2017-02-05 Luke 20:19-26 Two Kinds of Wisdom (1): Deifying Man

TWO KINDS OF WISDOM (1): DEIFYING MAN (Luke 20:19-26) February 5, 2017 Read Luke 20:19-21 – Wile E. Coyote – the WB cartoon character who is always trying to destroy the Road Runner by means of elaborate plans using Acme mail order contraptions like a rocket sled, jet-powered roller skates, earthquake pills, etc. Of course, he always fails. Always ends up squashed flat, knocked senseless or burnt to a crisp by his own devices. Don’t tell me you don’t remember this stuff! Now – just put the Pharisees in Wiley’s place and you have a perfect picture of the last week of Jesus’ life. His enemies come at Him in waves intent on destroying Him, but they all go away burnt to a crisp as Jesus uses their own devices against them. It’s an incredible display. Most teach this passage is about Xns and government. But that is a sidelight. This is an epic battle of cosmic proportions between Jesus and the elite of His day – human wisdom vs. God’s wisdom. Every time it looks like the enemies win, and every time Jesus turns the whole it around. Human wisdom can look very attractive. Many give their lives for it. But it is no match for divine wisdom. So this text powerfully demonstrates. Human wisdom vs. divine wisdom. 2 weeks to characterize them – Human wisdom this week. Divine wisdom next. What characterizes human wisdom? I. Disregards Sin Keep in mind, Jesus’ enemies thought they were right -- defending God’s honor. They believed Jesus was a blasphemer. They were absolute fools for closing their minds to the evidence, but they thought they had it right. They were spiritually blind. They are a perfect illustration of those God identifies in II Cor 4:4: “In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” They were absolutely blind to truth. BUT – that didn’t take them off the hook. They were culpable. They refused the cure – which starts with acknowledging you are blind. How do you know? You downplay sin. That’s why Jesus comes back to this subject over and over. Spiritually blind people deal with sin in every way imaginable – repress it; deny it; ignore it; downplay it; minimize it; excuse it; rationalize it; anything but repent of it. A low view of sin is the sure sign of spiritual blindness. If you bristle every time someone says sin and your first reaction is 1 to explain it away in your case, look out – you are spiritually blind and in mortal danger. Note the context for this encounter. 19 “The scribes and the chief priests sought to lay hands on him at that very hour, for they perceived that he had told this parable against them, but they feared the people.” These guys hate Jesus and want Him gone NOW. Why? Because they perceive the parable He just told was about them. It was about the vineyard tenants acted like owners in the absence of the true owner. Like all Jesus’ parables it was intended to expose their sin and elicit repentance. Instead it stirred up hatred. That alone should showed their blindness. True God-followers live a lifestyle of repentance; unbelievers take offense at any mention of the word sin. Our world hates it! When Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg igniting the Protestant Reformation, guess the main topic? – justification by faith? A protest against the sale of indulgences? All there, but the emphasis was, repentance. The first thesis read: “When our Lord and Master said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Mt 4:17), He meant that the whole life of believers should be repentance.” Repentance doesn’t start and end at conversion. The Christian life is a continuous exercise in repentance as we plumb the depth of our sin. Christians aren’t just repentant people, they’re repenting people. If your heart rebels against that, look out. You are almost certainly on the outside looking in. Jesus’ enemies couldn’t stand that implication: 19 “The scribes and the chief priests sought to lay hands on him [euphemism for “kill”] at that very hour.” It wasn’t repentance that was in their hearts, it was murder. They wanted to kill the only completely sinless man who ever walked the face of the earth. How blind can you be? And their sin is shown by their methods. They spied; they misrepresented; they flattered; they lied; they were hypocrites -- sinful thru and thru, but in complete denial. Human wisdom glosses over sin. That’s because it hates accountability. But what if God is real; what if sin is real; and what if we are accountable? Then what? I once got a tour of the Indianapolis speedway, including its museum. But there was 1 thing missing. There was no mention anywhere of the 40 plus drivers who have died there. No plagues, no memorial, no museum section – nothing. No driver has ever been pronounced dead at the track. Driver Scott Goodyear once explained: “You don’t go look at where it happened. You don’t watch the films of it on television. You don’t deal with it. You pretend it never happened.” Denial! 2 According to the Bible, this is exactly the way human wisdom deals with the sin. Denial! Rom 1:18, “18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” Human attempts to deal with guilt are suppression rather than confession. Psychology teaches us to ignore, deny, rationalize or otherwise excuse what can only be remedied by repentance. So if you find yourself shaking your fist at the very mention of sin, look out. You are headed right into the storm of God’s eternal wrath. Human wisdom can only lead to disaster because it disregards sin. II. Deifies Man It pays lip service to God, but by it actions, human wisdom exalts man. It chooses man over a God it denies or feels has disengaged. You see it in the partnership here. The “scribes and chief priests” were on the attack. Scribes were mostly high level, highly educated Pharisees and the priests were Sadducees. Mt 22:15 and Mark 12:13 tell us Herodians were also part of this conspiracy. Now, these groups hated each other. Pharisees were nationalistic, longing for a Messiah to overthrow of Rome. They’d rather fight than switch. The Herodians and Sadducees had sold out. Like the Vichy govt in WWII France, they accommodated! They’d rather switch than fight. These groups couldn’t agree on anything – except on thing. They agreed that they hated Jesus. They’d have killed Him immediately except “they feared the people” who were still a day or two from turning against Him as well. What Luke is showing us here is that while human wisdom comes in many different flavors it unites in its desire to deify man and bring God down. These scribes and chief priests are face-to-face with God in the flesh, but rather than accept His revelation, they elevate their own opinions. They believe they are more clever than He. They have devised a question they believe He cannot answer. They willingly challenge God’s ultimate revelation, Jesus Christ, with their own contrived wisdom – elevating man above God. It’s Eden being played out over and over again. In Gen 3:5 Adam and Eve fell for the lie: “you will be like God.” You can be your own God. It’s the longest running play in history. You can be your own God. It’s the foundation of every Christless religion and philosophy known to man. It is the inevitable result of elevating human wisdom above divine revelation. It doesn’t matter its flavor – Islam, Buddhism, Shintoism, Confusianism, Humanism, Secularism, Atheism 3 – it doesn’t matter the title – look deeply enough and you’ll find, you can be your own God. It’s the deification of man. It’s always been there, but with the scientific discoveries that led to the Enlightenment, the religion of Man has come to full flower. The novelist, Ayn Rand made the case as bluntly as anyone ever has: "Reason is man's only source of knowledge and his basic tool of survival. Man is an end in himself – which means that each individual must live by his own mind and for his own sake." It is Gen 3 all over again. It is the Tower of Babel all over again. It’s Nebuchadnezzar pompously proclamation: “Is this not great Babylon that I have built” (Dan 4:30) all over again. It’s the nations raging in Psa 2:3, “Let us burst their bonds apart [from God]” all over again.” It’s the scientist Carl Sagan pontificating with absurd certainty: “The universe is all there is, was, or ever will be.” It’s the atheist Robert Ingersoll raging, “If there be a God, let Him strike me down in one minute” and at the end of that minute saying, “See there is no God,” as though God’s grace could be exhausted in one minute. It’s the longest running play in history – the deification of man. But it’s just as foolish now as it ever was. It didn’t work in Eden; it didn’t work in at Babel; it didn’t work in Babylon, it didn’t work in 1 st century Palestine and it won’t work in 21st century America. God’s reaction is what you would expect of One who omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent: Psa 2:4) He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.” If you fear the opinions of man more than God; if you desire men’s approval above God’s, please reconsider. The idea that man can pit himself against God and win is a delusion. Before you decide that science has proven God out of existence, stop and consider that the science books are rewritten every 10-20 years. God’s truth is the only truth that does not require constant revision. ABC’s evening news has an “American Strong” segment. After the marathon bombings Bostonians turned it into “Boston strong.” Great means of rallying and rebuilding a community. But society is radically mistaken in adopting a “Human strong” defiance of a God who graciously withholds instant judgment. John Piper says, “Instead of proclaiming strength should we not be acknowledging our human weakness apart from God. God-ignoring, God-minimizing, human-exalting, city-exalting, nation-exalting ideologies are evil. That's the main problem in America today: The absence of God in most spheres of life is perceived to be normal; even Christians feel it as normal – which is why absorbing the culture all around us and its priorities is so dangerous.” Human wisdom condemns itself in deifying man. 4 III. Devalues Christ Human wisdom always devalues Christ. These men rejected His word, His authority and His Person. Remember they were having this conversation because they rejected His parable about their acting like they owned their own lives. V. 19 tells us, “they perceived that he had told this parable against them.” They heard the word, knew it was for them and flat rejected it. That led to their devaluing His authority. Rather than submit to His warning, they decided to kill Him. It all comes down to that, doesn’t it? With Jesus it is either bow to His Lordship or join the crowd at the cross crying, “Crucify Him!” Jesus never left any middle ground. Worst of all they judged they were more clever than He. They thought they had asked a question He could not answer. If He said, “Pay Caesar,” He’d lose His following. If He said, “Don’t pay Caesar,” He would offend the Romans. Either way, they win; He loses. They used pretense and flattery “that they might catch him in something he said.” They were smart; they were educated; they were the elite of their day, but they erred badly in thinking they knew more than the Son of God. We will see next week how Jesus their whole ruse around against them in 30 seconds. How many times have we seen that? How could Jesus win against the world’s best time after time? How is it they could never get the better of Him? Because human wisdom is no match for God’s wisdom. Never has been; isn’t now and never will be. Never. But this little verbal exchange could fit very nicely into the 21 st century, couldn’t it? Human wisdom still thinks it can outwit God. Human wisdom still willingly and defiantly devalues the Son of God. Human wisdom still pits itself against the Word and Person and Authority of God in a battle that it can never win! But it never stops trying. The methods may change a little. Thus Dorothy Sayers points out that the people who killed Jesus never accused Him of being a bore. She says, “On the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him "meek and mild," and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious ladies.” She’s right. Human wisdom, in which much of the religious world is complicit, has reduced Jesus to a parody that we pull out now and then at funerals and other hard times for a bit of comfort while ignoring completely His own statement that His 5 followers are those who deny self, take up their cross daily and follow Him – daily! We’re smarter than Him – and dumber than ever. Because that’s where human wisdom leads. Conc – But, of course, it is not human wisdom that will win in the end. They put Jesus in a grave, but they could not keep Him there. In the end, God will not be denied. Paul brought it all right back to Christ in I Cor 1:23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” And if you want to see what that looks like in living color, you have only to look at Dan 2 where God gave a vision of a great image to Nebuchadnezzar representing all of human history. It accurately predicted the rise of Babylon, Media-Persia, Greece, Rome and a yet future Roman empire. These embodied all the best of human effort, intelligence, power and culture. But God describes the end in Dan 2:44-45: “44 And in the days of those kings (end time rulers) the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever, 45 just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand (Jesus Christ), and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold. A great God has made known to the king what shall be after this. The dream is certain, and its interpretation sure.” In other words, God wins! What that says, Beloved, is when it comes down to a contest between what your human reason tells you and what God has revealed to you, the only wise thing to do is to go with God. To put your wisdom and desires above God is to deify man, and that will always lead to disaster. Peace and eternal reward are on God’s side. A man stopped to watch a Little League baseball game. He asked one of the youngsters what the score was. The little fellow replied, "We're losing 18 to nothing." The man looked at him and said, "You don't look very discouraged." "Discouraged," said the little boy. "Why should we be discouraged? We haven't come to bat yet." If you’re thinking human wisdom – yours or others is better than God’s, keep this in mind – the game isn’t over; Jesus hasn’t returned yet; God hasn’t had His final at-bats. When He does, human wisdom has as much chance as Wile E. Coyote; you don’t want to be on that side. Let’s pray. 6 Song – The Solid Rock 7