Disclaimer:
Due to the large amount of sermons and topics that appear on this site I feel it is necessary to post this disclaimer on all sermons posted. These sermons are original to the author and the leading of the Holy Spirit. While ideas and illustrations are often gleaned from many sources including those at Sermoncentral.com, any similarities and wording including sermon title, that may appear to be the same as any other sermon are purely coincidental. In instances where other minister’s wording is used, due recognition will be given. These sermons are not copyrighted and may be used or preached freely. May God richly bless you as you read these words. It is my sincere desire that all who read them may be enriched. All scriptures quoted in these sermons are copies and quoted from the Authorized King James Version of the Holy Bible.
Pastor James May
PRINCE OF PEACE INSTIGATES WAR
January 13, 2002
Matthew 10:34-39, "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."
Only a few weeks ago we celebrated the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. He was give to us, to be our Savior, just as the Father had promised so long ago. The night of Jesus’ birth is filled with peaceful events and supernatural appearances of Holy Angels who proclaimed forth, just as did the Prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 9:6, "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
In John 14:27, Jesus personally speaks these words to His disciples as He washed their feet and taught them at the Last Supper in the Upper Room, just hours before He was to be crucified, "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."
After looking at these instances and others where Jesus is not only called the Prince of Peace, but promises peace to everyone who will follow Him, why would He seemingly nullify His promises of peace to all men with the statements from our scripture portion in Matthew 10 that He is not come to send peace to the earth but to bring a sword?
The bringing of a sword always means that there will be arguing, fighting, hatred, variance, destruction and wars. Why would Jesus, the Prince of Peace, bring a sword to the earth?
First of all lets remind our selves of the circumstances and events that were occurring before, during and after the birth of Christ in Judea.
Israel and the Jews were under the oppression of the Roman Army and Caesar that had conquered them and set up their own rulers while allowing the Jews to have their own puppet government whose leadership consisted mostly of the High Priest and his subordinate priests of the Jewish Temple. These were the Pharisees and Sadducees of the Sanhedrin Council – those same people who tried, convicted and condemned Jesus in the most illegal trial in Jewish history.
All though the Old Testament and the books of the Law that were studied by the Jews prior to the writing of the New Testament, there were references to the coming of the Messiah, the Deliverer of Israel. The educated men of Israel knew every one of the promises and lived to see the day that their Messiah would come and free Israel from the bondage of slavery to a foreign power that now ruled over them.
They understood that this freedom not only included freedom from earthly oppression but that it would also mean a freedom to worship God without the interference of Roman Law or the critical eye of idolaters.
Oh how they longed for the day when the Messiah would come and set them free! How great was their oppression! How hard were the judgments of God against them for their sin and failure to serve the one true God in the first place!
What a terrible thought that when the Messiah did come, Israel did not accept Him but killed Him instead!
So we see that part of Jesus’ statement that He came not bring peace upon the earth had a direct fulfillment in the fact that He did not come to this earth to physically deliver the nation of Israel nor any other nation from oppression, slavery and bondage of another nation.
His kingdom was not of this world. His peace was far greater and more far-reaching than just a deliverance from the enemy of our flesh. The peace that Jesus brought was so great that it gives peace to us even in the midst of tribulation. He gives us peace in the eye of the storms of life. He gives us peace in the times of oppression by the powers of Hell and darkness that come against our soul. His peace is peace in our heart no matter what the world or the Devil can throw against us!
Peace on earth was not given to the Jews because it wasn’t long after the crucifixion of Christ that the Jewish religious hierarchy declared war upon Christianity. The Jews, jealous and guilty because of the murder of Jesus, would not tolerate anyone who confessed that Jesus was the Messiah because it pointed a huge finger of guilt at the High Priest and the Council.
In fact, Christians were captured, dragged before the Council and condemned to death, excommunication and banishment from their own people just because they believed in Jesus as the Messiah.
Even the great Apostle Paul was a part of this persecution and spiritual warfare. First on the side of the Jews, he was assigned to capture Christians and return them to Jerusalem for trial and imprisonment. Then, on the road to Damascus, Paul was transformed by the appearance of Jesus in a bright light. Paul then became a Christian and struggled to preach that Jesus was the Messiah while suffering the same persecution that he had dished out earlier.
Finally, the fighting among the Jews over the teaching that Jesus was the Messiah got the attention of the Romans and then the sword of Rome was unsheathed against both the Jews and the Christians. The Caesars, for a long period of history, are famous for their absolute persecution of Christianity. They fed Christians to the Lions, killed them in the Gladiator rings and crucified them by the thousands, even setting the bodies of those crucified on fire to light their highways and streets during the darkness of night.
Jesus’ words ring out true when He said, “I came not to send peace, but a sword.” After the crucifixion of Jesus there was more fighting and hatred expressed than ever before. It was as though His coming was the catalyst that stirred persecution and war to a greater level than ever before.
There is another dimension to the words of Christ as well. This is a dimension that reaches down into the heart of our world even today. It is a dimension that effects every one of us that sits upon the pews of the church.
Jesus spoke these words also, “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.”
Variance means, a difference, a change from the norm, or an argument from the acceptable and traditional.
When we begin to examine this statement of Christ we notice that the Spirit of God can have no union with the spirit of the World. James 4:4 says, “Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God."
Therein lies the variance that Jesus speaks about. All men who reject the message of the gospel and who reject Jesus as their Messiah, Deliverer, Savior and Lord – and it should be noted that if we do not accept Him willingly then we reject Him passively – are guilty of spiritual adultery because we worship self or some other idol as god and are therefore guilty of being unfaithful to Jesus who died for us. We willingly accept the false hopes, false love and false promises of the world and all that it offers while rejecting the true love, great hope and true promises of God through salvation and the Lord Jesus Christ. If we do not accept Christ as Savior then we default into the condemnation of original sin brought by Adam that culminates in eternal death.
The natural order of things is for parents to love their children, children to love their parents and family to love family, was established in the Garden of Eden when God created the family of man upon the earth. This natural affection, this natural love is destroyed by the power of sin in the heart.
Even though parents and children can still love another to some extent, that love is always conditional upon our feelings and emotions. Quite often we find that love grows cold through disobedience of one for another.
It is not just the natural love that we must deal with, it is the variance in the realm of the Spirit that is so strong that we must also deal with. Without the power of the Holy Spirit in our heart and life, there is little chance that we can overcome the difference in the spirits within those of the world and those who are “in Christ”!
Sadly, in our world, this variance makes itself so very visible in the relationships and training of children in every family.
Parents who bring a child into this world and then fail in training that child in the ways of righteousness, holiness and sanctification as taught by the Word of God are at variance with God and their children become the misled offspring of misled parents.
Suppose parents train their child to be egotistical, self-centered and arrogant either through example or by the way that the child is treated. Is this the way that the scriptures say that we should train our children? NO!
By training their children to grow up and become arrogant, self-centered, egotistical, pleasure seeking, materialistic and earthly minded, those parents fall into the category that Jesus speaks about when he says, “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.”
A father who trains his son to be indulgent in the pleasures of life, allows his son to be uneducated and to live off of the charity of others, who teaches him to be promiscuous, and teaches his son to live a life of total ambition for the things of this life only is teaching his son to be at variance with God’s laws.
A mother who trains her daughter to be vain in her appearance, to desire only the best of designer clothes and jewelry, to be promiscuous or sexually active, to seek only the desires of her own heart, to assert her self as a woman or young girl who is totally self-centered is also teaching that daughter to be at variance with God.
The daughter is the mother’s enemy, not just when they fight one another, but also when the daughter is trained to be an enemy of God. So is the father the enemy of the son whom he does not train in the ways of the Lord.
So many of our children are not trained and taught in the ways of the Lord and because of this our children become the enemies of God because our parents are at variance and are an enemy of God also.
In this fashion the words of the Bible ring so true when it says in Exodus 20:2-5, "I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;"
Matthew 10 also says, “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.”
In this, Jesus is saying to us, if you love the ways of this world as taught by your friends, family, teachers at school, or even parents who do not know Jesus nor live for Him, then you are also an enemy of God. Parents who place their children upon pedestals and make those children the center of their life and their reason for living without giving glory, honor and service to God’s laws in the raising of that child are also the enemy of God and will face God’s judgment.
The sin that the parents pass on is carried on from generation to generation until, one day, by God’s mercy and grace, one of those children decides to break with family tradition and follow the Lord. Then and only then is the curse of the sin broken and we can become the friends and children of God again.
If we are to called a friend of God then we must pick up the message of the gospel, put it in our life, allow the Holy Spirit to dwell within our heart and carry the cross of serving Jesus to the end of our days.
…He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."
Do you really want your life to count for something great? Are you tired of being on the fence or on the side that is fighting against God?
Then turn to Him right now. Allow the Lord to change you into a vessel of honor, a vessel that is not at war with God and a vessel that really has the peace of God that passes all understanding.
