Address to Whom?

Matthew 12: 43-45

“ When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none. ⁴⁴ Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. ⁴⁵ Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first. So shall it also be with this wicked generation.”

To whom is Jesus addressing this, and the answer is any and all evil and adulterous generations.  What signs should we look for to make sure that we are not the generation Jesus is addressing?  First and foremost, the sign of unbelief in the Scriptures, in the promises and the warnings, in the commands and the teaching, that are found in God’s Word.  The Scriptures are very clear about spiritual adultery, let us begin with the book of Judges 2:16-17, “Then the Lord raised up judges, who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them.  Yet they did not listen to their judges, for they whored after other gods and bowed down to them.  They soon turned aside from the way in which their fathers had walked, who had obeyed the commandments of the Lord, and they did not do so.”  If for some reason you forgot that one of God’s names is “Jealous” then look at 1   Chronicles 5:25, “But they broke faith with the God of their fathers, and whored after the gods of the people of the land, whom God had destroyed before them.”

So what happens to such a people?  God allows them for a while to bask in the pleasure of these little gods, but then comes judgment.  As you look at the nation that you live in what do you see, a turning to the gods of foolishness, the gods of greed, the gods of selfishness, the gods of pleasure, and away from the God of Creation, if so, are you experiencing judgment? 

I live in such a nation and we are experiencing God’s Judgment, in that He is allowing us to destroy all that made the United States of America a great nation.  If I began to list the tearing down of the foundation of this country in my lifetime, the list would be far too long.  Is there hope?  Yes, but it lies in the people who are followers of Christ, not in our President, or in what party is in control of the Congress.

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice

I'll be with you in a tick.

Matthew 12:38-42

It is totally impossible for anyone to understand God, or to say, if I was God I would do such and such, and here is the simple reason why, you cannot conceive of the heart of God.  You might dream of a time without sin, a time of being able to walk on planet earth without lust, greed, hate, or selfishness, but that time happened, and guess what man blew it.  So God chose Abram, who later became Abraham, who fathered a nation, a people that would follow the Lord’s commandments, but that also did not work.  Then God sent prophets and judges, and even kings to lead the people and that did not work.  And in the end times God sent His Son, His only Son, to be born of a virgin named Mary.  The Gospel according to John gives this account of what the actions of man were toward the Son of God.  “The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (John 1:9-13)

Now the clock is ticking down, and yet no one but God knows the date or the hour, but we have been given insight into the signs of the close of the age and the soon return of our Savior the Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, in Matthew 24.  As I study and look in the Scriptures, I believe we are in the generation Jesus calls an evil and adulterous generation seeking for a sign.  And Jesus gives us examples of things to look for: “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are but the beginning of the birth pains.” (Matthew 24:6-8)

I’m not sure, but it seems like we are into the birth pains; famines and earthquakes and wars and rumors of wars, this world is in a mess.  And yet we, like the scribes and Pharisees, are asking for more information, and Jesus is telling us that none will be given.  This was Jesus’ answer to them and to us: “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.  For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.  The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.” (Matthew 12:39-42)

The statement that keeps coming into my mind is; it’s time to act and live life as if Jesus tells the truth, anything less is rebellion.

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice 

Outward Appearances

Matthew 12:33-37

A Tree is known by its Fruit

“Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.  The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil.  I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Words of Jesus)

I’ve come to the conclusion that a good tree planted in bad soil will not give you the results that you expected, that is unless you know what to feed the tree.  The Spirit of God has been giving me lessons in 1 Samuel 16:7, But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him.  For the Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” 

The world you and I live in is totally built on outward appearances, and if you do not believe so, take inventory not of your neighbors appearance, not of his kids, not of his stuff, not what he says or does, but look in your mirror, and this is what you will see; you have fallen into the pattern of this world.  Do you remember when Bill Clinton’s chief campaign adviser, James Carville, insisted that money was the only issue, and came up with the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid” I’ve always confessed that ignorance is a big problem in my life.  So let me be so bold to state; “It is the heart, stupid,” the character, the integrity, not your looks, not your skill set, not your athletic ability, or your wealth.  And yet most of us, who go by the name of Christian, are wowed not by the heart but the outward appearance.

I confessed to the Lord this morning, I have a heart problem, I judge myself and others on the outward appearance, and yet often my judgment is tied to my values, my desires, and my words are often many and careless.  It comes back to not your performance, not what someone else says about you, but what is in your heart.  Now we are not talking about a hunk of muscle that beats 28 million tines in a year, and mine has now gone over the 2.5 billion beats, no we are referring to our intellect, our emotions, our will. 

Jesus made clear what defiles a person and yet the disciples did not understand, so Jesus said; “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.)   And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him.  For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.  All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

It comes down to one thing, “Do you believe Jesus tells the truth, and if the answer is in the affirmative, how is your heart?

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice

A Miracle is?

Matthew 12:22-32

A miracle is: What is your definition of a miracle?  For many it is the birth of a child, but can birth be explained, or a loved one cured from the worst kind of cancer and it is a miracle but often it is the medicine and treatment that gets the credit.  So what is a miracle: a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency: the miracle of rising from the grave. (The Dictionary)

Jesus is in a lot of trouble with the Pharisees for healing a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath, but those who are following him, and the number is growing each day, are being healed and we have this account by Matthew in chapter 12:22-24, “Then a demon-oppressed man who was blind and mute was brought to him, and he healed him, so that the man spoke and saw. And all the people were amazed, and said, “Can this be the Son of David?” But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, “It is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons.”

Why would the people asking this question, “Can this be the Son of David?” put the Pharisees in such a rage?  In the book of Isaiah 9:2-7, it is written the Messiah would be a descendant of King David, so when the people began to ask if Jesus was the Son of David, it put the Pharisees in a frenzy.  When it comes to Beelzebul that name is tied to the worship of Baal, and because there is only one God, Yahweh, all other worship of images was demonic spirits.  And in that Satan is the leader of demonic spirits the name became an alternate name for Satan.

It seems as if the Pharisees would have learned after a few encounters with Jesus that He was going to make them look as stupid as they were, but I will let you decide, this is the encounter.  Knowing their thoughts, he said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.  And if Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself.  How then will his kingdom stand? And if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out?  Therefore they will be your judges.  But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” (Matthew 12:25-28)

I once had a man tell me Jesus never claimed to be God in the Scriptures, I must say a statement like that can only be made by someone who has never read the Bible.  Here Jesus is saying check your facts, because “if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast our demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.”  I bet they just wanted Jesus to leave the room, but He was not through with them.  “Or how can someone enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house. Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.  And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.” (Matthew 12:29-32)

Jesus has always given us a choice, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.”  But God will not allow anyone to say that His Son is casting out demons by the power of Satan, those who do so will not be forgiven, for they were rejecting God’s gift of Salvation.

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice

I was informed about Jesus

Matthew 12:15-21

If you are a follower of Christ, why are you following Him?  That’s a question each of us should address, and I did not say if you are a teacher, a priest, a pastor, nor did I address the pew sitter, but a follower of Christ.  I’ve discovered in my own life that you can be any of the above and not be a follower of Christ.  So let’s look at why these people that Matthew describes as “many” were following Christ.

They were not followers at the beginning in the same way you and I were not followers of Christ, they were observers, and what did they observe, the healing of the man with a withered hand.  And as Matthew has stated, it was done in the synagogue on the Sabbath, and it did not please the keeper of the rules and tradition, in fact, they wanted to destroy him.  You may be thinking, but if Jesus were alive on planet earth today that would not be the case, how wrong your thinker would be.  I’ve watched Jesus live out His life in many a person, one is James Dobson the founder of “Focus on the Family,” that went from a two-person operation to a worldwide ministry.  I watched this man, a follower of Christ, stand for the family, for God, and he moved to the number 1 most hated man in America by the left, and if your asking why, because he was willing to follow the leadership of Jesus in a culture where both Christians and politicians had lost their spiritual backbone.

Now picking up Matthew’s account, “Jesus, aware of this, withdrew from there. And many followed him, and he healed them all and ordered them not to make him known. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: “Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased.

I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.  He will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets; a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench, until he brings justice to victory; and in his name the Gentiles will hope.”

Why did they follow Jesus?  For many reasons, but one that stands out is He had preformed an act of healing that was amazing, and of the many that followed Him, some of them were also in need of a healer.  So why have I become His follower: in Him I’ve found redemption, the only person who knows all about me, my thoughts, as well as my actions, and still loves me.  As a child and up into my late twenty’s, I was informed about Him, and if ask by anyone I would have said, I believed in both the Father and the Son, and yet it was more religion, I had no history, no understanding, that I could know Him personally like a friend.  I am so thankful for my barber who invited me to attend a Wednesday Bible study with four other guys.  Something had happened in his life that bothered me, my Barber was not a church kind of guy, my barber was a hell raiser, a man’s man, but he had changed right before my eyes and I wondered, why would he go to a Bible study?  For six months I attended that Bible Study, and I learned that if I, by faith in Jesus, would receive His grace invitation, that Jesus Christ would take up residence in my soul. 

I’m a deal maker, it’s the salesman in me, and for most of six months I made conditional deals with God, my conditions not His.  One night at about 10 pm in a hotel in Victoria, Texas, after coming from a bar, I opened the Bible in the drawer and it opened to Romans 10 and when I got to verse 9, I by faith confessed with my mouth that Jesus is Lord and believed in my heart that God the Father raised Him from the dead, and I was saved, “Born again,” experienced redemption, became a new creation in Christ, but I did not become a follower for many years.  I cannot share the time or the date that I began to believe and to act like Jesus tells the truth, but it happened when I began a search for the truth.  And Jesus said; “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice

Religious Conflicts

Matthew 12:9-14

Does your religion conflict with your kindness and acts of mercy?  Most of you would state infallibly no, but would you be right?  Jesus encountered religious leaders that were looking for any excuse to destroy Him.  Now these guys could drag a good Catholic or Baptist in their dust in preforming religious acts.  If you went to church each morning to ask for blessing, they would do more, for they needed to be seen doing religious acts.

Could it be that the Pharisees had a form of religion with themselves at the center, could it be that they could explain and totally understand all the acts of God?  But a god that can be explained by the created must use the materials of the Creator to explain that god, and that god takes on the character of the ones who formed it.  That is not the God of Abraham; in fact, a god that can be explained and understood is always centered in the minds of a religion.  I have always found that a religious zealot believes that their actions are right and just, and anyone outside of their group is wrong.  Blaise Pascal gave us this insight: “There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.”

Do you remember the account of Jesus going into the synagogue and a man was there with a withered hand?  The religious leaders asked Jesus if it was lawful to heal on the Sabbath?  Now they were not seeking truth, their end game was the end game of all religious people, to confront, accuse and to destroy any who oppose their tradition or rules.  Jesus was such a person and this was His reply to their question: “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” And the man stretched it out, and it was restored, healthy like the other. But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him.” (Matthew 12:11-14)

This writer, until the age of 27, lived in rebellion against authority, and yet believed in God and Jesus Christ, and when I read Scott Stapp’s quote, I understand that others have also walked that road.  “I always believed in God and Christ, but I was in rebellion – trying to make my relationship with God fit into my life instead of making my life fit in with him.  I was stubborn.” (Scott Stapp)   In closing this paper, let me once more quote Blaise Pascal, “Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.”  The closer I get to God, the more I see my own wretchedness, or as Blaise Pascal would state: “Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.”

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice

To break Traditions = a real Mess

Matthew 12:1-8

“At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath.  His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat.  But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.”

From heavens view, if a man steals to feed his family or because he is hungry, that is not good and he must repay, but if a man steals because he is a thief, then the penalty is much greater.  So is what Jesus’ disciples are doing theft?  Let’s look at the book of Deuteronomy 23:25, “If you enter your neighbor’s grain field, you may pick kernels with your hands, but you must not put a sickle to his standing grain.”  What’s the problem, it is not the eating of someone else’s grain, but the picking of it on the Sabbath.

“Work was prohibited on the Sabbath, and it seems that the First-century rabbis divided work into 39 categories, each having many subcategories.  Three prohibited categories were picking, threshing, and winnowing.  The disciples picked grain and rubbed it between their hands to remove the husks and thus broke the highly restrictive rabbinic law on three different counts.” (HC Study Bible page 1633)

Jesus brings up to the Pharisees the account in 1Samuel 21:1-6 where David and his men were on the run from King Saul and being hungry, they went to Ahimelech the priest at Nob, and asked for bread.  As we listen to Jesus we understand that He taught the Sabbath law was overridden by genuine human need.  He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.” (Matthew 12:3-8)

Traditions and religion go hand and hand, and if someone dares to break them, they have stepped into a real mess.  In the Gospel according to Mark, we have the encounter with Jesus and the keepers of tradition, the Pharisees and scribes, Mark 7:5-8.   “And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”  Does this shed some light on why religion hates Jesus and those who are willing to stand and speak the truth in love?  It was not fun to go one on one with your Creator, not then or now.

If only the Pharisees had been open to listening to Jesus they would have understood what defiles a person, listen to Jesus telling the people, then and now.  “And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice