We can become so comfortable with what we know that we fail to recognise what God has done.
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There is something about human nature that makes us comfortable with what we already know.
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When something new challenges an established way of thinking, the difficulty is often not whether the new idea is true, but what accepting it will mean for everything we have become accustomed to.
We see this clearly in Luke 5.
Jesus has called Levi, a tax collector, to follow Him. Levi leaves everything behind and follows Jesus.
He then holds a great reception in his home, with tax collectors and others regarded as sinners, and Jesus is there eating with them.
The religious leaders are not impressed.
They ask Jesus, “Why do you eat and drink with the tax collectors and sinners?”
Their objection makes sense if you understand the religious world of first-century Judaism.
Purity was important. People who openly violated the Law, or whose occupations placed them outside accepted religious standards, could become social and religious outcasts.
But Jesus responds, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
Something new has arrived.
Jesus goes on to explain this with two simple pictures. You do not put a piece of new cloth on to an old garment, and you do not put new wine into old wineskins. The new cannot simply be added to the old.
This is an important point about the Kingdom of God.
Jesus did not come merely to improve the existing religious system.
He did not come with a new set of rules to add to the old ones. With the arrival of Jesus, something fundamentally different had begun.
The Old Covenant was given by God. Its Law, sacrifices, rituals and regulations were not bad. They served an important purpose. But they also pointed forward to something greater.
Now that greater reality had arrived in the person of Jesus.
Jesus announced, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”
The King had come.
This meant that people could no longer simply evaluate Jesus according to the structures they already knew. The arrival of the Kingdom changed the situation.
It is rather like moving to another country where people drive on the opposite side of the road.
You cannot move there and continue driving according to the rules of the country you have left. The whole framework has changed.
This helps explain the reaction of the religious leaders. They were trying to fit Jesus and His disciples into the old framework. Jesus was telling them that the new Kingdom could not be contained within it.
Luke records Jesus’ pointed observation: “And no-one after drinking old wine wishes for new; for he says, ‘The old is good enough.’”
That is the danger.
We can become so comfortable with what we know that we fail to recognise what God has done.
David McAllan, Echuca Community Church.
Jesus did not come to give us a slightly improved version of the old religious life. He brought the Kingdom of God. He brought the fulfilment towards which the Old Covenant had pointed.
The question, then, is not whether we can fit Jesus into the life we already have.
The question is whether we will repent, believe the gospel, and follow the King who has come.
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