Sermon Transcript — January 27, 2007
I bring you greetings from the west coast of Canada. As Mr. John Pinelli mentioned, we look after congregations in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island as well. I talked to my wife last evening – she tells me that it's like spring in Vancouver. It was sunshine yesterday and 12 degrees. Now that is in Celsius, so if you add the 12 to 32, it gives you an idea of what the temperature was like on the west coast of Canada yesterday.
I notice we have some young people here and it kind of reminds me of the story of a little girl, about 8, 9 years of age, in conversation with her teacher and they were talking about the creatures of the sea and the conversation got around to talking about whales. The little girl said to her teacher: "Well, you know Jonah was swallowed by a whale", and the teacher looked at her and said: "No, that is impossible. A whale is a huge mammal but it has a very narrow throat and it could never swallow a man." And the little girl said: "Well, the Bible says that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and when I get to heaven I am going to ask Jonah". The teacher looked at the little girl and said: "And what if children went to hell?" The little girl said: "Then you ask him".
How easily are you influenced or persuaded by what you see, by what you hear, and by what you read? Do friends and associates influence your opinions and your decisions? How much influence does public opinion have on you? Do we follow the crowd or do we see ourselves as being independent thinkers, able to make up our own mind? What influences help us to form our opinions on controversial subjects, for example? Let's face it: We all have thoughts or opinions on various different controversial subjects. We will all have opinions on government, politics, religion, homosexuality, abortion, crime. Opinions on the war in Iraq, opinions on the President, opinions on congress, and opinions on immigration in the U.S. The same thing happens in Canada. The events that shape our nightly news.
Involved in all of this public opinion of persuasion of the masses is the media. I spent about 35 years in the media as a news broadcaster. Newspapers; magazines; radio; television; movies; music and of course, now the internet - all part of the media and polls. The media loves public opinion polls. Almost every website has a poll asking you various different questions as to whether you agree with this or whether you don't agree with it, and what you think about it. Which prompts a question: Do I pay media marketing consultants who try to capture the mood of people, follow public opinion, or do they create it? Markets surveys try to determine what people want.
In radio of course, it is either what kind of music or what kind of information, if it is a talk show. Television is what kind of programs, and it is based on the Nielsen ratings. Today the most popular programs of course, are all reality shows like Survivor, American Idol or Amazing Race. Movie makers don't hesitate to give us violence, sex, foul language. They like to push the envelope about as far as they can. Magazines, newspapers and political analysts are all trying to satisfy … what? Human desire: Human nature. Why? Because it makes money.
You look at what a burglary did in a hotel called Watergate a lot of years ago; what it did to a President of the United States. Forcing him to resign before he was impeached and yet a few years later a sex scandal could not bring down another President. Why? Because the moral levels, the moral standards in society, dropped between those two periods of time.
By the way, speaking of American Presidents: Back in 1986 when we had a world exposition up in Canada in Vancouver actually, and I had an opportunity at that time, when I was in broadcasting – I was also an elder in the Church but I was in broadcasting at that time, and I had the chance to interview a man who was being taunted as a Presidential possibility. He was at that time the head of the Chrysler Corporation. I think most of you would recognize the name: Lee Iacocca. I asked Mr. Iacocca during the interview about a book he that he had out at that time, called: Success, and he said to me, "What you do is you get an occupation that identifies with your name". I was a little confused by that and I said: "What exactly does that mean?" He said: "Well, let's take my name for example. How do you spell that?" He said you spell it I A C O C C A. I said: "What does that mean?" He said: "That means: I Am Chairman Of Chrysler Corporation America". Of course he never did run for the Presidency of the United States.
You can imagine what the media would do today to a man like King David. We know the Biblical background of King David. Imagine what the media would do to his life in this day and age. Look what they did to Britain's Royal Family. How much do most people know about the Queen? I would suggest to you that the way that she is portrayed in the new movie is the way that the people will see the Queen of England but the movie is an actress and it is a movie. That is not the Queen in the movie.
Media advertising: Is it really honest? Is it designed to tell the truth or is it designed to, if you'll pardon the pun, con the consumer into spending money for things they don't necessarily need but to make them wanted? Most ads are designed to create an interest in making you want the product; to desire the product. You've heard the phrase: No money down, no interest, no payment for six months. Now T. verse ads are not always honest and they are not always truthful. A political columnist, a man by the name of Cowl Thomas, maybe some of you have read his columns. He is in about 600 newspapers across the United States. In a recent column he wrote something called: Politics today is the new religion. Now this is what he wrote. He wrote: "Broadcast and cable networks encourage bickering because conflict brings higher ratings and greater profits". Later on, down in the column he wrote: "What puzzles me is why so many people put their hopes in politicians when politicians and politics repeatedly let them down. Has politics," this is the question he asks, "become a god-substitute? Have political messiah figures become false gods in our society?"
You know almost all media, including reputable television networks, are in business for one reason: Ratings. Why? Because ratings translates to dollars. Without dollars a television station will go off the air and a radio station will go out of business. For magazines and newspapers, of course, it is circulation which translates to money. Money means advertising dollars because certainly newspapers don't get rich by selling you their newspaper for 75 cents or a $1. What sells is sensationalism. I often thought the slogan for tabloid news reporters must be: don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Our society today, I think, thanks to a great deal of media hype, stresses ease over difficulty. Think about what you see on your television commercials. Ease over difficulty; Feeling good over being good; Appearance over substance; Saving face over solving problems; An illusion over reality. What you see in your automobile commercials on television – most automobiles can't really do that on the street. They don't climb buildings. In many ways the media has helped us create a culture of victims and finger pointers. "It is not my fault. It is society. It is the governments fault. Society makes me do this." We end up with a nation where there is very little individual accountability.
Public opinion; the desire to satisfy human desires; human lusts; human nature; to forget truth. The desire to be told only what we want to hear and not what we need to hear is a fairly familiar statement, I would think. If you turn to the book of Isaiah, you will find that this is as old as time. The idea and the concept of wanting to be told not what we need to hear, but what we want to hear, has been around for a long time. The truth is that public opinion is not been created by the marketing experts in New York and Los Angeles. It's been around a long time.
Isaiah 30:1"Woe to the rebellious children", says the Lord, "Who take counsel, but not of Me," Oh, they listen, but they are not listening to God. "And who devise plans, but not of My Spirit." So that they can do what? "That they mad add sin to sin;"
Just lower the level of the standard of morality. Drop down to verse 8 where He says to the prophet Isaiah, "Now this is what I want you to do."
verse 8-Now go, write it before them on a tablet, and note it on a scroll, book, and the next line is interesting because it says: That it may be for time to come, Forever and ever: It is a permanent message, brethren.
verse 9 – That this is a rebellious people, lying children, children who will not hear the law of the Lord;
verse 10 – Who say to the seers, "Do not see," and to the prophets, "Do not prophesy to us right things; speak to us smooth things, prophesy deceits.
"Just us make us feel good. Don't tell us we have to be good".
verse 11- Get out of the way, turn aside from the path, cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us."
We want a form of God but we don't want the real God to have to tell us what we need to do. It has been around a long time. Public opinion, the idea that we want smooth, comfortable words and not necessarily the truth of God is the same thing that causes some problems way back in ancient Israel, belief it or not and here is one example.
Let's go to Exodus 32. In this story, by the time we get to Exodus 32, we are at Mount Sinai and Moses is up the mountain. He's had the conversation with God who has called him up the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments and while Moses is gone, a certain event begins to unfold and we pick up the story here.
Exodus 32:1 Now when the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, the people gathered together to Aaron, and said to him, "Come, make usgods.." make gods for us. Who is trying to influence Aaron? The people. "…that shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him."
For all we know he walked off the other end of the mountain and we'll never see him again. So, Aaron then as you know, as the story goes along, asks them to take off their jewelry and all the gold had been melted down, and they create an image, and that image is a golden calf. In verse 4 the people almost as if it is in one voice, of the public of that day, so to speak,
verse 4 - ...Then they said, "This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!"
Now we are talking about a false god. Who said that? The people, and Aaron being persuaded by public opinion by the people, what does he do? He builds an alter we are told in verse 5, and he makes a proclamation and he says:
verse 5 -…"Tomorrow is a feast to the Lord."
He knows better than that. You don't use a false image to have a festival to God, but he's being coerced by the people to do this, because he knew better, but he gave in. So, of course God knows what is going down at the foot of the mountain. Moses doesn't, but God tells Moses and at the behest of God Moses comes down the mountain.
verse 21And Moses said to Aaron, "What did this people do to you that you have brought so great a sin upon them?"
What Moses is saying is: "You should know better. The buck stops with you. You're the high priest and now they have talked you into causing you to do something that is a sin for them", as well as for himself. And Aaron's excuse is this: He says to Moses:
verse 22 – "…You know the people, that they are set on evil" or as the original King James puts it: they are set on mischief.
Aaron was blaming the people. He passed the buck and that is not the only time. There is another example in ancient Israel: their desire to have a king. Let's go over to the book of 1 Samuel 8. As we pick up the story flow at this juncture: Samuel of course, is an old man and as we read in the story we realize that his sons certainly did not follow in the footsteps of Samuel. They were about to replace him. They became evil, as the scripture puts it, in the sight of God and it tells us:
1 Samuel 8:3 But his sons did not walk in his ways; in Samuel's ways or in God's way for that matter, they turned aside after dishonest gain, took bribes, and perverted justice.
verse 4 – Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah,
verse 5 - and said to him: "Look, you are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations."
Samuel was not happy with that concept or that idea. After all, God was their king and it tells us:
verse 6 – but the thing displeased Samuel when they said, "Give us a king to judge us."
So what did Samuel do? He did what any of us would do. He prayed to God and asked for God's guidance in this circumstance and situation and it is very interesting to note in the next verse, God's response to Samuel, because I think it is the same thing that God would say today to people who have rejected Him.
verse 7 - And the Lord said to Samuel, "Heed the voice of the people in all that they say toyou: Why? For they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them.
So what he is saying to Samuel in essence is: "They want a king. Go ahead. Let them have a king because they have rejected Me as their King. They haven't rejected you, Samuel". God then says to Samuel: "I can tell you what you can do. You can tell the people this: when they have a human king he will take their young men and put them in the military; he will force the young women to work as his own personal cooks and bakers and so on, and the bottom line of the whole thing is: he will tax you to death". And yet the people were thrilled and were not willing to listen to Samuel.
verse 19 – Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, "No, but we will have a king over us,
verse 20 – that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles."
Public opinion prevailed and the people chose a people king. The people king was Saul. The tallest man in Israel. A perfect choice to be a king as far as the people were concerned. He was a man of the people. He was the public choice. He was chosen by public opinion. Would he obey God or would he obey the people? We move along about a dozen pages over to chapter 15 where we see Samuel is about to name Saul as a king over Israel.
1 Samuel 15:1 – Samuel also said to Saul, "The Lord sent me to anoint you king over His people, over Israel. Now therefore, heed the voice of the words of the Lord.
The prophet's admonition to Saul is: "Listen to God". Saul is then commissioned to take his army and utterly destroy a perverse nation of that day called the Amalekites. After the attack on the Amalekites is over, Saul returns and:
verse 13 – Then Samuel went to Saul, and Saul said to him, "Blessed are you of the Lord! I have performed the commandment of the Lord."
That is a little bit arrogant on his part because he actually hadn't. Samuel looks around and you can imagine almost with a kind of a tone of sarcasm – he might have said to Saul: "O.K., then what the heck is the bleating of the sheep doing here and what is the lowing of oxen that I hear if you just said to me that you did the Lord's command! What's going on?" I am paraphrasing. You can kind of picture it in your mind how he might have said it because you can believe Samuel was a little upset. What did Saul say?
verse 15 – And Saul said, "They..." Who's they? Today we use the phrase: They tell you that you should this; they tell you that you should do that. People say that you should do this. What people? Who is they? In this case it was the people of Israel that Saul had taken with him when he had gone out to supposedly destroy all of the Amalekites.
verse 15 – And Saul said, "They have brought them from the Amalekites; for the people spared the best of the sheep and the oxen,.." to do what? "..to sacrifice to the Lord your God:" Now he doesn't call God his God, he calls Him Samuels's God, "and the rest we have utterly destroyed."
In other words: It is O.K. to bend the rules just a little bit. Saul is passing the buck. He is blaming the people. It is not his fault. It is the same today. People say: "It is not my fault." It is the way society is; all these different excuses. I grew up in a dysfunctional family. There are all kinds of different excuses that people use today instead of looking inward for individual accountability. Later on of course, Saul came to realize that he made a mistake, that he had indeed listened to the public rather than God. By the time we get down to 1 Samuel 15:24, notice what Saul says to the prophet.
verse 24 – Then Saul said to Samuel, "I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words, .." Why? "… because I feared the people and obeyed their voice."
That is what our politicians do today, whether it is in your country or mine. Public perception is probably the most important factor today in the political arena. They want to know how they are doing in the polls. They want to know what people think.
Believe it or not: public opinion had a great deal to do with the life and death of your Savior and mine, Jesus Christ. During His ministry many of the people who saw Jesus Christ believed in Him. They were taken by Him. They saw the miracles; they watched Him perform miracles; they sat and they listened to Him teach. In fact we are told at one point they wanted to make Him a king. They put Him up on their shoulders and they actually wanted to make Him a king. He was, as we might say today, their hero. In fact some of the disciples I think, really thought that He was going to have an overthrow of the Roman government of that day and bring the Kingdom of Israel back to it's great days of glory. Of course that didn't happen. They didn't realize, I don't think, that two thousand somewhat years was going to go by.
They thought that He was their champion but the Pharisees who were absolutely jealous, insanely jealous, hated Him. They couldn't stand Him. Why? Because He was a threat to their authority. At first they didn't lay any hands on Him. You've read the scriptures that talked about the fact that they would not lay hands on this Man. Why? It tells us they feared the people. In the beginning He was very popular. They didn't want to upset their own authority by doing something that would cause them a problem because they feared the people. So what did they do? They set out to change public opinion. They set out to change the perception of this Man. They employed the services of a thief and a spy named Judas; they spread half-truths and lies and innuendoes and accusations. The Pharisees eventually painted this gentle Man from Galilee as a criminal accusing Him of things like blasphemy and various other things that they simply accused Him of.
Did it work? Were they able to change the perception of people who had sat in the synagogues and listened to Him preach? Yes it did. It did work. Let's turn over to the book of John, New Testament Scripture, John 18. As we pick this up, Jesus Christ is appearing before the weak governor of Rome, Pontius Pilate, who probably wished that he was anywhere but in Judea. He'd far rather have been in some other area of the Roman Empire like maybe France or Germany, as we recall those countries today, but there he was stuck in the Middle East in Judea, and he had this decision to make and Jesus Christ is appearing before him and he doesn't really understand why. Pilate didn't get it in the beginning.
John18:33 Then Pilate entered the Praetorium again, called Jesus, and said to Him, "Are You the King of the Jews?"
Notice the answer that Christ gave him because in the answer, I think, we can very easily see that He understood the perception of Him had been changed because Christ answers:
verse 34 – Jesus answered him, "Are you speaking for yourself about this, or did others tell you this concerning Me?"
What He is saying to Pilate is: "Did you figure this out by yourself, or who told you this? Who gave you the idea and the concept that I said I am the King of the Jews?"
verse 35 -Pilate answered, sarcastically probably "Am I a Jew?" Then he says: "Your ownnation …" Your own people - What does that tell us? "Your own people they, along with the chief priests", he says, "have delivered You to me. What have You done?"
And of course the discussion, as the scripture goes on about truth; and Pontius Pilate then after that discussion simply gives in to public opinion. Pilate on his own without any influence may have let Jesus Christ go. Instead he didn't make his own decision; he let the people do it.
John 18:39 "But you have a custom that I should release someone to you at thePassover." Who do you want me to release? "Do you therefore want me to release to you the King of the Jews?"
He's trying to get them to say: "Sure, go ahead, release Christ." But no,
verse 40– Then they all cried again, saying, "Not this Man, but Barabbas!"
Barabbas, of course, was a robber, a criminal, a thief and a murderer and these people were so upset. The perception had been changed so dramatically that they were willing to say release a man who is a criminal, a known criminal, Barabbas, rather than this Man. Now the story is much stronger in Matthew's account. It paints a more graphic picture so I am going to go from John to Matthew 27, if you don't mind turning back a few pages to Matthew 27. We will continue with Matthew's version because I think it paints a little stronger picture and we get a little more of an insight as to exactly what was taking place here.
Matthew 27:22 Pilate said to them, "What then shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?" Notice the phrase is: They all … this entire mass of people out in front of where Christ was standing ….They all said to him, "Let Him be crucified!"
Picture it in your mind. It is a mob. They didn't sort of lean up against the building and say: "Well, we think you should crucify Him". No, they were screaming, they were hollering.
verse 23 – Then the governor said, "Why, what evil has He done?" But they cried out all the more, saying, "Let Him be crucified!"
Like a screaming mob with mob mentality, and do you know what is really interesting? The same people who sat in the synagogues and heard Him teach, the same people who sat down on a grassy knoll, maybe on the Mount of Olives and heard Him teach about kindness and forgiveness and love, the same people that watched Him make a blind man see and a deaf man hear and a cripple man get up and walk, the same people now had a mob mentality. The perception had changed. They had fallen into the trap of mass public opinion and now these same people were no longer individual. There was no single accountability any more. They had one mindset and that mindset was mob mentality.
A number of times in my broadcast career I had an opportunity to cover various different protests that take place. You see them all the time on Television – people protesting various different things – and I have witnessed and seen mob mentality concept with a group of people and there really isn't a single accountability. It is almost like they had one mind. It is almost like it grabs and takes over and they become almost one in what they are screaming or hollering about or protesting about.
verse 24 – When Pilate saw that he could not prevail at all, but rather that a tumult wasrising,… that is a screaming, out of control mob, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, "I am innocent of the blood of this just Person. You, you people, you see to it."
In the end Pilate gave in to the people, to public opinion. Remember what Jesus Christ said. He said: "If the world hated Me, it will hate you". What if, just think about this for a minute, what if at some future time the UCG became the focus of media attention? Headline news on television, newspapers, magazines; you can't turn on your radio; you can't turn on your television set without hearing about your Church. What if some of those reports were filled with half-truths, lies and conspiracies, false accusations and nasty innuendoes by todays Pharisees; then what? Will we belief every thing that we hear?
Will we allow persecution to come on our lives or are we going to say, "No" like Peter? We say: No, we don't really belong to that organization anymore. You deny the Word like Peter did. It is something for us to think about. Would it ever happen? I don't know but I will tell you this: In the day and age that we live in today, any thing can happen. On 9/11 when most people woke up in the morning they didn't expect to see on their television sets that morning what they saw. It came out of nowhere. Anything can happen, anywhere, anyplace, anytime, if God allows it to do so.
Public opinion, brethren can and does have a great influence on this world: from advertising to business dealings to the justice system to politics and yes, even to religion. The truth is it takes strong character and willpower to stand alone and take an individual position and be accountable to as, the scripture puts it: Stand in the gap. God says: "I look for a man to stand in the gap." I wonder if we would be that man or that woman: To stand up for the real Jesus Christ when the world wants a different Jesus Christ. They don't want the real Christ; they still want Him out of the way.
If that were ever to take place then there are some comforting words that I think we should put in our hearts and minds and remember and those words are found by the apostle Paul in the book of Romans chapter 8, because there could come a time when public opinion is unfavorable to our organization. It is not impossible and I have no idea whether it will or it won't. We need to be prepared for almost anything, in case. Romans 8:31. It begins when Paul starts to give some encouraging words to us.
Romans 8:31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?
verse 32 - He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?
verse 33 – Who shall bring a charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies.
verse 34 – Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us.
verse 35– Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Verbal abuse, anything. You can fill in a few words as well if you like.
verse 36 – As it is written: "For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter"
verse 37 – Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.
verse 38 – For I am persuaded, says Paul to us, and these words are as valuable to us today as when Paul wrote them to the Church in Rome, for I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, even in our day and age.
verse 39 – nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
And brethren, that includes the influence of public opinion.