Epaggelia

Key Texts: Luke 7:18-35 & Matthew 11:1-24

The honest inquirers from John the Immersionist are not criticized, but rather served by Jesus in the performance of many miracles. This shows the value God places on fervent prayer for faith & wisdom in searching for truth in our life. James 1:5-6 & Mark 9:23-27. But after the honest messengers from John, leave with good news, then Jesus addresses evil in the worst sense.  When good people do nothing in the face of wickedness, sin itself grows worse.  It’s one thing to start a lie, it’s another thing to knowingly remain silent.  The first sin was Adam’s, in not stopping Eve from doing what he knew was bad for her, Gen. 3:6 & Rom. 5:12.  Yes there are degrees of sin, just as there are different levels of temperature to fire, here and in hell. Whatever the world exalts, the Lord finds nauseating, Mt. 11:20-24, Lk. 16:15, Rv. 3:16.

“THEIR GENERATION”  (Lk 7:24, 31) was complaining like children, and are not accepting John’s standard of living and rejecting Jesus’ standard of morals.  They felt John’s diet of locusts and honey was insane and proof of demonic possession. They felt that the fellowship of Jesus with tax collectors and sinners was proof that He was one of worst kind of sinners. But this passage shows that Jesus thought the men of his generation were rejecting the will of God. Why? Because they wouldn’t accept baptism! (Lk. 7:29-30) His generation ought to know better, but they didn’t care, nor did they see reality, they were living a pretence. Mat. 13:14-17. Does our generation care about the reality of our morals in comparison to God’s morals? How does our generation view baptism? Yet in the face of this blind apathy towards the morality and message of God, He still searches for people who want to worship Him in truth and spirit, Jn. 4:24. God in Jesus is so gracious & merciful!

WISDOM IS JUSTIFIED, v35.  &   GOD IS JUSTIFIED, v29. Solomon often talked about wisdom itself, as if it was a woman, Prv. 1:20-33 & 9:1-6. Jesus takes the same view, Mt. 11:19 & Lk 7:35 and gives her children! Christian disciples are fruit of God’s wisdom and in our heart we grow His fruit, Gal. 5:22-23, so that it’s passed on to others to become Christians. Therefore God is made to be seen as justified (made right in their eyes). Before people become Christians, they often see God as unfair and somehow ruling in an oppressive way, over the lives of people in the world. Worldly people seem to always regard God as uncaring, but in Christians, we regard God as love and try to share Him. So were the tax collectors receiving baptism, v29.

The WOES of Jesus, Mt. 11:20-24.  Woe is used to express how much a person deplores something, and Paul uses it to express divine wrath upon himself, see 1Cor. 9:15-18. What exactly did Jesus find so tragic? The apathy of Chorazin, Bethsaida, & Capernaum would cause worse divine wrath upon themselves, than what Sodom experienced, Gen. 19:24.  The cities Jesus quoted were all on or very near thelake of Galilee, with Capernaum being the largest and having the most recorded miracles within it. Bethsaida was very near where Jesus fed the 5000 and people from Chorazin must have seen miracles of Jesus on the lake, as it was on the shore. The calming of the storm must have had an enormous reaction. In March 1992 a storm on the lake caused 10ft waves causing damage to downtown Tiberius.  Today, all of them are just ruins, only Tiberias remains on the west coast of the lake, retaining it’s name which John used, Jn. 6:1 & Lk 5:1.  If Jesus came to your neighbourhood healing the sick and teaching the truth, what would the reaction be?