“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.” – “To establish and to uphold justice and righteousness.”
We’re looking tonight at Luke chapter 18, and you can find that on page 877 in the Bibles in front of you. Luke chapter 18. If you remember where we were last week, we were making our way, Jesus is making His way to Jerusalem and we are following along in the gospel of Luke as He makes His way there to the cross. You may have noticed as He makes His way to Jerusalem there is a sense of urgency to His message and His words oftentimes cut. And we saw in chapter 17 last week that He was teaching about the coming of the day of the Son of Man. He was teaching about the coming of God’s judgment, of God coming in justice, of Jesus Himself coming to establish His kingdom permanently and finally in justice and in righteousness. And He calls for us to be ready for that day. The last verse of chapter 17 was, “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” What Jesus was basically saying is that God’s judgment is coming and that it will be unmistakable.
And where we pick up in chapter 18 tonight, it is a continuation of what He was teaching in chapter 17, pointing us, directing our attention to the future, directing our attention to God’s coming judgment, the coming of the day of the Son of Man. What does that mean? What does that look like? Well we’ll see that what Jesus encourages us to do in this passage is to continue to look for the blessings of God’s kingdom; not to give up, not to lose heart in the midst of the trials and the tribulations that we may see around us. And He encourages us, He exhorts us to live not according to the priorities of the kingdom of this world but to live according to the priorities of His kingdom – to live with humility and to wait upon God’s justice and His exaltation. That’s not always easy. That will take us out of our comfort zones, I believe, and it will impact how we assess our commitment to Christ. We’ll see all of those things in this passage tonight if we truly recognize who Jesus is and what He came to do, then that sacrifice, that discomfort that may come, is well worth it.
And so let’s look at Luke chapter 18, the first thirty-four verses tonight. We’ll see, one, how God exalts the humble, and secondly, how God humbles the exalted. Before we read, let’s ask God’s blessing.
Our Father, we thank You for this the Lord’s Day and we thank You for drawing us here together tonight to worship You. We give You thanks for the way in which our young people, our children, have led us and brought us to the throne of grace and reminded us of Your coming down to us, condescending to us. There is a place in Your kingdom for the humble and the lowly. And so we ask that You would give us Your Spirit tonight. We come before You tonight humble and lowly, acknowledging our need that we cannot understand Your Word unless You first open our ears, open our hearts, our minds. And we cannot obey it unless You give us Your Spirit. So we pray for Your Spirit tonight and ask for Your blessing in that we would see Jesus. Speak Lord, for Your servants listen. We pray all this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Luke chapter 18, starting in verse 1:
“And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. He said, ‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’’ And the Lord said, ‘Hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’
He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: ‘Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.’
Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.’
And a ruler asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother.’’ And he said, ‘All these I have kept from my youth.’ When Jesus heard this, he said to him, ‘One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’ But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich. Jesus, seeing that he had become sad, said, ‘How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.’ Those who heard it said, ‘Then who can be saved?’ But he said, ‘What is impossible with man is possible with God.’ And Peter said, ‘See, we have left our homes and followed you.’ And he said to them, ‘Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life.’
And taking the twelve, he said to them, ‘See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise.’ But they understood none of these things. This saying was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said.”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
God Exalts the Humble
God exalts the humble. Verse 14 says that “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” Now not only is that what this passage is about, but I believe that we can say that this is what this entire gospel, the gospel of Luke is about this very thing. If you look up in our hymnals what is the oldest of our Christmas hymns, you would find that it is a song called, “Of the Father’s Love Begotten.” Now, “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” was written by a Roman poet named Aurelius Clemens Prudentius sometime between 348 and 413 AD. So that’s a hymn that we still sing in the church today that is over 1,600 years old. It is an old Christmas hymn. But I think that a case can be made that the oldest and perhaps the first Christmas hymn is what we find back at the very beginning of Luke’s gospel in what we often call “The Song of Mary” or “The Magnificat.” And it begins with, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” And then Mary goes on to say, throughout her praise to God she says, “God has looked on the humble estate of His servant, for from now on, all generations will call me blessed.” She says, “He who is mighty has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate. He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich He has sent away empty.” Right there at the very beginning, Mary is saying something about how God humbles the exalted and exalts the humble.
And we hear it again, Jesus says almost these exact same words that we find in verse 14 in chapter 14 verse 11. He says, “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” With the coming of Jesus, there is a great reversal that is taking place and there is great hope for the humble. Who are the humble? The humble are the overlooked. They are the mistreated. They are the ones that have no resources. They are the ones that seem to have no voice or no power. I think we could even say that the humble are those that recognize the depth of their sin, their unworthiness, and their absolute need of mercy. They have a claim to nothing but mercy. And we hear the cries of the humble throughout the Bible. Sometimes their prayers make us uncomfortable. They say things that we might not be comfortable saying in prayer to God. Think about what the psalmist says, how oftentimes the psalmist says, “How long?” Psalm 13, “How long, O Lord, how long? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?” Or what about the writer of Lamentations when he views the destruction of Jerusalem and the dashing of all of his hopes and the things that they held sacred. And he says, “Why? Why do You forget us? Why do You forsake us so many days?” Or we could even look at Paul in Romans chapter 7 when Paul is discouraged by His own inconsistencies and unfaithfulness and he says, “I do not do what I want and I do the very things that I hate. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
You see, the Bible is full of the prayers of those who are laid low by their circumstances and who had humbled themselves before God. But what’s the temptation for someone who is experiencing trials and those trials persist and seem to have no end? The temptation is to give up, isn’t it? It’s to lose heart. But what does Jesus say in verse 7 of Luke chapter 18? He says, “Will not God give justice to His elect who cry to Him night and day?” And then He tells this parable. That question is in response to a parable that He had just told at the beginning of chapter 18. It’s a parable about a widow, a widow who basically has no rights. If we know anything about what life was like in Jesus’ day, there was no place for women in the courtroom. The historian, Josephus, says that, “From women let no evidence be accepted because of their levity and their temerity.” And of the widow, it’s been said that the widow is the classic symbol in the Old Testament of the most vulnerable adult in that culture. And here you have this woman who has been widowed, she is the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. She has no rights in the courtroom, no rights and claims to justice according to the culture of that day, and yet we find her persisting and begging before this unrighteous judge for mercy, for justice.
And if even the unrighteous judge will respond to her cries for help, then how much more will God who is righteous and just give justice to those who cry out to Him day and night? Verse 8, “Will He delay long over them? I tell you He will give justice to them speedily.” Did you catch that? God will give justice to His people. I think we come to this parable at first and we think of it as a parable about prayer, and it is. It is a parable to the effect that God’s people ought to always pray and not lose heart. But what are they praying for? God’s people are praying for justice. And why might they lose heart? Because of injustice, because of adversity that is piled up over and over and over again. And prayer is calling out to God and waiting on Him patiently to respond and to enact justice, to exalt the humble, and to make things right, and to bring the blessings of God’s kingdom into those difficult circumstances and trials. And Jesus says, “When the Son of Man comes will He find faith on the earth?” In other words, will He find those who are patiently waiting, who are living by faith and not by sight, who are living for the kingdom of God and not for the kingdom of this world? Will He find those who are trusting in God’s justice to come?
And when we come to the next parable we even find that that one is, in some ways, about God’s justice as well. It’s the parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the temple. You remember the Pharisees were the ones who thought that they were righteous and yet they treated others with contempt. It says that they fasted and tithed with precision and with zeal and yet they neglected justice and the law of God. They were the ones who made long prayers for pretense while at the same time they devoured widows’ houses. And Jesus’ parable, starting in verse 11, it wasn’t the Pharisee who went away right with God. No, it was the tax collector. Who were the tax collectors? The tax collectors were the cheaters. They were the traitors. They were the misfits. They were the obvious sinners of the day. And yet how did the tax collector pray? He prayed earnestly; he prayed sincerely. He was heartbroken. He looks down, he beats his chest, he says, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” “And I tell you,” verse 14, “this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.” It was the man who was the obvious sinner, who humbled himself and begged for God’s mercy who was justified. He was the one who was made right with God. He was the one who could stand before God in the last day and be vindicated in God’s presence. He was the one who would experience God’s justice in his favor. In other words, it’s a repentant sinner. It’s not the self-righteous hypocrite who will be on the right side of God’s justice in the last day.
We have a hymn that we sing, “Come, Ye Sinners.” And one stanza says, “Come, ye weary, heavy laden, bruised and broken by the fall. If you tarry till you’re better, you will never come at all. Not the righteous, not the righteous; sinners Jesus came to call.” That’s who God’s mercy and grace is for. It’s for sinners who recognize their sin, their need, and their desperate need for mercy before God. “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and those who humble himself will be exalted.” You see, it’s not the impressive, it’s not the self-assured that enter into the kingdom of God. No, the kingdom of God is for those who receive it like a little child. And again, isn’t it appropriate that tonight we have our children singing for us and playing for us. And we can see even in that, that there is a place in God’s kingdom for the smallest ones, for the youngest ages. In this situation before Jesus where the children were coming to Him, it says that the parents are bringing infants to Him. What can an infant do? Nothing. An infant has nothing to offer. It can’t do anything at all.
I saw a headline recently that said, “Babies Don’t Need Fancy Things.” And it was talking about so much in our culture, so much commerce around us that are targeted for babies charging thousands and thousands of dollars. Babies don’t need fancy things. Why was that article written? Because we buy fancy things for our babies. But that wasn’t the case in Jesus’ day. It wasn’t the case in this day. If we were to look at the mortality rates in those days, the youngest ages, the infants, were facing an uphill battle. They faced tremendous hurdles just to survive their first year. And we see what the disciples thought about the infants. They didn’t want Jesus to be bothered with them. They didn’t think He had the time or the need to fool with these little children, these little infants. And yet what does Jesus say? He rebukes them and He says, “Let the little children come to Me, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.” God’s kingdom is for the lowly, the helpless, those who need the most help and care and attention, but who recognize that, who recognize that we need mercy, that we come empty handed, that we come begging for God’s mercy and for His mercy alone. So God exalts the humble.
God Humbles the Exalted
On the other end of the spectrum, we find the wealthy ruler. We find that God humbles the exalted. Verse 18, the rich ruler, he says to Jesus, he asks in verse 18, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Now there were almost as many problems as there are words in that question. He says, “What must I do? What can I do to inherit? What can I to receive as a gift eternal life?” Jesus has just been teaching it is nothing that we can do. It is receiving it as a little child. It is simply crying out for mercy. There is nothing that we can do to receive eternal life. And he calls Jesus “good.” “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” But what is good to this man? When Jesus challenges him and says to him to obey the commandments, what do the commandments say? “All these things I have kept from my youth.” He is saying that he is a good man and he is basically on the same level as Jesus in calling Jesus a good teacher. What does good mean to this man? Not much. He doesn’t recognize the uniqueness of Jesus and the goodness of Jesus; that the goodness of Jesus is the goodness of God alone. And His righteousness far exceeds anything that this man can claim to have.
And then he says, he asks about eternal life. “What can I do to inherit eternal life?” And when Jesus says to him to sell his possessions and to give to the poor, “and then you will have treasure in heaven” – what does he do? He becomes sad and he turns away because he was rich. You see, here was Jesus offering him something much better than his own possessions. He was offering him treasure in heaven that nothing can touch, that nothing can take away. But he doesn’t want it. And here is Jesus saying this is eternal life. It’s to have treasure in heaven. And so this man doesn’t even really know what he’s asking for when he asks what can he do to inherit eternal life. And so he turns away from Jesus. He doesn’t receive the gift of eternal life or treasure in heaven that Jesus has to offer to him.
In some ways it’s sort of like the line from C.S. Lewis that we hear from time to time. “It’s like a child who is content making mud pies in a slum because he doesn’t recognize what is offered in a vacation at the beach.” That’s the C.S. Lewis version. There’s a real life version that I often think about. I remember a memory as a child walking through the French Quarter in New Orleans with friends and a friend of mine begging his parents for a hamburger from Shoney’s! And here we are, surrounded by the best food in America – po-boys and beignets and everything else – and he’s begging for a hamburger from Shoney’s. He doesn’t recognize what was available to him. This man doesn’t recognize what is available to him in Jesus. He doesn’t recognize truly what eternal life is. He doesn’t recognize the blessings of treasure in heaven and he turns away.
And when Jesus says to him these words, “Sell your possessions and give to the poor,” Jesus is not giving him something to do. No, He’s showing him where his trust lies, where his allegiances are, where his idolatry is. Where is it? It’s in his possessions. And Jesus says in verse 24, “How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God, for it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” And then there’s the question, “Then who can be saved?” That’s the right question. When Jesus exposes this man’s idolatry, when he exposes where his faith is and he recognizes the challenge of trusting Jesus that much, what should he have said? “Who can be saved?” And what’s the answer to that question? “What’s impossible with man is possible with God.” And access into God’s kingdom comes not because of anything that we can do, not even because of the amount or the strength of our faith, but it is because of what God does for us.
And God exalting the humble and humbling the exalted where He brings about the ways of His kingdom, establishes His kingdom with justice and righteousness through Jesus Christ, how does that happen? Well it happens through the greatest act of injustice that the world has ever known. And we find in verse 32 that Jesus tells His disciples that they are on their way to Jerusalem and, “Everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished, for He will be delivered to the Gentiles and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon. And after flogging Him they will kill Him and on the third day He will rise.” Jesus subjected Himself to the greatest humiliation that could be possible in order to redeem His people, to redeem the humble, to make all things right, to establish His kingdom with justice and righteousness and to pour out on the humble the blessings of the kingdom of God. It is exaltation by His humiliation.
I think the question that we can ask ourselves as we close tonight, we’ve been thinking about ways in which Jesus in His teaching, His Gospel, makes us uncomfortable. This call to humility, this call to humble ourselves, how does that make us uncomfortable? There are a few things that we could say about that, and one is that the way of exaltation in God’s kingdom is not the way of exaltation in the kingdom of this world, not the way of the exaltation in this world. What does that look like? It means that we don’t place our hopes on political power. I was reading an article recently that said one of the ways, one of the signs that you can tell if your Christianity is too comfortable is that there is never any friction or tension between your faith and your political party. And there should be something about us in what we look for in power and exaltation and peace and justice and righteousness is not the same as those of the political parties of this world. And there should be at times a friction and a tension between what we hold dear and what we hold as our convictions in this world. That we are living not for the power of this world, for the kingdoms of this world, but we are living for the kingdom of God.
Or what about standing on our own obedience as the Pharisee or the wealthy ruler did? We have nothing to stand on. Can’t we come to a passage like this and we read the Pharisee and his ridiculous prayer and we can think, “At least I’m not like that Pharisee.” And we’re doing the very same thing that the Pharisee is doing. And we can say that oftentimes in our prayers. We can thank God – I heard someone say this, this week – we can thank God that we are not a part of a liberal church or a progressive church. We thank God that we are part of a church that preaches the Bible and holds true to the historic doctrines of the Christian faith. And those things are all great and right, but if that’s our confidence, it won’t last us very long and it won’t do much before God. We’re called to humble ourselves in order to be exalted in the last day.
What about clinging to our rights? What does Paul write in Philippians chapter 2? That Jesus, when He humbled Himself to the point of death, He obeyed to the point of death, death on a cross, and he says, “Humble yourselves.” He says, “Count others more significant than yourselves.” And “look to the interest of others rather than to your own interests.” And that’s going to make us uncomfortable. And yet we can’t leave this passage without also recognizing not just the way humility makes us uncomfortable, but the way humility in God’s kingdom provides our greatest comfort. And it’s this – that if you are one who is mistreated, who has experienced injustice, maybe you are one who is subjected to poverty or to disability, bruised and broken by the fall, or even your own sin, the battle against your own sin, that when that lays us low and we recognize that we can’t do it on our own, we can’t do it by ourselves, we place our faith in Jesus who took the punishment that we deserve, who subjected Himself to those very same things. That He was bruised and broken by the fall and by His rising again from the dead, overcame death, overcame the grave so that we might be exalted in the last day. Then there’s a great comfort, isn’t there? That God will make all things right. That all things bad will go away. Evil will be dealt with. The effects of sin will be done away. There will be no more sickness, pain, death or sorrow. Tears will be wiped away.
“Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” Let’s pray.
Our Father, we thank You for the good news of the Gospel. We give You thanks for the work of Jesus Christ on our behalf. Would You help us to humble ourselves, to renounce anything of our own righteousness or standing in this world in comparison with others. Help us to humble ourselves and to come to Christ and to follow Him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. We pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.