Wednesday Night, October 21 2020 PM

Jesus Heals the Centurion’s Slave and the Setting of Luke 7

Then turn to Luke chapter 7, we'll be reading verses 11 through 17 this evening. The title of the lesson tonight is God Has Visited His People. God Has Visited His People. We just finished reading the portion where Jesus heals the slave of a centurion in Capernaum, a centurion who was well thought of by the Jewish community because he had built for them a synagogue.

So he would have likely been interested in Judaism at some level, probably had been paying attention, possibly attending the readings of the Torah at the synagogue and so on, but he knew about Jesus. And the elders, the Jewish elders of the city, upon his behalf, went to Jesus and entreated that Jesus would come to the centurion's home and heal this slave whom the centurion greatly appreciated and valued.

He did not want to see this man die. And so on the way Jesus was going and the centurion had a change of mind at some level and said to himself, no, he shouldn't even come into my home, I am not worthy.

And so he sent friends to go and intercept Jesus and say, I'm not worthy that you should come into my home and heal my slave, but just speak the word and it will be done for I too am a man under authority.

So we looked at that and we saw Jesus marveling at this man's faith in the sense that he had not found such great faith in all of Israel. But here, great faith was evident in the life of this Gentile centurion who understood the power and authority, the ability of Jesus.

So now we come to another story right after that, and we have another incredible miracle done by Christ. So this will pick up the story in verse 11 of Luke 7. Soon afterward, he went to a city called Nain and his disciples were going along with him, accompanied by a large crowd.

Now, as he approached the gate of the city, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother. And she was a widow and a sizable crowd from the city was with her. When the Lord saw her, he felt compassion for her and said to her, do not weep.

And he came up and touched the coffin and the bearers came to a halt and he said, young man, I say to you, arise. The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him back to his mother. Fear gripped them all, and they began glorifying God, saying, a great prophet has arisen among us and God has visited his people.

This report concerning him went out over all, went out all over Judea and in all the surrounding district. Just a few questions as we think about the meaning of this passage of scripture. And the first one is, what is the significance of Nain?

This is the only place in the scripture that Nain is mentioned, though, in the time of Jerome, who lived in the late 300s, early 400s, the village still remained and he could locate it on a map. So if you look at the Sea of Galilee and if you think of the Sea of Galilee like the face of your watch, about 730, a little bit down off your watch face is where Nain was located, about 12 miles south of Capernaum.

So Jesus, after healing this centurion's slave, travels south and we notice that a great crowd was with him. Not only the 12 disciples were with him, whom he had just called and had been teaching, but a crowd is following with him.

And it's interesting that we have a crowd of followers of Jesus who are, I think, pretty excited to be around Jesus to see what happens next after he healed this centurion's slave. And what will they hear next after a very impressive sermon that he gave on the side of the mountain?

They are full of joy. They are full of anticipation and excitement. They're willing to leave whatever interests that they have back at their homes. They're willing to travel with him away from Capernaum down to Nain.

They are excited, an excited bunch. And this crowd, as they come up to Nain, which is nestled in the lower slopes of Mount Morah, and it's a little village down at the bottom of a mountain. As they come up to this village, they are confronted with another crowd.

It's a crowd coming out of the city, out of the city gates, and these two crowds meet. And the crowd coming out of the village of Nain, probably heading off to the east where the tombs of Nain have been excavated, where they would take their dead out of the city and they would go, which is very customary.

The Jews would take the dead out of their city and they would go bury them elsewhere so that to avoid unnecessary defilement and contamination. Little backdrop, it was the Pharisees who came up with the law that you would be defiled if you, of course, touched a dead body.

We had that.

But no, if you walked over the top of a grave, then you would be defiled and unclean. No, wait, I've got one better. If your shadow fell across a grave, then you would be defiled. So anyway, you've got to get the dead away from the place where you're living so you aren't constantly defiled.

So this crowd coming out of Nain, full of sorrow, full of grief, and the crowd full of joy and excitement meet up. And at the center of both crowds, we have these two people. We have Jesus at the center of the crowd of joy, and then we have this bereaved widow at the center of this crowd of grief and sorrow.

The Cost of Losing an Only Son

Now, next question, what did it mean for a widow to lose her only son? What did it mean for a widow to lose her only son? Verse 12, the King James retains the Greek word, behold. It's you, behold, look at this misery, look at this sorrowful, pitiful scene.

Seen, behold, behold, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. One author said the death of a widow's only son was the greatest misfortune conceivable for that time and that culture.

Yes, it's one of the worst things that we certainly can think of. The mourning of a widow for an only son is the extremity of grief. Someone else wrote, Matthew Henry observed, she depended upon him to be the staff of her old age.

How would this widow be able to provide for herself with her husband dead? Well, it would fall to her only son to provide for her, and now he was dead. Henry says, but here her son proves a broken reed.

Every man at his best estate is so. How numerous, how various, how very calamitous are the afflictions of the afflicted in this world. What a veil of tears it is. What a boheme, a place of weepers. We may well think how deep the sorrow of this poor mother was for her only son.

The death of an only son was considered the greatest form of grief. Zechariah chapter 12 and verse 10 in the prophecy that they will weep as for the death of the only son. And so we would say this is the, one of the saddest scenes in all of the gospels.

One of the saddest scenes we come across in all of scripture that we have a widow who is bereaved of her only son. And being so impoverished, it would be unlikely that she would be able to hire mourners as was customary.

We have all kinds of customs, don't we, when it comes to funerals and different things that we put out money for, and some things are very expensive. And they're all just in some way kind of culturally expressive of our grief and yet our love for the one whom we've lost.

And one of the things that the Jews would do would be hire mourners, which was probably more followed when it comes to a larger city or a larger town. But here in this small place of Nain and with her being a widow who has lost her only means of support, I would find it unlikely that she would have been able to hire any mourners.

And yet the crowd, the whole village seems to have turned out to support her in her grief. Such was the extremity of her sorrow. So the size of the crowd tells us how sorrowful she is, and the size of Christ's crowd shows us how powerful he is.

And so we have the meeting of these two groups. And probably as well, that it was forbidden actually to do any work when a dead man was being buried. Even one of the common people, when someone died in Jewish culture, in Jewish society, and he was being buried, everyone stopped working.

Everyone stopped working. And we only have a very small, small little reminder of that left in our culture. Can anyone think of what it is? When a funeral procession is heading to the gravesite, everyone pulls over and stops.

That is a remnant from the Bible. It's a remnant from the culture from which we came. And so they're burying this dead man, but I have a question. What does the text say? Why does Jesus raise the dead?

What is the motivation? What is the reason? It's compassion. He saw how sorrowful she was. And the text tells us to behold, Christ is the one who saw it first. Behold, look at her sorrow. Look how much she is suffering.

Look at her weeping. And he tells her, do not weep. What a thing to say. What a thing to say to a widow who has been bereaved of her only child. And yet, Jesus could say, do not weep, because he knew what he was going to do next.

He was going to raise her son back to life. Because just out of the goodness of his nature, we see that in the previous miracle, in the previous miracle, we have people coming to Jesus, interceding for the centurion, asking him to heal the slave.

A couple of different communications with Jesus about healing this slave. And here, no one asks him to raise the dead. No one asks him to comfort the widow. No one asks him to bring about this great reversal.

He just does it out of his compassion. And we can give praise to God for his compassion and mercy. You know, the hymn we just sung about, you know, who asked God to hang the stars in the heavens? Who asked God to hang the earth where it is?

You know, who asked God to create all the different beautiful parts of his creation that we now, no one did. He did it purely out of his own good character, his good nature, for his own glory. It's an expression of his grace.

And how can the dead ask God to raise them up? Can't. No, it took a miracle. It took a miracle of love and grace. This man could not ask Jesus to raise himself from the dead.

He was dead.

And Jesus raised him from the dead. And this reminds us of our own new birth, how God raises up the dead in trespasses and sins. It's not an absurdity for Christ to tell the dead man to raise to life when he's going to give him the power to do so.

Lazarus, come forth. It was not an insane thing to say because Jesus gave resurrection or power to Lazarus to come back from the dead. And so we have the commandment to repent and believe, to be born again.

And it is not an absurdity for God to say so because he gives the power by his grace for us to come out of death into life. How did the people respond to this miracle? What was their response? Fear. We often see that when certain miracles are performed.

Do you remember what happened when the disciples were in the boat with Jesus and Jesus was asleep in the middle of the storm? And the disciples were afraid, greatly afraid, terrified they were going to die.

And when they implored Jesus to wake, for they perish, he awoke and he commanded the storm to be still, and then it said that they feared him, they feared Christ. But they saw he had power even over the storm.

And the people just see here, Jesus raised this man from the dead and they feared because of what they saw.

Christ’s Power Over Death and Uncleanness

Jesus comes up and he touches them and they stop. Oh, and he says, you know, get up, rise.

And he sits up.

And I'm thinking if I was, you know, one of those fellows, you know.

It would be hard not to drop it.

I would be afraid. I would be shocked.

Yeah. Well, and it's interesting. The word in the Greek is that of beer, b-i-e-r is the English word we have. And so it's basically a pallet with a dead man on top of it. They only actually, Jews only actually built coffins for their infants when they died.

And so this man's on a, basically a pallet that they're carrying. And they would have six or eight men who would carry. And they all had their, as the older scholars wrote, their deputies. Because they had a long way to walk.

So they would switch out because they had a long way to take this body. So they're all gathered around, right, ready to help. And so then this happens. And Jesus, of course, all these men are going to have to go through the process of being cleansed.

Because they, you know, touched the things, the dead bodies on all that. And for a stranger to come up with a great crowd around him and just, and then willingly touch something that would, according to their customs, make him unclean.

It's like him touching a leper, right, because he raised him from the dead. So Jesus, Jesus is, when he touches the unclean, he makes them clean. When he touches the dead, he makes them alive. So we see that they responded in fear.

And they give glory to God. They begin glorifying God. And what are the two things that they say? They say, first of all, that a great prophet has arisen among us. So they knew the stories. They knew the stories of Elijah and Elisha.

And how, on different occasions, they had raised the dead. And they knew the prophecy in Deuteronomy 18, where God told Moses, the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet. Or Moses, and Moses relayed the promise to Israel.

The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, and you shall listen to him. A great prophet was one of the names of the coming Messiah. Not only the son of David, who was a king, not only a great high priest, but also the great prophet, the Messiah, the anointed one, prophet, priest, and king.

So they may not go all the way and call him Messiah, but they definitely say, oh, this is, could this be the great prophet? Could this be the one who was foretold? And that question is going to come in the very next story, where John the Baptist wants to know, just who are you?

Who is, you're raising the dead, and I'm hearing, are you really the Messiah? Is this the way it's supposed to be? Difficult question to ask as he is in prison. But also, notice what they also say. God has visited his people.

God has visited his people. Now, most of the time in the Old Testament, when we read about God visiting, the Hebrew word, pokad, it's usually for judgment. When God visits his people, it's usually to take care of some business that's very unpleasant.

But, remember what situation the Jews have been in. How many years has it been since God had revealed himself through a prophet? How long was the silence after Malachi? Some 400 years, 10 generations of silence.

And now, these, you see, Jesus raised this man from the dead. He's a great prophet. God has visited his people. He, the silence is broken after such a long, long night. The light now shines. They are greatly affected.

They are glorifying God. They are fearing God. God has visited his people indeed. The word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory. Glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

He dwelt among us. The Greek word is tabernacled among us. He planted his tent among us. He is tabernacled among his people to bring new life. And notice he does so for those near and far. This report concerning him went out all over Judea and the surrounding district.

As we think of the story, as we think about Christ and this truth that God has visited us in Christ, how is our grief modified when we have our funerals, when we think about who Christ is, we grieve but not as those without hope.

It is not inappropriate at some point, at some level, to recognize the comfort of Christ, do not weep.

Why?

Why can we stop weeping? Why is it okay to go through the grief, but why is it okay then to stop weeping? Because we have this promise, don't we? That Jesus will not lose one of all that the Father gave to him and he will raise them up on the last day.

That all who believe in him have eternal life, even though they die, yet they still live. And so we have these promises. And so as he comforts the widow, the bereaved widow, do not weep. We have the very same comfort from Christ in this regard because of the hope of the resurrection.

And we think about how excited the people are and that he raised this man from the dead and they began to glorify God and fear God and spread the news far and wide how excited they were. And as we think about that, as those raised from the death of trespasses and sins, should we not then fear God and glorify God and spread the news about the one who does such a miracle that he would bring life to those who are dead?

Light to those who are in darkness? Well, you give praise to the Lord as we think of the power of Christ and this exclamation there in Luke 7, God has visited his people. Okay, well, let's turn our attention now to a time of prayer.

What can we pray for tonight?