An Answer to All

Man, I run into it all the time. How can God be so mean? You mean to say that just because people don’t believe, or don’t go to church every Sunday, they are going to hell?

I feel like an ambulance driver trying to get to the scene of a multi-car, multiple semi-truck accident that has blocked the freeway for miles on either side and has caused even more rear-enders as people plough into those already stopped. Where do you start?

I think a good place to start is with Jesus. That’s always the best place to unravel the mysteries of God. When he preached his first sermon in his hometown synagogue, Nazareth, he gave an answer to all, an answer that responds to both of the questions before us today. An Answer to All

1. Why are people saved?

2. How can God be so mean to send people to hell?

“Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (16-19).’”

What a beautiful passage Jesus picked to preach to his hometown people, the people he had grown up and whose lives he was acquainted with. He knew their poverty. He knew the aches and pains of the aging carpenters and stone workers, the loss of sight for those who had lived long enough to escape other deaths. He had felt the oppression of the Roman government as well as they. And he had an answer, the real answer, the Gospel good news of sins forgiven.

You see, when Isaiah wrote these words, God’s people were experiencing none of those things. They had a good life, slaves to no one. Outwardly. But God doesn’t look at the outward circumstances of our lives. He looks at the heart. And at the heart, God saw sin. That’s what Isaiah was talking about, in picture language. Sin holds us all captive. The good we want to do we don’t do. The evil we don’t want to do, that we do. Each of us are blinded by flattery or bias—towards ourselves! That’s why it is so easy to pick out the other person’s failings and totally overlook our many short-comings. Each day we are ground down by “the man.” Oh, not by God, but by the devil. The Bible says he is the ruler of this age. He wears us down with constant temptations, sexy ads here, enticements to drunkenness and envy. He stirs others up to try to tear down what we have accomplished.

We need a break. We need debt forgiveness—the forgiveness of the debt of our sin. We need corrective lenses to see life the way God sees life. We need someone to buy us out of the slavery to sin. And that’s what Jesus meant when he spoke about the “year of the Lord’s favor.” A time of debt forgiveness, sin forgiveness, not parole, but complete and free pardon. That’s Gospel. That’s the news that God is willing to forgive everyone their sins and freely take them to heaven, because that’s just the kind of God he is. Loving, forgiving and giving. And then Jesus delivers the closer, showing how God is going to do these great things for them. “And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing (20-22).’”

He was the anointed proclaimer of peace through the forgiveness of sins. Jesus was the deliverer sent by God to open up the prisons of sin and death and let the people go free. He was the healer prescribed by the Father to open eyes to see all the good gifts God had to give in this life and in the one to come. Jesus was the way to heaven. Jesus was the payment that would settle the debt of our sins. Jesus was the Savior Isaiah had been talking about. Why are people saved? Jesus is the answer to all. They are saved only because of the message and the work of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

And he still is. I’ve lived among you long enough to know your sorrows, your heartbreaks, your injuries and diseases. I know your life is not easy. And everybody else in the world, looking at us would wonder what in the world I am talking about—we’re Americans! We’ve got it made! But we are also sinners, living in a sin-filled world and that is what makes this life hard and that is what finally makes this life come to an end. The wages of sin are death. Has been since Adam and Eve and will be until Jesus comes again on the Last Day. We cannot undo the ravages of time, we cannot make up for the sins of our past. Absolutely helpless to take back a single wicked word. Too poor to buy back a second try at that day gone horribly bad. We need Jesus. He alone is the answer to all our woes. With his forgiveness, with heaven assured to us by his death on the cross and resurrection from the dead, we can go forward knowing he will get us through. We are saved only because of the message and the word of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. An answer to all. How can God be so mean to send people to hell? To help us answer that question, let’s see how this wonderful sermon of Jesus ended up.

“And all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth. And they said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son (22)?’”

They think about his words. Boy, they sounded nice. But wait! How can this kid be the Savior? He’s Joseph’s son! They reject God’s offer of sins forgiven because they reject the Savior God has sent. Maybe they were expecting Superman.

Jesus is not going to let these people slip through God’s fingers that easily. He goes on to try to show them what a horrible thing they are about to do and how often God has worked in ways that were, let’s say, unexpected.

They expected, if a guy was a doctor, he had it made and could help his own cause by prescribing his own medicine and giving his own diagnosis. I’ll pass by the wisdom of that thinking—these people were hicks from Nazareth, after all. Jesus should at least toot his own horn if he were the Savior. Do some miracles among us and we’ll believe. But remember what I told you last week—miracles do not convert the unbeliever. They are only designed to strengthen the faith of the believers. Jesus shows them that often men sent by God got a rough treatment among their own, indeed, were unable to work among their own because of the unbelief they found. And right about here they are starting to get hot under the collar because who is Jesus to claim he is the Savior and that they are unbelievers just because they don’t believe his cockamamie story?

But that’s why God is forced to work the way he does. Man’s unbelief narrows his options. Eight hundred years before, in the days of Elijah, there were many starving people in Israel, but did God send Elijah to them? No, he sent Elijah to a widowed woman in a foreign country, where Elijah miraculously kept her and her son alive. And later, when the next prophet was alive, Elisha, there were lots of sick people in Israel, but did God miraculously heal them? No. He healed a foreigner who had come all that way because he trusted in the God of Israel.

And that’s when the good people of Nazareth had heard enough. “They were all filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away (28-30).”

You see, they weren’t so good after all. Their hearts were hard, their minds murderous, their hands quick to act. How much self-righteousness do you have to have to hustle the preacher right out of church? Oh, but don’t stop there. How much chutzpah do you have to have to keep shoving him, riding him out of town? I guess tar and feathers were in short supply in Nazareth. Oh, but don’t stop there. What must fill your heart to be judge, jury and executioner wrapped in one that you want to push Jesus off the cliff your town was built on so that he would fall to his death?

Nice people, huh? Now, how can God be so mean to send people to hell?

How foolish! Is God making these people do these terrible things? Is God playing a twisted puppeteer just to give Jesus a little cardiovascular exercise? How wicked a thought! And how wicked to transfer the guilt and shame and deserved punishment from wicked people to God. Here, too, Jesus gives an answer to all. God doesn’t send people to hell. He doesn’t choose people for damnation. They choose it for themselves. They choose it by rejecting God’s greatest Gospel news, rejecting that Word of life which comes from Jesus’ lips.

I wonder if this incident is what Jesus was remembering when he told Nicodemus, “Whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed (18-20).”

The people of Nazareth did not want a Savior from sin because they, evidently, did not want to acknowledge they were sinners. As we go through the life of Jesus and see his interactions with people, that vicious cycle repeats itself. Pontius Pilate doesn’t need a Savior—“Am I a Jew?” The inquisitors of the man Jesus gave sight to, when the man was confessing Jesus, said, “You were steeped in sin at your birth—how dare you lecture us!” They openly objected to Jesus’ teachings about coming in the world to give spiritual sight to the spiritually blind, “Are we blind, too?” And Jesus gives a chilling response. “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains (John 9.41).”

It’s easy to say, “Oh, those baaaaad people in Nazareth. I would never be like them.” But watch out! To claim Jesus as our Savior means we are saying we are sinners. We can’t make that claim and then go home today, do dirt to our husband or wife and claim we are without sin. We can’t blow it at work and expect to escape blame if we just keep our mouths shut. We can’t lose our mistakes in a bureaucracy of covering each others’ tails. My sin caused Jesus to die. Your spiritual blindness led him to sink his head in death. When this all comes crashing down on us, we stop asking those types of questions, because in Jesus, we have An Answer to All.

1. Why are people saved?

2. How can God be so mean to send people to hell?

Then we stop looking at others and asking why and how. Then we start looking at ourselves and saying, “Get on your knees, boy, and thank God for his goodness.” “Get off your tail, gal, and start serving the Lord who is so good to you.” And everybody, approach our lives with fear and trembling knowing all it would take is for our self-righteous, sinful stubbornness to get a hold of us that we would throw heaven and Jesus away.