Sunday Night, July 29, 2020 PM

And we're not sure if Luke ever personally met Jesus Christ, but as someone who was a trained thinker and writer, someone who was a doctor, he knew how to record things, and he, led by the

Holy Spirit, wrote down what he called an orderly account of the things that were, had been said about Jesus Christ, and so he gave us a faithful narrative of Christ.

These are the things that happened in Jesus's ministry, the things that he said, the things that he did. And he's been giving this, he's been recording this and writing it all down, arranging it for Theophilus, his patron, who ostensibly is funding the entire project.

And so God uses this, and God used Theophilus's generosity and Luke's diligence through his

Holy Spirit to give us this gospel, Luke. And so Luke has been faithfully recording the initial reaction of Jesus Christ's ministry in Galilee.

Jesus taught in synagogues, he taught on hillsides, he taught from town to town, he called disciples to follow him, he ministered to the sick and to the outcast, he made established religious leaders uncomfortable, and he was either celebrated or resented, and little in between.

And so now we come to some of his core teaching, his core curriculum, as he explains the ways of his kingdom.

And in Luke 6, verses 12 through 19, we have a moment where Jesus is up on a mountain, he spends the entire night in prayer to God, he calls some of his disciples to be his apostles, and then he shows the power that he has as virtue, or his power is flowing out of him, and he's healing all these people who come to him, and he's casting out demons, and he's proving himself as the

Messiah. So now let's read Luke chapter 6, verses 20 through 26.

And turning his gaze toward his disciples, he began to say, blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.

Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil for the sake of the

Son of Man. Be glad in that day, and leap for joy. For behold, your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way their fathers used to treat the prophets.

But woe to you who are rich, you are receiving your comfort in full. Woe to you who are well -fed now, for you shall be hungry.

Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.

So the passage we just read contains a carefully constructed contrast.

The parallels that we have here, four blessings and four woes, are stated very carefully, precisely in opposition to one another.

The format is very similar to that of the blessings and curses which Moses laid out to God's Old Covenant people in Deuteronomy 28.

Each one of the blessings mentioned there at the beginning of Deuteronomy 28 match with the curses that follow.

And so Moses laid all this out for the Old Covenant people of God, and the basic message was this.

Those who keep the Covenant will be blessed. Those who break the

Covenant will be cursed. And on either side there's a precisely correlating blessing and cursing.

And in summary, Moses said in Deuteronomy 30 verse 19, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse.

So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants.

I take that as our title for these blessings and woes here at the beginning of Luke 6.

This is exactly what Jesus is doing as he comes down the mountain, a second and greater

Moses, and he says before the people, blessing and cursing. And essentially he's presenting himself and he's saying, choose life in order that you may live.

And this is, I think, very consistent with what he's been doing thus far in interpreting the

Old Testament in terms of himself and calling people to believe in his gospel. So I think our goal tonight is to just try to understand the overview of this small passage and get into the first blessing that Jesus offers.

I think it's important to see that Jesus is not merely rehashing the

Old Covenant here. He's the Covenant Keeper himself.

He makes the blessing and the cursing relative to relationship with him.

And I think he's going to show very clearly, especially at the beginning and the end of the

Sermon on the Mount here in Luke 6, verses 20 through all the way through the end, verse 49.

I think he's going to show very clearly that in order to choose life, in order to live, one must begin with Jesus Christ as their foundation.

And he says at the very end of Luke chapter 6 when he compares, you know, two men built a house.

Well, good for them. I bet they used the same material and everything. He said the only difference between them is one built it on a rock and the other did not.

And so the rock was all -important. The solid foundation was all -important. Christ is all -important.

So the basic message is this, choose Christ in order that you might live.

So at the beginning of verse 20, it says, "...and turning his gaze toward his disciples, he began to teach, began to say..."

Who is the audience here? It's important, I think, for us to remember who

Jesus had surrounding him at that moment. In the previous passage, we remember that Jesus was up on the mountain all night long praying to God, communing with his

Father. And he called some of his disciples, 12 of them, to become his apostles.

And then they came down the mountain and joined the rest of the disciples at a level place.

And then around them, a greater congregation was gathering, people all the way from Tyre and Sidon to the northwest, and people from all the way from Judea and Jerusalem in the south.

So it's a great crowd of people. All kinds of people are there, not just disciples, but we see that he's addressing his disciples and what is being said is going to have wider application to everyone there.

There's going to be some points here in Luke 6 where Jesus specifically warns the unrepentant, where he's specifically talking about the unbeliever.

And so we're going to have to keep that in mind as we move forward. So the four blessings, we see this, the blessed are the poor, blessed are you who are poor, blessed are you who hunger now, blessed are you who weep now, blessed are you when men hate you.

In contrast to that, we have woe to you who are rich, woe to you who are well -fed now, woe to you who laugh now, woe to you when all men speak well of you.

Exacting contrasts all in a row, four blessings, four woes.

So we see the structure of the blessings and the woes, but also notice that they correspond in present and future tense.

The first and the fourth are about all in the now, and the middle two are those who hunger now or weep now, but you shall, you shall.

And the same is true in the woes. It's the shall and the now.

So what is Jesus doing with these blessings and woes? Well, he's the second lawgiver, he's the ultimate

Moses here, and he's explaining how his kingdom proceeds through his new covenant.

He has blessings and woes that matter both in the now and in the not yet. Not everything happens now, some things happen in the not yet, and we walk by faith, not by sight.

And so he offers also contrasting considerations of flesh and spirit, of the world and of heaven, of the city of man and the city of God.

And as we track through those, I think what we're looking here is not so much a contrast of experiences, but actually a contrast of peoples.

There are those who are in Christ and those who are outside of Christ, and those in Christ know blessings that those outside of Christ do not.

Those in Christ have hope, those outside of Christ putting their trust in these things that, you know, you would think would make everyone happy, but actually there are many woes upon them.

Now the first group, the first group, now let's think about them just for a moment, they are the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the hated.

Wow, what a sad lot. You know, these people, this group, you would think this group has no reason for happiness, right?

I mean, this is a very sad crew. These would be, these are all those classified under some sort of systemic woe.

They're not getting out of this anytime soon. They've got a lot of problems. But in fact, surprise, surprise, these are the people who are blessed with much cause for happiness.

So why is Jesus surprising us in this way? He lists the people who should be sad, but he says,

Macarius, Macarius, Macarius, blessed, blessed, blessed, happy, happy, happy.

Hang on a second, these people should be sad, but you're saying that they're happy? In what way? Jesus is showing the nature of his kingdom.

He's emphasizing the blessings of salvation. And now think about the second group.

Now who are they? They are the rich, the well -fed, they are those who are laughing, having a great time, and everybody thinks really well of them, and says really nice things about them.

Okay, well it seems like these people have every reason for happiness, right?

Because they have it all together. But what Jesus is after is this, their reliance on these things, on this recipe for happiness that they thought would get them happy, their reliance on those things actually exposes their woe.

So the way that Jesus is approaching this is by surprising us, by, oh my goodness, why would these people be happy and these people have woe?

But he's surprising us in order to expose the religious system of the day, which had put far too much stock in indicators like wealth and fullness and feeling good and men's praise.

Those things are fleeting. Those things are fleeting. Okay, so that's the basic overview, but let's look at just the first blessing, the one where he talks about the poor.

In verse 20, the last half of it says, blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Now I've got to say, before we allow the president's reading to swamp our understanding of the text, notice that it does not say, blessed are all poor, because of their poverty

God gives them the kingdom. Now notice that it doesn't actually say that.

It doesn't actually say that. It is common for people feeding on or fishing down river from James Cone and other liberation theologians to say

God has preferential treatment of the poor, to say things like salvation is blackness or salvation is only for those who are in solidarity with the oppressed.

Salvation cannot be possibly for the rich. That's not actually what

Jesus is saying here, though it's often used that way. This half of the verse is really a beautiful little gem, once we wash all the modern and postmodern equestrian excrement off of it.

What we have here is a reversal. Jesus is not saying that poverty is a merit necessary for the kingdom of God, perceived by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone.

We don't earn the kingdom of heaven by becoming poor. We don't withdraw from the treasury of merits guarded by the keys of the

Pope by taking a vow of poverty and thereby gain grace to go to heaven. There's no merit here.

This is a reversal. Jesus is speaking to those who would otherwise think they have it bad, right?

He's talking to... he's a surprise. Here are some people who would think that they have it bad and little to no reason for happiness, and he says,

Macarius are the poor. What does that mean? Well, it means blessed. That word means fortunate.

That word means well -off. That word means happy. This is incredible.

How can it be that those who are poor should be considered fortunate and well -off? Well, certainly not precisely because they are poor.

Now, there's no virtue in being poor. There's no virtue in that, but there's a happy reversal. Here's the idea.

Even the poor are well -off and fortunate who have Christ. If they have

Christ, they have everything that comes with Christ, and that's called the kingdom of God.

Wow. So, happy are the poor who have Christ.

Why? Because they have the kingdom of God. As David the psalmist said, for a day in your courts is better than a thousand outside.

I would rather stand at the threshold of the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.

He'd rather just be an usher. If that's the only way he could get in, he'd just rather just be an usher. Now, what

Jesus is saying here has to do much with prophecy. When we read about these blessings and these woes, we are reading about a reversal that was prayed about and prophesied earlier in Luke's Gospel.

When Mary sang her song, remember it's called the Magnificat, when she sang her song, when her faith was strengthened, when she went to visit with her relative

Elizabeth, and John the Baptist preached his first sermon inside Elizabeth's womb, and leaped at the sound of the voice of his

Lord's mother. This so encouraged Mary that she began, and she sang a beautiful song that is tied very closely to Hannah's prayer when she prayed in thanksgiving to God when

God gave her her son. Now, in Luke chapter 1 verses 51 through 53, we can hear something of this reversal that we're hearing now.

He has done mighty deeds with his arm. He has scattered those who were proud in the thoughts of their heart.

He has brought down rulers from their thrones and exalted those who were humble. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent away the rich empty -handed.

Hear that reversal back and forth? God is shaking things up and changing all these things around.

Well, this is language straight from Hannah as well, and Hannah who prayed and clearly put her hope in God's anointed or God's Messiah, and Mary's hope is also in Christ, and so we have them praying and singing and rejoicing in this kind of reversal.

The good news is that this new covenant is for all kinds of people. It's not just for a select group.

Jesus himself has already preached from Isaiah earlier in Luke chapter 4, and he quoted the passage that said, the

Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the

Lord, meaning that this message about this message of good news is not for just those who had resources.

Every year, and sometimes multiple times a year, the Roman Emperor would send out a euangelion, and he would euangelizo the entire empire, which means what?

He would gospelize them. He would send good news. He would declare a gospel for all the

Roman Empire, and it had to do with how he was going to solve all their problems and be the most amazing, you know, demigod that they would ever pinch incense for, and he was always telling them how the state would be their savior, and that was the gospel that went out so many times over and over from the

Roman Emperor. Well, it was good for all sorts of the citizens of the Roman Empire, how it was going to help them out, but it didn't really have anything to do, there was no good news for the slaves in the

Emperor's gospel. There wasn't any good news for those who lived in the empire but weren't citizens.

It was good news perhaps for some soldiers and perhaps for some from those who had resources and maybe political connections, but it wasn't good news for everybody.

The good news that Jesus is preaching, the good news that he comes with, is for everybody, yes, even the poor, even the captives, even the blind, even the oppressed.

It was for everybody. That's the kind of gospel he was bringing, and so it's good news for the poor, even the poor.

It's not exclusive news for the poor, but if there's anyone who could do with some good news, with some world -changing, earth -shattering, heaven -ringing, humanity -saving good news, it would be the poor.

The poor are easily left out, and they easily feel left out of anything meaningful, anything powerful, or anything transformational, but the good news of Jesus Christ is for them, too, not just those who are typically included.

He came to save his people, to save them from their sins, it says, and he accomplishes this in his life and death and resurrection.

Also, in this, when he says, blessed are you who are poor, this surprise is helpful because it contains a reproof.

It contains some correction for the way of thinking in his day. A common assumption in our day, the cultural assumption in our day, is that the rich for being rich are necessarily wicked.

That's the common assumption in our day, and the poor for being poor are the oppressed righteous, and they don't deserve to be poor, and they've been picked on, but they're the good people, the poor are the good, and the rich, because they're rich, are necessarily wicked and evil.

That's kind of the cultural assumption of our day. Well, in Jesus's day, it was reversed, it was completely opposite.

You can hear this when Jesus is teaching, and he's explaining things to his disciples, and the rich ruler walked away from the gospel.

Jesus called him to repentance, and he wouldn't repent, and he walked away, and Jesus comments to his disciples, and he says, it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.

It'd be easier for the largest moving thing you've ever seen to go through the smallest opening your eye has ever beheld than for a rich man to get into heaven.

And the disciples, what do they say? Well, then who can be saved? What a strange thing to say.

What a strange thing to say. Well, then who can be saved? Why did they? Because they assumed that those who were wealthy were more favored by God, and therefore closer to God.

In fact, the wealthy were able to do more for God in giving and beautifying the temple, and doing all these good deeds with their wealth, and so on.

So obviously, they were closer to God and closer to heaven than the poor were. That was their common assumption.

So when Jesus said, yeah, it's impossible for a rich man to go to heaven, they said, well, then who can be saved?

And Jesus says, with man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible, right?

So salvation is of the Lord. Salvation is of the power and the grace of God. Now, that was the common assumption in Jesus's day.

To really understand the punch of what Jesus said in our own day, let me put it this way. To have the same punch in our day, we have to say it like this.

It would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a poor man to go to heaven.

Does that hit you really hard? Well, that's how it hit the disciples when he said what he said.

So he was dealing with the common perspective of his day, and so he was a little bit of reproof here.

How happy are the poor? How blessed are the poor? The assumption was that they would not be.

Jesus had a lot to say about the way in which things were done in his time.

Remember the widow with the two mites, the widow with the two pennies. Jesus is with his disciples and they're observing this widow.

A widow, meaning that she was elderly, she did not have a husband, and apparently nobody was taking care of her.

She had just a little bit left, and she went to the temple, and she had all she had.

Jesus told us it was all that she had, and she put her last little two pennies into the treasury at the temple.

Now, why would an elderly woman who has obviously not a whole lot of any of the kind of support do that?

Well, because she was instructed to do that. She was told how important it was that she did that, that that would be pleasing to God if she did that kind of thing, but she shouldn't have been doing that at all.

And Jesus said, look at these other Pharisees who come in, and they put in large sums, but they're actually not putting very much compared to what they actually have.

She put in all that she did. Look, and you can see that she's very dedicated. Look how sacrificial she was compared to the rest, but his point is better felt when you keep reading in the text.

What does he say next about the widow giving all that she had to beautify a temple that was already caked in gold, and that she had done that by the instruction of the

Pharisees? What did he say after he witnessed that? He said, look at these stones.

Not one of them will be left on the other, and he pronounced judgment on the whole thing.

But people thought that the rich were closer to God, because they were able to beautify the temple better than the poor were able to.

So there's a reproof here. But lastly, consider the prophet, the prophet of the poor. Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Part of what we have to think about is where is our happiness? I mean, happiness is not a bad goal. It's just a bad God. Happiness is not a bad goal.

It's just a bad God. The Bible tells us how to be happy all the time, but that's not the goal.

That's not the God that we serve, but it's not a bad goal. And Jesus says, happy are you who are poor, well -off, fortunate, blessed are you who are poor.

Why? Because you have the kingdom of God. Now, we think of poor,

I don't know what we think of, but 10 % of the people that Jesus would have in any given audience would be those who were lame, blind, leprous, demon possessed.

None of these people had any way of earning income. They would all be outcasts, and they would be our equivalent of homeless.

70 % of the people Jesus talked to were people who labored and worked and, you know, and scratched in the ground, and they barely had enough to eat for them and their families every single day.

Sometimes they were going hungry on Sabbath. That was about 70 % of the people he talked to.

And then 15 % of the people he talked to were the artisan class, the people like Peter, James, and John, Andrew, who were fishermen.

They actually had a trade. They had some supplies. They had tools, and they were actually able to work in a way that was a step above the rest of those.

And then 5 % he talked to would be those who had a lot of wealth. Okay, so that's kind of the demographics he was talking to.

And so when he's talking about the poor, he's talking about the majority of his audience.

80 % of who he's talking to would be considered the poor. Very, very, very, very few people we would know today would know anything about the poverty that Jesus is talking to right now.

And then part of that's good news, okay? Part of that's good news. Here's why. Jesus was talking to people who were way poorer than the poor of our country, and he was telling them, you all can be happy.

What? They can be happy? There's good news for them? There's something meaningful for them, even though there was really no way out of their situation?

Does a poor man need to focus on what kept him oppressed?

The temple system, the tax collector system, the Roman occupying force.

Does the poor man need to think about those things every single day and drag himself around in mourning and lamentation?

And the answer is no, he didn't have to. He didn't have to. He can focus on what makes him blessed.

It's not wrong for a poor man to look past his oppression and say that I'm blessed. It doesn't mean that he has to rejoice in the fact that he's poor, or it doesn't mean that he has to, if he can do something different, stay with what takes food out of his children's mouths or anything like that at all.

But there is something happy and blessed, and the point that Jesus always is seeming to make is that he will use an exceptional example, an extreme example, to prove all the rest of the following, which is this.

If the poor are blessed, if the poor are blessed because they have the kingdom of God, meaning that they can look past their economic status and know their blessings in Christ, then that's true for every economic status.

Nobody, nobody ought to be walking around and saying, I'm blessed because I have this amount of material.

Now, you've been made a steward of it, for sure, and you can do a lot of it for the glory of God, and that's awesome, but nobody should be saying,

I'm blessed because of a certain economic status. We are blessed insofar as we have

Christ, that we are in the kingdom of God through Christ, and if we have Christ, if we're part of the kingdom of God, what does that mean?

Well, it means we have access. We have access to God. We have access to the throne.

We come to God and have Jesus Christ at the right hand interceding for us, and so we have access to our creator.

We have access to the king of the universe, and we're blessed because of our outcome.

What's our outcome? Eternal life, new heavens and a new earth, forever blessed with Christ in the hereafter.

We have meaningful labor, whatever we do. Why? Because Christ is risen from the dead, at the end of 1

Corinthians 15, our labor is not in vain if we toil in the Lord, because of his resurrection.

We have all the promises that are in Christ. All of God's promises are granted to Christ for all of God's people who are gathered in Christ, and we are co -heirs with him.

Romans 8 says, in the talking about suffering, we are co -heirs with Christ.

So that's true of the poor who are in the kingdom of God, and therefore it's true of whatever else your economic status is.

If you're in the kingdom of God, you're blessed because of the kingdom, because of the king, and the economic status is not critical.

It's not critical. So there's the first blessing, first surprise

Jesus has, and we're going to look at more of those in coming weeks as the Lord wills. Any questions or thoughts before we turn our attention to some prayers?