God's Way is Right

 DEVOTION

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUKE

GOD’S WAY IS RIGHT

Luke 7:29-30

29(All the people, even the tax collectors, when they heard Jesus' words, acknowledged that God's way was right, because they had been baptized by John. 30 But the Pharisees and experts in the law rejected God's purpose for themselves, because they had not been baptized by John.)

NIV

We are shown two different types of people here: sinners and the self-righteous. Why do the experts in the law reject God’s purpose for them? Clearly, the law points directly to God’s purpose of seeing Jesus as the Christ, the long-awaited Messiah, and for anyone to find the truth and life. How can anyone miss the fact that Jesus came to give us a life that God intended his creation to have from the being of time? God’s purpose for Adam was to live perfectly in paradise, being an eternal being, with no evil, and sin. But man failed and death came into the world. Now Jesus redid what man could not, he lived a perfect life, reset the plan of God, and had his creation live in paradise free of all evil and sin. God’s way is right. His plan for man is right, and Jesus came to show us the way of God, the new creation, a place where we can live as God intended, eternally. What we see in the baptism of John is repentance, for that was his message. It is interesting the Greek word, metanoia, simply means a change of mind, we can see the base word of metamorphosis, like what a caterpillar goes through in becoming a butterfly. So when we repent we change the way we think, we go through a metanoia. This is what Jesus was telling them. The tax collectors and sinners already had a change of thinking, for they were baptized by John for repentance for the forgiveness of sin. That was John’s message. We have heard that message and have changed the way we think, and we have been baptized, although not by John, but the idea is the same, we are following the way of God, acknowledging his way is right. Jesus has already prepared the place for us, for he has been there for the past several thousands of years since his resurrection and ascension. Just as he created the first earth, a perfect place for his creation, with nothing but life. But we know evil and sin entered and ruined this perfect place for us. Therefore, Jesus came to reset everything and now we will live with him, walking and talking with God on the perfect earth, the perfect new creation Jesus prepared for us. We cannot get confused and distracted by the law, or the laws and regulations that we set before us, just as the Pharisees and the experts in the law did. When we start looking at living under any form of law, we are not seeing God’s way as right, but to find our own way to life, if we do that we fool ourselves because we are not changing the way we think, and we do not see that God’s way is right. We must go through that metanoia, that change of mind, living by faith in Jesus, acknowledging that God’s way is right.