The Lord of the Sabbath

[0:00] Turn with me please to the book of Luke chapter 6. Luke chapter 6. We've actually been running, Luke has had two parallel topics going at the same time.

[0:16] ! And we're kind of finishing one. Of course, we're nowhere near the end of the book. We'll see the topic much more through the book. But he's done this short series.

[0:30] That's pointed to an aspect of Christ's ministry. Now, actually several. One has been his divinity. Another has been his mercy.

[0:41] And so since the beginning of Jesus' public ministry, back in Luke 4, 18 and 19, do you remember that? That's when Jesus walked into his home synagogue, took the scroll, opened it up towards the end, almost to the end of the book of Isaiah, and read what is in our Bible.

[0:59] Two and a half verses. Rolled the scroll up, gave it back to the guy who took care of the scrolls, and said, today this is fulfilled in your hearing. And that passage dealt with the aspects that would typify the Messiah's ministry.

[1:19] He would be merciful and help those who are needy and spiritually needy. And that was what he pointed to as he read that. And so there has been, among other themes, a theme of mercy that has encapsulated what he read, which was from the book of Isaiah.

[1:39] And that theme of mercy Jesus has come to fulfill. And again, we'll see this later. We'll think about it a lot when we come to talk about John the Baptist again.

[1:51] But Jesus fulfilled that. And then Luke gave us a short section, now almost two chapters of our breaking of the book, of situations that, among other things, displayed the mercy of Christ.

[2:09] The mercy of Jesus was seen in the healing of the demon-possessed man in Capernaum. It was seen in the healing of Peter's mother-in-law, and then all who were brought to him.

[2:23] Next, it was seen in the great catch of fish that showed Peter and the other disciples that Jesus was divine before he called them to follow him.

[2:35] His mercy was seen in the healing of the people that he called them to follow him.

[3:05] He called them to follow him.

[3:35] He began to be, hmm. They set their sights on Jesus. In each of these situations, we've not only seen displays of mercy, but in each opportunity, he's revealed more and more about himself.

[3:53] Truths about the law, truths about the gospel. Today, we will again see Jesus show mercy, correct wrong applications of the law, and reveal his deity as he deals with two situations on the Sabbath day.

[4:12] Let's turn to Luke chapter 6. I'm going to read verses 1 through 12. On the Sabbath, while he was going through the grain fields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands.

[4:28] But some of the Pharisees said, Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath? And Jesus answered them, Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him?

[4:45] How he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat. And also gave it to those with him.

[4:57] And he said to them, The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. On another Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching.

[5:09] And a man was there whose right hand was withered. And the scribes and the Pharisees watched him to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath, so that they might find a reason to accuse him.

[5:20] But he knew their thoughts. And he said to the man with the withered hand, Come and stand here. And he rose and stood there. And Jesus said to them, I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm?

[5:38] To save life or to destroy it? And after looking around at them all, he said to him, Stretch out your hand.

[5:48] And he did so. And his hand was restored. But they were filled with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.

[6:00] Let's pray together. Father, I praise you that this day has already been filled with beautiful pictures of Jesus.

[6:12] And I pray that you would be with us to see more. Lord, I pray that we would see what your word has to show here. Lord, as we look at Jesus, we also need to think about that beauty in relation to our dark background.

[6:30] Lord, people talk about diamonds and how they look best on a black background. Well, Jesus certainly looks beautiful on his own.

[6:41] But compared to us and our need. We thank you, Father, that he came. And he came to meet that need of our sin being taken care of and our standing before you.

[6:55] And I pray that you would bless as we look at your word. I pray that you would open our eyes to the gospel, to the wonder of Christ. And Lord, that you would draw us to that. In Jesus' name.

[7:06] Amen. Amen. So we have two situations here. And Luke has arranged them together. They may not have happened one after the other.

[7:18] They might have. We just don't know. But yet Luke has arranged them together to prove one point. And that is he's speaking about the Sabbath. The first situation is a field of grain.

[7:33] His disciples are in a field of grain on the Sabbath. And as I mentioned, it is the Sabbath. Now, the Sabbath, most of us are familiar.

[7:45] The Sabbath was the seventh day of the week. It was the week God set aside for rest and for worship. And on that day, Jesus and his disciples, for whatever reason, we don't know where they're coming from, where they're going necessarily.

[8:00] Some have tried to say that may be true. But we don't know for sure. It's not spelled out in the text. But he's going from one place to another on the Sabbath. And to do that, most roads went through fields.

[8:17] They weren't paved with a certain amount of allotment on each side for the right-of-way of the state. A lot of times it was a path or a double path if it was for a cart.

[8:30] And people would simply walk along that path right in the middle of the fields. Now, you can still do that kind of thing. If you get out in the country in a farming area, you can drive down a road and have crops right up to the edge of the road.

[8:44] It's pretty neat. In the late summer, if you are on a road with corn, and it's grown well to drive down a road, and all you see are these walls of corn on each side.

[8:54] And it still can happen. You can picture that kind of situation, although this was either barley or wheat. Probably barley, but we're just guessing by the time of year.

[9:06] So they're going through this field, and they're going along, and it says that they're hungry. And so as they're going along, they're picking grain from the stalks as they went.

[9:21] Now, I've had an opportunity to do this kind of thing. I remember as a teenager, I was working for my neighbor one summer, and one of the jobs he had me do was to fix his sheep fence.

[9:32] And I gathered up a couple, three, four tools, stuff, supplies that I would need, and I walked this probably mile and a half, two-mile fence and would tighten it up where it was falling down and all the things that wouldn't go into fence mending.

[9:49] And so I'm making my way around this fence, and I remember that I was like two-thirds of the way around that fence and getting towards lunchtime. Of course, I'm a teenager, and back then I was hungry all the time.

[10:04] That was a sarcastic statement. I was hungry, and I came upon some black caps. You know what black caps are? Black raspberries.

[10:15] We on the farm called them black caps. And I came upon some black caps, and I'm like, oh, I will enjoy these. But I happened to look up, and right along the sheep fence was a field of wheat.

[10:28] And I thought, I know what I'll do. And so I hopped over the fence and went over just two or three steps, and you take a stalk of wheat, and you can grab it and pull hard on it.

[10:40] You can pull the kernels of wheat right off in your hand. Sometimes you have to break the stalk off and do a little bit more. But you can do a couple of stalks of wheat just pulling the grains right off in your hand.

[10:50] But if you've ever had raw wheat in your hand, you don't want to just throw that into your mouth because God made wheat to have these covers on them. We call them chaff.

[11:01] And so before you put them in your mouth, and this is what I did, you just rub them in your hand real quick. And what does that do? That loosens all the chaff. You blow on it.

[11:13] And what does that do? That blows the chaff away. So you're not eating this flaky, it's all right to eat. It won't kill you. It's probably really good for you. But it tastes better if the wheat doesn't have that on it.

[11:26] And then you pop that in your mouth and you can eat it. Well, I had black caps and wheat. So I did that with some wheat, blew the chaff away, threw three or four black caps on them. And I was going along, did that two or three times.

[11:38] And I enjoyed that. And it doesn't say that the disciples had black caps, but they were doing the same thing. They were pulling wheat off and popping it in their mouth. It's like pre-baked bread, if you want to say that.

[11:52] But it was a way of having some sustenance. And so they're doing that along the way. And it seems like a good time. You know, I enjoyed what I did. You would probably enjoy it if you did the same thing, or at least you'd be glad you had a new experience.

[12:06] But they're going along and things are just hunky-dory. But they've been in this field and I don't know if the Pharisees are following them. They wouldn't have binoculars, but it was almost like they have binoculars.

[12:19] What are they doing now? Oh, they're pulling wheat. And they're rubbing it in their hands and they're blowing on it. And then they're eating it. Ah, we've got them. They had a problem with someone doing this.

[12:32] Now, some might say, well, they were walking through the field and stealing people's grains. But Deuteronomy 23, 25 said, if you go in your neighbor's standing grain, you may pluck the ears with your hand, but you shall not put a sickle into your neighbor's standing grain.

[12:47] So you could walk through and just like I would not be in trouble for pulling three or four stalks of wheat, worth of wheat off from the stalk and eating it.

[12:57] So these people wouldn't either. God's law made provision if you're traveling and you were hungry, you could actually pull wheat off from the stalk and eat it. Maybe an apple off from a tree and stuff like that.

[13:07] You just couldn't harvest it. You just couldn't gather up a bunch of it and put it in your pocket and walk away with it. So they didn't have a problem with the fact that they were eating wheat or barley.

[13:19] They had a problem with what they were doing to be able to eat that. The Pharisees had a problem with the fact that the disciples of Jesus were transgressing the Mishnah.

[13:37] Now, what's the Mishnah? Now, the Mishnah was a great, I think, term to explain it was to call it a commentary. It was a commentary on God's law.

[13:50] Now, it was more than a commentary, but you get, I understand, you look at your Bible sometimes and you go, I don't understand what this passage means. You might go get a commentary and a commentary is the kind of thing that someone has spent a lot of time studying and they've gone into some history and they've gone into some language and they've gone into some background and they get an understanding of the thing and they write down, well, this is what this means and this is what it relates to and all this kind of things.

[14:17] So the Mishnah was sort of a commentary that the Pharisees had put together on God's law. It explained, and note the air quotes, what it really meant.

[14:29] Okay? Now, you might say, well, that sounds like a good thing, but it's not the kind of commentary necessarily that we would say.

[14:41] They defined everything they could so as to guard the law. Their thinking was, oh, we can't break the law of God because we want to keep it to be righteous in God's eyes.

[14:53] So we can't break the law of God. So, you know, people might get close to breaking the law of God. So we're going to make a bunch of rules that if they follow these rules, they'll be kept way away from breaking the law of God.

[15:08] So they made a bunch of rules about all kinds of things in the law. And when it came to the commandment of the Sabbath, they made 39 different groups of laws relating to how people could, should keep the Sabbath.

[15:29] What was working was what they were answering there. And there was to be no reaping, no thrashing, and no winnowing.

[15:41] There was no reaping, no thrashing, no winnowing. Now, when you think of thrashing, reaping and thrashing and winnowing, what do you think of?

[15:56] In this day and age, if you've been out in the country in the middle of the summer, you think of a combine. What's a combine? It's that big thing that goes along and it's just gobbling up wheat and it puts it through and it rubs the stalk so that the grains comes off and has a fan built in and it blows away the chaff and it goes up into a bin and they can haul it off in a truck.

[16:17] And that's what we think of when it comes to reaping. But things were kind of simpler back then, but they weren't this simple.

[16:29] They claimed, according to the Mishnah, the Pharisees claimed, according to the Mishnah, that the disciples had worked on the Sabbath day by pulling off those heads of grain, by rubbing them in their hands and blowing away the chaff.

[16:43] Reaping, thrashing, winnowing, and they even went further. They prepared a meal, which was, according to them, something they were not to do on the Sabbath.

[16:54] So here were the Pharisees looking at the disciples, pointing their finger and saying, you have transgressed the law. Now, our Savior steps in at this point and he addresses the problem.

[17:09] And in the middle of our passage, verse 3, Jesus answered them, Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God, took and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and gave it to those who were with him.

[17:31] Now, the Jews would have just totally understood this. The Pharisees certainly knew this passage, and Jesus was making this comment, so they realized that they need to rightly apply this passage in this situation, but certainly you've read of this.

[17:47] Now, on your own time, you can look at 1 Samuel 21, 1 through 6, and that's the account that Jesus is referring to. David has just heard that indeed, Saul is furious with him and wants to kill him, and now he is on the run.

[18:03] He is taking off from Jerusalem, and before he leaves town, he is on such an urgent desire to get out of town and to spare his life, the life of his men, that he takes nothing, and he just goes, and he ends up stopping by the temple and asking Ahimelech, do you have any bread?

[18:27] Can I have some bread? We're on an urgent mission, and I didn't take anything. He ends up asking for a sword also, but Jesus doesn't address that here. So he goes in there and asks for bread.

[18:40] Now, in the temple, there was no bread except for one particular kind of bread. It's called the bread of the presence. The bread of the presence was the bread that was baked every week, probably on Friday night, and there were 12 loaves that were made.

[19:01] They were rather large loaves from what I understand, and those 12 loaves were then placed on a table in the holy place, not the holy of holies, but in the holy place, and they were arranged in such a way on the table of showbread as pointing to how God had met the needs of his people in the wilderness by providing bread.

[19:26] It pointed some other things, but that's not what we're going to get into here. That bread was there as a ceremonial observance before the Lord. It was to be put there fresh every Sabbath, which was Saturday, and was to be replaced the next Sabbath, again on Saturday, with fresh bread.

[19:46] Now, Ahimelech says there is no bread here except the bread of the presence. And every Jew would have known at that point, well, it's like saying there's no bread there because the bread of the presence, God's word goes on to point out in Leviticus 24.9 that that bread was to be eaten after it was taken off from the table of showbread, but it was only to be eaten by priests.

[20:15] It was not to be eaten by anyone else. So, here is David in the temple, hungry, taking off on a journey to spare his own life, stops in and says, do you have any bread?

[20:29] And Ahimelech says, all I have is the bread of the presence. And so, at that point, Ahimelech, in taking all of the teaching about God, says, as long as the men are clean, you can have it.

[20:48] Now, he's not going by Leviticus 24.9 here. He's stepping out of a statute of the Lord and said, as long as the men are clean, you can have the bread.

[21:01] And David takes the bread. He says, the men are clean, I'm clean, meaning that they've not defiled themselves in any particular way. And they are clean, and so Ahimelech gives him the bread.

[21:13] what's going on here? Ahimelech recognized teaching from scripture that talked about how the Lord was merciful, and we are to be merciful.

[21:28] And in this situation, the statute of the Lord was set aside for the sake of mercy. Ahimelech recognized that David, as God's anointed, was hungry.

[21:43] and he had a need. And so he took the bread of the presence and gave that bread to David and his men. The high priest deemed it right to set aside the statute and show mercy.

[21:58] Now, the verse I'm going to read here at this point is not written yet, but it typifies the mentality that Ahimelech had.

[22:11] Hosea 6, 6, for I desire steadfast love, mercy, it's the word, word for mercy, for I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

[22:25] God desired that his people show mercy more. I'm going to be careful here because God is not throwing away his moral law, but in this ceremonial law, he said, I would rather people show mercy than carry out this command.

[22:47] And that's exactly what Ahimelech did. And as the Pharisees have been accusing the disciples of breaking the law, of reaping, winnowing, and harvesting, or harvesting, you get the words, of doing this work on the Sabbath, he says, haven't you seen what God has already taught?

[23:15] And they should have heard it. And they should have known it, but they didn't. They deemed it, the Pharisees deemed it, more important to keep this strict structural situation and let people starve than to feed them in this aspect.

[23:37] Jesus reminds them of that, points out by reminding that, that God does not reprimand David, nor does he reprimand Ahimelech, and now we can see from the New Testament, not only has God not reprimanded David, not reprimanded Ahimelech, he has commended David, and commended Ahimelech, for doing that which the Lord would have desired in that situation.

[24:07] How can Jesus dare say that? because Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath.

[24:18] It really says the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. Remember that the term Son of Man refers to the Messiahship of Jesus, Messiah, being both God and man, and this God-man is Lord of the Sabbath.

[24:39] By saying that, Jesus is declaring himself as God, the same God who instituted the Sabbath, and he's declaring that what David did was right, and what the disciples were doing was fine.

[25:03] There's a hint here that by Jesus saying this, he's not only the one who instituted the commandment that says, remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy, he was the one who on the seventh day in Genesis 2 said that this seventh day should be a Sabbath day of rest.

[25:29] There is a huge, people say Jesus never claimed to be God, they aren't reading their Bibles, because right here he is claiming to be the one who not only set down the ten commandments, he is Lord of creating the Sabbath, he is God, and remember that in doing all of this, he is showing mercy to the disciples, disciples, he is also teaching the Pharisees, and he is teaching us about the kind of attitude that we should have.

[26:08] Well, there is another account here, and that is the account of a crippled man in the synagogue, verses 6 through 11. Again, we do not know if this was the same day, probably was not the same day, could have been the same day, we do not know, but it is a situation where it is another Sabbath.

[26:27] So, wherever this took place, in the timeline of Jesus' life, Luke records it here to gather both situations together to elaborate his point.

[26:38] And so, Jesus is in the Sabbath, and he is teaching. And I'm sure it's one of those services, maybe you've been in one of these services, where the minute you walk in, you know that something could happen today.

[26:55] It's one of those services where Jesus is teaching, and everybody knows he's been healing. And people know that sometimes Jesus does it on the Sabbath day, and people know that when he does it on the Sabbath day, the Pharisees get all wound up.

[27:15] And so, anyone coming into that synagogue service, I'm sure, was thinking, oh no, what could happen today? Because somewhere in that group of people, was a man with a withered hand.

[27:29] The term means it's small, it atrophied, hadn't been able to use it. Sometimes in nursing homes you see people with atrophied hands, sometimes in life, they just haven't been able to use it, and it's gotten smaller, probably shiveled, sometimes it turns into a claw, and you just can't use it.

[27:48] Sometimes the elbow gets stiff. And so, as Jesus is in this synagogue, there is a man with a crippled hand. And it says the Pharisees were watching to see if Jesus would heal on the Sabbath.

[28:04] So somewhere in that building, there were gathered a small group of people who were Pharisees, whose only purpose was to be there to make sure people were keeping the law according to the way they had described it.

[28:19] they were bent on accusing him. Another gospel says they were bent on killing him. They were looking for a way to kill him.

[28:30] And so they were there just to do him in. At that point, the account goes on to mention that Jesus, knowing their thoughts, this is another pointer to his divinity.

[28:43] Jesus pointed it out all over the place. He acknowledged, he mentioned, he pointed to the fact that he was the God-man.

[28:54] And he knew their thoughts. And he gives them a challenge. As they're in the middle of the service, Pharisees are watching, everybody's looking around thinking, oh, Joe's here with the crippled hand, you know, or whatever his name was.

[29:12] What's he going to do? And Jesus in the middle of the service stops and says, whatever his name is, come here, stand right there, so that no one can miss what he's doing.

[29:30] He could have said, there's somebody here who needs to be healed. I pronounce them healed. Nobody would have known who, nobody would have known what.

[29:41] But Jesus called the man forward, now in that kind of situation, the Pharisees would have said, tomorrow, tomorrow's a good day to heal the hand of a crippled man.

[29:59] But they didn't say that. That's what they would have said if they could have said. And they didn't care about the man. They were there to deal with Jesus.

[30:11] they were only concerned that Jesus was keeping their rules. And so as the man is standing in the middle, where everyone could see that it was indeed the man with the crippled hand, it was indeed crippled, Jesus looks around all of them.

[30:29] and it gives you this picture that he looked methodically through the group of people and not just sweeping his eyes over, but catching people's eyes, looking at them, and in a sense, challenging them.

[30:49] He wanted the situation to sink in. after saying to the man, come and he stood here, he looked at them, and so he then throws out this challenge.

[31:05] I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it? And after looking around at them all, he said, stretch out your hand.

[31:20] And it was done in the presence of everyone. everyone saw that when Jesus said, stretch out your hand, his hand was able to be stretched out, and he did do it.

[31:39] He goes on to say, but they were filled with fury and disgust with one another, or and disgust with one another what they might do to Jesus. They weren't changed at all by what Jesus had just done.

[31:56] They were dead in their trespasses and sins. Their hearts were hardened due to their desire to harm Jesus. And as you think about these two things, these two situations, there are several things that we need to keep to get gleaned from him.

[32:19] First, people's needs being met is more important than the legalistic adherence to the law. People's needs being met is more important than a legal adherence to the law.

[32:39] When someone needed something done, Jesus had the compassion to do it because it needed to be done.

[32:51] Now, the problem with the world was they had the wrong understanding of the Sabbath. But in Jesus' ministry, he had this mentality that it was more important to meet people's needs than adhere to the law.

[33:07] I'm saying that, and you're thinking, preacher, you're getting real close. Jesus never transgressed the moral law. He never did that which was wrong in God's sight.

[33:23] In fact, we have here the Son of Man who is Lord of the Sabbath interpreting back to these people something that priests in years past had already known.

[33:36] Jesus was not setting a new standard. He was correcting their false thinking of the standard. He was teaching them what they should be thinking. They should be thinking, I need to be merciful to people who have needs.

[33:53] And I need to not say, I can't do it because it will transgress my standards here. We need to not transgress God's standards, but we need to be careful of our standards.

[34:07] The Bible talks, and Jesus uses this in a different place. He said, even, I'm paraphrasing, even priests would not allow their animals to suffer thirst on the Sabbath day, so they would go unwind the strap to their door, or put a leash on their horse, or their donkey, or their sheep, or whatever, drive the sheep to the point where they could get water.

[34:28] They would not let their sheep die of thirst on the Sabbath day. Why? Because they had compassion on those sheep, and that was right before God.

[34:40] And Jesus is arguing that it's right to have compassion on people, even if it's the Sabbath. Hosea 6, 6, I read this already, for I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offering.

[34:59] I've written this kind of backwards, but pay attention to the way I say it. God is not unconcerned about us obeying his commandments. In other words, God is concerned that we keep his commandments.

[35:13] The summation of the second table of the law is love toward your neighbor. We cannot say, according to John, that we love others, and even God, if we refuse to meet the true needs of others, even on the Sabbath day.

[35:35] Driving down the road. Now, even in saying this, we need to be wise, but you're driving down the road, and someone has had an accident, would you pass them by because it's the Lord's day?

[35:49] If they had a flat tire, would you pass them by because it was the Lord's day? If they ran out of gas, they should have known better, they should have planned better, this will teach them, would you drive on by?

[36:07] Why? Why? Why? people's needs being met is more important than a legalistic adherence to the law. And the Son of Man defends showing mercy as a valid, valid observation of the Sabbath.

[36:29] He showed it in his life, he's pulled the testimony of a situation from the past, and said it is valid to show mercy even on the Sabbath.

[36:43] What's your view of the Sabbath? It should be a day of rest, it should be a day unto the Lord, but do not forsake acts of mercy, and we're not just talking to the nurses in our church.

[37:00] all of us have a responsibility to be merciful to those who are in need. Another thing is notice how Jesus has come to mercifully meet the needs of his people, and he won't be stopped by any who think it should be done in a different way.

[37:24] I want you to see the fierceness of his mercy. maybe if we were in this situation, we would have caved.

[37:37] We've said, oh, yeah, no problem, I'll let it go. Don't need to heal this guy's hand today. Jesus was fierce in his mercy.

[37:49] He did not let the Pharisees stop his disciples from having their needs met. This is to get you a picture of Jesus.

[38:01] He did not let the Pharisees keep this man from having his hand healed. In the second one, there's this almost righteous anger tone in his thinking, in his words.

[38:17] I will not let you keep this man from receiving the mercy I want him to have. I want us to think of our Savior as being powerfully merciful.

[38:33] Ferocious against anyone who tried to keep him. Now, no one can keep him. But ferocious against anyone who tried to keep him from being merciful to his people. I want you to see your Savior as one who doesn't have to be convinced to love you.

[38:50] He, as you are God's child, he has loved you from before the creation of the world. He is the triune God, is the one who has loved you more than anyone in this world.

[39:08] There is no one, no one who loves you more, and no one who is more fierce in making sure you get what you need. what a beautiful Savior.

[39:21] I so appreciate that our brother Aaron brought Psalm 45, this picture of this glorious king, who is beautiful, and does beautiful things, and he has a bride that is brought close to him, and he does things for this bride.

[39:37] Brothers and sisters, that is you, and that is me. We are the bride of Christ, and he is furious, or ferocious, in his mercy towards you, not that he is ferocious towards you, he will let nothing stand in the way of being what he wants to be towards you as your king.

[39:59] Revel in that. Rest in that. Think of the cross. He let nothing stand in the way of him going to the cross that he can show you mercy.

[40:20] We have a glorious savior. Do you need mercy? Christian, Jesus is a merciful savior.

[40:32] Again, look how determined he was to show mercy. He didn't let the day of the week prevent himself from showing mercy. He didn't let legalistic people prevent him from showing mercy.

[40:49] He showed mercy. His heart was towards his people. If you're here without Christ, do you need mercy?

[41:01] Do you wish you had a person who was so ferociously merciful towards you? Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

[41:18] And they can have this beautiful, ferociously merciful king showing mercy to them.

[41:30] Hebrews 2.17, therefore, he had to be made like his brethren in every respect so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God to make propitiation for the sins of his people.

[41:49] Friend, if you're here and don't know Christ, that word, that long word that you don't hear much in society is a beautiful word. Our God has been ferocious to be willing and to do and be propitiatory towards us.

[42:10] That means he satisfies God's wrath. Nothing kept him from doing it. There are many ways in which Christ can show mercy, but the greatest is to show mercy in relation to our sinful condition before God.

[42:27] And that is what Christ came to do. And that is what he offers to any who now know that their sin brings them in judgment before God.

[42:39] It always has, but now if you know it has, you can turn to this one who will show mercy, this son of man, this Lord of the Sabbath, defender of disciples, merciful to withered-handed people.

[42:54] that's our God. Let's pray. Thank you, Father, for your word. Thank you, Father, for being able to look at your word today and see a beautiful picture of Jesus.

[43:09] Thank you that he is God and exercise his power for his people. Thank you that he is God and has been merciful towards his people.

[43:19] Thank you for the demonstrations here. Thank you for the principle that he set up and gave evidence to. Thank you for how he came to die for us and take our place.

[43:34] I pray that you would draw us to yourself this morning, Christians to know him better. Those who don't know you, may this be the day where they come to know this merciful Savior who is doing great things to show mercy towards you.

[43:49] I pray that you would bless in Jesus' name. Amen.