The Insincere Invitation

The other night I was at a street fair that takes place in the town that I live in. I overheard a conversation between a fellow who was part of a Christian ministry and another person who claimed to have no faith in God at all. The man, a self described atheist, insisted that the Christian read a best seller from a renown secular writer that claimed that God did not exist. The Christian insisted that the man needed to read the bible instead.

When the man who lives his life without God in it insisted that the Christian read the secular book first, he responded by saying, “why should I read a book about how life is just a black abys ending in an unconscious dirt nap?” He went on to explain that if he lives his life according to God’s word, statistically he will be happier, have a better relationship with his family and friends and lead a life of less stress in the face of constant duress and will open his eyes in heaven and live with God for eternity. If he is wrong and his fate is just the darkness of the grave with endless sleep, he will have lived a happier life on this earth and if the man of no faith is wrong, he will face an eternity separated from God.

We, as men, seem to always have a preference to want to hang our hat on the word or interpretation of another man. It is almost like we think that the word of God is too simple and needs to be more rigid or more slack. The man in the above story wants to shed the word of God completely and follow the writings of another man as if they were God’s words. To have faith that nothing exists requires a great deal of faith indeed and to believe another person’s creed requires more faith than I have.

In Luke 14:1, we run smack dab into another kind of faith, the modified word of God. This word is always used to put one person in judge of another. The modified law always has a Godly root source, in this case it is the commandment involving doing work on the Sabbath day.

Jesus was in the home of one of the leaders of the Pharisees on the Sabbath and just by coincidence, there was a man there in obvious need of healing. The reason that we know this is because Luke tells us that the man was swollen in the arms and legs. Luke also tells us that the people in the home were watching Jesus closely.

Let’s step back a bit and review this situation. Here are some points to think about:

1. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, He has been hounded by the religious leaders of the day and now He is invited into the home of one of the religious leaders.

2. There just happens to be a person in obvious need of healing, positioned in such a way that he and his condition can’t be missed, when Jesus walks in. This person was probably recruited because of his afflictions and it can be safely assumed that he knew that Jesus was capable of healing him.

3. Everyone in the house was to be a witness to the fact that Jesus was going to do something wrong.

This sounds like a set up to me and it took great courage on the part of Jesus to walk into what He surely knew was a trap.

He gets right to the point by asking the experts in religious law, “Is it lawful to heal this man on the Sabbath?” Luke tells us that they refused to answer Him and Jesus touched the man and he was healed. Jesus turned to his hosts and asked them, “If your son or one of your livestock were to fall into a pit on the Sabbath, wouldn’t you want to get them out?” Again the religious experts would not answer.

These religious men thought that they would trap Jesus with the word as they understood it. The fact is that they convicted themselves by their non action.