Luke 13:28-30

Luke 13:28-30 “There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown out. People will come from east and west and north and south, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God. Indeed there are those who are last who will be first, and first who will be last.”

The Jews were God's chosen people, chosen to show his glory to all other people and nations. He intended to make Abraham's seed a great nation that would reveal the one and only God to all people. God would bless even the alien and the poor in Israel because Israel was God's domain. However, the Jews were not faithful to God, and they chose many gods other than the one and only true God. As an adulterous people, they worshipped idols of other gods and even sacrificed their own children, God's chosen, to Moloch, the god of the Assyrians. They lived spiritually adulterous lives; therefore, God gave them over to their own fleshly desires. As the prophets had foretold, God judged his people harshly for their infidelity and finally dispersed them among all nations.

In today's verses, Jesus speaks of the resurrection. In that day, many Jews did not believe in the resurrection. In fact the Sadducees, the sect of priests in control of the temple, did not believe in life after death. But Jesus taught a lot about the afterlife as He was doing in this passage. He tells the Jewish leaders and teachers listening to him that in the afterlife many of them would not be able to enter into the kingdom of God to sit with the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Of course, all Jewish people who believed in life after death thought they would someday be in the presence of God at a great banquet. As God's chosen people, they would be honored by God and allowed to be in his presence in eternity. But Jesus says that many of them will not be there, and in their place will be the Gentiles, those the Jews called dogs and saw as unclean. He tells them that those who were chosen first because of Abraham will be last in the kingdom. Although God chose the Jews first when He selected Abraham out of the crowd by grace, now because of the Gentiles' willingness to accept Jesus as their Savior, many of them would enter the kingdom before Abraham's people.

The resurrection is a reality for Christians, either at our personal demise or at the sound of the trumpet. Either way, we who have trusted in Christ will be with him, for we are his. Jesus taught the Jews the reality of the resurrection and that God is the God of the living: Now about the dead rising — have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. (Mark 12:26-27) Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had been dead over 400 hundred years by the time of Moses, yet God spoke to Moses about the patriarchs being alive. HE IS THE GOD OF THE LIVING.

This is our hope: Jesus died and then was resurrected, proving that God is the God of the living. Consequently, we emphatically and wholeheartedly place our trust in Jesus and his words. He not only was resurrected, He did miracles that no man from the beginning of time could do. "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. (John 3:16,17) People from all over the world will gather at Jesus' feet in his kingdom of eternal life. People from every race and from every age will live in the kingdom, but Jesus sadly, brokenheartedly tells the reluctant Jewish people of that era, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when they realize their lost opportunity to be with God. Now my friend, with so much at stake, do not fail to enter into God's kingdom of rest and eternal peace because of doubt or unbelief. Enter today through the DOOR, your door, Jesus Christ.