Jesus Rebukes the Demon and Exposes the Disciples' Weakness

**Chris** (0:00)
Today, we're going to pick up in Matthew 17 Last week, we went over one of my favorite portions of Scripture, which was the Mount of Transfiguration. We looked at the similarities between when Moses in Exodus 24 went up Mount Horeb, and he had met with Yahweh, and Yahweh had given the Ten Commandments. We looked at a lot of the similarities between some of the nuances of what happened on the Mount of Transfiguration, where you have James, John, and Peter, who went up. They immediately see Moses, Elijah, Jesus has this transformation in front of them. And Peter did what any person would do. There's multiple people around, and he goes, hey, let me build shelters for all of you. And heaven interrupts him while he's speaking, and heaven says, no, this is my son. Listen to him. We talked about as commandment-loving people, a lot of times, we spend a lot of emphasis on the 613, which is really, it's an argument. It's more of a Jewish number that comes up. There's an argument on how many actual commandments are in the Torah. 613 is the most popular, but a lot of those can be boiled down to even more simplistic when you take out, if you're a man versus a woman, the temple sacrifices, all that type of stuff. So there's not 613 commandments that are given to every single person to adhere to, but there is one really, really important commandment that comes in the gospel that I testified in the 20 years of being in ministries who love the commandments. I never heard anybody teach this commandment as being up there. You know, we hear when we talk about the gospel, we hear about the two commandments. We hear about love God, love your neighbor, and then we hear about how all the Torah and the prophets will hang off of those two. And there's been some fun charts and stuff like that. You know, you look at the 10 commandments, you know, five or six of them teach you how to love God. The other ones teach you how to love your neighbor. And then you can slowly but surely go down the list of, you know, kind of building out the commandment tree. Well, what about that commandment in Matthew chapter 17 on the Mount of Transfiguration when heaven speaks audibly and he says, this is my son, listen to him.
It's one of those commandments that, again, we will always struggle with because, you know, I do a really good job of listening to my wife. Like, really good job. She's not here this week, so she can't attest or deflect or deny. I do a really, really good job of listening to my wife. My kids, you know, sometimes they listen, sometimes they don't, but we're all sons and daughters of God if we believe Jesus is our Messiah. And so let's just hypothetically take the parental standpoint. Kids always listen to their parents. Always. Always. I put Cory in the back room because Michael was leading worship this week, and I didn't want to have to look at his facial expressions next to his father. I didn't want him to lie. Now, he might be muting me on the broadcast right now, which is his power to do so. But my kids don't always listen to their father, and if we're being honest, we don't always listen to him too. But when we get into the argument over how do we listen to Moses, how do we listen to Elijah, how do we listen to Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and all of the prophets and all of the writings that are in there, what do we do about David when he talks in the Psalms, and what do we do about the Proverbs, and what do we do? God forbid we try to unravel Ecclesiastes and what some people believe is Solomon's writings, and what do we do with that? How do we fix that? Well, maybe we start with some of the most simplistic commandments, like listen to Jesus, because that's what heaven interrupted Peter and said, listen to him. That's the stage for this week. That's the stage. Jesus had gone up the mountain, they had separated from the crowds, they had separated from the women and the rest of the disciples. There was three of the disciples up that mountain. And here this week, we're going to pick up in Matthew 17 with them coming down the mountain. At the foot of the mountain, a large crowd was waiting for them, and a man came and knelt before them, and Jesus said, Lord have mercy on my son, he has seizures and suffers terribly. He often falls into the fire or into the water. So I brought him to your disciples, but they couldn't heal him. So Jesus is coming down from the mountain. He's coming down from what I would say is a pretty monumental moment in all of the history of Israel and the entire Bible, where Peter is saying, hey, let's set up houses for Moses, Elijah, and Yeshua, and heaven's interrupting him and saying, hold on, wait a second, you're going to listen to Jesus, you're going to listen to Yeshua, and then Moses and Elijah cease to be there. All of a sudden, they come down off that mountain, off that intimate time of revelation where heaven and earth meet, and immediately they go back into the work of the ministry. I want to also point out that when it talks about the disciples there, we have to remember what the context is, because sometimes we read the word disciples and we think of the 12