Shalom,
We ought to give thanks to the Lord for giving us an opportunity to attend the church service and enjoy His visitation in this world which is full of uncertainties. He comes extending His help to strengthen and restore our lives. Thus, we are to ask the Holy Spirit to help us understand His word.
Last Sunday we heard that when God comes to us, He gives us an opportunity to be sanctified and to serve Him; and we are encouraged to positively respond to His visitation.
According to Luke 20:1-26, what should we do to respond to God’s visitation?
- We understand the way God visits His people.
In His love God comes to His people through His word preached by His messengers (the prophets), His only Son—Jesus Christ (the living Word), the Bible (written Word) and the Holy Spirit.
Verse 1 writes about Jesus, “He taught the people in the temple and preached the gospel.” Hebrews 1:1-2 further say, “God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son.” This shows how active and creative He is when visiting His people.
In the parable of the wicked vinedressers, the owner firstly sent out his three servants to collect the fruit of the vineyard, but the vinedressers beat them up. Eventually he sent his own son with an expectation that they would show respect to him. But what happened? They killed him to get his inheritance. The vineyard owner’s son depicts Jesus who was sent by His Father, but then rejected by the world.
Together with His disciples, Jesus went through every city and village preaching the gospel of the Kingdom of God (Luke 8:1). Today we don’t see Jesus physically because He died, rose again and ascended to heaven. But before His ascension, He sent His disciples to go and preach the word of God that He had taught them (John 17:14,18,20). They obediently carried out the great commission as they were equipped with the power of the Holy Spirit to become His witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth—to us (Acts 1:8).
The Lord comes to us through His word that was impeccably written in the Bible. As we can easily have access to the Bible, we should eagerly read and meditate on it. Furthermore, He lavishly gives us the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth (John 16:13) and illuminate us to understand His word.
Introspection: Do we realize that God is visiting us through His word and He is so close to us? The word of God is in our mouth and our heart (Romans 10:8), and we can also read it in the Bible.
- We understand the purpose of God’s visiting His people: to restore, to set them free, to make them repent in order to be saved, to give them an opportunity to worship Him in holiness, and to give peace.
While Jesus was living in the world, He performed miracles of healing, casting out evil spirits, multiplying bread and fish, and many more. However, the foremost purpose of His coming to the world is to preach the gospel of His Kingdom. The Israelites, unfortunately, regarded His coming merely from political point of view: to set them free from the enemy’s invasion. They couldn’t see the fact that Jesus came to the world not only to save them from their enemy, but also to make them understand that they could be saved through the forgiveness of their sin as prophesied by Zacharias in his song (Luke 1:68-79).
To straighten out the people’s erroneous assumption that Jesus came to meet their physical needs only, He told them that the Son of Man came “to give His life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28) and “to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). There’s nothing wrong with asking Him to come to heal us or to give solution to problem in our work or study. Romans 8:32 writes, “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all [physical] things?” Even when He “didn’t help” us, it’s because He has a beautiful plan beyond our understanding. The problem is that at times we misunderstand the purpose of His visitation.
In the parable of the vinedressers, the wicked vinedressers depict the Jews—the Scribes and the chief priests (Luke 20:19), whereas the vineyard the Israelites (Isaiah 5:7). Jesus actually had wanted to gather the Israelites together as a hen protects her chicks under her wings but they rejected Him (Luke 13:34), resulted in the enemy destroying Jerusalem and its people and not leaving one stone on another; whereas He actually wanted to bring them peace (Luke 19:42-44). Consequently, the whole Jerusalem was destroyed including Gods’ temple, their pride.
Application: We need peace in facing a problem. A man who lives in sin doesn’t have peace because he always feels restless and fearful. That’s why the Lord offers peace because what we need is not only food, shelter and clothing, but more importantly, righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Romans 14:17).
When we have peace, we can face any problem calmly. But it often happens that we want God to visit us by giving what our heart desires, forgetting the reality that our desire doesn’t always align with His will.
- We respond to His visit well.
How to do so? We welcome His word with right motivation and thankfulness, admitting and believing in the authority of His word, receiving His word with humility, and doing His word joyfully under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
What was the reaction of the Scribes and the elders when Jesus was teaching in the temple (Luke 20:1-2, 19-20, 26)? As prominent people with authority, they must have known a lot about Scripture. The problem is they came to the temple not to listen to God’s word, but to question what authority Jesus used to do those things—sanctifying the temple, performing miracles, etc. They felt bested by the new comer in the ministry—Jesus. They thought Jesus had disrespected their authority. Didn’t Saul (then Paul) receive the authority from the high priest to persecute Jesus’ followers (Acts 9:1-2)?
Introspection: What is our motivation for coming to church? Do we desire life transformation? Or do we seek praise, profit and suchlike? We should make use the word of God which we read personally or together at church to transform our life, not to blame people close to us.
What was Jesus’ answer to the question of the chief priests, scribes and elders? He answered with a question, “The baptism of John – was it from heaven or from men?” (Luke 20:4). People knew that John was a prophet (v. 5), so did they. Why? Because they were the Israelite leaders. Yet they played it safe by saying that they didn’t know, meaning, they didn’t bother seeking the true answer. They didn’t believe in Jesus’ authority by wrongly assuming that because Jesus was younger than they were (He was around 32 years old), His authority as well as His position was automatically less important than theirs. Jesus often cornered them when arguing with them; therefore, they sought to kill Him (v. 47).
Because they refused the will of God by not confessing the truth that John’s baptism came from heaven (Luke 7:30,33-34), Jesus also refused to answer by what authority He did those things. Apparently, they rejected both John the Baptist and Jesus. They thought if they said John’s baptism came from heaven, it would be tantamount to admitting that Jesus’ authority also came from heaven, meaning that they had to revise the false message they had ever said about John the Baptist and Jesus; to agree what Jesus said about them—hypocrite and teaching only man’s culture; and to abolish the culture they had established. They did it because they valued their prestige more than the truth.
In Luke 20:9 Jesus told the people the parable of vinedressers. As mentioned earlier, the vinedressers depict the Scribes and the chief priests (v. 19) who acted the same as their stubborn ancestors who murdered the prophets and stoned the messengers (Luke 11:46-54; 13:34). Jesus implicitly told them that He came bringing His Father’s authority but they refused it for choosing to acknowledge the authority of the governor as what they did customarily since their ancestors’ time.
Shortly after, they sent spies to ask Jesus about paying taxes, intended to seize on His words (Luke 20:20-21). At the time the Jews who were under the Roman’s invasion were obliged to pay taxes while the Roman people were excluded. This unfair treatment prompted protests and riots leading to the temple’s destruction. The spies thought if Jesus gave wrong answer, they could rightfully catch Him for defying Caesar. Knowing their ulterior purpose, Jesus answered, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (v. 25). He clearly stressed two kinds of obligations: to God and to man—love toward God and man. Then the spies became silent, not because they agreed but they became more vengeful, seeking the right moment to kill Him, and eventually they got Him. They repeated what their ancestors did to the prophets resulted in God’s punishment on them (2 Kings 17:7-23; 2 Chronicles 36:11-17) because they had refused His visitation.
Application: What the Israelites did—refusing God’s visitation, having wicked motivation, refusing to be humble —should become a lesson to us by not following their steps. We need to come to Him believing in His word and authority regardless of who the preacher is. Let’s imitate the Berean for “they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day” (Acts 17:11).
Thus we need to understand the way God visits us through the word of God that we read and do. Also, let’s not focus on our physical needs for in so doing we will be able to discern the good purpose of His visitation: to save us by redeeming our sins and snatching us from the enemy’s hand. When we give positive response to His visitation, we find favor with Him. Amen.