Today on Renewing Your Mind… A proclamation that would lead to God's people being freed from the yoke of slavery to sin. On this, the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, we have been making our way through the Gospel of Luke in a sermon series by Dr. R.C.
Sproul. Today, R.C. focuses on chapter 4, where we discover that Jesus is in the synagogue and reading from the book of Isaiah. He concludes the reading with a rather startling declaration. Immediately after Jesus' temptation in the wilderness, Luke tells us that He returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, and news of Him spread through all the surrounding region, and He taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all. Now, this brief statement is a transitional statement that goes between the conclusion of the temptation and the beginning of the recitation of the event that took place in the synagogue at Nazareth.
We don't know how much time actually took place between the temptation and His appearance at Nazareth. We don't know where His travels took Him, but looking at the rest of the Gospels, it makes it clear that there was a considerable period of time of Jesus' ministry that took place between His temptation and His appearance at Nazareth, perhaps as much as a full year. But obviously, in Luke's arrangement of the material that he is presenting of the life of Jesus, he wants to focus our attention on this event that took place in Nazareth because in this incident, we see clearly the agenda, the mission of Jesus. We see it in the light of the Old Testament teaching of the coming Messiah. And obviously, the mission of Jesus was the mission of the Messiah.
And conversely, the mission of the Messiah was indeed the mission of Jesus because Jesus was the promised Messiah of Israel. And so we read that He came to Nazareth where He had been brought up, and as His custom was He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and He stood up to read. He appears here as a guest, as a visiting rabbi as it were, and it was the custom in the synagogue to allow a visiting rabbi to give the meditation or the exposition of the Word of God by way of the sermon. And so first Jesus stands up in order that He may read the text of the day. Every week at the synagogue, the custom was to read a portion of the Torah, a portion from the Law, and then another reading from the prophets. And this day, the prophet that was to be read was the prophet Isaiah. And so Jesus stood up and was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah, and when He opened the book He found the place where it was written. Now the place from which Jesus reads is from Isaiah chapter 61, which in all of the over 2,000 prophecies in the Old Testament that point to the coming Redeemer and the Messiah, perhaps there is none more important than this prophecy from Isaiah. It is included in Isaiah's book in which he describes the mission of the servant of God that culminates or at least had been explained earlier in chapter 53 of the mission of the servant of the Lord to be the sin-bearer of the people, to be the Savior of the people.
But this servant is not only to be the Savior of the people by bearing their sins, but He's supposed to be their Lord and their conqueror who will bring two things ultimately, salvation and judgment, the redemption of God and His wrath. And so in that critical passage in Isaiah, Jesus reads it to those who are assembled in the synagogue, and it begins with these words, I'd like to spend a few moments on that introductory statement from the prophet Isaiah and begin by saying that obviously one of the greatest mysteries that we encounter at the very heart of the Christian faith is the mystery of the Trinity. And contained within the mystery of the Trinity is the profound mystery of the incarnation where we find that in the incarnation of God, the incarnation of the logos of which John speaks, the second person of the Trinity who takes upon Himself a human nature so that the person Jesus has two natures, a divine nature and a human nature. In the incarnation, we have the second person of the Trinity perfectly united with the human nature of Jesus. And when we look at the earthly ministry of Jesus, we have to ask this question, by what power was He able to perform the marvelous miracles that the New Testament records? Were the miracles that Jesus performed a manifestation of His divine nature? That is, were these works empowered by the second person of the Trinity working through the human Jesus?
Or was it the human nature of Jesus endowed by the power of the Holy Ghost that rested upon Him able to perform these miracles? Now you may think that that's an insignificant question. Maybe it's a question you never even thought about. I have to confess it's one I never stop thinking about. I've seen so much confusion about the mystery of the incarnation where classical liberalism so denies the deity of Jesus that they allow the human nature of Christ to swallow up His deity. And on the other side of the aisle, evangelicals that are so zealous to proclaim the deity of Jesus Christ will often so strongly affirm His deity that they end up allowing the deity to swallow up the humanity so there's nothing human left of Jesus. We see it in the hymnody that sings about God's dying on the cross.
I say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. God can't die. God is eternal, self-existent, immutable, and I've told you before that if God died, so would Jerusalem, so would Jesus, so would the soldiers, so would the whole universe vanish because it is only through the power of the living God that anything else exists in the universe or continues to exist. God can't die. So whatever else happened in the drama of the cross, it wasn't the divine nature that died, but it was the God-man who died. And the divine nature was certainly united to the human nature when the human nature expired on the cross.
We know that. But again, what about the miracles? We find other men in the Bible who perform miracles beside Jesus. You see it in Moses. You see it in Elijah. You see it in Elisha.
You see it in the apostles of the New Testament. Moses didn't have a divine nature. Elijah didn't have a divine nature.
Elijah didn't have a divine nature, and the apostles didn't have divine nature. So by what power did these men perform their miracles? Well, I think the Bible makes it clear by what power they did it. They did it by the power of the Holy Ghost, the power of the third person of the Trinity, who though He is distinguished from the Father and the Son cannot be separated as they are all one in being and in essence. But I think it's important that the ministry of Jesus on this earth takes place after He's anointed by the Holy Ghost.
So I think it's safe to assume that even God incarnate was performing these mighty works through the power of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost. Remember that the name Christ is simply the Greek translation of the Old Testament word for Messiah and means literally the anointed one. And He's anointed by the power of the sovereign God. So when Jesus comes into the synagogue and reads this text that promised a future Messiah who would come and minister in the power of the sovereign God being anointed by God Himself. And again, to be anointed meant two different things. On the one hand, one could be anointed by the Holy Spirit in the sense being set apart or consecrated for a sacred vocation. Kings were anointed.
They were set apart. Prophets were all anointed, set apart just as we ordain ministers and elders today in the church. It's an act of consecration. But when Isaiah speaks about the anointing of the Messiah, he's not simply speaking about the Messiah as being set apart and consecrated, but rather that He's being charismatically endowed with power.
Now the first manifestation of that power is here in the text. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me first of all to do what? To preach the gospel to the poor. So the thing that this tells us is that the Messiah would be and Jesus was anointed by the Holy Ghost to preach, the most anointed preacher that ever walked the face of the earth, the one who had the greatest unction, whose preaching was so powerful that thousands of people could be converted in a single sermon, was Jesus of Nazareth, who had the full unction promised to the Messiah. And He was anointed to preach the gospel to the poor, not just to the physically poor as we see in His teaching on the Beatitudes, but those who were poor in spirit, those who are numbered among the brokenhearted, those who are poverty-stricken spiritually.
You can be persons of great wealth and still be spiritually impoverished, people who desperately need to hear the preaching of the gospel. And anytime the Lord Jesus preached that gospel, when the Holy Spirit quickened those words, everyone who heard Him knew immediately of their poverty-stricken spiritual condition until they were awakened by the power of the preaching of Jesus and the accompanying ministry of the Holy Ghost. He was anointed to be sent to heal the brokenhearted.
And so Jesus reads the prophecy of Isaiah. He's anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives. This in the appearance of Jesus was really the greatest manumission, the greatest emancipation, proclamation in the history of the world because He came not only to proclaim liberty to those who were enslaved and enchained, but those who were held captive by Satan himself, those who were in bondage to sin, slaves to the power of evil.
Jesus came to set them free. He came to proclaim liberty to all of us who by nature are enslaved to the impulses of sin. He came to give the recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, the year of Jubilee, the time when all debts are canceled. And that cyclical experience in the history of Israel was only foreshadowing the ultimate work of the Messiah, who would cancel the debts of all of His people permanently.
The Messiah says, I am anointed to do all of these things. And so after Jesus read this brief summary that Isaiah gives of the mission and the agenda of the Lord's Messiah, Jesus handed the scroll back to the attendant, and He sat down. Now sometimes when you visualize that, you think of the synagogue where you're having the time for the reading of the scroll, and this man comes out of the congregation. He comes up and the attendant hands him the scroll, and he stands there and reads the scroll. And when he's finished, he gives the scroll back to the attendant and goes back to his seat.
No, no, no. When he sat down, that was the signal for the beginning of the sermon, because in the synagogues the preacher sat on a chair or a bench, and the rest of the people sat on the floor at his feet. So we get that idea of sitting at the feet of a great teacher, of a great preacher. But in any case, Jesus sat down, and that was the signal now for Him to give His exposition, His explanation of the meaning of this text that He has just read. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him.
What is He going to say? We know this man. We watched Him grow up here in Nazareth, and He's been gone for a while. He's been living in Capernaum, and we have heard all the rumors, all the stories of this incredible ministry that He's performed, doing miracles and healings, and speaking to multitudes all throughout the land and especially here in Galilee. But He hasn't come home. And now here He comes, and He's going to preach in His hometown synagogue for the first time to every person in that crowd that's on the edge of His or her chair, their eyes fixed on Him, their ears listening intently.
What's He going to say? And this, of course, is the shortest sermon recorded by anyone in all of sacred Scripture. Jesus sat down and looked out at this congregation who were peering at Him relentlessly, and He began to say to them, today this Scripture is fulfilled in your very hearing.
Amen. End of the sermon. You've just heard the mission of the Messiah set forth by the prophet Isaiah. The people of this nation have been reading that prophetic agenda for hundreds and hundreds of years. The people of Israel have been waiting generation after generation for the Lord's anointed, the Lord's deliverer, the Lord's conqueror to come. And today He's here right now. They got the message. What Jesus is saying is, you're looking at Him. You are listening to Him. So after all these centuries when the anointed One of God appeared on the scene, the people from His hometown didn't get it.
What was their response? Let me just before we look at this response, and we're going to do it in just a minute. Sure, I can't cover this whole text today. There is no more important act of evaluation and judgment that you will ever make in your life than in answering the question, who is Jesus? Sit there for a moment in your imagination on the floor in the synagogue. You've just heard the text. You've just heard the Word of God, and now you hear the Son of God saying, I am He. What's your response?
Do you leap for joy and say, thank you God, we've waited so patiently? Does you want to run up and hug His neck and say, oh, we're so glad, Jesus, to know that you are the Messiah? That was not the response in Nazareth. People heard these words, looked at Him, the shock, and they said, is this not Joseph's son? Yes, it was Joseph's adopted son, but it was Yahweh's son.
It was the servant of the sovereign God, the anointed Son in whom the Father was well pleased. But they couldn't take it. They were choking on the words of Jesus. God willing, the next time we look at this text, we will explore further how Jesus responded to their unbelief and how they further responded to His response to their unbelief.
But He did not get the orator of the year award in Nazareth. Rather, they wanted to kill Him. What about you?
Would you be happier without Him? Or do you see that He was sent to heal your broken heart, to set you free? The Messiah was in their presence, but they couldn't stand His message. What a tragic response. But Dr. Sproul's question there is pressing and worth repeating. What about you? Jesus the Messiah has come. What will you do with this call to repentance and belief? We're glad you've joined us on this Lord's Day edition of Renewing Your Mind. Each week we're making our way through the entire gospel of Luke. Dr. Sproul was a theologian of the first order, but I think you also heard the heart of a pastor there, the care and concern he displayed for his congregation at St. Andrew's Chapel.
You'll find this same pastoral wisdom in R.C. 's commentary on Luke's gospel. I hope you'll contact us today and request his nearly 600-page commentary in digital form on this gospel. We'll send it to you for your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. Our offices, of course, are closed on this Lord's Day, but you can give your gift online when you go to RenewingYourMind.org. I want you to know that the financial gifts of listeners just like you are having an impact. We're hearing from people all over the world who have access now to new teaching series, the Reformation Study Bible, our translation projects, online training and discipleship. All of it is a result of your generosity, so we are grateful to you. Well, you probably heard the saying that a prophet has no honor in his hometown. That comes from Luke chapter 4, and next Sunday we'll discover how that applies even to Jesus. I hope you'll make plans to be with us next Sunday for Renewing Your Mind.
