The Call of Levi

As Jesus walked along the road, He called a tax collector to follow Him. And when Jesus came to Him, a man who routinely stole from God and stole from His own people, Jesus called Him to be His disciple. Jesus called Him to write the first gospel in order of the four gospels of the New Testament, because Levi's other name was Matthew. Few people were more hated and despised in first-century Israel than tax collectors.

They were considered traitors who took advantage of their own people and, like Levi, stole from them. But today we'll see that His immediate response after encountering Jesus was to leave His ledgers behind and follow the Savior. It was 1964. I was walking by myself down a street that was called the van der Haus lawn in the ancient walled city of Narden in the Netherlands. I was returning to the house where we had rented rooms from our landlady during our graduate studies there in Holland. And just as I approached our house, I saw an elderly lady coming from the other direction. She was carrying a bag of groceries, and I smiled to her and greeted her. And she stopped suddenly, and her face lit up like a light bulb. And she spoke to me, and it was like she wanted to hold on to me and not let me go. And so I spoke to her for about five minutes and then bade her goodbye.

And she went on her way, and I went into the house where we were lodging. And as I walked in the door, I was met by our landlady who was livid with fury. And she was screaming at me, asking me how I could possibly speak to this terrible woman that I had met on the street.

And I didn't understand what was behind all of this intense fury. And she explained to me that during the war, which had only ended 19 years previous to this, that this woman had been a collaborator. She was a traitor to her own people. She gave comfort and help to the occupying Nazis in the town. And then the woman went on to tell the story how the Germans were taking the sons, the young men, from the village and shipping them back to Germany and putting them to work in slave labor camps there to help in the military production effort. And this woman, together with her next-door neighbor, had conspired to dig a safe place under her living room floor where they put a bed and a fan and water and food and some flashlights. So if the Germans came near, they could hide these two sons, her son and the next-door neighbor's son, under the floor. And she told the story how one day the Gestapo came into her house carrying machine guns and asked the woman, do you have any sons?

She said no. They ran to the bedroom and felt the bed and looked in the closet to see if there was any evidence of young men. And then to fulfill their examination, they came back to the living room, and the leader pointed his gun at the floor, and he started to shoot into the floor where the two young men were in hiding. And while they were shooting into the floor, they were watching the woman to see what her reaction would be.

And when they were finished and satisfied that there were no young men there, the Germans left. And this woman had just about had a heart attack during this, and she rushed over to the trap door that had been concealed and went down into this cubbyhole that they had dug out and discovered to her delight that neither one of the young men had been hit by the bullets. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine hiding your own son in your house and having somebody come in with a gun and start shooting up the floorboards? I mean, that's the kind of stuff you see in movies, and you can't imagine how it could actually happen. And when I heard that story, then I could understand the intensity of her hatred that had lasted for 19 years, of the other neighbor woman who would give out and divulge the names of those who were in hiding the same sort of thing that happened to Anne Frank and her family in Amsterdam during those years.

Well, I tell that story, I've told it before, but I tell it for a reason. This kind of hatred that the woman had for the traitor, the collaborator, was how the Jewish people felt about tax collectors. In Israel, the term sinner and publican were versed in were virtually synonymous terms because the worst sin that the people felt was that sin of collaboration with the Romans who so severely oppressed the Jewish people. And the perhaps most miserable way in which they oppressed them was with their taxation. The burden of the taxes that the Roman government imposed upon captive Israel was incredible. The Romans were able to discover a tax for just about everything. Taxes on wheat, taxes on olives, taxes on grapes, taxes on wine, taxes on chariots, taxes on gas, taxes on gasoline.

No, that wasn't the Romans. And here was this Jewish man who was working for the Romans, sitting at his table outside along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, right on the route, the trade routes from Syria to Egypt, and he was collecting a toll tax or a tariff of some sort, keeping a percentage of what he collected for himself so that the pious Jews who prayed for their deliverance from the Romans every day couldn't stand to look at this man, named Levi, who was lining his own pockets by means of the oppressive confiscatory taxes levied by the Roman government. When you look in the Old Testament and you see how God structures a nation, there was a distinction between the priests and the kings, between what we would call the civil government and the religious establishment, and God imposed a tax, as it were, upon His church in Israel.

It was called a tithe, and every Jew was required to bring of his firstborn 10 percent of his yields, 10 percent of his gross, for those of you who try to evade it. And in addition to the tithes and the offerings that the people brought to support the priests and the Levites, the religious life and the educational life of the people, God also imposed a head tax that was given to support the civil government. And the same principle is given implicitly to governments throughout the world, and we are told as Christians that we are to pay our taxes to whom taxes are due. And yet at the same time, God holds governments responsible for only raising those taxes that are legitimate in God's sight, and chiefly through the imposition of a head tax where everybody pays the same. There is no progressive tax. There is no class warfare. There is no politicization of the economy in God's order of things.

And government is established by God and is responsible to God to seek the welfare of the people and to do their diligence in concerning righteousness and safety and peace and justice. But what happens historically? It happened in Greece. It happened in Rome.

It happened in Babylon. It happened in all of the nations that became large, became, as it were, too big for their britches, is that governments, instead of becoming satisfied with doing the things that they were ordained to do by Almighty God, became obsessed with becoming world powers, having global influence, colonial domination, and every one of them, in order to accomplish that, used the tax system to bleed their people and their subjects out of every dime that they could in order to sustain a larger and larger and larger and larger and larger and larger central government. For 70 years in this country, the policies of the Founding Fathers, represented chiefly by Thomas Jefferson, prevailed, but not without dispute or debate or in that whole time.

The followers of Alexander Hamilton, men like Henry Clay, and the party of the Whigs sought yearly to construct a huge national federal government, and they failed for the first 70 years. In 1860, you could take all of the federal buildings in Washington and put them on the property that is shared between St. Andrews and the Bible College across the lake. And a few weeks ago in Philadelphia, I listened to a lecture from a man by the name of Jack Templeton, whose father, John Templeton, was perhaps the most famous philanthropist on the face of the earth and founded the Templeton Foundation. And Jack Templeton lectured on thrift and generosity as biblical virtues. And he talked about the connection between thrift and generosity.

He said, you won't have anything to be generous with if you're not first thrifty. And as I listened to his lecture, I had an epiphany because he went on to say that in 2007, right before the Great Recession that we're still in, in that year, the average savings of working people in the United States was minus three percent. And I heard that, and I said, whoo, no wonder we collapsed, that the average person in America was living three percent beyond their means. That is, they were spending on average three percent more than they were taking in. Now, beloved, that is a recipe for economic disaster. It's foolish, and not only foolish, it's sinful, but here was my epiphany.

I have struggled and wondered how it could be that a church is vibrant as St. Andrew's could have so many members who don't tithe, who simply disobey the law of God, and who are guilty, as the Lord says, of stealing from God, committing what the Bible calls a sacrilege against God. And I just don't understand that. I mean, really, people have to help me with that. How can you be—I mean, here's me, I'm stupid—how can you be a Christian and do that? I don't understand it.

I really don't. Well, it could be more simple than to know that everything that we have belongs to God, and everything that we have comes from His hand, every good and perfect gift we get from Him. Yes, the government takes too much of it, and yes, we're over-taxed and all the rest, but we're not doing our basic fiscal moral responsibility. And I say, why? Because we don't have the money.

We owe to credit card companies. And when a person says to me, I can't tithe, I hear what they say. Well, I can't tithe what they say. Well, I translate that as, oh, what you mean is, I cannot live the lifestyle I'm living today and tithe 10 percent of my income to God.

It just doesn't work. I can't tithe and pay my government taxes. I can't tithe and pay off my credit cards.

I hear you. No thrift. And there's a connection, I think, historically, when the people of God rob from God, God gets them nationally. He hits the Jews because they were not tithing their tithes. And so here come the Romans, and take so much more out of the Jewish pocket than the Jews ever imagined. The Jews were one of the most heavily taxed people on the face of the earth in all of history at the time that Jesus went up to Levi and said, get away from this table.

Stop this nonsense and follow Me. Levi was a wealthy man, and you know he wasn't tithing. But when Jesus came to him, a man who routinely stole from God and stole from his own people, Jesus called him to be his disciple. Jesus called him to write the first gospel in order of the four gospels of the New Testament, because Levi's other name was Matthew, who wrote the gospel according to Matthew. And he said, leave this and follow Me.

And follow Me. And you know what he did? He packed up his ledger, threw away his account books, knocked down the table, and said, yes, Lord, I'm going with You. And not only did he follow Jesus, he threw a party for Jesus. He opened his house, and it was a big one. It wasn't like that house we talked about last week where they were lowering that poor fellow down through the roof. This was a grand house. This was a mansion.

This was a tax collector's house. And he had a party. And you know what he did? He invited all of his friends who were also tax collectors.

It's the only kind of friends he could have. He invited all of his tax collector friends over for this party, and they reclined, and they enjoyed this feast. And, of course, it was known by the Pharisees. And the Pharisees were like that woman in Nardin. How can Jesus go to a party with tax collectors? And Jesus responded to them. Because remember that the Pharisees believed in salvation by segregation, by separating themselves from the Amhorets, the people of the land, or you could be translated the people of the dirt, the dirty people, the outcasts, the sinners, tax collectors. And if you wanted to be saved, you had to stay a safe distance from these people, because if you come close to them, you'll become like them, and you'll become contaminated. And so, when they saw Jesus going to this party with tax collectors, it was more than they could stomach. They heard him say, well, I do this that you may know that there's you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. But isn't He pushing the envelope a little bit here?

Isn't He going a little bit too far with His forgiving sins, eating and drinking with tax collectors? And Jesus responded to them with very simple wisdom. Well, He said to them, those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Oh, I know we get annual checkups, or some of us do, and I know sometimes we go to the doctor when we're not sick. But for the most part, we hold off that call until we need the doctor, and then when we need the doctor, we really need the doctor, and we can't wait to see the doctor. We do that when we're sick.

But people who are well don't need the doctor, and if everybody continued to be well, doctors would be out of business. But Jesus is making the point to the Pharisees, a very simple point. He said, who do you expect me to spend time with? You don't know who I am or why I'm here. I'm the Son of Man, and I've come to seek and to save the lost. And I found one of those people who was lost, really lost, at that table sitting along the toll road by the Sea of Galilee.

And I asked him to join my group, and he left everything to follow me. I came for Matthew. I came for tax collectors. I came for prostitutes. I came for the people of the land, the dirty people. They're my people.

I'm going to shed my blood for those people, for collaborators, for your enemies. And Mr. Pharisee and Mr. Scribe, I didn't come to save the righteous or to call the righteous to repentance, but to call sinners to repentance. Well, maybe you don't think you need to hear my message, Mr. Pharisee. Maybe you don't need my ministry because you're righteous, and I've only come to call sinners and I've only come to call sinners to repentance. So, Mr. Pharisee, in your sinless condition, you have nothing to fear from me. That's what they were thinking. Oh, well, at least the man recognizes who's righteous and who isn't and who needs to repent and who doesn't.

How foolish. There was nobody in that neighborhood the night of that banquet who needed repentance more than the scribes and the Pharisees. Nobody needs a physician more than somebody who is fatally ill but doesn't know it. So it was with the Pharisees, and so it was with the scribes, and so it was with all of us who think for a minute that we don't need the ministrations of the Son of God to cover our sins, to forgive us and to redeem us, beloved. This is our Savior who calls tax collectors to join Him, who calls tithe evaders to be His, who wants His people to be made whole, to delight in the things that He delights in, and to delight in the law of God. Is there a sin that we can commit that isn't covered by Christ's death and resurrection?

I'm sure the Israelites would have included tax collection in their list of worst sins, but as we heard today, Jesus didn't see it that way. He called Matthew to Himself. We've heard the message of reconciliation today here on Renewing Your Mind as we continue Dr. R.C. Sproul's sermon series from the Gospel of Luke. We're making our way verse by verse through the book each Sunday, and we would like to help you continue your own study. Contact us today and request Dr. Sproul's commentary on the Gospel of Luke. When you give a donation of any amount, we'll be happy to provide you a digital download of this nearly 600-page commentary. Our offices are closed on this Lord's Day, but you can give your gift and make your request online at renewingyourmind.org. We hope that what you hear on Renewing Your Mind is helpful in your walk with Christ and in your understanding of Scripture. We make every effort to provide you with as much content as possible, and one way we do that is through our free app. You'll find these daily Renewing Your Mind programs, plus articles, videos, and digital books. Simply search for Ligonier in your app store. This program is a listener-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Thank you for joining us today, and we hope you'll be with us again next time for Renewing Your Mind.