The Man Nobody Knows

In January of 1804, Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States. Thomas Jefferson, at that time, ordered from a bookseller in Philadelphia two copies of the King James Bible. Not the new King James, but the King James Bible, which is, as you know, the Bible that Jesus and the disciples used.

Some of you had to think about that one for a minute. Two copies of the King James Bible. Over the next few weeks, even though he was very busy as president, Thomas Jefferson sat down with those two Bibles and a razor. And he turned to the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and he started to cut out of the Gospels, the various episodes from the life of Jesus. Now, Thomas Jefferson was what is called a deist or a rationalist. He was a product of the age of rationalism. He believed in a god, not necessarily the god that we believe in. He believed in kind of a larger, pantheistic deity that many of those men of that period believed in. But he was very much a rationalist. He didn't look to the supernatural. He didn't believe in miracles. And when he looked at the life of Jesus, he did not look at the miracles of Jesus, of either healing people, turning water into wine, feeding 5,000 people with just a little bit of bread and fish, or the fact that he was the Son of God. He didn't believe any of those things. All he believed about Jesus was that he was a wise rabbi that walked around the hills of Galilee in the first century and had a following and kind of founded this, you know, one of the world's first mass movements. But he looked at him as a wise teacher. So what he did was he cut out just the wise sayings of Jesus. Things like the Sermon on the Mounts, other teachings about, go to your brother, Matthew 18. And he didn't bring in any of the miraculous, mystical, supernatural aspects of Jesus's life. And what he did then was put together those cuttings into his own version of the life of Jesus Christ. And he published them as a book entitled, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth. The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth. And you could, I suppose, I didn't do this, but I suppose today you may find a version or a copy of that particular version of the Gospel according to Thomas Jefferson, still available. Perhaps in some modern updated form.

What Thomas Jefferson did was become essentially America's first Bible scholar or Bible critic, as he termed his view of Jesus Christ. Now, he was not the last. Over the succeeding generations, many, many other people took their particular view of Jesus Christ. They weren't always that of Thomas Jefferson, but they were interesting views, and there have been many and many and varied. Today, if you would go to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., you would find over 17,000 different books there about the life of Jesus Christ. There are more than twice as many books on Christ in the Library of Congress than there are books about William Shakespeare and his writings. So you can see Christ has been a very popular subject down through American history to have that many books just in the Library of Congress on that subject. That's not to speak of books in other languages and other parts of the world. Every generation of just in America, it seems, has had its own particular view and image of Jesus Christ. Jefferson created his own image, just a wise teacher, a wise rabbi. Others have expanded on that view, and certainly as people have looked at him as the Son of God, they still had to cast Jesus in their own particular image according to their times. We here in Indiana can claim a little bit of claim to one of those images because we had a son of Indiana in the late 19th century write a book about Jesus Christ, a man by the name of Lou Wallace, who I think lived down here in Crawfordsville, Indiana. He was a Civil War general. After the Civil War, he came back and he took up his new life, and part of that life was as an author. And he wrote a book sometime in the late 19th century entitled, Ben Hur. Ever heard of that book? Probably not, but you have heard of the movie, Ben Hur. Well, that was written by Lou Wallace, a native Hoosier. And the book, Ben Hur, written in the late 19th century, was actually the subtitle of Ben Hur is, A Story of the Christ. And though it's a story of this, you know, Charlton Heston type character, it's really a story about Jesus.

And it's a very muscular image of Jesus that is presented in the story of Ben Hur, a vigorous muscular man. And it fit the image that many wanted to have of Jesus in the late 19th century. And of course, when Hollywood got hold of the book and made a movie out of it, nobody else but Charlton Heston would do to be cast in that lead male role of Ben Hur. And so again, if you remember the movie, it is a very dynamic, muscular version of Christianity that is put out there. In the 1920s, there was another book written about Jesus. This time, it was written by an advertising man from New York City, a man by the name of Bruce Barton. Bruce Barton wrote a book in 1925, I believe, entitled The Man Nobody Knows. Ever heard of that book? The old timers up here will. Mr. Armstrong used to refer to that book, and we would refer to it in our past publications. The man nobody knows. Bruce Barton's image of Jesus was cast from his own point of view because he was an advertising man. So he wrote about Jesus as this marketing genius who got 12 guys together, gave them a marketing plan, and they went out and founded a church and had a success. And so he pulled that point of view out of the Gospel stories and wrote about the man nobody knows. By and large, what he wrote was not untrue, but it's again a narrow view of a time and of a man about Jesus Christ, from a marketing point of view. So here are three images of Jesus. A wise rabbi of Thomas Jefferson, a muscular dynamic man of Lou Wallace's time, or a marketing genius of the 1920s, which fits the mood of America at that particular point in time. And all three tell only a part of the story. And if you just took those three, and there are many other images that we could go through. I mean, there were Upton Sinclair and other writers from American history that also told religious stories using the idea of Jesus. And some of them were cast, Jesus was cast as a social reformer, trying to root out all the ills of society. And others have portrayed Jesus as kind of a radical revolutionary, if that was their particular point of view about the world and wanting to turn over the existing order. Then Jesus was their model, and they borrowed that from Jesus. Each one of those images taken by themselves do not tell the whole story about, excuse me, of Jesus.

They only tell part. And worse, they reflect either an age, a time, or one person's point of view. And taken very strictly and literally, each one of them falls into the realm of idolatry. Idolatry. Because they don't tell the full story of Jesus, they don't give the full image of Jesus. And because they are images of Jesus as the Son of God cast in their own image, they are guilty in many ways of creating God in their own image. It may not be a stone or a wooden image or an idol, but it is idolatry nonetheless. And it is a trap that every generation falls into when they do not fully come to understand and appreciate the story of Jesus as we have in the Bible. The man nobody knows. If you want a title for this sermon, it's The Man Nobody Knows. Because we come down to our own time, and we find we are still in the morass of ignorance regarding Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Look at any book, best-selling, fictionalized novel such as the Da Vinci Code or other more technical, critical view of Jesus that may be written from a religionist point of view. And there is a continuing, ongoing effort to remake Jesus according to the times and a particular point of view and an image without understanding and without fully appreciating what the Bible says and what the full story is about Jesus Christ. So this sermon is not going to be an exhaustive attempt to go through every aspect of the image of Jesus and who Jesus really was. We have a booklet about that, and there are certainly four gospel accounts that present a lifetime study for any of us on the subject of Jesus Christ. But it's to point up the fact that all of us need to be sure that we have the right image of Jesus Christ the Messiah in our minds and especially in our hearts as we look at Him and we have a relationship with Jesus and make sure that we are not taken up and deceived by our own point of view. You see, you and I can create Jesus in our own image as well based on what we want from His life, based on what we think we need from Him or from God, based upon our own cultural bias and perspective, based on where we are in America in the 21st century, and all of those together can be a trap for any of us to fall into when we try to make Jesus over into our image and where we want Him to be and what we want Him to do for us, and we can fall into the trap of missing the whole story of the story of the Son of God. But let me take you through a few points this morning by way of review to emphasize this point so that we understand that we are creating and molding and shaping the right image of Jesus in our own life. Let's look at a few of the basic things that we are told by way of reminder and make sure that we fully understand completely the story of Jesus Christ. First of all, who was Jesus?

He didn't leave us without any indication of who He was. He will turn over to John chapter 19, and we will see where we are told who Jesus was. Jesus made no errors and no mistake, no bones about saying that He was the Son of God. He claimed to be the Son of God. In John chapter 19 in verse 7, as He had been brought before Pilate for trial by the Jews, and at one point when Pilate brought Him out before the mob, wearing a crown of thorns and a purple robe, and they called for Him to be crucified, Pilate said, What's He done? In verse 6, I find no fault in Him. The Jews answered Him, and said, We, meaning the Jews, have a law, and according to our law, He ought to die because He made Himself the Son of God. He made Himself the Son of God. Jesus, on many different occasions, said that He was the Son of God. He had come from the Father. That was quite a bold statement. He wasn't just the Son of Joseph and Mary. He was the Son of God. Now, that's a pretty good starting point to understand something because you're either going to accept that or you're going to reject it. And if you accept it, then it makes all the difference in everything else that He said and did. As one Christian writer, C.S. Lewis, said about this particular statement, he said that what Jesus did was to say that He was the Son of God. It was either true or false. You have to accept it as either truth or as a complete lie. Either Jesus was who He said He was, the Son of God, or He was a lunatic. He was an idiot running around the dusty roads of Galilee and caught up in a mass movement or at least a localized movement that deceived a lot of people, but He was a lunatic to claim to be the Son of God. So you and I are left with that decision. That's where we have to start. And if we accept that He was a lunatic, then just be like Thomas Jefferson. Just look at His wise sayings and take that and throw out everything else. But if He was the Son of God, if He was the Son of God, then everything that we read about Him saying and doing is all important. All important. Well, we take that as our starting point, that He was the Son of God. And that makes all the difference. But we have to understand that, and we have to think that through in everything that He said and everything that He did. Now, Jesus made another statement back in John chapter 8 about who He was. John chapter 8 He had another run in here with the Jews, and this is one of His early ones. And He was telling them who they were. He'd already told them that they were liars, hypocrites. The Jews said, well, you have a demon. And so they had this going back and forth during this point in time.

And then down in verse 57, the Jews said to Him, you're not yet 50 years old, and have you seen Abraham? Have you seen Abraham? Because part of this Christ was basically was setting them up that before Abraham was, He was. And He said to them, His answer was, most assuredly, I say to you. Yeah, He said it's true. I have seen Abraham. He said, because before Abraham was, I am.

Now, the Jews looked at Abraham as their father, father of the faithful, a historical figure. By that point, you know, 15 centuries and more dead. But He was revered.

And here comes this rabbi, this carpenter's son from Nazareth, who has a following. And He says to them as He's standing before them, like I'm standing before a group of you here this morning, and Jesus said, before Abraham was, I am. Now, you remember any other statement like that in the Bible? I am. Anybody remember where that was? Yeah. It was back in Genesis, chapter 3, when Moses was out one day in the desert, and he saw this burning bush. And he walked up because he was curious, and you and I would be curious, too, if we saw this burning bush that wasn't consumed, and we'd walk up and want to know what was going on about it out in the middle of nowhere. And God begins to speak to him, His voice. And Abraham responds to it and gets his mission to go back to Egypt and bring the Israelites out of captivity. And he says, well, who do I tell them you are?

And God says, tell them I am has sent you. I am. So this story, again, as God spoke to Moses, was well known. And for Jesus then to say to the Jews before Abraham was, I am, was more than they could take. Because in verse 59, they took up stones to throw at him. But Jesus hit himself and went out of the temple, going through the midst of him, and so passed by.

Because he, again, made a claim to being God. But not only God, but this time he was telling them, I am the God that appeared to Abraham. I am the God who spoke to Moses. I am the God who said, I am. Which meant and means that Jesus was saying, I'm the God you read about in all those scriptures.

I'm the God you read about at your mother's knee that led Israel out of Egypt. Was in the cloud by night and the pillar of fire by day. I'm that, I'm that God. Now today, the Jews couldn't, couldn't wrap their mind around that. And interestingly, it is one of the teachings of the Bible that most people totally miss today. To look and to understand Jesus as the God of the Old Testament. To see him and understand that he was the one who wrestled all night with Jacob. He was the one who appeared to Abraham in the plains and announced that he would have a son of his old age. And as Paul later wrote that he was, he was the one that rock who was in the pillar of fire by night and the cloud by day. To explain that to people even today opens up a whole new panorama of understanding about God and the Bible when you really stop and think about it.

We take that for granted, you and I, because we learned that at some point in the past in the church. But it's, it is a profound truth that should continue to open up understanding about Jesus and who he was as the man and as the son of God for us today. This is where the Jews found themselves. They couldn't accept that. And again, it was part of what caused them to plot to to overthrow him. There's a great deal that they did not understand during their time. And for you and I today, there's a lot that we must be sure that we know and understand in our own life.

Jesus' whole mission is another point of understanding that the Jews in the first century missed out on. The first century community of Jews in Jerusalem were actually looking for something. They were looking for the Messiah. There was an expectation in the histories and what we do know from even writings of that time. People were looking for something at this point in history. The Roman rule over the world had brought about a type of a piece. It was a piece of kind of an iron piece at the hand of the Roman government, the Roman Empire. It was a Roman brand of peace, hard as iron, as Daniel's prophecy shows. But still nonetheless, there was still an expectation in the minds of people of something to come. And they were looking, the Jews especially, were looking for the promised Messiah of the scriptures of Isaiah, of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the other prophets of the Old Testament. And they were looking for that. And that's why when we read of the story, the accounts of Jesus' birth, that these wise men came from afar seeking to know who He was back in Matthew 2. When Jesus was born, verse 1 of Matthew 2, we read, where wise men came from the east to Jerusalem, saying, Where is He who has been born, king of the Jews? For we've seen a star in the east and have come to worship Him.

We know this story, and again, it's trivialized as part of the annual Christmas story. But nonetheless, it is a story as connected with the birth of Christ and tells us many things, but importantly, it tells us what people were looking for. They were expecting the king of the Jews, the Messiah, to appear. And of course, when Herod heard this, he felt threatened. Herod had been set in place by his Roman contacts and Roman friends. And he had done a lot to build up Judea and Jerusalem and buildings and economy-wise, but he didn't want to lose that. The idea that a king of the Jews was going to appear meant, in Herod's mind, he understood that that would mean the end of his reign. Herod understood that much about the Old Testament scriptures. His family were not native Jews. They were converts. And yet he knew the story. So that's why he was looking at one. Later on here in this chapter, he questioned these wise men as to where was this child born. And then of course, you know the story, he caused every male child born at this time to be killed. It was his effort to try to negate the prophecies. It shows you how much he believed. I think his belief was certainly mixed with fear and just pure, raw politics and survival, but it cost a lot of lives. You have to think about that, think that on through, that realize that Jesus, as he was growing up, was part of a generation that didn't have a lot of men.

Didn't have a lot of men. They were killed during that period of time.

Don't want to draw too much from that, but that demographically, that is the reality. Herod went on a one on a on a purge, but this was what people were looking for. And that began to drive people as they then listened and saw what Jesus did when he began to to teach. And going back to John in chapter 6 of John, there is the story here of Christ feeding 5,000. John chapter 6, performing one of his miracles. And down in verse 14, after he had done this, this afternoon on the edge of the Sea of Galilee, the people who witnessed the fact that after everybody was fed and there were still baskets of bread and fish taken up, enough to kind of open a whole farmer's market there in the region, verse 14, then those men, when they had seen the sign that Jesus did, they said, this is truly the prophet who is to come into the world. Now, they were part of a generation looking for a king, looking for the fulfillment of the prophecies. And when they said on this particular afternoon, as they looked at Jesus and said, this is the prophet, they were referring specifically to a statement that Moses had made back in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 18, where Moses said that a prophet like me will arise. And Moses was prophesying about Jesus. That's why there's always a connection between Moses and Jesus that is very, very strong in the Bible. Moses was the first lawgiver. Christ came to magnify the law, not to do away with it.

And in this, they recognized that they felt this was the prophet that Moses talked about.

And why not? Think about what Jesus had done here. He had fed a lot of people who didn't eat like that every day. Fish. Fresh fish. Good bread.

Unless you and I live on a lake today, or on the ocean, how many times do we eat good, fresh, fish in our life? You know? Good, baked bread. All we want. These were not the rich of their time. They were poor people. Their daily bread was just that, bread or grain. If they had meat or fish, it was a delicacy. It was truly a delicacy. And he had healed them. He'd healed people of their sicknesses. And he'd given them some very sound, valuable instruction. Why not make this man the king? He feeds you. He heals you. And he gives you good teaching. Let's make him king. They put it all together. But Jesus perceived what they were going to do in verse 8 to 15. He perceived that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king. And this was not his mission at this time. That's the point. And that's why he departed again to be alone. He said, I want to be alone. That was not his mission at that time. Christ's mission was misunderstood even by the Jews of the first century. They thought that the king, the Messiah, was to appear then to restore the kingdom to Israel. They wanted a king. They wanted their sovereignty. They wanted to live on a higher level. And this was the man. But this was not the time. This miracle caused a ground swell of support from among the people to make him king. But that's why on this occasion he passed through and left them. It never completely went out of their mind. His popularity swelled. And he continued to attract people to him. People wanted someone to believe in.

In the current presidential race, we are in America with Barack Obama and John McCain.

We're seeing a contrast in many different ways. And if you've been following it, which most of us do as we see these things, we can't help but be struck by the, particularly with Senator Obama, the hope that people are investing in him from many different perspectives. First black presidential nominee, a young man. His rhetoric, his book, his whole approach is meant to give hope. And many people, usually on the other side, they have mockingly referred to him as the Messiah, because he fulfills a great deal of hope for people. In whatever political sense, they look for change. They look for a better time. Anything but Bush, the approach that so many are in. And you see these allusions to him. It's been attached to him in a sense that it wasn't four years or eight years ago with either John Kerry or Al Gore or other others. And had Hillary Clinton been the nominee this year, she wouldn't have that same type of aspiration pinned to her as it has been with Senator Obama. But I think it represents what is within any generation at any particular time, especially when there are problems that people want solutions. They look for a Messiah type. They look for someone that they can pin their hopes and aspirations on to get them through a particular time and make life better. And many of these Jews looked at Jesus from a purely physical point of view. They were not understanding him as the Son of God. And they didn't understand the prophecies of the Messiah from a divine way. They were looking for the appearance of not the Son of God, but of a political leader who would restore the kingdom to Israel. Understand that these Jews were not looking for the Son of God. That's why when he said, I am the Son of God, they killed him because he blasphemed their law. They were looking for a political leader to arise, to throw off the Roman yoke, to restore the Kingdom of David and the good times of the past.

In that sense, not unlike any other generation, even our own, and looking for a political leader to fulfill all of our hopes and dreams. That's why they did not recognize who he was. They did not understand his mission. And that's why it all went wrong, at least from that perspective. But it all went right because it fulfilled the plan of God. Christ's mission was misunderstood then. That's why we go back to John 18 when he was before Pilate. Pilate said, Are you this king of the Jews? This dogged him from the moment of his birth all the way to the last moment of drawing breath on this planet. This issue surrounded Jesus Christ. Are you the Son of God?

Are you the king to come? In John 18 and verse 36 Pilate said, Are you the the king of the Jews? In verse 33. And Jesus answered in verse 36, 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.

It was not the time. The kingdom was not the time. That was not the time the kingdom would be established. That was a future role. And that was another part of what Jesus really taught but didn't get it across even to his those who stayed with him. When you go over to chapter 19 of Luke and you see that as Jesus was approaching Jerusalem at this period of time, prior to his death and his arrest and his crucifixion, Jesus in verse 19, chapter 19 and verse 11, Luke 19, 11, when they heard these things, and again he had done miracles, and they heard these things and he spoke another parable because he was near Jerusalem and because they thought the kingdom of God would appear immediately.

And so here he had to correct the perception. They thought that he was now ascending to the slopes of Jerusalem where the temple was, the capital, ancient capital, the city David had made his capital, and they thought now he was going to overthrow Herod, the Roman rule, and inaugurate the restoration of the kingdom of David, the kingdom of Israel, and restore that for them.

And he said he knew that and he said no. And he goes through this long parable, and you know this parable. In this he says, look, the kingdom is like a noble one who went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom and to return. I'm not going to go through all the parable here of the talents, but what Jesus did was showing them was, look, it's not going to happen now. It's going to be in the future.

The kingdom is like a nobleman going some place else to receive a kingdom. Those of you that have read the Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, one of the stories there is the return of the king. Where do you think he got the idea in the title for the return of the king?

The king returns to restore the kingdom within the story of the Lord of the Rings because in this parable, Jesus had already preempted Tolkien and told them that the kingdom is like a nobleman going off into a far country. He calls his servants and he gives them various jobs to do. He gives them talents, and they have a job to do and to keep and to obey until his return.

And when he comes, there will be a period of judgment when that happens. Jesus was expanding the concept before the people at this time, and they had no conception in their mind of what he was really saying. Some of them finally caught on years later, and among those were his closest disciples, certainly Peter and James and John and the others, and it took them a long time to catch on. You have to go to the second epistle of Peter to realize that at the end of his life, Peter realized probably things that Jesus said this day as he ascended to Jerusalem, and Peter himself didn't understand them.

It took him probably decades for him to fully grasp even this particular parable. So don't get too discouraged if you don't understand everything in the Bible in a year or five years or ten years. I think the apostles, it took them decades to grasp the full import of some of the teachings that Jesus said. That's the way life is, and I think that's the way God designed it. Jesus was saying to the people, look, the prophecies of the Messiah and the Messianic Kingdom are far off. It's kind of like looking at the stars.

You and I go out at night, and we can get a clear night, and we look up and we see the stars in the heaven. If you happen to be out away from any of the ambient light of the city, you can get into a really dramatic view of the stars, as we've all seen from time to time. And on a beautiful night, those stars look very, very close, don't they?

But when you study into astronomy a little bit, you realize that even though they look close, they're millions and billions of light years away. And some that look close and some that look far, those that look further away are actually closer than the ones that look closer because of the amount of light that they're emitting. And we can only know that through the study of the heavens, you know, through a gigantic telescope. But it looks close, but there are vast differences of billions of light years between them. The prophecies of the Bible are like that. The prophecies about the kingdom, the Messiah, are like that. They look close. They could look close at any particular time. And they looked close to the Jews at Jesus's time. But He was saying to them that they're further away than you might think. They're further away than they might see. You may expect them to be fulfilled right now in me, but it's not going to happen in a single coming. Now, we see that and we understand that from our perspective 2,000 years later. We have always to be aware that we don't get caught up in the trap of them trying to bring them closer than what they are in our own life. They are closer in our time than they were 2,000 years earlier. We have to exercise caution and judgment and exercise the careful scrutiny of the Scriptures to make sure we don't read too much into it even in our own time. But we are closer. Certainly, the single first coming of the Messiah was not when that was going to happen.

Jesus had to get that all explained before the people, but they misunderstood it then, and people misunderstand it today. Because of this, subsequent generations, looking at the story of the church and Jesus, they thought that, well, if you didn't set up the kingdom then, then the kingdom of God is something in your heart. Or the kingdom of God, something spiritual. It's something—or the kingdom of God, as they thought 300 or 400 years later, the kingdom of God is the church.

And now the church has this vicar that is over the church who is the vicar of Christ. And the church is the kingdom. And that formed the theological basis for the great church, the Christian church, down through the centuries. And so today, again, you still see the mixed-up ideas that people have about what is the kingdom of heaven, what is the kingdom of God. And is it something literal to come to the earth? Or is it still something kind of spiritual that's just up to us to try to enact in our own little corner of the world? And we can bring it about as best we can by doing good things and taking care of the poor, the needy, and social issues in our own world and life.

Is that the kingdom? The confusion still reigns among people, not fully understanding who Jesus was then, who Jesus is now, and what He is going to do when He returns. One other way that we can understand Jesus is to look at what He did. And time will let me go through a lot of that. But let me just take one point for us to focus on and to see what He did. We all know this, but let's be reminded about it. We're in Luke.

Let's go back to chapter 4 of Luke. Jesus did a lot of things. He healed. He fed. He taught. He also kept the Sabbath. In Luke 4 and verse 16, we read that He came to Nazareth where He had been brought up, His hometown. And as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read. He was raised in this town. In His custom, every other Sabbath as a kid was to have gone into this synagogue and hear and listen and to worship and to keep the Sabbath.

This is what verse 16 tells us. It was His custom to keep the Sabbath. Jesus didn't do away with the Sabbath by any of His teaching. You cannot find that in the scriptures as much as people try to do all kinds of intricate gymnastics with the scriptures. If you've been watching the Olympics and the gymnastics in Beijing, you wonder how those kids can turn their bodies and flip themselves and do what they do. It's amazing every four years when I watch gymnastics, the little bit that I do, as to how they do what they do in bending and twisting their bodies.

People do that with the scriptures. They bend and twist and distort the scriptures into what they think they say. And on this matter of what Jesus did on this specific point of the law and the Sabbath, you get all kinds of distortions as they are twisted around. But you can read no scripture about Jesus and what He did regarding the Sabbath. And there are a number of episodes. And you cannot get that He changed the Sabbath, that He did away with the observance of it.

His subsequent death did not change the Sabbath, despite the fact that the Christian tradition is that since He arose on the first day of the week, the day of the sun, therefore by that act the Sabbath was changed from the seventh to the first day. That does not hold water scripturally and is again something you have to jump through a lot of hoops to accept. Jesus's death did not change the Sabbath through any day of the week, the idea that every day is holy, all time is holy, another concept that people have to do away with the Sabbath.

If Jesus meant any of that, it's logical that He would have indicated that in some way and certainly not by doing it. It was His custom. He kept the Sabbath. In Mark chapter 2, another episode on the Sabbath that is well known, He was going through the fields on the Sabbath with His disciples and they got hungry. Mark chapter 2 begins in verse 23.

We're on the Sabbath. They were going through some grain fields. They got hungry and began to pluck the heads of grain. Let's just say it was corn since we're in Indiana.

You don't just eat corn. You don't eat grain right off the vine or off the stem or whatever it is, the stalk. You'd parchment, wouldn't you? Which means you have to build a fire, take a little bit to prepare it. Or if you were going to grind it, what they did with it, I don't think they made any corn bread that day. I think if they did anything, they just maybe built a fire, maybe parched it a little bit and then just ate it by the handfuls. That's my view of what they probably did.

Ever tried to eat raw corn right off the field corn? It just doesn't happen. Unless you want to break your teeth, probably. So the Pharisees saw this and they said, you're breaking the Sabbath. And Jesus went back to an episode in the Old Testament during the time of David. He said, no, it's legal. It's lawful. But then it comes down to verse 27 and he makes the most important point. He said, the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.

One of the most important of all the teachings regarding the Sabbath, that it is something made for man. It is a gift. It is a time when we rest. It is a time when we fellowship with God.

It is a gift to orient our life toward the kingdom, toward eternal life, to stop from our own worries and work and to reflect upon the kingdom of God. It's all of that. We could fill whole sermons just on that point alone. It is for man. That's how it was given. Even in the creation account, it comes following the day following the creation of man. It is a gift God has given to man. And Jesus here is keeping the Sabbath and he is removing the distorted views that the Pharisees had even in their day about the Sabbath. And that is why he said in verse 28, therefore the son of man is also Lord of the Sabbath. The Pharisees and the Jewish legal authorities by this point had overlaid the Sabbath with so many traditions and ideas as to how it was to be kept that it had made the day a burden for people. Even in this time. The same thing has happened today. If you go to Israel and you happen to be in the state of Israel today, which is the only nation on the earth where there are Sabbath laws that affect the way the society is run ostensibly. If you happen to be in Jerusalem or in Israel on a Sabbath, you will see the effect of tradition and human judgment about the Sabbath applied to the Sabbath. And you will see restrictions. If you're in a hotel, and they may have a bank of four elevators in this big hotel, normally working to keep everybody going up and down to their rooms on the Sabbath, all but one is shut down. And that one stops at every floor. When you get on, you have to stop at every floor because you can't push 2, 3, 4, 5 because you'd be creating a spark of electricity and therefore kindling of fire. And so the Jewish rabbinical law regarding that in Israel today, how they get around it, tourism, and everything else, it just goes up and down. It stops. And you don't have to do anything. When we were there last year and it was on the Sabbath and we looked out our hotel window, we were right next to an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. And you see barriers go up in front of the streets to keep traffic from going in. Some guy, a poor guy in a delivery truck, got caught when the barrier went up. He had to leave his truck parked right there for 24 hours.

Then he came back on Saturday night and got his truck because he couldn't be driving in that neighborhood. Now, other traffic through the rest of the main street still goes on because most Jews are secular, but the strict Orthodox Jews do have a hole over certain things in the state of Israel today. My point is you still see today the restrictions and the burdens that man has put on the Sabbath, just as Jesus did in his day. And when Jesus said, therefore the Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath, by his actions he was showing how to keep the Sabbath. He was showing the benefit, the gift of the Sabbath, what it is to be for mankind. And he was saying to these religious authorities even then, he said, you don't have the authority to do this. I created this day.

I will tell you by teaching and by example how to keep the Sabbath. You don't have that authority. Jesus, in this sense, was overturning the authority. A radical step, yes. But he wasn't afraid to do it. That's something about the nature of Jesus and who he was that, again, is little understood. He wasn't overturning his father's law. He was overturning human tradition on this particular episode here. And by doing so, then, he's sending a very strong signal to anyone who keeps the Sabbath today for you and I that if you want to know me, if you want to know who I am and how I lived, you will meet me on the Sabbath. You will go through the fields with me on the Sabbath. You will come out to meet me on the Sabbath, prepared in heart, mind, and body to fellowship with me on this day of which I am Lord. Use that as your starting point for any action, plan, approach that you and I develop as our own ethic toward the Sabbath day, and you won't go wrong.

Look at it how Jesus looked at it and understand it for what he gives us. I've always maintained over the years that we can, even in our own zeal, put restrictions on the Sabbath that keep us from keeping the Sabbath. And we can also, by our own ignorance and lethargy, abuse the Sabbath because we don't care and miss the point of the Sabbath as well. It works both ways. You can make yourself too strict, you can make yourself too lax, and miss the point of the Sabbath. It is up to us to set that ethic and to take that approach.

Look at the basic scriptures. Always understand that. You will not go wrong when it comes to understanding this. Jesus kept the Sabbath. He kept the law. There are so many things about the life and the teachings of Jesus that are so valuable and so important to us, all of which help us to get to know and understand who he is.

What do we do with all of this? How do we come to know the Jesus of the Bible, the Jesus who is the King of Kings, who is the Lord of the Sabbath, who is our intercessor, who is the Messiah, who is the coming King that is going to return in a time of judgment and restore and establish the Kingdom of God on the earth, who is today our brotherly advocate for us.

How do we get to know him? Well, we have to be careful that we don't do like anyone has done in the past. Whether it was Thomas Jefferson paging through the Gospels and deciding that, oh, this is ridiculous, I can't believe this part, or I can't do this, but I'll keep this. And we do our own little cut and paste. We wouldn't do it with a razor and an old Bible today, we'd do it with a computer program and a word processing document on our computer. We could do our own cut and pasting to come up with our own version of the life of Jesus. We have to be careful we don't do that. We have to be careful we don't make Jesus into the image of a radical, a do-gooding social reformer who focused only on the poor, and try to go around solving all of the world's problems ourselves, or through any other type of collective effort that we make. Not that good works, not that charity, not that certain things and many things need to be done, can be done, but we must be careful not to make Jesus into a sociologist, into a Mother Teresa or a Gandhi.

We have to be careful not to make him into nothing more than just a marketing agent who had a really great idea and motivated sales force of 12 to go out into found branch offices around the world and meet all their target goals through some grand strategic plan. That's not the Jesus of the Bible, either. That's not the whole story. He is the God who wrapped himself in flesh. If I can go to one scripture to focus on, it would be John chapter 1. It's more than knowledge as well. We can read through all the Gospels and take them as whole and know every aspect about it as well, but and have all the knowledge. We also should do know that you've got to act on that knowledge, and we've got to do more than just have a warehouse full of understanding.

In John chapter 1 and verse 14 is a key verse to think about, and I'll leave you with this. John writes about the Word, the Word who became flesh, the Word who was with God and was in the beginning, and the Word that became flesh, the deity, the God of the Old Testament, the God who was before Abraham, this part of the family of God or the Godhead, or however we want to term it, who was the Word, who at one point walked out and had bread and wine with Abraham in the form of a king of Salem called Melchizedek, or who wrestled all night with Jacob, or who appeared to Moses in a burning bush. This Word became flesh and dwelt among us. John says he wrapped himself around his fleshly body and life. He became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

The glory of God is not some bright shining light. The glory of God is not some booming voice, again, out of a burning bush in the desert wilderness. The glory of God is the story, the life, the teachings of Jesus Christ, the way He lived, what He did, everything. That's the glory of God. That is the glory that Jesus prayed in John 17.3 that we might have, which is the same glory as He said that He had with the Father before the world was. It's a way of life. It's a way of thinking. It was manifest in the flesh. And it's really not any more complicated than that. You don't have to know intricate theology. You don't have to know metaphysics. You don't have to try to figure out how in the world did the Spirit become flesh and get into all of that and flip your mind out in thinking about that. It's no more complicated than looking at the life of Jesus Christ that we are given from this fourfold witness of the Gospels and recognizing that the Word became flesh, lived among us. And John is saying, I, John, later would say, I, Peter, I saw it. I beheld this glory, this image, this vision.

And this is what it was about. This is my account of it. This is what He was. This is what He did.

And it's no more difficult than that. We have to believe it. We have to take it for what it is and live by it. And be very, very careful, brethren, that you and I do not create Christ in our own image. From your perspective, from your hurts in your life, from my view of each of people and of our times and where we are as Americans in the 21st century and the wealth and the standing and the position that we have in our life and power and an American Christ. He's not an American Christ. He's not a German Christ. He's not an African Christ. He's not a Black Christ. He's not a female Christ. He's not an Asian Christ. He's not a white Christ.

He is something far more than that. That's why later on you find that Paul writes and says, we're neither Jew or Gentile, male or female. We're something new.

And we become something new as we come to know the man that nobody knew then.

And fewer people even know today. The man nobody knows. The man Jesus Christ who showed us how God lives and invites us to live the same way.