Luke 7:18 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Luke 7:18

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Here is a very remarkable question, as the Lord Jesus Christ is, in effect, asked for his credentials. What kind of Saviour does Scripture lead us to expect? John the Baptist was clearly, at this point, unsure. There was a general expectation among the Jews that the Messiah would come, because for some 2,000 years there had been promises given, spoken through the prophets. There were promises made that he would be born a man, but he would be God entering into human flesh. He would come to suffer and die for sinners by laying down his life as a sacrifice, and he would stand in our place and take our punishment. There were prophecies which indicated the kind of character he would have: he would be holy, he would be perfect, but he would come in gentleness, and with great compassion. He would come with the mission to save people, so that he would lay down his life and he would rise again from the dead after his execution. There is very much said about Jesus Christ, and so it's not surprising that when we come to the New Testament, we find a text like this. The whole nation expected the coming of the Messiah. Now John the Baptist had been inspired to point to Jesus Christ, to recognise him and say to the people around him, ‘Behold, you are looking at the Messiah, the Lamb of God, who has come to take away the sin of the world. You are looking at the one who is going to be the sacrifice for all of us, and take our punishment.’ But John had later been arrested and thrown into prison. He had preached vigorously that people needed to repent, but now he was in prison, and there in prison he began to be despondent, and also very puzzled, because his disciples would come, and they would report animatedly, excitedly, what they had seen. The Messiah was doing this and that; he was healing people; he was telling them that there was an opportunity for them to repent. And John was confused, because there was something that John had not got right. When he was preaching about Jesus Christ, he quoted the Old Testament prophecy, and he quoted it quite correctly, and he told them that this is the one who is coming to judge, and that was absolutely right. But what John didn't know is that he hadn't come to judge immediately. He will ultimately be the judge of all the earth, but when he came the first time, he came to preach very tenderly, to woo and to win the hearts of the people, to call people to repent and to seek and find mercy, and then to suffer and die on Calvary's cross to bear away their sin. He had come to inaugurate a long period, 2,000 years already, during which that message of grace would be preached in all the world. He came in gentleness and in compassion and in mercy, and John the Baptist was confused. He expected the Christ would come to judge those who had never repented, that he would get rid of all the wayward, and set up a wonderful Jewish state. He rightly identified Jesus as the Messiah, but he wrongly interpreted the Old Testament in expecting that he would come and he would judge immediately. So when he hears all these good things about Jesus Christ, he sends to him and he says, ‘Are you the one who would come, or are you just another prophet like me? Is it someone else we are looking for? He seems to say, ‘If I have got it wrong, please correct me.’ When people begin to think about the things of the soul, the things about Jesus Christ, and when they begin to seek, then inevitably they get some doubts, and you have probably had many doubts if you are in that position. The doubts appear on the surface to be doubts held by none other than John the Baptist, but possibly it was his disciples were chiefly in doubt. They had some contact with John, because in those days you had to have some visitors so that you could be fed, since the state in those days wouldn't feed a prisoner, and so John the Baptist's disciples were able to speak to him. There had been tremendous events in the region, and Jesus Christ had been carrying out remarkable healings, but the majority did not believe that this astonishing healer who taught so magnificently was the Messiah. In their eyes he was just a great prophet (Luke 7:16), and this appears to have shaken the disciples of John. Now was John rattled by all the people thinking that the Messiah is in fact only a prophet, or maybe it was his disciples; it is hard to tell. But if it was the disciples, John did a very wise thing: he sent them to Christ. Christ would answer this query perfectly, and so they came to him and they asked him, Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?

Application

Doubts are often based on popular opinion, or what we think is the view of the majority. They are second-hand and they are little understood by the people who express them. Most of the time they are not our own deeply held doubts. Yes, some may have doubts which are their own convictions, but it is rare. They are usually objections to the faith which have never really been deeply searched out and tested by us. When you dig deeply you soon discover that the doubter doesn't really understand his doubts, and when you challenge the doubts he cannot consistently argue it. He runs from one doubt to another, and keeps changing his position. We do not like to be out of step with the majority, and we trust them to come up with the right answer. We hear it today constantly: ‘I do not believe in the Christian faith or in Christ because the majority don't believe.’ You look around our society look around the country, look on the television, and you get the impression that hardly anybody believes this; hardly anybody takes this seriously, so it cannot be true. It seems almost an irrelevance to believe in Christ. That is very undermining to many. If you should start seeking the Lord and be drawn to him, this doubt may attack you. ‘I will be seen as a fool if I do down that road.’ But this shouldn't cause you to doubt, and it shouldn't have caused John the Baptist or his disciples to doubt, because actually it is just what we should expect. We belong to the world, a world that is in rebellion against God, and we identify with it, and trust its opinions. They are not so much doubts as barricades against the, faith which we grab on to, and we deploy them to defend ourselves against any spiritual or religious challenge. You also find that the more a person is a convinced atheist, the less he is willing to listen. Atheism seems to close the mind. We tend to think the opposite. We think, if I'm an atheist and I reject all religion, it is because I have an open and an independent mind. It's an armour-plated defensive position.

Our minds have been darkened as a result of our sin, and we have no taste for the things of God. We have spent so long denying the existence of God and justifying our unbelief that we have a deep-seated bias against his truth. None of us at first will ever want to believe in Christ. Scripture teaches us this is a fallen world. We are alienated from God; we are sinners against him; we have been born into a fallen alienated race, and we have the nature of sinners. We do not want holiness and salvation, and Christ and God; we want our own way we want exclusively earthly things. We cannot come to God without leaving the world, and that is hard because all our interests are in the world. We do not want to be governed from heaven or follow his laws. We do not want to fall on our knees and worship God. We are too proud by nature, so this is just what we should expect: that most people will not want to believe. We have an instinct for God, but we are all by nature on the run from God. The true religion will prove offensive to us, but false religion won't. False religion is something which has been created by the human mind to please the human mind. It offers the comfort of a belief in more than just the material, but does not require us to see ourselves as spiritually lost, as those who have broken God’s law and are under his condemnation. We need to humble ourselves before God and repent of our sin and we need a Saviour namely Christ Jesus. That we find offensive by nature until God works in our hearts and shows us our error, and draws us to himself.

Doubts may be based on a mistaken view of salvation, a mistaken expectation about what God's plan is, and what he is doing in the world, and what Christ came to do. That is at the bottom of many doubts. We look about us when we are first thinking of inquiring into the Christian faith, and we think, ‘Yes, but most people these days don't believe this. Most people are completely indifferent, and if they think about it at all, they are very cynical, and they think I would be a fool in going to church and inquiring about these things and trying to find out about Christ.’ So something tells us that it cannot be true, because most people don't seem to think it is. Then sometimes we say to ourselves, ‘Christ came 2,000 years ago, and before that, there were all the prophecies about him for centuries, and yet after all these years the Christian church has been here over 2,000 years, and things are not any better. The world is still in an awful state, and there is still cruelty, and extortion, and inequality. Things are not under control. Therefore if Christ came to improve things, it has not been not successful. And so how can it be true? Then again there is a doubt which often comes to us which says, ‘There is so much suffering in the world, and people are killed, and there are terrible wars. Even if there is a God and he's a God of love, how can this be? How would he allow it?’ Then there are people today, just as there were in Christ's day, who find fault with God and with the faith in different ways. A lot of people said about Christ in his day, ‘He cannot be the Messiah, because he wasn't born in Bethlehem. The Old Testament says Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, and he was born in Nazareth,’ so they didn't believe in him. Actually, he wasn't born in Nazareth. He was born in Bethlehem. But they didn't know that. Doubts often are based on false information, and we get false information today. We are given the impression that science disproves religion. Actually, it doesn't do any such thing, but the very opposite, and there are many high-ranking scientists who are deep believers in God, and all that they see in their world of science points to him. In fact, there is more evidence for God now in science than there was a hundred years ago, because the longer time goes on, and the more is discovered about biological processes, and more is known about the intricacy and the detail, so that many top scientists are saying, look, this is evidence of design.

Questions

Sometimes people ask, ‘If God was sending his Son to be a Saviour, why did he come so late in recorded history of human beings? Why did he come 2,000 years after that first burst of announcements, and 4,000 years after the very first prophecy of his coming? One of the reasons is so that he should be clearly announced before he came, so that there would be no excuse for us failing to recognize him. It would be clear that he really was the Messiah of God, because he is accurately and repeatedly introduced. When you look at the Old Testament, it isn't just a jumble of vague prophecies, some of which could possibly, coincidentally, apply to Jesus Christ. It is full of so many specific promises and predictions and statements which could apply to no one else. There is not one of them that does not exactly and precisely fit him and suit him, in fact, the organizing principle of the Old Testament is Jesus Christ himself. There is no one else in history who has been the subject of clear and specific prophecy given far in advance of his coming, and who has credentials like this.

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Introduction

Luke 7:18 Commentary and Bible Study