The Two Builders
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Review of SM structure
Beatitudes (5:3-12)
The intro, colors entire SM
Blessed - favored by God, protected by Him, rescued, and promised His saving presence. Psalm 32 - “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the LORD counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.”
Seen in the content of the blessings - theirs is the kingdom of heaven, they shall inherit the earth, they shall be satisfied, they shall see God, great is your reward in heaven
The starting point is not goodness or strength, but humility, trust, need. Throughout the sermon, we have seen that true righteousness must be a gift, given to those who hunger for it.
Body (5:13-7:12)
framed in 5:17 and 7:12 with phrase “the Law and the Prophets”
Outlines the difference between those who are truly blessed and those who have no reward in heaven, will never enter the kingdom of heaven (5:20)
Christ did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them
Embodiment of the promises of God
Perfect obedience in our place (“you must be perfect”)
In his own teaching (note that Jesus is the Law-giver as well)
In contrast to the hypocritical teaching that lowered God’s standards into something that looked like righteousness on the outside but left the inside untouched, Jesus returned to the fact that the Law was first and foremost the story and standard of God’s covenant with Israel - v22 the Law-giver says “I say to you” (covenant with God), “his brother,” “be reconciled to your brother” - v24
Calls back to the fact that true acts of righteousness must be the fruit demonstrating what God has already done within - the false prophet produces false fruit because of what’s inside.
Chapter 6, warned, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.”
3 pillars of Jewish piety - giving to the poor, prayer, fasting
Call to live out the righteousness of Christ without seeking praise from others, but in order to bring praise to your Father
Chapter ends w/ the care and love of God the Father - and our need not to be anxious or to seek the things of the world, which your Father knows you need, but to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness
Chapter 7 - focuses on the theme of judgment - away from the judgment of condemnation and hypocrisy to the Good Judgment of discernment, discretion, and most importantly trust in your Father. Trust in the character of your Father - He loves to give good things to those who ask, so ask/seek/knock
7:12 - the Golden Rule - The Law & the Prophets.
Conclusion
2 Paths - Call to enter the Kingdom by faith in Jesus
2 Trees - Warning against false prophets, call to recognize them by fruit
2 Confessions - Warning against false faith, call to repent
2 Builders - Warning against the disaster/tragedy/folly of hearing & not doing
Q. How will we respond to Jesus’s words?
I. The Wise Builder (vv24-25)
I. The Wise Builder (vv24-25)
<<READ 24-25>>
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them.”
The parable is an application of the Sermon. There are 2 ways to respond to Jesus’s words - to hear and do them, or hear and not do them.
But every call to action in the Sermon on the Mount starts with utter dependence upon God. To let your light shine before men, you must first do what the poor in spirit do - you must come to the Lord in repentance and faith.
How do you do “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:20)? Must not respond to Jesus’s words by then attempting to be perfect in order to be accepted by the Father, as we’ve seen this puts us in the same place as the hypocrites. Instead, must come hungering & thirsting for righteousness, because they are promised they will be satisfied.
This is the starting point for the parable. Everyone who hears and does what the Lord Jesus says in SM will be this way.
The Likeness
What does Jesus means when He says “a wise man.” His wisdom is shown in his action - he builds the right way, in the right place
Elsewhere Jesus uses this word - Matt 25:1-13 - parable of the ten bridesmaids - five foolish, five wise. Wisdom shown in the fact that they were prepared for the return of the groom. Points to the return of Jesus - wisdom means we live this life knowing that there is an eternal destiny ahead of us. Living in the reality of Judgment
OT on wisdom
7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.
5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. 6 In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. 7 Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.
"The wise man” in v24 is someone who understands the implications of building his house in the right place.
Look at the Result in v25
The picture we get here is not just any ordinary storm, but the kind that changes everything.
ILLUST: We’ve got some friends in town from Illinois / Lord-willing, tomorrow will be taking them through Big Thompson Canyon to Estes Park. Those of you who have spent your lives in Colorado and old enough to remember 1976 will never forget the flood that devastated the canyon that year. A 20 foot wall of water destroyed everything in its path. The first time I went through the canyon, Bill and Jan Edwards pointed out the high water marks from the sequel in 2013.
WADIS: Many of the rivers in Israel are seasonal, drying out completely during the dry season and leaving behind sediment-filled valleys as dry as a bone. They call the river valleys wadis. In the rainy season, storms turn wadis from flat, dry pathways into rushing watercourses with frightening power and speed. This is a land of extremes - with baking sun and mighty tempests.
Jesus says the rain fell, the flood rose, the wind beat against the house, but the house did not fall, because it was founded on the rock.
II. The Foolish Builder (vv26-27)
II. The Foolish Builder (vv26-27)
The Man
But now, look at verses 26-27. Notice how similar the two halves of the parable are. This makes the differences all the more striking.
Both men hear. Both men build houses. The description of the storm is exactly the same. Only one thing is different, and it makes all the difference.
The house is in the wrong place.
The Likeness
Just like in Matthew 25 with the wise and foolish bridesmaids, foolish is not an insult on someone’s intelligence here, but a description of someone who has not planned for the most important thing. A bridesmaid who did not bring oil for her lamp has not stopped to consider what she’s about.
The foolish man’s behavior demonstrates that he thought only of the house itself, not of its purpose. A beautiful, uninhabitable house is not a great accomplishment for a builder.
Here, we should imagine a man standing on the shores of the Sea of Galilee or the beaches of the Mediterranean, admiring his new home, sitting on the sand. Or right in the wadi, in the flood plain.
The folly is plain on the face of it. And this is exactly the point. You may listen to Jesus’s words, and applaud, or shake your head and lament that so few people read their Bibles. You may even spend a lifetime studying these words. But if you do not do them, your house is in the wrong place.
The Result
The same storm hits, but verse 27 says that this house fell, “And great was the fall of it.”
Imagine with me that moment. From within your own house, you hear the pounding rain and the wind. The flash flood rumbles, and then roars as it bursts the riverbanks. But even over all of it, you hear the unmistakable crack of a house collapsing.
III. The Storm of Judgment
III. The Storm of Judgment
What are we supposed to make of it? Here is where Jesus’s introduction to the parable
Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has hearkened back to the Old Testament not as its interpreter, but as its author. The rabbis say this, and that, the Pharisees say this and that, “you have heard that it was said, but I say to you.” The authority of this Book, from start to finish, is that of God Himself.
It was the LORD who said to Israel in the Old Testament Law,
18 “You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.
The same God who breathed life into you and into me now says, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them is like this. Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them is like this.”
And Jesus, the Word made flesh, now reminds us of other parts of His Word:
Maybe you read this parable and your first thought is that the storm is sort of like the storms of life, that we all face.
But in Genesis chapter 6, when God looked and saw that all the intentions of the hearts of men were only evil continually, He judged the entire earth. The whole earth.
4 For in seven days I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.”
6 Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came upon the earth.
1 But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided.
The rain, and flood, and wind are more than any storm.
We said that to be blessed is to be favored by God, protected by Him, rescued, and promised His saving presence. And when the LORD had determined to flood the earth,
8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
Look elsewhere in the Old Testament. The Book of Judges tells the history of Israel in the land of Canaan, and the judges are God’s instruments by which He delivered Israel from their enemies and judged those who enslaved and oppressed God’s people.
In Judges 16, the judge Samson, blinded and chained, and reduced to a trophy in the Philistine temple to the false god Dagon was placed between the temple’s pillars. In his final act as Judge on behalf of Israel against the Philistines, the text says that he placed his right hand on one of the pillars, and his left on the other, and bowed with all his strength, and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people who were in it.
And in Ezekiel, the LORD revealed to the prophet the extent of the idolatry of Judah. Even after the Assyrians destroyed Israel as judgment for their unfaithfulness, and the Babylonians subdued and reduced the Kingdom of Judah to a puppet state, and deported the best and brightest to Babylon itself, instead of turning back to the LORD, God revealed to Ezekiel that the priests were worshiping idols in the very Temple of God, the men in the courtyards were worshiping the sun, the women were worshiping the false god Tammuz. And so, in chapter 13, the Lord said that because of the false prophets who claimed peace was coming and they had no need to repent, His judgment was coming like rain, and hailstones, and wind against a wall, and the wall would fall.
15 Thus will I spend my wrath upon the wall and upon those who have smeared it with whitewash, and I will say to you, The wall is no more, nor those who smeared it, 16 the prophets of Israel who prophesied concerning Jerusalem and saw visions of peace for her, when there was no peace, declares the Lord God.
So we return to the words of Jesus, and we see that this is no ordinary storm.
Last week, we saw that doing the Father’s will, and doing the words of Christ, cannot be a call to self-generated works of righteousness. The Pharisees and scribes tried that, and it just produced hypocrisy. That response to Jesus’s words will yield His judgment - as he says in verse 23, “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.”
Both houses faced the storm. But one stood, and the other fell. Everyone who hears the words of Jesus and does not do them, who does not come to the Father for His freely-offered blessing, for the Kingdom, for the freely-given righteousness of Jesus, everyone who does not listen to the words of Jesus and respond by doing them will never enter the Kingdom of heaven.
Everyone individually must come to the LORD in poverty of spirit, mourning for sin, trusting the goodness of the Father and longing for His righteousness, and putting our faith in Christ Jesus and His substitutionary, sin-bearing death on our behalf.
Here’s why: There is a reckoning that is coming. Jesus has made clear that He will not permit evil to progress unchecked forever.
The secular orthodoxy tells us that the world will continue for billions of years until the sun’s hydrogen core has been converted to helium, and its outer hydrogen-fusing shell expands to engulf the earth as a red giant. They tell us that even then, the universe will continue to expand at ever increasing rates, until eventually all stars have burned out and every black hole has evaporated, leaving nothing but an incomprehensibly giant, silent, frozen, tomb of a universe. There is no justice in that vision of the universe. There is no meaning, no true beauty, no hope.
But that is not the future for God’s universe. Stare into the cinders of a fire and marvel at God’s creativity, look at the wind rustle the leaves. Look into the face of a child and consider how, in eternity past, He knew that child, knew his every chromosome and lovingly awaited the day when you would get to see him for the first time. He chose to grace this world with stars too far away to see without massive telescopes, planned in advance that every civilization before ours would look up in any field and see the Milky Way and gasp in delight; and He is the one who planned that we would be the first generations to spend most of our lives in light-polluted areas where we would rarely or never see the Milky Way, and yet would also be the first to see the Horseshoe Nebula with any detail, the first to see the impossibly-distant galaxies of the Hubble Deep Field, and just last year, the very first photograph of the halo surrounding a black hole.
He seeded our lives with wonders beyond searching out. He put eternity into our hearts.
The One who created all this did not do it to see it fizzle out over a trillion trillion years. He intends to redeem this universe in the New Heavens and the New Earth, on that Day set when Jesus will return as Judge. Our response to Jesus’s words determines whether the storm will destroy or purify us.
Illustration: A well-built house as a place of solace & peace when the world is falling upon it. Quiet inside, crashing outside. One of the great sources of joy in the Christian life is how, after you weather a small storm, then a bigger one, then a devastating one, and the LORD brings you through, you start to see the proof of His wisdom. And can look toward the final storm, the Judgment, with confidence.
IV. Will We Weather the Storm? (7:28-8:1)
IV. Will We Weather the Storm? (7:28-8:1)
So look at verse 28 with me as we conclude: <<READ 28-8:1>>
How will we respond to His teaching? Will we recognize His authority and ooh and aw at His words, or will we do them?
As a church:
As individuals, will we put our faith in Christ Jesus as the crucified and risen Lord?
As saved people, Kingdom people, will we let the light that is in us shine before men? Will our fruit demonstrate what Christ has done in us?
Or as hypocrites, will we produce the poison fruit, the false righteousness that receives condemnation?
There is only one way to build upon the rock: We must do as He has said. We must receive what the Father gives for free. Here, at the Lord’s Table, we remember and proclaim the Gospel that gives true, eternal life. So let’s pray as the Communion Team comes forward. <<PRAY>>