Wednesday Night, December 2, 2020, PM

We'll be reading verses 24 through 30 tonight. Luke chapter seven, verses 24 through 30.

This is the word of the Lord. When the messengers of John had left, he began to speak to the crowds about John.

What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?

But what did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing?

Those who are splendidly clothed and live in luxury are found in royal palaces.

But what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I say to you, and one who was more than a prophet.

This is the one about whom it is written. Behold, I send my messenger ahead of you who will prepare your way before you.

I say to you, among those born of women, there was no one greater than John.

Yet he who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he. When all the people and the tax collectors heard this, they acknowledged

God's justice, having been baptized with the baptism of John.

But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected God's purpose for themselves, not having been baptized by John.

So last time we were in Luke 7, we read about the disciples of John coming to him while he was in prison in custody of Herod, for John had preached against the incest of Herod and Herod's wife didn't care for that and made sure that he was arrested and later on beheaded.

While he's in prison, he's in jail, and the disciples of John are coming to him regularly to see to his needs because there wasn't anybody else who was going to do that.

And they bring him reports of all of this happening with Jesus, how he's healing and doing miracles and teaching and all the people are coming out to him now.

And John's disciples make a point of telling him all about that. So John has them go to Jesus.

So you go to Jesus, he sends two of them, go to Jesus and ask this question. Ask him, are you the expected one or do we look for someone else?

Now, sometimes people read that passage and they get the idea that John is doubting. John's in prison, he's having a rough time of it.

His ministry is basically all dried up and everybody's going out to see

Jesus. John's faith must be shaken. And so here he's doubting, but I don't believe that's the case.

John always knew this was the case. He told his disciples, I must decrease, he must increase.

This is part of the program. And in fact, the question in any way does not admit to any doubt.

I don't think he doubted. The stories of John did not say that he doubted. Christ himself did not think that John was doubting.

So this is more about John doing his job as the forerunner. He doesn't want his disciples following him forever.

He wants the crowds and he wants his disciples. He wants everybody to turn and follow Jesus. That's the plan.

And these disciples, they're the ones whose faith is shook. They're the ones who are greatly concerned about all the attention on Christ rather than upon their master,

John, who's languishing away in prison. And John is handing them off. He said, go talk to Jesus.

He knows the question that's in their hearts. Are you the expected one or do we wait for somebody else? So he sends them to go ask this question in front of the crowds that they say are all around Jesus all the time.

Go ask this question in front of the crowds. Get everybody's attention on the fact of who this man is,

Jesus as the Messiah. So John's just doing his job as the forerunner.

And Jesus takes the opportunity after answering the question that John's disciples asked and quoting the scriptures, quoting from Isaiah and showing that the prophecies concerning the

Messiah are being fulfilled right there in front of everybody. After he heals and ministers to all these different people, he quotes

Isaiah and says, look, all this is being fulfilled right now, right here in front of you. Go tell John all of this.

And Jesus knows he's sending them back with all this information, back with this scripture, and John's gonna help put the pieces together.

But he says all this in front of the crowds. And so now he turns to the crowds and he is making the most of the opportunity that John has created by sending these disciples there.

And now that John is a part of the conversation, he's the subject matter. And as Jesus begins to talk about John, he begins to address what kind of teacher, what kind of teacher was

John? The crowds went out to go see him out there in the wilderness.

What are they looking for in a teacher? What are they looking for in a preacher? Why do they flock to John in the wilderness? Why are they following Christ then?

Right then? What kind of teacher, what kind of preacher was trustworthy? What kind of preacher, what kind of teacher should we be looking for?

I remember when I was pastoring and the founder of the church had moved back to town for a little bit.

And he was in his last few years and he let me know that his pastor was somebody else, one of the

TV preachers. I wasn't his pastor or his preacher, but he had somebody else who did that for him.

And then others would talk about how they would list off like 12 names of all the people that they read and listened to.

And they thought they were all great, even though within the spectrum, several of these men ardently contradicted one another.

But that contradiction never showed up in their minds. They just loved everybody. Everybody was a good teacher.

And it brings to mind, in our day and age when there's an abundance of preachers and teachers, and as we followers of Christ, we wanna be nourished, we wanna be edified, we want to grow in the word.

What kind of teacher or preacher are we looking for? I mean,

I've listened to many, I've read many, I've been helped by many, I've been let down by many. What about you? You know, what are you looking for?

A foreign accent? They seem to get a lot of hit, a lot of views. You have a foreign accent, boy, you're really smart.

Certain size of church audience maybe, style of clothing, style of speech.

Some people's shoes make a big splash. Sometimes we just settle for the brand, right?

He's part of the brand I like. He's part of that, I think he's part of that conservative Baptist reform circle somewhere around there.

He's gotta be all right. Just because he's got the brand name, then he's fine. But Jesus, in affirming

John's last labors as the forerunner, he clarifies for the crowds what kind of teachers and preachers we ought to be looking for.

Notice, first of all, two negatives and then a couple of positives. But the first thing he asks is, did you go out to listen to John because he was fraught with fear?

Because he was full of fear? Is that why you went to go listen to John? He began to speak to the crowds about John.

What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? Remember that John did his ministry down in the

Jordan River where he's doing the baptizing. And all along the Jordan River, along the banks, you would have wild plants just growing, including reeds, bulrushes, plants growing in the water.

And any given day that you're there, you could see the wind blowing the reeds. And they'd be just doing this all over the place, right?

So was that what John was? Was he all over the place? Wind blew and he was this way.

Then the wind blew somewhere else and then he was this way. Was that what you went out to listen to? John was out in the wilderness for a reason.

He was out amongst the reeds that were waving and he wasn't, but he was out there for a reason.

He was outside of the system. He was calling for repentance. In fact, he was calling for conversion.

You see, in this time, if you were a Gentile, say, and you were to become a Jew, if you were male, of course, you had to be circumcised, but also you had to be baptized.

You had to quote the Shema. Behold, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one, him only shall you serve. And then you would baptize yourself.

You'd get into a pool and completely immerse yourself as a ritual cleansing to show that you have moved out of your pagan

Gentile idolatrous type of worship. And now you worship the one true

God, Israel's God, the God of Israel, Yahweh. And that was part of your announcement that you had converted.

You were now following the Jewish God. So when

John is out preaching and he's calling both Jew and Gentile to repent of their sins and to be baptized, what was he saying?

Yeah, obviously Jews, obviously Gentiles need to convert, but you Jews also need to convert.

You're coming out of all of the Judea regions. You're coming out of Jerusalem, coming to, listen, all you holy

Jews, you need to repent too. You need to be converted. You need to get ready for Messiah. So John preached a baptism of repentance, meaning turn away from your sins.

And the people said, well, what is, what do I need to get baptized? At first you show the fruit of your repentance.

What does that look like? And he told them what that would look like. And after they were obvious repentance, then he said, yeah, then he would baptize them.

Now, John was preaching against all sorts of things. He was a fire and brimstone type of preacher.

We'll talk more about that next week. Lord wills. But there's a lot of humor here in how

Jesus addresses the crowds concerning John the Baptist. He said, you know, what'd you go out there to see?

A reed being shaken by the wind? He paused here for laughter. He had to. He absolutely had to.

Everybody knew John. Everybody knew his style. Everybody knew how stalwart he was. Everybody knew he was in prison for preaching even against Herod's incest.

They all knew that he was straight as an arrow and was never going to budge. And so Jesus says, was he like a, was he like a leaf kind of floating along?

Is he like a reed back and forth in the wind? And no, of course not. Of course not.

What does it look like when a teacher or a preacher shakes in the wind? What does that look like? Well, nowadays, it kind of looks like people throwing up an article from 2004 and an article from 2018 and saying, what happened?

Isn't the internet great? Here's a clip of somebody saying something in 2010.

Here's a clip of them saying something else in 2020. Why?

What changed? Well, the winds were blowing this way then and the winds are blowing this way now. They just kind of blow, whichever way the winds are blowing, that's what comes out of that person's mouth.

They just kind of test the wind for a little bit, figure out which way it's going, and then they dive in. That's what it looks like, shaking in the wind.

Remember, Jesus said to Nicodemus, about how Nicodemus said, I want to be born again. How do

I do that? Well, Jesus said, well, that which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the spirit is spirit.

Those who are born of the spirit are like those who are, well, it's like the wind. You gotta think about the wind.

You don't know where it's coming from or where it's going. You have no control over it whatsoever. Now, in terms of the work of the

Holy Spirit, the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit to bring about the new birth, that is a wonderful truth about grace.

But that's just the way the wind works, right? You don't know where it's coming from, you don't know where it's going. And those who are swept along with the wind, you don't know whether teachers and preachers that are driven by the wind,

I mean, you hear them, you hear the sound of them, but you don't know where they're coming from or where they're going, right?

They're swept along, and who knows where they're gonna end up. But John wasn't that way.

John wasn't that way. Jesus asks his next question.

Well, he wasn't fraught by fear, but was he bought by power? But what did you go out to see?

A man dressed in soft clothing? Those who are splendidly clothed and live in luxury are found in royal palaces.

I think this elicited more giggles from the gallery. Did you go out to see a man dressed in soft clothing?

Again, this is funny. Because at some point, either John or somebody else, probably

John, had likely found a dead camel, skinned the thing, tanned the hide, and used it as his outfit.

He had a tunic of camel hair, which means the hair was still on the hide, and then he had a leather belt to hold it all together.

And you can imagine what he looked like. He looked exactly like Elijah, who also was a man outside the system.

Who was preaching for repentance and people to come back to the Lord. But he was not dressed in soft clothing.

He was not at all soft. Where were the soft men? See, Jesus is saying this and bringing to mind, well, yeah, we didn't go out to see

John because he was all over the place. There are others who do that. We didn't go out to hear John because he was soft.

Now, there's others who do. Where are all the soft men? Where do you find the teachers and preachers who go squish?

Well, those soft men, richly adorned, enjoy luxuries where?

They're found in royal palaces. Royal palaces. And here we find that Jesus' humor has a serrated edge.

Remember that John is in the royal tank, and others are on the royal take.

John had attracted a huge following by God's grace. He preached and taught, not as one trying to keep the authorities happy and keep the people appeased, the religious leaders appeased.

He did not dress to suit all the folks. He could have been a royal advisor. Herod liked him. I mean, Herod liked

John the Baptist. He would often just pull him out of prison just for a little bit, just so he could hear from him.

I mean, he liked John. John could have modified just a little bit. He would have been a royal advisor to Herod, but he would never change.

If he had, he would have been in the royal palace, not the royal dungeon. Now, the religious leaders who at the end of our passage show up in disgust and anger, they are splendidly clothed.

They are luxuriously appointed. They are royally bought. They're kind of like Ahab's cohort and Jehoiakim's councilmen, who said what they needed to say to keep the king happy and the people happy.

Here's the political situation. The Romans had control of the high priest's vests.

They had control of it. They would not allow the high priest to bring out those vestments because they knew the power of them.

And they also appointed the high priest. It was a political appointment by the Romans, whoever the high priest was.

And since the Sanhedrin was mostly Sadducees and they were the strongest political group, they made sure one of their own got appointed high priest whenever they needed a new one.

And the Romans would let go of that scarlet purple robe for the high priest to wear, that luxurious clothing for the high priest to wear by imperial permission and imperial appointment and direction only.

All right, that's the system that Second Temple Judaism was under. And so the religious leaders of the high priest and so on, they were compromised.

But if they were too compromised, if they sounded like they were too much a company man, then the people would revolt against them.

They'd done it before. Within the last 100 years, they had done it before. So the high priest had to talk out of both sides of his mouth, had to keep the people from revolting, keep the people from doing anything too antagonistic to the

Romans. And at the same time, they had to tell the people what they wanted to hear so it didn't look like they had been bought by the

Romans. And well, that's the way you get the idea of waving in the wind.

It's where you get the idea of the one dressed in soft clothing and in the royal palace.

So the religion of Second Temple Judaism had become a politically bought money -making machine, and their approved preachers and teachers were those who helped to prop up the whole enterprise.

So Jesus is taking the opportunity, as John has been put in prison and he sends his disciples out,

Jesus is taking the opportunity to direct the people's attention to why was it that you wanted to go out and hear

John? Why was that? Well, because he wasn't fraught by fear, because he wasn't bought by power.

It's interesting in Revelation chapter three, there's a letter to the little church in Philadelphia, and they didn't have very much strength at all.

But it was interesting that Jesus told them that even the synagogue of Satan, even the

Jews who said they were Jews, but they were not, he said, even they were gonna come and bow down before this little church in Philadelphia.

And he's quoting passages in the Old Testament that talk about people converting and coming to faith.

So it's like, you're little, you don't have a lot of strength, you don't have a lot of power, but here's good news. The Jews who hate you and wanna murder you, here in a little while, they're going to, like Saul of Tarsus, they're gonna convert.

They're gonna come join your church. They're gonna come, they're gonna believe in Jesus and follow along with you.

And then he says something else. He tells them to hold fast what they have so that no one will take their crown.

So no one will take their crown. So they had it already. But he said, don't let anybody take it away from you.

Now, he's talking about the crown that the church has. He's not talking about like an eternal life crown that individual Christians have, because nobody can take that from you, right?

But what kind of a crown does a church wear, even if it's a little church? Well, you reign with Christ, right?

We're seated with him in the heavenly places, right? He has made us a kingdom of priests unto his

God. This is all the language of scripture. Well, how do you let someone take your crown?

Well, by pretending like Jesus Christ doesn't rule and reign, right?

The Bible says we rule and reign with Christ. We are seated with him in the heavenly places.

And Jesus says, all authority has been given him in heaven and on earth, and tells us to go tell everybody just that. Everybody has to obey

Jesus because he has all authority. So in what way can someone take our crown? Well, they can take our crown if we pretend like we don't have any authority to say anything.

And that's exactly what Jesus was talking about with John. He preached the truth and didn't waver and go back and forth, and he wasn't bought by the royal authority and so on.

So what we're looking for in a teacher or a preacher, something along those lines.

And then later on, we'll see more in this passage how what

John did, what he was as a preacher and a teacher, his ministry was wrought of God.

It was designed by God, it was defined by God. And also he just taught the truth and he appointed people to Christ.

So we'll look at that more next time. All right, well, let's turn our attention to praying for one another.