Luke 18:20 Commentary and Bible Study

The question the young man had asked was, ‘What shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ It is a legal question, and Christ gives him a legal answer. It is impossible for members of this fallen human race to keep God’s law, because sin is constantly expressing itself, and though we are responsible for all that we do, sin is in control of our desires, our thoughts, our actions, and our will, and it is determined to dominate us. We are its slaves, as it were. Nevertheless, we do not understand how bad things are, and there remains an optimism in the hearts of men and women, which makes them think that they are always on the verge of breaking free from sin’s grip. They refuse to see themselves as slaves, and they tell themselves that, at any time, they can change the course of their lives. One purpose of the law therefore is to deal with this foolish optimism. The law is a mirror which gives us an accurate view of ourselves. It corrects the rosy picture we have of how we live, and it shows us our hearts in their true colours. Christ tells the man, that if he is trying to do something to get to heaven, this is the standard by which he must live. Interestingly he refers only to the second table of the law: the commandments that have to do with our relationship with one another, but even then he leaves out one of the commandments and names only five of the last six. The Lord knows what response he is going to get from this young man, and this is going to lead to his devastating and convicting follow-up words. By leaving out this last commandment, which was this man’s master sin, the Lord leaves room for him to claim his compliance with the commandments. Of course, he is evaluating himself in a superficial way. The young man has not begun to search his own heart properly, or to understand the comprehensive requirements of each of the commandments. He has kept these commandments in his estimation, because he has not outwardly done any of these things. But he does not understand the law, and the way the commandments are presented. Each one is the most tangible and extreme form of a family of sins, but the family includes all the other sins that come under that head. Christ enlarges on the family members in the Matthew 5. He teaches that the command not to murder include the sin of hatred, because God does not limit his scrutiny to our outward behaviour. All those private thoughts that we entertain are not private to the Lord, but are on full display before his eyes.