Seeking a Sign

You people are blind, and the blindness extends to your whole life. If you don't have the light of Christ in your heart and in your soul, no matter how well your eyes function organically, you're living in utter darkness, and that will be your destiny for eternity—darkness. Without the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, we are utterly blind to the things of God. The Bible makes no sense, the gospel is foreign to us, and Christian morality seems like foolishness.

Today on Renewing Your Mind, R.C. Sproul returns to the Gospel of Luke to help us understand why Jesus pronounced a curse on a generation of Israelites and rebuked them for seeking a sign. Let's continue now with our study of the gospel according to St. Luke.

We're in the eleventh chapter still, and I will be beginning at verse 27 and reading through verse 36. And as it happened, as he spoke these things, that a certain woman from the crowd raised her voice and said to him, blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts which nursed you. But he said more than that, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it. And while the crowds were thickly gathered together, he began to say, this is an evil generation, it seeks a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah the prophet. For as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so also the Son of Man will be to this generation. The queen of the south will rise up in judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and indeed a greater than Solomon is here.

The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and indeed a greater than Jonah is here. No one when he has lit a lamp puts it in a secret place or under a basket, but on a lampstand that those who come in may see the light. The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore when your eye is good, your whole body is also full of light, but when the eye is bad, your body also is full of darkness. Therefore take heed that the light which is in you is not darkness.

If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, the whole body will be full of light, as when the bright shining of a lamp gives you light." These words from our Lord are preserved for us by the superintendents and inspiration of God the Holy Spirit. They are written for our instruction, our edification, for our training in righteousness, and carry the full weight of the authority of God Himself.

Please receive them as such. Let's pray. Our Father and our God, how much like those people who seek a sign we are, how weak is our faith, how fragile is our confidence in the truth of Your Word? And we pray that as we hear the admonishment of our Lord that we will take heart and begin to feast on that Word that yields faith, for we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. I've mentioned that the late D. James Kennedy made the observation that there are three kinds of people in the world, those that can count and those that can't.

Am I going too fast? I'm in that category of those who can't count. When I came in this morning and came up to the pulpit to open the text for this morning's sermon, I was surprised and alarmed to see that I had prepared a sermon this morning for the wrong text, that I had passed over this entire section that I just read to you, forgetting that it was there. And in over fifty years of preaching, I've never done that before. It's not as bad as what happened to my friend Sinclair Ferguson, where he prepared a sermon on the prodigal son. And when he got to the church, he saw that the text for the day was for the parable of the Good Samaritan.

And the problem is things got worse in the middle of his sermon. He got the two parables confused. He said the young man asked his father for an inheritance or an advance, and he went to a far country. And on the way, he fell among thieves. And the thieves robbed him and beat him and left him by the side of the road for dead. And then he said to himself, I will come to myself and arise and go to my father's house.

And on the way, he was bypassed by a Levite and a priest, until a Samaritan took him by the hand and came to the local inn and said to the innkeeper, kill the fatted calf. He told me that a couple of years ago here in Orlando, when I was scheduled to speak that evening after dinner, and he told it to me at dinner, I laughed so hard, I pulled a muscle in my ribcage. And so he had to preach in my place.

So I don't think it's quite as bad as that, but this morning I'm going to have to wing it on this text. The text begins with these words, and it's happened as he spoke these things. The discourse in which he answered the accusation of the Pharisees that the power he manifested in conquering the power of demonic possession was from the devil himself. After he finished that discourse, a certain woman from the crowd raised her voice and said to him, blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts which nursed you.

This woman, though not a prophetess, pronounced an oracle of wheel. She pronounced a divine blessing, not simply on Jesus, but on his mother, the one who gave birth to him and who suckled him at her breasts. This is part of the rosary that the Roman Catholic communion recites. When they say, Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou among women, blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and the hour of our death. Now in that rosary, Mary, whom the church has called Theotokos, the mother of God, is called blessed because she gave birth to Jesus. And surely no woman in the history of the world received a higher honor or a greater measure of blessedness than this peasant girl was given to have the honor of bearing in her womb the baby who would save the world. Jesus gives an astonishing response to this oracle of wheel. He said, More than that, more than the blessing that was received by my mother, greater than the blessedness visited upon Mary is the blessedness that is given for all of those who hear the Word of God and keep it.

Do you hear how radical that is? What Jesus is saying here is, is blessed that Mary was to be his mother. You are even more blessed. You have received an even greater blessing than she did by being a recipient of the Word of God.

She bore the Word of God incarnate. You hear the Word of God written and enunciated here in sacred Scripture, but there's a condition attached to it that blessedness comes not simply in hearing it, but in obeying it. In the Greek language, there's a strange twist of wording where the Greek word to hear is the word akouene, and the Greek word to obey is the word hupakouene.

From that prefix hupo, we get the English prefix hyper. That means that if someone obeys what they hear, they experience a hyper-hearing. That is, the hearing is not simply on the surface that goes in one ear and out the other, but it is somebody who hears it in an emphatic way so that they do what the Word commands. And so, if you hear the Word of God, and if you obey the Word of God, our Lord has pronounced a blessing on you that is greater than the blessing that the Father gave to his own mother. And so while the crowds were thickly gathered together, he began to say, this is an evil generation. It seeks a sign.

Let's pause there. Jesus now pronounces tacitly an oracle of woe, an oracle of doom upon the generation of his contemporaries. Now, beloved, the Scripture tells us that all generations are evil because all generations are made up of corrupt human beings. Jesus is singling out his contemporary generation as being peculiarly, especially evil and wicked. And I think the reason for the higher degree of wickedness that Jesus pronounced upon that generation is because, in contrast, this was the most blessed generation that ever walked the face of the earth. This was the generation who experienced the visitation of God incarnate. This is the generation that was on the earth when divine light shone on the planet in an unprecedented manner. This is the generation because of that light, that extraordinary light had also with it a much more somber and sober obligation to respond. So to reject the Messiah in the midst of this kind of extraordinary light accentuated the degree of evil of that generation.

Now, Jesus goes on to define why it is that he found that generation to be so particularly evil. He said, you're a generation that demands a sign. You want proof that I am who I say I am. You want to see miracles. You want to see a sign that is so weighty that it is irrefutable.

You know, in John's gospel, John characteristically doesn't speak about miracles. He speaks about signs. One of the principal words of his gospel is the Greek word semeion, which is translated sign. For example, the first sign that Jesus did, he did at Cana of Galilee in the wedding feast there where he turned the water into a sign. Now, what's a sign? A sign is something that has significance, significance beyond itself that differs subtly from the word symbol.

A symbol participates in that which it directs or points to, but a sign points to something outside of itself, something beyond itself. When you go towards the city of Orlando and you may see a sign that says, Orlando five miles, you're not in Orlando. You're headed to Orlando. You're going in the direction of Orlando because you're following the sign that directs you there.

But once you pass the city line, then you're no longer outside looking to something in the future, but you're in it. And so Jesus is saying, you want some kind of special sign that will prove to you that I am the Messiah, that I am God incarnate. Now notice, he's speaking this to a group of people who had just seen him cast out a demon. And you remember when the Pharisees accused him of doing that by the power of Beelzebub, Jesus responded by saying, if you see me casting out demons by the finger of God, what? This is a conditional statement, an if-then statement. If you see me casting out demons by the finger of God, then what?

Then you know that the kingdom of God has come upon you. In other words, this is a sign. I just gave you a sign and the sign went right past you. It wasn't a big enough sign. It wasn't a convincing enough sign.

You wanted a bigger sign, a better sign. I say to you, it seeks a sign and no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah. The sign of Jonah. How did Jonah get into this discussion? Was Jesus listening to Burke Parsons that day? Burke's been preaching on Jonah for those of you. How in the world is Jonah a sign?

Jesus explained that elsewhere where He says that Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days, so the Son of Man will be in the earth for three days. What He's pointing to here is the ultimate sign, the supreme sign, the most significant of the things that God did in Christ by raising Him from the dead. Remember when Paul was with the Athenians and he said to them, these former days has God overlooked, pointing to God's forbearance to an unbelieving world, to God's long-suffering impatience, the obstinacy of impenitent people.

And then he said, but everything's changed. For now, God commands all men everywhere to repent and come to Christ whom He has appointed to be the judge of all the world and proven that through raising Him from the dead. Those of you who are still looking for signs, those of you who are still waiting to be convinced that if you're looking for more evidence from God that He's already given, your hope is futile. You are on a fool's errand that will get you nowhere because the reality is God has already provided you with the ultimate sign.

Sometimes we overlook the importance of this. We have a certain jargon in the religious world where evangelists will stand up and give a sermon and then they will give what they call the invitation, inviting people to come to Jesus and to receive Him as their Savior. If you get an invitation in the mail to attend a particular event, to go to someone's home for dinner, to go to a party, whatever it is, usually at the bottom of the invitation will be the little letters RSVP asking you to respond if you intend to come or if you're not able to come. But the idea of an invitation is that it's an offer that you're free to refuse with impunity. God doesn't invite people to come to Jesus.

He commands them. That's not an option. If you refuse that command, you will perish.

You will not be excused. No RSVP comes with the gospel. Those days are over. In the former days God overlooked that. But no more. Now He commands all men everywhere.

Why? Because of the resurrection, because He's given the ultimate sign. And so Jesus says, no sign will be given to this generation except the sign of Jonah the prophet.

And He says as Jonah himself became a sign to the Ninevites, so also the Son of Man will be to this generation. And then another illustration He gives the Queen of the South, namely the Queen of Sheba, will rise up in judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon. She made that journey, not on an airplane or in a luxury car, an arduous trek indeed, particularly for royalty.

She made that journey for the sake of learning wisdom. The reputation of Solomon and his wisdom had gone to the far corners of the earth, and the Queen of Sheba was so impressed by that, she said, I have to meet that man. Whatever it takes, I'll go over land and sea to get one nugget of wisdom from the lips of Solomon. And Jesus said, there's one here who's greater than Solomon. And so the Queen of Sheba and her entourage will rise in judgment at the last day to those who ignored the invincible sign of Christ Himself.

The men of Nineveh will rise up in judgment with this generation and condemn it. They repented at the preaching of Jonah. Now, Jonah was a great man, despite all of his flaws and his imperfections. He was a prophet of God. He pronounced the word of God in the people, this pagan people of Nineveh, repented en masse.

It was Nineveh's great awakening. And Jesus said, because you're not watching Jonah. This isn't Solomon you're listening to.

One greater than Solomon, one greater than Jonah. Do you hear the implication? If you won't hear Jesus, who will you hear?

You heard the anthem this morning. You can have all the rest. But give me Jesus.

If you have Him, you have it all. Then he goes on to say, no man, no one when he has lit a lamp puts it in a secret place or under a basket. What's the point of that? But instead puts it on a lampstand that those who come in may see the light. Now he makes this analogy, the analogy between the lamp that you use to illumine the dark places of your house is like the eye. The way we perceive light is through the organ of the eye. But if your eyes are not functioning and if you're blind because your eyes no longer work, then your life is a life of darkness. You know, I think about what happens to people with various maladies and diseases and injuries and how they cope with it. At all of our national conferences we have people who are hearing-impaired and when we speak we have the message being translated through sign language for those who can't hear.

And one of the highlights of those conferences is the music and the words are translated to the deaf by virtue of the sign language, but they can't hear a single sound. I can't imagine what that would be like. But oh, how much worse is it to be blind, to be confined to darkness every second of the day. You've been in a room without light. You've been experiencing total darkness.

You know how intimidating that is, how scary that can be. I remember as a boy having to go down into the cellar with a coal bucket to get some coal from the coal bin and how frightened I was to go down there because it was dark down there. I had no idea what was hiding in the corners in that basement. And woe betide if the light bulb burned out. Even as a little boy being in my room with the light on and had to turn the light off, I used to have a race with the speed of light 186,000 miles a second.

I'd turn off that switch and try to get to the bed before the light marked, I lost that race every single time. Oh, to have a life confined to darkness. But Jesus said, that's where this generation is. The lamp of the body is the eye. When the eye is good, your whole body is full of light. But when your eye is bad, your body is full of darkness. Therefore, take heed that the light which is in you is not darkness.

What was He saying? It wasn't difficult to understand the point. You people are blind and the blindness extends to your whole life. If you don't have the light of Christ in your heart and in your soul, no matter how well your eyes function organically, you're living in utter darkness, and that will be your destiny for eternity, darkness. That image of darkness is used biblically to describe our fallen condition. We're by nature chosen of darkness. We prefer the darkness rather than the light because if we stand in the light, we are stripped naked as it were, exposed of all of our sin. And the light of the gospel does that.

That's why we flee from it. It exposes us until we rejoice in it and are covered by the gracious righteousness of Christ. The gospel is the light of the world because Christ is the light of the world. Without Him, your whole life is darkness.

With Him, it's nothing but light. For us as believers, it should be our goal to run toward the light of God's Word and to have our sin and frailties exposed. We always find forgiveness and healing when we confess our sin and run to Christ.

We've heard another message from R.C. Sproul's sermon series from the Gospel of Luke. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Lord's Day.

I'm Lee Webb. Thank you for being with us. Over the past several months, we have had the privilege of studying in-depth with Dr. Sproul, and our resource offer today is a Bible study tool that I think you'll return to again and again. Contact us today and request a digital download of R.C.

's commentary on Luke. In nearly 600 pages, you'll find helpful insight into every verse. To receive it, contact us with a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries.

You can do that online at renewingyourmind.org. And here at the end of the program, let me also remind you that our goal at Ligonier Ministries is to come alongside the local church. It's not our desire for this program to replace the fellowship you enjoy with your church family. We're thankful that you benefit from R.C. 's teaching, but we also hope you're benefiting from the means of grace in the proclamation of the Word and in the sacraments at your local church. I hope you have a great week, and I hope you'll make plans to be with us again next Sunday for Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.