Luke 18:18-30

Luke 18:18-30  (Transcript of sermon for Sunday, February 2, 2020)

When I was in high school, I remember thinking one time that if this whole business about heaven and hell was true, as I believed, then there could be no more important question in the world than the question of how to gain one and avoid the other. Off and on, I’ve spent almost 50 years thinking about that question.

It is the question we find in Luke 18:18 when some ruler comes to Jesus and asks, What must I do to inherit eternal life? I know; that’s not a question many people in our culture care about, but like I said, if what Jesus and the Bible say about heaven and hell is true, there can be no more important question in all of life than to know how to gain one and avoid the other. Unfortunately, I think much of what I was taught about this was not true. So let’s read what Jesus says about the subject in verses 18-22:

¹⁸ A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” ¹⁹ “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. ²⁰ You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’”

²¹ “All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said. ²² When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

LET’S PRAY

            In the broader context of Luke, Jesus has been traveling on what would be his final trip to Jerusalem, when, according to Verse 18, A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” In Jesus’ time each synagogue had a man known as the “ruler of the synagogue” who coordinated the worship and events of the local synagogue. Since, as we will see, this “ruler” knows the Ten Commandments by heart, my guess is that he is the ruler of a local synagogue.

His identity, however, is not important. What is important is to understand that the question he asks is about how to gain eternal life—it is not about how to get rewards in heaven, as some Bible teachers have taught.

            In verse 19, Jesus answers, “Why do you call me good?” … “No one is good—except God alone. This is a key proof-text for cults which deny that Jesus is God. According cults like Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, Jesus is saying, “Why do you call me good? There is only one who is perfectly good, and that is God, not me!”

            Frankly, if all we had was this one verse, we’d have to admit that they seem to have a point. It looks like that is exactly what Jesus is saying. But you should never just rip a verse out of its context. So we’re going to put this question on the back burner for now and come back to it after we’ve looked at the context.

            Jesus himself doesn’t seem to wait for an answer to his question. He just leaves the question hanging as food for thought, while he moves on. In verse 20 he says, You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’”

            Jesus is just giving a sampling of the Ten Commandments—he doesn’t have to quote all of them because the ruler knows them by heart. In verse 21 the ruler says “All these I have kept since I was a boy.”

This is where many people get confused because this ruler asked how he can get eternal life and Jesus basically says, “keep the commandments.” That sounds like “works salvation” and Paul says over and over again that we are not saved by doing good works. In fact we’ve seen earlier in Luke 18 that Jesus himself is clear that we are not saved by works. So what’s going on here? Why does Jesus tell this synagogue ruler he has to keep the Ten Commandments in order to be saved? We’ll also come back to this question in just a minute.

            Verse 22 says, When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”  Why does Jesus tell this man he has to sell everything he has? Jesus did not make that demand of other people. For example, there was a time when Jesus cast demons out of a man and sent them into some pigs. The man then begged to follow Jesus. Jesus didn’t tell him to sell everything. In fact, Jesus told the man to go home, and tell all the good things God had done for him.

Similarly, Jesus apparently did not tell Mary, Martha and Lazarus to sell their home. And the Gospel of John tells us that when Jesus died, one of the disciples took Jesus’ mother home with him. That disciple still had his home! Apparently, not even Jesus’ disciples had been required to sell everything! In fact, even in the immediate context we find in Luke 19:1-9, Jesus commends Zacchaeus saying "Today Salvation has come to this house" even though Zacchaeus only gave restitution and half of what he owned to the poor. So why does Jesus tell this ruler he has to sell everything if he wants eternal life?

The answer is this: This man thinks he had kept every commandment since birth, so Jesus is testing him on the very first commandment: You shall have no other gods before me. Jesus wants to know, which is more important to this ruler, his possessions? Or God?

You may say, wait a minute, Jesus didn’t say, “Sell everything and follow God.” Jesus said, “Sell everything and follow me!” That’s because to follow Jesus IS to follow God! As Jesus told Philip in John 14:9, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” So in other words, Jesus is putting himself in the place of God and saying that obedience to the first commandment means having no other gods before Jesus! Jesus is affirming his deity.

Now with that in mind, go back up to verses 18 and 19 to the first question I left unanswered, where the ruler calls Jesus a “good teacher” and Jesus asks, “Why do you call me good…?” “No one is good—except God alone.”  Like a good teacher, Jesus is asking the man a probing question to make him think. The implication is, “Are you coming to me as a good teacher who can give you an answer to your question? Or are you coming to me as the Good One—God—who can give you the eternal life you desire? Far from denying his deity, as cults like Jehovah’s Witnesses say, when we look at the whole context, we see that Jesus is actually affirming his deity!

            So how, according to Jesus, does one inherit eternal life? “Keep the commandments,” he says! That leads us to the second question I left unanswered: Isn’t this the kind of salvation by works which Paul so strongly condemns? The answer is No! We only think that because we don’t know the Law of Moses as well as Jesus did.

Keeping the commandments was never to be a matter of keeping rules and regulations by rote. It was always primarily supposed to be a matter of loving God as evidenced by obedience. Deuteronomy 6:4 and 5 says, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. This passage is called the Shema. It has been characterized as the very essence of what Judaism was supposed to be all about. Obedience was to flow out of that love or fear of God. In fact Deuteronomy 11:13 basically says that to obey the commandments IS to love the Lord and serve him with all your heart. Deuteronomy 11:22 says that obeying God’s commands IS about loving God and walking on obedience to him. Deuteronomy 6:2 and 19:9 say the same thing.

So when Jesus tells this ruler to keep the commandments, the idea is that you shall have no other gods before God, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength as evidenced by obedience that flows out of that love. It is an obedience that comes from the heart. In Romans 1:5 and 16:26 Paul calls it “obedience that comes from faith.” For Jesus, obeying the commandments boils down to having no other gods before God and loving God as evidenced by keeping his commandments. Like Jesus said in John 14:15, If you love me, you will keep my commandments.

Unfortunately, verse 23 says that when the man …heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy. The man who claimed to have kept all the commandments had not even kept the very first one—You shall have no other gods before me! He valued his possessions more than he valued Jesus.

            In verses 24 and 25, Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

            This was pretty radical because in those days great possessions were often looked upon as expressions of God’s favor. And by the way, the eye of a needle is a sewing needled. In the middle ages someone came up with the idea that “the eye of a needle” was a small gate which camels could only enter with great difficulty if they got down on all four knees and crawled. There is no historical or archaeological basis for that view.

Just as it is utterly impossible for a camel to go through the top of a sewing needle, it is impossible for rich man—or anyone else for that matter—to be saved on their own. What Jesus says about the rich in this verse it true of everyone. I suspect Jesus just focused on the rich because the ruler was rich, and because many people in those days may have thought that if the rich couldn’t be saved, what hope was there for anyone?

            In fact, that may be behind the question in verse 26 ²⁶ Those who heard this asked, “Who then can be saved?” ²⁷ Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”  Just like Paul, Jesus affirms that salvation is impossible apart from God’s grace.

So to put this story in a nutshell: A man comes to Jesus saying, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ response was to ask, “Why do you call me good? No one is Good but God.” In other words, the implication was, “Are you coming to me as a good teacher who can give you an answer, or are you coming to me as the Good One—God—who can give you the eternal life you seek? Jesus doesn’t wait for an answer but says, You know the commandments. The man says he’ has kept all of them since his youth. So Jesus tests him on the very first commandment by telling the man to sell everything and follow Jesus. The man went away sad because he failed the test. He valued his possessions more than he valued Jesus.

This “valuing” or loving Jesus even more than we love our possessions—or anything else, for that matter—is what John means when he talks about “believing in Jesus.” It is what Paul means when he talks about being saved by faith.

            For way too long, way too many people have been sold a false gospel. It is a gospel that says if you just believe Jesus is God who died on the cross for your sins and rose again, and if you trust him to save you—like you trust a chair to hold you up—you will have eternal life. Many, many people who have bought into this false gospel believe the right things about Jesus and firmly trust that Jesus will save them, but have no real love or devotion to Jesus, and little or no desire to obey Jesus, so it is not surprising that their lives never change.

According to one statistic, 73% of Americans claim to be Christians. How on earth could America be in such a corrupt, moral mess if 73% of Americans were really Christians? How can it be that so many of those who profess to be Christians live lives that are indistinguishable from all the unbelievers they work with? I think one reason is that so many have been sold this false gospel that says you can be believe or trust in Jesus but unrepentantly live any way you want.

In Galatians 5, Ephesians 5 and First Corinthians 6, however, Paul talks about those who unrepentantly wallow in sins like sexual immorality, witchcraft (or occult), hatred, discord, selfish ambition, dissensions, drunkenness and the like, and Paul says, “those who live like this will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”

But why not! Why can’t they inherit the Kingdom of God? I mean, if all you need in order to be saved is to believe that Jesus is God who died for your sins and rose again—and you are trusting him to save you, then what is to keep you from living a life of continual unrepentant wallowing in sin! Millions of people do—because there is no connection between what they believe in their head, and how they behave. 

I mean, there are millions of people who believe that Jesus is God who died for their sins and rose again, and who are trusting Jesus to save them—but who live as if the Bible did not even exist! Their lives are often indistinguishable from their unsaved neighbors. So how can Paul say that if you live like this you are not saved?

I once had a professor who said that it was just non-Christians who will perish for living this way. Christians can live lives characterized by unrepentant sin and be still be saved! As John Calvin would say, all Scripture cries out against such nonsense!

Way back in the 1500’s the great reformer, John Calvin, wrote that there were people even back in his time who had “no fear of God” and  “no sense of piety” (in other words, they didn’t love the Lord) and yet they thought they were saved just because they believed certain facts about Jesus. I have some disagreements with Calvinism, but I absolutely agree with Calvin when he wrote that saving faith “is more of the heart than of the brain.” Calvin says that saving faith is about a “devout disposition” in other words, a heart of loving devotion to Jesus above all else. (Institutes, III.2.8). 

Our passage this morning only talks about valuing Jesus more than we value our possessions —but elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus makes it clear that we are to love him even more than we love our family or our own life. So what does it mean, practically speaking, to love or value Jesus above all else?

First, to value Jesus above all else does not mean you that you no longer like money or things. We all like money and things, right. But it does mean that you love Jesus more. Ask yourself, if you could somehow know for a fact that Jesus was calling you personally to sell all you have and go into some kind of full-time ministry—would you be willing to do it? Do you value Jesus more than you value your possessions? And if you say yes, does your checkbook reflect that?

Second, to value Jesus more than you value your family does not mean you no longer love your family. In fact, I would argue that many Christians who love Jesus more than they love their families—often love their families much more than non-Christians do! Putting Jesus first can give a solid foundation and depth to our love that non-Christians simply don’t have.

But to value Jesus more than we value our family, may in some cases cost our family. In many countries when someone decides to follow Jesus, they know in advance that their families will completely reject them and totally cut them off. And yet they turn to Jesus anyway. They value Jesus more than they value their families.

I once heard of a case in America in which a wife got saved and could no longer in good conscience continue the wild, partying lifestyle she and her husband had. He eventually divorced her. He said she was a good wife, but he wanted someone to go out and get drunk with! She placed obedience to Jesus even above the husband she loved—and it cost her marriage. She valued Jesus more than she valued her marriage.

Third, to value Jesus above all else does NOT mean that you become sinless. Hebrews talks about the sin that so easily besets us. First John says that if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves! In First Corinthians 7 Paul talks about his own frustrating struggle with sin. We all struggle with sin. That struggle will continue until Jesus comes back.

The key word here is struggle. A genuine Christian—one who loves or values Jesus above all else—sincerely wants to obey Jesus and it grieves us when we fail. Someone who is not saved—who does not value Jesus above all else—really doesn’t care much about obeying Jesus. Obedience to Jesus is really not on their radar screen. I mean, they may feel guilty when they do bad things, but their feelings of guilt are probably not because of sorrow over letting Jesus down.

Those who value Jesus above all else want to obey Jesus. They confess their sins when they fail and ask the Spirit’s help to do better. Such a heart of faith, through the power of the Holy Spirit, can’t help but begin to make a difference in a Christian’s life. In other words, they begin to bear fruit!

Those who value Jesus above all else do not want to live in open rebellion against Jesus anymore. And that is precisely why Paul can write that those who unrepentantly wallow in the sin he describes in Galatians, Ephesians and First Corinthians are not saved.

            Finally, valuing Jesus above all else, could cost your life. On October 1, 2015 a heavily armed man entered Umpqua Community College in Roseburg Oregon. He went into a classroom and shot the English teacher. According to witnesses, he asked two students if they were Christians. When they said yes, he shot them to death.

            I don’t know anything about these students, but I’m guessing they were really not much different you or me. One thing I do know is that they valued Jesus even more than they valued their own life. This has happened many times overseas when Christians choose to die at the hands of Islamic terrorists rather than deny Jesus.

            But isn’t that radical? Even crazy!? I mean, the idea that we should love and value Jesus even more than we value our own lives or families! Why on earth would anyone do that? The answer is that although we have continually rebelled against our creator in thoughts, words, actions and attitudes, he became flesh and lived among us—allowing himself to be mocked, spit upon, brutally beaten and tortured to death on a cross—and he did it for you, and me. He loved you more than he loved his own life. That’s why we should love him who first loved us.

            You know, we all want to live, and we all love our families. We all like money and things and we all struggle with sin. The question, however, is, deep down inside, at the core of our very being, what do we value most? Is it Jesus? Or is it something else? To value or love Jesus above all else is what John calls “believing in Jesus” and what Paul calls “faith.”

LET’S PRAY