Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text is found in Matthew chapter 3:7-12. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Matthew chapter 3, beginning at verse 7.

“But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said unto them, Brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore, bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not think to say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our father. For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones. And even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Therefore, every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. I indeed baptize you with water under repentance. But he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly clean out his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

Let’s pray. Father, we pray that your Holy Spirit would instruct us from your word. I pray, Father, you’d give me carefulness of speech. Keep my thoughts focused, Lord God. Keep all of us attentive to the word of your scriptures that our lives may be transformed by the powerful work of your Spirit as he writes this word upon our hearts. We pray that what we do here now would be honoring and glorifying to you and further result in the manifestation of Christ’s kingdom. In his name we pray. Amen.

May be seated, and the nursery people may be dismissed.

My daughter Joanna read me a couple of funny little things out of the Oregonian yesterday. One was about dolphins and the other was about salmon tracking. The dolphin story was that there’s a researcher in, I believe, California who has recorded dolphin songs. You know, they sing these songs, these tunes they play, and he’s recorded them and then he slowed them down to quarter speed and what was found out was that they’re playing Mariah Carey tunes and Bryan Adams songs. I don’t know. I haven’t heard the tape, but the idea, the theory, is that the radio stations broadcast this music. The dolphins, who are where he was close to shore, pick these tunes up and then imitate them. I guess that could happen, right? I mean, there’s lots of radio waves bombarding us at all times. And if you have equipment that would pick up—I guess it might affect you. I don’t know.

Well, what we’re trying to do at Reformation Covenant Church and have now for, I don’t know, 15 years is change the tune from Mariah Carey to something more biblical—to the Psalms.

This is the Sunday that many churches celebrate or designate as Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, which is the Sunday closest to the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, 26 years ago I believe, legalizing abortion in our land. And so it was thought good early on—I don’t remember when Sanctity of Human Life Sunday began—but we’ve been doing services of malediction (bad words, not benediction—good words), prayers that God would bring temporal judgments upon abortionists, upon mothers that turn their children over to abortionists, upon civil rulers who promulgate abortion in our land and refuse to stop it, ever since we began.

And our practice is a little bit different. I’m real pleased that churches commemorate this anniversary. It’s an important thing to do. You know, you have to keep a long perspective in the biblical faith—the long line, as it were.

You know, Moses is on our mind both from the sermons in Matthew as well as from the movie. I think it was about—I’m not sure of the dates—but I think it was about 80 years after Pharaoh started drowning covenant children in the Nile that the Nile turned blood red. The ministry of Moses and then the culmination of the curses against that pharaoh and his people, the destruction of their firstborn. Talon, retribution, eye for eye justice coming forth from the hand of God.

Now you can bet that there was a great cry among the people of God in Egypt 80 years before the deliverer was sent. You can bet that, while I believe it’s indicated from the text that the people of God had really fallen away from the faith—I think that’s why they went into slavery—still, I’m sure there was at least a faithful remnant 80 years before. We know there was. And you can bet that the prayers, the sort of prayers that we’re going to pray today, were uttered forth. But it took God 80 years to answer them fully.

God is interested in the long line. He’s doing things that we don’t understand or know about. And we don’t want abortion to become just another thing that is part of our culture and we tend to forget about it. We want to remain continually energized as the people of God to witness to the civil state, to abortionists, to the common person that abortion is murder of preborn infants. We want to continue to have an emphasis at this church that we’re to pray for God’s judgments upon wicked people, and we’re also to minister grace to those who have distress relative to having children. And so we’re trying to do this, but we’re trying to do it in a very biblical fashion.

And we don’t talk anymore—I don’t talk about Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. What I refer to this day as is anti-abortion day of the Lord.

You know, there’s a big pro-life movement because we want to be politically correct. We want to be able to convince people that we’re nice people, too. We’re pro-something, not pro-choice, but it’s pro-life. We don’t want to be anti-something because that’s negative. But what are we talking about? We’re talking about the commandment of God: you shall not commit manslaughter. You shall not kill. You shall not murder. That’s the commandment that’s being violated. It is a negative commandment. We are anti-murder. We are not pro-life without some kind of definition of what that means.

After all, we believe in capital punishment. Scripture teaches that certain people should be executed. Some of the things we pray for is that God might, if need be, remove certain abortionists or politicians off the face of the earth—that they won’t come to repentance for their conspiracy against Christ.

Now, this conspiracy finds its manifestation in the death of preborn infants. But remember that all sin ultimately is sin against God first. “All them that hate me love death,” because they hate God and they thus strike out at the image-bearers of God—people. So we’re anti-abortion. I’m anti—I don’t know about you. I’m anti-abortion. I’m not pro-life in an unqualified sense. I don’t believe in the sacredness of human life as some sort of metaphysical or philosophical principle or truth. Human life is to be protected by the commandments of God against murder and other commandments as well—not because we’re sacred somehow, but because we’re made in God’s image. We’re image-bearers of God, no matter how sacred or profane we act.

Sacred is a state of being. God says, “Be holy, for I am holy. Be sacred. Be set apart. Reflect my holiness in your actions.” It’s a command to us. It’s not just some sort of state.

So, you know, Sanctity of Human Life Sunday—well, anti-abortion day of the Lord Sunday is okay. You know, the idea of Sunday as the name of a day was to reflect God’s work in the heaven where you had the sun, the moon, and the five visible planets. Those are the seven days of the week. And originally, the idea was a connection to God. And Sunday, Jesus is the bright rising sun. That’s okay. But I think in our culture, most of us don’t have any idea what Sunday means. So the name is somewhat pointless. We kind of tend to think of it as some kind of Greek worship of the sun god or something. So it’s good to call this day the Lord’s day or the day of the Lord.

In the Greek, when you read that Paul was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, there’s no difference between the Lord’s day and the day of the Lord. It’s the same term. There’s no different way of doing it. So when we gather for Lord’s Day worship services, it sounds like we’re coming together for a kind of nice time. But if we think of it as gathering for the day of the Lord worshiping services, and then conjure up in our minds how the day of the Lord is described in the old covenant—and which John refers to here—then it’s a different deal.

The day of the Lord is a day of light, but it’s also a day of darkness. And we’ll read some texts later on where God warns you not to think you’re going to like the day of the Lord. You know, a lot of Christians—so-called Christians—think they want the day of the Lord to come. But it’s going to be darkness for a lot of people who believe that because they’re a member of the church, baptized, whatever it is, prayed the prayer once, that somehow they’re part of God’s people.

So it’s important for us to remember that we are anti-abortion. We believe in the commandments of God prohibiting murder. We think it’s important for the church to proclaim truth to the culture. This truth is particularly proclaimed. And we believe that what we do today has significance. It is real. When we pray to God, he hears those prayers and he promises us that in time he will answer those very prayers.

The obligation in the case of the widow is that she cry out to God and God would hear and he’d respond. And the implication is that if God doesn’t hear, he’s not answering. So we have an obligation to cry out for justice and to pray the sorts of prayers we’re going to pray today. And we have the obligation to remind ourselves that eventually—the day of the Lord. The Lord’s Day worship services are a day when God comes to be with his people. Jesus stands at the door and knocks and he comes. Judgment begins here in the house of God. Much responsibility, much accountability, much gifting, much responsibility for action.

God comes. He comes in an advent. And then after he comes to the church, the idea is he goes to the whole world. It begins first with the house of God. But it does not stop here. It moves out into temporal realities in terms of his advent to the earth.

So we’re trying to sing a little different tune than a Mariah Carey pop tune in terms of this worship service. And I would venture to say that because the church for much of the last century has moved away from imprecatory prayers, reading the portions of the Psalms that deal with judgment, picturing Jesus no longer as the majestic King but as your friend—you know, the far off look in his eyes as he kind of gazes at heaven—that has produced a culture in which this culture no longer believes that God is active in the affairs of men.

They say, as the fool says, “He doesn’t know. The thought of God is not in any of his thoughts.” The fool. And we’re here as a culture in part to remind the broader culture that God’s judgments are for real.

When Christians think that it was the Old Testament God who judges sin in these severe ways and the New Testament God who kind of winks at sin, then the culture that will grow or flourish in such a theology is the sort of culture we have where people do pretty much whatever they want to do, and abortionists have no fear in their eyes. So we’re trying to sing a little different tune. And we’re remembering, as I said, the long haul.

Now, the long haul is particularly needful in such an area because when people commit abortions these days, it’s because they don’t really believe—usually the mother—that this is a real person anymore. They can’t see the baby in the womb. It takes an act of faith. You have to be able to see that child from the perspective of God’s word to know that this is a human being that you should not kill, even when the human being is in the womb.

And it takes Christian discipline for an unwed mother or a person who’s had a pregnancy for odd reasons—no father, no support, parents don’t want her to carry the child to term. All the counselors don’t have any—whatever is going to completely change her life. It takes an act of Christian discipline to bring that baby to term and then to raise the child. And you can’t affect the installation of Christian discipline and Christian faith as it relates to the unborn by passing a piece of legislation.

Now, passing a piece of legislation is good as it relates to bringing these truths up and as it relates to reforming the people’s view of what these things are. But you see, what we really need to do to affect our commitment to anti-abortion is to evangelize the culture and then to disciple the culture. Evangelism in your neighborhood, to your friends, to people that you come in contact with in your everyday walk of life, is anti-abortion. You see, because it moves people from the eyes of sight to the eyes of faith—to a perception of realities based on the word of God.

And when we preach reformation, and when this church supports, for instance, you know, Mark Horn in terms of trying to preach the doctrine of reformation that’s required in the Pacific Northwest area, up in Seattle area, that’s anti-abortion because it’s instilling back this view of the commandments of God and their abiding validity and the reality of God’s judgment in the context of our land. When that’s trumpeted forth, that produces an anti-abortion message that goes out to the culture.

So we need this long-term perspective. We’re going to get to the text in a couple of minutes, but first I want us to turn to Luke 18.

Turn to Luke 18, please. We did this in our Bible class—trying to remember to not say Sunday school, Bible school. Bible class for a church. We looked at these texts we’re going to look at now. For those of you who are interested, two weeks ago, the last time I was here, we’ve been looking at the structure of the Psalter, the books of the Psalter, and their structure. And then we’ve taken a short diversion to talk about imprecatory psalms.

There were three great talks given by Jeff Meyers at the Biblical Horizons conference. Going through his notes basically, he comes up with some of these texts that we’re going to read now. But anyway, if you want, I will deal more at length next Lord’s Day in the Bible class prior to worship. We’ll be dealing one more Sunday at least, maybe two, with imprecatory psalms and objections to imprecatory psalms.

But I think it’s important to turn to Luke 18 because we do live in the context of a Christian church that—as I said—there’s been the censoring out of the imprecatory prayers or portions of the Psalms. Even Isaac Watts, who we all, you know, love to sing his versions of the Psalms, he didn’t write—I don’t think he wrote very many, if any—of his tunes using the calls for God to bring judgment upon evildoers. There’s not a lot of that in Isaac Watts’ psalms.

Some of the common lectionaries used in Reformed and Episcopalian and Catholic churches have actually in the last 20 years explicitly removed psalms that call for the judgment of God to be executed in time and space against the wicked. They might be destroyed, cut off, whatever it is. And so it’s in that context that we come today to talk about the need for imprecatory prayers and prayers that God might bring judgment.

Now, we’re going to turn to the New Testament. We don’t have to do this, do we? We don’t have to find a rationalization of the New Testament for prayers of vengeance because, after all, if God speaks it, that’s it. I mean, he gives us a psalm book that we hopefully in this church—we all know—is supposed to be used for the worship of the church, and it’s filled with these kind of petitions, right? Petitions are cries for vengeance.

We’re going to sing Psalm 83 at the end of the service and you’ll be singing one of these kinds of things. But just so we’ll see how explicit this is, that this is appropriate and right for us to do, in Luke 18, we have a very familiar parable. It’s the parable of the unfortunate widow. Oldfashioned word. You know, the idea here is the woman. Jesus is saying, “This is how you ought to pray. This is how you ought to pray a lot.” And this is an example of why you ought to pray a lot.

And you know, it’s the idea of the widow. She’s got problems. She knocks on the door of the judge and he won’t answer her. She comes back and knocks again. And she just knocks and knocks and knocks and knocks. And finally, this judge who is not a godly judge, he answers her prayer because he’s just fed up with the grief. He just doesn’t want to—he’s tired of hearing from her. And so Jesus is given this parable explicitly how we ought to pray and how we ought to pray much.

And look at it though, what he actually says. What is this woman doing?

Now the woman here is probably a picture of the remnant church of Israel in the time of our Savior. The church is pictured as a widow. “And there was this widow in the city and she came unto him saying, ‘Avenge me of my adversary.’” Her prayer—that our Savior said in this parable—is the example by which we’re to pray continually and be in much prayer. It’s a prayer of vengeance. It’s a seeking the revenge of God upon her adversary.

Now, it isn’t—we shouldn’t see this as her personal adversary. She represents the church. It’s the adversaries to Christ and his anointed, Christ and his people, that are the subject of such prayers. But she prays for vengeance, and then he doesn’t hear, and then it comes down. And then in verse 7, shall not—okay, well, let’s just read the whole thing.

So she says, “Avenge me of my adversary,” and he would not for a while. But afterwards, he said within himself, “Though I fear not God nor regard man, yet because of this widow troubling me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me.” And the Lord said, “Hear what the unjust judge saith. And shall not God, the just judge—okay—shall not the just judge, God, avenge his own elect who cried day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, shall he find faith on the earth?”

So in this instruction by our Savior on prayer, we are told explicitly that the prayers were to be continually involved with—or that at this particular point in redemptive history of the church age—was the prayer for vengeance upon their enemies.

Now, this is preceded by Luke 17, which is part of the eschatological discourses of our Savior in the Gospel of Luke. And he’s talking about the coming judgment. He’s talking about Noah—you know, that when the judgment comes, one is taken, one is left. And he’s talking about the impending judgment to this culture that rejected Christ. He’s talking, I think, about AD 70. So what he’s telling them to do is between now and AD 70, engage yourself in imprecatory prayers because your persecution is going to be great in that time.

But we have application to us. We’re to pray whenever people trouble the church. When they persecute the church, we are to see—just like these folks are—as crying out for God’s vengeance upon these people.

Now, this prayer is actually—or this instruction—is heeded by the church in Revelation 6:9-11. Turn there if you will. Revelation 6:9-11.

“And when he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘How long, O Lord, holy and true, does thou not judge and avenge our blood in them that dwell on the earth?’ And he gives them white robes. He says, well, wait for a little season. There are more—there are more filling up of the martyred saints here—prior to AD 70 that are going to go on.”

The point here is that here we have in the context of glorified saints in heaven—saints who surely do not reflect in this their personal pique or their personal difficulties with people. These requests are not somehow colored by their being on earth when we can’t see for sure their motives. These are glorified saints in heaven. And what is their prayer to the Lord Jesus Christ? It is a prayer for vengeance upon God’s enemies who demonstrate they’re God’s enemies by their troubling the people of God.

See, this is a different sort of Jesus, isn’t it, who answers these sorts of prayers, than what many churches today teach. Let’s see how this Jesus acts in another port of Revelation in Revelation 2:20. We went through this, you know, a year or so ago, but just to remind us—well, this is not a glorified saint speaking now. This is our Savior in heaven speaking. And he tells the church here at Thyatira, he says, “You’ve got a problem. You’ve let this woman Jezebel commit fornication and encourage the saints to commit fornication, to eat things sacrificed to idols.”

“And I gave her space to repent of her fornication, and she repented not. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of her deeds.” He’s going to cast her into a sick bed. He’s going to bring temporal judgments upon this woman or upon people that follow this woman.

And then verse 23, “I will kill her children with death, and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts, and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.”

Our Savior is the one who says that, as part of his holy character, to bring about justice, vengeance, retribution of judgment upon those who trouble his church, trouble himself, or very specifically in some of the psalms, trouble the widow, the orphan, or the stranger. Jesus says that he will bring temporal judgments upon those who trouble the orphan. And surely the fatherless—and surely the aborted babies in our culture—are those who are fatherless and are the special targets, as it were, of God’s judgment.

If it’s okay for God in his righteous character to do that, then surely it is all right, and in fact it’s needful, for us to ask him to do that—to ask him to avenge himself on those who would commit this kind of heinous crime against [God] by murdering preborn infants.

So the scriptures tell us—not just in all the New Testament, Old Testament Psalms, and the prophets, but they tell us as well in very explicit terms—that our prayer should include these kinds of prayers. And very explicitly, we’ll turn now to our text. The text before us in Matthew 3 tells us as well that this is what God’s going to do—that God’s going to bring judgment, justice, and vengeance at his advent.

So let’s turn back to Matthew. And I want to talk briefly about John’s message, John’s audience, John’s purpose, and John’s relevance to today.

Now, we’ve known a little bit about the message of John here. We spent a couple weeks ago—we spent one Sunday looking at the first half of this description, verses 1-5 of his ministry of repentance. But we could do a little bit of review in that as well as looking at what his extended message is as we go now to his address to the Pharisees and Sadducees.

John’s message to the Pharisees and Sadducees is that the advent of salvation is accompanied by the advent of judgment. Now, so John’s preaching—and we read before from the earlier verses—that he’s talking about the coming of the Lord. “Make straight your hearts. Do some heart reconstruction work. Get ready for the coming of Christ.” This is Messiah. He’s going to bring salvation to his people. But just as surely as the advent of Christ brings salvation, it also brings judgment.

And so what he tells them. He looks at the Pharisees and the Sadducees who are coming to his baptism and he says unto them, “Brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

See, the coming of Christ is also the coming of wrath to those who reject him and to those who continue in their unrepentant ways. Christ is a King of grace, mercy, and salvation. But he is also a King who brings justice, vengeance, and retribution to his enemies.

Now, when he says, “Who warned you to come? Flee.” The picture here is kind of like—you know, you got a fire in a field, the snakes or serpents would come away from the fire, right? You’d walk along a burning field, you’ll see snakes coming out of it. If you’ve got snakes in your land, in this particular piece of topography, they did. So the picture here is a familiar one to the contemporaries of what John says. The fire is on its way and the snakes are coming to baptism to escape the fire. But they’re not really coming for the correct reason. And he calls them a brood of vipers. He identifies them as the offspring of the serpent, does he not?

And he actually calls them a brood of vipers. Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, wrote about snakes, a particular kind of viper. And I don’t know if it’s true or not, but what he thought was that these vipers were particularly evil because they would eat themselves out of their mother’s womb. So they would kill their mother in the birthing process. And the mother snake had killed the father in the procreation process. And this brood of vipers seems to identify them not just as serpents, but kind of with that then-believed idea that they were really wicked sorts of snakes that were anti-life, killing mother even as they emerged from the womb.

And there’s a sense in which the Sadducees and the Pharisees—the religious leaders of the day to which this is addressed—have indeed sort of turned against mother church, as it were, turned against the true community of God in their emergence as vipers. But in any event, he tells them that there is wrath to come.

Therefore, he says, “Bear fruits worthy of repentance and do not think to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham our father as our father. For I say to you that God is able to raise up children of Abraham from these stones.’”

What does that mean, stones? Well, I don’t know. Some people think, you know, he was at the Jordan River. There were the stones that were placed in the Jordan River when they crossed over, representing the tribes of Israel. Could be he’s referencing those stones. You know, all Israel is stones apart from the enlivening spirit of God. Could be other things. I don’t really know. But the point is obvious—that if they rely upon their credentials as Jews for right standing in the day of God’s wrath, it will not do them any good. It will not do them any good.

“Even now, the axe is laid at the root of the trees.” The advent of the Lord Jesus Christ is the advent of the axe bearer who goes right to the root—singular of the trees—plural. He goes right to the root, which is the rebellion against Christ, which is the work of Satan. And he will destroy that root in his advent. But in every advent of the Lord Jesus Christ, he strikes at the root of the—root of fruitless, wicked trees.

“Therefore, every tree which does not bear fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

“I baptize you with water, but he is coming who will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

And then the very pivot imagery. “His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will thoroughly clean out his threshing floor, gather his wheat into the barn. He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

The advent of the Lord Jesus Christ is the advent of salvation. But it’s also the advent of magnified judgment, retributive judgment to those who claim the name—in the case of these Pharisees and Sadducees—but really are not submissive to the great King of Kings, the Lord Jesus Christ.

John the Baptist is consistent then with the Old Testament calls for the retribution, the judgment of God, and vengeance against his enemies. The herald, rather, of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. His message is one that advent brings not just salvation but it brings the fire of God that is indeed cleansing and purifying to God’s people but which is destructive and purging to those outside of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So his message is one that is indeed one of judgment. It has two sides to it. Now, this is consistent with John’s forerunners in the Old Testament. For instance, in Isaiah 11, we read that the shoot would spring forth from the stem of Jesse and a branch from his roots. We know about that. He who would decide with fairness for the afflicted of the earth. This is verse 4 of that same passage. “He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth and with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.”

Speaking again of the Messiah. Isaiah, in Isaiah 61, says this: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God.”

See, the favorable year of the Lord that Christ proclaimed was—assuredly it was certainly good news. But it was bad news. It was the day of vengeance unto the enemies of God. So this message of John the Baptist is a two-edged message. It has salvation. But is salvation accompanied by judgment.

Secondly, John’s message is that salvation is holistic. The call to repentance is a call to reformation of one’s life. We talked about this at length two weeks ago. Very important to continue to repeat it. And here, and here, we don’t just rely now upon the word repentance. Remember in the Greek, the word for repentance here is to think again, to reconsider, to have a change of mind. It really would be better to talk about it as reformation. To have a reformation of one’s life is what this repentance is about.

It doesn’t mean feeling sorry for something, even for your sins. Paul tells us that godly sorrow yields repentance. It yields this reformation of one’s life. So we relied upon that Greek word two weeks ago as we talked about this truth—that the message of John is not a message to feel bad about your sins. It’s a message to change your mind, change your heart, change the direction of your life, to reform yourself by becoming submissive to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, ultimately I say reform yourself, but ultimately we know that it’s the gift of God, right? I mean, God grants the gift of repentance to the Gentiles. That’s what Peter said, for instance. All kinds of New Testament references make it very clear that if that happens—as it happened in your life—it was the gift of God that brought you to that kind of reformation of life.

Nonetheless, yes, the text is very clear here, is it not, that we don’t need just simply to rely upon the Greek word because John tells these Pharisees and Sadducees that if they’re repentant, they should bring forth fruits worthy—meat, fit, evidence of that reformation of one’s life. That’s what he says here. Don’t rely on your credentials. Bring forth fruit. This is very important to us. It’s very important.

One of the biggest problems I’ve had in my entire life comes out of this text because it seemed to me—and it still seems to me—that this text says that when people say they’re sorry because they sinned, it isn’t enough. If you’re going to try to measure repentance, elders of the church have to measure repentance as they or measure sin as they exclude and then readmit people to the table of the Lord.

And one of the first things that children learn—that parents quickly learn is that they learn—to say, “I’m sorry.” Every time they do something wrong and they see you reaching for your particular choice of implement of judgment or chastisement to the children, the first thing they’re going to say is, “I’m sorry.” Are they sorry? Well, you don’t have any idea yet, do you? Maybe they really are. Maybe they’ll evidence that by their change of life. That’s what John says.

The message is that judgment is coming and it’s—and judgment will not be restricted—will not be limited. Or let’s put it a different way around. If you say you’re sorry, and if you want to be baptized, that is not going to be enough to spare you the fire and judgment to come.

Now is where we talk about the salmon story in the Oregonian. Another little interesting story. Apparently there were these guys who were tracking salmon migration. I guess they had fitted certain salmon with, you know, emitters or something. They pick up the signal and they find out where the salmon, you know, where they migrate to. And so they’d lost track of one salmon. And they then refound the signal and they tracked the signal. And as they tracked it down, the salmon was in a fisherman’s refrigerator. Okay? He’d migrated to the refrigerator.

Well, see, he had the pulse going, right? He had that emitter on him. He was a son of Abraham. He was baptized. Had the baptismal mark. Had the baptismal certificate. He had the sign of circumcision on his flesh. This salmon. He was dead than a doornail. Still putting out signals of where he was migrating, but dead than a doornail in the fish’s refrigerator.

Well, what about us today? If we’re going to pray a prayer of judgment consistent with the message of the herald of King Jesus who has particular manifestations of his advent throughout history, AD 70 being one that’s being spoken of here. The final consummation also being spoken of. But we say today that God’s advent to this country will come in reference to the slaughter of the unborn infants in the wombs—millions of them for the last 26 years. We don’t know when or how, but we know it’s coming. And as we pray for that judgment to come forth, are we praying as dead fish or are we praying as fish that really have a real signal indicating the reformation of our lives?

Do we have fruits that demonstrate the reformation that God has affected in our lives? Or are we like these Pharisees and Sadducees?

You know, it’s interesting because he said the Pharisees and Sadducees. He treats them as one group, but they didn’t get along. You know, the Pharisees were the right-wingers, the Sadducees were the left-wingers, okay? The liberals, the compromisers. The Pharisees were the ritualists, Torah, all that stuff. So he includes them all, though. It doesn’t matter—here’s your right wing, left wing. And in terms of abortion, this has some very relevant application for us.

There was at the time of this writing of these scriptures, there was in the first century a movement amongst the Pharisees that some think was the predominant movement, who were ultraright-wing. They were like your right-wing extremist activists. Truly, Paul or Saul was one of them. And you remember he thought nothing of going and calling people back to prison, killing people for the sake of the glory of Yahweh.

Some of the Pharisees, not all of them, but a predominant group—some say the ascendant group at this time—were those who thought it was okay to take the law into their own hands to effect the kind of political reversals that they wanted to see as the result of being dedicated to Yahweh and his glory. They wanted the glory of Yahweh. They had zeal for Yahweh and they wanted King Yahweh to reign in Israel. And he wanted to throw off the Roman oppression, and they wanted to persecute, you know, Christians, if they got in the way of that. They taught a different king, and they would take whatever law they had to break, they would break it for the sake of the greater glory of enthroning King Yahweh.

And in the movement relative to the political movement of anti-abortion, there is a small but very visible element who will do the same thing, who think it’s okay to kill abortionists to protect children. You see, that is exactly contrary to the spirit of what we do today. That’s Phariseeism in one of its particular elements in the New Testament. I believe that’s the case. Now, if you want to dialogue about this later, that’s fine. But it seems to me that’s what these guys were doing. They had a perverted view of what the reign of Yahweh—how it was to be affected. It was to be affected through violent means, breaking laws, etc.

And there are extreme people on one end of the anti-abortion movement who actually kill abortionists, take the law into their own hands. I say it’s contrary to what we’re doing today because what we do today is we look at a situation which is hopeless from a human perspective. We look at a situation where the civil magistrate won’t hear us. Where, you know, the major forces, dominant forces in our culture advocate abortion. We can’t see any end to it. And so what do we do? Do we take it into our own hands? No. We cry out to God because we believe Romans 12:19 when it tells us that vengeance is mine, that we’re not to avenge ourselves. We’re not to actively pick up that sword ourselves and start lopping people’s heads off unless we’re the appointed representatives of God in a civil arena. We believe that. And as a result, we then pray to God.

The prayers, the imprecatory prayers of the church, are an indication that she believes that she cannot take up the sword herself. Because when you take up the sword yourself, the prayers now are irrelevant.

So this has great relevance—this two-fold message of John—that judgment is coming and that repentance is manifested. It is a change of life and it’s manifested by one’s deeds.

Now let’s look briefly at John’s audience.

Now, here in this particular part of John’s audience—in the telling of this historical account in Matthew 3—the specific audience who receives this message of God’s judgment, his advent of judgment, are the Pharisees and Sadducees. Those are the religious leaders of the community. But turn to Luke chapter 3, if you will, in your scriptures, and we’ll look at a couple of other elements or members of his audience.

Luke chapter 3 is a parallel account, verses 1-20. And look specifically at verse 7. “Then he said to the multitudes that came out to be baptized by him, Brood of vipers.”

See, so it’s not as if the religious leaders are out of touch with the congregants. Congregants and leaders alike are both addressed the same way by Matthew and Luke, by John, and then recorded by Matthew and Luke. And in Luke, in this text in Luke, we actually have a further articulation of what these fruits of repentance are, which we should look at just briefly.

Verse 10. The people hear this. They then asked him, “Well, what should we do? What are these fruits that would demonstrate this reformation of our lives?” And he answered and said unto them, “He who has two tunics, let him give to him who has none. And he who has food, let him do likewise.”

Love your neighbor as yourself. That’s what he’s saying, right? He’s recapitulating the second tablet of the last five commandments of the ten commandments, which are the means whereby our obedience to Christ can be discerned.

You know, I’ve said this before. Hopefully you understand this big pattern of scripture: the two tablets. How you love God, how you love your fellow man. And when the prophets bring covenant lawsuits against God’s people, they cite specifications of action against fellow man as demonstration that they’re not loving God. Okay? So John isn’t here saying, “Well, as long as you’re a good humanist, that’ll be fruits of reformation in your life toward God.” No, the idea is he’s citing second commandment summaries: Love your neighbor as yourself, essentially by way of action, as an indication that they truly have reformed their lives in submission to Yahweh or to Jesus Christ, King Jesus.

Okay? And that’s a good thing for us to measure our lives by. How well do we love the people of God? Are we a salmon in the refrigerator or do we really have a good life sign coming from us? Do our lives reflect that reformation that is found in the loving of man, our neighbors, ourselves?

And then the tax collectors also came to be baptized. They said unto him, “Teacher, what shall we do?” He said to them, “Collect no more than what is appointed for you.”

Likewise the soldiers asked him, saying, “And what shall we do?” So he said to them, “Do not intimidate anyone or accuse falsely, and be content with your wages.”

Ah, we could spend a couple of sermons on that. But recognize men who are called vocationally—the way a tax collector and a soldier was called vocationally. These are very significant to you and me in terms of vocational calling. Be content with your wages. Don’t defraud people. Don’t intimidate people. Don’t harass people. Don’t steal from your employer. Don’t steal from your employees. Put in a good day’s work. Let God’s law structure not just your private relationships in the context of the church, but you have that law on your forehead—written on your forehead—guarding your thoughts and actions in the workplace. That’s the picture for a man in vocational calling of what his reformation looks like, how it manifests itself, how his repentance or reformation manifests itself.

So we have the audience broadened out very helpfully to us so we can be self-analytical and know what to tell people as we look for demonstrations of reformation of their lives.

So the audience isn’t just the religious leaders, the audience is also the common people. And then finally, the audience is also rulers. This is not quite as explicit in the particular scene we have, but again, let’s look at the context.

I’ll begin reading in verse one of Luke 3 here. Okay, we’re still in Luke 3. So this is part of this literary unit is the introduction to it in verse one.

“Now, in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanius tetrarch of Abilene, while Annas and Caiaphas were high priests, the word of God came to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.”

Now that is a very telling verse. See, he rattles off the measure of time according to Caesar. He rattles off the rulers that have been placed over the covenant people of God in their particular places. He rattles off high names, high places. But the word of the Lord comes to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.

Now John was not—you know, he had ancestry. He was part of the priestly family. But nonetheless, it comes to John in the context of the wilderness. John’s context is an apostate civil system that had been imposed by Caesar. That really was bad. The Pharisees were right to not like that. That was the context. They were godless. Yes, they protected the church at times by the providence of God. They were a beast that helped guard God’s church, but they were a godless beast who had no fear of God in their sight.

And in the context of that, the civil rulers are addressed as somewhat irrelevant, are they not, at the beginning of this process. All this stuff’s going on. And the word of God, the herald of the King of Kings, the King of these men, comes to John in the wilderness.

The rulers are part of this. Now, we know specifically that the rulers are part of John’s audience, maybe not in the context of the preaching that we’re reading about here at the Jordan, but if you drop down to verse 19 of Luke 3, we’ll see the tail end of this story.

Verse 19 says, “But Herod the tetrarch, being rebuked by him—that is, John the Baptist—concerning Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, and for all the evils which Herod had done, also added this above all that he put John up in prison.” Then, of course, he beheads him.

John had a message to the religious leaders of the day, to the common people of the day, and he had a message to the civil rulers of the day, as do we as heralds of Christ’s coming advent and his particular judgment upon this country. Jesus comes and judges cultures as they rebel against him, that he might purify a people for himself, that he might remove the evildoers off the face of the land. He is coming in judgment on this country, and we have a message as John the Baptist did to herald that truth to the religious leaders of our day, to the common people of our day, and to the civil magistrates.

Notice, by the way, that John’s primary criticism of Herod is just about sex.