Did Jesus Repeat the Sermon on the Mount?

Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist, a daily Bible devotion and reading to accompany your morning coffee. My name is Keith Foskey, and I am a Calvinist. Today we're going to be looking at Luke chapter 6.

So if you want to open up your Bibles and go with me to Luke 6, there's a lot in this chapter. It begins with a section on the Sabbath, and I recently did a sermon about the Sabbath, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that.

I just want to point out that in verse 5, when Jesus says, The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath, that is a reminder of Christ's divinity, because God is the one who instituted the Sabbath, and the one who has the authority over the Sabbath is obviously God himself.

Jesus as Lord of the Sabbath

So when Jesus says, The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath, he's identifying himself with God. Now, the next thing I want to point out, as we go down this section, there's several things that we have here.

We have the situation with the 12 apostles, the calling of the 12, we have them named there, and then we have a very important section. This is the section I want to focus on beginning at verse 17 down through the end of the chapter.

Luke 6 and Matthew 5 as Parallel Sermons

This particular section, in many ways, mirrors Matthew chapter 5, which many of us know is the section known as the Sermon on the Mount, the greatest sermon Jesus ever preached. And it's Matthew chapter 5 to chapter 7.

Well, in Luke chapter 6, beginning at verse 17, we have a very similar account of Jesus preaching a sermon. But there are some key indicators that would identify this as likely a different sermon than the one in Matthew chapter 5.

The first one is in the very first verse where it says in verse 17, and he came down with them and stood on a level place and with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon.

So Jesus is here on a level place, and in Matthew chapter 5, it references him being on a mountain. So this is why it's called the Sermon on the Mount. And so there are some indicators that would seem to indicate that this is two different events.

But the issue is, when we look at this, what we find out is there's actually a lot of similarities between this, and that's led some people to believe, well, there is no difference. This is the same situation, the same sermon, just told from two vantage points.

But I tend to think that this is not the same sermon. I think this is Jesus possibly preaching at a different time, a different message, but it's very similar. In fact, it begins with the Beatitudes, which are the blessings.

And we know in Matthew chapter 5, it begins with, blessed are those who this, blessed are those who that. Those are the blessing statements of Christ. And this begins the same way. It says in verse 20, it says he lifted up his eyes on his disciples and said, blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who are hungry, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. And it goes on. But where this sermon differs, and Matthew chapter 5 does not mention, is this sermon has the woes.

Beginning of verse 24, it says, woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh. Woe to you when all men speak well of you.

This distinguishes this sermon. Now, that's not to say that Jesus could not have given those woes in Matthew chapter 5, or rather in that sermon, but they're not recorded. And one of the things that I think everybody understands when reading a sermon of Jesus Christ is it's likely that we don't have every single word that he said, but the Gospel Writers is providing for us an overview or focusing on the main points of the sermon.

But that could be wrong as well. Matthew chapter 5 could be a verbatim statement of what he said on the mountain, and Luke chapter 6 could be a verbatim statement, meaning there's nothing that has been left out of these sermons, and that's certainly possible.

And if that's true, then they are totally two different sermons. Even though they are very, very similar, they are different enough that would let us know that these are not the same thing. One, they're given in different locations.

Two, they have different content. And somebody might ask, well, why would Jesus preach such a similar message again? And the answer is that when you're preaching the truth, you repeat the truth. Truth needs to be repeated over and over and over, and I can imagine that as hard-headed as I am, I know how much I need to hear things multiple times, and we see in the writings of the Gospels that the disciples were no less hard-headed than we, and so they needed to hear things multiple times, and Jesus had multiple audiences.

It's not uncommon that a traveling pastor would preach the same messages to different groups because he has a different audience. One of the things that used to be kind of interesting, I used to watch the old Billy Graham crusades.

They would play them on Saturday nights on the Christian television network, and I would watch. I loved to hear Billy preach the Gospel, and what was interesting is I must have heard the same message over and over, but it was never in the same location, but I've heard him preach on Jonah.

He preached on Jonah a lot and on Nahum. That was a very, very popular message that he liked to give, and so there was so much that was carried over, but it wasn't the same audience, and it wasn't exactly the same message because as a pastor, I can tell you this.

Even if I preach the exact same sermon because I've done that before. I have a sermon I do every four years or so. Every time there's an election cycle with the president, it's been my tradition that on the Sunday prior to the election, I'll preach a sermon entitled God Will Still Be on His Throne Wednesday, and it's a reminder that no matter who wins the election on Tuesday, God is still sovereign on Wednesday, and I preach that sermon now probably three or four times since I began preaching, I guess three if you count up the years, and I know that every time I preach, it's been different, but it's all had the same basic content, and that's what we see here with Jesus' message.

It's basically the same basic content. Matthew 5 through 7, much larger, longer, broader, but Luke 6, rather, much shorter, much more condensed, and that's why I would say I think that they're different messages preached at different times with the same basic content, and so my encouragement to you today, if you want a little project for your daily devotion, is read Luke 6 versus beginning back up at verse 17 and all the way down to the end, which takes you down to verse 49, and read the whole thing, and then go over to Matthew 5 and read Matthew 5 through 7, and look for the areas where they agree, and look for the areas where one says something that the other one doesn't say.

There won't be any disagreement between the two sermons, but there are going to be times where one sermon will say something that is a fuller expression than the other, and like I said with the woe statements, we don't see those in Matthew's gospel.

So I would encourage you, if you would like to dig deeper into this, would be to do a harmony of these two. Go and see how Jesus proclaimed the gospel and his message in both of those, and I think you'll be blessed by doing so.

A Devotional Encouragement to Read the Sermons Side by Side

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Again, thank you for watching today. My name is Keith Foskey, and I have been your Calvinist. May God bless you.