Zacchaeus, Come on Down!

“And when Jesus came to the place, He looked up, and saw him, and said unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for today I must abide at thy house.”  Luke 19:5

No, Zacchaeus was not a contestant on “The Price is Right”.  Although with his former background before he met Jesus, he likely would have been a big winner after spinning the wheel because his prior occupation was one of those dreaded IRS agents, known as publicans in scripture, who made his fortune at cheating the people from whom he collected taxes on behalf of the Romans.  However, thanks to Jesus, his life would change for the better.

Jesus was passing through Jericho one day, and the throngs of people, as usual, were gathered all around Him trying to get a glimpse of the Man who had been doing some rather marvelous miracles, healing the sick and casting demons out of those who were possessed.  As a sidenote, I believe that folks are still being possessed by demons.  Otherwise, how could the utter ungodliness and perversions we see in our world be occurring?  Continuing with the narrative in Luke, Zacchaeus may have been rich, the CEO of all the publicans, but he, too, wanted to see Jesus.  What was his motive?  Did he, like most of the folks in Jericho, want to see this Miracle Worker or was Zacchaeus such a con artist that perhaps he was looking for a way to make more money.  We don’t know.  Unfortunately, people like Zacchaeus are always looking for an angle, a way to make money anyway that that can.

However, Zacchaeus had difficulty seeing Jesus over the heads of the crowd because he was short.  Leave it to the con man to figure out a way to see Jesus.  He may have thought to himself, “Hey, I can climb up in this sycamore tree and have a perfect view of Jesus”, not realizing that Jesus would be able to see him above all the other folks.  Folks who are sinners don’t usually like to be singled out.  They had rather keep their sins in the dark.  When Jesus did spot him, He called out to him by name and told him to hurry and come down from the tree because He wanted to go home with him.

The fact that Zacchaeus was so eager to see Jesus was likely a sign that the Holy Spirit had already been working on his heart, thus his excitement to meet Jesus one on one.  He scurried down the tree and joyfully took Jesus to his home.  Of course, the crowds began to murmur, saying something like, “Are you believing this?  Jesus has gone to be a guest with a man that is a sinner”.  Something had begun to stir in Zacchaeus.  He was in the presence of the Son of God whether he knew it or not, and conviction came over him immediately for all the wrongs that he had been doing among the people that he was supposed to be serving.  He didn’t verbally pray the conventional “sinner’s prayer”, but his heart had been changed.  Things that he had done as a publican began to come to his mind.  He promised Jesus that he would give half of his possessions to the poor and restore four times the amount to those whom he had cheated, that is, as he said, IF he had cheated any.  I find that interesting that he wasn’t really clear in his mind about those whom he might have swindled, but I am sure that the Lord would bring those people to his mind so that he could rightfully restore their funds.  To be clear, it wasn’t his acts of contrition which saved him but rather his heart of repentance and his belief in Jesus.

Since Jesus could read his heart and knew that Zacchaeus had sincerely repented of his sins, He declared that “salvation had come to this house forsomuch as he also is a son of Abraham.  For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (19:9-10).  That’s what Jesus does.  He seeks and He saves those who are willing to come to him in repentance and faith.  As far as we know, Zacchaeus is the only one who was saved that day.  That’s the thing about Jesus.  If you or I were the only person on earth, Jesus would still have died on the cross so that you or I could be saved and have eternal life.  You might ask how one solitary person on earth could possibly be a sinner, but in the beginning, there were only two people and both of them sinned.

In David Roper’s book, “Elijah, A Man Like Us”, he wrote of Edward Payson, a famous preacher many years ago who was preaching on a stormy Sunday and only one man attended the service.  Mr. Payson preached as though the church was full of people.  A few months later, that lone congregant called on the preacher and told him that he was led to Jesus through that service.  He said, “For whenever you talked about sin and salvation, I glanced around to see to whom you referred, but since there was no one there but me, I had no alternative but to lay every word to my heart and conscience.”  That’s the way that Jesus saves–one person at a time.