Luke 4

Today’s Passage: Luke 4

The heavens have opened over the Jordan, the Spirit has come down like a dove, and the Father has named His Son from heaven. And the very next thing that happens to Jesus is that He is led out into a wilderness to be starved and tested for forty days by the devil. Luke wants you to feel how those two things sit side by side. The chapter falls into four movements. First the wilderness, where the tempter comes three times to a hungry Man and is answered three times out of Deuteronomy, and then leaves, we are carefully told, only until an opportune time. Then a brief and shining sentence: Jesus goes back to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and the news runs ahead of Him, and He teaches in the synagogues and everyone praises Him. Then Nazareth, the village where He grew up, on an ordinary Sabbath, where He stands to read, is handed the scroll of Isaiah, and reads out the job description of the Messiah over Himself: good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, release for the oppressed, the year of the Lord’s favor. He rolls up the scroll, sits down, and says that today, in their hearing, it has come true. And then the room turns. It turns not when He claims too much for Himself but when He reminds them that God once sent Elijah to a foreign widow and healed a foreign general, and they try to throw Him off a cliff. Finally Capernaum, where the authority they refused to receive at home goes to work: a demon silenced, a fever rebuked, a whole town’s sick brought at sunset and healed one at a time, and a Man slipping away at daybreak because other towns must hear.

As you read, hold this: The Spirit-anointed Christ stands up in His hometown, announces that the year of the Lord’s favor has arrived today, and the room turns murderous the moment His grace reaches past its own borders.

Luke 4:1–8 (BSB)

¹ Then Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, ² where for forty days He was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when they had ended, He was hungry. ³ The devil said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” ⁴ But Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’” ⁵ Then the devil led Him up to a high place and showed Him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. ⁶ “I will give You authority over all these kingdoms and all their glory,” he said. “For it has been relinquished to me, and I can give it to anyone I wish. ⁷ So if You worship me, it will all be Yours.” ⁸ But Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.’”

Notice first that it is the Spirit who takes Him there. He is “full of the Holy Spirit” and He is “led by the Spirit into the wilderness,” so nothing here is an accident and nothing has slipped out of the Father’s hand. The testing is inside the plan. Notice next that the temptation runs the whole forty days, not merely at the end. Luke says He was tempted for forty days, ate nothing, and only then, at the point of greatest weakness, do we hear the three exchanges he records. The devil does not come at a rested Man. He comes when the body is hollow and the ground is stone. And look at the shape of the first approach: “If You are the Son of God.” The Father had just said aloud at the Jordan that this is His beloved Son, and now the whisper is, if that is really so, prove it, feed Yourself, use what You have for Yourself. There is nothing wicked about bread. That is what makes it so cunning. The sin offered is simply to take a good thing on the tempter’s timing and by the tempter’s dare rather than from the Father’s hand. And He will not. The answer is one line from Moses, and it is enough.

"He humbled you, and in your hunger He gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your fathers had known, so that you might understand that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD." Deuteronomy 8:3 (BSB)

Hear where that comes from. It is God’s own explanation of why He let Israel go hungry in the desert, and Jesus takes the lesson Israel never learned and lives it perfectly on an empty stomach. Then the second approach changes ground entirely. The devil shows Him all the kingdoms of the world in an instant and offers Him authority (ἐξουσία) exousia, pronounced ex-oo-SEE-ah. Strong's G1849, authority, rightful power, the right to act. Exousia is one of the great words of this chapter, and Luke plants it here in the devil’s mouth on purpose. It does not mean raw force, which is a different Greek word. It means the right to act, delegated power, the warrant a magistrate carries or the freedom a householder has over his own house. So the offer in the wilderness is not brute strength but legitimacy: the right to rule the nations, handed over on the spot. Jesus refuses it. And then watch where the word turns up again a few paragraphs later, when the people of Capernaum are astonished at His teaching “because His message had authority,” and again when they gasp that “with authority and power He commands the unclean spirits, and they come out.” Luke is showing you something quietly magnificent. The authority Jesus would not take as a bribe He already possesses as the Son, and it is not the authority to seize thrones but the authority to speak a word that demons must obey and sickness must leave. He would not buy the world; He came to redeem it. And in the end it is precisely this Man, who refused the shortcut, who tells His disciples after the resurrection that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Him. He got everything, and He got it by the cross. over the lot of them, with all their glory, for one act of worship. Do not miss what is actually on the table. It is the very thing the Father has promised the Son, every nation under His rule, offered now without a cross. It is a shortcut, and every shortcut around Calvary is a road away from our salvation. Note too that the devil says this world has been relinquished to him, which is a real claim with real limits, since Scripture calls him the ruler of this age and also says plainly that the Most High rules over the kingdoms of men. Jesus does not argue the boast. He answers with Moses again, and He goes to the one place the offer cannot survive: worship the Lord your God and serve Him only. Only. There is no arrangement in which the Son of God bows to anyone but His Father.

Luke 4:9–13 (BSB)

⁹ Then the devil led Him to Jerusalem and set Him on the pinnacle of the temple. “If You are the Son of God,” he said, “throw Yourself down from here. ¹⁰ For it is written: ‘He will command His angels concerning You to guard You carefully, ¹¹ and they will lift You up in their hands, so that You will not strike Your foot against a stone.’” ¹² But Jesus answered, “It also says, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” ¹³ When the devil had finished every temptation, he left Him until an opportune time.

Here is the detail every believer should carry away from this passage: the devil quotes Scripture. He has been answered twice out of the Bible, so the third time he opens it himself, and he opens it at a psalm about God’s protection of the one who trusts Him. He even quotes it fairly accurately. But set his version beside the psalm itself and see what he has done.

"For He will command His angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. They will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone." Psalm 91:11–12 (BSB)

The words he dropped are “in all your ways.” The psalm promises that God keeps His own as they walk in His paths; it never promised to catch a man who jumps off a roof to see whether God is watching. A verse with its context cut away can be made to say very nearly anything, and the enemy of your soul knows the Book better than you do. That is not a reason for fear. It is a reason to learn Scripture whole, the way Jesus plainly knew it, so that you can answer a half-truth with the truth. And His answer is exactly to the point: do not put the Lord your God to the test. Massah, where Israel demanded that God prove Himself with a sign, is the place Moses had in mind, and demanding proof is not faith at all. It is faith’s opposite wearing faith’s clothes.

Then verse thirteen, which is one of the most important sentences in Luke and one of the easiest to read past. The devil “left Him until an opportune time.” Not defeated forever. Not finished. Waiting. Luke is telling you plainly that this is not over, and when you reach the upper room and the garden and the words about this hour belonging to the power of darkness, you will remember this line. The whole ministry from here on is lived under it. And take the comfort in it as well: the One who now goes out to preach and heal is a Man who has been through the fire on our behalf and did not yield, and who therefore knows from the inside what it costs to stand.

Luke 4:14–19 (BSB)

¹⁴ Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and the news about Him spread throughout the surrounding region. ¹⁵ He taught in their synagogues and was glorified by everyone. ¹⁶ Then Jesus came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. As was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath. And when He stood up to read, ¹⁷ the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. Unrolling it, He found the place where it was written: ¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is on Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, ¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

He went in as He had gone in a thousand Sabbaths before. “As was His custom” is a small phrase with a great deal in it: the Son of God, in a village synagogue, week after week, with the same neighbors, hearing the same Scriptures read. Whatever else you make of this scene, make that of it first. And now He stands up to read, and the attendant hands Him Isaiah, and He finds the place. Every other Gospel puts Jesus in Nazareth later; Luke moves this scene to the very front of the ministry and lets it stand as the announcement of everything that follows. This is the program. Read the list again and keep it in front of you for the whole Gospel, because Luke will spend twenty more chapters filling it in: the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed. Those are the people this Gospel keeps putting at the center. Shepherds get the angels. A widow gets her son back. A Samaritan is the hero. A tax collector comes down out of a tree. When John’s disciples later ask whether He is the One, Jesus does not give them an argument; He gives them this list and tells them to report what they have seen. And the ground of all of it is the first line: the Spirit of the Lord is on Me, because He has anointed (χρίω) chriō, pronounced KHREE-oh. Strong's G5548, to anoint, pour oil on, set apart for office. Chriō is the ordinary Greek verb for pouring oil over someone, and in Scripture it is the act that made a man a king, a priest, or a prophet. Oil ran down Aaron’s head, and Samuel poured a horn of it over a shepherd boy in Bethlehem, and from that moment the man was God’s chosen and God’s Spirit came upon him. From this verb comes the noun Christos, the Anointed One, which is simply Greek for the Hebrew Mashiach, Messiah. So when Jesus reads “He has anointed Me” over Himself in that little room, He is not making a modest claim. He is saying the word the whole nation had been waiting to hear said by somebody who had the right to say it. And notice what He was anointed with. Not oil. Peter would later stand in a Gentile house and say that God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. The dove at the Jordan was the anointing, and Luke has just told us twice that He is full of the Spirit and moving in the power of the Spirit. Here is the wonder for you: the same Spirit who anointed the Head is given to the body, so that every believer, however unimportant the village, is joined to the Anointed One and shares His life. You are not on the outside of this scene. Me.

Then look at the four things He was sent to do, and see how physical and how total they are. Good news to the poor, and Luke means the actually poor as well as the poor in spirit. Sight to the blind, which He will hand out on the roads of Galilee and Jericho with His own hands. And twice over, in different words, the same idea: liberty (ἄφεσις) aphesis, pronounced AF-es-is. Strong's G859, release, liberty, forgiveness. Aphesis is the noun behind two words that look unrelated in English but are the same word in Greek. It means a sending away, a letting go, a release. In the Greek Old Testament it is the technical term for the Jubilee: the year of aphesis, when what was held is let go and what was owed is cancelled. And in the New Testament it is the standard word for the forgiveness of sins, which is exactly what forgiveness is, a debt released and a prisoner sent away free. Luke uses it in both senses in a single verse here, liberty for the captives and release for the oppressed, and the whole Gospel then runs both directions at once. Sins are forgiven a paralytic on a mat and a woman weeping at His feet and a thief on a cross, and bodies are healed and the demonized are set loose and the bent-over woman stands up straight. Do not let anyone shrink this word to half its size. The salvation Jesus announced is not merely a legal transaction filed somewhere, and it is not merely social relief. It is God letting go of what was against us and letting out what was locked up, and He does it because His Son paid the debt Himself. That is the year of the Lord’s favor, and it has not ended. to the captives, and release for the oppressed. He finishes with the line that gathers the rest, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” and any Israelite who knew his Law heard Jubilee in it. Every fiftieth year the trumpet sounded, debts died, slaves walked out, and the land came back to the families that had lost it. It is not clear that Israel ever kept it well. And now a carpenter’s son from up the road stands in the synagogue and says the trumpet has sounded. Not a better emperor, not a reformed system, but the year of God’s favor, the great cancelling of debts, arriving in a Person.

Luke 4:20–24 (BSB)

²⁰ Then He rolled up the scroll, returned it to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on Him, ²¹ and He began by saying, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” ²² All spoke well of Him and marveled at the gracious words that came from His lips. “Isn’t this the son of Joseph?” they asked. ²³ Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to Me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! Do here in Your hometown what we have heard that You did in Capernaum.’” ²⁴ Then He added, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.

Take the scene slowly, because Luke gives it to you frame by frame. He rolls up the scroll. He hands it back. He sits down, which is what a teacher does when he is about to speak. And the room goes absolutely still, every eye fastened on Him. Then one sentence: “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Today. The whole weight of the Gospel is in that word. The prophets had spoken of a coming day for seven hundred years, and the people of Nazareth had heard Isaiah read aloud all their lives as a promise about someday, and the Man standing in front of them says the someday is now and it is Me. There is no other sane reading of it. Either He is what He says or He is not, and every reader of this page has to answer that.

Notice also where He stopped. Isaiah 61 goes on in the same breath to speak of the day of our God’s vengeance, and Jesus closes the scroll in the middle of the sentence. He is not editing the prophet or denying the judgment, for He will speak about judgment more soberly than anyone in this Gospel. He is telling them what hour it is. This is the year of favor. The day of vengeance is real and it is coming, and it is not today, and the space between those two lines of Isaiah is the whole age of grace in which you and I are living and in which the door is still open. Give thanks for the pause.

Then comes the strangest turn in the chapter. At first they love it. They speak well of Him and marvel at the graciousness of His words. And then the second thought arrives: “Isn’t this the son of Joseph?” It is not stated as an objection, but it is one. We know Him. We know the family. We know the house He grew up in. Familiarity had made them incapable of receiving anything from Him, and Jesus names the thing they have not said out loud yet, that they want a demonstration, the trick they have heard He did in Capernaum performed here for the hometown crowd. And He answers with a proverb everybody knew: no prophet is accepted (δεκτός) dektos, pronounced dek-TOSS. Strong's G1184, welcome, acceptable, received with favor. Dektos means welcome, acceptable, received with favor. It is the word for an offering God accepts and a season He appoints, and it carries a warmth that our flat English word “acceptable” almost loses. Luke sets it in this scene twice, and the second use is a deliberate echo of the first that our translations cannot quite show. In verse nineteen Jesus proclaims the dektos year of the Lord, the welcome year, the year of favor. Five verses later He says that no prophet is dektos, welcome, in his hometown. Hear the terrible irony. The Messenger announces that God’s year of welcome has arrived, and the room He announces it in will not welcome Him. The favor of God comes to Nazareth in person, and Nazareth has no room for it. But now turn it around, because the same word is the hope of the passage. If God has appointed a welcome year, then there is a time right now in which sinners are received. Paul takes that very promise from Isaiah and says of his own hour that now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation. The welcome is real. It was Nazareth that refused it, not God who withheld it. in his hometown. Say it gently and universally, because it is not just about Nazareth. There is a kind of nearness to holy things that dulls a person. It is possible to sit in the same room as the Word of God every week of your life, to know the stories, to know the songs, to know the people, and to be the last one in the room to actually hear.

Luke 4:25–30 (BSB)

²⁵ But I tell you truthfully that there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and great famine swept over all the land. ²⁶ Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to the widow of Zarephath in Sidon. ²⁷ And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet. Yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.” ²⁸ On hearing this, all the people in the synagogue were enraged. ²⁹ They got up, drove Him out of the town, and led Him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw Him over the cliff. ³⁰ But Jesus passed through the crowd and went on His way.

Here is the hinge of the whole chapter, and it must be drawn out plainly. A moment ago they were speaking well of Him and marveling at His gracious words. Now they are dragging Him to a cliff. What happened in between? He told them two stories out of their own Bible. In the worst famine Israel ever knew, when there were widows starving in every village of the land, God sent His prophet past all of them to a woman in Sidon, which is Gentile country, up the coast, the very region Jezebel came from.

"“Get up and go to Zarephath of Sidon, and stay there. Behold, I have commanded a widow there to provide for you.”" 1 Kings 17:9 (BSB)

And in the days of Elisha there were lepers in Israel, and not one of them was cleansed. The one man who went home clean was a Syrian general, a commander of the army that raided Israel’s own borders.

"So Naaman went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, according to the word of the man of God, and his flesh was restored and became like that of a little child, and he was clean." 2 Kings 5:14 (BSB)

That is all He said. He did not insult them, He did not curse them, He simply read their own history back to them, and it enraged them enough to attempt murder on the Sabbath. Sit with why. They could bear a hometown boy claiming to be the Anointed. What they could not bear was the suggestion that the mercy of God is God’s to give and that He has a long habit of carrying it outside the circle where people expect it to stay. Grace going to the wrong people is the oldest offense there is. It is Jonah sulking under his vine because Nineveh repented. It is the older brother standing out in the yard refusing to come in to his brother’s party. And do not aim this at anyone but yourself, because it is not the sin of one village or one nation; it is the reflex of every human heart that has quietly begun to think of God’s kindness as its own property. A church can be as guilty of it as a synagogue. Anyone who has ever felt a flicker of resentment when God blessed someone he thought less deserving has stood in that room.

Then verse thirty, told with astonishing calm. “But Jesus passed through the crowd and went on His way.” Luke does not explain it and we should not try to. A mob had Him at the edge of a hill and He walked through the middle of them and left. His hour had not come, and no crowd on earth sets that timetable. He would go to a hill and be lifted up and die, but at the place and in the manner His Father appointed, and not one day early. There is deep steadiness in that for anyone whose life feels like it is being decided by other people’s anger.

Luke 4:31–37 (BSB)

³¹ Then He went down to Capernaum, a town in Galilee, and on the Sabbath He began to teach the people. ³² They were astonished at His teaching, because His message had authority. ³³ In the synagogue there was a man possessed by the spirit of an unclean demon. He cried out in a loud voice, ³⁴ “Ha! What do You want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have You come to destroy us? I know who You are—the Holy One of God!” ³⁵ But Jesus rebuked the demon. “Be silent!” He said. “Come out of him!” At this, the demon threw the man down before them all and came out without harming him. ³⁶ All the people were overcome with amazement and asked one another, “What is this message? With authority and power He commands the unclean spirits, and they come out!” ³⁷ And the news about Jesus spread throughout the surrounding region.

Nazareth would not have Him, so He goes down to Capernaum, and what Nazareth demanded to see is shown to a town that was willing to listen. The first thing they notice is not a miracle but His teaching, and the reason they are astonished is that His message had authority. The scribes taught by citing the rulings of earlier teachers, layer upon layer. This Man simply spoke, and the word landed like a word from God, which it was.

Then the authority is put to a harder test. There is a man in the congregation with an unclean spirit, sitting there on the Sabbath among the worshipers, and the thing inside him cannot keep quiet in the presence of Jesus. What it shouts is worth weighing. It knows His name and His village, it knows that He has come and that His coming means the end of its kind, and it knows exactly who He is: the Holy One of God. Understand what that means about mere knowledge. There was more accurate theology in that scream than in the whole synagogue at Nazareth, and it did the demon no good at all. Knowing who Jesus is and bowing to who Jesus is are two different things entirely.

And see how the Lord deals with it. No ritual, no incantation, no struggle. Two short commands: be silent, come out. He will not accept testimony from that quarter, and He will not let the truth about Himself be published by lying mouths. The demon throws the man down in front of everyone and comes out, and Luke, who cared about such details, adds the mercy in it: without harming him. The man is not left broken on the floor as a casualty of the deliverance. He is left free and whole. The town gasps and asks the right question, “What is this message?” They can feel that the authority in the word and the authority over the spirit are the same authority, and the news runs out through the whole region.

Luke 4:38–44 (BSB)

³⁸ After Jesus had left the synagogue, He went to the home of Simon, whose mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever. So they appealed to Jesus on her behalf, ³⁹ and He stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. And she got up at once and began to serve them. ⁴⁰ At sunset, all who were ill with various diseases were brought to Jesus, and laying His hands on each one, He healed them. ⁴¹ Demons also came out of many people, shouting, “You are the Son of God!” But He rebuked the demons and would not allow them to speak, because they knew He was the Christ. ⁴² At daybreak, Jesus went out to a solitary place, and the crowds were looking for Him. They came to Him and tried to keep Him from leaving. ⁴³ But Jesus told them, “I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns as well, because that is why I was sent.” ⁴⁴ And He continued to preach in the synagogues of Judea.

Out of the synagogue and straight into a house, and this is very Luke. An old woman in a back room with a high fever is worth the Messiah’s attention on the same afternoon He silenced a demon in public. Luke, who was a physician, notes that the fever was a high one. Jesus stands over her and rebukes the fever, the same verb used of the demon a moment ago, as though sickness itself were a thing under command. It leaves her, and she gets up at once and starts serving them. Nobody makes her. That is what a healed person does with her strength, and it is a small and lovely picture of the whole Christian life: raised up, and then immediately at work in the kitchen for the sake of others.

Then comes one of the most tender verses in the Gospels, and it is easy to read straight past it. The sun goes down, which means the Sabbath has ended and people may carry a burden again, and the whole town brings its sick. Every disease you can think of, laid down in front of one Man in a dusty street at dusk. He could have spoken one sentence over the crowd. Instead Luke tells us that “laying His hands on each one, He healed them.” Each one. One at a time, in the dark, for however many hours it took, with His hands on a body that in many cases nobody had willingly touched in years. That is your Savior. He does not do people in batches.

"how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how Jesus went around doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, because God was with Him." Acts 10:38 (BSB)

The demons come out shouting the truth again, and again He silences them, because the confession of who He is will be made properly and in the right hour, and it will not be made by them. And then, at daybreak, He is gone. He has slipped off to a solitary place, and Luke will show Him doing that again and again through this Gospel at every hinge of the ministry. The crowds hunt Him down and try to hold Him. Who would not? A town with a healer in it wants to keep him. But hear the answer, because it is the last word of the chapter and it explains everything He does from here to Jerusalem: “I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns as well, because that is why I was sent.” There is a must in Him. He is not driven by the crowd’s appetite or held by its affection. He is sent, and He knows what for, and He will not stop at the first grateful town.