Love Lifts Levi

Luke 5: 29-32

29 And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. 30 And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?" 31 And Jesus answered them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance."

Levi was feasting Jesus out of the fruit from his ill-gotten gains from tax fraud. Jesus knew it. Levi was being made aware of it. Interestingly enough, the means of Levi’s edification was not beration for his wayward life. Levi was already under conviction. What he needed was hope. The preaching to Levi came through what Christ had to say to the hypocrites. There are no accidents in God’s universe. God purposed that through the sinful judgmentalism of the hypocrites Christ would show Levi that His love was not constrained by human opinion or judgment. This, in turn was the curative - the means by which Levi could be released to hope in Christ, where he had no hope in self or in man.

Love lifted Levi. The love that is ready to forgive those who know they need forgiveness. And a love that refuses to forgive those who neither see nor acknowledge their own desperate need. Who does and who does not see his own need is clearly laid out by Christ in John Chapter 6 - where the unequivocal language attributes the drawing of sinner to Christ as the work of the Father, and regeneration to the work of the Holy Spirit.

So the Lord’s dealings with the hypocrites is observed by Levi. Normally - if he was human - his response to the Pharisees would have been either denial or bravado. He would have been hardened by their judgmental and accusatory tone. This would have been a great sin on the part of the "blind leaders of the blind". Jesus delivers them from the fruit of that sin (but not the guilt) by using their hardness to show His love to Levi.

Now I don’t want to get sentimental here. Many people go utterly one-dimensional as soon as you speak of the love of Christ. That’s all they want to know and they never go any further. Christ, Who is God the Son, being of the same substance as the Father, is love. But He is not love alone. He is love, truth and holiness (amongst other things). No attribute of His can be ripped out of the Godhead and worshiped by itself. We worship God - and that means all that He is, inasmuch as He has seen fit to reveal it.

The real point behind the whole conversation is to show that all are sinners, though only some are aware of it. Only some are convicted of it. But all have a duty to the God of Heaven to repent whether they are convicted or not. If they are not convicted, or if they cannot repent it is solely on account of their own moral depravity. If they do come to repentance, the Bible clearly teaches, it is on account of God’s grace at work.

This truth is odious - it is anathema to the natural man. To agree that all you are and do is corrupt, and that there is none good but God alone (Mark 10:18) requires such a deep and powerful intervention of God in the human heart that no man can apprehend it unaided. No man wants to.

The universality of hopeless corruption in every human being since the fall is Christ’s underlying point here. And the corollary to that point is that God sovereignly deigns to open the eyes of some to this truth, and to grant them repentance and life in Him. He loves, but He rebukes. He saves, but He passes over. And wherever He acts He is perfect and holy and just - whether in election, salvation or condemnation.

He has chosen Levi. Levi is granted to witness the Lord’s truth through the chastisement of those who do not see their own need. In this spectacle, Levi sees his need, because Christ rebukes others. Christ Himself implies that repentance follows conviction of sin. Levi is not chosen because he repents. He repents because God chose him and granted him repentance.

This is the light that needs to go on in any mind that comes to Christ. Jesus is not hoping people will decide to accept Him. He comes in to those Whom the Father has given to Him through the ground prepared by the Holy Spirit on account of His Own finished work. (His work was finished before the foundation of the world in the purposes of the God Who works all things according to the counsel of His Own will).

And how are such elect people to be found? They are the ones who come under conviction upon hearing the Word. It’s really very simple in practice, though it goes very deep beneath the surface for those who mine the Word for gold. As indicated before, a person does not need to understand the deep things of Christ in order to be saved. That is how the gnostics work, but not how the One True God works. God has made the gospel so simple that a child may receive Him by faith. All that child has to do is to believe that Christ is the full and sufficient answer for his sins.

Jesus called Levi. Jesus preached a sermon to hypocrites in front of Levi in order to assure the already convicted tax collector that forgiveness is freely given to those know they are helpless sinners. Not just sinners - but helpless sinners. Levi’s heart had been prepared by the Holy Spirit to gladly receive the Truth when He appeared.

Let me not wreck this moment by attaching to it what is not there. Jesus forgave Levi because he was chosen of the Father as evidenced by his response to Jesus. Jesus did not hope that Levi would respond to an open plea believing it was up to the called one to decide if he would come. There is sufficient forgiveness in Christ for a whole world, but only those who actually come are forgiven, and only those given by the Father can come. This is the gospel truth. Honest!