Synoptics 355, 356 and 365

The Road to Emmaus and the Opening of the Scriptures

Always the conundrum. Do you start exactly on time and then everybody walks in over the next five minutes or what? I was going to do a class participation thing this morning. And then I started trying to figure out how I was going to divide that up and decided that it didn't divide up in a way that would be overly useful.

And so I won't do that. We'll finish looking at Luke's discussion that we started last week and then try to make some application of that. Did you vote? Yes sir. I did. No, I haven't had time to. Did you?

And? Interesting. I learned a long time ago that when someone shows you their new baby and says, what do you think? And your response is, interesting. That's generally not a good thing. I was disappointed.

Okay, he was disappointed. Yeah, I do want to see it. I do want to see it, but we'll see. Only two people have seen it? Anybody else seen it? It certainly would be infinitely better than that. Yes. Anybody else?

I have not seen it. Nobody else seen it? Okay, alright. You didn't see Risen yet, George? I haven't seen it. Okay, alright. It would be relevant given our Sunday school lesson, but we'll skip over that for the moment.

We were looking at Luke chapter 24, which is why I said we don't need to get the synoptics out because it won't be anywhere other than Luke and Acts, actually. And we had just gotten to the point where in talking to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, Christ's response to their responses to his inquiry is, O foolish ones, it is low of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken.

Ought not the Messiah to have suffered these things and to enter into his glory? And so, part and parcel of Christ's understanding that is revealed here is that the path to exaltation, the path to glory, lay through suffering.

And in essence is basically saying, should you not have seen this? And so we have beginning of verse 27, And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded them and all the scriptures of things concerning himself.

So what I was going to do is I was going to divide us up and assign various sermons from the book of Acts and say, Okay, what verses did they focus upon? But then I tried to figure out how to break Acts up and keep it being something just, well, you know, anybody with a decent Bible translation can just go, Okay, this verse, this verse, this verse is already listed there and we're done.

And everyone's going to be sitting around twiddling their thumbs. So I wasn't sure exactly how to make that work. But we will look at some of the sermons in Acts here in a few moments to sort of gain a perspective as best we can from the book of Acts as to what texts were focused upon.

And so as they're walking along, he expounds them and all the scriptures of things concerning himself. Then they drew near to the village where they were going and he indicated he would have gone farther.

But they constrained him saying, abide with us for his toward evening and the day is far spent. And when he went in to stay with them, now it came to pass as he sat at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it and gave it to them.

Then their eyes were opened and they knew him and he vanished from their sight. So now we noticed, we noted before the fact that there was a supernatural hindrance. It would have been natural for these men to recognize Jesus because Jesus has risen from the dead with the same body, but now an uncorruptible body, that he had lived and communicated with them before.

He had broken bread with them. These are obviously disciples that, while not one of the twelve, were very close to the twelve. And lots of speculation in church history as to who they were, the second one was, other than Clopas.

But it says their eyes were opened and they knew him and he vanished from their sight. So of course, those who would deny the reality of the physical resurrection would say, well, this is proof that he's just a spirit, that he's just manifesting physical forms once in a while to convince the disciples of something that really isn't true.

And that is that the term resurrection, anastasis in Greek, means that which died coming to life again. And I remember when Dr. Jim Renahan and I debated John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, the late Marcus Borg, regarding the subject of the resurrection, that it took us half of a debate before these ultra-liberal theologians got the message that we actually believed that the grave was empty because Jesus had actually risen from the dead.

I mean, I remember the point in time, I forget who it was, I think it was Crossan, who, we were in a cross-examination, so all four of us had given our opening statements, and Crossan was like, so you think that the grave was empty because his body had been raised?

Yep, yep, how novel, yeah, what a shocking thing. Yeah, but again, from their perspective, way out there, that must have been just shockingly amazing to them. But anyway, well, possibly, I don't know.

I would assume that there would be a direct relevance. This and the story in John, which we'll look at, not this week, but hopefully fairly soon, there's not much left to be looking at in the Gospels, when Jesus is able to enter a locked room, a room with the doors locked, would indicate that certain physical barriers that seemed to me to be relevant to time are not at least dealt with in the same way.

I mean, what's keeping me from being on the other side of a locked door? Well, the amount of time to either go around another direction, or unlock the door, or whatever else it might be. I don't know what the experience of the resurrected person is in regards to time.

I think that's one of the real issues, maybe one of the issues why we don't have almost anything told to us about what experience we, you know, eye has not seen, ear has not heard, not entered into the heart of man, so on and so forth, is part of that because it's just not expressible in our current state.

We really could not even begin to understand what that's going to be like. I don't know. It is an area of speculation, but you do have these two incidents. And of course, verse 31, only eight verses later, well, seven verses later, "...and he said to them, Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your hearts?

Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself handling and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones, you see, I have.". So, the author is clearly communicating the reality of the resurrection, and yet, you have a supernatural manifestation here, very clearly.

How you put all that together, I don't know. Then, in this situation, you clearly had supernatural blinding and then opening of the eyes, and then he vanishes from their sight. "...and they said to one another, Did not our heart burn within us while he talked to us on the road and while he opened the scriptures to us?".

Fascinating statement. They don't turn to immediate speculation concerning the nature of the resurrection body. Their first inclination is to recognize. The most amazing thing was not that they had been kept from recognizing Jesus, or Jesus had vanished from their sight, but, "...did not our heart burn within us while he talked to us on the road and while he opened the scriptures to us?".

And so, their most memorable aspect of it was the opening of the scriptures, and all of a sudden the realization that they have, yes, this is what the Christ was supposed to experience, and this is what the prophets have said, and the law and the prophets bear testimony, and so on and so forth.

And so, though it would be probably toward, well toward dark by this point, "...they rose up that very hour and returned to Jerusalem and found the eleven, those who were with them, gathered together, saying, The Lord is risen indeed and has appeared to Simon.

And they told about the things that happened on the road and how he was known to them in the breaking of bread.". And so, probably because they knew the road so well, maybe they took a torch or something, I don't know how they managed it, but they get to Jerusalem and they meet with the disciples, they know where the eleven are, so again, they're in the immediate circle outside of the twelve.

Probably relatives of the owner of the upper room. Again, lots of speculations to exactly how this would be. When you open their eyes... It doesn't say anything about it. Right, well, because, well, open their eyes is just simply the removal of the restraint that was mentioned up in verse 16, and their eyes were restrained so they did not know him.

So, that supernatural restraint was removed, and that's what's being referred to here. Here, when it says their eyes were opened, that's different than verse 45, and you open their understanding, they might comprehend the scriptures.

But, I mean, it's supernatural, you could describe it to the Holy Spirit, I suppose, but the text doesn't specifically make that statement. So, they come, they make known to the disciples, who have been discussing the fact that Simon Peter has encountered Jesus, and now as they said these things, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them and said to them, Peace to you.

And they were terrified and frightened and supposed they had seen a spirit. And he said to them, Why are you troubled and why do doubts arise in your hearts? So, to view Jesus merely as a spirit is to give expression to doubt in the heart.

Yes, sir? I would have to fire up my computer to look. Why? Yeah, I grabbed the text that I used to read from the pulpit this morning just for the fun of it, because I was going to have to be flipping between so many pages that I didn't want to have to be doing it in here.

But, it is in mine. And he said to them, Peace to you is a variant. And I'm looking it up here. Well, that's again odd. The only, you say the New American Standard doesn't have it? Okay, what Bible are you playing with back there, dude?

Yeah, that's interesting. The New American Standard in 1995 says, Peace be to you. So, I'm not sure what you have, but it would have to be maybe the 1977? 1977, yeah. Yeah, it's only missing from the infamous Codex D and from the early Latin.

So, it's in all the rest of the Greek. So, I don't know exactly why the NA25, which is what the 1977 was based upon, would not have had it. But, it's in the NASB 1995 and following and pretty much every place else.

Okay, so, they're frightened. I think they've seen a spirit. And I guess I'm just going to have to keep this up here, because. I thought they saw a spirit. A pneuma, not a phantasma. Phantasma would be what we would translate as ghost.

Pneuma is spirit. So, the spirit of one who has passed away, something like that. Again, from the Jewish perspective, the physical resurrection does not take place until the end of time. That was one of the things that the resurrection of Christ as the first fruits challenged their traditions.

And so, Jesus' response is, why are you troubled and why do doubts, doubts as to his physical nature, arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, it is I myself. Handle me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, you see I have.

Now, some folks will try to create an extremely surface level contradiction here. Because elsewhere, in completely different contexts, specifically in the context between corruptible flesh and life-giving spirit, Jesus is contrasted.

It's that he is, you know, the second Adam becomes the life-giving spirit. And so, let's go, see, see, he's a spirit over here, but he's not a spirit over there. As if they're talking about the same thing, which clearly they're not.

His point is that he is not a disembodied spirit, which is what they thought they were seeing, verse 37. And the emphasis is upon handle me and see. So you've got very similar terminology that's used in John, it's used in 1 John, what our eyes have seen, what our hands have handled.

Same type of terminology that is used in other texts. So a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have. When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. But while they still did not believe for joy and marveled, he said to them, have you any food here?

So he gave him a piece of broiled fish and some honeycomb, and he took it and ate in their presence. So there is a giving to the disciples of a specific physical evidence of the reality. And obviously, as Jehovah's Witnesses say, this is just Jesus manifesting a physical body to prove the resurrection of them.

But the resurrection is not actually that Jesus rose from the dead, or that his body rose from the dead, but that he had been recreated as Michael the archangel. This would be extremely deceptive on Jesus' part, and it would be proving something that actually isn't true.

But that is what Jehovah's Witnesses believe. Now, upon appearing to the disciples, if you'll look at the rest of what Jesus says, verse 44 and 46, well, just say 44 through 46, because the commentary in verse 45 is relevant, is on the same subject, and that is the most important thing that the resurrected Lord first communicates to the two disciples in the Road to Emmaus, and then to the gathered 12, plus those same disciples there as well, it would seem, is the continuity in what has happened with the prophetic record, that this is not some breaking of, you know, this is, we're not throwing out the Old Testament here, the reality is that we are fulfilling, this is exactly what has been said.

Then he said to them, these are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning me.

And he opened their understanding that they might comprehend the Scriptures. And he said to them, thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Messiah, the Christ, to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day.

So, there is a immediate and strong emphasis on the part of the Lord, and it's the first thing he says. You would, probably if you wanted to think through what you would like to say after such a huge event as the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Christ, what would strike most of us, the first thing the disciples need to hear is, this is what the Scriptures have said all along, but that's what Jesus says is most important to understand, is that God has done what he said he would do, and here's how he had indicated that, that which is written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms.

So, the term that's frequently used today, we call it the Old Testament. Obviously, speaking to Jewish people, that's not a phrase that they're going to appreciate very much. They don't believe there are any other testaments.

They normally refer to what's called the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im and the Ketuvim. The Torah is the Law, the Nevi 'im is a Prophet, so the Nevi 'im are the Prophets, so the Law, the Prophets, and the Ketuvim are the Writings, which the Psalter would be the greatest example of that.

And so, Jesus is, in essence, using the same nomenclature that the Jewish people had developed to describe what we call the Old Testament, the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im and the Ketuvim. And all of that testifies to Him, not just a part, but all of that.

And so, but there is a necessity, verse 45, of opening their understanding that they might comprehend the Scriptures. And here, it's not that you have to have a spiritual opening of the heart or mind to be able to read Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek.

There are lots of pagans who can read the Scriptures. And there are lots of pagans who can identify historical context and everything else. But to be able to comprehend the Scriptures, because those Scriptures speak to us as rebel sinners, because they speak to us as creatures who are constantly exalting ourselves, and because of the nature of the harmony that exists within the Scriptures, which is not a simple, surface-level type of thing.

It is much deeper than that. There is a necessity for the opening of the understanding, so that one might not just understand what the Scriptures are saying, but comprehend, accept, bow the knee to see the unity and beauty of the Scriptures, and especially their testimony to Christ.

And so He says to them, Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem.

And you are witnesses of these things. Behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you, but tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power from on high. So, this is Luke's way of summarizing days of encounter between Jesus and the disciples.

He doesn't go into the fact that He doesn't talk about the 500 witnesses, He doesn't talk about the people on the hillside, He doesn't talk about going to Galilee. I mean, we're talking, this is where He decides to end it.

It's right here, and gives us nothing more than this, partly because He's going to continue on in Acts. And yet, all of us wish that there were certain elements of Jesus' life that we had much longer discussions of.

Everybody wants to know about what Jesus was like when He was a kid, and so the Gnostic Gospels filled all that stuff in with lunacy and weirdness. But the Scriptures don't tell us those things. And we'd like to have three or four books of the New Testament to be nothing more than what Jesus taught the disciples during the period between His resurrection and His ascension.

Don't get that either. Longest we get is John. Here is a fairly lengthy conversation. We get a little bit of Matthew. But they're all about different time periods and different portions of the encounter.

Luke, for example, just skips over the whole Galilean part. Why? I don't know. Clearly, He feels that the best way to end the Gospel is with a strong emphasis upon the unity of the message He has just written down and the Old Testament, the Tanakh's testimony and witness about what was going to come.

And so it is significant to me that we don't have a single verse mentioned in Luke 24 as to what Jesus talked about. Did He talk about Isaiah 53? Did He talk about Psalm 22? Did He talk about this text or that text?

Why? What's going on there? Well, part of that, I think, is due to the fact that Acts is going to be coming and Acts is going to answer at least some of those questions. But thinking about that and turning to the book of Acts, think with me for a moment, and this is what we're going to sort of do as a group, but we'll just have to do it this way.

If my assignment to each one of you individually, let's say my voice had gone south, and I decide I was just going to give you all an impromptu assignment this morning, and here had been your assignment.

Create a list, Old Testament texts, that Jesus explained to the apostles based upon the preaching of those apostles in the book of Acts. Now, how would you go about doing that? Well, it would seem pretty simple.

You just look at the sermons and look down the center column reference and write them up, right? But what was interesting is I was leafing through Acts, and where would you go? And what was fascinating is if we look at Acts, and this is one of the advantages of, for example, the NASB or the New King James, or uses italics or block print, and the ASB is really easy.

But when we start looking through Acts, it becomes fairly obvious. Well, the first one is Peter's Sermon on Pentecost. You've got Joel that is quoted there. You've got the Psalter being quoted. You've got Psalm 110 being quoted, which, you know, that's always what one would expect.

You've got Psalm 16 being quoted. So it would be really easy to start going through these, but obviously we learn a lot by how the Apostles connected these texts to one another and what's the context of Acts 2, but it's Jerusalem, and it has the assumption of knowledge of the Old Testament text on the part of the recipients of the message.

So we're not surprised then that when Peter speaks again in Acts 3, after the healing outside the temple, that we find specifically Deuteronomy 18 being quoted of Christ in verses 22 and following. With the conclusion in verse 24, Yes, and all the prophets from Samuel and those who follow, as many as have spoken, have also foretold these days.

And then, hidden at the end of verse 25, we have another key text, which will end up being expanded upon a lot by Paul later on, and that is Genesis chapter 12. And the blessing, Abraham, through Abraham, in your seed all the families there shall be blessed.

And Acts chapter 4, Psalm 118, the stone was rejected by you builders, which has become the chief cornerstone. There are all these little phrases that we start seeing, but then after that, we have Psalm 2, okay, that's pretty much given, but then the subject sort of starts changing, and we can go quite some time, and there's all sorts of Old Testament citations in Acts 7, but it's primarily just the text in regards to the history of the people of Israel, and not much in the way of Messianic texts there whatsoever.

Chapter 8 gives us something, but again, the Ethiopian, what's he doing? He has the Tanakh with him. He has the Old Testament scriptures. He is a God-fearer. He has already been to Jerusalem. Again, we still have that background that's being drawn from, and that's where you get Isaiah 53 coming in, and being quoted at that point in time, when Philip is preaching to him.

But then, once we leave that context, the next time that we're really going to find anything of any major... When you go to Cornelius' house, don't really have anything there at all, and then Chapter 11 is sort of a reiteration of what had happened in Chapter 10.

Chapter 12 is mainly just history. Finally, you get into Chapter 13, and you do have Paul speaking in the synagogue there, and so you get some key texts, Psalm 2, Isaiah 55, Psalm 16, a number of other texts come out.

And then after that, when you think about some of the great sermons, think about, for example, Acts 17. You think of... Well, let's not get there first. We have Amos, but a lot of these are starting to have to do not so much with the identity of the Messiah, but as to the universality of the Gospel, and how the Gospel is to go out to the Gentiles.

And so now the text starts shifting because we have the message going out to the Gentiles, and Acts Chapter 15 is all about that, of course. And so finally, when you do get to Acts Chapter 17, now you're talking to people who have absolutely no knowledge of the Scriptures whatsoever, and so you don't have any citations in Acts Chapter 17, I'm sorry, in Paul's preaching there that would take you back to the Tanakh.

Of course, he's cut off in the middle of his sermon, but that's sort of how that works. And so it would be, most of what we are given, we are given toward the beginning of the Book of Acts. Yes, sir? Right, yeah.

Obviously, Matthew's entire emphasis, and it's part of how we identify who his audience was, is built upon the fulfillment narrative. It was necessary just because, and this fulfills the Scriptures, and as it is written, is all the way through Matthew, which many, many years ago now, we used as a means of identifying Matthew's audience as primarily a Jewish audience, which is why you don't have the same type of language used in some of the other Gospels that are clearly written for a less or non-Jewish audience.

As to when Matthew receives the understanding that, well, this was fulfillment of that, this was fulfillment of that, this obviously would be the logical time period for that to take place, at least to be the origination of that.

Can we prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that every single appropriate prophetic fulfillment was announced by Jesus during this time period? Well, I can't prove without a shadow of a doubt, but it would strike me as odd, given how much time there was, that there would be anything sort of skipped over.

And so, I would at least guess that there would be a pretty exhaustive revelation and covering of all of this with the disciples, which would then be relevant to Paul's inquiry of them. The term there is hysterasi, when he inquires of Peter and the others about their experiences with Jesus.

Because it's very clear that Paul's drawing from the same texts that the apostles were. So, when did he learn these things and how? There's all sorts of speculation as to the chronology of Paul's conversion and to public ministry and things like that.

It talks about 14 years in Arabia. What was he doing for 14 years? It's a long time. And then, of course, the big issue about I did not receive my gospel from men, it was delivered to me directly by Jesus Christ.

What exactly is that asserting as well? And is that just in regards to authority issues and not in regards to other things? This is why commentaries are as long as commentaries are. And why there are so many commentaries that have been written.

No two ways about it. But yeah, it would seem to make sense that especially in regards to explaining fulfillment, it would be very difficult to explain fulfillment passages to the disciples when they still have a completely wrong idea as to why the Messiah has come in the first place.

So why would it be necessary for Christ to be born of a virgin? Why would it be necessary for any of these texts to speak what they speak to? It would make much more sense in the light of the crucifixion and resurrection than it would beforehand.

And even at that point in time, we have to remember that it's going to take God dropping a sheet out of heaven three times to whack Peter up the side of the head firmly enough to even get him to be properly thinking about the Gentile mission.

The Apostolic Preaching in Acts and the Old Testament Texts

For us, it's really easy for us to sit back and go, well, didn't you? Peter, weren't you there when you heard? It's really easy for us to sort of sit back and criticize. But it is a rather loud testimony to the power of tradition.

Speaking of the Gentile mission, what, since they weren't learning with the Old Testament, what would their view be? What would their mindset be? Since they have no Old Testament knowledge, or even knowing that there was a Messiah to come, or that type of thing, what would their take be on listening, knowing, hearing the gospel message for the first time?

Well, you know, not too much different than most of the pagans that we talk to who have never heard the gospel message either, even though in some sense, I suppose you could say, still in our society, most people have at least heard the idea of Jesus rising from the dead, even if they've only heard it in a mocking tone.

But, yeah, providing that background and context would be a tremendous challenge to the early church. And the only text they had to draw from in those first decades was the Old Testament. They didn't have a New Testament.

There was no New Testament that they could use. It hadn't been written yet. And so it has often struck me and sort of convicted me that the early church was a church of the Greek Septuagint primarily, and they were so skilled in its use that they could preach the gospel solely from its pages.

I think it's significant that one of the texts that is quoted in Acts is Isaiah 55, which has been identified as the gospel of John in the book of Isaiah. But the ideas of resurrection, it is interesting, who is it that the disciples, the apostles, go to first when they do leave the area of Israel and are going out into Philippi and places like that?

They search for the God-fearers. When the conflict happens in the synagogue, like Lydia, they found them down by the river because they knew that's where God-fearers would be for purification rituals and things like that.

What's a God-fearer? It's not a person who has actually gone through everything to become a Jew, but they are already attracted to the morals, ethics, and the monotheistic nature of the Jewish faith and hence have some exposure to the scriptures at that point.

They recognize that half of our work is already done here. So if we want to get something started quick, and the reason they want to get something started quick is because of the opposition that's going to come, then this is where we need to start and hopefully get them grounded enough that they can then be doing the second level evangelism, which would be the much longer process of providing all that background information in regards to the fact that, well, you may think that the gods live on Olympus and are just a bunch of supermen, but the reality is, and then you're starting with the Shema in Genesis 1 and Isaiah 43, and there's only one true God, and here are his scriptures, and here's where he prophesied that he was going to send the Messiah, and this is the nature the Messiah is going to be, and we're here to tell you he's come, and this happened in recent memory under Pontius Pilate, and so on and so forth.

And so it wouldn't be a... It was not a Four Spiritual Laws type thing. You can get away with the simplistic presentation when someone lives in a society where they've already gotten the majority of the story just because you're a part of that society, which used to be the case in our own society.

When most people in the 1800s were taught to read by reading the Bible, that was a blessing. That made it a whole lot easier. There are a lot of places where that's not the case, and I think most of us would struggle mightily because we are so dependent upon those crutches, and the early church didn't have those crutches.

They had to start from the beginning and build the whole stinking building. Dependent on where you lived, yeah. I mean, there was... Judaism was mocked for being monotheistic. The whole idea of one true God was considered hateful, backwards, bigoted, sounds familiar.

Yeah, the very idea that you would say your God is the one true God and anybody else's wasn't a true God, that's why they were called atheists because they were saying there aren't other gods. They were literally identified as atheists in those early years for that.

That's an interesting observation to make. There's an advantage to starting fresh. There is, there is, because so often part of the problem is that there are errors in the assumptions that you may not be able to necessarily identify.

You only find out about it later on, and you have to rewind. There is some truth to that. With that, we'll look at John next time. We'll wrap up his, and then we've got to deal with the real tough issue, and that is how do you put all these together?

Then we'll pretty much be done, which is scary in and of itself. Let's close with a time of the Word of Prayer. Once again, Father, we do thank you for the road to Emmaus. We thank you for the Upper Room.

We thank you for the fact that you do open hearts and minds even to this day to comprehend what is written in the Scriptures. We ask that you would do that for us now as we go into worship. We desire to comprehend, understand, all to your honor and glory, we pray in Christ's name.

Amen.