The Passage
After
these things He went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, the son of Alpheus,[Matthew] sitting at the tax office. And He said to him, “Follow Me.” So he left all, rose up, and followed Him.
Then
Levi gave Him a great feast in his own house. And there were a great number of
tax collectors and others who sat down with them. And their scribes and the
Pharisees complained against His disciples, saying, “Why do You eat and drink
with tax collectors and sinners?”
Jesus
answered and said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but
those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not
sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”
A Little Background
Tax collectors (also called publicans)
were among the most hated classes of people in Jesus’ day. Tax collectors were
virtually legal extortionists. They were contracted by the Roman government to
collect taxes, but they were also given both power and freedom to collect over
and above the tax as they desired. Failure to pay the demanded taxes invited Roman
brutality that enforced the law. Even worse, many tax collectors were also Jews
who extorted their own countrymen. Levi and Matthew are the same person. Levi
is his Jewish name; Matthew is his Greek name.
Some Explanation
After these things He went out and
saw a tax collector...
This incident immediately followed Jesus’ healing the paralyzed man who was lowered
through the roof. So far, there are seven disciples following Jesus. Andrew,
Peter, James, John, Philip, and Nathaniel first met and followed Jesus shortly
after His baptism at the Jordan River (John 1:37-51) It has been approximately one
year. Now Matthew joins the group.
‘I
desire mercy and not sacrifice.’...Jesus
quoted from Hosea 6:6. The entire verse reads: “For I desire mercy and not sacrifice,
and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings. In
the same way that we go to church each week, the Jews went to synagogue. But unlike
us, they didn’t carry Bibles (or iPads) with them. The leaders of the synagogues
would read from the scrolls. These scrolls were unmarked by chapter and verse markings. The passages were memorized
and well known. When Jesus quoted this short phrase, He was referencing the passage
within
the context of the entire book. This shortened phrase was spoken as a reference
to the entire passage. The two parts of verse 6 are an example of Hebrew
literature known as parallelism. Each part explains the other. Mercy and the knowledge
of God are linked because mercy is a part of God’s character.
It would be dishonest to take the verse
out of its entire context. The problem with the Jews of Hosea’s day was that
they had left the God of their faith. In fact, the prophet Hosea himself was directed
by God to marry a prostitute as a real-life object lesson of Israel’s
unfaithfulness. The Israelites were going through the motions of the sacrificial
system of temple worship, but their hearts were far from God. They were joined
to God in name only, much like an unfaithful spouse.
In Hosea, God was saying that the
sacrifices themselves were not the focus of their worship, their hearts of obedience
were. The sacrifice was to accompany a repentant heart in need of God’s mercy. To
the Pharisees and Scribes, Jesus was saying that He did not desire the judgment
of sacrifice, but to pour out mercy on repentant hearts.
Observations and Insights
It is a tragic mistake to think that
the cross is merely “the basics of our faith,” sort of like a spiritual kindergarten
that we pass through on our way to maturity in Christ. No, the cross is not
only the kindergarten, but also grade school, high school, college and PHD studies.
Paul gloried in the cross, boasted in the cross, delighted in the cross—and
that as a mature believer. Do we?
[Mike Clevelend, www.settingcaptivesfree.com]
The cross...the cross...the cross...
How can it be so simple, and yet so
easy to forget?
How can it be so powerful, yet it’s
message be so easily usurped?
The message of God’s love is not rooted in a warm embrace or how special and precious I am. God showed His love to me when I hated Him the most[1]. I was His enemy, alienated from Him[2]. Oh, yes, God loves us with an everlasting love[3]. We experience a taste of that love when, as parents we hold a newborn baby. We love and nurture that little life unconditionally. But let us not forget the rest of the story. Parents also know that children rebel—it’s the inborn bent of our nature. Some children never return, but reject and defy their parents’ love from the womb. This is the picture of us with our Heavenly Father. He loves us, not because we deserve it; we do not. He loves us because of His great mercy and kindness to the undeserving.
Oh, how we love to talk about justice!
But justice for whom? We want justice for the oppressed, the abused, the
hungry, the sex slave, the weak. But what about justice for God? God must judge
wickedness; He must judge sin. Any god who lets the wicked go free to continue
his wickedness is truly a wicked god himself. He must punish the wicked. Yet no
one could bear the full force of His righteous wrath.
And so God, because of His great
love, kindness and mercy came in human flesh, as God the Son and took the
punishment that I deserve. As Jesus hung on the cross, He took all the sin of
all the world upon Himself. The picture is clear—just like old Abraham lifted
the knife to kill his only son, God the father slew His Son who became sin for
me. He took His own wrath upon Himself and judged it there.
Dear fellow sheep, men and women
have voluntarily died brutal and heinous deaths in fire, in lions mouths, in
unimaginable torture . Our Lord Jesus did not sweat great drops of blood—He did
not cry out for the cup to be taken from Him because he feared the nails and
the sword. How weak! Jesus knew the
weight of the sin that He would bear. God
did NOT turn His face away because He couldn’t bear to see His Son suffer,
though His physical suffering was horrendous.
That would be a weak God indeed. God turned His face away because Jesus became
sin for me.
This is the truth that Jesus came to
proclaim.
John the Baptizer declared it when
he said,
“Behold the Lamb who takes away the
sin of the world!”[4]
If we for one moment forget this
truth we become as the self-righteous Pharisees. That is the truth that Jesus
declared to them. The message of the cross is also the message of hell and its
judgment. Jesus preached, “Repent and believe the Gospel!”
Keeping this truth always before our
eyes, keeps us from falling into ditches on either side. After we come to
Christ in faith, we stand complete in His righteousness[5].
We become comfortable there and soon start to see His righteousness as coming
from us. It is then that we become just like the Pharisees. Oh, yes! That is my
problem, too. How quick are we to judge the Fred Phelps’s of this world? I must
see myself as needy and as prone to fall today as I was before my faith in
Christ. For every time that I judge another for forcing his way ahead of me,
for failing a promise, for stealing what is mine—for committing sexual sin, yes
even homosexuality—I become just like those Pharisees. That doesn’t mean that
we should not speak out and denounce wrong—we should. It means that I must always
remember that I, too, come from the very same place. I was and am a sinner in
need of repentance. Remembering reminds me that all of us need Jesus’ mercy and
forgivess.
But it is also so easy to fall into
the ditch on the other side. That ditch affirms self and opens the gates to freedom
without repentance. Jesus did not spend His life partying with the downtrodden,
and the hated outcasts, loving and affirming everyone. Jesus’ message was clear—repent,
sin no more! When Matthew left his tax office,
he left it all to follow Jesus.
“Remember
this: you must always be growing in the gospel and your knowledge of it. It is
not Christianity 101, but Christianity from A to Z. You have not mastered the
gospel, nor will you master it, but it will master you!”—Paul Washer
Let us
all keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, the author and finisher of our
faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the
shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:3)
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