So if you turn in your Bibles
to Mark chapter 11, just to put you in the picture of what's
happening here is this is the last few days of the Lord Jesus'
earthly ministry. He has come to Jerusalem and
been acclaimed by the crowds, including the children, as God's
Messiah. An amazing public declaration
as he triumphantly marched in as king to his city and went
straight to the temple. The next morning he walks into
Jerusalem with his disciples and in a great picture of what
the reality of false religion is, he sees a fig tree. And there it is with a great
display of its leaves. and it has no fruit on it. A
wonderful picture and a sad picture of religion without Christ. A picture of how much it can
look appealing to the eyes of men but have nothing to do with
the Lord except Him in judgment. And so the Lord Jesus curses
that fig tree and so for these next two or three days in these
last days of ministry the disciples walk past this withered fig tree,
this cursed fig tree, this emblem of the religion of the Jews,
the most magnificent buildings, the most extraordinary traditions
and heritage, and yet God only came there in judgment. Jerusalem was the place for God
to come in judgment, and He went each night out over the hill
and dwelt with his people in Bethany. And so this is just
now a couple of days before the crucifixion. And Jesus in this
passage before us meets his enemies. and He goes to their place. The scriptures say that the gates
of Hades will not prevail against it. The gates are not offensive
weapons, the gates are defensive weapons. God goes in the face
of the Lord Jesus to the very heart of man's religion. He goes there as God and He goes
there as judgment. He came to Jerusalem, verse 27
of Mark 11. They came again to Jerusalem,
and as He was walking in the temple, He was confronted by
these people. We've got to remember that the
Lord Jesus began His ministry as a preaching ministry. He came into Galilee at the beginning
of Mark's Gospel, preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God
and saying, the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at
hand. Repent and believe the Gospel. So it was the norm of
Jesus' ministry. He came with a preaching ministry. He came with a ministry of proclaiming
the Gospel of God. And he kept preaching, he kept
proclaiming to the very end. It's a great lesson for us, isn't
it? That God's work is done. through the proclamation of the
Gospel, through declaring the wonders of who the Lord Jesus
is, declaring His deity, declaring His finished work on behalf of
His people, not declaring someone who tried to do things, not declaring
someone who honours the free will of men or the worth of men
or the works of men, but someone who declares that God's salvation
is God's work. The gospel must be preached.
And the Lord shows us by example. But also he shows us the gospel
must be preached and the gospel will be preached in the face
of the most severe opposition possible. And so the chief priests
and the scribes and the elders came to him. You've got to remember
the situation here. This temple was a magnificent
structure. We had pictures of it here several
weeks ago. It covered 25 acres of land,
12 hectares. It stretched from here down to
Narra Fair and across beyond the theatre. It was a huge, huge
complex of buildings. And these people who had come
back from the exile in Babylon had been established as a Sanhedrin. They called themselves, the Nine
Elders, the Great Sanhedrin. These people are representatives
of that Sanhedrin. Maybe not all 70 were there at
this particular moment, but they came as a huge group of men. Man who had for 400 years and
more had absolute authority over what happened in the temple,
and had absolute authority, apart from the king, over what happened
in Jerusalem, in Israel. These were powerful men. They
were the elite of the elite. They not only came in this magnificent
building and they came in this display, they came dressed in
all of their robes, all of the finery which showed them to be
the people who claimed to have the authority. over all of what
Israel did, and all of what Israel was to represent as God. These people came as God's representatives. They stood on this earth as the
people who were the defenders and the proclaimers, so they
thought, of the Gospel of God. And they began saying to Him,
it's a great sign of the darkness of humanity, isn't it? that men
would dare question God. They began saying to him, by
what authority are you doing these things? These things refer
both to his preaching and his cleansing of the temple. Him
saying, this temple is my house. This temple is mine to rule. This temple is mine to cleanse. This temple is my father's house,
which means it is my house. And you people have turned it
into a den of thieves. You've turned God's house into
a marketplace. By what authority are you doing
these things, or who gave you this authority? In reality, we need to know that
for three years these men had been plotting to kill the Lord
Jesus. These questions they ask him
at the end of his ministry are not fair dinkum questions. It is not a fair dinkum question. They are not seeking an answer
from the Lord to satisfy some need of knowledge. The sole purpose
of asking this question was to trap the Lord Jesus. See, they
were the ones who had the authority. If the Lord Jesus claims that
he has this authority from God, then they would say, here is
the book. Here is the priesthood. God's
priests are from the tribe of Levi. God's priests are from
the family of Aaron. God's priests today are from
the family of Zadok. And you are a man from the tribe
of Judah. We know that you're from David's
family. So this order of priesthood and
teaching and authority in the temple was fixed, and they could
hold this book up and say it's fixed by God. And so if he said
that, he would have been taking upon himself an office which
was not the right of man to take upon himself. And so they had
him trapped. If he said it was for men, They
could say, we are the only men who appoint men to teach other
men. We are the ones with the authority
from God, and this is our book to prove it. And you cannot do
these things without authority from us. And so just like the
question of the coin and other questions they brought before
Jesus, the purpose was to trap Him. They weren't being fair
dinkum. It's a great Australian phrase.
I hope it becomes a great international phrase. God's people need to
be fair dinkum. And so Jesus turns to these people
and he says, I will ask you one question and you will answer me and then
I will tell you by what authority I do these things. Was the baptism
of John from heaven? or from men? Answer me." So their
question was, is your authority from God or is your authority
from men? We hold the keys of both God's authority here on
earth and we hold the keys of all men's authority, so you cannot,
without our permission, do these things. Jesus asked them a question,
and it is the most important question you can ever ask yourself. It's a question that you must
ask yourselves in your hearts. It's not a question that's answered
publicly or in a very real sense physically. It's a question you
must ask in your heart. Is the work that is going on
in my life a work of God that comes from God and is sustained
by God's power and God's activities, or is this work the work of men
that's based on man's wisdom, man's will, man's activities,
and receives the praise of men? You're all sitting in a church
this morning. You're all listening to people proclaiming the Gospel. You're all listening to people
who say that they are speaking on God's behalf. Every church
you go to in this land will say that they are saying what they
are saying and they are doing what they are doing because they
are representing God. They are speaking on God's behalf.
Within a few hundred metres of here are four or five churches,
all proclaiming to be the ones who are doing God's work and
representing God on this earth. God says to his people, test
the spirits. He's not saying test things that
are floating around in the earth. He's saying to you young people,
test the people who speak to you and claim that they speak
on God's behalf. He's saying to older people,
test what you hear. Take what you hear and test it
against this word and see from this word whether this person
speaking to you is speaking on God's behalf, or is really someone
who is an angel of light, Satan masquerading as someone who proclaims
to have light but has no darkness, has darkness. There is no in-between
ground. Neither we here are speaking
on God's behalf, and we are God's servants bringing God's Gospel
with God's power to God's people, and it will work in God's way
in God's time. Well, we are deceivers. And one
of the verses that has really sort of run around and around
in my head so much lately is that God says, if the blind lead
the blind, they both fall into the ditch. He doesn't say that if the blind
lead the blind, a whole bunch of the lead blind will be okay
in their own good time. It's a very serious word from
God, isn't it? It's a promise from God. So these men were at the head
of an organisation which was huge. It claimed to have authority
from God. it had caused this huge temple
complex to being built. The number of people that attended
their big conferences numbered in the millions. They had the
most extraordinary services morning and evening, seven days a week. It was huge. It was huge in numbers
of men. It was huge in what it claimed
for itself. And yet God was only there amongst
that people in judgment. Sometimes we are asked why do
we keep saying these things over and over again. It's because
the scriptures say them over and over and over again. It's
hardly a word. You try and find a page in this
book that doesn't speak of warning about those who claim to be gods
but are not. It's repeated again and again
through Mark's Gospel. We have seen as the Lord comes
and reveals himself and reveals his glory, reveals his deity,
that he creates a division amongst men. There are some who rejoice,
rejoice in the fact that God is merciful to those who have
done nothing to deserve mercy, for the lost, for the blind,
for the parents with a dead child, for the lepers who are covered
in leprosy. God is merciful and people rejoice. God is merciful and his people
are healed and comforted. And at the same time there is
another group sent from Jerusalem, sent from these people, who stand
there and cart and criticize and mock what God is doing. So the warnings are serious.
Eternity is a long, long time. And the other thing is that the
history of the scriptures and the history of the last 2,000
years is a history that shows us that this is exactly what
is going to happen in every age of the church until the Lord
Jesus comes back. And so as God's shepherds warn
God's people about the wolves in sheep's clothing and say,
this is what the wolf looks like, this is what the wolf teaches,
the wolf teaches free will, the wolf teaches works religion,
the wolf teaches man's worth and man's will. The wolf teaches
that God is trying to save everyone, that God loves everyone, the
Lord Jesus has died for everyone, that salvation is an offer and
all you have to do is pick it up and take it. The wolves are
teaching those things all over this world. God's people are
saying again and again, as Zechariah chapter 4 says, not by might, nor by power, but
by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts." The other reason these
things are so, the scriptures are so full of these warnings
is that when we see it happening and when we see the scriptures
lived out before our eyes, when God's children meet with the
Pharisees and God exposes the Pharisees, We are then caused
to live in faith. God is faithful to his promises. And God's children can be warned
and then comforted. And then we can say, faithful
and true is our God. And so that's the question, isn't
it, the biggest question that lies before people who come to
this church. Is this the work of God in grace
and mercy, revealing His Son, causing Him to be honoured and
worshipped in His true character, gathered by Him each week, grown
together by Him, as He has promised? Grown together to be His witnesses
in this town, in this land, and throughout this world, we are
either God's servants or we are Satan's servants. Teachers come
under the strictest judgment, and it exercises my mind and
my prayers a lot. May God keep us faithful to His
gospel. We keep as much as we can to
keep our activities as public as we possibly can. We try and
publish everything that we say and do as widely as possible.
There are people in many countries who listen and read what we say. We beg of them to come and tell
us if we're in error. We have been to the leaders of
most of the churches in this town and we've asked them, what
is their gospel? What do they proclaim? What do
they say about our Lord Jesus? And so often the response we
have is the same response the Lord Jesus himself met with.
when people in their religion have established their righteousness,
their self-righteousness, and they find that the Gospel, the
declaration of who the Lord Jesus is, has stripped them of their
self-worth and stripped them of their self-righteousness and
shown them that they are nothing but sin, that their best deeds
are nothing but filthy rags, then all of a sudden The same
response of the Pharisees 2,000 years ago is today. They rise up in anger. The anger is really anger against
God. They will not bow to God. They
will not submit to the righteousness of God. And so there is in these
men a great example of spiritual ignorance. And we know that spiritual life,
spiritual light, can only come from God. But spiritual ignorance
is a culpable ignorance. God will hold people responsible
for what light they have received, and God will hold people responsible
for what light they may have received. We have an old house
and it gets very dark at night and sometimes wandering around
not trying to turn the lights on. If you're actually walking
towards something that has light, whether it's moonlight or a light
in another room, you can actually see very clearly when you're
walking toward light, you can see where you're going and you
can see what's in front of you. If you turn around, there's nothing
but darkness before you, even though I've been living there
for a long time. Occasionally I have their very embarrassing
stumbling and falling. Because when you walk towards
the darkness and your back is to the light, darkness is all
you see and the darkness gets deeper. These men had had three
years. The Lord Jesus at the beginning
of His ministry, in all of the Gospels, at the beginning of
His ministry said, I am God. I am the Messiah of Israel. I will save my people from their
sins. And He says to these men, you
now have three years. You have three years to test
everything that I do, everything that I say. And on top of that,
towards the end of my ministry, right at the very end, I'll give
you one of my disciples who has seen everything that I've done
and heard everything that I've said in private. You can have
him as well. You can have all of that. The evidence is just immense. The evidence of who the Lord
Jesus is, is just immense. Which is why the Lord Jesus says
to these people, the baptism of John, was it from men or was
it from God? The baptism of John was a baptism
of repentance. The baptism of John was a baptism
which pointed toward the Lord Jesus, that people were immersed
in their sins and then immersed in salvation as they came to
John the Baptist. But his whole ministry had one
focus, The reason he came baptising with water was that the Christ,
was that Jesus might be revealed to Israel. He quoted Isaiah,
make straight the paths of the Lord, make straight Jehovah's
way. And he had one message, he had
one wonderful message. It was, behold, look at The Lamb
of God. Behold the Lamb of God. Feast your eyes upon Him. Study
this Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Takes away the sin of all of
His people scattered throughout the world. And so they had the
evidence of John the Baptist. His proclamation of the Gospel. They had the evidence of Scripture
that John the Baptist had proclaimed. They had the evidence of God
the Father speaking from heaven. God, who had not spoken to them
for 400 years, came and spoke through John the Baptist, and
then spoke audibly from heaven. at Jesus' baptism. You are my
beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. The demons testified
to who Jesus was. I know who you are, the Holy
One of God. They had His own testimony. As
I said earlier, He proclaimed His deity. Who on earth, these
Pharisees say, at the healing of the paralytic man, who can
forgive sins but God alone? And Jesus said to them, but that
ye might know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive
sins. He claimed that he was Lord,
he was God of the Sabbath. His miracles proclaimed who he
was, messianic miracles. And then he sent out his disciples
and they continued his ministry. And the people widely proclaimed
it. The reality is that evidence
does not bring faith. Evidence does not bring faith. For those who have faith which
is a gift of God, evidence is a great comfort. But God's people
who have faith live by faith and not by sight. So many in
this world want to see evidence of God working. They want to
see people being healed. They want to see miracles performed.
They want to see things so they can prove that God really is
and that they can really put their faith in Him. These people
had three years. of God standing before them,
proclaiming Himself to be God, doing things that no one else
ever did. What on earth do we think that
some fake miracles are going to do today that for three years
these people had no faith at the end of it? In fact, as the
evidence mounted, these men, These wise, learned men became
more and more enraged. These men, like all men who stand
opposed to God, are dishonest men. Their question wasn't fair
dinkum. They were trying to justify themselves
and their authority, rather than bowing to God. And so it is in our day. The Lord Jesus tells them plainly, You answer me. You can't claim
to have authority. I am now the one who has authority
here. You tell me and I will tell you. And like all rebels against God,
when they are backed into a corner, they'll seek the comfort of other
men. They will seek to gather others
around them. Just imagine the situation. These
are the teachers of Israel. These are the brightest, most
well-educated. They are the elite of the elite
in Israel. These people know their Old Testament
almost off by heart. They have been trained in religion
from their childhood. They only get to be in this position,
this position of power and authority, because of their extraordinary
knowledge. Just imagine the scene. There's
a carpenter from Nazareth with a rag-tag bunch of fishermen
and the common people who rejoiced at what he was saying. And there
are these men in their fancy garments with all of their fancy
religious paraphernalia and they have a meeting. They began reasoning
among themselves. They who had laid a trap for
the Lord Jesus were now caught in a trap themselves. The honest
answer is to put up the white flag and say, I'm in trouble. These men, rather than telling
the truth, like all human reasoning never
gets to God's truth. All human reasoning ever does
is drive people further away from God's truth. And their reasoning
was pretty good. If we say, from heaven he will
say, then why did you not believe him? But shall we say, from men
they were afraid of the people, for everyone considered that
John had been a real prophet. They chose to speak publicly
against their own consciences, what they knew to be true, and
they were prepared in the face of all of this to tell a willful
lie and be accused of ignorance rather than be honest. These men who had come as judge,
had been judged. Out of their own mouths, they'd
been judged. So that's what happens when men
seek wisdom and praise of men. When confronted by God, they
are exposed as the dishonest men they really are. And God
will expose everyone. The Gospel exposes people, exposes
them to what they really are. It will expose everyone, either
in mercy here and in grace, as they are captivated by the wonders
of who the Lord Jesus is, that it's possible for sinners, for
wretches like us, to live before God as holy people because the
Lord Jesus took our sins as His own and suffered infinitely as
He was punished by God for them. sinners like us who simply put
their trust, put their rest in who Jesus is. All people will
be exposed. They gather a whole bunch of
other people who say the same thing as them and comfort them
with man's wisdom. God calls that, calls the religion
of this world a refuge of lies, a hiding place, a place where
people seek comfort. He says it is a refuge of lies
and he says one day that refuge will be swept away. These men,
rather than giving a plain, honest, straightforward answer, they
put their heads together, not to find out the truth, but how
to save faith. And the Lord Jesus answers them,
and it seems on first reading like it's a cop-out. Answering Jesus, they said, we
don't know. And Jesus said to them, nor will
I tell you by what authority I do these things. The Lord Jesus
is speaking in judgment to these people. He doesn't say, I cannot
tell you. He's saying, I will not tell
you. I will leave you in your darkness. I will leave you with your religion
of men. I will leave you to go your own
way." It's the most appalling thing, isn't it? To contemplate
that we live in a world where most people that we meet are
like that fig tree. It's withered from the roots
up. It has no possible hope of ever producing fruit. as our friend Robert Hooker says,
think to yourselves the state of a church, a people, a family,
yes an individual like this, and calculate if you can the
awful state of appearing flourishing to the eye of men while under
the blighting curse of God. So much of what we see around
us is religion that is flourishing in the eyes of men. It can build
huge buildings. It can gather huge numbers of
people. It can seem impressive to the
eye. It can talk much about Jesus.
But it's like the withered fig tree, because the life of God's
Church is spiritual life. The sustenance of God's people
is the gospel of the free grace that flows to sinners through
the work of the Lord Jesus and continues to flow and continues
to flow, not because men are clever, not because men work
hard, but because we have a husband who is faithful. We have a God
who is powerful. We have a truth that sustains
all of the darts of the enemy. We have a Saviour who is faithful
to His promises, and He will do it. May God protect us from
being anything like an institution that looks good to men, that
seeks to please men, that seeks to honour men. May God protect
us from that. May God grow us to be an organism,
a dwelling place of God by His Spirit. and then we who wait
on the Lord will see him doing amazing things in our midst.
as we live by faith and not by sight, we will have more to see
and more to rejoice in than all of those who ever seek to live
by sight and not by faith. May God grant us the grace to
continue honouring His Son and serving Him and worshipping Him.
Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we thank
you that the Lord Jesus so effortlessly overcame his enemies. and so effortlessly we'll overcome
all of our enemies. We pray to Heavenly Father that
the great captain of our faith has gone before us into places
we will go, has done the things that he asks us to do and he
does them in his people. Help us Heavenly Father to not
be like that fig tree that seeks the praise of men, that seeks
the glory of men, and has nothing of like in it at all. Please
grow us, Heavenly Father, in faith and love and in the grace
of our Lord Jesus, that we might be a people who proclaim His
praises, who delight in who He is and what He's doing for us,
and that He causes us to have our eyes fixed on Him, who is
the author and the perfecter of faith. We thank you in Jesus'
name, our Father. Amen. I don't think we're going
to see it.