Take Him At His Word
Luke 16:16-31 ·April 7, 2024· Joel Passmore
Part of: Luke
Transcript
Show
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors. Select a time to jump to that point in the recording.
About 10 years ago, I took a trip to Yosemite National Park. It was my first time ever in a place like that. Inside, the park is huge. I don't know how many millions of acres, but it is enormous. Inside the park, there is a lot of gift shops, eateries, small shops where you can get supplies, things to eat, things like that. Among all the things that they were selling, in nearly every store, I found one item that was the same. It was a book. I got a picture, Avery, if you could put it up here.
The book's title was Off the Wall, Death in Yosemite, being sold in nearly every store in the park. And I thought, the first time I saw it, I thought, boy, that's pretty dark. It doesn't seem to project the right image, right? Shouldn't they be selling like, you know, a hundred of the most glorious pictures of Yosemite or something like that? And then I realized that the reason why I found it at every store is because it was right along the checkout line of every store.
It wasn't off in the book section. It was right there where you would see the candy and the mints and things. And then this book, stacks of them being sold. And then it hit me. I realized that it wasn't so much there as a product to be sold as it was a message to be heard. They wanted people who were passing by to pick it up and read it and thumb through it like I did. And every time we were in a store, I would pick it up and I would thumb through it and I would read something.
They weren't worried about deterring people from visiting because people were already there. They were already there in the park. They were in the stores. They didn't want anyone else to end up in the second edition of this book. That's why they put it out there. They didn't want any more deaths in Yosemite from bears or from falling or whatever. And so they put this book out there so that everyone would read it. And that was the effect that it had on me.
As we went from place to place, as we were hiking, it sobered me up. It gave me wisdom. We were in some pretty dangerous places. I would literally stand in places and think, oh, this is that spot where that guy did that thing that was really dumb. He tried, oh, I see. He tried to get a picture right there. It was in my mind as I was hiking around. And it probably did more good than the little flimsy railing that they put up that people regularly hop over.
It's keeping me out of danger. It guided me on the right path. It protected my life. Now, there's a lot of things happening in today's sermon, but it's all about the Word of God. It's all about this. It's Jesus talking about the Word of God.
He says that God is speaking to us through it. And He wants us to listen so that we will protect our lives, so that we can be protected by Him in our lives. So there's a lot of things happening here, but it's all about the Word of God.
Turn with me to Luke 16, starting in verse 16. This is the Word of God for us today. It comes from Him. He speaks through it even now. The Word of God is perfect, solid for you to stand on and build your life on. So let's hear it and respond to it in that way.
The law and the prophets were until John. Since then, the good news of the kingdom of God is preached, and everyone forces his way into it. But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one dot of the law to become void. Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery. And he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery. There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.
And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried. And in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out, Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.
But Abraham said, Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things. But now he is comforted here and you are in anguish. Besides all this, between us and you, a great chasm has been fixed in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able and none may cross from there to us. And he said, Then I beg you, Father, to send him to my father's house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.
But Abraham said, They have Moses and the prophets. Let them hear them. And he said, No, Father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent. He said to them, If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.
Pray with me. Lord, open our ears and our hearts to your word. For these are not man's words, but your word to us. We want, we need to receive it and listen to it and pay careful attention and respond. And all of those things are possible, Lord, because of the working of your spirit in ordinary people like us. So do that, please, among us today. Make your word fruitful in our hearts and in this place. And we pray this, Jesus, in your name.
Take him at his word. Listening to God speak in scripture is truly a matter of life and death. Now there, as you can tell, there's a lot going on in today's passage. Today, my prayer is for God to help us receive his word with more earnestness and enthusiasm for a couple reasons. First of all, in my experience, the way you and I, the way we approach the Bible is very much a reflection of how we approach God himself. If we could take or leave the Bible, we could probably take or leave God.
If we're enthralled by it, if we go to it eagerly, we're probably doing that with God himself too. Right? The second reason is this. Jesus himself takes the scriptures seriously. And we want to be like him, don't we? So let's be like him. Let's be grown into people that resemble our Savior more. And let's start by untangling the naughtiest part of this passage. And that's verses 16 through 18. Okay? In these three verses, Jesus tells us that God's word endures.
God's word endures. He starts by saying the law and the prophets were until John. Okay. The law and the prophets. That is a shorthand way of referring to all of the ways that God has communicated with his people. All the ways that he has communicated to them over the years. Up till this point. He's given them laws and he sent prophets. It's just a way to summarize what he's done. He has revealed himself as the Lord of heaven and earth. No one would have known that and with the clarity that they do if he had not come down and spoken to them.
Revealed himself to them. He called people to himself and he said, this is how you live. And he said, I am going to someday bring salvation and do away with wickedness on the earth. all of these messages were compiled in the scriptures. What we call the Old Testament. And he says, when he says that this is until John, he's talking about John the Baptist. Not John the Apostle but John the Baptist. John the Baptist was the last messenger of that era.
The last prophet before Jesus. Now a new kind of communication is happening. Since then, the good news of the kingdom of God is preached. Jesus here is referring to his own ministry. He came proclaiming a message about the coming of the kingdom, about life in him. This was a message of good news that came straight from God the Father. This was God the Son saying, I got something from you. It's straight from the Father. It's good news. As we heard earlier in Hebrews, long ago and at many times and in many ways God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.
But in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son. Hebrews 1, 1-4 is saying the same thing that Jesus is saying here in Luke 16. Now the response to this good news is that everyone forces his way into it. That's what Jesus says. This is a really confusing phrase. Its meaning is debated. I think the best explanation based on the grammar and the context here is that Jesus is talking about the urgent response that people are having to him and to his ministry.
Everyone who really understands what Jesus is talking about and believes him is going after it with all they've got. People from all over, they're rushing in, they're crowding Jesus, they're following him, they're leaving behind their profession, their family, their money, they're leaving it all behind to follow him. It makes me think of when fans storm the court or rush the field when the home team wins a victory, right? Everyone's just swept up in it.
They're just, they're rushing. They've got to get down there where the action was. Everyone is forcing his way into it. I believe that's what Jesus is saying here. Jesus is compelling to these people because he himself is revelation from God. He doesn't just pass on words from God, he is the word of God, right? Made flesh. The word of God made flesh. He is God with us. And people see this is the one who is bringing the salvation that God promised through prophet after prophet after prophet after prophet.
He's here now. The Messiah is here. They're like a moth to a flame. They're rushing to him. Now amidst all this enthusiasm, Jesus wants to make a really important point. His coming does not mean that the scriptures that came before are obsolete.
He wants to make it crystal clear. It's easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one dot of the law to become void. The word dot is kariah. It refers to very small strokes that can differentiate certain Hebrew letters. Put up this picture here, Avery. So here's two Hebrew words. They look pretty similar, don't they? See if you can spot the difference. The one on the right, you'd be reading from right to left in Hebrew. The one on the right and the one on the left, they're different with their last letter.
Their last letter is first to us. It's the letter on the left. Go to the next slide, Avery. The one on the left, it's hesed, mercy or kindness. The one on the right is heser, which means lack or poverty. If you want to get a Hebrew word tattooed on you, be sure that they get this right.
The difference is very small. Go to the next slide. The difference is small and it's right up there at the top. You see how one kind of goes over and then it comes back and the other one just slants down? That's what Jesus is talking about. The smallest little pen stroke of Hebrew is not going to pass away. It's not void. It's such a small, when I was learning Hebrew, the first thing that was, the first of many hard things about it was just learning to differentiate the letters because I was looking and I couldn't even tell the difference between these two letters and this is not the only example.
there's like two or three other pairs that look very similar. Your eye has to be trained to see the difference and Jesus says even those small differences are not going to pass away. Not the smallest part is going to be void.
The New Testament describes how Jesus fulfills the promises of the Old Testament but fulfillment does not mean replacement. The New Testament is not like doing an iOS update on your phone where it just overwrites what came before and you have a new version now. It's not like that. It is still valid. God's word is one story. One story with 66 chapters. You don't cut out the first 39 chapters just because the last 27 begin to tell you how the whole thing is getting resolved, do you?
Nobody does that with a book. The first 39 chapters contain exposition and foreshadowing and character development and relevant truth about who God is.
Okay, so that's verses 16 and 17. God's word endures. And then in verse 19 Jesus brings up divorce. Now this probably seemed out of place when you're reading it. What? Jesus, are you changing the subject? He's not. He has a purpose in mind. That purpose I'll just tell you it is not to give an exhaustive teaching on divorce. In Matthew 5, 32 and 19, 9 Jesus says divorce is legitimate when there has been sexual immorality. And then 1 Corinthians 7, 15 Paul says that when a Christian has been abandoned by their unbelieving spouse they're not bound.
So I put those scriptures up here. Go ahead and flip to the next one. Luke. I put those scriptures up there if you want to read more fuller what the Bible says about this subject. Jesus is not trying to give an exhaustive teaching on divorce. What Jesus is doing is he's giving an example of how God's word endures even in his time. He chooses this subject out of all subjects because he's talking to the Pharisees. You have to flip back to the previous section of the text to know that.
He's talking to the Pharisees and divorce is one part disregarded. Deuteronomy 24 has laws about divorce. It says that the grounds of divorce are indecency. Well, religious authorities regularly stretch that word indecency to include most anything, including frivolous things like bad cooking. I'm not making that up. It's literally in some rabbinical teachings. It's named as a legitimate reason for divorce. You can see they're stretching from Deuteronomy 24 the word indecency to cover nearly anything.
And why were they doing it? Because in most cases the ones seeking divorce in this time were husbands. And at that time a divorced woman was a single woman with very few prospects of work or remarriage. They became vulnerable while the religious authorities would give the husbands their divorce papers and they would go on their merry way. This was a justice issue. This misuse of the law to grant frivolous divorces leaving women vulnerable.
This is a justice issue. Jesus is saying Pharisees this is wrong. This is not what God intended. Don't give people reasons to get out of marriage. Give them help to stay in marriage. That is your role as a religious teacher. Jesus said what God has joined together let man not separate.
This is a good April 27th. Seriously though we want to give all marriages in this church and those who are thinking about marriage an opportunity to learn and to continue to invest in their marriage to pour into the soil of their marriage and help it to grow.
God's moral standards remain unchanged even in this new era of salvation history. That's the point Jesus is making in the first three verses. God's word endures.
Next he tells us about the danger of ignoring it. And he tells us a story. In verse 19 he starts it a story with two characters. One is rich and lives in luxury. The second is desperately poor. Jesus gives the second one a name Lazarus. He longed for some help from the rich man. But the rich man did nothing. And then they both die. Lazarus goes to Abraham's side. Abraham's side is a Jewish euphemism for heaven. Meanwhile the rich man is in Hades the place of the dead.
Lazarus is in comfort but he is in torment. He asked for some relief. He asked Abraham to send Lazarus to put water on Lazarus was there starving. Abraham's response is clear and sober. You in your lifetime received your good things. Between us and you a great chasm has been fixed. None may cross. Jesus is cutting it straight for us. He doesn't want any misunderstanding. There are two destinations after this life. One with God in comfort and one apart from God in torment.
Those destinations are eternal. There is no crossing over. There is no escape. But listen, it's not just that in the afterlife everyone gets the opposite of what they got in this life. Remember, Abraham himself was a wealthy man.
A better understanding when we consider all the scriptures is this, the choices you make in this life of what to love and what to seek will have eternal consequences.
The desire to seek God, no desire to obey God. If he had, his life would have showed it, right? He would have loved his neighbor as an act of obedience and worship. The irony is this, that his life of physical luxury kept him from seeing his spiritual poverty.
That's the danger of riches. They trick us into thinking that we're self-sufficient and secure, and the consequences are tragic. The rich man, hearing that he can't get the water, he shifts and he says, then I beg you, father, to send him to my father's house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment. He's saying, Abraham, they've got to be told, they've got to have a warning, they need to know how to avoid this, but Abraham said, they have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them.
The rich man sees his brothers all in one car driving towards a cliff, but he thinks that there's no danger sign, no U-turn sign, and Abraham says, there is, there is, the scriptures, that's their U-turn sign, and now we see the big point of this whole story, it's all about the importance of listening to God's word, the abiding importance of the word of God, the voice that comes to us from above through it.
So let's turn to this last section, the call to hear. The rich man hears Abraham's answer and he is not convinced is he? No father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.
He's finally thinking about someone other than himself. He's thinking about his brothers, but he still hasn't really changed. To him, the word of God just is not all that compelling. No, no, Abraham, not some boring old book full of some stories of some random people and some rules and some weird predictions about the future. Send them a real messenger, something that really pops. I got it. Send them someone from the dead.
Give them a vision, something. That'll really get their attention. Those old scrolls, no, that's not going to do anything. Now Abraham's answer may shock you. It probably should shock you if you're reading it carefully. If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.
Listen, the only reason we have the scriptures at all is that the living God, the maker of heaven and earth, supernaturally revealed himself to us. This is a miracle.
If this miracle, God speaking to us, does not make someone sit up and pay attention, then no miracle will either. Not even if someone rises from the dead. I didn't exactly plan this, but just last Sunday was Easter, right? We just celebrated the resurrection of our Savior from the dead. That real event is dead. That real event is no hope. And yet, if you don't listen to God speaking here, the risen Jesus walking in the door won't convince you either.
That is a hard truth, isn't it? Because we like to think that would be more convincing than this, but Jesus himself says no. So I want to close with just a few short reminders that I hope will help us listen to his word as we should.
Whenever you read your Bible, whenever you hear it read, expect God to work through it. Okay? Expect God to work where he would soon His visit was for one purpose. He wanted to test the acoustics of the room to find out where he should stand. He stood up and he cried in a loud voice, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Unbeknownst to him, way up in one of the galleries was a workman. He heard those words and was hit with conviction of his sin. He put down his tools, he went home, and after a season of struggling spiritually with the Lord, he found peace by repentance and faith in Jesus. All because of a sound check, because Charles Spurgeon chose to recite the Word of God instead of just saying test one two three.
He went out. Friends, we have to let's rekindle that belief every time we read it. No matter what happens around us or in us, let's believe that this is living and active. Every time we read it, every time we hear it read, it's living and active. Expect God to work through it.
Next, let it change your perspective. God's Word comes to us in love for our good, but we must be willing to accept what he's saying even when it challenges us, especially when it challenges us. This text today is kind of an equal opportunity offender kind of text. We have covered, it's like a greatest hits of things that rub us the wrong way, right? Jesus has covered divorce, he's covered heaven and hell and eternal destinations, he's covered money, he's covered how we need to have our minds changed by the word of God.
It needs to form and shape us. If we find our own wisdom on these topics, we're going in the wrong direction. You just look around in the world and you know that and the world is preaching to you every day a different message than the word of God. Let it change your perspective. Let the word of God form your perspective on all these important things. Especially on the things that rub you the wrong way.
It does shape and inform our world in a In her article she makes a profound connection between caring for him with her words and how God cares for us with his word. This is just a short excerpt that I'm going to read from it. I've also got it up here. Given that our son cannot walk, see or speak, our words provide him with the crucial context of who he is, the ability to understand his life and of our presence and love. In a small way, it points to how the Bible is a lifeline for us in giving us an accurate picture of reality in reorienting us to live by gospel hope and in providing communion with God.
I'd encourage you to pick up that article or look it up online. It's really great. Let the word of God shape you and the way that you see the around you and let it be the means by which he draws close to you with his tender love and speaks to you.
The last thing is this. Come to Jesus in faith and worship. When you read the word of God, make that your goal. To come to Jesus in faith and worship. We have to be not just hearers of the word, but doers of the word, right? And the biggest do is to come to Jesus. That's the do that comes before all the others. Come to Jesus. In John 5, Jesus says, you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life. And it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.
We can know all about the Bible. We can read it in its original Hebrew and Greek. We can win every Bible trivia game. But if we don't come to Jesus we haven't really heard it.
The word of God contains good news of salvation and life in Jesus. Let's be people who hear it and find it so compelling that we just force our way into it through the narrow door. Through Jesus, through our faithful Savior rose again to give us life. That's how we read the word of God. Let's pray.
Jesus, thank you for this teaching that you gave us in Luke 16 which makes it so clear how you feel about the scriptures. And of course, Jesus, you are the word of God. Of course, you're going to agree with the words of God. Would you please lead us faithfully through your word. Help us to open it and read it with eagerness and enthusiasm. Help us to listen to it with eagerness and enthusiasm. To expect you to be at work. To have you change our thinking.
Lord, surround us with your love. Whisper in our worship. Thank you, Lord, for the miracle of your word. The breaking through that you have done into our darkness. We give you all the praise and In Jesus' name we pray.