Luke 7:2 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters | Metropolitan Tabernacle

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Luke 7:2

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We see four essential components of saving faith in this passage, reflected in the experience of this Roman centurion. What Jesus Christ does here is he holds this centurion up as a perfect example of faith. He wasn't perfect of course, but he was a grand example of saving faith. Now if the centurion's faith was of such an order of such a kind that it caused Christ to marvel and it was held up as an example to the people then that is the example we want to study in order to understand what is faith, what it means to really have faith, to have saving faith. We speak of conversion to God, of coming to know him and walking with him, and we are repeatedly told in the Scripture that conversion is something that you come to by faith. That means to say you cannot earn it. You cannot do anything to secure it from God. There is no set of religious duties or ceremonies, no ritual, no technique that you can indulge in and excel in which will secure for you the blessing of God and acceptance with him. We are an alienated race and we have offended him and we are cut off from him, and the only way we can know him and find him is by faith, actually by grace, through faith. We have to trust him and then by grace – unearned, undeserved favour – the blessing of conversion is fully bestowed and given. But what exactly is this faith? What are its elements or parts? There are broadly four, and we see them here. Capernaum was in those days a very pretty town on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. A lot of small fishing companies had their headquarters there. It was on a major trade route so there were trade and money to be had there, and it was a garrison town for the Roman occupation. A centurion was what we would call him today a captain, except that a Roman centurion was not a commissioned officer in the Roman system. If you qualified and you had the money and you were a freeman as a Roman citizen and you wanted a military career, you started here. Some centurions commanded not just a hundred, but two or three hundred men, which was likely the case in a major place like Capernaum. He was a most unusual man. He had come to a position in his life where he really wasn't satisfied with Roman polytheism. This was dangerous for him, actually, because if he wanted to climb high in the Roman forces, he should be a very enthusiastic polytheist. Yet he was obviously a thinking man. We know he had money because he had sponsored the Capernaum synagogue; the elders of the town say this in his favour. So it seems this particular Roman centurion had become very dissatisfied with paganism. Working in Judea he had come to value the things that were taught in the ancient Scriptures, and to believe that there was one true and living God, though his understanding was probably limited. He had thought about the one true God, the Creator of all things: ‘Is it possible for me to know him? Is it possible to have his blessing or his power in my life? Is it possible to have meaning and purpose?’ How many of us have got even this far? It starts here – the centurion’s servant began to be sick; he was at the point of death. A slave in those days, particularly the personal slave or servant of an officer like this was capable of tremendous acts of courage. They stuck by their master no matter what. They went on the field of battle with their masters, and they would stand between their master and the sword if he was in mortal danger. They were absolutely next to them like flesh and blood all the way through. This centurion had grown strongly attached to his slave. He was paralyzed with some condition which attacked the central nervous system and caused at the same time tremendous pain and violent tremors. The Greek which is translated grievously tormented means that that he had these great tremors. Many doctors would have been called in; the man was intensely wealthy, and was a patron and a supporter of the Jewish community. At the same time, perhaps over a period of weeks, he would have heard about the ministry of Christ. As he heard, he began to put the evidence together, the mighty things Christ could do, his tremendous statements and his claims: all this together with his burning need somehow catalysed the whole thing, and he began to realize that this must be a prophet of God at least, if not God's Messiah. So he would send to him.

Application

What enabled this centurion who had a servant who was a very dear friend of his as well as a servant? What was it that enabled him to put such implicit trust in Christ the Saviour? The first thing is that this man developed a tremendous need. That's the first ingredient of faith always. Faith is built on realism. It's possible for a man, a woman, young person to just be drifting through life and everything is going fairly well for you. Things are slotting into place and you have no idea that you're spiritually dead. ‘How do I come to be here? Is there a God? Can he be known?’ You never ask these questions and you never feel any need of his forgiveness or his power or his help. How are you ever going to get faith? Something has got to happen which shakes you out of your complacency. For some it may be a great tragedy, something that changes the whole life. It may be a bitter disappointment. All the ambitions you have hoped for and relied on suddenly smashed and broken down. For others it may be nothing out externally catastrophic; it may just be that suddenly within yourself life goes sour. However it happens, before you can have faith there has to be a great sense of need arise in you, and then you begin to open your mind to the bigger issues.

Perhaps you are confident that you can be happy without God. What God will do before he can help you is send into your soul a great thirst, a great need. Conversion starts here. You begin to think, you begin to see through this world and all its enthusiasm for merely material things, and it's confining itself only to the here and now, the things you can touch, feel, possess. You see through it, and you begin to see all the sinfulness, the wretchedness and selfishness, and the exploitation and the unfairness in the world. Many good things you see, but you see wherever human beings tread there's always a seam of rottenness and corruption, trouble and disorder, operating at the same time. Have you come to this point? What if it isn't true? What if I have been brainwashed to believe that everything has come about by a sheer accident? Even beautiful things, ordered things, so much perfection in creation – is all this really sheer accident? As a result of accident after accident, and the process of natural selection, we are told that you get wonderful music and wonderful artistry. You have begun to wonder about these things. Is this credible, this view that is pushed upon us from all directions these days in our modern atheistic society? You become dissatisfied with the idea that your life is nothing, that one day it will be gone and you will be forgotten, and there is no life beyond. The universe will either experience the ‘Big Freeze’ or collapse into a massive conflagration, and the whole of humanity will be destroyed and all the particles will fly apart and everything that's ever happened in history will have been utterly, utterly pointless. You don't want to believe that anymore. You think it doesn't add up. ‘I need an explanation, I need a purpose, I need a meaning, I begin to feel there's a Creator, there's a great Designer. I begin to feel that this great testimony of people who believe in God has substance.’ So many things have got you thinking and wondering. But you are against the tide, so many friends will say, ‘What are you thinking about? What are you talking about, that's nonsense, forget it.’ But it's getting hold of you. That must have been how it was with this man, for him to commit himself to taking such an interest in the Jews over whom he served.

Questions

What is faith? Faith is not what most people think it is. If you were to ask most people what is faith they would give you an answer which really amounted to this: it’s a sort of tenacity or willpower; faith is the power to believe in something which is not intellectually credible. We hear the stories from bygone years of how the poor sorrowing widow, at the close of the war, would not believe that her loved one was really killed in action, and would always expect that somehow there had been a terrible muddle and he would come home. People would say that woman has great faith. Well, she may have had great something – we don't wish to take away from what the effects that love can have in people clinging on to impossible hopes. But that is an absolute misuse of the term faith. Faith is not willpower. It is not hoping against hope that something is true which is improbable. But if you are a cynical kind of person, and you take a lot of convincing, and you think that's faith, then you will say to yourself, there's no hope in me being a Christian, because I'm a realist. I cannot screw up my reason and my intellect and my mind and into a ball and throw it in the waste paper basket and just cling on to something in blind hope. I can't do that. Well no one expects you to do that because that does not happen to be what faith is.

Outline

Purpose

Introduction

Luke 7:2 Commentary and Bible Study