Alright, please turn in your
Bibles to John chapter 9 for our scripture reading tonight. John chapter 9 starting in verse
1. And as Jesus passed by, he saw
a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked
him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man or his parents,
that he was born blind? And Jesus answered, Neither hath
this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should
be made manifest in him. I must work the works of him
that sent me while it is day. The night cometh when no man
can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of
the world. And when they had thus spoken,
he sped on the ground and made clay of the spittle. And he anointed
the eyes of the blind man with the clay and said unto him, go
wash in the pool of Siloam, which is by interpretation sent. He
went his way therefore and washed and came seeing. The neighbors
therefore, and they which before had seen him that he was blind,
said, is not this he that sat and begged? And some said, this
is he. Others said, he is like him.
But he said, I am he. Therefore said they unto him,
how were thine eyes opened? He answered and said, A man that
is called Jesus made clay and anointed mine eyes and said unto
me, go to the pool of Siloam and wash. And I went and washed
and I received sight. Then said they unto him, where
is he? He said, I know not. And they
brought to the Pharisees him that aforetime was blind. And
it was the Sabbath day when Jesus made the clay and opened his
eyes. And again, the Pharisees also
asked him how he received his sight. He said unto them, he
put clay upon mine eyes and I washed and I do see. Therefore said
some of the Pharisees, this man is not of God because he keepeth
not the Sabbath day. Others said, how can a man that
is a sinner do such miracles? And there was division among
them. And we'll start by reading there. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we are so thankful
to you for gathering us here once again tonight to honor you
with our songs of praises and the preaching of the word and
our prayers. And Father, I'd ask that your
spirit would be amongst us, that it would be in our presence,
that it would be in our hearts and in our minds, Father, that
you'd allow us to comprehend the scriptures, and Father that
this message would be edifying to the folks that are listening
tonight, whether they be here in this room or out on the internet.
And Father, we pray for those in our congregation that are
going through hard times, trials, afflictions, all manner of issues are out
there. Lord, your people are, it's not always easy. It's often
a struggle for many of us, and we all have our struggles and
trials. Father, I'd ask that you keep us comfort during those
times. And Father, you know best. And Father, we pray for our pastor,
Jim, in Hawaii, that his ministry would be beneficial to the folks
out there in Hawaii. We also pray for safe travels
for Brother Tim James, who will be here this Sunday, and we look
forward to a time of refreshment in the Gospel once again from
him. Father, we thank you for the blood of Christ being washed
in his blood from before the foundation of the world, the
Lamb slain. And Father, this sermon tonight,
Father, it's to honor him. It's in His name we pray, for
His sake, amen. All right. So this passage that we just
read in John chapter 9, that one's always intrigued me. I remember reading this one as
a young kid and thinking it to be a very, very strange story. I thought it was a strange way
for Christ to heal a man of blindness. He actually spit on the ground
and made mud. By mixing his spit with the dirt,
he scooped up that mud and put it on this blind man's eyes and
healed him. young adult, I'd just pass right
over that, say, well, he healed somebody using mud. And didn't
really think much about it. But, you know, to us in the modern
world that we live in, this seems kind of bewildering. At least
it has to me. And I've often pondered this,
and I went searching the scriptures for an answer as to why mud is
being used here with spit. And I couldn't really find an
answer. So I started looking at different commentaries out
there. I've got John Gill's commentary. I've got Henry Mahan's commentary.
And various men throughout the gospel age have commented on
this passage. And the answer is almost always
that it's a mystery. The main consensus that the commentators
have is that it just proves that God uses means to perform his
works. And such as the foolishness of
preaching, the gospel as a means to call his people unto himself.
And I agree with that consensus. I've been studying on this a
number of years, and I think I find some deeper insight into
what's going on here. And I've had to go into places
that I don't enjoy sometimes, but I had to go in to study the
law of the Pharisees and a little bit of history to see if I can
understand what's going on here. And for those of you who don't
know, the Pharisees in the New Testament here, they had a whole
set of laws that aren't from the Old Testament writers. Sort
of like the United States has a whole set of laws that aren't
in the Bible. When you see the Pharisees talking
about the law in scripture, I think they're often referring to not
just the Old Testament law, but their own set of laws that they
have added on top of God's law. And if you have a copy of the
Jewish Bible, you can see all their legalism on display. It's
not a good read, except the Jewish people, they still have the first
five books of the Bible there called the Pentateuch, and they
call that their Torah. And they also have some of the
prophets, such as Isaiah. But they miss the entire point
of the prophets. They miss the entire point of
the Law of Moses. But the Jewish Bible itself,
it contains a collection of laws that they lay down for all of
their adherents. And part of these laws are aligned
in what they call the Oral Law. The Oral Law, as the Pharisees
called it, was a list of commandments that were passed down orally
from one generation to the next, going back way before the time
of Christ. And they got a lot of crazy laws. And today you
can find what the modern Jews call the oral law written down
in books that they call the Talmud or the Mishnah. And it's in these
books that they have all sorts of laws and principles that the
Jews are bound to obey if they're going to be orthodox. And they've
got dietary laws, oh boy. And they've got laws for healing
and medicine. And this is all on top of the
law of Moses. And the entire Jewish religion
today is about abiding by these laws and principles. And most
of these laws predate the time of Christ and the fullness of
the gospel being revealed. And so the Pharisees we read
about here in the New Testament, we know they were legalists,
but they were more than just Old Covenant legalists. They
were extra-biblical legalists. They were legalistic through
their own set of laws that they had crafted over a long period
of time. They lived by the law. Not the Old Testament law, but
their oral law, their Talmudic law. And this Talmudic law If you give me a few minutes
here, I believe it got started by the Pharisees, I believe,
because they missed the entire point of the Old Testament prophets
and the Old Testament law. They didn't comprehend what God's
law was about. They didn't understand that it
was given as a curse to shut the sinner up in condemnation
so that they would see that their only hope of salvation was found
in Christ who was prophesied. What I think happened to kick
off the creation of Pharisaic Judaism as we know it today is,
I think after the Jews were restored to their homeland from Babylonian
captivity, they said to themselves they are never going to let something
like that happen again if they can help it. They didn't want
to be carted off to Babylon again. Instead of focusing on the Lord
and worshiping Him as God directs His people to worship Him through
His Son, They became obsessed with law keeping, thinking that
would keep them safe. So they went about creating a
hedge about the law. And they said to themselves,
we aren't ever going to break this law again if we can help
it. So we'll protect ourselves from this by placing a hedge.
And if you study Talmudic law, you'll see that's exactly what
it is. It's a hedge. And the Jews think they're protecting
the law with their law. They knew the writings of Moses,
and they knew they should write, rest on the Sabbath. So instead
of just letting that law stand on its own, they made all sorts
of laws around the Sabbath in order to protect themselves from
breaking the Sabbath. Do you remember when the disciples
and Christ were walking through a cornfield on the Sabbath, and
they started to eat the corn? And if you want to, you can look
in Matthew 12 in verse 1, One through eight, I'm going to read
it to you here. At that time, Jesus went on the
Sabbath day through the corn, and his disciples were hungered,
and began to pluck the ears of corn and to eat. When the Pharisees
saw it, they said unto him, Behold, thy disciples do that which is
not lawful to do upon the Sabbath day. But he said unto them, have
you not read what David did when he was hungered, and they that
were with him, how he entered into the house of God and did
eat the showbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, neither
for them which were with him, but only for the priests? Or
have you not read in the law how that on the Sabbath days
the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are blameless?
But I say unto you that in this place is one greater than the
temple. But if you had known what this meaneth, I will have
mercy and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the
guiltless. For the Son of Man is Lord even
of the Sabbath day." Jesus is saying right here that his disciples
weren't breaking the law at all. They weren't breaking his law.
Christ is the lawgiver. He's the Lord of the Sabbath.
The only law that was being broken here was the law of the Pharisees,
the laws that were in their oral law or Talmudic tradition. And the disciples, they trampled
all over the hedge that the Pharisees had erected around the Sabbath
day by gathering food to eat. And I was joking with Ron in
the back about the Pharisees and how they would sometimes
blow a gasket. They were blowing a gasket right
here. And they started to blow their gaskets here in chapter
9 of John. Christ wasn't breaking his law
by healing a man with mud made from spit on the Sabbath. He
wasn't breaking the Old Testament law. But the law the Pharisees
are accusing Christ of breaking is their law. And this Pharisaic
law is still on the books today. I went and looked for it. One
of the 39 forbidden Shabbat, or Sabbath labors, is healing. If you're Jewish, you're not
supposed to heal on the Sabbath. And I read one Jewish commentary
on this, and it said they still allow for emergency healing on
the Sabbath. But other than that, there's not supposed to be healing.
If you're going to be an Orthodox Jew, that is, in this day and
age. I'm sure if you walk down to a Jewish hospital, they'll
be happy to to heal you there, but Orthodox Jew, no. And healing a person of blindness,
that doesn't count as something that's urgent to them. And here
we have Jesus healing on the Sabbath, right there in front
of these Pharisees here in John chapter 9. And he's, in my opinion,
flagrantly breaking their own scriptural rules and regulations
right in front of them. Christ wanted this to be seen.
And the Pharisees act as one would expect. They're pulling
their gaskets all over the place upon seeing this miracle by the
Savior. Not only did Jesus break this stupid and unscriptural
principles and laws that they had by healing a man, he went
further. And in the mind of the Pharisees, he labored on the
Sabbath by making mud from spit, no less. Christ wasn't laboring
by his standards, but by the Pharisees' extra-biblical standards,
it was a triple whammy. We've learned through the Bible
teaching here at 13th Street that the Old Testament Sabbath
was given for men to rest. It was given to men to point
to Christ, because Christ is our Sabbath. We rest in Him because
He's performed all the work of salvation for us. Pharisees,
they missed the point of the law entirely. And they went about
setting more hedges around the Sabbath law. Did you know they
actually have laws in the Talmud about making mud on the Sabbath? You're not supposed to make mud
on the Sabbath. You know why? Because you could take mud and
you could use mud to make bricks. And they couldn't have men laboring
by making mud. So they had extreme laws, such
as you don't make any mud on the Sabbath. And they missed
the whole spirit of the law. And what I find amazing is the
Pharisees didn't have laws against healing with mud made from spit.
And the reason for this is if you go back to the ancient world,
spit was believed to have healing properties. For example, if you
read Roman history, there was a Roman emperor, Emperor Vespasian,
He was the emperor of Rome from 69 to 79 AD, shortly after the
reign of terror by Nero. And Vespasian was once urged
to spit into the eyes of a blind man to heal him. And if you read
the Jewish text, Baba Bazar 126b, you can read that the Jews believed
in the healing power of saliva, the Pharisees did. They actually,
it's a very interesting tradition they had. They believed that
there was a tradition that the Jews had that said the saliva
of the firstborn of a father has healing properties. The firstborn of a father has
healing properties. This is what the Jews believed,
what the Pharisees believed. And what I see here is Christ
sending a message, and it's pretty impressive. I knew this is just
my opinion, but this is what I'm seeing. First off, He's saying,
you guys aren't the law givers, I'm the law giver. Their puny
law had no meaning. The law of Moses, which Christ
gave himself, is the law, not the Pharisaic or a law. Second,
he's also saying he's the firstborn son of God. If the Pharisaic
tradition is that the firstborn of a father has healing properties,
I see this as Christ saying to everyone through his actions
that He is the firstborn of the Father. And he did this by using
spit in healing in accordance with their tradition. And he's
healing this man on the Sabbath, violating their fair sake law,
using spit. And to top it off, he's healing
with mud. Mud made on the Sabbath, violating
even more of their laws. In essence, he's tearing down
their hedge. He's tearing down their religion of workspace,
righteousness, and he's tearing down their way of life. And he
declared himself right there to be the Son of God right there
in front of all of them. The Pharisees knew what he was
doing. They knew exactly what he was doing. And even though
Christ proved beyond all doubt that he was the Son of God right
there through this healing, even according to their traditions,
they were angry. They were angry because he flaunted
their unscriptural laws and traditions. He violated their traditions
and declared himself before all of them that he is the lawgiver. He is the king. They aren't the
rightful religious rulers. Those who sit in power are often
afraid of losing it. And one act of defiance is enough
to set them off because they know it can lead to situations
where they're out of power. So what I'm seeing here in this
passage is the Pharisees are threatened. And instead of being
humbled, and worshiping the king, they reacted violently and angrily.
It's because they're more concerned about their hedge, about the
law, and their formula for salvation than they were for the actual
law and the true gospel. And I can just imagine what it
would be like to be standing there and watching this unfold.
Seeing the Son of God heal a man on the Sabbath, and then watching
some folks getting angry about it. because their traditions
were dishonored, but just goes to show how depraved the heart
of man is. And I know the Pharisees were
blind religionists, but I sometimes wonder if the Pharisees knew
exactly who Jesus was, and they just didn't care, and openly
rebelled against him. And so, The point I'm trying
to make is I find this same pharisaic attitude is present even today
amongst the churches. One could say that not much has
really changed in the attitudes of men of the gospel age. Sure, the gospel is preached
in some places, but men go about setting up formulas and hedges
around the true gospel. They go about setting up a righteousness
of their own, keeping their laws, but they ignore the true law
of God, the law of Christ. And they package the gospel up
into a neat little box that they can pass around and be religious
about. And you see it nearly everywhere.
Some churches might say that Christ saves, but they always
seem to add a little something something to their teaching.
And it doesn't matter where you go, something always seems to
get added in the same manner that the Pharisees added to the
Old Testament law. And they reason to themselves
that just preaching Christ and Him crucified is not enough.
And so they end up adding what they think are clever hooks and
extra doctrines and formulas and hedges to the gospel in order
to make the simple truth as a reason to be more digestible. Or in some cases, they seek to
protect against false converts by adding hedges. And I liken
this to packaging everything up into what they think are neat
little boxes. Boxes with walls made with formulas,
hedges, and traditions. So the title of this message
is Boxes. And I think as a warning to ourselves,
we need to be careful not to put God and his gospel into a
box. We need to avoid repackaging
the gospel into a slick formula or putting a hedge around the
truth. We need to stay true to the simplicity that is in Christ
Jesus. Here's an example. We've all
heard about free willism here. This error has been preached
against many times from this pulpit, week in and week out.
The idea, free willism is the idea that you can save yourself
by accepting Jesus into your heart. But in reality, it's just
a formula that men have invented to make the gospel message of
substitution and satisfaction more palatable to the masses.
I sometimes think that the people who invented this formula did
so because they were convinced it was a matter of what they
thought was practicality. And I'm not really sure how this
era got started. I'm thinking maybe they thought,
reasoned to themselves that the message of Christ is too complex,
too hard to just simply believe. So they tried to simplify it
by packaging it up into what they thought was a clever little
box, clever little formula. But this box, it misses the message
of Christ, as this box is more concerned with what the sinner
is doing instead of what Christ has already done. And there are
other formulas and boxes out there, works formulas, such as
you have to be Believing the gospel's not enough, you also
have to be baptized. That's a bad box to find yourself
in. I don't want to find myself in
that box. But people who make formulas like this, they're not
furthering or protecting the gospel at all. They're adding
to it, and thus destroying the gospel in the process. Same way
the Pharisees destroyed the law and the gospel with their law. People, they're making deadly
boxes. They're creating bomb boxes and
sending them out to everyone to be destroyed by them. They're
mail bombers. Some dangerous stuff out there.
But even we as sovereign grace believers, I think we can be
guilty sometimes of putting God into a neatly wrapped little
box. And I know I've been guilty of this myself in my life. We
need to stop. neatly, trying to neatly wrap
the truth of God into an easy box that we can simply unwrap
and then just sit there being content with our nice little
package. What I mean by that is we need to stop relying on
our formulas and return to the whole of scripture in order to
discern the truth. An example of this, a lot of
men think that the five points of Calvinism, or what we call
Tulip, is all there is to the gospel. Or sometimes men will
focus on a particular truth of scripture, like election, and
make that their soul box in which they live. And I agree that Tulip
and Calvinism and the doctrine of election are all wonderful
topics to study. But there's more to the gospel and the scriptures
than a neatly arranged box or flower box. We need to stop walking
around with formulas on how to live and what to believe. The
whole of scripture should be our judge. and not whatever self-made
box we've planted ourselves. And we can never learn all of
scripture, at least not while we're still living on this side
of heaven. And I'm amazed at how much I've learned in the
last several years as an older believer. When I was younger,
I was puffed up and I was a puffed up arrogant know-it-all at times.
I can still do that sometimes. It's scary. But I thought I'd
arrived at the peak of knowledge. I'd reasoned to myself a few
times, actually, I thought, man, I've got this all figured out.
I got it all figured out. I've arrived. But I have discovered
as I grow older, I continue to learn. Isn't this true for you,
too? Do you agree that as we grow
older, we learn to be more loving and more joyful and more patient
and more kind? We also mature in understanding
of grace and mercy. We begin to see ourselves more
for who we really are, and we see how wretched we really are. Some people think they aren't
all that bad because they haven't physically murdered someone,
but those of us who God has been revealed to, we know what we
are. We know our hearts, and our hearts
are deceptively wicked. And without the work of Christ
on our behalf, God's perfect standard of righteousness would
not allow us to stand in His presence. But we have to learn
these things through experiencing God's time, not ours. And you know what else we do?
I'm guilty of this. We don't only take God's truth
and put it in our own man-made boxes, we sometimes put each
other into boxes and compartmentalize people. Some men, they make the
practice of judging others the box by which they choose to live
their life. They even embrace others based
on their judgments of other men rather than the confession of
Christ. Their box says this or that person's not one of us. And if you don't agree with their
box, well, you're going to get added to that box as to one that's
not of one of them. They're essentially saying, don't
listen to this guy, because he listens to or associates with
some guy who wasn't in our box. That's sectarianism, that's denominationalism. And it's my opinion that we need
to stop putting everybody and everything in nice, neat little
boxes, and stop using creeds and confessions to define truth.
Let's go to scripture, study, and even stop putting our God
in a box. Sometimes the biggest hindrance
to learning are these boxes in which we compartmentalize everyone,
including God himself. Sometimes our biggest hindrance
is what we already know or what we think we know. Let me get back to the point
of my message. So our opening scripture was second Corinthians
11 verses one, two, three. Let me read these verses to you
again. You can turn there if you like. Would to God you could
bear with me a little in my folly. And indeed bear with me. For
I am jealous over you with a godly jealousy. For I have espoused
to you one husband that I may present to you as a chaste virgin
to Christ. But I fear lest by any means
is the serpent beguiled thee through his subtlety. So your
mind should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. We're sheep, and you know what
sheep are? Sheep are dumb. As sheep, we have minds that
are easily led astray. Our minds, they let us wander
about looking for boxes in which to trap ourselves. I know my
mind is that way. And instead of looking to Christ
and resting, we think to ourselves, oh, that's just too easy. We
better make something that complicates this. Or on the other hand, we
say, oh, that's just way too hard. Let's water it down and
make it palatable for those who are dead in their sins. And then
we build our little boxes and surround ourselves with the four
walls of a dead and dull box, thinking we're safe inside our
box. But these boxes, they're easily torn down with the truth
of scripture. But going back to the text here in 2 Corinthians
verse 3, take a look. Paul does not want our minds
corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. What is this
simplicity that Paul is talking about? Well, I understand it
to be that as justified sinners we should be firmly rooted in
grace, firmly rooted in the gospel. We should go about seeking to
find joy in Christ Jesus and what he's accomplished. while
relinquishing all trust in any of our worldly activities. And Paul emphasizes here in this
text that we as believers should focus our minds and our affections
on Christ and the pure essence that's found only in Him. And
the simplicity that entails salvation spanning from our regeneration
all the way to our ultimate glorification, solely dependent on Christ's
righteousness imputed, without any contribution from our deeds
as the basis of our salvation. We look only to His life, to
His death, and His blood for our salvation. In this simplicity, it also encapsulates
our reliance and devotion to Christ, giving Him full honor
and supremacy in our redemption and daily lives as well. Salvation
is not found in a formula. It's not found in a hedge. It's
not found in a tradition. It's not found in any of these
boxes. But salvation, it's found in
Christ and it's found in Him crucified. It's so simple. But we endlessly want to complicate
things sometimes. As believers, I think all of
us have this little Pharisee monster that lives inside of
us, and we have to constantly fight him. He's called the old
man in Scripture. And I've had a tendency in the
past to look at the beauty of Christ, and the simplicity of
gospel, and to think about all the endless implications of Christ
and his gospel. And I'm just taken away to just
wonderful places in my thoughts, in my mind, thinking of all these
implications, and then I'll get caught up in some of these implications. They'll become my focus, even
to the exclusion of the gospel at times. And I've known many
men that can preach the truth, and many men that seemingly once
believed the gospel will be carried away by something that was even
true. They're no longer enthralled
with Christ. They no longer marvel at the fact that the sins of
the elect were forever done away with. They don't care that the
Father's wrath was put away forever, that justice was satisfied. They're
more concerned with their pet doctrines and wouldn't even bring
Christ up. And if they do, it's just to
try and bring validation to whatever it is they're trying to pass
off as teaching. And sadly, some of these people,
they've just created boxes, trapped themselves inside them, just
like the Pharisees. The Pharisees had the living
God standing right in front of them. He declared himself to
be the Son of God in word and deed. He performed miracles in
their presence. But the Pharisees, they were
too caught up with their own box. They couldn't see. They
couldn't see it. Their minds were beguiled. as
Paul's talking about. And so it's my hope that the
Lord keeps me from whatever boxes that I'm prone to build and wander
into. And the Lord would keep our minds focused on Him and
not on the cares of this world or anything else. And I hope
it stays that way here at 13th Street, that our teachings, actions,
and approaches would always strive towards the simplicity. the simple
gospel, echoing the sermon of what Paul says here in Galatians
6.14, and I'll read it to you. But God forbid that I should
glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the
world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. So, before I end the sermon,
it's a little shorter than I normally go, I'm gonna read a poem that
I wrote called The Gospel Unboxed. A gospel claimed in grace, sovereign
and true, confessed by many, yet beliefs may differ too. One says you're saved, the other
takes it back, conditions imposed, a formula to track. The internet
is buzzing, voices rise and fall, A line of reasoning leading souls
to stall. You must repent of your dead
works, prove it true. A deadly twist, a fake gospel
brew. Free willers say, accept the
gift, be saved. While some sovereign grace folks
say, admit, be brave. Two formulas, two paths, both
in a box. A powerless God, limited by their
locks. The fear sets in, what if I can't
follow through? No assurance given, what will
I do? But oh, the joy, the gospel unboxed. No secret formula, nothing
to be dropped. Christ is our all, our hope and
our guide, not bound by false doctrine and formulas denied. A blessed privilege to know him
in love. Intimacy with Christ from heavens
above. Let us turn away from all sugar
waters, false and sweet, and cling to Christ, our only hope,
our only treat. Foul, I to the fountain fly. Watch me, Savior, or I die. For in Him alone our salvation
does lie. And that's all I got for tonight.
We're going to sing hymn number 147, There Will Be No Dark Valley.
Hymn number 147.