Luke 10:25 Commentary and Bible Study

(Synoptics: Luke 10:25-37)This is one of those great parables where there are two meanings. Not two contradictory meanings – far from it – but there is an initial, obvious teaching, and right behind it, there is a spiritual teaching, a deeper teaching. We often hear it used as a rather tame exhortation to do good works, an exhortation to be the kind of person who will see someone in trouble and will always go along to help. There is nothing wrong with that, except that it doesn't anything like do justice to the parable. If you are trying to find eternal life and God's blessing, that is not the way to go about it. To qualify for eternal life on the basis of your good works, you would have to do good and keep God’s law perfectly throughout your life, and that is impossible because we are members of a fallen human race. This man is called a lawyer, but he was a sort of religious lawyer, an expert in expounding the law. He has this absolute conviction, that you can please God by obeying the law, the moral law of God, the Ten Commandments, and all the other laws and ordinances. You can get to heaven, and have standing in the sight of God, simply by successfully carrying out the requirements of the law. From what follows, and from the response of the Lord Jesus, we judge that this was not a genuine question, coming from someone who genuinely wanted to gain eternal life, and recognised that he did not have it. Rather, it was a question designed to trap Christ. and highlight what, in the eyes of the Pharisees, was his unorthodox teaching. Luke says that he tempted Christ. He wants to put Christ to the test. Is Christ going to be orthodox? Is he going to confirm the Pharisees’ viewpoint? He asks, ‘Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ The question is designed to conceal what he is really doing. If Christ gave a highly unorthodox reply, then he would lay himself open to severe criticism, and so he asks this question. He thinks that the Lord Jesus Christ has little good to say for the law, that is, the Ten Commandments plus the ceremonial law of the Jewish Church of times gone by. Actually, he was wrong. He misunderstood the message of Jesus Christ. He saw an outcast like Matthew among the disciples of the Lord: a tax collector, an outcast from the temple, somebody who had been a quisling on behalf of the Roman authorities. He saw Christ moving about and speaking with people who were known sinners, for whom the scribes and the Pharisees had no time at all, and so he was sure that this teacher would never say, you must keep the law. But he had got it wrong, and the Lord Jesus Christ gives him a very orthodox answer.