GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LUKE 1:4
4 so that you may know the certainty of the things you were taught.
I met a man named Warren in the summer of 1997 at the church where I was serving my vicar (intern) year. A Jew who was descended from Kohath (1 Chronicles 6:1), Warren had come to know about Jesus kind of sideways. He had heard a little Christianity from the Salvation Army in Milwaukee, but they made it still sound like there were laws to be kept or rules to be followed, and he didn’t see any difference between his childhood faith and Christianity. Then he attended a Methodist church for a while, but he never got a clear message from them about who Jesus is or what Jesus did for us. He was willing to give the Christians one last chance, and he showed up at our soup kitchen (“Grace Oasis”) in the inner city of Milwaukee on a hot August night and talked to me. I told him about Jesus and about the forgiveness of sins, and I quoted Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah: Genesis 3:15, Deuteronomy 18:15; Isaiah 53:2-5; Psalm 22:1 and others. He wanted to know more. He said that he had read the whole Bible except for the Minor Prophets, and I said I’d be happy to read the Minor Prophets with him and show him Jesus even there in the prophecies, and so that’s what we did for the next several months. He wanted to know the “certainty,” and he hadn’t been shown anything certain yet.
Something like that seems to have happened to Theophilus. He had been taught something about Jesus, but he wasn’t sure; his faith wasn’t founded on a rock yet. There was still a lot of sinking sand.
Luke’s word, “certainty” is asphaleia (ἀσϕάλεια). In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, this word is the “safety” of Leviticus 26:5 and “the foundations” of the earth in Psalm 104:5. This is also the source of our word asphalt, used to pave roads and certain foundations to make them firm and trustworthy.
The certainty and foundation of our faith is the message of Jesus, but not simply that Jesus performed miracles, or that Jesus preached peace, or that Jesus was a revolutionary, or that Jesus died on the cross to pay for part of our sins. These are all part of a sideways Christianity that doesn’t go far enough or proclaim the gospel clearly enough.
Luke will lay out the height and depth and breadth of what Jesus came to say and do. Luke will go to great lengths of introduction (80 verses) before even coming to the birth of Jesus. The sideways path to Christianity taken by Theophilus will be shored up, smoothed out, and made plain by Luke, to prepare the way of the Lord: “The crooked roads shall become straight, and the roughs ways smooth” (Luke 3:5). And the point? “All mankind will see God’s salvation” (3:6). Throughout this Gospel, there is not a single chapter and hardly a paragraph in which Luke does not include a “because” or a “for” to explain why something took place. This Gospel is filled with answers and reasons why. But above them all is his promise to Theophilus and us that he wants us to know the certainty of the things we’ve been taught.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: http://www.wlchapel.org/worship/daily-devotion/
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota