Words of Jesus Podcast - The Church Sought to Destroy Jesus

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

There was an expectation among the Jewish people and the religious leaders that “things would change when Messiah came.” Age-old disputes would be settled; the temple would be needed no longer: salvation would come through faith and works, not DNA; Messiah would reign as King and Priest. The law of mercy and not sacrifice would be instituted. Sounds good, right? Yes, until your job is on the line.  It takes vision and the Spirit of God to rejoice through the fulfillment of prophesies. Instead, the Religious Leaders took the untenable position of striving to maintain the status quo.    ***Chapter 18: Jesus Heals A Withered Hand JESUS entered into the synagogue to teach.  In attendance was a man with a withered hand.            The scribes and the Pharisees watched Jesus closely to see if he would heal him since it was still the Sabbath day, thinking they might be able to accuse him.             Jesus knew their thoughts and was grieved at their hardness of heart.  He said to the main with the withered hand:             “Rise up, and stand forth in the midst."When the man had done so, Jesus said to the scribes and Pharisees:            “What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the Sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out? How much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the Sabbath days.”             Then Jesus said to the man:             “Stretch forth thine hand.”            When it was extended, it was immediately healed and was as good as the other hand.            Thereupon the scribes and the Pharisees left and conferred among themselves and with the Herodians as to how they might destroy Jesus. ***Matthew 12:9-14; Mark 3:1-6; Luke 6:6-11

Think Red Ink Ministries presents The Words of Jesus Series with Don C. Harris Hello my friend, welcome once again to the Words of Jesus series. I'm Don Harris of Synchronic Ministries. Our goal here is to reinforce Christianity with the wisdom and words of Jesus. We have plenty of reinforcement for the wisdom and words of people involved in religious activities and in education and such as that. But we happen to believe that the words of Jesus can do you some good.

And so what we're trying to do is make you familiar with them by taking you through this little book called The Words of Jesus. And this is a compilation of everything that Jesus said when he was on the earth. And so what we have is an opportunity to, as we learn what he had to say and learn exactly who he was, our ultimate goal is to think red ink, to think like Jesus thought, to have the mind of Christ. We're in chapter 18 of our little book now, and this is entitled, Jesus Heals a Withered Hand. Jesus entered into the synagogue to teach. In attendance was a man with a withered hand.

The scribes and the Pharisees watched Jesus closely to see if he would heal him since it was still the Sabbath day, thinking that they might be able to accuse him. Jesus knew their thoughts and was grieved at their hardness of heart. And he said to the man with the withered hand, Rise up, stand forth in the midst. And he said to the man with the withered hand, So I can just see the Pharisees scooting on their chairs and getting a little closer and listening, and he's going to do it, he's going to do it.

When the man had done so, Jesus said, Not to the man, but to the scribes and Pharisees, What man shall there be among you that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the Sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it and lift it out? How much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore is it lawful to do well on the Sabbath days? Then Jesus said to the man, Stretch forth

thine hand. And when it was extended it was immediately healed and was as good as the other hand. Thereupon the scribes and Pharisees left and conferred among themselves and the Herodians as to how they might destroy Jesus. It's really hard to imagine, isn't it? But that's exactly what they did. That was their plan. Their idea was to

destroy Jesus. There's the phenomenon that is just undeniable that we are going to blame and in some cases try to destroy the messenger. And I've heard people attach that idea to what we just read and many things like it. But Jesus was not hated or rejected or despised for bringing a message from God. I'm sure that had something to do with it and it was certainly their way to do

as they destroyed every prophet that God ever sent. John asked them one time, is there a prophet that we haven't killed? Can't think of one right now. But it's even speculated that John the Baptist, his father, was killed for just being a prophet. He was the son of a prophet named Zacharias.

Anyway, I think that it's too simplistic to say that they didn't like, essentially, the messenger. It wasn't the messenger because Jesus was not carrying a message from the Father. Jesus was the source of the message. I think they realized this. I think that for the reasons that they destroyed the prophets prior to this he was doubly so in jeopardy

because not only was he bringing supposedly a message from the Lord God Jehovah, but he was the center of that message. And they saw him as a threat, as a huge threat. Matter of fact, you'll find that they had no trouble saying exactly why they did not trust Jesus. They said

that if he has his way, that if we don't do something this man will destroy. Now listen to these things. He says that this man will destroy our people, our place, our nation, and the temple. And we have heard him say that he has come to destroy the law of Moses. Now because the scriptures say that

they suborned men of ill repute to come and give testimony against Jesus, we have assumed that what the men had to say was a lie. That Jesus didn't come to destroy the temple, but he did. He didn't come to deny the Jews access to the kingdom of God because of their DNA, but he did.

Jesus didn't come to turn the nation of Israel over to a new king which would have been him, but he did. And the accusation kept appearing in the book of Acts, you can find what I'm talking about, that these were the purposes that Jesus came to do. He said destroy this temple and I'll build it up in three days.

Of course he spoke about his own body, but in reality his intention was to set the children of Israel in such a relationship with God through himself that there would be no need for a temple. And this was his goal. His goal was to set aside the law of Moses.

Why would he want to set aside the law of Moses? Because the law of Moses had a particular characteristic about it in that, and we're not talking about the subsequent laws, the Deuterocanical laws or the Deuteronomy, the second law, but we're talking about even the Ten Commandments. Paul realized the plan of Jesus Christ and we can hear it in what he says when he says that if we live in the Spirit, we are no longer

under the law. Now some of the worst trouble I ever get into with my Messianic friends is when I say that Jesus never obeyed the law. He never obeyed the law. The law was not an imposition upon Christ. Why? Because Jesus' intention wasn't to obey the law. His intention was to obey the Father. If you obey the Father, and what we sometimes term the spirit of the law,

in other words, why the law was written, and these are things and thoughts that Jesus Christ had within himself that you can have as well, but you can only have it by way of the Spirit of God. The idea that if we live in the Spirit, we're no longer under the law has been stretched to the point of absolute heresy. In that people say, well you know the Bible says that Jesus is our Sabbath. Therefore we don't have to keep the Sabbath because he is our Sabbath. He's fulfilled

the law. Therefore we don't have to keep it anymore. Would you like to apply that to some other commandment? Or just the Sabbath day? Did he fulfill the law of thou shalt do no murder? Well, certainly he did. Did he fulfill the law thou shalt not commit adultery? Sure he did. Of not to steal, of not to covet, did he fulfill all these laws? Yeah. Well then we're free to

violate them? Well, no of course not. Well why is it that if he fulfilled the law of Sabbath that now we are free to either keep the Sabbath or no, move it to another day, redefine it, ignore it altogether. Why is it that we've applied that to one particular commandment? Well it's interesting to me that when the Lord was trying to prove the people of Israel

and trying to prove to Moses that these people will not keep my law, Moses argued with him and said, sure they will. They'll keep the law. And he says, well let's just put them to a test. Let's take the simplest, the least commandment I can think of that makes any demand on them is the one that demands that they do nothing. Let's give them that law. And people are surprised to hear that the Sabbath commandment was actually instituted in Israel before the Ten Commandments were given.

It was the test commandment. And he told them when you go pick up your manna, that on the sixth day of the week, on Friday, you're going to get twice as much as you need because no manna is going to fall on the Sabbath day. I don't want you to come out of your houses. I want you to stay there. Don't go out gathering.

And in doing this, he was going to prove to Moses that these people are going to do whatever they want to do. Well, guess what they did? You're right. They got up on Saturday morning and they put their britches on and went out with their little bags to gather manna. And the Lord had to say to Moses,

you see there, they're not going to keep my laws. The Sabbath commandment has always been, from its very inception until today, the test commandment. Are you going to keep God's commandments or not? Are you going to do that or not? And for some reason, conventional Christianity has focused on that commandment to eradicate that commandment. Well Jesus nailed the commandments to his cross. Well he didn't nail the ten commandments but let's just

say that you're correct. That he nailed to his cross the ten commandments. Does that make us free to violate them? Some people say, well, no, but we can be forgiven of them, of violating them. Well, you can be forgiven of violating any commandment way before Jesus ever came. I mean, how is this an argument for or against this? I don't understand.

Listen, the truth is that the Sabbath was a commandment that the Lord gave us. It is in the 10, and we need to keep that commandment the way he said to keep it. He explained how and when and in no uncertain terms, and we should just keep it. What in the world is the problem? I don't understand what the problem is. Why don't we just keep it? Well, you know what we find is? It's inconvenient.

It's just not a part of our society. So what are we worshiping? Our society, our church, denomination, our friends, our family. What are we doing here? What are we doing? Are we honoring God or not? Enough said about that.

This particular time, when the Lord healed this fellow, we have the Pharisees concerned about him healing on the Sabbath day. He asked them a question, which is another one of the scriptures that are pulled out by the anti-Sabbath keeping Christian. The world doesn't do this, by the way. They figure if God wants this, then that's what we need to do. Many times TRI Ministries will encounter a person that has

no church background whatsoever, and they look at that and they say, well, we need to be keeping the Sabbath day. Yep, there you go. They have no problem with it. It's only people who are educated in the church that have all these lists of excuses. One of the excuses that we use on a regular, they use on a regular basis is this idea that Jesus says if you have an ox in the ditch and then you get him out on the Sabbath day

and you find people who say that, well, you know, I try to keep the commandments, but sometimes I got an ox in the ditch. Well, there's a couple of things we need to know about this. Number one, Jesus' question was explicit. Is there anyone of you who won't do this? Is there anyone of you who are condemning me as if I am violating the Sabbath? You do worse than I do

and you don't condemn yourself. And one of the focal points of what he's saying is is there any man of you that doesn't do this? Jesus was not giving us a reason not to keep the Sabbath. Because frankly, I can pretty much make any situation in my life that's urgent at all, that's important at all, into an ox in the ditch. But there is no, there's no scripture, there's no words of Christ, there's nothing

for us to believe that it's okay to work on the Sabbath day if you have an ox in the ditch. He says, isn't this what you say? It's not what he said. It's not what the scriptures say. They don't allow for it, but the Pharisees did. He was showing their hypocrisy, not the inconsistency of the law itself. When we have

a good work to do, the Sabbath is a perfect time to do that work. When we have, I knew a fellow, I'll give you two examples. I knew a fellow, I'll give you two examples. I knew a fellow who said, yeah, well, we used to honor the Sabbath, but you know, I was working for a soup kitchen, and you know, these guys need to eat every day. And so there was no way to keep the Sabbath day.

And you know, report to this kitchen at 5 o'clock in the morning and start cooking for these people and carrying meals all over town. It was a big day. I can't keep the Sabbath day because I have to do this. And frankly I think this is more important than keeping any ritualistic Jewish holiday. Well first of all I felt for the first time because these were in the early days that I was seeing the Sabbath and the Scriptures

that someone would say, yeah we used to do that. And I'm thinking, wow I can't even imagine after having seen the Sabbath and the Scriptures, after having the Lord taking time and effort to reveal this to me that I would ever turn my back on it and say, you know, this doesn't work or won't work or can't work or for whatever reason. But this fellow was saying that I'm doing the Lord's work and sometimes it

bleeds over into the Sabbath day. Well, you know, you have an advocate. Jesus Christ is saying, should we do good on the Sabbath day or should we do evil on the Sabbath day? Well, of course we should do good on the Sabbath day. It's a perfect day for doing that. And for us to make some kind of an excuse or something that we should or shouldn't do by some man's reckoning or some man's deduction is kind of a silly thing to do. And you don't have Jesus on your side there. He's saying that there's work to be done. We have to loose these people of their oppressions. We have to heal on the Sabbath day.

And this isn't a violation. This isn't an ox in the ditch. This is absolutely the work of God. And there's not a better day to do it. So you don't have Jesus to argue with here. Who are you arguing with? You're arguing with church people that they decide what work actually is. The other example I wanted to give you was I knew a man that kept the Sabbath day and he did not, would not feed his livestock on that day.

So what he would do is, is Friday nights, he would go out there and feed them up real good. And then 24 hours later, after the sun went down on the Sabbath, he would feed them again. But he made them go 24 hours without food because he was under some constraint that his church body, messianic

congregation or whatever the influences were in his life and had so skewed his conscience to the point that he couldn't do that in good conscience. Yet while he's telling me this and I can't help but believe wanted me to be impressed about it, we were sitting at a table eating our lunch that his

wife had prepared all morning long and we're sitting there eating but his livestock is going without. You know, I don't understand the way some people think. I don't understand that. I don't know how they could think that God wants you to starve your animals on Sabbath day, or yourself. There's a group of people that believe that you should fast all day long on Sabbath day. Well, this actually comes from

a power play from we'll call it the church that tried to move the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. One of the reasons why our weekends today are set aside for sports is because they wanted the Sabbath violated, even if it was violated with sports and games and these kind of things.

There was another attempt to make the Sabbath day so miserable that nobody wanted anything to do with it, and that was when they instituted fasting on the Sabbath day. This has been an issue in church history for years, and nobody seems to be able to get their footing. Nobody seems to be able to balance. Nobody wants to know what the red words say. Nobody wants to know what the Son of God taught us when he got here.

This is a good day to do good. And I just think that it's a huge mistake to feel like that the Sabbath is some kind of a grievous thing that we have to bear when there's really no reason for it whatsoever. Now I am amazed that the scriptures can say so much about a subject and everybody hear something else. But I am convinced that because this

subject is so clear in the scriptures, the word, the concept, the commandment, the examples of the disciples that kept the Sabbath day, the women preparing the body of Jesus. Is that an ox in the ditch or not? You've got a dead man that needs to be prepared for his burial. If that's not an ox in a ditch, I don't know what in the world would be. But yet they, the Bible says, rested according to the commandment.

According to the commandment. Not according to their own conscience. Not according to what somebody else told them. But they rested according to the commandment. That's a huge testimony to modern day post-resurrection Christians. Well, that wouldn't be post-resurrection, would it? But it certainly would be post-Christ. These women lived with him and was taught by Him for all the days of His ministry. And to say that, even after all that time and example and watching and learning and hearing

that it never came up to just simply ignore the Sabbath day? I don't think Jesus ever taught us to ignore it. I think he wanted us to learn how to do it right. And that is to have first of all the attitude that the Sabbath was made for you. You weren't made for the Sabbath. And I am Lord of the Sabbath day. Many people hear I am Lord of the Sabbath day. Many people hear I am Lord of the Sabbath

and they think that, see, Jesus can eradicate the Sabbath if he wants to. No, that's not what he was saying at all. Am I your Lord? I am Lord also of the Sabbath. If I'm your Lord, I am Lord also of the Sabbath day. We're going to keep the Sabbath, friends. We're going to do that. If you're going to keep the commandments of God, you're going to keep the Sabbath day. There's a story of Nehemiah who kept finding local, well, not local, I guess they were, you they were people, they were merchants from other cities

and such that used to come into the gates of Jerusalem and sell their wares in there and they sold whatever they sold and they had no concern about the Sabbath whatsoever. They couldn't care less. Well, Nehemiah said, I want those gates shut on the Sabbath day. We're not going to do business. We're not going to do commerce on the Sabbath day. So they shut the gates. So the people went there

and now they've made provisions somehow so that they can camp around there and wait for the gates to open. Nehemiah hollered down from the wall, you know, if you guys don't get your junk and get out of here, I'm going to come down there and lay hands on you. Now, I don't think Nehemiah was offering to pray for them. But when he said lay hands on them, he's going to move them by force.

Because these things really used to mean something. And they were honored in every situation that they could be. There's also a prophecy where people are making the comment about Sabbath saying, oh, when will it not be the Sabbath so that we can do what we need to do? You know, when will the Sabbath be over? And listen, if you start keeping the Sabbath, you're going to have days like that. And you're going to remember that scripture and you're going to understand that, wow, you're looking at this thing wrong.

You're looking at it wrong altogether. This is a gift from God to us. And isn't it odd that the very people that go around talking about Jesus' salvation being a gift and trying to embarrass you into getting saved by saying you wouldn't refuse one of God's gifts, would you? And you're talking to a guy who absolutely refuses

the gift of the Sabbath day in many cases. Hypocrisy galore. All right. Hope you're enjoying this series, and we're going to continue next time we see you. That's all for this time. Hey, will you do something for me? I need to hear from you.

I need you to tell me who you are and where you are and how you're listening to this broadcast. If you have a question or a comment, send them to me at don at thinkredink.com. If you'd like to be a part of what we're doing and you need to have some way of sending us paper mail, you can do that at Think Red Ink Ministries at P.O PO Box 718,

Hightown, New Mexico, 87827. We'll see you next time. Thanks for being a part of the show. You've been listening to Don C. Harris of Think Red Ink Ministries. Email don at thinkredink.com. That's thinkredc.com. That's ThinkRedInc.com. Join us again for the next episode in the Words of Jesus series. you