The Power of Christ Doesn’t Come Without the Lordship of Christ - Luke 3-4

Luke 4:15 (ESV)

And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all.

Luke 4:28-30 (ESV)

When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away.

In the 4:15 passage we read that everyone in the synagogue was drawn to Jesus and was glorifying Jesus.  He had done many miracles and signs and they wanted to glorify Him and wanted to see more and experience more signs.  He had demonstrated to them great power.  But in 4:28-30 they had turned on Him and wanted to kill Him.   What happened in the middle?    

Jesus took a scroll from the prophet Isaiah and read a portion from it:

Luke 4:18-19 (ESV)

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim 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,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

The problem was NOT what He read.  The problem was how He interpreted what He read.   Later in His talk, Jesus made reference that He would be rejected by them.  He gave examples of Elijah being sent away from Israel to a widow in Sidon, a town outside Israel.   He tells them that even though there were many lepers in Israel at the time of Elijah, only Naaman the Syrian was cleansed.   The nuance of Jesus teaching was that they would reject Him but the outside world would benefit from His ministry.  That caused great alarm for them.  But even in the midst of their denial and hatred for being accused of rejecting Him, they rejected Him.   The more they yelled about what He was teaching the more they demonstrated the truth of His words.   Mankind has mixed feelings about God.  They want God-like miracles in their lives but they do not want God-like control over their lives.  They want to taste the miracle of Him turning water into wine and small loaves into baskets of abundance but they don’t want to have the control of God over their being.   This is what we see in the above passages.  They loved the signs of Jesus but not the teaching of Jesus (which was the purpose for the signs).   Mankind wants the power Christ absent the lordship of Christ.