As we come to this passage in Luke today in our ongoing
study of this book, we must continue to be reminded of the fact that Luke not
just writing an autobiography, but He is carefully, deliberately presenting the
gospel of Jesus Christ. And as we
said a couple of weeks ago, the gospel is no less than the good news that
Christ came to reconcile man with God through the forgiveness of their sins.
The gospel is first and foremost, above all else, God’s plan for mankind to be
reconciled to Him, to be made righteous through Jesus atonement on the cross as
payment for our sins.
2 Cor. 5:21 so
succinctly states the gospel: “God
made Jesus, who knew no sin, to become sin for us, that we might be made the
righteousness of God in Him.”
That’s the gospel in a nutshell.
So Luke is carefully presenting the gospel through this
book. He has in the first few
chapters established that Jesus is no less than God in the flesh, conceived by
the Holy Spirit in a young virgin, fully God and fully man. And then Luke presented a series of convincing proofs of not only that
Christ was divine, but since He was divinity He also had the authority to
forgive sins. We saw a few weeks
ago that Jesus said to the paralytic who was lowered through the ceiling in
front of Him while He was teaching, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” And to prove that He had that power
Jesus followed that up by saying, “So that you may know that the Son of Man has
the authority to forgive sins, I say to you, arise, take up your bed and
walk.” The point being that the
physical healing was only an illustration of the more important spiritual
healing that Christ had come to earth to accomplish.
Luke continued the presentation of the gospel by fleshing
out the nature of sin in the last couple of chapters; He presents Jesus healing a leper, who was a living
illustration of the depravity of sin and the way it corrupts completely and
produces uncleanness which separates us from God. He records Jesus healing the paralytic who was a picture of
man’s helplessness to help himself.
And he shows Jesus delivering a man possessed by a demon as an
illustration of God’s ability to free man from the oppressiveness and captivity
of sin. So all along Luke is
building this house of doctrine concerning salvation.
Last week, we saw Luke present yet another foundational
principle of the gospel, through the record of the conversion of Levi, who was also known as Matthew, who became
one of the 12 disciples. And the
point Luke presented through that illustration was that having become convicted
by your sin, and having realized that you are helpless to change it, and that
you are captive to sin’s power over you, that you must repent of it, leaving it
all behind, and follow after Christ with all your heart. Jesus said to Levi,
“follow Me.” So Levi was an illustration of discipleship. A proper understanding of the gospel is
that one must be willing to leave everything and follow Christ’s teaching.
Now today, we find ourselves looking at another event which
I believe Luke includes in his gospel to show another essential component of
the gospel, and that is the
uniqueness of the gospel, and it’s incompatibility with any other religion or
tradition. In other words, you leave everything and follow Christ. The gospel can’t be added to anything
else. It requires complete
exclusivity.
So as we look at our text we find it’s been some time since
Levi’s decision to follow Christ, and Levi has arranged to have all his old
friends and acquaintances come over to a banquet at his house to meet
Jesus. And as Jesus is in there
preaching the gospel to Levi’s old friends, the Pharisees come around and start
grumbling to Jesus’ disciples and questioning them, with the purpose of
discrediting Jesus. These
Pharisees appear righteous on the surface, but they have rejected the gospel
message of Jesus that says that they are sinners in need of forgiveness, and
they are actually angry over being called sinners. So they are trying to discredit Jesus’ message and Jesus
himself.
Look at verse 30, “The Pharisees and their scribes began
grumbling at His disciples, saying, "Why do you eat and drink with the tax
collectors and sinners?" And Jesus answered and said to them, "It is
not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. "I
have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance."
This is in effect Luke’s thesis statement. Up to now it has been all
introduction. But now Luke
presents in Jesus own words the premise of the gospel. That Jesus Christ came to save
sinners. But those that don’t first
of all accept that they are a sinner, helpless and hopelessly unable to
accomplish their own salvation, are unable to be healed by the Great Physician
of their spiritual, deadly disease of sin. But for those that do confess and are willing to repent of
their sins, Jesus is saying “I am able to save them, and furthermore, I have
come to earth to save sinners.”
Now these Pharisees and scribes were the leaders of a
religious order that we call Judaism.
And perhaps that needs a little explanation so that we can fully
understand the situation. . Judaism was a nationalistic/religious system
of laws and traditions, with the
belief that God was really only the God of the Jews. They believed in God, and believed in the scriptures, but
they added to the scriptures the Talmud and the Mishna, which were immense
volumes containing hundreds of extrapolations from the law, and interpretations
of those laws which were called rabbinic traditions. They held to a
nationalistic religion in which they believed that the Messiah would come to
resurrect Israel’s monarchy, and establish their way of life over the world.
These people prided themselves on their goodness and their
belief that they were law abiding, God fearing citizens of the greatest nation
on the face of the earth, and that God had granted special blessings to their
nation. Judaism stressed things like going to church on the Sabbath, publicly giving
alms to the synagogue, making big prayers on the street corners so everyone can
see them and fasting. Fasting was
required twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays according to the traditions of Judaism. Yet in the scriptures, God had only
required one fast, and that was on the Day of Atonement which was designed to
bring people’s attention to their sin, and the need to repent of their sin. But the fast that the Judastic system
called for was a fast of self righteousness. They put ashes on their foreheads and walked around town in
order to make everyone aware of how religious they were.
So look at verse 33; the Pharisees being convicted want to
debate now their spirituality with Jesus.
“And they said to Him, "The disciples of John often fast and offer
prayers, the disciples of the Pharisees also do the same, but Yours eat and
drink." So it must have been either a Monday or a Thursday, and they were
fasting according to their tradition, but they see the disciples of Jesus
having this feast with tax
gatherers and sinners and they get indignant. See, they want to contrast their spirituality, their
adherence to the laws and traditions of their religion and contrast their self
righteousness to that of Jesus and his disciples. They are convinced of their
own righteousness from doing all those external things. But what they fail to realize is that
righteousness can only come as a gift from God to the repentant sinner. It
cannot be earned or worked for.
And so Jesus answers the obvious part of their question with
an illustration, and then we are going to see Him go to the root of their
problem in the last few verses of the chapter. Because Jesus knows that they don’t really want an answer to
their question. What they are
trying to do is validate themselves.
So first He answers the superficiality of their question and then He
digs deeper and exposes their corruption underneath.
First His answer to the question why don’t your disciples
fast like we do? Vs.34, “And Jesus
said to them, "You cannot make the attendants of the bridegroom fast while
the bridegroom is with them, can you? "But the days will come; and when
the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those
days."
Jesus has already addressed these superficial religious acts
of Judaism in Matthew 6, the Sermon on the Mount. He said, "When you give
alms, don't sound a trumpet before you." They drew attention to themselves
as they gave alms. He said the hypocrites do so in the synagogues and in the
streets that they may be honored by men. And He says they have their reward.
What is it? The applause of men, that's it.
And then in verse 5, "When you pray, don't be like the
hypocrites, they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street
corners in order to be seen by men." They went out there on the corner
going through all of their ritual prayers, making sure everyone sees them, appearing
spiritual. Jesus says they have
their reward.
And then down to verse 16, there was the third element of
their ostentatious religious practice. "When you fast, don't put on a
gloomy face as the hypocrites do, for they neglect their appearance in order to
be seen fasting by men." Monday, this is what they did, they got up, they
put on their worse looking clothes, and they didn't comb their hair. And they threw
a few ashes on their heads so they'd look pale and gaunt. And they put a gloomy
face and they roamed around, "I'm fasting." And Jesus said they have
their reward too, it's from men. In verse 17, "If you're going to fast,
anoint your head." That means
wash your face, comb your hair so that you may not be seen fasting by men. In
other words, if it's real then it's between you and God. And the God who sees the secrets of the
heart will reward you.
Now back in Luke Jesus was using a very familiar example for
them of a wedding feast which often lasted for 7 days. It was a time of celebration, of joy,
as the bride and the groom come together and are joined in matrimony. Everyone there was familiar with Jewish
weddings. They knew that wedding
ceremonies were a time to celebrate, not to fast. And
they also knew, as I alluded to earlier, that fasting was associated with grief, either grief over your sin, such
as on the day of atonement, or grief over a death or impending death. But fasting was associated with
grief.
Jesus is saying, there is no reason that my disciples, my followers should be grieving now. Their sins have been forgiven. They have repented of their sins and they have been forgiven. Instead there is rejoicing, because I am the bridegroom that was promised in Isaiah 62:5 which talks about the coming Messiah redeeming His people and which says, “as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, So your God will rejoice over you.” Jesus is actually putting Himself in the place of the bridegroom as a picture of God rejoicing over his bride.
So that is Jesus answer to their question; He is the
bridegroom, and those sinners that are being saved are the bride of
Christ. And that must have been
like a knife in the heart of those self righteous Judaisers who would not admit
that they needed saving. The
bridegroom was taking another bride, not them. But now Jesus goes deeper, twisting that knife a little bit
to expose the corruption that was at the source of their self righteous
indignation. And Jesus gives three
illustrations of the uniqueness of the gospel, and it’s incompatibility with mixing of any other system.
Number one, Jesus says in vs. 36, “And He was also telling
them a parable: "No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and puts
it on an old garment; otherwise he will both tear the new, and the piece from
the new will not match the old.”
When I was a boy growing up in Eastern North Carolina, my brother and I
each got two pairs of jeans a year at the beginning of the school year. But we didn’t call them jeans in those
days, we called them dungarees.
And Mom always got them about 4 inches too long which we rolled up, ‘cause
we were growing so fast she wanted to make sure that we didn’t grow out of them
before the next year. The thing
is, after about 3 months the knees were worn out. Today it might be considered fashionable to have holes in
our knees, but my Mom would have died if her boys were seen wearing dungarees
with the knees worn out. So she
patched them up. She sowed old
material in the knees to make a patch.
And she was a good seamstress, sewed tiny little stitches and tried not
to let it show, but it was always apparent that our dungarees had patches. And it wasn’t cool. I was embarrassed to wear those
pants. Times have changed today. I was a hipster and didn’t even know
it.
So the illustration is clear. But what exactly is Jesus illustrating? Well, Jesus is referring to the
religious system of Judaism, and saying that the gospel is not able to be
patched into an old system of works.
The new is going to tear away from the old and at the same time trying
to make a patch from the new ruins the new cloth. They are incompatible.
The second parable is similar but it’s less familiar to us today, it’s
saying the same thing but using a different metaphor. Jesus says in vs. 37; "And no one puts new wine into
old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and it will be
spilled out, and the skins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins.”
The difficulty that I think many of us have understanding
this verse and the next is that we are unfamiliar with the ancient winemaking
customs of Israel. I used to work
in luxury hotel restaurants, and so I worked with wine makers and served wine,
and yet it poses some difficulty for me as well because we don’t have the same
understanding of wine today that they had then. And so I’ve been praying this week for wisdom to understand
this passage and what Jesus was saying.
And this is what I believe God revealed to me from the scripture.
It’s clear that Jesus is referring to two types of wine in
this parable. He speaks of old
wine and new wine. And if you do a
word search in the scriptures of the phrase new wine, you will find that there
is a Hebrew word tē·rōshe' which means new wine and there is a different word
for wine which is yah'·yin.
Now new wine is used in the OT 37 times, and in almost all examples it
is associated with blessings from God and was used to describe the wine
offering or tithe that was given back to God as the first fruits from their
vineyards as part of a sacrificial offering.
However the common name for wine is used 237 times, and the
majority of times it has the association of drunkenness. In fact the first time it is used in
the Bible it speaks in Genesis 9 of Noah drinking it and becoming drunk. It was associated with strong drink,
with mixed drinks. And there are
many, many admonitions against drunkenness in the scriptures that also speak of
drinking wine.
But one of the problems today is that we have lost much of
the distinctions that ancient Jews made concerning wine, and as such
theologians have debated for centuries the rightness or wrongness of drinking
alcoholic beverages such as wine.
But I don’t want to debate that argument here today. I would simply point out to you that
Jesus is making a distinction between new wine and old wine. And I would like to suggest based on a
lot of research that I and others have done, that He is referring to fermented
wine as old wine, and grape juice as new wine. And the fact that grape juice is referred to in historic
Jewish literature as wine is undisputed.
It was the fruit of the vine even as fermented wine was and often it is
indistinguishable which it is referring to.
But there is another Biblical illustration that lends
credence to my theory that Jesus is referring to unfermented wine. And that is the example of unleavened
bread at the Passover meal. In the
Passover meal prescribed by God in Exodus, the bread was to be made without
leaven. Leaven was always a
picture or a type of sin. The
yeast begins a process of fermentation, which causes the bread to rise. And
what happens is that there is corruption which causes the bread to puff
up. So as early as in Exodus,
there was a call from God to remove the leaven from their midst. The apostle Paul also would later say
that a little leaven leavens the whole lump, another picture of how a little
sin becomes entirely corrupting, and causes pride in our hearts. So this fermentation process is always
a picture of sin. And I believe
that when God called the Jews to bring him the new wine as a sacrifice and
offering unto God, as a tithe of their first fruits, it only makes sense that
He is asking for an unfermented wine, uncorrupted, which is always described as
new wine.
Now if that is the case, then this illustration makes a lot
more sense. Some have said that
since wine in old wineskins will ferment, then as the gases expand it causes
the wineskin to burst. And that is
true, but wine in a new wineskin will burst as well if left unvented. However
it is also true that old, cracked wineskins that have dried out will not hold
new wine because as you fill it up, it does not have the elasticity which
allows it to expand, and instead breaks and spoils the wine. New wine demands new wineskins that
haven’t grown old and dried and
cracked.
But here is the point that Jesus is making. The old wineskins are nothing less than
the old system of Judaism. And the
new wine is the new work that Jesus is doing through the gospel. And Jesus is saying that the gospel
will not mix with their old system of Judaism. If you mix new wine and old wine, then you are mixing
fermented wine with unfermented wine, and as a result the new wine will become
fermented. It will become
corrupted.
Listen, I see a parallel today between Judaism and modern
Christianity. I might even go so
far as to say between Judaism and Evangelical Christianity. There is a parallel. Like Judaism we claim we worship the
one true God. Like Judaism, we
think that God is really sort of exclusively the god of America. That He has shed His grace on us. That as Americans we are privy to a
degree of blessings from God that the rest of the world doesn’t fully share
in.
According to a Pew poll that came out on July 3, 2013, 78%
of Americans consider themselves Christian. But what exactly does that mean? How can we square what is
happening today in our country with the gospel? I suggest that it means that we have mixed a little bit of
God and instead of the Talmud mixed it with a little bit of the Constitution,
and throw in a little bit of the Bible with a little bit of the Bill of Rights
instead of the Mishna, and we have mixed all that up in a blender with a little
bit of the Power of Positive Thinking, and a little bit of the prosperity
doctrine, and a little bit of church membership and a little bit of Catholic
ritual and a little bit of charitable works and a little bit of Sunday morning
worship and we call it Judeo/Christian values. And because of these external things, we think that we are ok with God. We think that God is going to bless us
because we call ourselves American Christians and we have a nationalistic
fervor that is not much different than that of the Judaisers. But the truth is we aren’t any better
off than the Pharisees. The Judaisers
were not saved and neither I’m afraid are most so called Christians because
they are counting on something other than grace and forgiveness.
Listen, Jesus had mercy on sinners, He came to save sinners,
but He railed against the self righteous Pharisees and leaders of Judaism
because they thought that they were good people. They thought that a good God would accept good people if
they tried to do good things. But
if that is the case, then what in the world was the God of the Universe doing
hanging up there on that cross?
Jesus was proclaiming a salvation that depended totally upon God
providing a sacrifice for sin. The
Pharisees were proclaiming a salvation that depended upon their self
righteousness. And I’m afraid that
the problem with America today is that we have tried to mix a religion of works
and self righteousness with the gospel and it isn’t working. You can’t add the gospel to a religion
of cold dead orthodoxy. God wants
new wine in new wineskins. God
demands new birth resulting in a new creation, all things have become new and
old things have passed away.
America today is a wineskin that is ready to explode. We have mixed and blended and added and
subtracted until the gospel has become corrupt and stupefying. We have called good evil and evil
good. We think that our sin isn’t
really sin anymore because some judge said it’s ok now. And the corruption and the fermentation
has reached a breaking point. Yet
almost 80% of Americans say we’re ok.
We call ourselves Christians.
We believe in God. We think
we’re God’s chosen people.
We can expect all these blessings to continue because we are such good
people.
Listen, that is exactly what Jesus is talking about in verse
39, He says “no one, after drinking old wine wishes for new; for he says, 'The
old is good enough.'" The
problem is that we don’t want to turn away from our sins. The problem is that we aren’t willing
to forsake our old way of life. We
like our lives just the way we are.
And we are like the person in the parable. We have drunk so much of the fermented wine of the world, we
have mixed so much of the old with the new, that we don’t want new life. We are drunk on the excesses of
American materialism and blinded by American Idealism. We have become lukewarm
like the church of Laodecia in Rev. 3, to which Jesus says, “Because you say, "I am rich, and
have become wealthy, and have need of nothing," and you do not know that
you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, I advise you to
buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white
garments so that you may clothe yourself, and that the shame of your nakedness
will not be revealed; and eye salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see.”
We are drunk to the point of being in a stupor and don’t
realize that God’s judgment will come upon us as well. Paul warns in 2 Cor. 6:16 “What
agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living
God; just as God said, "I WILL DWELL IN THEM AND WALK AMONG THEM; AND I
WILL BE THEIR GOD, AND THEY SHALL BE MY PEOPLE. Therefore, COME OUT FROM THEIR
MIDST AND BE SEPARATE," says the Lord. "AND DO NOT TOUCH WHAT IS
UNCLEAN; And I will welcome you. And I will be a father to you, And you shall
be sons and daughters to Me," Says the Lord Almighty.”
I’m going to close with another familiar scripture in 2 Chron.
7:14 in which God says, “If my people, which are called by my
name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their
wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will
heal their land.” You call
yourself Christian? Good. God says you better humble yourselves,
pray, seek Him and turn from your wicked ways. Listen, confession has two parts, acknowledging your sin,
and then being willing to turn from your sin and follow Christ. God says when you do that, He will hear
that prayer of repentance, that cry for mercy, and forgive your sins, and heal
you of this deadly disease of sin, and heal this land. The only sin God cannot forgive, is the
sin that isn’t confessed as sin.
Humble yourself today and call upon God and let’s begin revival right
here. The solution for American
Christians is a spiritual revolution, not a political one. And it must begin first in your heart
as you humble yourself before God and confess your sins.
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