Inside and Out

Most of y’all know that I’m a hat guy. Always have been, as long as I can remember.

I’ve got hats of all kinds at home — fedoras, Outback hats, beanies, baseball hats, boonies, a bowler, bucket hats, Panama hats, and even a hard hat.

I even have a Stetson hat in the Gambler style, which Annette hates so much that I can’t even take it out of the box.

But way back when I was a teenager, I went through a cowboy phase, God help me, and I had a couple of cowboy hats — one leather and one straw. Both of them had absolutely outrageous bands with feathers and beads .

Now, during my cowboy phase — man, was I ever a confused teenager — I ALSO had cowboy boots, a leather belt with a great big buckle, and a western-style shirt. All that was missing was a gun belt and a pair of six-shooters.

And I remember walking through the mall in Newport News one night — this was when malls were at the height of their popularity around here. I was wearing the hat, the boots, the shirt, and even the belt, and I must have thought I cut quite the dashing figure.

As I was walking through the mall, I heard the voice of a young lady call out to me: “Hey, look! A real cowboy!” And then, she and her friend burst into giggles and headed the other way.

Well, I’d been looking for attention, and there it was.

Now, I HAVE ridden horses before, and I’d done so many times by the time of that night in the mall. And I had a great cowboy hat. I had a fine pair of cowboy boots. And my belt buckle was big enough and shiny enough that I could have used it for a place setting for a fine dinner.

But did any of this make me a real cowboy? Well, of course not. In fact, there may have been nobody alive at that time who was LESS of a cowboy than me.

What makes a real cowboy is what he DOES, not what he wears. It’s about what’s on the inside, not what’s on the outside.

And, whether we’re talking about cowboys or Christians — or anybody else, for that matter — what’s on the inside becomes evident by their actions.

In today’s concluding, bonus message regarding the Book of Jonah, we’re going to see people demanding evidence from Jesus that He spoke with the authority of God.

We’ll see His response, in which He talks about Jonah. And then we’ll see Him turn the tables on them — and especially on the Pharisees — challenging them to see that their own lives failed to show evidence of a true relationship with God.

We’re going to be looking at Luke’s account of this event, which is also recorded in the Gospel of Matthew.

We’re picking up in verse 29 of chapter 11. Let’s read the passage together, and then we’ll dig into the details to see the lesson that closes out our study of Jonah.

Luke 11:29–44 NASB95

29 As the crowds were increasing, He began to say, “This generation is a wicked generation; it seeks for a sign, and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah. 30 “For just as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so will the Son of Man be to this generation. 31 “The Queen of the South will rise up with the men of this generation at the judgment and condemn them, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and behold, something greater than Solomon is here. 32 “The men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation at the judgment and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. 33 “No one, after lighting a lamp, puts it away in a cellar nor under a basket, but on the lampstand, so that those who enter may see the light. 34 “The eye is the lamp of your body; when your eye is clear, your whole body also is full of light; but when it is bad, your body also is full of darkness. 35 “Then watch out that the light in you is not darkness. 36 “If therefore your whole body is full of light, with no dark part in it, it will be wholly illumined, as when the lamp illumines you with its rays.” 37 Now when He had spoken, a Pharisee asked Him to have lunch with him; and He went in, and reclined at the table. 38 When the Pharisee saw it, he was surprised that He had not first ceremonially washed before the meal. 39 But the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the platter; but inside of you, you are full of robbery and wickedness. 40 “You foolish ones, did not He who made the outside make the inside also? 41 “But give that which is within as charity, and then all things are clean for you. 42 “But woe to you Pharisees! For you pay tithe of mint and rue and every kind of garden herb, and yet disregard justice and the love of God; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others. 43 “Woe to you Pharisees! For you love the chief seats in the synagogues and the respectful greetings in the market places. 44 “Woe to you! For you are like concealed tombs, and the people who walk over them are unaware of it.”

Now, I didn’t read the passage that precedes these verses, but it’s important to the context. So, let me give you the abridged version.

Jesus had cast a demon out of a man who’d been mute, and some of the Pharisees had claimed He was performing miracles by the power of Satan.

Jesus responded, pointing out that it wouldn’t have made much sense for Satan to attack the demons that served him.

And while He was responding to the false charges of the Pharisee, a woman in the crowd shouted, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts at which you nursed.”

But Jesus said to her, “On the contrary, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.”

In other words, blessed are they whose actions in response to the message of the gospel give evidence of changed hearts. Blessed are they whose change isn’t just superficial but REAL and comprehensive.

The actions that result from their changed hearts give evidence that they belong to Jesus.

And that brings us to today’s passage, where “evidence” becomes the theme, both for Jesus’ interaction with the crowds following Him and for His encounter with a Pharisee over lunch.

Jesus now responds to the Pharisees’ demand for a sign or attesting miracle in verse 16 of this chapter. They had wanted Him to perform some miracle to prove that He was teaching in God’s authority.

All the way back to the Old Testament, the miracles performed by prophets were intended to give evidence that they spoke in God’s authority.

The idea was that doing something that could only be done supernaturally provided evidence that the prophet had been sent by God and that He spoke the words God had given him to speak.

So, the first problem with the Pharisees’ demand of Jesus might be obvious to you. The very act of exorcising the demon WAS the attesting miracle. It WAS the sign.

Now, they were demanding a sign to attest to the SIGN. And after that, they’d probably want a sign to attest to THAT sign. And so on.

But Jesus was no performing monkey. And He knew that no miracle would soften the hard hearts of those who wanted to reject Him. Indeed, He says as much later in Luke’s Gospel.

In His parable about the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus tells of a man who calls from hell to Abraham in heaven and asks that Abraham send Lazarus back from the dead to warn the man’s five brothers about the torment they’ll face if they don’t turn to Jesus in faith.

Abraham replies that the man’s brothers have received all the warning they need from God’s word in the Old Testament. And then, the man says, maybe his brothers will change their ways if they see a dead man who’s come back to life.

Jesus closes the parable with a bit of prophecy: “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.”

The point in both passages is that the people have God Himself, in the person of His Son, Jesus, standing there, speaking to them. They are hearing truth from the one who IS the Truth.

They should have recognized that what He was teaching corresponded perfectly to what the Old Testament had taught them about God.

Once He’d proved with His first miracle that He’d been sent by God, there shouldn’t have been any need for further proof, since His teachings were so close to what they SHOULD already have learned.

And so, He tells them they won’t get another sign. Or rather, that they only sign they’ll get is the “sign of Jonah.”

So, what does Jesus mean by “the sign of Jonah”? In Matthew’s account of this incident, Jesus connects His coming resurrection from the dead after three days in the tomb to Jonah’s emergence from the belly of the great fish after three days inside.

The idea is that Jonah’s miraculous rescue and release from the great fish is a “type” that prefigures Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

Some commentators believe Jonah’s miraculous rescue from the Mediterranean Sea was the evidence the Ninevites needed to believe that he’d been sent by God with his message of God’s impending judgment against them.

And as with Jonah, Jesus’ resurrection after three days in the tomb is a sign that He was sent by God with His message of repentance and faith. His resurrection from the dead should be all the proof needed of His divine assignment.

But Luke leaves that part out of his account, which suggests that Jesus may also have had something else in mind in His reference to the “sign of Jonah.”

Do you remember what I said was the greatest miracle of all the miracles in the Book of Jonah? It was the repentance of Nineveh.

Jonah’s appearance in Nineveh was a sign to the Ninevites, drawing them to repentance. And their repentance was a sign that God was working in their midst.

I think that’s what Jesus has in mind here when He says that all the Pharisees will receive is “the sign of Jonah.” He was calling them to look for the miracle of repentance taking place all around them.

Verses 31 and 32 seem to confirm this theory. Jesus mentions the Queen of the South, who was called the Queen of Sheba in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles. She had visited King Solomon and came away praising God because of Solomon’s great wisdom.

In verse 32, He mentions the Ninevites, who repented and worshiped God because of the preaching of Jonah.

THEY had repented and turned to the Lord in faith through the preaching of men. But here, now, stood Jesus, the Son of God — the Kingdom of God in human form — and these Jews were still unmoved.

And it’s significant that the Queen of the South and the Ninevites were Gentiles.

What Jesus is saying, essentially, is this: “Look, even the Gentiles of the Old Testament understood the things I’ve been teaching and turned to the Father in repentant faith based on what they’d heard. You’ve got the very Son of God standing before you. Why won’t you understand?”

And then, He gives a little object lesson about darkness and light. We could spend a whole morning on this little object lesson, but let me give you a thumbnail sketch of what Jesus is saying.

Do you have your eyes on the Truth, or are you gazing at the false teachings of this world? People who are focused on Jesus are full of His light. But those who reject Him and His message and live according to the false teachings of this world are full of darkness.

And the connection to the portion of the passage beginning in verse 37 is that those who are filled with the light of Jesus will serve as beacons in the darkness.

But those who are filled with darkness, no matter how pious and righteous they might seem on the outside, can only lead others to their doom.

What’s surprising about this passage to me is that, even though it’s clear that Jesus is speaking harshly against the Pharisees, one of them asks Him to join him at home for lunch. Maybe he thinks Jesus has finished with His rebuke.

But then, the Pharisee rebukes JESUS for not ceremonially washing Himself before reclining at the table. And that opens the Pharisee up to some of the strongest words Jesus has used yet in His ministry.

It’s important to understand that the ceremonial washing the Pharisee mentions was a tradition, not a requirement under the Mosaic Law. It was something the Pharisees did to look pious.

And Jesus isn’t willing to let this teaching moment pass.

“You Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and platter,” He says. They strove to be certain that anything they touched hadn’t been polluted by coming into contact with something unclean, like a dead bug, for instance.

“But inside, you are full of robbery and wickedness.”

The Pharisees were more concerned with outward appearances than they were about their internal attitudes.

In other words, they had much the same problem as Jonah, who’d learned that his OWN wrong attitudes put him out of touch with God.

If God was concerned about the purity of the utensils His people used, how much more concerned must He have been about the purity of their hearts?

And remember that the Pharisees prided themselves on their adherence to the Mosaic Law. In fact, as Jesus describes in verse 42, they took their tithes so seriously that they gave one-tenth of all their herbs and spices, which ALSO wasn’t required by the Mosaic Law.

They did this, Jesus said, but they disregarded justice and the love of God. In other words, they were indifferent to the poor among them. They didn’t love people, and they didn’t love God.

They loved to be SEEN giving tithes of their spices. They loved to be SEEN in the best seats in the synagogues, and they loved to be acknowledged as Israel’s religious leaders in the marketplace.

They LOOKED pious, but they weren’t. They LOOKED like real cowboys, but they weren’t. Their deeds revealed that their hearts were evil and that they didn’t belong to God.

And in their disobedience to God, they were endangering the rest of the people of Israel.

The Pharisees thought they were pure because of the meticulous way they kept the Mosaic Law. But the evil inside them — the selfishness and pride — actually made them as unclean and dangerous as an open grave to the people of Israel.

Even if they didn’t fall in and become trapped, the unwitting people of Israel were being led AWAY from God by the Pharisees, not TOWARD Him.

“The Pharisees feared contamination from ritual uncleanness, but Jesus pointed out that their greed, pride, and wickedness contaminated the entire nation.” [John A. Martin, “Luke,” in The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, ed. J. F. Walvoord and R. B. Zuck, vol. 2 (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985), 237.]

The Pharisees had demanded evidence that Jesus spoke with the authority of God. But Jesus turned things around and said that their actions gave evidence that that what was inside of them was darkness and not light.

For we who’ve followed Jesus in faith, His commentary here in Luke about “the sign of Jonah” is a reminder that our actions — our deeds — speak far more clearly of our relationship with Him than anything we might say.

Piety, it has been said, is often accompanied by hypocrisy. [Robert H. Stein, Luke, vol. 24, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1992), 341.]

We can talk well about God, just as Jonah did. We can sing songs of thanksgiving and praise, just as Jonah did. We can claim to be His children, just as Jonah did.

But if our hearts aren’t truly changed by this relationship, then we’re no better than Jonah. We’re no better than the Pharisees. What’s on the inside is more important than what’s on the outside.

We can come to church every Sunday and sing the songs and close our eyes to pray. We can read our Bibles and know all the stories there. But if our hearts haven’t been changed by the Holy Spirit, we’ve missed the whole point.

And if you’ve never given your life to Jesus — if you’ve never turned to Him in faith that He alone provided a way for sinners to be reconciled to God — then let me remind you of the sign of Jonah.

Just as God called the people of Nineveh to repent, so is He calling YOU to repent today.

Admit that you are a sinner and unable to do anything to save yourself from the penalty you deserve for your sins. Accept the gift of Jesus’ sacrificial death and supernatural resurrection as full payment of the penalty you owe. And give your life to Jesus as your Lord and Savior.

You might fool the rest of the church and the world with your little cowboy outfit, but you’re not fooling God. He sees your heart. And He wants to purify you completely, from the inside, out.

Won’t you give your heart to Him today?