On Whose Authority?

Recap

Since Jesus began his public ministry, people continually have been amazed by his authority. In Mark 1:27 they were amazed at his teaching as one with authority. In Mark 2:10 Jesus makes it clear that he, the Son of Man, has the authority to forgive sins. Then in Mark 7:1-13, Jesus condemned the oral traditions, and then most recently in Mark, Jesus emptied the temple.

Therefore the lingering question with all of this has been building up, on what authority does he do this. So let’s read Mark 11:27-12:12.

Main Point: Jesus is the cornerstone in which the Kingdom of God is built. Therefore, the church must be built upon him.

Points

The Father’s Authority

The Hardening Heart

The Cornerstone

The Father’s Authority

It’s day 3 in Jerusalem on Holy Week. And we read in verse 27, (READ). For the third straight day, Jesus enters the temple, but he is quickly approached by some or all of the group of 71 leaders who make up what is called the Sanhedrin. This group is composed of the chief priests and the scribes and the elders. One commentator writes, “The Sanhedrin, a buffer organization between Rome and the Jewish nation, was composed of seventy-one members who held near complete freedom in religious matters and restricted power in political matters.”

These leaders who have freedom over religious matters are mad. They want to know on what authority Jesus is doing these things. They don’t just want to know about the tossing of the tables and throwing out the money changers, but by what authority do you teach and perform miracles and forgive sin? The leaders are hoping Jesus will say that his authority is from God, because this authority could only come from him, but then Jesus would be accused of being a blasphemer. For Jesus would be speaking in place of God if he answers this question. And the leaders know that the authority hadn’t come from them. Therefore Jesus and his authority come to the center stage here. By what authority is Jesus acting on and why? Notice how Jesus responds to the Sanhedrin’s question in verses 29-30, (READ).

Jesus seems to be side stepping their question and trying to evade it. But in the words of Lee Corso, “NOT SO FAST, MY FRIEND” on accusing Jesus of side stepping. In fact, he gives a fuller answer to their question than those present and many realize. For in asking if the baptism of John was from heaven or man was a call for them to recall the baptism of John the Baptist. Turn back with me to Mark 1:4-11 (READ).

John identifies himself as one who is a prophet, a forerunner, which the crowds even understand as stated there in verse 32. But more importantly at the baptism of Jesus, where John baptized him, the heavens were split open and in that instance is when the authority of Jesus from the Father was inaugurated. Consider these words from James Edwards, “A decision about John is a decision about Jesus. If John’s baptism was solely “from men,” that is, fully explainable by empirical science, then the Sanhedrin may be justified in its accusation of Jesus. But if John’s baptism was ‘from heaven,’ that is, divinely inspired—as the crowds believed and as the Sanhedrin evidently feared—then Jesus’ authority exceeds mere human authority and must be explained by the authority of God.”

In other words, if John’s baptism is from God, so is Jesus’ authority. And therefore Jesus is teaching them, as well as us that his authority indeed is from God the Father. For it is Jesus who is the one who is stronger than John. It is Jesus who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And it is Jesus whose sandal straps that John is unworthy to stoop down and untie. Therefore it is also Jesus who is the one, as the Son, who pleases the Father in all that he does. Thus, Jesus has been given his authority to do all of these things from God, the Father.

Therefore we must not think that Jesus sidesteps this question, instead he tackles this head on. But one other thing he does in his return question is showing that he is not under the Sanhedrin, but over it. The religious traditions and positions of cultural position had no authority over Jesus, they were to submit to him, not the other way around.

Yet, how often is the temptation for us to surpass the authority of Jesus for tradition’s sake? How often are we to ignore the authority of Jesus for cultural relevance? How often do we ignore the authority of Jesus in what the Christian mission is?

For example, right before Jesus’ ascension into heaven, he gave us as Christians our marching orders. He said, Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age (Matthew 28:19-20). Because of his authority, Jesus has called us to go and make disciples in all that we do. Yet, when we seek to make our mission about anything other than the task of making disciples, then we go against the authority of Jesus.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to King Jesus. We need to recognize his authority given to him by the Father and obey. But, a rejection of the Son and his authority will lead to hearts that harden in sin. And that is where we turn in our second point this morning, the hardening heart.

The Hardening Heart

Following the Sanhedrin’s rejection to answering Jesus’ question of John’s baptism being from man or God, Jesus teaches in Mark 12:1-12 using another parable. Taking a deep aim at their hearts. For in this parable, we have a vineyard which represents the Kingdom of God, the people of Israel. We have a landowner which is being used to describe God. Then we have the farmer tenants, and these are the religious leaders of the Sandhedrin who are charged to care for their rented vineyard, giving back to the owner what is owed. Then you have the servants who represent the prophets throughout Israel’s history who had been sent to declare God’s word to the people of Israel. And finally, the beloved Son is a representation of Jesus, the Beloved Son of God the Father.

This parable of a landowner renting out his vineyard and going away was a common practice in the day, therefore it would have been a familiar and understandable parable to teach from. And while the tenants would have worked and maintained the vineyard, it all was done at the landowners expense. This would have clicked with who Jesus was talking about. In fact, we see that the Sanhedrin, the religious leaders of the day there in verse 12 perceived that this parable was told against them. And yet, though they perceived this parable was against them, they did not repent. Instead, they dug their heels in further, allowing their hearts to further harden as they sought for a way to arrest the Beloved Son.

The Sanhedrin failed to allow the parable to pierce their hearts and expose what they had missed. They failed to see that as the tenants, they were to work on behalf of the landowner, not fighting to overthrow the owner and inherit the land themselves. For the temple, the law, the whole of Israel existed for the glory of God, not for the Sanhedrin and their own purposes. God is the one who, like the landowner there in verse 1, planted the vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a pit for the winepress and built a tower. God had done this for Israel. For it was he who drove the nations out of the land of Cannan. It was the LORD who provided the materials to David and Solomon to build the temple. It was the LORD’s law he had given to show the people their need for Him.

Yet, every step of the way, people rejected God and turned his law into something it was not. And we see the results of this in the remainder of the parable there in verses 2-11. Each time as God would send his servants to gather some of the fruit from his vineyard, that is their faithfulness to him, the prophets were rejected. They were rejected through being beaten, struck, treated shamefully, and even killed.

When a right perspective and heart are failed to be had, sin will surely follow. The Sanhedrin failed to see their position was not for their honor and glory. Even now, Christian, we need to see that the church and our mission that we are on is not our own. That we are tenants caring for what belongs to the LORD. This means it is not up to us to decide the ways we go about fulfilling his mission. We are not the ones who get to decide how we worship him as we looked at last Sunday from Mark 11:1-25. It means we are not the ones who get to decide how the church should look, God does. It means that we do not get to determine what God requires for salvation, God does.

This is why our traditions, our preferences, our grasps of power within the church aren’t what is meant to guide us. We must look to the owner of it all and seek the ways he has instructed us to both live as individual Christ followers and to live corporately together as one people and one body. For those of us who are in Christ, we are not our own, but both body and soul belong to Christ, our King. The question for us, will we stop living as if we are our own? And will we awaken to see that the land, the Kingdom, the church are not ours, but that we are merely caretakers of it on behalf of the King, and the owner of it all, the LORD, our God?

Likewise, for those who know they are not in Christ, and think that they are their own god, determining how they live and what is good and not good. You may think you are the one in charge of your life, but you belong to God, for he created you. You are his creation. And as his creation, who are you to tell God how it should be? Who are you to think you get to be the heir of his kingdom according to your own means? For the sake of your own soul, wake up and see that God is the one to whom you will give an account. For while the Sanhedrin go on to kill the Beloved Son Jesus as we see there in verse 9, they are to meet destruction for their hardened hearts in rejecting Jesus, the whole point of Jesus’s coming is to glorify the Father as he willingly goes to the cross to suffer and die in order to rescue us. So even now, Jesus is calling you to come to him and believe. Put your faith in Jesus, the Beloved Son who was sent to rescue sinners such as you and me.

We must beware that a continued rejection of Jesus as the authoritative one will result in destruction. For while Jesus works to get to the hearts of the Sanhedrin and those of us here, there will be a time in which hearts will finally harden in sin. And then it will be too late. For the Sanhedrin, it was in this final rejection of Jesus, that takes place here and the section of text we will look at next week. But maybe for some here, it could be what happens if you leave this place continuing to reject Jesus. Maybe you are on the verge of coming to faith and think you will wait. Beware that your heart may harden and there might not be another opportunity to repent from sin and turn to Jesus. Others, maybe you have been willfully playing in sin, thinking you are getting away with it. Beware of that sin and how it very well may harden your heart, cutting you off from Christ, showing you were never in him to begin with.

Our hearts harden against God as we become dull of hearing his word from the pages of the Bible. Our hearts harden in sin as we think that God’s word is no longer applicable today. Our hearts harden in sin as we turn more inward towards ourselves. Christian, we must beware and fight against this hardening of our hearts. We fight against the hardening of our hearts by regularly going to God both in thanksgiving and confession. We fight against a hardening heart as we go deeper with God, together. And above all, we fight against the hardening of our hearts as we look more to Jesus and seek to build one another up in him. For it is Jesus who is the cornerstone of the Kingdom of God, in which it all holds together. And this is where we turn in our third and final point this morning, the cornerstone.

The Cornerstone

The Sanhedrin, and all who rejected Jesus have rejected God’s Beloved Son who he sent. And yet, it is this Jesus who has become the cornerstone, more literally the head of the corner. While the Son was killed and rejected, God’s plan was carried out, for Jesus is the one in which holds the entire Kingdom of God together. There in the second half of verse 10 - verse 11 we read...

This is quoted from Psalm 118:22-23. It accredits the death of the Son and his rejection to the Father for this very purpose, for him to become the cornerstone in which everything else is built. For it is Jesus who links together those of old before his day who believed in his coming with those who can now look backward that Jesus came and died to save sinners.It is Jesus as the cornerstone who brings together as one people those one have believed in him from both Jewish backgrounds and Gentile backgrounds.

The Christian faith is built on Jesus! One cannot be a Christian apart from faith resting in Jesus. One cannot be saved, apart from that faith in Jesus. And the church cannot be built apart from Jesus being that cornerstone! Therefore, it is crucial for Jesus to be the center of all that we are and all that we do. This is why we find this from Matthew 16:15-20:

He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ.

Because Jesus is the cornerstone, it is upon the confession of Jesus as the Christ in which the church is to be built. Apart from that confession of Jesus as the Christ, a church doesn’t exist. Apart from that confession, one does not belong to the church. And apart from the church resting on Jesus as the cornerstone as the confession that Jesus is the Christ, a true church doesn’t exist.

Church, as we labor to glorify God in all that we do, we must continue to stand upon the name of Jesus and him alone! For it is the gospel, the good news about Jesus that saves sinners. It is this good news that must be proclaimed to reach the lost. For as this gospel advances that the church will continue to be built upon the cornerstone which is Christ. For the church is an embassy of the Kingdom of God, it is the outpost that is to carry out and advance the mission of the King, by declaring about Him!

Therefore our mission is to make much of the King, Jesus! To build our church upon him and him alone! For when we fail to build our church upon anything other than Jesus, the church will crumble. The pursuit to be relevant is dominating so many churches, and I think is a deep root of struggle within our own. And yet it deeply misses the mark of what it means for Jesus to be the cornerstone in which the church is built. Mark Dever in his book, Nine Marks for a Healthy Church, writes, “The culture to which we would conform in order to be relevant becomes so inextricably entwined with antagonism to the Gospel that to conform to it must mean a loss of the Gospel itself. In such a day, we must re-hear the Bible and re-imagine the concept of successful ministry not as a necessarily immediately fruitful but as demonstrably faithful to God’s Word.”

We must look to building the church on the ways of God’s word and being faithful to it. We must continually build the church on Christ Jesus himself and the ways we see the church to be structured in the pages of the Bible, constantly reforming to the word, even when it goes against the grains of both tradition and culture.

Jesus is the cornerstone, and we build our church on him as we continue laboring to grow as disciples of Jesus. We build the church on the good news of Jesus and inviting others to both hear and believe this good news. We build the church as we make much of Jesus and little of ourselves. We build the church on the authoritative King who is the cornerstone of the Father’s Kingdom. We build the church on not allowing sin to harden our hearts.

Brothers and sisters, we need to see that the church belongs to Christ who has his authority from the Father. And therefore we are his servants, his tenants who are called to labor in the ways he instructs us. For the church is the bride of Jesus, and he has far more investment in her, than any of us could ever dream of having, no matter how long we have been part of a particular congregation. Therefore let us ensure that we are laboring to faithfully carry out God’s mission by keeping it centered on Christ, the cornerstone who came to be rejected and die in order to purchase us for himself.

Let’s pray...