A Wee Little Man?

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry.

Michael E. Abendroth here. It�s Friday, the 20th, 730 at night, and here I am at the church. Well, Kim�s out of town. My kids all live in California, and I thought I�d do some radio shows. Too bad we don�t do that kind of Facebook Live thing anymore, but that�s kind of off.

I�m off of Facebook and Twitter. We will on Twitter post some radio show stuff, or maybe I�m speaking someplace, or there�s a video. I think we need to do some more videos, working on some books, that kind of stuff.

But I�m mainly just here, thankful to be at Bethlehem Bible Church. It will be 25 years coming up in February, and right now we�re just preaching Christ and doing a five-part series on just who Jesus is.

I�m going to do Ephesians in six weeks, one chapter per week, just kind of as an overview. I think leading up to preaching through the book of Luke. I�m kind of stalling a little bit, because once I get into it, it could be quite a few years before I get out of it.

You can write me, Mike, at NoCompromiseRadio .com. I�ve talked to many of you. Mainly the questions that you have had in the past were, how do I assess a church? How do I find a church? How do I leave a church?

That kind of stuff. �Will, Mike, you come and plant a church I get that asked quite a bit. Not much anymore, though, right? Because we�re just on the downside. I think this is, you know, we just finished our 12th year.

This is going probably next month into our 13th year at No Compromise Radio Ministry. For a while, I kind of wanted to cancel it. Maybe we need to reboot it. Maybe we need to re-up it. Maybe we need to just do one program a week.

I don�t really know exactly what to do. But I know we have lots of listeners, kind listeners, many support on Patreon listeners, and so I�m very, very thankful. And literally this, I was going to call it dumb, I guess it�s not dumb, but this little podcast has introduced me to so many people, dear people like you who listen, met you face to face, or you�ve been encouraged, or you�ve encouraged me, or you�ve invited me to come and preach and speak and minister, and something good has happened because of just a nobody with a, like I said, a dumb little podcast.

But praise the Lord! If the Lord can work through me, he can work through anybody, right? That should be a good way to think about ministry. And one day I�ll die. I�m 61, and y�all forget about me and get back to work, and maybe we�ll pass a baton to Luke.

Luke�s NoCo Jr. right now. Although my brother Pat, while he didn�t say he listens to NoCo, he�s got a great show called The Pactum, thepactum .org. And I just was on episode 30, No Compromise radio on preaching, and you could pull that up and take a listen.

In the old days, people would say, �Well, you want to be on this podcast and I was all gung-ho and like, �Oh yeah, I�d love to be on the podcast and talk more about who Jesus is and breadth of ministry.

For my brother, I�ll do it, or my friend Matthew Johnston, I�ll do it. But, I mean, what else am I going to say? You know what I end up saying? �Talk about Jesus more. Why aren�t people doing that?

Drives me crazy. I thought there were Christian pastors. �Oh, we believe in Jesus. We assume Jesus. Yeah, I know you assume him, but the next generation. Aesop�s Fables. You ever read any of those? I mean, how do you even spell Aesop?

Aesop�s, Aesop�s, Aesopica, some call it. All those fables, I don�t even know if he wrote them all. Maybe it�s a fable that Aesop wrote Aesop�s Fables. They say he was a slave. If he did write them, he was a good storyteller.

And we think it�s about 600 years BC, Greece. Now, some people call it ancient Greece, but Greece 600 BC would be ancient Greece. Here�s one for you, Aesop�s Fable, Hercules and the Wagoneer. I thought that�s like a good band.

My family and I, we went to see Charlie Crockett, kind of a country singer with class and a little flair that sings old style Hank Williams senior kind of songs. Not really a country guy, but Charlie Crockett with an L-Y, two T�s, Crockett, direct descendant of Davey.

He was pretty good. Hercules and the Wagoneer. A Wagoneer was once driving a heavy load along a very muddy way. At last he came to a part of the road where the wheels sank halfway into the mire. And the more the horses pulled, the deeper sank the wheels.

So the Wagoneer threw down his whip and knelt down and prayed to Hercules the Strong, �Oh, Hercules, help me in this, my hour of distress. But Hercules appeared to him and said, �Tut, man, don�t sprawl there.

Get up and put your shoulders to the wheel. And the moral of Aesop�s Fable, Hercules and the Wagoneer, is that gods help them that help themselves. Some translators say self-help is the best help. And others say for Hercules and the Wagoneer, heaven helps those who help themselves.

That's definitely a fable, at least the moral is a fable. What I want to do is I want to go to a passage today during this show and teach you this passage. And if you know this passage well, you're never going to fall for any of the fables that people push, sometimes found allegedly within.

Obviously there are no fables in this passage, it's going to be a Bible passage. But if you know this passage well, you're going to say to yourself, �Oh, when people come and say things about this now, I'm easily going to say, �Nope, not true, not true at all.

And the passage today is Luke 19. Luke 19, highlighting the Savior, the Lord Jesus, and sometimes we'll say, �It's about Zacchaeus but it's about Jesus dealing with Zacchaeus. If you say, �Well, Luke, do we just parachute into Luke?

What do we need to know about Luke? What's happened so far in Luke Of course, there's a prologue and you think about Jesus, the Son of Man and His infancy and how He's getting ready for public ministry.

And then He's in Galilee in chapters 4 through chapter 9, and then in 9 .51 and following through 19 .27, He's journeying to Jerusalem. And one writer said, this is kind of interesting about Luke, �Starting with Luke 9 .51, Luke devoted 10 chapters of his narrative to the travelogue of Jesus' final journey to Jerusalem.

You have this marching, you have this progression, you have this incessant marching toward the cross. Why was Jesus born? Why the infancy part of the narrative? Why the public ministry inauguration?

Because Jesus became incarnate to live the life and to die on the cross. Of course, be raised from the dead, but nothing was going to stop Him. And He was going to rescue sinners along the way, culminating in His substitutionary death for them.

One writer said, �The point of the allusion is both Christological and theological. The story underscores, again, the connection between Jesus and the prophets of God and the scriptures. And it emphasizes that not only do Israelites receive the benefits of salvation, but foreigners do as well.

So Jesus is saving Jews and Gentiles. He's saving self-righteous and unrighteous. He's saving all kinds of people. And He is this great prophet who proclaims the truth, who lives the truth, who is in fact the ultimate prophet.

Remember Moses said in Deuteronomy 18, �The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers. It is to Him you shall listen. And so we come to Luke chapter 19.

It's kind of a fun passage because it's all about the Lord Jesus, and it probably elicits thoughts about childhood songs and other things, and we'll talk more about that later. J .C. Ryle said that this story should be frequently studied by Christians.

I like that. One man said, �For many Zacchaeus is a figure of fun, a short swindler who adds comic relief to an otherwise serious gospel. Yet, if we look at it more closely, this account gives startling insight into the real meaning of conversion and the way that God works in the heart even before a person is saved.

All right. Buckle up. My name is Mike Abendroth. This is No Compromise Radio Ministry. I say that because I just have to break up conversation, and then that kind of gets me going. Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through.

All right. What do you got in Jericho? Jericho is an interesting city. I've been there before. Oh, this will be important for some of our listeners. We still are planning to go to Israel. I doubt it will happen February 2022, but I don't have to make a decision until November 14th, technically November 15th.

Pat Abendroth and myself, Pat of Omaha Bible Church, we lose nothing if we wait that long. If we cancel now and then everything's, the COVID problem is all solved, then there's no way we can get flights.

Therefore we keep what we have for now. So if you've signed up, you can email me, we'll send you back your deposits, but we're going to wait until November 14th, hoping. I give it about a 10 chance, humanly speaking, but it still might work and it seems to be the best call.

So that's what Pat and I are going to do. But if they're going to require vax passports and quarantines and all these other kind of things and shutting things down, you don't get to see as much stuff and you're isolated or sequestered in places and people, you know, you want to get a vaccination, go ahead.

You don't want one. I get it. But we're going to cancel. So if things are like they are now, then we're going to say no. Okay. Just FYI, hang in there with me. I think we've tried to send out emails to everybody.

I think on my side, 25, 27 who are registered and on Pat's side, I don't know, 40 or something like that. Probably need even more than one bus. It was going to be so fun and still might be. You never know.

You never know. Jesus on his way to Jericho. And you know what? Jericho was pretty impressive back in those days. You've got Herod the Great and there's aqueducts there. There's fortresses, there's winter palaces, there's hippodromes.

You've got pools. They say that one of the pools that Herod made, he drowned his own son in. Remember, they said it's better to be Herod's pig than his son. And pig and son sound like the same in Greek language.

Edersheim, said Jericho in Jerusalem's day, was by a spring, the Elisha spring. And it gave, under tropical sky, unsurpassed fertility to the rich soil along the plain of Jericho. Josephus described it as the richest part of the country and called it a little paradise.

And there's all kinds of balsam plantations there that even Mark Anthony gave to Cleopatra from the revenues. There's places of kind of like, you know, Club Med kind of place for those days. Here Edersheim said that it was indeed already summer, for as Joseph tells us, even in winter the inhabitants could only bear the lightest clothing of linen.

We are approaching it from the Jordan. It is protected by walls flanked by four forts. These walls, the theater and the amphitheater have been built by Herod. The new palace and its splendid gardens are the work of Archelaus.

All the wave, all around wave groves of feathery palms, stately beauty, stretched gardens of roses, et cetera. Boy, it sure got dark all of a sudden. That, I think the hurricane's supposed to hit on Sunday.

And that's not my sermon either, but it could be, it could kind of be a doozy. Jesus comes into this wealthy town. It's an important town. It's on the way to Jerusalem. It's called the City of Palms and it's called a divine region by Josephus, fat, like it's just overflowing.

And the tie-in here that's important for you to know if you're reading the Bible and you want to understand it better. If you were a tax man, can you remember the baseline in the Beatles, tax man? Sounds like the jam, the start, Moose Foxton.

If you, if you were somebody collected taxes here, I'm getting ahead of myself, man, it's going to be good. That'd be a good gig right there. Tax collectors, this would be a good place. Better than some slumville, right?

Actually this is going to be a Roman regional tax center. And Jesus is in charge like he always is, and he's going to go for a reason and he needs to go to Jericho. Verse two, and behold, this interjection, this, this language here, you know, it's, it's startling.

It's supposed to grab your attention. Hey, listen up. I thought if I was going to talk to a bunch of young people. Listen up. Hey, Bartimaeus has been healed in the last chapter. Hmm. I wonder what's going to happen here.

Behold there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and he was rich. Now one of the things I like to do is look up people's names, what they mean. You can look up Michael sometime and see what my name means.

Zacchaeus, Hebrew, Jewish guy, tax collector, and his name means pure. His name could be translated innocent. His name could be translated clean. When I looked up Hebrew baby names, clean, pure. It might have a connotation of bright used in Isaiah 116, making yourself clean.

Was he clean? Was he unclean? Did the Jews like these people that sold their souls to the Roman government to extract money, exorbitant amounts of money, i .e. taxes from Jewish people? You mean to tell me your name's pure or righteous?

Uh, hmm. That's interesting. Here's the character, Zacchaeus, and he is a chief tax collector in this great town of Jericho, which is kind of like Toll Road. Ray Pritchard said Zacchaeus had three strikes against him.

Number one, he was a tax collector. Number two, he was a crook and a cheat. We'll hear about that later. Number three, he worked for the Roman government. I bet you they hated him. I bet you the Jews, I mean, he got money from Jewish taxation, gave the money to Rome, but he took a good portion for himself, and they got rich.

They got wealthy by, you know, by extorting their own people. I mean, think about God's law back in the Old Testament. You're not even supposed to charge interest if it's a Jew, right? If they're your own people, you don't even charge interest.

No way for this guy, he was going to use his position, use his office. I'm going to be at a trade route from Egypt to Damascus, and there's all kinds of balsam, there's all kinds of goods. This is going to be perfect.

And he's not a lower ranking, he's high ranking. He was rich. Oh, man, he must have been so hated. They must have hated this guy. I'd hate him if I didn't think rightly. I mean, most people back in those days, if there was any kind of tax collector, you would hate them.

You would detest them. You're representing Rome. You're representing idolatry. You're representing oppression. You're representing, you've taken us over, you've invaded us. This is not good. This is not good.

And when I say he was rich, just in the last chapter, remember what Jesus said with the rich young ruler, how hard it is for those who are wealthy to enter the kingdom of God. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom.

Do you think Zacchaeus is going to get saved? You think he'd be at the top of the list? Is he at the top of the list of savable characters? I think if you said, you know what, ask a Jew, out of anybody that you know in the world, who do you think is the least savable?

Humanly speaking, you'd pick somebody that hated the Jews, who extorted the Jews, who was a tax collector, who was rich off the back of his own people. I'm sure he was hated. I mean, this guy certainly is not going to get saved.

There's no possible way. It's impossible. It's hard to enter the kingdom if you're wealthy. I mean, you're just going to worship money. He obviously did. He lied. He cheated. He stole for money. Verse 3, and he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd, he could not because he was small in stature.

So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass by. Hmm. So he's small, can't see for the crowd. And by the way, do you think if he tried to push through the crowd, they'd let him?

Or do you think they'd spit on him? You think they'd elbow him? You think they'd try to take his money? I mean, he wants to see Jesus. Maybe he's heard other tax collectors like Levi. They've been given good news.

We don't know. But he does some pretty goofy things. I don't see it. These people don't normally run. They don't normally climb trees. I mean, there's supposed to be some Roman official governor like chief tax collector climbing up trees.

As we say, interesting, interesting, pushing, shoving. Pritchard kind of paints a good picture. He tries to stand on his tiptoes, but that doesn't help. He starts pushing. Excuse me, I've got to get through.

People see Zacchaeus, they spit in his face. You think they're going to let the tax collector through? Not this year, not any year. They hate this man. He can't fight his way through the crowd. Levi, will you, Levi, come down, follow me.

Or just follow me. Edersheim calls a crowd a solid wall of onlookers. And this guy's small. He's a micron. We would say we, or we'd say small. So he climbs up a tree. Hey, what do you mean, how is there a sycamore tree there?

I thought this, Jericho is known for balsam. Jericho is known for palm trees. It's kind of hard to climb those trees, but there's a tree that you could climb. There's a sycamore tree that's got a shorter trunk, kind of got lateral branches according to what I've found out.

One writer said, and I think it's so cool. This is the end of the show right here. Divine providence. How many years earlier was that tree planted? Huh? One writer said, was this tree on the side of that particular street in Jericho by accident or chance?

Who created this tree? Why did God allow this tree to grow here at this time? What if the tree had not been beside the road? What if it had been a palm tree instead of a sycamore tree known for its low hanging branches?

The city of Jericho called the city of palms. And so this blessed sycamore tree was no mere accident of mother nature. Wow. Isn't that great? I think that's great. Well, my name is Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio, Zaccheus, and we finished, I'm going to say finished verse four.

If you want to write me, you can, mike at nocompromiseradio .com. I should probably get out of here because it's dark and spooky out there and it's time for me to go get some ice cream, keto bars, everything's keto.

Thanks for listening. More about Zaccheus real soon.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.