Death is an inescapable fact of life. And while all of us share this common destiny, not all of us share a common destination. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg examines a parable in which Jesus challenges us to consider death now while we're living. We'll find out why. Luke chapter 16, verse 19.
There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried.
In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side.
So he called to him, Father Abraham, have pity on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire. But Abraham replied, Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things. But now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you, a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us. He answered, Then I beg you, Father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for I have five brothers.
Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment? Abraham replied, They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them. No, Father Abraham, he said, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent. He said to them, If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.
Amen. Father, we pray that with our Bibles open upon our laps that you will be our teacher, unless you come and quicken your word and quicken our ears and illumine your scriptures and open our eyes. Then the whole exercise is simply the futility of listening to a man talk. But we believe that when your word is really preached, that your voice is truly heard.
So we listen for your voice as we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. For those of you who are particularly perceptive and have been following our studies in Luke's gospel, you will notice that I've just made a jump of ten verses. I acknowledge that for the three of you that knew that I did that, and the rest of you are saying, oh, yes, that's remarkable, isn't it? Although you hadn't a clue where we were last time, and you've been making a discovery this time.
That's fine. I think I would be in much the same boat if I weren't able to go and look at what I did last time. The reason that I'm doing this is because I want to come back and pick up the central section from verse 10 to verse 18, but allow these parables to follow in succession from one another. This is the third of three parables that Jesus has told, each of which begins concerning a man. In the first of them, in Luke 15, he says, There was a man who had two sons.
At the beginning of chapter 16, he said, There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. Here in the 19th verse, he says, There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen, And so clearly, the ongoing dialogue between Jesus and his listeners is cohesive. These are not some random bits and pieces that have been thrown together by somebody trying to put a gospel together. But it is the unfolding instruction of Jesus that they would be concerned about the abuse of people, and that they would be concerned about an over-preoccupation with possessions. And at the beginning of chapter 15, we're told that Jesus was speaking, and it was the folks who were outside the realm of religious orthodoxy who were particularly interested in listening.
Luke tells us that it was the tax collectors and the sinners, and the kind of people that didn't routinely show up at services—the folks that you would find down the pub rather than down at the church—the kind of people who were out just enjoying sport and recreation. These were the individuals who were saying, oh, we want to hear what Jesus has to say.
So he spoke in such a way that the outsiders were drawn in. And funnily enough, the insiders were thrown out. The religious people, who you would have thought would be listening particularly carefully to this rabbi, were actually just muttering because they didn't like what it was he had to say. And indeed, by the time he had finished the previous parable, which some of us have studied together. Their response was just to sneer at Jesus.
In verse 14, the Pharisees loved money, they heard what Jesus had to say, and so they were sneering at Jesus.
So Jesus says, Well, let me tell you another story that'll wipe the sneer off your faces. That's my paraphrase. He doesn't actually say that. What Jesus is doing here is challenging his listeners—and we are his listeners this morning to consider their destiny. The writer of Ecclesiastes says, It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man and the living should take this to heart In other words the time to think about dying is while you still alive because once you dead you had it There will be no further opportunity after death to make decisions that will affect your eternal destiny.
There have been those throughout the history of the church who have found in obscure places mechanisms for trying to create that post-death experience. But just a careful reading of the Bible makes it impossible for us to reach those conclusions. Rather, it is appointed unto man once to die, and after this comes judgment. And Jesus here speaks about this matter of eternal destiny and confronts his listeners with an immense challenge.
Well, his stories are wonderful, aren't they? I hope you're enjoying them. I certainly am. I love it every time I come to one and he says, I have a story for you. As a child growing up, I loved always when I was told stories.
I had really no greater joy than someone telling me a story. And so every time I read and says, there was a rich man who was dressed in fine purple, I say, here we go again. I'm sure this is going to be a great one as well. It's the story of two men and five brothers. Only one of the individuals has a speaking part.
That's the first fellow. There was a rich man. How do we know that he was rich?
Well, by his clothes, first of all, he was dressed in purple and fine linen. You say, well, why is purple an indication of financial well-being?
Well, the purple dye was very costly. It was squeezed from a particular shellfish, the murix shellfish. They were rare. Therefore, to get sufficient quantity to dye clothes was an indication of the fact that the person was not short of cash. At the same time, to be able to line these magnificent robes with a kind of fine linen, which is referred to here, the kind of material that would be used also as undergarments, were a significant expression of the man's wealth.
We can understand that because in the same way today, there are all kinds of clothes that represent from the infancy of children now, all the way through the spectrum, some indication of status. And indeed, much of the clothing industry seems to be driven in its marketing strategy by trying to appeal to the acquisitive nature of us that we might be able to say, yes, this is, of course, one of those, you know. My son said to me yesterday, a suit I was wearing, I had a black suit. He said, what is that suit? I said, it is a suit.
He said, yes, but what suit is it?
So I looked inside, and it just said, you know, like, a suit.
So he was singularly unimpressed. But that was fine. It was okay. What did he want on it? A sticker or something?
We understand that. And this man was identified in that way. He was identified by his clothes, and he was also identified by his feasts. That's the significance of the phrase, he lived in luxury every day. It's a big, long Greek verb.
It's the same verb that you have in Luke 15, where the father says, let's have a party, let's kill the fatted calf, let's make merry. That's the same phraseology that is employed here.
So, in other words, people knew, they said, the parties at the rich man's house are fantastic. He lived the good life. He didn't have down days. He lived in luxury every day. And if you doubted this and were unable to get access to him, then there was one dead giveaway of his financial status, and that was his gate.
Verse 20, it says, At his gate was laid a beggar. Why does it mention the gate? Because it was the mother of all gates. This wasn't some little gate, you know, that hangs on a wooden fence. The word that is used here for gate is of a huge ornamental portico, such as you would find in front of a palace or perhaps in the entryway to a temple.
So there wasn't much else that could be put in his obituary. Essentially, what they were able to write when he died was, he was a rich man. And if you think about it for a moment or two, there is something quite sad in such a description.
Now, the second individual who is identified for us at verse 20 is also tied up with his gate. The difference is he's not in the gate, he's at the gate. Inside the gate was total luxury. At the gate was abject poverty. The word here for laid at the entrance is actually quite—is marked by a measure of decorum that is not present in the Greek.
It really means that he was thrown at the gate. Perhaps if somebody dropped him off as a beggar, or perhaps he was routinely just throwing himself down at the gate. The kind of individual who is so much a fixture of the locale that people just routinely ignore him, so that this man would be able to come in and out of this vast gate and pass the beggar each time, with his entourage moving on and ignoring him completely. If the back of the rich man was covered in fine purple and in wonderful linens, the back of the beggar was covered in sores. He was malnourished, and his skin bore the evidence.
There were no feasts for him. In fact, it says that he longed to eat what fell from the rich man's table. We might contemporize it by saying that on a Thursday morning, when the garbage trucks went down and out of the gate and off down the road, the beggar lying there said, You know, I wish I could get my hands on some of that guy's garbage. Because he throws out after these parties better food than I've ever eaten in my life. That's how hungry he was.
That's how much in need he was. If he could have got his hands on the stuff that the people threw out, he would have eaten it. There is wonderful stuff at the back of McDonald's. You say, oh, not only is he gathering pennies now, but he's eating out of the trash at McDonald's. No, I haven't gone there.
But there's just something that rankles at me when I think about it being there. Because there is an immense dissonance isn there between all of that stuff lying at the back of McDonald and all of those people lying in the streets There is some strange and bewildering circumstance when we are able to destroy product in the West in order to keep up our economic policies while nations of the world starve to death. We all understand inequality. We face it every day. That's why everybody is so interested in equality.
The Marxist is interested in the equality that comes about as a result of giving everybody the same start. The capitalist is interested in the equality that comes about as giving everybody the same opportunity. But both are interested in equality. Both have a different strategy for dealing with it. The Bible is not silent on these themes.
Jesus here is dealing with an inequity that is very real, and with a passage of time, is no less present. All those of you who love dogs, here you are. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. Now, is that a good lick or a bad lick? You have to try and determine.
I don't know. At first I thought, oh, that's nice. The dogs were licking his sores. Then I thought, oh, that's disgusting. The dogs were licking his sores.
I'm actually at disgusting at the moment. I may go back to that's nice, but I think what he's saying here is he's doing the same thing as in Luke 15, remember? And he went, and there was a famine in the land, and he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he fain would have filled his belly with a husk that the pigs would eating, but nobody would give him anything. In other words, his degradation was so bad that his only companions now were pigs.
The same is true here in the story of this man. The only creatures that pay any attention to him at all are the scavenging dogs from the neighborhood, or perhaps the dogs from the rich man's estate, who come down and lick him. And perhaps his condition is so malnourished that he is unable to lift his hand to defend himself against the interference of these creatures. Read it any way you choose. It's not germane to the issue.
It simply expresses the extent of his degradation. But he has something, you will notice, that the rich man doesn't have. What's that? He has a name. The rich man's just a faceless millionaire.
He's just run-of-the-mill. The beggar has a name. You know what I found interesting? I can't find any other parable that Jesus told where he gives a name to one of his characters. Not one.
This is the only one, and he gives him the name Lazarus. He says there was a man called Lazarus or Eliezer. The word actually means, God has helped me. There was a beggar lying in abject poverty. The dogs licked his sores, and his name was, God has helped me.
You imagine the listener saying, what? Because standing from the outside and looking at the circumstances of these two individuals, you would say, if anybody should have a name, God has helped me, it should be the man with the purple and the linen. But no, he says. Why? Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Happy are the sad. Rich are the pure. Exalted are the humble. You see how Jesus turns everything upside down, turns the Western dream of being a rich man wearing the right clothes, living in the right house, and being able to host the right kind of parties, turns it absolutely upside down and says, Now, I want to talk to you about a beggar with dogs licking his back.
You see, the Pharisees are sneering all over again. They say, Oh, we don't like that kind of thing, Jesus.
Now, the bell should be ringing in the minds of his listeners and should be ringing in the minds of some of us who've been studying Luke's gospel. We should hear Jesus saying, Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Luke chapter 6, verse 24. Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. What Jesus was saying there was this, that if riches is all you have, you better enjoy it, because that's it.
Because if you go beyond this into the realm of eternity where riches are irrelevant, then what will be your comfort?
So woe to you for whom riches, acquisitiveness, acquisition, the good life, is the end of the journey. Woe to you because you've had it. In fact, that's the significance here, isn't it? When Abraham responds to the rich man, he says, listen, in your lifetime, verse 25, you received your good things. I mean, I hope you had a good life, because that was it.
You had your good stuff. You made your choice. You said, I don't want to listen to the Bible. I don't want to obey God. I don't want to listen to Moses and the prophets.
I just want to do what I want to do.
So Abraham says, you made your choice in time. You live with it in eternity. Do you understand this? That the decisions that we make in time will impinge upon what eternity means for us. And time is such a short thing, and eternity is unending.
This man obviously wasn't prepared to do what Jesus had said in the previous parable. Remember in verse 9 of chapter 16, he had said, Use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves. This man hadn't made a friend of the beggar at his gate clearly. He obviously knew who he was, otherwise he couldn't call him by name and shout for him and ask him to go and do things for him.
So it wasn't he could say, I didn't know there was a beggar at my gate. He knew there was a beggar at the gate. He knew the name of the beggar at the gate. He must have passed in the morning and said, well, there's old Eliezer. There's old God has helped you know If that God helping you know And that what people say Well if this is your God and this is what he does you say hang on a minute The records are not finished yet We haven taken the final test The whistle hasn't blown.
It's not the end of the game. I know it looks like this. Why do the people who seem to do right get it in the ear? And why is it that the people that seem to just do what they want prosper so greatly? That's a question from the Bible.
Well, you see, we are such time-bound creatures. We have no concept of then to influence us in the living of the now.
So we live all of our now as if there were no then, which is really dumb, because then is what it's about, and now is a short journey. And this guy obviously never paid attention if he heard Jesus say, when you put together a party list, invite the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame. Verse 22. Death changes everything. Scene one, in which the circumstances of these two individuals are described in their lifetime.
Scene two takes us into the portals of eternity and gives us, in an allegorical fashion, an insight into the dramatic reversal of roles. You can hardly go through a week without somebody saying, death is the great equalizer.
Well, there's a sense in which that's true. Death doesn't recognize class distinction.
So no matter if you're born to play the king or pawn, for the line is thinly drawn between joy and sorrow. It's a fine line between genius and craziness. It's a fine line between sickness and health. And when you take that horizontal journey in the back of a hearse, it's not going to matter whether you're a professor or whether you're a income book. And in that sense, death will equalize.
Who was it? Three-dog night or whatever? You know, all the games people play now? Every night and every day now? Never thinking what they say now?
Never saying what they mean? And they while away their hours in their ivory towers till they're covered up with flowers in the back of a black limousine. Death doesn't recognize class distinction, Jesus makes it very, very clear that society beyond the grave—notice this, look carefully at your Bibles, see if what I'm telling you is true—that society beyond the grave is no more egalitarian than society prior to the grave. In other words, we're not all going to go off into eternity, and everybody get the same kind of little garden and the same kind of little place, and no matter who we were or what we did or what we believed, eventually we're all just going to be absorbed into some eternal blissful environment in which we just sort of eke out the remainder of this strange notion of eternity. No.
What Jesus says is that eternity—and it's revealed here in this story that he tells—eternity reveals a separation that is far more polarized and far more uncrossable than that which was represented at the rich man's gate. And essentially, what he's saying is this. If you think there is an inequity in time, check out eternity. Because, you see, there was more of a possibility of the poor beggar being able to gain access through the gate to one of the rich man's feasts than there was a possibility of the rich man being able to cross from hell into heaven. You can't live with the notion that somehow or another the experience of death will eradicate everything for us, and it all starts with a clean slate from there simply because we died.
Jesus says no the decisions that we make in time impact our life in eternity you're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg we'll continue studying this parable in Luke 16 on Monday we hope the teaching you hear on Truth for Life challenges you to reflect on God's word to take a moment and really consider what God is asking of you or what he is promising to you. Like Alistair said, the decisions we make now will live with us for eternity. This study in the Gospel of Luke confronts us with the necessity to look at life and death from an eternal perspective, and I hope you're finding it helpful. Did you know that Truth for Life is 100% listener funded? It is your giving and the giving that comes from fellow listeners that makes this daily program and all of our free online teaching possible.
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