Day 146, Luke 10 
Jesus was doing a
very significant amount of traveling, as He sent out the seventy "in pairs
ahead of Him to every city and place where He Himself was going to come"
(10:1). At a minimum, they announced His coming to 35 cities. Like the
twelve sent out before them, they were expected to trust God to meet their
needs as they went,
and not before they
went. Faith acts. Doubt waits.
Theirs was a
mission of mercy, manifested by divine healing, and also a mission of
condemnation upon those cities that rejected them. Some cities had already
sealed their doom, such as Chorazin and Capernaum, not having
repented after being visited by the Son of God.
According to
Jesus, Satan was in heaven before he fell (10:18). Scripture doesn’t tell us
everything that happened, but passages in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 indicate
that the devil was lifted up in pride because of his beauty. He attempted to
exalt himself above God, and for that reason was cast down. There was no cosmic
struggle or "spiritual warfare" between God and the devil. He
fell like lightning. One second he was in heaven, and the next second he was on
the earth. Satan's power compared to God's power is of no comparison.
Incidentally, if
Jesus was able to give the seventy authority over "all the power of the
enemy" (10:10), then He first must have had that authority Himself. This
disproves the theory that Satan gained authority beyond God’s control when Adam
fell. God always has been and always will be sovereign over Satan.
Now it is time
for our (almost) daily instruction in the errors of Calvinism. Calvinists sometimes
point to Luke 10:22 as proof that God selects certain individuals for
salvation: "No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the
Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him."
Considering the verse just prior to this one, however, reveals that Jesus
believed that God was hiding truth from the "wise and intelligent"
and revealing it to "infants." This is just another way of saying
that God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble. God has not
chosen arbitrarily to
hide or reveal truth to certain pre-selected individuals. Rather, He has chosen
to hide it from or reveal it to those who don't or do meet His conditions. So
we see once again God's "conditional election" rather than the
Calvinists' "unconditional election." God reveals Himself to those
who seek Him. He saves those who repent and believe.
Jesus obviously
believed that the way to eternal life could be found in the Old Testament, and
He affirmed the lawyer's belief that the way was to love God with all one's
heart, soul, strength and mind, and to love one's neighbor as oneself, that is,
following the two greatest commandments (10:25-28). This is troublesome to
those who do not understand the inseparable correlation between faith
and works and to those who have a faulty grasp of God's grace. Clearly, the
questioning lawyer was not obeying the second greatest commandment (10:29),
being a typical Jew who would have walked right by the wounded man in Jesus'
parable, just as the priest and Levite did. But Jesus was giving the
lawyer an opportunity to repent and begin to love his neighbor as himself, as
He told him to do what he had not been doing and imitate the example of the
Good Samaritan (10:37).
So there was the grace God was offering Him, the
same grace that God is offering everyone who is not obeying the two greatest
commandments. God will graciously forgive those who repent. Repentance implies
a striving to obey from the moment of repentance. And of course, it is those
who believe who repent.
I've written more
extensively on Jesus' encounter with the lawyer and His parable of the Good
Samaritan if
you are interested in a more in-depth look.
I'm so glad you
are spending time each day sitting at Jesus' feet and listening. Like
Mary, “You have chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from
you” (10:42).
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