Year: 2025

May 19, 28 A.D.  – “Doubting Thomas” — The Year of the Lord’s Favor #83

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , ,

Week 66 — “Doubting Thomas”
John 20:24-29

John 20:24-29   Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”
Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”  Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”  Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”   Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Poor Thomas, so famously known for one moment in his life.  This is how we often perceive people.  We tend to reduce them to that one moment that we remember.   And sadly, like Thomas, it may be a moment we view negatively.  Thomas is not the only person who, unfortunately, becomes known for one moment in their life.

If you are a baseball fan, there is one name that comes to your mind.  Bill Buckner.  It is Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.  The Red Sox lead the Mets in the series, three games to 2.  A win in this game will mean Boston will have their first World Series Championship since 1918.  Boston was leading this game, but the Mets tied it up, and the game went into extra innings.  In the top of the 10th inning, Boston scored two runs to go ahead again, 5-3.  In the bottom of the 10th, the Mets scored twice to tie the game again at 5-5.  The Mets had a man on second, but there were two outs, and they were down to their last strike.  One more strike and the game goes to the 11th inning.

Mookie Wilson hits a slow roller down the first baseline.  Bill Buckner is there to field the ball, but it goes between his legs and rolls into right field.  The runner scores and the Mets win.  The Mets go on to win the World Series, denying Boston yet again.  The term ‘Buckner Play’ became synonymous with a costly sports blunder.

Bill Buckner played Major League Baseball for 21 years. He ended his career with over 2,700 hits and almost 500 doubles, having batted over .300 seven times. He retired as one of the most effective first basemen in major league history, but is still remembered for one error.

“Doubting Thomas.”  Does he deserve this title?  Should he be known for this one event?  We don’t have as much written in the Gospel accounts about Thomas as we do Peter or John, but there is more to him than this one story.  Thomas was a bold, dedicated follower of Jesus.  When Jesus says he is going back to Jerusalem, and the disciples say, “Wait, you know they are looking to kill you there?”  It is Thomas who steps up and says, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

Another time, Jesus tells the disciples:

“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also.   And you know the way to where I am going.”

But none of them understood, and they were scared to admit it.   Only Thomas has the courage to speak up.”

“Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”     

And because Thomas was bold enough to ask, we get this from Jesus:

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

The reason we have this verse is that Thomas was bold enough to ask the question that the others were scared to ask.  But what do we remember about Thomas?  He was the doubter.    And is doubt really that bad of a thing?  Do we even understand what doubt means in the Bible?

According to modern dictionaries, doubt is “a feeling of uncertainty or a lack of conviction”. If that is what doubt means, then we might think of the opposite of doubt as faith, which is defined as “complete trust or confidence in someone or something.”  These would seem to be near opposites.  But these modern-day dictionary definitions don’t fit with the way the Bible uses these words.  You see, this is the Greek view, not the Biblical view.

Our thinking is significantly influenced by the ideas of Greek thinkers.  We tend to want proof with absolute certainty before we ‘believe’ something. In fact, the very idea of proving something is Greek.  It comes from the Greek mathematicians Euclid and Thales, who devised a method of proof for mathematical theorems.  (I am suddenly having flashbacks of writing proofs in Geometry in High School.  Anyone else nauseous?)

 However, in life, absolute certainty is rare.  So, then it takes a leap of faith.  You finally have to be convinced enough to accept something.  So the Greek idea of faith is what you mentally agree with.  If you have Greek faith, then you are mentally convinced, your mind is made up. 

However, the Biblical notion of faith is not from the Greek mindset but from the Hebrew.  Faith in Hebrew is ‘emet’ (from which we get our word ‘Amen’); it is about reliability, trustworthiness, and consistency of actions.  God is always consistent.  He always keeps his promises.  He is faithful.  Faith is about actions, not thoughts.  It is what you do, not what you think.  (It helps us to read “faith” as “faithfulness” as it is an action, not a thought.)

So, biblical faith is not just accepting God and His word, but acting in obedience to His word.  But if Biblical faith is about action, then what is doubt in the Bible?  The Biblical Hebrew word for Doubt is — wait, there is no Biblical Hebrew word for doubt.   Does that surprise you?  There is a word for doubt in modern spoken Hebrew (safek), but you won’t find that word in the Bible.  While we view doubt or mental uncertainty as a negative thing, the Old Testament doesn’t even assign a word to it.

You do see people in a time of mental uncertainties in the Bible, but it is not called doubt.  Abraham and Sarah both laughed when God told them they would have a child in their old age.  And while God corrects them, he does not rebuke them.  Twice, Gideon seeks confirmation of God’s plan before he acts because he is unsure.  Similarly, Moses needs assurance from God because he is uncertain that he is the right man for the job.

God doesn’t rebuke any of these people for having some mental uncertainty.  He helps them through it.  Jesus does the same with Thomas, yet you don’t hear “doubting Abraham” or “doubting Sarah.”  Instead, you see the author of Hebrews put all of these people who had uncertainties in the Hall of Fame for faith in Hebrews 11.  And for all of the “heroes of faith,” in that ‘roll call of faith, ’ you read not what they believed, but what they did.  Their faith is not what they thought about God, but their actions.  (Abraham offered up Isaac, Noah built an ark, Moses kept the passover, sacrificed the lamb, walked through the sea, etc.)

While there is no word for doubt in the Old Testament, you do see the word doubt in the New Testament a few times.  There are 2 Greek words that are translated as ‘doubt’:
Diakrino, which means to distinguish between two things, is occasionally translated as ‘doubt.’
Distazo, which means to waver, hesitate, or delay, is translated as ‘doubt’ twice.  However, it is clear that neither word accurately captures our modern understanding of doubt. The best example of how these words are used is the story of Jesus walking on water.  We reviewed this back in the fall, but let’s revisit it here to see what Jesus says that gets translated as ‘doubt.’

The disciples are in a boat in a storm.  Jesus is casually walking on the water by them.  Peter says, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”  Jesus replies, “Come.”  Peter hops out of the boat and begins walking on the water. 

Matthew 14:30-31   But when he saw the wind, he was afraid…    

Wait a minute.  Can you see the wind? No, you can only see the results of the action of the wind.  Hang on to that thought for a minute.

Matthew 14:30-31   But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me.”

What is going on? Why is Peter sinking?  Peter is wavering between two thoughts:
1. Jesus told me to walk on water, so I should be obedient.
2. It is impossible to walk on water (do you see those waves?)
And Peter is stuck.  He stops walking and becomes stuck in his thoughts, pondering between these two ideas.  This is similar to our concept of doubt.

Some call this Analysis Paralysis – His mental confusion led to an inability to do what Jesus commanded.  His mental uncertainty causes him to stop obeying Jesus’ command to come.  So, how does Jesus respond to Peter?

Matthew 14:31     Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him. “Lord, save me.”

This is important.  Jesus does not punish Peter for having mental confusion; he reaches out his hand to pull him up, and says, 

“Oh, you of little faith, why did you doubt?”

Why does Jesus say Peter has “little faith”?  First, remember that Jesus said if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you could move mountains.  A mustard seed was the smallest item he could show them, smaller than a grain of sand.  So the point is any faith at all is sufficient, even the smallest amount, because the outcome is not dependent on the amount of faith you have, but the amount of power God has.  “Little faith” really means no faith.

Why does Jesus say Peter has no faith?  Faith is like the wind.  You can’t see it, but you can see the result of it.  Remember when the paralyzed man’s friends let him down through the roof to Jesus?  The Bible says, “Jesus saw their faith.”   You can see faith because faith is an action.  Biblical faith is characterized by reliability, trustworthiness, and consistency of action.  Peter stops walking.  He is inconsistent in his actions. Therefore, he has no faith.

“Oh, you of little faithfulness, why did you doubt?”  Jesus isn’t asking Peter if he is theologically confused or has doctrinal issues.  He is asking Peter why he stopped walking.

This Greek word doesn’t mean ‘doubt’ as we think, but instead has the meaning of hesitating and/or delaying.  To Jesus, the problem is not mental questioning or uncertainty; the problem is his hesitation or refusal to do what he called Peter to do.  To Jesus, the issue with doubt is the lack of obedience.

The Bible doesn’t call us to be certain in our minds.  (It is not Greek.). Proofs are not necessary.  The Bible leaves room for uncertainty.  But it does not leave room for disobedience.

Jesus never said, “Understand everything I say and don’t ask questions.”  He said, “Follow me.”  It’s all about the action, all about obedience.  Jesus is fine with your questions.  He has no problem with your consideration as long as it does not lead to disobedience.

We see that with Thomas.  Thomas was an eyewitness to Jesus’ life; he knew Jesus had died.  If Jesus were alive again, Thomas would need to see Him again.  Jesus doesn’t fuss at him. He gives him exactly what he needs.  You need to see my hands and side.  Here they are..  Jesus solves his uncertainty.  Mental uncertainty is fine, as long as you remain obedient.

But there can be a huge potential problem with resolving mental uncertainty.  We need to go back to Genesis. There is a tree in the garden.  Eve says, “That fruit looks delicious!  It looks so good to me, but God said, ‘Don’t eat it.’”  So, where does Eve go when she has uncertainty?  Where does Eve go when she is confused?  She goes to the serpent and listens to what he has to say.  Then she reasons within herself.  Her mental uncertainty led to disobedience, as she sought advice from the snake and then decided that she was more capable of making decisions than God.

If Adam and Eve had some mental uncertainty or questions about the tree of knowledge of good and evil, then they should have asked God about it on their next walk in the Garden, not the snake.  The answers we need are not going to come from our reasoning, and certainly not from the snake and the world he controls.

Proverbs 3:5-6.  (Message)  “Trust God from the bottom of your heart; don’t try to figure out everything on your own. Listen for God’s voice in everything you do, everywhere you go; He’s the one who will keep you on track.”

If you find yourself confused or questioning, don’t go to the serpent for advice. Don’t go to the world that he currently runs.  And then don’t think you can decide better than God.   The next verse in Proverbs says, “Don’t be wise in your own eyes.

Luke tells us this also.  In the book of Acts, Luke writes about Paul’s ministry and says:

Acts 17:11. Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. 

Paul was saying some things they had trouble understanding.  You may not have noticed this, but Paul can be difficult to understand. (See 2 Peter 3:16 for Peter’s opinion on this.)   So what do you do?  You don’t go asking a snake about it.  And you don’t just sit around thinking you can reason it out in your own mind.

I frequently see this in Bible studies.   People ask, “What do you think the scripture is saying? What makes sense to you?”  I apologize, but that is not the correct way to interpret scripture. That’s what got Adam and Eve in trouble.  “The fruit looks good.  It makes sense to me to eat it!”  Use the Bible, God’s Word, to interpret the Bible, not your own understanding.  Don’t make the same mistake Adam and Eve made.  Ask questions about it, but go to the right place for answers.  Listen, if we spend hours in front of a television and never find time to study God’s word, it is no wonder we are confused.  Search the scriptures and ask God to help you understand them.

So it is all about action.   Christianity’s leap of faith is not a mental leap but a leap of action.

Remember the story of Naaman the leper?  He came to the prophet Elisha seeking healing.  He was expecting some grand gesture from the prophet, but Elisha sent a servant to instruct Naaman to wash in the Jordan.  Naaman was angry that Elisha didn’t even bother to speak to him personally, and he was mad that all he offered him was to bathe in a river.  What would that do?  But Naaman’s servant said, You’ve come all this way, what could it hurt to try the river that the prophet said?   So Naaman goes and washes 7 times in the Jordan.

Did Naaman, after his healing, understand how the water would heal him?  Did he solve his uncertainty about the prophet’s command?  No, but he was obedient, and he was healed, and his obedience led to faith. He goes back to the prophet and says, “Behold, I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel” (2 Kings 5:15). His obedience preceded his belief, and his obedience led to his belief.  Understanding is not a prerequisite to obedience.

Faith comes by obedience.  Let me ask you, “When has your faith grown?”  I have been in some beautiful church buildings and heard some fantastic music, and I enjoyed the time of worship, but that did not deepen my faith.  I have listened to some incredible preachers deliver great sermons, and I have learned a lot, but that hasn’t deepened my faith.    I have heard some amazing testimonies from others, but that alone didn’t make my faith grow.  However, all of these things contributed to inspiring me to do the one thing that ultimately led to my faith growing: walking out of the building and being obedient to what God led me to do.

It was when I followed God in obedience and stepped out to do something that my faith grew.  And often they were things that I didn’t really want to do or things I felt inadequate to do.   But as I stepped out, like Peter, God empowered me to do what I thought I couldn’t do.  And in obedience, faith grows.

Again, faith is not about mental agreement; it is about action.  Read the book of James.  James says faith without action is worthless.  It is dead.  It only exists if there is action with it.

Have you ever been rappelling?   Essentially, you attach a rope to the top of a cliff, hook into the rope with a harness, then lean back off the side of the cliff and walk backward down the cliff wall.  There is a big difference between believing that the rope is strong enough to support your weight and then stepping off the side of the cliff and depending on the rope.   Faith is not “believing that the rope will hold you”; it is leaning back off the side of the cliff on that rope.

James 1:6 But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.

James is clearly thinking of Peter on the water here.  Doubt (wavering between two things) is like the back-and-forth waves in the sea, just being tossed around.  “Let him ask in faith.”  Don’t be like Peter, who stopped being obedient while he considered the physics of water-walking.

We must also guard against analysis paralysis. I don’t know about you, but I like to stop and think about things first – I’m not Peter, just quickly jumping out of the boat.  I want to follow Jesus, but sometimes I’m not quite sure it’s His voice I’m hearing.  It is okay to be sure, but it is not okay to use that as an excuse for delaying obedience.

How often have I been prompted to do something – give something away, visit someone, whatever – and I have not done it because I second-guessed myself, not believing the prompting was from God. A wise friend told me that if it were an act of kindness that could not harm anyone, then don’t hesitate.  It would certainly be tragic to miss a command from God because I was questioning my motivations.  Remember, Jesus is fine with our questioning, but not with our delay and hesitation in obedience.

So “Doubting Thomas”?  No.  Thomas was no different than any of the other disciples.  None of them believed Mary or the disciples from Emmaus when they came and told them about Jesus’ resurrection.  They had all seen him alive and seen him die.  They all needed to see him alive again.  Let’s look at the end of the story again.

John 20:26-29   Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”  Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”  Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”   Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

“My Lord and my God!”   The clearest confession of Jesus’ divinity in the Gospels.1  Many called Jesus ‘Lord’, but that was a title of reverence and used as a standard greeting, as we say ‘sir’ or ‘mister’.  Some called him the ‘Son of God,’ but this term is used frequently in the Bible to refer to angels, the nation of Israel as a whole, and some kings, not specifically to a divine being. ‘Son of Man’ can be used as a reference to human beings or as a special reference to the Daniel 7 exalted figure called the ‘Son of Man.’

John began his Gospel, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.”  This is a statement about the divinity of Jesus.  And now John is ending his Gospel with the same statement.  How ironic that this most bold statement of faith comes from the man we call “Doubting Thomas.”

How does Thomas’ story end?  The Bible doesn’t say, but history tells us Thomas, the disciple who stated his willingness to follow Jesus to death, traveled further than any other apostle to spread the Gospel.  He traveled the trade routes east, outside the Roman Empire, through Persia to India, likely arriving there by 49 AD.  He started numerous churches and was later martyred there.  The man known for doubting followed Jesus further than anyone.

So what is our take-home message?

  1. It is ok to question God.  He can handle our questions.  If you are drowning in uncertainties, Jesus will reach out his hand to help you.
  2. If you are uncertain or questioning, do not go to the world and do not go to the serpent, and do not think you can reason it out on your own.  Go to God’s Word and God in prayer.  Don’t make the Adam and Eve mistake.
  3. Faith is something you can see.  It is not a creed, a list of things we believe.  It is the actions of a life that is based on that creed.  It is what you do, not what you think.
  4. If God calls you to do something, do not delay or hesitate; act promptly.  Be consistent in your obedience.

God brought us into his kingdom to do the work of the kingdom.  He gave us talents to use them.  There is nothing I can say to help you grow your faith.  I hope to inspire you to walk into God’s world and do what God leads you to do.   I truly believe God is calling each of us to do something for the kingdom this week.  And as we do, our faith grows.

  1. Last week, I mentioned that the Last Supper was the seventh meal Jesus had at the table in John.  Seven is the number of completion.  And then the next meal in Emmaus was a kind of ‘first supper,’ marking the beginning of a new era in the world following Jesus’ resurrection.  There are many ‘sevens’ in John.  There are seven miracles, and the eighth one, marking a newness of life in the world, is the resurrection of Jesus.  There are seven “I am” statements by Jesus.  There are seven statements by seven witnesses that Jesus is the Messiah, followed by the eighth one after the resurrection, the climactic witness that Jesus is divine.

May 13, 28 A.D.  – Why They Didn’t Understand — The Year of the Lord’s Favor #82

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , , , ,

Week 65 — Why They Didn’t Understand
Mark 16:12-14, Luke 24:36-49, John 20:19-23

Last week, we discussed what Jesus did on the day He was resurrected. He met the two disciples who were on their way home to Emmaus.  He opened up the scriptures to them and then opened their eyes when he broke bread with them. That day ends with the two disciples from Emmaus traveling back to Jerusalem to tell the disciples gathered there of their encounter with the risen Jesus.  We have descriptions of this in the Gospels of Mark, Luke, and John.  Mark’s account is the briefest:

Mark 16:12-14   After these things, he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country.  And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them.  Afterward, he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at the table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. 

Mark mentions the disciples from Emmaus and tells us the disciples “did not believe them.”

How frustrating when you are telling something you are all excited about, and they don’t believe a word you say.  And Mary Magdalene is over there in the corner of the room saying, “Same.  They didn’t believe me either.”   While they are discussing this, Jesus appears in the midst of them and rebukes them “for their unbelief and hardness of heart:

Why did the disciples have such a hard time believing Jesus was alive?  To us, 2000 years later, the resurrection seems so obvious. How could they have missed it?  Of course, things are always simpler when you are looking back.  It is difficult for us to put ourselves in the disciples’ shoes.  It is hard for us to imagine their trouble believing in Jesus’ resurrection.  Hadn’t Jesus explained this several times?  

I think there are three reasons why they couldn’t see what we see now. First, they were overcome with fear.  John tells us they were in a room with locked doors “for fear of the Jewish authorities” (John 20:19).1 They are in hiding.  The weeklong Feast of Unleavened Bread continues, and the city is still on high alert.  They were the core followers of a movement that the authorities had just deemed as blasphemers, insurrectionists, and traitors.  Their leader had just been dealt the most severe punishment thinkable.  They feel like they barely escaped.  Hadn’t Peter almost been discovered to be “one of them” in the courtyard of the high priest?  Peter had to lie to avoid being named as one of the conspirators.  They are scared.

Do not underestimate the effect that fear has on your thinking.  Fear activates the parts of the brain, such as the amygdala, that are designed to ensure self-preservation.  And that portion of the brain takes over.  Your body’s resources are all diverted to one goal: staying alive. Stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol, are released.  Your heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate increase to prepare for rapid, strong physical reactions.  Your pupils dilate, allowing you to see the threat more clearly.  And as these parts of the brain take over, your prefrontal cortex gears down.  This is the part of the brain that is responsible for rational thinking and decision-making.  You can’t do higher-level thinking when you are ruled by fear.

This system is designed to help you best react to immediate physical threats.  You start to step, but you see a snake, so you instinctively jump back.  That’s good… unless you are walking on the edge of a cliff when you see the snake.  It is not good to let this fear response run loose.  You may make terrible decisions you wouldn’t usually make, because your higher-level brain functions are suppressed. 

What about people who live in constant fear?  We see this with people living in areas of warfare where bombs are dropping around them.  But we have a word for the most common scenario of chronic fear: anxiety.  Anxiety and stress produce the same fear response and the same effects on your brain.  And the incidence of anxiety has increased in the US over the past 5 years.  The National Institute of Mental Health data from last year noted that 19% of adults in the US had an anxiety disorder.  That is almost 1 out of 5 people living in a state of chronic fear. 

Maintaining this fear response over more extended periods is physically harmful to the body.  Studies show chronic anxiety causes increased cardiovascular disease, increased gastrointestinal disease, weakened immune function, and physical changes to your brain as your prefrontal cortex shrinks.  The part of your brain responsible for higher-level thinking and decision-making loses mass.

Is it any wonder that the most common commandment in the Bible is “Fear not!”?  These disciples were scared that the Romans were coming for them next, and they couldn’t see past their fear to think about what Jesus had told them.  Jesus said this fear was a faith problem.  He calls them hard-hearted.  

The second reason I believe the disciples didn’t believe the stories of Jesus’ resurrection is that they didn’t understand Jesus’ mission.  Every Jewish person was expected to pray daily for the Messiah to come.  They had been praying and waiting for hundreds of years.  Over the past year with Jesus, the disciples began to understand that Jesus was the promised Messiah, but their concept of the Messiah was tainted by tradition.  They had been taught all their lives that the Messiah was coming to overthrow the enemy, which they naturally assumed was Rome.  Toward the end of his ministry, Jesus tried to make it plain to them:

Matthew 17:22-23   As they were gathering in Galilee, Jesus said to them, “The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him, and he will be raised on the third day.” 

That seems pretty plain, doesn’t it?  ‘Men are going to kill me, but I’ll only be dead for 3 days, then I’ll be back.’  But look at the rest of verse 23:  “And they were greatly distressed.”  ‘You’re going to die?  But you can’t die; you’re the Messiah.’ Fear kicks in, and the stress hormones surge, causing their brains to shut down. They didn’t even hear the ‘rise in three days’ part.  They sure didn’t process it.  Look at another time Jesus tried to tell them in Mark:

Mark 9:30-32   They went on from there and passed through Galilee. And he did not want anyone to know, for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him. And when he is killed, after three days he will rise.”

Again, look at their response in the following sentence:  “But they did not understand the saying, and were afraid to ask him.”  They didn’t understand.  Knowing what they knew and had always been taught about the Messiah, it didn’t make any sense, and they were afraid to even ask about it.  Their thoughts were captive to the erroneous teaching of their leaders.  They were unable to see the truth of scripture. They were blinded by tradition and blinded by fear.

They didn’t understand the scriptures about Jesus’ mission because they had the wrong paradigm.  A paradigm is a dominant way of understanding or interpreting the world, a framework of assumptions and beliefs that shapes how we perceive and interact with reality.  More simply put, it is your worldview that shapes how you interpret everything.  For example, some people have the basic political assumption that we need more governmental intervention, more governmental oversight, and regulation.  Other people have a completely different assumption that we need less governmental intervention, less oversight, and less regulation.  Your evaluation of a particular political candidate will depend on the paradigm you operate under. Two people can examine the same candidate and arrive at totally opposite conclusions due to their differing paradigms.

Have you ever been at a high school basketball game when there is a very close play, and people on one side of the court are completely certain their player was fouled, but the people on the other side are equally certain there was no foul? They both saw the same thing, but they have different basic assumptions.  Different paradigms.  So they came to different conclusions.

The Jews in Jesus’ day, as well as the Jews today, have the same Old Testament Scriptures that we read, the same ones Jesus explained to the disciples; however, they reach a different conclusion.  Why?  They have a different starting point, a different point of view.   So when Jesus goes through the scriptures with the disciples in Emmaus and the disciples in the room, he is not giving them new scriptures; he is giving them a new paradigm.   This is how their eyes were opened.  

We can have the same problem. Could it be that there are aspects of Jesus’ mission that we also don’t understand?  We must always be vigilant for instances where our preconceived notions influence our thinking.  We all have blind spots where our discernment is clouded by tradition.  What are yours?

To recap, why did the disciples initially refuse to believe that Jesus was resurrected?
1. They were overcome by fear.
2. They didn’t understand his mission.
And finally,
3.  They were overly focused on the natural and blind to the supernatural.

They knew Jesus as a person. Some saw him grow up from an awkward teenager. They saw him on the days he was dirty, and his breath smelled bad. They saw him trip on a rock on the path and spill his drink at the table. Sometimes we struggle to think of Jesus as a human with all the human issues we face, but the people around Jesus had a different problem.  It was all too obvious he was human.  The problem for them was seeing him as more than human.   This was hardest on his brothers, who, at one point, upon hearing him claim to be the Messiah, thought he had lost his mind.

Mark 3:21  And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, “He is out of his mind.”

I can hear James talking to Jude now.
James:  “Hey, older brother has lost it.”
Jude:  “Really, what is he doing this time?”
James: “He is running around telling people he is the Messiah.”  
Jude:  “Seriously?”
James:  “Yeah, he’s gone off the deep end now.   We had better stop him before he gets in trouble.”

They knew him as their older brother, the one who never got in trouble.  As kids, they probably saw him as the brother who thought he was better than them, kind of like how Joseph’s brothers saw him.

“But,” you say, “the disciples saw all of those miracles!”  Yes, but look at how they responded.  On Thursday, September 18, the disciples witnessed the miraculous feeding of the 5000, a truly supernatural event.  Everyone is amazed.  The people wanted to make Jesus king right then.  Jesus sends the disciples off in a boat without him. That night, they end up in a storm and see someone walking on the water.  They were terrified, thinking it was a ghost (there goes the fear again).  They find out it is Jesus, and Peter walks on the stormy water.  But then Jesus gets in the boat, and the storm immediately stops.  That’s pretty amazing.  But look at the following verse:

Mark 6.52   for they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened. 

They witnessed the miracle of the loaves being multiplied; they were the ones distributing them.  But a few hours later, they have forgotten the supernatural event and are back to thinking only of the natural.  This miracle on the water surprised them. You would think that after the bread miracle that day, they would not be so shocked, but they just didn’t understand it.  They are said to be  “hardhearted”, the same thing Jesus said this about the disciples when he appeared to them in the room after his resurrection. He said this is a faith problem. But wait, there is more…

You have these very supernatural events, and six days later, they are in a different area of the country, and this happens:

Matthew 15:32-33   Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said, “I have compassion on the crowd because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. And I am unwilling to send them away hungry, lest they faint on the way.” And the disciples said to him, “Where are we to get enough bread in such a desolate place to feed so great a crowd?”

It’s just been six days. This guy walks on water, calms a storm, and just 6 days ago made food appear from nowhere.  And now these disciples can’t imagine where they could find enough bread to feed these people.  Even after what they witnessed, their minds are thinking on a purely natural level, ignoring the possibility of the supernatural. 

I get it.  We tend to draw firm lines between what we call natural and supernatural. We define them this way:  the “natural” realm encompasses what we can understand and explain through science and the laws of nature. In contrast, the “supernatural” refers to events or phenomena that go beyond these natural laws, often involving spiritual or divine realms. My problem with these distinctions is that what we can understand and explain through science is a moving target.  

Many phenomena that were once thought to be supernatural have been explained by science.  In the past, lightning, earthquakes, weather patterns, and mental illness were all felt to be supernatural events. Until the 17th century, people believed that a supernatural force acted to move blood through the body.  William Harvey proved that blood was contained in tubes throughout the body, and the heart served as a pump.   What was once deemed supernatural was now considered natural.  From there, the idea emerged that science could eventually explain everything, and the realm of the supernatural shrank significantly as the “Age of Enlightenment” began.2  However, as time passes, we come to realize that the more we learn about the human body and the universe, the less we truly understand.  We have only begun to discover the complexities of science. And there is so much that science will never be able to explain.

But even the things we can currently explain with science could not have begun to exist by themselves.  We know why things fall when you drop them – gravity.  And we know gravity keeps planets in orbit.  We have also calculated the gravitational constant.  But if that number varied by the tiniest fraction (0.000000000000001), then the universe could not exist.  If it were that tiny bit smaller, then no planets or stars would have formed and stayed together.  If it were just that tiny bit larger, then the Big Bang would be followed by a Big Crunch, where everything would collapse back down to a single point.  And that is only one of many such constants that all have to be exactly as they are for us to exist.    Our universe is incredibly complex in its design.  Science shows that it could not have happened by accident.  The natural world only exists because God designed it with incredible precision.  We only have a “natural world” because a supernatural God ordained it.  

 So while we want to categorize things as either natural or supernatural, I see Jesus moving back and forth between them with complete freedom.  Notice in this passage in Luke how Jesus casually moves from “the supernatural” to “the natural” in this room with the disciples.

Luke 24:36-42   As they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them, and said to them, “Peace to you!”  But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit.   And he said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?   See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have.”   And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.   And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?”   They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.

Remember that he just vanished from the home in Emmaus. Just disappeared. Then he suddenly materializes in a room with secured doors in Jerusalem.  You thought Star Trek transporters were cool?  Jesus was doing that two thousand years ago.   Then he gives a casual greeting.  Peace be unto you.  In Hebrew, that’s Shalom Aleikem. That’s still a standard greeting in the Middle East (Jews and Arabs).    So Jesus is like,  “Hi Guys!  Don’t be scared, it’s just me alive again.  See these holes in my hands, Yep, still there.  No worries.  Sure, stick your hand in that hole in my side.  Pretty cool, huh?  Anyhow, you got any food?  I haven’t eaten for days.  Oh great, fish!”

The disciples are flabbergasted. To Jesus, everything is just routine. They are blind to the supernatural, and to Jesus, the supernatural is just, well, natural.  Death is a mystery to us, but not to Jesus.  Resurrection is hard for us to imagine, but not for Jesus.  We draw firm lines between the natural and the supernatural.  Jesus didn’t.  Because he understood nothing was impossible for God.  The disciples hadn’t grasped that, and we haven’t either.

So if right now, Jesus suddenly appeared out of nowhere right there in the room with you and said, “Hey, everybody! How’s it going?” How would you react?  Do you believe God can do miracles?  Do you believe God is still at work in our world today?  Then why do we live our lives ignoring the possibility of God working in our midst to do God things?  Why do we look at the problems in our lives and think we have to figure them out ourselves and find a way to solve them without God’s help?  We are no better than the disciples.  We see a problem like their 4000 hungry people, and say, “That problem is just too big to solve.”   Like the disciples, the problem only seems big if you see your God as small.   Jesus said this is a faith problem.

Let’s finish the story:

Luke 24:44-49   Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”   Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures,   and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.  You are witnesses to these things.  And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”

So Jesus goes through the scriptures, opening their minds by changing their paradigm. Then he tells them, ‘And by the way, you are going to be witnesses, spreading the need for repentance and the news of forgiveness through me to the whole world.  Now that is a big job.  So, if you’re going to do that, you’ll need some serious help.  You will need God’s power.  You can’t just depend on the natural; you have to learn to depend on the supernatural.. So sit tight until God empowers you.’

John gives more details:

John 20:21  Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.”  

 We could spend hours unpacking what it means for us to be sent to the world in the same ways that Jesus was sent to us.  However, we will focus on the one aspect that Jesus emphasized.   How is Jesus sending us?  The next verse:

John 20:22  And when he had said this, he breathed on them…

Jesus exhales a breath.  Is that odd?  Every time Jesus does something that seems weird to us, you had better pay attention, because he is teaching an important lesson.  Just like the Old Testament prophets, Jesus is a very visual teacher.

John 20:22. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.

Now we know these disciples will receive the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, the Feast of Shavuot, and the countdown to that Feast has begun, 50 days from Passover.  What Jesus is doing now is demonstrating a lesson about receiving the Spirit.

Jesus isn’t speaking English, and when he says ‘spirit,’ it is ‘ruach,’ the same Hebrew word as ‘breath’ and ‘wind’.  Here we have Jesus, God, breathing on man.  Pay attention, we’re going back to Genesis again.  It is the beginning of creation, without form and void, and what is hovering over the face of the waters? 

Genesis 1:2   And the ‘Ruach’ of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

 The Spirit of God, the wind, the breath of God.  In Genesis 2, we see God take dust and form a person from it. How does he give life to this dust?

Genesis 2:7. Then Yehovah God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

God breathed life into Adam, and now, God is going to breathe new life into these disciples.

Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection draw a big vertical line in history. There was creation, when life was first made, and God dwelt with man in the Garden.  Then came the fall, when sin caused death to become a part of the world, and then God was separated from his people.  Now Jesus comes, Emmanuel, God with us, and He demonstrates what life is, then destroys the power of death. Now life reigns again.  Everything from here on out is different. God’s plan to redeem his people is happening. 

Then, 50 days after Jesus dies on the cross, it is the time of the Holy Spirit.  Now it is not God with us but God in us, God’s Holy Spirit within us.  God is breathing on humans again — to give them life again.  A life where death does not prevail and a life that is abundant.  No longer will people be separated from God.  No longer will people have to travel to a temple to commune with God, for he will be God with us and in us.  We will be the temple of the Holy Spirit.  

The Spirit descends on the face of the waters at creation.  The Spirit descends on the church in a mighty rushing wind at Pentecost, a time of recreation.  God breathes life into Adam, and God breathes abundant life into his church. So, the countdown has begun to the climax of Jesus’ ministry, the culmination of God’s plan to restore fellowship with His creation. Pentecost is coming.

However, if we are to live an abundant, spirit-filled life, then we must overcome the same issues the disciples faced.  We have to drop our fear.  We can’t be afraid of what God will do.  We can’t fear how others will react.  We can’t let fear of doing something new or something hard cause us to be disobedient to whatever God calls us to do.  We must have the faith to believe that God loves us and will be with us always.  He will work everything to good.  Fear not!

We have to understand our mission.  When I was growing up, I heard many sermons that said every Christian should be knocking on doors and witnessing to people.  And I have friends who can talk to anyone, who can do door-to-door evangelism. But I also have friends who are introverts.  Talking to people is not their gift. And for years, they had listened to the church tell them they weren’t good Christians if they didn’t go witnessing.  Do not be blinded by this traditional teaching.

God has given people a variety of gifts.  Some are evangelists, but not all of them.   We are sent to build up the Kingdom of God, but it is not just about the number of converts.  The Kingdom of God is about following God’s will, and that includes feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, comforting the grieving, loving the unloved, caring for the sick, freeing the oppressed, and giving sight to the blind.  And many times it is in doing these things that people are drawn to the Kingdom.  

Finally, we have to expect God to work in supernatural ways.   We have to expect the supernatural.  The disciples were shocked every time Jesus did a miracle.  Wow! Look at that miracle!  We’ve never seen anything like that before!  (Yes, you did!  You saw the same miracle 6 days ago.) To be people of faith is to expect God to do God things!  We can’t be hard-hearted and live our lives as if God doesn’t exist, and God still doesn’t act in this world.  

We can’t go through life trying to solve problems on our own and ignoring God’s help.  If we only attempt to do things that we can do by ourselves without God’s help, then we are living faithless, empty lives.  If we can do it without God, then where is God’s place?  How can God get glory from that? 

John 14:12   “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.  

Read that again — Whoever believes will do Jesus things, and works greater than His!  Every believer is capable of doing Jesus-sized works!     But hold that thought… Why does Jesus going to the Father help us do greater works?

John 16:7   It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. 

And 50 days after Passover, after Jesus’ crucifixion, is the day of Pentecost, when Jesus sent the Holy Spirit in power.  We will do greater works because the Holy Spirit is in us.  It took the disciples some time to grasp the concept of greater works.   But they did.  And we have to also.   Why did God put the Holy Spirit within us if we are never going to listen to Him or do the things that require His power?

  1.   The Greek term, “Ioudaios,” is often translated as “Jews,” but typically is understood to be “the Jewish authorities.”
  2. The starting date for the Age of Enlightenment or Age of Reason is typically given as 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, followed in the next few years by Isaac Newton’s publication of “Principia Mathematica” and John Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.”

May 6, 28 A.D.  – Raised from the dead.  Now, what do you do?— The Year of the Lord’s Favor #81

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , ,

Week 64 —The First Supper
Luke 24:13-35

Here we are at week 64/70 following the ministry of Jesus week by week. And last week we talked about his final week that ended in his crucifixion and resurrection.  In 28 AD, Resurrection Day would have been as late as it could be, May 1.  So, putting the four Gospels together, let’s look at the timeline for that day of resurrection.

The Jewish day begins at sundown, so the day of resurrection, our Sunday, starts at sundown on the sabbath (Saturday). When the Sabbath ends on Saturday, May 1, 28 AD, Jesus has been in the grave for three days and three nights. So, some time after sundown on Sunday, Jesus is resurrected from the tomb.  Just before dawn, Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James, and Salome head toward the tomb to anoint the body.  Before they arrive, there is an earthquake as an angel rolls the stone away. The sun rises.

The angel tells the women that Jesus is risen, as he said. They depart to tell the disciples.  Peter and John run to the tomb and see it is empty, but do not see Jesus.  Mary remains outside the tomb, weeping, and sees Jesus, but does not recognize him at first.  She goes to tell the other disciples, but they do not believe her.  Jesus then goes to the throne of God and presents the firstfruits of the resurrection to the Father in Heaven.  Jesus appears to two disciples on the road to Emmaus; they head back to Jerusalem.  

Sundown on Sunday — a new day begins.  After sundown, the Emmaus disciples arrive and report their encounter with Jesus to the disciples.  Then Jesus appeared to ten disciples, and others gathered with them (Thomas was not there).  The next morning (Monday, May 3, 28 AD), the eleven went to Galilee as Jesus had instructed them.

So on the actual day of Resurrection, Jesus does three things:  

  1. He has a brief encounter with Mary.
  2. He appears in heaven for First Fruits (we discussed this about a year ago).
  3. He has a much longer encounter with two disciples headed to Emmaus.

And this encounter at Emmaus is our focus for today.

Luke 24:13-35   That very day, two of them were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and they were talking with each other about all these things that had happened.  While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them.  But their eyes were kept from recognizing him.  And he said to them, “What is this conversation that you are holding with each other as you walk?” And they stood still, looking sad.  Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” And he said to them, “What things?” And they said to him, “Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. 

But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened.  Moreover, some women of our company amazed us.  They were at the tomb early in the morning, and when they did not find his body, they came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but him they did not see.” And he said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!  Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”   And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

So they drew near to the village to which they were going. He acted as if he were going farther, but they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent.” So he went in to stay with them.   When he was at the table with them, he took the bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.  And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight.  They said to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?”  And they rose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem. And they found the eleven and those who were with them gathered together, saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!”  Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.

These two disciples hung around Jerusalem with the eleven disciples, waiting until Jesus had been dead for three days and nights. Why? Because you weren’t completely dead in their eyes until after that time passed (remember that is why Jesus waits to raise Lazarus, so everyone would know it was a true miracle). They were hoping he wasn’t really gone. So after the three days and nights had elapsed, they gave up and went home.  

Luke 24:21. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened.

“We had hoped…”, but now, after 3 days and nights, hope is gone.  And Luke tells us they just stood there “looking sad.”   They were defeated, grieving the lost hope of a Messiah.  It was a difficult 7-mile walk back home to Emmaus.1 

Who were these two disciples?  They are not part of the named 12 disciples, but were in the larger group (that we know at times was over 120).  Luke tells us one of their names, ‘Cleopas.’ The other is unnamed.  But we know they were family, living in the same house as they invited Jesus to “stay with us.”  Then we have this information from John:

John 19:25   But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 

The slight spelling difference in the Greek is not significant.  The two on the road were likely Cleopas and his wife.

So Jesus joins them on this road from Jerusalem.   But they, like Mary Magdalene at the tomb, do not recognize Jesus when they see him.

Luke 24:16 But their eyes were kept from recognizing him. 

Why did God not want them to recognize Jesus immediately?  (There is a reason.)  God intervenes and hides Jesus’ identity from them on purpose.  (This is important.)

God wants Jesus to explain the scriptures to them.  If they recognized Jesus immediately, they would be so overwhelmed at his presence that they could not focus on the very important lesson he had to teach.  God performs a miracle, concealing Jesus’ identity, just so he can teach this lesson.  

So they think Jesus is just some other pilgrim leaving Jerusalem.  The conversation goes like this:

Jesus:       Hey, what are you talking about?
Disciples:  Have you been living under a rock?
                  You must be the only person who was in Jerusalem who doesn’t know what
                  happened.2
Jesus:      What happened?
Disciples:  Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him.

(Notice that they call him a prophet, but not “the Messiah”. )

Disciples:  But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.  (We thought he might be the Messiah, but he is dead.)
Disciples:  Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see Jesus.3
Jesus:      O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 

“Foolish ones” — This is a poor word choice by our translators, because if you know your Bible, you might think Jesus is calling them that word he told us in the Sermon on the Mount never to call anyone.  But this is not the same Greek word; instead, it is a completely unrelated word that means someone who just doesn’t understand, lacking in wisdom.  Jesus is saying, “You just don’t get it, do you?”

“Slow of heart”  — The Greek is ‘Bradus Kardia.’  Now that is a very familiar term to me as a doctor.  Bradycardia is a heart rate of less than 60 beats a minute (or less than 100 for a newborn).  Sometimes when you’re asleep, your heart rate might fall that slow.  Your slow heart would be normal when asleep.3  But if it goes too slow while you aren’t sleeping, you may feel lethargic and tired.  Your slow heart would make you feel and act sleepy.

So what does Jesus mean by ‘slow of heart’?  They had been disciples of Jesus for some time and had just witnessed the events of Jesus’ last week, the most important week in the Bible.  25% of the material in our Gospels is about this one week. They were there. They saw it all, but here is the problem: They could not see how these current life experiences, how the events they witnessed this past week, fit into the story of the Bible.  They were confused.

What Jesus says is:  “Come on! It’s like you’re sleeping through this!  Wake up and see what God is doing!”

Then he says, “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”  In other words:  “You should have seen this coming.  The Scriptures said it would be this way.  Didn’t you read Isaiah?  Did you read it to understand it?   Did you just read the words, or did you spend time thinking about them?  Did you carefully consider, reflect on, and meditate on the scriptures?   The Bible is not just words on a page; it is the very wisdom of God.  We are not to read it like a first-grade reader or like the newspaper.”

The Bible is ‘Meditation Literature.’    How did the psalmists say they read the scriptures?

Psalms 119:15 I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways.
Psalms 77:12  I will ponder all your work,and meditate on your mighty deeds.
Psalms 119:23  Even though princes sit plotting against me, your servant will meditate on your statutes.

Even though my enemy is getting ready to attack me, I will take the time to sit and not just read the words, but think about them, meditate on your word.

This is why I like to study the Bible in the morning.  I read and ponder. I wrestle with the text.   I consider how people heard it on the day it was written.  What was going on in the world then?  What is the historical and cultural context?  What words did they hear differently than I do?  How does this part fit into the whole story of the Bible? And then, how does this fit into my life, what I am going through now, and God’s plan for my life?  And throughout the day, God gives me insight. Those scriptures keep churning around in my head all day, and then it is like a light bulb coming on as God’s Holy Spirit reveals truth.  

Then in our story, the narrator interrupts the dialogue and says,

Luke 24:27. And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

They had the Scriptures, and they had studied them, but they didn’t see the big picture of where God was headed in them. They had no idea how the events they had just witnessed this past week fit into the story in the Scriptures. Jesus is about to connect all the Old Testament dots for these disciples. 

Who remembers doing dot-to-dot pictures? You follow the numbers and connect the dots; the lines you draw help form an image.   Jesus is going to connect the dots of the Old Testament for them.  He will show them the prophecies he fulfilled and how all of the Scriptures, the whole Old Testament, points to him.  They knew what happened, they saw it happen, but they were unable to make the connection between what they had read in scripture and what was happening right before their eyes.  So Jesus takes them on a tour of the Bible and points out how all this time the whole story of the Bible was pointing to what they saw this past week.

Does God care that we understand the Old Testament?   You bet he does.  We live in a day when some preachers shy away from the Old Testament. They say it only confuses people.  They say we don’t need the Old Testament now that we have Jesus.  But look at this story where God purposely keeps people from recognizing Jesus so he can walk them through the Old Testament Scriptures.  Because God doesn’t want people to just see Jesus, He wants people to understand Jesus.  And we can’t understand what Jesus is saying if we don’t know the context.  And the context for what Jesus says and what he does is the Scripture of the Old Testament.

But they could not see how the events they had just witnessed over the past week fit into the story of the Bible. The story of the Bible is not a complicated story.   It can be broken down into just three parts.  And here is how the Bible is divided:

  1. Genesis 1 & 2:  God created the world, made man, and placed man in a garden.
  2. Genesis 3. Humans rebelled, broke the relationship, left God’s presence, and sin and death entered the world.  There is a separation between man and God. 
  3. The rest of the Bible, from page 4 to the end, is about God’s plan to redeem mankind and restore the relationship with his creation.  God is reconciling the world to himself.    And that plan is all about Jesus.  He comes to restore a proper understanding of God’s word.  He dies and is resurrected to defeat sin and death.  He is returning to gather his people who want to be with Him and restore creation.

It is not a complicated story.

So Jesus goes through the Scriptures and helps them see how they had been predicting what they witnessed this past week all along.  We are now picking up the story in verse 28. They have arrived at their house in Emmaus. They stop, and Jesus “acted as if he were going farther.” But they encourage him to stay as it is ‘towards evening.’  “Stay” means abide. They thought he would stay the night. They prepare a meal, then a very odd thing happens. 

Luke 24:30   When he was at the table with them, he took the bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. 

Now, if you don’t know the culture, you pass right by this as you are reading.  But this is totally unexpected.  This is odd because this is what the host in the home always does. Jesus is not the host here; he is the guest.  It would be like someone coming to your house for dinner, and you greet them at the door. Then they walk into the kitchen and start stirring pots, putting the rolls in the oven, setting the dishes on the table, and telling you, “OK, let’s say a prayer and eat.” That would be weird.  A guest would never assume these duties.

Now, don’t miss what is going on here. This is classic Jesus. He has just spent a while teaching them how the Old Testament predicted and explained the events of this past week. Now, he is going to demonstrate a lesson from the Old Testament. So he takes the bread, blesses God for the bread, breaks it, and gives it to them. And then, the climax of this story: their eyes were opened.

Picture what is going on here.  There is a man and his wife, and there is food, and their eyes are opened.  Can you think of any other time in the Bible when a man and his wife ate something and their eyes were opened?

Genesis 3:6-7   So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened,

Luke wants to make sure you don’t miss this connection.  This was the lie of the Satan, the adversary. He loves to tell partial truths.

Genesis 3:4-5   But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” is not about understanding good and evil; it is all about who decides what is good and evil and who makes the rules. Before this incident, God lived in harmony with humans.  They walked together in the Garden.  God made the rules, and man followed the rules.  God is the king, he is the ruler, and he makes the rules.  This disobedience breaks all of that.  By choosing to eat the fruit, they have decided they want to make their own rules. They want to decide for themselves what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong. They reject God as their king.  And because they rejected the king, they no longer live in the kingdom of God.

Oh, the serpent was sort of right.  Their eyes were opened all right. Their eyes were opened to the ways of the world.  Open to the possibility of sin, but closed to the way of the Lord.  And this is the way we have all lived since Adam, blinded to the ways of God, unable to understand the things of God.  But when we accept Jesus’ sacrifice for our sin, when we recognize him as the King who gets to make the rules, then his Holy Spirit opens our eyes again to God’s truth.

So, before the apple (pomegranate), Adam and Eve were in the garden with God, and everything was good.  God said it: “He saw that it was good.”  They were in communion with God; they walked in the garden with him.  They knew God, they heard and understood his voice. Then the Satan serves up some fruit.  Their eyes were opened (to the ways of the world), and now Adam and Eve are filled with sadness and shame.  They hide from God.  Then we see them leaving the garden.  

This opening of their eyes was actually a spiritual closing that rendered them unable to see God for who he is. They could no longer recognize their Father, who loves them. Slowness of heart, confusion, inability to see, and inability to recognize God and his designs—this is the state of Adam and Eve leaving the Garden, and this is the state of the woman and her husband, Cleopas, walking away from Jerusalem. 

They are sad and hopeless; everything is wrong.  They don’t see God, though he is standing right before their eyes.  They don’t understand the teachings of God; they don’t recognize his voice. Then Jesus serves food. Their eyes are opened to God and the things of God- they understand the scripture and how the events they just lived through fit into the story, and they see Jesus. They leave to head back to Jerusalem with joy!

Do you see why Luke wants us to recall the Genesis 3 story here?  Jesus is undoing what went wrong in Genesis 3.  Jesus is restoring what went wrong in the fall.  He told them with words, then gave them a picture by action.  All the harm done in the fall in Genesis 3 — Jesus is redeeming all of it.

But we are not done.  There is something else going on here.

Luke 24:30   When he was at the table with them, he took the bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. 

Jesus at the table in Emmaus—this has to remind you of something that just happened in Jerusalem in an upper room at the Last Supper.

Matthew 26:26   Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.”

Took, blessed, broke, gave…..Same verbs, same order. Jesus takes over the hosting duties in Emmaus, which is unusual because he wants to reenact the Last Supper for them.  Luke’s Gospel emphasizes gathering around the table for a meal.  The ‘Last Supper’ is the seventh table meal in Luke.  Seven is the number of completion in Jewish thought, so the Last Supper is the completion of that group.  So you could call this meal Jesus serves in Emmaus the “First Supper,” beginning a new era of sharing grace around the table.

We discussed hospitality back in September (#49) and how hospitality is a demonstration of the gospel. Remember that 1 Peter 4 tells us (my paraphrase), “Hey, the world is coming to an end, so most importantly, keep loving each other and show hospitality without grumbling.”  Don’t overlook the importance of sharing meals in your home as a way to show God’s love to your community. 

It was in the breaking of bread that their eyes were opened and the resurrected Jesus was made known to them.   Even though it is getting dark, they head back the 7 miles to Jerusalem because some news is so good it can’t wait.  And they find the disciples:

Luke 24:35   Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.

The breaking of bread.    And remember what their problem was:  Their eyes were closed.  They couldn’t recognize Jesus or see how the events in their lives fit into the story God was telling.  I am becoming convinced that a lot of the depression and anxiety of this world stems from our eyes being closed to these things.  

If we could truly see Jesus for who He is and how the things currently going on in our lives fit into the story of our lives that God is weaving, we would see how things that appear to be disasters can be opportunities for God to show his power. The Israelites are trapped between the armies of Egypt and the Red Sea. This is not a tragedy but an occasion for God to show He is God.  The Israelites see a huge giant, Goliath, coming to fight them.  That is not a disaster but a chance for God to show his power.  Hey, disciples in Emmaus, Jesus’s death on the cross is not the end of the world; it is God’s plan for deliverance. It is the beginning of a better world.

But this blindness to the way God is working in our lives affects us all. My wife and I, like many couples, went through a time when we desperately wanted to have another child, and we chased that dream with everything in us.  We tried almost every avenue, but every surgery and procedure that promised help failed.  Several times, we were set to adopt a baby, but they all fell through at he last minute. There were many tears shed in those days.  These were some very difficult, frustrating, and depressing times.  

Why were they so hard?   Because our eyes were closed.   We couldn’t see how what was going on in our lives fit into the story that God was weaving.   Like the two disciples in Emmaus, who could not see how Jesus’ death fit into God’s plan.  We couldn’t see the big picture of God’s plan.  He had a baby for us, a specific baby picked out for us.  But it was his doing, not ours – his timing, not ours.  Our anxiety, depression, frustration, and grieving over a child we could not have could have been relieved if we had only been able to understand how this circumstance in our life fit into God’s big picture for us.

The Bible makes it clear that God loves us as his children and works everything for our good.  Trials, hardships, unfulfilled expectations, and persecution are all viewed as good because God uses them all to refine our hearts and make us more of the people we were created to be.   

The disciples in Emmaus could not see how the horrible events of their past week fit into God’s plan.  So Jesus opened the scriptures to them and then opened their eyes in the breaking of bread.

The next time you participate in The Lord’s Supper, or Communion, remember these two from Emmaus.  Remember Jesus, whose death was not the end but the beginning.  And bring to that communion table or altar your anxieties, frustrations, and sadness.  

Is there something going on in your life that doesn’t make sense?  Do you find yourself wondering: Why did this happen, Jesus?  Why is this person suffering from this illness?  Why can’t I have healing?  Why are people so mean and insensitive?  Why are so many things going wrong?  Why can’t this friend or family member do the right thing?  Why can’t I do the right thing?  Why is life so hard? 

Every remembrance, every encounter with Jesus, is an opportunity to bring those concerns to the altar, and we leave them there, knowing that Jesus, who loves us, will take whatever the situation is and turn it to our good. Our eyes need to be opened, and often, that happens in the breaking of bread.

  1. Note that they are leaving Jerusalem before the end of the weeklong feast of Unleavened Bread. Only the first day was required. Deut. 16:7 notes that it is permissible to leave after that. Jesus’ disciples may be scattering due to disappointment in the outcome and fear of being charged next.
  2. This is good biblical irony. Jesus is, indeed, the only one who really knows what happened over the past week.
  3. Luke reports, “but him they did not see.” This is more irony, as these two telling the story can not “see” Jesus, even though he is right before their eyes.
  4. Athletic people can also have a slower-than-normal resting heart rate.

April 27, 28 A.D.  – Jesus rides in a parade, rearranges furniture, and kills a tree.— The Year of the Lord’s Favor #80

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Week 63 — Jesus rides in a parade, rearranges furniture, and kills a tree.
Matthew 21:18-19

As we follow Jesus’ ministry day by day, in 28 AD, this is the week of Passover, the week between Palm Sunday and the Resurrection.  At times over the past year, I had only had one short scripture passage to cover the events of that week in Jesus’ ministry.  But the week between the triumphal entry and the resurrection is so important to the story of Jesus that there is a lot of material: Seven chapters of Matthew, five chapters of Mark and Luke, and eight chapters of John.   Almost one-fourth of the material in the four gospels is about this final week.

There is no way to cover the material in those 20 chapters.   So I want to step back this week and get one aspect of the big picture of what is going on in the story of the Bible in that week.  The Bible is one cohesive story of how God is working to reestablish his relationship with his creation, and the key to that plan is what happens in this week and 50 days later.  Jesus does three symbolic acts at the beginning of that week.  We have already discussed two of them, so today, we will look at the third one and see how these fit into that big picture.

Matthew 21:18-19   In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he became hungry.  And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once.  

I know what you’re thinking.  “So, out of 20 chapters of Gospel Material from Jesus’ final week, this is what you pick as a focal passage?  And why is Jesus hating on a fig tree? “

At the beginning of Jesus’ passion week, he performs three significant symbolic acts, which carry a lot of meaning to his followers who are familiar with the scriptures. He rides a donkey into the city (the Palm Sunday triumphal entry that we discussed two weeks ago). He drives the money changers and animal salespeople out of the temple area (which we discussed last year), and then he curses a fig tree.

These may seem out of character for the Jesus we have seen this past year—that meek and mild Jesus who told people not to talk about his miracles, who was leaving town when he gathered crowds to try to fly under the radar, and who mostly avoided confrontation. Here, we see him in a big parade entering the capital city, jumping into the middle of a confrontation in the temple, and then performing a miracle of destruction. What has changed? Let’s look at these events.

The cleansing of the Temple happens twice in Jesus’ ministry.  Both at the same time of the year, just before Passover..  Every Jewish person at that same time every year would, in preparation for the feast of Unleavened Bread, go to great lengths to remove every bit of yeast from their homes.  This is to commemorate the exodus from Egypt when they left after Passover and ate only unleavened bread, because they didn’t have time to let the bread rise as they hurried out of Egypt.  Yeast came to represent sin and corruption.  So every home would be cleansed to remove any traces of yeast every year.  Walls would be scrubbed, and cooking utensils boiled in water.  This still happens in Orthodox Jewish homes today.  Jesus enters the Temple and sees that the House of God is full of corruption and takes it upon himself to do some spring cleaning in preparation for the festival.  This has great symbolic meaning to the people of Jesus’ day.  (You can go back to my blog entry of April 10 last year to review.)

Then there is this episode about the fig tree, which seems odd to us.  Again, these are very symbolic acts.  To understand what is really going on in these events, you have to have a good working knowledge of the first 2/3 of the Bible.  But most people don’t spend much time in the ‘First Testament.’  We call it the ‘Old Testament.’   Why study something old when you have something newer?   I really don’t like the ‘old/new’ nomenclature.  Jesus just called the Old Testament ‘the Scriptures.’  The only Bible that Jesus and the disciples ever read is the one that very few people now ever read.

But the Old Testament is the context for the New Testament. Jesus assumes you have a working knowledge of the Scriptures when he talks. Ten percent of his teachings are quotes from the Old Testament.  If you don’t understand his quotes, then you misunderstand what Jesus is saying.  These acts are a good example.  We miss what God is communicating if we are ignorant of the context and connection to the Scriptures.  So bear with me while I go way back to give you the big picture you need to understand the fig tree.

The key to these incidents is found in Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament.  

Malachi 3:1-2a “And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says Yehovah Tzavaot. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?”

Let me put this verse in its historical context for you.  The Jews were conquered by Babylon in 586 BC.  The Babylonians destroyed the city and the temple. Most of the Jews were taken to Babylon, where they lived in exile for 70 years.  When they finally returned, they rebuilt the wall around the city and the temple.  But they didn’t have the riches of Solomon to build the temple this time, and this temple they built was a sad imitation of the grand structure that had been.  The people came back from Babylon expecting to have all the promises of the prophets come true, that the Messiah would come and set up God’s kingdom over Israel and restore the nation with a time of prosperity, justice, and peace.

But the people don’t see that, so in Malachi, they complain to God, 

“Hey God, things are going very well.”  

And God could answer, 

“You’re telling me, I allowed your country to be conquered because of your sins, hoping that the time of exile would lead to repentance and that you would come back ready to truly follow me and my commandments and abandon your idols.  But you have not repented.  You are committing the same sins as your ancestors did, which got them exiled.”

The people keep complaining to God. (The book has six disputes between the people and God), And he says, 

“You are on my last nerve with all this griping and complaining and bad behavior.”  

(Or maybe that was my wife talking to one of my sons in the backseat of the car one day.)  But Malachi says it this way:

Malachi 2:17  “You have wearied Yehovah with your words.”    [He is tired of your griping.]

They are asking, “Where are you, God?”   Why are they asking this?  They have been back in the land for almost 100 years.  They had rebuilt the temple, and everyone came to the grand opening except God.   He didn’t show up.  To understand this, we have to go back even further.

Remember when Israel first encountered Yehovah in the wilderness of Sinai.  They had escaped from Egypt, and 50 days later came to Mt Sinai.  God invited them to come up on the mountain with him, but on that day, God came on the mountain with a great cloud of smoke, and with fire and the sound of a loud shofar, like a roaring wind.  And it scared the people so that they would not go up on the mountain to meet God.   So Moses goes for them, and while up on Mount Sinai, God gives him instructions to build a tabernacle, a tent of meeting.  God told Moses, 

Exodus 25:8  “Have them build me a tabernacle, a holy place so that I might dwell with them.”

God wants to dwell with his people.  He wants to walk with us like he did with Adam and Eve in the Garden.  Sin destroyed the fellowship between humans and God in the Garden, and the whole story of the Bible is God working a way to restore that fellowship so that he may dwell with his people again.

So they built the tabernacle, and when they dedicated it:

Exodus 40:34-38   Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of Yehovah filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it, and the glory of Yehovah filled the tabernacle.

Leviticus 9:23-24  And Moses and Aaron went into the tent of meeting, and when they came out, they blessed the people, and the glory of Yehovah appeared to all the people. And fire came out from before Yehovah and consumed the burnt offering and the pieces of fat on the altar, and when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces.

Just like on Mount Sinai, God comes in a cloud with fire.  Since they wouldn’t come up on the mountain, God comes to dwell with them in the cloud and fire and leads them with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

 And 400 years later, Solomon builds a more permanent structure. And the nation of Israel was at the pinnacle of its wealth.  So this temple was very impressive.  And when it is time to dedicate the temple:

2 Chronicles 7:1-3    As soon as Solomon finished his prayer, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of Yehovah filled the temple. And the priests could not enter the house of Yehovah, because the glory of Yehovah filled Yehovah’s house. When all the people of Israel saw the fire come down and the glory of the Yehovah on the temple, they bowed down with their faces to the ground on the pavement and worshiped and gave thanks to Yehovah, saying, “For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.”

First at Sinai, then at the tabernacle, and now at Solomon’s temple, God’s presence comes in mighty fashion.  Have you ever been in a church service where you wondered if God was present?  No one left these dedication services wondering if God showed up.  

But things go downhill in Israel, and God punishes the Northern and Southern Kingdoms by allowing them to be conquered by a foreign nation.  Four hundred years after Solomon’s Temple was built, the Jews were conquered by Babylon in 586 BC.  The Babylonians destroyed the city and this wonderful Temple. Most of the Jews were taken to Babylon, where they lived in exile for 70 years.  And that horrible day of destruction is still mourned by Israel today on their calendar on the ninth day of their month of Av.

But the worst part of this tragedy is seen in a vision by the prophet Ezekiel.  Now, most people reading the Bible miss this because Ezekiel is not exactly an easy book to read.  In his vision in Ezekiel 10, he sees God on His throne leave the temple in Jerusalem.  This is that odd vision of the throne chariot with the cherubim and the ‘wheels within wheels.’  God abandoned his temple and allowed the temple to be destroyed.  

Ezekiel 11:23. And the glory of Yehovah went up from the midst of the city and stood on the mountain that is on the east side of the city.   

(What mountain is on the east?  The Mount of Olives.)

But in Ezekiel, there is hope.  God abandoned the temple, but he didn’t abandon his people, and Ezekiel talked about God preserving a remnant and that God will one day take away the heart of stone and give them a new heart.   And in Ezekiel, we have the vision of the restoration, the valley of dry bones brought back to life.  And finally, in Ezekiel, there is a vision of God’s presence returning to the temple. Ezekiel sees God coming back from the East

Ezekiel 43:1-2   Then he led me to the gate, the gate facing east.  And behold, the glory of the God of Israel was coming from the east. 

And 70 years later, Ezekiel’s prophecies started coming true.  A remnant of the people returned from Babylon to Jerusalem and rebuilt the city and the temple, though as I said, it was nowhere near as grand a structure.  And as before, they held a dedication service:

Ezra 6:16-18   And the people of Israel, the priests and the Levites, and the rest of the returned exiles, celebrated the dedication of this house of God with joy.  They offered at the dedication of this house of God 100 bulls, 200 rams, 400 lambs, and as a sin offering for all Israel 12 male goats, according to the number of the tribes of Israel. And they set the priests in their divisions and the Levites in their divisions, for the service of God at Jerusalem, as it is written in the Book of Moses.

It was a grand service, and huge numbers of people crowded in to see the spectacle. But something was missing.  God was missing.  There is no great storm of wind, thunder, clouds, and fire that shows God’s presence in the temple.  They set up the altar, but this time, fire didn’t come from heaven to consume the sacrifice.  They have to light the fire themselves, because God doesn’t show up.

That is why the people of Malachi’s day asked, “Where is God? We rebuilt the temple, but he didn’t show up.”

They knew Zechariah had prophesied of the time when God would return.

Zechariah 8:3  Thus says Yehovah: I have returned to Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city, and the mountain of the Yehovah Tzavaot, the holy mountain.

So we see in Malachi that they complain that God has not returned as he promised. They had conveniently forgotten the first part of Zechariah, which made it clear to them that this was a conditional promise.  

Zechariah 1:3  Therefore, say to them, Thus declares Yehovah Tzavaot: Return to me, and I will return to you, says Yehovah Tzavaot.

But God explains, “You returned to the land, you returned to the city, but you didn’t return to me.  You haven’t repented.   You are still committing the same sins your fathers did that got them exiled.  So I have not returned to you. 

But when the people complain, Malachi answers, “Oh, God is going to come back to his Temple…”

Malachi 3:1 “Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Yehovah Tzavaot.”

Malachi says that a messenger of the covenant will come, and then God is coming back to his temple, but he may not come exactly like you want him to come.  The next verse, Malachi 3:2a

“But who can endure the day of his coming and who can stand when he appears?”   

Uh-oh… he is coming in judgment.  Malachi is the last prophet in the Old Testament. There would be 400 years of waiting until another prophet comes, until the time Malachi predicted.  And the Gospels tell us the messenger did come, John the Baptist, preaching repentance, and after that, God returns to the temple 

So in his final week, Jesus is again staying at the home of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary in Bethany.  He has his disciples get a donkey from the nearby town of Bethphage.  And Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey, with people shouting praise and proclaiming him as king, and he enters the temple. This is the first of those three symbolic acts Jesus did this past week. People of his time easily recognized the symbol of the king being coronated and triumphantly entering the city just as David and Solomon did.  But more than that, God, in the form of Jesus, is coming back to the temple as Zechariah and Malachi prophesied.  And he is coming just as Ezekiel predicted, from the east, from the Mount of Olives.

Ezekiel said, “Behold, the glory of the God of Israel was coming from the east.”  The Triumphal Procession on Palm Sunday – God returning to his temple.

And how does Jesus enter the temple?  As Malachi said, He comes not in peace but in judgment.  God’s presence will eventually come, never to depart again.  And it will come with a great sound of rushing and with fire.  But first, God has to deal with the problem of sin.  There has to be a cleansing of the temple first.  Jesus enters the Temple and sees that the House of God is full of corruption, and begins the process of cleaning it out.

Matthew 21:12-13   And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.   He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.”

He drives out the money changers who are charging exorbitant fees for the special coin that could be used to pay the temple tax. Then he turns over the seats of those selling animals and taking advantage of people who have to purchase animals to sacrifice.  And which animals does Matthew specifically note? The pigeons. They were the sacrifices of the poor who could not afford a sheep or goat.  Religion for profit, stealing money from the poor.

He is coming to judge.  As Malachi asked, “Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?”  But Jesus is just getting started with the cleansing.  Every time he comes back into the temple, the next week he is coming with his gloves off, he speaks in judgment, especially of the Scribes and Pharisees.  Matthew chapter 23 has 7 statements of woe on these leaders because they are ‘hypocrites,’ ‘false teachers,’ ‘blind guides,’ ‘all show and no substance,’ ‘dead on the inside,’ ‘sons of snakes,’ ‘people who will not enter the kingdom of God.’

This is the same Judgment God had passed on Israel in the past.  Look at the similarities from the prophet Jeremiah:

Jeremiah 7:2-11   Hear the word of Yehovah, all you people of Judah who come through these gates to worship Yehovah.  This is what the Yehovah Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Reform your ways and your actions, and I will let you live in this place.  Do not trust in deceptive words and say, “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD!”   If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever.

But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless.  Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, “We are safe”—safe to do all these detestable things?   Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you?  But I have been watching! declares Yehovah.”

And the third symbolic act we find in Matthew 21:

Matthew 21:18-19   In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he became hungry.  And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once.  

He sees this fig tree full of leaves.  And these fig trees produce an early fruit that comes when the leaves appear.  It is not as big as the later harvest of figs in the summer.  This fruit is not as good or mature, but these early figs bring the promise of more mature fruit later.   Early figs in Hebrew are ‘phage.’  And this happened in a town called Bethphage, which is in Hebrew, the house of early figs.

If you know the scriptures (the Old Testament), you know the prophets frequently used this symbol of early figs. I could give a bunch of examples, but we only have time for one.

Micah 3:9-12   Hear this, you leaders of Jacob, you rulers of Israel, who despise justice and distort all that is right; who build Zion with bloodshed, and Jerusalem with wickedness.  Her leaders judge for a bribe, her priests teach for a price, and her prophets tell fortunes for money.

Yet they look for Yehovah’s support and say, “Is not Yehovah among us? No disaster will come upon us.”  Therefore, because of you, Zion will be plowed like a field, Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble, the temple hill a mound overgrown with thickets.

Micah 7:1-4  What misery is mine!  There is no cluster of grapes to eat, none of the early figs that I crave.  The faithful have been swept from the land;  not one upright person remains.…

Now is the time of your judgment.

You are wicked and producing no fruit.  You will be judged.

So, as Malachi predicted, God would come back to his Temple, but in judgment. This condemnation of this fruit tree that was all leaves and no fruit is a symbol of Jerusalem. Its leadership is all leaves and no fruit, all show and no substance.  

You have to bear fruit.  This is the message of the messenger that Malachi predicted would come before God came back to the temple.  That messenger was John the Baptist, and he had a 2-part message.

First, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”  — Clean your house, God is coming back.  So all these people were coming to repent, and John said, “Hey, that’s great that you want to repent, but you can’t just say ‘I repent ‘ and then get baptized.  Your life has to change.  

Repentance is not something you say; it is something you do.

So the second part of the message is “You have to bring fruits worthy of repentance.”  You have to perform acts that are consistent with the life you have decided to live.  Don’t tell God you are going to change — show God how you have changed.  Then he warns them that a time of judgment is coming— either bear fruit or perish. And Jesus shows that symbolically with the fig tree.

Remember the reason God didn’t come back to the Temple they built in Malachi’s day?  They didn’t repent.  There is a reason Malachi saw the messenger coming before God came back to his Temple.  There is a reason John comes before Jesus.  The Messenger has to preach repentance before God returns. 

 And John told them it is judgment time, either bear fruit or perish.  Because the Kingdom of God is near.  God it about to return to his temple.  And we are in week 63 of this 70-week study.  You don’t want to miss week 70.  Because that is when God returns in power to his temple, as he did before with fire and the sound of a rushing windstorm.  But first, the temple must be cleansed.   First, there must be repentance.

Repentance is the necessary step everyone must take before establishing a relationship with God, and it is a step we must all continue to take as we walk with Jesus.  The old man dies hard.  We want to make our own rules.  We want to go the way that seems right to us, even though we are warned it leads to destruction.

Don’t miss the story of the fig tree.   But I can’t finish this morning without looking at Jesus’ other story of the fig tree Jesus tells in Luke:

Luke 13:6-9   And he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none.  And he said to the vinedresser, ‘Look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?’  And he answered him, ‘Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure.  Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

Why does this tree get a second chance when the other fig tree is condemned immediately? This Fig tree has been barren for years.  It is just taking up space in the vineyard.  How do we reconcile these two stories?   What is the difference?

This tree has an advocate—a vinedresser who intervenes and asks for mercy on its behalf. Someone who will show this tree more care and love in an effort to encourage it to produce fruit.  Thanks be to God that we have an advocate.

Romans 8:34. Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.

1 John 2:1  We have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.

We have a loving, merciful Father who remembers his children not for the day of their trouble, but the day of their salvation.  He remembers us not for our worst day but for our best day.

And Jesus and the Spirit within us are interceding for us.   And we can intercede for each other.  We can go before the Father asking God to be merciful just as this vinedresser interceded for this tree.  We can then, as the vinedresser did for the tree, show these people love and encourage them to produce more fruit.

Time is short.  Spend time in prayer before the Father on behalf of your friends and family.  And each day, seize the opportunity to produce fruit.

April 20, 28 A.D. — Will the Real Zacchaeus Stand Up? —  The Year of the Lord’s Favor #79

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , ,

Week 62 — Will the Real Zacchaeus Stand Up?
Luke 19:1-10

The date of Passover and Easter varies every year.  In 2025 it falls on April 20th, but in 28 AD, on that first Easter morning, it would have been a bit later, April 28.   So on April 20, in Jesus’ day, he had almost completed his final journey to Jerusalem.  He and all the other religious pilgrims from Galilee would have crossed the Jordan River and walked a short 5 miles into the city of Jericho, one of the oldest cities in the world.  There, he would have had a rather odd introduction to a man and then spent some time in his home.  You know the song….

“Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he.  He climbed up in a sycamore tree for the Lord he wanted to see.  And as the Saviour passed that way he looked up in the tree, and he said,”Zacchaeus, you come down, for I’m going to your house today, for I’m going to your house today.”

The story of Zacchaeus is typically told as the story of a height-challenged, wealthy, and wicked chief of the tax collectors who meets Jesus, repents, and is saved. But as I looked hard at the context of the story in Luke, I began to realize that there is much more to this story than what I learned in that little song in Sunday School. 

The story of Zacchaeus is found at the very end of the long travel narrative that Luke has for Jesus on his journey to Jerusalem.   This section of Luke runs for ten chapters, beginning in Luke 9:51.

Luke 9:51   When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.

Along his final journey to Jerusalem, Jesus had encounters and told many well-recognized parables, including the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the Parable of the Rich Fool, the Parable of the Lost Coin, the Lost Sheep and the Lost Son, the Rich Man and Lazarus, the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, and the Rich Young Ruler.  The section concludes with the Zacchaeus story and its accompanying parable.

Luke 19:1-6   He entered Jericho and was passing through.  And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich.  And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd, he could not, because he was small in stature.  So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way.  And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.”  So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully.

Zacchaeus is the Greek version of the Jewish name ‘Zaccai’ found in Ezra and Nehemiah.  It is from the Hebrew root (‘tzaddiq’) meaning  “righteous.”  Was Zacchaeus a righteous man?  Many commentaries say this is just ironic that they would give this wicked man the name ‘righteous’.

What else do we know about him?  He is a chief tax collector, in charge of other tax collectors, overseeing them.   And no surprise, he was rich.  Rome paid these people well.  Many tax collectors were richer than they should have been, as it was not hard to fix the books and pocket extra money.  To the Jews, they were the most hated people in the land.   Tax-collector equates with ‘sinner’ in the eyes of most people in Jesus’ day.  It was a job they thought no ethical person would do.  But let’s read the rest of the story….

Luke 19:7-10  “All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.  But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”  Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham.  For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

So Zacchaeus comes to a moment of repentance and decides to no longer cheat people. He will now give away half of his wealth to the poor and repay anyone he has cheated four times what he took from them.  What a great story!  But is this really the story?  Is this the message Jesus wanted to teach with this encounter?  When I started studying this passage last week, I had some problems. So welcome to my world of Bible Study.

The New International Version we just read, makes it clear that Zacchaeus has just now made a decision to change his ways.  “Here and now I give half my possessions…”   I found other translations that are similar:

The Holman Christian Standard Bible  “Look, I’ll give half of my possessions to the poor, Lord!”
Contemporary English Version. “I will give half of my property to the poor.”
New Living Translation.“I will give half my wealth to the poor, Lord…”

These are all consistent with the idea that Zacchaeus heard the crowd’s grumbling, met Jesus, and decided to change his ways.  But look at the difference of these translations with the following:

Amplified Bible – “See, Lord, I am [now] giving half of my possessions to the poor
English Standard Version – “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor.”
New King James Version – “Look, Lord, I give half of my goods to the poor…”

These are not “I will in the future give” but “I am already giving”.  Read this way, Zacchaeus is telling Jesus what he has already been doing, defending himself against the crowds who are calling out his unrighteousness…. So, which is it?

Then I found this: The first edition of the New American Standard Bible (1977) said it this way: “Behold, Lord, half of my possessions I will give to the poor.”  Ok, that is the traditional reading, with Zacchaeus telling Jesus he is making a new decision.  The New American Standard Bible released a revised version in 2020 based on “improved scholarship and accuracy in translation.”  One of the verses changed was this verse that now reads:  “But Zaccheus stopped and said to the Lord, ‘Behold, Lord, half of my possessions I am giving to the poor…”

So I had to go to the original Greek and multiple scholars’ journal articles on this verse.  (If you want to nerd out with me on all the Greek verb discussion, let me know.  I will refrain from boring the rest of you with this.)  But here is the bottom line:  The Greek supports the idea that Zacchaeus has already been, for some time, giving away half of his income, and if he finds that one of the tax collectors that he supervises has cheated someone, he makes sure they are paid back four times the amount.

So it is not a story of a horrible, sinful tax collector who encounters Jesus and finds repentance and then salvation.  It is the story of a man who was trying his best to live a righteous life.  At some point, he had found repentance and was living very differently than other tax collectors, resisting the temptation to cheat people and being generous with the wealth he had earned.  But he is not running around bragging about his generosity, but just quietly doing the right thing.  Then he hears Jesus is coming by, and he wants to not just ‘see him’ but “see who he was.”  He wants to encounter Jesus.  And Jesus calls him by name — he sees him as an individual, not just as a tax collector.   But the crowd was grumbling because they judged this man based on his occupation.1  So he defends himself to Jesus:  “But I am not the man they think I am.  I am giving away half of what I earn and repaying anyone one of my people has cheated.” 

 He had already found repentance.  Now he finds Jesus.  And that is what we need for salvation – There is a reason John the Baptist comes before Jesus.  You must repent before you meet Jesus.

But does it really make a big difference in which way you read the story?  I believe it does.  Jesus has been trying to teach a very important lesson through the past 10 chapters of Luke, and that lesson reaches its climax in this story of Zacchaeus.  And I think it all hinges on this point in the story when the crowd grumbles because Jesus is going to the home of a wicked tax collector.  Again, tax collectors were the most hated people in the land.  They were dishonest and traitors to their people.  They became rich by cheating the poor.  So this man Zacchaeus was assumed to be wicked because of his occupation.

Well, it is a good thing we don’t judge people in our day by their occupations — or do we?

Gallup polls have for years tracked the public’s perception of the ethical standards of various occupations. The results will probably not surprise you. The jobs with the highest ratings are pretty consistent. The only ones that were rated by more than 50% of the people as having high ethics are Nurses, Veterinarians, Engineers, Medical Doctors, and Pharmacists.  The occupations with the lowest ratings are also consistent.  At the very bottom were Politicians, followed by Car Salespeople, then Advertising firms, Stockbrokers, and Insurance Salespeople.

Sadly, the last poll showed that public perceptions of ethical standards in almost all professions have dropped significantly in the past five years.  There is some good news for the politicians and car dealers: they are being challenged for the position of the worst perceived ethics by Payday loan businesses, Congressional lobbyists, and telemarketers.

But are all car dealers and politicians unethical?  No.  I can personally vouch for one car dealer who is one of the most giving people I know and a serious Bible student and follower of Jesus.  And I can equally vouch for a friend who is a current state attorney general who has the highest standards and is also a serious Bible student and follower of Jesus.  But the fact remains, we tend to judge people in groups.

So, were 100% of the tax collectors in Jesus’ day unethical?  No.  Sure, it was an occupation that tempted people to cheat others.  But Rome paid these people very well, and you could be very well off financially without being dishonest.  Jesus calls one tax collector to be a disciple, tells a parable of one who is shown to be more righteous than a Pharisee, and then we have Zacchaeus.

In the beginning of the Gospel accounts we see tax collectors coming to John the Baptist seeking repentance. 

Luke 3:10-14   And the crowds asked him [John the Baptist], “What then shall we do?”  And he answered them, “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.”   Tax collectors also came to be baptized and said to him, “Teacher, what shall we do?”  And he said to them, “Collect no more than you are authorized to do.”  Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages.”

Notice that John does not ask the tax collectors or the soldiers to quit their jobs, just to do their jobs ethically.  Nevertheless, the public perception of tax collectors is what it is.  So when Jesus looks up in the tree and greets Zacchaeus and then invites himself over to Zacchaeus’ house, the crowd grumbles.  And as we discussed before, this isn’t the soft murmuring under your breath, this is the shouting-out-loud grumbling.   We see the word for this type of grumbling used only twice in the entire New Testament.  And these two passages are linked together.   The other time is Luke 15:

Luke 15:1-2   Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him.  And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.”

This is the same type of grumbling Moses heard when people complained about a lack of water or food.  Remember, these same Israelites had just seen the waters of the sea part so they could walk through on dry land.  And here they are grumbling because they didn’t believe God could deliver a 2-liter of water to quench their thirst. In the Bible, grumbling reveals the peoples’ lack of faith in God’s ability to deliver.  For Israel in the wilderness grumbled because they had no faith that God could deliver them from thirst.  They think it is impossible for God to do.  And it is the same idea in Luke 15 when the people grumble.  They just don’t believe God can deliver these people.  It’s impossible!

But Jesus doesn’t look at tax collectors the way the people do.  God counts no group of people as hopelessly lost, and Jesus is trying to teach this lesson that it is not impossible.

People see sinners who are hopelessly lost.  Jesus sees an individual he loves, a person created in his image, someone who can repent and bring great glory to the Father.  And he calls them by name.

This is such an important lesson that Jesus keeps returning to it over and over again.  Why?  

Because Israel in this day had drawn firm lines in who God could deliver and who was hopelessly lost, beyond God’s ability to save.  So they had two categories: People God can have a relationship with, and People who are hopelessly lost and beyond God’s ability to save.   And in the list of people who God will relate to is, of course, Jews.

But the Pharisees had created this rigid system of laws that were impossible for people to keep.  Oh, you might could if you were wealthy and didn’t have to work for a living.  But really, no one but the Pharisees could keep them. So a lot of people who couldn’t keep the commandments were just written off as hopeless.  So add to the ‘hopeless category’ those Jews who don’t keep all the added laws

Then, of course, there were the tax collectors and prostitutes; they were just called ‘sinners’. There was no hope for them.  And how about those who were crippled or blind or had the disease they called leprosy?  They felt that physical diseases were caused by sin.  These people had gotten what they deserved.  They had no place around God’s table.  Put them on the ‘hopeless’ list.

And then the big elephant in the room.  How about the rest of the world?  If you weren’t Jewish, you couldn’t even enter the temple.  Other nations were just pagans.  They were beyond hope.  God had written them all off.   So, who’s on the list of People God can have a relationship with?   Jews … (but only those who keep all those tedious laws the Pharisees had added.)

Do you see why Jesus had to come and fix this mess?  He chose Israel to be a kingdom of priests to all the nations, but they instead built walls to keep others away from God.  Jesus had to come to try to show them that every person mattered.  And they still didn’t really understand it even after the crucifixion.   It would take God striking a man blind on the road to Damascus to finally convince one person that Jesus’ message of grace, love, and hope was for everyone, every nation.   And Paul had to work hard to get the other apostles to understand.

But Jesus had been trying to teach this lesson all through his ministry, and we see it especially emphasized in these 10 chapters in Luke.2  He tells parables and interacts with people to try to demonstrate God’s love for all and how we can not judge other people based on race, occupation, or our cultural rules.    Look back again at some of the stories in this section of Luke.  I’ll mention a few of them:

Why did Jesus tell the story of the Good Samaritan?  He was asked the question, “Who is my neighbor?”  And his parable answers the question, every man is your neighbor that you should love as yourself, even the one that others tell you to hate.  Even the one from the race you have written off as hopeless.

Why did Jesus tell the three parables of the lost coin, lost sheep, and lost son?  Look back at the verse we read earlier:

Luke 15:1-2   Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him.  And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.”
Luke 15:3  So he told them these parables…

God counts no one as hopelessly lost.  The minute that you identify a group of people as undeserving of grace, as beyond God’s ability to save, then you have become the older son in the prodigal parable

Then in chapter 18, the chapter just before the encounter with Zacchaeus, we have this story….

Luke 18:10-14   “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.  The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’  But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’   I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Who is the righteous one in this parable?  The tax collector.  Tax collectors, the group that the Jews feel are the least righteous people in the land, can be found righteous by God if they confess their sins.  Again, why did he tell this parable?  Look at the verse I skipped:  

Luke 18:9  “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and treated others with contempt.”  

God does not see as man sees.  Do you see how Jesus was trying to teach this same lesson over and over again?  Do not judge a group of people by your prejudice.  No one is beyond the grace of God.

So this could be called “The parable of the righteous tax collector.”  And little do his listeners know that in just a few days they will see Jesus encounter a tax collector whose very name is righteous.

Then in that same chapter, you have the story of the rich young ruler.

Luke 18:18-27   And a ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.   You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother.’”   And he said, “All these I have kept from my youth.”   When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” 
But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich.  Jesus, seeing that he had become sad, said, “How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!  For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”   Those who heard it said, “Then who can be saved?”  But he said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”

The wealthy man becomes very sad when Jesus asks him to give up his riches.3   It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.  

So the disciples ask, “Then it is impossible for rich people to enter the kingdom?  And Jesus says, No, it is not impossible.  With God, anything is possible.  Remember, the Pharisees had that list of those beyond God’s ability to save? And here is Jesus plainly stating that, yeah, it is hard for a rich man to trust in something other than riches, but not impossible with God’s help.

No one is beyond God’s ability to forgive, God’s ability to save.  No one is beyond the grace of Yehovah. Jesus is trying desperately to hammer this point home.4

Then, a few days later in Jericho, Jesus finds a righteous tax collector—one who has already repented. He just needs to meet Jesus, and Jesus calls him by name. Though the crowd shouts out their disapproval, as they can only see the vile tax collector-sinner, Jesus sees a man who is repentant and only needs Jesus’ forgiveness and mercy.

Before this week, I had always believed the traditional telling of the Zacchaeus story: that before meeting Jesus, he was a vile tax-collector sinner.  But when I really studied the passage and looked at the context of what Jesus was teaching, I came to the conclusion that it can’t possibly be how it was.  The message Jesus is teaching in Luke culminates in this story of the crowd wrongly judging a righteous man. They thought he had no business talking to Jesus and certainly not eating with him. This man was a chief tax collector.  

In fact, if we read the story the traditional way, we have been tricked into committing the very sin that this story condemns. We, too, have assumed the tax collector is a hopeless sinner.5

Jesus has to teach this lesson.  No one is beyond the grace of God.  No one.

Let me point out one more thing.  I can’t tell you if this is true or not, but if I were writing a screenplay or movie about Zacchaeus, this would be there.  Jericho is only 5 miles from the Jordan River.  It is a short 2-hour walk downhill to the very spot where we are told John the Baptist was preaching repentance just a year before this Zacchaeus story.  Is it hard to imagine that this man Zacchaeus, who was so curious to see Jesus that he climbed a tree, would make that short walk one day to hear John the Baptist preach?  Is it possible he heard John tell the crowd they were sons of snakes and not Sons of Abraham because they were acting more like the snake in the Garden than their ‘father Abraham’?

Luke 3:7-8   John said therefore to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You sons of snakes! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bear fruits fin keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham.

Could it be that Zacchaeus heard John’s preaching and decided to repent?  Was he among the tax collectors who repented and asked John what they should do? 

Luke 3:12-13. Tax collectors also came to be baptized and said to him, “Teacher, what shall we do?”  And he said to them, “Collect no more than you are authorized to do.”

And then Zacchaeus becomes very generous and gives away 1/2 his salary and makes sure none of the tax collectors under him cheat anyone.  Then a year later, Jesus sees him not as another tax-collector but as a repentant child of God, and Jesus calls him by name.

After Zacchaeus defends himself to Jesus, proclaiming that he has already repented, Jesus says: 

Luke 19:9. “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham.”6

“Son of Abraham” — In using this phrase, Jesus, like John the Baptist, isn’t commenting on Zacchaeus’ heritage but on his character.  Zacchaeus was not a ‘son of a snake’ but a ‘son of Abraham,’ because he was repentant and trying to live a life of righteousness as his father, Abraham, did.

One day, I found myself seated in a small room in a maximum security prison in Alabama.  My head bowed, my eyes closed.  And the man laying hands on me, praying over me before I went in the other room to speak to the inmates gathered, was a convicted murderer who had committed horrible acts.  He was in for life.  He had come up for parole but had refused to enter the process because he had a ministry in that prison.  He was where God wanted him to be.  There are some moments in life you never forget.  I remember his name, but I think of him, this convicted murderer, as ‘Zaccai.’  Righteous.  I can’t read the Zacchaeus story without thinking of him. And because of him, I can never pass prison inmates on a work detail without thinking, “Which ones of these has God already called?  They are all created in God’s image, and the Father is just waiting for that moment of repentance to come for them.  

The resurrection message for us today is that the resurrection is for everyone.  No one is beyond the grace of God.  Even this “wee little man.”7 We can not judge any group of people as hopelessly lost.  As Jesus told his disciples, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”  

We must avoid making the same mistake that the religious leaders in Jesus’ day made. Remember, they said there were two groups of people: People who could have a relationship with God and People who could not have a relationship with God.  But they were so wrong about the requirements. The difference is repentance. There are only two groups of people: those who sin and repent, and those who sin and don’t repent.  Jesus came to seek and save the lost.  But God can not have a relationship with someone who is unwilling to repent.  We must learn the lesson. The only thing standing in the way of you having a better relationship with Jesus is you, your pride, and your lack of repentance.   And the Bible is clear:

2 Peter 3:9.   God is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.

I have become convinced that I do not spend enough time in prayer for those whom I know need to repent.   Paul counseled Timothy to teach and pray this way, especially for those who oppose the gospel or are enemies.  

2 Timothy 3:25-26. …God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will

  1. The people of Jericho knew Jesus was coming.  Jesus was a very big personality in the country, and they likely had made some preparations for his arrival.  Perhaps several of the important people in the town, either politically important or the religious authorities, had prepared their homes for a possible visit by this famous rabbi.  Imagine how they felt when they were passed up for a man in a tree, a wicked tax collector.
  2. You may also note Luke’s emphasis on riches and wealth.  The Greek word for ‘rich’ or ‘wealthy’, is found 28 times in the entire New Testament, but 1/3 of the instances of this word are in these 10 chapters of Luke.
  3. Contrast the rich man who went away sad, and Zacchaeus, who came ‘joyfully’ to Jesus.
  4. It is interesting that just before entering Jericho, just outside the town, Jesus heals a blind man who wants to be able to see.  Then Zacchaeus can’t see Jesus because of the crowd and was desperately “seeking to see who Jesus was.”  Then Jesus sees Zacchaeus, but he sees him not as the crowd sees him.  
  5. Kaeton, Elizabeth.  From “Trick or Treating with Zacchaeus”.  October 31, 2010.
  6. “Salvation has come to this house.”  Jesus name in Hebrew means “Yehovah’s salvation.”  Indeed, He has come.
  7. The scripture says Zacchaeus was ‘small in stature.’  The Greek for ‘stature’ (‘helikia’) can mean small of ‘age’ (young – doubtful as Zacchaeus had achieved an advanced position of overseer of tax collectors with Rome), or small of ‘height’, or small of ‘status’.  Certainly, the crowd’s reaction to Zacchaeus reveals his lack of status with them.  Perhaps he wasn’t short, but he was so hated by the crowd that there was no way he could mix in with them to get a look at Jesus, and that is why he climbed the tree. I found this explanation in several commentaries, but I am not ready to give up my ‘wee little man’ picture yet.

April 13, 28 A.D.  –  The Triumphal Entry — The Year of the Lord’s Favor #78

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , ,

Week 61 — The Aroma of Christ
John 12:1-8

As we continue to follow Jesus in his 70-week ministry, He has completed his final circuit of teaching in Galilee, and he is headed with the crowd of pilgrims on his way to Jerusalem.  This week, they would be somewhere here about to cross the river Jordan and head west to Jerusalem.   Next week, we will join Jesus as he enters the town of Jericho on his way toward Jerusalem.  But this week, I want to depart from my chronology and jump ahead a couple of weeks to the day before Jesus enters Jerusalem on what we celebrate as Palm Sunday. In 28 AD, almost 2000 years ago, the day of Jesus’ procession into the city of Jerusalem happened on April 24.   As you know, the date for Passover/Easter can vary as much as 35 days, and can fall as late as April 25.   But today, we will discuss what happened 6 days before Passover on the day before that triumphal entry.  But first, think back to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.  Remember when Jesus preached in Nazareth and read from the Isaiah scroll?

Luke 4:16-18  And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read.  And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.

What Jesus literally read in the scroll of Isaiah, in Hebrew, was, “The spirit of the Lord Yehovah is upon me because Yehovah has ‘mashach’ me.”    Mashach means ‘anointed.’  The same word in another form is ‘Mashiach’ or ‘Messiah,’ which means ‘the anointed one.’  (The Greek translation of ‘Messiah’ is ‘Christos’ which our English Bibles translate as ‘Christ.’)  These titles for Jesus – Messiah, Christ — all mean “the anointed one.” When you say Jesus Christ, you say Jesus, the anointed one.  And Jesus claims Isaiah’s prophecy.  The Spirit of Yehovah is upon Jesus because Yehovah has anointed Jesus.

In the Old Testament, anointing with oil is a ritual used to signify that an individual was consecrated, designated, and empowered by God. Three groups of people are anointed with special oils: prophets, priests, and kings.  

First, Prophets are anointed.  Elijah is here commanded by God to anoint Elisha as a prophet to take his place.

1 Kings 19:16  “… Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah you shall anoint to be prophet in your place.”

Elijah’s time as a prophet is over, so he is told to anoint Elisha.  You could view this like a runner handing off the baton to the next runner in a relay race.  It is actually more like a pitcher handing the baseball over to his relief pitcher.  He is being removed from the game because he hasn’t done well.  For now, see that Elisha is anointed for the task of a prophet.  With the anointing, God has called Elisha out and empowered him for the task with the Holy Spirit.

Priests are anointed.  Aaron and his sons are to serve as the first priests of Israel.  To set them aside for the task, they are anointed.

Exodus 28:41  “And you shall put them on Aaron your brother, and on his sons with him, and shall anoint them and ordain them and consecrate them, that they may serve me as priests.”

And Kings are anointed.   Here, Samuel anoints Saul as King:

1 Samuel 9:27-10:1   As they were going down to the outskirts of the city, Samuel said to Saul, “Tell the servant to pass on before us, and when he has passed on, stop here yourself for a while, that I may make known to you the word of God.”   Then Samuel took a flask of oil and poured it on his head and kissed him and said, “Has not the Yehovah anointed you to be prince over his people Israel? And you shall reign over the people of the Yehovah, and you will save them from the hand of their surrounding enemies.

After his anointing, Samuel tells Saul that he will meet a group of prophets and then

1 Samuel 10:6  “Then the Spirit of Yehovah will rush upon you, and you will prophesy with them and be turned into another man.

With the anointing of the king, the Spirit of God comes on Saul, and he is “Turned into another man.”  This is the effect when God anoints someone—they become a new man with new goals, a new focus, and new power.  When God anoints you, your life takes on new meaning; the old you dies, and you become the person God created you to be. 

We see the same when David is anointed by Samuel:

1 Samuel 16:13  “Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers. And the Spirit of Yehovah rushed upon David from that day forward.” 

David was anointed and set aside for God’s task for David to be a king.  And he was empowered by the Holy Spirit to do that job.  This process of anointing runs all through the Bible. And when Jesus reads from Isaiah in Nazareth, he says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me.”

So let me ask you a question.  When was Jesus anointed?  When did the Holy Spirit descend on Jesus?   Right, at his baptism.  

Matthew 3:16. “And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him.”

There, God sets Jesus aside with the specific task he had been created for.  There, his 70-week ministry begins.  Like Elisha, Aaron, and David, whom God created to fulfill the roles of prophet, priest, and king, there is this moment of anointing when God interrupts and changes their path to become the people God created them to be.  A person empowered by the Holy Spirit to do the work God set up for them to do.

Peter makes this clear in his conversation with Cornelius in Acts 10:

Acts 10:37-38  “…you yourselves know what happened throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee after the baptism that John proclaimed: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power.”

In Nazareth, Jesus claimed this anointing by God, being chosen, set aside, and empowered by God to do the ultimate task: to bring salvation to mankind.  But there are two other anointings of Jesus.  Jesus was anointed twice with oil.  Both times by a woman.  The first at the house of a pharisee by a woman of ill repute (Luke 7:36-50) and the second at the house of Simon, the former leper by Mary, sister of Lazarus (Matthew 26:6-13, Mark 14:3-9, and John 12:1-8.). It is this episode I want to look at this morning, as it happens the day before the Palm Sunday triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

John 12:1-8   Six days before the Passover, Jesus therefore came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.  So they gave a dinner for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at table.  Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.  But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was about to betray him), said,  “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?”  He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it.  Jesus said, “Leave her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial.  For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”

“Six days before Passover.”  I have to say a bit about the timing here, as it can be very confusing.  For many years, the common belief was that Jesus was crucified on a Friday.   This was because the Bible said that (John 19:31) that Jesus was crucified the day before the Sabbath.

John 19:31   “Since it was the day of Preparation, and so that the bodies would not remain on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken and that they might be taken away.”

Well, scholars then didn’t know much about Judaism, but they knew the Sabbath was Saturday, so that meant Jesus had to be crucified on a Friday, so his body had to be removed from the cross before the Saturday Sabbath started at sundown.

Except…. there are a few problems here.  First, John says it was the “day of preparation.”   That is the day when all the preparations are made for the Passover meal:  preparing all the special food, killing the lamb in the temple, and roasting it.  But wait, haven’t we all been taught that the Last Supper was a Passover meal?  Yet John makes it clear here and in several other places that the Passover meal is not held until after the crucifixion.  (Don’t just believe what tradition teaches you — read the Scriptures.)

Secondly, John specifically said that this Sabbath was a ‘high day,’ a special Sabbath, and not the regular 7th day Sabbath. You only know this if you study Leviticus, and well, we know people don’t read Leviticus.  In fact, during the 8-day Passover celebration, there are typically 3 Sabbaths. Leviticus 23:6-8 tells us that the day after Passover preparation day, the day after the lambs are killed, is always a Sabbath, no matter what day of the week it falls.  

Leviticus 23:5-8  “In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at twilight, is Yehovah’s Passover.  And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the Feast of Unleavened Bread to Yehovah; for seven days you shall eat unleavened bread.  On the first day you shall have a holy convocation; you shall not do any ordinary work.   But you shall present a food offering to Yehovah for seven days. On the seventh day is a holy convocation; you shall not do any ordinary work.”

So, day 1 and day 7 are special Sabbaths. It is this Sabbath that comes the day after Jesus is crucified, so that verse in John doesn’t tell us anything about the day of the week of Jesus’ crucifixion.

The Friday crucifixion also does not fulfill the sign on the prophet Jonah that Jesus mentioned more than once (Matthew 12:40 and 16:4, for example).  The only way Jesus could be in the tomb for the three full days and nights is if he was crucified on a Wednesday and resurrected at the close of the weekly Sabbath and the beginning of the first day of the week (which was the day celebrated as the feast of Firstfruits.)  That would give Jesus Wednesday night and Thursday morning, Thursday night and Friday morning, and then Friday night and Saturday morning.  He could be resurrected anytime after sundown Saturday which is the beginning of the first day of the week (our Sunday.)  

Finally, remember that in this first-century culture, people believed the spirit did not depart from the body until after 3 days and nights — it hung around the body, deciding if it was to depart or return to the body.  That is the reason Jesus delayed going to Bethany to raise Lazarus from the dead until after that time was over, so no one would deny it was a miracle.  Would Jesus’ resurrection be any different?  If he was placed in the tomb on Friday afternoon and raised on Sunday morning, that is less than 48 hours.  It would not qualify as a miracle for anyone in Jesus’ day.  He had to be in the tomb for at least three days and nights to qualify as an undeniable conquest of death. 

So a Friday crucifixion just doesn’t fit with the scriptures.  Nor does the Last Supper being a Passover dinner.  Again, don’t just believe the tradition you’ve heard.  Go home and read the scriptures.  If you find something you don’t understand, then discuss it with others.  Read the book!

All that being said, the bottom line is that the date doesn’t really matter.  Please don’t let this information about timing be your take-home message from this blog.  This is not the important part.   I have no trouble celebrating Good Friday, even though I know the crucifixion had to happen earlier.  (Good Wednesday just doesn’t have the same ring to it.)  What is important is not when it happened but that it happened.   And there is no doubt in the Scriptures that the resurrection happened on the first day of the week, our Sunday.  Everyone agrees on that and that is the important part.

But back to John 12.  There is a big dinner party for Jesus in Bethany six days before Passover (five days before the crucifixion).  It is at the house of a man named Simon, who had been healed of the disease ‘Lepra.’  And, of course, Lazarus and his sisters are invited.  It is only fitting that the used-to-be leper invites the used-to-be dead guy to the party.  They have a lot in common.  Lazarus had to have been a popular person now.  Don’t tell me you don’t think somebody at that dinner party wasn’t saying, Hey Lazarus, what was it like being dead?  

Then Mary comes in with an ointment and begins to anoint Jesus’ feet.  What is Mary doing?  It was an expected act of hospitality to anoint a guest in your home with a small portion of oil on their forehead.  But Mary is not the host, and she is not anointing his head but his feet.  And she is using a very expensive ointment instead of common oil.  We are told in our passage that the amount she used would be worth a year’s salary.

To Mary, Jesus is not just another person at the dinner table.  She has sat under his teaching.  He has been in her home many times.  She believes him to be more than just another itinerant rabbi or prophet.  Just a few weeks ago, she watched as he brought her brother back from the dead.  To Mary, Jesus is so much more.  He is her Messiah, the promised one, the anointed one.  And so she pays a dear price, a year’s wages, to anoint Jesus as a way of proclaiming him as not just the Messiah but her Messiah, her anointed one.

Imagine, just a few weeks ago, Mary and her sister lovingly anointed their brother’s dead body with fragrant oils in preparation for burial.  But now Lazarus lives, and the difference is her Messiah.  Now, in her presence is this promised Messiah who is anointed by God to become King.   She is aware that his time is short.  Jesus has not been secretive about this.  He is on his way to Jerusalem, where the religious authorities are going to kill him.  How can she best show her love and devotion to this Messiah who has raised her brother to life?  She can give him her best in anointing him as her King, as her prophet, as her priest.  And she feels she is not worthy even to anoint his head, so she anoints his feet.  She wipes them with her hair.   She lowers herself as a servant to show honor to her king.

And John, in his Gospel, as an eyewitness of Mary’s actions, is struck with one detail:

“The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

The scent fills the room, an important detail we should not miss. Again, this is not just any oil, but the most expensive ointment of nard made from a plant imported to Israel from far away, likely India. It is a powerful fragrance that fills the room.  Only the very wealthy could afford to use any perfume daily.  Perhaps the wealthiest of the religious elite in Jerusalem could use common fragrances on occasion.  But imported ointments like this were reserved for special occasions for kings.  

Throughout the Bible, instead of being crowned during a coronation, Hebrew kings were anointed with sacred oil perfumed with extremely expensive spices used only on kings and in the temple.   The scent of this extravagant perfume would spread far, like a cloud of holiness.  Anyone with that fragrance would be recognized as anointed for a sacred royal purpose.  As Lois Tverberg notes, “In the ancient Middle East, the majesty of a king was expressed not only by what he wore — his jewelry and robes — but by his royal “aroma.”  Even after a king was first anointed, he would perfume his robes with precious oils for special occasions.”1

Look at part of Psalm 45, which is King David’s wedding psalm.

Psalm 45:7-8   You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness.
Therefore God, your God, has anointed you
with the oil of gladness beyond your companions;
  your robes are all fragrant with myrrh and aloes and cassia.

The aroma of David’s robes makes it clear to all that he has been anointed by God.

During royal processions, the fragrance of expensive oils would inform the crowds that a king was passing by.  You would note the fragrance of a king even before you could see him.  Look at how Solomon’s procession is described in Song of Solomon:

Song of Solomon 3:6-7   “What is that coming up from the wilderness like columns of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all the fragrant powders of a merchant? Behold, it is the litter of Solomon! Around it are sixty mighty men, some of the mighty men of Israel…”

Now let’s look at one more procession of Solomon. His coronation entry into Jerusalem.

1 Kings 1:38–40  “So Zadok the priest, Nathan the prophet, and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, and the Cherethites and the Pelethites went down and had Solomon ride on King David’s mule and brought him to Gihon. There Zadok the priest took the horn of oil from the tent and anointed Solomon. Then they blew the trumpet, and all the people said, “Long live King Solomon!”  And all the people went up after him, playing on pipes, and rejoicing with great joy, so that the earth was split by their noise.”

Solomon was anointed with the oil and fragrance of kings and placed on a donkey and rides into Jerusalem with a procession of people shouting praise of the coming king.  Does this remind you of anything?

It is 6 days before Passover.  And it is not the religious authorities that anoint Jesus. No, they are against him, seeking to kill him.  Instead, it is one of his followers, one of the common people who have seen his miracles and accepted him as their Messiah.  It is a simple woman.  She anoints Jesus, and the following day, he rides a donkey like Solomon on the same path into Jerusalem.  And the crowd is not greeting just any prophet or rabbi.  

They are shouting out “Hosanna!  In Hebrew, that is two words: “Hosha na,” which literally means ‘save, please.’  And they shout, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel.”  They all know the scripture. They recognize the story of Solomon’s triumphal entry happening again before their eyes, and now they are proclaiming that the promised Son of David, their Messiah, has come.  And he will bring salvation.  And it all began with the anointing by a simple woman who loved him and had faith in him and gave all she had.  And that fragrance of a king remained with Jesus until his death.  Everywhere he went in that final week, his presence would have been preceded by the aroma of a king.  When the soldiers drove the nail into his feet, they would smell the aroma of a king.

The aroma of Christ still persists in our world today.  The fragrance that Mary anointed Jesus with has faded, but it is renewed by every follower today.  Paul recognized this.  Look at the words he used to describe it:

2 Corinthians 2:14-16  “But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere.  For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things?

That Palm Sunday triumphal procession is a public acknowledgment of faith in the Son of David, the promised Messiah, our anointed one who continues to bring salvation.  It is this proclamation that spreads the knowledge of him everywhere.  We are the aroma of Christ when we lift Him up and share the knowledge of his salvation.  How will you share the knowledge of our Messiah today?  How will you be the aroma of Christ today?  Will you spread the fragrance of the knowledge of him and speak of Him to your friends as you gather in your homes, as you work, as you go on your way? Will you demonstrate your faith in Him by acts of kindness and sacrifice as Mary did to Jesus?   In as much as we do these deeds of kindness to the least of these, we do these things like Mary, directly to Jesus.

We are now the anointed.  We have been set apart by God for a task, and empowered by the Holy Spirit to complete that task. And as the prophet Samuel said, when you are anointed by the Holy Spirit you become a new man.  Just as God anointed Jesus at his baptism with the Holy Spirit, God anoints us with that same spirit.  Paul said it this way:

2 Corinthians 1:21-22  And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.

To conclude, go back to what Jesus read from Isaiah in Nazareth:

Luke 4:18-19   The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

The year of the Lord’s favor is what we have been talking about this past year.   That period — just over a year of Jesus’ ministry on earth. That is the year of God’s favor — the time that God gave the greatest gift to us in his Son.  

The Spirit of the Lord is upon us.  We have good news for the poor; we have the message of liberty to those held captive by sin, by regret, by addiction.  We have sight for the blind and freedom for those who are oppressed.  It is our ministry now.  We live in a world full of people who feel they have no purpose, people living lives of regret, people who feel they are only failures, people held captive in a depressing world of emptiness.  Will you accept the anointing of God on your life and become that new person, that Holy Spirit-filled person who will fulfill the task God has prepared for you to do?  Will you be the aroma of Christ to a world in need?

1.  Spangler, Ann; Tverberg, Lois. Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus (2009)  Kindle Edition.

March 20, 27 A.D.  –  Can You Drink the Cup? — The Year of the Lord’s Favor #77

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , ,

Week 57 — Can You Drink the Cup?
Matthew 20:17-23

Jesus is on his final tour of Galilee and will soon be taking the long journey back to Jerusalem with all the other pilgrims headed to the Passover feast.   And our itinerant Rabbi Jesus continues to teach all along the way.

Matthew 20:17-23   And as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside, and on the way he said to them,  “See, we are going up to Jerusalem. And the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified, and he will be raised on the third day.”
  Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came up to him with her sons, and kneeling before him she asked him for something.   And he said to her, “What do you want?” She said to him, “Say that these two sons of mine are to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.”   Jesus answered, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” They said to him, “We are able.” He said to them, “You will drink my cup, but to sit at my right hand and at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.”

So James and John come to Jesus with their mother, who has been traveling with Jesus often.  She is specifically mentioned as being with Mary Magdalene and “many women” who were at the crucifixion, “looking on from a distance” (Matthew 27:55-56).   What are they asking Jesus?    They are seeking a prominent place of honor when Jesus comes into his kingdom.  Is that a ridiculous request?  

Jesus had just told the disciples  a few days ago: 

Matthew 19:28.  Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”

Jesus had put them in the position of princes in the kingdom, sitting on thrones, so they were asking to be chief of the princes.  But their timing is horrible.   Look back at what Jesus said just before they made their request:

Matthew 20:18-19   And the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified, and he will be raised on the third day.”
Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came up to him…

This is the first time he explicitly mentions being crucified.  It is the Jewish court that will condemn him and hand him over to the Romans to be crucified.  Following what had to be an emotional revelation by Jesus about his impending torture and agonizing death, Matthew says, “Then James and John and his mother ask to have a place of honor in the kingdom.  This is horribly insensitive.  

Jesus: In just a few days, I am going to be tortured and then die the worst death imaginable: crucifixion.”
Then his disciples say,  “OK… well then, can we be in charge when you are gone?

The disciples are having trouble grasping the words they are hearing.  Perhaps it is because, throughout their lives and for hundreds of years in their culture, they have been told that the Messiah will come into power and restore the throne of David to Israel.   They are still hanging on to that traditional understanding of what the Messiah would do.  They can’t really understand Jesus’ words until they let go of the misconceptions they had held for years.  They need to become as little children and drop what they think they already know.  But they hear what they want to hear (‘Oh great! We get to sit on thrones!’) and don’t consider the hard parts.  Some things they will not understand until they face the reality of the crucifixion.

So when they asked to sit on Jesus’ right and left, Jesus answered them,  “You don’t know what you are asking.”  Jesus knew they didn’t understand, but he tried to help them understand. He said, “Are you able to drink the cup that I must drink?”

Now we have to stop. Maybe you, like me, grew up in a church where no one really taught you the actual context of the Old Testament and how the themes of the first two-thirds of the Bible were so important to understanding Jesus’ words. The metaphor of ‘the cup’ is a very important concept in Scripture, and Jesus expects us to have learned this from our study of the Scripture.  

Maybe, like me, you grew up in church and had Sunday School lessons year after year about how strong Sampson was — but no one ever told you that he is in the Bible to be an example of how not to follow God.  Or you heard stories of Noah and all the cute animals on the ark, but no one ever told you how it was a de-creation event and what we should learn from it.   Or you talked about the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus and how the Israelites walked through it but never considered how passing through waters gives you background for your baptism or how the Biblical feasts are fulfilled in Jesus and in our future.  I am afraid we have failed to teach people the importance of studying scripture.   We dilute it into cute stories for children and then never move past that point as adults. 

Jesus assumes we have been obedient and studied the book.  If we haven’t, we can’t possibly understand what he is saying.  If the God of the Universe says, ”Hey David if you want to know more about me, how I suggest you live, and how I can help you, I wrote this book for you.”  And God puts it on my table, and I say, “Well, maybe I’ll find some time to read it later.  I’m in the middle of a Netflix series right now.” or “Sorry, God, I don’t like to read.” God has put a great treasure in our field, and we won’t even go to the trouble to dig it up.

So, there are no cute Bible stories for you today because we need to understand how Jesus used the common Bible metaphor of the cup.  The cup Jesus refers to is the cup of wrath, the cup of judgment.  If we don’t understand that, we can never understand Jesus.

We talked before about how God described himself as being slow to anger.   And we see in the scriptures that God gets most angry with those he has entered into covenant with.  Israel’s covenant with God, and our covenant with God, is described as a marriage, and when we choose to disobey God and follow idols of our own making, it is seen as adultery.  (You get the most angry with the ones you love or are closest to.)  And how is God’s anger revealed in the Old Testament? How does God’s judgment come?  Moses was the first to talk about this in Deuteronomy 31.

Deuteronomy 31:16-18   And Yehovah said to Moses, “Behold, you are about to lie down with your fathers. Then this people will rise and whore after the foreign gods among them in the land that they are entering, and they will forsake me and break my covenant that I have made with them. Then my anger will be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them and hide my face from them, and they will be devoured. And many evils and troubles will come upon them, so that they will say in that day, ‘Have not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?’  And I will surely hide my face in that day because of all the evil that they have done, because they have turned to other gods.

They broke the covenant by worshipping other gods.  They left God.  So God leaves them, and God hides his face.  Hiding his face means that God removes his protection from them.  Without God’s continual protection, they are forced to reap what they have sown.  An enemy, some foreign nation, comes and conquers them.  That’s how Israel ended up in slavery in Egypt, how they were defeated by armies in the conquest of the promised land, how Assyria defeated the Northern Kingdom, how Babylon defeated the Southern Kingdom, and how Israel was defeated by Rome just 40 years after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.  God hides his face, and an enemy conquers Israel.

Psalm 75 adds another common Biblical metaphor for God’s anger — the cup of wrath.

Psalms 75:8  For in the hand of Yehovah, there is a cup with foaming wine, well mixed, and he pours out from it, and all the wicked of the earth shall drain it down to the dregs.

Imagine a large cup in God’s hand.   Over the years, it slowly fills up with God’s judgment for the sins of his people, Israel. It may take a century of sins, but when it is full, God will pour it out on Israel, and they will have to drink it all, all of the building judgment against them.  They will stagger and fall as they suffer his judgment, which comes in the form of defeat by foreign nations.

The prophets rise in Israel to reveal the four parts of God’s judgment on Israel for their refusal to repent.  First, they let them know judgment is coming unless they repent – their sins are filling up the cup with judgment and will be poured out on Israel unless they repent.   

Then, they are told God hides his face, and a surrounding nation, an enemy, becomes the instrument of his judgment.  And they often reveal which nation God has chosen to be his instrument of punishment.  Whether Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, or Rome, God hides his face, removes his protection, and the evil conquering nation will come in to devastate Israel. Third, After the cup has been emptied and all judgment poured out, God will restore a remnant of Israel. 

Finally, justice must be dealt to the nations that served as God’s instruments, for they are not without sin.  They arrogantly believed they were so great that they could conquer God’s people, not understanding that they were only serving as a rod in God’s hand and were only victorious because God allowed them to be.  We see this cycle repeat many times in the Scriptures.

We see this in Isaiah.  The first part of Isaiah, chapters 1-39, reveals his prophecy that Israel will suffer God’s judgment through attacks by Assyria and Babylon.  The second part of Isaiah discusses what happens when the cup has been emptied, and the nation that conquered Israel has to receive the cup.  So, in Isaiah 51, we see that the cup has been emptied on Israel.

 Isaiah 51:22-23  Thus says your Lord, Yehovah, your God who pleads the cause of his people: “Behold, I have taken from your hand the cup of staggering; the bowl of my wrath you shall drink no more; and I will put it into the hand of your tormentors, who have said to you, ‘Bow down, that we may pass over’; and you have made your back like the ground and like the street for them to pass over.”

One hundred years later, we see this happen, just as Isaiah had said. The cup was poured out during the time of the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

Jeremiah 25:15-18   Thus Yehovah, the God of Israel, said to me: “Take from my hand this cup of the wine of wrath, and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it.  They shall drink and stagger and be crazed because of the sword that I am sending among them.” So I took the cup from the LORD’S hand, and made all the nations to whom the LORD sent me drink it: Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, its kings and officials, to make them a desolation and a waste, a hissing and a curse…

Then follows a list of nations that will soon drink the cup.  

Jeremiah 25:19-26  Pharaoh king of Egypt….all the kings of the land of Uz and all the kings of the land of the Philistines,…Edom, Moab, and the sons of Ammon; Tyre, Sidon, and the kings of the coastland across the sea;….and all the kingdoms of the world that are on the face of the earth.

And that is what happened in the 6th century BC.   The nation of Babylon conquered every nation described in the Bible.  Then, after the cup has been emptied on all the kingdoms, after God has allowed Babylon to be the rod in his hand, the nation that executes his judgment, then, because Babylon is also a nation of evil, 

Jeremiah 25:26. “…And after them the king of Babylon shall drink.

So we see that Israel fell to Babylon initially around 600 BC, Babylon fell to Persia in 539 BC, and then a remnant of Israel returned home. It happened over and over again. The people abandoned God and worshipped idols. The cup of judgment filled until God turned his face, removing his protection. And the cup was poured out in the form of another nation conquering Israel.

This is why we find Jesus bitterly weeping over the city of Jerusalem.  John the Baptist was a prophet who came with the warning to repent, but they did not.   Jesus came as a prophet with a similar message.  But as with many prophets before them, they were killed by the very people they came to warn.

Matthew 23:37-38     “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!  See, your house is left to you desolate.”

God’s protection will be lifted, and the Romans will decide to destroy the city and the Temple completely, killing over 600,000 and enslaving many more.  But something different is happening this time.   Jesus has come. We, like Israel in Jesus’ day, live in a world of sin.  We are all sinners.  So, our sins are slowly filling up a cup of judgment for us.  And that cup must be poured out.  But in the first century, God came to earth, took the cup of judgment in our place, and came with a cup of salvation.

John 3:17-18 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

 God has sent his son into the world to take the judgment for us, to drink the cup of judgment for us.  And I believe if all of Israel had accepted Jesus as God’s son, as their Messiah, then they would not have had the cup of Judgment on them and not been destroyed by Rome.  But they did not believe and thus were condemned.

But Jesus, who knew no sin, took our place on the cross and accepted the cup of judgment for all the world’s sins.  Jesus knows how horrible the cup of suffering will be.  In the garden of Gethsemane, just before he is betrayed and arrested, he prays: 

Matthew 26:39  “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” 

Jesus is in deep distress, knowing he will have the cup of judgment and suffering poured on him.  He is sweating drops of blood.  Twice, he asks God if there is any other way to accomplish the task.  But he is willing to take the cup of suffering if there is no other way.   

Then, when the guards who were meant to arrest him approached him, Simon rose and struck them with his sword.

John 18:10-11  Then Simon Peter, having a sword, drew it and struck the high priest’s servant and cut off his right ear. (The servant’s name was Malchus.)   So Jesus said to Peter, “Put your sword into its sheath; shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?”

The Father has spoken.  Jesus is to drink the cup of judgment in our place.  So when Jesus is tortured and crucified, it is the cup of wrath and judgment being poured out on Jesus.  The cup that had filled over the centuries by the sins of man, by our sins.  The accumulated wrath that should have been poured out on all humanity, for all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God.  All of that judgment poured out on Jesus.  

So let me ask you, was God angry at Jesus on the cross?  Did God forsake Jesus?  Did God turn his face from Jesus as he took the cup of wrath for our sins?  The Bible says he did not.  Let me show you. 

Psalm 22 tells the story of the crucifixion, which we can easily see now that we know the details in the gospels.  Jesus calls this Psalm out from the cross.  Remember that there were no chapter numbers until over a thousand years after Jesus.  The way to identify a particular passage in the Bible was by quoting the first line.

Matthew 27:46   My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Psalms 22:1   My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

So, for those at the crucifixion who knew scripture, Jesus turned their minds to Psalm 22 by quoting the first line of the psalm.  Most Jews there had that Psalm memorized, and now they can see the Psalm being acted out before their eyes.  Psalm 22 mentions one who is tortured, scorned, and despised by people.  It says that people mock this man and tell him that if he trusts God, let God deliver him—just as happened to Jesus on the cross. The psalm mentions that people divide his clothes and cast lots for his garment, just as the soldiers did for Jesus’ clothing.

Psalm 22 ends with these words:

Psalm 22:30-31  “…it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation; they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it.”

In Hebrew, the final word is ‘עָשָֽׂה’ ‘Asah.’  It can be translated as “it is done.” or, as our English New Testaments say, “It is finished.”

John records Jesus’ last words : 

John 19:30   When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

Jesus quotes the beginning and end of Psalm 22, and we see in that Psalm a story of the crucifixion—a story of one who was not forsaken but redeemed by the Father. We see it clearly in verse 24:

Psalm 22:24,  “For God has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he had not hidden his face from him but has heard when he cried to him.

God did not turn his face from the afflicted one, Jesus.  Jesus hung on the cross in our place and received the cup of judgment, the cup of suffering for the sins of the world.  But God had no anger for Jesus, only love. 

The man pictured above on the left is Franciszek Gajowniczek -He was a Polish soldier captured by Nazi troops and imprisoned in Auschwitz concentration camp.  After one prisoner managed to escape, the commander of the prison ordered that in reprisal, ten prisoners would be chosen at random to die.    Gajowniczek was one of the ten randomly chosen to die. But the man pictured on the right above, Raymund Kolbe, a Polish priest who was also a prisoner, volunteered to die in Gajowniczek’s place.   He was killed by lethal injection on August 14, 1941.   Gajowniczek survived the prison and the war and became a lay missionary. Kolbe took another’s punishment voluntarily. This is an act of love.

Jesus was the innocent one who stepped in our place to receive the cup of Judgment.  He was not guilty of the sins that filled the cup.   So, God was not angry with Jesus. In fact, God looked at Jesus on the cross with great love, that Jesus would lay down his life for the world.  

Remember when we talked about Jesus getting angry at Lazarus’ tomb?  What was Jesus angry about?  He was angry about death, and Jesus came to do battle with death and raise Lazarus from the dead.    And at the cross, Yehovah God has come to do battle with death and remove the sting of death and the victory of sin.  So while God, with one hand, pours out the cup of wrath on Jesus and Jesus suffers the judgment that should be on us, God lovingly holds Jesus close with his other hand.  The true message of the cross is not that of an angry God but that of a loving God willing to suffer in our place.

So Jesus asks James and John:

“Are you able to drink the cup that I must drink?”

They said to him, “We are able.” He said to them, “You will drink my cup, but to sit at my right hand and at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.”

Who will be on Jesus’ right and left?

“And with him, they crucified two insurrectionists, one on his right and one on his left.”

With Jesus on his right and left are two guilty of rebellion against Rome.  That is the crime that will eventually cause Rome to destroy Jerusalem.  And they represent us all, for we are all guilty and deserve the cup of suffering and death.   And they represent mankind, for one will accept Jesus as his redeemer.  One will allow Jesus to take the cup of wrath for him.  And the other will not and will have to take the cup of wrath, the punishment for his sins himself.

But those who accept Jesus and his standing in their place do not have to take the cup of judgment.  

Romans 8:1   There is, therefore, now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

But as Jesus told James and John, “You will drink my cup.”    You will drink this cup of suffering.  All of the disciples will drink a cup of suffering.  All of them but John will die a martyr’s death.  We learn of James’ death in Acts 12.

Acts 12:1-2   About that time, Herod the King laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church.   He killed James, the brother of John, with the sword.

His brother, John, history tells us, is thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil by Emperor Domitian.  John miraculously escapes, and the emperor exiles him to the island of Patmos.  And thousands of Christians in the first century drank the cup of suffering, tortured and killed by men.

However, the cup of suffering they drink is unlike the one Jesus consumes.  It is not the cup of God’s judgment against man’s sins, but they will take the cup of man’s wrath against God and his followers.   The suffering they receive will be from man alone.

The Greek word ‘martus,’ from which we get our word ‘martyr,’ is not one who dies but is one who is a witness.  The word is most commonly used in Greek for a witness in a trial.  Hundreds of years later, it came to mean those who died for the faith.  But the root of the word is ‘witness.’

God is not calling many of us now to be martyrs in the modern sense of dying for our faith, but he is calling every one of us to be martyrs in the New Testament sense of being a witness to the faith.  You might indeed be asked to die for your faith one day.  Or, if not you, perhaps your child. And if and when that time comes, I pray we will accept that fate joyfully.  But the bigger question today is not “What will you do if God calls you to die for your faith, but it is “What will you do if God calls you to live every day of your life in faithful service for him, never losing your hope, never lagging in your zeal, being a faithful witness to the end,” would you drink from that cup?

Living for Jesus every day means dying to oneself every day.  Jesus said, 

Luke 9:23, “If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” 

Jesus felt the words when he said take up your cross daily.  Jesus and his disciples had seen men crucified.  This is not an easy thing to hear.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: 

“Jesus says that every Christian has his cross waiting for him, a cross destined and appointed by God. Each must endure his allotted share of suffering and rejection. But each has a different share: some God deems worthy of the highest form of suffering, and gives them the grace of martyrdom, while others he does not allow to be tempted above that they are able to bear. But it is the one and the same cross in every case. … ”1

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”2

And Jesus asks:  Are you willing to drink from that cup?

Paul, because of his ministry, faced death often.  But he said the only point in his living was

Philippians 3:10   — that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

The King James Version poetically calls this “sharing in the fellowship of his sufferings.”

Are you willing to drink from that cup?

The communion table will soon be before us.  And we do not take it lightly.   Paul says this in 1 Corinthians:

1 Corinthians 11:27   Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord.  Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.  For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. 

When we take the bread and the cup in the Lord’s Supper, we acknowledge the depth of the sacrifice Jesus made for us, standing in our place to take on himself the cup of judgment for our sins.  And we acknowledge our willingness to join in the fellowship of his suffering, to take ourselves the cup of suffering, to come and die.

Jesus asks the question, “Can you drink the cup that I must drink?”  If we take that seriously, it will radically change our lives.  Jesus asks us if we are willing to suffer for him as he suffered for us.  We can not accept the joy of the resurrection in our lives without accepting the sorrow of his suffering and death in our lives also.  Can you say ‘yes’ to Jesus today when he asks if you are willing to take his cup, the cup of suffering, the cup of blessing, the cup of salvation?

  1. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship.
  2. Ibid.

March 20, 27 A.D.  –  The “Other” Good Samaritan — The Year of the Lord’s Favor #76

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , ,

Week 56 — The “Other” Good Samaritan
Luke 17:12-19

After raising Lazarus from the dead, we discussed last week how the Sanhedrin met, and the high priest Caiaphus concluded that Jesus must die.  But Jesus was on God’s schedule, not Caiaphus’.  Caiaphus would rather arrest Jesus and kill him right now.  Passover is coming up, and it is a time when the population of Jerusalem in Jesus’ day would swell from around 125,000 to over 600,000 as pilgrims came from everywhere for this required feast.  From Caiaphus’ perspective, that would be the absolute worst time to do away with Jesus when all of his followers from Galilee are there.  He is trying to avoid the possible riot that would cause Rome to intervene.    He would rather kill Jesus quietly.

But God determined long ago the day and the hour Jesus would die on the cross. The same day and hour as the final Passover lamb was killed.  God wanted to ensure we don’t miss the picture he is painting in history.  Jesus will be killed as a Passover lamb to defeat the enemy of death, just as the blood of the first Passover lamb prevented the death of the firstborn in Egypt.  That is God’s timing.  That is Jesus’ kairos.

Since it is not quite time for Jesus to die,  he has time to make one last tour to teach and preach in Samaria and Galilee.  John 11:54 tells us that after raising Lazarus, due to the increased pressure on Jesus, he withdraws to a small Village, Ephraim, for a few weeks.  Jesus will then head through Samaria and then through Galilee one last time.  There, he will join the people from Galilee on their pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover.

So, at the time of our scripture this morning, Jesus has spent time in Ephraim and passed through the region of Samaria to arrive at the northernmost part of Samaria.  It is just outside a small village near the border with Galilee where our story this morning takes place.  We have talked previously about the racial conflict between the Samaritans and the Jews.  By Jesus’ day, it was 600 years in the making.  J. Daniel Hays, in his book “From Every People and Nation: A Biblical Theory of Race,” said, “The ethnic and cultural boundary between the Jews and the Samaritans was every bit as hostile as the current boundary between Blacks and Whites in the most racist areas of the United States.1. It was as ugly and as frequently violent as the worst times of racial problems in our country.

The first time Jesus passed through Samaria was in May. Most Jews avoided traveling through Samaria altogether, so Jesus shocked his disciples by choosing this route. They would never consider going there. But it is there, on his first journey through Samaria, that Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well. Remember, Jesus asked her for a drink of water.  

John 4:9   The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) 

She is shocked that this Jew would even be in Samaria, much less speak to her.  But she is most surprised that he would drink from her vessel.  Can you imagine someone refusing to give water to someone in the heat of the day?  Can you imagine people refusing to drink water from the same vessel as another just because they are a different race?  For those of us in the US who remember the 1960s, it is not hard to imagine.

Jesus traveled through Samaria again in October when they went to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles. On this second trip through the region, he sent some disciples ahead of him to arrange a place to stay in a village of Samaria. But the Samaritans there refused to let Jews stay. This, too, is not hard for Americans to imagine.  The disciples were angry at being turned away by the Samaritans, and James and John asked Jesus if they could retaliate:

Luke 9:54  And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”

And how does Jesus react?  

Luke 9:55-56   But he turned and rebuked them.  And they went on to another village.

I wish I knew what Jesus said in his rebuke of them. Did he just give them a look or roll his eyes, or did he launch into a fiery sermon? We don’t know, but we do know that six weeks later, Jesus tells a parable to combat these racist attitudes further.

We all know the parable of the Good Samaritan.  The story is told in answer to the law expert’s two questions, “How can I make sure I get eternal life?” and “Who is my neighbor?”  The story’s surprise is how the Samaritan shows love to people that the current culture says he is supposed to hate. The Samaritan, not the priest or the Levite, is righteous in the story. Jesus tells the law expert if he wants to live life God’s way, he will have to drop any racism and treat those he viewed as enemies as a neighbor to love.  

And now, in Jesus’ last few weeks before his crucifixion, we find him purposely teaching in Samaria for a third time, demonstrating the same lesson.  Jesus is trying to undo 600 years of racial tensions between the Jews and Samaritans.  And later, in the Book of Acts, we discover that the disciples finally understood.   In Acts chapter 8, right after the stoning of Stephen, the persecution of the Christians by Saul and the Jews increased, and Jesus’ followers fled Judea.

Acts 8:4-8   Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word.  Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed to them the Christ.  And the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip, when they heard him and saw the signs that he did.  For unclean spirits, crying out with a loud voice, came out of many who had them, and many who were paralyzed or lame were healed.  So there was much joy in that city.

And here, near the border of Samaria and Galilee, just outside a village, Jesus meets 10 lepers.

Luke 17:12   And as he entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”

We have discussed before what your English translations say is leprosy.  Remember that the Greek ‘lepra’ is not the disease we identify as leprosy today.  Lepra was a collection of skin diseases that were not medically harmful but did lead to social isolation due to the Levitical purity laws.  A person with lepra was ritually impure.  They were required to live outside the camp or village.  There was no known medical treatment.

So these 10 stayed together outside this small village on the northern border of Samaria and Galilee.  They call out to Jesus from a distance, asking him to have mercy on them.  Jesus doesn’t tell them they are healed but tells them to go and show themselves to the priests.  If a person with lepra was healed, then under Levitical law, they were not allowed to reenter the city until they completed an 8-day process. First, they had to appear at the gates and ask for a priest to inspect them.  If the priest pronounces them healed, they would make the prescribed sacrifices and, after a 7-day waiting period, Would do a ritual bath, or mikvah, in the chamber of lepers in the temple.  Finally, they would present a sacrifice again at the Nicanor Gate in the Temple.  Again, Jesus does not say they are healed, but by telling them to show themselves to the priests, he is letting them know they will be healed and asking them to act in faith like they are already healed. Though they can see nothing has happened, they do as he said.  

Perhaps they had read their Bible. There was precedent for this.  They knew the story of Naaman.

So go back to 2 Kings chapter 5, 850 years before Jesus, when Israel was at war with Syria.  Namaan was a commander in the army of Syria who had contracted lepra.  There was an Israelite girl who had been captured and was one of his wife’s servants.  She told them of a prophet in Israel, Elisha, who could heal him.  So Naaman loaded up a caravan with 75 pounds of silver, 15 pounds of gold, and a rack of nice clothes.  In today’s valuation, that is $500,000 of precious metals.  This man is willing to travel into enemy territory and pay any amount of money to be cured.  So he makes his way to Samaria, very near where Jesus is in our story today, finds Elisha, and knocks on the door.

2 Kings 5:9-10    So Naaman came with his horses and chariots and stood at the door of Elisha’s house.  And Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, “Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored, and you shall be clean.”

Elisha doesn’t even come to the door himself but sends a messenger to tell Naaman to go wash in the Jordan. How does Naaman react?   Naaman is beside himself.  Doesn’t Elisha know who he is and how wealthy he is?  He is fit to be tied.

2 Kings 5:11-12   But Naaman was angry and went away, saying, “Behold, I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call upon the name of Yehovah his God, and wave his hand over the place and cure the leper.  Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?  Could I not wash in them and be clean?”  So he turned and went away in a rage.

He was expecting a grand display from the prophet, but all he got was a messenger who told him to jump in the river seven times.  Fortunately, Naaman’s servant persuaded him to try it anyway.  He does, and he is healed.  Then Naaman returns to Elisha’s home to try to persuade him to take some payment, but Elisha refuses.  (Read 2 Kings 5 for the rest of the story.)

This story of Naaman has several similarities to our story of Jesus and the 10 lepers.   They both involve lepers being healed in the same area of Samaria.  In both stories, the healing is not spectacular.  There is no prayer, waving of arms, unique words, or actions.  In both stories, the lepers are not healed instantly, but only when they do as they were told.  So perhaps the ten lepers were aware of this story of Naaman’s healing.

And as they go, they are healed.

Luke 17:15-16   Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan.   Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?   Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”

One of them, on recognizing that he was healed, like Naaman in 2 Kings, turned around and headed back to the prophet who healed him.  And he, like Naaman, begins praising God.  And then we learn that he, like Naaman, is called a foreigner.   He is a Samaritan.  He, too, is seen by the Jews as the enemy.  

And like Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan, this Samaritan is the one who acted righteously.  He is the other ‘good Samaritan.’  The Greek word Jesus used here for ‘foreigner’ is ‘allogenes.’   ‘Allo’ means ‘different,’ and ‘genes’ means ‘family group.’  That is where our words ‘genes’ and ‘genetics’ come from.  So it means ‘born to another family’ or born with different genetics.  In Jesus’ day, for many, it had the racist cultural connotation of being ‘born to the wrong family.’   That is the attitude that Jesus came to change. 

Though the word’ allogenes’ is not found anywhere else in the Greek New Testament, everyone in Jesus’ day knew it. It was used in the wording of the barrier placed around the Temple that forbade non-Jews from entering the temple area in Jerusalem.

This is a rendering of Herod’s Temple.  A wall about 4.5 feet tall separated the court of the Gentiles from the main temple area. Only Jews were allowed to pass through the openings in that wall.  No Gentiles could enter the actual temple.  There were signs all along the wall, warning that any Gentile passing through would be killed.  Note also the Chamber of Lepers in the temple where the former lepers who passed inspection by the priests would wait 7 days for their mikvah and final offering.

Here is one of the actual warning signs from that dividing wall, which was found intact in 1871 and is now on display in a museum in Istanbul.  Another partial sign is housed in the Israel Museum.

It says, “No foreigner is to enter within this balustrade round the temple and enclosure.  Whoever is caught will be responsible for his ensuing death.”

No foreigner, no allogenes.  This is the word that Jesus uses to describe the Samaritan leper.   Someone born of a different family (than the Jews.)

So you see, this Samaritan could not go with the other 9 to the Temple in Jerusalem to be pronounced clean, for he would not be allowed to enter the area to complete his cleansing.   

This over 4 feet tall dividing wall kept this man and other Samaritans from God.  They could not worship in the place where Yehovah said he would place his name forever because the Priests and Rabbis said they were of the wrong race.  Presumably, he could visit the Samaritan’s temple on Mt Gerazim to see a priest.  But it was not the true temple of God. So he elected instead to show himself to a different priest, Jesus, who would become our high priest.  This is Jesus’ third trip to minister to Samaritans, and he came to break down barriers between people.

And we see this temple barrier wall become a big issue in the Book of Acts.   In Acts chapter 21, some Jews from Asia were in Jerusalem for Pentecost and wanted to attack Paul because he was ministering to ‘foreigners.’ They drag Paul out of the temple and are going to kill him right there, but the Roman troops intervene. They then make some false charges against Paul and manage to have him arrested.  Paul ends up imprisoned for 2 years and then sent to Rome to be judged by Caesar.

 And what was the false charge they brought against Paul that led to all this? They said he brought foreigners past the dividing wall into the temple.  Paul spoke about this wall in his letter to the Ephesians. 

Ephesians 2:11-14   Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh… remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.  But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.  For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility

Don’t miss that Paul is talking about everyone in this room.  Before Jesus came, we were all allogenes.  We would not have been allowed to enter the Temple.   That was never what God intended.  The Jews were supposed to take God’s message to the nations, but they built a wall to keep everyone else out.  Jesus came to break down these racial barriers, and because of Jesus, anyone can be grafted into God’s family. 

Galatians 3:26-29   For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.  For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.  And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.

We are adopted into His family.  And once again, in our story today, Jesus has shown a Samaritan, one born of the wrong race, is the one who is righteous in Jesus’ eyes.

Luke 17:15-16   Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, npraising God with a loud voice; 16 and ohe fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan.   Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?   Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”

While the nine were on their way to Jerusalem, rejoicing over the gift, this Samaritan was praising and thanking the giver. He fell down in worship at Jesus’ feet.

There is a difference between being thankful for the gift and giving thanks and praise to the Giver.

How do you feel when you look at the beauty of creation, when you see a fantastic sunset, a waterfall, or majestic mountains like we saw this past fall in Glacier Bay, Alaska?  Many people were on that ship’s deck with us, looking at the beauty of the mountains and glaciers. Many were just admiring the view. But to some, it was much more; they were moved to admire not just the creation but the creator, the one who made the mountains.  Is it the gift of the giver you admire?

How do you enjoy the great things in life?  How do you appreciate a beautiful view, a great meal, or music?  Do you only see the gift and neglect to thank the giver?  How do you appreciate your health? All 10 men were glad they were healed, but only one was moved beyond appreciation of good health to worship the giver of life.   We don’t worship creation; we worship the creator.  We don’t worship the gift; we worship the giver.

Then Jesus says something very interesting to the Samaritan who used to have a skin disease.

Luke 17:19. And he told him, “Get up and go on your way. Your faith has saved you.”

Now, your version may say:

Luke 17:19. And he said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”

Well, which is it?  Was he healed from lepra, or was he also saved from sin?  The word translated as “saved you” or “made you well” is ‘sozo.’

Sozo is found in the New Testament 106 times.  Let’s look at the first two instances:

When the angel tells Joseph what to name Jesus:

Matthew 1:21.  She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

When the disciples are scared they will die in the boat in a storm:

Matthew 8:25.  And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.”

Sozo is the idea of deliverance — from disease, from danger, and from sin.

So, in verse 19, is Jesus talking about physical deliverance from disease or spiritual deliverance from sin and death? Jesus is speaking of spiritual salvation here. As told in verse 14, all 10 have been healed. They all have had physical deliverance from disease. But this Samaritan’s second encounter with Jesus brings more.

This former leper turned back and praised God. He fell on his face before Jesus and thanked him. Like Naaman in the Old Testament, he recognized Yehovah as the source of healing and the one true God.  

Naaman said:
2 Kings 5:11-17  “Behold, I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel…from now on your servant will not offer burnt offering or sacrifice to any god but Yehovah.`

This Samaritan praised God for his healing.  He acknowledged his unworthiness by falling on his face at Jesus’ feet.  His actions were that of a repentant heart.  He recognizes Jesus as the source of his healing.  He thanks the giver of the gift.  He didn’t need to raise a hand, walk an aisle, or repeat a sinner’s prayer.  He demonstrated all of that in what he said and did.  And he received much more than physical healing; he received a relationship with the Son of God, the Messiah, that day.  But the nine.  They left jumping for joy and grateful for the gift of healing.  But their happiness was only for the gift, not for the giver. 

We can go through life being joyful for the good times, the beauty, the food, health, and the air we breathe.  Or we can see all of these things and return to Jesus, the creator and sustainer of all, bow down and give him thanks.  In Jesus’ day, children were taught to be thankful for everything.  There were over 100 Jewish blessings a day.  “Blessed are you, Yehovah, king of the universe, who gave me breath this morning.  Blessed are you, Lord our God, who gave me eyes to see today.  Blessed is He who has allowed me to live to this day and see His faithfulness displayed in this answered prayer.  Blessed are you, Yehovah, who have given us food to eat.”

One hundred blessings a day is not a lot.  Your heart will beat over 100,000 times a day.  And each one is a gift from God.  The psalmist said, “How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me?”(Psalm 116:12).  How can we ever thank God enough for how he sustains us and provides for us every minute of every day?  It is that awareness of how much we have received that changes our focus from what we lack to the great abundance we have. 

The LORD is my shepherd I shall not want.

In Ephesians 5:20, Paul says we should ” give thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Television and social media push us into an endless cycle of discontent, constantly reminding us of what we lack. This attitude of gratitude to God for every gift combats the world’s negativity by recognizing the Giver of the gift. It is a demonstration of faith.  

Have you ever considered how thanking God is related to faith?  

Colossians 2:7 “Let your roots grow down into him, and let your lives be built on him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness.”

When we live in the mode of thankfulness, when we feel the 100 blessings a day in our hearts, then we are keeping our eyes on God.  Then we are worshiping our creator, not the creation, the giver, not the gift.  Remember when Peter was walking on the water and took his eyes off Jesus and looked at the storm with the angry waves? He began to sink. Gratitude keeps our eyes focused on the one who calms us in the storm and increases our faith.  

Thanksgiving is the voice of faith.  Notice what Jesus has done here.  Jesus is so good.  He is determined to strike against hundreds of years of racist attitudes by showing that Samaritans are God’s people, too.  He tells us the story of a ‘Good Samaritan,’ and then he has an actual encounter with a ‘Good Samaritan.’   And he uses these two ‘Good Samaritans’ to teach what he said were the two Greatest Commandments.

The story of the Good Samaritan teaches us the second greatest commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  The actions of this former leper, this other Good Samaritan, teach us about the greatest commandment –  Jesus quoted it from 

Deuteronomy 6:4-5 Hear, O Israel: Yehovah is our God, Yehovah alone.  You shall love Yehovah, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.

Yehovah is God alone; don’t worship anything else. We don’t worship the sun, moon, or stars.  We don’t worship idols.  We don’t worship the beauty of creation, and we don’t worship our health.  We don’t worship the creation; we worship the creator.  Yehovah is God alone.  Like the other Good Samaritan, for every blessing we receive, let us return to Jesus.   Let us bow down before our Creator and thank him constantly for every good gift.

1.  Hays, J. Daniel.  From Every People and Nation: A Biblical Theory of Race. p. 63.

March 11, 27 A.D.  –  God’s Timing – Lazarus Part 3 — The Year of the Lord’s Favor #75

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , , ,

Week 56 — Jesus, Lazarus, and Kairos
John 11:38-53

From Mary and Martha’s perspective, Jesus arrived four days late.  But as the Karen Peck song from 2000 states:  “Isn’t it great, when he’s four days late, he’s still on time.”1

God is always on time.  Many state that God exists outside of time.  There is much I do not understand about God and time.  For example, ‘Daylight savings time’ — I have no idea how missing an hour of sleep saves daylight.  There are things too difficult for me to grasp.  I do not understand eternity, but I take God at His word when he says he is eternal.  I can not grasp the idea of eternal life, but I know the God who promised it to me, and I am confident in his promises.  I know Peter tells us, 

2 Peter 3:8   But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” 

That concept is hard for me to comprehend.  I read Paul tell Timothy in a letter that 

2 Timothy 1:9-10  [God’s] grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus  

If we want to see how God interacts with time, we must go back to when time began.  On the fourth day of creation, God created the sun, moon, and stars:

Genesis 1:14   And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years.” 

This verse explains why God created the sun, moon, and stars. They were created for signs, seasons, days and years.   We understand that the sun and moon regulate the days and years.  We have a solar calendar with 24-hour days regulated by the earth’s rotation on its axis and solar years of 365.25 days regulated by the earth’s rotation around the sun; our year is divided into 12 months.   The calendar of the Old Testament also had a solar year and 24-hour days, but it had 12-13 months each year, determined by the moon’s phases.   So, we understand how the heavenly bodies regulate “days and years.”

They are also there for signs.  We see many examples of this in the Bible; for example, the magi from the east say:

 Matthew 2:2   “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”   

The sign was a star God placed in the heavens.

So we understand God placed the heavenly bodies for “signs’ and for “days and years,” but how about “seasons”?  We need to take a closer look at this one because I think that translation is not as descriptive as the Hebrew word used there.  The Hebrew word translated as “seasons” is ‘moedim’ which is the Hebrew word for “appointed times” (the singular is ‘moed’). 

Appointed times are times set aside for communing with God.  The Tabernacle is called the “Tent of Moed” and translated as the “Tent of Meeting.”  It is a holy place in that it is a place for a moed, an appointed time.  It is not a permanent place as the tabernacle moves and is set up at different locations.  What makes it holy is not its location but that it is a place set aside to have a time to commune with God.  

When God called Moses to the burning bush on Mount Sinai, he told him to take off his shoes, for he was on holy ground. That ground, that dirt, was holy at that time because it was a place where time was arranged for Moses to commune with God.

God designated one location as holy forever: the site of the temple in Jerusalem. This is the same place where God supplied a lamb for sacrifice in Isaac’s place and where God said He placed his name forever.  

2 Chronicles 7:14. For now I have chosen and consecrated this house that my name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will be there for all time.”

But if you study the Bible, you see God is more interested in Holy times than in holy places. 

So let’s look at these moedim, these holy appointed times.  The first he set up at the beginning of the world was the Sabbath.  The seventh day was a day God rested.  It is commanded in the Old Testament as a day of rest from the other 6 days of labor and a time to dwell in God’s presence.  Rabbi Abraham Heschel called the Sabbath “God’s Sanctuary in time.”2

Then, there are the seven appointed times of gathering:  Passover, Firstfruits, Unleavened Bread, The Feast of Weeks, The Day of Trumpets, The Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles.  They were set apart times to celebrate what God had done for them, like a visual aid to assist in their knowledge of God.   We use the same idea of visual aids with baptism, a visual representation of what God does for us in salvation, and Communion, a special time to celebrate and remember what Jesus did for us on the cross.  When the word ‘moedim’ is used in the Old Testament, it most commonly refers to these seven appointed times.

And then there are also a few other specially appointed times:

Psalm 75:2    At the set time that I appoint; I will judge with equity.

Daniel 11:35  …and some of the wise shall stumble, so that they may be refined, purified, and made white, until the time of the end, for it still awaits the appointed time.

Now, let’s look at these Feasts of Moedim in more detail.  These moedim are arranged in 3 seasons: the spring brings the feast of Passover, which includes Passover, Firstfruits, and Unleavened Bread.  These teach us about God’s deliverance.  The next season is a single feast, The Feast of Weeks, which we call Pentecost.  It falls 50 days after Passover and teaches us about God’s power.  The third season in the fall contains The Day of Trumpets, The Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles.  These teach us how to enter God’s rest.

God is firmly committed to his calendar of appointed times. He arranges the major events of the Bible to happen on the same day so that we can clearly see His plan. God has gone to great trouble to ensure that these events happen on the appointed days.

 For years, the Jews celebrated the deliverance of their people from the tenth plague of death by the blood of the Passover lamb, their deliverance from slavery in Egypt, and their journey to the promised land.  Over a thousand years of Passover feasts pointed to a coming messiah who would be the “lamb of God” slain on that very day of preparation for Passover, whose blood would deliver them from the sentence of death we all walked under.   God arranged events so that Jesus would be crucified on that very same day and at the same time as the Passover lambs were being slain, so he would then be resurrected and presented to the Father on the day the Jews had been celebrating for thousands of years as Firstfruits.  

So this season of feasts teaches us about God’s deliverance, from death and slavery to Egypt – with the Passover lamb, and then 1500 years later deliverance from sin and death through Jesus- our Passover lamb

Fifty days after Passover was the Feast of Weeks, Shavuot, celebrating the gift of the harvest of grain and the day when they witnessed God’s awesome power and received the law from God on Mount Sinai.  God came on the mountain in power with a rushing wind and fire. And 50 days after Jesus was crucified, as Jews from around the world had gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate this feast, God again showed his incredible power in a rushing wind and in the fire that appeared over not a mountain but over the people.  These people were the first to receive this outpouring from the Holy Spirit, a gift from God to us also so that we may live in His power.  The gift of the Holy Spirit comes on the same day they celebrated the gift of the law on Sinai for years.

God is painting pictures in history for those who have eyes to see. The Bible is one unified story—the story of God’s redemption through Jesus. So, these four feasts that originated in the Old Testament found fulfillment in the days after Jesus came, but the three fall feasts remain.  

God established the fall feasts with the Day of Trumpets to announce a new time coming, which is a new year, and then the Day of Atonement when God judges individuals and the nation and deals with sin, and then the Feast of Tabernacles, a festival of rest.  These fall feasts have yet to be fulfilled, but one day, the last trumpet will sound, announcing a new time coming, The Great Day of the Lord, with God’s ultimate intervention in history — then there will be a great judgment, the final day of atonement, followed by God’s people gathering to rest with Him. 

These are the moedim, the appointed times on God’s calendar, established in the Hebrew Bible, then fulfilled in the New Testament times and our future.

But Moedim is a Hebrew word, and our New Testament comes to us in Greek. So, the most commonly used Greek words for ‘time’ are chronos and kairos. Chronos is what we usually think about when we say ‘time.’  It is A quantitative measure of time, the time on our clocks and calendars. This is the time on your watch and your day planner.  This is where we get our English words chronicle, chronology, and chronic.

Kairos is a qualitative measure of time.  The special time when God has arranged circumstances to be ripe for action.  God’s appointed time, his moed.   It is the time of decision, that anointed time where God brings you to a fork in the road. It is a time of opportunity.

I have had many moments in my life in which I can see that God has moved in the background, arranging people and events to put me in just the right place at just the correct time.  I have told you before of the time God arranged for me to meet a man who had hitchhiked from Louisiana.  He just happened to be the father of a young woman who had delivered a premature baby the previous week that I had cared for.  I had been trying to contact that mother but didn’t have her correct address or number.  So God put this hitchhiker from Louisiana on the curb of a gas station in my path and told me to approach him and give him a ride.  It was a God-arranged meeting time – a kairos moment.

Now, let’s look at how Jesus understands his time.  Jesus was well aware of the short time he had on earth. His ministry was just over a year long, and he died on the cross as a young man around 30 years old. He was aware of how he must accomplish his tasks right on time, and the gospel of John really points this out.

When Jesus is at the wedding in Cana, and his mother asks him to solve the problem of the lack of wine, Jesus asks her, 

John 2:4   What does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.  

When his disciples ask him if he is going to Jerusalem with them for the Feast of Tabernacles, he tells them,

John 7:8   You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.

Jesus does go to the feast, departing later, and while he was in Jerusalem teaching, the authorities wanted to arrest him, but we are told, 

John 7:30   At this they tried to seize him, but no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come.

Jesus is on a timetable.  God chose this time in the timeline of history for Jesus to come, and God has arranged it so that Jesus will die on the cross on a certain day in a certain year.  God established his appointed times when he created the world.  

So when people start trying to accelerate God’s calendar, Jesus has to be careful to stay on God’s schedule.  So you see his hesitation to perform miracles at times.  And you see him sternly warn some people not to tell who healed them.  And then at times, as in John 7:30, when people try to take Jesus too soon, God intervenes and allows Jesus to escape, or Jesus withdraws.  Remember when Jesus fed the 5000, and the crowd was so excited about Jesus that they wanted to make him king right away?  What did Jesus do?  He withdrew and went into hiding a bit.  It was too early then.  There would later be a crowd shouting to make Jesus king, and he will allow it.  But this will be in his final week, riding into Jerusalem on a donkey.  But it had to happen on God’s timing.

When Jesus preached in Nazareth, it was a sermon they didn’t want to hear, 

Luke 4:28  When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away.

It wasn’t his time to die.  This was not God’s schedule, so God just froze everyone in place while Jesus just walked through the middle of the angry crowd untouched.  

So back in December of AD 27, Jesus was staying with Lazarus and his sisters and going to Jerusalem in the daytime. And the religious authorities wanted to arrest him then after healing the blind man.

John 10:39 Again they tried to seize him, but he escaped their grasp.

Jesus conflict with the religious authorities had reached a boiling point.  This is why Jesus left Jerusalem after Hanukkah and went to teach in Perea.  John tells us:

John 10:40    Then Jesus went back across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing in the early days.

It was not time for him to be arrested and then crucified, this was not God’s timetable.

Only one thing can make Jesus return to Judea before it is time for him to die.  And that is the story we have been discussing for several weeks.  His good friend Lazarus becomes ill and Mary and Martha send a messenger to Jesus.  As we discussed 2 weeks ago, Lazarus died shortly after the messenger was sent.  By the time he travels a day’s journey to find Jesus, Lazarus is already in the grave.  Jesus tarries 2 days and then tells the disciples he is headed back to Judea.  When Jesus tells the disciples he is headed back to Judea, how do the disciples respond?

John 11:8    “But Rabbi,” they said, “a short while ago the Jews there tried to stone you, and yet you are going back?”

The disciples think Jesus is walking into a death trap if he returns to Judea.  They don’t yet understand God’s timeline.  But they are willing to follow Jesus there, despite the danger.

John 11:16    Then Thomas (also known as Didymus) said to the rest of the disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

But it was not Jesus hour yet.  But it is getting close.

John 11:18-19    Now Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother.

Jesus is about to do an undeniable miracle right in front of the Jewish authorities and a huge crowd of mourners.  This raising of Lazarus will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  And all of this introduction and background brings us to our scripture, the rest of the Lazarus story.

John 11:38-53   Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance.
“Take away the stone,” he said.
“But, Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.”
Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”
So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I  knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.”
When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”
The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.
Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”
Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.  But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.
Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.
“What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs.  If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”
Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all!   You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”
He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one.  So from that day on they plotted to take his life.

It is now set in motion.  The high priest Caiaphas has concluded Jesus must die.  Caiaphus was appointed High Priest not as God ordained but by the Romans.  The high priesthood had become corrupted and was at this time merely a political appointment and position. It was a position that would give great wealth, so Caiaphas was a man of great wealth, but he was not a righteous man.  Even when Lazarus died and came back to life, he would not be persuaded to believe in Jesus.  Caiaphus had 5 brothers (or brothers-in-law) who would also be high priests, and they were not convinced to follow Jesus even after he returned from the dead.   Wait!  Haven’t we heard this story before?  This is Jesus’ parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Remember this wealthy unrighteous man asked to send Lazarus back from the dead to warn his 5 brothers.  He was told they wouldn’t believe him even if Lazarus returned from the dead.   And they did not.  Oh, what you see when you read the Bible and study it closely.

And did you see that in the scripture?  God used Caiaphas to make a prophecy that he really didn’t understand himself.   He decided it was politically expedient to kill Jesus so they would not have an uprising or rebellion that would cause Rome to destroy the Jews and his personal source of wealth and power.   Do you see the irony?  The man who said  “you know nothing at all” did not even understand the words coming out of his own mouth.  God used him despite his corrupt nature.

Since it is not quite time for Jesus to die, Jesus leaves Judea after raising Lazarus .   He has seven weeks left before Passover, his appointed time to die.  So he has time to make one last tour to teach and preach in Samaria and Galilee.

John 11:54 tells us that due to the increased pressure on Jesus, he withdraws to a small Village, Ephraim, for a few weeks.   This town was about 15 miles north-northwest of Jerusalem and just outside Judea in the region of Samaria.  Jesus will then head through Samaria and then through Galilee one last time.   There, he will join the people from Galilee on their pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover.  And Jesus arrives with this crowd of pilgrims, spending the night at Martha and Mary’s home in Bethany before the next day, when he will ride a donkey into the city on Palm Sunday.  It is just after this Palm Sunday ride into Jerusalem that Jesus declares his time, his kairos, has come.  John’s gospel that has told us throughout Jesus’ ministry that “the hour has not yet come” now quotes Jesus saying,

John 12:23   The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
John 12:27-28   “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.  Father, glorify your name!”

This is why Jesus came.  And now the hour has come, Jesus kairos moment.  And a few days later when he sends his disciples into the city to find a place for the last supper, Jesus tells them:

Matthew 26:18  Go into the city to a certain man and say to him, ‘The Teacher says, My kairos is at hand. 

From Mary and Martha’s standpoint, Jesus was 4 days late.  But he was right on time for that kairos moment, and for every kairos moment of his short life on this world.

God is sovereign in this world.  He is still in charge of time.  And I have seen in my life that God has special moments arranged for me.  You can call them godly coincidences, or divine appointments, but in the words of the gospel writers they are kairos moments.  They are special appointed times that God, the King of the Universe has arranged for me.

I have quoted Ephesians 2:10 at least four times in the past year in sermons.  I want to give a larger context for that verse.

Ephesians 2:4-10  But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.  For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.  For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Paul had no problem with the idea that our salvation comes through grace by faith, not works, and yet we are created to do good works.  In adjoining sentences he says, yes our works do not save us, but we are saved to do works.

Why are we here?

The great philosophies of the world try to answer this question: “Why are we here?”  What is our purpose for existing?  I did not enjoy my philosophy classes in college.  I just didn’t see much point in studying man’s attempt to understand the universe if that attempt didn’t start and end with God and His word.  But I was required to study it, so let me tell you how philosophies answer this question:  The Existentialists say we are born into a world without a pre-determined purpose, and it’s up to us to create our own meaning.  The Stoics say we should focus on living in accordance with nature and finding meaning in virtue, reason, and self-control.  The Nihilists say life is inherently meaningless and that there is no objective purpose or value.  And those are but three of the many empty answers you get from man’s philosophy.

But my God says we are created in Jesus in order to accomplish something – good works.  And not just any works, but works that were set up by God ahead of time.  God created us in a certain way and gave us certain talents and traits.  It was God who arranged for me one day long ago to meet a new friend from a different town.  A lady who would one day in the future need a kidney donation.  And it was God who arranged my body at the moment of my conception to have just the proper genes and antigens to be the 1/1000 donor for this lady.  And it was God who put that desire in my heart.  It was kairos.  A time set by God to do a work that he created me to do.  And I can look at my life and see many other such times.  Each of us is uniquely qualified to do certain good works, works that God set up in advance.  

We should walk through our lives preparing ourselves for those moments, those special God-ordained moments.  That kairos time that God has arranged for you to do a work you were uniquely created to do.  

So, what is your purpose for living today?  I don’t believe many people want to believe, like the Nihilists, that there is no god, that life is meaningless, and there is no purpose in life. But many people live their lives just like that, just like there is no purpose in life, and they are free to do whatever they want because nothing matters.  But God created us for so much more.  He has ordained our steps and designed us for specific tasks at specific moments.  Yes, we have free will.  We can choose to ignore God, to pretend He doesn’t exist, and we can go our own way and never reach the potential that God created especially for us.  The Army used a recruiting slogan, “Be all that you can be.”  Today I am asking you to be all you were created to be.  Don’t miss your kairos.  Today, the lesson you learn, the scripture you study, the task you practice, or the person you meet may be God’s preparation for a future moment of kairos.  Jesus was aware of his purpose long before his time came.  We may not recognize our moment of kairos until we are in the middle of experiencing it or when we look back on it.  

Why don’t you take some time now to talk with your Father.  A moed. An appointed time to meet with God.   God is waiting to hear your “Yes!”  Yes, Father, I want to be the person you created me to be.  I want to follow your plan for my life so that I may be ready to do the work that you created for me to be able to do.  I want you to tell God that you don’t want to miss your kairos moment and that you want to fully reach the potential that God has placed within you.  This is your time; this is your moment to talk with your Father. 

  1. “Four Days Late” by Karen Peck and New River.  From “A Taste of Grace”.  2000.
  2. Heschel, Abraham Joshua.  The Sabbath.  2005.

March 4, 27 A.D.  –  Jesus Wept — The Year of the Lord’s Favor #74

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , , , , , ,

Week 55 — Jesus Wept
John 11:17-39

Last week, we saw how a messenger found Jesus in Perea and informed him that his friend Lazarus was ill. We then began our discussion of Lazarus’s resurrection. We discussed how Jesus used this time to teach the second Beatitude: Blessed are they that mourn, for they will be comforted. We also discussed Jesus’ statement that Lazarus’ sickness would not end in death because death is never the end for any of us. Today, we continue the story.

John 11:17-39    On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days.  Now Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother.  When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home.
    “Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died.  But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.” 
   Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”
Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life.  The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.  Do you believe this?”
“Yes, Lord,” she replied, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”
After she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary aside. “The Teacher is here,” she said, “and is asking for you.”   When Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him.  Now Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him.  When the Jews who had been with Mary in the house, comforting her, noticed how quickly she got up and went out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there.
When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.
“Where have you laid him?” he asked.
“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.
Jesus wept.
Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”
But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance.
“Take away the stone,” he said.

Jesus wept. 

It is often referred to as the shortest verse in the Bible, and it is in many of our modern translations, but not the shortest in the original Greek, where it has 16 letters.  (The shortest verse in the oldest Greek texts is Luke 20:30, with 12 letters.  Remember that verse divisions were not added to the text until the 1500s.)   Nevertheless, this short verse portrays an important picture.  Please close your eyes briefly and try to picture what it says in this verse.  Whether we realize it or not, we all form these pictures as we read. Jesus wept.   What is Jesus doing in your picture?  Did he break down and collapse to the ground?  Did he weep bitter tears?  Did he wail and moan?  Did he sob?  Did anyone rush to comfort him?  Did he have to wipe the tears from his eyes with the corners of his robe?

Mourning differs from culture to culture.  We have talked before about how the Jewish practice was to hire professional mourners at the time of death.  They would ”lead” the family in their weeping by making sharp, ear-piercing cries of grief and playing the flute.   The prophet Jeremiah spoke of them, saying, 

Jeremiah 9:17-18  “Consider and call for the mourning women, that they may come; and send for skillful wailing women, that they may come. Let them make haste and take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run with tears, and our eyelids gush with water.” 

We see the professional mourners also in Mark:

Mark 5:38-40   They came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and Jesus saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly.   And when he had entered, he said to them, “Why are you making a commotion and weeping? The child is not dead but sleeping.”   And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him and went in where the child was.

You can see the professional mourners at Jairus’s home in The Chosen, Season 3, episode 5.  This was an important part of mourning in Judaism in Jesus’ day.  Professional mourning is still practiced in China and some Asian countries today.

Sometimes, I read a scripture and just want to know more.  Jesus wept.  Did he break down sobbing, did he wail, did he weep bitter tears, or did he just ‘tear up’?  And in this instance, more information is available if you dig deeper.  There are two Greek words for weeping in the New Testament, which differ by large degrees:  klaio, and dakruo. Both of these words, translated as weeping, appeared in our text this morning.

John 11:33-35   When Jesus saw her weeping (klaio), and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping (klaio), he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.
“Where have you laid him?” he asked.
 “Come and see, Lord,” they replied.
Jesus wept (dakruo).

The word used to describe Jesus’ emotional display is totally different from the one used to describe Mary and the other Jews who wept with her. “Klaio,” the word used for Mary’s weeping and the weeping of the other Jews, means to lament, wail, or weep with deep emotion.  “Dakruo” – the word used in the verse “Jesus wept” means to ‘shed a tear’ or to ‘tear up’  There is a big difference between these two words that both are translated as weep in our English Bibles.

So, if you pictured Jesus falling to the ground and weeping bitter tears, it is because you don’t speak Greek, and our friendly neighborhood translators didn’t bother to distinguish between these different Greek words.

But just because Jesus doesn’t collapse weeping is not to say that Jesus was not profoundly moved by the moment.  In fact, verse 33, preceding, clearly says Jesus was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.  And then, in the verse following Jesus wept, we see it was clear to everyone there that Jesus was emotionally affected:

John 11:36    Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”

It is evident to everyone there that Jesus grieved with everyone else at the tomb.  It was clear to them that he must have loved Lazarus, but he did not weep bitterly like the others.  He is described as “deeply moved,” which likely led us to assume his response in tears was to weep bitterly like the others.  Yet the Greek tells us his response is not extreme.  How do we reconcile our Bible telling us Jesus was deeply moved and yet just shed a tear?  Is it because Jesus is not capable of showing intense emotion?   We will see that he certainly can in just a bit.  But we need to look further at what “deeply moved” means.

Twice in this passage, in verse 33 and verse 38, Jesus is described as “deeply moved.”  “Deeply moved” is translated from one Greek word, ‘embrimaomai,’ which means “intense anger.”  It comes from the Greek word that describes the snorting of war horses before a battle. 

 Since most of us have no experience with angry snorting war horses, here is the picture that comes to my mind.  This is a painting I saw in the Palace of Versailles in France of Napoleon on his war horse.

This is embrimaomai.  A warhorse, snorting mad, going into battle.  This is Jesus, deeply moved; he is angry.

I am somewhat frustrated that I looked through over 60 modern translations and couldn’t find one that translated “deeply moved” with the idea of anger.  Yet many commentaries firmly state that Jesus is angry here. (I finally found it in the German Luther translation (redone in 2017), where it said Jesus “was angry in his spirit and shook.”  It is as if our English translators are afraid to show Jesus as being angry.  Well…they need to get over that — Jesus was angry, shaking mad.  And what is Jesus angry about?  He is warhorse-snorting, fighting angry about death.

It was Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying,” who first described what she called the five stages of grief over death.  They describe peoples’ common reactions to death in an attempt to normalize those feelings in a time of emotional upheaval.  They were never meant to be sequential, and many people don’t experience all of these feelings.   In her follow-up book in 2004, she tried to clarify that they are not steps that all go through or should go through.  Indeed, they describe many responses we have to death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

But let me tell you, Jesus is at the stage of anger.  Jesus is angry at death because when he created the world, death was not to be a part of it.  Life in the garden was designed to be without death.  Humans were designed to care for the world, walk with God as obedient followers, and have eternal life.  But then Genesis 3 happened.  Man chose to be disobedient, and sin came into the world, and with it, death came into the world.   Jesus looks at sin and death and gets angry because this is not what he intended for his creation. 

Death was not part of God’s plan.  Sin was not part of God’s plan.   But all of us have sinned, and all of us, by sinning, have welcomed death into the world.

 Let me show you how Jesus reacts to death.  Let’s look at Jesus’ stages of grief about death.  

Jesus doesn’t deny death.  He doesn’t get depressed about death.  Oh, he is saddened about the grief of others for sure, but not depressed about death.  And Jesus refuses to bargain with death.   And when Lazarus dies, Jesus doesn’t accept death.  Jesus gets war-horse snorting, angry at the death of Lazarus, and then does battle with death.  Jesus came to the Lazarus’ tomb angry enough to fight a war with death.  And Jesus has victory over death.

These are Jesus’ stages, straight from anger to victory.

Every time in the New Testament, Jesus encounters a corpse, it comes back to life.  He always defeats death.  Death cannot exist in his presence.

Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life.”  Note that resurrection is not what Jesus does; it is who he is.   He is the resurrection.  So death can not hold him.  

Now, you and I are not Jesus.  We will have emotional responses to death that may fall into any of these categories.  And sometimes, grief takes a very long time to process.  But you don’t have to live forever in these stages.  You don’t have to dwell in them forever because you know Jesus, the resurrection, and the life.  You know the one who has defeated death.  You don’t have to accept death as final because we know death is not the end.

Paul said it this way:
1 Thessalonians 4:13-14   But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.   Since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.

Because of Jesus, we do not grieve like those without hope.  Everything is different when you realize death it is not the end.  But we all will grieve because knowing the end of the story doesn’t mean you won’t cry at the sad parts.

So Jesus shows intense emotion here, but his emotion is not weeping from grief but intense anger at death.  His tears shed here in sympathy to the grief of his friends are very subdued.

 Contrast that to a time in Jesus’ life, just a few weeks after Lazarus was raised, when he did cry with the intense emotion of klaio, weeping with deep emotion.  And what was the reason that Jesus wept bitterly then?  

It is on the first Palm Sunday, and Jesus is sitting atop a donkey’s colt; people are shouting, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!.” He is riding down the Mount of Olives toward the city.  It is a celebration that is unparalleled in the gospel accounts.  Thousands are waving palm branches and shouting, “Hosannah!”  Amid this celebration, as the crowds descend the Mount of Olives and look across the Kidron valley to see the magnificent walls of Jerusalem and, just beyond them, the Temple, the place where Yehovah said he would place his name forever, Jesus interrupts the celebration.

While the crowd shouting praises, Jesus looks at the city and weeps over it.  And it is not the Greek dakruo, not simply the shedding of a tear, but the agonizing wailing and sobbing of the Greek klaio.

Luke 19:41-42   And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept (klaio) over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”

This Jesus, who teared up when grieving the death of a good friend and seeing his friends grieving over Lazarus, is now moved to wail and weep bitter tears over what?  

Jesus knows that the praise and affirmation He is currently experiencing is short-lived.  In just a few days, another crowd will gather to shout out in his presence.  But it will not be shouts of praise but shouts of condemnation.  “Crucify Him!” they will shout to Pilate.  Just a few days after thousands entering Jerusalem proclaim his as their King, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!”  there will be another crowd shouting.  Pilate will present this same Jesus and say, “Behold your king!” to which the chief priests will answer, and the very authorities responsible for maintaining true worship will answer, “Crucify him; we have no king but Caesar.”

Jesus cries because, as John said, “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.  He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.  (John 1:10-11) 

Rejection always hurts.  But if it is someone you love, someone you have trusted, someone close to you, it always hurts you much more.  Jesus was rejected by the very people he loved so much that he left heaven to come and suffer and die for.

That is what Jesus says as he enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday: “Because you did not know the time of your visitation.”  Jesus’ heart is broken, and he weeps, sobbing tears because they rejected him.  Because they refused his offer to repent and enter the kingdom of God.  

Luke 13:34-35   O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!  Behold, your house is forsaken. 

Jesus wanted everyone to accept him and his gift of forgiveness, repentance, and salvation, but most rejected him.

And Jesus knows the horrible consequences of their rejection of him.  The result is condemnation.  As Jesus told Nicodemus, “whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”  (John 3:18).  

And not only are the individuals condemned, but the entire city of Jerusalem stands condemned.  Let’s look again at Jesus response on that Palm Sunday, 

Luke 19:41-44   And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept (klaio) over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”

Jesus knows that it is happening again.
Throughout the Bible, we see the same thing happen repeatedly.  God calls out a covenant people.  He rescues and redeems them. He brings them through the waters. He saves them from their enemies.  He teaches them from the mountain.  He showers love on them.  He asks them to live by the rules of His covenant.  He asks them to have no other Gods.  They must not follow their way but follow him as their king.  And over and over God’s covenant people turn to other Gods and worship idols of their own making: Baal, Astoreth, money, power, prestige, and the greatest idol of all, self.  They crossed the line, and God turned his face from them and let them reap the consequences of their actions.  So they were conquered by foreign countries, be it the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, or the Romans.

And Jesus, the prophet, sees it happening again.

And it happens just as he said, for about 40 years after that Palm Sunday, Titus led an army of 50,000 Roman soldiers to encircle Jerusalem.  The siege began at the exact same time of year as Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, the time of Passover, when thousands of pilgrims entered the city.  The siege lasted 143 days, cutting off supplies and leading to 4 months of mass starvation and death. 

The historian Josephus writes: 
“All hope of escaping was now cut off from the Jews, together with their liberty of going out of the city. Then did the famine widen its progress, and devour the people by whole houses and families; the upper rooms of women and infants that were dying by famine, and the lanes of the city were full of the dead bodies of the elderly; the children also, and the young men wandered about the market places like shadows, all swelled with the famine, and fell down dead wheresoever their misery seized them.”1

Then, the Romans broke through the walls and, killed over 600,000 Jews and took thousands more captive to be sold into slavery in Egypt or used as sport for the lions in the arenas.  And for the city itself, as Jesus predicted, not one stone would be left on another…

Josephus again:
“The Emperor ordered the entire city and the temple to be razed to the ground, leaving only the loftiest of the towers…and the portion of the wall enclosing the city on the west…all the rest of the wall that surrounded the city was so completely razed to the ground as to leave future visitors to the spot no reason to believe that the city had ever been inhabited.”2

And I have seen those massive stones, some the size of large trucks tumbled down on each other lying where the Romans pushed them down.   I have stood at the remaining western wall, praying with those who gather every day, mourning the devastation of that day, and praying for God’s return to this place where he put His name forever.

What drives Jesus to weep bitter tears?  Not for the death of a righteous man, Lazarus.  Not for death does he weep, for he is the victor over death, but he weeps for the unrepentant and for the result of their failure to repent — destruction.  

For thousands of years, the Jewish people had looked forward to the coming of the Messiah.  Prophets had predicted the glory of that time, the time of the visitation when the Messiah finally appeared.  This was supposed to be the most significant moment in Jewish history. But instead, it brought unimaginable judgment and suffering. And THIS is why Jesus wept over Jerusalem.  

What drives Jesus to weep bitter sobbing tears is not illness or death.  It is a lack of belief and a lack of repentance. It is the necessary judgment of a just God on those who refuse his gift of love, who refuse his gift of repentance, who refuse his gift of forgiveness, and who refuse to live under the covenant God established with them.  Oh, but Jesus knew that God would someday redeem this place. He knew God would return to the place where he had placed his name forever. The heavenly city would descend and be God’s city on earth forever. But on that Palm Sunday, Jesus wept because knowing the end of the story doesn’t mean you won’t cry at the sad parts.

And when God turns his face from Israel in the Old Testament and removes his protection from them, and then they are devastated by enemy nations, we may tend to see this as punishment by God.  But this should not be seen as punishment.  It is more like in a marriage relationship where one partner is abusive or sexually unfaithful.  At some point, the relationship is so broken that the other partner decides the only recourse is separation because the marriage covenant is broken. When Israel continues to be unfaithful to God and refuses to change (repent), then their covenant with God is broken, and there is separation.  God turns his face.  And separation from God is destruction.

What does this mean for us today?

We have been grafted into God’s covenant people through the blood of Jesus.  Like his covenant people of old, we have been rescued and redeemed from our enemy of sin and death.    God has showered his love and blessings on us.  As God’s covenant people, we enjoy this closeness to God.  Let us not forget who we are and what God has done for us. We must not follow after other Gods of greed, power, prestige, or self.

 Let us not break God’s heart by breaking our covenant with him.  

 Let us heed the warnings of the prophets.  Let us heed the warnings of Jesus.  He says at the very end of the sermon on the mount, we have to do more than just listen to his words. We have to follow them — obey them.  If we listen and do not do what he says, we are like the man who built his house on the sand.  We are doomed to destruction.  

Jesus shed a few tears, sympathizing with his friend’s grief over death.  But he wept bitter tears over his people who rejected him.  We will all weep bitterly as we face the loss of our loved ones.  But do we share Jesus’ sadness and grief over those who are turning away from God?  Do we weep for those who have wandered from God?  

James 5:19-20   My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

This is the work of the church.  As long as someone has breath in their lungs, they have an opportunity to repent. For these people, we join with Jesus and weep.   May our hearts be broken with the things that break the heart of God.

  1. The Works of Flavius Josephus. Translated by. William Whiston, A.M. Auburn and Buffalo. John E. Beardsley. 1895.
  2. Ibid.