Have you ever been reading a book or an article and suddenly you came across a comment with which you totally disagreed, so you put the book down and didn’t pick it up again?
Or maybe you were listening to someone, and the speaker said something to which you disagreed and you stopped listening.
I suppose that we have all done things like this, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
But we need to be very careful, because we could be closing our ears and minds to some blessing or important truth which is yet to come.
John 6 begins with the feeding of the 5,000 people on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.
Many of those people stalked the Lord Jesus for several days, and they were rewarded with some of the strongest and most important theology found in the Gospel of John.
Verse 25: – “And when they had found him on the other side of the sea, they said unto him, Rabbi, when camest thou hither?
Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you: for him hath God the Father sealed.
Then said they unto him, What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?
Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.”
All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.
For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me.
And this is the Father’s will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day.”
Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God, he hath seen the Father.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life.
I am that bread of life.”
For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.
He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.
As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.
This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever.”
When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples murmured at it, he said unto them, Doth this offend you?
What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?
It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.
But there are some of you that believe not. For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray him.
And he said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father.”
Those people, whom Jesus miraculously fed, were being fed spiritual manna, but when the pieces got a little too chewy they spat it out and left the table.
We see the same thing with the teaching of Stephen.
As he was recounting the history of Israel in Acts 7, the pride of the nation was stirred and everyone listened.
But when he began to point to the truth that Israel had become stiffnecked and resistant to the ministry of God, they balked.
“When they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth.”
Here in Acts 22, the Jews listened with some degree of patience while Paul told a nice autobiographical story,
but when he mentioned the hated word “GENTILES,” the tinder-dry sins of his hearers exploded.
Unlike civilized people like you and me,
Away with such a fellow from the earth: for it is not fit that he should live.”
And once again, as in the case of the Lord Jesus and Stephen, they didn’t permit themselves to hear what they deeply needed to hear.
This morning, let’s consider some of the things which kept those people from hearing the truth.
These sins are universal among men, and that means that they can be found in us as well.
They need to be recognized, confessed, turned over to the Lord and forsaken.
They can keep needy lost men from the salvation of Christ, and they can keep the Christian from enjoying the highest blessings of the Lord.
Why did those Jews explode that day as Paul was talking to them about his relationship to Christ?
There are those words “tolerant” and “intolerant” again.
Tolerance is the capacity to recognize – and respect – the differences of others.
It doesn’t mean that we agree with those differences, but that we grant those people the right to be wrong.
All of us need to learn to be tolerant, while at the same time uncompromising when it comes to the Truth.
A BIGOT is someone who is not willing to grant those people anything, including the right to be wrong.
A bigot often looks at ALL the individuals in the other group as equally stupid, or criminal, or wicked.
A bigot, although not always admitting it, will hate the members of the other group, simply because they are in that other group.
A wise man once wrote: “The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions,
when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise is simply this:
I am in the right, and you are in the wrong.
When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me, for it is your duty to tolerate truth,
but when I am the stronger, I shall persecute you, for it is my duty to persecute error.”
her prayers are curses – her God is a demon – her communion is death – her vengeance is eternity – her decalogue written in the blood of her victims;
and if she stops for a moment in her infernal flight, it is upon a kindred rock, to whet her vulture fang for a more sanguinary desolation.”
To that point the people had been somewhat patient and respectful towards Paul’s little biography.
And for some of the rest, it was that they didn’t care one way or the other what he thought that he had experienced on the road to Damascus.
And the fact is they were mad-men.
It included the people of Africa, and those at the far end of the Mediterranean;
But “Gentile” is a generic word and included people of whom the Jews had only heard distant rumors.
In other words, in many ways their hatred of most “Gentiles” was unjustified.
What does it mean to you when I say that Jehovah is omnipotent?
Doesn’t it mean that He is unlimited? Unlimited in power? Unlimited in potential?
The grace and blessings of God cannot be consumed by their use.
If God made every gentile in the world ten times more wealthy than they had ever been before, it would not have made the Lord any less able to be a blessing to the people of Israel.
If the Saviour won the hearts and souls of every Roman and every Greek, it would not have harmed the life of the Jew in any way.
In fact if He had done so, the people of Israel would have been infinitely better off.
This reaction to the word “Gentiles” is nothing more than irrational bigotry.
Furthermore, let’s say that some of that crowd knew Paul in his former unsaved life, and now their hatred for this Christian version knew no bounds.
Shouldn’t his announcement that he was being sent to the Gentiles, have been enthusiastically received?
“Away with such a fellow from Jerusalem: for it is not fit that he should live in our nation, ship him to the gentiles.”
These people aren’t thinking.
Their bigotry has made them irrational.
But there is one other ingredient in this announcement which probably ignited them.
Paul said that it was the Lord who said, “Depart: for I will send thee far hence unto the gentiles.”
We can’t say for sure what those people were thinking when Paul referred to “the Lord,” but they should have been thinking about Jehovah.
And it WAS Jehovah who was sending Paul to the Gentiles.
But the bigotry of the Jews made such a thought inconceivable to them.
They thought that God would never send a blessing to the Gentiles.
It was the bigotry of those people, which sparked their wrath that day.
And it was bigotry which kept them from hearing the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Bigotry played a role their souls’ damnation.
Now – how much bigotry is there in you?
How much have you been hurt – not by those people you hate –
But how much have you been hurt by the bigotry that you have against others?
You need, for the sake of your fellowship with God, to confess and forsake this kind of sin.
But for every ten cases of pride, eight or probably nine of them are very definite evils.
And the Lord condemns it.
“When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom.”
“Only by pride cometh contention: but with the well advised is wisdom.”
“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
“A man’s pride shall bring him low: but honour shall uphold the humble in spirit.”
God resisteth the proud.
“These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him:
An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief,
A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.”
It’s from an elated, inflated, exaggerated ego that these people look at others.
It’s with an upturned nose, a flick of the wrist and a smirk on the lips.
The people of Israel have been unreasonably proud of Moses, the law, their temples and their religion.
During the days of the Lord Jesus they boasted of their relationship to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
because, like Israel, a great many Muslims can take their heritage back to Abraham and Isaac.
If a person’s pride is in the Lord and the blessings of the Lord, then it is not necessarily sinful.
but if his pride is in himself as a recipient of God’s grace, then it has turned to evil.
“For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.”
This was one of the early points in the Book of Romans:
Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:
Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;
To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.
Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith.”
But Paul says that there is no room for pride in our faith either.
First, because faith doesn’t actually DO anything.
No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: These things said he in the synagogue, as he taught in Capernaum.
Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?
When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples murmured at it, he said unto them, Doth this offend you?
What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?
It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.
But there are some of you that believe not. For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray him.
And he said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father.
From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.”
And as far as the unredeemed are concerned there is no grounds for pride at all.
There was no reason for the Jews to think that they were superior to the Gentiles.
I believe in the principle which is taught in Galatians 6:7: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
For nearly two thousand years, Jews have been crying about the bigotry and hatred that the Gentiles have had against them.
That bigotry cannot be denied, but it’s nothing more than reaping the seeds which they themselves have sown.
And that should make US look behind us to see what sort of seeds we have been planting.
Another factor in this explosion was Israel’s IGNORANCE.
Their own scriptures clearly taught that God would open the doors of His grace upon all people.
The Old Testament is not foreign to foreign evangelism.
But these people’s eyes were shut to those scriptures.
And another sin which may have sparked this emotional explosion was the Jews’ JEALOUSY.
Of course there was the natural jealousy of the enslaved people against their oppressors.
And there was the additional jealousy of the Roman and Greek prosperity, while Israel was at the point of economic collapse.
Unfortunately, for the most part, the nation wasn’t paying attention.
Please listen carefully to Romans 10:12 – “For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him.
How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?
And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!
But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Esaias saith, Lord, who hath believed our report?
So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
But I say, Have they not heard? Yes verily, their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world.
But I say, Did not Israel know? First Moses saith, I will provoke you to jealousy by them that are no people, and by a foolish nation I will anger you.
But Esaias is very bold, and saith, I was found of them that sought me not; I was made manifest unto them that asked not after me.
But to Israel he saith, All day long I have stretched forth my hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people.”
And David saith, Let their table be made a snare, and a trap, and a stumblingblock, and a recompence unto them:
Let their eyes be darkened, that they may not see, and bow down their back alway.
I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy.”
But instead of venting their hatred against Paul, they should have been bowing before the Saviour.
Look at the abundant grace of God.
If the Lord can, and will, save the sinful wretches of the Gentiles, why can’t we be blessed as well?
If the Lord is willing to sanctify those wicked people, I want to be saved and sanctified too.
And this should be our reaction as well.
You need the same salvation that others are receiving; you need this infinite Saviour.
Well then, bow before Him; repent of your sins; trust in His grace.
He Who saved the thief on the cross, can save any sinner, including you.