Scripture Reference Luke 10:30 “And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.”
We know this passage well. Jesus is teaching us how to really love people. It’s not easy. We say we love God, but in actuality most of us love the “idea of God”. We are told to love people, however we see their flaws, and then we become judgmental and condescending, forgetting that 1) we have flaws also, and 2) that if it were not for the LORD, yet there we would be also. It’s easy to love perfectness, hard to love faults. But Jesus is saying we MUST love the un-loveable.
The text tells us that a certain man: who is that certain man? Me, you, any one of us, went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell. Look at the symbolism here. The Jericho road was a long, winding, descending road that drops over 3600 feet, and was known to have thieves and bandits lurking at every turn, ready to stab you, to kill you, and to rob you of your “wealth”. Wealth: your dignity, your uprightness, your holiness, your “priestly” garment the LORD has put on you as His child. This man went down…and fell; so he started down a dangerous path and it caught up with him. You ever start off down a road in life that you knew was bad for you, then out of nowhere something leaped out and attacked you, wounded you and left you for dead? Such is the case in all of our lives. When we start to pull away from God, we fall; we are wounded when we get outside of His providential care; something attacks us and we end up wounded and left for dead. That is the sin in our life. The rebellious tendency we have to not listen, wait patiently, and obey our Heavenly Father. For we are drawn away by the things of this world: 1 John 2:16 says, “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.”
If you are tired of going down and falling, being wounded, and left for dead, maybe we should stop going down the “Jericho road” in the first place? Stop being drawn away by our own desires: going after what WE want, and not what GOD wants. And the next time we become condescending about other people’s fall, maybe we should think about our own fall and how if it were not for the LORD, who was on our side, there we would be also, falling right with them.
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