, the choices we make, the decisions we make, whether they will make us into a rebellious child or into a righteous child.

So the question I am asking today as we review a lot of these things is, will we follow the Deuteronomy 21 model or will we follow the Gospel model? That is, Jesus Christ. Because in these two things we have two poles, if you will, two ends of the spectrum. We have the human rebellious child full of human nature and rebellion against God and on the other hand, you have the perfect righteous Son. Where do you fit along that line?

Let us go to Deuteronomy 21. We will read verses 18 through 21 and go over this section so that we can see what God's law says about how to deal with a rebellious son that just goes to the extremes of perversity, well beyond normal conduct.

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 "If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and who, when they have chastened him, will not heed them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city, to the gate of his city. And they shall say to the elders of his city, 'This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice. He is a glutton and a drunkard.' Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall put away the evil person from among you, and all Israel shall hear and fear."

Most everyone who reads this passage, especially those who read it for the first time, looks up from it and says, "Wow, that's stiff." Or "Wow, that's cold." Or "Wow, that's crazy. Who would ever do that?" It is the generation gap on steroids, where the adult generation says this kid has gone too far and is deserving of death. And obviously, this is an expansion on the general commandment Number Five, the fifth commandment of honoring one's father and mother. This is an extreme version of disobedience of that commandment and it covers what to do if a child goes far beyond the bounds of proper conduct, far beyond the bounds of proper respect and obedience for his or her parents. It uses the male here. But it could also apply to a young girl or maybe I should say a young woman. Probably these things would have taken place when the child was late teens, I would imagine, mid to late teens.

However, I should mention that there is no record whatsoever of any Israelite ever doing this. In a lot of cases you go through the laws that are in the Torah here, in the Pentateuch, and you will see later on how they were put into practice. But not this one. This one is left without an example later on that we can point to and say, Oh, that is how it worked. This one is different.

So what we are looking at here in verse 21, as it says here, that such wanton disobedience and profligate living is evil and it is evil that needs to be purged from the nation. You see this in a single person who is just totally ungovernable and you put an end to it.

I want to go over a few of these words here so that we get an understanding of just what kind of person this is. The child is said to be stubborn and rebellious. Now, we should understand that "child" here, we are not talking about a toddler who will not eat his breakfast. The "child" we are talking about is someone still under his father and mother's authority in the house. And like I said, normally this would be an older child, like a mid-teen or so, before he has been put out into the world to care for himself.

And also we have to add into here that it says that the father and mother say that he will not listen. They have tried everything and he still will not change. So there has been a period of time for them to see the record of his behavior and it is all bad. He just will not listen, he will not change, he will not do what they say. And they have been trying to instruct the child in a way that is good for him. But the child just does not listen—in both cases: does not listen literally and does not do what they say.

The first Hebrew word that they use here, "this son of ours is stubborn" in verse 20, is sarar in Hebrew. That is Strong's 5637 if you want to go look that up. And it means stubborn, obstinate, refractory, or rebellious. Actually, both of these words can be rebellious. It is almost like saying our son is rebellious and rebellious. He is stubborn in his rebellion and he is just rebellious.

The second word is rebellious and that is marah, Strong's 4784. And it means rebellious or defiant or disobedient. So we are talking about a kid who is totally out of bounds. We might call him irredeemably rebellious. He is completely defiant, ungovernable, perversely malcontent, intractable. You just cannot get this kid to do anything right. No parental teaching, no discipline, no form of discipline has touched him, has changed him. The parents have tried everything to reach him, but they have had no success. This kid is bound and determined to be a criminal, a rapist, a murderer, you know, just do whatever he wants; drink and eat and everything to excess and no one can tell him no.

So the parents drag him to the civil authorities. Those are the elders who sit in the gate of the city. And what we see in verse 20 is basically their testimony before these elders so that they can get an idea of what kind of case they are bringing before them. It is likely that in the small communities that they had around Israel, in the cities, I am sure there were just a few 100 people in most of the cities and towns of Israel, especially at the beginning. They of course, grew, but probably the elders of the city already knew about this kid because he had been, you know, breaking windows and robbing widows and doing whatever that a rebellious kid will do. He had probably been up nights singing behind the bar, just doing all kinds of stuff, whatever he wanted.

Who knows? Maybe he had even come before them before for judgment because he had done something that was worthy of it. But we are talking about a kid who is basically out of control. So you would think that pretty much everybody in the community knew how bad this kid was. He was the one that you warned your kid about, "Don't go past him. He might pull out a switchblade and slice you for your money." This was the kind of guy he was.

And notice that the parents end by testifying that he is a glutton and a drunkard. We do not necessarily have to think that this was true in every situation. It may not have been. But it is general symbolic wording that we are supposed to think, not necessarily specifically about gluttony or specifically about drunkenness, but we are supposed to understand that the stubborn, defiant, rebellious attitude has by this time developed into a lifestyle of disillusion and vice.

So their life, their attitudes, their rebellious attitude from inside has begun to manifest in a sinful way of life on the outside. As Jesus says in Matthew 15, verses 11, 18, 19, and 20. "What comes out of the heart defiles the man." The kid's iniquity, as James says in James 1:15, has become full grown and the only end in sight is death. It is either going to be death by execution or it is going to be death because he, sometime in the future, is going to cross the wrong person, or the vices that he has begun to use will kill him. There is no good that is going to come out of this person's life because they are so stubborn, so rebellious, so defiant, so intractable that there is no other way he can go. His mind is set and it is going to end in destruction and death.

Now notice there is nothing between verses 20 and 21 in terms of a court case. But you have got to remember this is capital punishment going on here. And I imagine that the law is a bit truncated here. It just skips over the court case. Normally the case would be heard, just like any other case in a court of justice where evidence is provided by witnesses and one side builds a case and other side tries to defend. But just to keep things concise here, it skips all that. It skips the trial. It skips the sentencing as less important to the point because there is a spiritual point that is being driven at here. And so all the the other stuff, the details of the process of judgment, are skipped over and we proceed straight to the punishment, which is death by stoning.

Notice that the city's men have to participate in the stoning. They represent the whole community. So what this does is it takes the responsibility for this child's rebellion and it expands it out to the whole community. Somewhere along the line not only the parents had dropped the ball, but also the whole community had done their part in allowing this kid to get so rebellious. Another reason is that they show unity in the community because they all agree that this kid's behavior has become so bad that it warrants execution, and all the men of the city, all the families of the city unite behind the execution.

But there is another reason that is maybe the most important reason, and that is because the kid's crimes affected everyone in the city one way or another. It is not just his family that were troubled by the kid's rebelliousness, but they troubled his community. They, the neighbors, had to put up with this kid, the guys down the street, maybe his friends or people who were his friends until he went so out of bounds that they could not keep up with him. And if it were not stopped there at the town or the city where he lived, who knows? This kid's attitude and rebellion might affect the clan, the whole clan of this particular tribe. It might have even started to affect the whole tribe. And how about affecting the whole nation? And how about, finally, it reaching the whole world!

Now, that may be a bit extreme. You would not expect some kid in a little town of Israel to be rebellious and it affects everybody in the world. But it is possible.

But what God is showing here by saying that the men of the city should participate in this is that you have to stop these things as soon as possible, before they affect more than just the family. Because otherwise they are going to reach out and affect other people and cause major problems to the society, to the culture that is there.

Part of the lesson is that no man is an island. We cannot think of ourselves as independent individuals. None of us are independent. None of us can do something that is not going to affect someone else. It may just be a spouse or a child that is affected, but that is another person. It is going to make a difference in their lives. Our bad attitudes and our outward sins reach far beyond us and impinge on others in harmful ways. We need to keep this in mind as we go through the sermon, and not just in the sermon, but anywhere you go you need to understand that you will never sin in total secret. It is going to make some sort of an effect on others. Maybe not right now, but in time it may.

But perhaps the most important instruction that we should get out of this passage here is the last thing that is said in verse 21, "and all Israel shall hear and fear." This phrase is a flashing light, a wailing siren, or let us use today: an insistent trumpet or a shouted warning to everyone who is reading the passage. It is demanding that we pay attention to this law which seems so extreme.

But God is telling us with this final phrase, "all Israel shall hear and fear," that He has got a greater point in mind, much greater point. God is saying to those who listen to this, those who read it, those who are under the covenant, He saying, "Israel; all Israel, this instruction applies to everyone, not just parents with rebellious children. This instruction is something that everyone needs to keep in mind, even the whole nation."

Now, why? Why is God telling us to be particularly wary of this situation? Let us go back to Exodus 4.

Exodus 4:21-22 And the Lord said to Moses, "When you go back to Egypt, see that you do all those wonders before the Pharaoh which I have put in your hand. But I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go. Then you will say to Pharaoh, 'Thus says the Lord, "Israel is My son, My firstborn."'

Very interesting. He is telling Moses and He is telling Pharaoh that the children of Israel are not just the children of Israel, they are children of God, they are children of the Lord.

Let us move to Isaiah 64.

Isaiah 64:8-9 But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and You our potter; and all we are the work of Your hand. Do not be furious, O Lord, nor remember iniquity forever; indeed, please look—we all are Your people!

Here is the prophet acknowledging that yes, Israel are the children of God and God is their Father.

Let us just pick up one more in Hosea 11, verse 1. This is the one you probably know well, because it is a Messianic prophecy, but it first was for Israel.

Hosea 11:1 "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My Son."

We do not need any more than that. Just a little bit of verification that there is a parent-child relationship between the Lord God, the God of the Old Testament, and the people of Israel.

So it is a well known biblical concept that God was the Father to Israel. He adopted them. If you look in Romans 9:4, one of the things that Paul says there that pertain to the people of Israel was the adoption; that He had adopted them as His people, as His children.

He is telling them in Deuteronomy 21:18-21 that they stand in the place of the rebellious son. Or maybe I should soften that a little bit. They could stand in the place of the rebellious son in this aspect of His law. This is why He was saying all of you should hear and fear because if God made this judgment on a son of a physical family, how is He going to judge His children in His own family where He is the Father? And He has given instruction and He has carefully given discipline.

So God is telling them there at the end of Deuteronomy 21:21 that He would judge rebellion against Him and their hedonistic lifestyle, along with their failure to mature and repent, as evil. And the penalty was death. It was execution to exercise the evil from among His people. He was serious! He was saying, if you go this far, I will treat you as the rebellious son. And the answer is execution. They were to listen to this instruction carefully and take appropriate action. And the appropriate action for them in relation to God was to stay within the bounds of the covenant. They were to listen carefully to the voice of God. They were to do all the things that the covenant required of them. They were to hear and fear.

So what happened? Let us go to Psalm 81. (We have sung this twice today.) Psalm 81 is a psalm that is traditionally for the Feast of Trumpets because it mentions blowing the trumpet on the new moon in verse 3. We are going to read the first 14 verses.

Psalm 81:1-7 Sing aloud to God our strength; make a joyful shout to the God of Jacob. Raise a song and strike the timbrel, the pleasant harp with the lute. Blow the trumpet at the time of the New Moon, at the full moon, on our solemn feast day. For this is a statute for Israel, and a law of the God of Jacob. This He established in Joseph for a testimony, when He went throughout the land of Egypt, where I heard a language that I did not understand. I removed his shoulder from the burden; his hands were freed from the baskets. You called in trouble, and I delivered you; I answered you in the secret places of thunder; I proved you at the waters of Meribah. Selah

Selah, as we know, is usually inserted at a place where there is probably a musical interlude of some sort, somebody is playing on the lyre, and we are supposed to use the soothing time to pause and reflect on what has just been said. And what has just been said was God chose them, decided to free them from their slavery in Egypt, had been doing this for quite a long time. He mentions Joseph all the way there to the waters of Meribah. So over several hundred years, He was working things out to bring Israel out of Egypt and so we see in verses 6 and 7 that God did all kinds of stuff for them.

He helped them in every way, but He was not necessarily just saving them. It says here in verse 7 that He proved them, He was testing them. He was seeing what was in them, seeing what kind of people they were. So we are supposed to think about this in terms of the way God thinks, the way God judges, the way God acts, the way God saves. He does not save just to save, if you know what I mean. That is the way the Protestant world looks at it. They think that God is just out there trying to save the world and yes, He is. He is trying to save everyone. But like He did with the children of Israel, He wants to prove the people He saves. He wants to put them through tests and make them like Him.

Are not the children of Israel the children of God? Are not the people of God, the spiritual people of God, the church, also His children? (which we will get to in a little bit) And in every case, God does not simply save them. He asks them to join Him in a covenant. And then in order to be in the covenant, you have to swear that you are going to keep His way. And there are certain things that need to be done in order to stay in that covenant. And the overarching thing is not just obedience, but to grow in character, in righteous character, to be like Him.

So what we have here is the psalmist, this is Asaph, he was a smart guy. He got into a lot of these very in-depth philosophical and mental exercises for us to come up with some sort of a principle. But he is going through here in these first seven verses, getting us thinking about the process of what God does and using the example of what God did with the children of Israel.

Let us go on, the musical interlude is wearing down. We need to go back to the words.

Psalm 81:8-10 "Hear, O My people, and I will admonish you! [An admonishment is a warning. It is a teaching, but it has a warning edge to it.] O Israel, if you will listen to Me! There shall be no foreign god among you [What does He hit? The first commandment.]; nor shall you worship any foreign god. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt; open your mouth wide, and I will fill it."

That is His part of the covenant. He is going to teach us knowledge. He is going to give us blessing. He is going to do whatever is necessary to give you all the tools that you need to reach the goal that He wants us to reach. For the children of Israel it was the Promised Land. For us it is the Kingdom of God.

Psalm 81:11-14 "But My people would not heed My voice, and Israel would have none of Me [complete rejection]. So I gave them over to their own stubborn heart [sounds like Romans 1], to walk in their own counsels. Oh, that My people would listen to Me, that Israel would walk in My ways! I would soon subdue their enemies, and turn My hand against their adversaries."

He says, I was willing to do whatever it took to keep their enemies at bay, but they just totally rejected Me. And it grieved God. He was a Father. He wanted His children to follow His ways and they would not, they totally rejected Him.

Let us go a few pages forward to the book of Isaiah, chapter 1. This is what Isaiah leads with in his prophecy. We will read starting in verse 2 all the way down to verse 20.

Isaiah 1:2-4 Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth! For the Lord has spoken: "I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against Me; the ox knows its owner and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know, My people do not consider." Alas, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, . . .

Laden gives you these ideas, he just mentioned a donkey. Where a donkey, who can normally carry about 200 pounds worth of whatever grain or whatever you have to haul, is just laden down, you know, barely able to move. But what is on its back is sin. It is this donkey is laden with iniquity.

Isaiah 1:4-13 . . . a brood of evildoers [now we are talking snakes], children who are corrupters! They have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked to anger the Holy One of Israel, they have turned away backward. Why should you be stricken again? You will revolt more and more. The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faints. From the soul of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores; they have not been closed or bound up, or soothed with ointment. [Another ghastly visual there of just bleeding, bruises, and sores all over the body. Just repugnant, repulsive.] Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire, strangers devour your land in your presence; and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. So the daughter of Zion is left as a booth in a vineyard, as a hut in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city. Unless the Lord of hosts had left to us a very small remnant, we would have become like Sodom, we would have been made like Gomorrah [totally obliterated, but thankfully, God was the Father]. Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom [talking to people in Israel, in Jerusalem]; give ear to the law of our God, you people of Gomorrah: "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to Me?" says the Lord. "I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed cattle. I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs or goats. When you come to appear before Me, who has required this from your hand, to trample My courts? Bring no more futile sacrifices; incense is an abomination to Me. The New Moons, the Sabbaths, and the callings of assemblies—I cannot endure iniquity and the sacred meeting."

What He is saying here is, though they may have given lip service to what God said and gone to the Feast, gone to the Sabbath, gone to these new moons, gone to all of these things, their heart was black. They were doing it in iniquity. They were not doing it for the right reasons.

Isaiah 1:14-20 "Your New Moons and your appointed feasts My soul hates; they are a trouble to Me, I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands, I will hide My eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood [murders]. [So He says as in a last appeal] Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, reprove the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together," says the Lord. [He is offering them a way out.] "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword"; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Clearly, both Israel and Judah disdained God and the covenant. Their histories are a record of rebellion against God with ever-increasing sin and perversion. They got worse and worse; and God would send them prophets to bring them back to the right way and it did not help. Maybe a good king would give them a period of peace and they did okay, as long as the king was okay. But if the king turned or if there was a new king that was an idolater, Israel and Judah went down the wrong path. And so finally, God had enough of it. He was just totally frustrated and He acted. He acted according to the curses of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, those prophetic promises of divine judgment for turning away from Him and failing to keep the law and the covenant.

So what we have here is Israel proving. Remember God said that He would prove them? Israel proved that they were a rebellious son and God judged them and He gave the order of execution. He executed Israel in 722 BC. And He gave a similar order about Judah in 586 BC. You can read about the terrible destruction, loss of life, and the captivity of Israel in II Kings 17. And if you want to read the same about Judah, you can go to the final chapters of II Kings and II Chronicles, Jeremiah 39, Jeremiah 52, and the whole book of Lamentations. They are all about the same thing, the destruction of Israel and Judah and the reasons for it. And it comes down to stubborn and rebellious. And God said, "I must purge the evil from My people."

Eventually Israel and Judah were scattered: Judah in an early diaspora, Israel, so-called lost, scattered to the north of areas like Iran and Iraq. And then further on, they went up into Europe, but a remnant of Judah returned to Judea to re-establish their presence there and rebuild the Temple. You know what, almost immediately they returned to their old ways and it took the ministries of Ezra and Nehemiah, Haggai and Zechariah to return them to obeying the Old Covenant, at least in part. But in time, their descendants leapt into the other ditch, First they had been profligate, doing all of these terrible things against God and just being like nations of the world. But Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, and Zechariah took them back to the law and said, this is what must be done. We must keep the law. Because we did not keep the Sabbath properly, because we were idolaters, because we did not meticulously keep these things, that is why God sent us into captivity. And so they said, OK, we better keep the law. And over the years, over the generations, they got more and more and more judgmental about the keeping of the law and they leapt into that other ditch, the ditch of excessive punctiliousness.

I love that phrase, excessive punctiliousness. It is hard to say, but it means a whole lot. Meticulous dogmatism and judgmental exactitude. And they morphed over the centuries into the Pharisees of Jesus' time. And we know the problems He had with the Pharisees. They had not actually learned their lesson because they were still rebellious sons. They had just leapt into the conservative version of rebellious sons and decided that they were going to make their own law based on the law of God, and made it so hard that Jesus in Matthew 23 said, you just produce sons of hell. Proselytes come to you and you turn them into devils.

Let us go to Psalm 2 and let us start to build the other side of the coin or the other side of the spectrum.

Psalm 2:4-9 He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall hold them in derision. Then He shall speak to them in His wrath, and distress them in His deep displeasure: "Yet I have set My King on My holy hill of Zion. I will declare the decree: the Lord has said to me, 'You are My Son, today I have begotten You. Ask of Me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron; you shall dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.'"

So this, verses 6 through 9 more specifically, is a Messianic prophecy of the Son, of the Father saying, I have an ace up My sleeve for all of these kings of the earth who are laughing at Me and trying to plan great battles against Me. God says, I just laugh because I am going to send My Son and we will see who has the last laugh. Because He is going to break them, crush them with a rod of iron.

Let us go to Mark 1, verse 11. This is in Jesus' baptism or just after.

Mark 1:11 Then a voice came from heaven, "You are My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."

Now the Father says who fulfills this prophecy in Psalm 2. His beloved Son was the one called Jesus of Nazareth.

Let us go now to Acts 2, verses 29 through 36. Peter speaking, trying to explain to these people just who Jesus was.

Acts 2:29-36 "Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He would raise up the Christ to sit on His throne, he foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption. [That is in Psalm 8.] This Jesus God has raised up, of which we are all witnesses. Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He poured out this which you now see and hear. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he says himself, 'The Lord said to my Lord. "Sit at My right hand, till I make Your enemies Your footstool."' Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ."

So adding more of the Old Testament and the prophecies, looking forward to the coming of the Son, the coming of the Messiah, and pointing the fingers very emphatically at this one, Jesus of Nazareth, who gave Himself as a Redeemer of our sins and buying us back from sinfulness with His own blood and becoming our Savior.

Let us go to Galatians 4, verse 4.

Galatians 4:4-5 But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive adoption as sons.

Ah, interesting. So God did this at the very right time, when He thought it was most propitious to send His Son. His job was to redeem those who were under the law, His own people that we might receive the adoption as sons. He sent Jesus there to His own people, to Judah, and what was His job? His job was to redeem sinners, those who are under the law, that is, those who were under its curse, those who were under its penalty.

And what was He to do with those people? Make them sons, a new family, if you will. Later, he goes on and calls us in,

Galatians 6:16 As many as walk according to this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God.

So now there was going to be a new Israel, a new set of children. These are the ones who were redeemed from under the law, given the Spirit, and made sons of God.

Now Hebrews 1, verses 1 through 4. We all know this one quite well.

Hebrews 1:1-4 God, who at various times and in different ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds [this Son is also Creator and now heir of all things]; who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they.

This One who came to redeem people who are under the law and gave them His Spirit, has now ascended to heaven and sat at the right hand of God. And He is coordinating a new family, a new family for God, based on the old family. Do not forget that. God's calling, we learned last week, is irrevocable. So He will deal with Israel in time.

But He has made a new family under the Son. But now we are in Him. We are, as we will see, fellow heirs with Him. We are part of that Family.

Let us just go on to chapter 4. I do not want to get too bogged down in some of those details, not right now.

Hebrews 4:14-15 Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.

That is the important part here.

Hebrews 7:20-28 And inasmuch as He was not made priest without an oath [speaking of Christ as our High Priest] (for they have become priests without an oath, but He with an oath by Him who said to Him: "The Lord has sworn and will not relent, 'You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.'") by so much more Jesus has become a surety of a better covenant. [So not only is there a new family beginning, a spiritual Family, there is also a New Covenant.] Also there were many priests, because they were prevented by death from continuing. But He, because He continues forever, has an unchangeable priesthood. Therefore He is also able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him, since He ever lives to make intercession for them. For such a High Priest was fitting for us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and has become higher than the heavens; who does not need daily as those high priests [the Levitical priests] to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the people's, for this He did once for all when He offered up Himself. For the law appoints as high priests men who have weaknesses, but the word of the oath, which came after the law, appoints the Son who has been perfected forever.

Let me summarize all those verses: At just the right time in history, God the Father sent His Son into the world as Savior and Redeemer, the anointed one, the Messiah, or the Christ. And as we know, the Son of God lived without sin, thus providing us a perfect model for godly living in the world and qualifying as our High Priest and Mediator of the New Covenant.

He was perfect. He was the perfect example of how to live this way of life, God's way of life in this world, in a world of sin, and overcome and get through it without sin. Even cynical Pilate said three times during the trial, that sham trial of Jesus Christ, right before His crucifixion, "I find no fault with Him at all." Even a cynical Roman politician could see that this man was perfect. He had done nothing wrong. He was spotless and holy. He was the righteous Son, not the rebellious son. He is worthy of all praise, glory, and honor. He is the exact opposite of the rebellious son in Deuteronomy 21.

Yet Israel, represented by the first century Jewish leadership, flipped the script. They condemned Him, the perfect Son, as if He were the rebellious son. They exhibited perverted judgment based on guilt and expedience, and fear of loss and even envy, as Pilate recognized in Matthew 27:18. Pilate was pretty observant.

I will not go through all the verses. But there are plenty of verses in the gospels that show how much they condemned Jesus Christ time and time again. They condemned Him as a stubborn rebel. They said it was against God. But you know what? He was a stubborn rebel against their Pharisaism. They did not like that. They even called Him the exact words, that He was a winebibber and a glutton, which Jesus reports on Himself. In John 10:31 they accused Him of blasphemy and picked up stones to kill Him. They tried to throw Him over a cliff in Luke 4:28-29 when He implied that God would turn to the Gentiles because of the hardness of the Jews' hearts.

They were unjust judges, these Pharisees, these Jews of the time. They were willing to rid themselves of an unwanted member of the community because He threatened their ideas and their place in Judaism. Think about it. What would have been the difference in the world if they had judged righteously, if they had fallen on their knees in humility and repentance before Him?

But they are human; they would not do that, right? They did not really recognize Him. And so instead of removing evil from their midst, they removed the way, the truth, and the life. They removed their own Savior, they removed the perfect Man, they removed God their Father. So God followed through with the curses again on Judah.

Notice Matthew 23, starting in verse 29.

Matthew 23:29-39 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, 'If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.' Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your father's guilt. Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell [of death]? Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes [He is identifying Himself as who He was to them. He was their God. He was the one that sent the prophets wise men and scribes.] Some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous able to the blood of Zechariah son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation. Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her. How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you are not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate; for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, 'Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!'"

So He says here, even though I was your Father, you are not like Me. You were like your fathers who killed the prophets. You had another father whom you imitated. And He is saying, like your forefathers, you are altogether like them. You are the rebellious son. Even though their perfect Parent had instructed them in the right way of life and disciplined them to guide them to maturity, they disobeyed, spurned, and rebelled generation after generation after generation. So the punishment that they had come under in the law, under the terms of the covenant, their punishment was death, just like it had been for their forefathers. And ironically, it came at the hands of the same authority that killed the righteous Son, the perfect Son—the Romans. They stand in as the men of the city, citizens of the world, if you will. They were called upon as God's sword to rid the world of evil.

Let us go back to Galatians 4. Let us put ourselves in here a little bit more. We will read the fuller paragraph here because Paul brings us in at the end of this.

Galatians 4:4-6 But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, "Abba, Father!"

Have you ever thought of that in terms of God sending forth His Spirit? Notice he says, the Spirit of His Son. It says, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, "Abba, Father!" What it means to me is that the Son's Spirit comes into us and its purpose is to give us the ability to have the same relationship as the Son has with the Father. That is His purpose, to bring us around from rebellious, sinful people to true sons of God, perfect sons, righteous sons.

Galatians 4:7 Therefore, you are no longer a slave but a son. And if a son [notice the conditional there, if a son], then an heir of God through Christ.

If you can prove yourself as a son of God, you will be an heir, just like Christ, of God and all things.

But there is another side of this. We do not want to be like it says in II Peter 2:14 talking about the false teacher. The false teacher was fellowshipping among the church, yet it calls those false teachers who go off, who leave the way of God, accursed children. I did not notice that until Martin was there in II Peter 3 today. That the false teachers are called accursed children. They become rebellious sons and he says they end up worse than they began.

Let us conclude here in Zephaniah 3.

Zephaniah 3:1-5 Woe to her who is rebellious and polluted, to the oppressing city! She has not obeyed His voice, she has not received correction; she has not trusted in the Lord, she has not drawn near to her God. Her princes in her midst are roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves that leave not a bone until morning. Her prophets are insolent, treacherous people; her priests have polluted the sanctuary, they have done violence to the law. The Lord is righteous in her midst, He will do no unrighteousness. Every morning He brings His justice to light; He never fails, but the unjust knows no shame.

Now, remember, this is a typical thing of what it was going to be in the end time. And so what I take from this is that Israel will be a lot like they were in BC times, just before their fall in the modern times. There is going to be a correspondence. They are going to be just like they were then because human nature just does not change. And so he is describing Jerusalem before their fall as a type of what it will be like for Israel at the end.

Zephaniah 3:6-8 "I have cut off nations, their fortresses are devastated; I have made their streets desolate, with none passing by. Their cities are destroyed; there is no one, no inhabitant. I said, 'Surely you will fear Me, you will receive instruction'—so that her dwelling would not be cut off, despite everything for which I punished her. But they rose early and corrupted all their deeds. [God is saying, "I tried to get their attention. I tried to get them to change and they would not."] Therefore wait for Me," says the Lord, "until the day I rise up for plunder; My determination is to gather the nations to My assembly of kingdoms, to pour on them My indignation, all My fierce anger; all the earth shall be devoured with the fire of My jealousy."

You can also write down Matthew 24:14-22 which talks about the great Tribulation against Israel and Revelation 19:17-21 which talks about the great battle at His return.

But what I am showing here is that there is another great judgment that is looming over, not just Israel, not just Judah, but over the whole world. And it seems to be drawing nearer and nearer every week! Some day soon, God will act in righteous indignation, judging not just His people, but the whole world for their incessant rebellions against Him. Because remember, mankind was made in His image. By creation, all mankind are children of God. Billions of children have lived on this earth and all have gone astray. Some have been redeemed, but all have gone astray. All have stubbornly rebelled, all have proudly shaken their fists at their Creator for some thing or another.

He will invoke the law of the rebellious son, judge them guilty, and execute their just punishment in the Tribulation and the Day of the Lord. That is what is coming. As this feast pictures, He will return as the righteous Son, the King of kings, and establish His throne on this earth to teach the survivors of that great judgment how to live as righteous sons like Him.

And He will be assisted by tens of thousands of God's newly changed and now immortal and righteous children who are like Him. And they will tell these people, "This is the way, walk in it." And so, only then God will truly begin to solve humanity's cycle of stubborn rebellion against the Creator, the perpetual generation gap between the Father and His children.

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