The murmurers meet their merciful Messiah

Pastor-Teacher
John Farley
Sunday,
February 7, 2010

The murmurers meet their merciful Messiah

2Ti 1:9 who has saved us, and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was granted us in Christ Jesus from all eternity,

God’s plan throughout all the ages is that He might be glorified by the grace that He dispenses to undeserving creatures.

The supreme divine objective is that infinite love may manifest itself in super-abounding grace.

We need to understand how our Father treats us in grace and we need to understand how we should treat others.
This is what we call grace orientation.

During His earthly ministry, Jesus frequently employed parables as a teaching tool.

“A parable is a story that places one thing beside another for the purpose of teaching.”
“It puts the known next to the unknown so that we may learn.”

In particular, in the Bible, a parable is a comparison between a familiar fact and a spiritual truth.

Mat 11:19 the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they [the Pharisees] say, behold, a gluttonous man and a drunk, a friend of tax collectors and prostitutes.

Luk 15:1 now all the tax collectors and the prostitutes kept on coming near him to listen to Him

John 1:17 For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.

The tax collectors were the aristocracy of Rome.

1. It is very important to take note of the audience to whom Jesus first spoke the parable.

2. See whether Jesus actually gives the main point when He tells the story.

the lost sheep, LUK 15:4-7,
the lost coin, LUK 15:8-10,
the lost sons, LUK 15:11-32.

The Lost Son,
The Two Lost Sons,
The Waiting Father,
The Parable of Divine Mercy, God’s Love for the Lost, and The Lost Son and the Dutiful Son.

And we will see how dangerous it is for us to desire to be at our own disposal, and to live in a state of independence, and to be our own rulers!

His name is Kenneth Bailey and his work is titled “Finding the Lost: Cultural Keys to Luke 15”.

If you want to understand the point of a story that was told in another culture, you need to understand the culture.

And here we have a big problem, because modern American culture is VERY different from ancient Middle Eastern culture.

“The cultural gulf between the West and the East is deeper and wider than the gulf between the first century in the Middle East and the contemporary conservative Middle Eastern village.”

The cultural assumptions behind a story are critical to understanding the meaning.

Imperfect active indicative of διαγογγύςω
to complain throughout a crowd; to murmur, either through a whole crowd, or 'among one another', hence, it is always used of many indignantly complaining

The imperfect is used for regularly repeated, habitual actions or state that occurred in the past.

This word diagonggudzo is placed right at the front of the sentence. That serves to emphasize it.

They were trying to hurt the tax collectors and sinners.

In so doing they were hindering the Gospel from being preached and being received by these eager souls.

The Pharisees observed strict food laws that governed what they could eat, what they could not eat, who they could eat with and who they could not eat with.

But of course our Lord and Savior agreed with them on one point, namely that sharing a meal was a meaningful gesture.