Fans And Followers - Part 5

During this time, Jesus is fully into his earthly ministry and is gaining notoriety. The people of Jerusalem are becoming divided on who this guy is. Some say He’s a prophet and some say he’s a fraud. The party of people that despised Jesus and sought to kill him was the Pharisees. 

The Pharisees bring this woman who was caught in the act of adultery to Jesus and they ask him the “Law says we should stone her. What do you say we do?”

Approach: 

Understand the variables in the text.

Understand the variables:

We’ve got three main variables in this story:

1. We have Jesus: his love and his authority.
2. We have the woman caught in adultery: she represents people who are not right with God.
3. We have the Pharisees: this party represents people who only have an outward appearance of godliness and are self-righteous.
4. Lastly, we have the law: God’s command

Here is the question on the table as this passage relates to us in 2025: How are we going to apply God’s commands as it relates to how we treat those who are in sin? Are you going to be a self-righteous pharisee or are you going to be like Jesus?

Here are 4 points we can see in this text:

1.) Pride, arrogance, and self-righteousness keep us from seeing others as redeemable. 

• The Pharisees brought up the law and twisted it for their agenda. 

1. An example of this is when people say as an excuse to not help the needy, “God helps those who help themselves help themselves.”
2. This saying is said nowhere in the Bible. 
3. We need to be careful that we don’t twist scripture to suit our own opinions because it’s dangerous.

• Back to the Pharisees, we’re gonna talk more about the law in a second, but here is the complete scripture they were referencing:

1. “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.” Leviticus 20:10

• Last time I checked, it takes two people to commit adultery. So why did the Pharisees only bring out the woman? It was because their intent wasn’t to do God’s will. They intended to prop up and display their self-righteousness and to catch Jesus in a trap!
• The purpose of the law was not to condemn but to reveal our need for God. It was given, though weak, to put people in right standing with God. But we see the problem of the law in Romans 3:20; we discuss this every week. The law is insufficient to bring an ultimate solution to the problem of sin. That’s why Jesus died on the cross.

2.) Jesus introduces the law of Love.

• In Matthew 22:37-40 he says the greatest commandment is to love God and the second is to love your neighbor. Jesus says that all the law and the prophets depend on these two things. If you see the Greek rendering of the word depend, a literal translation would say that these two commandments “hang up” the law and prophets! 
• The Pharisees saw the law as a tool for condemnation. In their case if being condemned is a vice, then self-righteousness is the virtue. However, the Law was meant to reveal our need for a savior. Then God in his love provides that savior as his Son Jesus who fulfills the requirements of the law we could never fulfill.
• I know that was heady, but it’s important to discuss the dynamics of the law and the authority of Jesus in this passage.
• Everything we do as believers is predicated on loving God and loving people!

3.) Humbly remembering our sins, helps us to love others. 

• The death penalty during this time would commonly come in the form of being stoned to death. Meaning, people would gather rocks and throw them at a person until they died. It’s not explicitly mentioned here in the text if they were about to throw them or not. But we have some creative liberty here within what was common at this time to imagine this scene.
• The image that most comes into my mind is the grip these guys likely had on the stones. The Pharisees were filled with hatred towards Jesus and this woman.
• I don’t know about you, but when I’ve been angry, I can’t make a single good let alone loving decision.
• The Pharisees were so angry at Jesus. They had the Law, but they lost sight of what the law was a shadow of. Hebrews 10:1 and Colossians 2:17 say of the law, “These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”
• The law wasn’t meant to push people down rather, as Christ did, lift them towards godliness which He did ultimately through is death on the cross.

• What did Jesus draw in the sand?

1. Any answer you hear is a guess. There are many opinions that are out there, but if you ask me, I’m gonna say “I don’t know and will never know.”
2. But a theory that many have is that Jesus was potentially writing the sins of all those guys in the sand.
3. Saying “Brotha, I know you ain't talking. I saw who you had in your house last week. And it wasn’t your wife.” Or “Oh yeah you, I saw when you took that money from the poor family.”
4. So being ashamed of their own sin being made public and put on blast, made them go away. 
5. Proving a man wrong is a great way to get him to go away.
6. That’s a speculation but don’t miss this important point:

• In our interactions with others, we must remember our own depravity and brokenness, and reflect on God's love for us—He died for us while we were still sinners. When we truly grasp that, it transforms the way we love others. The grace and love God shows us should be the same grace and love we extend to others. How can we not?

4.) Don’t be afraid to get in the dirt.

• Jesus touched people and interacted with those who would have declared him to be ceremonially unclean. Jesus' behavior in this regard reveals to us the fulfillment of God’s promise in Deuteronomy 30:6

1.  “And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live”

• Jesus shows us that he came to fix what was really broken: our hearts. 
• His example was that a heart that God transforms, seeks to lift people out of the dirt rather than condemn them while they are in it.
• Just as Jesus had compassion on this lady in her sin, we too should have compassion on people in their lowly estate. 

Jesus’ follower Peter comes to Jesus and ask him, “how many times shall we forgive someone? Seven times?” Jesus answers and says “Not seven times. Seven times but seventy times seven.” 

God calls us to forgive. You may realize you’re like a Pharisee or you may be like the woman caught in adultery and have made big mistakes and have been slandered by others. No matter who you are or what you did, God has extended forgiveness to you through Jesus’ death on the cross. Now just as you have been forgiven, you are to go and forgive others!

Being able to forgive others starts with living in the personal forgiveness that comes from God and is displayed in our forgiveness of other people. 

If you want to be a true follower of Jesus and not just a fan, you have to forgive like Jesus did!

I have decided 

• I have decided to forgive others just as God forgave me.