As we continue our meditation and consideration in the Gospel of Matthew, the scripture reading for this morning is from the Gospel according to the Apostle Matthew, chapter 27, verses 1 through 10. Let us listen with reverent care to the reading of God's holy and inspired word. Early in the morning, all the chief priests and the elders of the people came to the decision to put Jesus to death. They bound him, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate, the governor. When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was seized with remorse and returned the 30 silver coins to the chief priests and the elders. I have sinned, he said, for I have betrayed innocent blood. What is that to us, they replied? That's your responsibility. So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself. The chief priests picked up the coins and said, it is against the law to put this into the treasury since it is blood money. So they decided to use the money to buy the potter's field as a burial place for foreigners. That is why it has been called the field of blood to this day. Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled. They took the 30 silver coins, the price set on him by the people of Israel, and they used them to buy the potter's field as the Lord commanded me. God's holy word, pray with me that he'll bless it to our understanding today. Lord, our God, as we, by your word and spirit, are confronted today with your presence. Lord, may you, by your grace, cause our hearts to greatly value you and for that value to be reflected in our lives and the way that we walk, in our actions and attitudes toward you and toward one another. and will give you the praise and the glory for the success we have in it. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Some time ago I was talking to my friend James from Australia about the fauna there, about kangaroos, and I asked him, can you eat a kangaroo? And he said, well, I suppose you could. He said, if you have to eat a kangaroo, the way to do it is this. He said, you take the kangaroo meat and you put it in a billy of boiling water and you put it in there with a rock and you keep boiling it and boiling it and boiling it until the rock gets soft. Then you throw out the kangaroo and eat the rock. And I can imagine that's true if you think about it. A kangaroo is a big marsupial. It would be like eating an opossum, which now that I've killed your appetite, we can stay a little later today. But something worse than eating a kangaroo would be eating camel. I'm not referring to the quality or the taste of the meat. but how detrimental doing so is to our souls. And it is precisely what the Sanhedrin, which condemned Jesus, did. In Matthew 23, Jesus had pronounced woes upon these very people. He said, woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are. Woe to you blind guides! You say if anyone swears by the temple it means nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath. You blind fools! Which is greater, the gold or the temple that makes the gold sacred? You also say, if anyone swears by the altar, it means nothing, but if anyone swears by the gift on it, he is bound by his oath. You blind men, which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? Therefore, he who swears by the altar, swears by it and everything on it. And he who swears by the temple, swears by it and by the one who dwells in it. and he who swears by heaven swears by God's throne and by the one who sits on it. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You give a tenth of your spices, mint, dill, and cumin, but you have neglected the more important matters of the law, justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter without neglecting the former. You blind guides, you strain out a gnat but swallow a camel." And never was that more evident than it is right here. The camel is to be found in what happens in verses one through five. Early in the morning when the chief priests and the elders of the people, the Sanhedrin, had come together and they came to the decision to put Jesus to death. So they bound him, they led him away, they handed him to Pilate the governor, and when Judas had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, saw that it didn't work out the way he had thought, He was seized with remorse and returned the 30 silver coins to the chief priests and the elders. I have sinned, he said, for I have shed innocent blood. But what is that to us, they replied? That's your responsibility. So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself. Last week we had looked at this passage from the perspective of the differing sorrows that were exhibited by Peter and Judas, and we saw that Peter's sorrow was a godly sorrow that led to a repentance unto salvation and left no regret, but Judas's worldly sorrow led to his death. And today we look at this passage from the perspective of the chief priests and the teachers of the law, the Sanhedrin, who have no sorrow or regret over what they are doing. And these were the Sanhedrin, the religious court of Israel, those who were ordained to be the spiritual leaders of Israel. It's important that we be reminded that as these men condemned Jesus, as they reached the decision to put him to death, they knew that he was innocent. We had read in chapter 26 and verse 59, the chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were looking for false evidence against Jesus so they could put him to death. They knew that Jesus was innocent, but it didn't matter. They had an end which they were trying to reach, an agenda that they wanted to engineer. Caiaphas, the high priest we'd seen in John's gospel, had said that it would be for the good of the people and good, no doubt, for the Sanhedrin if this man were to die. And so when Judas is seized with remorse and he tries to return the money and he says, I've sinned, I've betrayed innocent blood, their answer to him is, what is that to us that is your responsibility? Interesting that they didn't deny that it was innocent blood. It simply didn't matter to them. but it should have mattered supremely. The prophet Micah had said, with what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with 10,000 rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has showed you, oh man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God, the very things that Jesus told them they should be concerned about. And the fact that that meant nothing at all to them reveals a great deal about the hearts of these self-proclaimed lovers of God's law. They're willing to swallow the camel, but like good legalists, they must take care to strain out the gnats before they do so. So the chief priests picked up the coins and they said, it is against the law to put this into the treasury since it is blood money. So they decided to use the money to buy the potter's field as a burial place for foreigners and that is why it has been called the field of blood to this day. Now where did they get the idea that it would be against the law to use this money for the temple treasury? It had come from the temple treasury, well the nearest passage that I'm able to find that touches on it is in Deuteronomy chapter 23 and verse 18 and it says this, you must not bring the earnings of a female prostitute or of a male prostitute into the house of the Lord your God to pay any vow because the Lord your God detests them both. Now what does that have to do with Judas' betrayal money? Well, of course we can take the principle and we can apply it, mutatis, mutandis, that's a fancy Latin phrase that means with the appropriate changes being made, apply the situation to the one before us. So the principle they determine is simply this, that it's wrong to take money that's ill-gotten and use it to pay vows to the Lord, to use it in any way to make offering to the Lord. And so because of that, it would be against the law for us to take this money and use it for the temple. And by the way, in so saying, there's an implicit admission of guilt, is there not? That the money is ill-gotten. So they take that passage of scripture and they extrapolate from it and they conclude with a therefore that it would be against the law not proper to use this for the purpose of making offering to God. And when it comes to applying the law of God to other people, they're masters at it. Masters at knowing how the law works in regard to other people, but blind to the plain reading of it themselves. I pointed out just last week that in Exodus 23 and verse 7 we're told, have nothing to do with false charges and do not put an innocent or honest person to death for I will not acquit the guilty, but that's precisely what they do. And they seek to assuage their conscience by doing a good deed. with that money. And so they go out and they acquire the potter's field as a burial place for foreigners in that day and age, before there were airplanes. If somebody were to die in a foreign land, it would be months before their family ever found out about it. And if they had traveled there on business, the person would probably have traveled with a caravan, not really with those people, just kind of tagging along with them. and the people with whom he was doing business would probably not be close relations. And in that milieu and particularly in that part of the world, if somebody died and there was nobody to care for them, why, they were usually simply just taken to the nearest garbage dump and heaped up upon it. That is bothersome to the point of being intolerable for those who believe that man is made in the image of God. And for that reason, it has always been a mark of Judaism, ancient and modern, and Christianity, ancient and modern, to provide decent burials for people. It's a good work, isn't it? It's a good thing to do. But this is the way of the camel-consuming, self-proclaimed lovers of God's law. They're greatly concerned with the minutia of the law and with the sins and the failings as they may have to do with others, but they're little concerned with the law when it comes to them. with their own sin and their own failings. And so Jesus had told them that they tithe down to the produce of their little gardens that they use to season their foods while they neglect the important, the weightier matters of the law. These men are those who are keen to observe the splinters in the eyes of others while they are somehow dull to the beams that are in their own. Men who strain out gnats and swallow whole camels. And in doing so, they show how much or how little they value God. Then what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled. They took the 30 silver coins, the price set on him by the people of Israel, and they used them to buy the potter's field as the Lord commanded me. See, these are men who would no doubt say with the psalmist, oh, how I love your law. Oh, how I love your law. but somewhere deep down in their hearts, not even uttered to themselves, they would add to it, but not you, but not you. And it's evident enough, for here they stood face to face with the incarnation of the God that they professed to love, and they valued him at 30 pieces of silver. and they ginned up charges against him and were determined to be rid of him. It's secretly the heart's desire of all camel-consuming, self-proclaimed law-lovers to be rid of Jesus, because Jesus loves too freely. He forgives too easily. And if I am a person who does not love easily and can't stand when people are forgiven, I don't want to have anything to do with Jesus. Those of you who come to the evening study as we've been looking at the Law of God know, as perhaps some of you others don't, that the Ten Commandments, as they're often translated, are no such thing. They're not ten commandments at all, not ten mitzvahot, the Hebrew word for commandment is not the word that's used, but they're ten davarim, ten words. And as we've studied that, we've seen that the first word is not, as we so frequently assume, that you will have no other gods before me, but the first word is, I am the Lord your God. And there's an implicit therefore in God's declaration of who he is and everything that comes after. an implicit therefore which says, I am holy. And that law reflects what he is like. It shows his character, his attributes. And it is a summation of God saying, you are to be holy for I am holy. I am a holy God and you are my redeemed people. those ten words before they're anything else are facets for us and the attributes and the character of God. The Apostle John tells us of Christ that the word became flesh and in Christ we saw what that ten word compendium looked like lived out in flesh and blood. And oh, how the chief priests and the teachers of the law hated this one who was the embodiment of the law they claimed to love. If you read the Song of Solomon and you come to chapters four and seven, you'll see there that the type of poetry changes. The Song of Solomon is an extended love poem and a beautiful one. Chapters four and seven contain a particular kind of poem that's called a wasf, a W-S-F. And it is a poetic praise of the physical attributes of the woman that he loves from the head down in chapter four and from the legs up in chapter seven. And he praises with simile and metaphor her beautiful eyes and hair and teeth. And that's as far as I'll go. What would you think of a man who said, oh, I love her eyes and her teeth. I love them so much, I'd like to rip them out of her body and keep them. You'd call that man a psychopath. Friends, the law of God is a reflection of God's own attributes. And those who love the law of God, but not the God whose law it is, The God whose character is reflected in that law, who would rip the law of God away from God himself, are pneumopaths. They have a spiritual pathology. Of course, no one would say, oh, how I love your law, but not you. No one would utter those words. And people like the camel-consuming chief priests and elders of the people would feign great love for God. Oh, how I love God. How can we discern such people since they won't tell us? Or more to the point, how can we discern if we are such people? Since we would, of course, never admit to being such, not even to ourselves. This passage gives us a good indication. Those who atomize the law of God, who pay close attention to those parts that they like and ignore those parts that they don't, who think that they can justify themselves before God in a fastidious concern for some minor aspect of the law while they break the summation of the law with impunity, those who are extremely good at seeing the sins in others, who behave toward others with a haughty superiority and arrogance, rather than be humbled by their own sin, and do so as a way of justifying themselves, who have the attitude of the Pharisee that Jesus spoke about, who went before the Lord in the temple and said, oh Lord, I thank thee that I am not like other men. To really know the word of God, the law of God is to know them as God's attributes. And to be unmasked and to stand naked in his presence. And in the presence of a God who men fear and love, men are humbled. They're humbled. But in the presence of a God they hate, Men are arrogant, haughty, judgmental, legalistic, for they value God as worth very little. And in Jesus' day, some who loved the law by their proclamation, but not the God whose law it was seemed so holy because they were holier than thou. so holy that they were elevated to places of spiritual leadership or position where they harassed and vexed and flayed the conscience of the faithful. And friends, that can happen in the church as well. And often people may regarded as most religious who best pick knits. follow fastidiously and carefully those parts of the law that suit them and have lawyerly reasons why those parts that don't suit them don't really apply to them. Paul said in his day that there were those elevated to such positions in the church who were actually enemies of the cross of Christ. who we may deduce from the context of his letter to the Philippians sought to elevate themselves in God's sight by trampling upon everyone else. Kangaroo is probably awful. I hope to never find out. But camel is worse. And those who are far from Christ and the love of God strain out gnats and swallow whole camels. And far from God, they distract and preoccupy themselves with the minutia of the law or with their own invented traditions. Friends, Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of stew. May God, by his great grace, incline our hearts toward true love of him, to embrace Christ and not value him so lightly. that we would sell the birthright that he's given to us as members of his visible church for a bowl of camel soup. Let's pray. Well, Lord, what shall we say to these things? For we of ourselves, Lord, are no better. Lord, we're humbled before you because of the great depth of our own sin and see in the law of God and the Word of God that mirror, as James called it, ourselves reflected back. How prone, Lord, may we be to strain out gnats and swallow camels, and to be those who feign great love for your word and law, but whose hearts are far from you. Lord, fill us with your Holy Spirit. By your grace, O Lord, renew us and cleanse us. And Lord, grant that we would be a people who are marked as those who love justice and do mercy and walk humbly with their God. We'll give you the praise and the honor and the glory for it, O Lord, for we ask it of you in the name of Jesus, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns one God forever. Amen.