Wednesday Night, June 10, 2020 PM

Luke 5: Jesus Defends His Disciples and Explains His Ministry

Deal with us according to your mercies, according to your grace, according to your Son Jesus Christ. We pray tonight that as we look at your Word that you would bless us with the truths here, feed our hearts, nourish our lives.

I pray that you would do your work in your way according to your Word in us. We pray these things for Christ's sake. Amen. I want to invite you to open your Bibles to Luke chapter 5, and we are going to get ever closer to finishing up the chapter, but we're looking at some things that Jesus had to say to the Pharisees and their scribes in defense of his disciples, and in explanation to even John the Baptist's disciples, clarifying his ministry.

As we look at these words, as we consider the sayings of Christ in his statement and restating of the obvious, we are instructed in our prayer lives. Now we are in Luke chapter 5, and this is just after Jesus called Levi, who was also named Matthew, to follow him, remembering that Levi was a tax collector.

I'll go ahead and read for us beginning in verse 27 so that we can remember the context. Luke chapter 5, I'll begin in verse 27. After that, he went out and noticed a tax collector named Levi sitting in the tax booth, and he said to him, follow me.

And he left everything behind and got up and began to follow him. And Levi gave a big reception for him in his house, and there was a great crowd of tax collectors and other people who were reclining at the table with him.

The Pharisees and their scribes began grumbling at his disciples, saying, why do you eat and drink with the tax collectors and sinners? And Jesus answered and said to them, it is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick.

I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. And they said to him, the disciples of John often fast and offer prayers. The disciples of the Pharisees also do the same, but yours eat and drink.

And Jesus said to them, you cannot make the attendants of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you? But the days will come, and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days.

And he was also telling them a parable. No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and puts it on an old garment, otherwise he will both tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old.

And no one puts new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one, after drinking old wine, wishes for new, for he says the old is good enough.

The Bridegroom, Fasting, and the New Covenant

So Jesus is moving from one obvious statement to the next. The Pharisees and their scribes have objections to the way that Jesus is handling things. They object to him forgiving the sins of the paralyzed man before he healed him, but it only makes sense that the Son of Man, the Savior, would forgive sins.

They object to him eating with tax collectors and their friends, who are notorious sinners. But he says, well, it makes sense that a doctor would be around the sick. It would make sense that I as Savior, or I as the Son of Man, would be here for the sinners, not for the righteous.

And they object, saying, your disciples do not fast like ours do, or like those of John the Baptist. So Jesus makes another common-sense observation. Wedding feasters don't fast. That would make no sense if they did.

And so he's stating the obvious time and again. In this particular section, as he begins to further apply his metaphor of the bridegroom and those with him rejoicing, he is going to clarify that there is no happy synthesis between the Old and the New.

And in fact, he's going to be dealing with the relationship between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. And the fact is that he came to put away the Old Covenant, for it had fulfilled its purpose, and to bring about the New Covenant, which is the fulfillment of God's promises.

And seeing that the Old will be passed away, there is just no physical therapy for rigor mortis. There's no way to make this work going forward, so let's have right thinking on this matter. Jesus is going to show the incompatibility of the New with the Old, and he is going to tell us there will be no repairs, there will be no refills.

It's going to be like resurrection, all things made new. That's what we find in verses 36 to 37, that the New and the Old are incompatible. Not that they are opposed, or that they are radically, utterly different, but they are incompatible.

So Jesus takes up two images which would be appropriate for everyday life, you know, clothing and drinking, but actually these two analogies, these two word pictures that he gives us, are very appropriate for the wedding metaphor that is already in use.

He's already told his disclaimers that, hey look, I'm the bridegroom, my disciples are the attendants of the bridegroom, it makes no sense for them to fast during the wedding feast. The wedding feast would usually last for a week.

What are they going to do, you know, fast the whole week to celebrate the wedding? That makes no sense. So he's got this metaphor right before them, and now he talks about a garment. Now what do you think of when you think of a wedding and a garment?

Whose garment are we thinking of? The bride, right. And we even see that in the scriptures. We see the clothing of the bride often described to us in the scriptures, even to the very end, from Genesis to Revelation, there is some interest, is there not, in the clothing of the bride.

Well, what else happens at a wedding feast? Remember the first miracle that Jesus did? He turned the water into wine at a wedding feast because they had run out of the wine. So these two word pictures of a garment that needs to be patched, an old garment versus a new garment, and the need for wine, an old wine versus new wine, and these two word pictures go very well with the metaphor he's already begun using that of a wedding.

And so the master teacher is here building on his metaphor. Now the parable, a bridal dress. Now I know that the bridal dress from that day and age would be different than today, but the principle is still the same.

So if you would think of a bridal dress that is old, that has been kept, that has been a treasure, but it's old, and so you may imagine a tint of yellow, perhaps there is before you a treasure of fragile history, and there's an obvious tear, and there's a gaping hole in this dress that definitely needs to be repaired.

But how would that even be done? Will a bride to be, will a bride-to-be who needs a dress, will she go and buy a new dress and then cut a piece out of the new dress and try to attach it to the old? Does that make any sense at all?

It doesn't make any sense, and in fact, not only will the new dress be ruined, but once the new fabric is placed upon the old, and you try to attach that, it's actually going to make that dress in worse condition when you're done with that.

And so Jesus is again stating the obvious. Look, an old garment that needs a patch, you don't go out and you buy a new garment or a whole new swath of fabric and then cut out the new and put it on the old, it's just not going to work.

The way he puts it exactly, he says no one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and puts it on an old garment, otherwise he will both tear the new and the piece from the new will not match the old.

Now that's a, we'll come back to that image in a moment, but that's the one we can more easily grasp. The second image is that of wineskins. Now, by a show of hands, how many people have some wineskins hanging up in, no?

No? We're not very familiar with wineskins, are we? Wineskins were made out of animal hide. They would be scraped and cleaned and boiled, and the hide would be gathered together like a bag, and at the top where all of the the sides gathered together, that would be tied off with a string, and they would be hung and used later.

And as the wine inside the wineskins fermented, the new skins' elasticity would allow them to expand with the fermenting wine, and then as the wine aged, so also with the wineskins, and they would actually harden and they would lose their flexibility.

So, if you tried to use your old empty wineskins, after they'd been used, you've already used all the wine out of those wineskins, and he's like, well I've got this big empty container, I've got to, you know, reuse it.

If you put new wine into the old wineskin, well the elasticity is gone now. And even if you were to gather it up and you were to hang it up, the new wine would ferment and expand and would crack your old wineskin, bursting it, and then you'd lose the wine, and then you'd lose the container all at once.

And so it was an axiom almost too obvious to state that new wine must be put into new wineskins. Jesus is not telling these people anything new, anything revolutionary, with these images that they would have instantly understood the obvious nature of what he is saying.

Now, I've been speaking of these metaphors, these word pictures in the plural, but notice that the Scripture says Jesus told them a parable in the singular, right? Verse 36, and he was also telling them a parable.

In the mind of Christ, he is telling them the same thing. He is telling them a truth that combines the garment and the wineskin. That these two things come together, I think, only confirms to me that Jesus is indeed tying the images of the garment and the wine to that of the bridegroom's celebration.

He is tying it all together, and when we think about getting a dress ready and making sure there's enough wine in storage ready to go, those are preparations, right? Those are preparations, people getting ready for the bridegroom's full celebration.

The new bride needs a new garment, that makes sense, and new wine needs new wineskins, that makes sense. So here's the point of what he is saying. The disciples of John and the Pharisees and their scribes, they want to know why Jesus and his disciples are not operating the same way they are.

You're different than us. Here's how we do things, but you don't seem to be doing the same things that we are. I believe that they are willing, at some level, to accept this rabbi, this Jesus of Nazareth, who can heal people.

How amazing is that? And how well he handles the Word of God, and how he teaches the things of God. And if he could just help them understand how he, in his teaching and his ministry, would fit in with their way of looking at things, how he would enhance their own teaching, how he would enhance their way of religion, then everything would go over well.

Why are you so different? How is this going to work? They're the religious authorities in the land, but here is Jesus, and it seems like we either better...we got to figure out how to make these things work together, right?

Your ministry, your emphases, your miracle working, and then all of our traditions, and our deep, rich understanding of Judaism, and so on. How are these things going to mix, Jesus? How are these things going to work when we're so different from each other?

What Jesus is clarifying with these parables, there's not going to be a mixing here. There's not going to be a synthesis here. A complete overhaul is what is needed. We need new wine, yes, but that means new wineskins, not the old ones.

A new material, yes, but that means a whole new dress, not the old one, and we need that newness, and the tax collectors and the sinners needed that newness, and the sinful, paralyzed man needed that newness, right?

We need this newness. The bridegroom came for his bride, and he's not the old bride you're thinking of, she's the new bride, not the physical circumcision, but the spiritual Galatians says, not the old Jerusalem, but the new Jerusalem, Hebrews says.

Not the physical temple built of stones and gold, but a spiritual temple, as Jesus says in John 2, with Christ as foundation and capstone, and his people the everlasting stones, as we read about in Ephesians and in 1st Peter.

Not the former broken Davidic kingdom, but the new everlasting reign of the Son of David, as we read about in the Gospel of Matthew, right? New, newness, and you can sense that there's an agreement of sorts between the old and the new, but there is a full newness to the new.

The newness which Christ brings is incompatible with the old. Verse 36 concludes this way, the peace from the new will not match the old, meaning it will not harmonize with the old, it will not agree with the old, it will not accord with the old.

This does not mean that the new covenant was at war with the old covenant, or that God is of two minds, or that God messed up, or that he was frustrated and foiled by unfaithful men in the old covenant.

The old covenant was on a schedule. It was on a schedule fulfilled by Messiah, and he brought it to an end by his establishment of the new, and there's still a bride, and there's still a bridegroom, there's still a people of God and the place of God under the rule of God, but due to the newness of the new being new, all because of Christ, there would be no happy alignment of the new with the old.

The old was made obsolete and would pass away, the writer of Hebrews says, and there could be no going back to it, and there could be no synthesizing of the new with the old. It's like the...we have the same language throughout Scripture.

Just as the old man was made new and are passing out of death into life, the first resurrection, just as the old cursed body is made a new glorified body in the second resurrection, so also the old covenant is made into the new covenant, and all of these resurrections are recreations entirely dependent on Christ's own glorious bodily resurrection from the dead.

He started the new creation with his resurrection. That's Paul's point time and again. He started the new creation with his resurrection, which is why we worship on the first day of the week. The old creation was finished in how many days?

Six days, and God rested on the seventh. Right? Well, the new creation starts on what day of the week? The first day of the week, when Jesus rose from the dead, and that's where we worship on the first day of the week.

And the writer of Hebrews warned the Jewish Christians not to go back to the old covenant. He said, don't go back. You go back again and you're going to find only condemnation. Don't give up on the faith.

The writer of Hebrews warned them not to go back to the old covenant. He said it was obsolete, ready to pass away. Paul says he feared, in Galatians, he feared that he labored for them in vain, because they were going back to observe the customs of the old covenant.

Well, Jesus also anticipated these same temptations and these same struggles, and it makes it clear from the very beginning that there would be no synthesis. There would be no bringing physical circumcision into the gospel.

Was there? Right? There would be no forcing of people to observe Jewish feast days, or they would be cast out of the church. That went away, didn't it? There would be no happy synthesis between the old and the new, and Jesus makes it as clear as he can by stating the obvious over and over.

No Patch for Judaism, Gnosticism, or Modern Counterfeits

Now, there's some applications that we can make from this. If Christianity is no patch for Judaism, then it certainly is no patch for anything else, right? The gospel went to the Jews first and also to the Gentiles, but if Christianity is no patch for Judaism, then it can't patch anything else either, because everything else is far afield, isn't it?

It's no patch for Gnosticism, the ancient heresy, the first big heresy Christianity fought. It's no patch for Aristotle, as we see the synthesis in the Roman Catholic Communion. It is no synthesis for the current heresies of our day, the postmodern Marxism we deal with in our day.

Putting a Christian patch on paganism is like Jezebel painting her face up, right? It's just, what good is it? Further, if filling the bounds of Judaism with Christianity, if filling up the old wineskin with new wine would burst it, certainly any other container such as New Age mysticism or social justice or even cowboy church would be unfit, right?

There must be something more, you see, than just being gospel-centered and Christ-centered. I know that's the thing, everybody has to use that or, you know, nobody will listen to you. Listen, I'm not against being gospel-centered or Christ-centered, but these are very overused.

Let me put it this way, it doesn't matter what container you fill with Christ's wine in the center if that wineskin is an old wineskin, all right? It doesn't matter. There's no synthesis. It has to be new wine in a new wineskin.

It has to be thoroughly Christian, thoroughly of Christ, Christ through and through. So how do we pray? Well, I think that we should take up God's words and his emphasis on the promises of newness. What does God mean when he says he makes all things new, and then how does that impact the way that we pray?

Well, this language about God making things new, of course, is focused in the Scriptures upon Jesus, his person, and his work. We have promises in Isaiah as well as some application in 2nd Corinthians.

Isaiah 42, 8 through 9 says, I am the Lord, that is my name. I will not give my glory to another nor my praise to graven images. Behold, the former things have come to pass. Now I declare new things. Before they spring forth, I proclaim them to you.

This is a passage that happens within the Servant Songs of Isaiah where the Messiah is being revealed and declared, the promises of his coming and so on and so forth, and God combines this promise of the new things that I'm going to declare to you with rejection of idols, rejection of graven images.

I'm not going to share my glory with graven images. I'm not going to share my glory with false gods. And so if we're going to think about the newness of the new that Christ brings, if we're going to praise God for that and give glory to God, we ought to do so in a way that lays off the old and puts aside the old and gives up on the old to praise God and God alone.

And this praise is something that matters in everything. Isaiah 43, 18 through 21, do not call to mind the former things or ponder things of the past. Behold, I will do something new. Now it will spring forth.

Will you not be aware of it? I'll even make a roadway in the wilderness, rivers in the desert. The beasts of the field will glorify me, the jackals and the ostriches, because I have given waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert to give drink to my chosen people.

The people whom I have formed for myself will declare my praise. Everything gets changed because of the glory of God, so we can give him praise. I think a last passage to consider would be 2 Corinthians 5, 17 to 21.

This is very familiar to us. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature. An excellent translation would also be, he is a new creation. It's the same words elsewhere. We read about a new creation, same word here.

If anybody is in Christ, he is a new creature, new creation. Now what does that mean exactly? Old things have passed away. Behold, new things have come. Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

What is reconciliation? Well, namely that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us.

We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. You see, the ministry of reconciliation, the great need that is felt in our current month, the great need will be different in a couple of months, but this month the great need is for reconciliation, is it not?

And of course we do have that need. All humanity has that need to be reconciled, but our reconciliation is primarily to who? It's to God. Be reconciled to God. He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in him, the infinite wisdom of God.

He has given to us his son Jesus Christ, who has died upon the cross under the wrath of God, being made sin in our place, suffering what we deserve, that we might become the righteousness of God in him, that we would be righteous before him, that we would not be walking around in condemnation, full of shame and full of guilt, for God himself has not counted our trespasses against us, those of us who are in Christ.

Having been reconciled to God, we can then be reconciled to one another, and in fact, we have been made, in this newness and all the new things that have come to pass, this great newness, the fact that we're not just patching the old with the new, or trying to fill up the old with the new, no, it's completely new.

We are given the ministry of reconciliation, ambassadors for Christ, as God himself is making the appeal to be reconciled to him, and so that's our role, and that's our role. It's perhaps a topic of discussion in your homes, or among your friends, or among people about all this mess out there in the world today.

Well, you're an ambassador for God, ambassador, ministry of reconciliation, and our job is not to reconcile races and classes to each other, but to reconcile people, folks made in the image of God, to their Creator, through their Savior, who is Jesus Christ.

I'm so thankful for the newness of the new.