After His baptism and the
temptations in the wilderness, Jesus went back to His hometown of Nazareth and
on the Sabbath went to the synagogue where he read aloud from the scroll of
Isaiah a portion of this passage, said, today this is fulfilled in your hearing
and then sat down. This, He said, was the
year of the Lord’s favor. This passage
also declares that in addition to being the year of the Lord’s favor it was to
be “the day of vengeance of our God.”
Isaiah sees that the nations will bow before the Lord and they will
serve the chosen people rather than oppressing them. It is a beautiful passage of restoration but
not a “one for one” restoration. That
which was lost will not simply be restored, they will have a double portion of
the Lord’s blessing. In Jesus, we have
more than a double portion of blessing, more than simply the restoration of
loss, we have eternal life. If you could
choose today whether to have earthly riches or eternal life where there was no
pain or suffering, in the presence of Go, which would you choose? Maybe it is a
good day to rejoice in what you have.
As Jesus goes up to Jerusalem He
foretells the cross. What was the
attitude of those who traveled with him?
They (I presume the disciples) were amazed, and those who followed were
afraid. When was the last time you
experienced either of these things in your Christian walk? We can get too comfortable with Jesus in a way
the disciples and those around Him rarely seemed to have done. When they did, Jesus challenged them and
called them out like here with James and John.
They believe perhaps that Jesus doesn’t quite understand what it means
to be Messiah and ignore His prophecy and ask that they be allowed to sit at
His right and left in His glory. They want
to be co-regents but they don’t know what they’re asking. What that entails is the same sort of
suffering He will endure, getting to glory isn’t pretty like a Roman coronation
of an emperor, it isn’t majestic and awe-inspiring, it is awful. We have made it something else in our day, we
have reduced the eternal blessing of Isaiah’s vision to a temporal
prosperity. Let us always remember that
this is not our home and His kingdom is yet to come.
Paul tells Timothy to avoid
people like this: “lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive,
disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable,
slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous,
reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having
the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.” Who would be left in your life if you avoided
such people? Would anyone avoid
you? Paul may have converted from
Judaism but he maintained high standards for righteousness in this life. Jesus’ righteousness was all that mattered
eternally but Paul never used that as an excuse to sin or not pursue
righteousness. Doing so is the
definition of “having the appearance of godliness but denying its power” and it
is presumption and taking the name of the Lord in vain, for the sake of vanity
and nothing more. The pursuit of righteousness
in our confession of His righteousness and our love of it. The time is drawing nigh to get out of that
comfort zone and be challenged.
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