Every Last Word

Guest (Male): What happens when you do something wrong and it is found out? While you may try to make an excuse to justify your actions, sometimes that works, but eventually, you will get caught and punished for that wrong behavior.

Mark: Welcome to Every Last Word, a radio and internet program with Dr. Philip Ryken, teaching the whole Bible to change your whole life. As we continue our study through the Gospel of Luke, we come to a number of important issues such as justification, divorce, and election. We will see that these were important issues in Jesus’ time, just as they are today.

Phil, today most Christians recognize the extreme gravity of the sins of terrorism, abortion, and various kinds of sexual sin. Those are certainly grievous sins, but what else does God really find offensive?

Dr. Philip Graham Ryken: Mark, we do tend to rank our sins, don't we? We think of a few sins as being the really bad ones, but we will find in today’s passage Jesus puts the love of money and hypocrisy right in front of us as sins that are deeply offensive to God. Those sins are probably much more common for Christian people to commit. We need to listen carefully to today’s passage and what it has to say about sins that we ourselves may be tempted to love.

Mark: This passage today does say that people can force their way into the kingdom of God. That seems to go against the doctrine of election. How does that work?

Dr. Philip Graham Ryken: It is a puzzling expression, Mark. Jesus talks about people forcefully entering the kingdom of God, or it almost makes it sound like you can break your way into heaven. The point he is making, though, is that when you understand the gospel and you see your sin and begin to see who Jesus is, you will do whatever it takes to find the true way of salvation. That is not at all to deny that it is all of God’s grace, but if God is working in your life and you are beginning to understand the gospel, do whatever you can to come to faith in Jesus Christ and receive eternal life.

Mark: Thank you, Phil. Let's turn in our Bibles now to Luke chapter 16, verse 14, and let's listen together to Dr. Ryken.

Dr. Philip Graham Ryken: The human heart was made to love God, who is infinite in all of his perfections. We were designed to worship the supreme being supremely, and therefore there is within our hearts a vast capacity for affection. Yet our hearts were also designed in such a way that there could only be one predominating affection. There may be many things that we love, but one of them must have the controlling influence because our hearts were made to serve under the mastery of only one governing desire.

As we saw, Jesus said, "No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." Anyone who has ever tried to work for two bosses knows how impossible it is to try to meet two entirely different sets of demands. And so it is, Jesus says, with God and money. God demands that we worship him alone and live to serve others. But money demands that we work for what the world has to offer and live for ourselves.

How could anyone try to meet both of those sets of demands at the same time? And yet that is precisely what many Christians try to do. This was over a century ago now, but it is very up-to-date. J.C. Ryle said thousands on every side are continually trying to do the very thing which Christ pronounces impossible. They are endeavoring to be friends of the world and friends of God at the same time, and hence they live in a state of constant discomfort. They have too much religion to be happy in the world, and they have too much of the world in their hearts to be happy in their religion.

Could it be that these haunting words explain why life is sometimes so disappointing for us? That we love God too much to be satisfied with what the world has to offer, but we love our money too much to find our true joy in God? The Pharisees were like that. They were very busy doing many things for God, but in their heart of hearts, they loved money more than they ever loved God. As a result, not surprisingly, they disagreed with nearly everything that Jesus ever said about money.

If you will turn in your Bibles to Luke chapter 16, we consider verses 14 through 18. Jesus had just finished teaching and then applying the parable of the unjust steward. He was giving his disciples an eternal perspective on their earthly possession. He had warned them to plan for the future, to use their worldly wealth to gain everlasting friends. He had encouraged them to be faithful with what they had, so that one day they would be ready to manage the true riches of God. And he had spoken with them about this mutually exclusive mastery of either God or money.

Interestingly, the Pharisees had also heard what Jesus said about all of this. But rather than letting it rule their hearts, they could only scoff at him. This set the stage for another important exchange between Jesus and these leaders of the religious community, an exchange in which we hear the ridicule of the Pharisees, the rebuke of Jesus, and the only way to get right with God. We begin with the ridicule of these Pharisees. The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all these things, and they ridiculed him.

Luke is showing us the real motivation of these religious leaders, that they were in love with money, and that is why they had so much scorn for what Jesus was saying about serving only one master. You can see from their bad example that if you are not in love with Jesus, it must be because you are in love with someone or something else more than you are in love with him. It is what we love that keeps us away from Jesus. What the Pharisees loved was money and all of the things that they wanted to do with it.

I think you will generally find that people scoff at the things that they find threatening. The fact that the Pharisees were scoffing at Jesus suggests that they felt threatened by what he was saying about the love of money. Perhaps you can understand why. These were men who made a very sharp distinction between the sacred and the secular. On the one hand, they were very serious about following God, but only in a very narrow range of religious duties. And when it came to the rest of their secular business, they were trying to get ahead in life just like everyone else.

They were trying to do what Jesus had said could not be done. They were trying to serve both God and money, and they thought it was ridiculous for him to say that they would have to make a choice. Jesus says we do have to make a choice. We should ask ourselves, which master am I serving? Is Jesus Christ the master of my heart, or am I still slaving away for money, that is to say, all of the things that earthly possessions have to offer?

When we are anxious about our finances, not trusting God to provide for our needs today and tomorrow, we are in love with money and with its power to make us feel more secure. When our lives are so full of work that we have to say no to Christian service, we are in love with our money. We have given it mastery over our schedule. When we find our thoughts returning again and again to something we were hoping to buy, we are in love with money and its power to get us what we think we want.

When we make employment decisions that are spiritually unwise for ourselves or our families, we are in love with our money and our plans for getting more of it. When we find ourselves wishing we had some material possession that God has given to someone else, we are in love with money and the status, convenience, or pleasure that it seems to bring. Whenever we spend more time complaining about what we don't have than rejoicing in what we do have, we are in love with money and we are depending on our possessions to give us contentment and joy rather than trusting God to do that.

When it seems difficult or even impossible to give up something we want in order to give a full biblical tithe or to make some sacrificial gift to Christian work, surely then we are more in love with money than we are with the gospel and with the power it has to change the world. Test that you can offer yourself to see where you are in your relationship with God. Is he your strongest affection, or do you need to confess that you have the kind of love affair with money that will threaten to destroy your soul?

Most Christians are generally inclined to think of the love of money as only a small moral failing. Surely it is a lot lower down the list of bad sins than cursing against God or committing sexual immorality. According to Jesus, the love of money is an appalling betrayal of our love for God that actually sets us against the gospel of salvation and against the kingdom of God. Notice the way that Jesus rebukes the Pharisees: "You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God."

When the Pharisees ridiculed Jesus, they were rejecting God's whole way of salvation. Jesus is peeling back the layers of their self-deception to show us the heart of their sin. He is saying that their love of money is connected to a much deeper spiritual problem, and that is their desire to justify themselves rather than trusting God to justify them and to do it through Jesus Christ. They ridiculed Jesus because they loved their money, and in loving their money, they were seeking to secure their own standing before God and men.

Notice here the way that Jesus describes these men. He describes them as people who tried to justify themselves. This is the way people always are. Until we really learn the grace of God, it is our sinful human impulse for self-justification. It goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, to Adam and Eve, who tried to cover up themselves from one another and then hide away from God. This is what we are always trying to do: hide our sin by making ourselves look better than we really are.

One of the ways that the Pharisees tried to do that was by treating their financial prosperity as a confirmation of their spiritual success. If you are experiencing financial prosperity, that is a blessing from God. It means that God is approving of all that you have done. It is a sign of God’s favor that proves your godliness. That is the way the Pharisees were reasoning about this. Maybe you are tempted to make the same kind of self-justification, though you are tempted to make it in other ways.

We try to justify ourselves by measuring our amount of spiritual activity or by letting people know, even in subtle ways, how much we are doing for God and how difficult it is. We may seek to justify ourselves by refusing to confess our sins, secretly struggling and failing in our fight with temptation because we are too proud to admit that we are sinners too. We may do it from some other pride of position or of the church that we belong to. We may try to do it by pretending to be something on the outside that is nearly the opposite of who we are on the inside.

How different all of that is from God’s true way of justifying sinners, of putting people into a right standing before God. What Jesus said to these Pharisees when they were trying to justify themselves is just as true for us. God knows what is really in our hearts. He knows what acts of spiritual rebellion we have committed this very week, possibly even this very day. He knows what sins we are longing to commit if only we could get the chance.

He knows what quiet cursing we do about the little discouragements in life, what private animosity we have towards a brother or sister in Christ, what secret feelings of self-pity we are nursing in our hearts. He knows how superior we think we are to other people and how deceptively we give them a better impression of ourselves than we deserve. The real question is not what other people think of us. It is what God thinks of us. The reality is that God has a very different way of looking at things than we do, with a much higher standard for godliness.

What God thinks is commendable is exactly the opposite of the things that sinners love to celebrate. Notice again what Jesus says: "What is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God." What a shocking thing for Jesus to say. An abomination is anything that is disgusting to God. Most Christians think of an abomination as some evil deed perpetrated by unrepentant sinners, an act of terrorist violence, abortion, or homosexual sin. Those are the things you see Christians saying in our culture. Those are the things that are an abomination.

Notice what Jesus says is an abomination: it is the love of money. Particularly so when it is having a corrupting influence on people who belong to the community of faith. What is more disgusting to God than people who claim to follow Jesus but serve themselves with what they have instead of serving him? By its very nature, this is the kind of abomination that will only be found inside the church and not outside of it. How shocking, how alarming it is to see the view that Jesus takes of these things.

If all it takes to be guilty of abominable sin is to love a little money, what hope does anyone have of being saved? Our only hope is to be found in the gospel, in the good news of Jesus Christ, in the grace of God for sinful people. What we need is not some human way of gaining approval before other people so that other people will see what we have done. That is the way the Pharisees were operating. God's way of getting right with God is what we need, and that only comes through faith in Jesus Christ.

I was impressed with an interview I recently saw with the singer and songwriter world-famous, simply known as Bono, the lead singer for U2. He was speaking about spiritual things and he said the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between grace and karma. At the center of all religions is the idea of karma. What you put out comes back to you. Yet along comes this idea called grace to upend all of that. Love interrupts the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed because I have done a lot of stupid stuff. It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the cross because I know who I am and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity.

I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity either because there is no salvation in that. There is no salvation in anything that we could do to gain the favor of God. The good news which Jesus is proclaiming is that we don't have to because he has come to save us. This is the world-changing, life-transforming truth that Jesus announces here to the Pharisees of all people, and that he was announcing to his disciples, and that he announces to us if only we will receive it by faith.

Look what Jesus says in verse 16: "The law and the prophets were until John; since then, the good news of the kingdom of God is preached, and everyone forces his way into it." Jesus is telling us that his coming marks a major shift in the history of the human race. Before Christ was the time of the law and the prophets, that is the scriptures of the Old Testament. Even in those days, God was offering people his grace, but it was always in anticipation of the savior who was still to come. Everyone from Adam all the way through John the Baptist was waiting for the Christ. They were looking forward to the day when the savior would come in all of the power of God's saving grace.

Then the savior came in the person of God’s son, the Lord Jesus Christ. He came preaching the gospel and right from the very beginning of his earthly ministry, he was announcing that he had been sent by God to do this very thing: to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God. Why was what Jesus preached such good news? It was good news because it offered grace and forgiveness and eternal life to sinners. Soon Jesus himself would die on the cross for all of our abominable sins.

Then he would rise from the dead with the power of eternal life. This is the good news, that is to say, this is the gospel: that by faith in Jesus, in his crucifixion and in his resurrection, we ourselves can have the forgiveness of our sins and the promise that we will live forever with God. When people heard Jesus preach this, many of them didn't understand it. Some of them would understand it a little better after Jesus died and rose again. Even to this day, many people are like the Pharisees.

They continue to misuse the law of God. They treat it as a way of salvation. They imagine there is something they can do to justify themselves before God and men. It is even true in the evangelical church today where nearly 90 percent of people polled say that in salvation, God helps those who help themselves. It is your initiative that is required in the first instance. But this is the time of the gospel. From the time that Jesus began his earthly ministry right up until today, the kingdom of God has been preached as good news for sinners.

It means there is good news for us with our money-loving hearts. Good news for us whose transgressions are an abomination to God. We don't have to be saved by keeping a law that we can't keep anyway, but simply by trusting the grace that Jesus has for us in the gospel. This is how we are justified. This is what it means to come into the kingdom of God: it is by faith in Jesus Christ.

I want to say something further about what it takes to enter this kingdom of God, but first I think we need to make one very important clarification, a clarification that Jesus himself was concerned to make. He says, "It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one dot of the law to become void." Jesus needed to say this because when he distinguished the law and the prophets from the gospel, there were surely some people who would think that God’s law was no longer in effect. What need does anyone now have for the law?

Jesus says that the law will last at least until the end of the world. He said something very similar in his famous Sermon on the Mount: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I say to you until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished." When Jesus spoke about a dot or an iota, he was referring to the very littlest parts of Hebrew letters. It would compare in English to dotting your eyes and crossing your tees.

Furthermore, he also accepted the validity of the law as an abiding expression of God’s will for his people. God’s character does not change, and therefore what he requires of us in terms of holiness and purity and honesty and integrity, these things do not change. God still wants from us what he has always wanted: a life totally dedicated to his glory. In order to make this point, he proceeds to give an example of a biblical law that is still in force today.

Jesus said that everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery. Divorce is still divorce, and adultery is still adultery. We cannot set aside God’s laws for marriage any more than we can set aside his laws for anything else. What we find in the scriptures is that God’s intention is for men and women to remain in single-hearted devotion to God, or else for one woman to marry one man in a love covenant for life.

There are certain circumstances in which divorce is biblically permissible, most notably in the case of adultery or the abandonment of a believer by an unbelieving spouse. But let me be clear, divorce is never God’s desire for any marriage. These exceptions, as they may be, are only granted because of the hardness of the human heart. His desire is to promote the purity of our sexuality and to protect the sanctity of marriage. He reminds us of the biblical teaching that to follow an unlawful divorce with a second marriage is adding a sin to a sin.

We are surely reminded that marriage is a sacred covenant, and surely the high rate of divorce in our culture and even in the church is a grief to anyone who loves the law of God. Surely it must be a grief to Jesus himself. Why did Jesus talk about divorce here? What is the point of it in this context? Of all the regulations that he could have chosen to show the ongoing validity of the law, why did he choose this particular example? Probably because this was one of the very laws that the Pharisees were failing to keep.

Norval Geldenhuys says these words are especially directed against those Pharisees who allowed divorce to the husbands on various kinds of trifling matters, but violated the right of the wife in such a manner that no right of divorce was granted her if she was unjustly or cruelly treated by her husband. There was a kind of injustice with how the laws of marriage and divorce were being applied in the religious community, particularly by the Pharisees: great leniency towards husbands even to the point of being unbiblical, yet a harshness towards wives who were in a difficult marital situation.

Leon Morris explains the situation. The Pharisees were very permissive in some cases, allowing men divorce on the most trivial grounds. Thus, for example, the Rabbi Hillel thought it enough if a wife spoiled her husband’s dinner, and Akiba went so far as to permit divorce if the man found someone prettier than his wife. Can you see why Jesus would use this as a notable example of a law that needed to continue to be in force? Here the Pharisees were and they thought they could be justified by keeping the law.

But if they were going to have any hope of actually keeping it, they had to make it easier to keep. That is what legalism always does: it makes a great show of keeping the law and talking about the law, but eventually it ends up destroying the law because if you actually preserve the law in all of its perfection, it is much too demanding for sinners to keep. The only way we can keep it is by finding some way to lower God’s standard. That is what the Pharisees were doing with regard to marriage and divorce and many other commandments.

In various ways we are tempted to do the same thing. We like to think of ourselves as people who do what God says. But if you want to think of yourself that way, inevitably you have to lower God’s standards. It may be that some Christians do this in the area of marriage and divorce, somehow thinking that their own difficult marriage situation is an exception to the law of God. But the principle here applies widely to any area of Christian obedience. We generally have a lower standard than God does.

We have a different standard than he does for what does and doesn't count as gossip, or of how much of a right we have to be angry with our children or our parents. Or we may have a very different standard as to what extent our buying and selling are truly honest and fair. If we compared our standards for things and God’s standards for these kinds of things, we would see that they are very different. How could people like us ever justify ourselves?

If we can't justify ourselves, how is it possible for people like us to get into the kingdom of God? Do you see what good news the gospel is, that offers grace for sinners? As important as it is for us to understand the abiding validity of the law as God’s standard for our behavior, it is even more important for us to know the grace that God has for us in the gospel. This surely is the thrust of this. Jesus is proclaiming again that there is good news of the kingdom for those who will enter.

Bono went on to say in that interview the point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world so that what we put out did not come back to us, that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. It is not our own good works that get us through the gates of heaven. That is right. It is not our own good works that get us through the gates of heaven, but the work that Jesus did on the cross, which counts for us when we trust in him.

Have you entered the kingdom of God through faith in Jesus Christ? Jesus has a very interesting way of talking about that here at the end of verse 16. He says that in his day, people were forcing their way into his kingdom. It is a strange expression. What does it mean to say that people are forcing their way into the kingdom of God? It almost sounds like they are getting in by their own strenuous effort and yet the whole thrust of the passage is against salvation by works. It also almost sounds like they are getting in against God’s will.

It means that when people finally understand the good news of salvation, they will do whatever it takes to come to Jesus and to enter everlasting life. Everyone who listens to Jesus in faith presses with the greatest earnestness, the greatest self-denial, and the greatest determination into the kingdom. This is what was happening as Jesus was preaching the gospel. People were coming to him. They wanted to hear what he had to say. Tax collectors and sinners, they were all coming to meet with him and to eat with him. Everyone was drawn to Jesus.

When they heard what he had to say about the kingdom of God, they wanted to enter. It was like they were practically storming the gates of the kingdom of heaven to get in. They were like a rush of sports fans trying to get into the stadium before the opening kickoff, or like a crowd of shoppers trying to get through the doors for a storewide sale. They were pressing to get in. They would break down the doors to enter. This is the way it was in the ministry of Jesus Christ. The people of God had been waiting for the Messiah for centuries. Now the kingdom was actually there in the person of Jesus Christ and they were practically breaking down the doors to get in.

Not, of course, that you could ever take the kingdom of God by force. But it is a manner of speaking, as much as to say that this is how eager people were to get in. This is how eager we ourselves should be to find salvation in Jesus Christ. People will go to extraordinary lengths to get into a place where they really want to go. I had an experience something like this when I traveled to Istanbul more than a year ago in the wintertime with a couple of friends from this church.

On our only free morning, we traveled up some very icy and treacherous hills to go to the Chora Church, which contains what many believe are the finest Byzantine mosaics and frescoes anywhere in the world. To enter that church is to step back a millennium or more in time, to walk in the footsteps of the ancient pilgrims and to see items of unimaginable beauty. Unfortunately, the church was closed that morning. It was a disappointment because the guidebook said it was closed on Monday, the website said it was closed on Tuesday, we were there on Wednesday, and that is the day that it was closed.

There we were halfway around the world. When would we ever have the chance again to see the treasures on the other side of those ancient doors? We were determined to get inside if there was any way that we could do it. We knocked on the door and a little while later it opened just a little bit. A very anxious custodian spoke with us somewhat hurriedly through the door. He directed us around to the side entrance, which was more private. He didn't have the authority to let us in. But where there is a will, there is a way. After we had handed over an unreasonable amount of American money, he let us inside.

We were forcing our way in. Anyone who has ever been to that church can tell you it was well worth whatever expense and effort it required. What would you be willing to do to enter the ancient gates of heaven and to go in and see the beauties of God, to gaze upon the majestic splendor of the Lord Jesus Christ? Would that not be worth any effort and every expense to see that? And if necessary, if it were required, would you not force your way into the kingdom of God?

But the good news is that it is not necessary to do any such thing. All that is required is faith in Jesus Christ. It is just trusting in him. It is just believing the gospel that has been preached, the gospel of the cross and the empty tomb. If you will trust in Jesus Christ, you too will enter the kingdom that will never end.

Our Father in heaven, we give you praise for the teaching ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you, Lord, that his ministry to us often offends us because we have sinful hearts that ought to be offended. We pray that you would help us to see our sin, that you would help us to see the complete salvation that is offered freely to us in Jesus Christ, that we too may enter. In Jesus’ name, Amen.