The law of Christ is not as I would have written it.  There are actions that don’t bother me very much that God labels as sins, and there are things that chap my hide but are not condemned by Him.  I think pineapple on pizza ought to be classed as an abomination, but Jesus declared all foods clean, so there I am.

More seriously, there are plenty of people out there with serious, serious problems with portions of the word of God.  Their problems are so serious that they go hunting for reasons to become atheists, just so that they won’t feel obliged to keep that abhorrent commandment.  Sometimes, it’s not even something that they have to do.  They just don’t like that God said it, so they leave.

This is not a new problem.  Indeed, it is clearly on display in John 6.  Contextually, Jesus’ ministry has reached a high point after His feeding of the five thousand.  Throngs of new disciples think so highly of Him that they want to make Him king by force.

In response, Jesus preaches one of the most alienating sermons of His ministry.  Among other things, He tells His disciples that they have to eat His flesh and drink His blood if they want to inherit eternal life.  2000 years later, this is still a difficult concept, and its effect on its immediate hearers is predictable.  His new followers desert Him in droves, grumbling that His teaching is too hard to understand.

I doubt this result was accidental.  I’m sure Jesus would have been pleased if the crowds were sufficiently devoted enough to stick around even though they didn’t understand what He was saying, but He knew they weren’t.  He made such challenging statements in order to separate those who were truly committed from those who weren’t.

Today, God’s word continues to serve the same function.  I’ve never met anyone who was upset by the content of John 6, but I have studied with those who stumble over baptism, sexual morality, and marriage.  Others don’t like what the Bible says about authority.  Still others would rather zero in on grace and ignore Scriptural teaching on obedience.

Sooner or later, all of us are going to run into a hard saying in Scripture, something that we don’t want to do or don’t want to believe.  That’s not in question.  The question is what we will do when it happens.  Either we turn tail like most of the disciples in John 6, or we struggle on regardless.

If we want to be pleasing to God, though, this choice is no choice at all.  Either we submit to Jesus in everything, whether we understand it, whether we like it, or we submit to Him in nothing.  If we pick and choose from His precepts, we have removed Him as Lord and set ourselves in His place. 

The temptation to do so can be severe.  If we decide to reject the words of Christ, the devil will hand us half a dozen justifications for doing so in a heartbeat.  We must remember, though, that the troublesome issue really isn’t what’s at issue.  It’s just a tool that the devil is using to get what he really wants—our souls.  As long as he can separate us from Jesus, any method will serve.

That’s the decision that we have to make, then—whether we want Jesus to save us or not.  If we do, we will accept Him, hard sayings and all, because there is no other option.  Peter says lots of dumb things in the course of the gospels, but in John 6:68, he gets it exactly right.  He asks, “Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life.” 

Next to those words, the hard words pale into insignificance.

The ruler had a lot of respect for God’s prophet.  He believed that the prophet was a righteous and holy man.  He enjoyed listening to his preaching, and he protected him from harm.  After the prophet’s death, the ruler even thought it possible that God might raise him from the dead.

This sounds like a heartwarming story of faith, but in reality, it is anything but.  The ruler in question was Herod Antipas, and the prophet was John the Baptist.  Though all the above was true, it also was true that Antipas gave the orders for both John’s arrest and his execution. 

How do we get from Paragraph 1 to Paragraph 2?  How does such a heartwarming story take such a nightmarish turn?  The answer lies in the moral weakness of Antipas.  Ultimately, his respect and even affection for John were overwhelmed by his flawed character. 

These character flaws manifested in Antipas’ life in three main ways.  First, though he was entertained by John, he refused to repent in obedience to the truth.  John told him that his marriage was unlawful.  That certainly made Antipas’ wife, Herodias, murderously angry, but it did not lead Antipas to put her away. 

Second, Antipas loved worldly pleasure.  The climactic event of the story took place when Herodias’ daughter danced for the king and his guests.  Though Mark does not discuss the dance in detail, when we learn that Antipas was willing to surrender half his kingdom in exchange, we don’t have any trouble inferring what kind of a dance it was.  The ordinarily shrewd Antipas (Jesus called him a fox, after all) was so inflamed by lust for his own stepdaughter that he made an impulsive, foolish pledge.

Third, Antipas cared more about the good opinion of others than he did about righteousness.  He ordered John’s arrest because of pressure from his unlawful wife.  Then, when Herodias’ daughter stunned him by asking for John’s head, he was unwilling to appear foolish in front of her and his guests.  He was so very, very sorry about it, but he immediately dispatched the executioner who dispatched John. 

There are Jezebels in the world, strong-minded people who determinedly pursue evil.  However, there are more Antipases.  They mean well.  They really, really do!  However, they shy away from the pain of repentance, they enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, and they care about what their worldly friends think. 

Such people often give us hope.  They seem receptive to the gospel.  They will talk to us about Jesus for as long as we are willing to keep bringing Him up.  However, when the time comes for them to change, they change the subject instead. 

Antipases often are likeable.  Indeed, we may know the temptation to be an Antipas ourselves.  However, we must remember that Antipases don’t inherit the kingdom of God.  When the chips are down, they don’t do the right thing.  They do the wrong thing.  Acutely aware of the pain that godliness will bring, they turn a blind eye to the much greater pain that inevitably will accompany lawlessness.

Nobody should be an Antipas.  It’s just not worth it.

Jesus says many things that leave us scratching our heads, but one of the most contextually puzzling appears in Matthew 10:26.  “Therefore, do not be afraid of them,” He tells the twelve, and indirectly us.  “Therefore” usually follows a selection of facts that lead to a particular conclusion, but in the case of Matthew 10, many of the predictions that Jesus makes are not the sort that would lead to fearlessness in most people.

In 10:17, He promises the apostles that they will be haled into court by civil authorities and flogged in synagogues by religious authorities.  10:18 reveals that they will be tried before governors and kings.  According to 10:21, they’ll be betrayed by their families.  10:22 says they’ll be hated by everyone.  In 10:25, He predicts that they will be treated worse than He will, a revelation that would gain a certain grim resonance in a year or two.

And yet, “Do not be afraid.”  Certainly, no one ever could accuse the Lord of hiding the risks of discipleship!  Indeed, everything that He predicted would happen did happen to somebody, usually to lots of somebodies.  However, to Jesus, those facts are not the important facts.  Instead, he bases “Do not be afraid” on three things.

First, they should not fear because God’s Spirit would be with them.  Maybe they were a bunch of Galilean peasants, but they would speak with such wisdom and power that they would leave the best minds of the age dumbfounded. 

Second, if they endured to the end, they would be saved.  This didn’t mean that they would be saved from the physical consequences of persecution.  I’m sure that the apostle Paul’s back was a mass of scar tissue!  Instead, it meant something more important.  Those who were faithful until death would enjoy the salvation of their souls.

Third, to paraphrase an ex-president, they would be on the right side of history.  The gospel would be proclaimed.  The kingdom of God would triumph.  His will would be done on earth as it was in heaven.  Those who were with Him were destined for ultimate victory, those who opposed Him, for ultimate favor.

Today, we usually don’t face lawsuits and floggings when we proclaim the gospel, though hatred and family troubles are, alas, very much still with us.  Our biggest obstacle, though, is the same as it was 2000 years ago—fear.  As the Romans proved, even the mightiest external power can’t stop the good news, but Christians who are mute because of fear can. 

When we are afraid, then, we need to remember the encouragement offered by Jesus.  We don’t have to know what to say because the Holy Spirit does.  It is not our wisdom, but the wisdom of the word, that wins hearts for the Lord.  We still anticipate a salvation that is eternal rather than earthly, and we still know that God’s side is the winning side. 

In short, we need to learn to trust rather than being afraid.  The apostles did, and millennia later, their exploits still shine with deathless glory.  Admittedly, no one is going to write the New Testament about us, but God will remember everything we do for Him.  We have nothing to fear from honoring His will, but we have everything to fear from rejecting it.

Jesus says many things that leave us scratching our heads, but one of the most contextually puzzling appears in Matthew 10:26.  “Therefore, do not be afraid of them,” He tells the twelve, and indirectly us.  “Therefore” usually follows a selection of facts that lead to a particular conclusion, but in the case of Matthew 10, many of the predictions that Jesus makes are not the sort that would lead to fearlessness in most people.

In 10:17, He promises the apostles that they will be haled into court by civil authorities and flogged in synagogues by religious authorities.  10:18 reveals that they will be tried before governors and kings.  According to 10:21, they’ll be betrayed by their families.  10:22 says they’ll be hated by everyone.  In 10:25, He predicts that they will be treated worse than He will, a revelation that would gain a certain grim resonance in a year or two.

And yet, “Do not be afraid.”  Certainly, no one ever could accuse the Lord of hiding the risks of discipleship!  Indeed, everything that He predicted would happen did happen to somebody, usually to lots of somebodies.  However, to Jesus, those facts are not the important facts.  Instead, he bases “Do not be afraid” on three things.

First, they should not fear because God’s Spirit would be with them.  Maybe they were a bunch of Galilean peasants, but they would speak with such wisdom and power that they would leave the best minds of the age dumbfounded. 

Second, if they endured to the end, they would be saved.  This didn’t mean that they would be saved from the physical consequences of persecution.  I’m sure that the apostle Paul’s back was a mass of scar tissue!  Instead, it meant something more important.  Those who were faithful until death would enjoy the salvation of their souls.

Third, to paraphrase an ex-president, they would be on the right side of history.  The gospel would be proclaimed.  The kingdom of God would triumph.  His will would be done on earth as it was in heaven.  Those who were with Him were destined for ultimate victory, those who opposed Him, for ultimate failure.

Today, we usually don’t face lawsuits and floggings when we proclaim the gospel, though hatred and family troubles are, alas, very much still with us.  Our biggest obstacle, though, is the same as it was 2000 years ago—fear.  As the Romans proved, even the mightiest external power can’t stop the good news, but Christians who are mute because of fear can. 

When we are afraid, then, we need to remember the encouragement offered by Jesus.  We don’t have to know what to say because the Holy Spirit does.  It is not our wisdom, but the wisdom of the word, that wins hearts for the Lord.  We still anticipate a salvation that is eternal rather than earthly, and we still know that God’s side is the winning side. 

In short, we need to learn to trust rather than being afraid.  The apostles did, and millennia later, their exploits still shine with deathless glory.  Admittedly, no one is going to write the New Testament about us, but God will remember everything we do for Him.  We have nothing to fear from honoring His will, but we have everything to fear from rejecting it.

If there is anything we should take away from reading through the gospels this year, it is a deeper understanding of the skill with which the Evangelists crafted their narratives.  Nothing in any of the gospels is there just because Jesus did it.  As John observes in John 21:25, all four writers had a nearly limitless amount of material to choose from.  From this great mass of teachings and stories, each selected the small portion that best suited their purposes and those of the Holy Spirit.

This recognition should inform our understanding of the story of Jesus casting out the legion of demons in Mark 5:1-20.  This is a story that many of us can remember learning about as children, jokes about pork soup and all.  Even a surface reading leaves us awed by the supernatural power of Jesus.

However, there’s much more going on here than merely that.  This isn’t only a story about Jesus' power.  It’s a story about Jesus’ power in the midst of uncleanness.  Practically everything in the narrative except Jesus and His disciples is unclean.  It takes place in the region of the Gerasenes—an unclean, Gentile people.  The man (presumably a Gentile himself) has an unclean spirit.  He lives in the tombs—in an unclean place (Numbers 19:16).  The legion enters into a herd of swine, unclean animals.  Even the pigs die an unclean death (for a couple of different reasons provided in Leviticus 17:10-16). 

To put things another way, this is a story in which everything has been ritually defiled.  This fact pattern is as hostile to the Son of God on earth as it possibly can be.  However, even with the deck stacked against Jesus, He still triumphs.  The demons are banished, the unclean animals are destroyed, the demon-possessed man is freed, the power of God is demonstrated among the nations, and the good news of the kingdom is proclaimed to the Gentiles.

To the Jews of Jesus’ day, Mark’s account would have read like a horror story, and the victory of God would have been shocking.  As Haggai points out in Haggai 2:10-14, the unclean can defile the clean, but the clean cannot consecrate the unclean.  However, the power of Jesus was so unprecedented, so overwhelming, that it rewrote the old rules.

For us, then, this narrative is extraordinarily hopeful.  We know the defilement of sin all too well.  We understand what it is like to feel unclean to the very core of our being.  Indeed, some feel their sinfulness so strongly that they doubt that even Christ can help.

This is nonsense, and, among other things, Mark 5:1-20 is recorded to prove that it is nonsense.  No matter how dramatically we have stacked the deck against Jesus in our own lives, if we come to Him, He will be able to cleanse and save.  Nothing can stand against the purifying power of His grace.  It will scour away all the uncleanness in our lives.  Then, like the demon-possessed man, clothed in Christ, renewed in our minds, we will be able to proclaim to everyone what the Lord has done for us. 

As was the case for many Christians, when I was growing up, I was taught that the kingdom of heaven/the kingdom of God was the church.  When I got older, I learned (first and most notably from a sermon that David Maravilla preached in Columbia, MO nearly 25 years ago now) that the truth is more nuanced.  It’s better to define the kingdom as the rule or dominion of God.  When we do so, many of Jesus’ teachings about the kingdom take on a deeper meaning.

This is the case in Matthew 13:31-33.  In this text, Jesus compares the kingdom to two things:  a mustard seed and leaven.  The “mustard seed” parable is very churchy.  The church starts out little and gets big.  Its growth is obvious to all.

However, the church doesn’t fit quite so neatly into the parable of the leaven.  In that parable, the kingdom is invisible and exerts an invisible influence that only can be detected indirectly.  Only when we understand the kingdom in a broader sense does this begin to make sense.  Sometimes, the growth of God’s dominion in the human heart is not obvious at all.  You can only see it by the changes it produces in the lives of the converted.

In our increasingly secular age, there is a great emphasis on church growth.  Americans love things that can be measured and counted, so to us, it seems reasonable that the best measure of the health of a church is the increasing numbers of those in attendance on Sunday morning.  There is truth to this—after all, the mustard seed is supposed to grow and become a tree. 

However, we need to pay as much attention to the invisible growth of the kingdom too.  Many times, brethren take this kind of growth for granted.  The church has assembled, its members have heard the word, so perforce they must have been edified, right?

Not necessarily.  As the Lord points out in the parable, inward change begets outward change.  If Christians aren’t living differently than they were five years ago, or ten years ago, they have not given more of their hearts over to God’s dominion either.  Church cliché to the contrary, they have not, in fact, been built up.  This is a dismayingly common problem.  Though we love to bemoan the difficulties of evangelism, true edification is every bit as difficult.

In our work, then, we must be concerned not merely with church growth, but with kingdom growth.  The goal of our assemblies must be to increase the dominion of God in the heart of every member through exposure to the gospel, and every element of our assemblies must be calculated to achieve that goal. 

It’s not enough for our hymns to be fun to sing.  They must enlighten and inspire.  It’s not enough for our sermons to be easily digestible and amusing.  They must remind us of our calling and our hope.

Kingdom growth isn’t easy, any more than training for a marathon is, and for much the same reasons.  It demands a great deal from church leaders and church members alike.  However, its consequences will be profound, and they will make themselves known in any number of unexpected ways.  Not least, once we get kingdom growth down, it’s likely that we will start to see more church growth too.