This week we are going to try something a little
different, we are going to take everything we’ve been learning and put it into
practice. We are going to look at the same passage of Scripture all week
breaking it down bit by bit to really understand what’s going on.
Read Luke 4:13-30
Today we are going to begin by asking where this story
takes place and why that’s important to everything that follows. When some of
us read this story we immediately recognize it as Jesus going to his home town,
speaking, and being rejected. Usually this story is summed up by the phrase in
verse 24 “no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” But there is a major problem
with that, mainly that it’s wrong (at least at first).
So what do we know about Nazareth? We know that Nazareth
was founded by people returning from the Babylonian exile, but these people had
at least one belief that was very different from everyone else. The Nazarene’s
believed the Messiah would come from Nazareth. Because they believed this the
Nazarene’s were viewed as a cult and they were looked down on to others in
their society (See Luke 1:46).
Where did the Nazarene’s get this idea? If you look at
Isaiah 11:1 we see this reference to one coming from the branch of Jesse, as we
keep reading in Isaiah 11 we discover that it sounds a whole lot like the
Messiah. Now the word used here for “branch” is “netzer” which is also the root
of the word Nazareth. So obviously the Messiah will come from Nazareth. What’s
interesting is that Matthew makes this connection as well in Matthew 2:23 when
he refers to the prophecy that says “He shall be called a Nazarene”. Problem is there is no such prophecy.
So as you think about this verse this week, meditate on
how the people listening to Jesus excepted the Messiah to come from their town.
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