We're in Luke chapter 11. We'll be doing 29 through 32, following up from the reading that Mike had. We'll just give them an opportunity to make their way out the door. Okay, Eli's not having a good day today, apparently. These things happen. So, Let's read from the scriptures. When the crowds were increasing, He, Jesus, began to say, This generation is an evil generation. It seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this generation. The Queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them. For she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon. And behold, something greater than Solomon is here. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it. for they repented at the preaching of Jonah. And behold, something greater than Jonah is here." Let's pray. Father, I ask that you would help me to speak the truth simply this morning, that you would be removing the veil from the eyes of those who don't believe so that they might see the light of the gospel as Christ is proclaimed as the Lord. For you who said, let the light shine out of darkness, can shine in our hearts that we might see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Amen. After I became a Christian in college, I spent time hanging out with Campus Crusade for a couple of years. I remember one instance in particular, we were having the meeting and one of the guys, Jim, had something to share, something that he found very exciting. Jim lived in Warren Towers, which at that point was the largest dormitory in America. far too many people in that dormitory. You shouldn't get that many people who are 18 to 22 in one place. Just bad things happen, okay? But anyway, Jim was in there and he had been sharing the gospel with this one guy and he was just resistant to embracing the message of Jesus Christ slain for sinners and risen on the third day. and what happened is that there was another guy on the floor, and I believe he'd been playing soccer, but I can't remember, this is 25 years ago, mind you, and he had an accident playing and had broken his leg, and the doctors had said that the swelling was too much for them to do anything at this point, so basically, here's some pain meds, see you in a few days, we'll re-X-ray it, and see what we're gonna do at that point. So, this is what he says, anyway. Anyway, he decided to use this as an opportunity to confront this other young man and said, if God heals him, will you believe? And as Jim told it anyway, again, secondhand, I'm not first person in any of this, by the time the swelling went down, they went to re-X-ray his leg and lo and behold, there was no break. Jim had, in some sense, fallen into the trap that if there's just enough signs, if there's just somehow this one thing that God does that will prove that everyone will believe. Jim fell sort of into that trap, and that is, in a sense, part of the trap that we see here in the Scriptures. Not on the part of Jesus. He's not falling into a trap. It's the other folks who are falling into a trap. And it has that question of what is the standard of evidence for us to believe the message of Jesus Christ? Is there something that needs to be added to the scriptures in order for us to believe the message of Jesus Christ? Or are the scriptures sufficient in what they teach? Is it all there? That's really the issue. That's really the question that comes up in this text. The big idea this morning is that Jesus rejects all who reject the sign that he provides. We start with Jesus denouncing the desire for signs. We see that, again, the ministry of Jesus, the earthly ministry, is very, in many ways, successful. We see here at the beginning of this, it says that the crowds are gathering. They're still coming. More and more people are like, what? We've got to check this out. K? You're living in Judea in that day and age and there's not all that much exciting going on. You know? You can't go to the ball game. There's probably no plays that are going on. There's no movies. Not much to do, you know? but there's a miracle worker running around. We've got to check that one out! So, you know, the crowds are gathering and they're trying to see what is going on. They're coming because they're hearing about these various miracles and so there's a sense in which they are glory hounds and this is a parallel to what we see in Matthew. And in Matthew, it's in the same context. We see the same things around it. And so Matthew includes more of what goes on than Luke tends to in this particular instance. Why? don't know but we're gonna borrow from Matthew just like last week we borrowed from Mark and in Matthew we see that it is not just a general desire for signs but Matthew says specifically that some of the scribes and Pharisees answered Jesus saying teacher we wish to see a sign from you. And so it's not people in general that are wanting a sign, but it is the scribes and the Pharisees who are looking for a sign. They want proof, so to speak, and this should sound strange to us at this point in time. strange in light of the immediate context of this passage. You almost have to wonder, where have you guys been for the last couple of years? Because there's plenty of evidence for Jesus casting out unclean spirits, Jesus feeding thousands of people with a couple of fish and a couple of loaves, Jesus healing people who are crippled, Jesus doing all of these miracles, Where have you guys been? You want to say to the scribes and the Pharisees. Even the immediate context with this whole discussion about by whose power is Jesus doing these things. Now note that they recognize Jesus is casting out unclean spirits. They're not denying it. But what they say is, you're doing it by the power of Beelzebul. That you are doing this by the power of the Prince of Demons, to which Jesus makes his response, a house divided against itself cannot stand. This is absolute and utter foolishness. And so they recognize that Jesus is doing certain things, but here is that important difference. They're recognizing that he is doing this from a evil power. That's what they think is behind all of this. Now, in that day and age there were people who would go and they would be miracle workers. They'd do these things. They'd heal people. Most of it was, you know, a sham. Most of it was fake. And so Jesus is coming here and basically they're kind of saying, approve you're not a fake. Prove what's going on here. What's interesting is when you look at the records that they have from that period of time, from what Jesus was tried for, what they discussed within the Sanhedrin, sorcery. That was one of the charges they laid against Jesus, that he was a sorcerer, that he was performing these works by the power of the evil one, not the power of God. Note here that in Mark, sorry, not in Mark, in Matthew, they address Jesus not by any other name but teacher. And they're recognizing him, it's not the word rabbi, at least it's not transliterated over from the Aramaic, it's a different word for teacher. Luke notes earlier than this, in verse 16 of chapter 11, that others to test him. So this is the whole idea of why Jesus is getting upset here, is that these people are testing him. They keep seeking a sign from him from heaven. And so these people are coming with this request with a stance of unbelief. It's like they're claiming they're wanting to be convinced, but really, what has to happen in order to convince them? They're looking for a sign that kind of fits their desires. I'm reminded of a debate I watched in seminary. It's actually a debate between David Bonson and an atheist. And the atheist pulled out the usual trick. It seems like this must be all the playbooks that all the atheists get when they're in a debate. Because what happens is this. If there's really a God, I demand that he show up right now and prove himself. Prove to me that he exists. He can do this if he's God. Okay, that's what they do. In other words, just show me a sign. Show me a sign I cannot refute. But their standard of evidence is that God would show up on their terms at the time that they want and in the way that they want. And so what they end up doing is they neglect, ignore, and deny when God really did show up on his timetable in his way to accomplish his purposes. That, who cares about that? God has to bend to my will is essentially what this atheist and so many like him have been trying to do. And it's just like the Pharisees and the scribes right here. They demand that God answer them instead of them answering to God. What are you going to do with what Jesus has already done and with what Jesus has already said? That's the question. They're not looking to repent and believe. They're looking to prove something. They're refusing to accept the numerous signs that Jesus has given. And now, again, if we think about how John uses the exact term in the same context, these signs were miracles that proved what? Jesus was the Son of God. So why? So that people might believe on Him and receive salvation from God. And so they're refusing to accept these signs that God gives, that this is my Son, This is the one I love. This is the Savior that you must trust. Their standard becomes higher than God's to prove that Jesus is who He says He is. And so Jesus says, this generation, not this race, this generation is an evil generation. And he says this because of their unbelief and their persistent testing of God. Remember, when Jesus himself was being tested and tempted in the wilderness, and the evil one came with his second temptation and said, well, why don't you cast yourself off of the temple? For God will surely catch you because, he says, angels will guard your every footstep. And Jesus replies with the words from Deuteronomy 6 that say, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested him at Massa. And so these scribes and Pharisees are doing exactly what Deuteronomy forbids them to do. They are testing God. This does not mean that we should accept things blindly. It is a good thing to search the scriptures as the Bereans did. It's a good thing to look at the scriptures and say, now, does this really make sense? Does this all fit in? Is this what it's supposed to mean? That is a good thing. That is a person who's looking to see if there is a valid reason for their faith. That looking for the signs, however, was basically to justify their unbelief. Very different purposes. Do you understand? I'm not calling you to ignorance, I'm not calling you to blind faith, but I'm calling you to search the Scriptures and know what God has put there that you might believe, that you might be strengthened in your faith. Not to continue to use these signs as an excuse not to believe like these people did, Here, they're just avoiding that call to faith and repentance. Sort of like when you, I'm sure some of you who have tried to share the gospel with people, you often get the, yeah, buts. Ever get the, yeah, but, and people are coming up with, they're creating arguments in an attempt to avoid accountability to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Yeah, but what about the crusades? Yeah, but what about the scholastics who talked about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Yeah, but everything but talk about the reality of who Jesus is and what Jesus has done. Talk about all these other things that are irrelevant to the discussion at that point in time. John Calvin said this, the more God offers himself by the gospel to the world. I love that. Offers himself by the gospel. Not just forgiveness, himself. The more he invites men into his kingdom. So the more the gospel is made known, Calvin is saying, the more audacious, on the other hand, will ungodly men vomit forth the poison of their impiety." So the more the free offer of the gospel, the message of Jesus Christ slain for sinners is made known, the more impious men vomit forth their audacious poison. That's what the scribes and the Pharisees are doing. they're revealing their ultimate impiety because it does not flow out of a vibrant faith in the living and true God. And so Jesus denounced the desire for signs because of the motivation which was to avoid actually believing. Second part of this is that Jesus who rises from the dead is the sign. Jesus says they're not going to get any signs but one. Okay? And it's not going to be the one that you choose, he says. I'm going to tell you what that sign is going to be. This generation will get the sign of Jonah. I don't think they expected that. That probably wasn't, you know, on their list of signs. The sign of Jonah. Jesus kind of puts in this strange twist in what's going to happen here. But note what it says as well. Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites. Jonah himself was the sign. the person became the sign. That is very important for us to keep in mind as we think about this. Now Luke, as I said, doesn't have everything that we find in Matthew, and so Matthew clarifies this a little bit. He says that it is essentially Jonah's survival from the ordeal in the belly of the whale. Matthew 12 says this, for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Now, a couple of things as we look at that particular quotation from Matthew. One is, again, the red herring, it wasn't really a fish. Yes. The ancient Hebrews of Jonah's day, when Jonah was written, did not use Aristotle's categories for animals. So yes, it's irrelevant to the discussion. We're expecting our scientific standards to be held to by an ancient people who had no knowledge of them at that point in time. So you can't go there. Jesus quotes from Jonah, which says, three days, three nights, and the belly of the fish. And so this could potentially create a problem for us. Is Jesus, in quoting this, using it in an idiomatic fashion? Or does he literally mean it has to be three days and three nights? Do you understand the difference? Because the traditional calendar has Jesus dying on Friday, which would have three days before his resurrection, but not three nights prior to his resurrection. So is Jesus speaking in an idiomatic fashion, or is he speaking literally that he has to be three days and three nights and the gray. And if he's speaking literally, then you have to do what James Montgomery Boyce and Stu Sherrard, after him did, is kind of push it from his death being on Friday, moving it up until Thursday. And I really don't know. And so I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time. I'm not as sure about Boyce's argument as Stu Sherrard was, and that's okay. But he's basically, the idea, let's not lose the idea the point of this is that just as Jonah was as good as dead and Jonah as it were came back to life when he was vomited out of the fish onto the beach and then he showed up in Nineveh and uh... I know Mike Warnke and his testimony have been completely discredited discredited uh... I always get tongue tied on that one his joke about that was actually kind of funny I mean imagine for a moment you being a Ninevite and having this this bleached pale guy show up with seaweed hanging in his ears well of course that is it's been a while you know Jonah had to travel all the way from the the coast to Nineveh so I think he probably would have gotten the seaweed out of his ears but nonetheless he was probably bleached white from the acid in the belly of the whale and going repent you would you would know as Ninevite something significant had just happened Jonah himself, because of his experience, becomes the sign that convinces people who had no knowledge of the true God that they had to repent. And they did. And so Jesus, in this obscure way, is saying to them that the Son of Man will not be in the belly of a whale, but instead will be in the belly of the earth because He's going to die. And on the third day, He will rise again. Jesus is pointing to His own death and resurrection as He will be the sign. It's not a strict manifestation of His power, because first comes the suffering that takes place. But we see, even in Romans 1, how Paul builds on this a little bit, because in chapter 1 he says, Jesus was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by His resurrection from the dead. It was a sign. a declaration that He was the Son of God. Now, this is the first time. that he talked about this with the crowds. All the times we had seen up to this point, he's been talking just with his disciples. He's been telling them. He's trying to kind of dampen the excitement about the fact that he's the Messiah with the reality that first he must suffer as the Messiah before he enters into his glory as the Messiah. This is the first time he tells the crowds, and particularly those who are hostile to him, I'm going to die. But I'm coming back again. I'm gonna come to life again in three days." As Paul would say, in accordance with the Scriptures. Here's the hard part of that. Jesus isn't expecting this to bring these people, this generation, to repentance. And in fact, we find that most of Israel did not repent. Later on in Luke, chapter 16, he tells the parable of a man, the rich man, and the poor man, Lazarus. And when the rich man dies and ends up in a not so happy place, he asks Father Abraham, who he sees across the way. There's a gulf that separates them, and he can't get there. But he asks Father Abraham to send someone to warn his brothers about the reality of hell. And Abraham says, to him. If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead." That's the whole problem with the scribes and the Pharisees, is that they weren't listening to what the scriptures said about the Son of Man. And so, just because they didn't listen to Moses, when he rises again from the dead, they're not going to listen. If people won't listen to the Scriptures, no amount of signs is going to convince them The Scriptures alone and the power of the Spirit have the ability to convert people, to convince people. That's where all of the power lies. It's not in signs. It's not in miracles. The wicked Ninevites, the Assyrians, not nice people, warmongers, violent, corrupt, oppressive. These Ninevites were, in a sense, more righteous than the generation of Jesus' day because they repented and the Israelites refused. Israel had the scriptures. The Ninevites didn't. Israel had proper worship. The Ninevites didn't. But they had become, because they didn't listen to the Scriptures, they had become more wicked than the wicked Gentiles were. There should be a warning to us that just because we're raised in the church does not necessarily mean that we get it. We can easily become inoculated from the Gospel. We can get enough of the Gospel that we are immune to the real gospel, the whole gospel, just like these Israelites were. Now, that's all in the providence of God. But the point is that the Pharisees and the scribes thought that they were okay with God, that they were right with God, and they weren't. They were opposed to him. He showed up in the flesh and they were opposed to him. They hated him because self-righteousness deceives people. Whether it's the Israel of Jesus' day or 21st century America, self-righteousness is deceptive. We can think we're okay with God when we're really not. The sign that Jesus offers as proof to his identity is his death and his resurrection. Let's move to the last part of this, which again, if you're expecting a feel-good sermon today, I'm sorry, it's not happening. This is not a feel-good text. But the repentant rise against the rebellious at the judgment. Jesus brings up Gentiles, not Israelites, as those who respond to the truth here. It's interesting because in Matthew they're flip-flopped. But here in Luke he starts with the queen of the south, probably south on the Arabian Peninsula. who traveled far and the reason she traveled so far was the reputation of Solomon's wisdom. She had heard of it and she had enough faith to cross the desert to hear it in person and to bring gifts to this man. Here's this woman again separated from the people of Israel, from the true knowledge of God. She doesn't have the scriptures, but she hears and comes. But now, Jesus says, there is something greater than Solomon's wisdom here. Something greater than Solomon is before their eyes, and they refuse to embrace it. Then the Ninevites again. Because the Ninevites repented at the preaching of a foreigner who was preaching a foreign god. They had faith that what he said was true. And they repented. And God stayed his judgment upon them. And the point is that now there's a greater deliverance than the one that Jonah had. And this deliverance is given to Israel as a sign, and once again they reject it. And so Jesus says that they will rise up at the judgment. Now it's interesting, in the Greek he uses two different terms, one for the Queen of Sheba and one for the Ninevites. The one for the Queen of Sheba is essentially the one that can often be translated as resurrect. Okay, but they both have this idea of appearing. So it's just two words that refer to the same thing. They're going to appear, in a sense, as witnesses for the prosecution before the throne of judgment. They're going to stand up when they say, if these people, this generation tries to say, how could we know? They will rise up. Say, you knew. We, who had less than you, repented at the preaching of the message. And you, who had so much more, resisted the message. Jesus says that they will condemn them. They will pronounce them as guilty as charged. There is a price to be paid for rejecting the Son of God. I think of my own family. Jesus is speaking specifically of that generation, but I can see that by extension this can happen to every generation. Every person who stands before the bar of God on the great day when Jesus returns, they will all probably try to talk their way out of the reality of what is about to happen, and there will be those who rise up and say, no, we told you. Hopefully, I don't want to say hopefully. In one sense, hopefully, all of us will stand up. Because that means we have been making the message of Jesus Christ known. You cannot control whether or not someone believes that message. But if you do not stand up as a witness for the prosecution, it probably indicates you haven't told anybody. And I don't want to stand up when it's time for my family. I'm hoping they repent before it's too late. But right now I might be a witness for the prosecution for my own family. And so I don't say this callously in any way, shape, or form because this is personal to me. But I don't want to fall into this lie of this Rob Bell Christian Universalism thing, you know, because like at the end of time, everybody gets it. They suddenly go, oh, Jesus really is the Son of God. I believe now. There's not a second chance. It's this life that they have to believe and repent in. There's no second chance. And again, this idea, they are condemned. This is not, oh, we all get it now, and now we all live together in God's presence, and isn't everything just peachy keen? The scriptures do not support that. And if you don't know who Rob Bell is, good. He doesn't deserve your money. Don't buy his book. Unless you have a loved one who is talking about it like, this is the greatest book since whenever, then you might have to buy it or take it out of the library to say, okay, here's where he's missing the scriptures. The judgment is a real thing. And I believe it is a real thing precisely because Jesus talked about it. It's not the invention of the church. because Jesus spoke about it. And the people who are condemned and guilty are those who have trampled upon the dying and rising again Savior. Not a philosophical principle. They've rejected a person They've rejected a king, a savior, a lord, a master, a redeemer, an advocate. It's no small thing what they have done. And it's no small thing what will happen to them. People are looking for excuses for their unbelief, and sometimes they point to signs. If I only had the right sign. They ignore those that God has provided, and they demand these tailor-made signs. Jesus, the Savior, actually denounces their unbelief, their stubborn unbelief. The ultimate sign that He is the Son of Man, the Messiah, the Son of God, is that His death and resurrection three days later. The rebellious will be accused, justly accused, but the repentant, who believed on the basis of less proof, will be the ones accusing. Have you received the proof that God's provided? Or are you still holding out for something else? This is a high-stakes game. Let us heed the One who has the words of life to repent for the Kingdom has come. Let's pray. Father, it is impossible for us to speak of salvation without the reality of judgment. a reality that I know I wish wasn't there. And yet it is. And we must be clear. And my brothers and sisters need to be clear about that as they seek to explain what Jesus has done to people who need to know. So Father, if anything, I pray that we would be very active and proclaiming the news, making known what Christ has done for sinners, and that people must believe, repent and believe, that they must embrace the person, the reality of who Jesus is, and not just his teaching. So I ask that Your Spirit would be at work in us, that we would have a fervent desire to make Jesus known. And I ask this in His name, Amen.