Luke 13:1-5 - Repent or Perish

13:1,2

The firm words of Jesus continue. It really is very remiss of the church that we paint this totally one-sided picture of Jesus of being “forgiving”. Now He is completely forgiving, but forgiveness implies that we have done something that we need to be forgiven for. The gospel message is that we have sinned against God, we are slaves of sin, we need to be forgiven for our sins, and we need to be transformed. The forgiveness and the transformation make no sense unless there is something fundamentally wrong with us.

Jesus here comments on a local incident, and He does so to make sure that we focus first on our sin, rather than on the sins of others. Pilate had apparently had these Galileans killed while they were trying to offer sacrifices of some sort. This illustrates the sometimes violent nature of the Roman occupation. Galileans were considered to be somewhat uncouth. So it would be tempting for others to look down on them and surmise that they must have suffered their fate because they were worse sinners.

13:3-5

Jesus tells them in no uncertain terms that this would be absolutely the wrong attitude to have. Instead they themselves should repent. Now maybe some would then think that the incident did not demonstrate that the Galileans were worse sinners because Pilate was an evil ruler, so the incident just demonstrated the evilness of Pilate and the Romans, but what about the tower in Siloam. No man was directly responsible for that, that would have been an act of God, so they must be worse sinners for God to inflict that on them. Again, Jesus firmly refutes such thinking, and the message is the same, repent or perish.

All of us are sinners, we need to repent, we need forgiveness, we need to be transformed.