Turn to Matthew chapter 11. Matthew chapter 11. And let's
look at verse 12 through 19. Verse 12 says, and from the days
of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffered
violence and the violent take it before me. For all the prophets
and the law prophesied until John. And if you will receive
it, this is a life which was for to come. He that hath ears
to hear, let him hear. But whereunto shall I liken this
generation? It's likened to children sitting
in the markets and calling unto their fellows, and saying, we
have piped unto you, and you've not danced. We have mourned unto
you, and you have not lamented. For John came neither eating
nor drinking, and they say that he has a devil. The Son of Man
came eating and drinking, and they say, behold a gluttonous and a wine-bibber
and a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified
of her children. I had a conversation with our
dear friend Moose Parks the other day. And I told him that I'd
been thinking about this 12th verse. Let's read it again. From the days of John the Baptist
until now, the kingdom of heaven suffered violence, and the violent
take it by force. And when I quoted it to him,
he hesitated on the other end of the phone, didn't respond
for what seemed like about a minute, and then he asked me this question.
He said, so, have you decided that the violent people spoken
of in that verse, are they bad people or are they good people?
He says, they're violent. They're violent. And my answer
to him was, well, if I have it right, they're both. They're
good in that they are in Christ. but bad in that they are of themselves. If the Lord will enable me, I
want to consider this verse and try to make it a comfort to all
of us who trust in Christ. Matthew chapter 11 verse 12,
Chris. I heard a preacher say one time
that John the Baptist was rock star. I may have said that, told
that to some of you before. But there were multitudes of
people coming to John into the wilderness to see him and to
hear him. He was literally turning that
whole world upside down that he lived in in those days. with
the message that he'd been assigned to deliver way back in Malachi
400 years before. He was announcing in very precise
language that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. John was the
forerunner of Messiah. He didn't have a name at that
time. But Messiah means the same thing as Christ. in the translation
of the Word and the Scripture. And he was announcing his imminent
arrival into this world. That was his purpose and that
was his message. John came to the very dawning
of the day and he saw the sun arise. And he identified Messiah
as one who was standing among them right then. He was preaching
Christ in that wilderness just as every other prophet before
him had preached. And he was preaching Messiah
or Christ crucified. Look at verse 13. That he preached
Christ or Messiah crucified is obvious in that He was baptizing
believers, those of faith who were converted under His ministry.
Why does that mean He was preaching Christ crucified? Because baptism
symbolizes our public profession and our association with the
death, the burial, the resurrection, and the person of Christ. That
was the name in which He was baptized. Our Lord's approval
of John and the compliments that He paid to John means and it
proves that He owned John's ministry and that He made it successful.
He was the cause of the multitudes that were coming to hear John
and to see John in the wilderness. John, so to speak, had broken
the ice For approximately two years at this point in time,
he'd been preaching repentance and baptism. And he was preparing the people
of God for the kingdom of heaven and the public ministry of Christ,
which was about to come and about to begin. Whole multitudes had
been worked upon by God and his ministry blessed of God
in the conversion and the salvation of the people that John was ministering
to. Now this passage describes two reactions. It describes the
reaction and the effect upon God's elect to preachers in the
preaching of the gospel. When the gospel was preached
by John, it says that men went violently. The kingdom of heaven
suffered violence and they went violently into the kingdom. That
word violent means forceful. It means passionately. It means
in an intense manner. were great feeling. They were
vehement in their entrance into that kingdom. Impetuous is also
a meaning of that word. Extremely. They went extremely
to Christ. They went passionately to Christ.
They went violently to Christ. Verse 19, the last part of it,
if you'll look at that, describes those violent ones as being very
wise. being very wise in coming to
Christ. Verse 16 through 19 describes
those who do not come. And they're characterized as
mockers of both the preacher and the message that he preached.
You've played the music, but we ain't gonna dance. That's
what that says. We want nothing to do with it.
And our Lord says in another place, woe unto them. Woe unto them. This is always
the case. As you sit here this morning
under the preaching of the Gospel, some will believe and some will
believe not. That's what's in verses 12-19.
There's two people there. Believers and unbelievers. Acts
28. There's a comment there concerning
Paul. Not by Paul, but concerning Paul.
Luke says that Paul, when they had appointed him a day, they
made an appointment with him. That's what that means. And there
came many to him into his lodging to whom he expounded and testified
the kingdom of God. Persuading them concerning Jesus
out of the prophets And out of the law of Moses. And he did
it from morning to evening. And then it says this, and some
believe and some believe not. That's the two that you have
in the passage that we're looking at here. Now, I've had this passage
on my mind for a few weeks. That don't mean you're going
to hear anything new. And it's affected my thinking.
And even when I was reading other passages and commentaries on
other verses in the course of my thoughts and reading, I think
that I found a picture in the Old Testament of what this passage
right here is saying. And I want to look at it this
morning. Turn to 2 Kings chapter 7. 2 Kings chapter 7. 2 Kings chapter 7. And I'll go ahead and read all
11 verses. Hopefully I've got time for all
this. Then Elisha said, Hear ye the
word of the Lord, thus saith the Lord, Tomorrow about this
time shall a measure of fine flour be sold for a shekel. And two measures of barley for
a shekel in the gate of Samaria. Now what you've got to understand
here is this city was under siege by the Syrian army and had been
so for some time. The people in the gates and around
this city that was under siege were starving to death. They
had eaten everything, and they had no food, they had no water,
they were eating their horses, their cattle, and they had eaten
all of it, in my opinion, except for five horses. And they belonged
to the king. Verse 2, it says, then the Lord,
Elisha, let me say this, Elisha in that first verse says, tomorrow,
you're gonna have an abundance of food and drink and water and
sustenance that you can buy a whole cow for a nickel. Do you think
they believed that? Then a lord on whose hand the
king leaned, one of his governors or one of his henchmen, King Lene answered the man of
God, and said, Behold, if the Lord made windows in heaven,
that can't be true. And he said, Behold, thou shalt
see it with thine eyes, but you shall not eat thereof. And there
were four lepers, men at the entering in of the gate, and
they said one to another, Why sit we here until we die? If
we say we will enter into the city, then the famine's in the
city and we shall die there. And if we sit here, we'll die also. Now therefore,
come and let us fall unto the host of the Syrians. If they
save us alive, we shall live. And if they kill us, we just
simply will die. And they rose up in the twilight
to go into the camp of the Syrians. And when they were come to the
uttermost part of the camp of Syria, behold, there was no man. For the Lord had made the host
of the Syrians to hear a noise of chariots and a noise of horses,
even the noise of a great host. And they said one to another,
lo, the king of Israel has hired a bunch of mercenaries, the Hittites
and the kings of the Egyptians to come upon us. Wherefore they
arose and fled in the twilight and left their tents and their
horses and their asses, even the camp as it was, and fled
for their life. And when these lepers came to
the uttermost parts of the camp, they went into one tent, and
did eat and drink, and carried thence silver, and gold, and
raiment, and went and hid it, and came again, and entered into
another tent, and carried thence also, and went and hid it. Then
they said one to another, we do not well. This day is a day
of good news, and we hold our peace. If we tarry until the
morning light, some mischief will come upon
us. Now therefore come that we may go and tell the king's household.'
So they came and called unto the porter of the city, and they
told him, saying, We came to the camp of the Syrians, and,
behold, there was no man there, neither voice of man, but horses
tied. asses tied, and the tents as
they were. And he called the porters, and
they told it to the king's house within." Any sinner that comes
to Christ is going to have one trait in common with all others. That trait is that he has a great
need, and these four lepers, in the state in which they existed,
had a great need. They were poor. They were in desolation. They
were in ruin. And the preaching of God's grace
from the Scriptures will leave any and every sinner to be hungry
and thirsty and naked and open before God in need of His mercy,
His grace, and His forgiveness. Before God gives faith by His
grace, He will bring the recipient to know that He has nothing,
and that He is nothing and that He can do nothing to warrant
or to deserve or to earn the saving of His soul. Now in this
text, in 2 Kings, we have a picture, the picture of four lepers and
the grace that abounded to them. They had a dreadful disease as
we have. They were cursed. They were unwanted
and they were filthy. They were lepers. They were Jews
like everyone else there. And they were under siege of
an overwhelming army like everyone else that was inside the gates.
They were outside. They were starving and they were
certain to die and they knew it. Through God's providence,
we're helpless. and hopeless. And they knew what
was coming was a cruel death and that rightfully so, as every
sinner knows before they come to Christ. They knew innately
by the very disease that they had and were conscious of that
they were a blight on society. They were shunned. They were
rejected. They even had to cry out unclean when they encountered
someone on the street, so that either the person that they were
warning could cross the street to avoid them, or they would
cross the street to keep from infecting them. Sounds to me like they were pretty
sensible of their condition and their problem. All of those things
picture the effects of sin in all of us, and the wrath that
we are rightfully due. But this story is not about God's
anger. It's about God's pity. If you're a child of faith, as
we go from here, through this lesson, Consider yourself one
of these lepers. If you're one of these lepers,
there's something that you don't know. You're totally unaware of the
fact that the siege of this city is over. It's done. The battle was won. And that Syrian enemy had already
been defeated. That's always the case with the
salvation of every sinner. They're totally unaware that
God has saved them before this world was ever formed. But the first thing required
in delivering that sin is that the enemy must be destroyed and
totally defeated. And it had been done. Now given
the old nature that still abides with us, that's hard to see. There's nothing natural that
we can look at, that we can see, that would indicate that the
siege of our sin has ended. We live with ourselves. We know
what we are. What we're capable of. But we
know what we are in Christ. It's only by faith that we've
overcome the enemy of our sin. And our knowledge is based upon
the promise God has made and that He has made reconciliation
for us. And the work and the wages of
our sin is done and paid before we ever come. We believe what God has said
and not what we say. Was that not the case with these
lepers? They were scared to death of entering the camp of the enemy.
But what they didn't know was that God had already taken care
of that victory. Our victory over sin and death. You want to know what else they
didn't know? you didn't know that because
God had destroyed your enemies, all of the riches of His grace
was yours just for the taking. As they sat in their place of
death anticipating dying in their cursed estate, they didn't know
what God had already done. Your salvation had already been
accomplished and a bounty and a feast had been set by the very
hand of God in His pity for you. Elisha the prophet in verse 1
had told them that on this very day the table had been set and
that life had been freely secured. Is that not what he told them?
You can buy all you need tomorrow for nothing. What a sweet picture of gospel
redemption that is. It's the declaration of what
God has done, what Christ has finished, and that in Christ,
ours is an eternal welfare, not just simply continuance of life,
but life eternal. There's something you and I didn't
know. There's something these leopards
didn't know. They knew for certain that they
were going to die. Whether they went back inside
the walls, whether they stayed where they were, or whether they
went to the camp of the enemy, they were dead men. They were
going to die. And what is a dying man going
to do? Well, I'll tell you what he's going to do. He's going
to do whatever he can do to possibly avoid dying. The one thing they
needed to live was food. These folks had come to the state
of cannibalism. Think about that. They needed
food. And they knew the only place
where they could that could be found was in the enemy's camp.
They were desperate in their hunger and so desperate that
not even the ugly face of their enemy was a consideration. And what will a dying, starving,
spiritually emaciated sinner like these lepers do to get to
Christ? He'll come against the very gates of hell. He'll discount family. He'll
discount his friends. He'll discount his former religion,
his profession that he made when he was eight years old. He'll
discount anything and everything. His education at theological
schools. He'll discount anything and everything
that stands between Him and His need being met. You won't have to give an invitation.
You won't have to come up with a simple Roman Road 1-2-3 plan. All that needs to be done when
He's trying to get to Christ is just get out of the way. Is that your experience? The kingdom of God suffereth
violence. And the violent take it by force.
That's what that verse is talking about. They knew they were under
the curse of death. And if they died, they died trying
to get to where the food was. So what did they do? They went to the only place that
there was food. Their hunger, their need, was
guided by grace and the pity of God their Father. And they
walked into what they thought was certain death. I say walked
because they were hungry. And they were weak. And they
were weary. They didn't run. They're starving
to death. They dragged themselves like
dead men. And when they got to the camp, verse 5, it simply
says this. It says, Behold, there was no
man there. The enemy was gone. Gone. There were no enemies. Their
enemies were gone. Our sin is gone in Christ. Victory's
won. It was done before we ever were
informed. There was no man there. They
didn't even have to cry. Unclean. There was nothing left but handfuls
on purpose. What happened then? They filled
their stomachs and their backpacks. What'd they do when they saw
the riches of God's grace in the person of Christ? Oh, there
was plenty there. There was plenty there. You did
the same thing. And you just keep on going from
tent to tent to tent. Breaking it up. Filling your
stomach. Filling your backpacks. The spiritual blessings of forgiveness
and redemption of Christ. It's not thievery. That's one
of the things I thought of in reading. They were stealing that
stuff. No, they weren't. No. It's not
thievery or in any way illegal for you to lay up treasures in
heaven. And that's what these guys were
doing. That's what sinners do. They lay up treasures in heaven. God has said that all things
are ours. They weren't stealing. It was
Blomton. Blomton. It was given them in Christ.
It was given us in Christ. But they pictured it. And given the bounty and
the plenty which they discovered in the enemy's camp. They got a little twinge of guilt
about them, person nine. We can't keep this secret. We
gotta tell somebody about this. This is not right for us to keep
this secret. There's so much here that our
friends can't even. He's paid double for all our
sins. That means there's plenty around for others if we just
tell others about Him. Through the Gospel. I'm not talking
about door-to-door witnessing. Four worthless lepers here crying
out that the enemy was destroyed and their bounty for the taking.
It was a day of good news and they were fearful of being silent
about it. That's the state of the sinner
who's come to Christ. He wishes everyone could be as
fat and well-fed as He is. Like Paul said, woe is unto me
if I preach not the gospel. These lepers describe the violence
in the kingdom of heaven. Sinners who need the Lord Jesus
Christ as Savior are resolute, determined, desperate, forceful,
and passionate in their pursuit of Him. Their disease keeps them there. Their sin disease keeps them
so. And they come to know there is not one thing that will
recommend them to Him, but they will lay up in store for themselves
a good foundation against the time to come that they may lay hold on eternal life. And
they will fight the good fight of faith to lay hold on eternal
life. We fight daily. to abandon the
works and trusting in ourselves and trust only in Christ. That's the fight. The fight to
dispose of our self-righteousness and take up the righteousness
of Christ. To own it. To claim it. In the last part
of this chapter, there were some rich folks. We didn't read it. But they didn't believe. You
know why? Because they weren't hungry.
and they weren't thirsty. You can read it later. These
lepers, when they returned, they didn't believe them. And they
didn't go out to claim the spoils of the victory. Spoils of the
enemy. Put it that way. You know why?
They weren't hungry and thirsty. And a person that has no sense
of their sin And listen to me, a person who has no sense of
their sin and their standing before God has no hunger or thirst. And they're always suspicious
of grace, free, in and free. It just can't be that God will
count the works of our hands as nothing but filth and a stench
in His nostrils. They can't believe it. That prevents
them from believing and partaking in grace. They had food. They'd been eating their horses.
Only five of them left. It wasn't long, they'd been starving.
They had food while the little things, the base things of the
world that God had chosen, was eating their horses and one another. Think of the many who hear the
gospel. the good news of a finished work for salvation, and all the
mercies and gifts that attended, and yet they say in their heart,
this can't be so. That's what that guy said to
Elijah. That ain't going to happen. If the windows opened up in heaven,
it couldn't be true. Well, if you'll listen to this
lesson. Let me stand in the gate and I'll tell you this. How can you know that redemption
is for you? Well, all I can say is just come
back. Just come back. Just keep listening. I can't
tell one or another that they're saved. In my estimation, that
would be nothing but murder from this pulpit. But I can tell you
this, if God ever reveals that Christ has paid for your sin
on that cross, you'll know. Tim James said in one of his
messages, I thought this was out of sight. He said, how do
you know? He said the Holy Spirit will
call you up and tell you that God saved you. And it'll make you violent
in your pursuit of Christ. You remember that woman that
had that disease over in the New Testament? For 12 years,
an issue of blood. Can you see her crawling around
between those people's legs trying to get to Christ? That's the
Bible. If I can but touch His garment,
I will be made whole. Job sitting on that ash heap.
Scratching his soles with pot shirts. And he said, I don't
care if he kills me, I'm going to trust him. Blind Bartimaeus, just like these
lepers. Crying out, thou son of David,
have mercy on me. And people telling him to shut
up, and he just cried louder. Just got louder. These are the
violent ones in God's kingdom. They're the ones from whom the
kingdom of heaven suffers violence. And the violent take it by force. I'm not much on poetry, but I'm
going to read you this. A poet wrote it. I don't know
who. I just found it. He said, I'll
go to Jesus, though my sin hath like a mountain rose up. I know
his courts, I'll enter in, whatever may oppose. Perhaps he will admit
my plea. Perhaps he'll hear my prayer.
But if I perish, I'll pray, and perish only there. I can but
perish if I go. I'm resolved to try. For if I
stay away, I know I must forever die. God enable us to do so. Be warned. We will quit. our violence before this day
is over if God doesn't put another tenth full of His blessings and
forgiveness in Christ in front of us every day to pillage. Can you see that? We're just
going from tenth to tenth to tenth in this world.