HOPE BIBLE FELLOWSHIP
Blank Presentation
  • God you reign
  • How He Loves
  • Holy Spirit

  • Luke 11:29–36 ESV
    When the crowds were increasing, he began to say, “This generation is an evil generation. It seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this generation. The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. “No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a basket, but on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light.”
    I have a hunch that you probably have not sat in many a church and listened to a preacher who looked out at you and called you an evil generation. I may be wrong there, but in our sensitive, consumerist, American church culture, I would suggest that you likely haven’t been confronted that way from a pulpit. However, this is how Jesus confronts the skeptics of His doing the work of God beginning in verse 29 from our passage today.
    Context for what has just happened…
    As a refresher from last week, let’s look back at verse 16.
    Luke 11:16 ESV
    while others, to test him, kept seeking from him a sign from heaven.
    Antony Flew was an English philosopher who was a well known defender of atheism. He was the son of a Methodist minister and attended Christian boarding school. When he was a teen he decided he couldn’t see consistency between a good God and all of the evil in the world. So that is when he became atheistic. He studied at Oxford and even presented a paper called “Theology and Falsification” in front of a Socratic club that was presided over by C.S. Lewis. He wrote books on the topic of atheism and influenced people you’ve heard of today like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. But in 2004 he announced that after looking at the scientific evidence he accepted a “very limited form of deism.” This means he believed their was likely a God who created the world but Flew did not believe that God makes His will known through revelation. Basically, he said he believed their was a God but he never became a Christian. He even signed a letter to the British Prime minister to introduce intelligent design into state school science classes… but he never trusted Jesus. It’s tragic how close some people come and yet still live in darkness.
    The people we encounter in Luke’s gospel believed in God but they were undecided about Jesus. They were still trying to figure out who He was. They wanted more evidence from Him. They wanted to see a sign. Now, if I had seen the miracle that had just occured with the mute demon being tossed out of the man and him being completely healed and able to speak, you would have my undivided attention. They wanted some indisputable evidence.
    In one sense, Jesus had actually given them many signs of his identity as the Son of God.
    And we get to the point where He calls them an evil generation.

    I. A evil generation demands a sign.

    Luke 11:29 ESV
    When the crowds were increasing, he began to say, “This generation is an evil generation. It seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah.
    Jesus isn’t playing their game. First of all, one more sign would not have been enough for them. They were unwilling to be pleased with one more. I would say Jesus could have done a number of other signs for them and they still would not have believed. They had an unwillingness to believe in Jesus and this was their way of rationalizing it. He had given them plenty of evidence already. This should serve as a warning for any of us who might say something like, “I’ll believe if God will just give me a sign,” or “God, if you do this or that, then I’ll believe, then I’ll truly follow you.”
    Jesus really hammers home the evil nature of their generation by providing two witnesses from the Old Testament. Now, this is yet another example of why we need to know the Old Testament as well as the New. We can not unhitch our faith from the Old Testament. Without it we don’t get to the New Testament. All of scripture points to Jesus and it is all connected. In verse 29 Jesus says this generation will have one last sign of His salvation…of His identity. It’s the sign of Jonah.
    Let me briefly recap the basic story of Jonah. It’s a short book of four chapters and is really a great read. I would also commend to you Tim Keller’s wonderful book called Prodigal Prophet that goes deeply into what is going on in Jonah. God calls a man named Jonah, a prophet, to go and preach to the people of Ninevah, a wicked city that God was going to judge. Instead of going Jonah heads for Tarshish trying to run from God. A storm comes up and Jonah tells the sailors to toss him in the drink. They do and a giant fish swallows him. He’s in the belly of the fish for three days and then it vomits him up on the shore. He then goes to Ninevah and preaches and the people repent… and lastly Jonah is upset about that. Obviously there’s more details so go read it for yourself. But when Jesus says the sign given will be the sign of Jonah, we need to ask, which part of the story is He referring to? I’m going to cut straight to the point and go to the other place in the gospels where we see Jonah be referenced. It’s in the book of Matthew chapter 12. Verse 40 says this:
    Matthew 12:40 ESV
    For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
    The sign of Jonah is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is an instance of Jesus predicting His death and resurrection. What better or greater sign could the people desire than this? And even though this ultimate sign would be given, the people would still not believe.
    This sign of Jonah is the same sign we have today. It’s how we can have certainty about the things we read about Jesus in the scriptures, that they are true and that He is who He claims to be. That His death was sufficient as a sacrifice in our place, for our sin. And His resurrection proved it. It proves that it worked. The sacrifice was accepted by God as sufficient. We can be reconciled to God because of Jesus. He was saying this would be the sign given to them and it’s the sign given to us as well. And yet many of the people did not believe. Even that other sign was not enough for them.
    Antony Flew, even the well known atheist admitted that the resurrection was a sign for all times. And that’s coming from someone who never trusted in Jesus. A non-Christian.
    The sign we have is the GOSPEL.
    Jesus gives this testimony of the sign of Jonah and then goes even harder after these religious folks by referencing the testimony of the Queen of the South.
    Luke 11:30–32 ESV
    For as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this generation. The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.
    Solomon was the great wise king. He had extraordinary, God-given wisdom and immense wealth. A queen in the south (Sheba, likely Ethiopia) heard about this wise and famous king and traveled to see for herself.
    1 Kings 10:6–9 ESV
    And she said to the king, “The report was true that I heard in my own land of your words and of your wisdom, but I did not believe the reports until I came and my own eyes had seen it. And behold, the half was not told me. Your wisdom and prosperity surpass the report that I heard. Happy are your men! Happy are your servants, who continually stand before you and hear your wisdom! Blessed be the Lord your God, who has delighted in you and set you on the throne of Israel! Because the Lord loved Israel forever, he has made you king, that you may execute justice and righteousness.”
    So in Luke we have this group of religious leadership that were known for being on a quest for knowing the scriptures and the truth of God. Jesus points out that the Queen of the South came all the way to hear Solomon. The wisdom of Solomon was a foretaste of the wisdom of God. And she discovered it was true. Now something greater than Solomon and greater than Jonah was there right in front of the very people who should have recognized what was going on . And yet here are these guys who, as one scholar put it, won’t even cross the street for Jesus.
    And they would stand in judgment for their unwillingness to believe on Jesus.
    They illustrate a danger that Jesus lays out in the next few verses. It moves us to ask the question, what if the light you think that you possess is actually darkness?

    II. What if the light you think you have is actually darkness?

    They thought they were searching for truth. They thought they were doing what they do for God. They thought they were obeying the law. But what does Jesus say to them? Let’s look at verses 33 through 36.
    Luke 11:33–36 ESV
    “No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a basket, but on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light.”
    When I was younger and the power would go out, we would get our flashlights, and probably after playing lightsabers with them, I would shine my light up at the light fixture hoping it would shine out like the power was on and light up more of the room. I don’t know if that worked very well but the idea is that you get the light up so you can see.
    If you have a dark house, no electricity, and you want to light up the house, you don’t put the light under a basket. You don’t put it in the cellar. You put it up on a stand so everyone can see.
    The light of the gospel is shining. The sign of Jonah, the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God for sinners like me is shining. The catch is that they wouldn’t be able to see the sign of Jonah for what is if their eyes were shut.
    Light has come into the world but wicked and evil men and women shut their eyes to the truth. Willingly…
    R.C. Sproul wrote that in final analysis, “unbelief is not an intellectual problem.” It’s not from scarcity of evidence or that God has not made Himself clear about who He is. The problem is a moral problem. The truth is, we don’t want to believe. He goes onto explain that if we acknowledge God and that Jesus is God it means we MUST repent. We must turn from our sins and believe the gospel. And that is the pain of our resistance. We respond to this pain by clamping our eyes shut to the truth because we don’t want to believe. We don’t want to deal with that it will mean in our lives. And this is the stiff truth: We actually prefer the darkness to the light.
    John 3:19 ESV
    And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.
    We don’t want the light right in front of us because we love our sin.
    The people’s demand for a sign is certainly more subtle than the people we talked about last week who accused Jesus of working for Satan. But their variety of expressive disbelief is certainly more common because of it being less staggering. Less bells and whistles go off with it.
    The answer is to see the right sign with the right eyes.

    III. Seeing the right sign with the right eyes

    They were an evil generation according to Jesus. This wasn’t because they were misled or ignorant. The Greek in this passage is intense. It denotes a knowing and intentional wickedness. Pastor, you basically just said that with the last point. Well, let me drill down a bit. The function of a sign is not the sign itself. It’s function is to point to a deeper reality that exists in relation to itself. This evil generation was seeking a sign or miracle without any concern for its relationship to Jesus. In fact, it seems they may have been even seeking something separate from Him. They were seeking a detached sign. They wanted the show. They sought, as verse 16 says, a sign from heaven. They were in the unenviable position of seeking from Jesus something other than Jesus. They were after something “more spiritual.” They were not satisfied in Jesus.
    Many of the major heresies the church has fought over the last two thousand years have promised something “more spiritual” or a “more spiritual” form of Christianity. This is just what happened in the second century. Gnosticism promised a more “spiritual” form of Christianity based on secret knowledge. James R. Edwards says, “This longing for ‘more spiritual’ revelation is the mother of all heresies.” It’s still around and obviously not new. In fact, it’s the original temptation in the garden of Eden.
    Genesis 3:5 ESV
    For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
    It was a temptation not to simply know God but to be God.
    Those who have had their eyes opened to the light of the gospel don’t need signs. When you hear the gospel, you recognize the truth about God and what it means for your sin and you don’t clamp your eyes shut to it in unbelief.
    I love the way Thabiti Anabwele sums up his remarks on verses 27 through 36:
    “The finger of God points you to the kingdom of God through faith in the Son of God so you might escape the wrath of God.”
    The people in our passage today missed it. God in the flesh right in front of them and they missed it and they were condemned. The question for you and me is will you miss it, or will you obey? Will you repent and believe? Or will you shut your eyes to Jesus and suffer condemnation forever?

      • Luke 11:29–36ESV

      • Luke 11:16ESV

      • Luke 11:29ESV

      • Matthew 12:40ESV

      • Luke 11:30–32ESV

      • 1 Kings 10:6–9ESV

      • Luke 11:33–36ESV

      • John 3:19ESV

      • Genesis 3:5ESV

  • What A Friend We Have In Jesus (Converse)
HOPE BIBLE FELLOWSHIP
hopeofdixon@outlook.com
815-677-9185
http://hopeofdixon.com
22 members • 7 followers