EPISODE 32 Luke Chapter 10 ”The Good Samaritan” for Share The Word

Hi, and welcome to Share the Word, the best way to learn your way through the New Testament one chapter at a time. We know there are a lot of devotionals and encouraging thoughts for the day from the Bible available online, but our goal is a little more to honestly and systematically present the whole story of the New Testament. So let's listen in to today's lesson and go a little deeper. The Good Samaritan, Luke chapter 10. You've heard the old line, I'm sure, I've got some good news and some bad news. Which do you want to hear first?

That's kind of where I am with Luke chapter 10. In this section, there are some very sobering warnings from Jesus, but also one of his best-loved parables. So which do you want to hear first? My producer was just telling me to give out the hard stuff first, so I'm going to go with that. Buckle up for the hard part, and if you survive that, you're in for one of the best stories Jesus ever told, okay? Remember, Jesus is in the midst of his popular with the multitudes but unpopular with the religious authorities Galilean ministry.

He's in the north of Israel, where he grew up, where most of his disciples called home. At the beginning of this chapter, we read how at this point, Jesus sent out teams of representatives, two by two, throughout the towns and villages of Israel. Perhaps beyond that, we're not sure where all they went, but these were apparently places that he intended to eventually go. Just as John the Baptist had been doing before imprisoned, their mission was to prepare the way for Jesus, get people ready to listen to and hopefully receive the Messiah. He gave them authority to heal the sick in the towns and villages they visited, and very specific instructions about how to conduct themselves. If they were well received, Jesus said, they should stay and minister in that town.

If a family offered to host them, they should stay with that family and eat whatever those people provided. Because, as Jesus puts it here, the laborer is worthy of his wages. That's appropriate. Actually, more than appropriate. It was Jesus' actual plan for those who represented him to be taken care of as far as their basic needs went, and their hosts would be blessed for helping advance God's kingdom. In verses 10 to 16, he told them, on the other hand, if you come to a town or village where you are rejected, no one will host you and no one wants to listen to you, publicly announce there, we're shaking off the dust of your streets from our shoes as a protest against you, because the kingdom of God came near you and you had no time for it.

That might sound like a weird thing to do, but it was a cultural thing for the Jews when they traveled through hostile territory, like, say, through Samaria or through one of the unfriendly surrounding Gentile countries, to, when they returned to Jewish soil, wash off the dust from their feet because they had been in, in their view, an unclean place. Jesus was turning that practice around now and saying, even in a Jewish town, if they reject you and will not listen to your message, go out into their streets and call out, even the dust of your city on our feet we're cleaning off in protest against you. The kingdom of God came near in the person of the Messiah, he meant, and you had no interest. Then he added this startling statement: I tell you the truth, it will be more tolerable in that day for Sodom than for that city. Yikes. What could that mean?

Well, one of the most tragic accounts in the book of Genesis occurred during the time of Abraham and his family when they were first called to live in the Promised Land, the land of Israel. Some of Abraham's family, his nephew Lot and his wife and their daughters, decided to settle in a city called Sodom near the Dead Sea. Abraham and the rest of the clan camped in tents away from existing Canaanite towns. There was a reason for that. The Canaanite culture was seriously messed up. Sodom, the town Lot chose to settle his family in, was one of the worst places, God viewed it as extremely wicked.

One detestable thing in God's eyes was the openness and the prevalence of homosexual practices there. Our English term sodomy actually derives from that fact. I'm not going to tell you the whole sordid story, but if you're unfamiliar, you can read about it in Genesis chapter 18 and 19. It's an eye-opening story, and the gist of it is this: God warned Abraham to get his nephew Lot and family out of Sodom because, and I'm quoting, the outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is exceedingly grave. But Lot had gotten entangled in the city's business life. He didn't want to leave.

Abraham tried interceding with God, bargaining with God, that if there were at least ten righteous people in Sodom, he should not judge it. But beside Lot's own family, the place was entirely given over to the basest kinds of sin and immorality. Ultimately, because of Abraham's favor with God, Lot and his family were divinely protected and rescued from Sodom. But they were instructed in no uncertain terms to get away from that place as soon as possible. That's when Sodom and the neighboring Gomorrah were destroyed. Destroyed by what almost sounds like a nuclear explosion, fire and sulfur raining down from heaven.

By the way, remnants of those towns have been discovered and been excavated by archaeological teams pretty recently. They are on the north side of the Dead Sea. The remaining physical evidence there shows they were burned suddenly by a brief, powerful burst of extreme heat. What remains of them does not point to any known natural disaster. If you'd like to read about that yourself, you can do it in a scientific journal called Nature's Scientific Reports. Or better, there's a version more understandable for us laymen, a good summary written up in Newsweek magazine, October 4th, 2021.

It's titled, Is Archaeology Proving the Bible? The author is Eric Metaxas. You can find it on Google. Like it or not, we have here in Luke 10 Jesus' own confirmation that Sodom was judged as the Old Testament records. I know there are people who tune in to Share the Word from many different cultures, societies around the world. Let me say this to you.

I'm sorry that my country has to a great extent openly embraced immorality of all kinds, renaming it sexual freedom and homosexual behavior, rebranding it the gay lifestyle. Worse, Hollywood pollutes and even our government pushes immorality on the rest of the world. What happened in Sodom is what is happening in most of the Western world today. Remember, God says their sin is exceedingly grave. We're not being enlightened when we think all kinds of growing perversions in the West are acceptable alternative lifestyles. We're just being deceived.

We're being foolish, and we're asking for judgment. It's self-destructive for any culture to ignore what God says about human sexuality or to test God's patience by celebrating immorality. We living in the 21st century are not somehow suddenly exempted from what God has told us is His design for these things. We haven't become more sophisticated. We're just recycling dangerous practices that have been judged in the past. We'll discuss what the New Testament has to say about human sexuality in more detail, I promise, when we get to sections that address that topic head on, and several do, because it's such an important area of our lives.

And listen, this is not about hate, friends. Real followers of Christ don't hate anybody. But we do believe that God's rules, and we just learned this from Luke chapter 6, God's rules are never arbitrary, nor certainly do they exist because He wants to just limit or hurt us. They are always for our benefit and, by extension, a society's benefit. Notice this, though. Jesus said here about the towns in Israel which would not receive Him or listen to His representatives, I tell you, it will go better for Sodom in that day than for those cities.

What could He possibly mean by that? By that day, Jesus was referring to the day of final judgment. And by saying things will be more tolerable for the people of Sodom in that day than for some of these Jewish towns who rejected Him and His representatives, I can't think of any other interpretation but the obvious ones. First, rejecting God's offer of salvation through Jesus will leave you in line for judgment on the day of judgment that God says is coming. If Jesus said those who rejected him when he was here will be in a worse place on that day than Sodom, hmm, that's definitely not where you want to find yourself. But second, even among those who will be judged for rejecting God and his word, Jesus' teaching here indicates there will be differences in the severity of judgment that will be assigned.

That's underscored in verse 13 and following when he says, Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! The mighty works that have been done in you had been done in Tyre or Sidon, they would have repented long ago. But it will be more bearable in the judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. Chorazin and Bethsaida, these are Jewish towns near the Sea of Galilee which had witnessed Jesus' miracles and often heard him teach. Tyre and Sidon, on the other hand, were Gentile towns who never had those privileges.

Jesus' meaning seems plain, doesn't it? Judgment is coming for those who reject God's offer of salvation through Christ, who reject God's word, who reject and ignore his revelation of truth. But to those who reject, who've had more opportunities, more exposure to the light, for them judgment will be more severe. I can't see any other possible meaning. That's a sobering thought. This has been a heavy lesson thus far, I know.

I think it answers the question some may have as to whether Share the Word is committed to honestly sharing what Jesus and the New Testament writers have to say, or whether we would tailor our lessons to be, you know, less offensive. The answer is we will always shoot it straight. We will always share what the New Testament has to say honestly. To do otherwise would undermine the whole point of the podcast. At the same time, I can assure you, we'll never do anything intentionally to offend anyone. Christians have nothing to be smug about.

We're not righteous people talking down to the unrighteous, as someone has put it. Sharing our faith is only one beggar telling another beggar where he can find bread. So we welcome you wherever you're coming from. If you start to feel, I'm not sure I want to listen to this stuff, remember what Jesus urged a couple chapters ago when he told his listeners, Blessed are those who are not offended because of me. If Jesus is who he claimed to be, God in human form on our planet to tell us the truth, then it'd be wise for us to not get offended and to hear him out. Congrats, you made it through the hard part.

Now on to one of Jesus' best-loved parables. If we don't tell this story well in Luke 10, you won't hear it on Share the Word because it is unique to this gospel. Only Luke records the parable of the Good Samaritan. What prompted this famous story was a question put to Jesus one day. The setup begins at verse 25. A lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, Teacher, what would I have to do to inherit eternal life?

Jesus said to him, What is written in the law? How do you read it? And he answered, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus said to him, You've answered correctly. Do that and you will live. But he, desiring to justify himself, replied to Jesus, But who is my neighbor?

By lawyer in the society, Luke is talking about someone who was considered an expert in the Old Testament law. This man wanted to see what Jesus would say when asked the most important question possible. He wanted Jesus' take on what he or anyone can do to inherit eternal life. We might put it, Be sure we're going to heaven. Jesus' response was essentially, You're the Old Testament law expert here. How do you read it?

Remember, it says this man put this question to Jesus to test him. Jesus turned the question around by saying, What do you think God's law requires? The man answered what religious Jews then, and probably still to this day, would recite as a summary of the Old Testament: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. Jesus had responded to him, Do that and you will live. True enough. But the big problem, of course, is none of us do that.

Not that Old Testament scholar, not anyone else in the crowd that heard this exchange, certainly not me, and I dare say not you either. Loving God consistently, totally, selflessly, loving those around me as much as I love myself? The honest response to that challenge is, God, be merciful to me. I fall far short of that all the time. And that's how that man should have responded to Jesus. That is by confessing how far short of that ideal he knew he came.

But he didn't. He tried to justify himself by attempting to drag Jesus into a debate over a technicality. So who actually would be my neighbor? Who actually am I obligated to love? Pharisees taught that it's only the religious and righteous around them that they were obligated to love. You know, the people they considered just like them.

And as we have already seen, they felt it was fine, maybe even obligatory, to despise sinners. They saw their contempt for people they considered other, you know, the sellouts willing to collect taxes for the Romans, a whores, Gentiles in general, especially the Samaritans, pretty much anybody who was not in their group. Hating on those people was for them a mark of uprightness. It's part of how one fit in their club, and that was what prompted the now famous parable. There was a road from Jerusalem down to Jericho, connecting those two cities in southern Israel. It was a notoriously dangerous road, coming down from the highlands, dropping to sea level at a steady descent, drop of over 3,000 feet in only about 15 miles.

It was dangerous because thieves hid out in the rugged terrain flanking the road and attacked people, especially if they were alone and vulnerable. Jesus described exactly that situation in his parable: a man traveling that route alone, who was attacked, beaten, robbed, and left for dead on the side of that roadway. By and by, a priest happened by. He decided not to get involved. Perhaps he was on a tight schedule doing God's work, you know. And after a time, a Levite, a minister or musician who worked at the temple in Jerusalem, also passed by this severely injured man.

Just like the priest, he took a wide berth, probably hurrying his pace while looking over his shoulder since there were obviously robbers in the area. But finally, a Samaritan man who was journeying that way passed by and saw this seriously injured man and felt compassion. You remember who Samaritans are from our lesson on John 4, right? These were mixed-race people who were looked down on by the pure-blooded Jews as unclean and who they didn't want in Israel. But it was a Samaritan in Jesus' story who, realizing this man was in tough shape, disinfected his wounds with wine and poured soothing oil over his scrapes and bruises. He bandaged him best he could with what he had on hand, put him on his animal, and brought him safely to the first inn he found.

He stayed with him that night, and the next day he gave the innkeeper about $400 our money with this assurance: Please care for this fellow. This is what I have, but if the expenses are more, I promise I'll pay whatever the additional costs are for him to recover when I return from my journey. At that point, Jesus turned back to the lawyer and asked, So who proved to be a neighbor to the man who was assaulted by the robbers? What could he say? Certainly not the holy priest or Levite who saw the man in desperate need and passed by. So he said, The one who showed mercy.

There was no other answer. Jesus told him, Go and do likewise. This guy made a few different errors here, didn't he? First, he came at Jesus to test him, the Scripture says. That's a non-starter. Then when Jesus turned his question back on him, he said, in his opinion, eternal life could be gained by, and I'm paraphrasing, loving God with the entirety of your being and loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself, which frankly no one does.

But instead of humbly admitting, I know I don't do that, so now what? he tried to justify himself. He made an attempt to lower the standard in God's law by saying, But really, who is my neighbor? This is so important to understand. When any one of us looks into the mirror of God's law honestly, we will see how far we fall short of its righteous standards. The moral law of God was a standard of perfection and ideal that no one could actually achieve day in and day out, but rather an ideal to shoot for.

This man's question didn't come from an honest place. When Jesus pointed it back to him, showed him the law's standard, he tried to justify himself. I hope you can see through him the foolishness of trying to justify ourselves before God. If any of us could do that, God would never have needed to send us a Savior. The justification we need, and by justification I mean the act of being declared righteous in God's eyes, being made acceptable to Him, that's something we simply in ourselves cannot do. It's something only God can do for us, and exactly what He does for us when we accept the Savior that He sent.

Listen to how the Apostle Paul puts this in Romans chapter 3, starting at verse 21. God has shown us a way to be made right with Him without keeping the requirements of the law. We are made right with God by placing our faith in Jesus Christ. And this is true for everyone who believes, no matter who we are. For everyone has sinned. We all fall short of God's righteous standard.

Yet God, in His grace, freely makes us right in His sight. He does this through Jesus when He freed us from the penalty of our sins. Yeah, forget about trying to justify yourself with word games or by comparing yourself with others or whatever other mind tricks we humans deceive ourselves with. We are all sinners in need of a Savior. I freely admit that. Thank God He loves me enough that He sent one.

But now, after listening to Share the Word this far, I'm hoping you realize the need for a Savior too and have by faith received Him. Jesus perfectly obeyed God's law for you and then went to the cross to pay the debt for all of your failures. If you haven't already, we urge you to receive Jesus as your Savior today and to turn your life toward following Him from this point forward. Before we finish today, let's not lose sight of the ethical lesson coming out of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and that is that our neighbor is whoever we come across who is in need. That Samaritan had no connection with the man he came across on the road, but every one of us, from the lawyer who heard this parable first to those of us listening to it today, we know the Samaritan did the right thing.

So let's remember, as followers of Jesus, or just decent human beings, that when God seems to put someone in our path that is in need, we should not walk the other way. We should not rationalize, That person is no one to me. We should show compassion and do what we can do to help. That's what the Samaritan man in Jesus' story did, and to us Jesus also says, Go and do likewise. Thanks for listening. We hope you found this commentary both interesting and insightful.

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