Studies in Blasphemy—II / Luke 7:29-35

I wonder if, before becoming a political candidate, there shouldn’t be a test to have your head examined because you’re going to have to go through attack after attack and those attacks can bring some pretty low blows.  One of those low blows is name-calling.  “Oh, that candidate is part of the lunatic fringe.”  “He’s a war-monger.”  It reminds me of the story our pediatrician told me about a candidate who charged his opponent with being a “practicing thespian.”  The voters didn’t know what a “thespian” was, but it sounded bad and the election was lost. 

But there is a method in the madness of name-calling, a destructive madness. 

In Luke 7:29-35, there’s a divided group around Jesus: “All the people, even the tax collectors, when they heard Jesus' words, acknowledged that God's way was right, because they had been baptized by John. ³⁰But the Pharisees and experts in the law rejected God's purpose for themselves, because they had not been baptized by John.)”

When John the Baptist came, he announced that the Messiah was now inside Israel and He was offering the Kingdom promised to them in the Old Testament.  If they wanted to get in on it, they needed to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.  They would give evidence of this belief by being baptized, which was their identification with the kingdom.  That was God’s plan for them.  But the religious leaders didn’t buy it, so they missed out on God’s purpose. God’s purpose for people is salvation.

This mixed crowd of believers and unbelievers prompts a statement by Jesus: “To what, then, can I compare the people of this generation? What are they like? ³²They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to each other:  'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not cry.'”  He’s referring to the religious leaders. 

Religious people are like children—they want to control us, to get their way, and when they don’t get their way, they start acting up.  In Jesus’ example, he’s talking about children playing a game and He says that it’s like the religious leaders who want Me and John the Baptist to dance to their tune.” 

John was an ascetic ((Lk. 1:15; Matt. 3:4); he wouldn’t “dance,” so they criticized him for it.  They had clashed with John early on.  In Matt. 3:7-10, he tells them that their time is running out.  They clash because they are “religion.”  They thought that because they were related to Abraham that they enjoyed the merits of Abraham and because of these merits they could pray and their prayers would be acceptable; they thought that the merits of Abraham helped them in war, paid for their sins, appeased God’s anger and assured them of an entrance into the kingdom.  But John deals with personal repentance. (Ryrie Study Bible, pg. 1463)

Jesus was just the opposite, Jesus wasn’t an ascetic.  He went to weddings, dinner parties, drank wine and so therefore, they reasoned, He was a drunk and a glutton.  Either way, you got criticized.  (Mind you, they’d never seen Him drunk, they’d never seen Him be a glutton, but they said the blasphemy any way.  It was impossible for Jesus to sin.  He wasn’t guilty of either of these charges.)

This is an example of what religion wants to do with you, call the shots.  Roman Catholic theology is control-freak theology.  A large part of the control comes through their sacramental system.  According to their system, the benefits of Christ’s atonement pass over to the faithful through faith AND through the sacraments.  These sacraments were received by the church from Christ and the church dispenses them to you for your salvation.  By this means, salvation came to be viewed as something coming indirectly to a person from the church through their received system. 

A powerful tool in the hands of the control freaks is found in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist. The focus in the Eucharist is on the priest because he’s the only one who can administer it and because by the power of his voice, he can bring about the repetition of the sacrifice of Christ. 

What if the priest is immoral?  There have been millions of those throughout history.  That makes no difference.  He still can confer sacramental grace through the Eucharist.  The analogy they used in the Middle Ages was “Pure water may be conveyed through a lead pipe as truly as a silver one.” 

The system recognizes baptism as a sacrament, an important one, one Thomas Aquinas said, washes away original sin, but “the Eucharist is the most powerful because it contains Christ Himself.” 

With this focus on the priest, the priest is a powerful person.  What if you commit some sin, a serious one in the eyes of the Church?  He is so powerful that he can withhold the Eucharist from you.  Couple that with one quote: “Further, as Baptism (sic) is the sacrament of our Lord’s Passion, without which there is no salvation, so also is the Eucharist.  For the Apostle says, [here he quotes I Cor. 11:26].  Consequently, as Baptism is necessary for salvation, so also is this sacrament [the Eucharist]."

Now the system has you!  If the Eucharist is necessary for salvation and if the Eucharist can be withheld from you by a priest, then the priest has you and the church has you, lock, stock, and barrel.  This system keeps you coming back and back and back to the priest and the Eucharist again and again and again.  What’s happened is, by baptism, they have you at birth as a baby (or certainly they have your parents), then they have you week by week as you keep coming back for the Eucharist which you have to have for our salvation.  (Along with another week-by-week sacrament, Confession.) 

Salvation is now a matter of mechanical efficiency; observing the sacraments substitutes for the Savior, adds to His work which He declared “finished.”  Luther called this sacramental system the church’s “Babylonish Captivity.” 

In the Luke 7 analogy, John the Baptist is the one they want to “dance,” and Jesus is the One they want to “weep.”  Neither let religion call the shots. Ignore a control freak and the control freak gets angry and strikes back, and he does it, just like the religious leaders did.

John has told the truth about the religious leaders, as has Jesus and they don’t want to admit the truth about themselves.  What happens when people don’t want to admit the truth about themselves?  “People who want to avoid the truth about themselves can always find something in the preacher to criticize.”  (Warren Wiersbe) 

If you don’t like the message, criticize the messenger.  That’s something which can always be done because, if a person has a mind to, he’ll never run out things to criticize. 

Many a good messenger has been run out of the ministry because he gets to the point he just can’t take it any more.  A pastor friend of mine was getting to where he couldn’t take the criticism and he told me that he could quit, go into business, and his revenge would be to “make more money than all of them,” as he’d been successful in business before he entered the ministry. 

It’s like my Latin teacher told us our sophomore year: “Little minds discuss people.  Mediocre minds discuss events.  Great minds discuss ideas.” 

But lest we think, “It’s those Catholics,”  This Sunday, you can read about a lady who, being an upstanding member of a Protestant church in America , read and heard Ephesians 2:8-9 often and heard in church and she heard about grace every Sunday, but she said that nobody ever told her what it meant until . . ., but that’s next Sunday. 

Both Roman Catholics and Protestants put the word “grace” into Sunday play, but mix it with works and thus grace is no longer grace.  Each has its own theology by which they do it, but, in the end, it comes out the same, grace is no longer grace, they just take different routes to get to the same place.  One kills grace by the sacramental system; the other kills it by the Lordship salvation system. 

What blasphemy to say what they said about Jesus!  People have been arguing about Him for 2,000 years.  Our response is to tell the truth about Him.  He’s the Lamb of God who takes the sin of the world, the One full of grace and full of truth.

* = Free Grace Teacher or Ministry