Luke 16:16-31

Okay, so we've been in the book of Luke now for um a year, almost a year, and we're gonna be in Luke 16, 19 through 31.

Luke 16, 16 through 31.

Um so we're gonna read together starting in verse 19, and we're actually skipping over a few verses that um we didn't cover last week.

I'm gonna refer to them, but we're gonna read together um starting in verse 19.

So does every does anybody need an extra Bible?

We have extra Bibles over here.

Marvin can grab one for you.

Looks like everybody's set.

Okay, Luke 16, starting in verse 19, says this.

There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen.

Wow, he must have been looking forward to the Ravens game, huh?

I didn't even see that this whole week.

Okay, we're gonna make it past verse one.

He's dressed in purple and fine linen, and he lived in luxury every day.

At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores, and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table.

Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

The time came when the beggar died, and the angels carried him to Abraham's side.

The rich man also died and was buried in Hades, where he was in torment.

He looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side.

So he called to him, Father Abraham, have pity on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.

But Abraham replied, Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.

And besides all of this, between us and you, a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.

He answered, Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers, let him warm them so that they will not also, or warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.

Abraham replied, They have Moses and the prophets, let them listen to them.

No, Father Abraham, he said, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.

He said to him, If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be convinced, even if someone rises from the dead.

Let's pray again.

Lord, we just ask that you might speak to us through your word this morning.

Lord, you know where we are at, Lord, in our own stories and just the stuff that's going on in our lives, and we want to just surrender our lives to you, that you would speak to us in a powerful way.

So, God, would you um while that we're gonna go through the text, Lord, just um inform us, Lord, of what it means to have a personal relationship with you.

And we ask this in Jesus' name, amen.

Now, last week we had a um pastor with us, Pastor Cody, and he preached a great message on the value of scripture, and I sat right there, and I felt like he was breathing down my neck.

So I realized I'm gonna move a little bit off center here so that you have a view, except for Robert, you'll have a view of um the screen.

So, Luke chapter 16, here's where we're at.

Luke 16 · chapter mention

Two weeks ago we looked at the first half of chapter 16, the parable about the shrewd man getting fired.

Probably the most difficult parable in Scripture to understand.

Pretty confusing.

Jesus, in that parable, he was using this logical progression that we would call how much more logic.

So, in other words, he takes a bad example, but an element, or he takes a bad character who does something good, maybe, kind of, in the story.

And Jesus is basically saying if this bad character can figure out how to manipulate his circumstances in this way, how much more should the people of the kingdom be able to handle opportunity and resources as a good steward with good character?

And the emphasis that Jesus places is upon handling, properly handling our opportunities and resources with good character that can scale.

You remember he says, you know, if you're responsible with something small, um, how much more will you be when you handle something big?

Or let's actually look at it here in verse 9.

He says, I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourself, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much.

Whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.

And so again, Jesus is hammering to the audience, which is primarily Pharisees, he's hammering this idea of properly handling your opportunities and your resources with character.

And that you're gonna scale that good character from just a little bit of resources up to greater opportunities as they come along.

So there's a rebuke, there's a correction that's contained within the text that's primarily targeted at these Pharisees.

The Pharisees are the religious elites of Jesus' day.

Now, even after we did this text two weeks ago, Derek and Don and I were sitting in the car on a Sunday afternoon buying school supplies, back when we were doing all this cool stuff, and uh we were still talking about how weird the passage is.

But but just so you know, one of the commitments that we have as a church is that we teach through books of the Bible.

And what that means is that sometimes we'll come across passages that are confusing.

Where it's just like, well, why is Jesus, uh what is dry Jesus really, what's the main point of the parable that he's teaching?

We see a lot of application from verse 9 on, but how the parable itself ties in with it is, you know, we're we were kind of disagreeing with ourselves as we were having this conversation.

But for us, it is it is so important.

Um there's a priority for us as a church that we want to read through Scripture because we believe the whole thing is profitable, it says in Timothy, to correct us, to reprove us, to instruct us in righteousness.

There's this profitableness about reading through the whole Bible, even the difficult passages.

So we ended in verse 15, and then if we go on into verse 16 through 18, um, the text is really pretty fascinating.

I don't do I have it here.

No, I don't.

Let me read.

Um, you probably have it, obviously, in front of you.

Let's look at 16 through 18 really quickly.

Depending on what version you're in, um, it's broken up.

Um, so in the NIV version, you kind of have the end of a section in verse 15, and then you go into verse 16 through 18, and there are these standalone passages.

And Jesus says, The law and the prophets were proclaimed until John, and since that time the good news of the kingdom of God is being preached, and everyone is forcing their way into it.

It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pen to drop out of the law.

Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries uh a divorced woman commits adultery.

So you're reading through this and you're just like, whoa, where'd that come from?

Right, as the reader.

You're like, okay, we're talking about this weird parable, then Jesus is talking about the law, and then Jesus is like, and if you get divorced and then you get remarried, you committed adultery.

So so the so the kind of the continuity of the passage is difficult to necessarily pin down.

But it's important.

It is important for us to, uh I I believe it, it's important for us to see that Jesus is talking about the law and the prophets because the text we're going to spend most of our time on, when when Jesus or when Abraham is interacting with the rich man, um they talk about this whole idea of the witness of the law and the prophets.

Like, hey, the law and the prophets, you had them and you rejected them.

So I believe that there is this continuity to the text, but it's a little um it's not as clean, maybe, as some other texts that we've looked at, or the logical flow.

Um let's go into um this story of Lazarus and the rich man.

First of all, just a simple summary: there's a rich man and there's Lazarus.

The rich man is um partying every day, and Lazarus is suffering every day.

They both die and they end up in different places, which is fascinating.

The rich man is suffering and asks for a little water, and he's denied, and then the rich man asks Lazarus be sent to his five brothers to warn them.

Again, Abraham denies him.

So there's this conversation that we're given a window, and we're given context, and then we're given a conversation between the rich man and Abraham.

It's really important, I think, too, in understanding this, to go back to the text from last week and know that Jesus said regarding the Pharisees that they loved money.

They loved money.

And so here we have a rich man that is like living it up.

The language of this guy, he is just like partying every day, um, is kind of the picture that Jesus gives us.

Um Jesus, uh Jesus is warning the Pharisees about bad stewardship within the context.

Then Jesus says that the law and the prophets are in force in that this middle text between 16 and 18, that the the law hasn't isn't gonna go away, right?

It is still as uh valid as it has ever been.

Then he tells his story about the rich man who didn't use his resources properly and didn't heed the warnings of the law and the prophets.

So have have you ever watched a um one of those shows on like the Discovery Channel, where it's got kind of a similar view to this, where you go, even the camera, where the camera goes from being above the water under the water.

And the thing that happens is it's like it's just totally a different world of what's going on underwater, right?

Yesterday afternoon I was watching something on like some channel that had this, and it was sperm wells, you know, hunting down um something, I can't remember what it was, but it was crazy, like it's just like a totally weird world under the water, it's totally different, right?

And you're asking, Josh, how does that relate to our passage?

Here's how it relates when we look at this text, Jesus is pulling back a veil on afterlife, and it's kind of like the camera dipping below the water line, and yet here we're looking at what happens after death.

Um the the there's some weirdness here, like the the guy goes to Hades, which is not hell, and then Abraham's, and there's this gulf between the two.

So it's like it's valid to be saying, what is going on in the text?

Um and there's all kinds of fanciful descriptions of this, but but here's what's going on.

This is a pre before the cross.

So this is what uh like uh an intermediary state where they're waiting for the work of the cross.

So some theologians believe that when it says Jesus descended into the heart of the earth after the cross, before the resurrection, it says that Jesus led captivity captive.

The Apostles' Creed says that um Jesus descended into the heart of the earth.

Um and so there's there's a question like did Jesus literally go into hell or into Hades and get Lazarus and the other characters in the story and then take them to heaven?

Um I don't know, that's a little bit of a leap.

But what we we can kind of deduce is that this is this um intermediary state that these individuals are in, and they're already sorted into two groups.

We have the blessed and we have those who are in torment.

It's notable that um there's the word torment and agony is repeated.

It's the same word four times in the Greek that is repeated over and over again.

Most scholars, when they look at this passage, they agree that this is not a parable.

And here's why.

Luke does not introduce it as a parable.

A lot of other parables they start with, like Jesus told a parable, or Jesus said, I'm gonna tell you a parable.

This one we don't have any kind of introduction like that.

Second, Jesus gives us the name of Lazarus.

There's no other parable where the characters in the story are named.

And third, the point of the story is felt without using analogy, right?

So the so the message or the purpose of the story is received without having to use a metaphor or analogy to receive the point.

Right.

So just kind of giving you a little bit more in information as the interpreter of this text, right?

The name of Lazarus seems to be important.

It means God is my help, and yet he lives out his life in agony, with sores, not being helped.

Um, here's what Warren Wearsby says about uh this passage, which is just kind of an insight into the Jewish culture, which was the original audience for this text.

Why is one man wealthy and another man poor?

Had the Jewish people obeyed God's commandments concerning the sabbatical year and the year of Jubilee, there would have been little or no poverty in the land, for the wealth and real estate could not have fallen into the hands of a few wealthy people.

He continues.

The Old Testament prophets denounced the rich for amassing great estates and exploiting the widows and the poor.

So the way that God set up the nation of Israel was so that there was an expiration date on great accumulation.

It was like a um, it was like when I was in Hawaii, I was a part of a church that tried to buy a hotel.

But the hotel was on leased land.

That was uh a 20-year lease.

And what that does uh from a business perspective is that means that your your window of profitability is narrowing as the lease uh time decreases, right?

Does that make sense?

So the um so the way that that affects the deal is that um the the land becomes cheaper, not more valuable as you go along.

Well, Israel had a 50-year jubilee where after 50 years um slaves would be set free, the land was you know, if you had um leased out your property, it was given back to the original inheritors of the property, like you went back to zero.

It's kind of like shoots and ladders when you really lose, you know.

That's how it worked in Israel.

Like everybody would lose after 50 years, and we go back to zero.

And so what that did with the economy was fascinating in that it really flattened things out considerably.

So you wouldn't get these huge um uh this massive disparity between the wealthy and the poor.

Uh, there was a bunch of other um uh built-in rules of how the poor would be cared for, like if you were gleaning your field, you would you would kind of cut the corners and the corners would be left for the poor.

Really fascinating how God set up a nation.

Um, there may be some things that other governments could learn from in that.

It's but we're looking at it more anecdotally that what's happening in this story um shouldn't have been the case if the people of God had followed the word of God.

So this is because these are Jews, right?

And this is a Jewish wealthy man who has massive amounts of wealth, and there's a poor guy right outside of his gates.

Notice um it says in early on in the text, either verse 19 or 20, it says that this man Lazarus is longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table.

You see that?

He's longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table.

As I was looking at this, I just found this striking because I spent a good chunk of my week um lobbying whole foods right down the street to donate their nearly expired food instead of throwing it away.

So if you're new to our church, we get this food from Trader Joe's, right?

We get every week we pick up five or seven hundred pounds of food from Trader Joe's, and they do that 14 times a week.

So we have one of 14 slots where we get like 700 pounds of food.

So I have to drive all the way to Columbia on Fridays to get that, bring it all the way back up here.

So the idea is like, well, can't we get that with a local local grocery store?

So we've been working for the last four months to get Whole Foods to give us their nearly expired food.

We didn't know if they were doing it anywhere else.

Um we joined, we created a coalition between me and the relief center that we run, the two local public schools and the people that they're trying to care for, and a Catholic charity.

It's called Southeast Baltimore Food Access Coalition.

And this week we sent a letter to them just saying, Would you just stop throwing away your food?

Stop throwing away your food.

Let us have that food.

We have 200 families that need to be fed.

We can only feed 30 right now with the existing food.

And um I wrote down a couple of numbers on this.

Um they there are over, so right literally 1,329 feet away from the current location of Whole Foods, there are 1,200 people that live at Perkins.

The average household income in Perkins is$8,800 annually.

This is that's four blocks away.

Um Whole Foods is moving 209 feet closer to Perkins, one block closer in 2019.

Their proximity to Perkins, Section 8 housing, is causing Perkins to be overlooked as a food access area.

So the city is not giving as much attention to Perkins homes because they say, well, you don't qualify as a food desert, which is now called a food access area, because you have a grocery store called Whole Foods near you.

I don't know if you can afford Whole Foods.

Um I can't.

Um And I know that my neighbors who live at Perkins cannot as well.

And so one of the one of the things, if you go to like our church website, one of the things that is one of six values that we have is that we care about justice and mercy in the city.

And so the fact that Whole Foods' proximity to Perkins has a negative impact upon the community just by disqualifying them as a food desert, and the fact that they're throwing away thousands of pounds of food on a weekly basis, um, which even their employees are upset about and they've had internal conflict over, um, for for us it's a justice issue.

We we feel like we even actually have a Johns Hopkins student a grant to hire a student to pick up the food and distribute it.

And we just need them to not throw it away.

So um anyway, just uh as I As I was going through the text, I was just like, man, that just sounds so familiar when it says of Lazarus that he's longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table.

I love Whole Foods.

I have nothing against them.

I don't think that they are evil, but they have the responsibility to properly steward over their resources and their opportunities, right?

Don't we do we all have that responsibility to, and that's what that's what Jesus is on.

That's what he's teaching the elites, which are the Pharisees.

He's teaching them that we all bear this responsibility to properly steward over the responsibility, the opportunities and the resources that God puts into our laps.

So you can continue to pray.

We actually, the city this week sent letters also to Whole Foods.

And so hopefully, hopefully we get a breakthrough this week.

And it, I mean, it should be a win-win, I think.

Here's something else.

But we've always we've talked about that when we approach interpreting scripture, it's just like watching CSI.

How many of you watch CSI?

You've seen, yeah, you're at least familiar with the genre of CSI, right?

There's like all the spin-off versions of it.

And the way that the show is made is so that you become familiar with the science of criminology.

And so when you if you watch enough shows, you're able to see the crime at the beginning, and then you can second guess the CSI investigators as they are interpreting the crime scene.

And it almost becomes instinctive for the viewer.

This is how the show is created.

It's instinctive for the viewer when you watch it unfold that you begin to second guess how those investigators are processing the crime scene.

That's what makes it entertaining.

As we step onto the scene of scripture, we also want to have this kind of innate sense of what questions should be asked right off the bat.

And one of the things that we look for as interpreters of scripture is patterns.

So we want to note words that are repeated.

So in our text, there are four uses of the word agony or torment.

So there's something there.

But then there's also these similar words that are being used.

And I want to, I think I have a slide for this.

I want to draw your attention to these words.

These are at the end of the passage in like 28, 29, 30, 31.

You see there the rich man says, Let him, Lazarus, warn them, being the five brothers.

Send somebody back, like to warn the five brothers.

So you've got the word warn.

Then in the next phrase, you have the five brothers listening to the Moses and the prophets.

That's what Abraham is saying, is they need to listen to them.

And then the rich man says, if someone from the dead goes back, they will surely repent.

And then Abraham responds and says, if they do not listen, they will not be convinced.

So warn, listen, repent, listen, convinced.

All of these are like this cognitive processing of revelation.

And the rich man is saying, if a person is raised from the dead and goes back, surely they will listen.

And Abraham is saying, no, no, no, no, no.

They need to be listening to Moses and the prophets.

Remember, he's Jesus in this text, he said that the law and the prophets are in force.

There's nothing that has taken away the force of the law.

And here this rich man is being told, he's being corrected, he's being told, your brothers need to listen.

They have ample revelation in their life.

They need to listen to the law and the prophets.

It's interesting.

As you look at this passage, it ties together a lot of the stuff we've studied.

Treasures that are in heaven, stewardship over resources and opportunities, care for the poor, future judgment.

So Jesus here, and as we've said, we're in this context where Jesus in chapter 19 is going to be in Jerusalem.

It's going to transition into the last like two weeks of his life.

So Jesus here is using this to train his disciples in an intense way.

Even as he corrects the Pharisees, there's this hope that the disciples will be a contrast to how the Pharisees are living out their life.

So what's the big idea for us?

How do we finish this up, wrap this up?

You know, as we look at this story that Jesus is teaching, which is it's it's there's a horror aspect to this.

Like this is not something that you read and it's like, oh, that pumps me up, you know.

I feel good for the day.

This is this is horrendous.

This is the reality of a rich man living eternally in torment and asking for just a drop of water.

Like that's that's the degree of his request.

I just want a drop of water.

So Jesus in this, he is, this is this is really the big idea.

Heaven and hell are real.

After we die, we will live out an eternal reality that is directly proportional to our earthly response to God's word.

We will live out an eternal reality that is directly proportional to our earthly response to God's word.

Do you see the interaction that Abraham has with the rich man?

Abraham is saying, Your brothers have God's word.

They have enough revelation.

And this guy, post-grave, post-death, is asking that they would be given more revelation, and Abraham says, No, they have sufficient revelation.

In the book of Romans, chapters 1, 2, and 3, it's a very dark passage about judgment, the judgment of God.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

And the way that it's written is as if Paul is a defense lawyer defending God being judged by humanity.

And what Paul is doing in the book of Romans, he's saying that God is not wrong to judge the world and condemn the world and to pour out wrath.

And then he lays out for those who would want to condemn God for judging the world and says, No, God judges people according to their response to revelation.

And so he says, if you're a Jew, the revelation you've received is the law and the prophets.

God has given the Jew this great, incredible heritage of delivering them from Egypt and speaking to them through Moses and giving them a promised land and giving them David and the Psalms and the prophets.

And Paul's saying, look at all that God has done to reveal himself to humanity, and when humanity rejects all of that revelation, God is justified in condemning those individuals to hell.

But then Paul goes on and he explains why God is justified in condemning the Gentile.

Again, using legal language to say that God is justified in condemning the Gentile because they are given their own conscience and creation.

God says that, yeah, even the man on the island is going to be judged by God because God is made known through creation and through their conscience.

Now, which means, so there's always this question of like, you know, if salvation is through Jesus, if the rescue of God is provided through the person of Jesus, what about the guy on the island, right?

Have you ever heard people contend with the justice of God because, based off that argument?

Well, Romans explains that perfectly.

Paul says that everyone is going to be judged according to their response to the revelation they've received.

And so, what does that mean for America?

What does that mean for us?

When we have the Bible in our own language, we have the internet and just access to incredible teaching and preaching.

We've got churches spread out almost anywhere in America you can drive and easily be in a church.

What the logic of Romans says is that we are highly accountable because we've received a great degree of revelation from God.

You may think, why do the people, this is especially for those of you that are new, why does Haven City Church spend so much time in the Bible?

Why do we dedicate half of our church service every week to Scripture?

We believe that the Bible is God's word to us, and that our response has eternal implications.

That God has revealed Himself to us.

When you hold this Bible, when you hold your Bible or you open up the U version on your phone, you're literally reading God's words to humanity.

And our response to God's word has eternal ramifications.

Another way of saying this is that the Bible has authority.

It is a government.

It governs over our lives, it dictates to us what is right and wrong, what are the roles of created things, what kind of relationships we're to have with one another.

The Bible is authoritative.

And there's accountability for listening or rejecting.

Our culture prizes autonomy, which is the idea of you create your own set of rules.

It's even like a trend now of like, these are my, these are like my seven principles for living life, right?

Jordan Peterson's got this book that's a bestseller.

You've got Ray Dalio that wrote a book just called Principles.

We live in it in an age where people kind of are coming up with their own set of rules, and yet God has revealed himself through his word, and our response to his revelation has eternal ramifications.

There's an eternal reality that is directly tied to our actions.

Right now, we've been hearing about Hurricane Florence.

You guys know there's a hurricane that's coming, right?

The meteorologists are saying, and this is, I think, taken from this morning.

This is the latest map.

Looks like it may hit the Carolinas, but there's some that kind of put it on a trajectory coming up towards Maryland.

No doubt, so so the meteorologists are collecting the data, they're interpreting it, they're forecasting an outcome, and they're act asking people to take action now before it arrives.

No doubt there are going to be people who do not heed the warnings, um, but not listening to the meteorologists' predictions will not change the trajectory of this storm.

You, everybody in North Carolina and South Carolina on the coast, in Maryland, in Virginia, has a choice, right?

They're being given the information.

This storm is coming.

But you and I are free moral agents, we can decide what we want to do with that information.

But what we do with it, the rules that we have, does not change the reality of what's gonna happen, right?

By Thursday or by probably Tuesday or Wednesday, we're gonna know.

Is it gonna like miss us?

Is it gonna hit South Carolina?

Is it gonna come and hit us?

That's the reality of Scripture.

Scripture is God saying to us, here's what's right and wrong.

Here's my rescue, here's how to do life, here's what's valuable to me.

I mean, we are not absent of instructions.

God has completely revealed to us what heaven and the stakes of heaven and hell, the stakes of eternity.

And yet we can be like those who see a storm's trajectory and decide to ignore it.

I want to close with this verse in Hebrews chapter one, verses one and two.

It says, In the past, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he's spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.

Jesus is the word made flesh, it says in John chapter 1.

John 1 · chapter mention

Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God.

The Bible is about Jesus, and it says that Jesus came into the world to rescue us from our deserved eternal torment.

The torment that the rich man is suffering from.

Jesus came into the world to rescue us from that torment.

He who related this incident, in other words, Jesus, he was the tenderest, gentlest, most gracious man who ever trod this earth, trod this earth.

Certainly he would never, he never would have attempted to portray human suffering beyond the grave unless he knew and wished to impress upon his hearers the awfulness of living and dying without God.

If there were any possibility that men might live in their sins and yet find peace and blessing in another world, he would have made it known.

Jesus, in his love for us, makes known to us the stakes.

And it's terrifying to read about this rich man.

And yet he loves us to give us a choice related to the rescue of God.

And you and I will be held accountable of whether or not we received God's rescue through his son, Jesus Christ.

That's really kind of the end of my sermon.

But there's this one other thing I just want to tell you.

I was thinking this whole week about it, and I felt kind of like it's been missing from my sermon, which is just that God loves you.

Like the just the goodness of God.

We were singing about it this morning in worship, just that we build our life on just the love of God.

That God, through his son Jesus Christ, he loves you.

Like the sin you committed this week is forgiven and washed away in his son Jesus.

Like he delights in you, he delights in rescuing you this week.

You may face some brokenness, maybe physically or financially, or in a relationship, or um in your vocation, and yet God loves you enough that he wants to work in your life this week.

Yeah, he wants to prepare a place for you eternally to live a blessed in a blessed state with him, but he delights in revealing himself in your week.

So let's let's um live our life built on that foundation of the goodness of God.

Just know he loves you.

I've been waiting all week to just tell you that that Jesus truly, truly, he delights in you.

God, thank you.

Thank you for your love.

Thank you that um you take the poor and you bring them in to your kingdom.

And Lord, like it says in the book of Revelation, we're poor, we're blind, we're naked, we're a people in need of your mercy.

And you are the true rich man who brings us in.

There's such a contrast between this rich man in our story and you being our rich man that enriches our life.

We're so grateful.

We're a people that just rejoice in the blessing of God.

Thank you.

Thank you for Jesus.

Thank you for the inheritance we have in him.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Let's stand, let's worship with this last song.