The parable of the good Samaritan exposes the self-righteousness of a hostile questioner. But it also has a fuse attached. Once Christ had died and risen again it would be obvious that the Lord depicted Himself, and how to obtain eternal life.

And behold a certain lawyer stood up and tempted him saying ‘Master what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’

Our title for this message is A Time Bomb of Truth, because we have here a remarkable parable before us. A parable with an immediate message and challenge to the hearer, to the questioner – a hostile questioner. It has a message for him. But a parable which also is an illustrated message which will become plain and obvious as time goes by, when Christ the Lord allows himself to be taken and arrested and he is tried and crucified. When he dies on Calvary’s cross, then when he subsequently rises again and the preaching of the New Testament church begins just a little later, on the day of Pentecost, with an amazing sermon by the Apostle Peter. And the apostles and others begin to preach that Christ is Messiah and they preach his atoning death and the need for repentance before him in order to secure new life from God.

Then the message of this parable the underlying message becomes obvious. And obvious to the lawyer who first asked that hostile question. And to demonstrate this I’d like to introduce the message referring to one or two other scriptures. If you turn back to Luke 8 for a moment, and this just sets the context, in verse 10 the Lord says this to his disciples: ‘unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to others in parables, that seeing they might not see and hearing they might not understand.’ So the message of Christ – though plain in some respects, that people must repent and their sins must be taken away and so on – in other respects it was somewhat obscured, and it had to be obscured.

The disciples were being trained, otherwise they would have been arrested; there would have been quite a movement against them. So many people were becoming hostile, there had to be a certain veiling of the message to quell the fury of nationalistic Jewish people at that time. Christ was working to a timetable: he knew the day when he would be taken and crucified and nothing was to happen before then.