Introduction: The Church as Preview
A recent guest preacher at my church told us about a dire conflict in his marriage. It centered on the “preview controversy.” You know, the old argument that occurs when you get the video home from Blockbuster, and you have to decide whether or not to watch the previews. The guest preacher said that he represented the pro-preview perspective; he wants to watch all the previews, so he knows what the coming attractions are. His wife represents the anti-preview faction; she thinks they are a waste of time. She’s got other things to do, phone calls to make, letters to write, and just wants to be called in when the screen says “And now for our feature presentation.” The preacher went on to argue that his perspective was a decidedly more Biblical one. And I’d have to agree.
You see, the Bible is all about previews of coming attractions. The “feature film” is the kingdom of God in all its glory, beauty, and wholeness. And there are previews of it all throughout the Old Testament. Throughout the OT, we get prophetic glimpses into what life in the feature film will be like. In Psalm 46:9, for example, God says one day he will make wars cease to the ends of the earth: He will break the bow and shatter the spear. Psalm 72 gives a preview of life under the reign of King Jesus, the King whom God will endow with justice:
He will judge the people in righteousness, the afflicted ones with justice. The mountains will bring prosperity to the people, the hills the fruit of righteousness; He will defend the afflicted and save the children of the needy. (Verses 2-4)
Or consider the preview presented in Isaiah 32: 1-5...
See, a King will reign in righteousness and rulers will rule with justice…. The mind of the rash will know and understand, and the stammering tongue will be fluent and clear. No longer will the fool be called noble nor the scoundrel be highly respected.
So many previews...of the time that is to come when the swords will be beat into plowshares; when the child will play safely at the viper’s nest, when the lion will lie down with the lamb, when every man will rest secure under his own vine and fig tree, when the desert will blossom with crocus, when the burning sand will become a pool, when the mute tongue shall be loosed and the lame leap like a deer.
The consummation of the Kingdom of God is going to be awesome and glorious. And it has already begun to break in. We know that from the lips of Jesus Himself, in the very text we have before us this morning. Here in Luke 4, at the Temple, Jesus is inaugurating his public ministry. He took up the scroll of Isaiah, he picked out a preview passage from Isaiah 61:1-2, He read it — “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” — and then He said, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus was saying: “The feature film has begun.” The Kingdom has broken in to this world.
In this inaugural address, Jesus presents us with a threefold mandate for ministry. He has revealed what His own ministry on earth will be all about. He sums it up; He says it will be about three things:
1) preaching the good news of the Kingdom
2) healing the sick and restoring sight to the blind
3) releasing the oppressed; setting at liberty the prisoners.
We need to understand this ministry of Jesus, because He’s called His followers to imitate this mandate. He has invited us to join Him in His ongoing doing of this mission. He has told us what His agenda for ministry is, and we need to be in line with His agenda. His threefold mandate for ministry is our threefold mandate for ministry.
So, what I’d like to do this morning is some Bible study on each of these components of Jesus’ kingdom work. Let’s dig into the scriptures and observe God at work and cull out some principles. Then, in tonight’s address, I want to move to application – to flesh out what it looks like in terms of our day-to-day ministries to be disciples who follow Jesus’ threefold Kingdom mandate.
1) Preaching the Good News of the Kingdom
St. Francis of Assisi is famous for saying “Preach the gospel at all times, when necessary, using words.” It’s a great quote for reminding us that talk can be cheap, and that preaching or evangelizing without deeds and lifestyles that give credibility to the words is a danger to be avoided. But it is also true that we are sometimes guilty of being too shy to use actual words. Jesus, of course, was not. He was a consummate preacher and teacher. He was active in the work of evangelism. He was completely clear on the importance of a man’s soul. Thus, it is critical for us to be involved in intentional evangelistic inquiry. We will talk more about that tonight and look at some practical ways to do it.
So, we know that we are supposed to be about the work of evangelism and discipleship. We know that “preaching the message” is of crucial importance. But what is the content of the message that we’re to share? It must be the same message as Jesus’ message. So let’s consider the message Jesus was preaching. In short, as every Bible scholar will tell you, Jesus’ principal message was the Kingdom. Jesus defined salvation as “entering the Kingdom.” When the “gospel” is discussed in the NT, it is called “the gospel of the Kingdom.”
I’m now going to make a point that puts me in danger of being misunderstood. But I’m going to take that risk because I think this is a crucial point. In our own evangelism, we sometimes preach “the gospel,” but not the full “gospel of the Kingdom.” What we do is say that Jesus came preaching the Gospel. Period. And we’ve reduced “gospel” to a narrow thing about individual salvation. We’ve said that the Gospel is all about our personal salvation; about Jesus’ atonement for our sins on the cross and our rescue from hell & death and our salvation into heaven. And absolutely none of that is wrong, it’s just terribly incomplete. It’s just a dreadfully tiny glimpse that really doesn’t give God the kind of honor and glory that He deserves and that frankly, somewhat belittles the work of Christ. Jesus came preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom.
The Gospel of the Kingdom includes the glorious work of Christ on our behalf to save us from our sins. That is indeed the very heart, the very core of the Gospel of the Kingdom. And how we should celebrate this good news! We who were sinners deserving only death have been pursued by a loving God who satisfied His justice by killing his own Son, and who proved His mercy by pouring out on perfect Jesus the wrath we deserved for our myriad imperfections and wickedness. These truths are at the very heart of our love affair with Jesus and we should “marinate” in the gospel.
All of this is rich, and wonderful, and to be treasured & celebrated & talked about over and over again. But it is not the totality of Jesus’ message and it does not represent the full picture of God’s work of grace and it is not the whole definition of the “Gospel of the Kingdom.” We must understand the gigantic, cosmic nature of Jesus’ work. The apostle Paul speaks of it regularly in terms of reconciliation - which includes the reconciliation of sinful man to a holy God — but also includes more reconciliation — the reconciliation of man to man (consider Eph. 2:14-18) and the reconciliation of ALL things in heaven and on earth under the headship of Christ (consider Col 1:19-20 “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Him and through Him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things in earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross”). The Gospel of the Kingdom is about our personal reconciliation with God — but can’t you see it’s bigger than that? It is the reconciliation of all things under Christ’s headship. The Gospel of the Kingdom is about Jesus Christ’s defeat of our personal evil, our personal sin but it’s also about so much more — Jesus’ defeat of all sin and evil. What does the apostle John tell us in I John 3:8 but that “The reason that the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work”? Jesus spoke of this himself when he told the parable about binding up the strong man and plundering him. Our hymns get this better than we do: think about “Joy to the World.” Doesn’t it say: “He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found, far as the curse is found.” Jesus’ work is about our personal healing and our personal peace. But oh so much more. It’s about the inauguration of God’s “shalom” — the setting right of every broken thing. Even nature. That’s what the apostle Paul speaks of in Romans — the whole creation is groaning because of the curse and Jesus’ work is to throw back the curse and consummate a new Kingdom wherein nature itself will be released from bondage.
There is such a universal, such a cosmic, such a grand scope to Gospel of the Kingdom. As one scholar has put it, “The gospel of the kingdom announces nothing less than God’s intention, and activity, to replace the effects of the fall (sin, guilt, sickness, hunger, injustice, oppression, poverty, bondage, dehumanization, and death) with his kingdom righteousness, and His work will not be finished until his redemption covers the whole earth.” The gospel isn’t merely about making YOU a new creature, though it certainly is about that. Jesus’ good news of the Kingdom is that He’s come to make ALL things new. We are told in Revelation that that will be Jesus’ victorious shout when He comes his second time as the king of kings and lord of lords: “Behold, I am making everything new” it says in Rev 21:5.
The Gospel Jesus preached, the message Jesus shared, was big. It announced total revolution -- conquest by King Jesus of a runaway planet. It’s personal salvation and total societal transformation to a world without injustice, starvation, oppression, persecution, poverty, racism, alienation, warfare, genocide. This must be our message too. Preach good news to the poor – preach the WHOLE good news – that’s the first part of Jesus’ mandate to His church.
2) Restore Sight to the Blind
Well, if the first of the threefold mandate of Jesus’ mission is to preach the good news of the Kingdom, the second is to heal the sick, to restore sight to the blind.
We’ve just been considering the words of Jesus, as I’ve emphasized that the content of His preaching was the good news of the Kingdom. Let’s look now to the deeds of Jesus. Think about His miracles. There’s such a wonderful array of them. But first let’s consider how Jesus Himself interpreted His miracles.
Jesus interpreted His miracles in this Kingdom language. In Luke 11, Jesus casts out a demon in a suffering man, and the Pharisees are critical of it and accuse him of being in sync with Beelzebub. But Jesus responds in verse 20, “If I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you.”
What we need to see about the miracles of Christ is that when Jesus was performing those miracles, He was doing more than just healing individual sufferers. He was doing that – and it was beautiful and spectacular. But He was also doing more than that. Jesus was reaching into the future, full Kingdom of God, and He was yanking a foretaste of it into the present. It’s as if He were announcing, “In the feature film, there will be no blindness ... and so I give sight to the blind beggar Bartameas. In the feature film, there will be no leprosy ... so I touch the lepers and make them clean. In the feature film, there will be no death ... and so I say to you Lazarus: ‘Up from the grave!’”
The miracles of Christ were signs of the in-breaking of the Kingdom; foretastes of Kingdom realities. They show us the nature of holistic ministry, of how Kingdom shalom is to come into us in every sphere of our lives. The deeds resonate with the words: the message is “the Kingdom of God has arrived” – and that means wholeness – so the deeds then bring wholeness as experiential reality. The Gospel of the Kingdom is the message that shalom has begun to break into our world – and that means physical wholeness, emotional wholeness, mental wholeness, relational wholeness, community wholeness.
1) So, we see Jesus performing physical healings. We can think about the woman with the bent back or the man with the shriveled hand or blind Bartemeus or the deaf-mute or the ten lepers…there are so many wonderful examples.
2) We see Jesus performing mental healing – perhaps the best example here is Jesus’ healing of the man who called himself “Legion” because he was possessed by some many demons. He is in such mental anguish, he is out of his mind. He wanders about naked, groaning and shrieking. But when Jesus finishes with him, he is “clothed and in his right mind.” [find ref]
3) We see Jesus providing emotional healing – I love the story of Jesus’ healing of the woman with an issue of blood. You remember the story. Jesus is on the move to an important person’s home – Jairus, a synagogue ruler, has come with an urgent request for Jesus to come heal his dying daughter. And the woman with the issue of blood thinks she’ll just unobtrusively touch the hem of Jesus’ garment. But of course Jesus stops right in the middle of the procession. And you see, there is a reason why He does this. This woman would have been considered ritually unclean for so many years. You can feel her sense of shame – she doesn’t feel deserving. So Jesus not only heals her, but He puts her on the same level of importance as Jairus, because He is willing to stop everything to attend to her. Luke 8:47 says that woman knew that she could not go unnoticed – Jesus wants her to be front and center, and it’s because He wants to commend her faith before the crowd.
In all these healings, Jesus legitimizes the importance of the body, the mind, and the emotions. In all these things, Jesus is showing that His work, and consequently the work of the Church, involves more than talking about the good news. It means giving people foretastes of the Kingdom; it means helping people to experience the good news. This means that it is a Kingdom act to preach the gospel and it is a Kingdom act to run a medical clinic or to start a micro-enterprise or to provide shelter for the homeless or to tutor an at-risk kid or provide counseling to the victims of domestic violence.
And let’s take a moment to notice the character of Jesus’ healings. They are personal. There’s a one-at-a-time character to them. Jesus could have magically brought all the sick people together, gathered them in a crowd, and then waved a magic wand and healed everyone at one time. There was nothing to stop Him from doing it that way. You can even argue that that way would have been more efficient. Just think of all the time that could have been saved – just one gigantic mass healing that takes all of 10 seconds, then Jesus is freed up to do all sorts of other stuff—like preaching. But this is not Jesus’ method. Jesus shows us that God is a personal God, a relational God.
One of my favorite healing stories comes from Mark 7: 31ff. It’s the story of the healing of the deaf-mute, and it really demonstrates this personal character of Jesus’ approach to the ministry of mercy and healing.
I am indebted to Rev. Tim Keller for some wonderful observations on this passage. Keep in mind that this healing comes just after another healing, one in which the mechanics of the healing are completely different. If you look back to verse 24 and following, you’ll read the story of Jesus’ healing of the Syro-Phoenician woman’s daughter. And the contrasting point is this: in that healing, there was very little activity by Jesus. When the woman gives her famous answer about “even the dogs eat the crumbs under their master’s table,” Jesus rewards her faith by telling her that her daughter is well. So Jesus never sees the daughter, never gets up close to her, never touches her. His power to heal is such that He does not need to do any of that. He can just say the word from a distance, and in the instant His word is spoken, the healing is accomplished. There is not great effort ever required from Jesus to heal someone. It is the easiest thing in the world for Him; He never breaks a sweat healing someone. We have other examples of these kinds of distance healings in scripture as well. So we should ask ourselves, “What’s going on in Jesus’ healing of the deaf/mute in the passage we are considering here? For Jesus does a lot of weird stuff in effecting this miracle:
1) he takes the man aside, away from the crowd
2) he puts his fingers in the man’s ears
3) he spits and then touches the man’s tongue
4) he looks up to heaven and sighs loudly
5) then he says, in Aramaic, “Ephphatha” “Be opened!”
Again, keep in mind that none of this activity is necessary for the healing, this is not some magical mumbo jumbo that Jesus is doing to produce the miracle. What is it then? It is sign language. It’s a way of communicating the healing that Jesus has chosen for this man in a beautifully sensitive, individually tailored way.
You see, a deaf/mute would have been someone that had been made a public spectacle of all his life. And the crowd’s brought him to Jesus, hoping for some impressive show to watch. And Jesus thinks, “I’m going to treat this man with dignity. I’m not going to participate in his being made a spectacle yet again.” So he takes the man away from the crowd. But, isn’t it possible that the deaf/mute guy is made a little afraid by that action? He can’t hear Jesus; he’s never heard the words this holy man has said. And he can’t talk; he can’t ask Jesus, “Why are you taking me aside?” “What are you going to do?” All he likely knows is that this crowd has brought him to this man who is apparently someone very powerful. So, given his limitations, he might be feeling a bit nervous about this private session with Jesus. So Jesus speaks sign language to the man. He puts his fingers in the man’s ears, by way of communicating: “First I’m going to make you hear again.” Then he touches the man’s tongue, by way of saying, “I’m going to help you to speak.” And he wants the man to understand that the blessing he is about to receive comes from God. So he deliberately looks up to heaven and he sighs to indicate to the man that he, Jesus, is communicating with God. And then he speaks out the words of healing, and the miracle occurs.
How gentle is Jesus here, how personal. This is touching, one-on-one, individually tailored communication between the living God and a hurting person.
The principle here is clear – our ministries of mercy, our ministries of healing must also be personal. We’ll talk more about this tonight.
3) The final part of the three-fold mandate of Christ is to release the oppressed.
If the first part of the mandate could be called the evangelization mission of the Church, and the second part could be called the mercy mission of the Church, then this third part is what we might call the “justice mission” of the Church. Jesus’ three part inaugural address reveals what He is passionate about. He is passionate about the lost – hence He wants to preach the good news of the Kingdom. He is passionate about the hurting, the needy, the broken, the hungry and poor – thus He is about the work of healing, mercy, compassion, and restoration. And He is passionate about justice, about those who suffer from injustice, and thus He commits Himself and His followers to the work of releasing the oppressed.
We see Jesus doing the work of justice in Luke 19, when he drives the sellers out of the Temple after He has entered into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. This cleansing of the temple is recorded in all three synoptic gospels – Luke 19, Mark 11, and Matthew 21.What is Jesus really upset about here? Is it merely that worldly, mundane, economic transactions are occurring in the Temple – in this “spiritual” place that would be defiled by money and business? That was probably part of it, since an earlier temple cleansing, recorded in John 2:15, speaks of Him complaining that the people have made the temple into a marketplace. But in this second cleansing of the temple, which follows on the heels of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, it is quite clear that that’s not the main point. In all three accounts, the gospel writers record Jesus as saying this: “It is written, my house will be a house of prayer but you have made it a den of robbers.” If it was merely the doing of business in the Temple that Jesus was upset about, He could have said, “you’ve made it into a den of businessmen.” He deliberately calls it a den of robbers, and the reason is because these were not honest businessmen; these were oppressive businessmen who took advantage of the poor and weak. The very phrase Jesus selects is in fact a quote from the Old Testament, from the prophet Jeremiah. In Jeremiah chapter 7, God tells the prophet Jeremiah to go stand at the entrance to the temple and to rebuke the people for their false worship. They come in the temple to offer their sacrifices and lip service, but they are doers of injustice, and God doesn’t want them in his holy temple. God says to the people thru Jeremiah:
If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in the place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever.
But God knows the people are not doing justice – He says that He is aware that they are doing “detestable” things and then having the effrontery to enter His temple. So He says “Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you?”
Jesus was an advocate for justice; Jesus was active in doing social justice. We see it here in the narrative about the cleansing of the temple. We see it in Matthew 23 when He rebukes the Pharisees and scribes for tithing their spices but “neglecting the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness.” We see it in Luke 18, when Jesus tells the parable of the persistent widow and say that God is a God will who indeed “bring about justice for his chosen ones who cry to him day and night.” We see it in Luke 20 where Jesus berates the Pharisees for “devouring widow’s houses.” (ver 47) We see it in Matthew 15 where He rebukes the Pharisees for the injustices they do against the elderly (they taught that a grown son could tell his parents, who had a right to rely on him for financial aid, that he planned to designate whatever he would have given to them as “corban” – an offering to God – thus leaving them without the weight of the responsibility to care for their aged parents.
You see, Jesus is passionate about justice because He is God in the flesh, and we know from hundreds of scriptures that God is passionate about justice. The implication of all this is very clear: being lovers and doers of justice is not an optional add-on in our Christian lives. It is not something for just young people or radical people to do; it is not just for those people who are “into it.” It is essential and mandatory and central.
A) It is essential and mandatory and central because delighting in justice and doing justice are essential, central characteristics of God.
Justice is an essential part of God’s character. God refers to Himself in Deut. 10 like this: “For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.” God calls himself “a just God and a Savior” (Ps 45:21). God is worshipped in the heavenly courts as the God of justice: “Just and true are all thy ways O Lord” (Rev. 15:3)
He delights in justice; He doesn’t just do justice the way we do the dishes – because it needs to get done. He loves justice “Psalm 99:4 “The King is mighty, he loves justice—you have established equity, in Jacob you have done what is just and right”
B) It is essential and mandatory and central because God connects justice with true worship.
God tells us that the doing of justice is an essential part of true worship. In Isaiah 1, God tells the Israelites that their prayers and sacrifices and festivals are detestable to Him and that He will not listen to them. Instead. He tells them to “stop doing wrong; learn to do right. Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.”
C) It is essential and mandatory and central because God connects the doing of justice to “knowing Him.”
Perhaps the most powerful passage on the essential importance of doing justice is in Jer. 22:11-17, where God commends good King Josiah for doing what was “just and right” and then says “Is this not what it means to know me?”
Conclusion
We have covered a lot of territory this morning. And we have heard a lot about the character of the wonderful God we serve. It seems appropriate then, for us to conclude now with worship. Let’s have the Morgan sisters back up here to end with praise songs that remind us how good it is that God is passionate for the lost – for we were lost. That God is passionate for the broken and hurting – for we were (and often still are) broken and hurting. And that God is passionate for the oppressed – for we were enslaved in the kingdom of darkness, but He rescued us. This is a great God. This is a God worthy of our praise.
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