And parables are no accident in the Bible. They’re kind of like the proverbs of the Old Testament. They are giving us life in picture form on on the roads of life on the vineyards and the challenges that come just in day-to-day living and parables become not just a metaphor but a an explanation of how God wants us to live. The the two basic interpretational approaches to parables are one, you first of all looking at a parable like a brickandmortar relationship. In other words, take it for what it says.

Don’t spiritualize it. Don’t go running off into all kinds of applications with some of the details that aren’t suggested in the parable. Just take it for its message. And that’s basically what we’re going to do today with this parable in Luke 18. But if that parable also then in its context suggests greater and spiritual applications to the kingdom outside just the affairs of that parable, we go there as well.

And we’ve done that with the par the prodigal son in the last couple of weeks that I that I was here. So we’re in Luke chapter 18. Let’s see your Bibles. Luke 18. I do believe it’s good.

I love it when people show me their phone because that’s their way of saying, “John, just calm down. And if I didn’t bring a hard copy, that’s okay. But I like a hard copy. Luke 18. Luke 18.

Then Jesus said to his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and never give up. And never give up. And never give up. Does your text say that? And never give up.

He said, “In a certain town, there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea,” grant me justice against my adversary. Widows in the Bible were a high valued and honored group. And in 1 Timothy 5, you’ll find what’s called a widow’s list. For a woman who’s over 60 and who is a widow and who has had a faithful life of following God and caring for the saints.

And there were two groups in the New Testament church who as the church grew and developed were provided financial resources and support in the church. It was those elders in the church who principally began to detach from their task at hands for which they were a career involved. Carpenters, whatever. And they took on more time with the church and needed a double honor, a support, a stipen for caring for the affairs of the church. That was one financial group.

The second one was widows. And widows who were widows indeed who were in part of this list were part of the supported group. So this is an honorable place this parable has in talking about this woman who is a widow. And her request is to the judge, “Grant me justice against my adversary.” For some time he refused.

But finally he said to himself, “Even though I don’t fear God or care about men, pretty arrogant that he would even say that about himself, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice.” Four times in this parable, the word justice comes out so that she won’t eventually wear me out with her coming. That was the facts and Jesus applied it as follows. Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones who cry out to him day and night.

Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, and essentially, and I tell you, we can insert the parable, the parenthesis, take it to the bank. Will they not? I tell you, he will get he will see that they get justice and quickly. However, when the son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth?

This is a simple parable with a profound and powerful message because it asks and answers the question, why do bad things happen to good people? This is a widow. She was alone. She didn’t have the support of a mate. She presumably had modest resources, though we’re not told that in the parable.

But she clearly had two problems. She had an adversary. She had an enemy who was committed to her demise, to her lack of doing well for whatever that was, economic, health-wise, circumstances. We don’t know. But she had an adversary.

And then secondly, she had a bad judge. A judge who feared neither God nor man. And so in her situation, it was impossible. And she above all else was saying, “God, what do you want me to do? I’m doing the best I can.”

You know, I’ve had various experiences in the past with collegians who’ve asked and answered questions also about what’s God’s will for my life. I had one young man who wanted to know what car God would want him to buy. So, he had a number of dreams and in his dreams consistently they were yellow in color. I don’t I can’t explain that they were yellow in color. So, he went to a car lot.

He looked around the cars. He said, “Well, God wants me to buy a yellow car.” He spotted a yellow car. He bought it. Turned out it was a lemon.

So sometimes in the modest affairs of life where we don’t know what we should do. I had another collegian. I wasn’t going to tell you the story because we got a lot to cover but I will. He wanted to date this girl and he was in this A-frame watching this fireplace and these logs burning and he had preoccupied with should I date this young lady? And as the fire burned, it crumbled the logs down.

And he came to me and said, “Dr. Moore, what was God telling me in the in the logs that crumbled in the fire?” And I said, “I don’t know. There was a fire in the fireplace. I don’t know.

Is did you That God wasn’t telling him anything by that fireplace. That whole thing about why things happen to us is a question everybody in this room has. Name your list. It could be modest kinds of events. It could be financial reversals.

It can be family reversals. It can be the loss of a family union. The loss of a loved family member. It can be the kinds of reversals which leave you in a place which you never dreamed you would be before. But for all of us periodically because life and the vicissitudes of life come upon us all, we’re going to face the question and say why?

And this widow was novice to that question. But interestingly enough, she took a middle ground approach to her dilemma. We have some Christians who will when bad things happen just give up just kick up their feet and say can’t do any can’t do anything about it and if this is God’s will for my life I’m just going to suffer through it to those you might ask them how are they doing and they’d say well not bad under the circumstances and you want to say what are you doing under the circumstances what’s going on in your life that you can’t make more of it. The other extreme that a Christian could come to in terms of bad things happening in their life is that they take it upon themselves to fix the problem, to absolutely correct by whatever means necessary the situation they’re in. And there’s a partial truth in that because the widow took this middle ground and she said, “I’ve got an adversary.

I don’t have any resources of having a mate and I need to go to the legal process to try and find a solution. Now, we learned that about three or four weeks ago when we looked at the Apostle Paul and we found that three times in the book of Acts when he was being mistreated in his missionary journeys, he said, “Wait a minute, I’m a Roman citizen.” And we said then and we can say now that if you are in a context in a country and a culture and a situation where you have legal recourse, go for it. And that’s what this widow did. She went to this judge.

She didn’t calculate this judge, but she went to the law and said, “This is my dilemma.” Well, we already know the last chapter in this parable from the first and it is that Jesus is giving his disciples this parable to teach them the truth about it’s important to pray and to keep on praying when you face circumstances that seem impossible to you. So what kind of confidence can we have that God is going to intercede in our situation on the basis of prayer? And I suggested to you that this is the this is the question that comes when we hit the brick wall. When we say I didn’t plan on this I didn’t live my life to end up this way.

I was at a memorial service yesterday for a woman who for 50 years lived faithfully for her family, her husband, her children, only to suffer in the last year from a child that is mentally ill and suicidal. And she lived her last days full of fear and concern for this one son. She didn’t deserve it. That wasn’t the way she raised her family, but it came. And the part of the answer to this comes in the word justice because four times in this parable Jesus uses this term.

And justice is a favorite concept in the Old and New Testament. From the beginning of the Old Testament to the end of the New Testament, God is determined to do things that are right. Justice is often a synonym for righteousness in the Bible. Matthew chapter chapter 6:33 says, “Let first seek you first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you.” Now the context of that affirmation by Jesus was first of all don’t worry, don’t be afraid for the situations that happen in life.

And then after telling us to seek him first and his righteousness and these things will be added to us. He says, “Oh, and by the way, don’t worry about tomorrow. Today has enough trouble of its own.” So even in the dilemmas of life and the frailties and things that happen that cause us to say, “Why in the world has this happened?” It is Jesus who says, “Seek me first in the kingdom of God and all his righteousness.”

God will do the affairs of life that come up correctly for us. It starts with prayer. One of my favorite illustrations of that and an illustration of this widow’s pattern is actually found in the Old Testament in the book of Nehemiah. In Nehemiah, we find that Nehemiah was brought to serve the king Xerxes as his cup bearer, as his second in command. But he was troubled about the fact that back in Jerusalem, his people were suffering and the walls were torn down and there was no way in which they could thrive with any kind of security and confidence in Israel.

So at one point Nehemiah was called before the king and the text says in the month of Nissan in the 20th year of King Xerxes when he was brought to him I took the wine and gave it to the king. I’d not been sad in his presence before. So the king asked me, “Why does your face look so sad when you’re not when you’re not ill? There can be nothing but sadness of heart.” I was very much afraid.

But I said to the king, “May the king live forever. Why should my face not look sad when my city where my fathers are buried lies in ruins and its gates have been destroyed by fire?” And then the king, the one who had the authority and the power to make it right, asked Nehemiah, “What is it you want me to do?” Wow, talk about an imitation. The next verse reads, “Then I prayed to the God of heaven and I answered the king.”

So when you run into things that are confusing in your life and you don’t understand what’s happened and you don’t know whether justice is out there, whether righteousness, whether things are going to end up in the right way, the first thing we do is we drop to our knees and we pray. We ask of God as this parable tells us we can ask hard questions but we start with prayer and we keep on praying. So in that sense I’ve suggested to you that there are guarantees and non-g guarantees that come in life. First of all, the guarantees. Did you pick it up when I was reading in the parable at the end?

I tell you, he will see that they get justice. Fast forward to the end of time to the time when we all are celebrating him who is our savior and we’re looking back on the panorama of history and all those hard things that happen. Those who have been brought into the kingdom by faith in Christ and those who have rejected the gospel message into eternal condemnation. And I suggest to you that you’re and my response will be that was a just result. That was more than fair.

It was God giving these rejecting ones every opportunity to see his handiwork in nature and in the conscience of their hearts and have opportunities to respond to God. So in life as we know it when we ask and answer the question why the thing that you and I can take to the bank is that God is fair. But it may not feel like that to us. It may not look like that to us. And the reason is because there’s another agenda besides the justice of God going on in life.

And we see it not just in the concept of justice. We see it at the end of the parable when it reads, “But when the son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” I would be wonderful if if I could promise to you like some of the southern preachers promise that if you give enough money and if you’re devoted enough to God, guaranteed you’ll financially prosper, guaranteed you will prosper in life and with your families. But that’s foolishness. That’s not the biblical message.

The biblical message is that God has a job to do and we have a job to do. God’s job is to do justice. Our job is to live by faith. This is seen in Hebrews chapter 11. One of the chapters in the Bible that’s most famous for the concept of faith is Hebrews 11 where faith is defined as you know the one who does who believes in God and that he is the rewarder of those who believe in him.

And as we go through the book of Hebrews we find these giants of the faith. Abrahams, the Isaac’s, the Josephs, the Moses’s, the ones who were heroes of the faith, and they put themselves on a line, and they put their life on a line, and God came through in their lifetime. In fact, in verse 32 of Hebrews 11, it says, “What more shall I say? I do not have time to talk about Gideon, Bareric, Samson, Jeepa, David, Samuel, and the prophets who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised. Who shut the mouth of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword, whose weakness was turned to strength, and who became powerful in battle, and routed foreign armies.

That’s the winning team I want to be on. Sign me up. I’ll do that every time. I’ll march in that army because those guys were winners. And then without any expectation of the change, we pass through a veil in this passage from those heroes of the faith to read.

Women receive back their dead, raised to life again. Others were tortured and refused to be released so that they might gain a better resurrection. Some faced jeers and floggings while others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned. They were sawn in two.

They were put to death by the sword. Doesn’t sound so much like a winner now, does it? They went about in sheep skins and goat skins, destitute, persecuted, and mistreated. And then this remarkable phrase, less we get distracted with all this chaos that we’re reading as we pass through that veil from the conquerors to the non-conquerors, from the winners to the seeming losers in terms of what they see in their lifetime. This phrase comes up.

The world was not worthy of them. Take it to the bank. You and I do not have a guarantee that in our lifetime our affairs will be set right. They will be set right. But we may die waiting for that to happen.

And if we do, we die in faith believing that through God’s work among others the circumstances our prayers can still be answered. So the text says, “They wandered in deserts and mountains and in caves and holes in the ground. These were all commended for their faith. Yet none of them received what they’d been promised. God has promised something better for us.

That only together with us would they be made perfect. That’s the life of faith for a Christian. There are guarantees and that’s God’s business to do things that are righteous and that are just and there are not guarantees. There are conditional things that because of our faith we may see answers in this life. We may not until the life to come.

Christian missionary named Helen Roosevel set out to the bad lands of a third world country with a missionary group to bring the gospel to them. And they quickly were captured and imprisoned. And Dr. Roosevel and you can look it up on the internet suffered in the five months of captivity that her teeth were kicked in out of her face and she was raped twice and she was finally rescued and brought back to America and has spoken in different conventions since then. And she said, understandably, my question was why?

I did this for God. I gave my life up for him. Why did this happen? And the answer was from God. Can you thank me and trust me for this experience that you’ve encounter that you’ve realized even if I never tell you why?

That’s a life of faith. It says, “Okay, things are not good now. They may get better in my lifetime. They may not. I may die not having seen the realization of my prayers.

But by faith, I’m believing God has surrounded me entrusted me with the experience to grow me up and to have the privilege of praying to him who is the justifier of all that affairs in life will be made right. So there is in this parable a very powerful message. It’s a message that says we are people who are in a proving ground relationship with God. We are, as James 1 says, the we’re in a crucible of life that involves testing. And James instructs us that we are to count it all joy when we counter various trials of many kinds.

Knowing that the testing of our faith produces perseverance and perseverance finishes its work so that you may mature and complete not lacking anything. So James writes at the very outset and says, “When bad things happen to you, drop to your knees and pray and pray and pray with perseverance.” And you may have an opportunity that in your prayers, your prayers will hit that unrighteous judge and he’ll say, “I give up, so to speak, unrighteous judge. I give up in this lifetime. I’m going to give this woman what she wants because she’s wearing me out.

And it may be that our persistent prayers in this lifetime will be ones that God will honor and we’ll see a result in this lifetime. Would to God that that would be true. But James says it’s a proving ground that God has entrusted us to. He has taken us and shaped us in the fiery kiln to be ones who are tested, who persevere because God’s purpose for us is to be mature and complete, not lacking anything. And if we didn’t catch that point after James writes about, “But if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God who gives generously to all without finding fault.

Let him believe and not waver like a like a wave of the sea that is tossed to and fro. And after those instructions, James and then verse 12 says, “Blessed is the one who perseveres under that because having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.” So, in fact, God’s purposes in your life may be slow. You may be praying for something that you haven’t gotten an answer to yet. And that’s okay if that happens.

Follow through with Ruth Caulkins prayer. Lord, I know that there are countless times when I must wait patiently for you. It strengthens my faith. It deepens my dependence upon you. I know you are sovereign God, not an Aaron boy, responding to the snap of my fingers.

I know your timing is neatly wrapped in your incomparable wisdom. But Lord, you’ve appointed prayer to obtain answers. Even David the psalmist prayed with confidence. It’s time, oh Lord, for you to act. God, on this silent sunless morning, when I’m hedged in on every side, I cry boldly.

You are my father and I am your child. So Lord, could you hurry a little? That’s a wonderful prayer. There’s nothing wrong with that prayer because this widow took and gathered the circumstances of life and she said, “There are two principles at work. If we had the time, we developed the theological premises around what’s called an antitoy.

A N T I N O M Y anti-nomomas. There are two principles equally working in tension with each other in the scriptures. On the one hand, God is sovereign and he determines what’s going to happen and it will unequivocally happen because he’s determined it. That’s God’s part. And then there’s our part, human responsibility.

We’re responsible for what we do and what we believe. Perfect example is the cross itself where the Bible says Jesus went to the cross as it was determined by God. And on the other hand, woe to those men who put him to death. It’s true about it’s it’s true about the betrayal of Jesus by one of his own when it was said about him bless woe is him upon whom Jesus is betrayed. On the other hand, he was he was betrayed because of the sovereign purposes of life that led to the cross.

It’s true about things that have to do with salvation. The scriptures teach in Ephesians chapter 2 that God has ordained and chosen us before eternity passed. So your name was written in the book of life intentioned by God to become one of his children. And God determined that ahead of time. And yet the human responsibility is we are to believe.

We’re responsible to receive him and believe. Those tensions of God’s sovereign and govern God’s sovereignty and our responsibility lay together. And this widow understood that. She said, “Okay, I haven’t given up on my confidence that God’s working in my life. I’m praying, but I’m also working at trying to find a solution.”

So this little parable becomes for us a very powerful illustration of the message that we had three weeks ago which I’ve been asked to again repeat today about recognizing that it’s not how we start in life, it’s how we end. Him and you have Walter Scott. Lock him in a prison cell and you have a John Bunan. Bury him in the snows of Valley Forge and you have a George Washington. Raise him in abject party poverty and you have Abraham Lincoln.

Subject him to bitter religious prejudice and you have a Draeli. Strike him down with infantile paralysis and he becomes Franklin Roosevelt. Burn him so severely in a schoolhouse fire that the doctors believe he’ll never walk again. And yet Glenn Cunningham set the world record in 1934 for a mile at six at 4 minutes 6.7 seconds.

Have him born black in a society filled with racial discrimination and you have a Booker T. Washington, a George Washington Carver or a Martin Luther King. Make him the first child to survive a poor Italian family of 18 children. And you have Enrico Caruso. Have him born of parents to survive a Nazi concentration camp.

Paralyze him from the waist down when he is four. And you have an incomparable violinist, Isach Burlman. Call him a slow learner, Write him off as uneducatable. And you have an Albert Einstein. It’s not how we start, it’s how we finish.

Various authors, I trace mine back to Chuck Swindoll, but I can find other authors that have also said it, have said 10% of life is determined by what happens to us. 90% of life is determined with how we respond to it. So in fact to that woman who was savaged as she took the gospel to a third world country she said I’ve learned and God has impressed on me the following. Can I thank God and trust him for the experiences he’s putting me through without ever telling me why. There were three Christian nurses working in a hospital room in Idaho recently and the patient was a woman who was trembling and shuddering and couldn’t stop shuddering.

And in fact, that was problematic because the doctor’s instructions for this nursing team was, “You’ve got to get her to lay still so you can the right kind of medical tests so we can determine what’s wrong with her.” But for all the medicines they poured into this woman, she in fact continued to tremble and shudder. And the doctor finally finished his rounds and got back to that hospital room about an hour later and the nurses were in the room with this woman and they had administered to her the test, the test that the doctor prescribed and found out it was a brain bleed and they could address that medically in a way where she was at my last report recovering. But of course, that’s not what the doctor was most curious about, although he appreciated that. He said, “How’d you get her to stop trembling?”

And one of the women said, “I started to sing Amazing Grace.” That’s you and me. We stand in the breach of the circumstances of life that are hard that we don’t understand why they’re happening, but we say, “God, I’m going to pray. I’m going to trust you for the result and I’m going to do what I can to affect the affairs of my life. But in the final analysis, it’s God who provides the good and just results.

Whether it’s Dr. Roosevel whether that’s woman in an Idaho hospital room or whether it’s the myriad of people who had hard and bad starts in life and then in fact accomplish something in their life. God has a job to do and the affairs of this world are marching along in minute detail exactly as he

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