Matthew 21:33-43
Tipping Points
The gospel for today recounts yet another parable which Jesus told against the religious establishment of Israel. After he had spoken the parable, Matthew records these words:
45 Now when the chief priests and Pharisees heard His parables, they perceived that He was speaking of them. 46 But when they sought to lay hands on Him, they feared the multitudes, because they took Him for a prophet.
We know, of course, that those multitudes just a day later would be screaming for this prophet to be crucified. Perhaps it is the volatility of the crowd’s moods which the Pharisees and Sadducees really fear. But, we also know from the gospels that within Israel there were some few – and some of them were Pharisees – who after the resurrection would hear Peter’s preaching on the day of Pentecost, and they would finally believe in the Son whom God had sent to the vineyard.
I expect they remembered the parables Jesus told against the leadership, and as the early days of the Christian faith wore on, the terrible truth of Jesus’ parable was plainer and plainer for them to behold. Truly God had done exactly what Jesus said he would do – he took the Kingdom of God away from Israel, and gave it to a nation which would offer forth the proper fruits of the Kingdom of God. And, so it has been for the past 2,000 years.
The religious apostasy, the religious corruption, the religious arrogance, the genuine hostility toward God’s prophets, and finally to God’s own son – these did not spring up in a night in Israel. You could make a good case from the Bible that they had been growing for centuries. It was Jesus who lamented in Matthew 23, ““O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her!” It was Jesus who warned the religious leaders with these words in Luke 11: “Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets, and your fathers killed them.”
It was Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who preached to these kinds of people in Acts 7, saying this: “51 “You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears! You always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do you. 52 Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the Just One, of whom you now have become the betrayers and murderers, …”
So, what Jesus was facing in the gospel lesson for today was nothing new. But there is something new here. What we see in this parable is what historians will sometimes call a tipping point. A tipping point in history is a time when trends, movements, historical currents which have been moving for a long time, finally reach a point when they no longer can be reversed.
Imagine the leaning tower of Pisa for a moment -- it began to lean very soon after it was constructed. It continues to lean today. I’ve read that with certain efforts it might possibly be restored, or at least the leaning arrested. But, the leaning tower of Pisa has a tipping point – a moment when its leaning can no longer be arrested. At that point, its fall is sure. What we are looking at in the gospel for today is the tipping point of Israel’s apostasy.
In light of this, I want to back away from the details of this particular tipping point in Israel’s history and pose this question to ourselves: are we as a nation at a tipping point?
Last week, I spoke of God’s astonishing willingness to patiently wait for sinners to repent. Today’s gospel lesson is the other side of that coin. If man can best God at something, surely this is it: his persistence in sin can most definitely exhaust God’s extravagant patience. Are we at a tipping point in our nation’s history? How would we know such a thing? And if we are, what should we Christians be doing?
We might write a book to expound these things, of course, so what I have to offer next is very much a bird’s eye view of the issues. Let me first say that history is littered with nations who reached tipping points as far as their sins are concerned.
The entire earth reached a tipping point about a thousand years before the great flood. That’s how we know how far God’s patience can extend, for through the preaching of the prophet Enoch, and the name he gave his son Methusaleh, we know with some confidence that God’s patience lasted well over a thousand years before the flood. But, a tipping point came – about 120 years before the flood, when God instructed Noah to build the ark.
After the flood, the world reached another tipping point at the tower of Babel, and their God’s judgment fractured the human race along linguistic lines, a fracturing that is still very much with us. The city-states of Sodom and Gomorrah reached a tipping point in the days of Abraham. Even then, God was willing to spare them for the sake of ten righteous people. But, still – the tipping point was attained, so God sent angels to remove the righteous from the cities, and God incinerated them.
The nation of Egypt reached a tipping point at the time of Moses. The nation of Israel reached one of its first tipping points with God when it tempted God in the wilderness, so that entire generation died there before God was willing to take the next generation into Canaan. The land of Canaan, of course, had reached a tipping point soon before the Israelites arrived, and Israel was God’s instrument to judge the Canaanites.
Along the way, as we survey the Old Testament, we find gentile nation after gentile nation whose wickedness reached a tipping point. Occasionally, they repented, as, for example, Nineveh. Or Nebuchadnezzar. These seem to have come right up to a tipping point, and then because of God’s marvelous patience and compassion, they drew back from the abyss.
The point is found in chapter four of Jonah’s prophecy, where Jonah says to God “I know that You are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, One who relents from doing harm.” And, yet, some nations have exhausted even God’s patience. Israel, in today’s gospel lesson, had succeeded in doing just that. And recorded history after the first century is littered with the wreckage of nations which have fallen, because like the nations recorded in the Bible, they reached a tipping point in their unrighteousness, and passed beyond it into judgment.
When we come to consider our present day, and the nation in which we live, I think we must keep several things in mind:
1. First of all, we must never forget that just as the world of Noah’s day reached a tipping point and passed into judgment, so too will ours. John tells us in 1 John 2 that we must not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. 17 And the world is passing away, …” And when it finally passes away, it will be as the Apostle Peter wrote: in 2 Peter 3: 7 But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.” In one real sense, the Bible teaches us that this world reached its tipping point in the Cross of Christ, and we are yet in a period of God’s patience as he awaits all those whom he has purposed to save to come to repentance.
The second thing I would ask us to keep in mind is that our nation – for all its blessings, for all the good which has flowed from it, for all these wonderful things, has no divine entitlement to step out of its worldly matrix. America – as well as every other nation on the earth – is part of this world which is passing away. And, if in the providence of God, our nation should one day be brought low, as God has brought low many other nations in history, this is no surprise. And, indeed, I think we can see things ripe for judgment on every hand. The ongoing holocaust of murdered infants cries out for vengeance, just as they did in the land of Canaan which sacrificed their children to Molech. Honestly, I cannot contemplate the millions of souls consigned to the medical waste dumps of America for more than a few minutes, without being struck dumb that American is not already wiped from the face of the earth.
And that brings me to the third thing I want us to keep in mind: unlike the fate of Israel, as Jesus speaks its doom in today’s gospel lesson, we have no prophet who can infallibly let us know whether or not our nation has reached a tipping point. Perhaps it has; perhaps it has not. I think we might say it is near a tipping point with some degree of certainty, but I do not think we can know ON WHICH side of that tipping point our nation is currently sitting.
So, what can we do?
Thirty years ago, Francis Shaeffer and his son Franky launched a film and seminary project which they entitled “How shall we then live?” Its subtitle was “The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture.” The point of their survey was to suggest that the entirety of Western culture – not just America, but the entire Christian West – was near what I have been calling a tipping point. But, at the end of his book, he turned his attention toward individual Christians. In a final chapter of that book, addressed directly to Christians, the last words of that chapter are these:
“This book is written in the hope that this generation may turn from that greatest of wickednesses, the placing of any create thing in the place of the Creator, and that this generation may get its feet out of the paths of death and may live.” [Fleming Revell, 1976, pg. 258]
And, so, we can ask ourselves this question: “Are we, individually, sitting near any personal tipping points?” In Revelation 2, Jesus sends a message to a congregation of Christians in Thyatira, which includes these words: 20 Nevertheless I have a few things against you, because you allow that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, to teach and seduce My servants to commit sexual immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols. 21 And I gave her time to repent of her sexual immorality, and she did not repent.” You see, Jezebel reached a tipping point, and she then went beyond it. “ 22 Indeed I will cast her into a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her into great tribulation, unless they repent of their deeds. 23 I will kill her children with death, and all the churches shall know that I am He who searches the minds and hearts.” Are we near any tipping points? I do not think we can know that kind of thing when we’re talking about nations. I do think we can know such things when we ask them about ourselves.
So, the first thing we can do is repent.
The second thing we can do, after any needed repentance on our part, is found in the second lesson appointed for today. Remember what Paul wrote:
17 Brethren, join in following my example, and note those who so walk, as you have us for a pattern. 18 For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: 19 whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame—who set their mind on earthly things.
20 For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body, according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself.
God grant us to know and clearly perceive our own personal tipping points, so we may be like those nations and individuals throughout history who have drawn back from them. May we also understand that we are pilgrims and wanderers in this earth, even in the comfort of our homes here in Waxahachie, that our final destiny is Mount Zion the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. There we shall join an innumerable company of angels, the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven, the spirits of just men made perfect. And finally we shall see God the Judge of all and Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
