“You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? Luke 12:56 (ESV)

Today is the age of the spiritual skeptic, the rise of the questioner of all things Christian. More than ever before, atheists and stubborn agnostics seem to clutter our conversation and intimidate our faith as believers. There are all kinds of people from scientific backgrounds and philosophical bents who challenge Christianity, especially biblical Christianity, as being woefully lacking in proofs for its intellectual validity. Many people today seem to be leaving Christian faith under this kind of pressure.

But how did the Lord Jesus respond to people pressing him for more proofs about his identity and the reality of the faith that he preached? Well, after a period of time, Jesus drew a line in the dirt between he and his accusers. There came a point in his preaching life, after people had listened to him for some time, in which he said that they had more than enough evidence to support a decision to trust him as God in human flesh.

In this particular text, Jesus confronts the doubters in the crowd listening to him by calling them out as people that held God himself to a double standard: they would accept minimal evidence as sufficient to make daily decisions about their lives, but they would reject maximal evidence about who Christ was and keep demanding more and more. There was certainly a contradiction in the way they were approaching matters of faith as opposed to matters of daily life.

Jesus calls them hypocrites. They were indeed holding God to a double standard, a standard a lot higher than they held in their own private lives. They would make sweeping conclusions about things as complex as the weather based on the color of the sky or the direction of the wind, but they would not make ultimate decisions about who Jesus was, even in the face of all that he had done over the previous three years to prove his identity as the God man. Jesus tells them that they were unwisely rejecting all the evidence that he provided for them, and losing their spiritual opportunity.

What  had Jesus done in terms of revealing himself to that generation of Israelites? Quite simply, he had fulfilled the prophecy of the Old Testament that in the latter days, a Messiah would appear who would be a prophet in the style of Moses. Moses revealed truth from God that had never been received by man, and he also presided over a series of miracles in the Exodus from Egypt that had never been witnessed by man. In like manner, Jesus Christ brought the full revelation of God to earth both in his personal preaching and in who he was. In fact, the book of Hebrews reminds us that God spoke fully to mankind through his Son. So when Jesus arrived, the greatest revelation of all time from God’s throne room arrived with him. Along with his preaching and his person came his miracle working. Jesus, exceeding Moses but like him, presided over the greatest explosion of miracle power that history had ever witnessed. Month after month, morning after morning, people from all walks of life were healed and set free, thousands were fed on hillsides out of thin air, seas were stilled, demons were dispatched, and the laws of nature were set aside to prove the presence of God in human flesh. It was a remarkable season of time. It was “their time”, in the sense that it was a season of miraculous power and revelation of truth given to this special generation of Israelites so that they could indeed turn and embrace Jesus as Messiah.

And yet they chose to walk away from it all. Jesus here warns them that they were losing the opportunity to decide to trust him; the great power of their special moment, their unique season of revelation was fading. He warned them not to let it go.

 

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