Luke #28: Kingdom Divisions, Signs & Woes (11:14-54)
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: Luke 11:14-54
N:
Welcome
Welcome
Again, welcome to Family Worship with the church family of Eastern Hills. It’s a blessing to gather with such a wonderful church family this morning. I’d like to give a special shout out of thanks to our Safety and Security teams who rotate every week and greet folks on the parking lot, patrol to make sure things are secure while classes and service is happening, and who are ready to act if an emergency comes up. If you’re a Safety & Security volunteer, would you please raise your hand? Of course, a bunch of them are out doing their jobs right now, so make sure you thank the people in the yellow vests as you leave today!
If you’re a guest or visiting with us this morning, we would really like to be able to thank you for being here today, and to be able to do that, we have to get a little information from you. Could you please just fill out one of the Welcome cards that you’ll find in the back of the pew in front of you? When you’ve done that, you can return it to us in one of two ways: you can drop it in the offering boxes by the doors as you leave when service is over, or I’d appreciate the opportunity to introduce myself, so after service, I’ll stay down here, and I invite you to come and say hello and give me your card personally. I have a small gift to give you to say thanks for being here today.
Announcements
Announcements
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Opening
Opening
As you know, I’ve titled this sermon series “The Story of the King.” I did this because throughout the Gospel of Luke, the thread of “the kingdom of God” is woven. Luke was writing to inform Theophilus about the arrival of this kingdom through its true king: King Jesus. Last week, we looked at Jesus’s teaching His disciples to pray after they asked Him to, and he taught them to pray for that kingdom—the holy and righteous rule and reign of God on earth—to come. We saw this in verses 1-13 of chapter 11.
This morning, we will look at the rest of chapter 11 as we keep our focus on the kingdom of God and on its King. This is a fairly long reading, so I wanted to warn you ahead of time: If you do not want to stand for what will be several minutes, feel free to remain seated. Otherwise, please stand in honor of the recitation of God’s holy Word, and turn in your Bibles or your Bible apps to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 11, where I will begin reading in verse 14:
14 Now he was driving out a demon that was mute. When the demon came out, the man who had been mute spoke, and the crowds were amazed. 15 But some of them said, “He drives out demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons.” 16 And others, as a test, were demanding of him a sign from heaven. 17 Knowing their thoughts, he told them, “Every kingdom divided against itself is headed for destruction, and a house divided against itself falls. 18 If Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand? For you say I drive out demons by Beelzebul. 19 And if I drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons drive them out? For this reason they will be your judges. 20 If I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. 21 When a strong man, fully armed, guards his estate, his possessions are secure. 22 But when one stronger than he attacks and overpowers him, he takes from him all his weapons he trusted in, and divides up his plunder. 23 Anyone who is not with me is against me, and anyone who does not gather with me scatters. 24 “When an unclean spirit comes out of a person, it roams through waterless places looking for rest, and not finding rest, it then says, ‘I’ll go back to my house that I came from.’ 25 Returning, it finds the house swept and put in order. 26 Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and settle down there. As a result, that person’s last condition is worse than the first.” 27 As he was saying these things, a woman from the crowd raised her voice and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the one who nursed you!” 28 He said, “Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.” 29 As the crowds were increasing, he began saying, “This generation is an evil generation. It demands a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah. 30 For just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so also the Son of Man will be to this generation. 31 The queen of the south will rise up at the judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and look—something greater than Solomon is here. 32 The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at Jonah’s preaching, and look—something greater than Jonah is here. 33 “No one lights a lamp and puts it in the cellar or under a basket, but on a lampstand, so that those who come in may see its light. 34 Your eye is the lamp of the body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is also full of light. But when it is bad, your body is also full of darkness. 35 Take care, then, that the light in you is not darkness. 36 If, therefore, your whole body is full of light, with no part of it in darkness, it will be entirely illuminated, as when a lamp shines its light on you.” 37 As he was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to dine with him. So he went in and reclined at the table. 38 When the Pharisee saw this, he was amazed that he did not first perform the ritual washing before dinner. 39 But the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and evil. 40 Fools! Didn’t he who made the outside make the inside too? 41 But give from what is within to the poor, and then everything is clean for you. 42 “But woe to you Pharisees! You give a tenth of mint, rue, and every kind of herb, and you bypass justice and love for God. These things you should have done without neglecting the others. 43 “Woe to you Pharisees! You love the front seat in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces. 44 “Woe to you! You are like unmarked graves; the people who walk over them don’t know it.” 45 One of the experts in the law answered him, “Teacher, when you say these things you insult us too.” 46 Then he said, “Woe also to you experts in the law! You load people with burdens that are hard to carry, and yet you yourselves don’t touch these burdens with one of your fingers. 47 “Woe to you! You build tombs for the prophets, and your fathers killed them. 48 Therefore, you are witnesses that you approve the deeds of your fathers, for they killed them, and you build their monuments. 49 Because of this, the wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and persecute,’ 50 so that this generation may be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world—51 from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. “Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible. 52 “Woe to you experts in the law! You have taken away the key to knowledge. You didn’t go in yourselves, and you hindered those who were trying to go in.” 53 When he left there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to oppose him fiercely and to cross-examine him about many things; 54 they were lying in wait for him to trap him in something he said.
PRAYER (Schuler/Bryson family)
This morning’s passage sets itself up in a way that feels sudden. Out of seemingly nowhere following Jesus’s teaching His disciples how to pray, Luke takes us our of that gathering back into the public eye, where Jesus is ministering to the people, particularly that He was driving out a demon. This is not something new in Luke’s Gospel, as we’ve already seen Jesus specifically drive out several demons, and there have been several more references to Jesus driving out demons that weren’t specific about a particular instance.
Why Luke makes this abrupt transition without warning and without timeframe, we don’t know. But we see that there are three responses to Jesus’s work with this particular demon:
14 Now he was driving out a demon that was mute. When the demon came out, the man who had been mute spoke, and the crowds were amazed. 15 But some of them said, “He drives out demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons.” 16 And others, as a test, were demanding of him a sign from heaven.
Not shockingly to us, once Jesus drives out this demon that had rendered the man unable to speak, the man could speak again, and as we have seen before, the crowds witnessing this were amazed. However, this time there are some other groups who were there watching, and who were actually less than impressed. The first group denies that Jesus’s power could be of God, and they accuse Jesus of basically being in cahoots with Satan, and that His driving out demons is because of Satan’s power, not God’s. For the second, they feel that driving demons out of people is all well and good, but they want to see something special. Something big from heaven, something comparable to what the Scriptures (our OT) contain.
Jesus takes the opportunity to address both issues, while at the same time giving us some explanation of an aspect of demonic possession, and basically letting the Pharisees and scribes have it. Let’s start with those who accused Jesus of driving out demons by the power of Satan:
1: Kingdom unity (17-23)
1: Kingdom unity (17-23)
The first attack leveled at Jesus doesn’t make a whole lot of sense logically, and it might make even less sense to us today. Who is “Beelzebul,” and when did he become the “ruler of demons?” Well, it turns out that the name was taken by the Jews from one of the old pagan Philistine gods worshiped in the city of Ekron. Beelzebul was to them the chief of the demons, and the Jews had just kind of adopted the nickname for Satan.
We can only take a guess at why this group makes the accusation that they make: Likely they’ve listened to voices that have been saying that Jesus is a bad guy, because He often is in opposition to the Pharisees. So by their logic, Jesus could not have received His power from God, but they cannot deny His ability to drive out demons, so Satan himself as the origin of His ability became their best alternative.
I’m not going to read the whole passage again, but Jesus answers their thinking very clearly in verse 17, using the examples of a kingdom and a house:
17 Knowing their thoughts, he told them, “Every kingdom divided against itself is headed for destruction, and a house divided against itself falls.
If a kingdom fights against itself, what do we call that? Civil war. If members of a household are at odds against each other, what do we call that? Dysfunction.
Let’s think this through: Jesus was driving out demons, right? And those demons were team Satan, agreed? One would logically assume that if the demons were team Satan, and they were possessing people and causing trouble, then that was the goal of demon possession for team Satan, fair? How does it help team Satan in any way if Jesus drives out the demons that are doing exactly what team Satan wants done already?
It doesn’t. If Jesus were driving out demons by the power of Satan, that doesn’t advance Satan’s agenda at all. Jesus is making an argument to the best explanation. Jesus is right: a kingdom or house divided against itself cannot stand. It will collapse without unity.
Jesus gives an additional argument by bringing the only other logical possibility in verse 20:
20 If I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.
Since He can’t be driving out demons by Satan’s power, then He must be doing so by God’s power. And if Jesus does drive out demons by “the finger of God,” then it is proof that the kingdom of God has arrived with Him.
The term “the finger of God” is an interesting one to reflect on. It’s only used three other times in Scripture, twice in the book of Exodus (and once in Deuteronomy telling the story of one of the times in Exodus). The first is in chapter 8, with the plague of gnats in Egypt. Up to this point, the Egyptian magicians had been able to “duplicate” the miraculous plagues with their dark arts (or trickery). But beginning with the plague of gnats in verse 19, they couldn’t copy it. Even the magicians of Egypt say that this is something special—the finger of God:
19 “This is the finger of God,” the magicians said to Pharaoh. But Pharaoh’s heart was hard, and he would not listen to them, as the Lord had said.
So the first time that we see reference to the finger of God is in the midst of His bringing freedom to captives. Jesus was freeing people from bondage through the power of the finger of God.
The second time is found in Exodus 31:18, before Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Ten Commandments:
18 When he finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the testimony, stone tablets inscribed by the finger of God.
The finger of God inscribed the first set of stone tablets! So the second time the Scriptures reference the finger of God is in the context of God forming a covenant with His people—His representative nation on earth. In Luke, Jesus is using that power to bring about an even greater kingdom than Israel.
This finger of God overpowers the demonic forces, and proves the arrival of the kingdom of God.
When we read through verses 21 and 22, we might wonder who is who then. But Jesus made it clear through His reference to the finger of God. Satan is trying to guard his “estate,” the world along with all those he “possesses.” But Jesus is the “one stronger,” who overpowers Satan, removes his weapons from him, and divests him of his possessions as plunder. Jesus is the victor, fulfilling the promise that He made when He quoted Isaiah back in chapter 4:
18 The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
And finally, Jesus says something that’s similar to something He said back in 9:50, when He responded to John’s frustration with the exorcist who was driving out demons in Jesus’s name. But in 11:23, He said:
23 Anyone who is not with me is against me, and anyone who does not gather with me scatters.
This is where the importance of the unity of God’s kingdom is made apparent. Jesus doesn’t leave space for a middle ground. Neutrality about Jesus is not an option. One is either FOR Jesus, or AGAINST Him. If one does not belong to Jesus, then that one is in rebellion against Him.
This brings us to a question of application: “Which side are you on?”
Maybe you want to say that you are on the side of Jesus, but you know you’re not FOR Him. You think He’s cool and all, but you have other priorities, other desires, other things that you want to pursue at the moment, and you figure Jesus will always be there when you’re done doing things your way. You’re not on His team, but you’re not exactly hostile, either. Doesn’t matter. Jesus drew the line, not me. You’re either for Him or against Him. The only way to be saved is through faith in Jesus as your Savior and Lord. He died in your place to save you from your sins. He overcame death and rose again to give you eternal life if you trust in Him. Surrender to Jesus, even right now.
And church, are we FOR Jesus in our hearts? Do we pursue unity in the body, because we know that we are all on the same team? Consider what Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:
1 Therefore I, the prisoner in the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling you have received, 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.
We must not be divided, and if we do find ourselves in a moment of conflict, we must choose to do that which God would have us do in order to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. If that means we forgive, then we forgive. If that means that we need to lay down our “rights” in order to serve our brothers and sisters, then that is what we must do. We have to love one another enough to put in the work necessary to work out whatever differences we may be experiencing with each other. This unity is something that we are called to, brothers and sisters. A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. We must be actively engaged in promoting the unity of church family, and even further, unity between church families.
Our unity shows that we belong to a greater kingdom than the kingdom of the world, and how we live then reflects that we are subjects of the king, and live in HIs kingdom, which takes us to our second point:
2: Kingdom occupancy (24-28)
2: Kingdom occupancy (24-28)
Jesus continues our consideration about demon possession in verses 24-26 with a very interesting description of what happens following a demonic exorcism.
24 “When an unclean spirit comes out of a person, it roams through waterless places looking for rest, and not finding rest, it then says, ‘I’ll go back to my house that I came from.’ 25 Returning, it finds the house swept and put in order. 26 Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and settle down there. As a result, that person’s last condition is worse than the first.”
The fascinating thing about this is that when the first demon returns to the “house” (person) he had just been evicted from, he finds that it is put in order: counters wiped down, carpets vacuumed, beds are made...but also finds that it is unoccupied. The Holy Spirit hasn’t taken up residence in that person’s life, because they do not belong to Him.
This person had been set free from the demon by Christ, and while I’m sure he was appreciative, he still didn’t believe in Jesus, so he’s left to his own devices. Spiritually speaking, his house was left without someone in charge of it, even though for a short time he had escaped from the corruption that had controlled him. He has knowledge of the truth. He just hasn’t believed it yet.
So the demon moves back in, but first he goes and finds some friends—seven friends. The number 7 in ancient Hebrew thinking was the number of totality, perfection, or completeness. So this demon returns with all the evil it can muster, and this man is in much worse shape than he was before.
There’s a passage in Peter’s second epistle that really helps us understand this picture. In 2 Peter 2:20-21, Peter writes (maybe reflecting on what Luke has recorded here):
20 For if, having escaped the world’s impurity through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in these things and defeated, the last state is worse for them than the first. 21 For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than, after knowing it, to turn back from the holy command delivered to them.
Peter says that there are those who, “through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” momentarily “escaped the world’s impurity,” by understanding the Gospel and perhaps making some temporary behavior modifications. But they were again entangled by what had enslaved them before, and so they are defeated because they are not strong enough to stand against it, since they don’t actually have Christ.
Remember the parable of the soils back in chapter 8 (I preached this message on Mother’s Day)? Two of the soils sprouted plants, but never bore fruit. Either of these could be the types of people that Peter was talking about here. One heard the Word and immediately was excited about it, but had given their hearts to their excitement, not to Jesus. The other heard the Word and understood it, but were choked out by the “worries, riches, and pleasures of life.” (8:14).
Both Peter and Jesus says the same thing about this tragic turn of events: That their ending state is worse than the first. It’s better that they would have never heard than to have heard, pretended to believe, and then ultimately rejected Christ. Why is this so? Because they’ve already intellectually understood the promise of the Gospel and still walked away from it. A person whose heart is hardened against believing a Gospel which they understand is far more difficult to soften than the heart of a person who has never understood it in the first place.
Just hearing and understanding the Gospel isn’t enough. We need to believe it. Trust it. Surrender to it if we’re going to be set free. And our surrender is proven by our perseverance.
Paul says that, “The righteous will live by faith,” (quoting Hab 2:4 in Rom 1:17). And even here in our passage in Luke, Jesus is given the opportunity to make this plain through the ecstatic blessing for Jesus’s mother, yelled out to Him by a nameless woman in the crowd. Jesus’s answer doesn’t say that Mary wasn’t blessed (she was). It says that there is a more important blessing than having Jesus as a Son, and this blessing is available to all:
28 He said, “Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”
Both “hear” and “keep” in this sentence are parts of speech that mean to do something and continue to do it. The blessed person hears the Gospel and continues hearing it, and obeys the Gospel and continues obeying it. This isn’t salvation by works. It’s saying that people who are saved persevere in the Gospel, and those who persevere in the Gospel are people who are saved. Perseverance is the evidence of salvation, not the means.
And for those who claim to believe, this should cause us to reflect on the state of our hearts as well, not out of fear, but to make sure that we are not walking in unbelief in any area of our lives, giving space to that which would distract us from taking up our crosses and following Jesus.
But I’m going to guess that there are people in this room or listening online who are like this: kind of inoculated to the truth of the Gospel through continuing to hear it and reject it, hear it and reject it. Don’t allow your heart to be hardened this morning, your spiritual house to be leased by evil. Hear the fact that God loves you and has proven that love through sending Jesus to die for your sins. Surrender in faith, trusting Christ to save you.
I suppose the question we should ask is: “What are you waiting for?” What is it that you’re thinking you need to see, hear, or experience before you will surrender completely to Jesus? A sign, perhaps? Well, that’s exactly what the other group of objectors was waiting for, which brings us to our third point this morning:
3: Kingdom visibility (29-36)
3: Kingdom visibility (29-36)
Those who were asking for a sign didn’t get the answer they wanted. Jesus doesn’t perform for them some additional miraculous sign in order to prove His identity. It’s funny, as I studied this, I actually wrote in my notes, “Was this (driving out the demon) not a sign?” It’s like they were saying, “Jesus, it’s cool that You drove out the demon and all, but we’re going to need just a little bit more.”
And Jesus says, “Forget it. You’ve got the sign of Jonah.” I think it’s neat that Jesus gives reference to knowing the Word of God right after He calls those who belong to Him to hear and obey it.
The “sign” of Jonah, according to what Jesus said in Matthew’s record of this declaration, is Jonah’s fish experience:
40 For as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.
Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection would be the “sign” for the people that what Jesus was saying was true, just as Jonah being trapped in an organic submarine (basically buried) and spat back onto the land (basically resurrected) was a “sign” of the truth of God’s message of judgment against Nineveh hundreds of years before. Therefore, the people of Nineveh, who had believed Jonah’s message, would stand in judgment of the Jews of Jesus’s day, because the greatest prophet of all time was present among them, and they wanted Him to do tricks.
The Queen of Sheba (1 Kings 10:1-13) would also stand in judgment of them, because she traveled a great distance to hear Solomon’s wisdom directly, and they were standing there hearing directly from the One who gave Solomon his wisdom, and they were asking for something more.
They wanted something that they could see. So Jesus gives an illustration using light from a lamp—something that can be seen.
34 Your eye is the lamp of the body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is also full of light. But when it is bad, your body is also full of darkness. 35 Take care, then, that the light in you is not darkness. 36 If, therefore, your whole body is full of light, with no part of it in darkness, it will be entirely illuminated, as when a lamp shines its light on you.”
The image that Jesus paints here is that of our eyes—the “light” we take in—being the point from which we are filled with either spiritual light or darkness, health or disease. So this brings us to a question of application: “What are you filling yourself with?” Are we taking in truth, or taking in lies? Are we listening to good teachers, or are we listening to people who just tickle our ears and tell us what we want to hear? Do we have a godly person in our lives who knows what we are struggling with and helps us apply biblical solutions, or do we just go with whatever “feels right” in the moment?
We don’t need Jesus to perform a sign. If we’re in Christ, we are the sign. This is what I take verse 36 to mean—that if we are walking with Jesus, we’ll be so filled with Him that we will shine out to others, as Paul wrote in Philippians:
12 Therefore, my dear friends, just as you have always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence but even more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. 13 For it is God who is working in you both to will and to work according to his good purpose. 14 Do everything without grumbling and arguing, 15 so that you may be blameless and pure, children of God who are faultless in a crooked and perverted generation, among whom you shine like stars in the world, 16a by holding firm to the word of life.
We make the kingdom of God visible through our lives as we are filled with Jesus and reflect His light to the watching world.
The picture that Paul leaves us with leads well into the final point of our focal passage in Luke 11. As we work out our salvation, trusting in God’s provision for our holiness, are we blameless and pure, showing ourselves to be children of God? Or are we hypocrites like the Pharisees and experts in the law?
4: Kingdom hypocrisy (37-54)
4: Kingdom hypocrisy (37-54)
Finally, Jesus was invited by a Pharisee to come to his house for dinner, and Jesus accepted. The Jews had (and still have) a ritual about dipping their hands in water for a moment before eating, ceremonially rinsing any unknown spiritual uncleanness from their hands before touching their food—Please note that this was not a hygienic washing with soap and water… I’m not criticizing people who wash their hands before eating (I do it). This was one of those places where they created a rule to guarantee (in their heads) that they wouldn’t violate the Torah because they had a rule more strict than the Scriptures held. Well, Jesus didn’t wash His hands at dinner. He wasn’t worried about it. He knew He wasn’t unclean, because His touch could make unclean things clean!
But the Pharisee was shocked at this. How could Jesus not rinse His hands as the ritual prescribed?
In response, Jesus first criticizes the rule, and then pronounces three “woes” upon the Pharisees. We have to remember that this particular Pharisee was Jesus’s host’
39 But the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and evil.
He’s not talking about the cups, but about their hearts. They are more concerned about form than they are about substance, more worried about appearance than about reality. They “rinse” the uncleanness from the outside of their lives, but the inside is where the problem is. The issue is that their hearts are filled with “greed and evil,” which is why He’s going to bring the “woes.” Jesus suggests that God wants them to be completely clean, not just on the outside. The best way to deal with greed is to be generous, and so Jesus instructs them to give from their hearts to the poor, so that their hearts would be set free from greed’s control.
Each of the woes to the Pharisees reflects some failing in their worship of God. The first is that they tithed from the herbs their garden produced, but didn’t “act justly, love faithfulness, and walk humbly with God.” (Micah 6:8). Note that Jesus isn’t condemning tithing here… He says that we should both tithe AND practice justice and love for God.
The second is that they wanted the places of honor and popularity. They were more worried about their reputations than about the Lord’s.
And the third is the strangest one to us. They are like “unmarked graves,” and people don’t know it when they walk over them. Walking over a grave made you ceremonially unclean. To walk over an “unmarked grave” would mean that you didn’t know you had walked over it, and thus, you were unaware that you had become unclean. So was the Pharisees’ teaching. They had it so wrong, their teaching created sin in people even as they claimed to be teaching them the way of righteousness.
Essentially, their legalism sucked all of the joy our of being God’s chosen people so that a relationship with God was a burden, not a blessing.
An expert in the law realized that these criticisms could also be levied against their group, and so he points out the insult to Jesus. BIG mistake. Jesus is ready with three criticisms directed just to them:
First, they are hypocrites because they demand that others follow very strict lives, but they themselves don’t hold to the same standard.
Second was the most difficult of the six woes to understand. Essentially, Jesus was accusing the experts in the law of saying that the messages of the prophets was good, even though they were in the moment endorsing the same choices that their ancestors had made in killing them. As we will see, they were so angry that they were desperate to find something so they could get rid of Jesus. So they are just like their ancestors, even though they would say they weren’t. As a result, they would be held accountable for all of the blood of all the prophets killed for all of time, because they would eventually kill the greatest of all prophets. Abel was the first murder in Scripture in Gen 4:1-6, and Zechariah’s murder in 2 Chr 24 would have been the last one in the Hebrew Scriptures (2 Chronicles is the last book of the Hebrew Bible).
And finally, the last woe condemns them for “taking away the key to knowledge:” they deny God’s plan of salvation by grace through faith. And not only do they deny it, they teach others to deny it as well, so that they will not be saved.
They thought that their “religion” made them righteous in God’s kingdom, but it didn’t. And similarly, we might think that following a set of religious rules makes us righteous, but that in and of itself doesn’t. In fact, having a fixed set of rules that we judge ourselves and others by makes us less likely to walk in true holiness, not more, because if we can start comparing ourselves with others instead of Jesus, we can make ourselves out to look pretty great.
Robert Stein wrote in his commentary on this passage:
“The kind of commitment that leads to the finest piety is also frequently accompanied by hypocrisy. Neither Pharisaism nor Christianity is exempt from this unfortunate tendency.”
—Robert H. Stein, New American Commentary Series, Volume 24: Luke
The Pharisees and the experts in the law were in it for themselves, not for God. So this should bring us to our final application question this morning: “What is most important to you?” Are we living to please God and look more like Jesus, making His kingdom priorities first in our lives, or are we living for ourselves, trying to grab all the power we can.
Closing
Closing
The kingdom of God came in the work, ministry, and person of Jesus. It’s by His work that we are unified. It’s by His Spirit that we are occupied. It’s our calling to make His kingdom visible as we shine His light, and to live lives before Him that bring Him glory, not ourselves. Anything else is hypocrisy.
But being truly a part of the kingdom comes first from surrendering to the King as Savior and Lord.
Surrender
Baptism
Repentance
Church membership
Prayer
Giving
PRAYER
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
VALUES
Authentic Family
We have fun and encourage each other through life’s ups and downs.
Real Truth
We dig into Scripture for clarity in a confusing world.
Transformational Growth
We thrive as we learn to become more like Jesus together.
Practical Impact
We seek to meet the needs of our neighbors wherever we find them.
Bible reading
No Pastor’s Study, however: Don’t forget weed pulling tonight at 7 on the playgrounds
Prayer Meeting - Ezra’s prayer in chapter 9 #5
Instructions for guests
Benediction
Benediction
5 Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act, 6 making your righteousness shine like the dawn, your justice like the noonday.
