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    Straight to the Heart of Luke: 60 bite-sized insights
    Straight to the Heart of Luke: 60 bite-sized insights
    Straight to the Heart of Luke: 60 bite-sized insights
    Ebook332 pages4 hours

    Straight to the Heart of Luke: 60 bite-sized insights

    By Phil Moore

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    About this ebook

    Luke is excited. As the only non-Jewish writer in the New Testament, he can hardly believe that God became a human, not just for Jewish boys like Peter and Paul, but for Gentiles just like him. His excitement about the Gospel is contagious, as he tells us, wide-eyed: All of this happened for you too.

    Want to explore Luke, but feel like you don't have the time? Straight to the Heart of Luke is a concise and bite-size approach to Bible study, giving you nuggets of information that you can think about throughout the day.

    Bible study for busy people.

    Luke was so unlike the other New Testament writers that many of his contemporaries believed he wasn't qualified to write Scripture at all. But to understand the message of his gospel, we need to grasp who he was.

    Luke was the only New Testament writer who was not a Jew. The apostle Paul defends him by stating explicitly that his gospel was as much Holy Scripture as the Old Testament.

    Luke was an outsider to the Jewish faith that God inspired to compile an account of the life of Jesus in order to show people all around the world that what Jesus said and did him said and did for us all.

    The astonishing message of Luke's gospel is that what happened to Jesus happened for you. Phil Moore helps us to understand and see God's wisdom in choosing Luke as a writer. He shows that Luke assures us that this isn't someone else's story: he came for you. We can say yes to Jesus, discovering that he can use you.

    And that all this is possible because he made a way for you.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMonarch Books
    Release dateApr 21, 2017
    ISBN9780857218001
    Straight to the Heart of Luke: 60 bite-sized insights
    Author

    Phil Moore

    Phil Moore is a writer, thinker, speaker, teacher and DMM leader based in London, UK. He has strong links with the Newfrontiers family of churches but also leads more widely too. He is the author of the Straight to the Heart series of devotional commentaries, expressing timeless truths in a fresh and contemporary manner. More details at philmoorebooks.com

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      Straight to the Heart of Luke - Phil Moore

      Act One:

      He Came for You

      From Where I’m Standing (1:1–25)

      The angel said to him, I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news.

      (Luke 1:19)

      Matthew, Mark and Luke are often referred to as the synoptic gospels because they share a common perspective, whereas John wrote three decades later to fill in the gaps in their story.¹ Although this is a helpful distinction, it can also blind us to the major differences between Luke and the other three gospels, because in many ways it is Luke that stands apart from Matthew, Mark and John. We see this clearly in the opening verses of his gospel.

      In 1:1–4, Luke tells us that he is standing in the spectators’ gallery. He is not like Matthew, Mark and John – an eyewitness to the events that he describes. He presents himself instead as a classical Greek historian, introducing his work in the same style as Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon. Using the best Greek of any New Testament writer, he explains that his account is the result of a careful investigation of all the evidence.² Jewish witnesses could give oral histories of what they saw and heard, but only Luke could distil a thousand personal testimonies into a single Greek history book.³ His two years of painstaking research while his friend Paul was in prison in Caesarea from 57 to 59 AD had uniquely qualified him as a historical biographer of Jesus.⁴

      In 1:5–10, Luke introduces us to a man who stood at the very heart of Jewish history. Zechariah was one of the priests who stood before the Lord in the sacred inner room of the Temple in Jerusalem. None of the other gospel writers mentions him, but Luke uses him as a historical benchmark to pinpoint the date for us as June or July 6 BC.⁵ Whereas Matthew, Mark and John start their gospels by proclaiming that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, the Son of God and the eternal Creator, Luke starts by showing how these events fit in with where we ourselves are standing. All of this happened for us.⁶

      Zechariah is standing in front of the altar of incense in the inner sanctuary of the Temple, but what fills his gaze is disaster. He and his wife Elizabeth are devout believers in the God of Israel and have been blameless in keeping his laws, yet their prayers have gone unanswered. They are old and childless in an age that saw infertility as a disgrace, an outward sign of God’s displeasure. He is as confused about his own life as the Jewish nation that he represents is confused by its defeat and occupation by the Romans.⁷

      In 1:11–17, God does not leave Zechariah standing all alone in his confusion. The priest is suddenly terrified to see an angel standing next to the altar of incense. It is Gabriel, the same angel who appeared to the prophet Daniel and whose name is Hebrew for God’s Warrior.⁸ He calms Zechariah with an assurance that he brings good news. God has heard his anguished prayers and will grant him the son he longs for. More than that, he will make his son a herald of God’s salvation to the nation of Israel. The last two verses of the Old Testament promise that the Messiah’s arrival will be preceded by a prophet like Elijah, who will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents.⁹ The angel quotes from those verses to inform Zechariah that his son will be that prophet. In answering Zechariah and Elizabeth’s prayers, the Lord will also answer the prayers of Israel. As a proof that their baby will preach salvation to the Jews, he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even as a foetus in his mother’s womb.¹⁰

      Note what Luke does here at the start of his historical biography of Jesus, writing as a Greek outsider from the spectators’ gallery. He grounds the story of Jesus in the Jewish Scriptures and in the Jewish Temple in the Jewish city of Jerusalem. He explains that the coming of Jesus is good news for the Jewish nation, but even as he does so he announces that the coming of the Jewish Messiah is also good news for everyone. The angel tells Zechariah that his son’s task will be to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. John the Baptist would preach that no amount of Jewish ancestry could make anybody part of God’s true people. Similarly, no amount of Gentile blood could ever shut them out.

      In 1:18–25, Zechariah struggles to see things from where the angel is standing. He points out that he and Elizabeth are far too old to have children.¹¹ He demands proof from Gabriel. Instead of giving him proof, the angel makes him deaf and mute so that he will learn to listen.¹² He needs to stop talking and to start seeing things from heaven’s perspective, like the angel: I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. From where the angel is standing, this announcement makes perfect sense. The essence of the Gospel is that God helps those who cannot help themselves.¹³ Zechariah would only hear and speak again when he named his son John, which is Hebrew for The Lord Is Gracious. Elizabeth understands the Gospel faster than her husband. She declares that The Lord has done this for me. In these days he has shown his favour and taken away my disgrace among the people.

      If you are Jewish, the start of Luke’s gospel is fantastic news. It proclaims that God has fulfilled his promises to your nation through the birth of John the Baptist and of Jesus. If you are not Jewish, like Luke and Theophilus, the start of this gospel is fantastic news for you too. It calls you to come down from the spectators’ gallery and to take your place in the people that God is preparing for himself. Luke starts his gospel by calling all of us to change our perspective and to see things from where the angel is standing: all these events in the summer of 6 BC happened for you and for me.

      Notes

      ¹ Clement of Alexandria says that this was John’s purpose in writing (Eusebius, Church History, 6.14.7).

      ² Luke writes perfect classical Greek when he wants to (1:1–4), but he is also skilful enough to write Greek with a Hebrew flavour at other times. He deliberately echoes Hebrew turns of phrase in his Greek when he writes that he added to send (20:11, 12) and I have eagerly desired with eager desire (22:15).

      ³ Luke says he aims to write (graphō, 1:3) an orderly account of what has been taught orally (katēxeō, 1:4).

      ⁴ Whereas Matthew, Mark and John tend to group their material by theme, Luke is a stickler for exact chronology. His ordered account (kathexēs, 1:3) is easily as reliable as any other ancient work of history.

      ⁵ Herod the Great ruled from 37 to 4 BC and was still alive when Jesus was born. Since John the Baptist was 6 months older than Jesus (1:26) and Jesus was aged 30 in 27 AD (3:1 and 23), John must have been conceived in 6 BC. 1 Chronicles 24:7–19 tells us that Zechariah’s division of priests was only ever on duty in June or July.

      ⁶ It also happened for those all around us, so we cannot keep this good news to ourselves. Luke tells us in 1:2 that believers become servants of the word. Sharing is not optional.

      ⁷ Zechariah means The Lord Has Remembered and Elizabeth means God’s Oath. The Lord had made them infertile, not to curse them, but to make them a channel of his blessing and to fulfil his promises to Israel.

      ⁸ Daniel 8:16; 9:21. The time between the completion of the Old Testament in 432 BC and the appearance of Gabriel to Zechariah in 6 BC is known as the 400 years of silence. Suddenly the silence is over.

      ⁹ Malachi 4:5–6. John would not echo Elijah’s miracles (John 10:41) so much as the revival that Elijah brought to Israel in 1 Kings 18. See Matthew 11:7–14; 17:10–13.

      ¹⁰ Luke 1:15 deliberately echoes the words of an angel to another infertile couple in Judges 13:4–5. Luke wants us to view his words as Scripture. The God of the Old Testament is now giving the world a New Testament.

      ¹¹ Luke uses the same Greek words in 1:7 and 1:18 that are used in the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament to say that Abraham and Sarah were well on in years (Genesis 18:11; 24:1). He wants us to see his gospel as Scripture and as the promise of a new and better seed of Abraham (Genesis 18:10–15).

      ¹² The Greek word kōphos in 1:22 can mean either deaf or mute. We can tell that it means both from the fact that people have to communicate with Zechariah using sign language and a tablet in 1:62–63.

      ¹³ Gabriel uses the verb euangelizō to tell Zechariah literally in 1:19 that he has come to evangelize him.

      The Impossible (1:26–38)

      How will this be, Mary asked the angel, since I am a virgin? The angel answered… Nothing is impossible with God.

      (Luke 1:34–37)

      A judge like Theophilus must have heard some tall stories in his time. The courtrooms of the ancient world were full of them. But in all his years as a judge he cannot have heard a more impossible claim than this one. Luke said a virgin had given birth to a baby.

      Even today, many people struggle to believe that this really happened. Rob Bell asks if it might just be a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? He queries whether in the Hebrew language at that time, the word ‘virgin’ could mean several things or whether in the first century being ‘born of a virgin’ also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse?¹ Rather than skim over these verses, we therefore need to slow down to consider carefully what Luke is saying. What made him risk his credibility at the very outset of his gospel by asking Theophilus to believe the impossible? These verses suggest at least four reasons.

      First, Luke says this as a historian. He knows we will find it difficult to believe what he says happened, so he provides us with a time, a place and a name. He pinpoints the date by telling us that the virgin conceived six months after Zechariah’s wife – in other words, in January 5 BC.² He pinpoints the location as the town of Nazareth in Galilee – not a city where such things might be missed in the crowd, but a close-knit community of a few hundred people.³ He also tells us the name of the woman involved – the same Mary who was engaged to Joseph, the descendant of David. Luke expects us to believe him because his two years of research forced him to conclude that the impossible had really happened to a particular woman at a particular place and time.

      Second, Luke says this as a doctor. When the former tax collector Matthew describes the birth of Jesus in his gospel, he instinctively focuses on how events unfurled for Joseph. Jewish society was segregated by gender, so he naturally told the story from the perspective of the man. Luke’s profession transcended gender barriers. As a doctor, he instinctively approaches childbirth from the woman’s point of view. His reference to conception and delivery in verse 31 serves to remind us that these are not the words of a primitive fool, but those of someone who has been trained in first-century gynaecology. Luke is fully aware that what he is saying here is medically impossible – that one of Mary’s eggs was fertilized by divine miracle without there being any need for human sperm.

      Third, Luke says this as a student of the Old Testament. He does not quote explicitly from the Jewish Scriptures, since that would mean very little to Theophilus, but he clearly has the early prophecies of Isaiah in mind. The angel’s words echo the promise that God would cause a virgin’s son to rule forever on David’s throne over God’s people. Yes, that would be humanly impossible. It would have to be a miracle from God. But the prophet declared in triumph that The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this. ⁴

      Fourth, Luke says this as a scientist who has come to believe in something bigger than science. We might have expected a physician to play down all talk of the supernatural in his gospel, but in fact we find the opposite is true. Luke uses the words for demons and healing and the Holy Spirit more often than any of the other gospel writers. He uses the word angel almost as often as the other three combined. He adds several new miracles to those already recorded by Matthew and Mark. Nobody is more diligent than Luke in questioning facts, but nor is anyone more convinced than Luke that heavenly facts trump earthly facts every time God issues a simple command.

      Luke explains that Mary conceived through God’s power, because salvation always starts with him and not with us. God announced his plan to her through Gabriel, the same angel that appeared to Zechariah and whose name means God’s Warrior or God’s Strongman.⁵ Gabriel responds to her horrified expression by assuring her that The Lord is with you and that Mary, you have found favour with God. She is to call her baby Jesus, which is Hebrew for The Lord Saves, because her virgin birth is the fulfilment of God’s ancient prophecy to Eve that he would save the world through the offspring of a woman, without needing the help of any man.⁶

      Mary asks the obvious question: How will this be, since I am a virgin? She isn’t voicing unbelief, like Zechariah in the Temple, but bewilderment in the face of the impossible. The angel explains that The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.⁷ He doesn’t use the language of modern medicine, but Gabriel essentially informs her that the same Holy Spirit through whom the Lord created the physical universe in Genesis 1 will perform a creative miracle inside her womb. He will create a male gamete out of nothing to fertilize the egg within her. Her child will be the Son of God physically as well as spiritually. Luke is not denying medical facts. He is simply insisting that God can overrule them. He is inviting us to believe that God is truly this passionate to save us.

      Mary believes that if God can provide a baby for Zechariah in the barren womb of Elizabeth, he can also provide a baby for her in her virginity. She believes that if God’s Word was powerful enough to create the universe out of nothing at the dawn of time, it is also powerful enough to create whatever physical matter is needed in her womb to create a baby, without the need of help from any man. She believes the angel’s promise when he assures her in verse 37 that Nothing is impossible with God. Although she knows it may mean being rejected by Joseph and by her neighbours in Nazareth, she submits to God’s plan: I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.⁸

      Luke assures us as a historian and as a doctor that the impossible took place in the town of Nazareth in 5 BC. He invites us to respond with the same humble faith as Mary. He wants us to believe that God is this committed to saving us. All of this happened for you.

      Notes

      ¹ Rob Bell asks these questions in Velvet Elvis (2005).

      ² Jesus was therefore born in September or October. It’s just tradition to celebrate his birth on 25th December.

      ³ Matthew 2:23 emphasizes the spiritual significance of Nazareth for Jewish readers. Luke emphasizes its geographical location to help Roman readers to find it on a map and believe what he is saying is real.

      ⁴ Isaiah 7:14; 9:6–7. While Luke just states the facts, Matthew quotes from Isaiah for his Jewish readers.

      ⁵ Gabriel’s appearance proclaims God’s irresistible power, which is why Daniel, Zechariah and Mary all react with fear to seeing him (Daniel 8:17; Luke 1:12).

      ⁶ God prophesies over Eve in Genesis 3:15 and declares in Hebrew that her seed will be the Saviour. He does not prophesy about Adam’s seed because the Saviour would be born without the sperm of any man.

      ⁷ The angel’s words in 1:35 are meant to echo the Old Testament accounts of the glory of the Lord descending on the Tabernacle and Temple. The virgin birth singled Jesus out as the holy Son of God.

      ⁸ Mary was even at risk of being killed by her neighbours. See Deuteronomy 22:21 and John 8:1–11.

      The Lowest of the Low (1:39–45)

      As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.

      (Luke 1:44)

      When Nelson Mandela emerged from twenty-seven years in prison, he declared that A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.¹ In that case the Roman Empire was terribly guilty. Its male citizens ill-treated their wives as much as they ill-treated one another. They denied citizenship to the foreign tribesmen they conquered in their lust for empire and they denied legal personhood to their slaves. Rome was a place where the strong grew stronger and where the weak were often simply left to die.

      This was the world in which Luke had been raised, a world in which the poet Lucan complained that Poverty is shunned and treated as a crime.² When he came to faith in Jesus, Luke repented of his Roman ways and became a champion of the lowest of the low. One of the distinctive features of his gospel is how much he sides with outcasts and with rejects, insisting that what Jesus said and did he said and did for them as much as for anyone.

      Roman society viewed women as second-rate to men. It is therefore striking that Luke begins the story of Jesus by focusing on a woman. He mentions Mary by name more than the other three gospel writers put together, describing her inner thoughts and her interactions with her relative Elizabeth.³ Throughout the rest of his gospel Luke sees himself as a voice for the many voiceless women of the world. He includes at least ten women in the story of Jesus who do not feature in Matthew, Mark and John. He records two new parables about women and he notes that many women followed Jesus alongside his twelve disciples.⁴ Don’t miss this, because it was revolutionary.

      Roman society also looked down on the poor. It is therefore very striking that Luke begins his story with a Nazarene so poor that she brought the very cheapest offering to the Temple when her son was born.⁵ Luke speaks up for the despised paupers of the world by recording more of Jesus’ teaching about money than any of the other gospel writers: Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God… But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.⁶ Mary has very few material possessions yet Elizabeth assures her in verses 42 and 45 that she is more blessed than the rich in their palaces. Luke turns Roman attitudes towards poverty on their head.

      Roman society also despised outcasts. It viewed most of the empire’s population as barbarians, so Luke challenges this racism by telling us that a Samaritan leper was the only one who remembered to thank Jesus for healing him and that Samaritan travellers could teach the Jewish priests a thing or two about God’s compassion. He describes the love of Jesus towards lepers and slaves and beggars and prostitutes and tax collectors.⁷ The fact that they were deprived of a voice in Roman society did not make them any less worthy of salvation. Jesus came into the world for the likes of them.

      It is easy to imagine what effect Luke’s love for the lowest of the low might have had on a Roman reader like Theophilus. As a judge in one of the capital’s crowded courtrooms, he must have had more experience of the rotten underbelly of society than a producer on The Jeremy Kyle Show. However much he might have wished to resist Luke’s claim that he was a sinner in need of God’s salvation, he must have felt convicted by the gulf between the gospel writer’s attitudes and his own. Luke expects us to feel the same way when we read his gospel, convicted that we are also sinners in need of God’s forgiveness. To help us he challenges one of the biggest blind spots in our own day.

      We don’t keep slaves. We pride ourselves on our liberal attitudes towards gender and racial equality. We champion the rights of the disabled and of sexual minorities. But our attitude towards one of the voiceless groups that Luke defends in the first chapter of his gospel is no more enlightened than the attitudes of first-century Rome.

      Luke made a revolutionary statement in verse 15. Did you spot it when he told us that Zechariah’s son would be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born? Roman society denied that foetuses were fully human. Many women took the silphium herb to procure an abortion, and many men kicked their women in the abdomen if they refused. Once born, there was still a one-in-three chance that a Roman baby would be abandoned by its mother and left to die.⁸ Luke is therefore defending another type of outcast when he tells us in verse 15 that God’s Spirit can fill a foetus in the womb. He goes one step further in verses 39–45, since Mary has only just fallen pregnant when she visits Elizabeth. Jesus is still a tiny embryo inside her, yet the foetus of John the Baptist leaps for joy in his mother’s womb in response to his arrival.⁹ His reaction provokes Elizabeth to welcome Mary as the mother of my Lord – not as the mother of a cluster of cells that has the potential to become her Lord. Jesus does not yet have ears or fingers or toes, yet Elizabeth hails him as Yahweh.¹⁰ In our world of easy access to abortions and the morning-after pill, that ought to challenge us every bit as much as it challenged Theophilus and his first-century friends.¹¹

      At the end of the Hunger Games trilogy of novels, Katniss Everdeen reflects that

      I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despite being one myself. I think that Peeta was onto something about us destroying one another and letting some decent species take over. Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives… You can spin it any way you like… But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.¹²

      Luke therefore tells us good news. We have all sinned but, unlike Katniss Everdeen, God has not given up on us. Instead of rejecting humans for exploiting one another, despising one another and aborting one another, God has decided to save us by becoming a better kind of human being. He became a zygote, then an embryo, then a foetus in a poor Jewish girl’s womb. The Creator became the weakest of creatures to save humanity from its sinful self-destruction. So don’t be offended when Luke insists that we are all sinners who need saving. Admit that you are as guilty as everyone else. The first step towards experiencing the good news of Jesus is to confess that he came for you.

      Notes

      ¹ He says this in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom (1994).

      ² Writing at the same time that Luke wrote his gospel, the poet Lucan says this in Pharsalia (1.166).

      ³ Mary and Elizabeth were relatives despite the fact that one came from the tribe of Judah and the other was a Levite (1:5, 36). By 5 BC the twelve tribes of Israel had intermarried.

      ⁴ See 2:36–38; 7:11–17; 8:1–3; 13:10–13; 15:8–10; 18:1–8; 23:27–31; 24:1–11.

      ⁵ Leviticus 12:8 says that the offering brought by Mary in Luke 2:24 was reserved for the poorest of the poor.

      ⁶ Luke 6:20, 24. See also 11:37–41; 12:13–21, 33–34; 14:12–14; 16:14–15, 19–31.

      ⁷ Luke 5:12–14, 27–32; 7:1–10, 36–50; 9:51–56; 10:30–37; 17:12–19; 18:9–14, 35–43; 19:1–10.

      ⁸ See Child Abandonment in European History, published in the Journal of Family History (January 1992).

      ⁹ The Bible also tells us that foetuses are able to interact spiritually in Psalm 22:10, 58:3 and 139:13–16.

      ¹⁰ The Greek word kurios in 1:43 is the word used throughout the Greek Septuagint for the Lord.

      ¹¹ Luke is not trying to single you out if you have had an abortion. He is encouraging you that the entire human race has blood on its hands. All of us have sinned and all of us need saving.

      ¹² Katniss says this in the Suzanne Collins novel Mockingjay (2010).

      Every Single One (1:46–80)

      Mary said: My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.

      (Luke 1:46–47)

      Desiderius Erasmus provoked outrage at the start of the sixteenth century when he retranslated the first chapter of Luke’s gospel into Latin. For centuries the angel’s words to Mary in verse 28 had been used as a prayer: Ave Maria, gratia plena, or Hail Mary, full of grace. Erasmus had gone back to the Greek text and had discovered that this translation was in fact very misleading. The angel did not say that Mary was gratia plena – full of grace in the sense

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