Transcript
In your Bibles, will you turn with me to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 20. Luke chapter 20. Luke chapter 20. We want to begin reading at verse 19 of Luke chapter 20. Luke chapter 20, verse 19.
And the chief priests and the scribes sought to lay hands on Him at that very hour, but they feared the people, for they knew that He had spoken this parable against them. So they watched Him and sent spies who pretended to be righteous, that they might seize on His words in order to deliver Him to the power and authority of the governor.
Then they asked Him, saying, ‘Teacher, we know that You say and teach rightly, and You do not show personal favoritism, but teach the way of God in truth. Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?’
But He perceived their craftiness and said to them, ‘Why do you test Me? Show Me a denarius. Whose image and inscription does it have?’
They answered and said, ‘Caesar’s.’
And He said to them, ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’
But they could not catch Him in His words in the presence of the people. And they marveled at His answer and kept silent.
Hopefully you will never have to attend a funeral like the funeral that was held for Wind of Fire. You say, “Who in the world was Wind of Fire?” Wind of Fire, my friends, was a dog who very sadly died of a tumor. But they held a funeral for him where else but in the land of fruits and nuts, the great state of California.
The year was 1985. The place was Berkeley, California. The exact place was Calvary Presbyterian Church. And the funeral service was complete with prayers and communion and singing.
In attendance that day there were six dogs, one cat, and 25 human beings. Afterwards someone reported that all of the pets were properly leashed and behaved themselves very well. They didn’t show any emotion, however, but a lot of the humans cried.
The service was conducted by Ms. Joan Newman who happens to hold a Master of Divinity degree from the Pacific School of Religion out there in California. And as she conducted the service she thanked all of the animals for being in attendance. And she said, and I quote, “God loves what she has made.” Did you get that? “God loves what she has made.”
And she added, “God’s love extends to all creation, not just to people.” And she explained that the regular churches didn’t give us a good opportunity to grieve for our animal friends because they thought that was kind of strange. But nothing was strange for Ms. Newman.
She included in her service prayers for coyotes, for wolves, for seals, for pigs, for monkeys, and for dogs, and I quote, “all other animal victims of human injustice.” During the course of the service several of the people rose to pray their own prayers. And one of them prayed for all the seagulls and seabirds.
And then they concluded the service with a song that you probably heard but never heard sung this way. Listen closely. The song with which the service ended was “She’s got the whole world in her hands.”
Now I ask you, is that a weird story? Is that a far out story or what? But as strange as that story sounds to us it illustrates a problem that has haunted the Christian church almost from its very beginning. And that problem is the danger of getting a hold of strange and fantastic ideas and presenting them as though they were part of Christian truth.
Or another way of saying this is it is the problem of confusing religious reality with religious fantasy. Now I happen to suspect that if we could take an in-depth poll of this audience this morning we might even find that here at Victor Street there are a few ideas about God that are very, very strange indeed.
And because this is a very real problem and because it can affect the quality of our Christian lives I want to talk to you this morning about a subject which I express in terms of an equation. And my equation is this, faith plus fantasy equals frustration. Did you all get that equation? It’s a lot easier than the ones you used to try to learn in geometry.
Let me repeat it again because it’s also the title of my message to you this morning, faith plus fantasy equals frustration.
Now I suspect that most of you or some of you at least have heard me tell you that after my brother David died a number of years ago for a long period of months I dreamed repeatedly about David. And I would meet David in my dreams in all sorts of situations in all sorts of locations.
And the one thing that my dreams had in common was that in every dream I thought to myself, “Well, David isn’t really dead. He’s alive after all.” Now a psychologist would probably explain to me that I was going through a very normal grief period. And that only although with my head I had accepted the fact that David was dead emotionally I had not yet quite accepted it.
And those dreams expressed my emotional wish that David was still alive. But now I suppose somebody had come to me during those days and had said something like this. Suppose they had said, “Zane, I think God is talking to you through your dreams. After all didn’t God use some dreams in the Bible? And I think God is trying to tell you that David is not really dead. He’s actually alive.”
Now folks that’s not a strange idea in our society. Remember there were a lot of people who didn’t believe that John F. Kennedy was really killed in Dallas. That’s why they didn’t open his coffin. He wasn’t there. And there were lots of people who didn’t believe that Adolf Hitler really committed suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin.
And of course there have always been people who think that Elvis Presley is still alive. And we have repeated sightings of Elvis Presley. Now a guy who had said that to me might have hoped that I would buy into it because you see I knew a fact about David. My family knew this fact.
David had a very high security clearance with the government. And in case of a nuclear war David was supposed to report to a particular underground facility where he would serve as part of the U.S. government after a nuclear war. There are in fact underground facilities out east that were prepared so that at least some of the government could go underground and could continue to run the country.
David never told us very much about that because it was top secret. And we didn’t try to ask him because we knew there was no use to ask David about a military secret. But suppose my imaginary friend had said to me, “Look, I think that the body you thought you saw in the casket was really a very clever imitation, a wax dummy. And what you really buried was a wax dummy. And that David has gone underground with the government and is working on some secret project that none of us can know anything about. And he’s really alive. And God is trying to tell you that through your dreams.”
Now fortunately folks I don’t think I would have fallen for that. But let me remind you that there are lots and lots of people in America today who would buy into some kind of theory like that if it were presented to them. And I also want to remind you of this that fantasies are not the private property of people who live in America in the 1990s.
And way back in the days of the Lord Jesus Christ, way back in the times of the New Testament there were plenty of fantasies circulating. And some of them circulated among the Jewish people. And one of the most dangerous fantasies that circulated among the Jews was this. There were Jews who believed that it was wrong to be under the control of a pagan emperor like the Roman emperor. And that it was wrong to pay taxes to the Roman emperor because God was the king of his people.
And that inspired in these people a fantasy that somehow or other they could rebel against the Romans and God would help them and deliver them from Roman bondage. In fact around 6 A.D. when Jesus was still a little boy a man by the name of Judas actually led a rebellion in the land of Palestine against the Roman government. And of course the Romans crushed his rebellion. They killed him and defeated his army.
But that fantasy continued to live in the hearts and minds of many people in Israel. And eventually it broke forth into that terrible disaster which we call the Jewish War of 66 to 70 A.D. And it led to the ruin and the destruction of Israel.
And what I would like you to understand this morning is that this fantasy, this strange and unbiblical idea was in the background of the passage that we read just a few moments ago.
Now please remember that we are in the closing years, the closing days of the life of Jesus Christ. And Jesus is teaching in the temple. And he has just told a parable that was aimed directly at the Jewish leaders. And the Jewish leaders are furious about that. And they would like very much to arrest Jesus but they are afraid to do it because Jesus is popular with the people. And they’re afraid they’ll cause trouble with the people.
So they decide on a plan. They’re going to send some of their agents who will mix with the crowd. And these agents will try to get Jesus to say something they will get him in trouble with the Roman government. And maybe the Romans would do what the Jewish leaders were afraid to do.
And so here come these agents into the crowd. And eventually they are able to confront Jesus. And here is their question. Notice how the sweet words roll off their lips.
“Teacher, we know that you teach and speak correctly. And you don’t show favoritism to anybody. But you teach the way of God in truth. Now tell us, Teacher, is it according to the law of God for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”
What a trap! What a scheme that was! Now folks let me just tell you that those of us who are teachers and preachers we kind of like to be told that we really are serving God in an outstanding way and that we tell people how it really is. That’s what these men are saying to Jesus.
“Teacher you really tell it the way it is. You wouldn’t shade your message to please anybody not even the Roman emperor. You tell it straight. So give it to us. Should we pay taxes or not?”
It’s awfully tempting to respond to that kind of flattery. But Jesus didn’t have a sinful nature like we do. And obviously that flattery didn’t meet the target.
Let me just pause to say this. But one of the ways in which we can fall into a fantasy can buy into ideas that are totally wild is through our own sense of pride and through our own sense of self-importance.
In 1983 the Knight-Ridder newspaper services reported from Clarksborough, New Jersey a very sad and tragic story. Little ten-year-old Faith Anne Aliando died of complications arising from untreated diabetes. That meant apparently that her parents would not allow her to get medical help from a physician.
Now her father was described as a fundamentalist Christian. You know what he did? Instead of burying his little girl he took her body to a building in Clayton, New Jersey which was connected with a family-owned construction business. And he gathered about 20 people around him to pray for the little girl’s resurrection.
Do you know that little girl’s body lay there for the rest of the month of July for the entire month of August? And I can imagine the stench that existed by that time. And it wasn’t until September the 12th that the authorities acting on an anonymous tip discovered the body, took it away.
But even then it took 14 more days, 16 more days actually for a superior court judge to order that the body be finally buried. It was finally buried on September the 28th nearly three months after the little girl had died.
Now when did that happen? I don’t think it’s hard to guess the reason why it happened. Apparently the father believed that God was going to heal his little daughter of her diabetes. And when he didn’t do it the father could not bear to admit that he was wrong.
And he took his fantasy to a different level and he persuaded himself apparently that God had allowed his little girl to die so that she could be resurrected in a wonderful miracle.
Now folks let me tell you something. Sometimes we are tempted to feel so important and so special or sometimes we are tempted to feel that we have such special faith that we can actually believe that God is going to do some very spectacular things for us but he hasn’t promised to do at all in the Bible.
And I want to warn you of something. When you leave the solid ground of the promises in God’s word it is easy to move off into fantasy land and to believe all sorts of things that your own mind and other minds create which have nothing to do with the promises of God’s word.
Of course God can resurrect anybody. But is anybody able to read the Bible and think that God has made a promise that when your son or your daughter dies that he is going to raise them from the dead right here and now? Don’t you see it? We fall victim to fantasy through pride and through a feeling of self-importance.
We sometimes think the devil only tempts us to go out and live a wild life. Don’t kid yourself folks. The devil also tempts us to go well beyond the word of God and to build little fantasy castles. And then he allows those castles to collapse on us hopefully destroying our faith.
Now I don’t need to tell you do I? But Jesus didn’t fall for this trick. He didn’t fall for the silvery smooth flattery that these men were handing out. He dismissed all of it with the words, “Why do you test Me?”
And there’s no way that Jesus was going to encourage the fantasies that already existed in Israel that we could refuse to pay taxes to Caesar. We can rebel against Caesar and God is on our side and he’ll make us victorious.
And I think that what the Lord Jesus Christ did next was an effort to bring this discussion back to everyday life to get this discussion down to the bedrock bottom of nitty-gritty everyday living. And Jesus said, “Show Me a denarius.” That was a coin that was used for money.
And evidently someone had one and they handed it to Jesus. And Jesus holds it up and he says to his audience, “Whose image and whose inscription is on this coin?” Well everybody knew the answer was Caesar’s.
Now folks he probably held up a silver coin. And on one side there was probably the head of the emperor wearing a garland wreath and an inscription that said Tiberius son of the deified Augustus majesty. And on the other side of this coin there was a representation of his mother Livia who was presented as if she was the goddess Pax which meant peace.
And there was another inscription that said Pontifex Maximus which meant high priest. And folks the radical Jewish rebels in Israel were enraged by coins like that because those coins they thought were blasphemous coins. They made claims to deity for people who were only human beings. They were blasphemies against the living God.
And people rebelled against the coins themselves. But notice something that when Jesus holds that coin up he doesn’t talk about any of those things. His question is very simple and basic. He says, “Who issued this coin? Whose coin is this? Who minted it? Who put it in circulation?” The answer was Caesar’s.
Now there was hardly anybody in that audience folks who didn’t use that coin all the time. A day hand out in the field who worked all day could earn one denarius a day. At the end of his day he could go to the paymaster. He picked up his denarius. He’d go to the shops or the marketplace. He could buy the things he needed. Everybody used the coin.
And not only that that coin was good all over the Roman world from one end of the Mediterranean Sea to the other. And Jewish merchants and Jewish traders went all over the Mediterranean world and used the coinage of Caesar. And everybody in that audience benefited from the government of Rome and from the economy that Rome had established in the world from the Roman peace that made it possible to do business all over the world.
And that coin represented if you really thought about it the benefits of the Roman government.
Now let me stop here to ask you a question. Why is it that as Christian people we can pick all the faults apart of everything that is around us and we miss the blessings? We miss the benefits of the nation and of the government in which we live.
Some of you know that when I was growing up I grew up in south central Pennsylvania. It was kind of Amish country. And it was interesting to go downtown on Saturday morning because the Amish people would come into the city from their farms. But you know how they would get there? By horse and buggy I kid you not.
And the women wore these dark hats that covered their hair and they wore a long skirt that went all the way to their ankles. The men wore bushy beards and they wore broad brimmed hats. And as near as I can remember they all wore suits. They were either gray or black very colorless.
And then we had other people in the area called Mennonites. And they had different ideas of their own. I mean some of them wore these caps but they were see-through. You could see the hair. Some of the men wore shirts but they didn’t believe in buttons. I never figured out why they took all their buttons off and put clasps in place of the buttons.
Some of them drove cars but they always stripped off the chrome off the cars because the car was all right but the chrome was worldly. Now please don’t think I’m getting down on these people. I want you to know that I knew a lot of them. They were hard-working industrious and honest people.
But they had never been able to come to terms with the benefits and blessings of modern life. And in their own way they were still living in a fantasy world that no longer existed. They didn’t realize that they were rejecting blessings that God had surrounded them with.
Hey folks I’m not ashamed to say this but I’m very thankful for my red Tercel that is sitting out here in the parking lot. I’d hate to think of having to come to church every morning with a horse and buggy. I know I’ve been late every single day of the year. And I kind of like a red car. No gray cars or black cars for me folks. Fire engine red.
Nothing wrong with color. God created color and he filled his creation with color from one end of it to the other. And I think it’s something else I’m grateful for. I’m thankful that when I get sick when I get sick I can call up my doctor or go to the emergency room.
I do not buy into the fantasy that some Christians have that if we only had enough faith we wouldn’t need doctors we wouldn’t need emergency rooms. God has surrounded us with the benefits of medical science. We happen to live in a city that is unusually blessed with medical institutions and we ought to be grateful to God for these.
And I’ll tell you something else I’m thankful for too folks. I’m thankful for the United States government. Now I’m going to admit to you I’m a Republican. And I have never been too happy living under a Democratic president. The year I was born Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected and he was re-elected three times.
And when I was growing up I used to say to myself will I ever live under a Republican president? And yes I lived under a few since then. But whether we live under a Republican or Democratic president I think we all will be extremely grateful that we live under one of the best governments in the world.
You say we’ve got a lot of problems we sure do. But I happen to like the U.S. government better than the government that used to operate in Yugoslavia because over there it collapsed and the Croats and the Muslims and the Bosnians are killing each other. And I like our government a whole lot better than the non-government that exists over in Somalia where there are warlords and famine.
And I certainly like our government a lot better than the government of Rwanda where the soldiers are running wild and killing literally thousands of people. You know what there’s a woman who is suing the president of the United States. She got her picture in the newspapers and on television along the front cover of People magazine.
If she lived in another country she might be in jail. I don’t know whether Paula Corbin Jones has a case or not. That’s not important. What I’m telling you this morning is that we can fixate and focus on all the things that are wrong and we can forget all the things with which God has blessed us and the benefits of living in a country like this.
Nobody is shooting martyrs over this building this morning folks. Nobody is tossing hand grenades into Victor Street Bible Chapel. The police are not going to come here and break down our doors. We ought to be thankful for that.
We want to be realistic about the benefits that God has given us through government. And the more realistic and down-to-earth we are the less likely it is that we will fall into a fantasy.
So I happen to think that when Jesus held that coin up without saying it he was saying you all use this coin don’t you? You all benefit from this coin. And who gives you this coin? This coin is Caesar’s coin.
Now folks with that recognition there comes also a solemn obligation. And it is just here that Jesus states one of his most famous pronouncements. For in response to the question that has been asked of him he says, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.”
If we may paraphrase that Jesus is saying meet your responsibilities to the government and meet your responsibilities to God as well. May I suggest to you that you can’t just do one of these things. And that the only way you can really meet your responsibilities to God is by meeting the responsibility that you have to government.
Remember that the Bible tells us in Romans 13 that every soul be subject to the governing authorities because there is no authority except from God. And the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority is resisting the ordinance of God. And those who resist will bring judgment on themselves.
Just this past week President Clinton signed into law a bill that made it a federal crime to block access to abortion clinics. Now those who block access or vandalize abortion clinics or threaten the women who want abortions or the doctors who perform them are subject to federal penalties. They can be sent to prison from six months to nine months in prison. And they could be subject to fines ranging up as high as two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
And I’m going to tell you something I am not opposed to that law. Now let me hasten to add I am not telling you that I approve of abortion. I do not approve of abortion. I would never recommend abortion to someone. On the other hand I happen to think that the biblical case against abortion is not as strong as some people make it. But that’s not the issue this morning.
The issue I’m raising this morning is who in the world has the right to think that God has told them to go out and stand on private property and block the access of people to buildings that they don’t even know? Who has the right to think that God has told them to hurl threats or to make threatening telephone calls or to send threatening letters to would-be abortion clinic patients or to the doctors who perform the abortions?
What right does a Christian have to set an abortion clinic on fire or to take a gun as happened in Pensacola Florida and murder a doctor who performed abortions? The Bible doesn’t teach us that folks. People who think that are living in a fantasy world. Those are what fantasies? The Bible tells us to do is to submit to government. And the person who resists the government resists the ordinance of God.
Now let me assure you that the emperor Tiberius was no saint. He was not an angel in disguise. Neither is any president that we have. But our responsibilities are clear. We need to recognize the benefits that God has bestowed upon us through government. And we are responsible to pay our taxes to obey the laws and to pray for our leaders.
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” And then and only then will you be able to render unto God the things that are God’s.
Many years ago when Egypt conquered the ancient land of Nubia an Egyptian regiment was going through that vast wilderness which is called the Nubian Desert. They were on very limited rations of water and they were suffering severely from thirst. And then all of a sudden they saw a beautiful lake in the distance.
And they told their Arab guide who was the only one who knew his way through the desert they told their Arab guide to direct them to that lake. The Arab guide refused. He told them the lake wasn’t really real. And he wasn’t going to waste any time at all going off their route to an imaginary lake.
Well they argued with him and words came to blows. And they killed the Arab guide the only man who could have guided them through the wilderness. And then they went off in the direction of the lake.
You know what happened? The lake disappeared. And stretching before their eyes as far as they could see was the burning sand. And now raging thirst was accompanied by a horrible sense of despair.
Later the Arabs sent out a search party. And when they finally located the regiment they found parched and withered corpses. Somebody must have survived to tell the story maybe a Nubian servant. But all of the soldiers in the regiment were dead.
Now folks see this book? It’s the only guide we’ve got. And if we’re going to turn aside to imaginary ideas to mirages and to fantasies we’re going to reap the consequences of that. We need to keep our feet on the ground. We need to keep our heads in the Bible. And we need to reject the fantasies that exist all around us.
I think that the songwriter has put it perfectly, “My Lord knows the way through the wilderness. All I have to do is follow.”
Shall we pray?
Father help us to realize that your word is all we need that we can trust it and believe it. And that we can turn away from the wild and fantastic ideas that we meet among men. And we can rest on your simple promises and upon the guarantee of your help.
Father we pray that we may be people of the book who live our lives by the book and who are blessed as a result. We ask it in Christ’s name. Amen.