Conflating the Two Covenants

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I do not enjoy movies. Actually, I might enjoy watching some movies at home, but I don’t enjoy going to the movies. I don’t hate it or anything.

It’s just not my thing. I have trouble sitting there for three hours paying attention to anything and then just not being able to talk. I like to talk about what’s going on, and that’s kind of, people get mad at you at the movies.

Okay, you too? All right. So, Charla and I have never actually been to a movie theater together, which surprises people, but we both like to talk, so it would be a dangerous thing.

There was one of these things on Facebook. I didn’t answer it because that’s how people get information for your passwords, but one of these questions that went around on Facebook, what are the last three movies you saw at a theater? And I told Charla, mine are Jaws, American Graffiti, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, which makes it sound like I’m a lot older than I am, but I just have a dad that likes movies from that era and took me with him.

Anyway, I don’t like going to movies, but my wife and kids do, and so they go from time to time, and they’ll watch a movie, and they’ll buy popcorn, and of course we have to take out a bank loan for that, and they’ll go and do that, and I don’t go with them. Imagine what it would be like if they said, we’re going to go see whatever new animated thing is out, and we’re going to get our snacks, and we’re going to have a great time, and I say, great, I’ll go with you so that I can sit there the whole time and tell them how awful going to the movies is. Some of you have known some people like that who would do things like that.

That’d be an awful thing to do to them, wouldn’t it? It would be pointless really for me even to go to talk about how awful the movies are. It’s not a perfect comparison, but that’s sort of what the Pharisees did in the story that we’re going to talk about tonight from the book of Mark.

Last week, if you recall, from Mark chapter 2, I told you about a party that Matthew had thrown. Mark calls him Levi, but it’s Matthew. That Matthew had thrown after he found Jesus because he was excited about having found Jesus.

He was excited about having met the Messiah, And he wanted all of his friends, those who were not acceptable to the religious elite, he wanted them to have the same opportunity to come and meet Jesus. I told you they had this party. We hear the word party and sometimes think of other things.

It wasn’t a sinful gathering, but they were having food. They put out a big spread. They were having a wonderful time so that people could meet Jesus.

And the Pharisees showed up. When you look at these stories together, you realize the Pharisees showed up at Matthew’s party. They crashed Matthew’s party just to talk about how awful it was that they were partying at the time.

Like those are the kind of people you want coming to your holiday celebrations, right? I had some neighbors once upon a time that were very nice people and I enjoyed knowing them, but they were part of a denomination that believed that they were not Jehovah’s witnesses, but they were part of a church that believed that things like holidays, Christmas, and birthday celebrations and things like that were idolatry. And they made no bones about it.

And I thought, they’d be real fun to invite to a holiday party. Just sit there and complain the whole time. That’s what the Pharisees did.

And we’re going to look at that tonight. And Jesus sort of straightened out the Pharisees, not that the issue was the party, but the issue was what the party represented and the ideas that they were stuck in. So we’re going to be in Mark chapter 2 tonight.

Mark chapter 2. And if you turn there in your Bibles or if you’re using your phone to look up the scriptures, there’s a link in your bulletin or it’ll be on the screen for you. And we’re going to start in Mark chapter 2 verse 18 tonight.

When you find it, if you’re able to, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, we’re going to look at verses 18 through 22. And it says, The disciples of John and of the Pharisees were fasting. Then they came and said to him, Why do the disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?

Jesus said to them, Can the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days. No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, or else the new piece pulls away from the old and the tear is made worse.

No one puts new wine into old wineskins, or else the new wine bursts the wineskins, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins. And you may be seated.

So what they’re upset about when they come to Jesus is they’re upset that they are fasting and nobody else is fasting. Now, Jesus told us at some point, when you fast, don’t make a big deal about it. There’s nothing wrong with fasting.

There’s nothing wrong with fasting. But don’t do it and then make a big show about it so that everybody thinks you’re super spiritual. He said that kind of defeats the purpose. He says be discreet about it.

Do it for a period of time. But they were making a show of it. The reason why fasting was so important to them is that the Pharisees thought that their religious rituals were going to bring them closer to God.

That’s what they were counting on. That and their descent from Abraham, they were counting on their religious rituals to be something that brought them closer to God. When you look at the accounts of this story in Matthew 9 and Luke 5, they both add a word.

It’s not a contradiction. It’s just each of the gospel writers records different aspects of the story. But they include a word that Mark left out.

and that word is often. The Pharisees fasted often. So instead of the required once a year fast, that in the Old Testament, as far as I could tell, there’s one fast that’s required and it’s required once a year just prior to the to the day of atonement.

If you’ve heard of Rosh Hashanah, wait, I may be confusing it, Yom Kippur, one of those two. I apologize. I just, I knew this yesterday.

One of those two days is still celebrated as the Day of Atonement. And under the Old Testament, they were supposed to fast going into the Day of Atonement. But the Pharisees thought, hey, if one day of fasting is good, then all the days of fasting must be even better.

And so the Pharisees set up a system where instead of fasting once a year, they said, let’s do it twice a week. Now, already I am not on board, okay? Already I am not on board with any religious system that requires that.

The problem though, the problem is not that they fasted twice a week. If you fast twice a week, my goodness, if you want to fast five days out of the week and spend that time getting closer to God, more power to you. That’s great.

If you feel led to do that, that’s great. The problem was that they thought it made them super spiritual and even closer to God. And over time, something that started out as a good thing, a good thing that we’re going to use to focus our attention on God had become a self-righteous ritual that they were putting their trust in.

And not only that, they made a big show of the fact that they were fasting. You all probably know somebody who’s just a little more dramatic than they need to be, right? I’ve heard women talk about how when they’re going to lift a piece of furniture, they just lift the piece of furniture.

But they make fun of us men for being dramatic about it. That we have to lift it up! And then, ah!

I have one child, I won’t name names, but when we unload groceries, they know who they are. Or maybe they don’t. But when we unload groceries every week, they come into the house and, oh, it was so heavy, I worked so hard, I’m like, you just carried in a bag of apples.

You make it sound like you built the pyramids. Just a little dramatic. Okay, that was the approach of the Pharisees.

It wasn’t enough for them that they could fast. They had to make a big production about it. You know, when Jesus said, do it in secret, wash your face, take care of yourself, Jesus wasn’t just making up random things that he thought we might need to know later on. He was addressing things that were taking place in that day because they would come and they would make sure they look dirty and haggard and tired so that when somebody asked and said, man, you look terrible today.

Well, I’m fasting again. You get the idea. They wanted people to ask.

I’m sorry, I’m thinking of stories I could tell you, and I probably shouldn’t. My wife and I knew somebody in particular who was like this, and would limp just to get attention. The only problem was they would switch which leg, because they wanted somebody to ask.

And you’d ask, and it was, oh, I stubbed my toe, you know, that kind of thing. The Pharisees wanted people to ask, because that would give them an opportunity to strut around and talk about how spiritual they were. And, you know, it’s such a burden being this holy, but we’ve got to do it.

So for them, fasting was a big part of their identity. It was part of this big system of religious rituals that they thought set them apart and made them special and also were going to be their ticket in with God. It was part of the whole system.

The fasting alone wasn’t going to do it, but it was a brick in the whole wall. It was important. And so they came to Jesus with their question in verse 18.

and they asked him, why is it that we fast and your followers don’t? And we would read it like that maybe, but once you realize how important it is to them, this fasting, you’ve got to kind of read it the way they would. They would say it.

Why is it that we fast and your followers can’t be bothered to do it? They were outraged. They were scandalized by the fact that they were not living up to the Pharisees’ expectations.

And so when they’re coming at Jesus and saying, why is it that we do this and you don’t, there’s an accusation here that you’re not as good as we are. You’re not as righteous. You’re not as religious.

You’re not as consistent with these rituals as we are. And so they were a little bit offended, maybe a little bit accusatory in the way that they approached Jesus with this. And Jesus took this as an opportunity to talk to them about changes, to talk to them about the covenants.

When he’s talking about the wineskins and he’s talking about the patches, what he’s talking about here is the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant. The covenant that they understood, which was the law. And if you do all of this, and if you check all the boxes and do all the things that God said perfectly, then you’ll be right with God.

That was at least their understanding of the old covenant. Not realizing that in their hearts, as well as outwardly, they couldn’t keep that covenant perfectly. And that covenant was there to point them to the new covenant, which was their need for grace that was offered through Jesus Christ. And so he’s telling them, basically, it’s a new day.

And really, it’s not that God’s plans changed 4,000 years into this. It’s that this is what God had been using that covenant to prepare them for. And so more than changing the covenant, it was God changing their understanding.

Jesus opening their understanding to something that they had not understood before. And so he warned them, Jesus warned them that conflating the two covenants was going to bring confusion. It was going to bring confusion in their whole relationship with God if they could not in their minds separate these two covenants.

And that’s what they were doing because Jesus was there And yet it should be a time of rejoicing like Matthew and all the sinners recognized. But these religious people still thought it was a time for being somber and mourning. And he said there would be a time for fasting, which was something that you were somber while you were doing it.

It was sometimes a symbol of mourning. He said there would be a time for that, but Jesus’ presence made this a time for rejoicing. That’s why he said in verses 19 and 20, can the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them?

He’s talking about a wedding feast, a wedding celebration going on. And he said, can the friends, can the wedding party, can the guests at the wedding, can they really be sad? Can they really be somber?

Can they really treat it as a time of mourning while the groom is still there? I know, I know, in our culture, we’re all about the bride. Everybody stands up for the bride.

But in their day, the whole wedding scenario lasted for days or even weeks at a time. It was really cause for celebration. The wedding started before the groom ever got there.

He just kind of jumped in when it was his turn. But the time for real rejoicing was when the groom, the bridegroom, finally showed up. And while he was still there, before he and the bride left, that was the time for the celebration.

And so Jesus is saying, it’s like a wedding celebration. While the groom is still here, is this really a time to sit around and mourn and talk about how awful it is to celebrate? The Pharisees were these people who would show up at the wedding just to complain about the food and the decor and the music.

They have shows about this, did you know? It’s awful. These women will get together and they will go to each other’s weddings and they will rate each other’s weddings.

I regret even telling you that I know this is a thing. but I have seen this show and it’s awful it’s cringe inducing that’s what the pharisees were doing he says as long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast as long as the groom and Jesus is the groom in all of these scenarios as long as he’s here it’s a time for celebration it’s not fasting would be inappropriate while you’re celebrating the presence of the bridegroom they cannot fast but the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them and then they can fast in those days. See, wedding feasts were often the highlight of the peasants’ lives.

It’s hard for us to understand. Maybe it’s because I’m a guy, but it’s hard for me to understand because I think weddings, this again. We were talking this morning, I was talking to Lee Curtis about the funeral business, and he was talking about somebody he knew that is just involved in marrying and burying people.

And I said, honestly, the burying is the easier one. And he looked at me funny. I said, I figured this out early on in ministry.

At a funeral, the guest of honor is a whole lot less particular. I’ve dealt with some brides that I thought I’m never marrying people again. And a couple of grooms. The guest of honor at the funeral isn’t all that particular.

But weddings, I just think, oh, this again. Even my own. I was excited to be marrying Charla, but I said to her multiple times that day, why didn’t we just run off to the courthouse?

Just because it gets to be an ordeal. And even when we’re guests at a wedding, I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but I’m sure I’m not alone in saying, is there any way we can get out of this? Do we have to go to this? It just seems like an ordeal. I won’t say a waste of time, but it just seems like an ordeal. It’s because we are so spoiled in this country that we can have a good time anytime we want to.

For them, they worked hard. They had next to nothing, especially the peasants. Most people worked back-breaking labor six days a week, had next to nothing, had very few things to look forward to from day to day in life, but somebody in the family gets married, and you take everything you have, and you have a party, you have a celebration.

It was the highlight of their lives. Nobody in their right mind is going to go to the wedding feast and say, no thanks, I’m fasting. As a matter of fact, I read this week that even in some circumstances where their traditions required fasting, maybe even in addition to the Day of Atonement, when the traditions required fasting, that the rabbis said that doesn’t apply to the wedding party because it’s a time to celebrate.

We’re going to let you out of some of these religious obligations for a moment because it was a time of celebration. And Jesus painted that picture of something that comes along very rarely in your life. Something that is a cause for great joy.

And he compares it to the fact that he is there with them. Because for Jesus to show up is something to celebrate. And especially for them to be among those privileged few that got to see God the Son in the flesh and got to walk with Him.

What an incredible joy that should have been for all of them. And yet they missed it. And so when he draws their attention to this by pointing out the foolishness of going and fasting at a wedding celebration, he’s drawing attention to the fact that they had literally crashed a party, thrown to celebrate the coming of the Messiah, just to complain about the fact that people were partying and it was religiously inappropriate.

And when they did that, they weren’t just bringing down the party. It wasn’t just that they were Debbie Downer, character I think from Saturday Night Live. The Pharisees, it’s not just that they’re the kind of people that when they show up at the party, you hear the trumpets or the trombones in the background going wah wah.

It’s not just that they’re those kind of people. Jesus warned them that what they were trying to do was force these old religious rituals together with the new covenant that he was bringing, and he said they were going to make a mess of both by trying to do that. And so he uses these two examples here, one of combining a new cloth patch with an old garment.

Now, a lot of things come pre-shrunk nowadays, but used to, you know, if you wash something in too hot of water, especially something new, you wash something in too hot of water, you dried it on too hot of heat, it would end up a little smaller, right? There was a time when we could blame the washing machine for shrinking our pants. Now I just have to blame the refrigerator, right?

But what happens if you have an old garment that’s already done all the shrinking it’s going to do, and you have a small hole in it, and you try to mend it with a patch of new fabric that has not been shrunk, and then you go to wash it, and you go to dry it, and the patch that you’ve put on just so, and tightened, and stitched on there, and it begins to shrink too. It’s going to tear, isn’t it? And Jesus said it’s going to make an even bigger hole than the one you started with.

And then he brings in the example of the wine in the fermentation process. I’m always a little leery of this because three of our deacons are science teachers. So I have to be careful when using science related illustrations.

Y’all can tell me later if I get something wrong. But in the fermentation process, it causes the gases to expand. Is that right?

That’s just part of it. One of the reasons I’ve never been interested in alcohol is that basically it’s little bugs eating the sugar in the liquid and burping gases out and making alcohol. But it also causes things to expand.

Doesn’t that sound appetizing? It also causes things to expand. And so they would put the wine, the new wine would go in new wine skins so that it would stretch out when the wine expanded in the fermentation process and everything would be fine.

But if you take an old wine skin that’s already been stretched out, it’s as stretched as it’s going to get, and you fill it up with new wine, and then that new wine starts to expand as it ferments, what’s going to happen? It’s going to explode. It’s going to make a huge mess.

And then you’ve destroyed the wine, you’ve destroyed the wine skin, you’ve just lost everything at that point. And Jesus used both of those pictures that they would have been intimately familiar with as examples of what was going to happen if they tried to combine the old rituals Now you can read too much into, well, the wineskin represents this or the patch represents this. Sometimes I think we overanalyze the details of Jesus’ parables.

Sometimes with his parables, I think we have to step back and take the 30,000 foot view. He’s talking about a mess when you combine old and new, specifically as he’s talking about the covenants. It made no sense for them to try to cling to both because Jesus was bringing in a new covenant that was not compatible with their ideas of trying to get to God through religious rituals and through their DNA, their descent from Abraham.

The new covenant makes it clear that we are reconciled to God by His grace, period. The covenant He brought made it clear that we could not be good enough through our religious rituals and through our efforts. We could never be good enough to reach the standard of God’s holiness.

We just can’t. All of us, we’re sinners, and no matter how good we may try to be from a human standpoint, we all fall short. And so he says they were trying to come to God with these customs and rituals as though those were the things that were going to give them a relationship with him.

And their customs and rituals weren’t necessarily evil in and of themselves. Fasting is not a bad thing. You look at some of the religious rituals that people try to trust in today to have a relationship with God, and some of them are not bad things in and of themselves.

Going to church is a good thing. It’s good for you. And not just because God takes attendance and not because it’s going to get you to heaven.

It’s good for you. And I realize I’m telling the Sunday night crowd this, but it’s good for you because we draw strength from one another, from the teaching, from the fellowship. When the church is doing what it’s supposed to do, it is good for us to be part of the church.

It’s a good thing to go to church. People put their trust in baptism. Baptism is a wonderful thing.

It’s commanded. People put their trust in participating in the Lord’s Supper. That’s another thing Jesus gave us to do.

It’s not wrong to do. You can go through a list of things and some of the rituals that people trust in are not bad in and of themselves. Some of them are good things.

But as methods to get closer to God, as methods to have a relationship to God, as methods to try to earn our way to God, His message was clear that they had no place in the covenant that He was announcing. Part of their ideas of the covenant involved fasting so that you could earn points with God. When Jesus was coming to bring a covenant that was all about grace, and you can’t combine the two.

You can’t combine fasting as a way to get points with God with the idea of grace. It doesn’t work, and it’s going to be destructive, and it’s going to bring confusion. Paul expounded on this a little bit when he said, if you take grace plus the law, it’s not really grace anymore.

To put that in our terms today, Jesus plus anything else is not trusting in Jesus. We’re ultimately trusting in the something else. And that’s what Jesus was warning against here.

The deeper problem here, beyond just the rituals themselves, the deeper problem was self-righteousness. And I know I’ve talked about this a lot, but it’s kind of a theme of the early chapters of Mark as Jesus deals with the Pharisees. There’s a reason for that.

We humans, the way we’re wired, we like to think that that we’ve done something good. We like to think that if we’re right with God, we like to think we contributed to it. And so just as Jesus deals with the Pharisees, He’s addressing a very real situation in our hearts.

Self-righteousness. The rituals made them feel as though they were somehow earning God’s favor. But in His covenant, God’s favor is given not because of our righteousness, but because of the righteousness of Christ. That’s why Paul wrote in Philippians 3, Yet indeed I also count all things lost for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ, Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ, and be found in Him not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith.

He was talking about all the things that he had to boast of, and he said they are garbage compared to Christ. And when I stand before God, I don’t want it to be with my righteousness in hand, but with the righteousness that God gives me through faith in Jesus Christ. Self-righteousness is dangerous. And so the warning here to religious people, and I know some of us don’t like the word religious because we know it’s about a relationship with Jesus Christ. But you’re the Sunday night crowd. We’re church people.

The world would say we’re religious. There’s a warning in here for us that we should not, we must not reduce our relationship with God to a mere checklist of religious rituals. That’s what they were doing.

And when Jesus Himself showed up to bring a new understanding of God’s law, when Jesus, I shouldn’t even say new understanding, when Jesus came to restore to them the original understanding of God’s law, they couldn’t see this idea of grace. They couldn’t see this idea of His righteousness for all their attempts to be righteous themselves through all these rituals. And it is so easy.

If you’ve been a Christian for any length of time, you probably know what I’m talking about. It is so easy to reduce it, to reduce our relationship with God to a list of religious rituals. Well, I’m a Christian because I go to church.

I’m a Christian because I’ve been baptized. I’m a Christian because I do all these things. And if I don’t do them right, if I don’t read my Bible every single day, which we should, but if I don’t read my Bible every single day, I feel like less of a Christian.

I feel like I’m just a little bit less in God’s eyes. If I don’t pray five times a day facing Jerusalem, I feel like I’m just a little bit less of a Christian. We can put anything that we want to in there.

What makes us Christians, what makes us right with God is the fact that Jesus Christ paid for our sins on the cross in full, rose again to prove it, and we simply trusted in Him to do what He promised. That’s what makes us believers. And when we start going trying to add rituals on that, nothing wrong with baptism, Lord’s Supper, going to church.

But when we start adding those onto our faith as things that we think are going to earn us more points with God, it’s like putting the new patch on the old garment. It’s like sticking the new wine in the old wineskin. It’s going to make a mess.

It’s going to lead to confusion. It’s going to tear a hole. And so this is a warning not to reduce our relationship with God to that checklist of religious rituals.