For many years, as I am sure some of you can relate to, I desperately wanted to hear the voice of God. I do not just mean reading the Bible, I wanted to audibly hear him, or at least very clearly in my head. I do not know where the idea came from whether it was a Christian book, a devotional, in conversation with other believers, or my own fanciful thinking but I tried a number of different things to press God into responding. I went to a pretty solid church growing up, it was not some far out Pentecostal group. We were not quite the stoic, show no emotion or movement during worship type of church either. You know, the one where you will get some weird looks for tapping your fingers to the beat of the music. It was not strange to see people with lifted hands during a particularly emotional song. There might even be some swaying; but do not worry, no one was dancing.
I am not really sure what was behind my desire to hear God. There were times in my teens where I struggled with the question “How I do I know if you’re real?” No, that was not it, I always knew that he was real, there is never really any doubt about that, it was more “I know that you are there so can you show me something to prove it?” It was not just wanting to hear his voice, sometimes I asked for a sign, something to appear in the clouds or a specific thing to happen. I have talked to a number of different people who have had similar thoughts or experiences in their life. Some who have overcome those doubts and desires and matured in their walk with the Lord, some who are still struggling with them, still looking for signs or listening for a voice, and some who gave up when they never got one, walking away from God and religion and all that junk their parents made them do as a kid.
Now, I do not believe that wanting a sign or to see something special from God is inherently sinful, I think for many believers desiring a sign falls along a similar attitude to a desperate or distraught child crying out for their father to comfort them when the pain of life causes them to reach out for someone who can make them feel safe and secure. That, of course, is not always the case.
Why do I mention this? Well, because the issue of asking for a sign is the topic of our passage for this morning. Matthew 12:38-42 as the Pharisees come to Jesus asking for a sign. If you have your Bibles with you, I encourage you to follow along as we read.
“Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to Him, ‘Teacher, we want to see a sign from You.’ But He answered and said to them, ‘an evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation at the judgement, and will condemn it because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. The Queen of the South will rise up with this generation at the judgement and will condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.”
In our continuing our look at the gospel of Matthew we have been observing the interaction between Jesus and the Pharisees concerning who Jesus is and their perception of him. How could anyone see the miracles of Jesus and wonder? How could they question him, if not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, as at least a man sent from God, a prophet. It seems astounding, it seems unbelievable, especially as we tell ourselves that if we had seen something like this, we would be totally sold out for God. But that is the nature of sin. Sin is so blinding that no manner of evidence can overcome it. The heart is so enslaved to sin that and nothing but the direct infusion of the Holy Spirit by the sovereign will of God can free it.
In chapter 12, especially in verses 22-37 we have seen the height of the rejection of Jesus by the religious leaders of Israel. It is gone beyond the doubt and indifference that we saw in chapter 11, it has gone beyond the simple rejection and into a whole new level by calling the work of the Holy Spirit the work of Satan. Sin does not always reveal itself in the darkest of ways. In 2nd Corinthians 11, Paul even warns us that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light and that we should not find it surprising when his servants present themselves as agents of righteousness. That is why we must be so careful to consider and test all the words of someone who sets themselves up as a pastor or biblical teacher. In the end, their words and their lifestyle will reveal the truth of their heart, no matter how well they have hidden their true nature. A tree is known by its fruit and out of the mouth the true nature of one’s heart overflows.
Even after this scathing rebuke of verses 22-37, the Pharisees do everything they can to maintain the charade of righteousness and they come to Jesus with a question in verse 38. The way that they approach him is quite telling. They address him as “teacher,” a very respectful title and yet after the previous interaction you know that the Pharisees had to be seething with anger. So why the respectful title? Think about it, their public figures trying to discredit Jesus and keep getting humiliated when they go after Him so they change tacs. Instead of accusing the Lord of wrongdoing they come at him with this question that is just dripping with sarcasm and hypocrisy. “Teacher, we want to see a sign from you.”
I am sure you are all wondering the same thing, “have not they been paying attention?” Jesus has been doing signs all over the place, healing the sick, casting out demons. What is it that they want? The Pharisees knew that the Messiah was going to come with a number of signs from God that would authenticate His ministry. But for whatever reason, the countless healings were not enough. It might have been that they were accustomed to charlatan healers popping up from time to time. We have them today, even with all of our scientific knowledge and the ability to verify without a doubt whether or not a real healing has taken place, men like Benny Hinn still set up shop every week drawing in thousands upon thousands of hopeful people.
I am sure that the Pharisees knew there was something different about Jesus and his miracles. These were not questionable healings, you do not watch a man’s hand go from being withered and useless to healthy and vigorous in an instant and question the validity of the healing. We do not see a man, blind from birth immediately receiving perfect eyesight. But to describes in Pharisees, this was just not enough. They wanted a certain kind of sign, they wanted a grand, majestic, cosmic sign. For Jesus to stop the sun in the sky, to rearrange the stars, to call down a voice from heaven verifying his authenticity.
Apparently, calming a raging storm to silence in a moment, raising the dead, having the voice of God proclaim Jesus His Son and the Holy Spirit descending upon Him as a lightning and a dove was not grant enough. Or maybe they just were not therefore it, I do not know. The point being that nothing was good enough and they wanted something more.
It is interesting the difference in how Jesus responds to this request by the Pharisees and the request of John the Baptist. Turn back in your Bible just a page or two and look at chapter 11. John the Baptist was anguishing in prison and doubt had spread its penetrating tentacles into his heart. John had been present at the baptism of Jesus. He heard the voice of God and saw the Holy Spirit and yet he asks through his disciples “are you the expected one, or shall we look for someone else.” He was looking for reassurance, just needing something to get him through and what did Jesus do in response? It does not say it there in Matthew, but remember back when we did look this passage, in Luke’s account, before Jesus said anything back to the disciples of John He cured many people of diseases and afflictions and evil spirits, and He gave sight to many who were blind. Then the Lord sends John’s disciples back to him with this reassurance and with a quotation from Isaiah demonstrating how Jesus was fulfilling the prophecies about the Messiah.
On the other hand, we have the Pharisees who come and ask for a sign. They were not looking to have their doubts reassured, they were trying to trap Jesus. They did not believe he could perform the big cosmic sign they were asking for and they wanted to discredit Him in the face of the people. But Jesus does not play their game, instead, responding, “an evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign.”
The scribes and Pharisees represented the nation of Israel, they were the cream of the crop, the leaders and they had wandered far from God’s word and from fellowship with Him becoming enslaved to their own superficial, self-righteous, and legalistic religion. They may not have been worshiping idols like the Israelites that we read about in Judges and in 1 and 2 Kings; the exile had finally broken them of that habit, but they were no less idolatrous having wandered away from the covenant relationship with God in order to prostitute themselves to another religion. It was merely a different form of idolatry. They had exchanged idols for traditions, they exchanged open debauchery for prideful self-righteousness, they may not have been offering sacrifices to Baal or Molech but they were not offering sacrifices to God.
“An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign.” That is a pretty severe accusation by Jesus. Have you ever asked God for a sign? “God just show me something big, some impossible or spectacular thing, then I will believe, then I will follow wholeheartedly, then I will be fulfilled.” We may not have put Him straight to the test like that, but you may have secretly wished for it. God does not answer those requests. Because God has already given us the greatest miracle, the greatest sign we will ever need. And I can show it to you right now. Are you ready for this? I am going to present you the greatest sign God has given to us to prove Himself and the miracle from God that is fully capable of convincing us absolutely of His sovereignty and presence. Are you ready? (holding up Bible). Here it is. That is the sign.
If you want to see the transcendent power of Almighty God at work before your very eyes, open this book and read it. Do not just skim over the words, you have to dive into its pages and immerse yourself in it. Do not just hear what it is saying, you have to really listen to it. Because what God has given us is His very Word. And there is no force in creation equal in power to this book, nothing we can see or experience that will convince us of the truth of God and the validity of His Son, Jesus the Christ, then this book.
This is a power, a miracle that does not happen in a moment, it is eternal, everlasting. We are promised in Isaiah 40:8 that “the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.” Peter renews that promise in his first epistle. Its power has been there since the days of the Holy Spirit inspired it, and it has been changing people’s lives ever since, and I can attest to that fact because it has not stopped changing and transforming me and I am sure it has done the same in the lives of some of you sitting here now.
So why do people want a sign? Why do people want something written in the clouds or in the stars? Why do they think they need to hear the voice of God whispering in their ear or proclaimed through some modern-day prophet? Because they do not respect His Word with the level of reverence that they ought. I am convinced that stands behind the majority of people wanting to hear the voice of God or see miracles; what defines so many in the Pentecostal movement in Christianity. It comes down to one of three things. First is just plain selfishness and idolatry. They asked for a sign simply for what they can get out of it. “Perform this miracle for me, the way that I want it, or I will not believe.” That is a pure definition of the evil and adulterous generation that Jesus condemns in Matthew 12.
The second comes from immaturity. I believe that is where my own experience of wanting a sign or to hear the voice of God came from. It is a lack of spiritual knowledge, a lack of an understanding of the truth of God’s Word. As I have studied Scripture, as I have matured in my relationship with God and in my faith, I no longer ask for signs or try to hear the voice of God. Not because God finally did some amazing thing to convince me; but because as I have grown, I feel confident in seeing His sovereign plans carried out in the world and hearing the clarity of His voice through holy Scripture.
The third reason I think is probably the most prominent for those who continue to ask for signs and to hear the voice of God throughout their Christian life and that is a disregard for the Word of God. In a sense, a self-imposed immaturity. They don’t want to grow up and feed themselves from the Word of God, they want the basics, the milk over and over again.
One popular author made this abundantly clear in the instruction to a best-selling so-called “Christian” book. If you ever heard of the title Jesus Calling by Sarah Young. In the introduction to her first edition Young writes, “I knew that God communicated with me to the Bible, but I yearned for more. Increasingly, I wanted to hear what God had to say to me personally on a given day. I decided to listen to God with pen in hand, writing down whatever I believed he was saying.” She explained that that became her most important spiritual discipline, that listening helped her grow in her spirituality.
What is the problem with this? It directly undermines the Word of God, it makes the Bible not enough. Believers have long held and recognized that God’s Word is the final and perfect and sufficient revelation of God but that becomes not enough for someone like Sarah Young and those wanting further revelation or signs. They do not want to do the hard work of searching Scripture, working to understand what it meant in its original context and applying the universal truths to our times. That’s hard, I had to go to school for 3 years for that and I still have to read commentaries and other helps. It’s so much easier to just “listen” for the voice of God and write down what we want to think He said; or to look at the clouds or whatever and interpret the signs because we can never be proved wrong by something concrete like the Bible.
But for those like the Pharisees, no sign, no matter how spectacular will ever be enough to convince them. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16, the rich man who is being tormented in hell because of his rejection of God cries out in verse 27 “I beg you father, that you send (Lazarus) to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, in order that he may warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.” But then we read the response “they have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them but he said, ‘no father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent!” If they were to only see a miracle, if they were to be given an undeniable sign they would believe and repent. “But he said to him, ‘if they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.”
Scripture is enough. The signs and miracles of Jesus were in addition to the already sufficient sign God had given in his divine revelation. He see for a heart that is blinded by sin, no manner of sign or miracle is going to be enough. Even if God were to write in the stars, if you were to take the existing consolations and before the eyes of man rearrange them to spell out “Jesus Christ is the Son of God” by the next morning you would have thousands of theories as to how black holes or supernovas move the stars into this a random pattern. They would not believe the truth because they are an evil and adulterous generation.
So Jesus says, “okay you want a sign, no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet”
“What do you mean the sign of Jonah, he has been dead for centuries? And besides, Jonah did not do any miracles.” Jesus is saying, I am going to give you a sign and it is going to be a sign like Jonah. “for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” This is an interesting comparison that Jesus makes. On the side of the cross it makes perfect sense to us. Jonah was in the fish for three days and three nights and Jesus was in the grave for the same. What is even more astounding is to see the comparisons between the two. It is not just the timeframe.
Think back to when we studied Jonah a few months ago. If you remember, in Jonah chapter 2 we made an observation that most people do not pick up on. When Jonah was praying in chapter 2, he was not asking God for deliverance from the fish, he was thanking God for the fish, “I called out of my distress to the Lord, and he answered me. I cried out for help from the depth of she will; you heard my voice… Water encompassed me to the point of death. The great deep engulfed me, weeds wrapped around my head. I descended to the roots of the mountains. The earth with its bars was around me forever, but you have brought up my life from the pit, oh Lord my God.”
The fish was God’s deliverance from the crushing depths of the sea. The three days and three nights spent in its belly were not punishment for Jonah but salvation. In the same way, Christ spent three days and three nights in the grave to effectuate our salvation. The act of God crucifying Jesus on the cross was not a punishment meted out against us but his act of salvation for us. When Jonah was spit up onto the dry land it was a sign of God’s acceptance of the prophet and his commitment to ministering to the Ninevites. When Jesus ascended from the grave it was God stamp of approval upon the atonement of Christ. The ultimate sign of its success.
The Lord’s resurrection after three days was not the kind of sign that the unbelieving religious leaders expected or demanded but it was infinitely more miraculous and wonderful. It served as the final sign Jesus gave the world of his messianic credentials and saving power. He continued to appear miraculously to his disciples on numerous occasions after the resurrections in his glorified body and ascended before their eyes into heaven. And the apostles continue to work miracles as a verification of their authority granted through Jesus. But the resurrection was the great cosmic sign given to the world because Jesus had raised himself up from the dead and that was the sign he told the unbelieving scribes and Pharisees would be the only great cosmic miracle they would see.
But just as Jesus warned in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the Pharisees would not believe even if someone was raised from the dead to explain to them the truth. They had turned away from listening to Moses and the prophets. They not only rejected the truth of Jesus’s resurrection but payed the soldiers who guarded the tomb to spread a false story that his disciples that stole the body to create the illusion of resurrection. They were in such disbelief that they were willing to bribe pagans to cover up the truth. It is the continual outpouring of the evil treasured up in their hearts. When a person is confronted with the living Christ and his atoning death and resurrection, when they reject the Word of God, they demonstrate a heart that is hardened by sin such that no sign will overcome their rebellion.
And in that state they will face the condemnation of the righteous. “The men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation at the judgment, and will condemn it because they repented at the preaching of Jonah.” These were Gentiles, pagans of the worst order. Known for their wicked, corrupt, violent, and idolatrous systems. They had no previous knowledge of the true God or his will, yet their repentance of sin and their belief in God brought them salvation and spare them the physical destruction God had promised. At Jonah’s preaching, his warning of coming judgment the Ninevites fasted and put on sackcloth and ashes, from the king down to the animals who had no idea what was going on.
The Ninevites merely had Jonah, a prophet come to them with the Word of God and they repented; and yet something greater than Jonah was standing before the Pharisees and they were unwilling to accept Him. That generation of Ninevites Jesus says will stand alongside the generation of Jews that rejected Jesus, and the Ninevites, the pagan, wicked, deplorable, Gentile Ninevites will condemn them.
Jesus piles it on all the more by saying that “Queen of the self will rise up with this generation and the judgment and will condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.” This is a reference to 1st Kings and Queen of Sheba who was a wealthy and prominent Gentile from the southern end of Arabia. She heard of the wisdom of Solomon and crossed some 1200 miles to Israel. She crossed deserts, went to great extremes to hear the Word of God through Solomon. On the day of judgment this Gentile woman will stand alongside the Ninevites condemning the Pharisees because someone wiser than Solomon and preached God’s word to them and they rejected it.
If you want a sign that authenticates the person of Christ it is His resurrection. He performed it, it was His great cosmic sign. You may want to dispute it, you may reject it, you may not believe it but you are not going to get anything better than that. God considers the sign of Christ’s resurrection the most significant evidence to the identity of His Son. And if you will not accept that you will not benefit from the work of His Son. You will remain with the Pharisees, the evil and adulterous generation, in their condemnation. There are so many people today who sit in churches across the world that put on the façade of Christianity and yet reject the person of Jesus Christ in their heart, they reject the truth of the resurrection, they refuse to submit to God’s Word. They say the right words, they do the right things, but their heart is far from God. And the day of judgment they will hear the words “I never knew you. Depart from me you who practice lawlessness.”
But if you accept the resurrection of Jesus as the great sign and miracle of God, if you allow yourself to be changed, transformed by the Word of God, repenting at the good news that it contains, than you are promised salvation.