God's Judgement - Marriage Law

This morning, I wanted to reflect on something that I'm sure is really prevalent in your minds this week, I think. It's all through my email feed, my Facebook feeds at the moment, and it has come about again, this popular idea, because of what happened last week on Saturday. You might remember that last week, Saturday, May 23, Ireland made headlines for being the first country to, by referendum, vote in change on the laws of marriage. A social movement calling for what they label as marriage equality has seen the definition of what constitutes marriage as, in essence, being between a man and a woman, being changed to include same sex couples marrying as well. If you're anything like me, however, you will realise or you will have noticed the stir that this has caused.

It's been on the front page or on the second page of our newspapers for the last week, at least. Like I said, my Facebook is full of people trying to get me to vote this way or that way on this issue. And it's made me sort of reflect on what, you know, what my opinion is on this. But more than that, what I feel. I feel really frustrated with this situation.

I feel at times really hopeless or helpless with this situation. And above all, I feel absolutely exhausted with this debate. It's been going not just for the last week, but for the last years. So my question this morning that I want us to think about is how do we win this fight? Because that is what it feels like.

How do we win this fight? And the answer, I think, might surprise you because I would like to hazard or propose this answer that we win this by resting in the judgment of Christ. We're going to look at a very profound moment in Jesus' ministry where He was given a very tough situation to deal with. He was attacked and hounded by people for His opinion. His Facebook news feed would have been full if He had Facebook.

Let's turn to John chapter 8, and we're going to read from verses 1 to 11. John chapter 8, verse 1. Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn, He appeared again in the temple courts where all the people gathered around Him, and He sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery.

They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the law of Moses, he commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap in order to have a basis for accusing Him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with His finger.

When they kept on questioning Him, He straightened up and said to them, "If any of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." Again, He stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?"

"No one, sir," she said. "Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin." So far, our reading. We're going to have a look at the dynamics of what was happening in this story.

First, we see how the Pharisees, those who we know from previous times, were really against Jesus and what He was doing. They were, in many ways, the enemies of Jesus in His ministry. And we see again how these Pharisees were trying to trap Jesus. The Bible says that there was a woman that was caught in the act of adultery. The words there in Greek literally means that she was caught red handed.

There was absolutely no doubt that this lady was guilty of having committed this sin. Many people have assumed that this lady is Mary Magdalene. There's a whole tradition that says that we know who this was, that she was a known prostitute and so on. We don't know that. Nothing in the Bible indicates that at all.

So we are only left with a lady who had failed in this particular way. We also see in this situation the custom of bringing someone to a very public court. In the Jewish times, people were often brought to the temple courts or the city gates to be judged by an elder of some sort, a town or the village elder. Someone that was considered wise. Someone that was considered sort of the regional magistrate.

And so there was a whole commotion, a very public thing going on. This lady may even have been physically dragged to the temple courts at this time. And so a whole crowd was following what was going on. And so why did these Pharisees and these religious teachers bring this woman to Jesus? Well, verse 6 indicates that they did it to see if they could trip Jesus up again.

If they could see if Jesus was able to place a dilemma before Jesus, forcing Him to choose one thing over the other. If He was to choose, say, for example, to stone her according to the law of Moses, then He would be in trouble with the Roman overseers and rulers because the Roman law was that no one can make a judging on execution except for the Romans. And the Jews living under Roman rule were punished severely for having brought about their own sort of street justice, vigilantism. So Jesus would have been in the bad books with the Romans if He said, "Okay, go ahead and stone her according to these customs."

If Jesus said, "Don't do this," then He would have been in trouble with the people that He was preaching to because they were listening to Him and wanting to see what He was saying about their faith and their tradition. So they were posing to Jesus this dilemma: choose one or the other. You're damned if you do. You're damned if you don't. And see how Jesus responds, however.

Jesus doesn't react immediately. When this question is brought to Him, see what He does? It says that He stoops down and starts writing on the ground with His finger. Why does He do this? What is He writing?

It's such a perplexing question. Some have suggested that Jesus was actually writing the names of every Pharisee and every religious teacher there, writing their names down and their sin, knowing what their lives were about. Other commentators believe that Jesus wrote a warning to them, a warning aimed at them, maybe a Bible verse. And others have suggested that Jesus was at a loss of what to say, that He just didn't have any answers. So He just needed a bit of time to doodle and draw some funny pictures while He was thinking.

The truth is we don't really know. The truth is we don't really know. God hasn't revealed to us a clear reason in this situation of why Jesus immediately did that. If I was to hazard a guess and it's pure speculation, I believe that Jesus was really taken aback, was really frustrated at the brazen hardness of this angry mob that were willing to do something like this. And so He remained silent, doodling in the sand for the reason of having this angry, yelling, screaming, frustrated mob and getting them to simmer down.

Just giving them a bit of space. Just giving them a bit of time. And after the rush of blood had slowed down in the mob, they were calm enough to reason with, to argue with, to speak with. Because we literally see that in the context, they kept asking Jesus, "What do you say? What do you say, Jesus?"

This is the situation. This is what's happened. What's your opinion of this? Verse 7 says, "When they kept on questioning Him." For a long time, there had been silence, and Jesus, scribbling in the sand, had stripped them of this anger.

And funnily enough, they had come to Him with all the power and all the vigour and all the vitality, and now Jesus had taken it on Him, and He took the power and He said to them, in essence, "You guys wait until I'm ready to talk. What do you have to say, Jesus? Do you agree with Moses? What do you say? Shall we stone her?"

"Shall we release her? What do you say, Jesus? What do you say?" And then to add weight to His announcement, Jesus having knelt on the floor and on the sand and scribbling, stands up. He stands up.

And people take notice to hear what He has to say. And He gave a response that only Jesus could give. And if you read the Gospels, it's just something so in line with what He would have said. He turns it completely back onto them and He says, "If anyone of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." You see, judgment can only be handed out by someone who is willing to be judged.

Judgment is only to be handed out by those who are willing to be judged. True justice can only be done by those who are just. And this was a very unjust situation. Where was the man that this lady was with? Why wasn't he being dragged out into the temple courts to be judged?

It was one eyed justice, and therefore, it was an injustice that was being committed. But what Jesus does, and He does over and over again is He brings ethical law, moral law, spiritual law, and He combines it with judicial law. He brings it into the same equation. Jesus makes a point that our code of justice cannot begin in the courts. Our sense of what is right and wrong cannot begin in the courts.

It must begin in our hearts. And our problem is that our hearts are rotten, that our lives are rotten. There's no point in fighting for a justice system to be fair when those who are meant to be the ones keeping it fair are broken. Justice begins with us, Jesus says. And before we criticise secular hedonists for allowing certain things to happen in our society, for allowing gay marriage, for example, we have to do some soul searching in how our people, our family members, our friends view things so differently to us?

How has Australia ended up in this place? We have to ask that question. Has the church really done its best to winsomely draw people into the debate about a better life, about what God has to offer? Where have we failed to show how God's justice is better than adopting something else? What we see here and what Jesus is pointing us to is that we make horrible judges.

We make horrible judges for two reasons. Our motives are often so messed up. We see the crowd here swept into this fury. Mob mentality, street justice. We're going to get this lady.

She's done a horrible thing. There's anger, there's emotion. We see it so often in the Gospels. There's just a crowd that's willing to murder someone. And we see this crowd and the outrage at this sin that is not their sin.

It is someone else's sin, and they are willing to take a life for it. And yet, Jesus says that they are willing to overlook their sin. They're willing to overlook their sin. They're willing to put their hatred of their own sin onto someone else. And the second thing we see is our inconsistency and our hypocrisy.

The crowd was willing to accuse this woman and place her before the judge to be condemned, but which one of us would do that against ourselves? Who in their right mind, if we had committed adultery, would go to a public court and go to a judge sitting there and say, "I've done a terrible thing. Please judge me"? No one. So we see the hypocrisy and the inconsistency of our nature.

We see that we are willing to take this lady, forget about the guy, and commit something that was truly atrocious. We're willing to be outraged at sin, but anyone's except us and ours. I'm reading a book at the moment, and it sort of just highlights this point for me, on the life of Kurt Cobain. Does anyone know him from Nirvana? Yeah.

All the Gen Xers will have their hand up for this one. Nirvana was a band started in Seattle in the late eighties, early nineties. Kurt Cobain was a very angry, depressed, bitter man who single handedly created a cult music genre called grunge music. It was bitter. It was angry.

It was rebellious. And people asked him, "Why are you so angry? Why are you so sour at the world?" And he said the single reason he was this angry, despite having had a good loving mum and dad, was because his parents divorced at one time. And that left deep scars in his life.

And that caused him that was a driving factor in his disillusionment with the world. Now he started this movement called Grunge, but the irony is that a year after the birth of his child and having been married, he committed suicide. And the circle was complete. He left a wife and he left a child behind. And so we see the hypocrisy.

We see a man who was willing to fight this fight, who was willing to fight the system, who was willing to say the world is terrible because we are terrible people, and yet so selfish and so ironic. We make terrible judges. And so we see how Jesus treats this woman then. He says to her, "Is no one here to condemn you?" And she said, "No one, sir."

"Then neither do I condemn you," Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin." Now some people, especially liberal Christians, Christians that like to pick and choose aspects of the Bible that they like, will say that this passage talks about how gracious Jesus is, how willing He is, how humble He is, how non-judgmental He is. But if we look at these words, we will see that Jesus is not being unjust or unfair or too lenient. He calls a spade a spade.

He says, "Go now and leave this life of sin." Lady, you have done the wrong thing. Leave this life of sin, Jesus says to the woman. He doesn't make light of her sin. He says, "You have sinned against God."

You have sinned against your husband. You have sinned against yourself. Leave that life and sin no more. He wasn't making light of the sin. He wasn't making light of the seventh commandment, "You shall not commit adultery."

He didn't even, in so many words, set aside the law which demanded the death penalty for these offences. On the contrary, without in any way implying He personally desired her death, He proceeded to point out the real reason for the Pharisees dragging her out into the temple courts. These men were not interested in upholding justice. In their hearts, they were willing to sacrifice the life of this lady to prove a point. They wanted to trip Jesus up, and they were willing to kill someone for it.

Jesus says to them, "Why are you really here, guys? What are you doing with this lady? If you are so righteous, if you are so holy, pretending to uphold the ideals of holiness, are you really that outraged at this issue? Will you really kill this woman now?" And we see at that time, all the courage escapes them and flees down the street.

And one by one, the Bible says, from the oldest, the most wise, the most mature perhaps, these guys leave. They go home, and they leave her by herself. And we see again in complete conformity to what Jesus was described as, what Jesus described Himself as in John 3:17, that Jesus had not come to judge the world or to condemn it, but to save it. John 3:16 and 17. That's what Jesus did.

He did not come to judge this lady, but to save her. Jesus didn't cast His woman aside or condemn her as unfit for the kingdom. There is indeed a place, He says, for a lady like her in the kingdom of God if she is willing to turn away from her sin. What this means for us in a world that is so upside down and so confusing and has so many voices and has so many opinions, what this means for us is three things. We have to keep Jesus Christ as the King and the Judge for three reasons.

First, we must really put our motives for holiness and goodness and righteousness under the spotlight. We have to put it under the microscope and really ask ourselves, "Why am I outraged at this? Why am I willing to say these things? Why am I willing to take this action? Is it because of a mob mentality?"

All the other Christians are doing this. I better hop onto it as well. So many people are outraged at this. I better do it as well. Is it because maybe I have unresolved issues with sin in my life?

And because I am not dealing with this and I'm frustrated and angry with this stuff in my life, I'm willing to project it onto someone else. The hatred and the anger and the frustration I feel about myself, I'm willing to put on that person. Are we willing to ask those hard questions about ourself? We have to be so careful about that. Can you see what Jesus is driving at here?

He's asking these men, "Are your motives really that pure? Where does our attempts for righteousness and right living begin? In other words, is it first in me and then in others? Or is it in others first, and then we see what happens?" The second point is we can rest from this attitude. We can rest from judgment.

In our passion and love for God, love for God's word and His ways, there's something in us that just wants to pick up a cause and fight for it. There's people willing to go to parliament to write petitions, to pick up the cause of Christ and go to war. But if we're not careful, and I'm not saying those things are bad. Please understand me. I'm not saying those things are bad.

But if we're not careful, we might find ourselves trying to be judge, jury, and executioner all in one. We forget that it is the Lord Jesus who is the active, present judge in this world. We forget that, okay, on the one hand, He will judge the living and the dead at the end of this time. But through His spirit, we have the promise that He is busy doing that as we speak. He guides human history as we speak.

He raises up leaders. He casts aside leaders. He brings and encourages and equips His church along. Jesus is the judge of all the earth. He is the judge of all of humanity, and He will judge all of us one by one.

But His kingdom of peace is actually here now as well, and it is advancing, and it is growing, and it is in the process of being established more and more. That is the promise from Scripture. And therefore, it means that He is still judge and king over the earth. And what that means for us is that we can rest in many ways in the knowledge of Jesus being the one who will make the right call because He is judge, and He will teach, and He will correct. The third thing is that we can be grateful that we have not only a judge, but a compassionate judge.

We can never forget what the grace of Jesus Christ has meant for us. He is such a good judge. He is so merciful. He was not simply willing to judge us for our crimes. He was willing to step down from the bench, to stand in our place, willing to take on our punishment for us.

That is the kind of judge He is. He did not simply overlook us as judge. He stepped down and stood in our place and took our penalty, and we can never forget that. When we do forget that is when we become angry and bitter and vengeful. We become self righteous, and we forget that the punishment that brought us peace was laid on His shoulders.

And by that punishment, by the wounds on His back, we've been healed. That is the judge we have. When we wrestle with and struggle with the direction of this world, when we get frustrated with what's happening, when we get angry, we have to remember these things. We have to rest in Jesus Christ and believe in the redeeming power of God. He has the power to make the right call, and He will make the right call.

Sometimes not in the way that we expect, sometimes not in the way that we foresee it going. When we see our country make laws that contradict God's creation, that contradicts His word, we can and we should make our voice heard. We can and we should. But we have to keep in mind as well, 1 Peter 3:15, to do it with gentleness and respect. But at the end of the day, don't become disheartened.

Don't become disheartened. Remember and believe that God is still in control. Believe that He hasn't given up on His creation, that this is still His kingdom. He's not losing it. And remember that we don't have to be the saviours because a Saviour has already been sent for us.

So go to Him, pray to Him, plead with Him for what is going on in our world, but then rest in Him as well. Let's pray for Him right now. Father, we love You. Lord Jesus, we love You, and we love Your ways, and we love that You have given us a new life, a good life. And therefore, we want everyone around us to enjoy this as well.

We want others to understand this. We see so much pain, Lord. We see so much brokenness around us. And our hearts break. And we get frustrated with the ignorance.

We get frustrated with, oh, Lord, the hard headedness. But, Lord, in that frustration, help us not to sin. Lord, help us to evaluate our motives and put it under the spotlight of Your word. Lord, let justice, let what is fair, let what is godly begin in us. May our lives more and more be reflections of You as we imitate You, Lord Jesus.

Lord, keep us and guard us from hypocrisy. Keep us and guard us from hidden motives that we may not even realise, that we may not even consciously decide to do. Lord, for our frustration with our own shortcomings, help us not to project that onto others. Let us evaluate that plank in our own eyes before we try and take the speck out of someone else's. But, Lord Jesus, thank You that You are a good judge.

And Lord, You had all right. You had all right to judge this lady. And Lord, You're so gracious still, and You're so willing to build Your kingdom out of adulterers and prostitutes and sinners. Forgive us in our anger. Forgive our frustrations.

Forgive us our adultery, for our one eyed sense of judgment and justice. Father, forgive our rage and our inaction. Forgive us our laziness and our harshness and our gossip. Let holiness start in us, and then we ask, Lord, may it overflow into this country. We pray for our government.

We pray for their decisions, Lord. But whatever happens, we know that You are the one that is still in control. That above all, Your heart is broken and disturbed. But, Lord, You are in the process of redeeming us. Give us hope and courage and joy in the face of this, we ask. In Jesus' name. Amen.