Haitus over, lol. Sorry for the drought but I have been in a holding pattern lately. Not that I haven't had things on my mind but I haven't had the time to blog! My job has exploded and I spend most of my days with someone in my face asking for something. This particular post has been marinating for a while.
In the sixth chapter of Mark's gospel, Jesus returns home to Nazareth and when we look at the parallel gospel accounts in Matthew and Luke, we can begin to see the details of this event. He came to the synagogue to teach as was His custom. He took the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and read from what we now know as the 61st chapter. He read these words (Luke 4:18,19):
"The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because He has anointed me to bring the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord."
He followed this by saying "today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing". By reading this particular scripture, Jesus was essentially saying that He was God! The different gospel accounts all say something similar. Initially the people spoke well of Jesus. They claimed that he did all things well and he spoke with power and authority. But then in Mark's gospel, they sort of turned on Him. They began to question His genealogy saying that He was the son of the carpenter, by saying that his mother and his brothers and sisters were among them and by basically refusing to recognize His deity. Reading Luke further, you can see why they started tripping. He basically called them out for their faithlessness and they eventually drove him to the brink of a cliff before he walked through them without being touched.
The Jews were expecting the Messiah to come as a military conqueror considering the fact that they were oppressed by the Romans. Prior to this period they were under the thumb of the Egyptians, the Midianites, the Babylonians and/or the Assyrians. They were looking for an earthly redemption but Moses said that God would send a prophet from among them (Deuteronomy 18).
It is easy to get into a self-help gospel and start talking about the people's perception of Jesus but their perception had nothing to do with anything. He lived among them for His entire life. He undoubtedly worked among them as an apprentice to Joseph (for a great read, check out "The Hidden Years at Nazareth" by G. Campbell Morgan) and He worshipped with them every Sabbath in the synagogue. Nazareth was a poor place with a bad reputation so there was no way that anyone could afford to look down their nose at anyone. The consternation regarding who Jesus was kin to was less about their perception of Him and more of an excuse for their unbelief! They were not interested in Jesus as God, they wanted to see a sign or a work.
Their refusal to follow the evidence caused them to get hung up on the circumstantial. Jesus did things that have never been done since the beginning of time (see John 9) i.e. open blind eyes, and unstop deaf ears. It was evident that He did not work on His own initiative and He even said he same on many occasions (John 5:19).
The passage that He read was also very telling. The favorable year of the Lord is the Jubilee year (see Leviticus 25). In the Jubilee year, the 50th year after 7 sabbaticals (every 7th year was a sabbatical year where the land was left fallow and no planting took place) several things happened: ALL slaves were freed, all dispossessed people were given their land back and more importantly, anyone that owed any debt was freed from their obligation to pay! Let's put this in terms of salvation: the Jubilee year that Jesus ushered in represented the cancelling of the sin debt of all who would trust Jesus as Savior! Jesus ushered in the year of God's favor by coming to cancel the debt to God that our sins created!
However, the unbelief of the people was so deep that they caused Jesus to marvel! These people made Jesus say, "wow!" Don't get me wrong, Jesus is 100% God and is omniscient, but the human side of the hypostatic union had to certainly shake His head in disbelief. Because of their unbelief, the bible says that he could do no miracles there! He laid His hands on a few sick people. Does this mean that Christ was limited? Absolutely NOT! The inability of Jesus to perform any miracles had more to do with the people not believing enough to come to Him. God has unlimited power. The first five chapters of Mark's gospel are full of miracles. So much so that Jesus' fame spread throughout all the land (Mark 1:28). These people were in the immediate presence of the Unlimited God but their faith was so limited that He did not do there what He had done in other places.
Luke's account tells of Jesus saying to the people, "you will no doubt say to Me, physician, heal yourself...do here what you have done elsewhere..." and Jesus made mention of Gentile people that received God's grace in lieu of Israelites that could have received the same thing.
God can do anything that He wants to, but God operates in faith. When we persist in unbelief and refuse to follow the evidence that God is who He says He is, we bind ourselves and limit God to what we think He can do. We put God in a box when He is so much greater! If there is something that you are dealing with and you are having issues with faith, it is my prayer that you would check God's record and see that He has never failed. Don't bind God up with bandages of unbelief! Don't limit God to only what your mind has the ability to conceptualize. Let God be God and the rest will work together for the good. Grace and peace!
