Text: Luke 7:11-23, Title: The One, Date/Place: NRBC, 4/4/10, AM
A. Opening illustration: The Babi prophecy of the coming one, Bahá'u'lláh, see below
B. Background to passage: Jesus has been ministering in Galilee, given the Sermon on the Plain, then traveled through several of the towns ministering to the crowds and teaching His newly designated disciples. When He comes to Nain, he meets a funeral procession, and demonstrates some things for everyone.
C. Main thought: God has come, raises the dead, and saves the world!
A. The One Who Commands the Dead (v. 11-17)
1. As Jesus entered Nain, there came a funeral procession, up the same lonely street came the Resurrection; they mourned the loss of a loved one, and Jesus saw their grief, he laid his hand upon him, and death had to leave. The text said Jesus had compassion upon her, and said, “Do not weep.” But biblical compassion is always completed by action, for words like these would seem insensitive, if no action followed. In the touching of the coffin (to stop the procession) Jesus became ceremonially unclean, but then He commanded the corpse to live. Only 9 people were raised from the dead, not including the saints at the death of Jesus. Three were in the OT, one was Jesus, 2 were in Acts, and three were raised by Jesus. All of the ones raised by Jesus were given a command to live. And the corpse obeyed! Elijah and Elisha prayed and laid over their resurrections, Peter prayed, Paul embraced, but Jesus commanded by His own authority. This was very much a sign of Christ’s deity. Only God commands life. This was the main reason that Jesus performed all His miracles—to demonstrate His deity.
2. John 11:25, 1:14, 8:58, 5:23, 10:17-18, Col 2:9, 1 Tim 3:16, 1 John 4:2-3, Eph 2:6, Col 3:1,
3. Illustration: Lee Strobel reflecting on the conversion of his wife, and his planned deliverance, stated, “The starting point seemed obvious to me: clearly the resurrection was the linchpin of the Christian faith. After all, anyone could call himself the Son of God. But if someone could substantiate that assertion by returning to life after being certifiably dead and buried—well, that would be a compelling confirmation that he was telling the truth, even for a skeptic like me.”
4. Christ was not only a great teacher, and prophet, a holy man, a miracle worker, a visionary, a leader, a radical, a preacher, an observant Jewish rabbi, HE WAS GOD INCARNATE. In fact, He still is God! He has no limits upon His power! And today on Resurrection Sunday morning 2000 years ago, Jesus raised Himself. Yes, God raised Him too, but remember that Jesus said, “if I lay it (His life) down, I will take it up again. He not only commanded this corpse to live, He willed His own body back to life. And one day He is going to will every dead body worldwide to come forth, some to a resurrection of life, as Daniel 12:2 says, and some to a resurrection of damnation. If you believe, if you are born again, because Jesus rose, you will rise too. In fact, if you believe, spiritually you have already been raised with Christ. So then you will be physically what you are now spiritually.
B. The One Who is Coming (v. 18-23)
1. John the Baptist heard of these healings of the Gentiles, and other things that stretched the Jewish notion of the coming one. There was a long-standing expectation (that still exists among Orthodox and Hasidic Jews today) that the Messiah, or Anointed One, would come. And He would be their deliverer, their king, their political liberator, etc. John was in prison awaiting execution, and he wanted to know for sure if Jesus was “the One,” before He died. Jesus’ ministry didn’t fit the mold, John’s or the Jews’, and so John sends disciples to figure it out. And Jesus answers by telling the disciples to tell what they have seen, and speaks of the miracles, and the prophecies of the Messiah found in Isaiah, “The Festival of Salvation.”
2. Isa 29:18-19, 35:5-6, 42:18, 43:8, 61:1,
3. Illustration: the rabbi in Brooklyn, NY that all the Hasidic Jews believed to be the Messiah see below, Belief in the eventual coming of the moshiach...is part of the minimum requirements of Jewish belief. In the Shemoneh Esrei prayer, recited three times daily, we pray for all of the elements of the coming of the moshiach: gathering of the exiles; restoration of the religious courts of justice; an end of wickedness, sin, and heresy; reward to the righteous; rebuilding of Jerusalem; restoration of the line of King David; and restoration of Temple service.[5]
4. Jesus tells John, and now I tell you, “Yes, He is the One!” Jesus is God in the flesh, to whom has been given all authority in heaven and earth, and glory and honor and power! Jesus is our Savior, because He alone can ransom your soul from the sin that you have committed and deserve the wrath of God for! Jesus is our Deliverer from death, because He will raise us too; from sin, because He broke the curse, and freed us from the bondage of the law; from shame, from doubt, from worry, from hopelessness, from sorrow to joy! Jesus is our sacrifice satisfying the wrath of God; and our substitute obtaining righteousness for us! Jesus is our great High Priest, interceding for us! Jesus is life, breath, joy, strength, power, righteousness, and all the promises of God summed up together! Don’t you want to know Him? He is the ONE! And you must put your faith in Him, believe in Him, trust Him, and follow Him, if you want eternal life!
A. Closing illustration: Bruce Larson said, “The events of Easter cannot be reduced to a creed or philosophy. We are not asked to believe the doctrine of the resurrection. We are asked to meet this person raised from the dead. In faith, we move from belief in a doctrine to a knowledge of a person. Ultimate truth is a person. We met him. He is alive.
B. “Don’t be offended by Jesus Christ! Embrace Him! He is alive and reigns forevermore! Why would someone be offended? What can we see from Paul’s life in regards to the impact of the resurrected Christ? One commentator noted:“The truth and power of the resurrected Christ had brought three great changes in Paul. 1) First was deep recognition of sin. For the first time he realized how far his external religious life was from being internally godly. He saw himself as he really was, an enemy of God and a persecutor of His church. 2) Second, he experienced a revolution of character. From a persecutor of the church he became her greatest defender. His life was transformed from one characterized by self–righteous hatred to one characterized by self–giving love. He changed from oppressor to servant, from imprisoner to deliverer, from judge to friend, from a taker of life to a giver of life. 3) Third, he experienced a dramatic redirection of energy. As zealously as he had once opposed God’s redeemed he now served them”
C. Invitation to commitment
MESSIAH SIGHTING IN BROOKLYN
In 1993 I saw a news report on T.V. it was about a "Messiah sighting" in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. Twenty thousand Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews live in Crown Heights, and many of them believed the Messiah was dwelling among them in the person of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Word of the rabbi’s public appearance spread like a flash fire through the streets of Crown Heights, and Lubavitchers in their black coats and curly sidelocks were soon dashing toward the synagogue where the rabbi customarily prayed. The lucky ones connected to a network of beepers got a head start, sprinting toward the synagogue the instant they felt a slight vibration. They jammed by the hundreds into a main hall, elbowing each other and even climbing the pillars to create more room. The hall filled with an air of anticipation and frenzy normally found at a championship sporting event, not a religious service.
The rabbi was 91 years old. He had suffered a stroke the year before and had not been able to speak since. When the curtain finally pulled back, those who had crowded into the synagogue saw a frail old man with a long beard who could do little but wave, tilt his head, and move his eyebrows. No one in the audience seemed to mind, though. "Long live our master, our teacher, and our rabbi, King, Messiah, forever and ever!" they sang in unison, over and over, building in volume until the rabbi made a small gesture with his hand and the curtain closed. They departed slowly, savoring the moment, in a state of ecstasy. (Rabbi Schneerson died in June 1994. Now Lubavitchers are awaiting his bodily resurrection.)
When I was watching this, I thought to myself, how can they believe such a thing. Who are these people trying to kid-—a 91 year old mute Messiah in Brooklyn? And then it struck me: I was reacting to Rabbi Schneerson exactly as people in the first century had reacted to Jesus. A Messiah from Galilee? A carpenter’s kid, no less?
The disbelief I felt when I heard about the rabbi and his fanatical followers gave me a small glimpse of the kind of responses Jesus faced throughout his life. His neighbors asked, "Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers?" Other countrymen scoffed, "Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?" His own family tried to put him away, believing he was out of his mind. The religious experts sought to kill him. As for the common people, one moment they judged him demon-possessed and raving mad, the next they forcibly tried to crown him king.
This is the glory and the wonder of Christmas, that God could plant not only into the womb of this woman the Son of God, but He could plant in her heart the faith to believe the message that she received from the angel. Her response has always overwhelmed me with a sense of absolute submission that ought to be in the heart of every child of God. Mary said, "Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word."
Bábism (Persian: بابی ها Bábí há) is a religious movement that flourished in Persia from 1844 to 1852, then lingered on in exile in the Ottoman Empire (especially Cyprus) as well as underground. Its founder was Siyyid `Alí-Muhammad of Shiraz, who took the title Báb—meaning "Gate"—from a Shi'a theological term. Unlike other Islamic messianic movements, the Bábí movement signalled a break with Islam and attempted to start a new religious system. While the Bábí movement was violently opposed and crushed by the clerical and government establishments in the country in the mid 1850s, the Bábí movement led to the founding of the Bahá'í Faith which sees the religion brought by the Báb as a predecessor to their own religion, and gives a renewed significance to the Bábí movement.[1]
Bahá'u'lláh (ba-haa-ol-laa, Arabic: بهاء الله "Glory of God") (12 November 1817 – 29 May 1892), born Mírzá Ḥusayn-`Alí Nuri (Persian: میرزا حسینعلی نوری), was the founder of the Bahá'í Faith. He claimed to be the prophetic fulfilment of Bábism, a 19th-century outgrowth of Shí‘ism, but in a broader sense claimed to be a messenger from God referring to the fulfilment of the eschatological expectations of Islam, Christianity, and other major religions.
