The Politics of Jesus
The Politics of Jesus
Introduction: Let me start off this morning by saying that in the last few decades there has been a strong push to get pastors to influence their congregation’s political views from the pulpit. A friend of mine who is a new pastor got discouraged recently when a few members sent him a link to a program broadcast on a Christian radio station calling pastors who do not use their pulpits politically cowards. I find it interesting that many of the same people calling pastors out are wined and dined by the candidates and lobbyists who they are advocating for. This is not a left or a right phenomenon but one that is an area where there is unity across the aisle. My job as a pastor is to proclaim the Word of God and present you a Biblical perspective, to pray for you, to lead us in reaching the loss regardless of their political affiliation. I believe that you are plenty capable of applying Scripture and prayer as you vote and I believe that I would actually have very little influence over this area of most people’s lives even if I wanted to. However, go vote if you haven’t. Pray diligently before and after you do. So when you see a title of a message like this I want you to take a breath. We are going to look at an ariel view of politics in general and reflection, not necessarily on one election or another but on the topic as a whole. And let me say, as I watch the news on occasion, as I scroll on social media and see local politics, as I get texts or spam calls from this one or the other one, I have wished that I had Jesus’s cell phone or at least his email. I say this knowing that as a believer I can go to Jesus in prayer and he will speak to me but sometimes it is a lot of hard work to hear his voice and know what he wants. If I could sit on the couch with Jesus and say “what do you think about all of this it all seems kind of messed up.” Not just in presidential races but in all of it. Right, you vote for someone you think best represents you, sometimes not really feeling like anyone fully represents you. Things can still get complicated. If I had Christ’s email or cell phone I would shoot him a text that would ask the question Jesus what do you think about all of this political stuff?
Transition: Is that a fair question though? Should I expect Jesus who seemed to deal little with politics to give me an answer about politics? Did Jesus ever address politics? Can we even fairly compare Ancient Rome with the United States of America? I know a lot of guys will kind of work Scripture and kind of insert America in places, but is that fair to do? There are a lot of tough questions to wrestle with but we have to wrestle with them. To answer some of these questions we have to deal with the page in your Bible between Malachi and Matthew. Did you know that there are some 400 years between the last recorded events of the Old Testament and the first recorded events of the New Testament? While scripture was silent time moved on. So what happened during this time scholars refer to as the intertestamental period?
So let’s have a different kind of message this morning, let’s have a bit of a history lesson and then we will land on a main point here at the end. So don’t panic if a lot of this feels like an introduction, it’s not a three hour message, it’s a tour through history that will, I think, help us answer this question of what would Jesus think of all of this.
Intertestamental History
1. Well about fifty or sixty years after the events of Ezra and Nehemiah (which is chronologically the end of the OT) A guy named Alexander the Great entered the scene and conquered much of the known world. While he conquered Greece he loved their culture and wanted to spread it across the world.
2. While some of the Greek culture was great such as their philosophy, their view on government and their food they also had some very negative things in their society such as their philosophy which either advocated multiple gods or no gods at all. They held to very loose moral standards. Israel was conquered and many of their people accepted these views and tried to merge them with Judaism such as the Sadducees while others tried to maintain the purity of Judaism (the Pharisees). We will get to more of that in a minute.
3. Alexander the Great died and his four generals (who weren’t so great) took over various portions of their empire and it played out like a giant game of Risk where Israel eventually wound up under the reign of the Seleucid empire. Initially this is great because he let the Jews practice religion as they wanted unfortunately when a guy named Antiochus IV enters the scene he bans certain Jewish practices and sets up an altar to Zeus in the Jewish temple next to the altar to God (many scholars consider this the Abomination of Desolation that Daniel addresses in his book). Priests are expected to offer sacrifices to Greek gods and Yahweh. A man by the name of Matthias Maccabee decides not to do this and he begins what is known as the Maccabean rebellion. (While Protestants do not consider this to be scripture the Catholics include information on this in the Apocrypha it makes for interesting reading although I do not believe it is divinely inspired). During the rebellion Judas Maccabee leads the Jews to conquer many of their foes and establish an independent Jewish state. His brother Eleazar is such a mighty warrior that he rushes into battle with a sword and charges an elephant that one of the generals was seated upon. He stabbed the elephant in the belly, it fell on him and he died.
5. The free Jewish states prospers for a while but the religious leaders start to quarrel amongst themselves as to whether Israel is becoming too worldly. The Sadducees like everything Greek but the Pharisees not so much, they advocated a strict Jewish law that added things to the scriptures. This conflict creates a civil war and one side calls out to Rome to come and help. Rome who is rapidly becoming the most powerful nation in the world enters Israel and helps but never leaves.
6. Rome now considers Israel part of its kingdom. In response to this there are really four different kingdoms being campaigned for during the time of Jesus. So forget a two party system you have four different groups. Let’s take a look at these groups
7. The Pharisees actually held a lot in common with Christ. He built upon their understanding of a coming resurrection and afterlife. However they built such a strong law tradition that in their minds they were the only ones who could keep it, they had a sense of self-righteousness that alienated them from common Jews and messed up their pursuit of God. Although they ultimately pushed for the arrest of Jesus he fussed at them for their strict legalism but he also encouraged their search for God (John 3 with Nicodemus, Mark 12 the greatest law). Many would convert to Christianity after Christ died. They pushed for a purer Israel and wanted people to separate themselves from Roman culture.
8.The Sadducees were on the other side of the spectrum. They agreed that the OT purity laws need to be kept but they did not believe in an afterlife.(That’s why they were sad-you-see). They loved Greek philosophy and were more than willing to profit from Rome’s control of Israel. Their plan was to work Rome to benefit themselves. Jesus never has a positive encounter with a Sadducee.
9. The Zealots hated all things Roman and wanted to reclaim the free state at whatever cost necessary. Many expected Christ to join this group and advocate this sort of takeover. However, Christ really never speaks ill of Rome. He never directly challenges Rome. Some of his disciples belonged this group, some even hold that Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Christ was meant to initiate a political rebellion (although scripture tells us he was greedy, and certainly that greed played a role).
10. The Essenes are probably my favorite group. In response to Rome conquering Israel and the culture of the Jews becoming defiled these guys just left. They headed up into the mountains and ignored the world they lived in. They convinced themselves that the world was going to end and as a result they had little impact on the world around them. They took the nearly impossible law of the Pharisees and made it completely impossible. It was so ridiculous that from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday (Sabbath) you supposedly couldn’t go to the bathroom. Good luck with that. Christ respected their isolation and we have no record of him ever interacting with the Essenes.
11. Then there was Rome. Rome enjoyed their power and continued to expand their influence all over the world. Rome enjoyed the power they had, Roman emperors believed that they were gods and ruled the world. They often persecuted the people that they ruled over but despite that, Christ interacted favorably with them. He told the Jewish citizens that if a Roman soldier legally forced a citizen to carry their load for one mile do it for two. He healed the centurion’s servant and in the end the Roman guard who stood before the cross exclaimed upon the death of Christ that “surely this man was the son of God.”
Transition: I recently watched through an old television series called the West Wing, it’s an idealized version of the what it would be like to work in the White House. The show depicts fictitious candidates making decisions that impact the country and dealing with all the challenges that come with that position. What was interesting to me is that everyone who showed up at the White House had a plan, they wanted something for their plan. Usually, the result was them getting ahead and getting power. You know every political party during Jesus’s day had a plan, they were working toward something. Every group has plans some of which are honorable and some of which are not. But Jesus also had a plan. He was building his own kingdom. Not a physical one but a spiritual one. He wasn’t intimidated by the power of Rome because he knew one day Rome would no longer be ruler of the world. He wasn’t impressed by the Essene’s isolation because he knew they would come and go with little impact on the world in their day (however, the Dead Sea Scrolls have had quite the impact in our day). Christ didn’t buy into the plans of the Jewish Zealots because he knew that any kingdom built by man could be destroyed by the children of those who built it, as it had centuries before. The Sadducees’ fancy thinking didn’t challenge Jesus to loosen up and relax he had a plan that did not involve sucking up to Rome. Finally, the strict law of the Pharisees didn’t impress him because he knew their hearts. Any kingdom they built would collapse on itself.
Christ knew this and so should you:
Colossians 1:15-20
1. He was God, the God none had ever seen an image of before.
2. Everything was created with his knowledge and his blessing including Rome, the groups of priests and the Zealots.
3. Everything that existed was for him.
4. He was going to use everything in existence to bring people to a right standing with God through his death on the cross.
1. God used Alexander the Great to establish a common language throughout the known world so that by the time Jesus came his life could be recorded in one language and passed along so that any literate person could read it.
2. God used the four generals who came after Alexander to spread Jews throughout the known world bringing God’s word to many who had never heard it.
3. God used Rome to build roads that would allow the same Jews to travel to Jerusalem and hear of the work that Christ did on the cross.
4. God used the Essenes to record and preserve the Old Testament so that thousands of years later people would find these Dead Sea Scrolls and see that the word of God is trustworthy and has not been manipulated.
5. God used the Zealots to show that a physical kingdom made by man was not the answer they needed.
6. God used the Sadducees love of the Greek culture to teach the Jews of that day Greek so that they could read the recorded words about Christ’s life.
7. God used the Pharisees to show that no one could ever live up to God’s strict standards and the world needed someone to deal with sin and that someone was Jesus Christ, God in flesh.
They were all used by God and they didn’t even know it. That didn’t make it alright that they did things that they shouldn’t have but it did show that God was working through the kingdoms of the world to establish his kingdom.
Now let’s get back to our question that we asked at the beginning of the sermon.
What would Jesus say about the 2024 presidential election?
Closing: Jesus rarely provided people with the answers they expected. Often times he would turn around and answer their question with another question. Jesus when asked about paying taxes gave a straightforward answer, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s so in that we are challenged to give our country what it is owed. The answer is prayer, support, taxes, and participation in the electoral process. Government isn’t bad, it may do bad things at time but that’s because it’s ran by people and people are imperfect and do imperfect things. Guess what if you had to run the white house you would do some pretty dumb things, how do I know this because imagine the pressure involved in making decisions involving the lives of millions on a daily basis. A decision that creates 5,000 new jobs may inadvertently destroy 3,000 other jobs. A decision to let a starving kid come into the country may cause another child already here to starve. Those are some staggering decisions. They need our prayers and some of you children, youth, maybe even adults may be called to have a career in politics and if God calls you to it there is nothing wrong with that, it is honorable to seek to better your country. However, the answer I believed Jesus would have given based on Scripture would be this, a question.
Main Truth: Whose kingdom are you building?
-a kingdom for the thief who came to steal, kill and destroy or a savior who came that we might have life and have it more abundantly. If you chase after the world and its agendas you’ll build the first kingdom, not the second. Give what is owed, rise above, build in the right order.
Invitation
Introduction: Let me start off this morning by saying that in the last few decades there has been a strong push to get pastors to influence their congregation’s political views from the pulpit. A friend of mine who is a new pastor got discouraged recently when a few members sent him a link to a program broadcast on a Christian radio station calling pastors who do not use their pulpits politically cowards. I find it interesting that many of the same people calling pastors out are wined and dined by the candidates and lobbyists who they are advocating for. This is not a left or a right phenomenon but one that is an area where there is unity across the aisle. My job as a pastor is to proclaim the Word of God and present you a Biblical perspective, to pray for you, to lead us in reaching the loss regardless of their political affiliation. I believe that you are plenty capable of applying Scripture and prayer as you vote and I believe that I would actually have very little influence over this area of most people’s lives even if I wanted to. However, go vote if you haven’t. Pray diligently before and after you do. So when you see a title of a message like this I want you to take a breath. We are going to look at an ariel view of politics in general and reflection, not necessarily on one election or another but on the topic as a whole. And let me say, as I watch the news on occasion, as I scroll on social media and see local politics, as I get texts or spam calls from this one or the other one, I have wished that I had Jesus’s cell phone or at least his email. I say this knowing that as a believer I can go to Jesus in prayer and he will speak to me but sometimes it is a lot of hard work to hear his voice and know what he wants. If I could sit on the couch with Jesus and say “what do you think about all of this it all seems kind of messed up.” Not just in presidential races but in all of it. Right, you vote for someone you think best represents you, sometimes not really feeling like anyone fully represents you. Things can still get complicated. If I had Christ’s email or cell phone I would shoot him a text that would ask the question Jesus what do you think about all of this political stuff?
Transition: Is that a fair question though? Should I expect Jesus who seemed to deal little with politics to give me an answer about politics? Did Jesus ever address politics? Can we even fairly compare Ancient Rome with the United States of America? I know a lot of guys will kind of work Scripture and kind of insert America in places, but is that fair to do? There are a lot of tough questions to wrestle with but we have to wrestle with them. To answer some of these questions we have to deal with the page in your Bible between Malachi and Matthew. Did you know that there are some 400 years between the last recorded events of the Old Testament and the first recorded events of the New Testament? While scripture was silent time moved on. So what happened during this time scholars refer to as the intertestamental period?
So let’s have a different kind of message this morning, let’s have a bit of a history lesson and then we will land on a main point here at the end. So don’t panic if a lot of this feels like an introduction, it’s not a three hour message, it’s a tour through history that will, I think, help us answer this question of what would Jesus think of all of this.
Intertestamental History
1. Well about fifty or sixty years after the events of Ezra and Nehemiah (which is chronologically the end of the OT) A guy named Alexander the Great entered the scene and conquered much of the known world. While he conquered Greece he loved their culture and wanted to spread it across the world.
2. While some of the Greek culture was great such as their philosophy, their view on government and their food they also had some very negative things in their society such as their philosophy which either advocated multiple gods or no gods at all. They held to very loose moral standards. Israel was conquered and many of their people accepted these views and tried to merge them with Judaism such as the Sadducees while others tried to maintain the purity of Judaism (the Pharisees). We will get to more of that in a minute.
3. Alexander the Great died and his four generals (who weren’t so great) took over various portions of their empire and it played out like a giant game of Risk where Israel eventually wound up under the reign of the Seleucid empire. Initially this is great because he let the Jews practice religion as they wanted unfortunately when a guy named Antiochus IV enters the scene he bans certain Jewish practices and sets up an altar to Zeus in the Jewish temple next to the altar to God (many scholars consider this the Abomination of Desolation that Daniel addresses in his book). Priests are expected to offer sacrifices to Greek gods and Yahweh. A man by the name of Matthias Maccabee decides not to do this and he begins what is known as the Maccabean rebellion. (While Protestants do not consider this to be scripture the Catholics include information on this in the Apocrypha it makes for interesting reading although I do not believe it is divinely inspired). During the rebellion Judas Maccabee leads the Jews to conquer many of their foes and establish an independent Jewish state. His brother Eleazar is such a mighty warrior that he rushes into battle with a sword and charges an elephant that one of the generals was seated upon. He stabbed the elephant in the belly, it fell on him and he died.
5. The free Jewish states prospers for a while but the religious leaders start to quarrel amongst themselves as to whether Israel is becoming too worldly. The Sadducees like everything Greek but the Pharisees not so much, they advocated a strict Jewish law that added things to the scriptures. This conflict creates a civil war and one side calls out to Rome to come and help. Rome who is rapidly becoming the most powerful nation in the world enters Israel and helps but never leaves.
6. Rome now considers Israel part of its kingdom. In response to this there are really four different kingdoms being campaigned for during the time of Jesus. So forget a two party system you have four different groups. Let’s take a look at these groups
7. The Pharisees actually held a lot in common with Christ. He built upon their understanding of a coming resurrection and afterlife. However they built such a strong law tradition that in their minds they were the only ones who could keep it, they had a sense of self-righteousness that alienated them from common Jews and messed up their pursuit of God. Although they ultimately pushed for the arrest of Jesus he fussed at them for their strict legalism but he also encouraged their search for God (John 3 with Nicodemus, Mark 12 the greatest law). Many would convert to Christianity after Christ died. They pushed for a purer Israel and wanted people to separate themselves from Roman culture.
8.The Sadducees were on the other side of the spectrum. They agreed that the OT purity laws need to be kept but they did not believe in an afterlife.(That’s why they were sad-you-see). They loved Greek philosophy and were more than willing to profit from Rome’s control of Israel. Their plan was to work Rome to benefit themselves. Jesus never has a positive encounter with a Sadducee.
9. The Zealots hated all things Roman and wanted to reclaim the free state at whatever cost necessary. Many expected Christ to join this group and advocate this sort of takeover. However, Christ really never speaks ill of Rome. He never directly challenges Rome. Some of his disciples belonged this group, some even hold that Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Christ was meant to initiate a political rebellion (although scripture tells us he was greedy, and certainly that greed played a role).
10. The Essenes are probably my favorite group. In response to Rome conquering Israel and the culture of the Jews becoming defiled these guys just left. They headed up into the mountains and ignored the world they lived in. They convinced themselves that the world was going to end and as a result they had little impact on the world around them. They took the nearly impossible law of the Pharisees and made it completely impossible. It was so ridiculous that from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday (Sabbath) you supposedly couldn’t go to the bathroom. Good luck with that. Christ respected their isolation and we have no record of him ever interacting with the Essenes.
11. Then there was Rome. Rome enjoyed their power and continued to expand their influence all over the world. Rome enjoyed the power they had, Roman emperors believed that they were gods and ruled the world. They often persecuted the people that they ruled over but despite that, Christ interacted favorably with them. He told the Jewish citizens that if a Roman soldier legally forced a citizen to carry their load for one mile do it for two. He healed the centurion’s servant and in the end the Roman guard who stood before the cross exclaimed upon the death of Christ that “surely this man was the son of God.”
Transition: I recently watched through an old television series called the West Wing, it’s an idealized version of the what it would be like to work in the White House. The show depicts fictitious candidates making decisions that impact the country and dealing with all the challenges that come with that position. What was interesting to me is that everyone who showed up at the White House had a plan, they wanted something for their plan. Usually, the result was them getting ahead and getting power. You know every political party during Jesus’s day had a plan, they were working toward something. Every group has plans some of which are honorable and some of which are not. But Jesus also had a plan. He was building his own kingdom. Not a physical one but a spiritual one. He wasn’t intimidated by the power of Rome because he knew one day Rome would no longer be ruler of the world. He wasn’t impressed by the Essene’s isolation because he knew they would come and go with little impact on the world in their day (however, the Dead Sea Scrolls have had quite the impact in our day). Christ didn’t buy into the plans of the Jewish Zealots because he knew that any kingdom built by man could be destroyed by the children of those who built it, as it had centuries before. The Sadducees’ fancy thinking didn’t challenge Jesus to loosen up and relax he had a plan that did not involve sucking up to Rome. Finally, the strict law of the Pharisees didn’t impress him because he knew their hearts. Any kingdom they built would collapse on itself.
Christ knew this and so should you:
Colossians 1:15-20
1. He was God, the God none had ever seen an image of before.
2. Everything was created with his knowledge and his blessing including Rome, the groups of priests and the Zealots.
3. Everything that existed was for him.
4. He was going to use everything in existence to bring people to a right standing with God through his death on the cross.
1. God used Alexander the Great to establish a common language throughout the known world so that by the time Jesus came his life could be recorded in one language and passed along so that any literate person could read it.
2. God used the four generals who came after Alexander to spread Jews throughout the known world bringing God’s word to many who had never heard it.
3. God used Rome to build roads that would allow the same Jews to travel to Jerusalem and hear of the work that Christ did on the cross.
4. God used the Essenes to record and preserve the Old Testament so that thousands of years later people would find these Dead Sea Scrolls and see that the word of God is trustworthy and has not been manipulated.
5. God used the Zealots to show that a physical kingdom made by man was not the answer they needed.
6. God used the Sadducees love of the Greek culture to teach the Jews of that day Greek so that they could read the recorded words about Christ’s life.
7. God used the Pharisees to show that no one could ever live up to God’s strict standards and the world needed someone to deal with sin and that someone was Jesus Christ, God in flesh.
They were all used by God and they didn’t even know it. That didn’t make it alright that they did things that they shouldn’t have but it did show that God was working through the kingdoms of the world to establish his kingdom.
Now let’s get back to our question that we asked at the beginning of the sermon.
What would Jesus say about the 2024 presidential election?
Closing: Jesus rarely provided people with the answers they expected. Often times he would turn around and answer their question with another question. Jesus when asked about paying taxes gave a straightforward answer, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s so in that we are challenged to give our country what it is owed. The answer is prayer, support, taxes, and participation in the electoral process. Government isn’t bad, it may do bad things at time but that’s because it’s ran by people and people are imperfect and do imperfect things. Guess what if you had to run the white house you would do some pretty dumb things, how do I know this because imagine the pressure involved in making decisions involving the lives of millions on a daily basis. A decision that creates 5,000 new jobs may inadvertently destroy 3,000 other jobs. A decision to let a starving kid come into the country may cause another child already here to starve. Those are some staggering decisions. They need our prayers and some of you children, youth, maybe even adults may be called to have a career in politics and if God calls you to it there is nothing wrong with that, it is honorable to seek to better your country. However, the answer I believed Jesus would have given based on Scripture would be this, a question.
Main Truth: Whose kingdom are you building?
-a kingdom for the thief who came to steal, kill and destroy or a savior who came that we might have life and have it more abundantly. If you chase after the world and its agendas you’ll build the first kingdom, not the second. Give what is owed, rise above, build in the right order.
Invitation
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