Our Status Before God
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJJjsCrp18s
One of God’s great gifts to us is the Bible, it has so much riches and it continuously brings us closer to God as He shows us He has come close to us. Every week during this sermon series on Mark I could have chosen any number of themes that interlayer through this gospel, there is more that I haven’t touched on than I have. I say this to urge you to keep reading and to keep digging. We will never plumb the depths of God’s love for us, His glory, and His wisdom, and since this is what we need we should hunger after it like a thirsty dog craves water.
Over the last two weeks, you’ll remember that we have looked at how God is overturning everything for good, even us, and how much we owe God for giving us, well . . . everything. This week we see our status, where we stand in relation to one another and God. We have already seen that we are meant to be God’s children, in his image but God continues to show us that there is more than what first appears to be true. We might struggle with status because we have often seen how status is used to rule over or debilitate others, but you’ll remember that for Jesus the greatest are those that become the servant of all as Jesus Himself does.
After last week, the religious leaders remain silent and Jesus has the freedom to speak. He starts to dig into a psalm that King David wrote. You’ll remember that King David is said to have the heart of God as he would worship, sing and dance in praise of God. He was the first to follow God with righteousness, yes, he went wrong, but King David is often thought to be the pinnacle of the Kingdom of Israel. When King David wanted to make a house for God so that God would be honoured and remembered, God instead promised David that He would build a house for David and that a child of his would rule forever.
This promise to David was an immense hope for Israel, because after generations of unrighteous kings, after Israel’s exile in Babylon and Persia, after Israel was continuously under foreign occupation there was a hope that our faithful God was still going to live into. In this series, we have already talked about how Jesus as the Son of David is bringing an even greater Kingdom than the one they imagined.
That brings us to the Psalm that David wrote and a detail we could easily just skip over. David says, “The Lord says to my Lord”. Who are the two Lord’s? The Lord should be God, because “the” constitutes the pinnacle, the greatest of Lord’s, just like when we hear Jesus talk about the Son of man, vs. a son of man. Any person is a son or child of man, but only the greatest person is the son of man. But then David talks about my Lord, who could this refer to. In Jesus’ day, there were definitive status terms. You would call your parent Lord, or someone in a higher position than you, but why would the greatest known king of Israel call his son my Lord. David’s son must somehow be even older than David, an even greater king. Through the Holy Spirit, David saw this before almost anyone else. When God promised David that his seed would reign forever. There is no kingdom or person that could reign or live forever outside of God Himself stepping in. We know that God did that with Jesus both a Son of David and the Son of God. This simple word of status points us to an even greater hope than if we were just thinking of a restoration of the Kingdom of Israel because this means that God as the fair, loving, merciful king is coming to reign.
This Psalm offers more hope though because God makes another promise to my Lord. “Sit at my right side until I put your enemies under your feet”. We might struggle with this because it sounds very authoritarian but remember David was a warrior king. He was praised by most for his prowess and how he drove back the Philistines again and again, but God told David that he has too much blood on his hands to build the house of God. God says to David’s Lord, sit at my right side, the greatest position of honour until I put your enemies under your feet. You see it is God that will establish justice, it is he who will set things right. This is important, we too often want to take the place of God and be judge, jury and executioner, but we continuously get it wrong, because we don’t know what is right. God has a far better way and somehow this will be a way unlike the bloody way of David.
All the enemies to God’s Kingdom will be brought low. Again, we might struggle with this, but we are all brought low before God. We should all be humbled before His infinite power which generally shows itself in love, mercy, and patience. This is just a setting right, a recognizing of our real status before God, but God doesn’t leave us there. He brings the highways low and the low ways high.
Jesus’ warning about Scribes begins to do this lowering. Here are these people who have enjoyed social status and privilege: they wear long flowing robes to make themselves look good, to make them look wise, or devout, they walk around the streets so people might see them and honour them, they sit at the best seats at religious gatherings and social ones, they even put on these long prayers to make themselves look good, but at the same time they are devouring widows’ houses. Here are these people who have all the worldly status, but have no real honour. They are not anything great because their greatness is all superficial and they are corrupting and rotting on the inside, they are even missing their relationship with God. Jesus is showing us what is really there, which is evident if we look beyond the surface. We see the same thing happening today, people put their best selves on social media and hide what is going on, people in person present their best selves to others and hide what is underneath. We pay top dollar for dinners, clothes, cars, houses and so much more to make ourselves feel better, to lift us up, to make ourselves appear righteous and much worse, but if we open our eyes we will see where true honour, status and greatness lies and it is definitely not with all of this.
Instead the Scribes and religious leaders were devouring widow's houses. Maybe not literally, but they weren’t caring for those who really needed it. You see back in the book of Deuteronomy, a very important book for any Jewish person, there was a commandment that religious and social leaders were supposed to care for widows, orphans, foreigners, all those who were in need and support. This command was repeated often through the prophets. But instead of listening to God, the leaders of Israel were using everything to only help themselves. Sure they worked hard, like everyone does, but they never earned the gifts God had given them, the skill, the position, the birth. They were given the gift from God to care for others, only then will they show themselves to be trustworthy. To those that have been given more will be expected of them.
We see that in the widow’s donation, often called the widow’s might. Jesus commends her because she gave out of sacrifice, she gave out of trust and hope. She gave what she had to live on and that shows her trust and hope in God. While we hold onto stuff and honour and hope and trust can so easily rest on that stuff rather than God. We hold onto it because we think it can protect us and offer us more, but too often we become like that rich man that left Jesus because he was unwilling to give it up for God and others. I struggle with this too. I don’t always know the way forward with what we have been given, but we must let go of our dependency on all of this fickle stuff and use it like the shrewd manager to make friends in heaven and to be truly honourable. The widow showed that she was mighty and honourable through her sacrifice and trust, how do we do the same?
This is digging deeper into that overturning that God promised and what we owe God. It does challenge what we care for, what we desire, even who we are. The question persists are we willing to change, are we willing to make Jesus our true Lord above all, are we willing to offer ourselves up to God, so that he might take our humble state and make us even more?
