Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast. We are going to close out the week with an email

from a listener named David. Hello Pastor John, up until his crucifixion, Jesus faced

more opposition from the Pharisees and others with an unhealthy religious spirit than he

did from the Romans and the secular society around him. Do you believe that in a similar

way, the greatest opposition to God's kingdom today comes from within the church or within

the religious world more so than the secular world? Pastor John, how would you answer this

question? I think the best way to answer that question is to say that the point of greatest

conflict with the advance of God's saving rule, God's kingdom is not the church or the

world, but rather to say that the point of greatest conflict with the advance of God's rule

will always be the very place where the point of the spear of truth is penetrating the sphere

of unbelief and unrighteousness and intruding upon the dominion of darkness. In other words,

there's nothing peculiar about religion or e-religion that makes it stand in opposition to

the gospel. What always stands in opposition to the gospel is sin and it's root in unbelief,

and that unbelief and that sin may be found in the world and it may be found in the institutions

of religion, including the churches. The reason the gospels tell the story of Jesus in a way that

shows how much conflict there was with the Jewish religious establishment, which were embodied in

the scribes and Pharisees in chief priests, is not because they were less receptive than the Romans

to the message of Jesus, but because Jesus was sent to the law sheep of the house of Israel. In

other words, the reason there was such resistance from the Pharisees is because that's where the

spear of truth was pointed. Jesus wasn't doing any evangelism among the Greeks and Romans.

He was doing evangelism among his own people because that's what God said to the Jew first,

then we'll get to the Greeks very quickly. We get a pretty clear glimpse of the reception that

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