Light on the Hill

Guest (Male): Next on Light on the Hill, the chief priests, scribes, and elders set out to trap Jesus with a few questions. Get ready for the answer.

Thank you for joining us today for Light on the Hill as we get back into Mark's Gospel. We'll be in chapter 11, verses 27 through 33. The religious leaders of that day are up to no good, trying to entrap Jesus with their questions. But Jesus, in His wisdom, turns the tables on them with a question of His own. Let's take a close look at that exchange and the lessons from it with Pastor James Kaddis.

James Kaddis: Very quick and brief, the setting here is the temple. This is roughly about a week before Jesus is killed on the cross, and there is a lot of stuff happening leading up to all of this, which we've been talking about extensively over the last several weeks. Jesus's ministry is becoming very well known amongst many people. The notoriety that He has developed as a result of some of the hard-hitting things that He was doing has definitely got a lot of people to think and to look at things much differently, especially because of the way that Christ would teach.

This is an important thing because we've talked about some aspects of how Christ taught and how He dealt with things. One aspect of how Christ dealt with things was something that we talked about last week and over the last several weeks. As long as we're in the Gospels, I always bring this aspect out, and that is the fact that when Christ would speak to somebody, He would never speak to what it was that they were actually saying. He always spoke to the posture of their heart in that moment.

He would never just simply answer a question directly in many cases because He knew that there was a heart issue that was driving the conversation in that moment, and then He would revert to doing other things instead of what would appear to be the obvious or what some people might term or deem as the correct answer. A great example of this is one of the stories that we read about where Jesus runs into a woman who is at a common meeting area, the well.

He runs into her, and the woman basically says, "Our fathers worship over here," talking about the north, "and the people that you associate with yourself, they worship over here. Where's the right place to worship?" In essence, that's the question that gets imposed. Jesus says, "Do me a favor, go get your husband." What Jesus just tells her has nothing to do with what is ensuing in the conversation, and then the lady gets a bit defensive. It's very obvious what's happening. She says, "I don't have a husband." "Well, you're right. Actually, you've had five of them, and the one that you're with right now really isn't your husband." It's very harsh, but this is Jesus's style of addressing communication.

It's interesting. There's a lot of principles that you can learn to develop in other parts of our lives based on patterns that we see with Christ. One of the things that I see with Christ that I so admire is Christ is super good at eliminating noise. He was always good at eliminating noise. He was never distracted by anything anybody said or did. He never allowed anybody to take Him away from the mission or from the focus.

God was always very good, Christ was always very good at literally wiping out the noise and only tuning in to the signal, as many people would put it. It's a very important aspect of the way He did things. Of course, this all relates to how He addressed people. The other thing that He would do oftentimes is He would respond with a question. In doing so, He did it in a way where He invoked another issue that oftentimes created a lot of debate or sparked up controversy.

When He did that, He always did that for a reason, and we're going to get into that because He does that here today. But the other thing, the second most common way that we would see Jesus communicate, is what we would call great authority. Let me explain what I mean when I say that. Jesus did not teach like a typical rabbi. A typical rabbi would oftentimes respond to a question being imposed by their students by asking the students another question that would lead them to some kind of inadvertent conclusion that was never authoritatively based.

It was always very existential in nature, for lack of a better term. But Jesus didn't do that. Jesus would actually sit down in a session where people were seeking to understand something, and He would be very definitive about the conclusions that He would come to. If you were sitting down with a rabbi back in those days or any of these religious people that Jesus was talking to, they would ask a question, "Rabbi, what do you think about this?" And then the rabbi would say, "Well, this person says this, what do you think about that?"

That's the way they always responded. That was always the way they taught. There was never any real definitiveness in any of the conclusions they came to. There was nothing declarative in nature based on the things they said, and there was nothing that had a very clear signal tied to what they did. They were literally like a bunch of existentialists. They never spoke in a way that was thesis-based; it was very synthetic in nature.

In other words, it was like, "We'll just leave it loose to interpretation, and we'll do that by asking a series of questions that never really halts down to the true issue." Jesus, on the other hand, was completely different from that. Jesus would be questioned with something like, "What is the greatest commandment?" and then He would just write off this is what it needs to be. If you want to know what the greatest commandment is, it's to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, your soul, your strength, and every other command hangs on that.

It's just so interesting to think about that because Jesus drew a different picture for anybody that would hear Him based on the definitive nature of His representations. Another great example of Jesus doing this, and He would do this all the time, but you would hear somebody go to Him and maybe ask Him a question about a specific issue in the law. Jesus would provide a response like, "You have heard it said that you shall not commit adultery, and some of you might even believe the idea that you never have committed adultery. But I tell you that if you've lusted after somebody in your heart, you're guilty of committing the same sin."

It's the same kind of shock that Christ would produce in people because of the fact that He was so definitive in nature with respect to the representations that He made. This is why in the Gospel, we read all kinds of accounts where people are astonished at what it is that Jesus is saying because He's not beating around the bush. He's speaking authoritatively, and nobody is taking it in any other way other than the very declarative nature of what He was saying.

There was no other way to interpret what He was saying. It was not subjugated to some idea that was obviously made relevant through some cultural stand that existed within the religious sect of the time that Jesus was walking in. It was a very different world. It's interesting to understand this, and if you do understand this and you see this and you recognize it for what it's worth, then where we go next becomes so critical. Where we are about to go is eye-opening.

Where we are about to go actually changes literally everything. Why? Because the application of what it means to see what Jesus did here is literally life-changing. It is the ultimate picture of what it looks like to be one who takes responsibility for the actions and assertions that you continue to give yourself to. We're going to see that right here. Let's jump in at verse 27.

This is on the tail end of Jesus turning over the tables in the temple, teaching throughout the temple area, and being very aggressive about what He called His Father's business. Verse 27 says, "And they come again to Jerusalem: and as he was walking in the temple, there come to him the chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders." Already, you know it's not going to be good because if the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders are coming together, you're already seeing a group of people that don't get along.

The chief priests, the scribes, and the elders, by default, did not get along when they were together. But we see more and more of these accounts of them being together. Why? Because although they did not get along with one another, they actually found great value in the commonality that existed between them, which was the fact that they made an enemy of Christ. We might not like each other, and we might not get along, but we will all get along for the common purpose of entrapping Christ because we know He's a problem for us.

The scribes had a different point of view than the others that they were associated with, but all of them had the same point of view with respect to Christ, and they did not like Him. They're seeking to entrap Him, and you know that's what's going to happen here. Look at what happens in verse 28. "And they say unto him, By what authority doest thou these things? and who gave thee this authority to do these things?" First of all, let's just say this. Number one, what things are they talking about? What things are they referring to when they say, "By what authority doest thou these things?"

When He's talking about these things, He's talking about three things primarily because we're only looking at the local context here. If we're looking at the local context, then it's going to be these three things. Number one, it's going to be Him turning over the tables in the temple. Number two, it's going to be Him teaching. That's going to be another one. And the third thing that they're referring to is His miracles.

These are the three things that are front and center within the context of what we've been reading in Mark, and these would obviously be the three things that these scribes and Pharisees and all these other people are going to Him questioning concerning. Now, the nature of these two questions is very, very important to understand. They are critical to not miss. The first of the questions that they ask is, "By what authority doest thou these things?" and "Who gave thee this authority to do these things?"

Unless you take the time to deeply analyze and seek to contemplate the nature of these questions, you will not recognize the faulty premise by which these questions have been imposed. The premise behind how these questions are imposed is faulty. Although the main intent for them to ask this question is to entrap Jesus, what they did not realize is because of the faulty premise of these questions, they were in essence not only entrapping themselves, but they were demonstrating to the rest of the people that were watching them, if they were perceptive enough, that they are actually ignorant of the very thing in which they're asking.

It means they are not clued in to how it actually works within the kingdom of God, but perhaps more significantly and consequently, they don't even understand how it works within the laws of nature. The first part of this question is important. They say, "By what authority doest thou these things?" The general assumption when they ask this question is that the actions of Jesus within the context by which He gave Himself to these actions required some level of authority.

It is in essence them making the statement that nobody could do what Jesus was doing, although Jesus did it, and He did it without consequence. Not only did He do it without consequence, He did it with great forbearance, for lack of a better term. In other words, what Jesus did when He did what He did was He clearly communicated every principle that He intended to, and there was nothing that blocked Him or stopped Him from being able to do it.

By default, asking that question was already faulty because it carried the premise that God had no authority to do so. Without the authority being established to Him, He in essence was not capable of doing what He plainly did. Think about it like having 50 military men standing at a gate, and they're told, "Guard the gate with your life. Don't allow anybody to go in." Some guy walks up to the gate, and whether or not they're famous, whether or not you know them, whether or not they have credentials, I don't care if it's a five-star general, you will not allow them in the gate. You just won't do it.

The guy walks up to the gate, and as he walks up to the gate, every single person who's guarding the gate, who all received the same order, walks away and lets him walk in. The commanders that are on the other side of the gate who issued the order, are they going to go to the person who walked through the gate and say, "Who gave you the authority to walk through this gate?" No. They know the answer to that question. The man just simply walked through the gate.

The people that they need to be asking that question to are the 50 guys who received the order to not let him in the gate. If I have five people that work for me, and I ask those five people to stand at that door and not allow anybody in, and all of a sudden some guy walks in, talks to me, the conversation is over and he leaves, am I going to contact the guy that came into the building and say, "Who let you in?" I know who was standing there.

I'm going to contact the five people who gave him the authority to come inside and as a result defied my authority. The mentality of cowardice is already coming through to these people because the authority that Christ had in doing what He did was already inferred based on the reactions of the people that He interacted with at the time that He did what He did. If the Pharisees truly wanted to understand the answer to the premise behind the question that they were carrying, they would go to the people that gave credibility to Christ. They're not going to Christ.

The reason why they're doing that is because they're seeking to intimidate Him or at least entrap Him into not going to wherever He is going with the authority that He's already established. Do you understand the problem? Do you understand why it's broken? If I have my children with me, and we go to their grandma's house, and my children are told, "If Grandma offers you a soda, don't touch the soda." If their grandmother offers my children a soda, I'm not going to be aggressive with Grandma.

Grandma gets to do anything she wants. It's at her house. She is the older generation. She can do anything she wants with her grandchildren. But if her grandchildren choose to defy me in seeking to indulge themselves, the bone that I'm going to pick is not going to be with Grandma. The bone that I'm going to pick is going to be with them because they defied the authority that was vested in me to manage them. Makes sense? They're going to the wrong person to ask that question.

It's actually a very broken question, but they're too fearful to go to the right people that they should actually be going to to ask that question because they would realize very quickly that they are fake. They're not the real deal, and they would learn that very quickly. That's the first question. Then the second question that they ask, and who gave thee this authority to do these things? The second question is even more ridiculous than the first question because the second question is in essence more of a bad-faith question than the first question.

They know the fact that Christ already has the authority, and they know that the authority that He has can only be had by default if you are one person and one person only, and that's God. Think about it like this. If somebody appears in front of me that I don't know, but they do something that only one person can do, I'm never going to go to that person and ask them who gave them the authority to do what they did because I know that there's only one person in the world that can do it.

Which means he's the man who's done it who also represents the core of the value that stands with respect to the authoritative mechanism they're trying to draw. Think about it like this, and this is super important to get. If only God can do one thing, you would never go to the person who did that one thing and say who gave you that authority because it's obvious that the authority is intrinsic within the person who did it because only God can do what that person did.

In other words, you would, based on what that person did, you would say, "God did it." The way that that manifests with people like us is that people see us do what appears to be supernatural and miraculous, and the default position can no longer be, "Look at what that person did." The default position demands that you say, "Well, God did it. It was a miracle." If I go to a person and I tell them you've got a tumor and that tumor is irrecoverable and you're going to die in two weeks, and then two weeks later you go to the doctor and the tumor is gone, you're not going to go to that person and say, "What a great miraculous thing you did." No, you're going to say it was an act of God.

You're never going to ask the question that demands an answer by which "Who is the one who gave you the authority?" when in reality, it's a foolish question to ask. It's going to them and asking them what the authority or what premise the authority is being established in when there is nobody who can hand that level of authority because you have to be at the top of the food chain in order to be able to do it. God Himself is the one that's doing these acts.

But they're asking that question because what they're doing is beyond narcissistic. What they're doing is beyond nefarious. What they're doing is they are acknowledging the fact that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, and then they are making a concerted effort to conceal Him as such by asking Him questions that you would never ask God. They want people to not view Him for who He really is because they know the loss that they would obtain in doing so would be the very reputation that they have spent years to con people over. They are trying to rob God of His glory. That's the simple way of putting it. They're trying to take credit for God's work by simply questioning the authority by which that work is being done.

Guest (Male): Thank you for joining us today for Light on the Hill. What you just heard is one part of a study in Mark's Gospel from Pastor James Kaddis. You can hear it again at lightonthehillradio.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Not long ago, Pastor James released his new book on the first half of Revelation. It's entitled The Last Book. He points out that Revelation isn't a book of fear but rather a book of hope. Pastor James will help you understand the world we live in and current events through a biblical lens, preparing your heart for what lies ahead. Get a copy by going to lightonthehillradio.com or through Amazon.

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James Kaddis: Look at what happens next because this gets so powerful. Again, this is the wisdom of Jesus. Jesus does something that He normally doesn't do, but He's doing it here. He's doing it, I think, for two reasons. First of all, He's trolling these guys in a way. It's like the ultimate troll. I'll explain that in just a second. But then on top of that, the other thing that He does is He is immediately holding them accountable to the conclusion that they are coming to by making the statement that they are making.

Look at what He says here. This is very interesting. "And Jesus answered and said unto them, I will also ask of you one question, and answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things." So Jesus basically just took on the personality of the same teachers that are trying to entrap Him. Jesus is now beginning to do something that's outside of His nature to do or outside of His representation to do, and He is now doing what all the rabbis do. He is now seeking to answer a question by the imposition of a question.

The people are probably looking at Him with their eyebrows raised, going, "Whoa, He doesn't do that. What's up with that?" And then He imposes this question, and this question is remarkable. "The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men? answer me." Now you understand why that's such a crazy, wild, smart question to ask. You understand why that's such a powerful question. Let's talk about what they instantly did and how they worked through it when Jesus asked the question.

"And they reasoned with themselves, saying, If we shall say, From heaven; he will say, Why then did ye not believe him? But if we shall say, Of men; they feared the people: for all men counted John, that he was a prophet indeed." What's going through their mind is, we really can't answer this question. Because if we say that John the Baptist is of heaven, then we're acknowledging that by default, Jesus is God because of how John spoke of Jesus in saying He was preparing the way.

John actually said, "I'm not even worthy to unbuckle your sandals." That's what John is basically saying here. So if they say that John is of heaven, then they're immediately acknowledging that Christ is the Messiah. If they say John is not of heaven, then the mob's going to kill them because the mob thinks that John is absolutely a prophet. Jesus Himself said that John was the greatest prophet that had ever lived. So we know for a fact, this is hugely entrapping.

Remember, you are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.

Guest (Male): [outro music]