The Answer to Life's Greatest Question, Part 2

People don't ask the question about eternal life. Death is an obscenity you don't talk about.

It's an obscenity we don't want to deal with, the reality of death, and we're so consumed with this life. We need to learn how important it is to think about eternal life. Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. When you come to Christ, what changes about your life? Well, if you're married, you'll see your role as a husband or wife through new eyes. If you have kids, the way you raise them will change. The fact is, your outlook on every part of your life is going to be different when Christ transforms you.

But does a different life mean the best life right now? Is that the focus of the gospel Jesus taught? Bottom line, what is the gospel? John MacArthur is going to help you answer those questions in his continuing study, What Must I Do To Be Saved?

And with a message now here is John. Looking at our text, Luke 10 and verse 25, let's read the text. And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and put him to the test saying, "'Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?' And he said to him, "'What is written in the Law?

How does it read to you?' And he answered and said, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.' And he said to him, "'You have answered correctly, do this and you will live.'

But wishing to justify himself, he said to Jesus, "'And who is my neighbor?'" And so with this reading we return to the most critical question that anybody could ever ask or have answered, the question that appears there in verse 25, What shall I do to inherit eternal life? This was the prevailing question of the time. This had been the prevailing question among the Jews for a long time. The prophets had promised that God was going to establish an eternal kingdom.

In Daniel 12, too, the Old Testament said, And many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake to everlasting life, others to disgrace and everlasting contempt. The promise of the Old Testament was that God would send His anointed who would establish an eternal kingdom. The Jews anticipated that eternal kingdom where God would rule through His anointed Messiah, where righteousness would prevail and peace, where all that was ever promised to Abraham and to David and all that was promised in the New Covenant to Jeremiah and Ezekiel would come to fruition and fulfillment. There would be a realm of perfect righteousness, perfect joy, perfect peace, perfect fulfillment, perfect satisfaction, perfect relationships.

They wanted to be there. Their preoccupation was with eternal life. And by that they were referring to the next world, the next life, God's eternal kingdom of heaven, not the current world and not the current life. This question was so much on their minds that it surfaces numerous times in Jesus' encounters in His ministry. As I pointed out last time, there are several such incidents recorded in the New Testament. Each gospel refers to it, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, different occasions when people came and essentially asked the same question, what do we do to receive eternal life?

What do we do to make sure that we do the works that are going to bring us into your eternal kingdom? They had that forward look. They had that perspective about the life to come. And thus they asked the most critical question.

Put that against the backdrop of contemporary thinking today. Rarely is that question ever asked in American society. The question asked in American society is how can I have a better career? How can I bump myself up on the economic scale? How can I feel better about myself? How can I make my marriage better? How can I have a better family?

How can I meet this felt need and that felt need and the other felt need? And it's all about here and now. And evangelical Christians are spending a fortune virtually to try to influence Washington, to try to influence the various state capitals in order that they can do things that are going to somehow make them more comfortable in this world. Rarely am I ever asked the question, what do I do to make sure that I will receive eternal life? I could count on one hand the times I've been asked by somebody, how do I escape hell and get to heaven? I'm not sure that that question would be interesting enough to draw a small crowd.

If you put a sign out there that said, come one, come all, how to double your income, etc., etc., you'd get a crowd. People don't ask the question about eternal life. Death is an obscenity you don't talk about.

People who are dead, you know, in the typical funeral they look like horizontal members of a cocktail party, all decked out and made up. It's an obscenity we don't want to deal with, the reality of death, and we're so consumed with this life and we need to learn how important it is to think about eternal life as opposed to eternal death. This scribe asked Jesus the right question. We see here Jesus in personal evangelism and He becomes our model for effective personal evangelism. Even though the Jews wanted to believe, and I think it was part of their sort of traditional conviction, that they by being Jews were guaranteed the Kingdom, that they by being circumcised were guaranteed the Kingdom, that they by going through the ceremonies and the rituals and the sacrifices were guaranteed the Kingdom, certainly the Apostle Paul affirms all that in Philippians 3 when he says, I did all those things and I assumed they were all gain to me. And I think it's true to say that in the system of Judaism that existed in the time of Jesus that still exists today, being Jewish, being circumcised, following the Sabbath Law, maintaining the rituals and the ceremonies and the traditions is at least on the surface a wishful hope that they're going to make it into the Kingdom of God. But still there was the underlying nagging reality of their own sin and guilt and a conscience that was always assaulting them for their conscience had never been put to rest because their guilt had never been dealt with and they were still having to grapple with their sin under the surface.

They were like the Pharisees, white on the outside and inside full of stinking dead men's bones and they knew it. And from time to time the real longing of the heart, the real question surfaces. Yes, I'm Jewish. Yes, I've been circumcised. Yes, I maintain the ceremonies.

Yes, I keep the Sabbath, etc., etc., but there's this nagging possibility because I know my own heart that I'm not fit for the Kingdom of God. And so the question arises. It is the right question. And I want you to see four things as we look at this conversation. If you're going to evangelize somebody, this is the issue.

This is the issue. Jesus doesn't promise you health, wealth, prosperity, a better career, a perfect marriage, a great family, freedom from problems, not at all. Those are not guarantees in the gospel. Those are not attendant blessings to salvation. The ability to endure difficulty is in salvation.

The ability to see God work good out of the bad things that come in life is part of the guarantee, but there is no guarantee that you're going to be free from pain and suffering and trouble, etc. That's not what salvation is designed to do. Salvation is about the next life, not this life. And so if you're going to evangelize somebody, instead of focusing on this life, you have to get them to the next life. Instead of saying, we're here with our gospel to make your marriage better, or your family better, or your life better, or whatever, we're here to talk about the next life, forget this life.

It's eternity that you need to deal with. And we went into detail last time on how the Bible indicates that all people are going to live forever, either in heaven or in hell. And the first task of every evangelist, of every witness, of every Christian who goes out to present the gospel is to show someone that what matters is the next life because it is forever, and it is either forever in the bliss of heaven or in the horrors of conscious punishment away from God in hell. The message of the gospel is about eternal life, life is eternal life. It's about eternal life, life in the next world. The gospel offers hope for a joyous, blessed, rich, happy, satisfied, amazing, astonishing eternity in heaven. The gospel doesn't promise any particular comforts, successes in this life. And anybody who does say the gospel offers that isn't telling you the truth.

That's a deception. The man in the story, the scribe, the lawyer, he comes, he asks the right question. And here we are living in our culture, people aren't asking the right question. Instead of cultivating their minds in the direction of the right question, we reinvent Christianity as some kind of a message to change your current circumstances.

That is not what it is. We've got to get back to the fact that our message is a message of deliverance from eternal damnation and punishment in hell into eternal life. And so we started last time with the recognition of eternal life.

Come to the second point. After there's a recognition of eternal life, there needs to be a motivation for eternal life. If the person will come to the place where they recognize that the gospel is not about here and now, it's about then and there, it's about eternity, not time, if we can get them to understand that they're going to live forever, that there are two places where they will possibly live, either heaven or hell, then we move to the motivation.

And obviously as we come into the text now, this particular man was motivated for eternal life. How do you get somebody motivated for eternal life? The only thing you can do is explain the joys of heaven and the horrors of hell. You explain to them that everybody is immortal, everybody lives forever in one of those two places.

Take the time to lay that out. Don't give the gospel on the basis, do you have trouble in your life, do you have pain, do you feel bad about things, let Jesus fix you up that is superficial and maybe not even saving. That isn't the issue because as soon as you start talking about heaven and hell, you have to inject into the discussion sin because somebody's going to say, well, I'm not going to hell, am I?

And then you're into the issue, aren't you? You're into the issue of sin, why you're going to hell and why God justly condemned you to hell because of your violation of His law and what you did, what you said, what you thought and what you are. That is where you start effective evangelism.

You get their attention off this world on to the next. And if you present the joys of heaven, the glories of heaven, the horrors of hell, the reality of sin, the desperate need for forgiveness, the provision of God in Christ to provide that forgiveness and to deliver the sinner from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His dear Son, you've now at least put them in a position to be motivated toward eternal life. This lawyer that came to Jesus must have known that there was some place that He definitely wanted to be and that was in the kingdom of God. He wanted eternal life. He did not want what Daniel 12 2 said. He did not want a resurrection that would bring Him to eternal disgrace and contempt and shame. He wanted eternal life. He had the motivation for eternal life. That is the first necessary attitude in bringing a person to Christ.

You've got to get them away from wanting something in this world to desperately wanting eternal life in the world to come. That raises the stakes very highly. So a certain lawyer, verse 25, oh by the way, and behold, a surprising encounter. That's simply an indication that it was a rather surprising moment. Jesus was in the midst of teaching, most likely. And behold, a certain lawyer stood up.

This would not be unusual for someone to stand up during a teacher's lesson with a question or a query or comment or a clarification. And in this case, it was a certain lawyer. With that simple designation, we are introduced to the nameless man who converses with Jesus.

This is not parallel to any other encounter, so this is all we know about him. Lawyer is the word namikos in the Greek, namikos, namas, which makes up part of that word, is the word for law, ikos, icon. He is a legal icon. He is a lawyer.

And when we talk about a lawyer today, we obviously think about civil law primarily or criminal law. We don't think about religious law, but in a theocratic kingdom, in a government like Israel's, these were the law experts, not in civil law, not in Roman law, but in the law of Judaism, religious law, starting with the law of Moses. He is a scribe.

That's a normal term used to describe these people. He is one of those Jews who had become expert in the knowledge of and the interpretation and the application of Judaistic legal rules and regulations. Now whenever you see the Pharisees, you usually see the scribes because the Pharisees had the scribes along as their legal advisors. And as the Pharisees worked to discredit Jesus, eventually to murder Jesus, they needed to consult with the religious lawyers to find ways in which they could bring indictment against Him. So they were the accompanying lawyers to the Pharisees looking for ways to discredit Jesus, to catch Him in violations of Judaistic law and eventually bring Him to His death. They were experts, not just in the law of Moses, but in all of the rabbinical traditions that had grown up through the centuries. The Pharisees and the Jewish leaders, the high priests, the Sadducees, the Herodians and the rabbis hated Jesus.

And they used these scribes to finagle accusations against Him as their legal consultants. In their role, they are often seen questioning Jesus along with the Pharisees. They didn't have any power. They didn't have any authority. They were just counsel for those who bore the power.

And so this man comes. Whether or not on behalf of the Pharisees or on his own, we don't know. But since it doesn't say the Pharisees were behind Him, let's just assume that this was an issue for him...for him. He may have come at the behest of Pharisees to question Jesus. He may have been in the meeting and arisen to ask the question because he was prompted or even paid to do it.

But we don't know that. So let's just take it at face value and as Jesus was teaching, perhaps about the Kingdom of God as that was always His subject, even after His resurrection, for 40 days He spoke of things pertaining to the Kingdom. This man stood up.

This is not a disrespectful interruption because it says that he stood up and addressed Jesus as teacher, dadaskale, very respectful, very appropriate, something that would normally be done in a teaching context. But that interesting phrase in between those two indications is he stood up and put him to the test. This doesn't necessarily ascribe to this man some evil intent, nor does it sort of open the veil a little bit on a plot. It's just really a test as any question is a test when you want to know the answer. You're testing the person's knowledge and ability to give you the answer. This word can be used for a temptation, as it is in Luke 4.12 when it says, Satan put Jesus to the test, same Greek word.

But it doesn't necessarily have to be a temptation. It's just an effort to find out if Jesus knows the answer. You say, well how would He know if Jesus knew the answer? Because He knew the answer and He was just going to find out if Jesus knew the right answer to the question. And maybe He wanted to sort of reinforce the answer that He knew to be the right answer. The question was fair. The question was important. The lawyer appears to be genuinely interested.

I don't think we can read anything else into it. We know from the fact that this question was asked so often that it was a general question on the minds of Jews under the surface and so there's a certain level of honesty here for Him to jump up and ask this question. And He does say this. He doesn't ask it as a third person. He doesn't say, what is necessary for someone to inherit eternal life? He says, what shall I do?

What shall I do to inherit eternal life? Can you think of anybody who has ever come up to you and asked you that? I'm a preacher. I'm a Bible teacher. As I said, I could count on one hand in my life people who asked me that question. I was asked that question once that I can remember on an airplane. A gentleman turned over to me sitting on an airplane and said, I see you have a Bible. You wouldn't know how I could have eternal life through Jesus Christ, would you?

I said, you've got to be kidding. Yes. As it so happened, I actually got to know him on the plane. He was baptized here.

But that's rare. Remember the rich young ruler in Matthew 19 came running to Jesus, slides in, falls on his knees, what do I do to inherit eternal life? Same question. This was the topic of conversation. They were interested in living forever in the Kingdom of God.

And we live in a society where that is not the issue but it has to become the issue and preachers need to stop preaching that Jesus is going to fix your life here and start talking about what's going to happen in the life to come. And he also knew that this was not corporate. He also had the understanding that there was something that he needed to do. There was something inside of him, the realization of his own sinfulness and his guilt, his own fears, the same ones the rich young ruler had, that made him worry about the fact that because he was a Jew might not get him there, because he was circumcised might not be enough and there was something he needed to do. Question indicated then that the Jews understood individual salvation, that they weren't just swept away with some kind of Judaistic salvation, some kind of corporate salvation.

They understood individual salvation and they understood his own human responsibility. This is really about life after death. It's about resurrection. It's about heaven. It's about the presence of God. How do I know I'm going to have that eternal life?

So he not only had the recognition of eternal life, he had the motivation for it. I think that's where the gospel has to go, folks. That's where it has to go.

We have to stop talking about peripheral issues. I talked to a gentleman a couple of days ago, very, very prominent gentleman. He said to me, everything that Christians do, everything that they do here in Washington to lobby, everything they do to put pressure to get their Christian agenda through is counter-productive to the gospel...all of it. Because the people here see them as just another political pressure group with a temporal, earthly agenda. And they succumb to the pressure because these people put a lot of money into it to put the pressure on.

As soon as the money runs out and the pressure runs out, the people they've influenced revert to the way they used to be, only the difference is they have a deep resentment for those people who pressured them to conduct themselves in ways inconsistent with their own convictions. And it's counter-productive to the gospel. So how will the church wake up to the reality that we have one message and it's not about this life, it's about the next one? That's Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary.

The title of his current study, What Must I Do to Be Saved? Well any time evangelism is the topic, as it was today, good questions will be raised like, how do I start a gospel conversation? And what are the basics to cover when you give the gospel? Well, we received a call on our Q&A line, and the caller raises a potentially delicate issue about evangelism that maybe you also have.

So let's play that question now, and then John, you respond. I have a question about evangelizing children. My grandchildren are around me a lot. Is it okay to share the truth of God with them even though I know their parents might be Mormon or Muslim? Thank you. That is a very important question.

Thank you for asking. Yeah, I think you are bound by your love for Christ and bound by the call of God on your life as a Christian to share the gospel. And it's obvious just historically and statistically that more people who are saved are saved when they are children than any other segment of their chronological life. Most people who come to Christ come to Christ in childhood, and that I think about so often as a pastor of a church with thousands of little children in our church. They are the primary mission field, and we have to not assume that evangelism is going to go on in the best way possible in the home. We hope that's true, but we have to double down on that and do everything we can to give the gospel to them. I think you know you don't want to offend in one sense, but in the other sense you would offend God, and you would offend that child if you knew the truth and didn't communicate the truth to the child. The parents may or may not accept that.

There may be some fallout for that. But again, that's the price of the gospel. We don't expect affirmation from unbelievers. That's part of the courage that is required in proclaiming the gospel. You must communicate to the parents of these children that you love them and that because you love them, you tell them the truth, and that's the best you can do. You have to leave the fallout to the Lord, understanding that this may be—you may be the person that leads them to true salvation.

Then on other times, in other cases with the other children, it may be that the parents pull them away from you, and that's really not in your control. You need to be faithful to proclaim the truth, and do it in love, and the Lord will bless and honor that. Yes, he will, and thank you, John. Of course, friend, to proclaim God's truth, you need to know God's truth. To help you understand Scripture like never before, let me suggest you get a copy of the MacArthur Study Bible.

Contact us today. Our number is 855-GRACE and our web address, gty.org. The MacArthur Study Bible is reasonably priced in hardcover and leather, with 25,000 footnotes that help unpack the meaning of virtually every passage.

It's a great resource for making God's Word clear and for helping you share the truth of Scripture with others. To order, call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org. Now let me mention a way that you can enjoy a consistent flow of biblically sound resources from Grace to You for free. Ask to start receiving John's monthly letter. That's his opportunity to speak more directly to you and to talk about issues that are important to him and to the church, and he will also offer you a free book or some other resource every month. To request John's monthly letter, just call 800-55-GRACE or write to Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412.

Or you can email us at letters at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for joining us today and be here tomorrow when John shows you how to be like Jesus, not just in how you live, but also in how you evangelize. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace to You.