Seed of the Women and David's Son
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
May 11, 2014
This morning we are continuing our series through Mark and we pick up the story in Mark 12:35.I know all of the mothers here were thinking this morning when you had breakfast, “I sure hope my church to celebrate Mother’s Day will preach a sermon about Jesus crushing all of his enemies because that would make my day so special!” That’s what you were hoping for, right? A sermon about war and enemies and a crushing defeat, a sermon that likens Jesus to Rocky in Rocky III, as Jason did last week?If you were hoping for this, then I want you to know, you will not be disappointed.For the rest of us, which is probably everyone here, I’ll admit up front that because we are committed to moving through passages of scripture sequentially it means that sometimes we will hit on themes that we were not expecting.Two things to say. First, I’ve become more and more okay with this (i.e., having expectations challenged), because I’ve been around enough to know that getting my expectations met, especially when dealing with God and the things of God, is not always what is best. Said another way: I’m glad God does not give me all of my expectations all of the time.Second, in honor of the women here, I have written a poem. I have no illusions that it will stand the test of time to become one of the great literary works of the century. It will not. However, I hope it blesses you. I’ve have given it the ridiculously long title,
“A Conversational Ode to Christian Mothers, Especially Mothers with Young Children, and Especially to My Wife.”
Mom, what are we doing tomorrow? And then after nap? And after dinner? And after church? And after Thanksgiving and Christmas?Sweetie, we’re only in the month of May.It should come more often, this Mother’s DayEspecially for how little the pay.Mom, my can I play at the park? Can I come out of my room? Can I go to Gretchen’s house? Can I have a snack?No, buddy, no. We just ate.You’re going to have to wait.Mom, my shoe’s untied? My hair is tangled. I think the little one has pooped.Okay, okay. One thing at a time.Hard to remember, I suppose.When all there is are dirty clothes.But there are rewards, are there not?To see your children raised and taught.To show them Christ, as he’s loved you.To be there for all they go through.Hard to remember, I suppose.When baby has a snotty nose.Remember this, when they are smallYou are mother, but that’s not all.Your children will help to shape you,But your children do not make you.The Target checkout lady knows your nameAnd so does God, and he even knows your shame.And your pain, and he loves you all the same.Because Christ has taken all of your blame.
That was my slightly humorous and slightly serious way to say this: Motherhood is a good thing, but it is not an ultimate thing; motherhood is important, but it is not everything. The best mothers are the mothers that know that their children do not define them, but that Christ does.Maybe being a mom has worked out great for you and you will Skype with your grandkids today. Well, that’s good. But maybe being a mom hasn’t worked out so well—maybe you had miscarriages, or abortions, or children that got divorced, or maybe you never had any children. Well, that’s hard. Very hard.I guess I would just say, to all women here, especially to young mothers, and especially to my wife, that God loves you and “Christ has taken all of your shame.”Let’s pray and get to work on a sermon about Jesus crushing his enemies. Pray with me…
Introduction
Psalm 6:2, 3, I am faint; O LORD, heal me, for my bones are in agony. My soul also is greatly troubled. But you, O LORD - how long?Psalm 74:10, How long, O God, is the foe to scoff? Is the enemy to revile your name forever?Psalm 89:46 How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever? How long will your wrath burn like fire?Psalm 90:13 Return, O Lord! How long? Have pity on your servants!
Four different Psalms, four different eras of Israelite history, four different authors (David, Asaph, Ethan, Moses), all saying one thing: How long, how long, how long, how long, O Lord?If I were to sum up the Old Testament in just two words, I might do it with these: promises and longings—promises of redemption and the longings for it.God created a world that was perfect. A world of joy, delight, companionship, holiness, trust, beauty, friendship, and much, much more.But this perfect world of Genesis 2 is a world far from our world—a world where Twin Towers collapse and disaster strikes Sandy Hook Elementary and dozens of Nigerian pre-teen girls are kidnapped and where 10,000 other less publicized evils seem to go by without a reckoning from God.Paradise was tarnished. It was as if someone put graffiti everywhere.If you’ve ever been to one of the State Parks in Pennsylvania, and looked around and thought, This is amazingly beautiful, and then you got a sinking feeling in your stomach as you looked over and saw McDonalds wrappers stuck in a tree and smashed bottles of Miller Lite, then you have a tiny, tiny glimpse into what I’m talking about, namely, that something is very wrong.As early in the Story as Genesis 3, God promises to put evil under his feet and crush it. In Genesis 3:15, God says, One day—one day—there will be a woman, and that women will have a particular offspring, and that particular offspring will “crush the head” (NIV) of the evil one. It’s going to happen. I promise, says God, I promise to send the Serpent Crusher.As the Old Testament presses forward, this promise is not forgotten by God. And the people of God get little reminders here and there that God is a warrior—reminders that God’s enemies are not the equals of God.But the reminders that God would one day crush evil, often they came too infrequently for sinful and forgetful people, or at least it seemed. And women and men of God would cry out to God for justice against their enemies, cry out for deliverance from evil, and cry out for the sin that was around them and the sin that is within them to be vanquished. How long, how long, how long, how long, O Lord.Again: if I were to sum up the Old Testament in just two words, I might do it with these: promises and longings—promises of redemption and the longings for it.When we come to the New Testament, what was a promise becomes a reality and what was a whisper becomes something shouted by the Biblical authors: He’s here! He’s here! We have waited, and waited and the Messiah is here.However, in the gospel of Mark, the religious leaders take a look at Jesus, and they think, “He’s not so special. What’s all the fuss about? We can take him.” And they are wrong. Their view of Jesus was too small. This is the problem of the religious leaders in the gospel of Mark. And, too often, it can be our problem as well. Too often, we have a Jesus who is tame.There is a famous quote in The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis about this point, and even though it has been quoted so often, I’m going to gladly allude to it again now by saying this: in Jesus we do not have a tame, domesticated house pet. We have a lion, perhaps we could say, a Serpent Crusher, that will one day crush his enemies.These are heavy realities. These are realities I don’t want to make up, realities I don’t want to take lightly, and thus, realities that we have to—HAVE TO—see that this passage is in fact actually teaching.So now that we’ve had a long introduction, here are the two points of our sermon, 1) What did Jesus’ question mean to the religious leaders, and 2) What does Jesus’ question mean to us.
1. What did Jesus’ question mean to the religious leaders.
Let’s start by taking up the first main point, namely, what this passage meant to these religious leaders.It is a short passage, just three verses, but it is rich in meaning. We are going to move through it slowly. Here we go.V. 35 reads,
And as Jesus taught in the temple…
This little detail is important. Jesus is “in the temple.” As we have said in other weeks, Jesus was supposed to be at home in the Temple—it was his Father’s house (Luke 2:49)—but instead he is a man behind enemy lines, a man in occupied territory. And every day he is there, the pressure builds, like a room filling with explosive gas. Continuing,
“How can the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David?
Notice three things. First, we need to realize something about this phrase “the Christ.” When Jesus asks about “the Christ,” we have to remember that “Christ” was not Jesus’ last name in the same way my last name is Vrbicek. Christ is not a last name; it’s a title. It means anointed one or Messiah. Therefore, when we say Jesus Christ, what we mean is Jesus the Messiah, or Jesus who is the Christ.Second, when Jesus says “son of David,” he is referring to King David from the Old Testament. David received extraordinary promises from God about his own kingship and the subsequent dynasty of kings that would come from him. So when it says “son of David,” Jesus is talking about King David from the OT who lived 1,000 years earlier.Third, what does Jesus question mean? What Jesus means when he asks the question is this: how can the scribes say that the Christ was merely the “son of David.”The issue is not that the Messiah was going to be a son from the family line of King David—everyone thought that was true (cf., Mark 10:47 and 11:10)—but the problem Jesus is surfacing is that the religious leaders thought the Messiah was merely a son.We can see this by the following statement Jesus makes. He continues in vv. 36, 37.
David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared, “‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.’ David himself calls him Lord. So how is he his son?”
Here, Jesus quotes a Psalm written by King David. It is the first line to Psalm 110. Natalie read this psalm earlier during the worship set. An obscure fact about this verse from this Psalm, a fact that should not make it so obscure, is that this verse is the most quoted and alluded to Old Testament verse in the New Testament (Matt. 22:44; Mark 12:36; Luke 20:42; Acts 2:32–35; 1 Cor. 15:25; Eph. 1:20; Col. 3:1; Heb. 1:3, 13; 8:1; 10:12; 12:2; 1 Pet. 3:22; cf. Matt. 26:64). In other words, no verse in the OT is quoted or alluded to more in the NT than Psalm 110:1. In other words, it’s a big deal.Stay with me. I know this is the nitty-gritty, but it’s in the nitty-gritty that we are going to find gold.Jesus says that by the Holy Spirit David spoke,
“‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.’
What does this mean? Are there two Lord’s in this passage? What is going on?Yes, there are two Lords in this passage. This opening line of the Psalm is a line of dialogue between two people, two Lords. One Lord is speaking to another Lord. The first Lord, says, “Sit over hear while I take care of your enemies.”What is the difference between these “Lords”? The first Lord is called “The Lord”—in Hebrew, it’s YHWH, the most holy name for God the Father in the Old Testament. The second Lord is called “my Lord” or “David’s Lord” —in the Hebrew this is Adonai.That’s complicated. I know.Let me say it all again: In the OT there is the expectation that there would be a Messiah who would come, and the common (and correct) expectation was that the Messiah would be a son of King David. (For 1,000 years: How long, how long, how long, how long). However, Jesus is asking this: if the Messiah was merely a son of David, then why would David refer to this him as “Lord”? Why would David call his son Lord? Fathers do not call their son’s Lord. It’s normally the other way around.For days the pressure in the temple has been building and Jesus’ quoting of Psalm 110 is the spark that explodes their view of the Messiah. Jesus says to theses religious leaders, “You know what, you’re asking me all of these question and whatnot, but I’ll tell you what, you have no idea who you are talking to. Everyone around here is calling me the Messiah, the Son of David, and I am that, but just so you know, the Son of David was and is also Lord, and soon I am going to sit with God the Father at his right hand, and God the Father will one day crush all of my enemies for me so that I can stand over them in their utter destruction.Wow. Who talks like that? Who says, one day all of my enemies will be crushed not by me, but God’s going to do that for me. No one should talk like this, except for Jesus, which is why we must respond to Jesus strongly; neutrality is not a legitimate option.And what does the crowd think when they hear this? Continuing in v. 37,
And the great throng heard him gladly.
We are not told exactly why they feel strongly. Maybe they get it, maybe they don’t.So there is the passage. Main Point One was what did Jesus’ question mean to the religious leaders, and the question meant that the religious leader’s view of the Messiah was too small. They thought they were dealing with a mere man, and Jesus reminds them that he is the long awaited for Serpent Crusher.Let’s transition to the final point, namely, what does this passage mean to us.
2. What does Jesus question means to us.
This passage means a least three things for us. Because Jesus is the Messiah who will one day defeat all of his enemies, we must…
…cling to the gospel.
…share the gospel.
…lift up our heads.
First, because Jesus is the Messiah who will one day defeat all of his enemies, we must cling to the gospel. Good things to be asking are things like: Who are the enemies of Jesus? What makes someone an enemy of Jesus?If you are a child of Adam and a daughter of Eve—which is to say, every one of us!—then you are broken. We sin. We rebel. We don’t have it all together. God is not the center of our universe all of the time. Like Adam and Eve, we look to other things to make us happy. And that makes everyone in a war with God. God is perfect and we say, No Thank you; I’ve got better ways of doing things.This would be a terrifying thing, except for the fact that now is the time when Jesus goes to the cross to die for his enemies. Yes, Jesus is the Messiah who will one day defeat all of his enemies, but he is also the Messiah who loves you so deeply that if you would surrender your life to him he will not crush you. By no means, rather he will heal and mend every broken desire and care for you and see you through death into glory where he will one day wipe every tear from your eyes and you will be in his loving presence forever—it will be like it was in the Garden of Eden, only better.Second, because Jesus is the Messiah who will one day defeat all of his enemies, we must share the gospel—humbly, joyfully, earnestly we must share. Now is the time of redemption. Now is the time of forgiveness.Last week, after Wednesday night youth group and Boys Brigade and GEMS, I got home and my neighbor and his friend were out on their porch hanging out. They asked if I would join them for a bit. So I did. And by God’s grace, I was able to share the gospel with my neighbor and his friend. If you’ve been in our Sunday School class for the last month or so and if you were ever been in my group when we got in small groups to pray, then you’ve heard me pray for him.And so you’re wondering, How did it go? To be honest, it was a little awkward. It felt stilted. They were asking me the questions, so that was good, but I got some blank stares. There are things I am good at, but sharing the gospel with non-Christians is probably not one of them. But I’m trying. And I love to be around all of you, because my strong sense is that you are trying too, because you know it matters. We have to cling to the gospel and we have to share the gospel.Third—and I’ll close with this—because Jesus is the Messiah, and because of the gospel and the fact that we are no longer enemies, we must lift up our heads.What do I mean by this—lift up our heads? I mean we must be encouraged. I take this phrase from the last line of Psalm 110 which says, “He will drink from the brook by the way; therefore he will lift up his head” (v. 7). He lifts up his head, and so shall we.There is a pop-culture, folk religious, pseudo-Christian belief that is pervasive today. It says that in this world there is good and evil and they are in a war—that much is true—but good and evil are in a war and they are pretty much equals in strength and we don’t know, in fact we can’t know who will win, so if we cross our fingers, and wish upon a star, and if we try really hard and hope for the best, and vote for the right person, then maybe, just maybe, if we are lucky things will be okay.NO! God is a warrior and his enemies are not his equals.God the Father sits on the throne of the universe and says to the Son, “Park your throne next to mine until take care of this for you.” When Jesus gave the Great Commission in Matthew 28—mark this—he declares, “All authority in Heaven and on Earth has been given to me.”Christians, lift up your heads.Some of you have had things happened to you that were unspeakably cruel. And there are all sorts of ways that I as your pastor would hope to minister to you. If you would ever want to talk about it, I could just weep with you and just look you in the eyes and say, I’m so sorry someone did that to you and I’m so sorry someone did that to your child. I can do that. I will do that. I have done that.But also, I would hope to minister to you, hope to tell you to lift up your heads, by reminding of you of the realities that in Jesus we do not have a tame, domesticated house pet. We have a lion. That would be scary, of course, but as the quote goes in The Chronicles of Narnia, he is a good lion and he is for his people; he is for you.
