Let's turn together in our Bibles to Matthew 17. And if you don't have a Bible today, then please get one of the black Bibles on the end of each pew. And in that Bible, it's going to be on page 822 on to page 823. And if you don't have a Bible for yourself, by the way, then just keep that Bible. It's our gift to you. I would like to begin just by telling you about youth camp. When I was a teenager, I had this experience when I was, I think, about a sophomore in high school, where I was part of a youth group at a church, And I had never done anything like youth camp before. I remember that there had been one little thing that I went to as a child that was like a boys camp, and I told my parents I didn't like that, I don't think I want to do that kind of thing again. And then eventually my friends talked me into coming to youth camp. And when I went, I don't really remember all the things that went on. I don't remember what Scriptures we were in. I don't remember the name of the preacher that week. But what I do remember is that having a few days just out, away from everything, simply dedicated to opening the Bible and meditating on the Gospel and seeing what God had to say, that as a young believer that was just deeply meaningful to me. And I had this sense of, wow, I can go and I can meet with God. And it was this time where I simply thought, well, this is a high-up, good experience, and things are going to be different after this. And what happened is I came home and I thought, wow, everything is going to be different after this. And guess what? My brother was still annoying. And there was still stuff that went wrong. My parents and I would still get on each other's nerves. And I thought, well, how could this be? It seemed like I just had this high up thing with God. God's in charge of everything. And I just spent a week with God and came back and was convinced everything's going to be different. And guess what? It's not. Well, guess what? We live in a world that's like that. We live in a world that is still messed up. By God's grace, He gives us these opportunities to have these experiences of Him. I think we long for those. If you're a Christian, you know what I'm talking about. These intimate experiences with God where it's as though we are whisked away from everything else and we experience just God. And this thing tends to happen after that where we sort of come back down to earth and things are still there and they're still messed up because we still live in a world that is deeply affected by sin. We're not in heaven yet. As much as our hearts may be set there and ought to be set there, we're still not there. Well, this experience that I'm talking about with us is something that we see reflected in the life of Jesus. And we see it in a couple of different places, and one was when Jesus went for His baptism, where He went out to John the Baptist at the Jordan River and He was baptized. And when He was baptized, the Holy Spirit descended on Him like a dove, and God the Father called out from the clouds and said, this is My beloved Son with whom I am well pleased. And this lofty experience, and the very next thing that happened with Jesus is it says that He was led away by the Holy Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. And He was there 40 days without food and experiencing these satanic attacks and temptations immediately after that. Well, something very similar has just happened now in Matthew where Jesus went up on this mountain with three of His disciples And at the top of the mountain, His disciples were allowed to see a glimpse of His pre-incarnate glory, where His face shone like the sun, His clothes lit up bright like light, that once again, God the Father came and spoke from a cloud out of heaven and said, this is My beloved Son with whom I am well pleased. And He said, listen to Him. and God the Father emphasized, this is My beloved Son higher than Moses, who you see over there talking with Jesus. Higher than Elijah, who you see on the other side talking with Jesus. This is God the Son Himself, and He was shining in the radiance of His glory. And this strange thing happens, which is He comes back down the mountain, and He is still in this world, and this world is still frustrating and sinful and messed up and is the place where He Himself, the Lord of glory, will be crucified. Let's see what He encounters when He comes down from the mountain. Namely, failure, death, and taxes. So, we'll start in verse 14 and look at the failure that he sees when he comes down. In Matthew 17, verse 14, When they came to the crowd, a man came up to him, and kneeling before him said, Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic, and he suffers terribly. For he often falls into the fire and often into the water. And I brought him to your disciples, and they could not heal him. And Jesus answered, O faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to Me. And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was healed instantly. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, why could we not cast it out? He said to them, because of your little faith, for truly I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you. What Jesus encounters first when He comes down from the Mount of Transfiguration is His very own disciples standing there powerless in front of a demon and embarrassed, and an embarrassment almost to Jesus' ministry. So what has happened is this man comes up to Jesus and says, have mercy on me, I need your help here. You were gone for a little while, and I came to see if I could get this demon cast out of my child, because I've heard that you and your disciples have been doing that kind of thing, and they had. I mean, Jesus has been going around and doing all sorts of miracles, and one of the kinds of things that Jesus has done on a fairly regular basis is approach people who were possessed by demons of Satan and commanded those demons to go away, and the demons have shrunk before Him and cowered in fear and run away. But it's not just Jesus. We saw back in Matthew 10 that when Jesus commissioned His disciples to go out and to spread the gospel, that He had given these apostles this authority, even over unclean spirits, to cast them out. And so they'd been doing this. And they may even have this idea that they were really used to this. This is just a thing that we can do because Jesus has made it so we can do this. We can cast out demons. But now this particular man has come to these particular disciples and said, well, I've heard you can do this, so go ahead and do it. And what was the problem? He said, have mercy on my son. He is an epileptic, and that's not really intended there as a very specific medical term. It just means that he has those kinds of shaking fits and seizures, and he suffers terribly. And here's what it looks like. It's not simply describing a medical condition, because it says he often falls into the fire and often into the water. I mean, that's not a normal kind of just, I have a medical condition sort of a thing. It's, hey, when my son is walking past a fire, something goes off in him, and he starts shaking, and something is throwing his body into the fire, and this is terrible. Or when He walks past water, something is throwing Him in trying to drown Him to death. And Jesus and His disciples look at this and they know exactly what's going on, which is that this boy is possessed by a demon, by an unclean spirit. But there's a problem here. He says, I brought Him to your disciples, and they could not heal Him. They could not do anything about it. Now what's Jesus' first answer? He answered, O faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Before he said, bring him to me and I'll heal him, what he's doing here is he gives us a little hint here in the text that Jesus' big concern here, even more than showing us that he can do the miracle of casting out this demon, because we already know that he can do that, But Jesus' big concern is why do I have to put up with these faithless disciples? Why do I have to put up with this generation? Why is it that I come down from the Mount of Transfiguration and I find this? He says, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you in this generation? That's kind of the feeling he has. I mean, he has humbled himself. He's come to the earth. He has been, as it's put in one of the catechisms that we like to talk about, he's been made under the law, undergoing the miseries of this life, and yet, at this moment, he's gotten a great glimpse of where he is going back to in his glory. And now the reality. Oh, I'm still here in this messed up, faithless, sinful world where these disciples, even my own disciples, just don't seem to be getting it. So, what does he do then? He rebukes the demon. The demon leaves the boy instantly. The boy is healed. He's well from that moment on. But then the lesson for the disciples. This is the real lesson that the text drives home for us. It's the lesson for the disciples. The disciples came to Jesus privately and said, why could we not cast it out? That's the big question. We've cast out other demons. This seems to work well before, but why not now? He said to them, because of your little faith. And when He tells them, your little faith here, He's not saying, great, you have faith like a mustard seed. He's about to sell you, and you don't even have the faith of a mustard seed. He's talking about their poor faith, their weakness of faith, that it's not there. And He says, truly I say to you, if you have faith like the grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you. Now some take that quote of Jesus and say, well, that just means if something's going wrong in your life, then you just don't have enough faith. If you just have more faith, then whatever it is that you don't like in your life would be better, and even a mountain would move. And that's not what Jesus is teaching here. A great place for some context on this is Philippians 4 where Paul says this quote that also gets taken out of context a lot where he says, I can do all things through Him who strengthens me. Talking about Christ. And some say that, and they say, I can do all things through Him who strengthens me, which means that I can smash through seven cinder blocks in a row with my elbow. Watch this. Now that's pretty cool to watch. I don't mind watching that. It's great. But it's not what the text means. Because in the text itself there in Philippians, when Paul says, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, the verse that comes before that is, I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty, and hunger, abundance, and need. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me." What he's saying is that it doesn't matter what circumstance and what task it is that God has put in front of him, he trusts that if God has put it in front of him, that by faith in Christ and by the strength of Christ, that he will be caused to endure it and to handle it. And the disciples are getting the exact same lesson here in different words out of Jesus' mouth where the way that Jesus puts it is, if you had the faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, be cast into the sea, and it would, as is put in another of the Gospels. But what he's saying is, whatever situation God has placed in front of you, the solution to it is not in your own strength. The solution to it is in faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. So, just to give you an example of what's going on here with the disciples, they think, well, there is a demon-possessed boy in front of me. I've cast out demons before. I should be able to do it now. Demon, get out of him. Why aren't you obeying? Why isn't this working? And they're approaching it in their own strength as though, well, it's me. I can do this. In another one of the Gospels, in the Gospel of Mark, when it recounts this story, Jesus actually adds on another sentence here where He says, this kind comes out only by prayer. This is just emphasizing it is only by dependence upon God. Only by faith and not by oneself. Now some people say, well, we are putting God in a box by saying that these miraculous gifts of healing are no longer being given to human beings in this day and age. Well, we're not putting God in a box. We're saying that God put people in a box, and He took them out for a little while, and then He put them back in the box, and that's where they are. But what we're not saying, we're not saying that God no longer does miracles. God absolutely still does actual, literal miracles. But he says here that it's even more powerful for those things to come purely through prayer than for them to come through someone standing up and saying, I have the gift of healing. I will do this. God says it comes through faith. It comes through prayer. We can actually pray for demons to be cast out of people. We can actually pray for miraculous healings of bodies. We can pray for all kinds of supernatural acts of God, keeping in mind that they are supernatural acts of God, and praying in faith and not approaching it as though I am here, the world will obey me. We do this thing at our house with our kids. Ben's getting a lot bigger. He's eight now. He's pretty heavy, so it's a lot harder to do this with him anymore. But they'll come up to me and they'll say, Hey Dad, can I walk on the ceiling? And I'll tell them, no, you're not allowed to walk on the ceiling. And then I'll pick them up upside down and they start to walk on the ceiling. And I say, stop it. You're not supposed to do that. But they love to do this thing where they walk on the ceiling. Now, I want to know what would happen if Isaac were to just decide one day, I'm going to walk on the ceiling even though Dad's not home. I've done it lots of times. I'm a ceiling walker. I'm just going to walk on the ceiling now. It wouldn't work out too well, would it? What the disciples have done is they've said, well, I've cast out demons before. I'm a demon caster-outer. I'm just going to cast out this demon. As though it didn't matter anymore whether or not Christ were in the equation. He's saying, no, Jesus is just standing here frustrated. Saying, why do I have to bear with this faithlessness with these people who just think that they have the power to do what's in front of them on their own? Now, do we do that? We do. We do. You know, whatever God has put in front of you, He has put in front of you to encounter and to carry out by faith in Himself. One of the greatest marks of whether or not you were walking by faith is if you were approaching your life and the things that God has put in front of you to do in prayer. in actual words to God of dependence upon Him for what He's put in front of us. Well, you say to yourself, well, I'm used to my job. I do it every day. I can just do it. Really? You think that you're doing your job by your own strength? We have to approach even our mundane, everyday tasks that we're used to as Christians knowing that we must do them by prayer and by faith in Christ. And we can also pray for really, really big, crazy, supernatural, God-only stuff and pray that God would carry out His work as we trust in Him to do it. But Jesus is here and He's encountering this failure. The next thing He's going to see and going to confront head-on now that He's come down from the mountain is death and His own death. Look at verse 22. As they were gathering in Galilee, Jesus said to them, The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him, and He will be raised on the third day. And they were greatly distressed. Jesus has told them this before. He's telling them the same thing again. He's saying, I am the Son of Man. I am the Savior. I am the Messiah. And here's how it's going to work out. I'm going to be delivered over to death. Wow. That word delivered that He uses there. It's kind of ambiguous. You're wondering who's delivering Him? Who's going to deliver Him over? The disciples might have wondered that. I don't know. One of the simple answers is Judas delivered Him over. But another answer is God the Father delivered Him over. This was God's foreknowledge, God's plan, God's sovereignty all along is that Jesus would be delivered over to death and that He would be killed. He would die as a sacrifice for our sins because that's the only way that we could possibly have eternal life is for Jesus to die and to pay the punishment for everything that every one of His people would ever have done against God ever. And He died, and it said, and then He will be raised on the third day. I kind of think Jesus is... I just kind of get the feeling that as Jesus has just said, how long do I have to be here? That in one sense, Jesus is looking forward to this. He's not looking forward to His death, but He's got the resurrection at the end. He's saying, there will come a time when I complete my task here on earth, and I will be resurrected, and I will sit at the right hand of the Father in glory, and I will prepare to come back and to take my kingdom and my second coming. But His disciples don't understand this. They just kind of gloss right over the resurrection part. And it says that His disciples' response was they were greatly distressed, or they were very, very sad about it. Saying, how could this be? And you think about it, it just does not seem to make sense that the Savior of the world sent from God would die. I had a high school teacher who was one of those teachers that everybody looks at and thinks, well, he's a really cool guy. He's not like the other teachers. And he would talk to us about things that the other teachers wouldn't talk to us about. And everybody was kind of interested in his life and what his plans were. I think he left after the year that I had him and went to law school. And I don't know what else he did. There was one day in class when he was talking about his family and he just kind of mentioned in passing, he said, and my brother was executed by the state of California. And then he just kept on going and talked about something else and nobody ever asked him about it. And that just kind of hung out there and it floated. And you thought, I don't know what to think about that. I mean, people aren't just executed for no reason. We're kind of scared to wonder what happened there. I still don't know. But why would it have ever occurred to those who were expecting the Savior that He would be executed as a criminal? It just brought such shame and reproach and just seemed so out of place that this man would go and would not only die, but would actually be brought and tried as a criminal and convicted and executed by the state. It's messed up. It is completely messed up. And it's an indicator that this is a messed up world we're living in. Whenever you think to yourself, well, the world that I'm in ought to be different because I'm a believer. I don't know if you've ever thought that, but sometimes it feels that way, doesn't it? I'm redeemed, so things ought to be different around me now. Just remember, we are still living in exactly the same world that crucified the Lord of glory. And until He comes again, we don't really expect that it's going to be that different. There is still sin in the world. There is still temptation in the world. There is still disaster. There is all kinds of difficulty in this world. But here's the good news. The very fact that Jesus died, is also what has earned and ensured absolutely settled 100% that this world will be redeemed. And that those who trust in Him are already redeemed and are already a new creation. and that one day this creation itself will be set free from the decay and the bondage that it is in, God will take all of this messed up stuff that we are seeing all the time around us, and He will make it right. But will we be part of that day when it is right? And the answer to that question depends upon whether or not your faith is in this man Jesus who has defeated it, who suffered at the hands of sinful men, was crucified as a criminal, but then was raised in glory on the third day. Will we be on His side? Or will we look around at the world and say the world's still messed up, so I guess I'll just go with the world. That doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? And then, Jesus confronts taxes. He's got failure, not His own failure, His disciples' failure, and then death, and now taxes. Verse 24, when they came to Capernaum, the collectors of the half-shekel tax went up to Peter and said, does your teacher not pay the tax? By which he means, your teacher doesn't pay the tax, does he? He said, yes. And when he came into the house, Jesus spoke to him first, saying, What do you think, Simon? From whom do the kings of the earth take roll or tax? From their sons or from others? And when he said, From others, Jesus said to him, Then the sons are free. However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up. And when you open its mouth, you will find a shekel. Take that and give it to them for me and for yourself. So just to kind of give you some background about what's going on here, there had been this prescription back in Exodus 30 that whenever the leaders of the Jewish people took a census, that part of that census taking would be that each adult male in the kingdom of Israel would give a half shekel, or two... I'm trying to remember the name of the word. but a couple of coins, and so it would be about two days wages that each person would owe. And now, in the Roman rule over them, they weren't doing this the same way. They weren't doing it the way that Moses prescribed to do it, where you take a census, and then as part of the census you take that. They had just turned it into this tradition where it was expected that every adult male Jewish man would give this half-shekel tax once a year in order to pay for upkeep of the temple. So that's kind of the idea here. And they approach Peter and say, your teacher doesn't even pay that, does he? It's kind of the attitude that people were looking at Jesus with where they were saying, it sure seems like your teacher is really not on the same page as the leaders that we encounter when we go around the temple. So we pretty much expect that you don't even pay this tax. Am I right? And Peter says, yes, he does pay the tax. And he walks in to see Jesus, and before Peter even opens his mouth, Jesus says to him, I want to teach you a lesson about this. The lesson is this, from whom do the kings of the earth collect tax or toll? From their sons or from others? Now, we live in a country now where everybody pays taxes, or at least is supposed to. OK? Now, I understand there's certain levels on the bracket, deductions, where sometimes things even out and nothing ends up going in. But we don't live in a country where we say, oh, well, the president and his family are collecting a government salary, and they're in charge. And so therefore, we don't expect them to pay taxes. Yeah, we really, really do expect them to pay taxes. uh... but in this day it was different where you had a king you know if you had a king who was over a country he sort of was the government he he was the one collecting the taxes his family was running the country and and so So it was not expected that the king or his family would pay anything into the treasury. They were the ones collecting it. So that's kind of the illustration of the picture that Jesus is setting up here. And what He says is, we actually are not under obligation to pay this temple tax because I'm the Son of God. Whose house is the temple? The temple is the house of God, and He's saying, I'm God. And I actually don't have to pay this. And guess what, Peter? Because you're with me, you're a child of God, and you actually are not under obligation to pay this either. But here's what he does. He says, so as not to give offense, we're going to pay it. That's pretty good, isn't it? Jesus right there, living in this messed up world, has poured out so many of His own rights. I mean, the fact that He came as a human being, He poured out so much that He could have simply taken hold of as God, as it says in Philippians 2. And this is just an example of that, where He says clearly, I don't owe this, but I have come and I've humbled myself, and I am not going to put any extra barriers in front of them that don't have to be there. I mean, the very fact that Jesus is claiming to be the Son of God, that's scandalous enough. So, Jesus basically says, I'm not going to add scandal upon the necessary scandal with an unnecessary scandal by saying, no, I'm not going to pay your tax, even though I actually don't have to. But he says, in order not to offend, let's go ahead and pay it. And he performs this miracle where he sends Jesus down to the sea and says, you catch the first fish that comes up, you're going to look in its mouth, there's going to be a coin there, a full shekel coin, four days' wages, and one coin that's going to pay the tax for you and for me both, and we will pay that. Now, that's amazing. There have been stories about fish in the Sea of Galilee that people have caught that had coins in them. Jesus knew exactly where the next fish was that had a coin in it. This is not something that happened every day either. And He said, I'm going to bring that fish in contact with your hook. That's going to be the one that comes up, and we're going to pay this tax. And He provides. He provides. It's pretty good. But what we've got here is Just as Jesus is going about in this life, in this world, there are so many weeds. If you're a gardener, which I'm not, you know that as long as you try to upkeep your garden, They just keep on being more and more weeds. You can make it the most beautiful garden that you have ever grown, but then you're going to look and it'll be a day, maybe a couple of days, and you go out there and you're going to have to pull weeds again because it just keeps on happening. You know what the reason for that is? It's because we are living in a broken, sinful world. That was part of the curse on the earth is that there would be weeds And it's not just in gardens. It is in so much of life where we say, but I'm a part of the new creation through faith in Christ. I shouldn't have to deal with weeds, but we're still here. And there's still weeds. And there's still taxes that we have to pay. And as Jesus was not under obligation to pay the temple tax, we actually are under obligation to pay our government taxes. And there is difficulty. Let me just give you an example. Maybe you came to First Baptist Church of Matawan. and you said, I am so glad to be joining a church where we love the Bible, where we just love biblical doctrine together, and now I'll never have to do anything except just think about biblical doctrine. And then all of a sudden, somebody comes up to you and says, hey, will you start coming to a meeting once a month where we talk about how to fix the messed up drain in the back? And you think, well, that's not what I signed up for this church for. Well, there's still weeds in this world. And we've got what God has put in front of us. We've got a really old building to deal with at the church. We've got logistical stuff. And it's not just in the church, it's in life. You think, well, I'm a child of the King now, but why do I still have all of these things, these weeds that just pop up in life? Well, Jesus did too. He was here living in the same sinful, broken world that we were living in. What did Jesus do? Well, Jesus, He did what He had set before Him, and He provided. I want you to think about this. In all three of these things, where Jesus has come down from the Mount of Transfiguration, and found that the world here that He is still in, that He is still bearing with it, that it's still messed up, but in all three of these things, Jesus proves Himself to be the One who is the Provider. The One who is the solution to all of these things. So when Jesus came and found His disciples in a total failure of faith and embarrassed in front of this man who was asking for help for his son, Jesus came through and provided and did what they couldn't do and cast out that demon. When Jesus is talking about His own death, and when we even reflect on the fact that we live in a world where the wages of sin is still death and we still go through physical death even as believers who will not go through eternal death, we see Jesus said right there at the end, He will be raised on the third day. That Jesus is the overcomer of death itself. And when this tax thing came up, Jesus provided, He said, I'm going to put a fish right there that will have the right amount of money in it so that you can do what we are called to do, which is to pay this amount. Now, which one of those things is better than the rest? There is one, and it's this, that Jesus went to the cross and He died and He rose from the dead. All the other things, all the other things depend upon that. And as we continue through the world, as we have troubles and trials and sicknesses, as we know that our bodies will not hold up forever, we will pass away from this world, as we know that our bank accounts are not reliable, and as we know that people can turn on us and there's all kinds of weeds that pop up that we never expected in this world, through all of it, here's our hope. that the Son of Man was raised on the third day. That's it. So, as we look to the world that we live in, let's look to Christ. Christ who came and He humbled Himself and He bore with this wicked, evil generation. He bore with us. He laid down His life for us. We were weeds to Him because we were sinners, and yet, He laid down His life for us. And He rose from the dead and He is alive. And we can look to Him for eternal life and we can depend upon Him and have faith in Him for everything that He puts in front of us every day. Let's pray. God, we thank You for Jesus' humility to come, to lay down His... so many of His own rights to come and to fulfill the requirements of the law and His act of obedience, to fulfill the requirements of the law and its curse for sin and His passive obedience and His death on the cross. Lord, we thank You for Jesus' endurance in this life, in this world. And Lord, we thank You for His resurrection from the dead as He has died for our sins, that He is alive, that He is King. God, would You take us as people who are redeemed, and as we walk about in a world that is not yet redeemed, and would You make us more and more into the image of Christ, Lord, would You fill us with the Spirit. Would You cause us to bear the fruit of the Spirit and to even walk about with joy as You persevere us through this life. And it's in Jesus' name we pray, Amen.