Chapter 1: What questions do we ask when tragedy strikes?
It's hard enough to understand how human beings could be so inhumane and so wicked in their treatment of other human beings, but how could God allow these things to happen? Well, those questions are the questions that every generation seeks to answer, and the people in Jesus' day were no different.
When tragedy comes, whether to our own family or to our nation, our minds can quickly wonder, why me? Why us? Or if someone we know or a celebrity experiences loss, we can begin to question, what did they do? What sin did they commit to deserve that? Well, the people of Jesus' day were no different. Hello, I'm Lee Webb, and thank you for joining us for this Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
Today and tomorrow, R.C. Sproul will consider some of the hard sayings of Jesus, those texts that are either hard to understand or hard to believe. Dr. Sproul actually had four different series dedicated to these hard sayings, and all of them were brought together for the hardcover book, Hard Sayings, Understanding Difficult Passages of Scripture.
And we will send it to you along with digital access to the Hard Sayings of Jesus series when you give a donation in support of Renewing Your Mind at renewingyourmind.org before midnight tomorrow. Well, when tragedy strikes, we're often quick to speak of innocent victims. But when people had questions about some local tragedies in Jesus' day, his perspective was very different from ours.
Here's R.C.
We're going to turn our attention to some of the hard sayings of Jesus. What we call a hard saying is a saying that is either difficult for us in the sense that we perceive it as being harsh or severe, or we can call it a hard saying because it's hard to grasp or hard to understand. It's difficult to figure out what it means, and so we'll be choosing both of those types of hard sayings.
And today, I want to turn your attention to the gospel according to St. Luke, to the 13th chapter, to an episode that is contained there that I, in an earlier series, have already spoken about under our series entitled The Providence of God. But I want to revisit this episode in light of its being a hard saying. Chapter 13 of Luke begins with these words.
There were present at that season some who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And Jesus answered and said to them, Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered such things? I tell you, no. No. but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.
Were those 18 on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse sinners than all other men who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Obviously, the questions that were being brought to Jesus were questions that people had about catastrophes that had befallen people in their day.
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Chapter 2: How did Jesus respond to questions about calamity?
But how could God allow these things to happen? Well, those questions are the questions that every generation seeks to answer. And the people in Jesus' day were no different. And they came to Jesus and reported two specific incidents from their own day. The first one refers to an event that took place in Galilee where while people were in the midst of worship in church, if you will,
Some of the soldiers under the authority of Pontius Pilate came in and massacred them, mixing their blood with the blood of the animals. I mean, these were not warriors on the battlefield. These were supplicants in the worship environment who were stormed upon and treated with a brutal massacre so that their blood was flowing and desecrating the sanctity of the religious buildings there.
And so they come to Jesus and they say, You know, how can this be? And Jesus answered and said to them, do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered such things? Jesus, in a sense, ducks their question and takes this opportunity to instruct them on a very weighty and difficult theological truth.
Jesus answers the question with a question, and it's very similar to the response He gave elsewhere in His ministry that's recorded in the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John. where people brought a man who had been blind from birth to Jesus and asked this question. Trying to trap Jesus with a theological poser, they said to Jesus, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?
Now, those who raised that question committed an informal fallacy of logic, and that fallacy is called the fallacy of the false dilemma, or sometimes it's called the either-or fallacy. They came with Jesus, and they only gave Him two options to account for the man's blindness. Either They said, the man was born blind because of his own sin or because of the sin of his parents.
And how does Jesus answer the question? Neither. Didn't have anything to do with this man's sin or his parents, but that God may be glorified. And he was indeed glorified through the healing of the man born blind. But what was behind that question?
that the disciples raised of Jesus in John's gospel was the assumption that all suffering in this world is proportionately related to a person's particular degree of sinfulness. This is a weighty matter. I don't know how many times I've stood in a hospital room and talked
privately as a confessional situation with dying people who have expressed to me their conviction that the reason for their pain and their suffering was some particular sin that they had committed, and they wanted to get that off their conscience before they died. That is far more present and pervasive among people than we realize. We hardly ever talk about this.
because we want to divorce ourselves from any thought that there is a relationship between sin and suffering. Yet, in the broad picture, the general scope of Scripture, we are told that it is because of sin that suffering and death come into the world. so that there was a sound idea, at least partially, in the minds of the disciples when they asked the question, why is this man blind?
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Chapter 3: What are the hard sayings of Jesus regarding suffering?
Jesus said, don't think that because they suffered, you are better than they are, or they were worse than you are. And then he turns to them and said, unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Beloved, people do dreadful things to people who are innocent of any crime against those who injure them. The terrorist works indiscriminately. He doesn't aim at military installments.
He aims at the general public. He aims at children in order to terrorize as many people as he possibly can. And with respect to the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator, the victim is innocent. And that's true, and we need to remember that.
On the other hand, it is also true that when we look vertically in terms of our relationship to God, none of us is an innocent person before God. And that's what Jesus is trying to communicate, that lest you repent, you will all likewise perish. He's saying to these people, you're asking me the wrong question.
Instead of being horrified that a good God would allow this catastrophe to befall these innocent people in Galilee, the question you should be asking is why your blood wasn't spilled in Galilee. Why is Jesus saying that? That's a hard saying. Jesus is trying to remind these people that there is no such thing as an innocent person, and He's trying to communicate to us
that the real amazing question is not the justice of God but the grace of God. We have a song that we sing called Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. We sing that in church with great gusto and with very little belief. Do we really believe that we are wretches who have been saved by the grace of God?
Do we really believe that the favors we receive from the hand of God are unmerited, unearned, and undeserved? You see, Jesus is saying we should be saying, why didn't our blood flow in that place? How did we escape? How could God, who is a good God, allow me, a sinner, to continue to enjoy all these benefits? That's the question that should be being asked.
And likewise, the next incident that is contained in this narrative is Are those 18 on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think they were worse sinners than all the other men who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, no. They weren't any worse. They weren't any better. Eighteen innocent people in a building, and the building collapses.
It's not like they were standing there outside the construction of this temple playing sidewalk superintendent and harassing the construction workers. And so as a result, God judged them and had the tower fall on their heads. No. They're walking down the street minding their own business. The tower collapsed. Boom. They're killed. The question is, how can God allow that to happen?
Jesus answered his heart. He's saying, why shouldn't God allow that to happen? And the question you should be asking is why that temple doesn't fall on your head. If you really believe that we live by grace, that's the response you have to have.
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