What Jesus Demands of the World – Lesson 6

Demand #10 – Rejoice and Leap for Joy

Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.
—Luke 6:22-23

Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.
—Luke 10:19-20

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
—Matt. 13:44

These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
—John 15:11

The rewards that are ours are so tremendous that it is reasonable that Jesus demands that we “rejoice . . . and leap for joy” (Luke 6:23; cf. Matt. 5:12). However, we still find it counter to our inclinations since we are not naturally inclined to taking great joy in spiritual things.

It surely is to the point that C. S. Lewis said: “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

We are not being called on to have an irrational rejoicing and joy in our heart. This is a rational thing. It is far better than winning a lottery. In fact, valuing the winnings of countless lotteries over what Christ gives us is foolish beyond imagining. The Grace of God in your life is of such a surpassing worth that nothing should be compared to Grace by rational men. The value of Grace in your life is beyond measuring. Even the spiritual accomplishments of Paul were counted as filthy trash compared with the worth of knowing Christ (Phil 3:8). This was an accurate assessment by Paul and was not hyperbole given the known Holiness of God and the richness of God’s Grace.

Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matt. 13:44). When we see the treasure then everything else in our life is revalued and in our “joy” we give up our lives and make them living sacrifices (Romans 12:1) for the treasure. Jesus came into the world with good news, not bad news. Beyond dry service without joy He calls us to himself and to his Father. The prosperity in the Gospel is our joy in God and Jesus and not health and wealth. As Luke 14:33 teaches, “Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” We renounce what was our joy and treasure because we have found the real thing, our glorious God, to be infinitely more valuable.

C. S. Lewis says: “The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.” There is a reward for our self-denial.

Jonathan Edwards (one of America’s greatest theologians, 1703 - 1758) says, “Self-denial will also be reckoned amongst the troubles of the godly. . . . But whoever has tried self-denial can give in his testimony that they never experience greater pleasure and joys than after great acts of self-denial. Self-denial destroys the very root and foundation of sorrow, and is nothing else but the lancing of a grievous and painful sore that effects a cure and brings abundance of health as a recompense for the pain of the operation.”

Piper draws the parallel that Jesus’ demand for us to have joy is like a command to be cancer free and the demand for self-denial is the command to have the surgery. We can’t live in rebellion and have the joy that Jesus demands that we have.

It is truly amazing that when Jesus says, “Rejoice . . . and leap for joy” is that he is saying it precisely in the context of pain. “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy” (Luke 6:22-23). “They will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons . . . and some of you they will put to death. You will be hated by all for my name’s sake” (Luke 21:12, 16-17). “If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household” (Matt. 10:25). “If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20).

There was a guy who lived in Smyrna a few years ago named Polycarp. Not our Smyrna but the Roman’s Smyrna. He lived from 69 to 155 and was converted by people who had seen Jesus. He was in his late 80s when he was persecuted and hated by Marcus Aurelius. Polycarp was a good teacher and good leader. He walked as quickly as he could into a stadium of people who wanted him to die. He was old and the leaders really didn’t want to kill someone of his age so they told him to simply say “Away with the Atheists” since the Romans at that time thought that Christians were atheists since they refused to worship pagan gods. Polycarp waved his hands at the people seated in the stadium seats who rejected Christ and said, “Away with the atheists.” Well they were not amused and that might have come from Polycarp with some joy and, except for a dislocated leg, he might have jumped a little bit. He refused repeated calls to deny Christ.

The proconsul then said to him, I have wild beasts at hand; to these will I cast you, unless you repent. But he answered, Call them then, for we are not accustomed to repent of what is good in order to adopt that which is evil; and it is well for me to be changed from what is evil to what is righteous.

But again the proconsul said to him, I will cause you to be consumed by fire, seeing you despise the wild beasts, if you will not repent. But Polycarp said, You threaten me with fire which burns for an hour, and after a little is extinguished, but are ignorant of the fire of the coming judgment and of eternal punishment, reserved for the ungodly. But why do you tarry? Bring forth what you will.

Polycarp rejoiced at his persecution. When they were going to burn him, he told them not to bother nailing him down that he would not run out of the fire. I don’t know if he was jumping for joy but he wasn’t scared. They tried to burn him but it seems God prevented the fire from consuming him and they finally sent the executioner in with a knife and killed him. Then they finally burned the body after his death. His death was a testimony to both believers and unbelievers.

Piper says, “They think that Jesus’ demand for joy is a demand to tell jokes or weave slapstick into Christian corporate life. I don’t smell the Jerusalem-bound Jesus in that atmosphere. Something has gone wrong. What’s wrong is that the aroma of suffering is missing. For Jesus the demand for joy is a way to live with suffering and to outlast suffering. Therefore, this joy is serious. It’s the kind you fight for by cutting off your hand (Matt. 5:30) and selling your possessions (Matt. 13:44) and carrying a cross with Jesus to Calvary (Matt. 10:38-39). It has scars. It sings happy songs with tears. It remembers the dark hours and knows that more are coming. The road to heaven is a hard road, but it is not joyless.”

Polycarp and countless others have shown us how to face hard times like men. In the pleasure of God and the joy He gives we set aside the things of this world. Polycarp found his joy and his greatest satisfaction in Christ. He wasn’t prepared at the last moment for martyrdom. He was prepared by his 86 years of finding his deepest joy and pleasure in God. What did the world have to offer to make him deny God? Nothing, God had let him know that he was going to be martyred. The unsaved don’t have a natural understanding of where Polycarp got his strength. Jonathan Edwards said: “We come with double forces against the wicked, to persuade them to a godly life. . . . The common argument is the profitableness of religion, but alas, the wicked man is not in pursuit of [moral] profit; ’tis pleasure he seeks. Now, then, we will fight with them with their own weapons.” When God is on His throne in your heart then pleasure from Him and submission to His moral law makes life truly pleasurable and surpassing joy in the promise of what is to come.

Jesus says our current joy is based on the hope of reward. “Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven” (Luke 6:23). Jesus says to his disciples just before his death, “You have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:22). Jesus says, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11).

Even now we experience the pleasure and joy of Jesus’ presence. He said, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:18). “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). He said, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will . . . glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:13-14). We can have the joy and rejoicing produced by the Holy Spirit.

The first thing we can do to change our hearts in rejoicing and joy is to begin by realizing that we are even forgiven for a lack of joy and rejoicing in Him. At the last supper, He took the cup of wine and said, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28). He said, “The Son of Man came . . . to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). So we have a firm foundation to fall back on. Any failure is under the blood of Jesus.

Secondly, Jesus prayed, “I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:26). This pure rejoicing joyful love of God for Jesus will be in us. Jesus prayed that we would have a love of such character that it would respond to perfect holiness in a perfect way. Infinite admiration for perfection and love of holy fellowship is to be ours. Jesus prayed for that and I really want that in my life. As Piper says, “We are not left to ourselves to rejoice in Jesus as we ought. Jesus is committed to making it happen.”

Thirdly, for us to glorify the Father and the Son we need to be rejoicing in them. We pursue this joy because it glorifies God. The opposite shows why a lukewarm heart is such an offence and such an embarrassment before God. As Piper says, “We should waken to the truth that it is a treacherous sin not to pursue our fullest satisfaction in God. There is one final word for finding delight in the creation more than in the Creator: treason.” Once again the unpardonable sin for a child of the cold war is mentioned and the finger points at me.

From the Song of Solomon 5:1 Jonathan Edwards taught: “Persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites.” Instead, he says, they ought to be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and to obtain more spiritual pleasures. . . . Our hungerings and thirstings after God and Jesus Christ and after holiness can’t be too great for the value of these things, for they are things of infinite value. . . . [Therefore] endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement. . . . There is no such thing as excess in our taking of this spiritual food. There is no such virtue as temperance in spiritual feasting.”



Demand #11 – Fear Him who can Destroy Both Soul and Body in Hell

And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
—Matt. 10:28

But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.
—Luke 19:27

Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” . . . And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
—Matt. 25:41, 46

The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom (Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 9:10) and the beginning of knowledge (Proverbs 1:7). We are commanded to fear God (Matthew 10:28) and in the Law the need to fear God was repeated as one of our chief obligations.

Deuteronomy 6:1-2
Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over, to possess it, that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son’s son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be long.

Deuteronomy 10:12-13
And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord, which I am commanding you today for your good?

Of course one of the reasons that we are studying what Jesus demands of the world is because we fear God. In part we are commanded to fear God as motivated by common sense. The verse in Matthew 10:28 makes sense in a rational way. We are rational to fear God more than a man who may harm us but has no eternal authority.

As Piper points out, Jesus spoke of hell more than anyone else in the Bible. He called it a place of “outer darkness” where “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:12). “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 13:41-42). He calls it “the hell of fire” (Matt. 5:22), “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt. 25:41), “unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43), “eternal punishment” (Matt.25:46).

Hell is not a popular topic these days. We like to talk about the Love of God. It is easy to understand why we gravitate toward something that, for us, has resulted in our being born again as the Children of God. Our general ignorance of the implications of God’s Holiness is without excuse. When a man gets a glimpse of God’s holiness he then doesn’t need to be told about fearing God. You will instinctively fear like Isaiah and Daniel did when you are confronted with the reality of God’s holiness. We can be told we have a sin nature and may accept it intellectually but when we are confronted with the “Holy” we know our problem to the core. We say with Isaiah, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5). Isaiah was a prophet and by our standards he was a good guy. He easily would have been one of the best guys on the planet. But he was right and he was lost. He was headed for judgment but in the next verse his sins are forgiven.

In the selfishness and pride of our generation we have forgotten the holiness of God. We don’t even begin to have knowledge and wisdom because we never begin to understand the fear of God. I know I’ve heard sermons that try to redefine fear to mean respect. We’ll of course we need to respect God but if we, as sinners by nature, don’t fear a Holy God who hates sin and is omniscient then we really have fallen off the knowledge and wisdom curve and landed in ignorant and stupid.

In addition to redefining fear we have tried to redefine hell. I’ve been exposed to all sorts of preaching since I grew up in such a variety of generally Southern Baptist churches all over the country. I have heard pastors say that hell is simply a consequence of rejecting God. I’ve heard it presented as something that just happens and that God simply doesn’t interfere. The problem with that is that our selfishness and pride keeps us from understanding that we deserve hell and that it is a fair punishment for rejecting the God of the Universe. You’ve committed “cosmic treason” against the most high God. You’ve done it repeatedly. You’ve enjoyed and even if you could stop there is no way for you to go back and make it right. You can’t commit treason and then say, “Yeah that was bad. I won’t do it again so don’t take me to court and punish me.” We deserve hell. It is the fair penalty for our actions.

So this fear could seem like a discouraging thing but right after telling us to fear God then Jesus tells us that God is watching every sparrow and that we should not fear and the hairs of our head are numbered (Matt. 10:29-31). Jesus was speaking to the disciples. You need to understand the holiness of God, the rightness of the fear of God, and the fairness of hell in order to understand the Cross. Jesus bore your just punishment for sin. The wrath of God was poured out on Him for your forgiveness. Not only were your sins paid for on the Cross but His perfect obedience is credited to us who are “in Christ”. That is the atonement. If you don’t understand the fear of God then how you get there is beyond me but this is why we don’t fear the future or God’s care of us. We have both an abiding trust and peace in His care for us but a fear of the God of the Universe who takes sin seriously.

As Piper points out the fear of God remains to attack unbelief. One way in which we see this worked out in our life is as we begin to drift towards works to “feel righteous” before God. When we meditate on Scripture we see how sinful this is and how right it is to fear standing before God dressed in anything but the righteousness of Christ. Another way we see this in our lives is in driving our desire to know God as fully and truly as we are able. To have, what is in essence an idol as our concept of God is not something we want in our lives. Those who reject the atonement have an idol rather than God on the throne of their lives. Those who reject some attribute of God (such as those who teach the open god heresy) then have unbelief in their lives and an idol for a god. Our fear of God should make us give all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength to our pursuit of right relationship and right knowledge of God.

Another action of the fear of God in our life is for obedience. God will discipline us and a rational fear of God will cause us to want to avoid being disciplined. Piper says, “Fearing God means fearing the terrible prospect of running away from the merciful, all-providing, all-satisfying reign of King Jesus.” Conviction of sin and error is one of God’s gifts to us. Paul says that those who teach false doctrine have their minds cauterized. A fear of God will keep us on guard so that we seek to be sensitive to what God is saying to us and so that we never get to the point at which we sin without feeling conviction. A Christian who sins and doesn’t feel convicted is headed for a serious disciplinary encounter with God. When we see this in the lives of non-Christians we can intercede for them because they are in rebellion against the King of Glory. We must get a God given view of the seriousness of sin in order to see the majestic Grace of our justification, the urgency of our sanctification, and the essential nature of our intercessory prayers for those around us.