Lord, We Need Your Help! Series

Lord, We Need Your Help!

The Gospel of Matthew

Matthew 16:1-12

Sermon by Rick Crandall

(Prepared August 23, 2022)

BACKGROUND:

*Please open your Bibles to Matthew 16. This chapter begins with Jesus in the region of Magdala, and there the Pharisees and Sadducees showed up to harass our Savior.

*Up to this point Matthew had mentioned the Pharisees 11 times, but he only mentioned the Sadducees once. That was in Matthew 3:7 where John the Baptist "saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism," and he rightly called them out by saying, "Brood of vipers! Who has warned you to flee from the wrath to come?"

*For the most part, both groups were a horrible brood of vipers. And it's important for us to understand how evil these Pharisees and Sadducees were. Jesus was now in the third year of His ministry. And though the Lord had already worked countless miracles to prove that He was the promised Messiah, these Pharisees and Sadducees had totally rejected Him with murderous hatred.

*In Jesus' day there were only a few thousand Pharisees, but they held power far greater than their numbers. For over a hundred years they had basically been in charge of telling all of the other Jews what was right and wrong. By Matthew 12, the Pharisees were stalking Jesus, looking for any opportunity to accuse Him of breaking their man-made laws. In that chapter Jesus went into a synagogue and healed a man with a withered hand. But it was on the Sabbath day, and that was against their man-made laws.

*Luke 6:11 tells us that on that day, the Pharisees were filled with rage to the point of madness. And Mark 3:6 says they "went out and immediately plotted with the Herodians against Him, how they might destroy Him." The Herodians were followers of Herod the Tetrarch, and normally they were the Pharisees' arch enemies. But the Pharisees hated Jesus so much, they were working with their enemies to plot His death.

*You see, Jesus rejected all of the petty rules the Pharisees had added to God's Law. There were thousands of these regulations, like their ungodly law against healing on the Sabbath Day.

*About fourteen hundred years earlier, just before the Children of Israel entered the Promised Land, Moses spoke to them, and in Deuteronomy 10:12-13 Moses asked them: "What does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all His ways and to love Him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the LORD and His statutes which I command you today for your good?"

*God gave His Law to the Children of Israel FOR THEIR GOOD. But the Pharisees had corrupted God's Law by turning it into a terrible burden on His people. William Barclay gave this example: In Jeremiah 17:21, "Thus says the Lord: 'Take heed to yourselves, and bear no burden on the Sabbath day.'" But a "burden" had to be defined, so the scribes and Pharisees defined it as "food equal in weight to a dried fig, enough wine for mixing in a goblet, milk enough for one swallow, honey enough to put upon a wound, water enough to moisten an eye-salve," and so on.

*Then they had to settle questions like this: "Could a chair or even a child be lifted on the Sabbath Day?" Or would it be carrying a burden to do so? On and on the regulations went. Then this random, unschooled carpenter from Nazareth showed up and rejected all of their ridiculous rules. Jesus also publicly criticized them for those laying heavy legal burdens on God's people. (1)

*Now here in Matthew 16, the Sadducees came back into view. And Barclay explained how strange it was for them to join ranks with the Pharisees. The two groups were normally bitter enemies. The Sadducees were a small group of wealthy aristocrats, who were happy to cooperate with their Roman conquerors, -- if that allowed them to keep their wealth and privilege.

*The Sadducees rejected the legal burdens the Pharisees had added to God's Law. But they also rejected basically everything miraculous in God's Word. GotQuestions.org gave this list of their beliefs that radically contradicted Scripture:

-The Sadducees denied God’s involvement in everyday life.

-They denied any resurrection of the dead (Matthew 22:23; Mark 12:18–27; Acts 23:8).

-They denied the afterlife, holding that the soul perished at death and therefore denying any penalty or reward after the earthly life.

-They denied the existence of angels and demons (Acts 23:8).

*Barclay said it would be almost impossible to find two more opposite groups, but they came together for one reason: their hate-filled desire to eliminate Jesus. (2)