Every Last Word

Mark: Jesus was asked many questions during his life, but occasionally he would ask one or two of his own. He had a riddle for the Pharisees, and it wasn't why is six afraid of seven? It had significant spiritual meaning. Turn to the Gospel of Luke and listen in as we discuss the question that Christ asked the Pharisees about his own family background.

Guest (Female): Welcome to Every Last Word, a radio and internet program with Dr. Philip Ryken teaching the whole Bible to change your whole life. Today, we're continuing our studies in Luke. Jesus presents a riddle to the Pharisees. Its answer gives us a lot of insight into the person of Jesus Christ.

Mark: Phil, people in the Bible are always asking God questions, and today you're going to review a number of questions. Is it okay to ask God questions about our lives and his plans?

Dr. Philip Graham Ryken: Absolutely, Mark. This is a relationship that God wants to have with us, and that's one of the things you do in a relationship—you ask questions. But it makes a very great difference how we ask. We'll see that very clearly in today's message from the Gospel of Luke. It makes a difference whether we're asking God out of a place of really wondering and asking a sincere question, or if we're just coming to God with some objection or, even worse, trying to catch him making a mistake, which is what the Pharisees did to Jesus, as we'll see.

Mark: Also from the message, why is it important that Jesus be both David's son and David's Lord?

Dr. Philip Graham Ryken: Today we'll encounter a great prophecy from the Old Testament that goes back to Psalm 110. We'll see Jesus claiming to be both the Son of David and the Lord of David. He's the Son of David because he came from that royal line of the House of David. He had to be from that line in order to be the Savior. But he is also David's Lord because he is truly God. In order to do the saving work of offering a perfect sacrifice for our sins, Jesus also had to be divine to offer a sacrifice of that power. We'll see that in today's message. He is both David's son and David's Lord.

Mark: All right, thank you, Phil. Let's turn in our Bibles now to Luke chapter 20, verses 41 through 44, and listen together to Dr. Ryken.

Dr. Philip Graham Ryken: If you know anything about my background, you know that I had one of the most privileged of all childhoods in that I grew up in a house full of books. My mother was a voracious reader, my father a professor of English literature. You just had to scan the family shelves and you would see the names of the great authors: Chaucer, Milton, Dickens, Dostoevsky.

Of all the wonderful books in our home, none seemed to hold greater promise than a green volume with a golden title, *Answers to Questions*. Those magical words could almost make you believe that the book held the sum of all knowledge. What questions this book proposed and what answers it gave!

Question: Do fish sleep? Answer: Fish do not sleep, but at times they remain quiet in pools and streams. Question: Was Clara Barton a lover of music? Answer: On the contrary, Miss Barton is said to have had little, if any, love for music. Question: Are pigs naturally dirty farm animals? Answer: Pigs are the cleanest of animals if allowed to be so.

Question: Is it true that a person dreaming of falling from a great height will die from shock if he does not awaken before he hits the ground? Answer: Physicians say that such an idea is ridiculous. However, this is not susceptible of absolute proof, for if any man has ever died from the shock of landing at the bottom of a dream, he has never had a chance to tell about it.

So it went. You can imagine the appeal. What could be more satisfying to an inquisitive mind than to know the answers to these and many other questions? If only we could get the same kind of clarity from God. Most people have questions about life they wish that God would answer. How can I know for sure that what the Bible says is really true? Why is this happening to me? What is the meaning of all this suffering? Where will it all end?

Even people who know the Bible still have some questions. Even people who don't believe in God at all, or at least say that they don't, are looking for those kinds of answers. It was the same way in the time of Jesus Christ, which no doubt explains why the Gospels give us so many answers to so many questions. People were always asking Jesus to explain something.

In fact, parts of the Gospel of Luke almost read like the transcript for a question-and-answer session. Why not? People always have questions for their teachers, and here was the greatest teacher who ever lived. People were always coming to him with their questions. Let me just remind you of a couple of them. Very early in the Gospel of Luke, you'll remember that Jesus forgave a man's sins, a man who had been paralyzed. People asked him, "Who can forgive sins but God alone?"

They saw Jesus spending so much time with low-life sinners, and they wanted to know, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors?" They saw what the disciples were doing on the Sabbath and they asked him, "Why are you doing what it is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?" They were asking all kinds of questions, and then they were asking questions about the way of salvation, the most important question that anyone can ask: "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?"

When Jesus told them what love it would take to be saved by doing, they came back with their follow-up question, "Well, who is my neighbor?" The questions kept coming. When will the kingdom come? By what authority are you preaching the gospel? Do we have to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Then finally, as you can see in chapter 20 of Luke's Gospel, some scholars came to him with a very complicated seven-part question about who would be married to whom after the resurrection.

With every question, Jesus gave some kind of answer, and he answered in a way that proved his total mastery of theology, his deep understanding of the mind of God. Jesus had been doing that ever since he was a boy. If you think back to that well-known occasion in Luke chapter 2 when Jesus was twelve and it was Passover and he stayed back in Jerusalem, we're told on that occasion that the teachers at the temple were amazed at his answers.

Then again, I think you could say that Jesus always amazed everyone with his answers. It wasn't just the teachers at the temple; it was also the Devil himself. Think of the answers that Jesus gave to Satan when Satan came to him in chapter 4 and tried to tempt him to claim the crown without suffering the cross. Each time, Jesus had an answer for him, a devastating answer that was based on the Word of God.

If you trace the series of questions and answers through the Gospel, you can see that Jesus was equally devastating when he answered all of the questions that were posed by his enemies. He gave answers about forgiveness and answers about the Sabbath. Sometimes he would tell a story that was the answer to the question, a story like the Good Samaritan, which is one of the most famous stories that's ever been told.

With every answer, Jesus was unfolding deep truths about God and man, about sin and salvation, about forgiveness and eternal life. In the end, if anyone was expecting Jesus to make some kind of mistake, they had to give up entirely. His intellect was so superior, his answers so unanswerable, that finally some of the scribes said, as we see in chapter 20 at verse 39, "Teacher, you have spoken well." For they no longer dared to ask him any question.

Their defeat was complete as Jesus claimed total victory over their unbelief, the unbelief that was behind all of their skeptical questions. The English poet Richard Crashaw explained the situation well. He wrote a poem with a rather lengthy title: "Neither Durst Any Man From That Day Ask Him Any More Questions." Here is what Crashaw wrote: "It was time to hold their peace when they had ne'er another word to say. Yet is their silence unto thee the full sound of thy victory. For to hold their peace is all the ways these wretches have to speak thy praise."

You understand what the poet is saying? In other words, silence really can be golden. When a spiritual skeptic has a personal encounter with Jesus Christ and realizes that God has answers even to the hardest questions, then the silence that ensues gives glory to God. It's a sign of the victory that Jesus was winning—that these skeptics had nothing more that they would even dare to say to him.

The Bible says that every mouth should be shut before God. For some people, that won't happen until the Day of Judgment, when the personal return of Jesus Christ will give a visible and unmistakable answer to anyone who has ever doubted his supreme deity. Oh, when Jesus comes again, there will be nothing that any doubter can say, and the silence of every skeptic will give glory to God.

If you are wise, you will close your mouth now. You will close your mouth sooner than the Day of Judgment, and you will offer to God the worship of a silent and submissive heart. Jesus always welcomes sincere questions from people who are really seeking to know the truth. I tell you, he'll always give answers that will satisfy your soul.

But if you're only raising questions because you want to prove that you're right and God is wrong, really it would be better to say nothing at all. That's the conclusion that we reach at the end of all these questions. It's the great lesson in life that Job learned. Job had all kinds of questions for God as he struggled with his sufferings. He had all these things he wanted to say to God, questions that he wanted God to answer.

At the end of that struggle, he came face to face with the power of the mighty Creator. By the time God was finished asking Job his questions, there was nothing more that Job could say. He finally realized what he was up against. He said, "I have uttered what I did not understand. Therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes." In other words, it was his way of saying that when Job was questioning God, he really didn't know what he was talking about. It would have been better for him to say nothing at all but simply to sit before God in silence and awe.

That seems to be almost the place that these scribes reached. They didn't have any more questions for Jesus. I wonder, were they at the point where they were ready to worship Jesus as the Son of God? Some worthy theologian—and I haven't been able to remember who it was, maybe somebody will be able to remind me—some worthy theologian has rightly said that this is what a Christian is: someone whose mouth has been shut.

Shut against making any more accusations against God, or against making any more claims about our own worthiness, so that Jesus Christ can truly be God. This is what it means, in part, to believe in Jesus: to be silent from all of our skeptical questions and simply to worship him and to believe that he is who he says he is.

The scribes and scholars may have been finished with all of their questions, but Jesus still had one last question for them. Only I think it's really more of a riddle, a riddle that I think opens up the mystery at the heart of the universe. Let me just remind you of the context here. Jesus was in Jerusalem. It was the last week of his life. There were religious leaders there, religious leaders who denied that Jesus was the Son of the living God, who wanted to know what right Jesus had to preach the kingdom.

That was at the beginning of chapter 20; they were questioning his authority. You may remember that all through this Gospel, Luke's purpose has been to help us know salvation for sure by believing that Jesus is the Christ, by believing the very thing that these leaders were seeking to deny. Here in chapter 20 is one of Luke's clinching arguments, which is presented in the form of a riddle that you can only answer if you believe that Jesus Christ is really God.

Here's what Jesus said to the scribes, beginning in verse 41: "How can they say that the Christ is David's son? For David himself says in the Book of Psalms: 'The Lord said to my Lord, "Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool."' David thus calls him Lord, so how is he his son?"

This riddle is the kind of riddle that we have to work hard to understand, not just to understand the answer to it, but actually to fully understand the question. But if we take the trouble to do that and attend to it carefully, I think we learn some of the most important things that anyone can ever know. If you're like me, you love riddles. I think everyone loves a good riddle. It's absolutely marvelous that God has put a riddle in the Old Testament that Jesus can use to help us understand the truth that leads to eternal life. Don't you want to know the answer to a riddle like that?

Jesus began with something that everyone knew already: the Christ would be David's son. This was simply common knowledge. Christ was another name for Messiah, for the Anointed One, for that Savior that God had always promised to send. David, of course, was Israel's greatest of the ancient kings. The scriptures prophesied that the Christ, the Messiah, would come from his lineage.

There's a prophecy about this that God gave to David himself in 2 Samuel chapter 7: "I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. And your house and your kingdom shall be established forever." Think of the famous words from Isaiah that we often repeat at Christmas: "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given," and the prophecy goes on to say, "on the throne of David and over his kingdom." When the Messiah came, he would belong to the royal bloodline of the House of David.

Let me assure you that this was a criterion that Jesus of Nazareth clearly met. He was a direct lineal descendant of King David, and therefore he had a right to be called the Son of David in the messianic sense of that term. Luke has given us a number of reminders of that in the Gospel. You go back to the very beginning to chapter 1, and it is announced that his earthly father, Joseph, was a man from the House of David.

The angel Gabriel, speaking to Mary, said that her child would inherit the throne of his father David. Then when the child was born, Luke tells us, and this is now on into chapter 2, that he was of the house and lineage of David. Then in chapter 3, it's confirmed with a very careful genealogy that Luke provides there. You can find similar things in other places in the New Testament. The point is—and this is the fact that sets up the riddle, it's foundational to the answer that Jesus gives—the fact is that Jesus belonged to this venerable house, the most noble of all kingdoms. He is the Son of David.

So far, so good. That's easy enough to understand. Everybody knew it. Everybody knew that the Christ would be David's son. But now Jesus goes on to ask how the Christ, if he is David's son, could also be David's Lord. This is the puzzling question. To really understand what the question involved, I think it's important to go back to something that David himself once said, and that's found in Psalm 110. It's a Psalm of David. It's a messianic Psalm. That is to say, it is a Psalm that makes explicit prophecies about the coming of the Christ.

All of the ancient rabbis agreed on this point: that in Psalm 110, King David was prophesying about the Christ. Later, the Puritan Edward Reynolds would say that this Psalm is one of the fullest and most compendious prophecies of the person and offices of Christ in the whole Old Testament. Indeed it is. It is a prophecy about the Christ. It begins, you'll notice, with a dialogue.

What is somewhat confusing about this two-person conversation is that both participants are called Lord. It can be confusing if you have a dialogue or a conversation and both people have the same name. David says here, "The Lord says to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand.'" So who are these two Lords? The identity of the first Lord is obvious, isn't it? Most English translations print his title in small capital letters to show that it refers to God himself. David is using here the name Yahweh, that special divine name that belongs only to God. So the person speaking here in Psalm 110 in verse 1 is the Lord God Almighty.

But now to whom is he speaking? I think the identity of this second Lord is somewhat less obvious, but it's perfectly clear nonetheless. This time David uses a different name for Lord; it is the name Adonai, a more general term that can be used for a number of different kinds of lords, but I think here referring specifically to the Messiah, to the Christ, to the Anointed One. This becomes clear from the rest of the Psalm, which declares that this Lord will rule over the kingdom of God.

David is repeating a dialogue between God Almighty and the coming Christ. He's saying something like this: The Lord God says to my Lord the Messiah, "Sit on my throne to rule the universe." What's puzzling about this is that David regards this Christ as superior to himself. He calls him "my Lord." Yet David never called anyone Lord except, of course, the Lord God himself. Maybe when he was a young boy his father, or perhaps Saul, who was king of Israel before him, but David certainly didn't call anyone Lord once he became the king in his own right.

Yet here David is referring to a person who is so great that he must call him his Lord. The reason I say that's puzzling is because we already know that the Messiah is supposed to be David's son, and in that culture, fathers did not call their sons Lord. I could say we don't do it in this culture either. As far as I know, there aren't any Lords in the Ryken household, but if there were, it would be Lord Philip, it wouldn't be Lord Joshua, it wouldn't be Lord James. It's not something that any patriarch would ever do; it's certainly not something a monarch would ever do.

The son is to give honor to the father, not the other way around. When the Messiah came, surely he would pay homage to David as his great father. Yet here David, even before the Messiah comes, is the one giving the homage. He's acknowledging the superiority of his son. It would be his son, yet David must call him Lord.

You'll notice as well that this second person in the Psalm, the one David calls his Lord, is someone who's going to receive the kingdom. He's going to sit at the right hand of God. Every one of his enemies will be defeated. Of course, the right hand of God represents God's own rule and authority. To be exalted to sit in that awesome place is to reign in glory. It is to share in the royal majesty of God.

So who is this mighty king? Do you understand the riddle that Jesus is posing? How can they say that the Christ is David's son, because David himself says, "The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand." If David thus calls him Lord, how is he his son? What's the solution to that riddle? Obviously, Jesus wasn't denying that he was the Son of David. That's not the solution—to deny that he really is David's son. Jesus knew that he was David's son.

But here he is using the scripture to prove that he is more than the Son of David. He was and is the very Son of God. The Christ was David's Lord because he was David's God. So here you have a riddle that can only be resolved if Jesus is God as well as man, if he is both human and divine. Of course, we know that he is human, that as a man he descended physically from King David. He was David's son.

The Bible also testifies that Jesus was and is also God. By the virgin birth, he had a divine nature as well as a human nature. As God the Son, he had existed since eternity past. So it is that Jesus himself could say near the end of the Book of Revelation, "I, Jesus, am the root and the descendant of David." In other words, I am both David's creator—his root—and his human son. This explains why David should call him Lord. The Son of God was David's Lord at the very moment David uttered the words of Psalm 110. At that very moment, he was God the Son, and he was ruling with his Father in heaven, and David rightly called him my Lord. It was his deity—his eternal deity—that made him superior to David. The fact that as God the Son, he was very God of very God.

Jesus had already given, I think, many convincing proofs of his divine power. We've commented on many of them in our study of the Gospel of Luke. Every miracle he performed was a proof of his deity. If you had any doubt about the deity of Jesus Christ, all you need to do is go back to Luke chapter 9 to the Mount of Transfiguration, where Jesus is revealed in all of the splendor of his divine majesty.

But now Jesus is proving his deity from the scriptures, from the Word of God. He's clinching the case with a riddle that can only be resolved by the man who is also God. Do you believe this to be true about Jesus of Nazareth: that he is the Christ of God? Some people don't believe that. The scribes and the scholars didn't believe it. They didn't understand that the Messiah would be God as well as man. They didn't see that David's son was also their Lord God. But do you believe it?

Earlier I said that the answer to this riddle really unlocks the mystery at the heart of the universe. It teaches you some of the most important things that anyone can know. If there's any riddle in the universe to understand, it's this one from the Gospels. It shows us the mystery of the Incarnation: that Jesus Christ is both human and divine. God the Son has become one of us to save us, but he has also done this without abandoning his deity, and therefore he has divine power to save us.

When you go to Jesus for salvation or for anything else, you're coming to the God who has all authority in the universe. What perspective that gives to the troubles of life! What confidence that gives in prayer, to know that Jesus is very God. This riddle of David's Lord also shows us the mystery of the Trinity, not just the Incarnation, but the great mystery of the Trinity—that there's one God in three persons.

For how can David say, "The Lord said to my Lord," unless there's more than one person within the Godhead? This is a mystery that's only revealed when you understand the Trinity. There you have a conversation that gives you a conundrum that only the reality of the Trinity can resolve. How wonderful it is that already in the Old Testament, you have a clear indication that although there is only one God, he exists in more than one person. This is the truth of the Trinity—that the one and only true God eternally exists in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

How often this comes up again and again in the worship of the church. We give praise to the Father and the Son and the Spirit. Here in the Gospel, as Jesus is quoting from Psalm 110, he is pointing to his deity, and in pointing to his deity, he is testifying to his relationship with God the Father as God the Son. What an amazing riddle! It's unfolding for us the mysteries of the Incarnation and of the Trinity.

It's also bearing witness to the exaltation of Jesus Christ, to his resurrection from the dead, to his ascension to heaven, to his eternal rule over the universe. Because when you look at what Jesus says—that the Lord says to my Lord—if you look at the meaning of Psalm 110, you see what the Father is doing for the Son, what the Lord God is doing for the Messiah Christ. What he's doing is exalting him to his royal throne.

Here we see Jesus knowing the promise of David and embracing it as his own destiny. It's the last week of his life. He's getting ready to lay down his life for our sins. He'll pursue the work of salvation to the very death. But he also knew that the day was coming when he would rise to the throne of the universe, when he would rule in triumph, when as God the Son, our Savior would sit at God's right hand. He would reign on his Father's throne with all of his enemies under his feet.

This is the worship, this is the high praise we give to the Lord Jesus Christ when we confess our faith using the words of the Apostles' Creed: He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Do you see that Jesus is the Christ, that he is the Son of God, that he is the divine king who rules over earth and heaven? He is David's son, and he is David's Lord.

What a deep impression this Psalm seems to have made on the disciples, because this Psalm is the one that they quoted more than any other. It's the one that shows up more times than anything else in the New Testament, more than twenty times in all, if you look at all of the different references and quotations. The Apostle Peter used it on the Day of Pentecost. You'll remember the occasion: he was preaching repentance, about 3,000 people were saved that day. He was telling them that Jesus had been raised from the dead, that he had been exalted to the right hand of God. As part of his biblical argument, he quotes from Psalm 110. Here is the proof that God had taken Jesus, the same Jesus who was crucified, and had now made him to be the Lord and the Christ.

The Apostle Paul used the very same Psalm to prove that when Jesus raises us from the dead, he will destroy every last one of our enemies. The Book of Hebrews uses the Psalm in a number of different ways, but one of them is to show that Jesus is superior to the angels and therefore that he has supremacy over everything. The apostles celebrated Jesus as David's Christ. When they thought of this Psalm, it raised their hearts to praise. It convinced them and confirmed them in the truth of Jesus and the resurrection.

Is this the Savior that you know? Is this the God that you worship? Is this the response of your soul when you hear that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is Lord over all? Do you worship him not just as David's Lord, but also as your Lord? What an amazing question Jesus asked, and what an amazing answer he gives. It's really not just the answer to this question; it's the answer to all of our questions. The answer he gives is himself. He tells a riddle to which he himself is the answer.

If we believe in Jesus, then the very Son of God is Christ our Lord. I think that's the most important saving truth in the whole universe. I think it's the answer to the question of all questions, the riddle of all riddles: Who is Jesus? If you answer that question with a response of faith in your own mind and heart, then you have the key to unlock all of the other mysteries in the universe. The other answers will come. Just be sure to begin with Jesus as the Christ, with Jesus as the Son of God. The scripture says that this Jesus was descended from David according to the flesh, and he was declared to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.

That's the way the Apostle Paul put it early in the Book of Romans. He said, "Jesus Christ our Lord, this Son of David, this Son of God, risen from the dead with the power of salvation." He is Jesus Christ our Lord. Are you able to make that same testimony in your own mind and heart, that Jesus Christ is your Lord? Because if you believe the answer to this ancient riddle—that Jesus the Savior is the Son of God—then David's son is not just David's Lord, he's also your Lord, and he will raise you with him to eternal life.

Our Father in heaven, we give praise to Jesus Christ as our King and our God. All salvation is found in him. Lord, help us to seek the answers that you have to give us by beginning with Jesus, to see him as the answer, to acknowledge him as our Lord and God. It's in his name that we pray. Amen.

Guest (Female): You are listening to Every Last Word with Bible teacher Dr. Philip Ryken, a listener-supported ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance exists to promote a biblical understanding and worldview. Drawing upon the insight and wisdom of reformed theologians from decades and even centuries gone by, we seek to provide Christian teaching that will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place. Alliance broadcasting includes The Bible Study Hour with Dr. James Boice, Every Last Word with Bible teacher Dr. Philip Ryken, God's Living Word with Pastor the Reverend Richard Phillips, and Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible featuring Donald Barnhouse.

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