Category: Band

The Jews were a special people. God had made his covenant with them, that they were his people. That was the covenant: If they obeyed his commandments, God would be their God and they would be his people.

So God gave them his commandments, but the Israelites both forgot about God and didn’t obey his commandments.

Yet some of the people, some of the Jewish religious leaders, looked back to God’s commandments and determined that they were the special people. They had received the commandments, they had received the commandments directly from God, so they determined that they, clearly, were God’s people.

Never mind the fact that they had broken the covenant in that they hadn’t actually obeyed the commandments.

Never mind the fact that they had rejected God and refused to live under his rule, in the way that God had originally intended their relationship to be.

So in the second chapter in his letter to the Romans, Paul points out that Jews have been judging the Gentiles, meaning that the Jews had been deeming the Gentiles to not be worthy to be God’s people. The Gentiles didn’t have the law, so clearly they couldn’t be God’s people! The Gentiles didn’t have the sign of circumcision, so clearly they couldn’t be God’s people!

Only the Jews…or so the Jews thought.

But Paul points out that it isn’t the fact that they had the law that makes them God’s people. It wasn’t the fact that they were circumcised that made them God’s people. No, it was obedience to God’s law and living as the people who were under the covenant that was demonstrated through circumcision that makes someone a person within God’s kingdom:

Circumcision has value if you observe the law, but if you break the law, you have become as though you had not been circumcised. So then, if those who are not circumcised keep the law’s requirements, will they not be regarded as though they were circumcised? The one who is not circumcised physically and yet obeys the law will condemn you who, even though you have the written code and circumcision, are a lawbreaker.

A person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a person’s praise is not from other people, but from God.

Romans 2:25-29

As we teach people to follow Christ, we emphasize obedience to Christ.

But this can rub people the wrong way at times. I’ve heard various questions like these:

Aren’t you just teaching people legalism?

Aren’t you just teaching people empty obedience?

Isn’t that just the same as the Muslims or the Catholics or any other religion that is based on works?

No, it is not the same. Far from it.

In a legalistic religious system, we do good works so that we can make God happy, and as a result, he will allow us to go to heaven. For example, the Muslims pray five times a day so that they can build up their good works. Then, if their good works outweigh their bad works, God should then allow them to go to paradise.

And that is how most people think about religion. They want to be a good person and they think that if they are judged to be a good person after they die, they get to go to heaven.

Except that isn’t God’s story. There isn’t any who is “good”. Everyone is a sinner and their sin – any sin, even one sin – prevents them from being with God, a good and holy God who is without sin.

So this is why Jesus had to be the sacrifice for each of us. Every one of us needs a Savior. Every one of us needs a perfect sacrifice of perfect blood so that we can be clean before God.

The point is this: God did it all. Jesus paid for my sins and every person’s sins, if they will receive his grace and mercy by faith.

That is very different from being a prideful person following a religious system, essentially saying instead: I can do this. I will be good enough. Then, God will owe me. Then, once I have proven to him that I am good enough, he will – he must! – allow me to come into heaven.

But there is one more step to consider yet. Once we have received the grace and mercy and love of God, do we just move on and continue to live as we always have? Can we just assume that God has saved us, be baptized, and move on?

No, Christ bought us at a precious price. His own blood bought us so as to take us from the kingdom of darkness and redeem us – or we could use the words “ransomed us” – into the kingdom of God. My natural response should be that of thankfulness, gratitude, and love for God, both for who he is, but also for what he has done for me. I sinned and rebelled and went away from him, but Christ came to ransom me out of the state in which I had put myself. I was in the kingdom of darkness, but he came to purchase me with his blood to enter into the kingdom of God.

So my response must be thankfulness. My response must be love. But what does that look like? What does it look like to love a God that I can’t see? That I can’t touch? How can I love a God with whom I can’t even have a face-to-face conversation?

Jesus was clear and gave a simple answer to this question:

If you love me, keep my commands.

John 14:15

Do you love Jesus? You must do what he says.

How can I show Jesus that I love him? I keep his commands.

And so this is why we teach that to be a disciple is to obey Christ. Not because we want to create a bunch of religious robots, but because the sign of true change is obedience to Christ. We show him and the entire world that we love him by obeying him. It isn’t that we say that we must do this. Instead, we do this because he says that we must do this.

This was the problem with the Israelites that led them to stray away from God, breaking the covenant. They didn’t love him and so they didn’t obey him. God’s covenant required that the Israelites obey his commands and then he would be their God and they would be his people. But they didn’t do that. Instead, they preferred to focus on themselves and the fact that they were the people who were given the law. They were the people that were given the sign of circumcision.

But they didn’t love God, and therefore they didn’t keep the covenant and obey him.

We don’t want to make the same mistake. We want to be sure that we are a people that are in love with God through his Messiah, through Jesus Christ, and therefore we want to be a people who keep Jesus’s commands and teach others to do the same. Loving Jesus by obeying him, just as he told us to do.

On Easter morning, as we were gathered together as a church, we read Luke 24 where Jesus enters the room where the disciples had been discussing together the fact that the women had found the tomb empty and the two men on the road to Emmaus had walked and talked with Jesus until they recognized him as they broke bread together.

Suddenly, there was Jesus, in their midst, greeting them and saying “Peace be with you.”

He ate with them. The disciples touched them. He was real. He had a physical body.

It wasn’t a made-up story. It wasn’t a fable. No, many of the disciples went to their death because of the reality of what they experienced that day and in other days. People won’t go to their death because of a fairy tale. But they will because they truly see God move in their midst. And that is what happened with Jesus there amongst them.

So as we were together on Sunday, I pointed out that the part that struck me is the historical nature of what we were reading. We weren’t reading something that was considered to be a fable. We were reading history. Not just history because a few writers had their collected works in the Bible, but it is history because what Jesus did has been independently verified and written about by many others, even outside of the Bible.

And as I noted before, people died as they maintained that the story of the resurrection was true. They knew the truth. They knew that the story was real. They knew what they had seen and heard. They knew that Jesus had been revealed, both originally from heaven, and then subsequently in returning from the dead. The revelation was real. It was historical.

I was struck that we are waiting again for a revelation once again. Just as Christ was revealed to the disciples as we read in the Bible, in the same way, we are waiting for Christ to be revealed to us even now. It will not be a matter of a fairy tale. It will not be a fable. It will be a real, historical event when Christ returns. In the same way that we look back today and read about the historical events of Jesus’s first coming, we will one day look back and remember the day that Jesus returned to judge the earth, to destroy evil, and to rule over the earth.

This was one of the main themes that Paul wrote about in his second letter to the Thessalonians. He was well ahead of his time, of course, but so were the prophets that we read about in the Old Testament today. They told of the Messiah that would come thousands of years in advance of Christ’s coming. So now we are waiting for Jesus to return and Paul’s writings continue to be relevant to us even today.

Paul warns the Thessalonians that before Jesus is revealed from heaven, the “lawless one” will be revealed, marking the beginning of the end:

And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.

2 Thessalonians 2:6-12

Yes, the man of lawlessness will come and will deceive many. We see that deception in our world today, even without this person having been fully revealed yet.

But our hope is in Jesus’s coming, that he will not only be revealed, but as Paul says, he will come and destroy this man of lawlessness even by the breath of his mouth and his splendor.

This man of lawlessness is being revealed to the world, but Christ’s revealing will be majestic. Kingly, and like that of a coming warrior to destroy evil completely. Jesus has defeated the power of sin and death on the cross, but there will come a time when evil will be defeated completely.

The time for that revelation can’t come soon enough, but it is in God’s plan. No one except the Father knows when it will happen, so at this point, we are waiting for Christ to be revealed. But one day, we will look back and remember the day of the revelation of Christ from heaven as the turning point of history as we return to the reign of our God and his Christ.

The Thessalonians continued to experience persecution as a result of their faith. The local Jewish leaders have led the way in bringing persecution upon the believers, but we can imagine that the believers there in Thessalonica may have also experienced a persecution from the local governmental officials or those that worship the local Greek gods – in short, everyone else – because of their faith in Christ as the one true God and true king, just as had happened in many other cities and churches.

Yet Paul told the Thessalonian believers that God will return vengeance for the persecution that they have experienced. One day, Jesus will be revealed from heaven and will return to earth. One day, he will judge those who have insulted and persecuted and harmed the Thessalonian believers. One day, God will administer the justice that is to come against every evil, against every unrighteous act, and against each person who commits them against those who believe in Christ.

All this is evidence that God’s judgment is right, and as a result you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering. God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels.

2 Thessalonians 1:5-7

If we ask ourselves what it means to be saved, this is it. God is just and he will one day bring his judgment and wrath upon the evil that has been perpetrated on the earth. Evil against the believers and evil against God himself. But by placing our faith in Christ, he makes us worthy, through his blood, through his death and resurrection, to be made righteous, to be saved. We do not have righteousness within ourselves, but we are made right with Christ. In him, we can be known by God. In him, we will be saved. We will be saved from the judgment of God and we will be the beneficiaries of the justice that God will give against those who have committed evil against his people.

It may be that we will experience evil as a result of what we believe, as a result of our faith in God, as the Thessalonians did. But one day, God will return and will bring vengeance upon that evil because he is just.

Persecution wasn’t the only challenge that Paul was facing as he did his work. The Roman culture was sexually promiscuous, and proudly so. It was normal for a man to sleep with prostitutes. It was generally accepted practice to even worship the gods or the goddesses at the temple by having sex with a prostitute at the temple. This was the prevailing culture, the reality in which Paul was doing his work, calling people out of these practices to be sanctified and holy before God.

He told the Thessalonians:

It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the pagans, who do not know God; and that in this matter no one should wrong or take advantage of a brother or sister. The Lord will punish all those who commit such sins, as we told you and warned you before. For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Therefore, anyone who rejects this instruction does not reject a human being but God, the very God who gives you his Holy Spirit.

1 Thessalonians 4:3-8

In many ways, this is very similar to our western world today. Every type sex, according to our culture, is permissible, and the attitudes and practices of the prevailing culture regularly find their way into the church.

But God calls us to be sanctified, to be made holy. He calls us to leave behind the practices of our local culture and instead heed his commands. He is our God and we are his people. He calls us to be holy, just as he is holy. He calls us to live as the people of God in every way, including our sexual lives. Not to deny our sexuality, but to live out our sexual lives fully and happily in the way that he has ordained, with our spouses, our wives and husbands.

But as I read this morning that someone said, the plan of the enemy is to completely subvert God’s plan: to get us to disobey God, tempting us have the most amount of sex outside of our marriage covenant and the least amount of sex inside of the marriage covenant as God has ordained.

So this is the call that Paul gave to the Thessalonian believers, that they should be sanctified and holy, leaving behind the culture that is all around them and instead adopting the new culture of the kingdom of God. No longer that of the kingdom of darkness, but that of the kingdom of God. And that same call echoes to us even today, even in our culture now in the twenty-first century. We are to be sanctified and holy, leaving behind the traps set for us by the culture all around us that tempts us into every type of sexual sin and running for the culture of sexuality that God has given us as his people.

Today is Good Friday, the day that Christians remember Jesus was nailed to the cross.

It seems like a strange thing to celebrate. We celebrate that an innocent man was murdered, hung on a cross to die.

But that killing, that sacrifice, is what allows us to come to God. It is our faith in innocent blood that allows us to live forever. Based on God’s plan that was foretold centuries before Jesus’s time, and based on God’s consistent character of being a God that requires both justice as well as mercy and love, and based on God’s consistent nature and actions that required a blood sacrifice as the payment for our sins, Christ willingly took upon himself the punishment for our sins as he hung there on the cross.

It wasn’t that he wanted to be killed, of course. He even prayed to the Father that, if there was another way, that God would use this other way to bring all people back to himself, reconciling them with himself.

But there wasn’t. There was no other way. Only in this way could all of humanity find shelter, find salvation, in Christ with God. Jesus went to the cross to redeem people away from the kingdom of darkness so that they could enter into the kingdom of God, bringing glory to the Father due to his love, his grace, and his mercy toward his people.

This is the message that Paul brought to the Thessalonian people and to all of the cities where he traveled: Christ crucified.

That is the message.

It was the message that animated Paul, that had him traveling all across modern-day Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Malta, Italy, and more…on foot. And it was the same message that made Silas and Timothy, Barnabas, John Mark, and several others, join Paul on these travels, suffering greatly as they went:

Christ was crucified so that we can live forever.

I was reminded of this today as I was reading Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. He knew that the Thessalonians would face strong persecution for their faith and he continued in prayer for these new believers. Paul was with his companions – Silas, Timothy, and possibly even Luke – in Athens, probably just before heading over to Achaia, to the city of Corinth, and Paul reaches a point where he just has to know. He has to find out. Are the Thessalonians remaining steadfast in their faith in the crucified Christ?

So when we could stand it no longer, we thought it best to be left by ourselves in Athens. We sent Timothy, who is our brother and co-worker in God’s service in spreading the gospel of Christ, to strengthen and encourage you in your faith, so that no one would be unsettled by these trials. For you know quite well that we are destined for them.

1 Thessalonians 3:1-3

Here we have Paul from Tarsus. Silas, who is a Roman citizen, possibly from Rome. Timothy from Lystra. And seemingly also Luke from Troas. They are all traveling together, men from different places and different backgrounds, but motivated and moved by one specific idea: that Christ was crucified, and they must glorify God by telling other people this amazing news, bringing as many to know Christ as they possibly can. Their lives would count, not just for today, not just for next twenty, thirty, or forty years, but for eternity because they took ahold of that which was the most important news and called people to know Jesus, the Messiah who had been slain on the cross and yet was now resurrected, alive, and the Way to come to the Father.

Because of this one simple, historical fact that changed everything – the fact of Jesus Christ crucified, fulfilling prophecies, and redeeming people to the kingdom of God across all time – they allowed themselves to be sent out by the Holy Spirit and by the church, putting themselves in great danger, ruining their financial futures, and wrecking their reputation with everyone except those who believed.

And in the same way, they sent Timothy back into one of the most dangerous cities that they had ever visited. This is the same city where a mob had been formed that even entered into a man’s house and literally dragged him out and before the city officials. Maybe only Lystra and Jerusalem could be considered more dangerous given what we know happened. And yet, the stakes were too high to not go. Were the Thessalonians persevering in their faith? Paul had to know, so while he was continuing on with his work there in Athens, then on his way to Corinth, he sent Timothy back to Thessalonica to learn about how they had fared in persevering through the persecution that had come as a result of their faith.

This is the same message that moves us even today. It is the same reason that we moved to another country where we could meet people who are flowing into Europe from across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. It is the same reason that our team has sent out men who will take the Gospel back to their own people. This one central message is the message that everyone must hear: Christ was crucified for the forgiveness of sins, to usher people into the kingdom of God, for the glory of God and his Christ, king Jesus.

The Thessalonian believers had experienced some severe persecution. If we look back to the first part of Acts 17, we see that some of the Jews there in Thessalonica had believed as a result of Paul and Silas’s teaching and preaching, but several others had formed a mob and even started a riot in the city, looking for Paul and Silas in order to beat them, likely even to kill them.

They didn’t find them as they had hoped at Jason’s house, so instead they took Jason and dragged him out of his house and before the city officials, accusing him of accommodating these “troublemakers”, Paul and Silas, who had simply been teaching the word of God in the synagogue for the last three Saturdays, the last three sabbaths.

So unfortunately, not only was there a severe threat of violence, there were also legal and financial troubles as a result of believing. Jason and his frinds who had believed had been taken before the officials and were even forced to post bond in order to be released.

So this is the context in which Paul had sent the Thessalonians a letter from Corinth, just a few months later. Paul had to escape from Thessalonica, and then subsequently from Berea because the Thessalonian Jews had even chased him there, moving down to Athens, and ultimately on to Corinth where he was working at the time. He wrote back to the Thesslonians to encourage them in their faith, that they shouldn’t give up, that they should keep going, because it was in the middle of the persecution, and maybe even directly as a result of the persecution that they were experiencing, that the message of their faith was amplified:

You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you welcomed the message in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia. The Lord’s message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia—your faith in God has become known everywhere.

1 Thessalonians 1:6-8

Paul praises the Thessalonians because he knows what it means to be persecuted for their faith. Now, the Thessalonians were also experiencing the same, except they were living it, at home, even in their time. We might say that Paul had experienced persecution for the work that he had done, and we would be correct in saying this, but the Thessalonians, and people in many other cities like them, continued to experience the persecution that Paul experienced as well. And yet they continued to live their faith there locally. It was worth it to them. It was worth all of the hassle, the pain, the suffering, the loss, because they could have both now and eternally that which they couldn’t have before: a joy in Christ given to them by the Holy Spirit.

They had joy in Christ that was given to them by the Holy Spirit. It isn’t some type of happiness that is momentary and fleeting. No, it is a joy that is lasting, that goes on even despite the difficulties, despite the suffering in which they found themselves.

When we see this type of joy, it makes an impact on us. When you see joy in the midst of turmoil, in the midst of difficulty and suffering, in the midst of persecution, you immediately wonder why. Why would this person be joyful when they should be sad? Why do they seem to have a source of life within them that sustains them when they should instead be complaining because of their circumstances? Their life seems upside-down. It seems strange. Joy instead of sadness in the midst of problems? There is something else that is happening here that we aren’t seeing…

This joy that the Thessalonians were experiencing was an important reason that their message was ringing out from them. Yes, they were telling others. Absolutely they were speaking. They must.

Yes, they were experiencing the work, the power of the Holy Spirit. They were likely seeing miracles in their midst.

But it is extremely important that we understand the context in which these people became believers and were continuing in their faith. Despite their circumstances, despite their difficulties, despite the persecution that they were experiencing every day, they had joy, a deep and profound joy in Christ. And so when they spoke of their faith, or when they spoke of what God had done in their life, their words were not theoretical. They were experiential. You could see those words in action. You could understand that there was something that had truly changed.

And so their faith became known everywhere. The Lord’s message rang out as a result of the faith that they were living, in joy in the midst of the persecution. The Thessalonians became an example to everyone. The Macedonian churches – at the least, those in Philippi, in Thessalonica, and in Berea – and those in Achaia, the church in Corinth and possibly other believers and other churches as well. Their faith became known everywhere and the Lord’s message rang out from them as they took their example from Paul and Silas and in their joy in Christ, they became an example for all of the other churches as well.

Last night, I had the opportunity to answer a question from a friend who is a new believer that had come out of Islam and his own type of atheism to eventually place his faith in Christ. He had a question about the work of the Holy Spirit as he was trying to understand the difference between the three persons of the Trinity, the three ways in which God shows himself to us.

My friend had asked what the Spirit does within us and I explained that, first and foremost, it is the Spirit of God that makes us alive before God. In our sins, we are dead and in Christ we are made alive, placing our faith and trust in his death and resurrection. As we do that, the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit is given to us and we are marked as God’s people with a seal, a seal that represents the promise before God that we are his.

Of course, this comes straight from Ephesians 1 and 2 where we see that Paul says that we were dead in our transgressions and sins and yet, despite being dead, God makes us alive – spiritually alive – in Christ. As we stand before God, he sees us in Christ. He sees us alive.

But if we are in our sins, we are dead. There is nothing more that we can do. There is nothing that can be further done on our own to make ourselves come alive. We are dead.

But Christ makes us alive. He acts upon us as the one who can make the dead come alive, giving us the Holy Spirit as the seal, the confirmation, the actual life that is within us. It is the life that only God can give and it is the life by which we live as those who follow Jesus.

Of course, in this Easter season, it is an appropriate time to remember what Christ has done. Last Sunday marked “Palm Sunday”, remembering when Jesus entered into Jerusalem seated on a donkey as the people triumphantly waved palm branches in a demonstration of the coming king. This Friday will mark “Good Friday”, remembering Jesus’s death on the cross. And this coming Sunday will mark Christ’s resurrection, when Jesus was raised from the dead.

And so it is appropriate to remember that Jesus was the first amongst us who are raised from the dead. As we say that we are following Christ, we do, of course, mean that we desire to do what he says to do. In this way, we follow him, obeying him, demonstrating our love for him, just as he says that we must by doing what he commands us to do.

But there is another very important sense also in which we follow him, at least one other sense in which I want to note as I read from the story of Christ’s resurrection this morning. We follow Jesus in his death and resurrection.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him.

Mark 16:6

If we remember that we were dead in our sins, and yet we were made alive in Christ, we can understand that we are actually spiritually following a similar path, similar steps that Jesus followed. Without deserving punishment, Jesus died as a perfect sacrifice. He did not sin, but yet he was killed on the cross, shedding his blood for our sins.

We, on the other hand, did deserve punishment. We deserved the death that we received because of the sins that we have committed. Thanks to God that he made a plan that would allow our sins to be paid for by Christ himself!

So we give thanks all the more because Jesus not only paid for our sins, he was raised from the dead. He was resurrected. He came back to life, and so in this same way, we follow Jesus. Because he paid for our sins, he allows us to come back to life as well. He allows us to live, and live forever. Like him, we no longer experience spiritual death. We will go on to live forever, eternally with him.

This is the amazing gift that he gives us. He gives us life. Life that continues on forever. Life that rips us away from the kingdom of darkness to come into the kingdom of God. Life that allows us live for him forever, glorifying him, living for him instead of living for myself. Once I was dead, but now, like Jesus, I have been risen to life to live in this way and for this purpose forever.

Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Council, one of the leaders from the Sannhedrin who had just been part of the group that had sent Jesus before Pilate, the move that ultimately sent Jesus to his death. From what we can tell, it doesn’t seem that Joseph spoke up for Christ before Jesus had died. Maybe he didn’t realize that it would go this far. Maybe he wasn’t sure what he believed. Possibly he was intimidated into not speaking up. We don’t really know.

But Joseph now knew that Jesus was dead. An innocent man had been nailed to the cross and left to die. Jesus’s blood was on their hands, and Joseph knew it. He knew that they, the Jewish leaders, had done this and he couldn’t let the disgrace continue.

It was a dangerous time, though. The Jews had been fine with killing an innocent man, and the Romans were indifferent about whether any Jew lived or died. They simply wanted peace. They primarily wanted to maintain their empire and maintain the civil status quo. No one person, or even group of people, innocent or otherwise, would stand in the way of accomplishing these goals.

Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body.

Mark 15:43

It took great courage for Joseph to go to Pilate to ask for Jesus’s body. He could have been called out as one of Jesus’s followers. He could have been identified as one to be counted amongst the enemy. After Jesus’s death, his followers could be next, hunted down and killed.

This was, in fact, the very question that the Sannhedrin considered just a few weeks later. They had arrested the apostles, who by this time had received the Holy Spirit and had gone public with the start of the church in Jerusalem, and they wanted to kill them.

Then subsequently with the arrest of Stephen, they went through with it. They killed him and a persecution broke out against the believers.

So Joseph would have known the danger that he was in. He would have understood the climate within which he was acting. He knew that it would be a great risk to be known as the one who was caring for the body of Christ.

Yet he went. He took great courage. He went boldly to Pilate. He was waiting for the coming of the kingdom of God. He thought that Jesus may have been the one to restore the kingdom to Israel, but those hopes now had been shattered. Yet still they had killed an innocent man.

Will we act with such boldness? With such courage? Even in the face of danger? Or even if not danger, in the face of embarrassment? Or at the potential loss of status? Or money? Not because we are identified with our church or potentially a particular political statement, but because we are identified with Jesus. Is Jesus worth so much to us that we would give up those other things? May it be that we would go boldly, that we would live with courage because of our identification with Christ.

As Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples, he made some simple statements that I think we can frequently overcomplicate based on our religious traditions and misunderstanding of the bigger picture of what Jesus was about to do, both in the next few hours as well as in the coming centuries:

First, as they were eating dinner together, Jesus picked up some bread, broke it, and began to hand it to his disciples:

Take it; this is my body.

Mark 14:22

Very simply, Jesus was telling his disciples that his body would be broken, just as he had broken the bread.

Next, he picks up a cup of wine and passes it to the entire group and they all drank from it. He told them:

This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many

Mark 14:24

There are a few things to note here. First, he says that is the blood of the covenant. What covenant?

God made covenants – or you might in another way say “agreements” – with his people. He would be their God and they would be his people. He did it with Abraham. He did it with Moses.

God would be their God: watching over them, leading them, protecting them, guiding them, and more. Meanwhile, they would obey him. They would follow his commands and do what he said that they must do.

This was the essence of the old covenant, an agreement between God and his people, the people of Israel.

Now, Jesus is saying that he, himself, is establishing a new covenant. He is now making a covenant that will supersede the covenant that was made previously between God and the Israelite people.

Keep in mind…only God can make a covenant between God and his people. And yet, here is Jesus making the covenant, demonstrating that he himself is God. He is saying that this wine within the cup that he is sharing with his people represents his blood that is being poured out for the people. This blood is what will bring redemption. It is what will cleanse his people, giving them forgiveness for their sins. This wine represents this new agreement, that anyone who puts their faith in the blood will now be his people. This is the agreement: Through Jesus, God will be our God and we will be his people.

But there is an even bigger picture to this story than Jesus offering salvation. There is an even bigger picture than Jesus revealing his identity in this moment. Jesus makes a prophetic statement to finish his point to the disciples with the lesson that he gives through the bread and the cup:

Truly I tell you, I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.

Mark 14:25

Even at this moment, we are waiting on Jesus to return. He is the bridegroom and his people are his bride, and there will be a great marriage in heaven with a great banquet to celebrate the marriage of the Lord to his people. In fact, if we read in Revelation 19, we can see a representation of exactly that for which we are waiting:

Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder, shouting:

“Hallelujah!
For our Lord God Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and be glad
and give him glory!
For the wedding of the Lamb has come,
and his bride has made herself ready.
Fine linen, bright and clean,
was given her to wear.”
(Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of God’s holy people.)

Then the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!” And he added, “These are the true words of God.”

Revelation 19:6-9

There will be a great banquet for the bridegroom and for the bride. Jesus will be at the wedding banquet as will all of those who are the Bride of Christ, those who are part of his kingdom. Jesus is the Lamb that was slain. It is his banquet!

So this is the time in which he will drink the cup anew in the kingdom. That is the day in which the Bride will be united with her Bridegroom, the day in which the fulfillment and completion of the kingdom of God will come to pass.

As we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we must keep in mind that there are profound things that Jesus is saying. He is declaring things that have already happened. He is declaring the agreement that God now makes with his people through the blood of Christ. And he is foreshadowing that which will yet happen as we look to the day that everything will be finished and we will one day be united with him. Maranatha – come Lord Jesus! May you drink the cup one day new in our presence as your Bride.

I learned something about agriculture and growing fig trees today. I was curious why Jesus was so upset with the fig tree when he saw that it had leaves, but then, upon looking closer, he found that the tree wasn’t bearing any fruit.

Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it.

Mark 11:13-14

What I learned today is that when a fig tree has leaves, it should also be in the process of growing fruit. On the other hand, if it isn’t the season for figs, you shouldn’t see leaves on the fig tree either.

So what was the problem in this case, with this fig tree? The problem wasn’t necessarily that the tree wasn’t producing fruit. The problem moreso was that the tree was producing leaves, making it look as if it should be producing fruit, and yet there was no fruit to be found. It had the right look for producing fruit, yet no fruit was being produced.

In Jesus’s time, this may have been a representation the spiritual situation, the spiritual context in which Jesus found himself with the nation of Israel. They were supposedly God’s people. They were supposedly serving him, yet they didn’t obey him. They were proud. They didn’t truly want God, they wanted the benefits of being God’s people without actually knowing God or living according to his commands, in relationship with him.

In short, like the fig tree, they were producing all of the leaves, and yet they were producing no fruit.

The fig tree represented the nation of Israel.

We see the evidence of this, in fact, interspersed with the story of the fig tree. Immediately after Jesus initially encounters the fig tree, he enters into Jerusalem and overturns the money changing tables and of those who were selling sacrifices. The temple, the place where Jesus does this, was intended to be a holy place. A place of prayer. A place where sacrifices would be offered. A place where God would be worshiped and glorified. The majority of the activity, though, was actually commercial. People were more concerned about making money in that space than they were in being near to God.

The temple looked like it would be a place that would serve God – like the fig tree, it had all of the leaves – but it was producing no fruit. It was not serving God. It was not necessarily a place to worship God. It was serving man. It was giving to man a way to vend religious goods and services.

A second example, after Jesus and the disciples pass by the fig tree a second time and find it shriveled up, is the question related to John’s baptism. The Pharisees had come to Jesus, asking him by what authority he had been doing the things that he had been doing. Who told him that he could go and overturn the tables of the money changers? Who told him that he could upset the business of those who were selling the sacrifices?

Even in these leaders coming to Jesus to ask this question, we see the example of the fruitless fig tree. They were the religious leaders of the people of Israel, not Jesus, and they wanted to exercise their authority over Jesus and the religious systems of Israel. But if they were truly producing fruit, they should have recognized that what Jesus had done was from God. Jesus’s actions should have caused them to sit and cry out in repentance, not come to judge him and ask him by whose authority he had been acting within the courtyards of the temple.

But Jesus pushes it even one step further. He asks them a question: Was John’s baptism from God or from man?

They don’t know.

And yet they should have known. They should have recognized John’s call to repentance as being directly from God. They should have been the first in line, repenting of their sins.

But the truth was that they didn’t understand the ways of God. They couldn’t understand the ways of God. It wasn’t possible for them to do so because they were spiritually blind. They were spiritually deaf. Their hearts were hard and incapable of understanding that the call to repentance was for the entire nation. Not just some people. All of the people.

These Pharisees, though, were like the fig tree. They had the right look on the outside, they had all of the “leaves” that made them look correctly, but they were not producing fruit.

I think it is important to know that the example of the fig tree may not only represent the nation of Israel. It was a warning to them, but it is also a warning to us. God’s people should all heed the warning of the fig tree. Are we looking right on the outside? Are we producing leaves so that we simply look like we are producing fruit? Do we look like a healthy follower of Christ without producing the fruit of Christ within us or through us?

We need to be sure to learn the lesson and heed the warning of the fig tree. We cannot fool God. He will look for the fruit, and he will either find it or he will not. Will we be a people that will bear fruit? Or will we simply be a people who are producing nothing but leaves?