Have you heard the one about the man who named his dog with his wife’s first name? That way he was sure somebody would respond when he called.
That brings a smile to our faces but the underlying truth in the joke is that married couples often don’t pay attention to each other, so much so that they don’t communicate anymore. Well, that’s the way it is sometimes with our relationship to Jesus. According to the Bible, we are the Bride of Christ, but we don’t hear our husband’s call or we ignore it, leaving that responsibility to the family dog. We act like our time is so valuable that we can’t be bothered or perhaps we want to demonstrate how displeased we are with our spouse. So we reply belligerently, “Who Wants to Know?”
Of course, we already know the answer. Our spouse, the one who is speaking, is better known to us than almost everyone we will meet in our lives. And it should also be true with Jesus, that we know Him better than anyone, but so often it isn’t. We haven’t invested enough time in our spiritual relationship to say we know Jesus very well. If we really did know Him intimately, like the Bible encourages us to do, we wouldn’t be belligerent toward Him and for that matter toward anybody else. That is because knowing Jesus well helps us to see ourselves as we truly are. And by comparison with Him, we should be humbled to an extreme. And with humility comes meekness, the characteristic of demeaning oneself for the sake of others. And that makes us feel good.
But there is a danger. There is a tendency in our culture to think that man is basically good, that he will be charitable toward others if it doesn’t cost him anything and sometimes, even if it does. But the Bible says just the opposite, that man is inherently bad. Critics of the Bible see the benevolent works of man, the love he has shown toward something or someone in nature and say, how can the Bible be correct about that? They are unaware that the ‘good’ mentioned in the Biblical context of man’s nature is equivalent to the word ‘perfection’. Since very few people are willing to say they are perfect, there really is no basis for disagreement. Man can be good to a certain extent but beyond that threshold, he becomes flawed. Everyone who has given this serious thought would agree with this statement.
So what is the point when Jesus says in Luke 18:19 that nobody is good except God? Is he telling the rich ruler something that everyone already knows, that nobody’s perfect? On the contrary, He is telling them something they haven’t heard before, that God will not live in eternity with a sinner, even one with only a tiny flaw. And that meant keeping the Law of Moses almost perfectly, like the rich ruler did, wouldn’t make them good enough to be accepted by God. He got the message across to the crowd because a few verses later, in verse 26, they ask, “Then who can be saved?” The answer they got from Jesus hints at the nature of grace, the unmerited favor of God that leads to forgiveness. He replied, “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.” His disciples were unaware of the scheme God had devised to redeem sinful man so it isn’t surprising when Peter recounts their sacrifices in following Jesus, thinking that their works will compensate for their sins. And to this day, there are people in churches who think the same thing, that their works will balance the scales on Judgment Day. They are wrong.
Instead, the scheme God enacted involved letting Jesus take the punishment for everybody’s sin, knowing that his son’s sacrifice was worth more than all the sins in the world of men. But there was a caveat; while the Christ’s sacrifice was worth more, it didn’t save everyone. It saved only those people who put their trust in Jesus to give them unmerited favor, that is, forgiveness of their sins. That trust is what Christians call faith and the result of having that faith is receiving God’s grace or unmerited favor. Although nobody is good enough to deserve a place in God’s house, they receive it anyway, because they have faith in the promise of Jesus to adopt them into God’s family. And as a member of the family, when Jesus calls, you shouldn’t answer with “Who wants to know?” Instead, you should say “What can I do for you?” like a loving spouse would answer. Perhaps your task will be to explain to someone else that man isn’t good. There would be two ways to approach your conversation. You can point to other cultures where people are allowed to starve to death, or perish by disease when rich rulers have the resources to save them. Or you can agree with them that a person unfettered by self-interest can be good to a degree, as demonstrated in our culture, the most generous one in the world. But in either case, that won’t be sufficient to satisfy God’s definition of good. His definition is perfection and nobody has achieved that except God’s son.
As if to demonstrate this point, in the same chapter of Luke, Jesus displays the quality of meekness when a blind man on the road to Jerusalem calls out to him and He responds, “What do you want me to do?” The man wants to see and when Jesus obliges him, he simply says, “Your faith has healed you.” So it is by faith that we have a relationship with Jesus and if we work on it, that relationship will make us more like him. As I said before, we already know the answer to “Who wants to know?”
