Luke Chapter 7- With Jim Briggs Part #1

Hi, I'm Joanne Vickner, Meemaw with It's Storytime Meemaw, an answered prayer for stories that point children to God on the Truth Network for Kids. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds.

Enjoy it, share it. But most of all, thank you for listening to the Truth Podcast Network. I'm Dr. Jim Briggs, Associate Director of Finding Purpose. You can find God by helping men find their purpose for living.

For more information and to connect with Russ Andrews and Finding Purpose, you can visit us online at findingpurpose.net or connect with us on Facebook. Now let's listen to Russ Andrews as he teaches us how to be a Christian without being religious. Thank you, Russ.

And thank you, men. It's a great privilege to be here tonight. This is, I won't lie, working on a sermon is hard work.

But it is always a privilege to be able to be up here and to share God's work. It would be a big help to me and I know it would be a help to you as well if you'll pull out your Bibles. We are in Luke chapter seven, as we were last week. I think we've got one more week in Luke chapter seven.

And so if you've got your Bible handy. You know, as I as I was thinking about the sermon, something came to me as I was looking at this that I don't know if you felt the same way, but it was almost you remember back in your school days that at the end of a semester, at the end of a term, you you had a review before the exam. Well, we're not quite to the end yet.

We're not quite to the exam. But this almost felt to me like a review of sorts as we look at Luke's wonderful job of capturing all of the facts about Jesus Christ and his ministry up to chapter seven. And as I thought about it, I thought, well, this is a great opportunity to kind of look back because looking back will help us to understand a little bit about what's going on in this prison cell where we find John the Baptist in our in our story tonight. So one of the things that as you think about it, if you think back to chapter one, that was a while ago, since we're in chapter seven, but we found that Luke was investigating all of the evidence, right? So he's pulling together all of this evidence from eyewitness accounts, all the stories, all of everything about Jesus. And he wanted to present this to his front to a good friend of his. He wanted to present this orderly account.

And you remember the reason why was so that his friend would be certain of all that he had been taught. And so really, that's what he's doing for us. He has pulled together all of this evidence that we've been going over week by week, as you studied, as you've done your lessons, if you spent time in your discussion groups, and as you've been in here listening to some great sermons, we've been listening to all of this evidence as it's been unpacked.

And so I thought it would be helpful maybe to kind of take a quick look back and just sort of see what that evidence was. Luke's narrative really is about Jesus demonstrating his divine authority. And so when we look back, we see one, remember Jesus, when he came on the scene, when he started his ministry, he demonstrated his authority in the way that he taught. He taught unlike anybody else. He taught with authority. Remember, it said that the people were amazed at his teaching because his words had authority. Well, another way that he showed authority is that he was able to command evil spirits, and they obeyed him, right? We saw that he had authority over the spiritual world.

In chapter 5, we saw that he was able to bring about a record catch of fish. So it shows that he has control and authority over the natural world. He has authority over sickness, too. We've seen in chapters 5, 4, 5, 6, 7, that Jesus was able to heal the sick, the lame. He was able to cleanse the lepers. All of this, he showed, he demonstrated that he had authority over illness. Remember, with Peter's mother-in-law, not only did he have authority, but that authority was instantaneous. He was able to, say, be healed, and she was up and ready to serve her dinner party that night. He was also able to forgive sins.

We saw that in chapter 4. Jesus has authority over the power of sin. And then, last week, we saw two more examples of how Jesus shows his authority. We were introduced, in his visit to Calpurnium, we were introduced to a centurion. Now, a centurion, as you remember from last week and your studies, is a man of authority. He had authority over a hundred men, as Russ pointed out last week, and so he knew what authority was. He was under authority, but he was also over others. So he knew and understood what authority was, and we saw that this Roman soldier, this Roman centurion, actually recognized Jesus' authority, and he pleads with Jesus to heal his servant.

And then he ventures off to this little town called Nain, and you remember there, he demonstrates that he has authority even over death itself by raising the widow's son. And so this is interesting to us as we look at this in the sense that we see all these things and we're amazed, we're astonished at what Jesus is able to do, but what Luke has been doing is he's been ticking off all of these bits of evidence, building a case that helps us to understand who Jesus is. And you remember that at the end of all of this, in verse 16, we see that the people responded by saying, and I think correctly interpreting, that God had visited his people. Now, one of the other things that they mentioned was that a great prophet has come, and so there's still confusion here, and I think Jesus addresses that even in this lesson. But Luke has presented all of this evidence really not just to give us clues about who Jesus is, but he wants to, just like his friend that he was writing to, he wants us to be certain about who Jesus is.

And so as we think about this, the question is, well, why? Why is it so important for us to know who Jesus is? Well, understanding Jesus' identity is crucial, isn't it?

It's crucial for you, it's crucial for me, it's really crucial for everyone. Everyone will one day have to ask, confront the question, who is Jesus? And so it's critical that we ask these questions, and the reason for that is found in, actually, in chapter 9 and verse 23 of Luke. And it says that whoever wants to be my disciple, remember, what do we have to do? We must deny ourselves and pick up our cross daily and follow him. And I don't know if you read on to the other part of this, but it says, For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever will lose his life for my sake will save it. So Jesus is asking us to die for him. Picking up a cross is the idea of dying to self. So Jesus is commanding that we die. And so no one in their right minds, no one would ever follow anyone unless they truly believed that he was authentic, right? No one would ever follow Jesus.

No one would ever lay down their life for someone other than Jesus that says, you must die for me. And so it's important, it's crucial that we understand Jesus' identity. And so that brings us to tonight's lesson. And you probably saw this question just like I did and thought, well, this is the question, this is the question we're supposed to ask. Who is Jesus?

It's phrased a little differently. It says, are you the one to come? Well, is Jesus the one? Is Jesus the one to come? Is Jesus the one that the Old Testament has been pointing to? Remember, everyone was waiting for this Messiah, the anointed one, to come. I don't know if you remember, but even when John the Baptist came on the scene, many questioned in their hearts whether or not he was the Christ, the Messiah. And so people were watching, people were looking, people knew that the Messiah was coming, and they were anticipating him coming. And so the Old Testament prophecy about him coming was known.

And Old Testament prophecy also contained lots of details about this Messiah. What would he do? When would he come?

What would he look like? And so people were watching for all of these things. And so this is the essential question. Are you the one who is to come? But you know, it's also a surprising question, isn't it?

It's surprising because of who asks it. John the Baptist asked some of his disciples to go and asked Jesus this very important question. The reason is, as you remember, all of these events that we just talked about, that I just itemized, were well known throughout the country.

All through Judea, all through the countryside, they were very well known. And so John's disciples came and told him, hey, this Jesus, this is what he's doing, these are the things that he's doing. And it caused John to wonder, well, okay, doesn't quite fit what I had in mind about the Messiah. Would you do me a favor? Would you go to Jesus and ask him this question? Are you the one to come?

Or shall we look for another? Well, that brings up another question. Why in the world would John have this sudden wave of doubt over who Jesus was? Why would he send his disciples to ask this question?

Are you the one to come? I don't know if you remember, but back in, or if you flip over to John 1, John 1 29, you see that John actually has said of Jesus, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Alright, so John already recognized him, one, as the Lamb of God.

There was something about the Messiah coming and the sacrifice that he would make on our behalf. He didn't quite understand it all, but he certainly recognized him and said, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He also says in verse 34 of that same chapter, I have seen and borne witness that this is the Son of God. Alright, so John was rock solid in his understanding of who Jesus was. He's the Lamb of God, and he's the Son of God.

So why the confusion? Well, I would direct you to Isaiah 55 for the answer there. And in Isaiah 55, you realize that...

This is Isaiah speaking, or rather, the Lord speaking through Isaiah. It says, For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

So, I mean, that's logic, isn't it? We know that if God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts, his ways are higher than our ways, then it's pretty understandable why we would be confused from time to time. I clearly can't know all that God wants to do, or the ways that he's going to do it, and so I know I'm going to have some doubts, I know you're going to have some doubts, and that's what we see here with John. And one of the things that's interesting to me about this, and I think this is a great principle for us, is that when we do have those kinds of doubts, when we see things going in a completely different way than we had expected, we go to Jesus. Now, John couldn't go physically to Jesus, of course, because he was in prison. But he sent his disciples to Jesus to ask this very important question. And I think that you and I, of course, we can always go to Jesus and should go to Jesus anytime we have doubts, anytime we have questions about what Jesus is doing in our life. Well, I want you to now take a look at Luke 3, 16 and 17, because we still want to ask this question, why is John so perplexed? Now, the picture here is John is on the banks of the River Jordan, and you remember people were coming from all over the countryside because they had heard about John out in the wilderness, and he was baptizing people with water.

And here's something interesting that he says here that gives us maybe a clue as to why he's a bit perplexed. He says, he will baptize you, he's talking about the one to come, with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear the threshing floor and to gather the wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

Did you get that? The chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. You know, throughout his ministry, John has been calling people to repentance in view of this coming wrath of God. That's what he's been preaching all this time. Repent, for the kingdom is at hand.

Repent because God's judgment is coming. And now Jesus, from all reports that he's getting, is going from town to town and he's preaching love and mercy and forgiveness, and he's healing people. Well, do you see why John was a bit perplexed? What Jesus was doing didn't look at all like what John thought the Messiah would do when he came.

So here's the issue. He believed Jesus was the Christ. That was clear from his earlier testimony. But in John's understanding, God would send his Messiah to purify Israel and to wipe out her enemies and to establish the new kingdom. So John had preached judgment, but Jesus now was preaching love and mercy, and he even had helped a Roman soldier, the enemy of Israel. So John was very, very confused. Jesus wasn't anything like what John was expecting.

I think this is kind of interesting here. I think doubt may be the wrong word. We talk about doubt. I don't think John doubted Jesus at all. I just think that he didn't understand what Jesus was doing. And so, as I said, he went to Jesus.

It wasn't a question of who, but of how. So John just didn't understand how all this was going to take place. Well, so he goes to Jesus and he says, Are you the one to come? Well, that leads to the next part in our story where John's disciples arrive and they arrive just at a time when Jesus is healing many people of diseases and plagues and evil spirits.

He's restored the sight of the blind. And the answer to John's question comes really in two parts. And first part is the exciting answer.

An exciting answer. He says, Go and tell John what you have seen and heard. The blind received their sight and the lame walk. Lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear and the dead are raised up. The poor have good news preached to them.

That's verse 22. Well, we might expect Jesus would try to reassure John by telling him that, hey, don't worry, judgment is coming. But instead, he sends the disciples back with reports on these miracles that he's performing. And, you know, quite frankly, the list of miracles that he's been performing are very much like the miracles he's already been performing. So this report to John is really nothing new.

But why is this such an exciting answer? Well, because it's interesting, one, that Jesus is not rebuking John for expressing his doubt. Rather, he gives John the prophet a gentle little reminder of God's word about what the coming Messiah, what he would do. He's essentially quoting from Isaiah.

And I want, if you will, let's take a little journey. I want you to first turn to Isaiah 35. Now, Isaiah is towards the middle of your book, the middle of the Bible. You go from Psalms right in the middle of the book, and then Proverbs, and then Ecclesiastes, and then Song of Solomon, then you get to Isaiah. Go to Isaiah 35. Isaiah wrote this 700 years before Jesus' birth.

And listen to some of the words here. See if you can pick out some of the things that Jesus is trying to use to explain why he's doing what he's doing. Say to those who have an anxious heart, be strong, fear not. Behold, your God will come with vengeance and with recompense of God. He will come and save you. Then the eyes, listen, the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. And then the lame man will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy. So Isaiah here is saying that the Messiah would do everything that Jesus was doing, everything that Jesus had just reported.

But I also want you to notice this bombshell in verse 4. Behold, your God will come with vengeance and the recompense of God. Who will open blind eyes? Who will heal the lame? God.

God's going to do these things. What Jesus is showing him through this reminder is that Jesus is, in fact, God. But what about the vengeance, right? We read that part about the vengeance. Behold, your God will come with vengeance and with the recompense of God.

What about the vengeance, this passage says, that God will bring? Well, Jesus had come, but he was nothing like what John thought. Nothing seemed to have changed. The enemies of Israel were still completely in power, right?

The Romans were there. I mean, John is actually in prison, in Herod's prison, and it seems like nothing has changed at all. All those who oppose God are still in power.

They haven't been punished. And this kingdom that John had been talking about, the kingdom that is at hand, this new kingdom doesn't seem to have arrived yet. Well, let's take another look in Isaiah. Go to Isaiah 61, and we're going to look at Isaiah 61, 1 through 2. And you may recall, as you're flipping there, you may recall that this was the passage that Jesus read in the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. Do you remember that? That was back in chapter 4.

So that was a few weeks ago. But Jesus had read this, really to show that this prophecy in Scripture was being fulfilled through his ministry. And again, as we take a look at this, I want you to read, or at least pick out, the things in this prophecy that are reflecting the very things that Jesus is doing. So it says, The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Right? So that's a familiar passage. We studied that in chapter 4. And indeed, Jesus is preaching to the poor. He's preaching good news. But it's easy to see why John has some doubt here, too, right? Because it also says that he was there to proclaim liberty to the captives. He was there to open the prison of those who were bound. Where was John?

In prison. So, this is an exciting answer, but it's also an incomplete answer. Jesus seems to be fulfilling only part of this prophecy. Jesus was telling John that he was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing.

The very miracles, in fact, that were causing John such a problem were confirming that Jesus was, in fact, a Messiah. And, you know, even today, when so many biblical prophecies have been fulfilled, we have to acknowledge that prophecy can be pretty confusing. Prophets, you see, looked at the future like we look at a mountain range. Now, when I was a young boy, I lived in East Tennessee, and from our back porch we could look out and we could see the Great Smoky Mountains. And so if you were standing on my back porch, you could see what looked like just a long and giant mountain spread out across the horizon.

It just looked like one. But if I were to go to the first mountain and climb it, if I got to the top, I would quickly find out that it wasn't one long continuous mountain. But stretching out to the horizon behind that first mountain, there were more mountains, there were more ridges, and there were valleys in between.

And they went as far as the eye could see. And so this is what is happening with this biblical prophecy. The prophets of the Old Testament really were seeing all of the future, but they were looking at it like a mountain range. And really what God had done for John the Baptist, from where John the Baptist stood, God had granted him a very clear perspective of the closest mountains of Jesus' miracles and preaching.

But he had no clear idea of how the distant future events would spread out, when they would happen. This is what's called prophetic perspective. Prophetic perspective. So when we look at prophecy, very often we see a lot of things that will happen. Some of those things, as I said, have already happened.

Some of those things happened when Jesus came, and some of those things won't happen until Jesus returns. And it's important to remember, too, about prophecy, that prophecy is not a haphazard guess. Prophecy is not based on uncertain data, like, say, a weather forecast. You know, you can predict the weather, and they do often, and you get prepared for the snowstorm, and then you wake up that morning and guess what?

It didn't happen. That's imperfect data, and they're predicting what's going to happen. Prophecy is not a prediction like that. Prophecy is God's Word.

God's Word is a sure thing. And Dr. Hugh Ross, who's an astrophysicist and a Christian apologist, actually writes that there are approximately 2,500 prophecies in the Bible, about 80% of which have been fulfilled perfectly. Libraries, as you know, are filled with books that contain information surrounding historic events that we read. And I'm a history buff.

I like to read, in particular, biographies of past presidents. And as I read those, I see all the facts about their lives and all they accomplished and all they did, and I sort of take those as true. But also we know that sometimes history can be written and it's incorrect, and we can find out later, as the discovery of some new documents or new research that's been done, that that history that we thought was true was maybe not quite true. Well, God's Word isn't like that at all. Biblical prophecy, unlike our history books, biblical prophecy is history written in advance.

History written in advance. And this is because it's God's Word, right? We trust God's Word.

God's Word is inerrant. God knows all things. He knows the future. He knows the past. He knows the present.

He knows everything that's going to happen. And so if he's writing about the future, it's almost as if it's already happened. In fact, it is as if it's almost as if it's already happened. This is really the bedrock, too, of Christian hope. You know, as Christians, we have hope. We talk about hope all the time. But it's not a hope-so kind of hope in the way that the world talks about hope. It's a know-so kind of hope because it's based on God's Word. As Stefan just said a little while ago, the bedrock of our faith, right? Everything can be built on God's Word because it's a sure thing. And we can have absolute confidence, therefore, in what God's inerrant Word says about future works because it's His story. This is the Truth Network.