Getting the Big Picture (Part 2 of 2)

After His resurrection, Jesus met two of His disciples on the road walking to Emmaus and neither of them recognized Him.

So how could that be? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains that without God opening our blind eyes, we're incapable of recognizing Jesus on our own. From Luke chapter 24 continues.

Without this basic problem, it is a conversation between two individuals whose hopes were dead and buried. And verse 15 tells us that as they talked and discussed these things in their animated interaction, they are joined by a stranger. Now, I hope you notice that it doesn't say that they didn't recognize him. They didn't recognize him.

But that's not what it says. It says that they were kept from recognizing him. I find that very helpful, because if it had simply said they didn't recognize him, I would have been tempted to say, That's weird to me. I mean, how can you not recognize him? Even though you didn't expect to see him there, even though his resurrection body had different characteristics to the one that he took into the tomb, even given that, you would anticipate that they would be enough about this person that you would recognize him. And so Luke, with his eye for detail, points out they were kept from recognizing him. I wonder if what Luke is doing there is something very important—namely, pointing out to us and pointing out to his readers that we cannot see the risen Christ, although he is walking with us, unless he wills to disclose himself. Some of you come routinely to Parkside Church. But you do not recognize him.

You may even wonder why it is. It may be that God has kept you from recognizing him, in order that when you do, it may be so clear to you that this is the Lord's doing, and it's marvelous in his eyes, as opposed to, you know, well, I know there is a Jesus, or I know that my children sing the songs about him, or I know they bring the pictures home from the Sunday school when I go and pick him up up the stairs, but I need to just get in the car and get on with my life. I don't recognize Jesus.

They were kept from recognizing him. And he speaks to them. He just asks a question. What are you discussing together as you walk along? What's the topic of the day, essentially, saying, What's happening? What's everyone talking about? What are we talking about today?

This is a fair opening line, isn't it? Happens all the time, people say, on elevators and in airport terminals and on buses and at bus stops. So, what's the word on the street, you know? What's happening?

And they say, Excuse me? Are you just a visitor to Jerusalem? You don't know the things that have been happening there in these days? In other words, we're talking about what everybody's talking about. If it had been this past week, if this had taken place on Monday, their response would have been, What?

You didn't see the halftime show? Jesus comes back and says, So what's everybody talking about? So what are you talking about? Well, we're talking about Jesus of Nazareth. I love the irony in this, don't you? It has the touch of John's Gospel about it. Happens all the time in John, these little ironies. Luke doesn't do it very often, but he's perfect here.

So we have Jesus talking to them, asking them what they're talking about. They're talking about him, but they don't know he's he. He's him.

Him who? Ha ha ha! Whatever it is. All right?

It's fabulous. A child reading this as a bedtime story will get this very quickly, faster than some of us intellectual adults. They say, Well, I don't know.

So the child goes, Daddy, does that mean that he…? That's right! Wow! This is a great story. And it is a great story.

So what are you talking about? Talking about Jesus of Nazareth. Oh, Jesus of Nazareth! Very interesting.

Yeah, so what's the word? Well, his sermons were fantastic. Terrific sermons. We were sick and tired of the scribes, the Pharisees. Their stuff was boring.

It was horrible. The same old stuff, week after week. But when he spoke, people listened. People began to follow him and believe in him. We had done the same thing. And his miracles—wow!

We've seen lame people get up and take their beds and walk, blind people see. We saw the transformation of a little cheat called Zacchaeus. He came scattering down the tree and finally came out of his house, and his whole life was turned upside down.

Oh, yes. Jesus of Nazareth—fantastic sermons, wonderful miracles. There is no question that he was a prophet. He was a prophet. But the chief priests and our rulers, the Jewish authorities, handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him. And our hopes for liberation, verse 21, all came to a grinding halt.

We had hoped he was going to be the one to redeem Israel. It's now the third day since all this took place. There doesn't really seem to be any indication of the fact that he is who he claimed to be. The women have gone, and the story is out about the angels and so on.

Some of our companions actually went to the tomb. They found it just the way the women said, but him they did not see. Now, when you read this, it's not difficult to catch the perplexity in their voices, the disappointment, the sense of hopelessness that permeates the account.

That's the basic problem. Now we turn to the big picture. Verse 25. Jesus said to them, How foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!

Quite an opening line, wouldn't you say? To this point, he simply asks questions. What are you talking about? We're talking about the things that have happened. What things that have happened? The things about Jesus that have happened. Oh, he says, fine. And as he listens to them talk, he then says, Aren't you failing to understand, and aren't you slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken?

Now, that little three-letter word is crucial. It wasn't that these folks were unbelievers. It wasn't that they didn't know certain things the prophets had said. But in their reading of the Old Testament and in their thinking about messiahship, they had failed to grasp the big picture. They had not been paying attention to all that the prophets had spoken. They had, if you like, and perhaps understandably, focused on only one side of the story—the story of the Messiah who would be a triumphant king, the story of the Messiah as a conqueror and a ruler of his people, the story of a Messiah who would usher in justice upon the earth, a day when the lion would lie down with the lamb, and all of that they anticipated following the revelation of the Messiah, and they had every reason to believe that Jesus of Nazareth had met the bill, was sufficient for the job, if you like.

But it had all gone so horribly wrong. They had warmed to the idea of victory, but they had failed to see that glory and victory lay along the path of suffering and of death. Now, Jesus hadn't concealed this.

We know that from our studies. I'm only going to give you one other cross-reference. It's Luke chapter 18, and it's verse 31. Jesus had not concealed this. There's no sense in which Jesus had tried to make it easy for people to be his followers, the way that some of us are tempted to do. Jesus had not said, you know, Come and follow me, and it's just going to be victorious, it's going to be triumphant, it's going to be fantastic. No, he actually said, If you follow me, it's going to mean a radical change in your life.

And if you follow me, you're going to follow me to death. And if you're going to follow me, you're going to have to take up your cross every day and follow me, and so prove that you're my disciple. No, Jesus did not, like some contemporary explications of the gospel, hold out these wonderfully juicy carrots for the silly donkeys along the road. He actually held out a story for the thinking man and woman, despite the fact that he had difficulty getting their heads around it. Verse 31 of Luke 18, Jesus took the twelve aside and told them, We're going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written by the prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled.

And then, to help them, he goes on to work this out. He will be turned over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him, spit on him, flog him, and kill him.

On the third day, he will rise again. And then Luke tells us the disciples did not understand any of this. Its meaning was hidden from them, and they did not know what he was talking about.

And here we are on this first Easter Sunday afternoon. These peripheral followers of Christ are having their discussion as they make their journey back to this little town seven miles away from Jerusalem. And in verse 27, we're told that Jesus gave them a systematic Bible study, beginning with Moses and—notice again—all the prophets.

He explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. I don't write in my Bible this particular Bible. I write in some Bibles.

The pages are too thin, it gets very messed up. But in the Bible that I write in, then I'm going to circle all, all, all. How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and enter his glory?

And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. Now, this is of vital importance, and it is really here that we're going to end. As I was preparing this and thinking along these lines and anticipating this morning, I flew home yesterday afternoon from Chicago. And in the course of a very short flight, fifty-five minutes or so, myself and the stewardess were engaged in conversation, the details of which are not significant, at least its introduction. But it finally turned on the fact that she asked me, What translation of the Bible do you like to use? Well, I said, I use, presently, the NIV. Oh, she said, I don't like the NIV. And then she walked away with a diet Coke or a ginger ale or something. And I said to myself, How interesting!

In all the conversations I've ever had, I never really had a conversation with somebody whose opening line was, What translation of the Bible do you like to use? And in the back of my mind, I said, Here we go. Well, of course, I was right. Because when she came back with the trolley, she said, I said, So why don't you like the NIV? Well, she said, Because the NIV removes God's name.

Hmm, I said. Immediately I knew who I was dealing with. I was dealing with the Jehovah's Witness.

Right? What she was telling me was that since the name Jehovah appears in the NIV as Lord—capitalized—L-O-R-D, that this was actually the removal of the name of God, and it had been done seven thousand times. Well, very fortunately, I had recently heard a sermon on this in which the pastor explained that when the Hebrew was translated into the Greek some seven thousand times in the Septuagint version of the Bible, they translated Yahweh—the unpronounceable name of God—they translated Yahweh as Kurios.

Remember? Kurios Jesus. And they did so in order that it might be absolutely apparent who Jesus is. So that Paul's great declaration, At the name of Jesus every knee will bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, is God, is Yahweh.

He understood what he was saying. He was a monotheistic Jew, and he was declaring the reality of the divinity of Christ. And of course, fortunately, because I'd heard that sermon—I actually preached it—but fortunately, because I heard that sermon, because I also hear what I preach, fortunately, I was able to say, and kindly, yeah, I understand your stuff about the tetragrammaton and all these other things.

Don't do that to me, and don't try and baffle me with Hebrew and with Greek. I didn't say that, but essentially I said that, and as the conversation unfolded, I said to her, you know, why are you so concerned that Jesus would not be the person he claimed to be? And she didn't have any answer for that at all.

But what she had was a series of proof texts. So she went to the standard stuff that the Jehovah's Witnesses are trained to go to. The Lord said to my Lord. And then she tried to tell me about what that meant. Because in good in fairness to her, that is exactly the instruction that she has received.

And coming out, as she told me, of a moribund, deathly Roman Catholicism, which had done nothing for her at all except make her feel guilty, she had found great release in this discovery of the Jehovah's challenge and the energizing opportunity of trying to convert erstwhile little Scotsmen as they're sitting drinking their Diet Coke on the plane back to Cleveland. I said, Well, I'm so glad that you feel it necessary to convert me, because I am equally committed to converting you. And she said, But wouldn't it be wonderful if we could agree? I said, No, it would be terrible if we could agree. Because our disagreement is fundamental.

It is absolutely vital. Because if you are right and Jesus is a created being, then he is not God, he is not Savior, he is not alive, and salvation history has ended in the cul-de-sac of a Palestinian tomb. But if the New Testament is right, then in actual fact, you may know him. Now, why do I mention that?

Because the way to be able to deal with the Jehovah's Witness, with the Mormon, is not the way it is usually suggested in the bookstore. If they say this, you say that. If they say this, you say that. So what it ends up being is a big proof text thing. Well, I think… So it's like chess, you see? And you move the thing, and eventually, one of the two of you gets frustrated, flips the chessboard right on the floor. Forget the whole thing!

Isn't that how it goes? Look, get out of my house. I gotta cut my grass. Go on! Get out of here.

Right? Or maybe that's only me. But here's the deal. Before we criticize them, some of us are hanging by our fingernails with a proof test Christianity. We get about three or four verses that we understand and have memorized, and the rest of the Bible, we aren't a clue what we're doing with it. And we need the explanation that Jesus provided in this systematic biblical exposition. We need the information that comes by the studying of the Bible. That's why we study it in books. That's why we're going all the way through Luke's Gospel. That's why when we turn from this and go back into other things, we're going to work our way systematically through them.

Why? To prevent us from doing the very thing that others are tempted to do to us. The necessity of the big picture. Genesis, all the way to Revelation, is the story of God's amazing grace. It's the story of the fact that God has purposed from all of eternity to redeem a people that are his own, and that it is the utterly undeserved privilege of all who believe to be included in that great company. That in Genesis, when Adam and Eve discover their nakedness and they hide from God, God comes and pursues them. And discovering them in all of their nakedness, he provides them with a covering for their nakedness, pointing out in the very infancy of things that there will eventually come a day when he will provide a robe of righteousness, the very robe of his Son, so that we may, in royal robes we don't deserve, live to serve his majesty. That all of those big, amazing, dramatic stories in Leviticus and on, about the sacrificial system and blood and smoke and curtains and bells and all of these things, they're all pointing to the fact that God is holy other than us, that he cannot tolerate to look upon sin. That because he's so incredibly holy, sin must be punished. Because he is so amazingly loving, he provides for sinners a sacrifice of atonement, so that from the very beginning all the way to the end, the focus is ultimately found in Jesus. Who are you talking about? We're talking about Jesus of Nazareth.

Well, it doesn't seem to be doing you much good, does it? You're too slow to believe all that the prophets have written. You got the big picture? The awfulness of sin and the deep, deep love of God combining to make Calvary inevitable. And their hearts began to burn within them. At least, that's what they said later on. Their ears started to burn first, I'm sure.

Their cheeks flushed. Dear, oh! And then their hearts stirred, learning, listening, saying, Oh, that makes perfect sense! Now I understand Psalm 22. Now I understand Psalm 22.

We just read it this morning. I hope you understand it. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I can number all my bones. They're attacking me like wild dogs.

They pierce my hands and my feet. Christ on the cross quotes the Bible. Christ on the M.A.S. road teaches the Bible. And there will come a day when, in all of his kingly power, the lion will lie down with the lamb. But for now they need to get this, and so do we.

Well, that's it. Facing up to the basic problem. Facing up to the basic problem. We had hoped that Jesus was this, but he is apparently not. They needed to have that notion corrected, and some of us this morning need that corrected too.

And then finding the big picture. Jesus says, Guys, the problem here is not that you don't believe. The problem is that you don't believe properly.

That's the problem for some of you. It's not that you're unbelievers. You've come out of a background of orthodoxy. You've been taught the creeds. You believe that Jesus was the Christ. You believe that he was the Messiah.

You spend time in the company of Christ. But have you recognized him? In the way that Saul of Tarsus recognized him?

Who are you? Lord? That is the name of God.

Here he is, Curios, Yahweh. Being a Christian is about more than just being in the presence of Christ. It's about having a relationship with him as our Lord and our Savior. That's the challenge from today's message on Truth for Life with Alistair Begg.

Please keep listening. Alistair will be back in a minute to close with prayer. Well, having just celebrated Easter, I hope you are comforted to know that your salvation is assured because of the resurrection of Jesus. Our culture often dismisses the resurrection as a myth, claiming that miracles can't be true if they can't be scientifically verified.

Well, our current book recommendation is a book titled Alive! How the Resurrection of Christ Changes Everything, and it refutes this notion with both historical and biblical evidence. The book provides a thorough defense of the reality of the resurrection.

So whether you're looking to relieve your own doubts about the resurrection or convince others of the truth of God's Word, be sure to request your copy of the book Alive! when you donate today. Your giving directly supports the distribution of this daily teaching program. You can give easily through our mobile app or by visiting truthforlife.org slash donate.

You can also call 888-588-7884. Now here's Alistair to close in prayer. Father, thank you for the Bible. Thank you for its clarity and its power.

Thank you for the fact that it confronts our basic problem, as it did those individuals. And thank you, too, that when we get a grasp of the big picture, we find that it forms up ultimately in this wonderful portrait of Jesus. Thank you for reminding us that life does have meaning, and that that meaning is found in Christ. Grant to us eyes to see, ears to hear, minds to think, hearts to welcome, and wills to obey the Lord Jesus Christ. And may grace and mercy and peace from the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit be the abiding portion of all who believe today and forevermore. Amen. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening. Join us again tomorrow as we learn how to draw closer to Jesus. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.