The Uniqueness of the Gospel
Luke 5:33-39
I have much to say to you, this morning, and I want you to turn to your Bibles, Luke 5 verses 33 to 39. This is a passage of some length, at least for me, to cover, but I'm going to cover it this morning because it needs to be presented as a unit. It is a very, very important portion of Scripture...Luke 5:33 to 39. And let me read these verses to you.
"And they said to Him, 'The disciples of John often fast and offer prayers; the disciples of the Pharisees also do the same; but Yours eat and drink.' And Jesus said to them, 'You cannot make the attendants of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you? But the days will come and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days.' And He was also telling them a parable. No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it in an old garment, otherwise he will both tear the new and the piece from the new will not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled out and the skins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one, after drinking old wine wishes for new; for he says, 'The old is good enough.'"
Now in the reading of that you obviously have some questions raised in your minds. And perhaps the singular question is...what's this all about? And what it's about is essentially the title of the message today, "The uniqueness of the gospel...The uniqueness of the gospel." And I want you to understand this, it is critical, it has far-reaching implications. The gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel of God, as Paul calls it, the gospel of grace, the message of forgiveness through the work of Jesus Christ, the gospel which we know and love and believe is unique. And I mean that in the purest sense of the word. When I say the gospel is unique, I mean to say that it is incompatible with any and all other religious belief. It stands alone. The idea that the Christian gospel can mix with or blend with any other religious system in any way is absolutely wrong. You cannot mix the gospel with Roman Catholic or orthodox sacramentalism. You cannot mix the gospel with liberalism. You can't mix the gospel with Mormonism, or the religion of the Jehovah's Witness, or Christian Science or any other religion. You cannot mix the gospel even with the religion of Judaism. The gospel is absolutely exclusive. It mingles with no other religion. It mixes with no other religion. It accommodates no other religion. In fact, it replaces all other religion. The gospel is absolutely exclusive. Now this needs to be emphatically understood in a time which exalts diversity of belief, tolerance of religion, pluralism, inclusivism and even universalism which essentially says we're all headed the same direction.
Now we know there is one God, there is one authoritative book, the Bible. There is one Redeemer of souls, the Lord Jesus Christ. There is one gospel, the gospel of grace and faith. And that singularity of the Christian gospel means that any intrusion that mixes or alters the singularity of the gospel renders it void, nullifies it. It stands alone. Being a Christian is to the exclusion of all other religious systems, or you're not a Christian because all other religious systems are systems of works, to one degree or another, of ritual, ceremony, or human works earning favor with God. We are here again then, as we so often do in our studies of the Bible, defending the purity of the gospel. The passage before us today is very, very important and very focused on this very subject, the uniqueness of the gospel. And what this passage does for us is demonstrate that the gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel of salvation is incompatible with Judaism, and we would assume that Judaism is its nearest kin. But we're going to find that Jesus didn't come to add to Judaism. He didn't come to alter Judaism. He didn't come to blend with Judaism. He came to bring the gospel which replaced it. And here Jesus will show us the bankruptcy, the emptiness and the incompatibility of even Judaism with the gospel. Again I say, the Christian gospel cannot be mixed or mingled or blended or added to any religion, any religious system, even Judaism.
Now this becomes eminently clear in the passage and it points us in the direction of understanding why there was such an ongoing conflict between the religious leaders of Judaism and Jesus, which ultimately led to them getting the Romans to execute Him. The hostility continued to escalate to a fever pitch until they managed to incite an entire crowd to scream for Jesus' blood in an irrational call for His execution. And the hostility was based upon the fact that Jesus came with the gospel that totally replaced the religion of Judaism. That must be understood..
Now we already have plenty of indication that the hostility has begun. If you go back into the prior passage in chapter 5, the one we studied in our last look at Luke's gospel, you remember that Jesus called a man named Levi, starting in verse 27, also named Matthew. We know him as Matthew, the writer of the first gospel. He called a man named Levi to Himself. He forgave his sins. He saved him. He made him a disciple. And then Matthew Levi put on a feast, a celebration, a banquet, a festival, a party at his house because he was so excited about his salvation, he was so excited that he had been called to be a disciple of Jesus Christ he called all his friends together. Well all his friends were the social riff-raff. He was at the lowest level of society as a tax collector. He was more hated than anybody else in Jewish society because he worked for the Roman government and was an extortioner and a crook who was robbing his own people to pay a foreign Gentile oppressor and to get rich at the expense of his people. And so tax collectors were the scum.
The only people they could associate with were thugs, enforcers, prostitutes and other sorts of criminals. Matthew was happy about his conversion, elated about his conversion, about being forgiven, being called to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, he called a party. Invited his friends and verse 29 says there was a great crowd of tax gatherers and other people. The other gospel tells us "other sinners," just the people I just named for you, the outcasts, the despicable, the despised of society and they were all at the dinner. And verse 30, "The Pharisees and the scribes began grumbling at the disciples of Jesus saying, 'Why do you eat and drink with the tax gatherers and sinners," and here we find another indication of the terrible breach between Jesus and the religious leaders.
The religious leaders were self-righteous. The religious leaders had external parade of their supposed righteousness. And one of the things they did was disassociate themselves from all people that they deemed unclean. They were the sanctimonious. They were the righteous. And they didn't soil themselves by going into a Gentile house or hanging around with tax gatherers, prostitutes and other thugs and criminals. And Jesus associated with those people all the time. In fact, He basically gained the title, "the friend of sinners and tax collectors...the friend of drunkards," because those were the kind of people He went to. And when the question was asked, Jesus answered in verse 31 and said, "It's not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick." And this is sarcasm, He said, "You who think you're well don't call for the doctor. These people are sick and they know they're sick. They're sinful and they know they're sinful and they have called for the spiritual physician and I have not come...verse 32...to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." And again it's sarcasm. You are the righteous, you are the self-styled righteous, your righteousness won't save you, it's your righteousness that damns you. It's the wrong righteousness, it's the righteousness of your own self-invention and I can't help you, but I have come to sinners, the poor prisoners, blind and oppressed that He referred to from Isaiah 61 earlier in His message in the synagogue in Nazareth.
So we already know that there is a huge gulf between the religion of Judaism concerned with staying away from sinners, and the gospel of Jesus concerned with being with sinners. The religion of Judaism concerned with self-righteousness, the gospel of Jesus concerned with heart righteousness. The religion of Judaism concerned about what men think, and the gospel of Jesus concerned about what God thinks. The religion of Judaism concerned only with the outside, the gospel concerned with the inside. Huge gulf exists and it is very natural then to transition into the passage that I just read to you because in this passage Jesus makes it very clear that in fact the gospel is incompatible with Judaism, that what these Pharisees and scribes are seeing that looks to them to be a kind of religious behavior that is the very opposite of their religion in fact is accurate. The behavior is different because the gospel is different. Here we have then the uniqueness of the gospel by demonstration of its incompatibility with Judaism. And here in this text, Jesus points out the bankruptcy, the emptiness, the incompatibility of the Jewish religion of His day with the gospel. And this is really something we need to keep in our minds because today in this inclusivistic mentality, everybody wants to give people credit for their religion and maybe we kind of introduce Jesus into it but we don't upset it. The fact of the matter is, the gospel can only if it is to be effective, it can only replace all other religious systems.
Now Jesus had just dealt a severe blow to Jewish Pharisaical legalism because Jesus says He's from God. Jesus says He speaks for God. Jesus proves He is God because He healed a paralytic and forgave his sin, two things that only God can do. So here is God and what is God doing? God is calling the riff-raff, the scum, the wretched, the miserable people as His disciples and God in human flesh, if in fact Jesus is God, this one who supposedly comes from God, this one who represents God, this one who claims to be God is in direct opposition to the religion of Judaism. What they're wondering is why He doesn't pay attention to the traditions and why He's so concerned about the heart and why He doesn't associate with the scribes and Pharisees instead of the tax gatherers and prostitutes. They are shocked at His breach of religious etiquette and religious tradition. And so it's right on the heels of their shock over the whole incident with Matthew and the riff-raff in Matthew's house and Jesus' association with them, it's right on the heels of that that Luke follows up with this conversation with Jesus and these people.
And by the way, Matthew and Mark record the same scene in the same sequence which leads me to believe that these are sequential events. If the celebration that Matthew held took place all day long, this may have happened that evening. If it took place all day long and all night long, this may have happened the next day. But I think they're very close in time that perhaps they were linked so that they occurred at the same time. Another reason I believe that is because verse 33 says, "And they said to Him..." And if you're leaping somewhere else in time, you need to identify who they are. But if you're following immediately in sequence, :"they" takes you back to the Pharisees and scribes who were talking to the disciples in the prior incident. So perhaps later that very day, in the evening, or perhaps early the next day this comes in sequence. And it provides a perfect opportunity for Jesus to demonstrate the uniqueness of the gospel.
Now conflict...this is actually the third conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees in this chapter. The first conflict with them came over His healing of the paralyzed man earlier in the chapter. The second conflict comes at the house of Matthew, or outside when the disciples come out and are questioned by the Pharisees. Here is the third conflict and the stakes are raised every time...every time. In the house where the paralytic was healed, there's no real direct confrontation of the Pharisees. But there is at the time of the feast of Matthew. Now we have an even more intense confrontation as Jesus speaks directly to them about the bankruptcy, the emptiness and the incompatibility of Judaism with the gospel.
Now as we look at the passage, verses 33 to 39, I just want to flow through three elements, three simple elements...the inquisition, or the inquiry, the question that's asked, and the interpretation, how Jesus interprets the behavior in light of the question, and then the illustrations, just three simple points. Let's look at the inquisition, first of all.
Verse 33, "And they said to Him, 'The disciples of John often fast and offer prayers; the disciples of the Pharisees, or those of the Pharisees, also do the same; but Yours eat and drink.'" Now what they're doing is pointing at a very obvious breach of the religion of Judaism. The religion of Judaism calls for prayers and fasting, we're not talking about voluntary prayer and voluntary fasting. They had prescribed prayers and prescribed fastings. They had a routine, a daily routine of ritual prayers that were prayed at certain hours during the day. And I'm not going to take time to go into all of that pattern of prayer, although I will comment a bit on the fasting because we've discussed their prayer patterns in other contexts. But there were certain hours of the day when they stopped everything, went into a public place, and routinely went through their prayer list. And they did that in a fashion to demonstrate their supposed spirituality before men. These were required, routine, ritual prayers which were either read or recited from memorization. They were in that sense heartless. They also had fasts. In fact, it was part of the Pharisaic system to fast every Monday and every Thursday of every week. You remember Luke 18, the Pharisee went into the temple to pray and he was saying, "I thank You, O God, that I'm not like this lousy tax collector, I fast twice a week..." And he was telling God how righteous he was because he fasts twice a week. Monday was fast day, and Thursday was fast day. And it may well have been that Matthew's party was on Monday, or on Thursday and they're saying, "What in the world are You doing eating and drinking when all the rest of us are fasting? Don't You understand the tradition?" Which they, of course, had deemed to be the true religion of God, as all false religious do.
Now just look at verse 33, "And they said to Him," that shouldn't pose any question, but it does because we don't know who the "they" are, unless we look back a little bit. Luke seems to use "they" to take us back to the Pharisees and the scribes. They are the group in verse 30 that had just encountered the disciples and "they", no doubt, refers to them. So Luke poses the question from the Pharisees and the scribes. And they say, "All the disciples of John fast and pray; and our disciples also do the same, but Yours eat and drink." So the Pharisees and the scribes appear as the antagonists in the prior passages and "they" relates to those prior references to them.
However, Matthew says, Matthew 9:14, "Disciples of John came to Him saying..." Well, you might say, "Who is it? Is it the scribes and Pharisees, or is it the disciples of John? Is this a contradiction?" No, Mark who records the same incident, chapter 2 verse 18, and John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting and they came and said to Him. That is very typical of what we call synoptic gospel accounts. Luke emphasizes the Pharisees posing the question. Matthew emphasizes the disciples of John posing the question. And Mark says they both posed the question. Very simply, the disciples of John were associated with the Pharisees and the scribes. They were hanging out together. They were committed to the same patterns of prayers and fasting. And they came together and they asked the question together. Perhaps as a group would do...Yeah, why don't Your disciples...Yeah, that's what I...I want to know that...and the question was coming from people who were scribes and Pharisees and people who were disciples of John. Both groups.
Now, this is interesting, both groups obviously observed these fasts and prayers. It says, "The disciples of John often fast and offer prayers; the disciples of the Pharisees also do the same." They have a pattern, they have a routine and they keep this and "Your disciples ignore it," they said to Jesus. I mean, this is an outrage. Don't You understand? This is our religion. This is the true religion of God, they believed, and You're in violation of it. How are we supposed to accept You as the spokesman of God, as the One who is the prophet of God, as the One who is the Messiah of God, as the One who is God incarnate, the healer of diseases, the forgiver of sins? How are we supposed to accept You when You don't even observe our religion?
Now I need to explain something about the disciples of John because when you think of the disciples of John you probably think of the good guys. And what are the good guys doing with these bad guys, these legalists? Well it's not strange to understand the mingling together and I'll tell you why. John the prophet, you remember, came in the third chapter of Luke, we studied it. He came into the region around the Jordan and he was preaching repentance. He was saying, "Messiah's coming, Messiah's coming, the Kingdom's coming, the Kingdom's coming. You better be ready when the King comes to set up His Kingdom and you better repent, better repent. If you don't repent, the wrath of God is going to come upon you." Remember? A very strong message. And it tells us in Luke 3 starting in verse 3 and going down to verse 15 that everybody in the Jordan area was coming out there. One of the other writer says, "All Judea was going to John." Literally thousands of people, if not tens of thousands were going out there, they were listening to John preaching repentance, and getting ready for Messiah. "Come, repent and be forgiven and get your heart ready for Messiah." And he had many thousands and thousands of disciples.
There was a day, you remember in John's ministry, not all of those people would have been there that day, when Jesus showed up. And that was the day that John points to Jesus and says, "Behold...what?...the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." And John wanted his disciples to then move their allegiance to Jesus. In John 3:28 to 30 John said, "He must increase and I must decrease. I've got to fade away and you need to move toward the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ." And Jesus, you remember, was baptized by John and the Father said, "This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased, and the Spirit descended upon Him," and it was clearly recognizable to John that this in fact was the Messiah. And so John wanted to transition his people to the one who had to increase, Jesus Christ.
But not all his followers were there that day and not all his followers were convinced Jesus was the Messiah. And not all of the disciples of John followed Jesus. But I'll tell you what many of them did, because we meet them in this context. They made a serious commitment down there at the river. The confessed their sin. They asked for forgiveness. They wanted to be acceptable when the Messiah came and set up His Kingdom so they could get in the Kingdom. So they cranked up their religious involvement a few notches. And how would you do that in Judaism? You would start hanging around with whom? The scribes and the Pharisees. You would say, "Hey, we had a real dedication over there, we sort of recommitted our lives to religion and to God and where is the highest level of religion, we need to get there? So let's hang around with the scribes and the Pharisees. Let's do the fasts that they ascribe to. Let's do the alms giving that they ascribe to. Let's pray the prayers that they ascribe to. And let's really be serious because when the Messiah comes, we want Him to know that our repentance was real." So they don't make the transition to Jesus, but all of a sudden they start hanging around with the people they perceive in their religious system are at the highest level.
Now at this time also, interestingly enough, John the Baptist is in prison. So he's not around to help his disciples. He's not around to be preaching everywhere saying, "Here's Christ, here's Christ, follow Him, follow Him." He's in prison and he's going to lose his head. So for all intents and purposes, his voice is stilled.
So these disciples of John wanting to be very, very faithful to their dedication that they made at their baptism with John wind up associating with these religionists. They blend in to the religion of the day and they do what would be the highest level of religious devotion. And by the way, long after this, go all the way to the nineteenth chapter of Acts, don't go there really cause we don't have time, but in your mind or write it down. The nineteenth chapter of Acts, first seven verses, way into the book of Acts you will run into disciples of John who never heard of Jesus...never heard of Him. That...that's years later. There was no media, there was no radio, or TV, print media. If you didn't hear about Jesus or meet Jesus, if you were off somewhere else, you didn't know, you didn't know. So there were disciples of John way into the nineteenth chapter of Acts and you remember they were asked if they knew about Christ and they said, "We have never so much as heard of Christ." And they gave them the gospel, do you remember? And they repented, they believed in Christ, they were baptized, they received the Holy Spirit.
So there were these people associated with John who in a desire to be fastidious in their religion associated themselves with the Pharisees. So they come as a group, kind of a mingled group and they ask the question. The disciples of John here they fast and offer their prayers and the disciples of John say, "Yeah." And the disciples of the Pharisees, they do the same. But Yours eat and drink, You're having a party here and this is, maybe, Monday, or Thursday.
Now just to make sure you understand what we're talking about, this was their own human invention. Do you know how many fasts in the Bible are commanded by God? One. There's only one commanded fast in the entire Old Testament, just one. It is Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement...that is the only fast commanded by God. Leviticus 16:29 and 31 commands people and it uses the phrase, "Humble your souls," or in the New King James, "Afflict your souls," from the Hebrew word anah which is commonly used to refrain from food. What was the Day of Atonement? It was a day when you took a hard look at...what?...your sin. When you did a deep inspection of your soul, when sacrifices for the whole nation were made, when the whole nation stopped its normal course of action and everybody did a heart search of their own sin...and that was God's required fast. You don't eat, you mourn, you grieve over your sin. There weren't any other required fasts. There were occasions in the Old Testament when the Jews did fast over grief in the book of Esther, chapter 4; in Isaiah 58 they're referred to; 1 Kings 21 they're referred to; Joel chapter 1 verses 13 and 14. There are fasts in the Old Testament associated, always associated with grief and mourning and the wrenching of the heart over some serious issue. That's...that is a proper fast. They're not required, they're just done voluntarily when...here's the key...someone is so overwrought, so sad, so heart sick, so concerned to pray that they have no appetite.
I see this even today. I go into a hospital and I see a young couple and their baby is in surgery because the baby's hanging between life and death. The last thing you want to say to those people is, "Let's go to the cafeteria and eat," because it's liable to make them sick because you feel that trauma and that pain in your stomach. There...there is a need to just pray. If a person loses a loved one, a spouse and there's an overwhelming grief, that is the time to mourn, that is the time to weep the fast. If you have a prayer burden, you're praying for the salvation of someone and it literally dominates you to the degree that you have no appetite, that's the true and pure fast that is born of the heart...born of the heart. There's no merit in fasting. You're not going to get points with God if you don't eat, just because you don't want to eat so you can get points with God. It's when you have no appetite, it's gone because of the sadness and the turmoil of your heart. And there are occasions in the Old Testament when such fasts exist, when there is a grappling with something severe that takes away all desire to eat.
There were one-day fasts. There were three-day fasts. There were seven-day fasts. In Daniel 10 verses 2 and 3 there is a three-week fast. And there are several times in the Old Testament when you have a 40-day fast, right? Such as Exodus 34, Deuteronomy 9, I think 1 Kings 19 and even our Lord Jesus fasted for 40 days in the tremendous conflict over His soul with Satan.
But there's only one required. But what had happened in Judaism was they decided that fasting looked spiritual, so they invented routine fasts that had nothing to do with their hearts cause their hearts were rotten. Their hearts were stone, in the language of Ezekiel. I mean, on the outside they were white, on the inside they were full of dead-men's bones, Jesus said, they were hypocrites, they were despicable to God. They fasted only to be seen by men. And they determined that every Monday and every Thursday they would fast. And then every day they went through the ritual prayer, the ritual prayer. They had three major religious expressions of the Judaism of the time of Jesus and it still exists today among those that are orthodox. Prayer, alms and fasting, those were the three religious expressions and they did them publicly and they did them as ostentatiously as they could possibly be done in order to parade their supposed godliness before men.
Turn to Matthew 6 for just a minute. This will be a reminder because we've studied this in the past, but Jesus when He preached the Sermon on the Mount really lit a bomb in that message because He spoke to these religious leaders, these religious Jews and He said, "When you give alms, don't sound a trumpet before you." Can you imagine? You're going to give and so you have some guy blow a horn...Here, look over here, folks, ta-ta-ta-da, I'm giving. See, that was the kind of thing they did. They hypocrites do it in the synagogues and in the streets that they may be honored by men. Well they have their reward. What is it? They're honored by men, that's it.
And then in verse 5, "When you pray, don't be like the hypocrites, they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners in order to be seen by men." There they are out there on the corner going through all of their ritual prayers, saying all their little prayers, appearing spiritual. I've seen them do that even today among the orthodox. It's routine. I've seen it in many places in Israel.
And then down to verse 16, there was the third element of their ostentatious religious practice. "When you fast, don't put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites do, for they neglect their appearance in order to be seen fasting by men." Monday, this is what they did, they got up, they put on their worse looking clothes, shabby, torn rag stuff and they didn't comb their hair. And they threw a few ashes around so they'd look pale and wan, like death warmed over. And they put a gloomy face and they roamed around, "I'm fasting." That's what they did. And they have their reward too, it's from men. In verse 17, "If you're going to fast, anoint your head." What does that mean? Put on some Brylcream, you know, comb your hair, or whatever you use. Comb your hair and wash your face so that you may not be seen fasting by men. In other words, if it's real then it's between you and God.
So there are the three things: prayer, alms, fasting. They had routine alms giving, routine prayers, routine fasting and they did it as ostentatiously as possible so people would see them. And Paul said they made an open display in the flesh, Galatians 6:12. But again, there was only one commanded fast. Any other fasting you did was from the heart because of grief, mourning because of sadness and concern. Very different. The Pharisees and their followers were engaged in really nothing more than hypocrisy. And the disciples of John the Baptist probably were pretty well intentioned, I would think, and they said, "Well, this is...this is the highest standard of religion so we'll kind of get into this." And so they're going through all