Jesus' Power over Death
Luke 7:11-17
I can certainly tell you personally, and I'm sure others would say the same, that for a preacher, a favorite subject is the Lord Jesus Christ. The theme of the entire Bible is the Lord Jesus Christ. Certainly and particularly the theme of the New Testament is the life and ministry of our Lord and preaching on Him in specific is the highest privilege, the greatest joy for the preacher. That's what makes it so rewarding to be working our way through one of the gospels, the gospel of Luke. And when you come to a season such as the Christmas season and your thoughts are directed in a special way toward the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, when you're in a gospel you can almost just stay right where you are because every paragraph presents the glory of the incarnate God in Jesus Christ. And that is certainly the case for us, both this Lord's day and the next. We'll just keep moving through Luke because what we're going to be learning here is so critical to this very Christmas season because the two passages before us proclaim Jesus as God come into the world.
Open your Bible then to Luke chapter 7...Luke chapter 7. And we come to a text of Scripture from verses 11 through 17, it's a wonderful story of Jesus raising a man from the dead. Jesus' power over death. Without question, I think, we would all agree Jesus Christ is the most well-known person in human history. The literate civilizations of the world all know something about the man Jesus Christ. The exceptions around the world would be those tribes and those isolated groups and families that are illiterate. It's rare to find someone who hasn't heard about Jesus Christ. I remember on one occasion trekking through a field in China, way out in the countryside and coming across some people living in a little ram-shackled place, Chinese people in an agricultural setting who had never head the name of Jesus Christ. That is rare in our media-dominated world today.
But as universal as the knowledge of the name of Jesus Christ might be, knowing who He is is not so universal. There are diverse and divergent opinions concerning who Jesus Christ really is. It is not necessarily helpful, however, to list all the wrong ideas. We will not be assisted by going through a long list of the wrong views of Christ. I suppose there are so many we couldn't count them all. There are those sort of religious perspectives where a whole mass of people in some religious organization have the same view of Christ, such as the Muslims who think that He was simply a human prophet. Or the Mormons who believe that He is a created being, the spirit brother of Adam and Lucifer and on and on you could go. And then there are all of those myriad of opinions that from everyone who seems to think that he can basically define truth for himself might hold toward Jesus. You ask a hundred people, you might get fifty different views. But as I said, it's really not helpful to learn all the wrong things about Jesus, what is necessary is to know the truth. And the truth simply put is that Jesus is God, fully man and fully God. And that is the core, the heart, the backbone, the foundation of the Christian faith.
That is also the testimony of Scripture. And before we look at Luke 7, I want to just read you a verse that I think most concisely states the reality of Jesus as God. It is John 1:18, I'll just read it to you. "No man has seen God at any time." That is a blanket statement. There are people who have had a view, a diminished view, a limited view of God. Moses, remember, saw the glory of God. Adam, you remember, even after the Fall, the presence of God was manifested to him in the Garden, probably in light, in a diminished form. There was the vision of God that Isaiah had. The vision of God that Ezekiel had. There were others. Abraham, who was confronted by God, appearing as a man in the book of Genesis. There have been times when God disclosed Himself in a diminished sense, in a limited sense. But no one has ever seen God fully, not even Moses who saw the glory of God. Moses, says Exodus 33 and 34, only saw God's afterglow, His back parts and he was veiled and tucked into a cave so that he was not exposed to the full blazing glory of God because God said, "No man can see Me and live."
So then, even though Moses was in one sense, Numbers 12:8, face to face with God, what he saw was a diminished reflection of God's real glory. No man has seen God at any time. But the only begotten, the monogenes, the only begotten God, that is God the Son, the One who is in the bosom of the Father, the One who is intimate in the trinity, He has declared Him. Nobody has seen God but the best view ever is the view of God brought to us by the monogenes, the only begotten Son of God, the One who is literally intimate with God, in the bosom of God, that is the One who is of the same essence as God, He has declared Him or explained Him. The verb is the same verb from which we get the word "exegesis." Jesus exegetes God. Jesus explains God. Jesus unfolds God. Jesus reveals God. So when you look at Jesus, you're seeing God. That's why He Himself said, "If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father."
The greatest, clearest vision of God that man has ever, or will ever see, is in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ has made God known, has exegeted God. He is, in fact, God in human flesh. And that is why in Luke...Luke calls Him the Son of the Most High God, calls Him the Son of God, calls Him the holy offspring and all of that way back in the first chapter of Luke. And as Luke unfolds the history of Jesus Christ, he continually demonstrates to us that there is no other explanation for Jesus Christ then that He is God. There is no other possible explanation.
We have seen that all the way through this incredible gospel. The original angelic revelation that the child would be born indicated that He would be coming down from heaven, that He would be Emmanuel, God with us. The angels proclaimed that to Joseph, to Mary, to Zacharias and Elizabeth, that their son would be the forerunner. They proclaimed it to the shepherds. The virgin conception of Mary indicated that this child was God. The virgin birth indicated that He was God. His parents affirmed it. Ananias...or Zacharias and Elizabeth affirmed it, so did Anna and Simeon. Even more importantly, God the Father affirmed it at His baptism and so did the Holy Spirit. And then when Jesus began His ministry, He showed power over Satan in triumphing over temptation. And then He showed power over demons in casting the demons out. And one of the demons in Luke 4:34 said, "I know who You are, the Holy One of God." And then in His power to heal the diseases, it was clear that He was God because every time He healed somebody He recreated them...recreated them physically...as well, in a sense, as reviving them, resuscitating them spiritually by casting demons out. His teaching also manifested His deity because He taught as no one had ever taught, with knowledge and wisdom that is without equal.
Luke then finally in building this case that Jesus is God, comes now to His power over life and death. And in a story that we'll see in verse 11 and following, Jesus' deity is evident because He raises a dead man from the dead. As the story unfolds, and I want you to begin to look at it in verse 11, we're going to see evidences that Jesus is God. We're going to see some implied evidences before we see an explicit demonstration of divine power.
Verse 11, "It came about soon afterwards," that is soon after the healing recorded in the prior passage. You remember that He healed the slave of the centurion. We had a wonderful time studying that passage. "Soon after that," that's an indefinite time designation, "Soon after that," that would indicate a few days at the most. "He went to a city called Nain, and His disciples were going along with Him accompanied by a large multitude."
I read that and posed the question...why did He do that? Why did He decide to go to Nain? Nain is about 20 miles from Capernaum. It would be a full day's walk to walk 20 miles. It was south of Capernaum. It was about six miles southwest of Nazareth so that Capernaum, Nazareth and Nain kind of in a triangle, was three miles west of a town called Endor. You remember the witch of Endor. It was a small and very nondescript and insignificant town. By the way, it still exists today with the same name. Two hundred people live there. It was on the slope of some mountains called Little Hermon, near the valley of Jezreel on a hill called Moreh. The other side of that hill had a town called Shunem where Elijah went to the Shunemite lady. So it was just a little town, nondescript, insignificant. And what's going on here is that Jesus determines to go to Nain and to drag this huge entourage with Him for this day's journey.
Now this introduces to us this idea, and this is the first point I want you to grab, of divine purpose. When you look at Jesus and you're looking to see God, you see it in this feature, this attribute, divine purpose. God never acts without a fixed goal and a fixed purpose. God never acts whimsically. There are no unexpected coincidences. There are not unplanned for problems, contingencies. There are not plan Bs. Everything within the plan of God is fixed, settled, unchanging and brought to pass. He is sovereign. He has perfect intentions for everything He thinks, everything He says and every act. His mission is clear, His objective is clear, His strategy is clear, His plan, His purpose will come to pass. And the Old Testament makes this clear. This is how God acts. Jeremiah 29:11, God said, "I know the thoughts that I have toward you." In other words, there are no random thoughts in God's mind. Nothing pops into God's mind or nothing pops out. He doesn't have to remember anything, nor does He forget anything. Everything is purposeful, planned, fixed, unchangeable and settled. He also says in Isaiah 55:11, "My word which goes forth from My mouth shall not return to Me void, or empty, without accomplishing what I desire, without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it." Every thought is intentional. Every word is intentional. Every thought effects its end. Every word effects its goal.
Finally in Isaiah 46:9 to 11, "I am God. There is no one like Me, declaring from the beginning and from ancient times things which had not been done, saying, 'My purpose will be established, I will accomplish all My good pleasure. Truly I have spoken. Truly I will bring it to pass. I have planned it, surely I will do it.'" great truths. Every thought God has, every word God says, every act God does operates perfectly on divinely established purpose. And that is the way it is with Jesus. If you study the life of Jesus in the gospels, you will find a certain resolve in Jesus, such as in John 4:4 when He says, "I have to go through Samaria." Why do You have to go through Samaria? Because the plan is there's a well there and when we get to that well there will be a woman there at the very moment we get there, for an encounter that has been planned from eternity past by God. In the ninth chapter of Luke, and there are many illustrations of it, verse 51, "It came about when the days were approaching for His ascension, He resolutely set His face to go to Jerusalem." He knew exactly when He was going to die, when He was going to rise, when He was going to ascend to heaven. He knew exactly what the timetable was and what the steps were to bring that to pass. And so He resolutely sets His face to go to Jerusalem. This is evidence of His deity. He knows the future. He knows the divine purpose. He works on a timetable. A number of times He said, "My hour has not yet come," remember that statement? John records it several time...times. It's not time for Me to do this, that time will come and when the time comes He acts resolutely. In 13:33 of Luke, "Nevertheless I must journey on today and tomorrow and the next day for it cannot be that a prophet should perish outside of Jerusalem." He knew where He was to be when He died, and He knew how long it would take Him to get there. He knew the divine timetable. He knew the future and all the issues of the future and He moved on that plan. And here we see Jesus demonstrating the very nature of God. He knows where He's going, He knows what's going to happen when He gets there, even though the people that He will meet don't know it.
It was a day's journey to Nain, 20 miles at least, maybe a little more and walking was the way you got there. They would have had to start early in the morning with this massive crowd to make that trip. Circumstances that were going to occur probably after they left would set up an incredible event. Jesus knew what perhaps hadn't even happened when He first began to head toward Nain, but He knew when He got there everything would be the way He wanted it.
Now back to verse 11. He wasn't alone, His disciples were going along with Him. And this group, again, includes His apostles, it includes anybody who was a student or a learner. Some of them later defected. John 6:66, "Some of His disciples walked no more with Him," when He said certain things that offended them. Disciples were students. This was His entourage. He was a walking school, is what He was. He was...He was a teacher of teachers and mentor and He had this massive crowd of hundreds, if not thousands of people following Him everywhere He went. They were learning. They were at all levels of learning and commitment to Him.
In addition to the disciples, whom we've already seen and discussed back in chapter 6, the apostles we met in chapter 6 verse 13, the disciples we talked about when we were studying chapter 6 verse 20. But also we said, and we see it here again, there was a large multitude. These weren't committed students of His, this was just the thrill seekers, the curiosity seekers, the people who were following because they were so amazed by what He said, they were so amazed by what He did...power over demons, power over disease. And this crowd is accumulating. Go back to chapter 4, 5, 6 all the way through chapter 9, all the way down into chapter 14 and verse 25, He just keeps accumulating this crowd of people who are drawn by His miracles. They don't have any clue why He's going to Nain. He doesn't tell them. They don't have any sense of divine purpose. They're like us, they can't tell the future, they can barely interpret the present. They have a hard time interpreting even the past. But Jesus knows the past perfectly, He knows the present perfectly and knows the future perfectly. He knows exactly where He's going and why He's going there.
One of the current blasphemous ideas that's being circulated in evangelicalism is called "The openness of God" view. What it purports is that God has no idea about the future. Not only does He not plan it, He doesn't even know what it is. That is blasphemous. God knows the beginning and the end. Jesus Christ Himself as well, He is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. So here is Jesus with intentionality, moving in the direction toward an obscure little town that would never be known to us biblically if it weren't for this one incident. But He goes there because it is purposeful in the plan of God to have an encounter there with a funeral procession. That is God's plan. And the interesting reality would be that when Jesus left in the morning, the man may not have been dead yet because the Jews never kept a body overnight, never. They didn't embalm. Decay sets in immediately. All they did was sprinkle the body, anoint the body externally. Wrapped the body in cloth. Once death occurred, they did that very rapidly, had a funeral very rapidly, and moved to bury the body. No one was kept overnight. It is very possible that Jesus started moving toward that funeral procession before there even was a dead person. But that was all in His own knowledge.
Secondly, divine purpose then melts into divine providence. God not only has a purpose, but God can orchestrate all of the contingencies to bring about that purpose. Jesus was going to Nain to raise a dead man. A dead man who when He started out may not have been dead. How was Jesus going to control all of the issues? The death of the man? The timing of the funeral? The service? The whole thing to have the encounter that He wanted to have at the moment that He wanted to have it? Right place, right moment? Well, that's divine providence. That's a great word. Providence refers to God's superintending control over all human actions and events to effect His predetermined purpose. That is, to me, one of the most amazing characteristics of God. I can understand a miracle better than I can understand that. A miracle is not complex. A miracle is when God steps in, interrupts the natural and injects a supernatural explosion of power. I understand that. The natural stops, when God steps in supernaturally. Providence isn't that. Providence is God taking all the natural events and orchestrating them perfectly to effect His purpose. The complexity of that is staggering, absolutely staggering. But He knows all the details. He is in to the details. Proverbs 16:9 says, "A man's heart plans his way, the Lord directs his steps." You can make all the plans you want, God sovereignly directs everything. Proverbs 16:33, "The lot is cast into the lap." You know, you may think you're just gambling, you're casting lots, throwing dice. But it's--every decision is from the Lord. Read Psalm 139 verses 1 to 5, you'll see it there as well. Amos 3:6, "If there is a calamity in a city, will not the Lord have done it?" Nothing happens in calamitous level unless God has a purpose in it and providentially orchestrates it to effect that purpose.
So here. Purpose, we're going to Nain, melts into providence, perfect timing...perfect timing. Verse 12, "Now as He approached the gate of the city..." Small town like this wouldn't have a wall because there wouldn't be anything to protect, nobody is going to come in and siege Nain. It's just a small little town. But they had a gate because a gate symbolized that they had a city. And the gate was at the head of the main street and it was the place where they socialized and where the elders of the city sat and adjudicated on the issues and so it had a gate, sort of a symbolic gate, just sort of identifying a town. Sometimes when you're driving through a country, in a rural area, you'll come to a small town and they'll have some stone pillars on the side with the name of the town. That's not some wall of protection, that's just a point of identification. Something like that.
And so, perfect timing, He approaches the gate of the city. Nobody knows why He's going there, yet He does. It's all planned. "And behold a dead man was being carried out." Exact split second, providential timing, all the control factors belong to God. The man dies at the right moment. They get him ready for the funeral at the right moment. They have the funeral. They do the shammah[??], they go through the wailing, they go find at least two flute players, no self-respecting Jew would have a funeral without two flute players, even the poorest of the poor to play mournful notes on the flute and you had to have at least one guy banging a cymbal to put some dissonance into it to represent the discord and the dissonance of the pain of the loss. You should at least have one wailing woman, that was a profession in those days. You could be a professional wailing woman. There are women, if they had that today, who would qualify without question for that kind of career. They could make a real career out of that. And then what the wailing woman did, and the flute players did and the cymbal player did was create dissonance and noise and move the crowd to wail and cry and the friends and the family, whoever was in the town, would all come out in this entourage.
Well it's a startling thing. "Behold," is the word in verse 12, "Whoa," from a human viewpoint, this is a surprising event. From the viewpoint of Jesus, this is exactly on schedule. From the human side, it's a startling coincidence. There is no such thing as a coincidence in God's perspective. The Lord is just gracefully, purposefully taking a step at a time, arriving at exactly the moment when that procession comes out of town. Biblical history is filled with that kind of scheduling.
By the way, in the tenth chapter of Luke there's an interesting little verse there. In the tenth chapter, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. And in verse 31, I was reading this and it struck me as interesting. Verse 31 says, "By chance a certain priest was going down that road." And I read that and I said, "Stop right there. Nothing in God's economy happens by chance." So I say, "I've got to go find that Greek word, what is that word?" Well it's suncherero[??], it means "to happen." And the right translation is, "And it happened that a priest was going down that road," but that was not by chance. God is not caught up in serendipity. Things don't happen by chance. Well, that's just a footnote.
Back to chapter 7. With no...that's like saying, "Luckily, Jesus showed up." No. Luckily doesn't work. So we read here that He approaches and out comes this funeral procession and this is a shock. Out comes this wailing noisy crowd and this dead man was being carried out, it says in verse 12. The funeral was over. People were carrying the corpse that had been sprinkled on the outside, dusted with some powder and some herbs and things like that and then wrapped and laid on a flat bier, b-i-e-r, stretcher. The word coffin appears here in the account in verse 14, but that would be very, very unusual for Jews to put a body in a coffin. They put them on a stretcher. And later on when the young man sits up, it's pretty evident that he wasn't in a coffin. So it was a stretcher. The body was laid upon and having been wrapped and a cloth placed over the top of it. As I said, always buried immediately, never kept overnight. It's the end of the day now. It would take a full day to walk there with that large group and so it's getting to the end of the day which means the young man could have died early in the afternoon, or late in the morning after they had already started. So that Jesus goes there before the death has even occurred for this divine rendevous.
Burial places are always outside of town, poor people might, perhaps like this widow, she may have been poor, we don't necessarily know that she was poor. The son may have provided well for her. But poor people were buried in a hole in the ground, the grave was dug, as is common today, and stones were placed on the top and stones were placed on the top to mark the grave for the purpose that people not go near it because if you went near the grave and touched it, you would become ritually defiled and you would have to go through this very complicated ritual prescribed in the nineteenth chapter of Numbers to ritually cleanse yourself. The Lord did that just as another way to remind people of how sinful they were. It was a symbol of sin and death, being a defiling reality. And so they would avoid graves. They wouldn't go near graves. One of the reasons they painted them white was so you would go around them. You didn't want to get yourself defiled. They would whitewash them, not so much to make them look beautiful, although I'm sure it made a contribution to that, but so the people could avoid them.
So it would be late in the day, they converge at the gate. The Jews have traveled along with Jesus all day long. They now confront the funeral. Now to make this even a more interesting scene, the dead man was the only son of his mother. The one thing a mother in Israel wanted was a son. You remember Hannah? How much did she want a son? And that was pretty typical. If you didn't have a son, it was the end of the family line and heritage and history was so important. And the fact that this is an only son makes this even more a scene of pathos, sad. By the way, in the eighth chapter of Luke, we're going to see Jesus raise someone from the dead. In this case it was the daughter of Jairus, and in verse 42 of chapter 8, he had an only daughter twelve years old. And in the ninth chapter of Luke and verse 38, I think it is, there was a man who came to Jesus and said, "I beg You to look at my son, for he's my only boy." An only son, an only daughter, and an only boy adds to the pathos of these scenes.
And so Jesus sees this dead man being carried out. In the funeral procession, the mother, by the way, the family goes first, and in this case the mother alone is going ahead of the casket. She's leading the procession to t