Before our Old Testament reading, please turn to the book of First Kings. In our evening worship service, not long ago, we went through the book of First Kings together. So if you’re with us on the occasion upon which the sermon was from First Kings 17, these words will be very familiar. Our reading is 1 Kings chapter 17, verses 17 through 24. At this point, Elijah had been living in the home of a widow who had a son. And we encounter an incident in the life of the woman’s son now, and how God acted mightily in behalf of the son and his mother. First Kings 17, 17-24. Listen to this. This is the very Word of God. After this, the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, became ill, and his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him.
And she said to Elijah, what have you against me, O man of God? You have come to bring my sin to remembrance and cause the death of my son. He said to her, give me your son. And he took him from her arms and carried him up into the upper chamber where he lodged and laid him on his own bed. And he cried out to the Lord, O Lord my God, Have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I sojourned by killing her son?
And he stretched himself out upon the child three times and cried to the Lord, O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again. And the Lord listened to the voice of Elijah. And the life of the child came into him again and he revived. And Elijah took the child and brought him down from the upper chamber into the house and delivered him to his mother. And Elijah said, see, your son lives. And the woman said to Elijah, now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth. Now for our New Testament reading. Turn to Luke’s Gospel, chapter 7. Luke chapter 7, and our text is verses 11 through 17.
Soon afterward, he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a great crowd went with him. As he drew near to the gate of the town, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. And a considerable crowd from the town was with her. And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her. And he said to her, do not weep. And he came up and touched the beer, and the bearers stood still. And he said, young man, I say to you, arise. And the dead man sat up and began to speak. And Jesus gave him to his mother.
Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, saying, a great prophet has arisen among us, and God has visited his people. And this report about him spread through the whole of Judea and all the surrounding country. Thus far, the reading of God’s word.
Let’s pray for his blessing upon it now. Father in heaven, thank you that you have power to raise the dead. Thank you that you’ve done that in so many of us who are dead in sins and trespasses. You’ve quickened us, you’ve given us life. as we consider this passage from your word, Lord. Strengthen our faith, work faith in us, glorify yourself and get glory for your son, our savior. We pray in his name alone, amen. You know, one thing about this passage is you’ve got Jesus and there’s a large crowd with him. And he and this large crowd, including many of his disciples, are approaching the town, the village, and then there’s a crowd coming out of the village.
It reminds me a little bit, you know, in some of those epic war movies, particularly the ones where the fighting is with swords and things like that. They’ll have an aerial view of two armies getting ready to converge. They’re coming together and they’re both racing towards one another, you know, like in the movie Braveheart, maybe, or maybe one of those great battle scenes from the Lord of the Rings movies. I think of those things with these verses, because you’ve got two crowds of people coming towards each other, not to do battle with each other, but in a way there is battle going on, isn’t there? There’s spiritual warfare going on. Because out of this little town, this village called Nain, there’s a funeral procession going out to lay to rest the body of this young man who has died. and then coming right towards that funeral procession is a gospel procession, and they’re gonna collide, and life and the gospel are going to triumph over death.
So this happens not long after the incident we read and heard about last time with the centurion, the man who had a servant who was sick, and he came to Jesus seeking to have his servant healed. And then that happened, in the town of Capernaum, which is on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. And from there, Jesus and his disciples and a crowd with them have moved south. They’ve gone around the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, heading south, sort of to the southwest, passing Nazareth, for example, where Jesus was born and grew up.
And they come into contact, they come towards this town called Nain. A small village, it’s not a city. It’s not a fortress, it’s just a village. One scholar estimated that in the days of Jesus, the population of Nain was about 200 people, not a big place, not significant on the map. And it’s not mentioned anywhere else in the whole New Testament.
And we’re told that as Jesus approached Nain, there was a great crowd with him and his disciples too, part of that crowd. And as this gospel procession collides with the funeral procession, it teaches us that death is going to be swallowed up in victory. It teaches us that death will be swallowed up in victory through the invincible gospel of Jesus Christ.
Three points this morning, just one word each, and they all start with P. So here’s my three-point outline. Pity, power, and praise. Pity, specifically the pity of the Lord Jesus, his pity for sinners, his compassion towards those who are suffering, and then power, his power over death, over sin, and then finally praise. So first of all, pity.
This narrative This passage from God’s Word, this little piece of the history of Christ’s ministry confronts us with death. There’s a funeral procession coming out of the city, the town of Nain. And Luke very skillfully kind of just stacks up for us the sorrowful circumstances that we’re presented with. name, doesn’t that sound kind of doleful to you? I mean, if, if CS Lewis or, or Tolkien, we’re going to create a village in one of their stories in one of the worlds they create, and they called it Nain, Nain, just seems like a place where life is hard, you know. But life was really hard for this one woman in particular, because first of all, first element of sorrow here, we have death, death. which is the culmination of all the misery of the fall. And anytime we encounter it, it’s a bad thing. It’s a sorrowful thing. Life passes from this present age into eternity. The soul separated from the body, which was never the original design. It’s not natural, as people so often are inclined to say.
In marriage, we say what God has joined together, let not man separate. When a man and woman are united in marriage, they’re supposed to stay together, and it’s bad to separate them. And it’s the same thing with the body and the soul. God joined together the body and the soul, and when they come apart, it’s tragic, it’s sorrowful.
It’s sad. So there’s death, first of all. But secondly, not just any death. Here was a son who preceded his mother in death. If there’s any parents in here who had to say goodbye to a child, you know the intense sorrow that that is. Forgive me another reference to the Lord of the Rings, but you know, when Theoden, is at the grave of his son. He’s standing there mourning with Gandalf and he’s weeping and he says, a father should never have to bury his own son. It’s not the way it should be. Sons bury their fathers, but when a father, when a parent has to bury a child, that’s even more intense.
And to add to that magnification of the tragedy, this man, this young man who had passed away was the only son of his mother. And even Scripture itself refers to the grieving for an only son as particularly intense, particularly deep grief. God uses it as a paradigm for the kind of grief he wants his people to experience when they repent of their sins, when they come to grips with their sins. So in Jeremiah 6, verse 26, for example, the prophet says, O daughter of my people, put on sackcloth, roll in ashes, make mourning as for an only son, most bitter lamentation. And that’s not to minimize any kind of grief over anyone’s death. But you see how Luke is just stacking up the sorrowful circumstances here. Not just death, but a son who’s being buried by his mother. And he’s her only son. And to top it all off, she’s a widow.
Widows which, even in biblical terms, are kind of the epitome of the disadvantaged. Because in the ancient Near East, there weren’t very many ways a widow could get a living. They depended on others. They depended on a son to protect them, to support them.
So this woman is helpless now. And there she is. Traditionally, the family would walk out in front of the beer or the casket beer there. That’s basically a litter. It’s a pallet. on which a dead body would be carried out for burial. And in ancient Israel, the family would walk out ahead of it and lead the procession to the grave.
And of course, being a widow, this wasn’t the first time this woman had done that, is it? Sometime, we don’t know how long ago, but she walked out with a procession when her husband passed away. So she’d been there, done that. But when her husband died, probably her son was walking next to her, grieving with her.
Now he’s behind her on the bier. Philip Ryken commenting on this passage said, the woman was probably walking alone because in those days it was customary for the family to proceed the deceased. And in this case, very sadly, No one else was left. But you see how Christ responds with pity. Verse 13, then the Lord saw her. He had compassion on her. The Greek word there that’s translated, he had compassion.
There are a number of different words that the Greek language can use to convey compassion or pity. The one that’s used here, specifically conveys a visceral response, that feeling that you get in your stomach when someone else is hurting, that sympathy that you feel physically when someone’s undergoing deep grief. Relief agencies and different organizations that want you to send money so that they can do their work, you know, they put these ads on television. or they come up, they pop up on your computer screen, and they have images in them that are designed to get that very thing from you. They want you to feel in your gut, sympathy, compassion, pity, so that you’ll send money so that they can help feed the hungry or provide for orphans or whatever the case may be.
That’s what Jesus felt in his human body, in his gut. And it’s an important reminder to us that in his humanity, Jesus felt just as we do. There are a number of places in the Gospels where we’re told that Jesus had compassion. Sometimes the The author just tells us he felt compassion. But there’s a case, for instance, in Matthew 15, where Jesus tells his disciples, I have compassion. Matthew 15, verse 32, Jesus said to his disciples, I have compassion on the crowd.
And he wasn’t just stating the obvious. He wasn’t just saying, just informing them. It was more like, you know how you feel when you feel that sense of palpable, tangible, physically manifested pity about something. You might tell someone next to you, man, I’ve got a knot in my stomach. That’s what Jesus was saying when he told his disciples, I have compassion. He’s saying, I feel this thing inside.
My heart goes out to them. And that’s what it was doing when Jesus encountered this woman walking out of Nain. So he had compassion as a human being, but he also had compassion as the divine son, which makes his compassion even greater, doesn’t it? The second person of the Godhead who has compassion. He’s a compassionate God.
Remember when Moses asked to see God’s glory, and God decided, well, Moses can’t see me and live. No one can look at me and live, but I’m gonna declare my glory to him. I’m gonna cover him in the cleft of the rock. I’m gonna pass by and I’m gonna declare to him my name. And that’s how I’m gonna show Moses my glory.
And you know what God says about himself? The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate. Some of your Bibles may say merciful. But what God wanted Moses to know about himself and about his nature and about his glory is that he’s a God of compassion. As it says in Psalm 103, verse 13, See, God kind of brings it down so we can understand. He says, for as a father shows compassion to his children, so Yahweh, the Lord, shows compassion to those who fear him.
So both in his humanity and in his deity, Jesus has pity for sufferers. Pity, compassion, It’s a divine attribute, and this passage holds before us the pity of Christ for the suffering, the pity of Christ for the grieving, and ultimately for lost sinners. And so great is his pity for sinners that he came in the flesh to be our Redeemer. And he has power. to redeem. That brings us to our second point, the pity of Christ, but the power of Christ we see.
Now, you have felt that, I won’t even try to say the Greek word. But you felt that that compassion that in the gut, in different situations in your lives. But you know, a lot of times we have that we feel that we have compassion, but we lack the ability to give any relief. We can’t help. And that sometimes makes it worse, doesn’t it?
But Jesus doesn’t have that problem. He has both divine compassion and divine power. He has power to help. That’s why he could say to the woman, do not weep. It made Just a casual reading, maybe an insensitive reading, you might think, well, that’s a pretty insensitive thing for Jesus to say to this woman whose son passed away. Don’t weep? What are you talking about? Of course she should weep. She lost her only son. She’s a widow. But Jesus said to this woman, do not weep, because he has power to raise her son, and he was about to do it. So her cause for weeping in a mere moment was about to be lifted, taken away.
You notice Jesus, too, says he touched the beer. And if you’ve read the scriptures much, you know that there’s a problem for that. Because if you’re a Jew, and you touch something that a dead body is on, that makes you unclean, makes you ceremonially unclean. But Christ has power. of holiness, he has power of moral purity, so that it doesn’t affect him to touch this thing.
People might have said, uh-oh, you touched that, you’re unclean now. But by what happens next, it proves that no, actually he was not unclean at all. It would have made anyone else unclean. It would have made me or you unclean if we’d gone up and touched the beer. The bearers, because they did that labor of love and carried the body, they would have been unclean simply because they carried the body. But so great is Christ’s holiness that the giver of life cannot be made unclean. Uncleanness doesn’t transmit to him. He translates cleanness and holiness and life to what he touches. He holds the power over death and he gave the command to the young man to rise.
Remember when Jesus managed the situation with the centurion’s servant? The centurion’s servant was near death. He was very, very sick, near death, but not yet dead. This man was dead. They were carrying him out to bury him. Yet Jesus gave him a command. We sometimes forget how odd that would have been, how Out of place, it would be to speak to a corpse, to tell a corpse, a dead body, to do something. And yet Jesus did that, just like with the centurion. He gave the word. He gave the command. And the young man sat up immediately. Isn’t that what it says? Young man, I say to you, rise. And the dead man sat up, began to speak.
And part of the reason we read the passage from 1 Kings that we did is because in this case where Elijah also raised a young man from the dead, Elijah prayed multiple times. He stretched himself out on the body of this young man. Elisha did something similar. He stretched himself out on the body of a young man who had died and restored him to his mother. But you see the excellence of Christ, that he didn’t have to go through all these steps. All he did was give the dead man a command and he rose instantly. And that’s a powerful illustration of the gospel too.
Because formerly all of you and I were dead, not dead physically, But as it says in Ephesians chapter two, we were dead in sins and trespasses. It’s important that we understand that sinners that are apart from Christ aren’t merely spiritually sick. There are senses in which you could say that they’re sick, and even scripture uses that kind of description. in certain contexts. But we weren’t spiritually sick to the point where if we just reached out for the right medicine, we could be made well. Or that there was some spiritual life in us, we just needed to kind of drum it back up, get it back to a point of health. Sinners aren’t simply sick. They’re not simply at the point of death. Sinners are more like what Ezekiel saw in that valley. Sinners are like so many dry bones lying on the ground with no flesh on them.
And in our effectual call, when Christ through His Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit brought us to Him, He in the Spirit says to us the same words that He said to this young man outside of Nain. He says, arise. And He quickens us. He makes us alive. That’s what the gospel does. And what happens in verse 15 of our text today is what happens every time a sinner is converted. It’s no less than someone who was dead in sins and trespasses being given life. Someone who spiritually was on the beer, but rises, begins to speak, begins to breathe, begins to live. It’s no less than a miracle of God’s grace. and God’s grace is sovereign.
It’s his doing, it’s none of ours. We love, but we love because he first loved us. We rise because Jesus said, rise. And you notice in this passage, although on many occasions people did ask Jesus of things, ask of Jesus things, they requested help from him. No one asks Jesus for anything in this passage, do they? The widow doesn’t, the young man certainly didn’t and couldn’t. Jesus just acted. He simply acted out of pure compassion.
There’s a reformer by the name of Johannes Brentz, who spent much of his ministry and died in the city of Stuttgart, where Hillary and I lived for a number of years. Writing on this passage, Johannes Brentz said, and so it is made clear in Christ that the Father is so full of pity and compassion that he will help the lowly, the afflicted, and the oppressed even before they pray. Before the young man ever called upon Christ, Christ called him. And that’s what he does for each of us as well, in his sovereign grace.
Christ has moved with compassion for sinners, and he’s able to remedy their plight as well. We sing a hymn that says he’s full of pity joined with power. Both. He’s got both of those. pity, and power. And because He is, that makes Him altogether worthy of our praise. And that’s our final point. Christ’s pity, Christ’s power, and Christ’s praise.
If you glance with me once again at verse 16, you see the response of all those who witnessed what happened there outside of name. Fear seized them all, it says, and they glorified God, saying, a great prophet has arisen among us, and God has visited His people. when it makes reference to fear, it’s talking about holy fear, it’s talking about awe at the situation, but more than that, awe at the person of Jesus Christ.
It’s like what happened if you just flip back to chapter one of Luke. when, when john the baptist had been born, and everyone said, Oh, you should name him Zachariah after his father, and his mother should know his name is john. And they said, well, nobody in your family’s named john. And so he asked Zachariah, and he asked for a writing tablet, he writes on the tablet, his name is john. And as soon as he did that, he always he’d been unable to speak for the whole gestation. The whole time john was in the womb, he was unable to speak.
And people knew that and all of a sudden his tongue is loosed. And it says in response to that, fear came on all their neighbors. These things were talked about through all the hill country of Judea. That’s what we see here. Verse 16 of our text, fear seized them all says, and they glorified God.
And that’s the proper response to God’s goodness. That’s the proper response to God’s mercy and to the exhibition of his power. Now, here’s how they responded, specifically, as the text tells us. It says they responded. Here’s how they analyzed the scenario, in other words. They said, a great prophet has arisen among us, which is true. It’s very true. In fact, the greatest prophet had arisen among that.
That was a very logical conclusion, because they knew the Old Testament scriptures. They heard them read in synagogue every Sabbath day. So, they knew and were familiar with that passage that we just read from 1 Kings. They knew the passage in 2 Kings, where Elisha did something very similar, raising a young man from death to life.
And nothing like that had happened in Israel since the days of Elisha. Elijah performed a similar miracle, Elisha did, and then it hadn’t happened. And then along comes this Jesus of Nazareth. And he speaks to a dead man, and he rises. And then people are like, can you imagine what it’d been like to be an Israelite in those days? And think back to the great prophets, Elijah, Elisha, and then there’s someone in your very midst doing things like those wondrous works that the prophets of old had done. And they were rejoicing, they were excited that a prophet had risen among them yet again. So Christ’s authoritative word and this miraculous work that he did, it placed him right in the very top rank among prophets, not just any prophet here, but like one of the great ones. And then they said, God has visited his people. The Israelites have been waiting for centuries for this. Centuries. Powerful signs of the favor of their God.
And when they say God has visited his people, that doesn’t mean visit there doesn’t mean come and spend time with. It means to come in power. It means to come and do something mighty, to take action, to deliver, to help. That’s what they mean by God has visited his people. That idea of God visiting can have connotations either direction, by the way. It can be meant in a positive way, like that’s the term that’s used when God delivered Israel out of exile from Babylon.
He delivered them. But for God to visit can also mean to come in judgment. to come and destroy his enemies. That’s also described as God visiting, like he says in the 10 Commandments. He visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children under the third and fourth generation. That’s the way the word visit is being used here, but it’s being used in this glorious, hopeful, joyful sense. God has visited his people.
They recognized that God was mightily working among them. And of course, word got around. Verse 17, report about him spread. The news traveled far and wide. So in verses 11 and 12 of our text, these two multitudes converged. And because there’s this large crowd with Jesus, and because there was a considerable crowd coming out of Nain with the woman, what that means is when Jesus touched the beer, said to the man, rise, and he rose from the dead, what did you have? You had a multitude of witnesses. People saw it.
So that then, years later, when Luke wrote his gospel, if someone came along and said, I don’t believe that, there were still witnesses that said, it happened, I was there, I saw it. And Luke’s gospel would have been discredited long before it ever circulated. Verse 16, as far as the way the people responded, Their immediate conclusion was not incorrect.
A great prophet had risen among them, and God had visited his people. But we even have a fuller understanding of what was going on and who was among them than they had, don’t we? People criticized this response. When the people said a great prophet has arisen among us, some people have said, well, they’re not going far enough, which, okay, it’s true. But as far as the information that they had, what they knew, they were glorifying the Lord Jesus.
But we know, don’t we, that Christ is not only just a great prophet. He’s the prophet. He’s the great prophet, our great prophet. He’s the word of God made flesh dwelling among us. And in him, God has visited us and he’s visited us with eternal salvation. And so we too ought to glorify Him.
So you see on display in these verses, a very heartwarming, moving display of the compassion and the pity of Christ. Let me just make a few points of application as we close. When you see this demonstration of compassion on the part of Jesus Christ, it should persuade you and encourage you and assure you that Jesus still has compassion on sinners.
He has compassion on us when we suffer. He has compassion on each one of his children when they’re enduring difficulties and trials. He sees, he knows, and he cares. He still in his human body, his glorified human body, feels that compassion that he felt outside of Nain, So when you’re hurting, Jesus has that same pity within him. He sees you, each one of you, and he cares.
Secondly, this passage teaches us and motivates us to have compassion for souls. Compassion for souls as motivation for evangelism. You’re inwardly moved. Now maybe we try to suppress it, we get immune to it, we get inoculated to it, but aren’t you still sometimes moved when you see those television ads and you see poor suffering children and an organization is trying to feed the ones that are hungry or trying to house and care for those that are orphans? You feel that. How much more than should our souls be stirred with compassion for people who stand condemned apart from Christ and are destined for outer darkness for eternity?
Put that on the TV screen of your mind and let it motivate you to share Christ with others. They might not believe. They might not respond to the gospel. but least let us let them hear Christ’s offer. I want to say a word of application to those who aren’t Christians. If you’re not a disciple of Christ, know this.
Just as all the ancient creeds of the church say, this Christ is coming again. He will return. and he will judge the living and the dead. And if you appear before him in the judgment, but you haven’t been united to him through faith, you will be held accountable for every wrong you’ve ever committed before the judgment seat of God. So I would urge you, if you haven’t been, to be reconciled to God through the Lord Jesus Christ now, before that day.
Well, finally, in closing, look with me once more at verse 14. Because verse 14 contains a preview, maybe a teaser trailer, we could think of it as of the last day. Because in the last day, the end of the age, as we stand on the precipice of eternity in this present world passes away, Jesus is going to speak again, and he’s going to say to everyone, arise, arise. And we will, every one of us.
The prophet Daniel says, those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Jesus himself said, an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear my voice and come out, those who have done good to a resurrection of life, those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment. Christ will command death to surrender its prey. He’ll plunder the grave. And when he does, all of you who have put your trust in him will enter into glory. inherit eternal life.
Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for the hope of eternal life that we have in Christ Jesus. Give us love for others that we might share that hope with them. Lord, we thank you for the compassion of our Savior. We thank you for his power. Help us to give you, together with the Son and the Holy Spirit, all the praise. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.