Mat 12:1-14, Loyalty to the King and Mercy to His Creation.Wednesday February 5, 2025 Are you loyal to anyone? What does loyalty mean?
Websters: faithful to those persons, ideals, etc. that one is under obligation to defend, support, or be true to.
Loyalty is love and obedience. It has to be both. When you do not want to obey, love for Him will spur your duty onward to win the day.
If you have love and not obedience, you only have an emotional love that will not spur you on in the way.
Main Idea: To the extent you are loyal to the Lord, to that extent you will be merciful to others.
2 Scenes:
Scene 1: Grainfield - the Lord of the Sabbath is with His disciples on the Sabbath.
Mat 12:1-2.
Pharisees have rules which they added to try and protect the Sabbath from violation, but they had no mercy.
Jesus teaches wisdom and mercy. He is always trying to teach, trying to save.
Mat 12:2-7
Jesus’ Supremacy over all Israel: Greater than the temple (12:6). Greater than Jonah (12:41). Greater than Solomon (12:42).
Greater than the temple means that He is above the Law.
Greater than Jonah – context is the preaching of Jonah, so Jesus is greater than the gospel.
Greater than Solomon – greater than Israel’s most prosperous king (era spoken of as the days of Solomon – peace and Israel’s greatest expansion).
Jesus makes His most profound claim to supremacy up to this point in vs. 8. It is a claim only God can make.
Lord of the Sabbath = Lord of Creation (Gen 1-2:3) and Lord of Law (Exo 20:8-11).
Scene 2: Synagogue - the one greater than the Temple is in the synagogue.
Mat 12:9-14.
Jesus shows His authority by stating what is lawful and then by healing.
He graciously appeals to their reason – “If a sheep falls into a pit …” God does not want us to shut off our reasoning skills.
Supremacy of Christ and the responses to it.
Jesus Christ is the Lord God and true humanity.
We all with one voice confess our Lord Jesus Christ one and the same Son, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, … acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, or without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way abolished because of the union, but rather the characteristic property of each nature being preserved, and coming together to form one person. [Council of Chalcedon, 451 A.D.]
Don’t just know the doctrine of the hypostatic union, but marvel at it, at Him.
When He quoted Mal 3:1, He put Himself into the pronoun for God. Mat 11:10 'Behold, I send My messenger before Your face, Who will prepare Your way before You.'
The title Son of Man directly points to His dominion. (Dan 7:13-14).
Coming with the clouds of heaven would refer to His ascension upon which He would rightfully take His seat on the throne at the right hand of the Father, as God and Man.
Psa 110:1-2 The Lord says to my Lord: "Sit at My right hand Until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet." 2 The Lord will stretch forth Your strong scepter from Zion, saying, "Rule in the midst of Your enemies."
Jesus quoted this before the Sanhedrin when the high priest finally asked Him if He was the Christ, the Son of God. Paul quotes it as the beginning of the new age of the church who would receive her inheritance (Eph 1:20). Paul would quote it in saying that every believer in the church is raised up with Christ and seated with Him in the heavens. The ascension fulfilled His appointment as the great High Priest (Heb 8:1) as He alone cleansed the all saints of all of their sins (Heb 10:12), and from there poured out the Holy Spirit to indwell all of His saints. What was done to Him, as human, was never done to an angel, and so by His ascension, born-again humanity are forever higher than angels (Heb 1:13). And we are told that we should forever fix our eyes on Him there as we toil here (Heb 12:2).
Jesus is appealing to them and to us to bow to Him. The only infinite Master who is also gracious and merciful.
The responses to Him fall into two camps, and two only. There is no middle ground (Mat 12:30).
Based on Hos 6, we can see that the response must be loyalty to Him, and then from that loyalty, Jesus says there will be mercy.
Skeptic: loyalty is ultimately to self.
Hos 5:3-4 I know Ephraim, and Israel is not hidden from Me; For now, O Ephraim, you have played the harlot, Israel has defiled itself. [parallelism] 4 Their deeds will not allow them To return to their God. For a spirit of harlotry is within them, And they do not know the Lord.
Harlot (theme of this prophet who was commanded to marry one) stems from Israel being married to the Lord, but she was unfaithful. She was not loyal so she committed adultery.
Hos 5:5-7 Moreover, the pride of Israel testifies against him, And Israel and Ephraim stumble in their iniquity; Judah also has stumbled with them. 6 They will go with their flocks and herds To seek the Lord, but they will not find Him; He has withdrawn from them. 7 They have dealt treacherously against the Lord, For they have borne illegitimate children. Now the new moon [idolatry] will devour them with their land.
They rob the poor (no mercy because they are not loyal to the Lord).
Hos 5:10 The princes of Judah have become like those who move a boundary;
Then the prophet (like them all) offers a beautiful offer of repentance. As Hosea went after his harlot wife who left him, so God tenderly pursues Israel and offers His love if they will turn back to Him.
Hos 6:1-7 "Come, let us return to the Lord. For He has torn us, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. 2 "He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day, That we may live before Him. 3 "So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord. His going forth is as certain as the dawn; And He will come to us like the rain, Like the spring rain watering the earth."
4 What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? For your loyalty is like a morning cloud And like the dew which goes away early. 5 Therefore I have hewn them in pieces by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of My mouth; And the judgments on you are like the light that goes forth. 6 For I delight in loyalty (chesed, which Jesus translates as eleos: mercy) rather than sacrifice, And in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. 7 But like Adam they have transgressed the covenant; There they have dealt treacherously against Me.
We can see, then, why the Pharisees loved the rule of ritual and missed mercy all together.
Seeking to be pleased with yourself and at the same time trying to satisfy God means that you need rules to complete – like completing an obstacle course.
When you do not love and honor the Lord in this way, then what you want is rules. Rules allow you to get through it, to finish the task without violation, or at least violation that you know. One can boast that they did it right and the task is complete.
Mar 2:27-28 Jesus said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath."
The other response is loyalty.
We already saw the loyal in Mat 11:25. Jesus called them infants. They have love and obedience and so pure loyalty. They are not perfect; no young child is. But when a young child is shown love, encouragement, is acknowledged as valuable, is cared for, taught, affirmed, shown grace and forgiveness; he or she loves and seeks to obey his parents. It is a beautiful display that God has made a permanent part of every human being – we all have longed for it, and in Christ we have it.
Mat 7:11 “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!”
God modeled life through His Son, Jesus Christ, and if we’re loyal to Him, we will be exceedingly merciful to others.
Chesed is eleos - loyalty to God is directly proportional to mercy to others.
The more loyal you are to God in all areas of your life the more gracious you will be to others: Loved ones, liked ones, indifferent ones, aggravating ones, enemies.
The issue with mercy, or lack of, is not in self, but in self’s loyalty to God.
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