Wednesday, November 17. 2021 PM

Tonight, we'll be in Luke chapter 13. I'll be reading verses 10 through 21.

Let's begin with a word of prayer. Father, I thank you so much for our time together. I pray that you would bless our reading of your word.

I pray that you would give us understanding, that you would encourage us as we listen to the words of our

Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, as we witness his mercy and compassion, and as we consider his parables, and as we take hold of his good news.

I pray that you would encourage our hearts, lead us, and direct us for your glory. It's in Christ's name we pray, amen.

Luke chapter 13, beginning in verse 10. Now, he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the

Sabbath, and behold, there was a woman who had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bent over, and could in no way raise herself up.

But when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said to her,

Woman, you are loosed from your infirmity. Had he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and glorified

God. But the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation, because Jesus had healed on the

Sabbath. And he said to the crowd, There are six days on which men ought to work.

Therefore come and be healed on them, and not on the

Sabbath day. The Lord then answered him, and said, Hypocrite, does not each one of you on the

Sabbath loose his ox or donkey from the stall, and lead it away to water it?

So ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound, think of it, for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the

Sabbath? And when he had said these things, all his adversaries were put to shame, and all the multitude rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him.

Then he said, What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall

I compare it? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and put in his garden, and it grew, and became a large tree, and the birds of the air nested in its branches.

And again he said, To what shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, until it was all leavened.

So in this passage, we see two aspects of the kingdom, one in we see how someone is freed, delivered from her bondage, so it's an emancipation, then we also see

Jesus talking about how the kingdom expands, how the kingdom grows.

What are our expectations should be for his kingdom? So we begin with the story of the healing of the woman who was bent over and could not straighten up, how she was healed on the

Sabbath in a synagogue where Jesus was teaching. And you have the idea that he was still being looked upon with some degree of acceptance, some degree of favor from some folks, being allowed to read the scriptures and teach in a local synagogue.

And while this is going on, someone comes in late, and behold there was.

So suddenly you see someone that you didn't see before. The idea is that she makes her way in, probably in a very slow and cumbered fashion, and so it's difficult to miss her.

And it's one of those situations where in the middle of a teaching, in the middle of a lesson,

Jesus is confronted with this situation where things are very awkward all of a sudden. She's not going to be slipping in gracefully.

All sorts of accommodations are going to have to be made for her to make her way into this room and find some place to sit.

People, if they're going to be kind, they're going to have to get up and move out of the way and it's going to cause some disruption, especially if the crowd is as thick as it usually is.

And so Jesus sees her and he stops the lesson. We're going to stop and we're going to handle this right now.

And so he calls her over and he does not ask her how she's feeling.

He does not ask her what she's thinking, what she believes. He has no regard for her faith or her merits or her background or anything.

He has compassion on her and he says, you are loosed. You are healed.

And indeed she was. He laid his hands on her and immediately she was made straight and glorified

God. We are reminded about the touch of Christ time and again.

There is, false teachers have made a lot of hay out of laying on hands and doing this, that and the other.

What Jesus did time and again should have made him unclean as he touched lepers and touched the maimed and deformed and touched the diseased.

But it was absolutely the reverse. Everybody Jesus touched became clean. And there is a clear reversal going on from the old covenant mandates about how

Israel was to maintain cleanliness as the shadow mediator to show God's glory to the nations.

They were to exercise cleanliness and they were not to touch the unclean and the diseased and so on.

And if they did, there was all kinds of things that they needed to do to show purity and holiness. But Jesus touches people all the time and he heals them and cleanses them.

Something to remember as well is that this woman being as injured and disabled as she was would never have made it down to the temple in Jerusalem.

However, if she didn't make it that far, she'd be turned away because of her deformity.

But she comes, she doesn't have to go to the temple. Jesus, who is the meeting place between God and man, the one mediator, he touches her.

So she went to temple that day and she met Jesus. He touches her and makes her well.

And so she was made straight and she glorified God. So this is a wonderful thing.

But, but, verse 14, the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation.

The word indignation is a four syllable word which means he got really mad.

Really mad. It's a strong word. It's not, I feel a little unsettled.

No, he got angry. Jesus himself was indignant on more than one occasion.

Jesus was indignant when he saw the condition of the temple and he made a whip and took care of things. Jesus was indignant when they refused to let the little children come to him.

He was also indignant with those who said that they, whatever they would use money -wise to take care of their parents, they had given away to the temple so they were off the hook.

Those are three different occasions when he got indignant. He got really mad. But he did it in a righteous way.

This man is unrighteous. This ruler of the synagogue is unrighteous in his anger. He's angry, watch this, because Jesus had healed on the

Sabbath. Now he would not have put it that way, exactly. I mean, it's more than that.

He's not really angry because something good happened. Don't pin that on me. He's saying, why would he say that he's angry?

He would say that he was angry because Jesus disregarded Moses. Jesus broke the law.

He broke the commandment. He broke the fourth commandment. That's why he's upset and angry.

That's how he perceives it. But the truth of the matter is, he was angry because Jesus had healed on the

Sabbath. Now he would have spun it every which way other than that, but that was the case.

And so he says to the crowd, there are six days in which men ought to work, therefore come and be healed on them, and not on the

Sabbath day. Is there anything interesting about the way that he handles the situation?

He doesn't talk to Jesus, does he?

He talks to the crowd, right? He talks to the crowd.

He doesn't deal with Jesus directly. He talks to the crowd. This is a man who is angry, but he doesn't have any ground to stand on, and he decides to try to stir up the people and get after them, and not get into a head -to -head conflict necessarily with Christ.

Well, he's going to say what he says, and if Jesus has a problem with him, well then he can talk to him. This is not a very manful way to handle it.

Verse 15, Jesus then answered him. So the man turns to the crowd and tries to stir them up.

I've got a beef, I'm angry, I'm angry because you broke our rules, so I'm going to post it all over social media,

I'm going to get everybody stirred up and mad. Rather than talking to the person that you believe did the wrong thing and give biblical reasons why.

Now that would be the manful thing to do. This guy doesn't do that. Jesus, however, addresses the man directly after the man tries to stir all the crowd up.

Jesus directly answers him and says, hypocrite, economy of words, hypocrite.

So he diagnoses the man as two -faced, wearing masks for different occasions, not being true and genuine.

Hypocrite, does not each one of you on the Sabbath loose his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it away to water it?

Isn't that work? Why do you give yourself special exceptions to all these rules that you insist that other follow?

That's the definition of hypocrisy. I don't know if you have noticed in the last year and a half, but people who are most vocal and loud and insistent and passionate about rules tend to have little exceptions for themselves.

We notice that? The people who are most passionate and even volatile, indignant that everybody follow the rules have little exceptions for themselves where they don't have to follow the same rules.

This is Achilles' heel, the weakness of man -made religion.

We have all been subjected to the indignation and the zeal of a new holiness code, a new way to be holy and pure in society, and if we don't follow all the different mandates and rules, then guess what?

We are considered unclean. It's a complete legalistic religion that has emerged naturally from the paganism in which we now live in the milieu of paganism we're in, but we see that just like every other legalistic religion, that the people who are most indignant about it and trying to enforce the rules have exceptions for themselves and they don't even follow their own rules.

So Jesus acknowledges this with the people he's talking to. This is nothing new. And he exposes this very quickly and then tries to put the attention where it should be to think about what actually just happened here.

So why not this woman being a daughter of Abraham, a daughter of Abraham, whom

Satan has bound, think of it, for 18 years, to be loosed from this bond on the

Sabbath. Now what can we think of when it comes to the connection between the loosing of a bond and Sabbath?

Loosing of a bond and Sabbath. What would the biblical connection be?

Certainly rest comes into mind, a key word of the Sabbath. Rest every seven days.

Rest every seven, Sabbath means seventh. So how many different Sabbaths were there?

A seventh day, a seventh year, seventh year.

What happened on the seventh year? Their fields rested, their fields rested, didn't it?

But that's not all, the fields rested and then the slaves were all loosed.

The slaves were all set free every seven years. On the seventh set of seven, year of Jubilee, all the land was returned to the original ancestral owners, but on the seventh year, there was a releasing of the slaves.

So this is Deuteronomy 15, right after a passage about generosity to the poor.

We read in verse 12 of Deuteronomy 15, if your brother, a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, a daughter of Abraham, right, a daughter of Abraham, is sold to you and serves you six years, then in the seventh year, you shall let him go free from you.

So in the seventh year, they go free. Now she was bound 18 years.

Surely it's time for her to be set free, right? The way that Jesus says it, the way that he approaches it, hits them where they're at.

The ruler of the synagogue tried to indict Jesus indirectly for doing work on the

Sabbath. He says, you know, we need to abide by Mosaic code around here. And Jesus says, this woman, this daughter of Abraham has been bound for 18 years, shouldn't she be free?

And what a better day than the Sabbath day? And everybody says, can't argue with that, you know.

And Jesus is showing that the way in which the religious leaders were conducting their version of the

Jewish religion in that time was entirely illegitimate. And when he said these things, verse 17, all his adversaries were put to shame.

And all the multitude rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him. So this, of course, deepens the wedge between Jesus, the fan base of the folks, and then the religious leaders.

This is going to just help deepen the wedge between them. And the conflict continues. So in the kingdom of emancipation, we see the healing and then we see the hypocrites.

On the next four verses, we have two parables that are set next to one another because they reinforce one another.

Then he said, what is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it?

It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and put in his garden, and it grew and became a large tree, and the birds of the air nested in its branches.

And again he said, to what shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until it was all leavened.

So when he talks about kingdom expansion, what is the kingdom of God like, he tells lots of different parables to describe the kingdom of God.

The synonym to the kingdom of God is the kingdom of heaven in Matthew. Everywhere you have

Matthew saying kingdom of heaven, Luke says kingdom of God. They are absolutely synonymous. There is no distinction between them.

So he tells lots of parables about the kingdom of God. Who gets in? Who doesn't get in?

What is the nature of it? Here he talks about the growth, the expansion, the progression of the kingdom of God.

And he's got two illustrations, one from baking and the other from gardening. And both have to do with food.

Of course, Jesus' audience is just like us. We think about food a lot. We like food.

We're big fans of it. Of course, they were closer to the starvation gap than we could ever dream or experience ourselves.

So they were more anxious and fearful about food. But nonetheless, he takes this illustration that is, these illustrations that are relatable to everybody.

And he talks about these two things. First of all, the mustard seed. The mustard seed. When we look at the expression of the mustard seed, we have a very small seed, a very small seed.

And it's one that grows and grows and grows and becomes large enough in their garden, their urban vegetable garden space that they would have, gets big enough.

And Jesus brings in a little bit of extra size here.

Imagine this little mustard seed growing to be the biggest mustard plant you've ever seen. So much of that has branches big enough that birds can come and nest in it.

So kind of imagine that. How long would it take for a mustard plant to get that big? You know, it would have to have the perfect conditions and then it would have to be, you know, it would have to be cared for.

But, you know, just think about how big that thing would get. Probably nobody would really want a mustard plant that big in their garden.

Like, I can't plant anything else. You know, the whole thing is this big mustard tree. But the way that Jesus says it, that the birds come and nest in its branches, is particularly phrased from prophetic passages in the

Old Testament. It was an image, an illustration of kingdoms, dominions that got big enough so that the nations could come in and find alliances and peace.

They could find resources. They could find diplomatic alliances and so on.

So, for example, in Daniel chapter 4, which we went over a few weeks ago in church,

Daniel interprets a dream for Nebuchadnezzar about a tree.

And he says this in verse 20 of Daniel 4. The tree that you saw which grew and became strong, whose height reached to the heavens and which could be seen by all the earth, whose leaves were lovely and its fruit abundant, in which was food for all, under which the beasts of the field dwelt, and in whose branches the birds of the heaven had their home.

It is you, O king, who have grown and become strong, for your greatness has grown and reaches to the heavens and you're dependent to the end of the earth.

In Ezekiel as well, more than one place, we read about a tree with the birds nesting in its branches and the birds are said to be nations.

Okay, so that is an established illustration from the Old Testament about a kingdom or a king expanding and growing in power and ability so that the nations come in.

So Jesus says that's what the kingdom of heaven is like. It's like a small little mustard seed, it begins slow but it grows and becomes a large tree and it includes all the nations.

Well that fits with the descriptions of the kingdom of God, the promises of the new covenant throughout the scriptures.

Sometimes the illustration, sometimes the image is not a tree with branches and birds.

Sometimes the illustration is that of a mountain and that all the nations come to the mountain. So we have different images there but it's the same principle.

So that is a description of what? Something that is very small but becomes very large.

How small were things there around resurrection day?

How many folks were in the room on the day Jesus rose from the dead?

Fewer than are in this room now. Pretty small, isn't it?

Pretty small. How many brothers and sisters in Christ do we have today on planet earth and in heaven at rest?

It would take us a long time to count. So it starts small and gets really, really big.

And it's not just the Jews, it's the nations, Jews and Gentiles. Second illustration is that of yeast or leaven which a woman obviously puts into her dough because she wants it to rise so she can have a nice loaf of bread.

So this is something that is also small but it is also something that is also hidden in that the mustard seed goes into the ground and it's hidden but then it grows slowly.

So also the leaven is put inside the dough and it works slowly.

And there are visual effects of it. You can see that the bread is rising over time.

But he says that this is the same, this is like the kingdom of God, like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until it was all leavened.

So when we think about these illustrations, what are we to think?

Something that happens but it's not something that we engineer. Does the gardener crank something to make that mustard seed grow?

Does the cook, does the baker, does she make any progress at all after putting the leaven in the bread by poking at the dough and trying to make it work better?

This is very much along the same lines of what Jesus says about the kingdom of heaven in Mark chapter 4 and verse 26 where he says,

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground and should sleep by night and raise by day and the seed should sprout and grow.

He himself does not know how. The emphasis in the scripture time and again is that God is pleased to work through us but it's his strength being put on display in our weaknesses.

And that the outcome is salvation belongs to our

God and to the Lamb who is on the throne. He gets all the credit. He gets all the glory and however that it has come about.

So the kingdom of God is something that is often silent, slow, small, hidden, but growing.

Luke chapter 17, in Luke chapter 17 in verse 21 Jesus says this about the kingdom of God.

In verse 20 particularly, when he was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them and said,

The kingdom of God does not come with observation, nor will they say, See here or see there, for indeed the kingdom of God is within you.

There's a children's book that talks about how confused Nicodemus was about why he had to be born again to see the kingdom of God.

I mean that sounds kind of confusing. After all he was born a Jew and he lived in the promised land and he could see the temple and so on and so forth.

So how could it possibly be that he couldn't see the kingdom of God? But he had to learn that the kingdom of God is not something you get born into, it's something that gets born in you.

And that's what Jesus is talking about. The mustard seed was in the ground. The leaven was inside the lump of dough and the kingdom of God begins inside the person according to the

New Covenant promises of the heart of stone being removed and the heart of flesh being put inside upon which the law of God is inscribed and the

Holy Spirit is given to every member of the New Covenant and so the kingdom of God spreads in that fashion.

So the kingdom emancipation, we see the healing and the hypocrites.

We notice that the hypocrites religion does not work out so well. They're following external rules and measures and saying that if we follow the policies and that makes us holy.

If we follow the policies that makes us saved. All right, that's this. She was also on that day delivered from the system that kept her there, right?

When she met Jesus, she got delivered. She got doubly delivered, perhaps triply delivered. And so then in the kingdom expansion,

Jesus begins to talk about what the kingdom of God is like. Okay, any questions or thoughts before we close our time together?

Oh, certainly. Yes. Yes, and then all sorts of things happen in the growth of the kingdom of God.

All things happen in the expansion of Christ's people and his church and so on and so forth.

All sorts of things expand and grow in ways that we can't see.

We don't know about. But God does. We can't comprehend the whole of all that Christ is doing.

But we can rejoice that his promises are true. Eventually, it does become manifest and then you begin to see something.

So I like the dispatchers from the front, Tim Kazee. And just all he does is just give glimpses of where the church is at all over planet earth and just all of the different fellowships of Christians worshiping together and the things that they're doing and the things that are going on in their midst and so on.

And those are just little tiny glimpses on very brief trips. And even that is just, you know, it's just a little bit just scratching the surface.

You don't even know about all the places that he doesn't have time to go or wasn't couldn't get to.

And just a reminder that without fanfare, without political announcements, without massive monuments and so on and so forth,

Christ is growing his church. He's building his church. The gates of Hades are not prevailing. There is success.

Even if we can't master all the details of it to assure ourselves of this being so.

So there's great encouragement in the parables and the promises. I want to ask,

Ken, would you do me a favor and lead the prayer time tonight? I'm about to lose my voice.