Reasons Jesus Rejoices, Part 3 | Reasons for Rejoicing

Luke 10:22

Today is a study in Christology, a deep and high Christology, an understanding of the study of Christ and what the Scripture says the truth is about Christ. So let me read just two verses, Luke 10:21-22, “In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, ‘Thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.’” Or as we said last time, “Such was your good pleasure.”

“All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” Those verses, those two verses there, are really the culminating point in revealing the divine nature of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel. There is a lot that indicates that Jesus is God, that Jesus is, has a divine nature. But here it’s clearly and explicitly stated.

Luke has been leading us to this point from the very beginning of his Gospel, ever since he recorded Gabriel’s words to Mary, Luke 1:35, “‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you,’ he said to Mary. ‘The power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be called Holy, the Son of God.’” So ever since the miraculous conception of Jesus in the womb of the virgin Mary, we have seen the birth of a human baby. We’ve seen the growth and development of a human boy. We have seen, then, the appearance of a human man, who presented himself as a man at the baptism of John. Jesus has had all the growing, maturing experiences of a normal human being, normal human experience, normal human life, precisely because he is a human being.

At the same time, as readers of Luke’s Gospel, we’ve seen a remarkable, supernatural power and authority working in and through this very human man, power over malevolent spiritual forces, demons, and the devil himself; power over impersonal, physical maladies like sickness and disease; power over creatures, like, like little fish in the sea of Galilee and bringing them into the nets of Peter and John and the rest of the Apostles there; power over impersonal forces like a hurricane at sea, wind and waves and all the rest. He’s able to command with his voice the wind and the waves. More than that, we’ve seen on several occasions Jesus with power over death itself. He raised people from the dead.

So deity is really the only category that we have to understand, comprehend, apprehend, and explain all that we have been reading. This is divine power. This is divine authority in Jesus Christ. From very early on, as Jesus entered into ministry, we’ve read about a man who is unlike any other man that we have ever known, that we’ve even read about. There’s no one in history like him. On the one hand, “He was tempted in all points as we are, yet without sin.” His impeccable purity drove away the devil himself and exhausted all the fulness of his temptations.

On the other hand, we read about someone who handled himself and conducted his life in a manner that we can only describe as divinely righteous. He’s been perfectly consistent in all the will of God. He has been flawless, constant in his pursuit of holiness, in doing the will of God, in doing the will of God in the way of God. He speaks the language of perfect truth. He acts in perfect righteousness, his love and mercy and compassion in perfect harmony with the Lord God of Israel, the one who revealed himself to Moses as “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”

And so, confronted with his power and authority, confronted as we are reading this, with his moral perfection, when the amazement kind of subsides for just a bit, and we’re able to think carefully about what this power and authority and righteousness represents, we see and recognize in him the very holiness of God himself.

And that raises in our conscience a rather uncomfortable thought, namely, the reality of our own sin, the fact that we know in our conscience that we’re guilty before someone who is this holy. We’re aware of how utterly sinful we are and in contrast how utterly righteous he is. And that contrast, it smites our conscience. We’re stricken with the thought of our unworthiness and cry out like Peter did, Luke chapter 5, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!”

But here in the text before us, we find hope. We find hope in the person of Jesus Christ. And it’s not the way we might expect. Hope that he shows himself to be just like us, and us just like him. That’s not the hope that we find. In fact, the hope that we find is exactly the opposite, that we find the gap between who we are and who he is wider than ever.

Instead of finding Jesus to be more like us in Luke 10:22, more human, he is human, but we actually find the opposite is true here. The gap widens here between us and him. Any correspondence between us and Christ, which there is a correspondence by our very, by our virtue of our being human, we find that humanness is eclipsed here in this text in his infinite and divine glory.

If you remember what we studied last time, Jesus has rejoiced in the Holy Spirit. He’s been praising God the father for who God is, for what God has done, and because of why God has done it. That’s Luke 10:21, “I praise and thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding,” on the one hand, “and revealed them,” on the other hand, “to little children, babes; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will, for such was your good pleasure.”

We had three points: Jesus praising God for who he is, what he’s done, and why he’s done it. And to those three points we add a fourth today: Jesus rejoices not only in who God is, and what he’s done, and how, and why he’s done it. Now Jesus rejoices in how God has done what he’s done.

The Father has hidden salvation truth from the wise and understanding, and the father has revealed salvation truth to little babes and, get this, he has done both by filling Jesus Christ with all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. He’s done both of those things by causing all the fulness of deity to dwell in Christ bodily. He’s done both the hiding and the revealing work; he’s done the concealing and the revealing in one act, the incarnation.

In other words, what condemns proud sinners before a holy God, what condemns them, and what reconciles humble sinners to a holy God, is in the same reality, the mystery of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the God-Man, with emphasis there in God, in his God-ness, in his deity, in his divinity, his divine nature.

Verse 22 again, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” That, folks, is an incredible revelation. It exposes to us the mystery of the nature of the Godhead, that God is triune, that he is one God in three Persons.

I could give you, in this fourth point in our larger outline, I could give you a series of subpoints to unpack it, but let’s scrap the subpoints for this morning and just do points, okay? One, two, three, and four. Four points we’re going to see, just in one verse here, four points of parity between the father and the son, four ways that father and son are equal. And this is from the lips of Christ himself.

Starting with the first point, number one: Father and son share absolute authority. Father and Son share absolute authority. It’s in that very first sentence, there. Jesus says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father.” Now a sentence earlier, Jesus said, “I praise you, Father,” what did he call him? “Lord, right?” “Lord of heaven and earth.” That title kyrios refers to the absolute sovereignty of God the Father, his supreme Lordship. He’s Lord of heaven and earth. He exercises an authority that is universal, transcendent, and absolute.

So anybody who says, oh, all morality is relative, say that’s garbage. Because God is not relative. He is absolute, he is transcendent, he has universal sovereignty, and his word is righteousness. And when he speaks, when he delivers his words, his law, his truth, it is absolute as he is absolute. It is transcendent as he is transcendent. And its authority and supremacy is universal, as he and his authority and supremacy are universal.

All of that, more than we can even comprehend, it’s contained in that little title, Lord of heaven and earth. And now Jesus says, speaking in the Spirit, by the way, he says, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father.” So whatever is in the category of all things contextually, which we rightly understand includes all things contained in heaven and earth, that entire bucket of things, material and immaterial, physical and spiritual, literally, Jesus says, “To me, to me, that has been handed over,” past tense, passive voice.

All things over which the father has absolute authority, all of that, has been paradidomi, that’s the verb, transfer of authority. It’s been handed over, delivered over, turned over to Jesus Christ. This is about authority. Which again, well, if you go back to verses 19 and 20 and those disciples as they returned, they were just like so bubbly over this power and authority they had over demons. It really puts that into a broader perspective, doesn’t it?

Authority over hostile spiritual powers? That’s just one instance of his authority over all things. And the father has turned over all things to the authority of the son. And so when we come to the end of Matthew’s Gospel, as we do, and Jesus said, Matthew 28:18, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” he wasn’t announcing there something new. He referred to what has been established long, long ago. The divine authority of the son is a matter of divine decree made in the eternal councils of the triune God. This is a matter of the divine will from eternity past.

According to Psalm 2, if you can get back there fast enough you can follow along, but Psalm 2, God warns the kings of the earth about their rebellion against his authority and about the rebellion in particular against the authority of the son whom he has anointed to be king. And in that psalm, in Psalm 2, we hear the voice of the preincarnate son of God speaking. Even before he’s come through the virgin’s womb, here he’s speaking in Psalm 2. He says, “I will tell of the decree: The Lord said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I’ll make the nations,” your inherit, “your heritage, the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.’”

That there is the decree of Sonship, and it’s an eternal decree, an ab, of absolute authority that the son has. And the father then follows up in Psalm 2 with this warning, “Now therefore, O kings, be wise. Be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.” And then this, “Kiss the Son.” He’s saying, do homage to the son, “lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”

So coming back to Luke 10, when Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” when he said that in Matthew 28, end of Matthew 28, that’s not new. It’s old, it’s ancient, it’s eternal, it’s from eternal, it’s from everlasting in the past. It’s the decree of God from the eternal council of the Holy One. And Jesus then, speaking to his disciples here, prompted in prayer by the Holy Spirit, he reveals his absolute authority to them. What Luke records here, Matthew also records in his account as well, Matthew 11:25-27.

But what’s written here in this revelation of Jesus’ self-disclosure, who he really is, his identity, his divine nature, becomes the subject of John’s entire Gospel. This issue of authority in John’s Gospel is actually thematic. It’s prominent from start to finish.

Just a few verses. Jesus says, John 3:35, “The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.” John 5:22, “The Father judges no one but has given all judgment,” into the, into the, “to the Son.” Again, in verse 27, John 5, “He has given him authority to execute judgment because he’s the Son of Man.” Later on in the upper room, the night of his betrayal, John 13:3, Jesus says, says, knowing, or it says, “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands,” there’s that same statement, that he’d come from God, was going back to God.

Jesus carried on then with the, some of the final acts of his earthly ministry, teaching his disciples, telling them, speaking of the future, speaking of their ministry, all by his authority. Same night, one of the disciples not getting it, Philip, “Jesus, show us the Father.” “Have I been with you so long, Philip, and you don’t know me? How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” John 16:15, Jesus said, “All that the Father has is mine, and therefore I said that he,” that is, the Spirit, “will take of what is mine and declare it to you.” So Jesus has authority over all things, all things, which includes the judgment, “so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father,” John 5:23.

There’s really no limit to this authority. It’s utterly comprehensive. Jesus said, Luke 10:22, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father.” And Paul goes on in his writing to help us to see how far that authority extends. We need to understand when the father gave all things into his hands and gave him all authority, that meant everything. Paul says, 1 Corinthians 15:25 that Jesus “must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet.” All enemies. That’s referring to, that’s alluding to, Psalm 110:1. David says, “The Lord says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’” So he alludes back to that. This is the fulfillment of that prophecy. The incarnate Son of God comes, and he’s going to reign until all enemies are put under his feet.

And Paul continues in 1 Corinthians 15, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death,” death, there, personified like an enemy. “For God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” Listen, even death itself, the authority of death itself is put into the hands of the son. Jesus then has authority over judgment and death, death being the curse for sin, the sentence of judgment being eternal death.

So Jesus has authority over judgment, over the sentencing, over the execution of the sentence in death. And that is why the father has put into the hands of the son all divine authority. Why? So he can fulfill his mission, Jesus’ mission, to bring glory to the father. Philippians 2:9-11, “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so the name of Jesus every knee should bow.” What is that? An acknowledgement of his great divine authority. “At the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

In the end, when all is said and done, 1 Corinthians 15:28, “When all things are subjected to the Son, then the Son himself will also be subjected to God the Father, the one who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.” This giving over of authority, it’s for the accomplishment of Jesus’ mission, to bring glory to the Father, to subdue all things, to subject all things in heaven, on earth, under the earth, to bring everything into compliance with the will of God in the outworking of his divine degree.

You say, I’m kind of having a hard time getting my mind around that. Welcome to the club! It’s true! That encompasses everything in Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation. Just incredible what Jesus said in one sentence. We don’t have time to go through that in, in any other fulness unless we turn this into a ten-week series, okay?

So Luke 10:22, that simple statement, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father,” such broad, far-reaching implications. And it leads to a second point of parity between the father and the son. Father and son possess infinite knowledge. Father and son possess infinite knowledge. It’s that next statement there in verse 22, “No one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son.”

Folks, this is an incredible claim of deity. When Jesus spoke this, it provoked Jewish religious zeal. Jewish leaders heard a claim like this, and rather than consider it carefully, rather than evaluate the claim in light of God’s Word, in light of truth, in light of prophecy, we should mention apart from the aid of true spiritual understanding, apart from the grace of God to believe and to understand and to illuminate the truth, they were armed with mere human knowledge, attendant with all its noetic effects, the distorting effects of sin on the mind, the thinking, but also polluted with their jealousy and envy.

The scribes, the Pharisees, the elders, the chief priests, they considered claims like that one to be blasphemous. John 10:33, they said, “It’s not for a good work that we are going to stone you.” Notice, “We’re gonna stone you.” “It’s not for your good works. It’s not for healing the blind, making the lame walk, curing people of leprosy, raising the dead.” Notice, they acknowledge his good works. “But we’re not going to kill you for any of those works of supernatural power, but for blasphemy because you, being a man,” how could they say that? “You, being a man make yourself God.”