And Some Sneered!

SERMON: 2016-03-27--es16--and-some-sneered SOURCE DURATION: 00:31:41.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The recording begins and ends with continuous theological exposition and narrative discussion related to the sermon topic. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- As Paul is speaking to these Athenian philosophers on what is also known as Mars' heel, and as he is expounding, God is the creator God as opposed to their idols, they listen pretty carefully. They listen carefully, that is, until he starts talking about the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Listen again to verse 32, "When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, 'We want to hear you again on this subject.'" Notice there is a two-fold reaction. There are some who are saying, "We want to hear you again." Those would likely be the Stoics. The Stoics were a group of philosophers who had developed a philosophy of life that says, "In face of much suffering in the world, don't become emotionally engaged, learn to rationally think your way through it." They were also people who believed, to some degree, in life after death, so they were interested in hearing more about this teaching of the Apostle Paul. But there is another whole group there, and those are the Epicureans. The Epicureans were the followers of a fellow by the name of Epicurus, and they approached the painful situations of life in this way, they said, "Go through life as pleasantly and as comfort-filled as you can, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." They were materialists, they didn't believe in the life that is to come, and they likely are the group here that sneered, they sneered at the notion of the resurrection, they pulled up their noses, they made fun of the Apostle Paul's message. And the reason for that, I suspect, is that there was nothing within their framework, there was nothing in their realm of thinking that provided them with a framework of resurrection. And if you think about it, if you live by the natural senses, all the ones that we're born with, then resurrection doesn't really make any sense. I was thinking about that, interestingly enough, a week before last, when we did two committal services at the cemetery. And one of the liturgies that we use in the committal service are these words, "In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God, our brother, our sister, and commit his or her body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." What gives us that sure and certain hope? Well, it is the promises of scripture and the testimony to the resurrection of Jesus. And if you and I did not have that, then we ourselves would be hard for us to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, wouldn't you think? I remember at one point looking out over the cemetery and you see all these gravestones, of course, and I got to thinking about what the Bible promises about the day of the resurrection. All these graves opening up, all the dead rising to meet the Lord in the air, all the scattered ashes all over the world being reconstituted to give us resurrection bodies. And I said to myself, it wasn't for scripture, I wouldn't believe it either. Because there is nothing in our experience that prepares us for the life that is to come. So in the time that remains, there are three lessons that I want to draw from this skepticism of the epicureans towards the resurrection, a skepticism that is increasingly being shared all over the world by unbelieving people, especially in North America. Lesson number one, our natural minds are not enough to lead us to a full understanding of the truth. Let me say it again. Our natural minds are not enough to lead us to a full understanding of the truth. Think this through with me a little bit. These philosophers in Athens were the brightest minds of their day. And as they contemplated the issues of suffering and pain in the world, they could not visualize that there would be life after death, and that disease and illness and pain would have been conquered. When they use their natural senses, all they could conclude is that life is hard, we're all going to die, and we better learn how to cope with that as best we can. The Bible puts it this way, the man without the spirit does not accept the things that come from the spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him. He cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned. Doesn't matter how smart you are, you cannot begin with your natural mind to understand the life that is to come any more than these two twins in the womb have no frame of reference to even contemplate what life might be like after delivery. Now that said, that doesn't mean that your mind doesn't count, because God has given us glimpses of the life that is to come. What I like about the little video is the conversation about, if you're silent, you can hear. There are glimpses that maybe there is more to what we are experiencing today. Even unbelieving people have those moments of transcendence when they say, there's got to be more to life than this. The apostle Paul puts it this way, he says, "What may be known about God is plain to them," that is to unbelievers, "because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that men are without excuse." So what Paul is saying there, and you've heard me quote this before, "Even the blindest pagan, by looking at the beauty of nature, by the structure of creation, ought to be able to deduce there must be somebody who stands behind creation who has made it and who we are to seek after." Paul in Acts chapter 17 here at the Areopagus follows the same argument when he says that God created all people from one people and then designated places where they were all supposed to live and then he goes on to say this in verse 27, "God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us." Then he goes on to say, and that won't be on the screen, "In him we live and move and have our being as some of your own poets have said we are his offspring." You see he's arguing that even in pagan society there was some intuitive understanding of who God is. And what God wants even the greatest pagan to do is pay attention to those signs and to seek after God because if they will seek after God he says, "Anybody that seeks me will find me." The tragedy of the human race of course is that we're not interested in seeking after him or finding him because he's too threatening, he is too scary, he limits our freedom and so Romans 1 tells us that it is by their wickedness that people suppress the truth. You have to work hard, did you know that? You have to work hard at being an unbeliever. You have to shut out the light of God's revelation in nature, you have to shut out the light of God's revelation through your conscience, you have to shut out the light of revelation that comes at you through scripture and with blinders on just blindly go on and try to figure out life on your own. I don't care how smart you are, you'll not figure out God, you'll not figure out the spiritual world and you surely will not figure out the age that is to come because it is too far removed from what you have experienced in your life. That's the first lesson we want to draw from this story. The second lesson is that to understand truth we must come to faith in Jesus. Jesus put it this way, John chapter 14 verse 6, you've heard it many times, he said, "I am the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except by me." What does it mean to believe in Jesus? Well it means to believe that God sent him into the world from outside the world, that he lived our life, died our death because he was without sin, he was raised from the dead, sits at the right hand of God in glory and the promise of the gospel is that when we come to him admitting that we cannot fix ourselves, we cannot fix the world, only Jesus can and we give ourselves to him as best as we know how then we are what the Bible calls saved. And what happens then is that God gives us his Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit opens our spiritual eyes so that we can see spiritual realities and believe spiritual realities that we cannot get our head around in the natural. Jesus puts it this way, John chapter 16 verse 13, "But when he," that is the spirit of truth comes, "he will guide you into all truth, he will not speak on his own, he will speak only what he hears and he will tell you what is yet to come." And then Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 2, 11 and 12, he says, "No one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God." And then he goes on to say, "We have not received the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God that we may understand," there's that word again, "that we may understand what God has freely given us." Now why is that important? It's important because I know all kinds of people who have difficulty surrendering their lives to Jesus because they insist on understanding everything first. They want to understand the Bible first, they want to understand the mysteries of life first, they want to understand the mysteries of God first. And yes, there is a place for inquiry, there is a place for understanding the fundamentals of the gospel. But you know, all the thief on the cross knew when he hung there next to Jesus was that he was in big trouble and he deserved it. Jesus hung on the cross, didn't deserve it, and it was Jesus that was going to have to rescue him for the life that was to come. And Jesus said to him, "Today you will be with me in paradise." Sometimes we make it a lot more complicated than it needs to be. But it is after coming to faith, which is always a leap. That says, "Lord, I don't understand everything, can't figure it all out, but I know a little bit about who Jesus is and you've worked faith in my heart and I'm going to trust him and I'm going to make that leap so come into my life, give me your spirit, help me to live for you, forgive my many sins, and bring me to glory." Then you get the Holy Spirit. And guess what happens when you get the Holy Spirit? Things begin to make sense. Because now you have eyes to see, ears to hear, the scriptures come alive, songs begin to come alive, the Christian life begins to make sense, and through the Holy Spirit we even begin to see what there is in the age that is too common. Again, this won't be on the screen, but a verse that we've often quoted around here, it's a quotation that Paul makes out of the Old Testament, "What eye hasn't seen." Do you remember it? Say it with me. "What eye has not seen, ear has not heard, the heart of man hasn't even imagined what God has prepared for those who love him. He has," what? "Revealed to us by his Holy Spirit." He has revealed to us by his Holy Spirit. We are not meant to wander around in the dark. Jesus is the light of the world. You don't have to be brilliant, you don't have to be good, you don't have to be educated. The simplest believer will receive that kind of revelation from God that enables us to fix our eyes on that which is to come. So number one, our brains aren't good enough to figure it out. Number two, we have to come to faith in Jesus who promises us the gift of his Holy Spirit. And then, number three, the third lesson I want to draw from this is that the resurrection of Jesus Christ, get this, it changes everything. It changes everything about who you and I live. Think that through with me a little bit. Let's suppose the resurrection of Jesus Christ didn't happen. How would your life today be different if Jesus had not been raised from the dead? Well, it'd be different in many, many ways. Because first of all, it would mean there is no life that is to come. If there is no life that is to come, guess what, then this life is all there is. And if this life is all there is, what do you think is your greatest priority and your greatest value? Well, I'll tell you, you will either become an Epicurean or you'll become a Stoic. If you're an Epicurean, you start living for pleasure. You start avoiding pain. You become a materialist. You believe that this life is all there is to live. And so you say, as Paul does later on in 1 Corinthians 15, "If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die." Or you become a Stoic. And a Stoic, as I said before, looks at the problems of life and he says, "You don't want them to drag you emotionally all over the map, you have to develop a Stoicism." That's where the word Stoic comes from. You have to learn to use your mind and try to stay ahead of the game in life so that you can figure it all out and hopefully you will avoid suffering and you will avoid pain. And so when there is no resurrection, if you don't believe in a resurrection, then you live obviously for the here and now and making the here and now as comfortable and as prosperous and as good a life as you can possibly make it, that becomes your ultimate priority and suffering is to be skewed at all costs. And because the nature of life is that the more we feed the flesh, as the Bible calls it, the more we fall into its grip and the more deceived we become. And so we live today in North American society in a culture that is increasingly in a wholesale fashion rejecting the life that is to come, rejecting the authority of God, rejecting the promises of God, we're living by what we know and by what we experience and we're sliding to hell in a handbasket adopting values that 10, 20, 30 years ago nobody would have believed could be part of today's culture. If you're following the news, North Carolina is in big trouble because they just passed legislation forbidding gender neutral bathrooms. And the whole world in big business is up in arms because that's a forbidden value in this day and age. And the issue of course is that transgender people should be allowed to use whatever locker rooms or whatever bathrooms that they want to use despite the girls or guys biologically that are present in that particular situation. You have a situation where in this country we're now seriously debating euthanasia because or doctor assisted euthanasia because at all costs we must avoid pain, we do not see a redemptive purpose in pain, you understand what I'm saying? When you reject the life that is to come and the fact that biblically speaking this life is a preparation for the life that is to come then you must avoid at all costs anything that is inconvenient and you must try to get through life as securely and as comfortably as you possibly can and if you think that describes a lot of North America including a lot of North American Christians you're absolutely right which is why we are so powerless in terms of being the salt of the earth and the light of the world. But now let's turn that on its head. What if there is a resurrection? What if there is life after delivery? What if Jesus really rose from the dead? How would that change your life today if you really truly and honestly believe it? Well it would change it drastically on every level. Let me just rattle a few things off real quick here. Number one it means there is a God because nobody can raise himself from the dead. Even Jesus was raised from the dead by the Father. If there is a God then he probably created you don't you think? You're not the product of some mindless evolutionary process that brought you into being for absolutely no purpose whatsoever. Now there is a God who designed you as we saw on Good Friday who knows you, who's got a plan and a purpose for your life and who number three has the right to tell you how to live, imagine that. Somebody telling me how to live, somebody who tells me that my thoughts, my feelings, my ideas might be wrong. Even worse yet somebody who can hold me accountable on that final day of judgment. I strongly suspect that these Athenian philosophies were bent out of shape about the resurrection not just because they couldn't get their head around what a resurrection would look like but also because resurrection includes a day of judgment. Listen again to how Paul puts it in verse 31. He that is God has said a day he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed he has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead. From one end of scripture to the other there is a teaching that when this life is finished everybody that has ever lived is going to stand before the judgment seat of Christ and they're going to be held accountable for what they have done. We read in 2 Corinthians chapter 5 10 we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ that each may receive whatever is due to him for the things done while in the body whether good or bad and Paul in Romans 2 says the same thing God will give to each person according to what he has done to those who by persistence in doing good seek glory honor and immortality he will give eternal life and for those who are self-seeking there you have that word again it's all about me those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil there will be wrath and anger. You see not only does God hold us accountable but the resurrection will also be the day of vindication for his people. One of the biggest issues that we face in life as God's people have historically is what about all the injustices that happen I get mistreated the rich get richer the poor get poorer historically why do the wicked prosper why do the righteous suffer and as I've said many times a lot of people reject faith because they can't square the realities of their life's experience with the promises of scripture and unless you believe in the life that is to come unless you believe that there is coming a day of judgment when everybody is going to be gathered before the throne of God and rewards will be dished out and punishments will be dished out you cannot possibly live as a Christian and keep your faith in the world because in the short term life is not fair and there's a lot of us that have cried into our pillows at night and cried out to God and said God where are you why aren't you doing something about it and nothing happens and our hearts shut down and we walk away if not literally from God we close off our hearts. But see Jesus was not vindicated while he hung on the cross was he in fact why did he cry out when he hung on the cross my God my God why have you forsaken me that was the cry of all God's abandoned people throughout all generations and it was a cry that went unheard and embodies all our tears and all our pain but whereas Job's wife in that kind of situation counseled him to curse God and die Jesus did not lose his faith because how does he end father into your hands I commit my spirit and it was pretty dark on Good Friday wasn't it it looked like God had forsaken him it looked like the enemies had triumphed and all the devils in hell were dancing on the grave of Jesus because he was finally out of the way until that Easter Sunday morning and you know all hell shook went up from the grave he arose with that mighty triumph over his foes and defeated death and hell once and for all amen and in that resurrection lies our resurrection and in his glorification lies our glorification because there is a day coming when God was bottled up your every tear who has seen every injustice that has ever been accomplished and and who has heard every groan of your heart about how unfair your husband is or how unfair your wife is or how miserable your kids are or how nasty your boss is or how crooked the world is he's got it all written down and he is going to judge the world the Bible says with righteousness that is going to scare the living daylights out of the unbelieving world because when they see him coming in glory they're going to cry out for the mountains to fall upon them and the rocks to cover them to hide them from the wrath of him who sits upon the throne but for those who find their safety and their security in Jesus Christ it'll be an incredible day of deliverance when the father says come beloved of my father inherit the kingdom that has been prepared for you from before the foundation of the world wow that's Easter that's resurrection one more quick thing and then we'll wind this up there's still a sixth life-changing fact produced by the resurrection of Jesus and that is that you and I tap into new power to love God above all and our neighbor as we love ourselves why is it that even among God's people we have such a hard time really putting God first we have such a hard time really turning the other cheek when we get injured or people offend us how come even in our most intimate moments it's so often about me and not about the other person well the Bible says it's because we share Adam's nature and Adam's nature as Paul points out in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 is of the earth we move towards seen as the sparks fly upward we are by nature children of wrath and Paul puts it this way as was the earthly band so are those who are of the earth and is the man from heaven so also are those who are of heaven and just as we have born the likeness of the earthly band so shall we bear the likeness of the band from heaven what gives us confidence to face the future when the future is increasingly dark what gives us confidence that he who began a good work in us will bring it to completion in the day of Jesus Christ we have been joined to Christ in his death we have been joined to Christ in his resurrection we are seated with him in heavenly places and the resurrection life of Jesus that death could not hold down God has poured out into your heart and into my heart and as we cultivate that and we seek to move forward with him life happens and we have the power to say no to the crud say no to all the things that want to pull us down and we can say yes to the things that are of God that is what makes the gospel good news and all we have to do to experience that is to own him by faith and to say Lord as you give me grace I will follow you and I will obey you and as we do his life transforms us from glory to glory until one day one day after delivery we are going to stand before him imagine that we are going to stand before him without wrinkle or blemish or spot and for all eternity we are going to enjoy life that we can't even begin to imagine even so [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:31:35.360; remove through 00:31:41.000] Maranatha oh Lord come quickly. 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