Deal Or No Deal

Deal or no deal. Luke 22:39-44 NKJV, KJV

Any resemblance of this sermon to any other is coincidental. Pleas feel free to use this sermon in whole or in part.

How many of you have ever watched the TV show “Deal or no Deal”. My son Will loves this show, he loves the anticipation and the suspense of opening the next case. Let me explain the game.

Basically there are 26 cases and you pick one for yourself. Each case holds an amount from .01 to 1,000,000. After selecting your case, you have to open other cases, trying to eliminate the lower numbers first.

After a given number of cases are opened, the banker will offer you money for your case (you don’t know what is in your case until the game has ended). Once the banker has made the offer, you are asked, deal or no deal?

If you take his offer then you push the big red button and say deal. If you say no deal you must flip the cover down over the big red button.

Then you have open more cases and your next offer from the banker could be more or less depending on the dollar amounts you reveal.

As I watched this game played, I noticed that average people off the street that probably don’t make over 20 or 30K per year were turning down a sure thing in the range of 75 to 150K gambling that the next offer would be higher.

Invariably greed takes over and they find themselves with as little as 10 bucks. What made them turn down the equivalent of 3 or 4 years wages only to leave with virtually nothing? The possibility of something they perceived might be better…

In reality this game show has been played over and over in God’s word, starting in the Garden of Eden. God had given Adam the sweetest deal that has ever been given to a man;

Free run of the Garden, a beautiful wife that had been custom made by God specifically for him, an all you can eat salad bar, peace and tranquility, no war, no famine, no poverty, no hate, and an intimate personal relationship with the creator of the universe.

Then what happened? Satan came along and started to stir things up. In Genesis 3 we find him tempting Eve with a new deal. One that he makes sound better than the one God had made for them.

He basically says to Eve that if she takes his deal she will be like God, that she could replace the one true God with the god of self, herself and for Adam, himself.

Eve pushed the deal button when she should have said “no deal”.

You don’t have to go very much farther in scripture to find the next installment of Deal or no Deal. God told Abraham that he would make a great nation of his descendants.

But Abraham was very old and his wife Sarah was also very old, so Sarah cooked up a deal that was going to help Abraham along. She offered him her servant Hagar for a concubine to have children with.

What did Abraham do, deal or no deal? He took the deal and as a result there have been wars between the descendents of Hagar and the descendents of Sarah ever since.

Abraham allowed himself to be talked into trying to accomplish something in the flesh that God had promised to do supernaturally. And even though his disbelief caused problems, ultimately his faith was accounted to him for righteousness.

If you look at the book of Daniel you will find three young men who we given the choice of bowing down to a golden image, an idol, or be cast info a furnace of fire.

They could have simply bowed down physically and not worshiped in their hearts, that probably would have allowed them to get along well with the King and not cause any problems, it would have been the politically correct thing to do.

But that was not their choice, when the King said bow or burn, they said No Deal. They said that God was able to deliver them from the furnace, but even if He chose not to, that would still be OK with them.

They had integrity to stand strong in what they believed and God honored and protected them for their obedience.

Skip on over to Jonah, lets take a look at his deal. Jonah was commanded by God to go and preach to Nineveh. Now since this was a commandment by God, you wouldn’t think that there was any wiggle room to make a new deal.

But Jonah made the mistake of believing that God’s commands are optional. So off he went in a ship in the opposite direction. God caused a great storm that was going to sink the ship.