Book of Luke - Ch. 13, Vs. 17-19 (12/14/2003)

Let's see, Luke chapter 13, I believe we're starting with verse 18, I think we left off at verse 17 last week.

This is actually the day of Greg and Mae Cheen's first anniversary.

So now they'll have something to remember this start of this year with. We're going to have the

Lord's Supper after this service, or as a part of this service, so we will not cover a lot of scriptures in the lesson this afternoon.

But I believe, isn't that where we left off, chapter 13, verse 17 is what I had marked. It's always nice when it's the right one, since that's what

I studied. Starting with verse 18. Okay, we have a couple of very short parables here.

So one of them is two verses, well they're both two verses. And they're short, but they say a lot.

And one of them is prophetic, the first one is prophetic. And the second one is more of a warning that we ought to live by all the time.

So let's go to the Lord in prayer and then we'll begin. Father, we thank you so much for the baptisms that you allowed us to witness today.

Picturing so beautifully the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And these two people that you drew to yourself and gave them the desire to follow you in baptism, what a wonderful day.

This will be a day they remember forever. And so be with them as they grow each step of the way, that they would walk in the light and would be obedient children.

Thank you for blessing Greg the way that you have in his life and his family as well.

Thank you for blessing our entire church family with knowledge of your son

Jesus Christ and a close walk with him. Lord, would you teach us as we study together in Jesus' name, amen.

Let's read this first one, Luke 13, verse 18. And then,

I'll tell you what, let's put these on, then we'll read it. How about that? Okay, then said he, and to what is the kingdom of God like?

Now let's don't just skip over that question, because this kingdom of God is kind of a mystery.

If you study what the Bible says about the kingdom of God, at first as a new

Christian when you first start studying it, you might be confused. And because you might picture it as being heaven.

You just, that's kind of what it sounds like it means. But it really can, it does include that.

It also can include the thousand year millennial kingdom. But it also includes what the

Bible calls the mystery kingdom, which is in our hearts during this church age. Because there is a parenthesis in God's timetable, and we're in it.

We are parenthetical, we're a parenthesis, and the Jew did not see that parenthesis.

And he had the scriptures, he had the prophecies of Isaiah chapter 53, he had the prophecies of Daniel, he had

Amos, he had Joel, many prophecies all the way from Adam.

All the way up until John the Baptist, the Jew had these prophecies. And they saw more clearly

Jesus coming as a reigning king in power. What they did not see is the suffering servant aspect of Jesus' life.

And they could not see the church age being in between where they lived and when the kingdom would begin at all.

From their view, the kingdom was always a physical kingdom. And we're living in the spiritual kingdom during the church age.

But the physical kingdom will continue for the Jew and for the

Gentile when the Lord Jesus returns. So there's a parenthetical there.

So the kingdom of God, when Jesus talks about it, it can include all of that. It can certainly include the church age because that's part of the mystery kingdom.

And this particular parable of all of the parables that were spoken to the Jews, of course they're all spoken to us as well for our benefit who live in the last days.

The Jewish people did the things in physical terms and they're all pictures of the spiritual truths. So it's all for us too.

But in particular, he was speaking to a group of Jews. And I have the opinion that Jesus spoke during the first part of his ministry as if the kingdom may start at that time.

And he spoke that way. And it is as if from the human viewpoint, it is as if had the

Jewish nation received him as their king, the kingdom would have started at that time. But was that the father's will?

Jesus said, if there be any way that this cup can pass from me, let it be so.

Nevertheless, thy will be done. What a beautiful prayer example. Jesus, as the man

Jesus Christ was saying, could we just go into the kingdom now, perhaps? And the father's will was not so, because the lamb had to suffer.

The lamb had to give his blood. And yet, as he spoke, as he got closer to the time of his crucifixion, he began to reveal to his very close followers that he was not going to set up a kingdom at this time, at least not a physical kingdom.

That he was going to be killed at the hands of the Pharisees and the Romans, and that he would raise again the third day.

And that's what he told them, and they did not like the sound of it. They didn't like it one bit.

Peter said, Lord, don't even talk that way. You are not going to die. And Jesus looked him straight in the eyes and didn't talk to Peter, but he talked to Satan, who had indwelt

Peter, and said, get behind me. And so, thus it was.

They didn't like this idea. But of all of the parables, even though he spoke them all to the

Jewish nation, primarily, this little parable in verse 18 through 19 fits the church age so perfectly.

And look what it says. It says, then said he unto, what is the kingdom of God like?

And whereunto shall I resemble it? He didn't try to explain any of the kingdom of God ever with just one parable.

But he would show us parts of the kingdom of God and what that part was like. And show us a little more of a glimpse over another parable, so that we can put it all together and see a little bit of what the kingdom of God is like, just a little bit, enough for us, what

God wanted us to see at this time in our lives. But this one speaks,

I believe, about that part of the kingdom of God that deals with the mystery kingdom in the hearts of the believers in the church age today, and so he says this.

It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took and cast into his garden, and it grew and waxed a great tree, and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it.

But I can't see any way, and I've read many commentators on this passage, and they do have differing opinions, but I can't see any way to interpret this other than that this is a picture of the church age, that the fact that this mustard seed, which is supposed to be planted and grow into a small little mustard bush plant, mustard seeds don't grow into huge trees naturally.

So this picture's an unnatural growth. It's not natural, it's beyond nature.

And this little thing that was supposed to be a mustard plant, unnaturally in a hideous way, in a grotesque way if you know nature, almost a frightening way, grows up out of the ground and grows well beyond its normal size and height and becomes a huge tree that shades the ground with some unnatural power.

So large that the birds can come and nest in this little, what should have been a bush, and now it's a tree.

Well, let me give you some scripture on what the bird can typify or symbolize in the

Bible. In Matthew chapter 13 verse 3, it says, and he spake many things unto them in parables, saying,

Behold, a sower went forth to sow, and when he sowed, some seeds fell by the wayside, and the fowls, the birds, came and devoured them.

Then down in verse 18, Jesus explains that particular parable. And in that parable, he gives us a view of what birds can typify in the biblical sense.

Verse 18, hear you therefore the parable of the sower. When anyone heareth the word of the kingdom and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, that is

Satan, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart.

This is he which received seed by the wayside. So the bird that came and plucked the seed off of the hard path was

Satan. That's what the fowls picture now in this parable.

As we go back to it, we see a little seed that turns into a plant and then grows in a grotesque way into a tree much larger than it is supposed to be by nature, and it's filled with birds picturing evil.

And I believe, as many of the commentators believe, that this huge tree pictures the modern church as it's prophetic, in the sense it was looking forward to the church age and how the church would grow.

Through the times of persecution when it was sound, into the times of the dark ages of the

Roman Catholic Church as it, you have to understand it did not start out the way it is. It was a long process of adding to the word of God.

Didn't happen that way overnight. Augustine was a man of God and he was a Catholic. But as years went by, they began to bring in the things of man, such as the worship of Mary and all those things.

And you can trace that in a timeline in history, didn't happen overnight. But this church grew unsightly large as the

Roman Catholics began to go into every foreign country and take in their beliefs, take in their false religion, and just kind of merge it with the mass.

And perhaps would say, we don't care what you believe, as long as you take the mass with us, everything will be all right.

And they began to go all over the world as they are today. And then we had the phenomenon that's happened in our lifetimes, where the

Protestant Church came out of, not that this happened in our lifetime, only Brother Otis can tell you about how when the

Protestant Church came out of Roman Catholicism, and Martin Luther came out.

And what was it you were saying you saw? You saw the Civil War or something this morning in Sunday school.

He was telling us about the stuff that happened during that time period. But it's a different dispensation.

But as you go through this, you see that the Protestant Church comes out and it becomes persecuted by the

Catholic Church. And then you had the Anabaptists and those kind of people nowadays don't call them

Protestants, but the books that you read do because they protested against the Catholic Church, even from 300

AD up forward this way. We can trace it back that far, a different line of godly people. But they were always a very small group.

In fact, the Roman Catholics burned nearly all of the books of this group and tried to destroy every trace of history of these groups.

And only one book has held through that has some history about the Anabaptists and the

Waldenses and those different groups that go all the way back. They were small, persecuted groups.

The Roman Catholic Church was unseemly large. And then we come into our day, since the 1900s and predominantly as a result of Arminian thinking and building churches as we build a business, using great marketing skills, using all types of persuasion.

Anywhere from Amy Semple McPherson coming in at the first of the 1900s and bringing in the modern tongues heresy into the world and all the popular faith healing that comes with that.

And because of that and because of some of the independent Baptists going into the Arminian mode.

And all of these things that happened together, all of a sudden you began to see what's called the megachurch in the

Protestant movement. And the megachurch among the Baptists, we thought we had found the promised land in the early 1980s when we found the independent

Baptist movement. We found that in almost every state of the union, the largest Baptist church was not Southern Baptist, it was independent

Baptist. They were huge. Jack Hiles, the leader of this group in our day, boasted that he had 200 ,000 in Sunday school every

Sunday. Largest Sunday school in the world. And all of these gigantic megachurches,

I think, are pictured by a mustard seed plant that's supposed to be a small plant with faithful, truly born again people in the word of God, in the meat that runs off the birds.

But if you start leaving some of that meat out and you just preach around the milk a little bit, and maybe not even that too much, you might get to the point where you give a little piece of a verse and you tell a bunch of stories around it, and you sing a bunch of great songs and you go home.

If you do that enough Sundays, those black birds will come and begin to lodge in your local church.

And the black birds typify false teachers and false people. Evil ones who are the seed of Satan.

They're called tares in other parts of the Bible. Here they're depicted as the birds that come and try to snatch the seed out of the true word of God out of the minds of people before they can even hear it.

And our churches today are filled with the black birds that come out of the seminaries. And I'm not saying all seminaries are bad, but I'm saying a lot of black birds are professors that teach in those seminaries.

And in our Bible college, my daughters in Arlen back there, they go to La Terno, which is a

Christian school. But they've got some interesting Bible teachers there that say some very interesting things that are not at all orthodox in my view.

According to what I see the Bible saying, and so it bothers me. But the seminaries are full of black birds, some female, some male.

But the black birds typify the false teachers. And the evil seed that comes in, and the enormous size of this tree that's supposed to be a bush.

If you thinned out all the dead wood out of every church in America today, even

Criswell's, what did he say, he felt that 5 % of his people in that great First Baptist Church of Dallas were truly born again.

And that was 20 years ago, 25 years ago when he said that. If you culled it all out, you know what you'd have?

You'd have a little bush, a small bush the size of a strong organism.

And so this parable pictures the church in an ungainly size, full of black birds and full of lost people.

Never should have been the size that it is numerically at any given time. And when you go into the parable of the leaven, which we'll hold until next week, it kind of gives a fore view.

The first parable we just studied is prophetic because when it was written, the church was not this way, but now it is.

The next parable, the parable of the leaven, if you would allow me, Brother Otis, I'd like to teach that one.

You've taken mine several times when I've been on trips and things. So perhaps I could teach next

Sunday, no, we'll do it on Friday, I guess. But I want to follow up with this because it goes together with it, because what it shows you is when that church gets like that, then you have to be careful about the leaven.

And I want us to talk about that leaven and how easily one little bitty bit can get in the church and it spreads.

Beware the leaven. So we'll talk about that next Sunday afternoon. Let's have a word of prayer, and Brother Russell, if we need to bring anything forward, you may have it all here already, but if you need to go ahead and bring that forward, we'll have the

Lord's Supper right after this prayer. Dear Father, we thank you so much for the events of the day.

What an unusual day that we'll always remember. And we thank you so much for our soldiers who are so brave and the way that you give gifted men to be their leaders.

And that you've given us a born again president to be the commander in chief. And Lord, we do not take these things lightly.

We praise your name that you made the election go the way it did, that we would have this man at the helm during this troubling time in our nation.

And not the other person. So Father, we thank you for the capture of this evil man today.

We thank you for that on the international scene. We thank you for what's going on in our local church, for this beautiful baptism today that symbolized our spiritual union with Jesus Christ, but also showed forth the godly home.

And may our homes in this church be that way. May we all have our homes centered around the

Lord Jesus Christ. And we thank you for our fellowship time today, also our

Bible studies. And Lord, now direct our hearts to the very face of the Lord Jesus as we celebrate the

Lord's Supper together today in remembrance of him and what he has done for us. And we pray in Jesus' name, amen.