Jesus Judges Religion (Matthew 23.1-12)

Even in our secular Age religion is still alive and well. And there are some aspects of religion that even the secular world admires and praises. I was reminded of this recently when Pope Francis was named by Time magazine as the Person of the Year for 2013 – mostly because of his compassion for the poor and his willingness to seek change within the Catholic Church. So even the secular world admires religious people who take a stand on those issues deemed important by today’s cultural elites.

Jesus was born into a religious culture that would make us seem pagan by comparison. Most of the things that Jesus taught were said to people who were deeply religious, having been formed not only by the Law of Moses, but by an organized and formalized system of traditions. The infamous Pharisees represent one tributary of this religious stream, the fountainhead of which could be traced back to the time between the Old and New Testaments.

And Jesus found this religious system with all of its traditions to be a complete corruption of the Word of God that had originally come to Israel through Moses. You will soon discover, from even a brief exposure to Scripture, that what impresses men and what pleases God are not one and the same.

The official religious establishment of the nation of Israel did not love or even know the God of Israel at all and were using their religion entirely for self-aggrandizement. The religious elites were emphasizing only what was convenient for them or what made them look good in the eyes of the people instead of actually doing the things that really mattered to God that He had commanded in the Law.

These religious leaders of Israel had become proud and self-righteous and were completely alienated from the God they claimed to worship. Jesus is showing His disciples how to avoid the folly of these religious men, which was leading them directly to Hell.

If we examine the larger context of Matthew 23 we begin to see that our text is actually part of a long section devoted to Jesus pronouncing judgment and condemnation on the religious establishment of Israel at that time. It is difficult for Americans to understand the context in which Jesus spoke these words of judgment. We don’t take religion seriously. The Jews took their religion very seriously, enough so to want Jesus dead when He did not endorse the system.

Jesus could not endorse Judaism as it had developed because the religious leaders had corrupted the original Law of Moses by adding to it a layer of traditions and Rabbinical interpretation and commentary. Jesus made it clear what He thought of these additions. He told them that they had nullified the Word of God for the sake of their traditions (Mark 7.1-13).

Jesus’ final condemnation of the Jewish religious establishment began when He came into the city of Jerusalem for the final time – an event Christians call The Triumphal Entry (Matthew 21.1-11). But Jesus’ first order of business in Jerusalem was to clean out the Temple (Matthew 21.12-17). This bold act was a picture of God’s judgment on that corrupt, religious system. This event was immediately followed by Jesus cursing a fig tree outside of Jerusalem because the tree had no fruit. This was yet another picture of God’s judgment on the religious system of the Jews. God was looking for spiritual fruit and He had found nothing but leaves (Matt. 21.18-22).

You can probably anticipate what happened next. Jesus was attacked by the religious leaders who were seeking to trap Him and discredit Him by something He might say (21.23-27; 45-46; 22.15-39). Several different groups of religious leaders, representing the various parties in that system, all try to trap Jesus with what they thought were tricky issues and difficult questions. Nothing works and Jesus counter-attacks, speaking in parables about the religious leaders and their rejection of God, God’s Kingdom, and God’s messengers. Jesus also asks them a question that they cannot answer, concerning the true identity of the Christ, and thereby silences them for good (21.28-32; 33-44; 22.1-14; 41-46).

Jesus then turns to instruct His disciples about the danger of following in the footsteps of these corrupt religious leaders. This diatribe against the religious leaders of Israel included a series of seven woes, or warnings of impending doom (23.13-36).

Israel actually had a history of rejecting God’s messengers that He sent to them, and now they were even rejecting the Son of God Himself (Matthew 23.34-36). And Jesus laments the sad, spiritual state of Jerusalem and foretells its destruction (Matthew 23.37-39; 24.1-2).

Jesus’ words in this section should in no way be taken to be a condemnation of all the Jewish people everywhere and for all times. Jesus’ words are directed at the religious leaders of that particular generation. Not all of the Jews rejected Jesus and God has certainly not written off the Jewish people and replaced them with the Church (See Romans 9-11).

One important lesson we learn from this entire section is that there is perhaps no sin that arouses God’s wrath like religious hypocrisy! The Church needs to take this to heart, and that is probably why this section of Scripture was preserved for us. We should not think we are safe from God’s wrath if we transgress like the religious leaders of Israel.

Lurking behind the scenes were the secret plots of the Jewish leaders to murder Jesus (Matthew 26.1-5). It is a little disturbing to see that the people who wanted Jesus dead were the most religious people! Why was this the case? Should they have not been the first to recognize and welcome the Christ? But Jesus was a threat to their power and position. They were simply jealous of Jesus, His power, and His popularity with the people who flocked to hear Him. Pilate knew the Jews were wanting to get rid of Jesus out of envy (Matthew 27.18). Remember that these men claimed to be close to God and to represent Him, but they hated the Son of God!

Their true feelings about God were exposed by Jesus, the Light of the World, just as light exposes what is hidden in the darkness (John 3.19-21). Their hatred of Jesus shows that even though they knew about the true God and were experts in His Word, they did not really love or know the living God (John 5.37-47).

Of course we love to read these passages about Jesus versus the Pharisees because we always put ourselves on Jesus’ side against the Pharisees. If we had been alive back then we would have been on the right side, no doubts at all! In other words, we all assume our moral superiority. But if moral superiority had anything to do with entering the Kingdom of God, then the Pharisees certainly would have entered in and would probably easily beat out all of us by comparison.

So we can easily miss the whole point of this passage, which is not to condemn the Pharisees (Jesus already did that for us) but to look at our own hearts and make sure there is nothing there resembling what Jesus condemned here in this passage.

Jesus stands firmly planted in the prophetic tradition and sounds very much like Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Amos in this passage. These prophets also warned Israel about God’s wrath against them because of their religious hypocrisy.

We should take note of what makes God angry. Jesus got angry with the religious leaders. Jesus did not get angry with the Samaritan woman who had five husbands and was with a man who was not her husband. Jesus did not get mad at the woman caught in the very act of adultery. The prostitutes, tax collectors, and other sinners were entering the Kingdom of God ahead of these religious leaders because those who know they are sinners are ready for a Savior. From this viewpoint the worst possible sin, the sin that makes you irredeemable, is pride and self-righteousness.

Religious sin is much more serious than the sins of the flesh.

What God really wants from us is honesty and truthfulness instead of pretense. Our righteousness must exceed the scribes and Pharisees (Matt 5.20). It was God’s intention to make a New Covenant and write His law on our hearts (See Jer. 31.31-34).

This is why Jesus told a Pharisee that “unless you are born again you cannot see the Kingdom of God” (John 3.3-5). What is needed is the total renovation of the human heart.

We must remember as we read the Gospels that when we see and hear Jesus we are seeing and hearing God. Jesus is God in human flesh and so when Jesus speaks, acts, or reacts, we are seeing the nature of God displayed through a human being. The incarnation is what separates Christian faith from all other philosophies or religions out there in the world. The God revealed in Christ is up- close and personal. Perhaps too close for our comfort sometimes!

In Jesus’ condemnation of the religious system of the Jews we are seeing something about God. Obviously we see something about God’s wrath here. Wrath is God’s righteous indignation. God is opposed to evil and sin and to anything that is at variance with His own nature. God is never neutral about evil, and we should be glad that He is not a passive observer.

But we also see in Jesus the compassion of God, even here in this text that thunders forth in judgment. After Jesus has pronounced doom on the religious system in Jerusalem, He then breaks down and laments the awful fate of the city, or people, that God loved.

Compassion is a feeling – the original Greek word literally means to feel something in your guts – of pity and of sorrow for someone who is hurting or who is in dire straits. The Gospels are constantly showing the compassion of Jesus, particularly for those who were sick, and also for those who were lost like sheep without a shepherd. The attributes of wrath and compassion both belong to God’s nature, without being at conflict with each other or canceling each other out.

If we are to add wrath and compassion what we get is jealousy. God is a jealous God! This was one of the primary revelations of the Law of Moses. God is jealous for His covenant people and He becomes filled with both wrath and compassion when His people turn away from Him to other lovers. Wrath, you see, is not the opposite of love. The opposite of love is indifference. Love does not equal tolerance.

This is what many people today who object to God’s wrath or jealousy fail to understand. I know that the idea of jealousy makes many people uncomfortable because they think of God as some kind of selfish, manipulative man who just wants to control. But God is not a man. God is the Creator and He has the right to lay claim on His creatures and their affections.

God is not being selfish because we can add nothing to Him – He doesn’t need us. But we need Him. His love is our highest good and when we reject Him we are choosing death. And God does not want us to die. He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. He sets before us life and death and He pleads with us to choose life!

God often compared Himself to a husband who was jealous for His wife. But Israel was unfaithful to her Husband and broke the covenant – just like Hosea’s wife. God loved Israel but they ran away after other lovers. Is God not supposed to be moved by this unfaithfulness?

I am not sure that people really want God to love them. I think what they really want is for God to leave them alone. But Love cannot leave us alone. The Lover pursues the Beloved. I have a certain jealousy for my wife because I love her and I want her to be with me and love me back. The marriage covenant is a picture of God and His people. When we invest in a relationship we expect something in return and God is no different. God’s wrath is not because God hates His people, but precisely because He loves them and seeks their highest good. And He is filled with compassion, or grief, when they reject Him and die as a result.

The nature of God is the engine that powers salvation. In salvation we see both wrath and compassion. There are numerous examples of this in Scripture. We see it at the very beginning after the man and his wife had sinned and stood before the Lord. They were made to face their sin and were kept from the Tree of Life and cast out of Eden. Yet God made coverings for them and gave them a promise that the serpent’s head would eventually be bruised.

Later God was grieved in His heart, a feeling of compassion, because of the wickedness of mankind. He determined to destroy mankind, an expression of wrath, yet Noah found grace and the human race was not exterminated. God came down to confuse the language of those building Babel, yet immediately after He scattered the people He called Abram out of Ur and gave Him a promise of blessing for the world. The ultimate meeting of God’s wrath and compassion was seen in the Cross and in God providing atonement, or a covering, for sinners. Without God’s wrath and compassion there would be no salvation for us.

Those who want to remove God’s wrath are actually making God less loving, not more loving. God’s love is what moved Him to provide a propitiation for His wrath. Unless we accept the Biblical revelation of God we are in constant danger of creating a god in our own image – either a god who is soft and tolerant or a god who is harsh and angry.

But God is making a people for Himself who know Him and who reflect His own character. We are meant to feel what God feels – both wrath and compassion. In other words, we are to be like Jesus. When Jesus looked at Jerusalem and that religious system He felt both wrath and compassion and we should also have this complex response to the sin and error of people. Sometimes I think we are too simple and only have one gear in our emotional transmission. We feel either wrath or compassion, but not both at the same time. We get out of balance.

Some of you feel nothing but compassion for people, and because of this you are too soft. You tolerate too much and you fail to say the hard words that must be said. Some of you are all wrath and anger. You are like the prophet Jonah who wanted nothing more than to see the people of Ninevah fried to a crisp! Instead of being like Jonah we should be like the Apostle Paul who was distressed when he saw the city of Athens filled with idols. Paul was not simply angry. He was filled with concern for people who were being ruined by the idols they worshiped. We must represent God accurately – feeling both wrath and compassion for those who are going astray. If we don’t feel these things then we are not really ready to serve God because we are nothing like Jesus.

If Jesus had not come, there is a very good chance that many of us would be just like the Pharisees and would fall under the same condemnation. Jesus wants to save us from corrupt religion. I say corrupt religion because religion in itself is not necessarily evil. There is a kind of religion that is pure.

But religion can easily be false or corrupted, and that is what Jesus is condemning in our text. The Jews had the only revealed religion in history and they managed to corrupt it. I have no doubt that the Church has done the same thing with the Gospel, which is even more serious!

We learn from Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees that the flesh, or human nature, can corrupt anything.

Our religion must be pure, untainted by the flesh, and Jesus is the only one who can save you from your flesh. What this means is that Jesus is really saving us from ourselves. As long as your flesh dominates your life, everything you do – even your religion – will be corrupt and unacceptable to God. Those in the flesh cannot please God (Rom. 8.8). There is something we are missing that no religious service can give us. Religious people still need Jesus.

Cain is a picture of the kind of religious man God will not accept. Cain was going through the motions of religion and offering something to God, just like his brother Abel. Abel is accepted and Cain rejected. It has been noted that Abel offered an animal sacrifice while Cain offered something from his crops. But under the Law Israel was commanded to offer both animal sacrifices and part of the fruit of their crops. The problem was not with the offering but with the man. Cain’s offering was rejected because there was something wrong with Cain. It is the man who makes the offering acceptable not the offering that makes the man acceptable.

God does not simply want our sacrifices and offerings. In fact, Israel’s sacrifices were rejected by God even though they technically brought the correct offerings (See Amos 5.22). The PEOPLE were not acceptable so neither was their religion. We are to offer ourselves as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God (Rom 12.1-2). God is not just looking for a certain kind of worship or religion. God is looking for a certain kind of worshiper (See John 4.23). We tend to be far too impressed by the external act of worship. But God looks at the heart and is not impressed by what pleases men. Jesus came to change our hearts so that we would be acceptable to God. When we are acceptable then our worship or our religion will also be acceptable.

Our self-centered focus is the problem. From this comes the hideous sin of pride. Religious pride is perhaps the worst kind. The pride of religion is self-righteousness and the smug, self-satisfied feeling of moral superiority.

But anyone who really saw Jesus became instantly humble, even afraid. When Jesus commanded Peter to cast his nets and there was a miraculous catch, Peter fell down before Jesus and said “away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man” (Luke 5.8).

Imagine that you are an accomplished singer. You even enter singing competitions and you win! Perhaps you have just been crowned the best singer in your town. Then you decide to take your talents to the Big Apple! What will happen to your self-image when you arrive on Broadway in New York City? You will be humbled!

We can always make ourselves feel superior by comparing ourselves to some poor slob who is a moral failure. But what happens to our self-confidence when we look at Jesus?

The key to true humility is neither to praise yourself nor to debase yourself, but not to look at yourself at all. We cannot be proud when we look at the Cross of Christ.

“When I survey the wondrous Cross
On which the Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride!”

Jesus came to Jerusalem to offer himself as a sacrifice for sinners. When he got there he encountered this proud, self-righteous, religious institution. There is this intentional contrast between Jesus who will humbly offer Himself and the pride of the Pharisees who thought only about themselves. The Cross is God’s final judgment of all human pride, religion, and self-righteousness. All of our efforts to justify ourselves before God through our religion are judged by the Cross.

That’s why, unless you become like a little child, you will never enter the Kingdom. Pride is not something we can bring with us into the Kingdom and work on later, like a bad habit. Pride excludes you from entering.

Pride not only alienates us from God, it also alienates us from each other. Religious pride is expressed in a feeling of superiority. This causes rivalry, competition, contention, and division. We feel free to attack people because we feel superior to them.

But Jesus is setting the standard for relationships among His disciples. We are not to be like the Pharisees who were looking only for position and trying to exalt themselves over each other.

Those who exalt themselves will be humbled by God. Those who humble themselves will be exalted by God. This is a universal law of the Kingdom of God that is just as dependable as the law of gravity!

Keeping pride from rising up within us is a constant battle because pride is so subtle and can be well-concealed behind a religious cloak. Pride is not always so obvious like the sins of the flesh. Maintaining humility can be like trying to hold a wet bar of soap.

We should examine ourselves to make sure we are not modern-day Pharisees! Jesus makes it clear that if we are like the religious leaders there is no way we will escape being condemned to Hell!

We know how God feels about corrupt religion.

The New Creation (Revelation 21.5)

There is an inherent optimism in young people that older people find both amusing and disturbing at the same time. It amuses us because we remember when we had all kinds of hopes, dreams, and plans for life – many of which were not realistic. But we are also disturbed when we see young folks launching out into the world because we know what they don’t: life is filled with failures and disappointments. There is no way to understand this part of life apart from the wisdom that comes only through experience. Unfortunately, each generation has to go through this painful cycle of discovery.

In our culture we call the desire for the good life the “American Dream.” But every culture has its own vision of living life to the fullest. One of the reasons we have civilization at all is this goal of a happy life. All of the great civilizations in history, including our own, came into being as an attempt to capture and then preserve the dream of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” All of the forces of history run in this direction.

Secularists believe that this desire for a better life is the result of the relentless progress of evolution. But people with a Biblical world-view have a different explanation for human endeavor. All people are haunted by the collective memory of Eden. And our search for a perfect life in this world – the dream of a Utopia – is a vain attempt to return to Eden.

To really understand the human condition we have to understand the Biblical doctrine of the Fall. Sin has introduced a curse of corruption and death, even on the Creation itself, which brings frustration, or vanity, to human life. Vanity is pointless activity that leads to frustration. People are born, they struggle for that good and happy life, and then they die. This seemingly endless, and ultimately hopeless, cycle is the reality that permeates all philosophical and religious thought and is even expressed in the book of Ecclesiastes. But can this cycle be broken? Is there anything new under the sun?

Everyone wants to have hope that things can and will get better. We even want to have hope beyond the grave. The book of Revelation is designed to give us hope. The Apostle John is given a vision of the future and he sees a new world coming into view.

I. The End takes us back to the Beginning. 

The Bible begins with the creation of the present heavens and earth, and the Bible ends with the passing of this creation and the beginning of a new creation. Revelation 21-22 reminds us of Genesis 1-3 and these sections of Scripture provide us with the perfect bookends to God’s story. The Bible is one contiguous story and we must understand Scripture this way or we will miss the proverbial forest for all the trees.

Some scholars have said that the Bible contains one mega-narrative, or storyline, that is filled in with many meta-narratives, or smaller stories. But the smaller stories always contribute to the larger story. The story-arc, or mega-narrative, of the Bible is Creation to New Creation. In Genesis we see the beginning of the world that we know. The first Creation and the Fall of Man are the foundation of the rest of the Biblical story.

The first few chapters of the Bible have been in modern times seriously questioned, criticized, and largely abandoned as an explanation for the origin and condition of the world. The book of Revelation has also historically been on the fringe of the Biblical canon and mostly considered an impossible puzzle to solve. If the first chapters of the Bible are rejected outright, and the last chapters of the Bible remain mysterious, then it is no wonder our modern generation remains ignorant of the message of the Bible.

However, if we compare the first chapters of Genesis with the last chapters of Revelation we begin to see an integrated picture emerge:

• In Genesis God creates the heavens and the earth. In Revelation this first heaven and earth pass away and there is a new heavens and earth.

• In Genesis God made everything good but man fell into sin. Sin introduced a curse of frustration and death. In Revelation this curse is lifted. All of the unhappy effects of sin are gone forever!

• In Genesis, before man sinned, God walked with man in fellowship. Sin caused a separation and alienation. But in Revelation the dwelling of God is with men again! The alienation has been completely removed.

• Perhaps the most important connection between Genesis and Revelation is the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life was there in Eden, but when man ate from the forbidden Tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the way back to the Tree of Life was blocked. But in Revelation the Tree of Life reappears and is prominent in the New Creation. Even the leaves of the Tree of Life have healing power! We will have full access to the very source of eternal life.

And so we have come full-circle. What was broken by man’s sin God has restored. This does not mean that God is simply restoring the original state that was in Eden. We can never go back to that as if the Fall never happened. But actually, the world to come is much better and more glorious than Eden ever was or could have been. Redemption is actually more than just fixing what was old.

The newness of life in the New Creation includes some continuity with the old. Our text does not say “I make all new things,” but “I make all things new.”

But new wine must be put into new wineskins because the newness of the New cannot be contained by what is old. The eternal, spiritual life of the New Creation is far more powerful and dynamic than the old. That is why the first has to pass away before the New can come. As long as the Old is in place the New cannot come because the Old cannot contain the dynamic life and power of what is New.

When we go from Genesis directly to Revelation it becomes clear that God is committed to defeating evil. Evil is everything opposed to God and His purpose. God promised that the Serpent’s head would be crushed. This crushing of the Serpent’s head represents the ultimate demise of evil in all its forms, including the actual defeat of Satan. Satan’s head was crushed at Calvary, yet it seems that the final victory is yet to be realized and will not be a reality until the New Creation takes over. Even now we still wrestle against Satan and his spiritual forces of wickedness.

It is dangerous to think that the final victory has been achieved because we will begin to think that we do not have to continue to wrestle with evil. But we do have to continue to resist the Devil. The Bible wants us to be assured that the victory will be complete, which keeps us fighting instead of giving up or living in denial.

However, the victory is not ours to achieve. God will defeat evil and any victory we have will come from the Lord. The battle is the Lord’s! The War has already been won, but God will finish what He started.

John sees the final destruction of all evil – the enemies of God and His people. The crescendo is that God will dwell with His people forever. God has never deserted humanity, though there have been times when it might look that way.

Revelation is the language of hope. The language must be symbolic because it describes things outside of human experience. But the images in Revelation are designed to fuel our hope and expectation, even if our curiosity is sometimes unfulfilled.

In Genesis Paradise was lost. In Revelation Paradise is regained. In between Genesis and Revelation is the progressive unfolding of God’s plan of renewal.

II. The God who creates also renews. 

God’s ability to renew is tied to His power to create. It seems that the first creation was made to showcase God’s ability to bring renewal. Even angels long to look into these things pertaining to salvation.

There are a couple of times in the Bible that the question “is anything too hard for the Lord?” or the statement “for nothing is impossible with God” were uttered. The first time was to Abraham and Sarah when they were told they would have a son in their old age. The second time was by the angel Gabriel after announcing to Mary that she would bear a son while still a virgin. God can make an old, barren woman give birth. God can make a virgin conceive. And God can give birth to a new world. Nothing is too hard for the Lord! The Bible is to showing us this truth so we will also believe in what God can do. When speaking about God’s promise to Abraham, Paul affirms God’s ability to fulfill His promise because He is the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17). The New Creation actually began when God called Abraham. The God who made the world from nothing would bless the world through an old man and his barren wife! God worked this way to show us that the New Creation can only be traced back to Him just as the first creation came into existence by His Word and will.

Some works can be accomplished by God alone. Only God can create something from nothing. It is often said that men have creative abilities and that this is part of the Divine image in man. I believe in the Divine image in man, but man’s creativity and God’s ability to create are not the same. God had the ability to call something into existence that previously did not exist. God made everything from nothing. Can you do that?

We can reshape and reform some of the things that God has made, but we cannot will something into creation that did not previously exist. God is Creator. We are not. And yet we often live under the illusion that we can create our own destiny.

It should be obvious that if creation is a work only God can accomplish then the renewal of that creation, or a New Creation, is also a work only God can accomplish. Salvation belongs to the Lord. We cannot save ourselves. We cannot renew the world and make a New Creation.

This means that our hope must be in God alone. We have to reject any man-made plan to renew the world, save mankind from extinction, or create Utopia. If there is one thing we learn from human history it is that men have failed to renew the world. There has been no philosophy or form of government that has created a perfect world. Even our great scientific discoveries have failed to solve all our problems, and have actually created many new and terrifying possibilities, including nuclear holocaust. And there has never been a cure for death. One of the great efforts has been to try to get men and nations to stop killing one another. None of the world’s great religions or moral teachers have changed the hearts of men. Something more is needed than just a law, a religion, government, philosophy, or morality. We have tried all of these things throughout human history and the new world has not been created.

It should be sufficiently demonstrated by now that men cannot create a new world order. If our hope cannot be in man then we must look for hope in God.

Specifically, our hope is in the person and work of Christ. Jesus Himself is the firstborn of God’s New Creation. We can see the renewing work of Christ in three, distinct actions:

1. Incarnation. God became a man, the Creator becoming a part of the creation, in order to renew all of creation, including men. If men are going to be renewed this renewal had to take place through a man, just as sin and death had originally entered the world through a man.

2. Atonement. It was sin that brought the curse of death and alienation from God. Sin is the problem and this has to be addressed. God cannot simply pretend that sin never happened. And so by offering Himself as a vicarious sacrifice Christ has effectively taken sin away. The cause of our alienation from God has been removed and He is now free to bless us in Christ.

3. Resurrection. Death, the great enemy, has been defeated. The resurrection of Christ is a preview of things to come. Someday all the dead will be raised and death itself will be ended.

The resurrection of Christ is itself the promise and guarantee of the New Creation. Him the heavens must receive until the time comes for the renewal of all things (Acts 3.21). And so we wait for His appearing the second time and the fullness of the New Creation. God’s New Creation had to involve the work of Christ in His incarnation, atoning death, and resurrection. Our hope is in Jesus Christ.

We should make it clear that our hope is not in the world accepting Christ’s moral teaching. It has been popular to speak of Christ as another great moral teacher and all we have to do to have a new world is just obey the Sermon on the Mount. The trouble with this is that the world has never listened to the great moral teachers. Jesus did not come to bring us another moral law. God already gave us the Law of Moses to prove that Law cannot save us. And so what we could not do for ourselves God has done through Jesus Christ. The God who created the world will renew the world.

III. The New Creation is already here. 

John saw the new heavens and the new earth – the fullness of the New Creation. But the New Creation has already invaded. The New Creation invaded the night a baby was born to a virgin in Bethlehem. What John saw in Revelation was not the beginning of the New Creation but its fullness. This might cause some confusion because the Old World still seems to dominate all that we see and experience. We cannot ignore these realities.

But we can also not deny that something New has come. Solomon’s old question “is there anything new under the sun” is answered in the Gospel with a resounding affirmative!

The Gospel calls us to participate in God’s purpose now. The New Creation has invaded and created a beachhead, much like the Allies did in the Normandy invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War. When the Allies hit the beaches that day there was a terrible resistance from the enemy forces. But once the beachhead was secured, the end of the war was soon to follow as the invading forces advanced relentlessly toward their goal. In the same way the Kingdom of God has landed and is advancing.

When Jesus began to preach publicly He proclaimed that the Kingdom of God had come. To prove His point, Jesus performed many miraculous signs that all pointed to the reality of this Kingdom. Someone has referred to the miracles of Jesus as previews of coming attractions. In the Kingdom we would expect all of the effects of man’s sin to be removed and Satan’s Kingdom to be removed. Those things have not happened yet, but Jesus gave us a sneak peak of the future world. Jesus did not preach that the Kingdom of God would come in the future, but that it was breaking in now and that we should repent and enter it in anticipation of its fullness in the future. We are caught between the Now and the Not Yet of the Kingdom of God.

The present reality of the Kingdom and our hope for the consummation of God’s reign is perfectly captured by the writer of the hymn This is My Father’s World:

This is my Father's world.
O let me ne'er forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong,
God is the ruler yet.
This is my Father's world: the battle is not done:
Jesus Who died shall be satisfied,
And earth and Heaven be one.

There is more to come, but we enter the Kingdom now. The New Creation begins for us personally when we are born again. Jesus said we cannot enter the Kingdom unless we are born again. The Holy Spirit is the agent of the New Creation just as the Spirit of God once hovered over the watery chaos of the first creation. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Paul speaks as if this Newness of life were already a reality. I must realize that God making things right begins with Him making me right! Much of what we call the Christian life is me coming to realize that I have been made new in Christ and living according to the New Creation. The Old Order is obsolete and what really counts with God today is a New Creation (Gal. 6.15).

But remember we still live in the tension between the Old and the New Creation.

We still have the Flesh and we still live in a fallen world that is ruled by the Devil. And so the believer is a microcosm of this tension between the Old Order and the New Order. We are experiencing, along with the Creation, the birth-pangs of the New Creation (Rom. 8.22-23).

Our “Great Commission” is to begin to exploit that beachhead that the Kingdom of God has made and live in the power of the New Creation remembering that if we “walk by the Spirit, you will not gratify the desires of the flesh (Gal. 5:16). We already have tasted of the powers of the world to come through the presence of the Holy Spirit. We will not be everything now that we will be in the world to come. Now these earthly tabernacles, otherwise known as our bodies, frustrate us because they are tied to that Old Order. But do not have a defeatist attitude. There is a principle of New Life in you, through the Holy Spirit, that is more powerful than the Old nature. Even now believers have the ability, through the Spirit, to live in victory over the world, the flesh, and the Devil.

And obtaining this victory is not an optional process reserved for the spiritual elite. Every believer much begin to cut loose from the world and the Old Order and begin to live in the New Creation.

We perfect holiness and subdue the desires of the Flesh so that we can fit into the New Creation when this world finally passes away.

We have to be made new because God is making everything else new! He has made us new ahead of time. You must become compatible with the New Creation or you will be excluded from it. In Revelation John sees many people who are excluded from God’s New World. These are people who continued in their love of this present, evil world.

If we are going to have a place in the World to Come we have to at some point lose our affection for this world. Our main goal has to be to make it into the World to come, not to make it in this World. If we were going to leave our country and live in another country, we would no doubt make some preparations. We would learn the culture of the country to which we are going. We would familiarize ourselves with its language and customs so that we will be good citizens of our new home. In the same way the saints of God are becoming familiar with the culture of the World to Come. When this world passes away we will not grieve because we will be welcomed into our true home.

In The Chronicles of Narnia, when the old Narnia passes away and they find themselves in a new world, it is Jewel the unicorn who realizes what has happened and declares “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!”

Perhaps this New World is quite clear to us now, yet Monday morning comes and we have to go out into this present, evil world. And this world has a way of creating a kind of fog in our minds that hides the World to Come. This world and all of its demands, what Jesus called the worries of this life, can come rushing at us like wild animals. And it becomes our duty each day to push aside the things of this temporal world order so that we can get a glimpse, no matter how fleeting it may be, of the New Creation God is about to unveil.

“I make all things new!” We already know the end of the story. And since God has already revealed His purpose to us it is our business to know what it is and get involved in it. We have no right to make our own agenda. If we try to hang on to this World, not only will we lose everything here, we will also forfeit the world to come. But if we let go of this world, which we cannot keep anyway, we can take hold of the New Creation.

The Power of Grace (Ephesians 2.1-10)

Believers are blessed in Christ with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places. This is how Paul begins his letter to the Ephesians. The first section of the letter is a single, run-on sentence; a litany of praise for all of the ways God has heaped benefits on those who are united with His Son. All of this is part of a predetermined plan, made before the World was made.

Paul is building the confidence of believers. They had already heard the Word of Truth, the Gospel, and believed it. But now he wants them to see more. He prays for them that they can see the greatness of salvation.

In the Gospel the mystery of God's eternal purpose is revealed. God's plan is to show to the Heavenly Powers the greatness of His wisdom. He will do this through the Church, or those who are being saved. The Church is being prepared as an eternal dwelling of God, so Paul again prays that the believers will be even now filled with all the fullness of God and able to comprehend
God's expansive, loving, gracious plan for His people in Christ.

Paul wants us to know how blessed we really are and what the grace of God has done for us and is now doing in us. It is wrong for believers to remain ignorant or small-minded about salvation or fail to appropriate everything grace has brought to us. We need grace to be saved, but we require more grace to understand what happened when we were saved.

Grace has made us acceptable and useful to God.

But that was NOT our former condition at all!

In order to help us understand what grace has made us Paul takes us back in time to our former life in sin, apart from grace.

Formerly we were dead in our sins. This is not a popular view of humanity! This will shatter your self-esteem!

Spiritual death involves both insensitivity and alienation or separation. Being spiritually dead means you do not and cannot respond to God, just as a dead body does not respond to stimuli.
Now this is important if we want to understand grace.

Without the power of God's grace in our lives, we would still be dead because a dead person cannot help himself. People dead in sin do not think about God, obey God, or care about the glory of God. As far as they are concerned, there is no God.

But death also causes alienation. There is a huge separation, a tremendous gap, between God and those who are dead in sin.

Death is also corruption and it is offensive. Just as we are repulsed by a decaying corpse, a holy God is also offended by sin. People who are dead in sins cannot be pleasing to God.
Sin was once our native environment, like a fish is at home in the water, and this environment was a place of death.

But there is more.

We were also following the course of this World. The World Paul is talking about is that spiritual system of organized rebellion against God, which is recognized by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. We were caught up in the current of the World and swept downstream by its force, away from God, even though we were probably unaware of this force. The World is not neutral but is moving, and its movement is away from God.

We were also following the Devil. (In our text he is called “The Prince of the Power of the Air.”)

Everyone is subject to spiritual influences, and many of these spiritual influences are evil, that is, they are opposed to God and will lead a person away from God. Satan influences people who only live according to their earthly, carnal appetites. That is Satan's domain!

To sum it up, we were destined for wrath, that is, God's righteous anger against all unrighteousness.

It seems to some people that Paul is exaggerating our former condition. People who are dead often seem to be nice, cultured people. They don't seem to be dead. They seem to be very much alive! And they are alive to many things, but not to God. We were biologically alive in the world, but spiritually we were dead. People in this condition are alive to many things in the world like money, pleasure, fame, power or success.

You can remember a time when these things meant more to you than your connection to God. And many of these worldly pursuits are not evil. But God was never in your thoughts.

When people are in a state of spiritual death, it is easy for them to be swept along by the current of this present evil world. We are not aware of this; we just thought we were doing what we wanted to do. But that was an illusion. People in the world are swept along by trends, fads, fashion, and popular ideologies. We might call it being a slave to fashion or just wanting to fit in or to be hip. Young people especially just want to be accepted by their peers. No one wants to be an outsider. And so they are thoughtlessly swept along by the strong current of the World, which is actually Satan's domain. He is in control, but of course he lets them think it is freedom.

Jesus said that anyone who sins is a slave to sin. It is subtle deception! We think we are free, free to do what we want to do, but therein is the greatest slavery of all: the slavery to ourselves.

Perhaps you remember what a small world you used to live in, thinking only from day to day about what you wanted and how to get it! Nothing made you angrier than when something or someone got in the way of you being able to be happy, that is, being able to get what you wanted!

There is only one possible destiny for people who live like this. God has already passed judgment on Adam's race and He will also destroy the World that so many have come to love instead of the One who made the World and everything in it.

Of course, Satan keeps his people blissfully unaware of their true condition and destiny.

The problem with our former condition was not just the things we did, but it went deeper than that. The problem was what we WERE, not only the things we DID. People who are dead in sins can do all kinds of things, many of which appear to be very nice, moral, and even religious. The trouble is that none of these things, even the good things, were done unto God.

The living God simply cannot accept dead people. We had to be given spiritual life! And that is exactly what grace has made us in Christ—alive to God! This brings new sensitivity and new awareness. What we want is no longer the primary consideration when we are made alive to God!

God can work with people who are alive. In fact, the only people who can serve God effectively are those who have been given spiritual life and recreated in Christ Jesus.

When we begin to think of being saved, or the Christian life, in terms of actually being made spiritually alive then we begin to understand that Christianity is more than just morality or being nice. If being spiritually alive is the real issue then the mere practice of religion is not enough, because spiritually dead people can go to Church on sundays. Even signing off on all the right doctrine and belonging to the right Church or Movement comes far short of being made alive.

All of the best efforts of the Flesh are obnoxious to God, just like putting lipstick on a corpse.

A lot of religious activity is not done unto God, but is done for others to see. Spiritually dead people are more concerned about what other people think about them than what God thinks about them.

If we are honest, we can all remember when this was how we lived. We were dead to God, insensitive to His will, and thinking only about our own agenda. Even when we did something good, it was only for others to see, not for the glory of God. We may have even gone to Church, and on the outside carefully whitewashed our tomb, which inside was full of death and decay. In this state we were offensive to God and unable to please Him.

But now the grace of God has made us alive and a new creature in Christ!

There was a great Divine turning point in our experience. We were dead but now we are alive. There is only one person who could have done this. Only God can raise the dead. You could not raise yourself from death. God had to intervene.

Grace is God's intervention in the natural course of things, which always brings supernatural results. We must begin to see grace as a powerful force that gets things done. Grace is active. Grace does something and always accomplishes God's purpose. (What people call “grace” is really the mercy of God. God may have mercy on us, not treating us as our sins deserve. But grace goes further than this, not simply withholding wrath and judgment, but bestowing God's good gifts upon us. When Joseph revealed himself to his brother in Egypt, he sent them back to get his elderly father, Jacob. This was during a time of famine. Not only was Jacob's family being saved from the famine, they were also getting a first-class ticket to the best of the land of Egypt under Joseph's rule and care. When old Jacob saw the wagons, Joseph had sent for him and his family to go to Egypt, his spirit was revived! THAT IS GRACE!)

The grace that gave us life has made us part of God's eternal purpose.

Before this we were being swept downstream in the current of the World. Now we are right in the middle of the current of God's purpose. The eternal purpose of God is running throughout this context in Ephesians. Everything that has happened to us is really part of a Divine plan, formulated before the foundation of the world.

This kind of thing often sounds less than desirable to modern ears because we believe in our ability to make our own choices and chart our own course. But Paul has already told us that this kind of self-determination, or free will, is really an illusion. We were not in control of our lives. In the same way our rescue from our previous state was not something we could bring about ourselves. It had to be grace!

What has happened to us in Christ was not our doing but was part of God's plan. If we can somehow escape from the presuppositions of our Age, this truth of predestination can be a great source of joy and confidence to the believer in Christ. Paul is not saying that we are made into mindless drones or that God ruthlessly condemns people to Hell who desperately want Heaven.

God is the one responsible for us being in Christ, and not ourselves, which means it is all grace! In other words, God has made it possible for us to be saved because if there was no plan of salvation then no salvation would be possible, no matter how much we wanted it or searched for it, all would be lost. But God has opened the Door.

We were once outsiders but now we are insiders—made privy to the secret of the universe—a mystery that was once hidden but is now revealed in the Gospel. We were destined for eternal ruin and uselessness. But now we are on a new journey, one with a divinely appointed destination and purpose. The only way we could have gone from outsiders to insiders is if God chose to open the Door and let us in on His secret.

No philosophy or scientific experiment could have discovered the eternal purpose of God. If you know the Truth, it is by grace. We know God's plan through revelation. The Gospel is really the revelation of God's eternal purpose and our introduction or induction into it, and that by grace alone.

Now it was the Apostle Paul who seems to have had the most insight into the Gospel and this eternal purpose, more even than the other Apostles of Christ. When the time was right God let His secret out through Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles. Indeed part of this mystery was that Gentiles could get in on God's plan, something that previously would have been thought impossible! Here was God once again doing something new, something surprising.

The grace of God is even big enough to reach out and include the Gentiles in the Plan of the Ages! The choice of God was clear and it is never a good idea to object to God's choice. God had chosen even the Gentiles by grace and no one has the right to veto grace. God's choice is the thing that makes grace what it is. Grace is God choosing to do what He wants to do and we can either get in on the blessing or get out of the way!

God has revealed what He intends to do and that purpose will stand and will not change. This purpose has been prepared over many centuries, with small-scale information leaks periodically. How blessed we are to live in these Times! It is an eternal purpose, prepared outside of time, and continuing even when Time will be no more and the heavens and earth passes away.

Even with the light of the Gospel we still do not see the fullness of God's purpose. Only in the coming Ages, while the ceaseless cycles of eternity roll on, God will unfold the riches of His grace. We have only touched the hem of the garment on this side of Eternity, locked within the confines of Time and the limitations of the Flesh.

Grace is preparing us for eternity, where the real story will begin, of which we have only read the first chapter.

Because we are part of an eternal purpose, we must be people with an eternal perspective. Our minds are not dominated by what is temporal.

Many Christians are afraid of being overly spiritual or too heavenly minded so as to be of no earthly good. But C.S. Lewis said "whatever is not eternal is eternally out of date." Nothing is more relevant than eternity. If our main preoccupation is the purpose of God it is not because we are checking out of life in this world, neglecting our stewardship and responsibilities, but because we know that ultimately no other agenda will succeed except for the purpose of God. Why would you be part of a losing team? Why invest in a bankrupt company? Why buy a ticket for a cruise on the Titanic?

Paul does not mean to make us into a bunch of starry-eyed mystics, gazing up at the heavens while life passes us by. He means to build our confidence in our calling and salvation, which are even more reliable than the heavens and earth. These things will pass away, but God's purpose will not.

By this time we should know about the instability of the world. Whatever can be shaken will be shaken. Our brother Henry F. Lyte wrote in his beautiful hymn "Abide with Me" about the world in which we live: "Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day; Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away; Change and decay in all around I see—O Thou who changest not, abide with me."

What we call sanctification is really the process of eliminating everything from our affection that competes with the eternal purpose of God. God's people have been taught to think of our life in the world as a journey, a pilgrimage, or a voyage to Glory. There is some baggage we can't take on this journey.

Any good journey has a destination that is predetermined. Otherwise we would never know where we are going! (Someone once stopped a stranger to ask for directions. "Where are you going?" he asked. The man replied "I'm not sure." The stranger replied "then the road you are on is just fine.")

Every journey has a beginning, middle, and an end. The same is true for salvation. The beginning is really what most people call salvation. But as long as we continue to sojourn in these mortal coils, our salvation is technically a work in progress. By grace we must remember where we have come and what we are in Christ.

Grace has united us with the resurrected Christ!

The Apostle is reminding us of these things so that we will not lose ground but will instead move forward toward the heavenly goal. In other words, you are not what you were so you can't go on living like you did!

Paul says that believers are in Christ; united or identified with Him. This is not just a metaphor but describes a spiritual reality. This is not a goal: that we should be united with Christ. It is a description of what it means to be saved by grace. By grace God put us in Christ. The implications are staggering to consider! And we must consider this often.

By way of contrast, we were IN Adam. We were identified with Adam and his race which is under God's condemnation. But now we have been united with Christ and everything that is true for Christ has been transferred to us. Just as Christ was raised, we have also been raised. Just as Christ has been exalted into the heavenly realms, we are also seated there with Christ. Now this may sound strange because our bodies are still on the earth. But the work is not finished. The goal is to bring everything in heaven and on earth together in Christ, and the first stage is accomplished by God putting us in Christ!

In order to understand the final destination of God's purpose we must first understand where we are now, saved by grace, having been made one with Christ.

Our connection with Christ is not like the connection we might have with a great hero of the past whom we admire and want to imitate. When we are connected to Christ, we are being connected to a living person. The fact that Christ is in heaven does not limit our connection to Him at all.

In fact, His presence in heaven is the thing that makes all of this possible. That is why He told His disciples that "it is for your good that I am going away." Christ can do much more for us in Heaven than He could while on the earth, being limited by space and time. If God's ultimate plan is to bring heaven and earth together, then it is only logical that the Redeemer needed to first descend to the earth and then ascend into heaven, which is exactly what Christ has done. And He will descend again when the plan of God reaches its fulfillment.

In the meantime, those who are in Christ, united with Him, are spiritually already seated with Christ in the heavenly places. Physically we are on earth. Spiritually we are already in Heaven, reigning with Christ. This is a prelude of things to come. But even now being seated with Christ in heavenly places, we have access to God through Him. And we are aware of a higher reality, no longer living with our heads nailed to the earth.

If all of this begins to sound too high-minded and mystical we need to go back to when we were first united with Christ, which was at our baptism. Remember that everything that is true of Christ is true for those in Christ. When we were baptized, we died with Christ and were raised with Him. The Lord gave us this visible way of remembering something that is invisible because this becomes an anchoring point for our faith.

We are to reason on what happened when we were baptized into Christ. A man put us under the water, but God put us in Christ, uniting us with Him and all the saving effects of His death, resurrection life, and ascension into the heavens. Where He is, there we will be also.

Now grace gives us the ability to see this union with Christ and to begin to appropriate its power. There are things that we must appropriate, or learn, or become acutely sensitive to and aware of—things that are not apparent to the senses. If this appropriation does not happen, we will not grow up in Christ, which is the goal of salvation.

Grace gives us more than forgiveness of sins. We also share in the life of Christ, having been united with Him. Ultimately the purpose of God is for us to be conformed to the image of His Son (Rom. 8.28-30). (We should be intimately familiar with what God is doing: God is creating a new race of men who are like His Son! He is the firstborn among many brethren. Adam represents the old race, and Jesus is the new. We belong to one race or the other, each with radically different destinies. The destiny of those in Christ is glorification – the final stage of salvation – but the process of change leading to glory begins here in this world.)

But how does this happen, practically speaking?

The Lord gives us what seems like terribly mundane ways to make this happen. We start with a humbling act of being submerged in water. Soon after this we are regularly ingesting very small portions of bread and wine. We read the Scriptures. We pray. We meet with other Believers, who are also called to do these things, and together we learn to care about each other. He may even ask you to give money! But notice all of these things require some kind of self-denial. And as we continue to deny ourselves each day, more grace is given, and with grace more of the life of Jesus.

Remember Naaman the Syrian who was desperate for a cure for his leprosy? He was told to simply dip seven times in the Jordan River, which at first he refused to do. But when he humbled himself and obeyed the Word of the Lord he obtained grace. The Lord sometimes asks us to do unexpected, perhaps even unexciting, things. But in our response of self-denial we are given grace, and eternal life.

In his letter to the Ephesians the Apostle wants believers to be able to comprehend the greatness of salvation so we will continue to grow in this grace. The grace of God has raised us from death and grace can also empower us to be filled with the very resurrection life of Jesus. Spiritually we are already seated in the heavenly places with Christ, but physically we are still in the lower, earthly regions. And so we still need the power of grace, until the work is finished and all of God's children are safely home.

The Legacy of Babel (Genesis 11.1-9)

The entrance of sin into the world had a degenerating effect on the human race. The first eleven chapters of Genesis illustrate this point. The very first family was torn apart by a brother murdering his brother, and all of that over a religious matter. Then the world became so violent that God had to cleanse the earth and start over with one man and his family. But after the Flood did, things get better? No, sin was still in the heart of man which makes him a rebel against God.

If left to itself, without Divine grace and intervention, the human race would have continued in a downward spiral of depravity. And it is only the restraint of God which is a kind of common grace given to all humanity that keeps the world from descending into oblivion. We now have weapons that can literally destroy the human race. Why has it not been destroyed? God is restraining the evil of man, making human life tolerable. Sin always gets worse if left unchecked and is actually a bottomless pit. No one really knows how far down human beings can sink in sin. If you study history, you will be shocked at what some people have done. How could they do that? How did the Second World War happen? How did Hitler manage to send six million Jews, along with many other peoples, to concentration camps and then to gas chambers? Some actually refuse to believe that it happened! We should remember this principle that unless God restrains man there is no known limit to man's sinful capabilities. Man seems to be able to create new ways to be evil!

God may express His wrath by giving people over to their sinful desires.  This is the result of man rejecting the knowledge of God (Romans 1:24-28). It is a scary thought that if man does not want God then God may give man what he wants! And man will suffer the natural and inevitable consequences of being without God and in slavery to our passions. Paul's example of the ancient world included the sin of homosexuality which was rampant in the ancient pagan cultures and is taking over our own today! This is a sign of Divine abandonment.

But before we become dark and morose about the state of our culture we must remember that God has continued to guide the development of human history and has not deserted the world.

Now there are those who might question this. We can look around our world and see the chaos and could draw the conclusion that God has withdrawn. But the Scriptures teach us that, even though God does express His wrath at times, God has never taken His hand off the wheel and let things spin out of control.

God has ordered human life so that men can seek after Him. God is governing history, not for the physical comfort of man, but for the spiritual development of the Race. "And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:26-27).

Paul says that men should seek God but he does not say that men actually do seek God. Actually the history of the race shows us that men have not been seeking God, yet God has continued to seek after men. God has not left himself without a witness but has given some revelation to all men. And God is going to hold people responsible for the knowledge that they had available to them. God will not judge people unfairly, but according to the light they had. For those of us who live in the full light of the Gospel this means we have a great responsibility and to whom much is given much will be demanded!

The world could not be sustained if God were not involved with it. The idea that God made the world to operate on its own laws is not a Biblical one. If God were to withdraw completely for even a moment, the result would be that the world would return to it primordial chaos, darkness and emptiness. The Word that created the world also upholds it. The first section of Genesis gives us a picture of a world trending back toward primordial chaos and darkness, was it not for God's intervention.

I. We learn from Babel that the agenda of man is inherently flawed and wicked.

To an ignorant person this plan to build a city might seem harmless enough. Is God against architecture? Is God not in favor of human progress and us making our lives better? In our modern times Christianity has often been painted as the great hindrance to human progress. Didn't we call the period of history ruled by the Church the Dark Ages? Didn't the Church persecute the great scientists who were making advancements to make life better? So we have this modern war between science and religion, perhaps epitomized for us by the famous Scopes monkey trial and the debate of Evolution versus Creation.

One of the greatest goals of humanists and secularists is to get everyone together and united for the advancement of the human race. That is what happened at Babel.

So why was God not pleased? Doesn't God want unity? A humanity that is united is not a good thing if the agenda is ungodly. God is concerned about the unity of the Human Race, not its diversity. The agenda of man to have unity in a godless agenda is something that God will always oppose and He has kept the nations confused and divided, usually suspicious of each other and going to war, so that what happened at Babel does not happen again.

Even so, the wicked are still coming together against the Lord and His Christ. If God did not continue to stop the building of the City of Man then be assured the world would unite and make a united effort to cleanse the world of every follower of Jesus.

At one time the greatest empire in history that ruled the civilized world made an attempt to stamp out Christianity and failed to do so. But as the End approaches God may begin to take away what restrains wickedness and we will see more of a united effort against believers.

The world wants peace and harmony, but on its own terms and without God or God's agenda. The world wants all of the good things that can only come from the hands of God, but they do not want God Himself. It is wrong to have unity at the expense of the Truth of God.

We often hear denominational Church leaders talk about Christian unity and there is a dangerous willingness to throw the Word of God and the truth of the Gospel out the window just to have some kind of institutional unity. This is the Spirit of Babel and cannot be blessed by God! God wants to give unity, but on His terms and in His way. We will have unity with one another when we are all submitted to the reign of God.

It is important that God's people not unite with the wicked or help with their plans and goals. If Babel is being rebuilt in our day, it is vital that we refuse to pick up a single brick in support and solidarity. This is why Christians who want to get involved in politics have to be very discerning lest they find themselves with some strange bedfellows! Now we cannot completely withdraw from life in the world or we would have to leave the world. But we can refuse to be involved in those systems that have come out against God. This is precisely why many Christian people cannot support the public education system in this country. Neither can we support corrupt Christian institutions even though they wear the name of Christ, which is actually a worse perversion than the completely secular institutions!

II. Babel represents all of mankind's attempts to order life without God.

God is not against building or even against human beings harnessing the power of natural resources in order to make life better. God is not against civilization. Men were made in the image of God and were set to rule over what God had made. The building of the Tower was a human agenda made without God in mind. Anything that is good becomes evil if it is not done unto the Lord. It is interesting, however, that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob always lived in tents and not in cities. Lot, however, chose to live in the city of Sodom!

Even when the Israelites came back to Canaan and possessed the cities of the Canaanites God warned them not to become forgetful of God in their new-found wealth and prosperity.

The prosperity of human cities or civilizations has been one of the major forces causing men to forget God, focusing instead on all of the distractions our world has to offer!

We should not make our plans without thinking of God and His will. Now this is a warning even for believers while still in the world. Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil (James 4:13-16). If you make your plans for life without God at the center, you are committing the sin of Babel and God will come down and destroy your plans! The fool lives as if there is no God or that He cannot see! This describes our generation perfectly! There is a disturbing lack of consciousness of God in people today that reminds us of the generation that started building Babel.

Believers are people who pray for His Kingdom to come and His will to be done on earth. And this starts in our own lives! Have God's rule and reign come to your life? Is His will being done in you? Until this happens there will be nothing of lasting significance accomplished for the Lord today.

This building was wrong because it was for the glory of man rather than the glory of God. The builders of Babel were competing with God, which is why this project was doomed to failure from the beginning. Man was made in the image of God to be God's agent on earth and to further God's reign. Man was not made to act independently of God and take the world for his own. Yet this is exactly what Babel was doing. In fact, this desire to be God was part of the first temptation to sin and this remains at the very heart of sinful man's nature. Sin is man's attempt to be God, removing him from His throne. Sin is cosmic rebellion. It started with Satan in heaven and Satan has done everything he can to spread his rebellion on earth in man. The Bible teaches us, in incidents like Babel, that all of this cosmic rebellion is futile. It's very important that we don't become a part of Satan's losing cause. Now is the time to join the winning side!

All sin falls short of God's glory. We were made to reflect the glory of God, not to compete with it and attempt to suppress it.  But that is what the world does, following in the footsteps of Babel. God's purpose was to make Himself and His Name known. But the people at Babel wanted to be famous, not to further the knowledge of God. In the heart of man is a desire to promote himself and to be known by others who honor and respect us. This is a great temptation for every person here: to love the praise of men more than the praise of God.

This building also included technological advancement that was used for wicked purposes. Man perverts the abilities God has given. Again, God is not against technology itself. But God knows what wicked man is capable of doing. We are made in His image and the higher the creature the greater the fall into wickedness. Men, not monkeys, make atomic bombs. Man is a servant and a steward and will be held accountable by God. Everything we have is a gift from God and is not our own to use for ourselves. It is vital that we use all of our resources, gifts and abilities for God alone.

The Lord expects his people to work and to increase what He has given, using all of our creative, mental, and physical capacities. God's people should be the most industrious and innovative people on the planet!

The building of the Tower probably included an idolatrous religious purpose. It was to reach to the heavens because they were worshiping the heavenly bodies. Man worships the creation rather than the Creator. This is idolatry, which is perhaps the ultimate sin of the human race. An idol is any good thing that becomes an ultimate thing. This is why everyone is really religious and everyone worships something! Idolatry is not an innocent thing, coming from man's desire for moral freedom without accountability to God. Behind all false religion is an attempt to manipulate and control rather than to submit and trust. After the example of Babel we have the calling of Abraham, the man known for his faith and trust in God which is the exact opposite of the men at Babel.

God's people are to be different from those in the world with all of their anxiety and running to and fro after material wealth! We trust God to supply what we need in the world as we seek first His Kingdom and righteousness.

III. Babel shows us that God thwarts the purposes of wicked men.

And God has kept doing this throughout history as other towers were attempted right up to our present time. GOD WILL NOT ALLOW WICKEDNESS TO ULTIMATELY SUCCEED!  This does not mean that evil men will not arise from time to time, sometimes even persecuting the saints of God. We will suffer evil in the world, but the ultimate victory is assured.

"God came down to see the Tower" is a comment on the smallness of man's enterprises. This is Divine scorn, as in Psalm 2, which says God laughs in scorn at men's attempts to overthrow His rule. Those who were building the Tower of Babel are called "the children of men." Babel was like children playing in the dirt! Whatever is valuable and impressive to man is a worthless abomination to God. People who don't know God are much too easily satisfied and impressed with worldly things. Man's greatest need is to be humbled. We remember the example of Nebuchadnezzer puffed up with pride as he looked out on his city of Babylon: "Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?" While the words were still in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven . . .  (Dan. 4:30-31). "Pride goes before a fall." Christian thinkers have always said pride is the most deadly of sins, which also brought Satan down to the earth.

Man cannot successfully compete with or thwart God's purpose. God does whatever He wants in the world and easily removes men who oppose Him. This is why we should never fear man. This account illustrates that wicked man cannot do all that he will but is limited by Divine sovereignty. Man is really not free when alienated from God. We should not fear or envy wicked men because their time is limited. God has placed the limitation of vanity on human life. Life is like a child at the beach trying to build sand castles that are washed away by the rising surf. Everything mankind attempts to build will eventually fall to the ground!

It's important for us to realize this in our own efforts to build our lives here in the world, which is in a state of passing away.

God thwarted man's purpose because He has His own purpose for the world. God does not give us the things we want because He has something better for us. God giving people what they want can be the worst thing that ever happened to them.

The purpose of God will begin with the call of Abram and a promise to bless the world through him and his Seed, which is Christ. We should pursue the blessing of God at all cost! In contrast to the promise of blessing for the world coming through Abraham, Babel was cursed by God.

The forces of confusion and dispersion, seen throughout human history, are signs of God's curse and wrath.

God is typically not the author of confusion when it is His work and not the judgment of man's evil work. The result of sin is being cast out or exiled. Babel is a larger scale of what happened to Adam and Eve when they sinned and were cast out of Eden. This is the story of the human race! God is still angry with the wicked every day and nobody gets away with sin but must reap what he sows.

IV. The spirit of Babel endures in our world today.

The degeneration of the early world may be a picture of the degeneration of the world at the end of time which will set the stage for the return of Christ and the commencement of the New Creation. It is no accident that immediately after God dealt with Babel He called Abraham out of Ur and the New Creation began. The world will end in much the same way that it began. In spite of man's growing wickedness God will intervene and make a New Creation. The days before Christ's return will be like the days of Noah.

We expect an increase of wickedness as one of the signs of the End. There will be the rise of the Man of Sin who is the Antichrist and strong delusion in the last days. The rise of Babel in the early world precipitated the rise of spiritual Babylon in the modern world. Babel is translated everywhere else in the Scriptures as Babylon and becomes a type and shadow of the wickedness of the world system and its corrupt religion that is a satanic counterfeit of the Lord's Christ. In the End Satan will be set loose to make one last, desperate, attempt at destroying God's work, but will be destroyed. Perhaps the gathering of Satan's forces for this last stand has already begun in our time, just as the men began to gather in the plains of Shinar to build this city and its infamous tower.

Babel is a picture of the World with all its lust and pride. We are not to love the world and its preoccupation with lusts and pride in possessions (1 Jn. 2.15-17). The spirit of the world is not of God but is actually in opposition to God. The world is not neutral but is moving in a certain direction and not toward God. Apart from salvation in Christ we will all be subject to the course of this world.

Babel is also the spirit of all false religion. False religion is really just worldliness in disguise. When the Church commits adultery and is unfaithful to God she gets intimate with the world and compromises her holiness, becoming like the world rather than reflecting the glory of God. False religion is that which man builds and that does not have a Divine origin.

The spirit of Babel is living a selfish life without a consciousness of God. Men are basically selfish and will remain so unless there is Divine grace. This selfishness is often disguised and hidden. We don't think the plans we make are selfish! The part of our nature that tends to repeat the sin of Babel has to be put to death.

Instead of living according to the selfish desires of the Flesh, we are called to be a part of what God is building!

Jesus is building His Church. These members of His Church will be from out of all the nations scattered at Babel!

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb" (Revelation 7:9-10)!

At Babel the nations were confused and scattered. At Pentecost the Gospel was preached in many tongues and people were gathered in! As Daniel saw the stone cut out of the mountain without hands will crush all earthly kingdoms and fill the earth!

God is building a City for His people! The City of Man will be judged and destroyed. God has prepared a city with foundations for His people who have been strangers and aliens in this world. We should be satisfied with nothing less than what God is preparing for us.