Don’t Kill the Messenger

Luke 4:22-30

No Sabbath ever began so wondrously and no Sabbath ever ended so tragically. Jesus’ fame drew a huge crowd to hear His first sermon, and v. 22 says they were greatly moved by it, but by the end of the day we see the events of vv. 28-29, as they try to kill Him.

It's actually shocking. It rivets you to the page to understand how this could have happened.  How did it turn so? Why didn’t they believe? 

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 acceptable year of the Lord," and He stopped when the rest of the verse in Isaiah 61 said, "And the day of vengeance of our God?"  Why did He leave the vengeance out?  They were very excited for the Messiah's coming. Honestly, they were as eager for Him 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, 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 vengeance.

In fact, John himself was greatly perplexed because soon after the beginning of the ministry of Jesus, he 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, and when He was going to bring the vengeance of God, and open the prison doors and let John out.  And 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 some of his own disciples, sent them to Jesus to ask Him if He was really the Messiah because he wanted to know if He's the Messiah, where is 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.

They just heard the greatest speaker that ever lived.  There was never a preacher like Him.  They were stunned by His ability to speak, and amazingly they hadn't heard Him before though He had grown up in their midst.  He had never taught, and He’d never preached and when He did, they were in awe.  And they were saying repeatedly, "Is this not Joseph's son?"  Familiarity breeds contempt. 

They never got over this, by the way.  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 can He now be the Messiah?  They just couldn't get it.

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.  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 aren't the poor, the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed. That's got to be somebody else, that’s the Gentiles.

And so, in self-defense they begin to think. The problem is not us. How do we know He's the Messiah?  And they just put up a wall.  Jesus reads their minds. 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 thyself!  Whatever we heard you did at Capernaum, do here in your home town as well.'"

You see what they were doing?  "I know what you're thinking," He said.  You're saying, "We don't have any proof."

It was never a question of miracles.  It's never a question of miracles ever because miracles don't prove anything.  If Jesus did a miracle, does that prove that He could save sinners?  If Jesus did a miracle, does that prove 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 magicians and bring them all together, you can take all the 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.

Never do the Jewish leaders question Jesus' miracles.  In John 11:47 the Pharisees, the chief priests said, "This man is doing miracles." They never questioned that.  They knew He did them.  They said, "Do them 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. 

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. 

v. 24        All experts are from out of town, aren't they?  It's more of that "familiarity breeds contempt." 

What you're about to hear is profound.  He makes a transition.  Speaking of unwelcome prophets, let me talk to you about Elijah and Elisha.  Two prophets in Israel unwelcomed, hated, rejected, refused by the people. 

They all knew Elijah, the great prophet of Israel.  And in his day, around 850 B.C. there were many widows.  Death was frequent, as men died in wars.  And 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.  Ahab was so bad, 1 Kings 16 says, "He did more to anger God than all the kings of Israel before him."  So here's Elijah, he's in the midst of this. 

Elijah comes on the scene in 1 Kings 17.  And the first thing that he does is he announces a drought.  And a three and a half year drought produces a famine, and 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. 

Now it says, verse 26, "And Elijah was sent to none of them."  You know, the Jews didn't like this story, and as Jesus starts to tell it, they get angry.  Why is He bringing up that ugly story?  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.  And she 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? 

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 liveth."  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 oil, enough to make one cake, right?  One scone, if you will, one biscuit.  And God does a miracle for her. Her barrel never would run empty. He even later raised her son from the dead.

Now, you know, if she had been in the synagogue at Nazareth, she would have probably said, "Oh no, no, no.  Not on your life.  How do I know you're a man of God?  How do I know whether 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 proven anything if he had done some amazing things, or if he had done some healings, it wouldn't have proven 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 trust it to him. 

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.

And Jesus wasn't finished. They're getting angrier by the moment.  Verse 27: Elisha followed Elijah and that was a time, 850 to 790 B.C., when disease was a major problem.  Leprosy is a broad term.  It identifies various ancient skin diseases, everything from superficial diseases to serious diseases.  It was in the time of Elisha, and they didn't like Elisha, he didn't have any honor in his own country any more 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?  He was a Gentile. And you know how he came to believe and about his miracle of healing. 

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 hometown.  We are worse than a Syrian Gentile leper.  This is intolerable."

There's nothing worse than spiritual pride, is there? 

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 in you, forgive your sin and send you to heaven until you give your life to Him.

All of a sudden bedlam broke loose in the crowded synagogue.  They cast Him out of the city.  They grabbed Him and like a lynch mob they roared out of the city, led Him to the brow of the hill on which their city had been built. Nazareth sits on a slope. 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. 

God offers nothing to people who are content with their own condition, except judgment.

But it wasn't His time. 

Verse 30 follows, and an instant calm, "But passing through their midst He went His way."  We don't know how that happened.  In 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.