- Text: Luke 11:29-36, NASB
- Series: Luke (2025-2027), No. 40
- Date: Sunday morning, November 23, 2025
- Venue: Central Baptist Church — Lawton, Oklahoma
- Audio Download: https://archive.org/download/exploringhisword/2025-s02-n040-z-reacting-to-gods-truth.mp3
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Transcript:
One day this week, one of our kids asked us if they could watch the movie Titanic, and Charla and I said no, because there were some things that they didn’t need to see, but as disappointed as they were by that, we told them it’s okay. The boat sinks, so now you don’t have to watch the movie. You know, the boat sank at the end. I don’t know that that… You look shocked.
like you didn’t know that and we hadn’t had that conversation the boat sinks at the end and so I don’t even remember how long ago that movie came out so if I spoiled it for you I’m sorry but the ship also sank you know over a hundred years ago but we were talking about as a result of that we were talking about things that led to the sinking of the Titanic and there were there were many many factors many things that needed to go wrong that did go wrong in order for that to happen and people have speculated over the years of what could have made the outcome different what could have kept the ship from sinking and one of the things that we look at is the fact that they were being given ice warnings on the radio they were being sent ice warnings through the whole voyage and especially that night, and they just chose to ignore them.
The other ships around them were saying the ice is out here, it’s dangerous. I don’t think that they denied that the icebergs were out there. I think they denied that it was any threat to their ship. They ignored that truth. They ignored that warning, but it didn’t make the threat of the ice any less real and true, did it? The answer is no, because we know the ship sank, right? As shocking as that is to some of us, the ship sank. I thought a lot about them this week because of the passage that we’re in in Luke, as we continue our study through the book of Luke. Jesus deals with a group of people who had kind of a similar outlook on truth, that is right there in front of them, but we’re just going to ignore it, maybe hope that it goes away, maybe hope that it doesn’t affect us.
But Jesus speaks to these people, and He speaks pretty firmly, and that’s what we’re going to look at this morning in Luke chapter 11. And we’re going to start in verse 29. We’re going to look at what Jesus says about our reaction to God’s truth and what it ought to be. So if you haven’t already, please turn with me in your Bibles to Luke chapter 11, starting in verse 29. And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, if you don’t have your Bible or can’t find Luke 11, it’ll be on the screen for you to be able to follow along. No, it will not be on the screen for you to follow along. I forgot that part. All right. Starting in verse 29, it says, as the crowds were increasing, he began to say, this generation is a wicked generation. It seeks for a sign, and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah.
For just as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so will the Son of Man be to this generation. The Queen of the South will rise up with the men of this generation at the judgment and condemn them, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here. The men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation at the judgment and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. No one, after lighting a lamp, puts it away in a cellar, nor under a basket, but on the lampstand, so that those who enter may see the light. The eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is clear, your whole body also is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is also full of darkness. Then watch out that the light you is not darkness.
If therefore your whole body is full of light with no dark part in it, it will be wholly illumined as when the lamp illumines you with its rays. And you may be seated. This is another one of those passages that it seems like Jesus just switches topics in the middle of it so that we have multiple topics just crammed together. But really these, both of these, well, all of these topics, all of these topics, dealing with the sign of Jonah, dealing with the queen of the south, he calls her here the queen of Sheba. She’s identified in the Old Testament. That’s not a contradiction. Sheba is south of Jerusalem. So, the queen of the south, the sign of Jonah, the two different statements he makes about the lamp, They’re all tied together to this idea of God’s truth.
Now, all of this takes place, this rebuke that Jesus gives them here in chapter 11, happens, as Luke says in verse 29, the crowds were increasing. This was a point in Jesus’ ministry where earthly teachers would look at it and say, things are going great. The crowds are huge. People are turning out, seeing what Jesus is going to do next. For most teachers, this would be exciting. But Jesus is not concerned about the size of the crowd. And I think that’s an important lesson for us. That’s not the main point of this passage, but it is something that we need to be aware of. At no point does Jesus gauge the success of what He’s doing by the crowd that He attracts, or how excited they are for the show that He’s putting on. As a matter of fact, those seem to be the times when Jesus points out there’s something wrong in this crowd.
and it’s not it’s not wrong it’s not evil to have a whole lot of people here it just needs to be something that we’re aware of as we follow jesus your faithfulness to what he’s called you to do is your measure of success not how many people respond to it and not how much excitement follows it so if you’re serving the lord faithfully and you’re ministering to one or two people in your life don’t ever feel like you’re a failure because jesus looked at the increasing crowds and said there is a problem in these crowds. What Jesus cared about was whether or not the crowds, the people in the crowds, were walking in the truth. And that’s what he addresses with them. Because he looks at this crowd, he sees this group that so many people would have been so excited that all these people are coming to listen to me, and he calls them a wicked generation in verse 29.
That’s a way to win friends and influence people right there. you wicked generation. And actually, he says this is a wicked generation. It’s almost as though he turns to his disciples and says this about the crowd in front of them, that this is a wicked generation. Why would he call them that? It’s because they were seeking after a sign. Now, there may be times when it’s okay to look for a sign from God, but this was not one of those times, because what these people were looking for was some kind of phenomena to happen that was going to allow them to ignore the clear teaching of God that was right in front of them, and this goes back to verse 16 that we looked at last week, where it says others to test him were demanding a sign from heaven. These were the people that, well, I’m not saying that Jesus works by the power of Satan. I’m just asking questions.
Can you show us a sign in the heavens to prove that you really are from God? So they’re not outright accusing him of being in league with Satan like some of the others were that we talked about last week. But there were people demanding a sign because they weren’t ready to believe what Jesus said, and they’re looking for a way either to get their intellect tickled or their curiosity satisfied, or at worst, they were looking for a way to weasel out of what he was telling them to do. The issue here is that he was already doing things that proved who he was. He was already doing things that pointed to him being from God. He is already healing people. He has already raised the dead. He is already teaching with authority that they can’t fathom. Even his detractors said, nobody, we’ve never heard anybody teach like this.
And last week, those who looked at him, they couldn’t deny the power of the things that he did. They just had to try to explain it away. That was really the point of what I talked about last week. They had to acknowledge that his power came from somewhere. It wasn’t just that of a normal man.
they tried to explain it away so he was already doing things that proved who he was to anybody who was paying attention and looking at the evidence honestly it was right there in front of them but for these people it wasn’t good enough they wanted him to show the signs they wanted they wanted the signs they wanted they wanted them when they wanted them they wanted how they wanted they want Jesus it’s the equivalent of today somebody saying you know the cross the resurrection all of that I’m not sure if he was real why wouldn’t he just put a big neon sign in the sky because you try to find some way to debunk that too if you’re determined not to believe no amount of evidence is ever going to be enough because it’s not an evidentiary position and so they’re looking at Jesus and they’re saying, I’m sorry, the evidence you’re giving us is not good enough.
We want you to jump through our hoops. We want the signs we want, but that’s not how God works, as Jesus points out. As we look at what He says in verses 29 through 30, we see that God’s truth is never tailored to our tastes. They wanted these signs. They wanted Him to do something miraculous up in the sky in verses 16 and 29, no doubt they argued that if we just got a sign, if you just show us a sign, then we’ll believe. This is not the only time that Jesus had a conversation like this, and on one occasion, he told them, you wouldn’t believe even if I showed you the signs you wanted. I’m paraphrasing. But the reality is once we’ve decided we don’t want to believe something, evidence is very unlikely to change our minds. Because just deciding we don’t want to believe something is not an evidentiary decision.
And we could say the same thing about deciding we want to believe something. We might decide we want to believe something whether it’s true or not, and then it’s really hard for the evidence to change our minds because it’s not a position based on evidence. It’s a position based on feelings. And I’ll tell you, we as believers, by the way, have to be very careful about basing our faith on feelings or I want this to be true. It’s okay to want the Bible to be true. That just can’t be our reason for believing because that’s not going to convince a dying world. Our faith has to be rooted in something like evidence, like evidence for the resurrection. Jesus said they were only going to receive one sign. In verse 29, He says, no sign will be given to them but the sign of Jonah.
And when He says this sign of Jonah is the only sign they’re going to receive, what He’s referring to is His own death, burial, and resurrection. This is also not the only place where Jesus talks about the sign of Jonah. And in other places, He’s very clear and very explicit about what He’s talking about when He says the sign of Jonah. when Jesus says they will receive no sign but the sign of Jonah. I’m not going to put neon lights in the sky. I’m not going to make the moon go backwards. I’m not going to extinguish the sun. I’m not going to do any of that. The sign you’ll get is the sign of Jonah. In other places, he explains that means his resurrection, just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale or the great fish, depending on what translation you look at. Just as Jonah was in the belly of this sea critter, if we can put it that way.
For three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the belly of the earth for three days and three nights. And the implication there is that just as Jonah was spit out on the dry land, so the earth would have to give up Jesus because it wasn’t able to hold him. So he says there’s no sign that you’re going to receive other than the resurrection. It doesn’t mean the resurrection is the only evidence that He is who He claims to be. It means they’ve ignored all the other evidence pointing up to this point that was enough to convince anybody that was looking at this honestly. And they’re determined they want the signs they want. Jesus says, here is the ultimate sign. And the idea is that if the resurrection can’t convince them, there is no evidence that is going to.
If somebody can predict and accomplish his own resurrection from the dead, and if I remember the count correct, nine times in the Gospels, he publicly predicts his own resurrection from the dead before accomplishing it. If somebody can predict and accomplish his own resurrection from the dead and do so in a way that is publicly verifiable, and by the way, that we have excellent arguments and evidence for today, if that’s not enough to convince them, then just him showing some signs in the sky is certainly not going to do it. And so we’ve got this sign, the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. That’s the only thing there is.
Maybe you’ve been to the doctor at some point, and you’ve been trying to treat some kind of ongoing illness, and they put you on a medication, and they say, we’re going to try this, and we can go, if it doesn’t work, we can try a higher dose, and we can try a higher dose. At some point, you get to a point where that’s the highest dose they make. And after that, you just know this is not going to work. This is not going to fix it for you. It may for other people, but it’s not fixing it for you. The resurrection is the highest dose of evidence that there is. And if somebody resists that, he’s saying to these people who are watching him, and watching his miracles. If all of this wasn’t enough to convince you, the only thing left is the resurrection. And that’s important because we would look at that and say, why is that the only sign they get? It’s the only sign they need.
It’s the greatest possible dose, and if they’re going to be immune to that, they’re going to be immune to all of it. It’s the only sign any of us should need if we’re really open to the evidence. And one of the things I love about the resurrection is that we can look back at historical evidence, and we can make a solid case for the resurrection. And if the resurrection is true, everything else follows. Well, how can you worship a God who told Israel to go in and wipe out the Canaanites? You know what? That’s a good question. We can have a discussion about that. but I don’t have to be able to answer that in order for me to believe. Jesus either walked out of the grave or he didn’t. Well, is the earth millions of years old or is it 6,000 years old? You know, I believe the Bible makes a case one way. I know other believers believe the Bible makes a case one way.
I don’t have to be able to explain that, though, to know that Jesus is who he said he is because he either walked out of the grave or he didn’t. The resurrection really is the cornerstone of everything. And I’m not saying nothing else matters. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have spent so much of my life delving into topics of apologetics. But if you can come back to the resurrection, as far as knowing that Jesus is who He says He is, we can spend the rest of our lives studying all those other questions. And which side we fall on does not make a difference at the heart of the gospel. Jesus either is who he says he is or he’s not. And that’s rooted in whether he walked out of that tomb or not. And me being able or unable to answer any other question that pops up has nothing to do with it.
It’s the ultimate sign predicting and accomplishing his own resurrection from the dead because that’s something even the prophets couldn’t do. And so he says in verse 30, just as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so will the Son of Man be to this generation. When he rose from the dead, they would be confronted with that truth and it would be an unmistakable sign confirming him as the Messiah and as God the Son. And the sad thing for them is it’s not the sign they wanted, but it’s the sign they needed. and it’s the sign they got. God gives us the truth we need. He reveals to us the truth we need to know and sometimes it’s not what we want to hear. Sometimes it’s not in the form we’d prefer, but he doesn’t change it just because we insist. I don’t care how faithful you are as a Christian.
I don’t care how faithful you are to follow God’s word, there are things in this book that are uncomfortable to the flesh. There are things in this book that he tells us to do that we’d just rather not do. Hopefully over time he changes our hearts, but we know it to be true. There are things that he tells us that even in here after over 30 years of walking with Jesus, there are still things that I’m like, I wish I didn’t have to do that. And it’s because we have a sin nature. We have flesh, but He doesn’t tailor His truth to what we want. He tells us what’s true, and He tells us what we need to know, and He tells us the way we need to know it and the way we need to hear it. And so our job is to not ignore what God has revealed about Himself. What God tells us about Himself and His will, it may not be what we want to hear or how we want to hear it.
But we listen to Him anyway because He tells us the truth. And here is the sad fact for the Pharisees who were standing there in opposition to Jesus. God’s truth holds us accountable even when we reject it. These Pharisees, we see this in verses 31 and 32, these Pharisees were rejecting Jesus and they were rejecting the truth that the Father revealed in him, but they saw themselves as the keepers of God’s truth. I said something along these lines last week. It just popped into my head, and I wish I’d written it down, but something along the lines of never underestimate the ability of religion to take God’s word and twist it. These people thought they were the keepers of God’s truth, and yet here was the truth of God in human form right in front of them. And they were doing everything they could to oppose Him.
And in response, Jesus points out to them two examples of Gentiles who received the truth from the God of Israel more readily than they did. And this was not so much meant to shame them as to point them to the gravity of what they were doing. That the Gentiles that they looked at and said they are less than us, they are estranged from God, they are not good enough. These people understood the truth of God and received the truth of God more readily than they did who considered themselves to be the keepers of the truth. That’s why he gives us the two examples. The Queen of Sheba, who he calls the Queen of the South here, she made the long trip up from Yemen. Now, I’ve never been to the Arabian Peninsula, but it doesn’t look like a fun place to hang out.
you would have to the logistics of taking a queen’s caravan and everything she would have to pack and the guards and the camels she would need and everybody all the people that you would have to supply food and water for and all of this and she took a trip up to visit Solomon because she heard that there was a king there who possessed great wisdom from God there was this gentile queen who knew nothing of God, who was willing to go through such trouble and put herself in such danger to go up to Jerusalem because she knew that up there was a king who spoke on God’s behalf and knew God’s truth, and she wanted to hear it. Here’s this Gentile queen doing what they themselves would not do because Jesus said, there’s one who is greater than Solomon is here. There is a greater king who doesn’t just have God’s wisdom, he personifies God’s wisdom.
And he was standing right in front of them, and they rejected him. To the point that they say, this queen of the south is going to stand up at the judgment. Not that she’s going to stand in judgment, that’s God’s role, but this Gentile would stand up and testify against them at the judgment. When the answer is, well, we didn’t know, or there was no reason for us to have known. This Gentile says, I recognize God’s wisdom secondhand when I received it and couldn’t wait to go and hear from Solomon. And then he gives the example of the Ninevites, again, another pagan country. They were the Assyrians, and the Assyrians had one of the worst reputations for brutality in world. These were not nice people. No wonder that Jonah was scared of them and or hated them to the point that he was not willing to go and preach to them. Because he wasn’t scared of what they were going to do to him.
He was scared that they were going to repent and God was going to forgive them. And Jonah hated them because of their reputation for brutality. And even these people who were so hardened, if you had looked at the Ninevites, you would have said there’s no way that group of people is going to respond to this message of God’s judgment. And yet Jesus said the Ninevites repented at the preaching of Jonah. And here in Jesus, we have a greater prophet showing an even greater sign than Jonah did, and the Pharisees were rejecting it. But what we need to understand, and what Jesus wanted them to understand is their rejection of Jesus didn’t make his claims any less true. If somebody says today, I don’t believe Jesus, does that have any bearing on whether 2,000 years ago he walked out of the tomb or not? It has no bearing.
I was talking to a group of middle schoolers a couple weeks ago about how our beliefs have to be rooted in reality. They have to be connected to reality. And we talked about philosophies that would say things like, oh, suffering is just an illusion. And yet people who profess that, they don’t walk out in front of traffic because they’re going to be smacked by the reality of suffering when a bus comes down the street. There are certain things that are true, and they’re true regardless of how we feel about them. And Jesus’ claims about himself are either true or false. Spoiler alert, kind of like with the movie, I believe they’re true. But Jesus’ claims are either true or false, and our feelings about his claims 2,000 years later do not change the truth or falsehood of the claims. He either walked out of that grave or he didn’t.
And that’s the truth they were going to be held accountable for. And he said that these Gentiles would testify against them on the judgment day, confirming that they had to know the truth. And folks, the same thing is true of us. Jesus tells us who he is. That’s why His apostles wrote it down for us, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. That’s why the church recognized these documents immediately as being the eyewitness accounts. These were given to us so that we would have an understanding of who Jesus is and who He claimed to be. And we can look at this and say, well, I don’t believe what He says about Himself. It doesn’t change the truth of what He claimed. If it’s true, it’s true regardless of whether we reject it or not. And so our concern has to be what is true. And if it’s true, we dare not reject it.
Then we come to this passage starting in verse 33 where he talks about the lamps. And he’s actually making two different points in these verses here. But all of it centers around the fact that God’s truth is offered openly, but it must be received willingly. In verse 33, Jesus tells them that God has revealed the truth for it to be known. That’s why he says, no one after lighting a lamp puts it away in a cellar nor under a basket, but on the lampstand so that those who enter may see the light. It’s a common image in the Gospels. You don’t light a lamp and then hide it under a bushel. In the next couple of weeks, some of you may be putting up lights on your houses. Do you do that so that people can see them? Or do you then go hang tarps all around your property so nobody can look at them? That’d be crazy. You put the lights up so people can see them.
When he makes that case in connection to this idea of them rejecting truth, what Jesus is telling them is that God has revealed the truth. He’s put it there so that people will know it. I think sometimes we have this idea that God is sitting up there amused because He’s hidden truth here and there, but we’ll never find it, and that God is somehow amused by this cat and mouse game. There are things in His Word that He calls us to dig and search for and look for, and the Holy Spirit makes those plain to us as is appropriate. But here He’s talking about the very basic truth of who He is. And there are things that God has put right on display because He wants us to know. God has, in Jesus Christ, has revealed Himself, and Jesus worked all these miracles and taught in the way that He did because God wanted us to know who Jesus is.
Jesus didn’t come to earth to be the world’s best kept secret. God’s truth was offered openly. The problem is that we allow our sinful desires to corrupt our perception of the truth. We see that starting in verse 34 where he’s talking about the eye being the lamp of the body. He’s using the word lamp in a different way here, talking about letting light in. Sometimes what we want to be true shapes our perception of what we’re looking at. And if we look at Jesus and we say, I don’t want that to be true, we will convince ourselves that it’s not. And the reason why we might not want Jesus to be true is what John said in John chapter 1, that we love the darkness more than the light. We have this sinful nature. We fight with it throughout our whole lives.
Where there are these desires and temptations in our lives that we know that God says do this, and our flesh still leads us to want to do this instead. And you know what? If Jesus isn’t true, then I don’t have… If he’s not who he claimed to be, I don’t have to listen to him on the stuff I’m supposed to do. It makes sense that people might not want Jesus to be who he claimed to be. But the issue is whether he is or not. not who we want him to be. And so Jesus tells us in verse 34, told the Pharisees to watch out. Watch out. Not watch out, I’m going to get you, but watch out that you don’t fall into this trap of letting what you want to be true and want to be false. Cloud your perception and distract you from the reality.
The reality is that Jesus claimed in front of the Pharisees to be the greatest truth that we could ever need, to be the greatest king who ever lived, to be the greatest prophet, to be the greatest revelation of God’s truth, in fact, to be God in human flesh. He claimed all of those things. And the question for us is not, does that sound good? Does that sound workable? Does that sound like the way to a fun life? The question is, is that true or is it not? And He’s given us ample evidence through all the miracles that He worked and ultimately through His death, burial, and resurrection. But each one of us has to look at that evidence and make the decision for ourselves. Is He who He claimed to be or is He not? Because if He is who He claimed to be, one of the things that He claimed was that he was the only way to the Father.
And the reason for that is that you and I have sinned against God. Notice what I said. It was not you’ve sinned against God. It’s you and I, all of us, have sinned against a holy God. And he could have easily written us off and said, you know what, they’re ungrateful, they’re too much trouble, I’m done with them, and he could have just let us run wild and spend eternity separated from Him and suffer all the consequences. But instead, God looked at us in spite of our sin and loved us enough that Jesus Christ came willingly and took responsibility for my sin and for yours. For everything that we’ve ever done that is offensive to a holy and just God, He took responsibility for it.
and he was nailed to the cross in our place and he took all the punishment that we deserved he paid all the penalty that we owed and then he rose again three days later to prove it and he did all of that so that our slate could be wiped clean and he was punished so that we could go free this morning if you’ve never trusted him as your savior it’s very simple it’s a matter of believing what he says about your sin that it separated you from god believing what he said about himself that he he is the only way to the father believing that his death on the cross paid for your sin and that his resurrection from the grave proved it. And in believing that, you ask God for the forgiveness that Jesus paid for. And he promises that your slate is wiped clean, that you’re forgiven, and that you have eternal life with him.