Jesus and His World: Romans

[00:00:03] Our Lord and King, we ask that you would bless us now as we come to hear Your Word. We ask that you would help us to give to due consideration to it and meditation upon it, that we might find ourselves rejoicing in the work that you have done. Lord, we thank you for coming into our world and saving us from our sins. We thank you for being victorious and bringing that conquering victory not just over the powers of this world that rise and fall from man to man, but Lord, over death itself and the great evil one who seeks to undo us. Lord, what a salvation it is that we are no longer captive to him, no longer enslaved, but find ourselves in a resurrection of life. Encourage us in these things this evening. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. [00:01:07] Well, let's turn to God's word in Luke chapter two, verses one through 17. [00:01:43] So Luke chapter two, verses one through seven, let's hear God's word. [00:01:49] In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinus was governor of Syria, and all went to be registered, each to his own town. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with Child. And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth, and she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. [00:02:32] May God bless his word to us. Please be seated. [00:02:58] Well, as I mentioned this morning, over the course of this month in our morning and evening services, I'd like to spend some time with you, reflecting on the world that Jesus entered into the world of his time, and of course, the world of our time as well. For it is the same world in some ways, different in some ways. Different rulers, different people, different names, but many similarities all the same. And this morning we considered that there are people in the past that Jesus entered into a world that already had a history. And today, tonight, I want to begin considering some of the people that were in the world at his present time. Luke draws our attention to this at the beginning of this chapter of chapter two, when he says, in those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This governor of Syria, one of the regions of the larger Roman Empire, is also mentioned here. [00:04:05] So what does this mean and what implications does this have? Well, of course, it's not all packed here into Luke two verses one and two, jesus's experience and the time within the Roman Empire is explained throughout the Gospels in a lot of different places. And even after Jesus left, the continuing Acts of the Apostles, the life of the Christians, this continued on for some time. What it meant to live in the Roman Empire varied in some ways from emperor to emperor, from time to time. But it is worth considering this time that Jesus entered into this government that he entered into, and what that means for his work as a messiah. Why would Luke take the time to remind us that Rome is ruling and very clearly ruling Caesar Augustus calling for this registration? [00:05:08] So let's do a little bit of history this evening. [00:05:12] Of course, Rome didn't always rule over Judea, didn't always rule over the Jewish people. [00:05:20] The previous empire before the Romans were the Syrians, and the last ruler of these, Antiochus IV, was a bad, bad man. [00:05:31] He had been attacking Egypt at the time before he came to do some really terrible things in Jerusalem. He was attacking Egypt. When there was a rebellion in Israel, he left attacking Egypt, came back to Israel to deal with that rebellion, and he did several things. [00:05:49] He plundered the temple. He began to forbid circumcision and the following of the laws. He dedicated the temple, the temple of Jerusalem, right, the Temple of the Lord. He dedicated it to Zeus. [00:06:04] He erected an altar in the temple court and sacrificed pig's blood on it. He commanded worship to Bacchus and perhaps to himself as well. Just about anything that you could think of that would poke the Jewish people in the eye and make them really mad. He tried to do, and in fact did. And there were all kinds of reactions to this, this Syrian ruler. [00:06:31] One reaction was that of a family called the Maccabeans. The Maccabeans desired holiness and especially the father of that household. And eventually they were able to lead a rebellion against Syria, overthrow that government and establish a rule. And perhaps you know about Hanukkah. It is the time when the temple was dedicated in 165 BC. And for a short period of time, Israel remained in control of herself in a way ruled by this family. [00:07:11] But things went south off very quickly. [00:07:16] The Jews ruled by this family. The Maccabeans began hiring pagan Gentile mercenaries to fight for them. David's tomb was robbed of its wealth in order to pay foreign people. [00:07:32] Alexander, one of the rulers, toward the end of this time, killed 6000 of his own countrymen. In order to continue to establish his rule, he crucified another 800 of them. [00:07:48] All this to say that things were very tumultuous and raucous when Herod the Great began to rule, another one from the Jewish people. But Rome sees an opportunity at this moment as itself is expanding. As Syria is dying down, Rome establishes itself. It steps into the middle of this, establishing not only governorship over Syria, which includes Judea, but as it was inclined to do at various times, put a governor in that particular spot. Israel, for some of these reasons and more, was sort of a hot spot, a problem spot in the empire of Rome. And so when that happened, Rome would sometimes establish special governors in those areas to kind of keep control, keep an eye on things, collect taxes, put down uprisings. And that person, of course, was Pontius Pilate. Pontius Pilate was a Roman governor, one. He was not from the Jewish people, but he was there to make sure that things kept order. [00:09:00] Octavian Augustus. Caesar Augustus ruled during this period, and in many ways, he was one of the best Roman rulers. He ruled up until 14 Ad. [00:09:13] He says some of his famous lines. When he died, he said, I found Rome as clay and I left it as marble. A proud boast, but somewhat true. During his time, he expanded Roman rule and created much peace through a couple means. [00:09:31] The first was brute force. The Romans during this time and other times, well, this is one of the ways they established their strength. Lots and lots of manpower and quick action and controlling rebellions. And the other strategy was this sort of political savvy in which you have herod a people of the Jews ruling the Jews in connection with a governor who was nearby and all kinds of complicated and uninteresting relationships that on the one hand allowed freedom, allowed the movement of ideas and wealth, but on the other hand was really firm about no uprisings and other things like that. [00:10:21] So this is the time Caesar ruled. And this is likely why he was calling for this registration. [00:10:26] He was expanding his tax base. He was making sure that he knew how many people were there for military recruitment, for the collecting of taxes. This is part of his strength and this is part of the world in which Joseph and Mary lived. [00:10:44] After Caesar Augustus died in 14 Ad, tiberius comes to rule, and he's the one who rules throughout the rest of Jesus's life. Tiberius was not so wise, not so clever. He was a brutal man who killed people for sport, went to a secluded island for most of his time, the island of Capri, where he indulged in all kinds of terrible things, tortured people. [00:11:16] Well, there are lots of stories. Many of them are disgusting. Tiberius ruled and he ruled during this time after Caesar Augustus. All this to say, if you can imagine yourself in this situation, what do you as a Jewish person right here in Judea, what do you do? What are your options? [00:11:39] How do you live in this kind of environment? [00:11:43] Changing, better at sometimes, worse at sometimes, but very much under the power and authority of an extremely secular government. [00:11:55] One reaction that people leaned into was rebellion. So the Zealots, we hear about them in the New Testament, the Zealots Barabbas, who was eventually freed from prison so that Jesus could be crucified, was considered a murderer and part of an insurrection. [00:12:18] There were people who tried to take control, regain control over the government through insurrection. [00:12:26] That's one end of the spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum, you have men like Herod, tax collectors, people who are extreme collaborators and alliance makers with Rome. They are not seeking rebellion. They're seeking to establish as much security and strength and peace as they can, certainly for themselves and possibly for others through alliances with Rome. [00:12:56] Another reaction you get is the Essenes, the people you might have heard of in the Qumran community. These are isolationists. People say, this is a mess. Let's get out of here. Head for the desert, right? And they'd lived and they tried to live in holiness and in isolation and just separate themselves as much as possible from these kind of things. [00:13:20] Then you get another kind of isolation, but a more public kind, with the Pharisees and the sadducees and the scribes. People who publicly distinguished themselves as people who were different, who stood up and did everything they could to lean into their. [00:13:44] And this explains all kinds of questions that we read in the Gospels that eventually come to Jesus, who was born during this time. [00:13:52] Do we pay taxes to Caesar or do we not pay taxes to Caesar, which is the greatest law? How do we obey them? What are we supposed to pray? How do we follow these laws? [00:14:04] Joseph and Mary were very much in this mix. [00:14:09] What do you do when Caesar Augustus says, I want you to travel and disrupt your lives and go to the town of your birth and register so that I can collect taxes from you and find people of military age and all this sort of thing? [00:14:28] How do you live as Joseph and Mary or as Elizabeth or John the Baptist or any of these other people that we read about in the New Testament? [00:14:44] Well, what we see in the example of Mary and Joseph and many others among the pious Jews of Israel is that they were waiting for the Messiah. This is one of the things that we could say marked their attitude, their way of life and what they did. They lived under this government that they had been placed under. [00:15:06] They refused it and criticized it sometimes, as we see with John the Baptist. But they also waited. [00:15:16] They ultimately put their hopes in someone who was to come, this King of David who would come, this one who would be the Son of God and who would establish things forever. [00:15:29] We read about this a little bit in Psalm two and these hopes that had been set from a long time before. Let's read about this a little bit more from some prophecies in Daniel, chapter two. [00:15:42] If you want to turn there with me or you can just listen is fine as well. [00:15:48] In Daniel chapter two, which is an interesting time as well. Right. Because Daniel is also living in a time under a foreign rule. [00:15:58] He is subject to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, Israel, being taken out of their country and scattered. [00:16:09] The king has a dream, and here's what we hear about that dream and its interpretation. So, Daniel two, beginning of verse 31. [00:16:21] You saw, O king, and behold a great image. This image, mighty and of exceeding brightness, stood before you, and its appearance was frightening. The head of this image was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron and its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. As you looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay and the bronze, the silver and the gold altogether were broken in pieces and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors, and the wind carried them away so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. [00:17:15] As we read of the interpretation of this dream in the coming verses, we read this in verse 36. This was the dream. Now we will tell you, the king, into interpretation. You, O king, the king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given the kingdom the power and the might and the glory, and into whose hand he has given, wherever they dwell, the children of man, the beasts of the field and the birds of the heavens, making you rule over them all. You are the head of gold. [00:17:50] Let me just pause and underline what he's saying here, right. He's saying that this statue that King Nebuchadnezzar envisions, he is this great head of the statue, him and his kingdom. It is a kingdom that God himself has given to him, and it is a kingdom that is great and glorious and powerful. [00:18:10] There is a but on this, of course. Let's continue reading. Verse 39. Another kingdom inferior to you shall arise after you, and yet a third kingdom of bronze which shall rule over all the earth. And there shall be a fourth kingdom strong as iron, because iron breaks to pieces and shatters all things, and like iron that crushes itself, break and crush all these. And as you saw the feet and toes partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom, but some of the firmness of the iron shall be in it. Just as you saw iron mixed with the soft clay, and as the toes of the feet were partly of iron and partly clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly brittle. And you saw the iron mixed with soft clay, so they will mix with one another in marriage, but they will not hold together, just as iron does not mix with clay. And in the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever. Just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand and that it broke in pieces, the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold, a great God has made known to the king what shall be after this. The dream is certain and its interpretation sure. [00:19:39] So this is one of several prophecies of many prophecies about what was going to come. Now, this is a prophecy that obviously came before the Roman empire, came all the way back with the Babylonian empire, but it very clearly speaks of Rome and all those in between. And what does it say? It says that by the hand of the lord, great kingdoms, empires would be established. These kingdoms would be glorious and strong and powerful, but one would be left to another and to another and to another, until one day, a stone cut by no human hands, we could say a divine stone, a divine rock would come and smash the whole thing to smithereens, right? To chaff. Similar to psalm two, when it speaks about the Lord, this begotten son, this anointed, one who like a rod of iron, would break to pieces those who would not. The kingdoms of this world. [00:20:47] The kingdoms of this world. [00:20:49] Chaff is this very light material that when separated from the plant, is just blown away. [00:20:59] It's just blown away. [00:21:01] Every now and then I roast coffee and it produces chaff. The little green things crack and they break and makes the whole house smell. And then it creates these little loose things, and they're so light. They're so light, you can just barely breathe on them, and they just sort of float away. [00:21:21] The contrast between that chaff and a great kingdom of iron, right, is so strong. [00:21:29] It reminds us of how we often experience the empires and powers and kings of this world, sometimes at this very massive scale, and sometimes at a very individual scale, when some man with a gun is pounding on your door or someone is telling you to bow down to an idol or be thrown into a furnace. There are these moments where there are the very particular people who seem stronger than you, more powerful than you. And of course, at a great scale, this is true as well. [00:22:03] But the scriptures remind us that the kingdoms and powers of this world do not last forever. They just don't. They won't. As Daniel, the prophet of the Lord, says, the dream is certain and its interpretation is sure. [00:22:22] So if you're Mary and Joseph, if you are one of the sons and daughters of the Lord. [00:22:33] This is what is in your mind. [00:22:36] It's what should be in our minds even today. [00:22:40] This sense that, yes, the kingdoms of this world are powerful, in a sense they're ordained by God as well, that we do pay taxes to Caesar, that we do register ourselves when it's called for and these kinds of things. But there is a time when we give only our allegiance to the great king. [00:23:00] And this great king is one who will bring all things to a final conclusion, not just of destruction, but one of creation. [00:23:12] Remember in the prophecy, this stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. I love imagining this, right? This sort of stone flying out of nowhere, breaking apart. This thing blasts to pieces and then it just fills the whole earth, the power and the strength of that kingdom, this kingdom of the Lord. [00:23:40] So that's what they were waiting for, right? They're waiting for this anointed one. They're waiting for this messiah. They're patiently hoping and giving their expectations toward this end. [00:23:54] So that's why when we read in the gospels, when the angels come and announce the birth of this one who was to come, this king who is to come, this one who would establish his rule over Israel and the world, this is good news. [00:24:16] This is exciting news. It means the oppression, the slavery, the unfairness, and all of the ways in which the kingdoms of this world have always worked and always will work, it would be undone. [00:24:30] This isn't just the evil things and the power that is used for immoral ends, but it's also the whole program of works that marks the things of this world. [00:24:43] The Roman Empire was very much characterized by systems of patronage. [00:24:49] The emperor being the chief patron, he sort of gives down to his people the various gifts and things that they need and desire, and then they give to him loyalty and worship and all kinds of things like this. It's a system in which social networking and soft skills like charm and eloquence and political maneuvering are very important. [00:25:16] When Jesus comes though and establishes a kingdom and he does it without human hands, he establishes a kingdom that is not of our works. [00:25:28] The kingdom is not transferred over from one human to another human. It's simply established by the Lord. It simply is grounded in the ground as it blows up the things of this world and establishes a kingdom that is forever, which means in part that it is not only a kingdom of power, but as we come to see throughout Jesus'ministry, it's a kingdom of grace. It's a kingdom that is simply given to people not achieved, know, stabbing this guy in the back, or creating this coup or this rebellion, or implementing complicated tax systems, or establishing governors, or all these very complicated and empirey things that was necessary to rule a kingdom. God simply rules, and he pours out gifts, and he gives things to his people, and he says, here, you're a citizen now. How well, just trust me. That's it. [00:26:34] What about all these things? Don't worry about it. Just trust me. [00:26:40] We, of course, give God's gifts to God of obedience and love. We give to him worship. We give to Him our lives, but not as something that earns for us this kingdom, not something that maneuvers us into the kingdom or earns our freedom or status as citizens. God gives to us these things freely, simply through faith in Him. [00:27:05] Well, this waiting for the Messiah is what they were doing, and that meant trusting Him and his kingship, even when it didn't look like it was maybe expected to look like. [00:27:18] Trusting Jesus didn't mean just looking for his kingdom of power and of glory, but it also meant looking for a kingdom that maybe was not like the kingdom of this world. [00:27:30] It comes to us in the way it comes to us because Jesus comes to us in the way that he does. When Jesus entered in the world, he didn't jockey for position. He didn't curry favor with Pilate and then sort of leverage that to get in with Herod and then donate some money to Caesar and then gather a bunch of clients around Him. [00:27:52] It's not how he lived, is it? In fact, most of the time, he was rejected ultimately by the people who were in authority and who had power. They crucified Him, and they let out Barabbas in order to do it. One of the chief jobs of Pilate was to crush insurrections. And sort of in the name of that, he lets Jesus go. [00:28:17] But Jesus doesn't care what Pilate thinks. [00:28:21] Jesus doesn't try to rationalize his actions or make sure that he makes sense to Pilate. Jesus doesn't try to figure out how to smooth things over with Herod. [00:28:33] He simply comes in obedience to his Father, and he dies on a cross, and he establishes a kingdom which, thank God, did not crush us all in vengeance and wrath, but instead opens for us a path of salvation. And he says to me, come unto me, you who are weary and are heavy laden, and I'll give you rest, I'll give you peace, I'll give you inheritance. I'll give you safety and protection. I'll give you eternal life. [00:29:09] This was hard for the disciples to see. [00:29:12] There were missteps along the way. James and John. Hey, Jesus, when you rise into your kingdom, can I sit on your right hand? And these kind of things? [00:29:21] No. Jesus says, you don't understand. But eventually they did. And eventually the apostles gave their lives, shed their blood, many of them, for the sake of the Gospel, as do many Christians all throughout the world. They willingly give their lives for the King, for King Jesus, knowing that even in death, there is life through faith in Him. [00:29:46] It should be our prayer to understand these things as well, to think about prophecies like Daniel Seven and Psalm Two, about the world that Jesus entered into and the world that Jesus saves, and to give our faith to him, our allegiance to Him, our hope to Him, our life to Him. [00:30:09] Let's pray and ask that God would help us to do this. [00:30:15] Our Heavenly Father as we consider the world that Jesus entered into, a world ruled by empires and governors and taxes and armies and guards, people with weapons and power and glory. [00:30:39] We are so thankful that you, who are the king of kings, the greatest king, the king above all, even creation itself, has sent your son into the world to save us from ourselves. [00:30:58] You sent Him into the world and created established a kingdom that will never pass away, a kingdom established by the shedding of his own blood, a covenant which established a people and a promise that we can rely on every single day of our lives. Whether we live here in the United States or any place around the world, we can put our trust in you. We can look to you in the ups and the downs of life, and the times when things seem to go so well and they're easy, and the times when they're so difficult and there's much persecution in all of it. Lord you remain steadfast. You remain strong and gracious, helpful and guiding. You lead us through the valley of the shadow of death, and you bring us into places of still water and life. You prepare a table before us and before us, before our enemies. You are not threatened by those who would seek to harm you and Your people. [00:32:04] You are not threatened by those who sought to harm Your very own Son. [00:32:09] But instead, Lord, you used his work to save us all. [00:32:15] Blessed be your name. [00:32:18] May we live out our calling as citizens of the kingdom of God through repentance and belief in the gospel. Teach us to walk as you have called us to walk, giving our lives and praise to Jesus and all that he calls us to do. Let Him be chief in our minds, in our hearts. Let Him be all that we hope for and desire. [00:32:45] Lord, we ask for Your blessing in these things. Steady us. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.