Stop! No More of This

I want to begin this morning by asking the question that's related to our sermon. Have you ever struggled with God's will? Sort of a general question, and the answer for all of us would be yes. Has there been a time when you've not understood why something is happening? Or wondered why God hasn't intervened and kept the bad things from happening? And of course all of us can say, yep, that's happened on a number of occasions. Things have happened in my life, are happening in my life, I'm worried will happen in my life. But I don't understand. And I'm often left wondering, how does this thing that's going on fit in with God's character? How does it fit in with his will? Where do I fit in with it? What am I supposed to believe? What am I supposed to think? What am I supposed to do? In our passage last week, we studied Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, just before he was arrested. And in that garden, he prayed, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.

Yet not my will, but yours be done. We could summarize Jesus' prayer as asking for God's plan to be changed. He knew what laid ahead of him, and he asked for it to change, to not happen. He immediately moderated this request by submitting it to his father's will, though. He says, not my will, but your will be done. And so his desire was that the plan would change, but not that his father's will would be thwarted for his request to be met. even though he knew what was coming to him, that he was going to stand before his father, bearing the guilt and facing the punishment for all of our sins. He knew that this was what was just around the corner for him. And so this morning, we're going to continue on in the book of Luke, and we're going to see the answer to this prayer, namely that his father's and his will, being Jesus, was that he would be arrested by night.

that he would be taken away and that he would be killed. I began by asking you if you've ever struggled with God's will because our text teaches us a very valuable lesson about how to accept God's will by faith. It has to be noted also that Christians are the only ones who can accept God's will, often being called in these sorts of circumstances severe mercies, difficult things. And having noted that only Christians can accept this, we also have to note that accepting These severe mercies from God doesn't come without much prayer and faith, meaning that it's not easy even for Christians to reconcile the difficulty that they see around them and the character and goodness of God. And so this morning, I want us to process through these questions. I want us to see how Jesus handles being arrested, having just prayed that there be another way. We're going to consider what he could have done to prevent it and also why he didn't. Would you stand now for the reading of God's word?

From Luke chapter 22, verses 47 through 53, this is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. While he was still speaking, behold, a crowd came, and the one called Judas, one of the twelve, was preceding them. And he approached Jesus to kiss him. But Jesus said to him, Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss? When those who were around him saw what was going to happen, they said, Lord, shall we strike with the sword? And one of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus answered and said, Stop, no more of this. And he touched his ear and healed him. Then Jesus said to the chief priests and the officers of the temple and the elders who had come against him, Have you come out with swords and clubs as you would against a robber? While I was with you daily in the temple, you did not lay your hands on me. But this hour and the power of darkness are yours.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. I want us to bear in mind at the beginning of this that this happens right on the heels of his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and also right after the Last Supper, where he's in the upper room and he's with his disciples and he eats the Passover with them. And then they go out, they go out of the city and they retire out into the countryside. And then Jesus... goes out and prays. And he takes some of his disciples with him and he warns them not to fall into temptation, but to stay awake, to stay on the alert. And he goes off to pray and he prays that this cup would be removed from him if there's any way possible. And our text opens up this morning with, while he was still speaking, behold, a crowd came. And so as Jesus is warning his disciples to be on the alert, that they not fall into temptation, Judas appears, leading a crowd to Jesus. And you have to think for a minute, why was Judas leading this crowd? Well,

That's because this garden where Jesus habitually went to pray was only known to Jesus and his disciples. Not that the garden was hidden, but that it wasn't common knowledge that Jesus frequented it at night to pray. You remember when Judas went to the chief priest to tell them, I'll betray you, betray him to you. He said, I'll tell you where he's at. I'll tell you where he goes at night. And so Judas leads the way to this garden where he knew Jesus would be praying. The crowd didn't know where Jesus was at. And then there's a strange thing that happens. Judas comes up to Jesus and he kisses him. And it seems like the strangest thing, at least to me. If you've betrayed this man, the son of God, Jesus, to these men who are going to kill him, why do you go kiss him? Why don't you come and just say, there he is, go get him. Why kiss him? But what you learn is there's something about betrayal. There's something about the nature of betrayal in Judas' kiss that we should learn. And it's often that those who betray,

work to conceal their betrayal. They're not forthright with it. They're not open and honest with it. He comes ahead of the crowds, coming to Jesus, acting like he's greeting him. Having gone away for a time, he's come back now to greet him, not to betray him. And this is why Jesus, who knows everything, asks him, Judas, are you betraying me with a kiss? You come with a greeting that would have been common in their time, much more so than at our time. You know, we don't kiss people to greet them. our friends. It's just not part of our culture. One of the benedictions that I read at the end of the service says in it, greet one another with a holy kiss, and it always makes me uncomfortable. And I wonder if it makes you guys uncomfortable that scripture tells us that that's what we're supposed to do. And you wonder, is someone going to kiss me? But Judas comes and he kisses Jesus. And Jesus asks him, are you betraying me with a kiss? Jesus' response shows that he knows what Judas is doing, that Judas' betrayal isn't hidden to him.

He knows what he's been up to. And so one of the first things we learn in our passage is that betrayers, those who are going to betray Jesus, will often feign love as they do it. Fake it. They'll feign means that they will act. They're posers. They will act like they love Jesus. But they're doing it as a cover for their betrayal. And one of the things that it does, one of the difficulties we face with those who betray Jesus is Are they betraying Jesus? That's the question. Is what I think might be happening actually happening? You remember when Jesus said in the upper room, one of you is going to betray me. And they all started looking around and they said, not me, not me. Am I going to do it? They had no idea what Judas was about to do. And Jesus tells them, go and do it quickly. And so now Judas is coming back and you have to consider, what do you think the disciples would have thought of him? Why was he coming back?

And even at that point, Judas is seeking to maintain his betrayal, at least in the eyes of the disciples, if not Jesus, that he is one of them, that he does still love Jesus, even as he's brought out this murderous crowd to drag Jesus off to death. And so we have to be aware, not just of other people's betrayals, but of our own betrayals, that the sort of deception that Judas carries out here is not unique to him, but that we would, We are also tempted by the same sort of thing, saying we love Jesus and we want to serve him and we're his and he's ours while we're denying him, while we're betraying him. This is something that we have to keep a watch on in our hearts. It's not a special temptation that only Judas faces. The passage goes on and it says, when those who were around him, around Jesus, saw what was going to happen, they said, Lord, shall we strike with the sword? They understand Judas has come.

has greeted the Lord with a kiss. And then they see the crowds and then they see what's happening. And they realize, we know what you're here for now. Shall we fight? In the upper room, Jesus had told them, you've previously, I sent you out without swords. You didn't need them, but now you need swords. And so they've got their two swords and they're saying, do as a time to fight. Peter is the one who cuts off the high priest's slave's ear. And he doesn't even wait for a response from Jesus. He thinks it must be, it's time. This is going on. These men are here. They're here to take him away. They're here to arrest Jesus. No. And if you were in your own shoes, in Peter's shoes or in the disciples' shoes, at least some of us would, that would resonate with us. We'd go, yeah, I understand that. If someone was coming to take away Jesus, I would want to step in front and say, you aren't going to get to him without going through me. Or something to that effect. If you had a sword, you'd draw it. This is exactly what Peter does.

You can imagine the intensity of the situation. There's a section in this passage or in this account that Luke doesn't record for us, but Matthew does. And it's Jesus' response. In our passage, Jesus exclaims, stop it, and heals his ear. But there's something Jesus says to his disciples before that, that Matthew records for us, but Luke has omitted. And so what Jesus says after Peter draws out his sword is he says, do you think that I cannot appeal to my father? And he will at once put at my disposal more than 12 legions of angels? And what was the purpose of Jesus saying that to Peter? The question at hand, the thing motivating Peter was deliverance. We don't want you to die. We don't want you to be arrested. We're going to put a stop to it. And Jesus says to him, if that's what my father's will was, if that's what my will was, do you think that I couldn't do it? Do you think that I couldn't stop this from happening? Jesus could have delivered himself in a moment's time.

if he had desired to. And so what we see then is his disciples' efforts were against God's will. What was going on around them didn't make any sense to them. Jesus was about to be drug off and murdered. That was God's will, and it didn't make any sense to them. And so there they step in, working to thwart God's plan. And if you're like me, you can see yourself in those disciples, that when something difficult is coming to you, something scary, something intimidating something painful, the temptation immediately rises to take that situation into your own hands, to work to prevent the outcome that you don't want. But as we do that, we have to be careful to be sure that we're not opposing God in our efforts. And there is a difference between Jesus here and us. Jesus was fully God. He knew from the time of Adam and Eve that this day was to come. He knew his Father's will. He knew it perfectly.

There was nothing hidden from him. And this is not true for us. This isn't always the case. We can't always look out into the future and go, this is what's going to happen and this is how it's going to glorify God and this is how he's going to grow me and sanctify me. We look out, we just have questions. We go, how does this all fit together? I don't understand why. And so there's a difference between Jesus looking into the future, knowing the future and what's coming in us. He looks into the future and he has perfect understanding. We look into the future with uncertainty. We don't see how, we don't know how.

And this is one of the things that causes us to take matters into our own hands as the disciples did, drawing their swords. This isn't the first time Peter's done this. You remember when Jesus was talking with him and he says to him that the Son of Man is going to be delivered over into the hands of men. What does Peter say to him? I go to prison and to death even for you. And what does Jesus' response? Get behind me, Satan, for you do not look on God's interest but on man's. And so even then, Peter was... or given to standing in the way of God's will. And it's worth noting that you can oppose God's will for any number of reasons, but you can't change it. And so I want to caution us not to behave like the disciples did in their rashness. They're given to us here as an example. Not simply to beat up on us and tell us that we're failures. We're men and women.

just like they were, with the same sort of temptations that they faced, with the same sort of questions. And if we had seen what was happening to Jesus happening before us, my expectation is that we would say, no, you can't do this. And yet we have to submit ourselves to Jesus' response to them, which is, if deliverance was my plan, I could call down all the angels of heaven to deliver me. Another way of saying this is when things get difficult, things get scared, you don't know what the outcome's going to be. Be careful not to take this issue into your own hands. Be careful not to think that you know the way out. I had a conversation recently with a brother and he said, he said, you know, something you've said recently, he's talking to me, he says, you've said that's something we need to pray about, which is not something I normally say. If you've been around for a while and you know me, to my shame, that's not usually the first thing I say. Usually I'm pretty practical and I'm trying to think through the issue and how we can resolve it.

But as of late, there have been a number of things that have come across my plate. And I go, we need to pray about it. Because I can't fix it. I spend my life looking to my own hands, my own intellect, and my own ability to reason and control and manage. And I look at these situations and I go, I don't know how to fix that. I can't fix that. And so instead of despairing at that point, which is a temptation, what I've come to is to say, we need to pray. Just like Jesus did in the garden, we need to pray and ask God to move and ask God to work and ask God to change and to resolve the things that I can't in my own mind do or with my own hands do. Psalm 46 verse 1 says, God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. I memorized this verse and it's a funny, I memorized it before I ever knew that it existed. Well,

Yeah, I suppose that's the right way to say it. When I went into the pastor's college, I had to take a Bible knowledge exam going into it. And I was convinced I was going to fail. Just absolutely convinced. There was large portions of the Old Testament I'd never even read at that point. Not once. Fairly new Christian. And it was one of these questions, you know, complete the sentence. God is a very present help, blank. And I had no idea what to say. And I got the question wrong. And that's when I learned. to take comfort and to turn to God when you find yourself in times of trouble. God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble. Not the one that we ought to turn away from, not the one that we ought to distance ourselves from, not the one we ought to curse when hardship comes. So Jesus answers after Peter cuts off the high priest's slave's ear. Jesus answers and he says, stop, no more of this. He touches his ear and heals him.

Now, I've read this passage a number of times in my life, and I know that this happens. But until I studied it to preach on it, I never considered the miracle that Jesus does here. Okay? Peter gets out his sword, goes to cut the guy's head off, misses, cuts his ear off. Jesus, stop, takes the ear, puts it back on. What would your response be if you had been there? On either side. What should the disciples' response have been? What would you imagine a good response would have been? Amazed. Your faith is strengthened. You're like, okay. What do you think that man's response should have been? The one who was the slave of the high priest there to arrest Jesus. The same, right? What is this? Here we are with clubs and swords, come out by night with torches to arrest this man and he healed me. What is the response? There's no record of any response.

They just carry on with their plan to arrest him and to carry him off. One of the things that we can learn from this is perspective and blindness to what's going on around us. No one who was there, so far as we can tell from the record of Scripture, took anything away from Jesus healing this man. What do the disciples do after Jesus heals his ear? They tuck tail and run. They scatter. They're gone. When they realize they're not going to fight and die for Jesus, they abandon Jesus. They leave because they're scared. The chief priests and those with him go on with their sinister plan to arrest Jesus. There's a time in our lives, and there's a temptation that we all will face to betray Jesus. And one of the things that goes along with betrayal, in addition to hypocrisy, which is Judas kissing him, One of the other things that goes along with that is blindness, is a hardness of heart, a complete unawareness of what's actually going on. And it works, that blindness and that hardness of heart, Satan uses it to further corrupt and harden us. And we have to be on guard against it, that we wouldn't betray Jesus and that we wouldn't be afraid, particularly when we don't know what's coming, as the disciples did.

So Jesus exclaims and he says, stop, no more of this. Now, what is it he wants to stop? Well, first and most obviously, the violence. There's about to be a massacre. You've got a dozen guys with two swords up against a crowd with swords and clubs who are armed as though they're coming out after a robber. They're prepared for a fight. There's about to be a massacre. Stop, no more of this. But one of the other things that I'm convinced he was saying stop to was the resistance of God's will. Stop. No more of this. He knew what his father's will was. And there was not to be any more waiting for it to be accomplished. It was time. Leading up to this, there have been times when Jesus is hidden. There's been times when Jesus has removed himself, has gone away, has avoided the persecution, the conflict. He's put it off. But here he says, stop. No more of this. It's now time.

Jesus then says to the chief priests and the officers of the temple and the elders, all who had come out against him, he says, have you come out with swords and clubs as you would against a robber? While I was with you daily in the temple, you did not lay hands on me. But this hour is the power of darkness are yours. Now, why does Jesus say that to them? Why does Luke record that for us? What Jesus is doing when he says this to them, it's beyond reasoning with them and trying to convince them not to do what they're about to do. What he says to them exposes their hypocrisy. He says, if this is what you wanted to do to me, I was with you daily in the city. You have ample opportunity to arrest me and to do this. Why didn't you arrest me then? And we know from other accounts in scripture why they didn't arrest them then. Why didn't they arrest Jesus in public? Because they were afraid of the crowds and because they wanted to maintain their reputation. And this is what those who

are opposed to Jesus will always do. They'll act in the shadows. They will not be forthright. They'll not be direct. Because to have their deeds exposed might mean that their deeds wouldn't be accomplished. And so they have to act in the dark. And so the caution to us is that for us simply not to act in the dark. Hey boys, be quiet. You're being a distraction. And so the chief priest in the scribe's way was to act in secret at night. to maintain their ability to deny how it actually went down and to protect their own reputation as they did. Now, this is our text. It's pretty straightforward. Judas leads the chief priests and the scribes out by night to arrest Jesus. There's a bit of a scuffle. Jesus puts an end to it by healing the guy's ear. And now I want to ask us the question, why didn't Jesus avoid his arrest? Why didn't he do something? He could have done something. Why didn't he? Jesus didn't avoid his arrest.

Because he knew that it was his father's will. He knew that it was his father's will that he would die in the place of sinners. And as we mentioned last week, if Jesus hadn't died and satisfied the full wrath and justice of his father, we would still all be in our sins. Left to bear the penalty ourselves. And so Jesus knew his father's will. And he submitted himself to it. He prayed, if there's any other way, remove this cup from me. But father, not my will. but your will be done. Now, it's one thing to pray that, and it takes faith to pray that God's will will be done instead of yours. But the question remains, what will you do if God's will is not to grant your request? It's one thing to ask for his will to be done. It's another thing to submit to it when it becomes clear what his will is. It's very difficult. It's not easy.

There are things that keep Christians from hypocrisy and from apostasy. Apostasy means turning away from God, forsaking him, betraying him. And as we read this passage and as we consider the chief priests and Jesus' persecutors, and we also consider the disciples and their weakness of their faith, we ought to be considering ourselves and going, how is it? that I avoid that? How do I learn from this passage? What do I learn from this passage? That I don't go their way. That I don't betray Jesus like Judas did. That I don't abandon Jesus like Peter did. What is it that protects us? Well, the first thing is you have to be a student of scripture. You have to know who God is and what he says. You can't be protected against apostasy if you don't know what God has said. He's revealed himself most clearly to us.

Through the pages of Scripture. You have to be a student of Scripture and you have to know how he's worked in the past. Because one of the primary temptations that you will face when you enter into temptation and you want to abandon the Lord is you'll think you're the only person who's ever gone through this. And yet when you read Scripture, you find that you're not. Excuse me. Yes, the temptations that you face are yours, but you're not the first one of God's people that Satan's got after. And it's a comfort to know that you're not the first person who's been led down this path. And what you'll find as you study Scripture is that God sustains his people through that path and brings them out safely to the other side. But you won't know that if you aren't a student of Scripture. You'll think all is lost. And this is what you see in the disciples. Their immaturity and their ignorance leading to their abandonment. Next week we're going to study Jesus' denials. With cursing, he denies that he knows Jesus, that he has anything to do with him.

And so it's our place, thank you, honey. And so it's our place to know scripture, to know what God has said, what he's done in the past and what he's promised to do in the future. This is one of the, you know, if we were driving down the highway of life, this is one of those concrete barriers on the side that keeps you from going off into the ditch. God has said, and he will do. To neglect his word is to go barreling down the highway without a guardrail. Without any boundary between you and the ditch. Only your ability to keep it on the road. So this is the first way that we discern God's will. As we read and study his word and we see what he said and what he's done. And what he says he'll do. The next way we learn what God's will is, is simply by looking around and seeing what he's doing in our lives. In each of our lives when we face temptation, there are circumstances where we realize,

what's going to happen? And it's a hard thing to accept. But that doesn't make it any less clear that that is what's going to happen. And so as we look into our circumstances, our surroundings, and we say, this is what's going to happen, we then have to say that we have to believe that God is in control of that, that he's sovereign over that, that that's not happening because he was impotent and unable or disinterested to change it, to work in it. But that somehow and in some way, As he works in this situation and allows what's coming to pass to happen, we have to believe that he has a purpose in it, that he has a design on it for his glory, even if it's unclear to us at the time. And the reality is there are things like that in our lives that will go to our grave having not understood. And the Christian will go to their grave having believed that God worked in it and through it, even though they didn't understand it.

I want to end by talking a little bit about how we're to emulate Jesus. And the part I want us to emulate is to realize what was coming in his life. He knew what was coming. He could see it. And this arrest is the very beginning of his trial, his passion. And he submits himself to it the whole way through. How are we to emulate that? Well, first I want to tell you that Christianity has always been marked by victory coming in the form of defeat. Christianity has always been marked by victory coming in the form of defeat. And so the first example is to consider how was our salvation accomplished? It was through the death of Jesus. To all who opposed him and who wanted to be done with Jesus, they thought they'd won. They'd killed him. And yet victory, salvation, rose from his death for us. There's an old theologian who once said, The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. And what he meant was when Christians would go into these unreached lands and countries and tribes and people, it was very common that they would simply be killed. That they were convinced by God that that was their work and that they realized that it likely meant that they were going to die. And so this old theologian, Tertullian, said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

Because those who watched and those who remained and those who had to make sense of this sacrifice often became Christians as a result of it. If this seems strange to you, you can watch a movie. Here I am, church. I'll give you a movie to watch. You can watch the movie called The End of the Spear. End of the Spear, The End of the Spear. It's the story of Jim Elliot, Elizabeth Elliot's husband, who went down to, I believe, South America to minister to these Indians, these cannibals. and they killed him. And then someone else came, and they killed him, and someone else came, and they killed him. And eventually, this tribe repented, because they couldn't understand why these people kept coming to be killed. And this is the sort of thing that Tertullian was getting at long before Jim Elliot's time, when he said, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Life comes, spiritual life and vitality comes through death. The whole message of the gospel has always been one life for another.

for the unjust, the pure for the impure, the righteous for the wicked. And so when this is required of us, that we would lay down our lives for the sake of others, that we suffer for them, that we sacrifice for them, all that's being required of us is what was required of our Lord, that he would lay down his life for the sake of others. This is what's going on in the arrest. This is what God's will is. We can look at the situation and we can go, why is it God's will that Jesus would be arrested and he would be murdered? And that's one way of describing God's will. And it's a fairly negative way or short-sighted or narrow-minded way of describing it. Another way of describing it would be that God's will was that he loved the world enough so much that he sent his son to die. Same course of events, different explanation. And too often we struggle with find an explanation that glorifies God, that comforts us. But if we're to emulate Jesus at this particular point, then there's no other conclusion that we can come to other than that sacrifice is what's required of us. Husbands are told to lay down their lives for their wives, just as Jesus did for the church, to do this exact thing for the salvation of their wives, to fulfill their calling and their duty to them. Mothers are called to the same work. What is a mother supposed to do except give her life up for the life of her children?

and her family. That's motherhood in a nutshell. And that's what makes it so hard, and that's what makes it so necessary and so glorious. It's one life for the lives of others. This is what older siblings do for younger siblings. They have to move at the pace of the younger. It's a simple example. They have to move at the pace of the younger ones. They have to play with the younger ones in a way that the younger ones don't get hurt. They have to sacrifice for their sakes. We all understand in our bones that if the older kid just walloped on the younger kid, that there is something wrong with that. That they have to sacrifice so that the other one can grow. And so sacrifice is what's required of us. Submitting our lives, whatever they are, whatever burdens we have in them, to God for his sanctification, for his growth, for his work on it. The last thing I'll say about sacrifice is that you'll often do it for people who don't deserve it. That's the nature of sacrifice.

You do it for people who don't appreciate it, who don't thank you for it. This is how we would describe Jesus' death. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. While we were his enemies. And so the sort of sacrifice that's required of us is that we would give of ourselves for those who probably won't appreciate it, at least not in the moment. You realize that Jesus could have prevented his death, but he chose. to lose, if you will. He chose to submit. He chose to give up, to give his life up is what I mean. And it's very important that we as Christians learn when it's appropriate for us to sacrifice, to give up our desires, to lose them, to submit them to God's will. Understanding often comes after the fact. Rarely does it come before. And this is why we live by faith.

We have Jesus as an example of doing this very thing for us, and this is the work that we're called to as his brothers and sisters, to sacrifice and to submit our will and our desires to his will, for his glory, because he saved us. He's made us, and he won't ever abandon us. Let's pray.