Luke 17 Round Two: Jesus Talks About the Future

What if the kingdom you’re searching for can’t be pointed at—but can be practiced right now? We open Luke 17 and follow a through-line that starts with forgiveness that outruns our feelings, moves into mustard-seed faith that obeys before it sees, and lands in a surprising picture of the kingdom that is already among us. Along the way, ten men with leprosy cry out for mercy, and only one returns in gratitude, turning healing into worship and proximity. That single pivot—from receiving a gift to returning to the Giver—becomes a lens for the whole chapter.

We also wrestle with Jesus’ words about the days of Noah and Lot, the lightning-flash arrival of the Son of Man, and the warning not to cling to what we can’t keep. Using the “already/not yet” frame, we explore how many early Christians recognized a near-horizon fulfillment around the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD while still holding a future hope. Rather than chase rumors or timelines, we lean into a practical readiness: open hands, uncluttered hearts, and a life aligned to Jesus in the ordinary—buying, building, eating, working—without falling asleep to what matters.

You’ll hear why humble service is freedom, not invisibility; how small faith becomes strong when it acts; and why gratitude keeps us close to Christ when blessings tempt us to run ahead. If you’re longing for clarity that doesn’t feed fear, for a sturdier way to live between the “already” and the “not yet,” this conversation is for you. Listen, share with a friend who loves the Gospels, and tell us: where do you see the kingdom at work around you today? And if this helped you see Luke 17 with fresh eyes, subscribe and leave a review so others can find the show.

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The More We Dig. The More We Find.

Scripture quotations taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT).
Copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation.
Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Luke 17 Setup
• 2:36 Forgiveness, Faith & Humble Service
• 4:07 Ten Lepers and One Grateful Heart
• 6:40 The Kingdom Already Among You
• 9:05 Days of Noah, Lot, and Readiness
• 11:35 70 AD and the “Already/Not Yet”
• 12:15 Takeaways & Next Chapter Tease

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Bible Breakdown Podcast. Every day, we take one chapter of the Bible, dig deeper, and discover that the more we dig, the more we find. You can find out more at the Biblebreakdown.com. Now let's grow in God's Word together. Well, hello, everybody. Welcome back to your tour through the Gospel of Luke today, Luke chapter 17. And remember, the whole goal of this is just the more we dig, the more we find. And I have this idea of you and I sitting across the coffee table. We've got our Bibles open and we're just going through God's Word together, just excited about the truth that is there that we can grab onto every day. And I kind of think of myself as your friendly neighborhood tour guide, just pointing things out as we go, giving you some things to think about, and hopefully encouraging you to study this for yourself. The goal is not to give you an academic, complete breakdown of every single thing that's there. We had some folks from yesterday because, you know, I kind of, you know, I kind of poked the bear a little bit on some of those theological ideas, and there's so much out there that there's just no way that we could do justice to some of the deep theological content. So I just want to throw some things and then give you some resources so you can do your own research as well, because the more we dig, the more we find. And today is no different. We're gonna start off with Jesus is gonna talk about forgiveness and faith. Then he's gonna talk about the idea of he goes and he he heals 10 lepers and only one comes back, but then he's gonna get into what many people divide themselves over when it comes to the coming kingdom of God. And we're gonna jump into this. Maybe gonna get a little controversial toward the end, but hopefully to give you something to think about and to realize that God's word is so powerful and it's so deep and it's full of life. So let's jump into this again as the Luke, as Luke, the physician, turn investigative journalist, continues to talk more about this. And I just wonder, I can't help but wonder when we get to the part about the lepers, if maybe he talked to the one who came back. Imagine how beautiful that story would have been. All right, let's jump in and get to that place. Luke chapter 17, verse 1 says this. One day Jesus said to his disciples, There will always be temptations to sin, but what sorrow awaits the person who does the tempting? It would be better if they would be thrown into the sea with a millstone hung around your neck than to cause one of these little ones to fall into sin. So watch yourselves. If another believer sins, rebuke that person. Then if there is repentance, forgive. But if that person wrongs you seven times a day, each time, turns again and asks forgiveness, you must forgive. And the apostle said to the Lord, Show us how to increase our faith. And the Lord answered, If you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, May you be uprooted and planted into the sea, and it would obey you. When a servant comes in ploughing and to take care of the sheep, does the master say, Come in and eat with me? No, he says, Prepare my meal and put on your apron and serve me while I eat. Then you can eat later. And does the master thank the servant for doing what he was told to do? Of course not. In the same way, when you obey me, you should say, We are unworthy servants who simply have done our duty. Now pause. Is Jesus flexing on them? No, that's not what he's doing. Why in the world would the king of the universe need to stoop down to reminding them who's boss? Rather, what he's doing is he's saying, understand that the honor that we have is that we get to serve in the kingdom of God, that we live a life to serve one another. Yes, our faith can increase to the place that if we even have a little bit of faith, we can do great things. But we don't live to do great things. We live because it is an honor to serve in the kingdom. So notice what he's trying to say is with great power comes great responsibility. So says the great scholar Spider-Man, or Spider-Man's uncle, uh in the Avengers movie, right? With great power comes great responsibility. Turns out his uncle didn't say it first. Jesus said it in Luke chapter 17. All right, the next one, verse 11. As Jesus continued toward Jerusalem, he reached the border between Galilee and Samaria. As he entered a village there, ten men with leprosy stood at a distance, crying out, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. He looked at them and said, Go show yourselves to the priests. And as they went, they were cleansed of their leprosy. One of them, when he saw that he was healed, came back to Jesus, shouting, Praise God! And he fell to the ground at Jesus' feet, thanking him for what he had done. And this man was a Samaritan. Jesus asked, Didn't I heal ten men? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give glory to God except for this foreigner? And then Jesus said to the man, Stand up and go, your faith has healed you. Now, why were there ten men together? Well, many times what would happen is you got to think without modern medicine, if you got an infectious skin disease, many times it could be lethal, but it would take a long time to happen as it slowly took over your body. And the different kinds of skin diseases would do different things, uh different things, but one of them, leprosy, one of the things it would do is it would um possibly um it would destroy the nerve endings on your body, and so you could get injured and not know it. I mean, it's just it was a horrible, horrible disease. And because the way that they could deal with these kinds of diseases was to quarantine these people, is that the people who all had the same diseases many times would then have to live outside of the community and they would develop communities of their own. So it's likely these ten men had developed a community of their own, and they're now all going to Jesus at the same time. Hey, if we're gonna die, we're gonna do it together. If we're gonna live, let's live together. So it's amazing that these men all were doing this together. And so that's when Jesus says, Go show yourselves to the priest, which was what they had to do if they thought they had been cleansed. And the Bible says that as they went, they were cleansed of their leprosy. But what's amazing is when the one man realized what had happened, we start to realize that one of them wasn't just interested in cleansing his leprosy, he wanted to get close to Jesus. It shows his heart in this. Because the other nine, once they got their healing, they went all about the merry way. But when the tenth one saw that he had been cleansed, maybe, and this is me just kind of wondering here a little bit, maybe now it gave him the opportunity to do what he really wanted to do, and that is he wanted to come to Jesus. And when he came to Jesus, Jesus didn't just forgive him, but he also sent him off with a blessing. He's saying, Stand up and go, your faith has healed you. It's just an amazing, amazing thing. All right, here we go. This is the controversial part. Verse 20. One day the Pharisees asked Jesus, When will the kingdom of God come? Now remember that's because he's been talking about the kingdom of God is here, kingdom of God is here. So they're like, okay, when? When's it gonna happen? It's a fair question, right? Jesus replied, The kingdom of God can't be detected by visible signs. You won't be able to say, here it is, or it's over there. But the kingdom of God is already among you. What Jesus was talking about is he wasn't talking about taking over a government, he was talking about bringing freedom to the world. Verse 22, then he said to the disciples, The time is coming when you will long to see the days when the Son of Man returns, but you won't see it. People will tell you, Look, there is the Son of Man, or here he is. But don't go out and follow them. For as lightning flashes and it lights up the sky from one end to the other, so it will be on the day when the Son of Man comes. But first the Son of Man must suffer terribly and be rejected by this generation. When the Son of Man returns, it will be like in the days of Noah. In those days the people are enjoying banquets and parties and weddings, right up to the time Noah entered his boat, and the flood came and destroyed them all. And the world will be as it was in the days of Lot. People went about their daily business, eating and drinking, buying and selling, farming and building until the morning Lot left Sodom. Then fire and burning sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all. Yes, it will be business as usual, right up until the day when the Son of Man is revealed. And on that day, the person who will be out on the deck of the roof must not go down into the house to pack. A person out in the field must not return home. Remember what happened to Lot's wife? If you cling to your life, you will lose it. If you let your life go, you will save it. That night two people will be asleep in one bed. One will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding flour together at the meal, one will be taken, the other left. When will this happen, Lord? The disciples asked. Jesus replied, Just as the gathering of vultures shows there is a carcass nearby, so the signs indicate that the time of the end is near. Now, what in the world is Jesus talking about? Well, depending on your theological tradition, some people say this is talking about the rapture of the church at the end of days and then the coming judgment over what's called seven years of tribulation. Other people say that this is the sign of the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. Others have other opinions. And I will not take the time now to tell you all the different opinions that are there, but I would encourage you to do some research on this. And there is something that's called the right now but not yet theology that's in the Bible. And what that is, is that God has the ability to both speak to situations that are coming up very quickly and also situations that are coming in the future. Let me give you an example. One of those are many of the prophecies about Jesus. There were prophecies in the Old Testament where the Bible would say this, this, and this was going to happen. And it was a prophecy, let's say in the book of Isaiah, about something that was coming up in the near future in Isaiah's time, but then was also speaking for 800 years later when Jesus would be uh would come into the earth. And so it's it's something that was being prophesied that was going to happen quickly, but then was also that had a future fulfillment in a time that is later. It's the right now, but not yet, theology. And after reading this and after scouring through a lot of different theological ideas, I've come to the conclusion that I think that the number one thing that Jesus is talking about, both here and in Matthew chapter 25 and 26, and I'd encourage you after this to read that. I think that Jesus is doing one of those already but not yet kind of prophetic utterances because so much of this right here lines up when the Temple of Jerusalem in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD. As a matter of fact, when many of the new Christians had read at that point some of the things that had come out in the Gospels, as well as heard Jesus, they said, When you see these things, flee to the mountains, get out, go away. When they saw the Roman legions coming to the city of Jerusalem, they realized that Jesus was had been prophesying about this very thing, and that's what they did. They flee to the surrounding countrysides, they got out of the city of Jerusalem, and because of that, according to history, almost zero Christians were killed during the sacking of the city of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. Many, many, many Jewish people were slaughtered on that day, but almost no Christians died because after hearing the prophecy, both that is in this chapter and in Matthew 25 and 26, they realized Jesus was talking about 70 AD, the destruction of the temple. And so as soon as they saw, as Jesus said, the vultures gathering around a carcass, you know, the enemies gathering around one thing, they realized what was going on. They got out of the city and they were not destroyed. And so, does that mean that this can't have a future prediction as well? Absolutely not. Jesus is saying this is what's coming in the future, but it's also what's coming in the far distant future as well. So I would encourage you, read chapter Matthew chapter 25 and Matthew chapter 26. And if you're so inclined to do so, do a little research on the early church and the destruction of the temple in 70 AD and see how so many of the new Christians were had were able to escape the destruction and the absolute slaughtering of the people in the city of Jerusalem from hearing this testimony of Jesus and getting out and saving their lives and their families. So very interesting, right? The more you dig, the more you find. I hope you enjoyed this today. I will see you tomorrow for Luke chapter 18.