Luke 4:21

PROPHECY FULFILLED

‘This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.’

Luke 4:21

Jesus had returned to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. It was now some months since He had left His home to go away to Jordan’s side, where John was baptizing. Now He returned alone. In the meantime many things had happened. The fame of Him had gone through all the region round about. He had taught in their synagogues, being glorified above all; so that now, when He returned once more to His own home and stood up, as His custom was, to read the lessons, He was received with eager, if somewhat critical, interest. Unrolling the scroll as the minister handed it to Him, and finding the beautiful passage in Isaiah 61, He read it aloud. In the middle of reading the second verse our Blessed Lord stopped and, rolling up the scroll, gave it back to the minister and sat down. Sitting among the Jews was the attitude of the preacher; when, therefore, Jesus sat down after His reading, the people knew that He would preach, and the eyes of all men in the synagogue were fastened upon Him. And the sermon? The Evangelist gives us but the opening sentence, yet that one sentence is a clue to all: ‘This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.’

I. What was fulfilled?—He tells us that the good things which Isaiah spoke of are coming true now in a way far more wonderful than the prophet could have dreamed. ‘This day is this scripture fulfilled.’ Now is the new era; now the acceptable year indeed has come. We ourselves know how literally the Lord fulfilled His Word. And we know, too, how, in another sense, more deep, more wonderful, more spiritual, He made His words good. He did indeed bring in the year of jubilee, the Gospel era. The whole New Testament is but one long story of light and hope and freedom, and all the comfort which Jesus brought to men. Thus, in a burst of inspired enthusiasm, Jesus gave to His own people, in His own old home, the joyful tidings He came to bring to men.

II. The message the same to-day.—And still the message of Jesus is the same to-day, and still His Word goes out to England as it went out to Nazareth long ago, and still He is present among us with His power to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and to make His words good. To the spiritual sufferer Jesus is present with us in power to-day, as He has ever been. We are bound to assert that He in His Divine Spirit, through His Word, His ministers, His sacraments, and in whatever other way it may seem good to Him, is preaching good tidings, is binding up the broken-hearted, is breaking the power of the wicked, is making men see deep things which they only can describe. We are bound to think and assert that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is a living power here in England to-day.

III. A simple faith needed.—These are Christ’s words. At first, indeed, men wonder and admire; soon comes the critical and controversial spirit. Better is it far for us if we could accept our Lord and His Gospel in simple faith. The world may laugh at simple, childlike faith, but simple, childlike faith is about the best thing that man can have. Happy is the man who can still take Jesus at His word, who can believe that He is the Son of God Who came to save the world, who can trust to Him every burden, who will look to Him for the hope of everlasting life, and who can live in the power of that faith.

—Rev. P. M. Smythe.

(SECOND OUTLINE)

DIVINE ENDUEMENT

Standing on the summit of Old Testament prophecy, and gathering about Himself the fullness of its glory, He declares Himself as the realisation of Isaiah’s grandest language: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me.’

I. Christ uses this prophecy as entirely personal to Himself.—Witness this fact, said He, the ‘Spirit of the Lord is upon Me’; Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled; the Holy Ghost testifies through Me, and this is all-sufficient for your belief in My Messiahship. Here is the keynote to His ministry, the assertion of His own Divine consciousness, and, on this basis, He rests His claims to be accepted and trusted. What else save this consciousness of Himself could impart spiritual life to their consciousness?

II. The Lord Jesus asserts distinctly that the Holy Spirit was the anointing or unction for His Divine ministry.—The words are explicit: ‘Because He’—not an influence, but a character; not an attribute or quality, but a Divine person—‘because He hath anointed Me to preach the Gospel’; therefore stand I here as the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy. He claims attention and homage on the ground that the Spirit rests upon Him. The stress which the Lord Jesus laid on the Spirit’s co-operative agency with Him is one of those truths on which He insisted as cardinal. Recall the message He sent to John the Baptist in prison, and you find it little else than a quotation from Isaiah’s prophecy. Throughout the ministry of three years it was His supreme vindication against vexatious doubts, the hasty judgments, the querulous impatience of His most trusted friends.