Am I the Kind of Person God Saves?, part 1-3

Am I the Kind of Person God Saves?

By John MacArthur

Jesus' Return to Nazareth: Ministry in the Synagogue

Will you open your Bible, please, to Luke chapter 4? In our ongoing study of this immense work of God, the gospel of Luke, we come to verses 16 and following. This is Luke's first account of Jesus' public ministry. It's taken a long time to get here, hasn't it? Four chapters and many, many months of going through the beginning of the gospel of Luke to finally arrive at the point where Jesus begins His ministry.

Luke could have selected a number of events. None of the gospel writers give us all of the events that occurred in Jesus' life. In fact, the gospel of John says that all the books in the world couldn't contain everything He did and said. The gospel writers are selective. They pick and choose things that pertain to the emphasis that they want to make. Luke's first account of Jesus' public ministry is not the first actual event in His public ministry. As we noted last time, Jesus after His temptation, which Luke records in the first thirteen verses of this chapter, went up to His home town of Nazareth very briefly, attended a wedding there at Cana and did His first miracle, He turned water into wine.

He was there for the duration of the wedding, which would have been a week or maybe a total of two weeks. He started south again back to Judea, stopped and spent a few days in the city of Capernaum which is right at the tip of the Sea of Galilee, not far east from Nazareth and then proceeded south.

He was in Judea for something short of a year. Luke skips all that. He skips the miracle at Cana. He skips the visit to Capernaum. He skips the nearly a year of Jesus doing miracles, cleansing the temple, giving the gospel to Nicodemus, meeting the woman at the well. He skips all of that. John writes all of that. So in John chapter 1, 2, 3 and 4 we can fill in the gap of that part of Jesus' ministry.

Luke goes right from the temptation of Jesus to the launch of His formal Galilean ministry. Remember now, the land of Judea is divided into three sections, really, the southern part, the land of Israel, the southern part is Judea, the northern part is Galilee and in the middle to the east is Samaria. And Jesus ministered in Galilee and in Judea. The opening, as I said, the opening months of His ministry were in Judea with the exception of a few weeks when He attended the wedding in Cana. The rest of the time was in Judea. It was then that He cleansed the temple, made a whip and threw all of those that were turning it into a den of thieves out. It was there that He met Nicodemus. It was there that He began to cement some of the relationships with His early disciples. It was there that He did some of His early miracles that followed up the miracle of making water into wine. But Luke skips all of that. And, in fact, so does Matthew and so does Mark. Only John fills in that period of time in the life of Jesus.

Luke begins in verse 14 with the Galilean ministry. It says, "And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit. News about Him spread through all the surrounding district and He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all." That's how Luke launches his account of the ministry of Jesus, but keep in mind, now, nearly a year has passed before Jesus begins the Galilean ministry.

Now the Galilean ministry was the time that Jesus spent in the Galilee, as it was called, and it was about a year and a half long. For about a year and a half Jesus went through the towns and villages of Galilee. Josephus tells us there were about 240 towns and villages, so there were plenty of locales to visit and Jesus did that for a year and a half.

Now that Galilean ministry is the content of Luke's gospel from chapter 4 verse 14 through chapter 9 verse 50. So the next number of chapters, we're going to be occupied with seeing events that occurred in the Galilean ministry of Jesus.

Verses 14 and 15 just kind of give us an overview before Luke gets into details. And we learn about the place, the place was Galilee, as we pointed out last time. We learn about the power, the power was the power of the Holy Spirit. We learn about the popularity, news about Him spread through all the surrounding district. And we learn about the priority, verse 15, He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all.

The place was Galilee, the power was the Holy Spirit, the popularity was everywhere, all through the surrounding district. And the priority for Jesus was teaching in the synagogues. As we will learn all the way through the study of Luke, as you would learn through Matthew and Mark and John, the priority for Jesus was teaching God's Word. Long ago somebody said, "God had only one Son and He was a preacher," and that is true. Jesus was a preacher and teacher, that was His primary responsibility, to preach and teach the Word of God. And you see that as the story unfolds.

For example, drop down to verse 31 chapter 4, "He came to Capernaum, a city in Galilee, and He was teaching them on the Sabbath." Go to chapter 5 verse 3, "He got into one of the boats which was Simon's and asked him to put out a little bit from the land, and He sat down and began teaching the multitudes from the boat." Verse 17, "It came about one day that He was teaching and there were Pharisees and teachers of the Law," etc. Chapter 6 verse 6, "It came about on another Sabbath He entered the synagogue and was teaching." And that is precisely what we're going to see all the way through. In fact, in chapter 11 His disciples come to Him, verse 1, and say, "Teach us to pray." He was a teacher. They recognized Him as a teacher and they asked Him to each them.

Jesus was commonly known as "teacher." He was called teacher, He was called rabbi. In Matthew you have the great Sermon on the Mount, or better, the Sermon on Salvation in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. And when it was done, the Jewish people said, "He teaches as one having authority, not like the scribes and Pharisees." He was a teacher but His teaching was unique because He didn't have to quote anybody. He didn't have any footnotes in His sermons, He just took the Word of God which, of course, was His own Word, and taught it with power and explained it with clarity. He was a teacher. And you can read in Mark and you can read in John and you'll always see the priority of His ministry is teaching. And that is the important matter, to be teaching the truth, the miracles were simply to draw attention to the fact that He was from God, that He was the Messiah, that He was God in human flesh, but it was His message that was always the priority.

The word "teaching" there in verse 15 comes from didasko, a very familiar Greek term that you know, and it's simply a word from which we get the English word didactic. He was engaged in a didactic effort, that is an explanation of the meaning of things, and in His case it was the Scripture. And so we see in verse 15 He began teaching, and that's what He did all through His entire ministry, He was a teacher and a preacher.

Now you'll notice the place where He was teaching, and it's very important, He began teaching in their synagogues. He went into Galilee and He had ready-made venues in which to teach. Synagogues were perfect places for Jesus to teach, and I'll explain why they were. Every town and village had one. All it took to have a synagogue was ten Jewish men. If you had ten Jewish men in a town or a village, that was enough men to constitute a synagogue and they would build a permanent synagogue. In most cases, the synagogues were made out of stone and typically they faced Jerusalem. So in Galilee they would face south, that is to say when the teacher or the preacher was giving the sermon, he would be facing south. When people turned to go out the door they would be going south, they would be headed toward Jerusalem, the synagogue faced Jerusalem. And so the speaker would look to the back out the door and would be looking directly toward Jerusalem. Synagogues that were built to the east of Jerusalem faced west. Synagogues that were built to the south of Jerusalem faced north because Jerusalem was always the focal point because that was where the temple was. For Jesus, every synagogue He ever preached in faced Calvary, and so He taught in the synagogues.

Two hundred and forty towns and villages in the Galilee, certainly there may have been a town that didn't have ten men but it would be a rare on. Most of them would have at least ten men, some of them would have populations of 20, 30, 40 thousand people, they would have more than one synagogue. There would be a number of synagogues that would be built in larger places. For example, according to the Jerusalem Talmud and there are some scholars who debate this number, but according to the Jerusalem Talmud there were 480 synagogues in the city of Jerusalem alone. Only to point out that there were many, many synagogues in larger population areas. So Jesus traveling around the Galilee in 240 towns and villages would have more than that in the number of synagogues that He could teach in. So there were plenty of places for Him to teach. His priority was teaching the Word. And Jewish history had so worked itself into a situation by the time He began His ministry, that He had available venues which He could teach, namely these synagogues.

Now Philo, ancient Jewish writer, tells us that synagogues had a name. They were called "houses of instruction." They were called "houses of instruction." And that is exactly what they were for. They were for the teaching of God's Word. They weren't for the teaching of anything else, they were for the teaching of the Law, the Torah, the prophets, the haftorah and the holy writings, the hagiographa, as it's often called, sacred writings, all of the Old Testament. That was what they were for. They were houses of instruction and perfect places for Jesus to teach. The Old Testament would be read there and it would be exposited there by someone who could explain its meaning.

By the time of Jesus, it was established in the land, synagogues were firmly established. As I said, many of them built out of stone. Archaeologists believe they have the footings even today of some of those synagogues from the time of Jesus although most of the ruins of synagogues, and you will see some synagogue ruins in the land of Israel, are from synagogues of later times, after the time of Christ, that may well have been built on the footings of synagogues there at the time of Jesus. But every town had at least one if they had ten men, and some cities would have many more than that.

Now if there was not a synagogue, let's say there was a town that didn't have ten men, the Jewish people typically the women and the few men that were there, would gather by a running stream or they would gather on the seashore on the Sabbath to worship and to read the Law and to have someone explain it. That's what you have in Philippi. Philippi was in Greece, as you know, and when Paul went to Philippi in Acts 16, there was a group of Jewish women meeting by the river and that is an indication that there weren't enough men to build a synagogue and that's where they would traditionally meet to read the Law of God, the prophets, the holy writings and to be taught.

I would say that probably the proliferation of synagogues in the time of Jesus would be somewhat parallel to the proliferation of Christian churches in our society today. You go into the average town and there are churches all over. The smaller the town, the fewer the churches, the larger the city, the more the churches. That's the way synagogues developed. They even developed around certain rabbis who taught a certain way and they also developed around certain trades. There were certain guilds, or certain groups of craftsmen who would have a synagogue for themselves. Maybe that's because they lived in a certain part of the town and that local area suited their craft and so that's where they lived and they came together in their own synagogue.

Now Jerusalem had always been centered on the Temple. You need to understand the difference between the Temple and the synagogue. There were hundreds and hundreds of synagogues, there was only one Temple. The Temple, of course, is clearly identified in the Old Testament. First of all, God designed a tent called the tabernacle, it was to be the place where He would dwell in the Holy of Holies, a place where the people of Israel would come and they would offer prayers and they would offer offerings and sacrifices and there were ceremonies and festivals and feasts and the priesthood would function there, of course, in the matter of taking care of all of that. And the Temple was a singular facility. The Lord gave instructions for the tabernacle when they settled in the land, the Lord gave them instructions and you remember Solomon built the great...the great Temple.

Well the great Temple was destroyed. It was destroyed in 586 B.C. when the Babylonians came. They first came in 603, they came back in 597, each time they deported the Jews out of Judah, the southern kingdom. They finally came back in 586, completely devastated the city, razed it to the ground, destroyed the wall and destroyed and sacked the Temple and stole all of its wealth and hauled it off to Babylon, along with the remaining people.

Judaism, up to that point, had been defined by the Temple. The Temple was the place of ceremony. The Temple was the place of worship. The Temple was the place of instruction. And there were priests who served in the Temple but there were many more priests who weren't there. Priests, as you remember, they went to the Temple only a couple of weeks a year because there were 24 orders of priests. The rest of the time when they weren't serving in the temple for their two-week stint, they were out in their villages and towns where they lived and they were informal teachers of the Law. The priests would be the local expert. If you had an issue of understanding the Law, or of understanding the prophets, or the holy writings, you would go to the local priests and you would ask for help and they would be the experts in understanding the Law. Some of those priests would be scribes, very careful in their handling of the Law.

So there was an informal network of teaching, but in the entire Old Testament you will never find reference to a synagogue. There isn't any reference to one in the Old Testament. There is no divine charter, there is no divine design for them. They don't have any holy hardware in there like the Temple does. They don't have special altars and special lavers and special curtains and sideboards and all of the kinds of things that made up God's instructions for both the tabernacle and the Temple. They would be no different than this kind of a building, just a place. There were no sacrifices offered there. There were no ceremonies held there. There were no feasts held there as such in terms of the large feasts, the national feasts, they were still going to be held in Jerusalem, the Passover, Feast of Fruits, Pentecost, all of those kinds of things.

But what happened in 586 B.C. really shattered the Jewish structure. When the Babylonians came in in 586 B.C. and finally demolished Jerusalem and tore the wall down and literally devastated the entire Solomonic Temple and hauled all the people into captivity, that captivity lasted 70 years. For 70 years there was no land, there was no nation, there was no city and there was no Temple. The people then were in need of some manner, some method of getting together and hearing the Law of God taught.

If you read the book of Ezekiel you will find out one thing they did. Ezekiel, for example, was a prophet of God, he was taken into captivity by the Babylonians. So when he was in captivity, he would be sitting somewhere, you'll find this in Ezekiel 8, Ezekiel 14, Ezekiel 20 and I think once in Ezekiel 33, Ezekiel sitting down with people sitting around him and he's teaching them the meaning of the Word of God. They simply did what they needed to do, they found somebody who could explain the meaning of God's Word and they sat at his feet. So in the captivity, the exiles met often and sat at the feet of prophets like Ezekiel to hear the Word of God.

Well apparently during the time of captivity, they began to develop these patterns and they would gather together in small groups on a regular basis, and increasingly regular basis, eventually on the Sabbath and they would read the Word of God and they would hear the Word of God explained to them. Devout Jews had a hunger for that. And as I said, they had no land, they had no nation, they had no Temple, they had no opportunity for instruction. And then the 70 years of captivity was over, you remember, and they were allowed to go back to the land. And when they went back to the land, the first thing they wanted to do was recover the Word of God and read it and explain it again. And you remember who did that, don't you? Ezra did that. In Nehemiah chapter 8, they opened the book and they read the Scripture and gave a sense of it, which means they translated it into the common language, the local language and explained its meaning.

So after the captivity when they came back, they don't have the Temple anymore but what has developed is small gatherings of Jewish people sitting around the feet of a teacher who reads the Scripture and explains it to them, reading and expositing, or giving the sense of it. It was the destruction of the Temple and the destruction of Jerusalem that precipitated or created the need for a place and an opportunity to meet for the teaching of divine revelation. It is also true that prior to, during and after the captivity, Jews were scattered all over the Mediterranean world. They were everywhere in the Mediterranean world. It was called the diaspora, the dispersion of the Jews. And as they were dispersed out all over the world, they obviously didn't have immediate access to the Temple which if they lived in the land of Israel was very near to all of them because it was a very small place. Now that they're all over the world, they need some place where they can gather and meet together. And so in the dispersion these synagogues began to develop. And so by the time you get to the life of Jesus, there are synagogues everywhere there are ten Jews, in Galilee, in Judea, and all over the Mediterranean world.

Now the term "synagogue" is from the Greek word sunagogoswhich simply means a gathering...a gathering or a gathering place. And that's exactly what they were. They were not a Temple, they are not to be confused with a temple, no sacrifices were ever made there, no altars are there, no labors are there, no sacerdotal or priestly paraphernalia are there. They were what Philo called them, "houses of instruction." The people gathered for the purpose of reading the Word of God and having somebody explain it to them. And as I said, everywhere the Jews went where they could get ten men together, they established a synagogue.

When you read the book of Acts, for example, and you see the apostles, the apostle Paul and those who worked with him, they start out into the Gentile world, they go into Damascus and there's a synagogue there. And they go into Salamis in Acts 13:5 and there's a synagogue there. And they go to Antioch of Pisidia in chapter 13 of Acts and there's a synagogue there. Chapter 17, they come across a synagogue in Thessalonica. Chapter 18, there's a synagogue in the city of Corinth. All these are Greek cities. There's a synagogue in Alexandria. There's a synagogue in Rome as well as all over Israel. Everywhere the Jews went, synagogues began to develop. Now this by the purposes of God was providential, wasn't it? Because when Jesus begins His ministry, He needs a place to teach. It isn't just in the Temple He should teach because how is He going to reach the nation. But every place where there were at least ten male Jews had a synagogue and that's why Jesus' ministry in Galilee lasts a year and a half so that He can literally circumvent that entire land and touch those teaching opportunities at every local point.

A synagogue, by the way, also it was never and isn't even to this day, never seemed to be in competition with the Temple. It was never sort of rebellious kind of thing. It was always a wonderful accommodation that the Jewish religion felt very positive about, even after they came back from captivity. You remember, Zerubbabel their leader after they came back from 70 years in Babylon, helped them build a temple. They built a rather meager, small imitation of what Solomon's temple's glories were like. And later on, Herod came and built even a more glorious temple, the Herodian temple which was in its place during the time of Jesus and that was destroyed in 70 A.D. by the Romans.

But they came back and they did build a temple. Zerubbabel was the guy who led them in the building of the temple after they had rebuilt their city and their wall. But even then the synagogues continued to exist because they served such a wonderful need. The temple was the place of ceremonies and sacrifices and rituals and offerings. There was instruction given in certain areas in the temple services, but it was primarily for sacrifices and ceremonies. So it really was not in competition with the synagogues and the synagogues really in a sense a sort of formalized form of the informal priestly teaching that had always gone on in the towns and villages.

In the eighteenth chapter of John, for instance, the twentieth verse, Jesus said, "I have spoken openly to the world, I always taught in synagogues and in the Temple where all the Jews come together." All the Jews still went to the temple for all the great ceremonies and all the great national feasts, as well as attending their local synagogues. And by the way, history tell us there was even a synagogue on Temple Hill, right on the Temple mount there was a synagogue. And the ruler of that synagogue was a man named Theodotus(??) who also was a priest. So he was both a priest who served in the Temple and the ruler of a synagogue right on the Temple Mount. So there was no competition because the temple's function was primarily national feasts, sacerdotal or sacrificial priestly kinds of functions whereas the local synagogue had one primary function, it was a house of instruction.

Now they were organized in a very simple way. This is something I find very interesting. They were...or sorry for the history lesson, but we've got to do this because you're going to be in synagogues for years to come, folks, I'll just tell you. By the time we get to Luke you will have been to the synagogue many times and I want you to know where you are and what's going on.

I want to tell you about how the synagogue was structured. There was one man who was called the archisunagogos, the ruler of the synagogue, archimeaning the chief guy. There was a man who was called the ruler of the synagogue and you come across such rulers in the New Testament.

Now they were in charge of the facility, first of all, they would be responsible to make sure that it was in repair and that it was clean and that it was ready for whatever functions that were going to be occurring there on a day-to-day basis. The ruler of the synagogue was also responsible for the structure of the service. It was his responsibility to set the structure of the service and primarily to select the preacher. On each Sabbath occasion he would be the one who would approve the preacher, the one who was to preach the sermon. He would also select the Scripture readers. Scripture was read by different people and he would be the one who would select who would read the Scripture. He would follow...lead the flow of the service and then he would have to approve the one who preached.

They did not have a full-time pastor. They did not have a full-time rabbi. They did not have a full-time teacher, as such. In fact, in a local town there would be perhaps a number of men in the town who could teach and do the preaching and the sermon and they would take turns doing that. And should a local teacher of some qualification or suitability or note come through town, he would always be invited to be the guest teacher. The people would welcome that. This was known as what's called in history "the freedom of the synagogue...the freedom of the synagogue." It was a policy that developed early in synagogue life to allow for various teachers, and the ruler had the responsibility to determine who that teacher would be.

Now this becomes another thing that God in His wonderful providence has brought about so that when Jesus begins to teach, all the synagogues that He would go to were operating on the basis of quote/unquote the freedom of the synagogue and they gave over their sermon to any visiting rabbi which was perfect because no matter where Jesus went, He was a well-known teacher and rabbi and it gave Him immense opportunities to teach. Everywhere there were ready-made venues for Him to teach and preach the gospel, to announce the good news that came from His lips.

And, by the way, beyond that the apostles did the same thing. When the apostle Paul went out and launched world ministry, where did he go when he went into a town? Every time, a synagogue, that's the first place he went. He didn't go to the Gentiles first or he would have alienated the Jews because they didn't like the Gentiles. And he also knew that there wouldn't be an immediate identifiable venue in which he could teach the Gentiles, but there was one everywhere he went with the Jews. And if you went to the Jews, he would always have a place to teach. He was a Jew and He was recognized as a rabbi or a teacher. He had studied under the greatest Jewish teacher of his time, Gamaliel so he had credentials. He could tell them his background and his instruction, they would all know Gamaliel.

So Paul would go to the synagogue because there would be a group of people he could teach. Also, he went to the synagogue because if he could lead some Jews to believe in their Messiah, he would then have enlarged the force to evangelize the Gentiles. Whereas on the other hand, if he went to the Gentiles alone, the Jews would never have accepted him because they would have seen it as a Gentile message and he would have had to do it alone. So he always went to the synagogue and there he found a ready-make opportunity to teach, and so did the other apostles. They used the synagogues. God in wonderful providence out of the captivity gave birth providentially in Israel to the synagogues which became the place where the gospel was spread.

In fact, the synagogues, folks, actually became the place where the churches were born. Because what would happen is, Paul would go into a synagogue, lead the people to Christ, and then out of that synagogue they would come and they would establish a church. So churches were literally given birth in synagogues.

The ruler of the synagogue was the person who opened the door, if it were, to the visiting rabbis and the visiting teachers.

Now also the synagogue had a full week's schedule. There could be teaching in some synagogues every day. There could be teaching on the Torah, the Haftorah, the holy writings every day. There also was in the synagogue typically an elementary school. The elementary school was for the training of children, not in the arts and sciences quote/unquote, but in the Law and the prophets. So the children were instructed in the Word of God and the synagogue was the place where the elementary school was conducted, and that is still true in many cases even today.

Synagogues also became local courts, and I'll tell you why. There was the ruler of the synagogue, the archisunagogosand then there were the presbuterosin the Greek, the elders. They were a group of mature men, devout men, esteemed in the community who had the oversight, the general oversight of the synagogue. The archisunagogos, the ruler of the synagogue sort of was the main elder. There were other elders who helped him, they were responsible for the elementary school, they were responsible for opening the synagogue to prayers during the week. They were responsible for teaching through the week various series week after week. They became a local Sanhedrin, as well. In any town they became the judges in that town, they became the court in that town. It wasn't trial by jury in those days, it was trial by elders. And so every local town had its synagogue, and every synagogue had its elders and those elders constituted the local court. Whenever there was some adjudication, whenever there was some conflict, whenever there was some legality that needed to be dealt with or whenever there was some issue in a family or between neighbors, it would be brought before the judges.

Now the elders in the New Testament are interesting. We see them many times and you'll see them in Matthew, and you'll see them in Mark, you'll see them in Luke, you'll see them in John, all the gospels and they are ruling in the synagogue. You see them sometimes scourging people...that's right, literally whipping people which is how they dealt with sinners. That's changed, as you well know and probably are grateful for. They also could excommunicate people. They could put them out of the synagogue. You know, to be one of the greatest Jewish, I guess, reproaches was to be unsynagogued...to be unsynagogued, literally mean to be thrown out of the synagogue. If you were thrown out of the synagogue, you were persona non gratain your society. And they could even anathematize you, pronounce a curse of damnation on your head as you find in the New Testament accounts.

So that was the structure. There was also a man in the synagogue known as the interpreter, there might be more than one, the translator or the interpreter. The Scripture was always read in Hebrew but then it had to be translated into the local language, the local language was Aramaic. And so the translator would translate the Scripture into Aramaic.

There was one other officer, the lowest on the totem pole, he was called the chasong(??). He is the lowest servant and his responsibility was to take care of the scrolls. All the scrolls were kept in a chest and he was the one who took care of the scrolls and made sure that everybody got the right scroll for the right reading. He also was kind of the school master for the elementary school.

So that was what the synagogue was, very much like a church today, isn't it? With all kinds of weekly activities, people responsible to care for the facilities with elders, with somebody who is responsible for the oversight of all of that. That's very much the pattern of the church because the church was born out of the synagogue.

Now let's say today we were in Nazareth and we were going to go to the synagogue. What would the order of worship be like? What would it be like? Would it be anything like what we experience at Grace Church? Well yes, here's typically what we find when you look back at Jewish history.

A synagogue service would begin with singing and generally they would sing psalms because psalms glorify God. They would sing psalms of praise to God. Very often the Hallel, Psalm 145 to 150, "Praise God, Praise God, Praise God." And then from the singing they would go to the Shema. The Shema is Deuteronomy 6:4 and following, "The Lord our God is one, the Lord is one." This celebrates God as the one true living God as against all the many gods of the nations. So they started with worship. They started singing praise to God and then there was the recitation of the great identity of God as the one true and living God.

Singing and Shema was followed by supplication. There was a series of prayers and after the prayers there were punctuated "amens" from the people. There would be a prayer and then "amen," and then a prayer and then "amen," and amen means "let it be." And then after that prayer would come the Shimenah Ezra(???). Shimenah Ezra were 18 traditional benedictions or blessings that people would recite sometimes called The Tefala(?).

So they would come together, they would sing, they would again affirm the greatness of their God, the true and living God, the one true and living God. They would then have a time for pouring out their heart in prayer, punctuated by amen. Then there were 18 benedictions called the Shimenah Ezra. Then came the main point. All of that was leading up to the Scripture. Always the Torah was read, the first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers, the Law written by Moses. They would read a section of the Torah. There would be verses read in one to three combinations. In other words, there might be several readers, they would only read one to three verses, then somebody else would read one to three verses, somebody else would read one to three verses.

They read through the whole Torah in three years. So they had 154 sections of the Torah that would cover the 52 weeks for three years. So they would read through the Torah, the five books of Moses, in three years.

Then they would read the prophets, the Haftorah, as it is called. And they had certain sections of the prophets, certain books of the prophets that they would read. They would read both the Torah and generally the prophets at each service. Then would come the sermon.

So, you go from the singing, the Shema, to the supplications, to the Sheminah Ezra, benedictions, to the Scripture and finally the sermon. And that is when the appointed preacher gave an exposition of Scripture. After that there was a final benediction drawn usually out of Numbers chapter 6 verses 24 to 26, the benediction of Aaron, the first high priest.

Now that's the pattern. Now, you know, that's not unfamiliar, is it? It's a little bit like what we do. We come together and we invite the glory and the presence of God. We sing hymns of praise to God. We pray together. And then there comes a time for the Scripture reading, we read the Scripture and then there's a later reading of Scripture on which a sermon is based, which is what I'm doing right now and it's ending with a benediction. That's a pattern that has been followed by the church, borrowed, if you will, from the synagogues. And it's an appropriate pattern and a wonderful one.

So here is a perfect location for Jesus to go into teach, and that's exactly what He did. Back to the point that I made in the beginning, looking back at Luke 4, Jesus was first and foremost a preacher and a teacher who read and explained the Scripture. That's why we do what we do. That's why I do what I do because that's the pattern My Lord established for me.

Now with that in the background, we can come to the text of verse 16. "And Jesus came to Nazareth," He's...this is where He starts His Galilean ministry. "Where He had been brought up as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath." Now this was a traditional pattern for Jesus. It was a Sabbath and He came to the synagogue.

Now why does Luke start with this? Of all the things that Luke could have picked, he didn't have to pick this first event at Nazareth, he could have picked something else. Jesus preached a lot of sermons. Why did the Spirit of God inspire him to write this? Why is this account important? Why is this the launch point for Luke's discussion for the ministry of Jesus?

The answer to that is very simple, because what Jesus said on this occasion identifies Him as Messiah and perfectly defines His ministry. What He said that day in the synagogue of Nazareth when He began His Galilean ministry is a perfect summary of the Messiah's mission, that's why I've called this sermon "The Messiah's Mission." It is not in chronological sequence, it's not immediately after His...His conflict with Satan. As I said, it's nearly a year later. But it makes sense for Luke to pick an incident that is really definitive about who Jesus is and what His message was. As Luke intends to continue to show us that Jesus is the Messiah, this becomes critical and he wants to make it first because it establishes who Jesus is and why He came in absolutely clear and potent terms.

One little footnote. There is a similar event in the synagogue at Nazareth that happened at the end of Jesus' life. Don't confuse it. Matthew 13:53 to 58 and Mark 6:1 to 6 give the account of Jesus' visit to the Nazareth synagogue at the end of His ministry in Galilee, this one is at the beginning. They're discussing the final visit, this is His initial visit.

It's sad to say this, but this visit to Nazareth actually sets in motion Jesus' death. It's amazing. Before this Sabbath day is over, they try to kill Jesus. They try to throw Him off a cliff. Let me set the scene for you just briefly.

Nazareth stands on a little slope and it's in a hallow in the lower slopes really of the Galilee, near the plain of Jezreel. George Adam Smith describes it this way. "Looking from the hilltop the history of Israel stretches out before the watcher's eye. There was the plain of Esdraelon where Deborah and Barak had fought, where Gideon had won his victories, where Saul had crashed to disaster and where Josiah had been killed in battle. There was Naboth's vineyard and the place where Jehu slaughtered Jezebel. There was Shunem where Elisha had lived. There was Carmel where Elijah had fought his epic battle with the prophets of Baal. And blue in the distance there was the Mediterranean and the islands of the sea. But not only the history of Israel was there, the world itself unfolded in view from the hilltop in Nazareth. Three great roads skirted that town. The road from the south with their pilgrims from Jerusalem on it, the road, The Great Way of the Sea, which led from Egypt to Damascus with the laden caravans moving along it. There was the great roads of the east with the caravans from Arabia on it and the Roman legions marching out to the eastern frontiers of the empire."

The crossroads of the world were going around skirting the little city of Nazareth. Jesus, it says in verse 16, had been brought up there. After His birth in Bethlehem and He stayed in Bethlehem for a little while, remember the wise men came to visit Him while He was still there and living in a house. And then when Herod tried to kill all the babies, He was taken to Egypt to escape that massacre and He was in Egypt for a while. And then finally when Herod died He left Egypt and spent the rest of His life in Nazareth, up until the age of 30. It was His hometown. In fact, even though He spent His ministry...His ministry home was in Capernaum because they tried to kill Him in Nazareth, He had to relocate to Capernaum, even though His home during the ministry years was in Capernaum, He was always called "Jesus of Nazareth," He never lost that title. He's never called "Jesus of Capernaum," or anywhere else, but "Jesus of Nazareth." It was there 30 years almost, except for the time in Bethlehem and the time in Egypt, He had been in Nazareth.

He had done no miracles there. He had taught not at all. He hadn't told anybody He was the Son of God or the Messiah, He just worked at His father's carpenter shop. They didn't know who He was. They didn't hear Him speak. They didn't see any of His power. But they must have wondered at His person. It's a small town and His family was well-known and he was known and His perfection and uniqueness must have always caused them to wonder.

But all of that is in the past now. He has been baptized. His ministry has been inaugurated. He's passed the test against Satan. He has done the miracle of the turning the water into wine. He has cleansed the temple. He has given the gospel to Nicodemus and others. He has done miracles in Judea. He has brought about the salvation of Samaritans. And now He's back to Galilee and the word is traveling into Galilee from what He had done from the marriage at Cana which is right adjacent to Nazareth. You could walk from Nazareth to Cana. So they had heard about the miracle there and they heard about the cleansing of the temple because it happened at Passover and many of the people of Nazareth were there when it happened. And they must have heard about His other miracles and about His teaching and they may even have heard about the fact that He had brought into the Kingdom and to salvation Samaritans. And so there was this growing interest in this local boy who is coming back. And after nearly a year of ministry in Judea, He comes back. You can be sure that when He went to the synagogue that day, it was packed.

As was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath. I love that. Wherever you see Jesus in the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, you will find Him on the Sabbath in the synagogue, always there. It was His custom to be in the synagogue on the Sabbath. When it came to the day of worship, the day which God had prescribed for worship, He was there, always faithful to the synagogue services. And you find that throughout Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

On this occasion, however, something was different. For the first time...for the first time He stood up to read. Verse 17 says, "The book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him and He opened the book and found the place where it was written, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.' And He closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all of the synagogue were fixed upon Him."

The actual posture for the reading of Scripture, that's why we do it, was to stand up as a sign of respect. So He's the reader and on this occasion He's the reader and the expositor of the prophets. In the reading of the Torah, as I said, they read it in one to three verse increments and several people would read. But when it came to the prophets, apparently Jesus was the only reader and He was reading the text for the sermon that He would give. He had been approved by the ruler of the synagogue or else He wouldn't have been given that opportunity. And surely there would have been a lot of clamoring...did you hear that Jesus, the one whom John said was the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world...did you hear that Jesus, remember, who cleansed the temple...Jesus who talked about the new birth with Nicodemus...Jesus who made water into wine...Jesus who was healing people in Judea...this Jesus who claims to be the Messiah, the Son of God...this Jesus...this Jesus we know, Jesus the Son of Joseph and Mary, Jesus who grew up in our town in the carpenter shop, Jesus has come back, He's going to be at the synagogue and for certain this was the time to give Him the scroll and let Him be the preacher. He was to be the matheteer(??), the reader of lessons from the Haftorah, the prophets.

I love the words of Alfred Edersheim whose volumes on The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiahhave blessed so many people. Edersheim writes, "Starting on Friday as the lengthening shadows of Friday's sun closed around the quiet valley, Jesus would hear the well-remembered double blast of the trumpet from the roof of the synagogue, proclaiming the advent of the holy Sabbath. Once more it sounded through the still summer air to tell all that work must be laid aside. Yet a third time it was heard and the one who blew it would lay it down right where he stood and not profane the Sabbath by carrying it, for now the Sabbath had really commenced and the festive Sabbath lamp was lit. In the morning, Sabbath morning dawned and early Jesus went to the synagogue where as a child and as a youth and as a man He had so often worshiped in the humble retirement of His rank, sitting not up there among the elders and the honored, but far back. The old well-known faces were around Him, the old well-remembered words in the services fell on His ears. How different they had always been to Him than to the people with whom He had...He had mingled in common worship, and now He was again among them, a stranger among His own countrymen, this time to be looked at, listened to, tested, tried, used, or cast aside as the case might be."

It was the first time, as far as we know, that He taught in a synagogue, the synagogue was His own in Nazareth. So the book of the prophet Isaiah, verse 17, was handed to Him. It was a scroll. Isaiah could be contained on one scroll, we know that because when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found Isaiah was contained on one scroll. It was kept in a chest wrapped in cloth and it would be taken out by the attendant, mentioned in verse 20 as an attendant, huperetes, means a low slave, the under-rower, hupermeans under. He was called a hazan(??), he was the lowest officer there, responsible for the caring of the scrolls and he delivered the scroll to Jesus. He handed it to Him. He was also, as I said, the synagogue school master.

You know, they had some pretty high standards. That was the lowest officer there, he was the school master, he was the one who attended to the scrolls but according to Edersheim he had to be without reproach, his family without reproach. He had to be humble, modest. He had to know the Scriptures and he had to be distinct and correct in his pronunciation of Scripture, simple and neat in his dress, an absence of self-assertion. All qualities which later on show up in lists that Paul had for elders and deacons. So he handed Jesus the appropriate scroll.

It may have been that in the reading of the Haftorah, the prophets, it was time to read Isaiah. They may have been in a series of readings in Isaiah. Although He doesn't open the scroll to any particular reading because it says, "The book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him and He opened the book." Jesus unrolls the scroll to the Scripture that He wants to read and speak on. He found the place where it was written. The place He found... Isaiah 61:1 and 2, and He reads them in verses 18 and 19. Verses 18 and 19 are quoted from Isaiah 61:1 and 2. So Jesus read them and there's slight variation. There's one phrase that's omitted. There's the phrase borrowed from Isaiah 58:6.

And I just want to mention something here because it's so important, particularly for Jewish people. The gospel, the Christian gospel is not a disconnect from Judaism. It is not a disconnect from the Old Testament. It is not another religion. In fact, it is rather...Christianity is rather the fulfillment of the Old Testament, isn't it? When Jesus wanted to identify Himself He read the Old Testament. Christianity is not a new religion, it is the culmination, it is the glory of the Old Testament. The Old Testament speaks of Jesus. Luke 24:27, Jesus talking to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, it says, "And beginning with Moses and all the prophets He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures." He was opening the Old Testament and the Old Testament was all about Him.

So what Jesus did was go back to Isaiah to messianic prophecy and this is what He read, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor, He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord." And He reads that Scripture.

Now they knew that this was messianic. They knew that. They knew the prophet. They knew that Isaiah's prophecy is largely prophecy about the Messiah. And it starts, does Isaiah 61:1, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed Me." They knew that Messiah would be anointed by the Holy Spirit, that was a messianic prophecy, that when Messiah comes He will be anointed by the Holy Spirit. Anointed means "set apart for special service, empowered for special service."

In Isaiah chapter 11 you have a similar prophecy about Messiah. In Isaiah 11 the Messiah is a shoot that springs from the stem of Jesse. Jesse is the father of David, meaning that He comes out of the Davidic line. He's a branch from his roots and it says, "The Spirit of the Lord will rest on Him. That Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and strength, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord," the seven-fold full Holy Spirit will rest on the Messiah, so it says in Isaiah chapter 11. In Isaiah chapter 42 and verse 1, "Behold My Servant, Messiah, whom I uphold, My chosen one in whom My soul delights, I have put My Spirit upon Him." Again another

messianic prophecy indicating the Messiah will be empowered and anointed by the Holy Spirit. In chapter 48 of Isaiah, verse 16, "The Lord God has sent Me, says Messiah, and His Spirit." And then in 61 you have this statement, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He anointed Me."

So they know they're hearing messianic prophecy. The Messiah was going to come, anointed by the Holy Spirit. Now what do we remember happened at Jesus' baptism? In the third chapter verse 21 it says that when He was being baptized, verse 22, the Spirit of God descended upon Him, right? And then in chapter 4, look at verse 1, "Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan where He was baptized." In verse 14 which we read earlier, He returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit. So Jesus has on Him the anointing and the power of the Holy Spirit, just as the Messiah is to have, according to Isaiah. He's been anointed for special service.

Then in the...verse 18 there are four concise components to Messiah's mission...to bring good news to the poor, to announce release to the captives, to give sight to the blind, and to liberate the oppressed. Now, folks, I want to tell you, this is why Luke picked this because you can't have a better summary of the mission of Messiah than that. Four groups are identified, the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed. And the Messiah comes to change those tragic conditions. He comes to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, liberation to the oppressed. Now that speaks of His saving work.

And verse 19 sums it up, also from Isaiah 61 verse 2, "To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord." What is that? That's the year the Lord brings favor. And what is the year of the Lord brings favor? It's the year the Messiah arrives. The favorable year of the Lord is the time of Messiah's arrival. It's the time of God's favor mentioned in chapter 49 of Isaiah, verse 8, which is also called the day of salvation. It's equal to the day of salvation. It's equal to what Isaiah 63:4 calls the year of My redeemed.

What it's saying is this is the age of salvation. The framework around this ministry, I'm going to bring good news to the poor, release the captives, sight to the blind, liberate the oppressed, and it's all going to happen within the soteriological framework of the era of salvation. In other words, what He's saying is salvation has come, the age of salvation you've long awaited has arrived. This is the year when the Lord shows His favor by providing you the Messiah, the Savior, the sacrifice for sin. It's favorable because it means that it's going to cause good news to come to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, liberation to the oppressed. This is the favorable year.

So Isaiah prophesied that. They were familiar with that passage. The Messiah will come. He will be anointed and empowered by the Holy Spirit, which means He'll be able to say things that are divine and He'll do miracles that are evidence...evidence of the Spirit's power. He will come to liberate and He will release and set people free, and so forth. And this will be the age of salvation we've long awaited.

It has overtones of another great event in Israel's history called the Jubilee Year. Back in Leviticus 25 the Jews were instructed that every 50 years there was a Jubilee Year. The fiftieth year was a Jubilee year. You remember what happened? You can read Leviticus 25. All slaves were freed...all debts were cancelled. All property returned to its original owner.

Now this is reflective of the genius of the mind of God. This is economic genius because it keeps people amassing anything because you're going to get it all taken away from you in the fiftieth year. All the property goes back to the original owner, all debts are cancelled and all prisoners, or slaves, are released. Jubilee was like the symbol of salvation when there was release and forgiveness and restoration. And this was the hope of Israel that as it was symbolized in the Jubilee, there would come that final Jubilee, that favorable year of the Lord was the Jubilee year but that was only a symbol of the real favorable year of the Lord, the year when Messiah arrived and all the promises to Abraham would be fulfilled and all the promises to David would be fulfilled. And this was their hope and they knew the passage, they knew it well. They read it many, many times and their hearts were filled with hope. It was regularly read in their synagogues, all their lives it had been read.

Amazingly, by the way, verse 19 where Jesus reads from Isaiah 61:2. "To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord," He stops in the middle of the verse because the rest of verse 2 in Isaiah says, "And the day of vengeance of our God." And Jesus leaves that out. It's not time to talk about vengeance. It's not time to talk about judgment. It's time to talk about salvation.

After He read that, closed the book, rolled it back up and gave it back to the kasan(??), sat down because being seated was the traditional posture for teaching. "And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him." What is He going to say? "And He began to say to them, 'Today the Scripture...this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.'" Whoa!...Nobody ever said that, no preacher had ever said that. They had always said, "Some day," not "today." Crammed, jammed full of people, I'll never forget staying in Tiberius next to a synagogue for several days and seeing the people crammed and jammed in there, just imagining that kind of scene here, and Jesus says, "Everything you've been waiting for is here, everything you've been hoping for stands before you. Today, right here, right now, this Scripture has been fulfilled." Perfect tense verb indicating an existing state of fulfillment. You are seeing the fulfillment of this passage before your eyes, you are hearing it with your ears.

The prophecy of God through Isaiah is no more in the future. It is now. The Messiah is here. Salvation has come. The messianic age has begun. He was saying, "I am the Messiah."

Now you say, "That's a very short sermon," verse 21. I don't think it was that short because verse 21 says in the Greek, "And He began to say to them today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." And the structure of that, "And He began," indicates this was just a summary of much more detailed explanation. But the sum of it was "today," this is no longer future, it is present. They had had a lot of sermons about the Messiah now they had one from Him. They had a lot of sermons about the age to come, now they were in it. Dramatic...dramatic. Before it's over, verse 29, they try to throw Him off a cliff. Amazing, but we'll have to wait to see that.

And next Sunday, let me tell you this now, I'm going to explain to you what Isaiah meant when he wrote chapter 61 and what Jesus meant when He read it by the four statements...preaching the gospel to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and setting free those who are downtrodden. I'm going to...I'm going to unfold those truths to you so you will understand the nature of Messiah's mission. Who are these poor? Who are these captives? Who are these blind? And who are these downtrodden? And what does He offer them? That's for next time. But at least now we have the setting and we'll give you, I think, probably I'm going to try, at least, give you an exposition of Isaiah something like Jesus must have given that day before He summed it up saying, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing," so you'll know exactly what His mission is.

Father, it's so refreshing to attend a synagogue in Nazareth with Jesus today, to be taken back to see the wonder of His person another time. He is so amazing to us, so glorious. We thank You that You have caused us to know Him and love Him, that He is not to us a stranger, that He is not to us an unattainable end, but that this Jesus who stepped into His own town, into His own synagogue, this Jesus who announced that He had brought the age of salvation, this who Jesus preached the good news belongs to us and we to Him. He is ours, He lives in us, He loves us, He gave His life for us and some day He will take us to glory to be with Him forever. Father, increase our love for the Savior and may the wonder of His person continually translate into increasing devotion to honoring Him in our lives. We pray in His name. Amen.

Jesus' Return to Nazareth: Preaching in the Synagogue

Let's open our Bibles to the fourth chapter of Luke, and again this morning, Luke chapter 4. This is part two in the mission of the Messiah...the mission of the Messiah, a very definitive portion of Scripture. And as we will learn in the ongoing study of Luke, if we haven't already learned it, Luke is very, very selective in the material out of the life of Christ that he chooses and it seems as though all of it is preeminent, all of it is significant. And that is certainly the case in Luke chapter 4 verses 16 to 21 where we are now studying.

Let me back up a little bit because I'm very aware of the fact that we have many visiting friends and folks who are kind of coming into our church and haven't had the opportunity to be carried along with all of our studies, I want to just give you a sort of a large context in which to fit the message that I want to give to you this morning.

The great theme of the Bible is salvation. If anybody ever asks you...the Bible is a big book, its got 66 books inside of it, what is the message of the Bible? You can tell them the message is salvation...that is the message. The message of the Bible is that God, the creator of the universe, graciously rescues doomed sinners from the eternal punishment of hell and brings them instead to the eternal joy of heaven. That's the theme of the Bible. I'll say it again...that God, the creator of the universe, graciously rescues doomed sinners from the eternal punishment of hell and brings them instead into the eternal joy of heaven. And from Genesis chapter 3 where man falls into sin, clear to Revelation chapter 22, the very end of the Bible, salvation is the theme of all 66 books of Scripture. Salvation from hell, salvation from sin is the one constant message throughout the Bible. To put it another way, God, the creator of the universe, for His own glory has chosen to create and gather to Himself a group of people to be the subjects of His eternal Kingdom who will praise, honor and serve Him forever while enjoying the full riches of His blessing. That's the theme of the Bible.

And because all people are sinners and cannot save themselves from hell, cannot rescue themselves from the punishment that they deserve for their sin, God therefore must rescue them. God must devise a way in which to save sinners from sin and hell. God must come up with a plan by which He can forgive sinners for all their sin. In order for Him to do that, a just payment for sin has to be made, His justice has to be satisfied, there must be a payment for sin to satisfy His holy justice, while at the same time it can't be the sinner who pays for his sin or he will be damned to hell, the only way he can pay the price for his sin. Therefore, God must come up with a substitute. God must have a substitute who can pay the penalty for the sins of His people. God has to find someone to die in the place of sinners, to feel the wrath of holy justice on sin. The Bible tells us that that One is the Son of God who is God who came into the world in human flesh to be the substitute who would bear the wrath of God and die in the place of sinners is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah. Throughout the Old Testament we're told that He is coming, that the Son, the Savior is coming. He is the main person in the Old Testament by way of anticipation. The Old Testament begins to talk about Him in Genesis 3:15, He is referred to as the "seed of the woman, He who will bruise the serpent's head." He is the pierced one of Zechariah, to whom Israel turns and by whose death God opens the fountain of forgiveness for all who mourn over their sin and believe in Him. He is the one symbolized in all of the sacrifices of the Mosaic Law. He is the suffering servant, the suffering substitute of Isaiah and the other prophets who was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities and the chastening for our peace with God is laid on Him, by His stripes we are healed.

So, throughout the Old Testament the Messiah is presented as the one who will come, the one who will bring the Kingdom, bring forgiveness, bring the age of salvation, the one who will die for the transgressions of His people, the one who will become the substitute, the sacrifice, the true Lamb of God who will take away the sin of the world. So the Old Testament anticipates the coming of the Lord and Savior, the Messiah. And all the Jews knew that and they were waiting and waiting and waiting, centuries they were waiting for the Messiah to come. Then He came and the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, record His arrival. We're studying Luke's account and the four gospels are parallel accounts that can be co-mingled together to get the full story. They are complementary to one another. But certainly the arrival of the Messiah is worthy of four biographies looking at the richness of the fulfillment of all that Old Testament prophecy. So we're looking at Luke's account of the arrival of the long-awaited, oft-promised Lord and Savior and Messiah.

Now let's look at verses 16 to 21 as we are finding ourselves here in the fourth chapter. The Messiah has reached the age of 30 now and He has just begun His ministry. Luke records for us the first incident in His gospel in the ministry of Jesus. As I told you before, it isn't the first of Jesus' ministry, He had ministered for up to a year already but Luke skips over that. It occurred, for the most part, down in Judea and Luke begins with the ministry of Jesus in Galilee, in the north, and with one incident that sort of launched that ministry, that is His preaching at the synagogue in His own hometown of Nazareth. Verse 16, "And He...the Lord Jesus...came to Nazareth where He had been brought up. And was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath and stood up to read. And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him and He opened the book, or scroll, and found the place where it was written, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor, He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.' And He closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon Him. And He began to say to them, 'Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.'" We'll leave it at that point.

Now as you remember, Luke skipped over the first few months of Jesus' ministry. His ministry actually began with His first miracle up in Cana which is a town adjacent to Nazareth. After being baptized by John, He was tempted by the devil 40 days in the wilderness, after that He was ministered to for a while by the angels, then He went up to Cana to attend a wedding to which His family had been invited. Weddings usually lasted a week, it was there that He did the first of His miracles, turning water into wine. After that, He left and came to the north end of the Sea of Galilee, a town called downtrodden where He ministered for a few days and did some miracles, as verse 23 in this passage indicates, then He proceeded directly back south into Judea and Jerusalem where He ministered for many months in His first Judean ministry. Luke doesn't tell us about that, neither does Matthew or Mark, but John fills in the gaps there in the first three chapters of John's gospel, actually the first four chapters because in chapter 4 He's trekking north and goes through Samaria where He meets the woman at the well and many of the Samaritans believed in Him as Savior and Lord. So Luke picks up the story after He's come back into Galilee and launches His Galilean ministry.

Now as I told you last time, the Galilean ministry is defined for us in verse 14. "He returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit and news spread about Him...about Him spread through all the surrounding district and He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all." The Galilean ministry lasts about a year and a half of Jesus' life and Luke's record of it goes through chapter 9 verse 50. So we'll be talking about His ministry in Galilee for quite a while. The nature of it was He was teaching. The venue in which He taught was the synagogue. There were about 240 towns and villages in Galilee, as I told you, each of them would have at least one synagogue and some of them would have more than that. There were plenty of places for Him to teach and that's what He did for that year and a half...taught and did, of course, some wondrous miracles as well. That all begins then in verse 16. He launches that Galilean ministry by going to Nazareth, His own hometown on the slopes of the Galilean hills...a wonderful place to visit even to this day. You can even go to the village of Cana where He did His first miracle which is near by.

And Jesus had been brought up there, it says. After He left Bethlehem and escaped into Egypt to avoid being killed by Herod, He then left Egypt and returned to Nazareth where He lived most of His 30 years and in obscurity without ever teaching or doing any miracles, just quietly with His family in Nazareth. It was His custom all the while in His 30 years while He was growing up to go the synagogue on the Sabbath. Synagogues were gathering places, sunagogesor sunagogosmeans a gathering place, or a gathering. And these were places that grew up after the Babylonian captivity where the Jews assembled, they were called by Philo "houses of instruction," the purpose was to go there and hear the Word of God explained. It would be read and explained every Sabbath, as well as during the week there were many, many other times during the week when the Word of God would be read and it would be explained, but particularly on the Sabbath.

Now this was an unusual Sabbath. For the first time it was Jesus, verse 16, who stood up to read. He was chosen to be the reader and the expositor. What they did was read the Scripture and then exposit it, or explain the meaning of it. And that is exactly what Jesus does. Many, many, many Sabbaths He had been in that synagogue, everybody there was familiar with Him, watching Him grow, familiar with His family, His father, His mother, His brothers and sisters. They were familiar with the folks in the community. It was a small enough place and synagogues were small enough congregations and if, as some historians guess, Nazareth had as many as 20,000 people, there would have been many synagogues...that one would have been one they were very familiar...where they were very familiar with each other and so they would know Him well. But He had never taught before, He had been always quiet and now it is His time to stand up and read, which means to read the Scripture and to explain it, to be the preacher to give the sermon that day.

Verse 17, the chazon(?) called the attendant down in verse 20, gave to Him the scroll of Isaiah, apparently unopened and Isaiah may have been the normal reading at that time. There was a calendar of readings, as I told you, in the Mosaic Law which was always done. There may well have been a calendar of reading in the prophets also, while the Mosaic Law was prescribed as to exactly which verses, there may have been a little more latitude with the prophetic material and it seems as though he simply handed Him the scroll and Jesus opened the scroll and found the place where it was written. It is possible that Jesus selected that place. It is also possible that that was the place that was prescribed to be read, we can't be sure either way.

First He read from Isaiah 61:1 and 2, and Jesus, no doubt, gave an entire sermon, which means He read them and gave detail in regard to their exposition. What Luke is doing here is summarizing the textual material used by Jesus in His synagogue sermon. A normal synagogue sermon would take one text and there would be an exposition of it.

Now Jesus is essentially saying to them, as we saw last time, "I am the fulfillment of these prophecies and the favorable year of the Lord...verse 19...is now." Favorable year of the Lord is the era of salvation, the age of redemption. He is simply saying the promised Messiah is here, salvation has arrived, it isn't any longer future, it isn't any longer something you look forward to, it is here, it is now. I who stand before you am your Savior and Messiah. I am the fulfillment of these prophecies.

Now they knew from Isaiah 61:1 that when the Messiah came, they knew it was a messianic passage, that the Spirit of the Lord would be upon Him and He would be anointed, as the first part of verse 18 says. And, of course, that's true of Jesus. Back in chapter 3 verse 21 Luke makes a very clear point that Jesus was being baptized, while He was praying heaven opened, the Holy Spirit descended upon Him. In chapter 4 verse 1 He was full of the Holy Spirit and led by the Spirit. Chapter 4 verse 14, He returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit and very importantly the Messiah is to have the full power of the Spirit of God upon Him. And that is the case of Jesus. So Jesus is the fulfillment of this prophecy, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He anointed Me." And as I told you in the past, in His incarnation the second member of the trinity set apart the independent use of His own attributes, became a man and submitted to the power of the Holy Spirit who came upon Him to enable Him to do His ministry and to anoint Him with divine power. So Jesus is that Messiah and He says it in verse 21, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." I am the Messiah and this is the day of salvation.

Now Jesus in His lifetime in the synagogue heard many, many sermons. Every Sabbath day they heard sermons and every week there would be days during the week, a Tuesday, a Thursday, a Wednesday, a Friday when they would go to the synagogue and they would hear a reading of Scripture and another exposition of Scripture. They were used to this. And the greatest subject for them to deal with was the hope of Messiah's coming. And so it was very common that they would hear the message of Messiah, particularly, of course, when the prophets were read, but even when the Mosaic Law was read and they were brought again under the condemnation and obligation of the law, there could be a declaration of the fact that there was going to come finally the ultimate sacrifice, the one who would make the final atonement for sin. So constantly in the synagogue preaching, Messiah, the coming of the Lord and Savior, would be the subject of the sermons and it would keep the hearts of people highly anticipatory of Messiah's arrival.

I did a little research this week and I wanted to find a typical synagogue sermon, something that a first-century Jew would have heard on a typical Sabbath in the synagogue and I found one from the first century. This sermon has been preserved through the centuries and it was a sermon that somebody preached in a Judean synagogue in the first century A.D. based on Isaiah 61:10. "He has clothed Me with the garments of salvation." So it would have been right out of the same scroll, right out of the same Isaiah. The Scripture would have been read, "He has clothed Me with the garments of salvation." And here is an English translation of what the sermon was. "Whoever the preacher was he said this, seven garments the Holy One, blessed be He, has put on and will put on from the time the world was created until the hour when He will punish the wicked. When He created the world He clothed Himself in honor and majesty, as it is said in Psalm 104:1, 'Thou art clothed in honor and majesty.' Whenever He forgave the sins of Israel He clothed Himself in white, for we read in Daniel 7:9, 'His raiment was white as snow.' When He punishes the peoples of the world He puts on the garments of vengeance, as it said in Isaiah 59:17, "He puts on garments of vengeance for clothing and was clad with zeal as a cloak.' The sixth garment He will put on when the Messiah comes, then He will clothe Himself in a garment of righteousness, for it is said, 'He put on righteousness as a breastplate and a helmet of salvation upon His head.' The seventh garment He will put on when He punishes Edom, then He will clothe Himself in adom, or red, for it is said in Isaiah 63:2, 'Wherefore art Thou red in Thine apparel.' But the garment which He will put on the Messiah, this will shine afar from one end of the earth to the other for it is said in Isaiah 61:10, 'As a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, so He will clothe Me with the garments of salvation.'"

So they were seeing this as a messianic prediction of the Messiah clothed with salvation. And then the preacher said, "Blessed is the hour when the Messiah will come." This was his conclusion, "Blessed is the womb out of which He shall come. Blessed His contemporaries who are eye witnesses to His arrival. Blessed is the eye that is honored with the sight of Him, for the opening of His lips is blessing and peace, His speech is a moving of the spirits. The thoughts of His heart are confidence and cheerfulness. The speech of His tongue is pardon and forgiveness. His prayer is the sweet incense of offerings. His petitions are holiness and purity. O how blessed is Israel for whom such has been prepared, for it is said in Psalm 31:19, 'How great is Thy goodness which Thou has laid up for them that fear Thee.'"

In other words, there was in the sermon tremendous excitement and anticipation of the Messiah's coming. "Blessed is the hour when Messiah comes. Blessed is the womb out of which He comes. Blessed His contemporaries who are eye witnesses." Well, all of that was reality on this day. Sermons they had heard many times about how when the Messiah comes He will be clothed with righteousness, He will bring forgiveness and blessing and here He stands before us, today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

Now we went through that last time but we left out the message of verse 18, and I want to direct your attention at it today. His ministry is here defined. When the Messiah comes, what is it that He will do? It says He will preach the gospel to the poor. He will proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind and set free those who are downtrodden, in proclaiming the favorable year of the Lord. His ministry then is described in a series of phrases in verse 18, phrases built around infinitives that describe the work of Messiah, the work of salvation. And there are four metaphors...the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed. These four metaphors described the unredeemed, they described the unsaved, the describe the lost, the unconverted, the unforgiven. They sum up the work of salvation. He preaches good news to the poor, release to the prisoners, sight to the blind and freedom to the downtrodden, or oppressed. Each of these provides for us a metaphoric picture of the sinner in the desperate condition of his need. And you will remember that I read earlier Psalm 107. Psalm 107 has a number of parallels, I'll allow you the privilege of jumping back and forth to see them there, but it is a magnificent expansion of the imagery you have right here, that's why I read it earlier in the service.

When you think about the unconverted in the world, this is how you are to view them. They may, in fact, be rich. They may, in fact, be free. They may, in fact, have no physical infirmities whatsoever, let alone blindness. And they may appear to be on top of the world, eminently successful. But the fact of the matter is, any sinner falls into these categorizations. Apart from the salvation that Christ brings, they are poor, they are prisoners, they are blind and they are oppressed. This is the desperate condition of the sinner and until the sinner comes to a recognition of that condition, there will not be any compulsion to seek a solution. When we look at the world around us, we cannot look at them superficially. They may on the surface be rich, as I said, they may have what they believe to be absolutely unlimited freedom, which is the way most sinners in our society live, free to express themselves they think in any way they want. They may have great physical health and well-being, taking advantage of all the fitness and all the medical assistance they can get. They may think they're on top of the world in terms of life style. But the fact is, spiritually they are poor, they are prisoners, they are blind and they are oppressed. They have to come to see that in order for them to turn to the One who can deliver them. Like the people we read about in Psalm 107, they have to realize that they are wandering in the desert, they have no water and no food and nowhere to find it. They have to realize that they have a blindness and a darkness and a shadow of death, a pall of death hanging over them they can't do anything about. They have to realize that they are in a storm that they can't cope with and the end of the storm can be their demise. They have to realize there are no personal resources to which they can turn to solve their imminent deadly dilemma. And that is the point of what Jesus is saying here as He opens the meaning of Isaiah 61. When the Messiah comes He will deal with the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed. Let's take them one at a time.

The first one in verse 18, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me," that is identifying Him as the Messiah, the Spirit has anointed Him, the Messiah means the "anointed one." And the first purpose is to preach the gospel to the poor. You hear the word "gospel" a lot, it's simply a word for good news. It's an old English sort of derivative from what was good. It is the good news. Messiah will be empowered by the Holy Spirit to preach the good news to the poor. The good news is not that poor people are going to get rich, the good news is not economic prosperity. The good news is not material enhancement. We're talking about spiritual riches here. The good news is to people who are spiritually impoverished, spiritually poor. The good news is you can be released from your poverty.

Let me talk about that word "poor," if I might, for a minute. The Greek language is a wonderfully rich language which has almost limitless nuances both in vocabulary and in word form. And here is a word that enriches our understanding greatly, it is the word ptochos, p-t-o-c-h-o-s if you transliterate it, ptochos. It is from a verb that means "to cringe" quite interestingly, or a verb which means "to shrink back," or "to cower." It conveys the idea of a beggar, it is the word that refers to a beggar, someone who cringes in the shadows. Classical Greek used the word to refer to a person in total destitution who crouched somewhere in a corner begging. And in classical Greek the image was that one hand went out and the other hand went over the face to hide identity. This was so shameful. Here was a person who had reached the person of abject destitution. Here is a point where there is utter and total bankruptcy of all resources. It is used, by the way, this word ptochos, to describe in Luke 16:20 a beggar by the name of Lazarus who was begging for crumbs, anything to eat. It is not the ordinary word for poor. The ordinary word for poor, penichros, means somebody who has very little.

For example, the widow in Luke 21:2 is the widow who had just a few pennies, she was poor. She had very little. But ptochosmeans you have absolutely nothing, and that is the word here. The Messiah will come and bring good news to the people who are destitute, the people who have nothing. And spiritually speaking, this is talking about people who recognize that they have nothing by which to commend themselves. In Luke 6:20 Luke records Jesus saying, "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God." And again it's a repeat of Matthew 5:3, "Blessed are the poor in...what?...in spirit," not in money, but the poor in spirit. That is the condition of every sinner. Every sinner is morally bankrupt. Every sinner in the words of Isaiah could count his righteousness as filthy rags. Every sinner is destitute of anything to commend himself to God. And, of course, this goes contrary to the Jewish mentality, they thought that by their good works and by their self-advancement by keeping ceremonial law and obeying the Mosaic system, at certain points being fastidious legalists they would earn salvation. And Jesus comes and shatters that entire view and says, "The only people that Messiah is going to be able to bring salvation to are those who recognize their spiritual destitution." As long as you think you're a good person, as long as you think your religion counts for something, your morality counts for something, you're damned to eternal hell and you have an irremediable condition. The poor are those, on the other hand, who recognize their total spiritual destitution. They are completely unable to recover without help. They're like the people in Psalm 107 again, wandering in the desert, no food, no water and they know it. They're like those people sitting in darkness. They're like those people sitting in chains, like those people in the storm of the sea, there are no human resources to solve their dilemma, they can only cry out to God. They're the true poor, the true prisoners, the true blind and the true oppressed. So the person who comes to the realization there are no saving resources available, they can only beg for mercy from God alone, they and they alone receive the grace of salvation. All pride is gone, all self-assurance is gone. They are utterly empty-handed, without commendation, who alone can turn to God and receive from Him what they cannot themselves generate.

Their poverty is not an act, by the way, it's not a false piety, it's not a false humility, it's the real thing. They have the humble and broken spirit of Isaiah 66:2, the broken heartedness and crushed in spirit referred to in Psalm 34:18, or the broken and contrite heart of Psalm 51. They're like the publican in Luke 18 beating on his breast, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner." And he falls down and he won't even look up, he won't lift his eyes to even look toward heaven because he's cringing and cowering in his spiritual destitution. And next to him is the Pharisee saying, "I thank You that I'm not as other men, but I fast and I tithe and I do all these good things. Aren't I great?" And Jesus said, "The man begging, the man with his face down went home justified, not the other one. It is the state of spiritual bankruptcy then where a person really sees their own helpless condemnation.

The imagery is pretty graphic in a similar passage of Revelation chapter 3 verse 17 where Jesus says, "Because you say I am rich and have become wealthy and have need of nothing, and you do not know that you wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked," and there's all that same imagery again. Your problem is I can't help you because you don't understand your desperation. You think you're rich, you think you have what you need, you don't understand. You're poor and miserable and blind and naked.

So please note, folks, He's not talking about the economically poor. But it is true, and I want to add this as a footnote, it is true that people with economic need, people who are genuinely poor, people who are in desperate economic conditions ARE fertile soil for the gospel because their human circumstances drive them to a level of despair that many people spiritual circumstances don't, as long as they have what they need physically. We know that people who are poor, people who have very little are drawn sometimes to God where people who have everything materially are not. Jesus put it this way, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for...what kind of man?...a rich man to enter heaven." His riches become a barrier to his entering the Kingdom because he has no sense of his need. That's why in 1 Corinthians 1:26 Paul says, "Consider your calling, brethren," this is the Corinthian church, "there were not many wise according to the flesh, there aren't many scholars in the congregation, there aren't many mighty," that is there aren't many elite there. "Aren't many noble, but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things that are strong, the base things of the world, the despised God has chosen, the things that are not that He might nullify the things that are that no man should boast before God."

If you look at the Kingdom people you will see that God chooses the poor. It is the poor who come more readily to the level of personal desperation that reaches out in spiritual bankruptcy for God. James 2:5, "God chose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the Kingdom." While we're not talking about the economically poor being made rich, we're talking about people who realize their spiritual bankruptcy and largely people who come to that realization are people who have dire circumstances to face in life.

So here we're talking about lost sinners, restless sinners without resources, starved, hungry, thirsty. Like Psalm 107 says in verses 4 to 9, "Wandering hopelessly, aimlessly searching for a city where they can beg for something to drink and something to eat and finally in the end they cry out to God and He delivers them." The Messiah brings good news to those who are spiritually bankrupt, spiritually destitute and who know it and who come to the Lord with the words like that hymn, "Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to Thy cross I cling."

The second picture is of prisoners. It's an equally graphic one. In verse 18, "He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives." God sent His Son to free the prisoners. The sinner can also be viewed as a prisoner. Not only as a poor person, someone who is bankrupt because he has nothing of value before God, no matter what he has in the world, no matter what he has religiously, he has nothing of value before God, he has nothing to buy his salvation, buy his way into heaven, so he has to realize his spiritual destitution...it is also true that he is a prisoner. This is another metaphor describing the same person, the lost sinner. And the good news is that He has come, the Messiah, to proclaim release, aphesis, and the word aphesistranslated release really has the idea of forgiveness...forgiveness. The reason somebody is in prison, think about it, is because they have been put there by someone else. They have been put there as a punishment. Now we know He's not talking about actual prisoners here, He wasn't talking about economically poor people before, He's not talking about actual prisoners here. There weren't any prisoners probably for sure in the synagogue at Nazareth, the prisoners would have been in prison. So He's talking to people who are spiritual prisoners, people who are in spiritual bondage. And spiritual bondage is to guilt and to the penalty of that...to sin, to guilt, to the debt of that guilt which is the penalty. These are captives, aichmalotos, it literally means prisoners. It can mean prisoners of war, those who have been taken captive by some powerful source, brought into prison for crimes that are deemed that they have committed and are waiting their own execution. That's how He sees the sinner. The sinner is a prisoner.

You know, there's nothing probably truer of sinners today than that they think they are free. Would you say that's true? They...in fact, they see Christianity as some kind of bondage, don't they? And they think they're free. This is all about rights, everybody's got their rights and nobody is going to infringe on my rights, I can be what I want to be, I'm free to be myself. You hear that inane statement again and again and again. They are not free. The Bible would define them as prisoners. They are prisoners, sin has indebted them to God. They cannot pay that debt. They are held prisoner to God, really, by His justice and His holiness. They are in bondage and they are awaiting death. Satan wields, according to Hebrews 2:14 and 15, the power of death and holds them in bondage all their lifelong by the fear of death. They are the children of wrath, of Ephesians 2:1 and 2 says, they are under the power and authority of Satan. So there's a sense in which they are captive to sin, captive to Satan and to the dominion of Satan, the prince of the power of the air, and yet all of that is only a sub-definition. The real sovereign over them, the real judge over them who has imprisoned them and held them guilty and sentenced them to death is God Himself. It is God who destroys both soul and body in hell. So the sinner is a prisoner. He is a prisoner of Satan, he is a prisoner of sin, but more than that, he's a prisoner of the eternal executioner who is God who holding him accountable has him awaiting his eternal execution.

In Psalm 79:11 it says, "Let the groaning of the prisoner come before Thee, according to the greatness of Thy power preserve those who are doomed to die." That is the way it is with sinners. They are prisoners by virtue of their sin. They are doomed to die. Isaiah 42:5, "Thus, says God the Lord who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and its offspring who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk in it, I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I will also hold you by the hand and watch over you. I will appoint you a covenant to the people, a light to the nations to open blind eyes...this is the Messiah...I'll have You the Messiah open blind eyes and bring prisoners from the dungeon and those who dwell in the darkness from the prison." That's what God says. I'm going to send My servant, the Messiah, to do, to give sight to the blind and to free the prisoners from the dungeon. And that is precisely what you see again in Psalm 107, as I read earlier, people sitting in the dungeon, sitting in chains, sitting in the darkness without light, without hope because of sin, under the judgment of God. And the only hope for them in Psalm 107 is the Lord. The only hope, of course, here is the Messiah.

Back in the praise of Zacharias chapter 1, you remember verses 77 to 79, when the Messiah comes He will give His people the knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins. And when it says "release to the captives," that word release, aphesis, means forgiveness. The way you are freed, the way a prisoner is freed is when his sin is forgiven, when his crime is forgiven. And that's precisely what the Messiah will do, He will release the captives because He will forgive their sins. That great, great dominating truth is one that we always want to put at the forefront of our understanding of the gospel. Forgiveness sets the prisoner free. The only way we can be forgiven is because Jesus took our penalty. That's why Charles Wesley wrote in that great hymn of Christ, "He breaks the power of cancelled sin, He sets the prisoner free."

So poor and the prisoners are the pictures of the sinners. Thirdly, the blind, "And recovery of sight to the blind." Here is the third metaphor for the damned...not physically blind, although Jesus did heal blind people, we'll see some of that as we go through Luke's gospel, but He's talking here from Isaiah 61:1 about those who are in spiritual darkness, as was Zechariah. Again back in chapter 1 when he talked about the Messiah as the Sunrise from on high who would shine on those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death. There's a picture all through the Bible, I wish I had time to develop it, all through the Bible of spiritual blindness, spiritual darkness. The sinner is not only without spiritual resources to commend himself to God and thus poor, he is not only guilty of sin thus bears the debt of sin which brings the penalty of sin and is therefore a prisoner under the justice of God, but he is also blind in the fact that he cannot see or understand the truth. Spiritual blindness is commonly discussed in the Bible. It is natural to fallen man. Psalm 82:5, "They do not know nor do they understand. They walk about in darkness." Jeremiah 5:21, "Hear this now, O foolish people without understanding, who have eyes and see not, and who have ears and hear not..." This is the state of the unconverted. "The natural man understands not the things of God, he can't know them, he can't understand them," "because they're foolishness to him."

So naturally, just by virtue of being a fallen sinner, the sinner is blind. Judicially, another category of blindness, he's also blind because God has blinded him. John 12:40, "He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts lest they should see with their eyes, lest they should understand with their hearts and turn and be healed," and that's quoted from Isaiah 6. So God literally judicially blinds. So here is the natural mind blind to start with, then God compounds his blindness by sentencing him to blindness for a punishment for his sin. Isaiah 29:10, "The Lord has poured out on you the spirit of deep sleep and has closed your eyes."

A man is further blinded by Satan. He's blinded naturally. He's blinded judicially by God. He's blinded satanically. Second Corinthians 4, "Even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the god of this age has blinded." So we're talking about very, very comprehensive blindness. Blind naturally, blinded further by God judicially, blinded further by Satan who has blinded the eyes of those who don't believe.

And then Romans 1 says this is the reason that when we know God we don't honor Him as God and our foolish hearts are darkened. There are many other passages along that line. So the sinner is seen as a blind person...can't see, can't know the truth. That's why you can take the greatest scientists in the world, you can bring them together, let them fuss around forever trying to discuss origins or anything else for that matter that relates to the creator God, that relates to the supernatural dimension and they are utterly unable to come to the right answer...to say nothing of salvation. The natural man cannot solve the dilemma of his blindness spiritually on his own. John said, "Unbelievers hate the light," John 3:19 and 20, "because their deeds are evil and they love their evil deeds.

So what does the Messiah come to do? It says in verse 18, "To give sight to the blind." Isaiah 42:7, "To open blind eyes," as well as to bring out prisoners from the prison. John 8:12, Jesus says, "I am the light of the world, he who follows Me shall not walk in darkness but have the light of life." Second Corinthians 4:6 , "It is God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." When you...when you realize you're in blackness and darkness and you come to the Messiah, He gives light. "Once you were darkness," Ephesians 5:8 says, "now you are light in the Lord." Colossians 1:13, "He has delivered you from the power of darkness and taken you into the Kingdom of the Son of His love." The light shines in the heart of one who meets the Messiah.

In Acts 26 Paul gives his testimony, he said to the Lord on the road to Damascus, "Who are You, Lord? The Lord said, 'I am Jesus who you are persecuting. Arise, stand on your feet, for this purpose I have appeared to you...I love this...to appoint you a minister and a witness, not only to the things which you have seen but also to the things in which I will appear to you, delivering you from the Jewish people and from the Gentiles to whom I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to God in order that they may receive forgiveness of sins, an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by faith in Me.'" That's just one of the great passages of the Scripture.

So the Messiah has come to those that are spiritually bankrupt and know it, to those who are imprisoned and waiting death and execution and know it, to those who are blind spiritually and know it, and finally He comes to those who are called the downtrodden, or the oppressed. And again the word release is used here, set free it's translated, but it's athesis, again. It's used in a little different way, to free those that are oppressed. The oppression here is not the idea of a prisoner, it's not someone in chains in a dungeon, it's someone overwhelmed by the pain of life, overwhelmed by relationships that are abusive, overwhelmed by illness, overwhelmed by whatever kind of troubles life can bring to bear and there's a certainly an almost endless list of those things that I don't need to go over. This is the person who is so overwhelmed by life, this is the afflicted person, this is the distressed person who has lost all joy. This is a person to whom Jesus spoke when He said, "Come unto Me all you that...what?...labor and are heavy laden." This is the person who is overburdened. And by the way, to set free those that are downtrodden is drawn from Isaiah 58:6. And in that passage God complains against Israel for failing to be a source of deliverance for the oppressed, but the Messiah will do that. Messiah will loose the burden. Remember what Jesus said in that wonderful passage that I just quoted, "Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest," Jesus...that's in the end of Matthew 11, Jesus said, "Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, I'm gentle and humble in heart and you'll find rest for your souls, for My yoke is easy and My load is light."

One of the things a Messiah does is come to the person who is overwhelmed and oppressed. And what is that oppression? It is sin. It is sin. It is the burden of sin, the wearying burden of sin, the weight of the law being unable to keep the law. The Pharisees bound on the people all kinds of law, as Matthew 23 tells us, and they didn't help the people to carry it and the people were crushed under this absolutely wearying, heavy burden of trying to keep the law of God which they couldn't keep. And well beyond that, trying to keep the law of man as the Pharisees were inventing laws upon laws. Jesus will come, the Messiah will come, take the whole burden of sin, the whole burden of trying to keep the law off and give you rest...rest. And 1 John 5:3 says, "This is the love of God that we keep His commandments and His commandments are not a burden." They're not a burden.

To those who are spiritually bankrupt, to those who are in the dungeon of their own sinfulness awaiting final execution and hell, to those who are blind to truth and reality, to those who are oppressed by the heavy, heavy burden of sin and all the issues of life that come with it, the Messiah comes. He comes to poor prisoners blind and oppressed by sin and He comes to make them spiritually rich, to bring the forgiveness that sets them free from death and hell, to give them sight and to deliver them from all the issues of life that oppress them and give them rest. This is why this is the favorable year of the Lord, folks.

And when Jesus was speaking, by the way, this was already happening because He had already been preaching for many, many months. The poor had already received the good news. They were receiving it even as Jesus spoke and are still receiving it today, and you and I are among them. We are the poor who have been made rich spiritually. We are the captives who have been set free. We are the blind who now see. We are the oppressed who have been delivered. For all true believers it continues to be the acceptable year of the Lord, it isn't just a year, it's a lot longer than a year because we're still in it today.

Jesus stopped at that point. As I told you, He didn't read the rest of Isaiah 61:1 and 2, the rest of Isaiah 61:1 and 2 says, "And the day of vengeance of our God." He said, "To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord," and closed the book, verse 20 says. He didn't want to talk about vengeance, that's the next time He comes. The time of judgment is still future. While judgment is not future for us, it's only future in the sense that we face it at death, but the time of Messiah's great world judgment is future. For now, it is the age of salvation. Paul said it, "Today is the day of salvation." It's the time for the poor prisoners, blind and oppressed, to come to the Messiah and be forgiven and receive God's salvation. Let's pray.

Father, we thank You that the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has come to rescue us forever from our spiritual poverty, our spiritual prison, our spiritual blindness, our spiritual oppression. We thank You that He has come to give us riches, freedom, sight and deliverance. That's what He said to the people that day, and that's what He says to the people today. He's still the preacher, for it is His sermon that we have heard this morning. And may there be in this congregation some poor who cry out in recognition of their destitution, some prisoners who cry out in recognition of their doom, some blind who cry out in recognition of their darkness, and some oppressed who cry out in recognition of the seriousness of their distress as they bear the burden of sin and we know You will hear and You will save because that's why You sent Jesus Christ. Do that mighty work, we pray, for Your glory. Amen.

Jesus' Return to Nazareth: Rejection by the People

Jesus' Return to Nazareth:

Rejection by the People

I met this week with a very famous rabbi, a very gracious man, very intelligent, a historian, very serious-minded man who asked to meet with me because we shared something in common, and that is a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible.  And we both take God very seriously and take His Word seriously.  And it's true of this rabbi, a very gracious man, very knowledgeable man.  He cares about righteousness.  He cares about the honor and the glory of God and he's given his life to serve God.  I greatly enjoyed our time together and I believe we'll have more time in the future, and I look forward to that.

I was telling someone about my meeting with the rabbi and their comment was, "Why does he not believe in Jesus as Messiah and Savior?"  And the answer to that question obviously is a very important answer, the answer is that people who don't believe when they know the facts don't believe for one reason, it's always the same reason, it's never different, it's always the same.  When people know about Jesus Christ and they know the facts of Jesus Christ and they don't believe, there's only one reason why they don't believe.  Everybody who rejects Jesus Christ as Messiah and Savior rejects Him for the very same reason and what that reason is will become clear to you this morning by the words of Jesus in the text of our message.  Open your Bible to the fourth chapter of Luke.

This is one of those gripping and powerful portions of the Bible.  Jesus is the speaker and the teacher in this passage, as you know from our study last week.  His words captured the moment in a way that was shocking and they still grip us with their power and their force.  Let's go back to verse 16 in Luke 4 and pick up the scene where it really begins.

"Jesus came to Nazareth where He had been brought up, and was His custom He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath and stood up to read, and the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him and He opened the book and found the place where it was written, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor, He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.'  And He closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down.  And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon Him and He began to say to them, 'Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.'"

Imagine coming to church today expecting to hear me preaching and having the Lord Jesus Christ appear in person to tell you that He had come to fulfill all the prophecies of His Second Coming, all the prophecies of the glory of His Kingdom of salvation on earth.  Imagine that you had come this morning and Jesus was standing in the pulpit to tell you that the time was now for the fulfillment of all prophecies and it would begin with Him taking us to heaven in the glories of the Rapture to the homes that He has prepared for us there.

Well that's something like the Jews in the Nazareth synagogue experienced that day.  They had been all their lives to the synagogue, all their lives to that synagogue and they had heard reading after reading of the Torah, the law, and the Haftarah, the prophets, and sermon after sermon on Sabbath after Sabbath through millennia, if not centuries of years and they had heard many sermons about the Messiah and they had read many Scriptures about His coming. But all of a sudden on this Sabbath in the year 28, He was there.  All those many years they had gathered to hear the law and the prophets and the law and the prophets had all spoken of the Messiah.  They had come to the synagogue which, as Philo called it, was a house of instruction where the Scripture was read and explained.  Many, many times the text was messianic and many times the text was read and explained and their hearts were filled with the hope of the Messiah's arrival.  But on that day the Messiah Himself is the reader and He is the expositor, Messiah the Son of God Himself is the mafteer(?), to whom the chazan hands the haftarah.

It's true the reputation of Jesus had been growing, that's why they were so excited that He was going to speak in their synagogue.  Verses 14 and 15 tell him...tell us about Him, "The news had spread throughout all the surrounding district," and verse 15 says, "He was being praised by all," His reputation was gathering by the time He came to this synagogue in Nazareth where He launches His year and a half Galilean ministry.  He has already been ministering almost a year in the south, in Judea, with a few visits to Galilee.  So the word is beginning to grow about Him.  Here He comes to His own boyhood synagogue, and if, as historians tell us, the town of Nazareth had about 20,000 people, it would have had a lot of synagogues.  They were like local churches in towns today, there are many in a given town.  There were many synagogues and this was His boyhood synagogue with all the familiar faces there.  He would have gone into that synagogue and seen His aunts and His uncles, and His half-brothers and half-sisters, and His cousins and distant relatives and friends and neighbors.  They were all the familiar faces of His life there.

But this was a different day cause now He took the place of the Messiah and declared to them that He was the fulfillment of all messianic prophecy.  He was the long-awaited anointed one, He was the Savior of the world.  And so far the story has been positive.  All the way through these four chapters of Luke's gospel, everything has been very positive.  And, of course, as I read in verse 15, He was at this point being praised by all and even in verse 22 all were speaking well of Him.  The initial response to His speaking in the synagogue was positive.  Everything was going so well.  We've had four chapters.  We've had months and months and months well over a year in Luke already and everything has been so positive.  The tapestry of testimony from angels, from Gabriel, from the angels that gave testimony to the shepherds in the field, a rich testimony from godly men and women like Zacharias and Elizabeth and Joseph and Mary and Simeon and Anna and even the testimony of the prophet himself John the Baptist, and it's all been positive up to now.  There's just one little negative statement in all these chapters up to here, and that's in chapter 2 verse 34 and those searching words by Simeon, that old man in the temple, who said to Mary, "This child is appointed for the fall and rise of many in Israel and for a sign to be opposed and a sword will pierce even your own soul."  That was the only...that was the only negative in all these chapters that He was going to be opposed?  Messiah?  That He was going to cause people to fall as well as to rise?  That He was going to be the reason for a sword to penetrate the heart of sweet Mary, His mother.  Just that hint.  But that begins to come true in the text before us.  Let's follow the story.  Pick it up where we left off.

Verse 22, "And all were speaking well of Him and wondering at the gracious words which were falling from His lips and they were saying, 'Is this not Joseph's son?'  And He said to them, 'No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me, "Physician, heal thyself! Whatever we heard was done at Capernaum, do here in Your hometown as well."' And He said, 'Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his home town, but I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah when the sky was shut up for three years and six months when a great famine came over all the land, and yet Elijah was sent to none of them and only to Zarephath in the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow and there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed but only Naaman, the Syrian.'  And all I the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; and they rose up and cast Him out of the city, and led Him to the brow of the hill on which their city had been built, in order to throw Him down the cliff.  But passing through their midst, He went His way."

We're in shock, aren't we?  We haven't seen anything like this in all these chapters all these months.  What is happening?  What went wrong?  It all began so assuringly.  Jesus read Isaiah 61:1 and 2a, and then He explained, according to verse 21, that today this Scripture has been fulfilled, that is I am the Messiah, I am the fulfillment of all messianic promises.  And then He proceeded to exposit the passage, recited there in verses 18 and 19.  We know that He did that because in verse 21 it says, "He only began by saying, 'Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing," that was just how He started, then He gave the exposition of those passages and showed what they meant and how He fulfilled them.  All we have here is just a summation.  He was saying the Messiah was there in their midst and they were hearing Him speak.  And He told them He had come to fulfill messianic prophecy, He had come to bring the favorable year of the Lord, which means the era of salvation, today is the day of salvation as the apostle Paul put it in writing to the Corinthians, the day of salvation had come, it was there, it was fulfilled, He the Savior who would bring the salvation was standing in front of them and they were hearing His voice and looking at His face.  He was there.  And with Him came salvation to the poor, and the prisoners, and the blind, and the outcasts, the distressed, the oppressed, the downtrodden.

What did that sermon that He preach say?  Well, that's what I told you last week.  Salvation is available, it's available to those of you who confess your spiritual poverty, who confess your spiritual bondage, who confess your spiritual darkness, who confess your spiritual defeat.  Many times the preacher had stood up in the synagogue and said, "The blessed hour of the Messiah is to come."  Many times the preacher had said, "The people who are eyewitnesses of Messiah Himself will be greatly blessed."  Many times the preacher had said, "The eyes who honored to look at the sight of Messiah are of all eyes most blessed and the ears who are honored to hear His voice of all hears most blessed."  That was them.  They were the blessed, the blessed of all nations, the blessed of all generations, it was in this generation that He came and out of all that generation, the blessed of people because it was to them that He came, to that small little group in that small town in that small synagogue.  To them had come the Messiah of God, to them had come the Savior of the world with the message of salvation, a message of riches, a message of forgiveness, a message of eternal life, a message of release.  It was now present, it was now in their midst.  What a day...what a day.  No Sabbath ever began so wondrously and no Sabbath ever ended so tragically.

It's actually shocking, it rivets you to the page to understand how could this have happened?  How did it turn so badly?  How could Jesus let it happen?   At first His words settled well, look at verse 22, "All were speaking well of Him."  Oh that doesn't mean they believed in Him as the Messiah, it just means that the buzz was positive, just rippling through that packed synagogue.  It was positive.  They were speaking well of Him.  And what was behind that well speaking?  Well they were in awe of the gracious words which were falling from His lips.  I mean, there may have been some things that they were wondering about in His message.  I mean, they must have...some of them must have wondered why He stopped reading there in verse 19...why did He stop reading in the middle of Isaiah 61:2, "The favorable year of the Lord," and He stopped when the rest of the verse said, "And the day of vengeance of our God?"  Why did He leave the vengeance out?  Some of them probably were wondering about that.  Let me be very honest.  They were very eager for Messiah's coming...honestly, they were as eager for the Messiah to come and wreak vengeance on their Gentile enemies as they were for Him to come and bring salvation to Israel.  They hated their oppressors.  It must have bothered some of them that Jesus stopped there and didn't say anything about the day of vengeance, after all, had John the Baptist himself in his ministry about which they all knew, John the Baptist had said, "When the Messiah comes He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with...what?...fire, an unquenchable fire of judgment."  So even John had talked about that.

In fact, John himself was greatly perplexed because John the Baptist soon after the beginning of the ministry of Jesus was taken prisoner, he was put in prison by that pagan, wretched, wicked, vile man named Herod, John must have sat in prison and wondered when the Messiah was going to come and destroy Herod, when He was going to bring the vengeance of God on Herod, open the prison doors and let John out.  And when Jesus didn't do that, when, in fact, Jesus didn't take vengeance on any of the ungodly people, whether they were Romans or whether they were apostate Jews, when there was none of that going on at all, John became concerned and eventually so confused that he took his own disciples, got word to them, sent them to Jesus to ask Him if He was really the Messiah because he wanted to know if He's the Messiah, where's the vengeance.

But Christ had no intention of overturning the power of Herod.  He had no intention of kicking open the prison doors, of wreaking havoc and divine vengeance on the ungodly.  This was the time for the age of salvation.  The day of vengeance will come after the day of salvation.

And maybe there were some in the synagogue who were wondering why He didn't read that and comment on it.  He didn't, because that was future.  The day of salvation was present.  He wasn't there for vengeance on anyone, He was there for salvation.  And through His whole life He didn't express vengeance.  He was there for salvation for anyone and everyone who recognized that they were poor, prisoners, blind and oppressed.

But more than wondering about that, that might have been a minor thing, they were really struck it says in verse 22 by the gracious words which were falling from His lips.  Listen.  Powerful orators have always been able to captivate people.  Great speakers making great speeches have always won over the minds and hearts of their hearers.  Let me put it to you simply.  They just heard the greatest speaker who ever lived.  There was never a preacher like Him.  There was never an orator like Him.  The words that fell from His lips were like words they had never heard from anyone ever.  They were stunned by His ability to speak, and amazingly they hadn't heard Him speak and He had grown up in their midst.  He had never taught, He never preached and when He did, they were in awe.  He was the greatest preacher who ever opened His mouth, impeccable understanding of truth He possessed, pure and holy passion for that truth, flawless reasoning, accurate interpretation, unmatched dexterity with the language.  They had never heard anything like it.  They were literally stunned by it.  They were astonished by it.  And they were saying repeatedly, "Is this not Joseph's son?"  Familiarity breeds its normal contempt.  They couldn't equivocate on the majesty of His oratory.  They couldn't equivocate on the masterful way in which He had communicated the message unlike anything they had ever, ever heard, not even close to anything they had ever heard.  They knew that this was speech like there had never been.  And what they couldn't understand was that they knew Him and this was just Joseph's son, or so they thought.  They didn't even take into consideration that the Father out of heaven had said, "This is My beloved Son."

They never got over this, by the way.  They never did.  They never did.  At the end of His year and a half ministry in Galilee, Jesus came back again to the synagogue in Nazareth and again they said, "This is Joseph's son and we know His mother and we know His sisters and we know His brothers, this can't be the Messiah."  And He grew up and He didn't do any miracles and He didn't make any such claims and He didn't do any speaking and how could He now be the Messiah?  They just couldn't get it.

At this point they are in awe of His communication ability.  And they are stirred, believe me, because they heard the truth presented as clearly as it could ever be presented.  They understand exactly what He said and, believe me, they understand what He meant by what He said because He spoke so perfectly clear.  And you know what the message to them was?  Salvation is available for the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed.  And they're the only ones who will be saved.  They got the message.  If they wanted salvation, they had to confess their spiritual destitution, their spiritual poverty, their spiritual blindness, their spiritual bondage, their spiritual oppression.

They weren't about to do that, are you kidding me?  That is the last thing they were about to do.  They were righteous.  They were noble.  They worshiped the true and living God.  They went to the synagogue. They gave their tithes.  They fasted.  They were like that Luke 18 Pharisee.  They were the people of God.  They were like Paul, and I read it in Philippians 3, they were circumcised and they had their tribal pedigree and they were of the people of Israel and they were traditionalists and they were ceremonialists and they were zealous for the law and they kept the law as blamelessly as they could. They aren't the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed, that's got to be somebody else, the Gentiles.

And so, in self-defense they begin to think...the problem is not us, we just can't buy this message, how do we know He's the Messiah?  And they just put up a wall.  We don't know that He's the Messiah.  And so Jesus reads their minds, that's what He did.  That's not a problem for Him.  Back in John 2 when He was in Judea it says that the people came to Him but He didn't commit Himself to them, John 2:24, because He knew what was in them.  Omniscience, He read their minds.  And so He says to them in verse 23, "No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me, 'Physician, heal yourself!  Whatever we heard was done at Capernaum, do here in your home town as well.'"

You see what they were doing?  He knew, He read their minds.  "I know what you're thinking," He said.  You're saying, "We don't have any proof.  The problem is, we don't have any proof.  If You want us to believe in You, then, Physician, heal yourself.  Don't You come tell us You're the doctor if we...if we don't have some proof."

So, that's what they want.  You know, words of salvation were offered to them, forgiveness, good news, release, light, sight, but they had to be willing to admit they were the poor prisoners blind and oppressed.  That is absolutely unthinkable...unthinkable.  No such confession is ever going to rise out of their hearts, their hard hearts are filled with pride and self-righteousness and religiosity. They would never accept the fact that they were the poor prisoners blind and oppressed.  And Jesus knew that because Jesus knew their hearts.  He knew that.

And you know what?  It was never a question of miracles.  It's never a question of miracles ever because miracles don't prove anything about that.  If Jesus did a miracle, does that prove that He could...listen carefully...save sinners?  If Jesus did a miracle, is that proof that He can transfer people from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light?  If He does a miracle, does that prove that He can save your soul from hell?  If He does a miracle, does that prove that He can give you eternal life and take you to heaven?  No.  It doesn't prove that.  You can take all the miracle workers, all the so-called miracle workers, all the demonic miracle workers from Jannes and Jambres and the Egyptian magicians, all the way down to Simon Magus in the New Testament, you can take all the oracles of Delphi and all the historical supposed black magicians and white magicians and bring them all together, you can take all the white hocus-pocus faith healers and TV evangelists, line them all up, have them do their whole gig of miracles and when they're all done with all their miracles whether they're true or false, they do not prove that Jesus Christ can save someone from hell.

And that's...that's...that was not the real issue with these people because they don't even question that Jesus can do miracles, all they want Him to do is to do in Nazareth what was done in Capernaum, twenty miles away.  The word had come back of what He had done there.  They didn't question that.  They had reliable eye-witness accounts of what Jesus had done when He was there during that first year of ministry, He spent some time there.  We don't know how many visits He made, we know of one in particular that is indicated in the second chapter of John, we also know in John 1 He was there to call some of His disciples.  But He had done some miracles there as well as the miracle of the wedding at Cana when He made some wine out of nothing.  And there were other miracles that occurred in Judea that must have been well-known to the Galileans who are often down there for Passover and other feasts.  So the cumulated information about the miracles was growing and growing and nobody ever questioned that.

Let me tell you something as you study the New Testament.  Never does the Jewish population or the Jewish leaders question Jesus' miracles, never.  They never question them.  In John 11:47 the Pharisees, the Chief Priests said, "This man is doing miracles." They never questioned that.  That was not a question in their minds.  This is not an honest question...Please, we would like to believe in You, prove You're Messiah...we would like to believe that You can take the spiritually poor and make them rich, the spiritually bound and make them free, the spiritually blind and make them see, the spiritually oppressed and fearful and deliver them, we'd like to believe that, could You please spin up in the air and do a cartwheel or two in space and come back down?  That doesn't prove anything.

They knew He did miracles, they even say it.  "Whatever we heard was done at Capernaum, do here in Your home town as well."  They're not questioning that He did them, they know He did them.  They're saying..."Do them here."  There was not an honest issue of evidence.  They were unsympathetic to His message which was that if you want to have salvation, you've got to see your spiritual bankruptcy, and your spiritual destitution and the true condition of your heart.  They were unsympathetic to that, they were too proud, too self-righteous, they were too skeptical because they were in a self-defense mode.  And so Jesus says, "I know exactly what you're saying, in your mind you're saying...Physician, heal yourself?"  This was a proverb that was well known, it's actually the Greek word parabolewhich means parable, but parabolehas a broad meaning, it could include a proverb or an axiom, and it's a fair axiom.  I mean, it's a normal thing.  If you're going to trust somebody to be a physician, you want some proof that he can...he can heal.  And so that's what they say.  It's a way of saying...prove your claims before we're going to believe on You, before we're going to believe that You're the Messiah, You better do some miracles here like You did down there in Capernaum.  And there may have been a little bit of town rivalry going on as well, Capernaum was only 20 miles away.  And what they're saying is...You know, it's not our fault that we don't believe, Jesus, it's Your fault, it's all in Your control, it's Your fault if we don't believe, You just haven't done enough here to prove this, we just need more evidence.

I have to say as a footnote here, all of this supposed miracle-working stuff that these modern-day supposed healers do has absolutely no bearing on the gospel.  I don't know what they think they're accomplishing by falsifying miracles as if falsifying miracles somehow is going to cause people to believe in Jesus Christ.  It isn't, it doesn't, it didn't.  Jesus banished disease from the whole land of Palestine and they put Him on a cross.  It doesn't.

What it does do is affirm the faith of those who believe, but it does nothing for those who don't because no miracles can prove that Jesus can save the sinner from hell.  They don't want the salvation He offers if the terms are to admit that you are the poor and you're the prisoners and you're the blind and you're the oppressed.  He says, "You want Me to do what was over there, but that's not because you really care to have proof, this is your way of self-justification."  You're saying, "Well, why should we believe Him, after all, we don't have any proof that He's the Messiah."  They had plenty.  They could have proven that He was the Messiah in an instant.  They chose not to.  They chose to throw up a smoke screen in their minds and Jesus read their minds.

In verse 24 He says, "Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his home town."  Amen is what the word is in the Greek, I solemnly assure you.  It's an idiom for "I'm telling you the truth, this is really true, no prophet is welcome in his home town, no prophet is dektos, accepted in his home town."  All experts are from out of town, aren't they?  It's more of that "Familiarity breeds contempt."  You know, there's a bit of a concession here, I think Jesus is making a bit of a concession.  He's saying to them, "I can see that it's hard for you to get pass the fact that I'm a local guy, that I grew up here and that I am Joseph's son and Mary's boy and that this is my synagogue and you saw me here all those years of my life.  I understand that."  There's a bit of a concession there.  And I think there's a bit of...there's a bit of mercy in that in Jesus' case.  I understand that no prophet is welcome in his home town, that, by the way, is a phrase He repeated a year and a half later when He came back again to that synagogue, He says the same thing as recorded in Matthew 13:57 and Mark 6:4.  He also used it as recorded in John 4:44.  So there were a number of times when He referred to this.

And as I said, it is a concession.  I understand that humanly speaking that that's a factor, I understand that...human nature.  But at this point, He makes a brilliant transition, and, folks, I want you to listen carefully.  What you're about to hear is profound.  He makes a transition.  Speaking of unwelcome prophets, speaking of a prophet not welcome, let me talk to you, verse 25, about Elijah, verse 27, let me talk to you about Elisha.  Two prophets in Israel unwelcomed, hated, rejected, refused by the people.  Speaking of prophets that were unwelcome, I remind you of Elijah and Elisha.  Let's see what He says, verse 25.

"And I say to you in truth," very much like the prior statement in verse 24, "Truly I say to you."  These are statements indicating great importance.  "I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah."  Let me tell you about the days of Elijah for a minute.  They all knew Elijah, the great prophet of Israel.  They all knew him.  And in his day, his ministry around 850 B.C. there were many widows.  Sure death was frequent, men died in wars.  There were many widows.  And in the days of Elijah there were not only many widows, but there was Baal worship everywhere because the king was a man named Ahab.  Remember him?  He had married a woman named Jezebel.  Jezebel was a Gentile.  Jezebel was a Gentile Baal worshiper.  Ahab became a Baal worshiper, a worshiper of Baal, his wife led that.  The whole of Israel became idolatrous, started worshiping Baal.  Ahab was so bad, 1 Kings 16 says, "He did more to anger God than all the kings of Israel before him."  He was a wretched, wicked king who worshiped Baal.  His wife worshiped Baal.  He led all of Israel to worship Baal.  So here's Elijah, he's in the midst of this.  The whole nation is worshiping Baal.  There are many widows.

Elijah comes on the scene in 1 Kings 17.  He just drops out of nowhere.  And the first thing that he does is he announces a drought.  Jesus said here in verse 25 that the sky was shut up for three and...three years and six months.  It doesn't say that in 1 Kings, it does say that here and it says it in James 5:17, it refers to the same occasion, so we know it was a three and a half year drought.  No rain in Israel for three and a half years.  The result, the end of verse 25, "When a great famine came over all the land."  You've got a lot of widows in the land.  Now God cares about widows.  There's all kinds of instruction in the Old Testament to take care of widows.  Exodus 22, Deuteronomy 10, through the Psalms, Isaiah 1, many, many places and God has a special heart for widows.  God in Psalm 68:5 is called "The God who is the defender of widows."  Psalm 146:9, "God, the Lord who relieves widows."  And He instructed the people to care for the widows and that was a very important part of living out godly righteous life.  Even in the New Testament, the New Testament enjoins upon Christians to take care of widows because they are of particular care in the mind of God.  So God cared for widows.  So it's a time in Israel, apostate, they're worshiping Baal, they've turned from the true God, the true and living God, they're worshiping false gods.  There are many widows.  God sends a judgment on Ahab, a judgment on Israel and it's a three and a half year drought.  Now a three and a half year drought produces a famine, people start to die.  The people who are at the bottom of the food chain are the widows because they're charity cases.  The people dependent on charity suffer the worst because the people who give to charity only have enough to survive.  So the people at the end of the food chain get nothing, so widows are on the brink of death.  Widows are dying, the special care of God are these widows, not enough food to feed your own children let alone to give it away to some widow.  That is the situation.  That is a judgment of God.  First Kings 17, that judgment comes through Elijah, he drops on the scene out of nowhere and he announces this judgment.  The judgment comes and it is a judgment on the idolatry, the Baal worship of Ahab and the people of Israel.

Now it says, verse 26, "And Elijah was sent to none of them."  You know, the Jews didn't like this story, I can tell you, and as Jesus starts to tell it, they start to get angry.  Why is He bringing that ugly story up?  God, the God of the fatherless and the widow, God, the God who cares about the widows, there was a famine in the land for three and a half years and the people were dying and the widows were dying and God never cared for any of the widows.  We don't like that story at all.  They were familiar, believe me, with 1 Kings 17, very familiar with it.  And if you think that was bad, that Elijah was sent to none of those Jewish widows, this was worse.  He was sent to Zarephath in the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow there.  Now this is worse.  Why?  This woman in the land of Sidon...hang on...is a Gentile.  It's bad enough to be a woman in Jewish tradition at this time, it's far worse to be a Gentile woman.  But to come from Sidon, that is unthinkable.  How could God ignore the Jews of Israel?  But then how could He possibly send His prophet to go minister to a Gentile widow in, of all places, Sidon?  Sidon was Gentile territory on the north coast of Israel, Tyre and Sidon, the two familiar cities.  Tyre and Sidon in that Gentile region, Zarephath was a town in between the two, Tyre and Sidon, a Phoenician city.  The area was the home...this is even more amazing...the area was the home of the father of Jezebel.  You know what his name was?  Ethbaal, he was so devoted to Baal He named himself after Baal.  Ethbaal means "Baal is alive."  And Ethbaal was such a wicked man he murdered his predecessor and he was a priest as well as being a king, he was the king of Phoenicia, Tyre and Sidon, he was the king, he was a Baal-worshiping king, he was also a priest in the temple of Melcarte(?)and Astarte, two of the deities in the pantheon of Baal worship.  This is the most wretched thing imaginable.  This is the father of the apostasy...the apostasy, in a sense, in Israel because he's the father of Jezebel who came and polluted Israel worship when she married Ahab, and so forth.  And so here God sends His prophet to a woman from the home region of Jezebel, a Gentile widow.  That famine...that area, by the way, was also affected by the famine.  Food supply was low.  Well, if you go back to 1 Kings 17, I don't have time, you're going to hang with me now, another few minutes, because we can't break this off, I'm not going to get to speak to you for a while, we've got to cover this, this is so powerful.

God sends Elijah in the midst of all this famine over to Zarephath to this widow.  So if you look at 1 Kings 17 you see the story.  God sends Elijah in this midst of all this famine over to Zarephath, to this widow.  This is a widow who believes in the true God.  The text of 1 Kings 17 indicates that.  She says, "The Lord God of Israel lives."  She gives testimony.  Somebody had witnessed to her about the true God of Israel and she trusted in the true God of Israel.  She is a pagan Gentile widow in the midst of a pagan godless area but believes in the true and living God.  And so to her goes the prophet of God rather than to Israelites.  Her food supply was down to one little bit of flour and one little bit of oil, enough to make one cake, right?  One scone, if you will, one biscuit.  And the prophet comes to her and you can read the story in 1 Kings 17, I wish we had time to do it, we don't.  And he says to her, first of all, "Can you get me some water?"  And then he says when she's going to get the water, "Can you also take what you have left and make me a meal?"  Huh....this is a stranger, she's never met this guy in her entire life, he walks in and says, "Take what you've got, that's all you've got and make me a meal, I am the man of God, I am from the God of Israel." She knows the God of Israel lives, she says it, "The Lord God of Israel lives."  Well, I'm from the God of Israel and I'm going to ask you, if you will, to take all that you have left, your last meal before you die, starve to death, and she had a son as well, and give it to me.

Now, you know, if she had been in the synagogue at Nazareth, she would have probably said, "Oh no, no, no.  Aha, not on your life.  How do I know you're a man of God?  How do I know whether you're going to take that one thing and you're going to do with that one thing something that's going to provide for me all the rest of my life?  How do I know that I can trust you?  Could you please fly up in the air and spin around, could you do a few healings?  Could you do some magic somewhere, I need to see something so that I can believe?"

That wouldn't have proved anything if he had spun up in the air and done some amazing things, if he had done some healings or whatever, it wouldn't have proved anything.  The only way she would ever know whether God would supply all she ever needed was to take the little that she had and trusted it to him.  She figured that out, by the way, she wasn't in the synagogue in Nazareth and it was probably a good thing or she might have been influenced by the crowd attitude.  She probably thought like this, "Well, I only have one little cup left, one little bit of oil, that's all I've got.  If I give it to him and he is a man of God, then I'll have life.  And if he's not, I'll just have one less meal and die half a day sooner.  I'm going to die anyway, what have I got to lose?"  Pretty good thinking, isn't it?  "All I've got is one meal left.  I'm destitute.  I'm desperate.  I'm in poverty.  I don't know where to turn.  If I don't trust the God of Israel who lives, if I don't trust the man of God, I'm dead anyway, what's half a day longer?  But if he is the man of God, and if God did send him, then I have life."  The only way she would ever know was not if he went up in the air and spun around a few times, not if he went out and healed some people, the only way she would ever know that the God of Israel would give her all she would ever need was if she took what she had in her poverty and trusted him with it.  She did.

And you remember the story?  She made the little cake, the prophet ate it and the next thing that happened was her barrel was never empty.  Remember that?  It just was supernaturally filled all the time.  And the cruel of oil was never empty, it just kept getting filled and filled and filled.  That's an analogy of spiritual life and supply.  She took the little that she had, she gave it to the man of God and in return she got life, permanent life.  And then...and then the Lord did another amazing thing.  Her son got sick and died, remember?  And he raised her son from the dead just because she trusted the tiny bit that she had.  She knew that she was the poor, the prisoner, blind and the oppressed.  And Jesus was saying to those Jews, "Let me tell you something, you may be Jews, you may be part of Israel, you may be the people of the covenants and the people of the Messiah, but I'll tell you this, God will save an outcast Gentile widow who admits her spiritual destitution before He'll save you."

Let me tell you this, folks.  There's only one reason why people who know the gospel don't accept Christ.  It is because they do not see themselves as the poor, the blind, the prisoners and the oppressed.  Do you see it?  That's always the problem.  It's always the problem.

She knew her condition.  She knew her condition.  Salvation has always been that way, folks.  It's always been that God will save Jew or Gentile when they come to a point of spiritual destitution and they know it.  And she would only know if that was the man of God if she trusted him.

Now listen to this very carefully.  You know how the Jews in the synagogue that day that they could have known that Jesus was Messiah?  Oh they said, "Do some things like You did down there.  Heal some people, do some, you know..."  No that wasn't...  You know how they could have known if Jesus was the Messiah?  Very simple, admit their sin, ask Him to save them and see if He did it, right?  That's the issue.  You want to know whether Jesus can save you from hell?  Ask Him.  Give Him your life, that's the only way you'll ever know.  You can see all the miracles under the sun, false miracles or whatever, you can see the whole parade of stuff, it's not going to convince you.  There's only one way to know that Jesus can save your soul from hell and change your life and send you to eternal heaven with all your sins forgiven and that is to take your meager little wicked life and hand it over to Him and see what He does with it.

And Jesus wasn't finished. They didn't like this at all.  They're getting angrier by the moment.  They don't even like the fact that He's telling these stories.  Verse 27, "There were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha, the prophet."  Elisha followed Elijah and that was a time, 850 to 790 B.C., disease was a major problem.  Leprosy is a sort of a categorical word.  It's a broad term.  It identifies various ancient skin diseases, everything from superficial diseases to serious diseases.  It may also include what is today called leprosy, but really by that most people mean Hansen's disease, but it included all kinds of diseases of the skin described in Leviticus 13.  They tended to be disfiguring diseases, usually contagious diseases. They made the victim unclean, cut off from all fellowship, all social activity, cut off from the families and isolated because of the Contagem that was believed to be a part of these diseases, and Israel had many, many such people with these diseases, many of them.  It was in the time of Elisha, and they didn't like Elisha, he didn't have any honor in his own...in his own country anymore than Elijah did.  The people were still worshiping Baal, they were still turning their backs on the true and living God and along came leprosies  everywhere and in verse 27, "There were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet and none of them was cleansed but only Naaman the Syrian."  Oh, man, did they hate this story.

Now what's wrong with Naaman?  Naaman was a commander-in-chief of a section known as Aram.  He was a soldier.  He was a...he was a big-time soldier.  He commanded a set of troops that were always raiding Israel.  They would come across the border and they would fight and they would terrorize and raid Israel and they would take prisoners and haul the prisoners back to Syria.  He was a Gentile.  He was a Gentile and worse than that, he was a leper, he had leprosy, he was unclean, he was despicable on every count.  On one of his raids he took captive, this is in the stories in 2 Kings 5 the first fourteen verses, you can read it yourself, he took back this girl, one of his captives and she became a servant in his house to help his wife.  She had a great attitude, she knew about his leprosy and she said to him, "You need to go find the man of God, Elisha, because God can heal you."  And you know what happened?  He began to believe in the power of the God of Israel and so eventually through some situations, I won't go into all of it, he wound up meeting Elisha.  Here is an enemy, a Gentile, somebody who has sacked and attacked and killed and plundered Israel and he's a leper...this is the outcast of all outcasts.  And Elisha says to him, "The God of Israel is willing to heal you, all you have to do is go over to the river and go down seven times."  One preacher titled a sermon on this, "Seven ducks in a dirty pond," and that's essentially...that's essentially what he told him to do. Go over there in this dirty river and just duck yourself seven times.  And he said..."I'll..." he was furious, he was a man of honor and a man of stature and a man of dignity and a man of nobility and he isn't going to humble himself in some kind of humiliating deal and go dump himself down seven times in some dirty river.  He even says, "We have clean rivers in my area, I'm not going in your dirty river."

So he goes back and his servant says, "Well, better a dirty river and a clean Naaman, huh?"  And he starts to think about it and he had second thoughts.  And he realizes his desperation and he realizes there's no relief and there's no cure and there's no healing and there's nothing except the God of Israel.  Is the man of God really the man of God?  Is God really truly God?  Is this really His prophet?  How will I ever know that?  How am I going to know that that's true unless I do what He says?  I have to take my desperation, my destitution, my disease, I have to go over there, I have to do what the man tells me to do.  If I do what the man tells me to do, then I'll know whether he's the man of God, right?

So he goes over there and he does his seven ducks in a dirty river and guess what?  Clean!  Oh boy, you're sitting in the synagogue, you're saying, "This is not going well.  So we are worse than a Gentile widow from Jezebel's home town.  We are worse than a Syrian Gentile leper.  This is intolerable."

In verse 28, "All in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things."  Let me tell you something, there's nothing worse than spiritual pride, is there?  You know, the Lord had said, "You know, I come to save, this is it.  But I can only save the poor, and the prisoners and the blind and the oppressed. That's all I can save and it doesn't matter whether they are a Gentile woman or if they're a Syrian leper, it doesn't matter who it is, it just matters that they see their bankruptcy, their destitution, and they come to Me like the man who said, 'Lord, I believe, but could You help my unbelief?'  And they may not know everything there is to know and their faith may not be full, but if they'll just come in their desperation and say, 'I don't have a choice, here's all I have and see what I can do with it.'  Then they'll know that I'm the Messiah, right?"

You didn't know either and neither did I until I gave Him my life.  Then I knew.  And you could have paraded before me an infinite number of miracles, they wouldn't have proved anything.  You will never know whether Jesus can save your soul from hell, give you new life, recreate your soul, plant His Holy Spirit there, forgive your sin and send you to heaven until you give your life to Him.

All they could think about was that they were below Gentiles.  They didn't even want these stories to be rehearsed again, they didn't like these stories.  And they're so angry with Him because He's insistent on the fact that unless they humble themselves like a Syrian leper, unless they see themselves as no better than a Syrian leper, no better than a pagan Gentile woman, unless they see themselves as no better than outcasts, they aren't going to get saved.  And that is absolutely intolerable to them, to go to someone who is a life-long Jew, a life-long attender of the synagogue, a serious devout Jew and say, "You're no better off than a pagan, you're no better off than an outcast Gentile leper," is unthinkable because they're so committed to the self-righteousness that's a part of a work system.

And so, it says in verse 29, "They rose up," all of a sudden bedlam broke loose in the crowded synagogue.  They cast Him out of the city.  They grabbed Him and in mob violence like a lynch mob, they roared out of the city, led Him to the brow of the hill in which their city had been built, Nazareth sits on a hill, many hills on the hill but it's up a slope...we don't know what brow of it, they found a place, a brow of a hill in which the city had been built in order to throw Him down the cliff.  Deuteronomy 13 said that if you have a false prophet, you can do that, kill him.  They were so entrenched in their self-righteousness, so unwilling to see their sin that when Jesus, the Messiah they had waited for for so long, the Savior of the world came, they tried to kill Him because He threatened their self-righteousness.  There's only one reason why people who know the truth of Jesus don't believe, it is because they do not see themselves as the poor, prisoners, blind and oppressed.  You see that?  Because you can't be saved if you don't.  God offers nothing to people who are content with their own condition, except judgment.

In their minds they were the respectable.  They were the godly, the chosen, the true worshipers, the legalists, the ceremonialists, the covenantalists.  These other people were wretched, destitute outcasts, they couldn't see themselves as spiritual lepers.  They refused to admit it and they were His relatives and His friends and His neighbors.  How could you...they were His relatives and His friends and His neighbors?  Yeah, and they tried to kill Him.  They hated that message so violently because they would not be humiliated.  You can't get saved unless you're willing to be humiliated and realize your sinful condition.  Again I say, take all the healers, line them up, let them heal all the sick, that doesn't prove that Jesus can forgive sin, just give your life to Him, He'll prove He can.

They tried to kill Him but it wasn't His time.  Verse 30, instant calm, "But passing through their midst He went His way."  We don't know how that happened.  Some miraculous way He just.....was gone.  If they wanted proof, all they needed to do was ask Him to save them from their sins, but they had to admit their sins and they wouldn't.

How about you?  Those are the only people He can save.  Let's pray.

Father, this is such a powerful, powerful statement of the mission of the Messiah to save sinners.  May He in grace save many sinners even today. We pray in His name.  Amen.