A Word in Season: Seeking and Saving (Luke 19:10)

Luke 19:10 and the Son of Man’s Mission

The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost. That's the way that the Lord Jesus himself describes his identity and his activity in Luke 19 and verse 10. And he uses those two designations, the one individual, the other corporate.

On the one hand you've got the Son of Man, on the other you have those who are lost or that which was lost. So this is language that is rich and evocative. The Son of Man, on the one hand, is a figure from the Old Testament.

It cloaks and reveals simultaneously. It's an ideal title for the Lord Jesus during the days of his incarnation. It speaks of divine glory wrapped in humility. It's a wonderful phrase to describe the Son of God incarnate.

And so you have this figure, God's servant, God's mighty representative. And on the other hand you have the lost. Now we use that language quite easily and quite casually, I suppose. And even then we know that it comes weighted with a sense of distress and gloom.

How much more then when the Lord Jesus Christ uses it to describe a spiritual condition. Lostness is isolation and exposure. And in this case it would be isolated from God, cut off from him. The Bible uses the language of alienation and exposed to the judgments of God against our sin.

This lost language is used repeatedly both in the Old and in the New Testaments to talk about the one who's going in his own way rather than in the path of God. And so on the one hand you've got the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of Man.

On the other you've got those who are lost. Now what would the Son of Man come to do in his dealings with those who are lost? You might imagine that the Son of Man would come perhaps with despising the lost.

Looking down his nose at them. That's what we might do to people who've raised their fist against us. Or to destroy that which was lost. To take God's vengeance against it because of its sin and its transgression.

Christ’s Mercy Toward the Lost

And yet what we find is in fact that the Lord Jesus has come to seek and to save that which was lost. And if we draw the wrong conclusion or jump to the wrong conclusion then it tells us that we actually don't understand the heart of God towards sinners and the revelation of his heart in the person of his Son.

Because the lost clearly then cannot find their own way home. Someone needs to go and find them otherwise they remain lost. And those who are dead in their trespasses and sins need somebody to save them because they cannot save themselves.

And that's precisely where God in his mercy acts. He sends his Son and the Son of Man comes. This glorious servant of God clothed in our humanity. He comes into the world not now to damn us but to deliver us.

To go after that upon which he set his love. To find that which cannot come back by itself and to bring them back to God and to restore us to a right relationship with him. That language of salvation is the rich testimony of a peace that has been restored between sinful man and a holy God.

The Son of Man’s Saving Work in the World

And it can only be done by the labors of the Son of Man, the incarnate God, Jesus the Christ. He did that in coming into the world to lay down his life for his people. And he does it still by sending his preachers, using his word and his spirit to make known his saving work and the intents and the desires of his heart.

So if you know that you are isolated from God and exposed to his judgments, if you've had to face those fearful realities, then you need the Son of Man who came to seek and to save that which was lost.

He is full of pity, joined with power. He is all and everything that we need in his identity and his activity. And where he seeks, he finds. And where he saves, he keeps. So that those who are known by him and who know him as their savior are truly safe now and forever.