Why People Hated Jesus

The ministry of Jesus Christ was a message of hope. And when you see Him speaking to people, He's always giving them the hope of what God will do, what God can do. And yet, many times when He spoke, people didn't find it comforting. They didn't find it a message of hope. Now, these were Jewish people who anticipated the coming of the Messiah. They anticipated this hope that would come, this blessing from God. And yet, they found Jesus' message to be confrontational, extremely confrontational. There were times where they said, He's demon-possessed. That's how confrontational. They had the Scripture, you know, that was what was written at the time. They had the entire Old Testament. They believed the Old Testament. They tried to keep the Ten Commandments. They kept the Holy Days and the Sabbath. They believed in the God of the Bible. They believed that there was a Messiah coming. They were, in fact, they were anticipating the Messiah coming. Under the three major groups, religious groups that was in Judea at the time, the Essenes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees all believed that the Messiah was coming. They all were anticipating it happening soon. And although they had little different viewpoints of who the Messiah was, there were similarities. The main similarity was this was a man from God who was from the line of David. This man would have powers from God, supernatural powers from God. He would come on the scene. He would gather Israel together and make them a great nation again. They knew that was going to happen. That was prophesied. That was promised. And when he did, he would drive out the Romans. He would drive out the oppressors. Now remember, they had been oppressed for centuries. The Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans. They had been oppressed for generation after generation. And this was going to stop when the Messiah came. In fact, his impact would be so great, other kings would come to him and he would begin to teach the world the way of God. And they look forward to that. This mighty warrior coming from God, like King David. And he would drive out the enemies. And God, once again, would be there because they would set up the temple. Well, they had the temple, but the temple would now be cleansed and the Shekinah glory might be there. God's presence would be right there with Israel.

And that would be sort of, they didn't know how long that would last. They didn't understand that the world was going to be converted. There's things we believe that we just celebrated in the fall Holy Days. They had no understanding of because you have to have the New Testament.

But they look forward to this. And Jesus comes with a message of hope and sometimes they hated Him for it. We're going to go through a few places in the Scripture where He brought a message and the very people He had brought the message to hated Him. And the reason I want to do this is because there's an important message for us. This has to do with their understanding of the Messiah. There's an important message for us in this. So let's start in Luke 4. Luke 4. This is early in Jesus' ministry.

He's a Nazareth. Because of this incident, He would not preach in Nazareth near as much as He did in Capernaum and other places. So here He is. He's in the synagogue. And as the Jewish custom was, if you were of a certain age, certain learning, you could get up and read from the Scripture. Verse 16. So He came to Nazareth where He had been brought up. So this is where He had grown up. Everybody knew Him.

Everybody knew Jesus, Son of Joseph, the carpenter, probably a stone mason more than anything else because they built things out of stone. They knew Him. He was a good worker. He was a good kid. He had learned from the rabbis. He knew the Scriptures. And as His custom was, He went into the synagogue in the Sabbath day and stood up to read. And He was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah. When He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor.

He has sent Me to heal the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. Now this is a very important prophecy in the Jewish world. Still is today among conservative Jews. Because this is about that Messiah. This is about the one God's going to send to become the King of Israel and restore them to their proper glory.

Verse 20 says, that He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him. He gets up and He reads this. He did read all of it, by the way, because the rest of the sentence is about the day of vengeance. And that's actually about His Second Coming. And they didn't know there were two comings of the Messiah. Some rabbis thought maybe there were two comings. Others thought there were two Messiahs. In fact, the Essenes thought there were two Messiahs.

One came from David and one came from Abraham. Not Abraham, but Aaron. Because there would be a priestly and a kingly Messiah, and they would rule together. So they had all these different ideas. It's interesting. We know Jesus is what? King and priest. They couldn't figure out how the Messiah could be King and priest, so they had two Messiahs. But they knew what He was going to do.

He gets up and reads this, and He sets down. Everybody's just staring at Him, because this is pretty exciting. You know? Maybe He's going to explain who this Messiah is and when He's coming. Maybe we'll have the exact dates. Maybe we'll know how this is going to happen. And He began to say to them, today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

I imagine they were just dumbfounded. They didn't even know what that meant. I mean, it's fulfilled because you just read it. What's that mean? So all bore witness of Him and marveled at the gracious words which were proceeded out of His mouth. And they said, isn't this Joseph's son? We remember him out there with his dad working on people's houses.

We remember him. You know, remember? There were these rumors about he was illegitimate. His mom was pregnant when they got married. This is just Joseph's son. What's it mean to be telling us that he's here to tell us about the Messiah? And He said to them, you will surely say this to me, physician heal yourself, whatever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in our country. In other words, I'm going to Capernaum and you're going to say, hey, come back and speak to us. Then He said, surely I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own country. He just declared himself to be a prophet.

But more importantly, as they began to analyze it, He just said, I am the Messiah. This is happening right now. This is the beginning of it right now in this synagogue. But I tell you truly, now He really hits him hard. I tell you truly, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elijah when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months. There was a great famine throughout all the land.

But none of them was Elijah sent except to Zarephath in the region of Sidon to a woman who was a widow. He said, you know what? He said, God punished Israel for a long time with Elijah and Elijah only went to one person through a number of years and it happened to be a widow. Everybody else ignored him. Nobody else listened to him. Just one woman. And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet. And none of them were cleansed except Naaman the Syrian. You know, even when Elisha was the great prophet, people didn't listen to him either.

Finally, the only person he healed was a Gentile. I mean, it's hard for us to understand how hard he's hitting them. Because he's saying, you're not accepting me. That's okay. Your forefathers didn't accept Elijah. They didn't accept Elisha, the two of the greatest prophets. So I guess it's not inconceivable that you're not going to accept me. These words, we read through these things, but it's hard to be, we had to put ourselves right there as a Jew of that day waiting for the Messiah. He gets up and says he's going to explain the Messiah. He's just some average kid that grew up.

Everybody thought he's pretty smart. He's a good guy. But this is Joseph Mary's son. This isn't the Messiah. This is what the Messiah's supposed to do. Get up in the synagogue and say that we have problems. He's supposed to destroy the Romans, take over, and set up God's Kingdom on the earth. So all those in the synagogue, this is what happens.

Now, this is the first recording of Jesus giving a sermon. I hope I never have this problem. Let's just say his ministry did not start out well. He didn't start a megachurch. There weren't people shouting Jesus, Jesus, right?

So all those in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath and rose up and thrust him out of the city and led him to the brow of a hill in which the city was built, that they might throw him down over the cliff. His first sermon ended up with a synagogue so furious, so madly insane, that the people that knew him, the people that knew his family, his friends, got him, shoved him outside, and they were going to kill him. How's that for a good sermon response? Then passing through the midst of them, he went his way. In all the confusion, God confused them, and he just walked through them and walked away.

Wow! How could that be? These were people who had the Scripture. These were people who knew what the Messiah was. They anticipated it. They looked forward to it. They talked about it. They were excited when he went to Isaiah. I was going to talk about it. You know, I've beaten this drum for a while, but I'm going to keep beating it because there's an important lesson for us. In the Western world, both Europe and the United States, there is a Christian movement.

We used to. I remember first coming in the ministry, and I'd go visit new people. And the questions would be things like, so should we keep the Sabbath? So, okay, I figured out we probably shouldn't eat pork. But I'll should eat. Explain to me the Holy Days. I was baptized once in the Church of Christ, but they never laid hands on me. Should I be baptized again?

These were the questions we got for years. Those aren't the questions we get from new people, unless they have been involved in YouTube videos and literature for years. Because we, the average Christian today has no understanding of what we're talking about. They don't even know the words we're using. They don't understand. You have to be of a certain age or of a very shrinking Protestant group to even get what we're talking about. They don't know. It was called the New Age Christianity, then the Postmodern Christianity, then it was called the Woke Christianity.

Now it's just called mainstream. This evolution of Christianity and what's happened over the last 40 years. I literally, I don't do this all the time because it presses me, but a couple times a month, you know, usually at night, Kim's going to bed, I'll turn on a couple sermons from churches that teach the Woke Christianity. Or an interview. And in doing so, you see the whole movement, and like I said, it started 40 years ago, but now it's just everywhere. Entire denominations have been destroyed. The Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, they're just, they're not even remotely. If you're an Episcopalian, if you were an average Protestant, when my parents came out of the Methodist Church, when you're the average Protestant 50 years ago, 60 years ago, you would have a hard time finding a place to go if you believed that, what they taught then.

And one of the things that have changed in many groups is the definition of Jesus. You know, Jesus didn't die for your sins. That would make God a child abuser. That's a horrible thing to think that He died for your sins. He came to show us love, because people don't like love, they killed Him.

And in doing so, He showed us love. 20 years ago, I gave a sermon on this many years ago, some of you might remember it, 20 years ago, some researchers from Notre Dame got thousands of teenagers together and asked them to describe Christianity. And they were amazed at how uniform they were in their answers. There were only a few people that were different. And there were five major doctrines of Christianity, according to these thousands of teenagers.

Now I say this, it's so interesting because they're in their 30s today, and this describes what's happening in Christianity. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth. There's a God, we believe in a God. The Old Testament has no meaning because that's not God. That's just some people made that up. God wants people to be good and nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and other major religions. Goodness, fairness, being nice, you can find that in Hinduism, you can find that in Buddhism.

Life is in every religion. It's just more open in Christianity. The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about yourself. We all want to be happy, and we shouldn't go around feeling bad about ourselves all the time, but you want to be miserable? Spend your life saying, every moment of my life is to make me happy and feel good about myself, because you won't have a good relationship with anybody else.

I mean, you'll destroy your life. I'm just going to be happy all the time. Everybody else's job is to make me happy. Everybody else's job is to make me feel good about myself. Of course, when you read the teachings of Jesus, every once in a while, He makes us feel bad about ourselves. He just does. And there's a purpose for it. It's not to make us hate just who we are. It's to learn that we have to become who we're supposed to be.

The central goal of life, I just mentioned that, God does not need to be particularly involved in your life unless you need Him. So God's sort of like a Santa Claus. He helps you when you need something otherwise you just live your life. The one I find the most interesting, good people go to heaven when they die.

It doesn't matter their religion. If you're good, you've earned the chance. So salvation isn't through a relationship with God because there isn't one. It's not through a relationship with Jesus Christ. In fact, Jesus Christ wasn't even mentioned except that He is our example. We have to follow Jesus because He teaches us what love is. So all good people go to heaven. Now if you notice if you go through those concepts, there's no concept there of corrupted human nature. There's no concept of Jesus's sacrifice. Goodness is a very vague set of terms. You're just really nice. That's why that today has expanded out into there is no command from Jesus, not, you know, homosexuality is okay, abortion is okay, humanism okay.

It's why, and secular humanism has moved into this too, because secular humanism believes in evolution and they sort of end up with some of the same conclusions like the woman who brutally murdered her three children, choked them to death. And there's a huge movement in this country that we have to love her and accept her and it's okay. In all of history, there is no Christian movement that would accept that. You know, we talk about Catholicism and how bad Catholicism is.

Sometimes I'd rather deal with Catholicism than this movement. At least I can go to the Bible to prove something. I can't go to the Bible with this movement. We have to be careful this doesn't infiltrate into us. That we don't become so oblivious to what's going on. That we don't become influenced by this. So that's the first point.

That's this first example. They thought they knew who the Messiah was and when He stood in front of them, they tried to kill Him. We better know who Jesus Christ is. We better know that He reveals God to us. God sent Him to reveal Him, for Him to reveal God to us. We better know that God created all things through Jesus Christ. That includes the Sabbath, by the way. Why should we keep the Sabbath? Well, Jesus created it and He says, I'm the same today, yesterday and forever. That's a pretty good reason to.

We need to know who He is. So we don't begin to slide into this where Jesus allows everything. He just loves. That's all there is to it. Define love and it just comes down to you have good feelings. It's all some emotional experience.

Of course, here's what that produces. It's called, let's see, theoralystic, theoralystic deism. Deism, a worship of God without understanding God. But it's moralistic and there has to be good rules. Like, you don't lie to people, you're not mean to people, you help the sick, you help the poor. Okay, it's moralistic, but it's therapeutic.

I watched a sermon recently. Oh no, it was an interview with a woman pastor in a church that believes all this and she said, I've been reading Paul. She says Paul did not understand love.

That's why he makes such stern remarks about people and people are going to go into the lake of fire and all these things. She said, but you know I understand Paul. After reading about his life and reading his writings, he didn't have a minister and a therapist. Exact words.

He had a pastor counseling him. Now there's pastors we counsel, right? And there's nothing wrong with going to a therapist. What I'm saying is, understand this and how they're defining it.

If they would have explained to him how bad his theology was, and he would have been a much better Christian. This seems strange to us. I don't even know how to talk to those people and yet that is becoming the majority. If it continues to go on the way it is, it will be the majority within the next five to ten years. Even conservative Protestants are screaming, Christianity is being destroyed. There's lots of conservative Protestants. I mean, I say, biblically conservative. I'm not talking about politically. They're looking at the Bible and saying, that's not what the Bible says. You know, they're giving Christmas and Easter. And even though this is wrong, because it redefines who Jesus is. Okay, our second example. John 6.

John 6.

All the places we're going to look at, he's actually revealing he's the Messiah.

And it has some really strange repercussions in what happens. In John 6, verses 1-14, Jesus takes a little bit of bread, a couple of fishes, and he feeds thousands of people.

I mean, it's a miracle. Everybody sees it. Everybody knows it's a miracle. And he preaches to them.

I mean, nothing like this had happened since Moses giving manna, right?

Nothing like this had happened, where thousands of people are miraculously fed by God.

And after Jesus preaches to them, he disappears. He gets on a boat, goes out in the sea of Galilee, and disappears. He just goes off to the other shore. Now you have, it just says a great multitude of these people. We don't know how many. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them are searching for him. They're searching for him. You know, he fed us. And here's what they decided they were going to do in verse 15. Therefore when Jesus perceived that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he departed again to the mountain by himself alone.

This has to be the Messiah. He's the king. He's the descendant of David. We need to bring him together, declare that he's king. He can go take over the Sanhedrin. He can go take over the temple. We'll raise an army. God will lead him. And we will once again be the great people of God on earth.

They actually thought he was the Messiah.

And he went and hid from them. When they finally find him, there's this long, interesting confrontation that begins in verse 26.

Jesus answered and said to them, because they asked, why did you run away from us? Why did you go away? Rabbi, you should be king.

Jesus answered and said, Most assuredly I say to you, you seek me not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled. They saw him as Messiah.

The problem was why they saw him as Messiah. See, the first group didn't see him as Messiah. They saw him as some kind of heretic. When you go through these three stories, there's something that becomes obvious. If we're going to accept, which we do, if people are going to accept Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as legitimate biographies of Jesus, if you're going to accept that as legitimate biographies of Jesus, something happens.

Either he is who he says he is, or he's a madman. If he was today, he either is the Messiah, or he needs to be put in a metal institution.

There's no middle ground here. There is no middle ground. Either he is who he says he is, or he's nuts. He's crazy. He thinks he's a king. He thinks he's a prince. He thinks he came from God. He thinks God talks to him. If you were out here at a park and there's some guy standing here with a Bible yelling, I am the Messiah. God talks to me. Come eat my flesh.

How many of you would run up and say, oh, please teach me?

Now, they were receptive because they were waiting for the Messiah.

That wouldn't work in our environment. It did then because they were waiting for the Messiah.

And he was doing miracles. Now, if a guy fed 5,000 people, he would be careful with that too, because if it's possible, even the elect will be deceived by miracles. So you've got to be careful about the miracle thing.

Because it would be some false prophet, there's going to be lots of miracles.

So he says, you're not here because you want me to actually teach you, bring you to God. You're here because you want physical blessings. Verse 27, do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you, because God the Father has set His seal on him. And they said to him, what shall we do that we may do the works of God? So what do we do? Okay, we get this. We want God to work in us. We want to become His children. What do we do? And Jesus answered and said to them, this is the work of God that you believe in Him who sent He sent. He said, first of all, you've got to understand who I am so you can listen to what I'm going to say.

Well, okay. What do you mean? We want what? Which of the laws should we keep more?

He's not antinomian. Jesus was the one who gave the laws. Okay. He's completely for law.

But His answer was, you have to accept that I am that Messiah. Therefore, His words hold weight. His words are the words of God. When Jesus speaks, He's speaking divine words, right?

The Sermon on the Mount are divine words.

So that's what He's telling them. You're going to have to listen to me.

Therefore, they said to Him, what sign will you perform? He just fed 5,000 people. What sign will you perform that we may see it and believe you? What work will you do? Okay, do a little magic trick for us. Okay, another magic trick will prove it to us. Our fathers ate man in the desert and it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat. How about some manna? We really liked it. You make some manna, we know you're the Messiah.

Then Jesus said to them, Most assuredly, He said to you, Moses did not give you bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread from God is He who comes down from heaven and gives His life to the world. And they said, give us this bread. We want this what you're offering us. They're still thinking of physical things. And Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall never hunger. And He who believes in me shall never thirst. He goes on and explains this to them. How God, He has come from God to be this bread of life.

That you must take in this bread and you can have eternal life.

That's something the new Christianity denies.

If we do good things, we get eternal life. It doesn't matter how good we've been.

If we haven't accepted that we have a corrupted human nature, that we are sinners, and that we must repent and have Christ's blood cover us, we can't receive eternal life no matter what we do. You know, there's a problem in the church. We go to one extreme to the other. We either get where we just accept sin or we get to the other end where we're always in some kind of turmoil because I'm not good enough. We can't accept sin. We fight it until we're changed. And we'll never be good enough until we're changed.

The acceptance that God loves me and is working with me in spite of me, that's part of this message.

But if you don't need that sacrifice, you can't even define evil, just love.

And if someone merges their babies, it's okay for certain reasons.

Now, I do believe in mental illness, and there are certain people that will do evil acts until God heals their brain. There's nothing that can be done. That's not an excuse. That's an acceptance of a corrupted human nature because they're even physically were corrupted. You can't excuse evil. You can't. So He tells them they have to do this. Verse 41, then the Jews then complained about him because He said, I am the bread which came down from heaven. And they said, is this not Jesus? Remember these were the same people that won our date in King just a couple days later. I mean before. Oh, He is the Messiah. Wait a minute. No, He's just Jesus to stone. He said, that's all who He is. Son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know. How is it then that He says, I have come down from heaven? So He goes on and explains that God has sent Him. And God has sent Him. Verse 47, most assuredly I say to you, he who believes in me has everlasting life. He says, you want what this is really all about. This life is temporary. It's got a lot of good, a lot of bad. We struggle. But God comes into our lives and we can't have everlasting life. But in order to do that, He says, most assuredly, or verse 48, I am the bread of life. Your father is not the man in the wilderness and are dead. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread.

Now, if you can imagine being a Jew at this point and hearing this, the man that fed 5,000 of you, the man that you were about to make king, and now he was saying, you have to eat me, they decided he was insane. They decided he was insane. In fact, most of his disciples left him. Those who had been following him, who believed in him, who many believed he was the Messiah, they left him. He's not overthrowing the Roman Empire. He's not bringing God's kingdom to earth. He's talking like a madman. He must be insane. Once again, Jesus couldn't create a megachurch.

He kept losing people as fast as he could bring them in because of what he taught. And so they leave. Verse 67.

Then Jesus said to the twelve, most everybody had left. There were still some, but he had lost most of his following. Then Jesus said to the twelve, do you also want to go away? But Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. He says, where are we to go? Everybody else leaves. There is no other place to go, and then he tells why. Also, we have come to believe and know that you are the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one, the Son of the living God. We know it. They know who He was. They still didn't understand entirely His work because they still didn't understand He was going to die. That was a shock, even though He told them.

And then after the resurrection, what was the last thing they asked him before he ascended?

When are you going to set up the kingdom? When are you going to take over? Drive out the Romans.

Make sure that we have plenty of food, you know, plenty of grapes, plenty of grain. Everything will be green. All the animals will be tamed. This is great. When are you going to do it?

And restore Israel.

There was really no concept, well it was a limited concept, that the kingdom of God was coming for the world. You will see that in Isaiah. You'll see it. And to the Gentiles, He'll do this. And to the Gentiles, He'll be this. To the Gentiles, to the Gentiles. They just zeroed in on to Israel and they did not understand that it was for the world. He was coming for the world, for everybody. Everybody has value.

We center in on, and rightly so, in that first resurrection, He's coming for us and for others.

But He isn't just coming for us. That first resurrection is for the saints. He's coming back to set up His kingdom for a thousand years and then that second resurrection, which we celebrate on the last day, that eighth day, that last day. We celebrate that. That resurrection where humanity gets its opportunity to choose. He's coming for them too.

It isn't all about us. We're just privileged to be part of this part of the plan. That's it. Everybody gets their chance to be part of the plan. The 12 got it. Most did not.

One last situation here. John 18.

There's lessons here for all of us. Those people knew so much. Those people believed so much.

And Jesus' involvement in their life, Christ's involvement in their life at that time wasn't exactly what they thought it would be. Sort of the way we just looked at that group, it was the health and wealth gospel, right? You're going to give us all this stuff. No, I'm not. Not now, not yet. First of all, it's who do you think you are? The second time it's, good, you're the king. Give us stuff. Take care of us. This one's very interesting here because this has to do with reality. What it is is that Jesus was now dragged before the Sanhedrin and then before Pontius Pilate to give a defense because he was accused of crimes that he deserved to die. Verse 28. Then they led Jesus from Caiaphas to the Praetorium. It was early morning, but they themselves did not go into the Praetorium, lest they should be defiled that they might eat the Passover. They would become ceremonially unclean to go among the Romans because the Passover was that next day, or when they would keep the Passover. Pilate went out to them and said, what accusations do you bring against this man? I can imagine Pilate wasn't in a good mood. He's the Roman governor and they won't come into his hall. He has to go out and meet them because they don't want to be made unclean being around him in his hall. Pilate went out and said, what accusations do you bring against this man? They answered and said, if he was not an evil doer, we would not have delivered him. Up to you. In other words, well, we don't have to tell you the charges. He's evil. That's good enough. Kill him. We're the ruling body. Then Pilate said to them, you take him and judge him according to your law. Therefore, the Jew said to him, it is not lawful for us to put anyone to death. In other words, we don't want this man imprisoned. We don't want him flogged. We want him to die. And we don't have the right to do that. Under Roman law, only you have the right to do that. Verse 32 says, that the saying of Jesus might be fulfilled when he spoke, signifying by why death he would die. Then Pilate entered the Praetorium again and called Jesus and said to him, are you the king of the Jews? Now, he had to know something about Jewish culture and he had to know something about the accusations to even ask him that question.

It's a brilliant legal question. The Romans didn't care what your religion was.

As long as he sacrificed to the Caesar, you know, they really didn't care. They didn't care what, you know, economically it was probably the most free economic system in the world. You could do anything. You could run a brothel if you wanted to. Just pay your taxes. That's all. It didn't matter what you did. I mean, you could steal, but well, there were lots of thieves. But they, you know, it didn't matter what you did. Is it for a business? Just make money and give us our taxes.

Free enterprise system wasn't capitalism because they didn't understand banking systems. But it was a free enterprise system and freedom of religion.

But if you threatened Roman power, you died. Are you a king?

Sets him up. There's only one king, and that's Caesar. Oh, you might be a king, but you have to be recognized by Caesar. Herod was recognized by Caesar as a king. If he was not recognized, he's committed treason. Jesus answered him, are you speaking for yourself about this, or did others tell you concerning me?

He's a little, Pilate's a little overmatched here. Okay, did you make that up, or did someone else tell you? Is this just an accusation?

Pilate said, am I a Jew? I don't even understand you people. Of course I didn't make this up. Someone else told me, because I don't understand you people, your own nation and the chief priest have delivered you to me. What have you done?

Jesus answers very interesting here, because we're looking at different ways of determining truth.

Jesus answered, my kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight so that I should not be delivered to the Jews. But now my kingdom is not from here. Yes, I'm a king, but in a mystic sense, I'm a king. Now the Romans were very superstitious, very mystic. Yes, I'm a king, but not in the way you understand it. It's a mystic kingdom. It's not here. It's an otherworldly kingdom. Now that's very interesting, because Pilate's response. Pilate therefore said to him, verse 37, are you a king then? Jesus answered, you say rightly that I am a king, for this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come to the world, that I shall bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice. Yes, I am a mystic king, and I've come here so that I can tell everybody what truth is.

Pilate's answer is, and I don't know, I would guess this is the voice of a weary man who didn't have much purpose anymore. His whole life was being a soldier and in politics. And he says, what is truth? I'm here to tell you the truth. What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again to the Jews and said to them, I find no fault in him at all. He's just one of your crazy prophets. They're all nations known for hundreds and hundreds of years of crazy prophets out in the desert. And, you know, we had to deal with John the Baptist. And so he's just a crazy Jewish prophet. I'm not going to do anything to him. And you know, this story with the Sanhedrin was able to use where they released one criminal at the Passover to use that for Jesus to be condemned. What you have here are three different ways to look at truth. And I put these three stories together because I want you to really think about the new Christianity. I mean, if we rejected the Christianity for Christmas and Eastern Sunday keeping, this one is just absolutely heretical. I also want you to think about why understanding Christ as the Messiah as the Christ, Jesus as the Christ, is so important because that focuses all the truth we have.

I mean, we have God, but you know, if you believe in the Old Testament like the Jews do and don't have Jesus Christ, they would think we're sort of crazy.

They wouldn't understand what we're reading the Old Testament and they wouldn't understand why Isaiah 52 and 53 is about Jesus.

They wouldn't understand why we take Psalms. Well, that's about the Messiah, but that's not about Jesus. He didn't set up a kingdom on earth. He's not reigning.

We have the truth of the Sanhedrin, which is we know God, they did.

We know the Scripture, they did. So what we've created is a religion so tight with rules that nobody can mess up. And there was a reason for that because you had to earn salvation.

At the end, God took all your good deeds and all your bad deeds, and if the good ones outweigh the bad ones, you can receive salvation. Jesus came along and said, no, you're all doomed. You're all lost. I can save you.

And yes, you do have to do good deeds. Jesus never said that salvation comes without good deeds. Neither did the Apostle Paul. They twist him to say that. But it's in the concept of you start with, I can't chalk up enough good deeds for God to say, man, you made it. You got it right.

You have a thousand good deeds and 999 bad deeds, you get saved. That's not how it works. It's a change of who we are. It's a change of our nature, the way we think, the way we feel. Everything changes as a lifetime as a Christian. So yes, there's good deeds.

Yes, there's works. But you can't chalk up enough good ones to make up for the bad things.

It doesn't work that way. So we accept the forgiveness of God through Christ.

The Pharisees didn't see that. They had a system, and you could earn your salvation. That was truth to them. As far as Pilate, his was just the truth of power.

It was all about power. The Roman world, truth was his power. Nothing else mattered.

The Romans lived by oxymoron, tolerance enforced by subjugation. Oh, we tolerate you, unless you disobey. He understood that. Practical man. I don't want to kill Jesus. He's just, fact, you know, he shouldn't kill some kind of holy person here. He might be some kind of holy person. But practicality is, for political reasons, you want Barabbas or this Jesus guy.

Oh, we want Barabbas, the criminal. Okay, and he had him killed. Wash his hands in one great ceremony. See, I'm not guilty. Smart politics. Smart politics. That was his reality. His truth was power. So you have, I earn my salvation. You have power. And Jesus comes along, and his reality is, I am that king. His reality is that kingdom. God is in heaven. The kingdom's there. It's coming here. That's his reality. And if, as he told him, when we read in that second example we went through, you come to me, and we will get you there. The Father and I will get you there. We'll go down that path, and you'll become part of that kingdom. His reality is who he is, who the Father is, what the kingdom is. That's what he came. And that's what he, even right, you know, before he died, what's he doing? Yes, that's who I am. And yes, there is a kingdom.

And you have no idea, Pilate, the power that this kingdom has. You think you know what power is? He didn't say that to him. You think you know what power is? Yeah. Remember what he told the disciples? You think, I can call out 12 legions of angels. Roman legions is about 5,000 men, sometimes more.

I have 60,000 angels I can call in right now. I can lay waste to the earth. You don't know what power is. I can lay waste to the earth with a simple statement. But that's not going to happen, because that's not the plan. He showed the Sadducees, the Pharisees, they didn't know who the Messiah was.

And there are cons of the Messiah was wrong. He showed Pilate, he had no idea what power really was.

And then he was crucified.

Of course, resurrected. That simple truth, you know, I thought, this is so simple, should I even give it?

No. With this new Christianity, we had better know this. Our children had better know it.

They better know this. Understand it, because it's going to be tested.

Jesus revealed reality. You and I live in a world, and this will explain why you have such trouble living in this world, because you've been exposed to some reality of God. They're in total denial of reality. They just don't know it. So, let's be aware of this new Christianity. Let's be aware of who Jesus said he was. Remember, it's either true or he's a madman. Have a good Sabbath.