August 22, 2025; Luke 10:25-42

Daily Dose of Hope

August 22, 2025

 

Scripture – Luke 10:25-42

 

Prayer:  Lord, How we need you.  Thank you for your presence, thank you for the way you continue to pursue us.  Lord, in these next few moments of silence, help us set aside our scattered thoughts and focus on you...In Your Name, Amen.

 

Welcome back, everyone, to the Daily Dose of Hope, a deep dive into the Gospels and Acts.  Happy Friday!  Today, we dive into the second half of Luke 10.

 

The first portion of today’s reading is the parable of the Good Samaritan.  The story begins with an expert in religious law asking Jesus, “What should I do to inherit eternal life?” It’s possible this lawyer/religious academic type is actually trying to trap Jesus.  These guys tended to think Jesus had a low regard for Law. But this man didn’t realize that Jesus was actually smarter than him. Jesus answers, “What does the law say?” As you know, the Old Testament law is really long and rather than just starting to read the whole law in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, it was not uncommon to summarize it with two precepts:

·      Deut. 6:5 says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with your soul and with all your strength.”

·      Lev. 19:18 says, “...love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”

 

Now, these are really, really hard principles.  The law expert, a smart man, would have known there was really no way for him to obey this law on his own. But he wanted to justify himself.  He wanted to keep trying to find a way that he could obey the law in his own power, so he asks Jesus, “Well, who is my neighbor?”  And, as we know, Jesus uses this opportunity to share a parable. 

 

He says that a man was traveling on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Now, the first thing we need to understand about this road is that it was really, really dangerous. Think more dangerous than Nebraska Ave. at midnight. But there weren’t a whole lot of options so people did it. Now part of what made the road so dangerous was its geography. It was 17 miles long and drops 3,000 ft. during those 17 miles. The geography also lended itself to lots of caves and nooks where bands of thieves and robbers could hang out and just wait for their next victim.

 

What’s kind of interesting here is that Jesus does not give us a lot of information about the man who is traveling. The people Jesus was speaking to would probably automatically assume the man was a Jew like them. What we do know is that he was beaten, stripped, is probably unconscious, beaten, bloodied, and is unidentifiable. The guy was left for dead.

 

Now, the first man that walks by this poor guy, lying half-dead on the road, is a priest, a man of God. The Scripture says that “he crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by.” Then a temple assistant, a Levite, walked by. This time, we are given information that he looked at the man lying there, but he also decided to walk to the other side and pass the dying man without providing any help.

 

Next comes a Samaritan man. Many of you know that the Samaritans were despised by the Jews. 800 years before Jesus, the Northern Kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians. What the Assyrians did was disperse the Jews living there and sen