Year 1, Day 222: Luke 13

Repent Or Perish!

There is nothing like good practical advice from Jesus to start off the morning.  I warned you that Jesus gets feisty after the transfiguration.  What is Luke 13:1-5 all about?  “You’re no better than anyone else.  Repent, or perish.” 

I think I’ll just leave it blunt like that today and let Jesus’ words stand on their own.

Fig Tree

So now we turn to the fig tree.  We find no comfort there.  A fig tree is planted.  According to Leviticus 19:23-25 nobody could eat any of the fruit of a new tree for 3 years.  On the fourth year, the fruit belonged to the Lord.  So we can come to one of two conclusions.  Either this person in the parable is unrighteous and coming early for fruit (unlikely because Jesus is telling the parable and the character of the master of the tree is not being called into question) or we can conclude that this tree is actually on its 7^th year of life!  (3 initial years + 1 year of the Lord + 3 years of the man coming for fruit)  If this is true, no wonder the tree was slated to be cut down!  This poor man has been waiting for 7 years to eat a fig!

Why is this important?  It is important because it shows the patience of God.  God does more than enough to make bearing fruit easy.  He sent His Son to cover our faults so we need not worry about making mistakes.  He sent His Spirit to guide us, to direct us, and to encourage us.  He sends other faithful people into our life to help us listen to God.  If we can’t bear fruit, then whose fault is that? 

Yet, God waits for us.  God endures us.  And God always has.

God endured the evil generation 40 years in the wilderness, giving any of them that wanted some time to repent.  God endured fall after fall after fall during the time of the judges.  God endured Saul’s poor leadership, David’s oft-misguided leadership, and Solomon’s eventual slide into spiritual decline.  God endured king after king after king while sending the Assyrians and the Babylonians against the Hebrew people to give them a chance to repent.  God even gave the Jews of Israel 35 to 40 years after Jesus was killed there to bear fruit before the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed.  God is patient!  But we should not forget that the Day of Judgment is coming.  God’s patience has limits; yet even with those limits His patience is far more than we deserve.

Sabbath

Luke 13:10-17 is another passage about the meaning of the Sabbath.  I have hit upon this topic well in the past, so let me move quickly through this one.  God desires mercy, not sacrifice (again with the quote from Hosea).  God does not desire us to do nothing on the Sabbath; rather God desires that we spend our Sabbath doing His work rather than the work of the world. 

Jesus’ healing on the Sabbath is doing God’s work; therefore it is righteously done on the Sabbath.  Remember, the Sabbath is not for doing nothing; the Sabbath is for resting from the work of the world and focusing on the work of God.

I’m going to skip over the parables of the Mustard Seed and the Leaven simply because I can do a better job discussing them when we get to the same passage in Matthew.  So I will leave them for now.

Narrow Door

This then brings us to the narrow door.  Again we hear a stark warning from Jesus.  Jesus says “Many will seek it and not find it.”  That word always haunts me – even when I know it is coming.  In the Greek, many means … well … many.  And in English many means quite a bunch, more than half, a great multitude.  And when we compare the “many” in v.24 as a direct result of the “few” in v. 23 – I think we have to consider that many means a good bit more than half.  In other words, there will be far more people outside of God’s grace and salvation than inside of it.

That’s hard for us to conceptualize.  Jesus’ description of God in this passage is equally as hard.  People come to the door and say “we ate and drank in your presence” and “you taught in our streets.”  Yet the Lord will say, “Get out of here, I don’t even know who you are.”  Sure, we can interpret that to mean all the people in our communities that drive up and down past the Christian churches but never darken the doorway.  But I’ve got a scarier proposition.  Jesus is talking to people who have literally seen Him at work and yet who still will not bend the knee to Him and put their trust in Him.  They acknowledge Him as something great but they aren’t willing to become slaves of God and filled with the Holy Spirit.  They’ve literally eaten and drank in His presence, yet God does not know them.

I honestly wonder how many people in our churches fit that category.  How many people who get up and do the Sunday thing are acknowledging that Jesus is powerful, but they are not His servants?  How many people are seeing the power of God change lives around them yet they themselves are unwilling to respond to what is happening?  How many people in our pews will look to the Lord and say, “We saw you at work in our churches and we heard you teach from where we sat in our pews?”  Yet how many will honestly be told by Jesus, “Depart, I don’t even know who you are.”

I know, that is a pretty scary and a pretty bleak picture I paint.  So let me give a little hope.  How do you know if you are not in that group?  Are you a slave of God?  Do you focus on His ways or your ways?  Do you have the Holy Spirit living inside of you?  That is the true test – perhaps the only test – of salvation.  If the Holy Spirit is alive in you, changing you, bringing you in line with God’s ways then you have evidence of your salvation.  But if your relationship with God is a simple matter of going through the Sunday motions where nothing really changes who you are and nothing really sparks your relationship with God … well, I’d do some rethinking about that relationship.

Granted, please don’t take this as judgment.  God is the judge; I don’t want anyone to hear me condemning them to hell.  That isn’t my place.  On the other hand, I do feel that we need to be honest about what Jesus teaches.  There will be a heaven.  There will be a hell.  There will be a judgment.  There will be people saved under God’s grace.  There will be people knowingly condemned.  And the scary part is that this parable teaches that there will be people surprised to find out that they are shut out of the kingdom.  That scares me.  I have to speak the truth.  I don’t mean to judge anyone, but I do want people to be informed.

Lament Over Jerusalem

Then Jesus laments.  Jesus laments because He knows the truth about His words.  The numbers of people who truly follow Christ are few.  The numbers who rebel against God are many.  And the list begins with those in what should be the holiest of all places: Jerusalem.  Jesus laments because those who have every reason to be holy in God – separated for a divine purpose in this life – have rejected Christ and will reject Him to the point of death.  They will die in their own denial.  And that is something Christ mourns. 

The holy places are sometimes the places where we least find the holiness of God.  Again, I think Christ mourns when that is true today.  And I join Him in mourning that fact.  I confess that I am even occasionally guilty of being the reason that fact is true.  But that is why we repent, confess when we have not put God first, and return with a new spirit that has been reinvigorated with the Holy Spirit!

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