Monthly Archives: February 2020

THE GOSPEL OF LUKE – FORGIVENESS IS A LIFESTYLE

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FORGIVENESS IS A LIFESTYLE

“‘Be alert. If you see your friend going wrong, correct him. If he responds, forgive him. Even if it’s personal against you and repeated seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I’m sorry. I won’t do it again,’ forgive him.'” Luke 17:3-4.

What Jesus is advocating here is not reluctant and sporadic forgiveness but a generous and open-hearted attitude to people who offend us as a reflection of the Father’s attitude towards us in spite of the way we behave towards Him.

Forgiveness is the foundation of our relationship with God, and His forgiveness stands securely on what Jesus did on the cross. He paid the debt of all the sin of all people for all time when He gave up His life as a sin offering for us.

When we sin against another person, we sin against God. David understood this. He had Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, killed in battle to justify his lust and adultery but, when his sin was exposed, he cried out to God, ‘Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge.’ Psalm 51:4 (NIV).

Sin incurs an unpayable debt and only because of God’s mercy, made available to us through Jesus, can He cancel our sin and clear our record of guilt. There is nothing that can separate us from His love because the blood of Jesus has washed us clean of sin for all time.

However, God requires a reciprocal attitude from us. Since He has already forgiven the sin of those who sin against us, we have no right to hold them guilty. To do so is to act illegally because we cannot demand payment for what had already been paid for. If we refuse to forgive another, we automatically cancel God’s forgiveness of us. Now that’s a scary thought! That means that we will experience separation from God and have to bear our own guilt.

Not to forgive our fellow man for the paltry things he does against us is to misunderstand the greatness of the debt we incurred against God and the enormity of His mercy that provided a way of forgiveness at the cost of His own Son’s life. Because we tend to focus on what the other person has done to us rather than on what we did to God, we hold on to our offences instead of letting them go because we can.

But there is something deeper to this issue of forgiveness. God forgave us through the death of Jesus to restore the unity between Himself and us because the entire universe can only function properly as a unit. When the relationships between humans remain fractured through offenses and unforgiveness, the whole of life unravels, leaving in its wake chaos and destruction.

Forgiveness is God’s way of restoring unity with Himself and unity between people. When we forgive and reconcile, we contribute to the healing of our world. When we refuse to forgive, we fail to co-operate with God in His work of restoring everything to its original purpose of reflecting Him in the universe. We add to the destruction of our world.

Since God has already cleared the debt of the one who sins against us, all that is required of us is to look the guilty person in the eyes and declare, “You owe me nothing.” It’s not about making excuses for their failure. It’s about setting them free from their debt and restoring the unity that expresses who God is. And that is not only an act but a lifestyle.

THE GOSPEL OF LUKE – BEWARE!

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

BEWARE!

“He said to His disciples, ‘Hard trials and temptations are bound to come, but too bad for whoever brings them on! Better to wear a millstone necklace and take a swim in the deep blue sea than give even one of these dear little ones a hard time.'” Luke 17:1, 2.

Do we ever ignore this warning! Why is it that we fall into this trap so easily? We live in an interactive world. No-one is an island, and no-one functions in isolation. It was God’s intention to create an entire universe that functioned together as one as the greatest expression of His nature.

God is one – echad – unity in diversity. There are sects and religions that take pride in their ‘monotheism’, denying the plurality of the Godhead from the mistaken idea that one God implies a single entity rather that a unity of essence and nature. The name, God, is a term that refers to a species, in the same way as ‘man’ or ‘dog’ refers to a species. Within the species are a myriad varieties but their essence is the same.

There are many gods in the world but they are the creation of man’s imagination and are therefore the reflection of human nature. They are often cruel, capricious, unpredictable, dictatorial and demanding. But, according to the Bible, “This is what the Lord says – Israel’s King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty, ‘I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God. Who is like me?'” Isaiah 44:6.7a (NIV).

God’s being is expressed in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They are one in nature and essence but separate and distinct with different functions, one in purpose, not three gods, but one God. Jesus could say, even in His earthly human form, ‘I and the Father are one,’ and of the Holy Spirit He said, ‘But when He, the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth…He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.’ John 16:13,15 (NIV).

What is the implication? When God created man in His image, He made a being that was one with Himself, reflecting His nature and fulfilling His purpose, to be part of a unified universe that reflects His nature and glorifies Him.   

Therefore, like the issue of adultery which we have already discussed, to do anything that disrupts that unity is to challenge the power that holds the universe together. What happens between individuals sets a chain reaction in motion that affects families, communities and nations.

Man chose to violate than unity when he followed the lies of the devil at the beginning. Now we live in a world that has been torn apart by disunity. Selfishness, greed and wickedness rip families and communities apart and create misery and suffering everywhere. Take for example the wars that have decimated nations and are still destroying people’s lives today. Nations on every continent are at war, ruining cities, tearing up society and devastating families. Why? Selfishness and greed!

Yet Jesus warned, ‘Don’t you be the cause of it.’ He takes this matter so seriously that He said it would be better for that person to be thrown into the sea with a grinding stone around his neck than to put a stumbling block in the way of the nobodies, the ones He called ‘the little ones’.

To do that, wittingly or unwittingly, is to deny the very nature of God which does no harm to Him but does terrible damage and destruction to us. We are only fully human when we are one with the Creator of the universe, and that takes the miracle of God’s forgiveness and grace, through Jesus Christ, to begin the process.

But it’s your choice…

THE GOSPEL PF LUKE – THERE WAS ONCE A RICH MAN

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THERE WAS ONCE A RICH MAN

“‘There was once a rich man, expensively dressed….wasting his days in conspicuous consumption….A poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, had been dumped on his doorstep. All he lived on was…scraps off the rich man’s table…Then he died, this poor man….The rich man also died….In hell and in torment, he looked up….He called out…”Send Lazarus…”…But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember…'” Luke 16:19-31.

A familiar story to Bible-readers, but what is the point of this parable? Hebrews read for identification. Who am I in the story? How often Jesus directed His stories at the Pharisees as a wake-up call! If God’s word is a seed, then Jesus sowed lavishly into the ears of the religious leaders, but to no avail.

This is quite a shocking story for several reasons:

Firstly, it uncovers the heart of this rich man. Jesus had no issues with his being rich. In fact, the Apostle Paul stated categorically that Jesus Himself was rich. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus that, though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich.” 2 Corinthians 8:9 (NIV). He had issues with what the rich man did with his riches.

In this case, he spent it all on himself, not just on his needs, but on a sumptuous and lavish lifestyle that made him blind to the need of the poor man at his gate, a simple but graphic description of what was known as the ‘yetzer harah’ – the evil eye or the eye of darkness – the inward-looking eye that sees no-one but self.

Secondly, Jesus shows us the destiny of greedy and selfish people. Hell is not about God getting people back for not listening to Him. It’s a consequence of a life squandered on self instead of fulfilling God’s higher purpose. The Valley of Hinnom (Gehenna- translated “hell”) was the garbage dump of the city where worthless stuff was burnt – a terrible tragedy and sorrow for the God who gave us the freedom to choose, knowing that that freedom could cost us our eternal destiny.

Thirdly, it smashed into the Hebrew philosophy that wealth was equal to God’s blessing and poverty a curse on people who were out of favour with God. How could this rich man land up in hell if his wealth was a token of God’s favour? This must have shocked both the Pharisees and the disciples. On one occasion, a rich man came to Jesus to ask what he needed to do to have the assurance of eternal life. Jesus told him to get rid of his wealth because it stood between him and following Him. The young man refused.

Jesus’ comment puzzled His disciples. ‘How difficult it is,’ He said, ‘for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’ The disciples blurted out, ‘Who, then, can be saved?’ That was a shock to them. If rich people, who were supposed to be the blessed ones, could not enter the kingdom, what hope was there for the rest?

Jesus’s story reveals something much deeper than wealth=blessing=salvation. It was not having wealth but what you did with it that revealed your heart. Wealth is a good servant but a terrible master. What we do with is it the measure of our love for God.

Fourthly, not even torment in hell changed the heart of this man. O yes, he thought about his brothers but only because he did not want them to experience the terrible end of a worthless life, which presupposed that they were living just as he had lived. But his attitude to the poor man had not changed. He still regarded him as less than himself. ‘Send Lazarus,’ he instructed Abraham, as though Lazarus were his servant to dispatch as he chose.

Jesus was not, for one moment, advocating good works as a way of salvation. His blood alone can forgive the guilt of our sin and cleanse us from all our unrighteousness, but He presupposed that our hearts will also be transformed so that we do not continue living self-indulgent lives. Generosity is a sign that our hearts and lives have been changed, If not, we need to re-evaluate so that we do not land up where the rich man did because he assumed…

THE GOSPEL OF LUKE – THE INDESTRUCTIBLE WORD OF GOD

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THE INDESTRUCTIBLE WORD OF GOD

“‘The sky will disintegrate and the earth dissolve before a single letter of God’s Law wears out.

Using the legalities of divorce as a cover for lust is adultery; using the legalities of marriage as a cover for lust is adultery.'” Luke 16:17-18.

This seems like an odd combination of ideas, the eternal nature of God’s word and a warning against using legal ways as an excuse for adultery. But there is never anything random about Jesus’ thinking. He always came from the perspective of God and His ways rather than the natural, human way of thinking.

The concept of adultery has far wider implications than simply breaking a marriage relationship. It is a violation of the essence and nature of God Himself and the power that holds the universe together.

According to the Shema – the Hebrew confession of faith – “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Deuteronomy 6:4 (NIV), which an Israelite would recite more than once every day, God is one (echad – in Hebrew), not in uniformity but unity in diversity. Those who deny the Trinity or reject the deity of Jesus or the personality of the Holy Spirit have not grasped the significance of this unity. God is three persons, separate, but in essence and nature, perfectly one.

This oneness is reflected in the universe. Everything in the universe is interactive and interdependent. Everything on earth functions as one; man is a unit – every system in his body functions as one and when one system malfunctions, the whole body is affected.

God created a man and a woman and brought them together in marriage to function as one as a perfect reflection of His being. So, according the Genesis 2:24, marriage is primarily to be a visual aid of the unity of the Godhead. “For this reason (that the woman was fashioned from the body of the man), a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” The purpose of marriage is not primarily for companionship, procreation or legalised sex but to express the unity of God. 

Is it any wonder, then, that Satan targets marriage and the family as his most potent expression of hatred against God? Our so-called sexual ‘freedom’ has done more damage to the fabric of society than any other deviation from the ways of God because it has caused the whole of society to unravel.

Adultery is not just the disruption of a marriage partnership. It is a denial of the nature of God and attack on society as a whole and every human being in particular. The consequences of adultery are not only individual, they are universal.

Since God’s word is the manifestation of Himself in another form, it cannot be destroyed. It is as eternal as He is. His word is not broken – those who reject or disregard His word are broken by it and whatever is broken will land up in the trash.

Jesus warns that we must not think that we can get away with lust by disguising it under a legal divorce or even a legal marriage. Using divorce as a way of getting free to marry someone else does not fool God and neither does legal marriage as a cover-up for lust. These are the ways in which the selfishness that breaks ‘echad’ can be expressed. The only legitimate motivation for marriage is the sincere purpose of becoming one as a true, though imperfect, expression of God’s echad-ness.

Here is the Apostle Paul’s take on marriage. “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord…Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy…and to present her to Himself as a radiant church…In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies…’For this reason a man must leave his mother and father and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and His church.” Ephesians 5:22-32 (NIV).

God’s word on marriage does not change because society has decided otherwise. Unity inside a monogamous union is the only way in which marriage can flourish because tha’t the way God planned it and that’s what He said.

THE GOSPEL OF LUKE- IT’S ALL ABOUT PERSPECTIVE

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IT’S ALL ABOUT PERSPECTIVE

“‘What society sees and calls monumental, God sees through and calls monstrous.

God’s Law and the Prophets climaxed in John; now it’s all kingdom of God – the glad news and compelling invitation to every man and woman.'” Luke 16:16.

What an important truth Jesus highlighted in this one statement, something that many of us believers do not seem to have grasped! Firstly, the Old Testament, with its dealings with Israel, is the indispensable foundation for understanding the entire message of the Bible. Many Christians believe that they can do away with it and read only the New Testament, but that’s foolish. It’s like reading a mystery story from the middle of the book.

Secondly, the Old Testament, important as it is, is not the whole story. God had a certain way of dealing with His people because they were His chosen vehicle through whom Messiah would come. His Law was the expression of His perfect nature. It was never intended to refashion His people into His image. It was intended to show them what He required and how impossible it was to live up to His standard by purely human effort.

Thirdly, God was developing a culture which would lay the foundation for understanding His entire recovery plan. All the rituals surrounding the sacrificial system, for example, were to prepare them to understand the once-for-all atoning sacrifice of His Son. The laws regarding clean and unclean would teach them the seriousness of sin, its contagious nature and the need for cleansing through a blood sacrifice.

The cultural practices surrounding courtship and marriage taught them how God was wooing them as His bride and preparing them for an eternal ‘marriage’ relationship of intimacy and oneness with them/ These and many more laws and practices laid the foundation for receiving and understanding the person and work of Jesus when He came.

Imagine for a moment if God had sent Jesus, unprepared for and unannounced, into a country like India with its myriad gods, or into a Muslim country with its rigid system of Sharia law. How would the people have received Him?

What Jesus was emphasizing was that His coming changed everything. All of the types and shadows of the Old Testament system were fulfilled in Him. He is the substance of which these things were the picture. John the Baptist was the cut-off point, the last and greatest of the Old Testament prophets, because he was not gazing at Messiah from a distance but actually introducing Him to the world. Short as his ministry was, it brought into sharp focus everything the preceding prophets had foretold.

This is where many of God’s people have gone wrong. There is a blurring of the difference between the Old and New Covenants and hence, unbiblical ideas and practices are perpetuated through misunderstanding. Let me highlight just two.

Firstly, in our understanding of prayer. A movement has grown up around the world which functions mainly on Old Testament ideas. People are taught to do ‘prayer walks’ and ‘Jericho marches’, to ‘take authority’ over principalities and powers, to identify and pull down ‘altars’ and to ‘bind’ the devil and his demons wherever the ‘spirit of’ this or that is identified. The favourite one, of course, is the ‘Jezebel’ spirit.

A thorough search of the Book of Acts does not reveal any of these practices. Instead, there is a confidence in the power of the cross through which Jesus defeated the devil, publicly exposed and disgraced him, stripped him of his weapons and set people free from his deception. The simple proclamation of Jesus as the Christ and as Lord, and the command  to repent and turn to Him as the truth, set people free to begin a new life under a new Master in the kingdom of God.

Paul’s ministry in Ephesus is a case in point. Ephesus was the centre of the powerful idolatrous cult of Diana-worship. Paul’s preaching lost the silversmiths business, caused a riot and eventually transformed the city. The new believers brought their witchcraft paraphernalia and made a bonfire of it in the middle of the city. No prayer walking, no pulling down of altars, no taking authority over demons – just the simple proclamation of the Word transformed lives and destroyed the power of Diana.

Secondly, the way we understand ‘deliverance’ is faulty. Satan works through deception. His stance is that he has the power to control people, which is a lie. Neither God nor Satan have the power to control the will of man. We give power through whatever we believe. If we believe Satan’s lies, we open ourselves to his influence.

Satan’s source of power was exposed at the cross. Jesus showed the world that He did not have to respond to the worst that human beings could do to an innocent man by reacting in a sinful way. “When they hurled their insults at Him, He did not retaliate; when He suffered, He made no threats. Instead, He entrusted Himself to Him who judges justly. He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness…” 1 Peter 2:23, 24 (NIV).  

The way of ‘deliverance’ is the way of truth – expose Satan’s lies and replace them with truth. The need for deliverance implies that we are victims, needing to be rescued rather than people who need to take responsibility for what we think and believe. Confronting the devil is far less effective than helping the victim to accept responsibility for what he thinks, and to receive and believe the truth which renders the devil’s lies powerless and sends his demons packing. “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy, the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith…” 1 Peter 5:8,9a (NIV).

So what was Jesus saying? The Old Testament era closed with the ministry of John. Jesus ushered in the new era of the kingdom of God. Everything changed when Messiah came. The power of the kingdom of God lies in the truth, embodied by Jesus and empowered by His Spirit and His Word. Now repent – change your mind and believe the good news that Jesus is in charge, no longer the devil!