Thanks, Warren.
Good morning.
It's good to be with you, and I appreciate your
willingness to come and study this critical
idea of preaching from a gospel with me.
It's interesting, this morning on the news, the
tragedy in Mammoth Lakes, California.
Some teenagers wandered out on ice, but they
fell through, and people went to get them
and save them, and they fell through.
So last they knew there were about seven people
who had drowned.
As they interviewed people on the news, people
kept saying the ice just wasn't thick enough.
There were only two to three inches.
They shouldn't have been on there.
It wasn't thick enough to support the weight
that was there.
I wanted to begin with that.
I think God has put on my heart a need to say
just a word before we get into some of
the technicalities today, and that is that it's
easy to get into preaching and study
of gospels and so on, and forget the gospel, to
forget that God has redeemed us through
Jesus Christ.
And I live in fear of taking us into
technicalities of Synoptic Gospels and so on,
and in my own
life, weekly, that fear of getting in and
looking at grammar and syntax and comparing
parallel columns so much that I forget the
wonder of the story that God has redeemed
me through Christ.
And after a while in our preaching, we can get
to the place that the ice isn't thick
enough to support the weight we're putting on
it, and we start to preach out of a sense
of desperation without that deep conviction
that God is working and that His Spirit is
ministering in us.
So I thought it appropriate today that we begin
by asking God to use us and to let us
see afresh the Good news that's presented in
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and all
through the New Testament and the Old Testament.
Another story from last year was of a bridge
that collapsed in Tennessee not far from Searcy.
They found out that people had been checking,
had been looking at the big columns that supported
it, but nobody ever looked beneath the surface.
They never got any divers to go down and look
at the condition of the pillars underneath.
And then as they began to check, they were
corroding under the water.
Above they were fine, but seldom had they
checked what was beneath the surface.
And I pray that God will let us check for just
a moment this morning what's going on
beneath the surface and to see that there is
enough weight to support what we're trying
to do and God has called us to do.
So would you join me in a couple songs and just
a word of Scripture and then a prayer?
Oh, worship the King, all-glorious above, And
gratefully sing his wonderful love.
Our shield and defender, the ancient of days,
Pavilioned in splendor and girded with praise.
The ninth chapter of John is the sixth of seven
signs presented in that Gospel.
The prologue said that he is the Light of the World.
And so now he comes to one to impart light.
Of course, it wasn't just that eyes need to be
open, it's that souls need to be opened.
And so after being rejected by neighbors and by
parents and by religious leaders in a chapter
we'll look at a little more in the next hour,
Jesus, having heard that he'd been thrown
out, found him and said, Do you believe in the
Son of Man?
Who is he, Sir, the man asked?
Tell me so that I may believe in him.
And Jesus said, You have seen him, in fact,
he's the one speaking with you.
And then the man said, Lord, I believe, and he
worshiped him.
And Jesus said, Sometimes when you think you
can see, when you've got it all figured out,
when you've hammered out all the hermeneutical
principles and the exegetical tools and so
on, sometimes you don't see because you're too
self-sufficient in your seeing.
It's only when you're blind and knowing that
you're needy that you can see.
Praise your name, Lord Jesus.
You're my rock, you're my fortress, you're my
deliverer, and you will I trust.
Praise your name, Lord Jesus.
Into my heart, into my heart, come into my
heart, Lord Jesus.
Come into me, come into my heart, Lord Jesus.
Here we are, Lord, people who have no right to
even speak your name, much less get in
front of people to declare the name.
We are sinners, we have sin that needs to be
uprooted in our hearts.
And yet, Lord, the word that we preach is that
you have come through Jesus Christ to
redeem us.
And so here we are, Lord, people saved, your
sons and your daughters who bear your name.
Mold us, use us, turn us upside down, rip out
what needs to be ripped out and uproot
what needs to be uprooted.
Let us never take for granted the message that
we preach, never let us get so comfortable
with holy things that we don't even see them.
Fill us with the wonder of the gospel.
We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Turn to Luke 3 with me.
Is Harold Schenck here?
This is a rotten thing to do, but we're going
to study the text he's about to preach.
I tried to call Harold yesterday to get his
permission to do this, and he'd already left
Memphis so this is rotten, but we're going to
talk about what he ought to be doing at 9.45.
And then we'll come back at 11 and talk about
whether he did it or not.
And Doug Parsons, if you're here, don't feel
very comfortable because this afternoon we'll
talk about Luke 4, which he's doing tonight.
But as I got to thinking about how to preach
from a gospel, maybe one of the best ways
we can get into this is just grab a text, and
especially one that's about to be presented,
and go with it.
Craig, aren't you glad we didn't do this yesterday?
The class was Tuesday instead of Monday, but I
know you did a good job, and I know Harold,
and I know what Harold's going to be doing,
kind of.
I know where his heart is, and I'm confident
that what we talk about is going to be echoed
at 9:45, part of this.
When you come to Luke 3 and you're ready to
preach, the first thing you think
of, if you haven't thought of it for a while,
is that there are four gospels.
John the Baptist is in all four of the gospels,
but this is just one of the four.
And that's an incredibly important little
discovery, that there are four gospels.
Now our tendency is to try to do what Tatian did.
He produced the Deuteron very early in the 2nd century.
It was the first systematic harmonization of
the gospels.
Try to bring the four of them together to
produce one story.
And there's something useful with that.
I think for people to see the story told at
once and to get a feel for that is useful.
But I don't want to give them a Bible where
everything is harmonized for them, because
that's not the way it comes in canon.
But he was doing something useful to try to
give a sense of the story.
Not to take away all whatever clashes and
uncomfortable passages may sit next to one
another, but just to show the story.
But we can't do that first.
The first thing we do is to realize there are
four gospels, and four different voices
have to be heard.
When we come to Luke 3, we are not preaching
miscellaneous thoughts on John the Baptist.
We are preaching Luke 3:1-20, or whatever part
of this pericope you choose
to tell.
And so don't go grabbing something out of
Matthew and something out of Mark, and don't
go get all the Behold the Lamb of God in John 1.
Begin in Luke 3.
That says something very important that there
are four of them.
Because if the gospels are setting out just to
tell the story of Jesus, they didn't do
a very good job.
We could have one gospel instead of four.
If God just wanted a biography of Jesus, and
these are told in the story line of biography,
I'm not saying they're not, but they're not
just that.
If He wanted just that, we'd just have one
probably, and it would have filled in more
of the blanks.
It would have made it a little clearer.
We wouldn't have wondered why this over here
and why that over there.
It's not told that way.
It's told in different ways, Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John.
And we do that all the time.
I preach to a church that is made up
predominantly of college students, and what you
say when
you ask them, tell me about yourself, their
response depends on who asks them.
If a doctor says to a college male, tell me
about yourself, he's not going to say, well,
I like old Star Trek movies, and my favorite
color is blue, and so on.
A doctor has asked, and so he's going to say
something like this, well, I've been fairly
healthy all my life.
I had the measles when I was in first grade.
In my spare time, I do aerobic exercise, and I
eat fairly well.
He says that because it was a doctor that said,
tell me about yourself.
Now he goes over to the student center, and a
college female says, tell me about yourself.
He's not going to say, well, I had the measles
when I was six, and it's a different context.
He tells her something different.
It sounds more like dating game talk.
Well, I'm 21, played five years for the
Cowboys, I'm a radiologist.
My spare time, I work out, eat rare beef, do
various caring and romantic things.
He knows the context, and so he says that to her.
Professor comes up and says to him, tell me
about yourself.
He's not going to go into his dating game Spiel.
He'll say, well, maybe this, I graduated salutatorium.
He doesn't mention there were five in his
graduating class, but just graduated salutatorium.
In my spare time, I read old organic chemistry
textbooks, and try to bone up on my French,
and so on.
A preacher comes up and says, tell me about yourself.
He says, automatically, well, I was baptized
when I was 14.
I went to Bible camp four years, served as a
counselor one year.
My spare time, I study Hebrew, you know, I go
door knocking, and so on.
He's giving it that context.
Now, you sit back and you say, now, which one
of those stories is true?
Well, they're all true, except maybe the dating
game story, you know.
That one tends to be stretched the most.
But outside of that, what he told the doctor is true.
Part of what he told the girl is true, what he
told the professor is true, and what he
told the preacher is true.
But the context, he was speaking to them, and
they expected something different.
Four different circumstances demand four
different answers.
Who is Jesus?
Well, there are four different contexts.
Matthew's writing to his Christian community,
Mark's writing to his Christian community,
Luke's writing to his, and John is writing, I
think, to his Christian community.
He says, I write these so that you might
believe, but that could be so that you can keep on
believing and in believing have life, like
you're not experiencing it and should be experiencing.
And so it depends on whom you're speaking to.
The same way is true of any history, any narrative.
We've got to get out of thinking that history
is neutral.
History is not neutral.
When I tell you our family history, I'm trying
to tell you who I am and who my children are.
When I tell Matthew the story of Mike and Diane
getting married and moving to Memphis
and wanting a child and having a child and
moving to North Carolina because they thought
he would be blessed by living there and so on,
I pick certain things to try to frame
life for him.
I'm building his sense of life by the stories I select.
When you studied American history, and if
you're an American citizen, you did study
American history.
It's a federal law.
You studied certain stories.
And the reason, especially probably more true
20, 30 years ago, but even today, the reason
some of those stories were selected was to
produce patriotism.
You don't get a history textbook that gives all
of the trash of America without any of
the good things.
What they're trying to do is select some
stories, select some events that give you,
yes, a sense of history, but also a sense that
this is my story and I enter into here,
and this is my nation.
So we're familiar with that.
We're producing something in the Gospels.
Each writer has a point or points that need to
be made.
He's taken his material that was available to
him, and in the next hour I'm going to
come back and talk more about where the
material came from and how it was shaped and so on.
But he takes that and he shapes it to produce
some point.
And so in some ways, you preach Luke just like
you preach Colossians.
One of the mistakes we make is we go to
Colossians and we do real good research.
We study the history.
We study the literary context.
We come to Luke and preach Jesus stories.
When the same tools need to be brought to the
Gospels, because he was trying to do something,
he had material before him, he says in Luke 1,
there were accounts out there.
I grabbed them and I did something with them to
produce my account, because here's what
I'm wanting to do.
And again, that is for our next hour, what he's
trying to do.
But just now, getting in mind that we're not
just looking for sweet Jesus stories.
We're not even searching, you've heard the
phrase, the Ipsisima Berba, the exact words
of Jesus.
Now that's great to do that.
Jeremiah spent a lifetime looking for the exact
words of Jesus, but when you finally
get down to it, what's in my text, my canon, is
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
And I speak authoritatively when I preach a
text from one of those.
So it's interesting to look for what we think
are the actual words when you've got some
words here and some parallel words there and
they're a little
bit different.
It's interesting to go back and take a guess at
what the actual words were before the shaping
came in.
But when it comes down to it, what I need to do
is let Matthew's voice be heard when
I preach Matthew, and Mark's voice be heard
when I preach Mark, and so on with the other two.
Well, let's just jump into Luke 3:1-20, and
walk through some steps
if we were going to preach these, these verses,
and then I'll come back in the next class
and spend a little more time on these points.
Step 1, read the whole Gospel, and we might
add, and read it.
The problem you'd have with preaching Luke 3
today that I would have is that we're used
to Mark, and we're going to try to get John the
Baptist preaching the kingdom of God,
and he doesn't do that in Luke.
You tuck John away, and then you preach the
kingdom in Luke.
Or we're going to end up with John confessing
Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the
sin of the world, and he doesn't do that in Luke.
He does that in John.
Boy, in the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark,
and Luke, you don't get all these Christological
titles on the lips of other people until late,
but in John, John wants you to know this one
came from God, and so you have all those titles
in chapter 1.
He's going to lay it out.
He wants you to know where he's coming from and
where you ought to be coming from.
But we're not trying to preach John, the Gospel
of John here, we're not preaching Matthew,
we're not preaching Mark, so we read the whole
Gospel to get that flavor.
As you read Luke over and over again, some of
those themes start to jump out.
My assumption is, if we had been the original
recipients of Luke and Acts, some of those
things that are subtle to us would not have
been so subtle.
We've all heard the telephone conversation illustration.
You walk into the room, your spouse is on the
phone, you're trying to piece it together,
but you can only hear half the conversation,
and you don't know what happened.
He did?
Who did?
He didn't.
Who didn't?
You're trying to figure out what is she saying,
what's the other end of it going on?
So it's more subtle to us than to that person
hearing the voice on the other end.
So we read and reread, and maybe some of those
subtle themes will begin to
surface for us.
Let me share something that helps my ministry
that I don't know if you can even do this,
but early on, I asked my elders for two weeks
off in the summer that don't count as vacation time.
Those are just study time.
I've been doing that for about four years now,
and it helps me because our year at the
college church begins in September when the
students come back at the end of August.
And that gives two weeks to read and plan and
think for that year because we all know
week to week it's tough to do that.
In fact, one of the things I worry about is you
come to a class like this and everybody
leaves frustrated.
You know, I can't do that every week.
And we've all heard, if there are any college
professors, I don't mean anything bad about
this, but college professors especially can
really, you know, because they know the way
it ought to be done, and we know the way it
ought to be done.
How many times have I heard Jack Lewis say,
spend one hour for every minute, one hour
study for every minute you preach?
Get serious.
Obviously, a man who doesn't preach twice a
week says that.
I can't do that.
I'd love to.
I think I should.
But you know, I kind of enjoy guilt anyway, so
it kind of feeds me weekly.
Something about my heritage I think does that,
but I can't do that.
I preach 25 minutes on Sunday morning and about
30 minutes on Sunday night, and I don't
have 55 hours every week.
Probably nobody ever told him that there are
people needing counseling, you know?
I'm just kidding.
Jack knows that.
And he's coming from another extreme, because
he's seen people who just, you know, order
a swindle tape and listen to it twice, and he's
had it with that, and I think we should
all have done with that.
But you've got to be realistic.
So what I'm saying is, if you can get a little
time where you can get away and do some of
that preliminary work, and read, and get that
flavor of Luke.
Read the whole Gospel.
Pick up on some of those themes that start to surface.
There is a little cycle.
There's no chord here.
I keep worrying about tripping over a chord.
There's kind of a cycle that's going to be
produced as you study.
Pericope, I think is a term you're familiar
with, just means a paragraph or a thought unit.
That's what's usually used to refer to those
sections that belong together in the Gospels.
It's just kind of a cycle that keeps going.
You begin by trying to understand the Gospel.
You read the Gospel, get a flavor for it, but
then you don't really understand the Gospel
until you understand the little pericopes that
make it up.
How can you understand what this is until you
understand those?
But you start reading that, and then after you
do that, you come back and you study these,
and when you learn a little bit more about
that, it's going to tell you a little bit
more about that.
So now you can read that better, which allows
you to come to the next pericope and read
it better, and you just keep going, and going,
and about the time you end your
35-week series on Luke, you'll be ready to
start the book is the way it usually works,
because in the beginning you think you know it,
but by the time you have studied through
and prayed through each one of those little
thought units, by the time you do the resurrection
account, you think, huh, I wish I could start
over again.
But then it's time to go on, but at least your
soul has been nourished, and hopefully
we're learning more than the people that we
preach to.
Sometimes I'm confident that's true.
Luke 3 and verse 2, I'm in my own preaching,
verse 2, would be an example of
a theme that is going to stick out.
The Word of God, that is a Lucan theme.
The Word of God came to John, but in a way,
more than the other three gospels, that Word
of God is going to keep coming back, we're
going to keep hearing about it.
Chapter 5 and verse 1, the people crowded
around Him and listened to the Word of God.
Chapter 8, I committed a great tragedy.
Yesterday I could not find my real Bible, and I
have come with a counterfeit today,
and it does not open to the right places, but
chapter 8 and verse 11, the seed is the
Word of God.
In verse 21, my mother and brothers are those
who hear the Word of God.
And chapter 11, blessed rather are those who
hear the Word of God.
And when you get to the book of Acts, do you
remember those little summary reports?
Several times it will just say, the Word of God multiplied.
Now in some of these passages in Luke, if you
compared the parallel gospels, if you
compared Matthew and Mark, it would be saying
the same thing, but it wouldn't use the phrase
the Word of God.
Luke is interested in people hearing the Word
of God, hearing the voice of God, and we'll
look at that in the third session today as we
study some of the different sections in Luke.
We'll look at the way that's framed in the
parable of the sower.
But that's one that would surface.
In Luke 3, another one that would have been
useful as we read the whole gospel,
not only the Word of God, but repentance.
There was a way he edited the story of Jonah,
the sign of Jonah, and we'll look at that later.
So that when you read the sign of Jonah in
Matthew, it's not like the sign of Jonah in Luke.
Who's right?
I'm not saying one's right and one's wrong.
They're shaping their material, they're
highlighting something different for their community.
And incidentally, there's some basis for
thinking that already a pattern has taken place for
new application of that message of Christ in a community.
In the Gospel of Luke, you have a lost sheep.
There's a concern for the outsider, finding the
outsider, find him and bring him in.
In Matthew, that story occurs, but it's not a
lost sheep, it's a straying sheep.
Matthew's concern seems to be for straying believers.
It's not a contradiction.
He's giving new life to that story.
He's saying, that applies right here.
There are lost sheep within, there's straying
people within.
And so we kind of come along and we do the same
thing and we make the new applications.
The danger point that needs to be put up here
is we are not producing inspired documents here.
And so we want to stay with scripture as our authority.
But I like to see that developing sense of the
new application of what the Christ message
is even in the text here.
All right, so number one, read the whole gospel.
Number two, establish the text.
And here we're talking about matters of content.
There's some helpful reading that can go with
this, but I'll give you a bibliography at
the beginning of our next class.
Establish the text.
For example, we want to know what is the chunk?
What is the paragraph?
What is the pericope?
My tendency is to take as big as sections as
you can.
Some people could probably get five sermons out
of Luke 3:1-20.
Spurgeon could get 50, probably, or MacArthur
could get 500, but today's text is the word
15, you know, or something like that.
But it seems to me that verses 1-20 go together
real well.
And if I were to preach that, I would just take
that chunk.
But there are different themes, and you could
do it more than that, but at least be aware
of what that text is.
If you go on up earlier, you've really gotten
into another story.
If you go down later, you have committed a big goof.
And I'll explain why in a little bit.
You don't want to go below verse 20, except to
just say maybe what's going to happen.
And so we establish the text.
Now, the best way to do that is this feel of
reading the gospel and the pericopes and
so on, so that you can come back and say, I
believe this goes together.
But most of us need help.
And if you're reading from the Greek
translation, or from the Greek text, look at,
for example,
in the UBS, look at how they break it up.
Or in the Nestle Allon, look at how they break
it up.
Or if you're using English translations, get
more than one.
Look at how the NIV breaks it up, and the
revised standard, and maybe whatever else
you use.
I think it's helpful to tell our people that
they ought to use paragraphed Bibles, if at
all possible.
And I think if you like the King James
tradition, I believe the new King James is in paragraphs,
isn't it?
Does somebody know?
Norval said he thinks it is.
To me, that'd be a big improvement.
Instead of having every verse begins over here,
that teaches them not to think in paragraphs.
You don't learn to think in that flow.
I don't like that about it.
I think the new American standard is that way,
isn't it?
With every verse off to the left.
It's helpful to have it so they can see it in
paragraphs, to get that idea that, hey,
this all fits together.
And it's not just that you can grab a verse
here, and a verse over there, and a verse
over there.
Because that kind of hodgepodge has got us in a
lot of trouble anyway.
It gets a lot of people in trouble.
So if we can get the idea of establishing a
text, using different translations, different
editions, or whatever, to help us get in mind
what that is.
And incidentally, I think my experience has
been most of these tend to break them up too much.
If I had a complaint, it would be, they tend to
have too many pericope.
Here I like this.
The NIV has just one heading.
You know what I'm talking about here?
The little headings that are not inspired, but
that somebody just put in there to help
Mine says, John the Baptist prepares the way.
And that's the only one you have for verses 1-20.
I like that.
But a lot of times it'll have several little
divisions and places that seem like they ought
to go together.
Also in establishing the text, we're not just
setting the pericope.
We're also talking about grammar, about syntax,
about textual variance.
Unless you think that, you know, that I'm
trying to lay all this on you, I'm not telling
you that I spent an hour on textual variance.
It's, you know, it's just a question of, is
there something that's significant?
And a lot of it is, am I about to make a big
point on something that's not even in their Bible?
You know, that little faux pas has occurred to
me before, you know, build a sermon around
something that was right there in my UBS, you know.
And I didn't take the time to notice, whoops.
Or I typically don't even look at a King James version.
And there are some things that a textual
variant doesn't even show up in the UBS because it
was so obscure.
But back in the early 17th century, you know,
that maybe was the predominant text.
And so there it is in the text of the King
James version.
I wasn't even aware of it.
So maybe, at least if we can search and look
for those, sometimes it's very important,
like the ending of Mark.
I mean, when you're doing gospel studies,
that's a biggie because, you know, Mark just
looks like it ends in verse 8 of chapter 16,
but there's a feel like it shouldn't, you know.
And so we have that strong desire to bring in
the ending of Mark or something else.
But anyway, those would come into play, textual variants.
Another is historical context.
This is all under content.
In this one, there's a lot of historical
context because this is one of the places Luke says
this guy was not a Johnny Appleseed.
We're talking history here.
So in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius,
you've got to have some idea of when that was.
You know, who's Tiberius?
When did he begin reigning?
When's the 15th year?
When Pontius Pilate, you know, Herod, Philip,
Lysanius, Annas, Caiaphas, there'd be a lot
of historical context stuff right here.
All this stuff that's in here.
It would be stuff like the Isaiah quotation.
Where does that come from in Isaiah?
What did it do in Isaiah?
Where else is it used in the New Testament?
Anything else you want to look up, a tax
collector, a soldier, you know, I don't know.
Just anything that has to do with the
historical context.
But you can get in your mind what the writer is
saying happened.
And then also, one other thing to go here is
what is the genre of the text?
What kind of literature is it?
What kind of writing?
Now obviously it's gospel.
I mean, we set aside gospel from epistle, from
apocalyptic and so on.
But even within the gospels, there's different
kind of literary style of genre.
You have proverbs, there are parables, there
are pronouncement stories where you have a
story and then at the end there's a punchline
like give unto Caesar what is Caesar, give
unto God what is God.
There are healing stories and so on.
So there's a lot going on here.
Thank you.
Anyway, you kind of just get a feel for that
here. This is not a proverb not a
parable, it's narrative. But again, narrative
doesn't mean just biography
because something happens with narrative. In
the Old Testament, those
stories in 1st and 2 Samuel are not just strung
together, they're telling the
story of God and what God was doing. And in one
book you'll get the sense of,
yeah, no wonder there wasn't a king around
anymore, you know. And the stories
are put together like that. Okay, number three,
and this is where we're gonna hold
Harold Schenck to the fire here and see what
he's doing. Three, determine the
author's function. And here we're talking more
about context. That's content. What's
there? What's it about? Here is context. And
incidentally, this is, we always got
to be just a little careful here. We're kind of
making educated guesses and
getting strong feels, but you know, it's not
like we can authoritatively say this
is what's in Luke's mind. In fact, one thing
I've had to remind myself is
sometimes a gospel writer may put it in there
because they're trying to tell a
good story and because that was a part of what
happened. And it's not
that everything has to have some little
secretive point, alright, so maybe don't
overanalyze as part of it. But still, if we're
believing that there are four
Gospels because they were written to four
different church situations, we want
to hear the unique voice of this author. There
are two contexts that we're
interested in. One is the historical context,
not just like up here, which is
historical matters of what is in the content of
the text, but here the historical
context by which I mean the historical
situation. If you've grumbled through
some books, you've seen the phrase the
Zitzemleben, you know, it's just the idea
that something caused the writing of this.
There's something going on that
he's addressing. What was happening in that
church? Why did Mark frame that
discipleship material the way he did? Can we
make the educated guess that maybe
his church needed a reminder that following
Jesus means a cross? You know,
that goes back to doing a lot of that work. But
here we're looking for that
historical context and the literary context,
which is, all right, given that
there is a historical situation, how does this
help? How does this fit in to what's
going on there? Does it add something? Does it
make a unique point? How was the
author using this? And these kind of go back
and forth. The literary flow,
it's another hermeneutical cycle. The literary
context helps define what
was going on, helps you understand what was
going on. What was going on lets you
know a little bit more about maybe how that was
being used. Now, I feel like this
is getting ethereal real fast, so let's go back
to our text here. Can everybody
kind of see this? If you don't, it's the
parallel passages from Luke 3:1-6,
and then the next page is right here. Okay, in
order to do this, the first thing
we have to do is to read our text horizontally.
All right, you with me? Just
write it down if you don't understand it and
We'll...I'll explain what I mean.
Read horizontally means you're going to find
the text and you're going to read it
this way, because we're going to see who has
this story and how this is unique.
And incidentally, I think my secretary edited
John out here for us so that this
would be a little bit bigger. But here we're
looking at Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
I'll give them the bibliography of where this
comes from. I think most of you
probably are aware anyway. What we're looking
for is what is the unique voice
of Luke? And looking down here, you can see
what is, because if they're saying the
same thing or about the same thing, then
they're right across from one another.
If it's unique, it'll stick out like this part
right there. That's unique.
There's the Isaiah quote in Mark and it's there
in Matthew, but there's more of it
in Luke. That may be very important. There's
some dependence between these
writers. We'll talk about that a little more.
I'll just give you my bias in the
beginning. I just accept what I think is a
pretty solid conclusion of biblical
study, that Mark was written first and that
Matthew and Luke had access to Mark.
All right? That's just my bias and I don't know
that we necessarily want to argue all
that right now. And I think probably most of
you would feel comfortable with that,
that that doesn't... Luke said I use sources,
all right? I mean, he said I was
looking at other people's accounts, but he was
doing something with it.
So we're going to look horizontally and we're
interested in the differences.
We're not going to preach John as seen in the
New Testament. We're preaching Luke
3, 1-20. We're looking for little scenes,
little comments, the fact that it
was selected, how it's arranged in the text,
and we're not just going to shove it
all together. Just a word here. I bumped up
against this and I don't mean this
bad, but make sure your people don't use the
narrated Bible for their Bible, all
right? I mean, the narrated Bible is wonderful
to give people a sense of the
story. I just want to be sure my people don't
start making that their Bible. Read
it at home and get a sense of how it...
everybody ought to see once how the story
goes, but when you try to put those stories
together and you start to lose
this, then you've lost the punch of canon,
which is there is Matthew, there's
Mark, there's Luke, and there's John. There's
not a Jesus story, okay? Just one
little bias there. So what is unique here is
we're looking horizontally. Well, this
is unique. That sticks out. So we make a little
note of that, and I think that's
very important that Luke is looking at Mark's
Gospel. He sees that Isaiah Quote.
It's been passed on in the oral forms, but
there it is in Mark's Gospel, but he
takes it farther because the rest of this fits
in so well with Luke's Gospel.
That's part of the point he's wanting to make.
Every valley is going to be filled
in, every mountain and hill made low, the
crooked roads will become straight, the
rough way smooth, and all mankind will see
God's salvation. The word salvation is an
important one in Luke and Acts. It's one of the
themes, but more than that, just
that reversal of fortunes. Look back in chapter
1. Again, this would be
underlined in the right Bible in what's called
the Magnificat, Mary's song that
begins in verse 46, but in verse 52, he's
brought down rulers from their thrones
and he's lifted up the hunger, I mean the
humble. He's filled the hungry with good
things, but he has sent the rich away empty.
Well, that's a powerful little
punch. You've got, it's one of these things,
you know, you've heard chiasmus,
you've got the rich are going to come down, but
he's going to lift the poor, he's
going to lift the poor, the rich are going to
come down. There'll be a reversal of
fortunes. That's why it's so important to help
people see that Luke wanted more
of the Isaiah text because this is what he
thinks John was going to do and what
supremely Christ was going to do. John's
pointing to Christ that the valleys are
going to be filled, the mountains are going to
be made low, things are going to be
different. Okay, what else is unique? Let's go
to the next, continue the, is this the
right, yeah, that's it, okay. Now there's some
part there that's in Matthew and
Mark, but not in Luke, is that right? Yeah, and
then we've got some part that's in
Matthew and Luke. It's kind of, again,
generally believed that that Matthew and
Luke had access to another written source that
they shared because so many,
the order seemed to be similar in that source
and the wording is similar, but
then again this one sticks out because here's
another one that's in Luke, it's
not in the other ones. If I were guessing, I,
you know, incidentally these are in the
book, somebody could let me read Harold's book
and we'd be, I would guess
that's where Harold's gonna go. I don't know if
he doesn't, if he wants to preach
John is revealed in the New Testament, that's
great with me, but I'm
guessing that's what he's gonna, that you're
gonna hear that stuff right there
because that sticks out like a sore thumb. It's
not in Matthew, it's not in
Mark, and that is pure Lucan stuff there. I
mean that doesn't mean it didn't
happen, not at all, it's just he wants to tell
more of the story. Repentance is
being preached, John's gonna preach repentance.
That is, that's a theme
that just screams at you in John. Let me go
ahead and show you, let's park there
for a minute and look over in Luke 11:29 and
following and then turn
back the other way to Matthew 12:38 and
following. This is where you have the
sign of Jonah. In Matthew what you're really
gonna see is there, the sign is he
is three days and three nights in the belly of
a huge fish, which refers to
what? The resurrection. Big point there. You
want to see a miraculous sign? There's
gonna be one, three days, three nights, belly
of a fish, but you're not gonna see
it. In Luke, that's not the point. In Luke the
point is, the sign of Jonah is you
preach repentance and you better change. Verse
29, but none will be given it
except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah was a
sign to the Ninevites, so also the
Son of Man will be to this generation. The
Queen of the South will rise at the
judgment with the men of this generation and
condemn them. For she came from the
ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom
and now one greater than Solomon
is here. The men of Ninevah will stand up at
the judgment with this generation
and condemn it. For they repented at the
preaching of Jonah and now one greater
than Jonah is here. Sign of Jonah and Matthew,
resurrection. Sign of Jonah and
Luke, repentance. You preach to the Ninevites.
Does that mean one of them is not inspired?
No. It means you hear their unique voice, the
unique voice of Matthew, the unique
voice of Luke, which the Holy Spirit has given
to us in Scripture. And we're just
thankful for both accounts. But there's an
example, you'd see that all the way
through Luke, where he has shaped his material
to highlight repentance and
here it is before us. And so we're not going to
hide that, we're not going to
disguise it, we're going to show that this
sticks out. Social justice. That's
social justice. If you want to repent, you've
got two coats, you share. You've
been ripping people off, don't rip them off,
don't cause violence. And if you
don't read horizontally, it'd be hard to pick
up on that because you'd just be,
you'd be thinking Mark's stories or be thinking
John's stories. Now we need to
keep going if we're gonna finish this one
pericope in time to listen to
Harold. And so I said read it horizontally and
then the other is, this
is under this, that'd be like A is read it
horizontally and B, actually read it
vertically. Which means that now we're not
reading Luke as compared to Matthew,
Mark, and John, we're now reading Luke. We're
gonna read it again, we're gonna go
back and look at it in its context. How does
that fit in? And there's some great
stuff with Harold's text. And you can't show
all of this, I mean you don't have
to, he doesn't need to, he's gonna pick
something here and he'll go with it.
Let's see what John does, I mean what Luke does
with John as you read
him vertically in these first three chapters.
Luke 1, we're kind of
stair-step here. First we have an announcement.
It's an announcement about John but
an even more glorious announcement about Jesus.
Zachariah goes into the temple and
there he's blinded. He's told that he's gonna
have a child who will bring people
back to the Lord, their God. These are gonna
come true at the proper time.
Elizabeth is pregnant, she says the Lord has
done this for me, that's one of the
themes in the first two chapters, the Lord has
done this for me. But then
beginning in verse 26 you've got the birth of
Jesus foretold, there's the
announcement there. And here it's a little
different, it's you are highly favored,
God will be with you, you're gonna give birth
to a son, his name is gonna be
Jesus, he's gonna be great, he'll be called the
son of the Most High, God is
gonna give him the throne of his father David
and he's gonna reign over the
house of Jacob forever, his kingdom will never
end. Boy that's great stuff. And
then you've got the mothers, you've got
Elizabeth, John's mother, you've got Mary,
Jesus' mother. Elizabeth is thrilled with
what's happening to her, Mary too comes
to visit Elizabeth, but when the two women get
together, this is important I
think for the Gospel of Luke, when Mary walks
in, what happens to Elizabeth? The
babe leaps in her womb. Elizabeth is filled
with the Holy Spirit. In a loud
voice she exclaims, blessed are you among
women, blessed is the child you'll bear,
but why am I so favored that the mother of my
Lord should come to me? As soon as
the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the
baby in my womb leaped for joy.
Blessed is she who has believed that what the
Lord has said to her will be
accomplished. You see what happens when the two
women get together, it's like the
baby inside one is leaping at the joy that the
other one has come in. You're
already getting a tip off as to Luke's bias
here. Then you have the two births,
the birth of John beginning in verse 57, 57-80,
but even that is pointing
to what he's going to do. God's going to use
him, but he's going to use him
because after him a horn of salvation is coming.
Then chapter 2, the great story
of the birth of Christ about how a Savior has
been born, he is Christ the
Lord. Then we come to chapter 3, the text we're
looking at. Look at verses 19 and
20, but when John rebuked Herod the tetrarch
because of Herodias, his
brother's wife, and all the other evil things
he had done, Herod added this to
them all. He locked John up in prison, period.
John's out of there. In the gospel
of Luke, don't have John the Baptist baptizing
Jesus. He wasn't there. Now
that's not a contradiction. Luke doesn't say he
didn't do it. It's just the way he
has shaped his material. Before you get to
Jesus' baptism, John is out of the way.
He's locked up. He's in prison. He's behind you.
At the end of verse 20, you
put a period, and then you start in verse 21
when all the people were being
baptized. Jesus was baptized too. By whom? It
doesn't say. It was John, and Luke's not
denying it was John, but for his gospel. He
wants to get John out of the way
because he was a forerunner. He was preaching
the Good News, but not
the kingdom. He's pointing to the one who's
going to preach the kingdom. So now
Christ comes. He's baptized. He doesn't even
mention by whom, and Christ goes on in
this vibrant ministry. In chapter 16 of Luke, a
man named
Konsilmon got a lot of mileage out of chapter
16, verse 16. I think
there's something to it. I don't know how much,
but he said that Luke has three
stages of history. There's Israel, there's
Jesus, and there's the church. I don't
know for sure about that, but there's something
useful in that. In this, John
is the end of this period. You see that? The
law and the prophets were proclaimed
until John. Since that time, the good news of
the kingdom of God is being
preached. Since that time, since John, since we
closed that period off, is the
way Konsilmon says it. Since that time, the
good news of the kingdom of God is
being preached, and everyone is forcing his way
into it. So the way he has
shaped it, you close it off. You've got John
there. He's preaching. He calls for
repentance, and then he's locked up. And it's
like when you come to verse 20, you
see a long bony finger going like this, because
the Gospel of Luke is not about
John. It's about Jesus. So John is pointing.
This is pointing all the way
through. It's getting you ready for that. In
the announcement, there's John, but
Jesus is greater. In the mother's, John's
mother, the baby, the fetus leaps when
Mary walks into the room, and the birth is more
wonderful for Jesus than
for John, and now when John comes. All right,
so we got two minutes. What would
we preach if we were doing this one story?
Well, we'd start, you know,
hopefully weeks before we started our series,
we'd be reading the whole
gospel, and reading it to listen to Luke. We'd
be establishing the
text, 15th year of Tiberius, Pontius Pilate,
tax collectors, so on. The length
of the Pericope looks like verses 1-20,
grammar, syntax, textual variance, and
so on. And then, why is it here? Why that text?
Why in Luke? We want to hear Luke's
voice. So if we wanted to preach this text, we
might talk about the reversal of
fortunes, because there's that longer Isaiah
text. The valleys will be
filled, the mountains will be brought low. We
might preach repentance. That's the
one I think I'd really want to hit. Social
justice, repentance. Repentance is
a change of mind, but boy, in Luke, you don't
want to try to make that just a
change of mind without anything to show for it.
If you've repented, then you're
going to start sharing your cloak, and you're
going to start not ripping people
off, and so on. And then, we might also preach
that as wonderful as John was, we
are people who are followers of Jesus. And in a
similar sort of way, all we can
hope to do is stick a short stubby finger out,
or a long bony finger out, and
point to Him, because we preach not ourselves,
but Jesus Christ and Him
crucified. I'll see you right after Harold's
through, and I hope we have good news.