MONDAY October 28th
As I continue with the theme of these devotions, ‘Jesus the very thought of thee’ I am continuing with Luke 4 and what was said about Jesus after he had spoken the words from the prophet Isaiah. Luke 4:20-22 ‘And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And all spoke well of him and marvelled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth. And they said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?”’
Jesus has stood up, he had read from Isaiah, he sat down and then he spoke these words, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’.
It would have been a great honour to have been in that synagogue on that day and to have listened to Jesus and to have literally seen scripture being fulfilled in front of you, and it says that those in attendance spoke well of him and marvelled at his gracious words. Something about this man Jesus had an impact on them, but then they started questioning concerning who he really was, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’
Now Jesus must have heard some of the conversation because he then challenges them in the following verses, which lead us to verses 28-29 where they were no longer astonished, but rather enraged, filled with wrath, and they drove him out of the town, determined to throw him over a cliff. Wow, what a change of heart!
When it comes to the message and the person of Jesus, we see the same thing today, there are those who are astonished and amazed such as we whose blind eyes have been opened, and there are those who are full of fury and rage, they may not show it openly, but they show it by their continual rejection of him. They question who Jesus really is, and they reject him out of hand.
And we could say today concerning our nation, that whereas in our recent history, Jesus was welcomed in our classrooms, in our families, in our government, and many of us can recall that we could hold a Sunday School or a children’s club and the children in the local community would willingly come in, but not today unless you are giving out social handouts.
See who Jesus is and what he has come to proclaim no longer suits the agenda of our society, his morals, his righteousness no longer fits in with the lifestyle our society wants to live and the ideology it wants to promote. Just as the crowd wanted to throw Jesus over a cliff, our modern secular society has thrown Jesus out.
More than ever before we who have come to love Jesus and chosen to live according to his standards need to proclaim Jesus. Reaffirming in our hearts and by the very lives that we live that Jesus is Lord and that in the words of the hymn I am basing these thoughts on, that the very thought of him, with sweetness fills our breast. The same hymn continues, ‘Jesus, our only joy be thou, as thou our prize wilt be; Jesus, be thou our glory now, and through eternity.’