Experience TRUTH - #8

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What in the world has taken over Experience Truth? I'm Stu Everson, and we're in Luke chapter 19, and we have given you a little teaser there. Robby Dillmore, the Christian car guy, is right alongside me here. Wonderful to have him as a guest on Experience Truth when he's able to be here going through the Scriptures. Robby, we teased it, now we're getting into it.

It's time to talk about Zacchaeus. Luke 19, 1-10. Read the passage for us.

We'll get right into these questions. Then Jesus entered and passed through Jericho. Now, behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus, who was a chief tax collector, and he was rich. And he sought to see who Jesus was, but could not because of the crowd, for he was of short stature. So he ran ahead and climbed up in a sycamore tree to see him, for he was going to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and saw him, and he said, Zacchaeus, make haste and come down, for today I must stay at your house. So he made haste and came down and received him joyfully. But when they saw it, they all complained, saying, he's going to be with a guest of this man who is a sinner. Then Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, Lord, Lord, I give half of my goods to the poor, and if I have taken anything from anyone by false accusation, I restore it fourfold. And Jesus said to him today, salvation has come to this house, because he's also a son of Abraham, for the son of man has come to seek and save that which was lost. So Robbie, that's the passage, Luke chapter 19, 1 through 10, and we are putting a halt, we're putting a freeze on any short jokes, okay? I mean, you're 6'5", I'm pushing 6'7", 240 pounds, mostly muscle, and you're going to walk in that door, you're going to be careful, okay? So this guy was a wee little man, and we'll get into that.

It's interesting, I preached this sermon that we're going to talk about today, this is our weekly Bible study, a bunch of men get together new, called Wednesday in the Word, and we give you that every week on Experience Truth, just journeying through the Scriptures, so we hope you're with us with your Bible open, or at least listening, as we ask some very important questions and just tie right to the Scripture, what God is saying through his Word. But it's fascinating, at the Epperson Reunion, where there's all these 6'9", 6'8", 6'5", 6'4", tall people, the Epperson's are tall, you know, big stew, so I get my height from, I'm preaching on the wee little man, so I had to really dial back the short jokes there, Robbie, you know. But you know what, once in a while tall people got to vent. I mean, how many times have people asked you, Robbie, how's the weather up there?

My African friend from Sudan who's 6'11", and my other friend who's 7'4", 7'3", big James, he's getting it all the time. Everyone says two questions, they say, number one. What's the weather up there? How's the weather, how tall are you?

Number two, do you play basketball? So you just got to get that out of the way and then you can move on. So here we go with this, why don't you ask the first question, Robbie, we'll jump right in. How does Zacchaeus, the wee little man, compare and contrast with the publican rich young ruler and the blind beggar?

Wow, so you have this tax collector, and what a picture. Luke 19, this is a brilliant picture of the life-changing gospel, transforming gospel of Jesus Christ. But leading up to here, we have dealt with Jesus' story in chapter 18 of the two men that went to the temple to pray. One was just too good for God, and the other one was, woe is me, he had a heart. And God only heard one of those two prayers, and only one of those two men was justified.

It wasn't the self-righteous, but it was the unrighteous man. That's followed immediately by the man who it was too hard for him to go to heaven. He was too good for heaven, the rich young ruler.

You would have thought he had everything going for him, we would have signed him up to run our church, our building program, nice donor, nice giver, nice tither. He was rich, he was young, he was a ruler, very religious, he kept everything, but he was too good for heaven, and he went away weeping. And then you have blind Bartimaeus, this blind guy, which we covered last time, who's standing there begging. He's begging, crying out, and he asks to receive his sight. His first thing he ever sees is Jesus. Jesus takes time out of his busy travel through Jericho, a bustling economic town with all kinds of merchandising going on, all kinds of religious people, all kinds of dynamics, to heal this one blind guy out of the crowd. And his life was transformed, and he followed Jesus. So now we have Zach.

Now we have the Zach attack. Another rich guy. Very rich, and it's interesting, Jesus said, it's likely for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, then for a rich person to get to heaven. Well, here we have in Luke 19, we have the camel going through the eye of a needle.

But he is little, so he fit better. See, I told you to towel those short jokes back. I knew you would. Unbelievable.

I have to call security to get you to put a clamp on that one. But yeah, that's right. So he's the wee little man. So it's a great contrast. But again, the theme of the whole book, if we go to the end of this passage, the theme of the whole book of Luke is verse 10. I learned this verse from Pastor Bud Owen in eighth grade Bible class at Woodland Baptist Christian School.

And I'm not going to tell you what year it was, probably in the 50s or the 30s or 40s or something, Robbie. But he said the theme of the book of Luke, as he was teaching us the Bible, is Luke 19, 10. The Son of Man has come to seek and save that which was lost. And that's the theme. You have Christ seeking and saving and going after us. Isn't that true in our lives? But if you go back, you've got to look at the Bible through the lens of Jerusalem, not through the lens of America.

And this is what's going on here. And all of a sudden, Zach, he is becoming a part of Jesus' plan. So Jesus entered and passed through Jericho. Where is Jericho? This is the busy, bustling place east of Jerusalem, commerce and trade, major industrial haven.

Traders and tax gatherers did really well there, because wherever there's money made, there's taxes to be paid. You've got to pay the man, right, Robbie? Two things are going to happen to everybody.

You're going to die and you're going to pay taxes. And from my perspective, Jericho is sort of a cursed place. They weren't supposed to build it even, right? Yeah, that's right. After the whole wall came down and all the shenanigans, it went on.

So here it is doing really well. And verse 2 tells us, Now behold, so now it's setting up the story here, there was a man named Zacchaeus. You're not going to believe this, but you know what Zacchaeus means? The name? Pure of heart.

How about that? So this guy's parents, very likely Jewish, named their little fellow. They're like, hey, we want this guy, this little guy, to be a godly man, maybe a priest, maybe a spiritual Christian leader of our country. Maybe he'll be a part of when the Messiah comes.

And so they named him Pure One, or Pure of Heart Zacchaeus. And here they're like, how in the world did this happen? And here they're like, for years maybe people are coming up to his parents and saying, what happened to that dude? Oh, we don't know who he is. We've never seen him before, right?

How many times do you think that whole drama played out? That's a really cool thing, Stu. I mean, that just blows my mind. Because biblically, how true is that? And often God gives people a name, which he had some hand in this, that they later become. Like, Gideon's throwing the wheat down in the well so that nobody sees him because he's a big chicken. And the angel comes up and says, mighty warrior! Gideon's like, me?

That's a really cool insight. And we'll come back to that at the end, because we're going to see how God just brilliantly restores in the redemption of Christ. But it says we know his name. He was a man.

He was named Zacchaeus, which means pure of heart. And he was a chief tax collector. Ah, big dog.

So he's a big dog. So a chief tax collector, he would have been over multiple tax franchises. So while he has an occupation of high net worth and lots of cash flow, lots of money, he would have been the lowest of the low in Israel. The tax collectors were despised.

They were hated because they worked for the occupiers, the Romans, to shake down and extract taxes from their own people. So if, Robbie, if the tax is 10%, and I'm the tax collector, and I work for the Romans, and you're my fellow Jewish guy who we're supposed to be the same deal here, same race, same ethnicity and all that stuff, same worship, same God, I say, Robbie, I know the tax is 10%. I need 75%. And you're like, you need what? And I say, I need 75%. And you're like, I ain't giving you that, Zacch. You get out of here. Well, I say, well, there's two guys with big spears right behind me, and we're pretty much going to put your kids in slavery. We're pretty much going to take your house over and all your cattle and your whole net worth and your inheritance and your land.

Did I say I need 85%? See how it keeps going up? And so that's what these guys did. I mean, these guys were, they were hated. They were loathed.

The Jews wanted to kill them, literally. They were tax collectors. And who could have been among his merry men?

Maybe Matthew. He was the chief tax collector. He had a bunch of them working for him. So maybe he was curious about all this because he had heard what happened to Matthew, and wow, he was thinking, but what had his money done for him? What had his money done for him? What did he accomplish to him? Well, let's look at what he does here. It says he sought, and verse 3...

Okay, I didn't mention this, but we did. He was a chief tax collector. He was rich.

So there's a simple statement of his wealth. Verse 3, and he sought to see who Jesus was. So here's a guy who's looking to see who Jesus was. Well, no doubt he'd heard about Jesus.

Maybe from Matthew, you know, his fellow tax guy who'd followed Jesus, left everything to follow Jesus. But from the reputable...you know, he just healed a blind guy in town that had been probably trying to shake Zacchaeus down. Hey, give me some money, dude. You're loaded, you know, you daggum tax collector.

Give me some money. Hey, everyone's like, Zacchaeus, you should give that blind guy. All of a sudden, Zacchaeus is like, wait, why isn't he out there begging for money anymore? Because he's healed him. Maybe he's heard about the raising of the dead of Lazarus. Maybe he's heard about all these great miracles Jesus has done. So it says he sought to see who Jesus was, but could not because of the crowd.

So Jesus has bevelled momentum. This is later in Christ's ministry. He's on his way from Jericho to Jerusalem.

He's still in Jericho. So there's a huge crowd that's amassed. People are hearing about Christ. They're coming to learn about him, to listen to him, to follow him. The setup is beautiful because, you know, Zacchaeus must have believed in his heart that Jesus was not going to hate him. And he had to have some word that, hey, here's somebody that even will talk to me. Because he had just a pretty lonely place that he was at that point in his life because nobody's talking to him. And he's going, well, maybe this guy will talk to me. And maybe there's hope there.

And so that's an interesting thing that your reputation kind of goes in front of you of, you know, who you will hang out with. And your money can only buy you so much friendship. Your money can only buy you so much health. Ask Steve Jobs, worth $7 billion. And he said himself, I can't pay someone to take my pancreatic cancer.

And I can't pay to have it fixed. Then he went on to say a bunch of other things about what's really important. Tragically, he didn't know Christ. But you see that he had all this wealth, and you can't pay people to be your friend. And so you can't buy time. You can't pay for time. And so here, Zacchaeus was at the end of his rope.

And read this question here, Robbie, and we'll have to probably pick it up more next week because we're almost out of time. What does this man's behavior tell us about his searching soul? So here he—and what is his behavior?

Look what he did. It says he ran ahead. I mean, that's probably a fairly old dude, man. He climbs a sycamore tree. Climbs a sycamore tree, which was a very sturdy tree with a low root base. And plenty of branches so a little guy could get up there.

That's exactly right. He climbed up there. There you go on the little guy jokes again. Because he knew Jesus was going to go past that way. So here he's plotted a little scheme. He's hatched a plan to put himself in the direction and a way in the area where Jesus Christ would be. He's little.

He can't see over the crowd. So he is going to climb a tree. And we're going to find out suddenly that while Zacchaeus was trying to get a glance at this miracle-working Messiah, and he hatched a plan to do that, Jesus Christ actually had a plan for him. How is he a part of Jesus's plan?

We'll find out next time on Experience Truth. On my encouragement to everyone, read the Word. Study the Word. Share the Word of God. Share this story with someone. Teach your kids the song.

Zacchaeus was a wee little man. It's easy to find. And ask yourself this question. How did Jesus seek you? What are you doing to get a glimpse of him? Experience Truth.