Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Why is God Saving the Wrong People? | Learning to Follow Jesus | Luke 4.14-30

Episode Date: February 17, 2020

"If Osama becomes a Christian, that's no greater miracle than if you or I become a Christian." Jesus said to love our enemies, but what about genocidal dictators like Adolph Hitler or radical terrorists like Osama bin Laden? They don't just fight against people, they fight against the church. How do we respond to them? Gain insights from https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Keith's) reading of Luke 4.14-30 as we continue our series on https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcast-series/how-to-follow-jesus/ (Learning to Follow Jesus) Interested in more content like this? Check out our series on 1 Corinthians 13 to see how the Bible Redefines Love to learn more about what loving your enemy looks like. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Facebook), https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. Right now, we're learning how to follow Jesus by working our way through the Gospel of Luke. I just want to set up our time together by asking you a couple questions. And the first one has to do with the email that we get probably once a year. And I want to know how you would respond to it. So let me set it up for you.

It's the days approaching Veterans Day or Memorial Day, which of course are the days that we as a country have set aside to honor people who have fought in our military and even given their life for the sake of our country. And so the email comes in and says, how are we as a church going to participate in Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and honoring these people who have fought and died for our nation? How would you respond to that email? Would you, if you were a pastor of the church and got to make the decisions, would you do something in the worship service? Not? What would you do? What wouldn't you do? Okay, the second question is a little bit of a thought experiment. Imagine that right before he is killed by the U.S. forces, Osama bin Laden has put his faith in Jesus as his Lord and Savior. Let's don't worry about how it happened because I have no reason to believe that this is true at all.

Let's just pretend for our thought experiment that it did happen, though, and that right now, Osama bin Laden, upon his death, entered into the presence of God and is filled with joy and peace and the glory of Christ, and he will experience that for all of eternity. You could do the same kind of thought experiment with someone like Adolf Hitler. Would you be excited to know that Adolf Hitler had become a Christian right before he died? Or is there a sense in which, whether it's bin Laden or Hitler, you're a bit disappointed because what you wanted was them to face the justice

of God, to experience the wrath of God because of all their horrible sins against people. Well, those two questions set up what we read in Luke chapter 4. Now, Patrick talked about this same passage in the episode immediately preceding this one, so it might be worth listening to that as well, but we'll try to make sense out of it for our time together today. So in Luke four, and this is the part Patrick went into more detail in, Jesus is in a synagogue and he reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. And it's a passage about the coming Messiah and what he'll be like and what he'll do. And it says the coming Messiah is going to preach good news to the poor and proclaim freedom

to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind and set the oppressed free. And Jesus says that all those things are coming true in him. In other words, he is God's Messiah. Verse 22, all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. So the response to Jesus' teaching and him saying that these truths about the Messiah are coming true in him is their first response is to say, man, that was amazing and to speak really well of him and be impressed. Not that he's a good speaker, but man, his words are filled with grace and truth. truth and love and mercy. But then, then you kind of notice in the next sentence, and we're in

verse 22 of Luke 4, you notice in the next sentence that there's a little bit of suspicion. Because right after being impressed with Jesus' gracious words, it says, they asked, isn't this Joseph's son? Now, Jesus knows where this is going. In other words, he sees that what they're doing is they're saying, how can Joseph's son be the Messiah who's going to set the prisoners free and bring justice for the oppressed and all that? And so Jesus, knowing where it's going, he says, no prophet is accepted in his hometown. And then he tells them two stories from the Old Testament. Now, remember, these are people who were in the synagogue. They were Jews. They knew their Old Testament very well. And so Jesus doesn't have to tell the whole story. He just says,

hey remember Elijah the prophet, one of the most famous prophets in all the Bible. He says, remember that there are a lot of widows in his day in Israel, but he went outside of Israel to a Gentile widow in the region of Sidon. And that's the person that he healed. And then he tells another story briefly about a leper named Naiman, who again is not an Israelite, but is a Gentile. And he says, look, there are a lot of lepers in Israel, but Elisha, the prophet that followed Elijah, Elisha only healed one, and that was Naman, the Syrian, the Gentile. Verse 28 says all the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of town, took him to the brow of the hill, of which the town was

built in order to throw him off the cliff. Now, what the heck happened? How did they go from verse 22 that they all spoke? speak well of them and are amazed his gracious words to verse 28 and 29 when they're angry and they're trying to kill him. What happened? What made them so angry? Well, just to put it bluntly, God is rescuing the wrong people. See, Jewish texts of this day showed that a lot of the Jewish people wanted God's justice and wrath to be poured out on their enemies. And now, what Jesus is doing is he's saying, hey, it's always been God's plan to reach the world with the message

of the gospel. God has always been about the whole world. He's never been about just one nation. If you go back and read the promises that God originally made to Abraham in what we call the Abrahamic covenant, it was that he was going to bless Abraham so that Abraham and his descendants could be a blessing to the world. God's always had a heart for all the nations of the world, all the people of the world. And we find out in the book of Revelation that in heaven there will be people from every tongue, tribe, and nation, because God's heart for the world ends up with a people who are from every nation, tribe, ethnicity, tongue across the world. The problem is that these people in the synagogue, These Jews in the synagogue did not think that was good news.

God was rescuing the wrong people. So what does it tell us about ourselves when we're a little disappointed that Hitler or Osama bin Laden, at least in our thought experiment, became believers before they died? What does it tell us about ourselves? I think one thing it tells us is that we are more prideful than we think, that we actually believe that we deserve God's grace, But these other people, these bad people, they don't. And sometimes the bad people are people like bin Laden or Hitler or someone who's done something very harmful to us.

Sometimes we treat the bad people as our political opponents, right? That people who voted for a different candidate than we did or who ascribed to a different party than we do. And we think those are the bad people. And we're the good people because we're smarter. we're wiser, we're more compassionate, whatever it is. There's something about us that makes us better, and so it's okay if God comes and rescues us, but he shouldn't rescue them.

Obviously, that kind of thinking goes against God's plan, against God's will. It's sinful thinking, wrong thinking. Maybe there's also some religious presumption going on here. In other words, these are people in a synagogue. These are people who are doing the religion thing. And these pagans, these just, Gentiles that God has a heart for and that God has come to save along with the Jews, maybe they

look down on them because they aren't as religious as them. But I think we also have a lot of nationalism going on here. Now, nationalism can be good. It can be a love for your country. There's a proper kind of pride to have in your country. But nationalism can go wrong pretty quickly. It can become self-righteous. It could become we are better. We look out for ourselves. God didn't create Israel just so that they could experience God's blessings for themselves.

He entrusted those blessings to them so that they could be a blessing to the nations. But when Israel ends up being angry with the nations, being disappointed that God has a heart for the nations, when Israel thinks that the Messiah belongs to them and only them, well now nationalism

has gone the wrong way. It has produced pride and self-righteousness, and it is against the plan of God. It's against God's heart for the world. So maybe this is the place to answer the question that I posed at the beginning of this episode, and that is how would you respond to the question, what are we as a church going to do

to honor those who died and fought for our country? And the answer is that we aren't going to do anything about it. Not as a church. In other words, we as individuals might attend a Memorial Day parade or might say thank you to someone who served. We as individuals or we as Americans may very well want to honor people who made sacrifices for our country. And that is totally appropriate. But it's not necessarily appropriate for the Church of Jesus Christ to participate in nationalistic holidays. On a Sunday morning at the crossing,

there are people who identify with all kinds of different countries. There are people from different countries in Africa or Asia or South America. And how would they feel if the Church of Jesus Christ called to be the people of God transcending tribe, tongue, and nation all of a sudden began to honor one nation

above all others? Now is maybe a good time to answer the question that I posed at the beginning of our episode, and that is, how would you respond to the email wanting us as a church to honor those who fought and died in our military battles? And the answer that we give is that we as a church in the worship service aren't going to do anything. It's not that we don't appreciate the sacrifice that people have made on our behalf. We as individuals may very well attend a Memorial Day parade, or may lay flowers on a tomb or may say thank you to a veteran. That's entirely appropriate. And it's

appropriate for our nation to honor them. But the church of Jesus Christ is a church made up of people from every tongue tribe and nation. And therefore it would be inappropriate for a church to exalt one nation over the others. The church is committed to God, made up of people from every nation. Even on a Sunday morning here at the crossing in the middle of Missouri, you'll find people from a variety of nations worshipping with us. So we're not the kind of church that's going to have an American flag in the sanctuary. We're not against the American flag. Remember, we think that's a great thing. It's just not the proper place, not the church, not a worship service. We aren't Americans first. We are Christians first. So let's just end by reminding you. We're

ourselves the truth that we should walk away with. The first truth is this. We should be rooting that everyone would come to faith in Jesus. Everyone. If we find out that Osama bin Laden or Adolf Hitler or someone who's done cruel things to us or someone, a celebrity like Kanye West, we should be rooting that everyone would come to faith in Christ. And if we find out that someone did genuinely come to faith in Jesus, we should be excited for that. All of the of heaven rejoices over that, so we should rejoice with heaven. We shouldn't be disappointed when all the angels of heaven are celebrating. The second truth is that we should see ourselves accurately. We don't deserve God's grace. We're not better than anyone else. If Osama bin Laden

becomes a Christian, that's no greater miracle than if you or I became a Christian. God's grace in Jesus is open to everyone. And everyone's invited. to believe. No one is more deserving than anyone else. All of us who are Christians know that we are believers only because God has given us faith. God has opened our eyes. It's all of God and we're thankful for that. Third, we need to be careful of inappropriate nationalism. Remember I say inappropriate because there's a kind of pride in your country and thankfulness for it and love of country that is entirely appropriate for a Christian. But when we become caught up in our country and care more about our country than the cause of Christ, well, now we have a problem.

When we become people who are disappointed that the outsiders became Christians, the people from the other ethnicity, the other race, the other nation, well, now we've got a problem. God's heart is for the world. And therefore, our heart should be for everybody, every tongue tribe and nation. We're thankful for our nation, but we know that our real citizenship is in heaven with God and the people of God. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily. Also ask yourself who you could share this podcast with. Texting an episode to a friend or family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually.

If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.