NOTES for Luk 18:26-30

Christ's words that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven deeply struck His listeners. Many, by no means only the Pharisees, were deeply wounded by these words, because we all consider prosperity the main sign of God's favor toward a person. If Jesus calls wealth an obstacle to entering the Kingdom, then who can be saved? To this the Lord says that no one can be saved. This is the terrible truth the Pharisees hear and reject in Christ's words. A person's whole hope that he can do something to attain salvation is undermined by these words.

These are frightening words, but there is nothing new in them. A good half millennium before Christ, the prophets of Israel spoke about this. "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may you also do good, who are accustomed to do evil," the prophet Jeremiah said at the end of the seventh century before Christ (Jer. 13:23). Much more important is what Jesus reveals in the second half of the same sentence: "but all things are possible with God." Salvation, entry into the Kingdom of Heaven, the Lord says, is within God's power and, even more importantly, God desires this salvation of people. He repeatedly says that the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost, and that the Father sent Him not to destroy souls but to save them. It is not the Father's will that one of these little ones should perish, Jesus says, but the Father's will is that whoever believes in the Son should not perish but have eternal life. This will of the Father for our salvation overcomes our sinful helplessness, and this is the chief good news - the Gospel.