It may be that there are some here this evening who have not been with us through the earlier meetings of this conference. Therefore, for their benefit, I may say that we have been led in this season to give our attention anew to the great matter of the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of divine anointing for the believer in Jesus Christ.
We have looked at this matter from various standpoints and pursued it along various lines. So this evening, in this closing gathering, we are coming back to this great basic passage which has been read here from the Gospel by Luke, Chapter 4.
Jesus, visiting Nazareth, entered the synagogue. The attendant, evidently knowing Him as belonging to, and having been brought up in, that town, passed to Him the roll with the prophecies of Isaiah inscribed upon it.
He took it and unfolded the roll, working in the unfolding toward that point in those prophecies which we know as Isaiah 61. Then He began to read:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor.
So this evening we are to be occupied with the anointing in relation to the good tidings—what we call the gospel.
Now, as you will see, Luke puts this incident very early in the ministry of Christ. It would seem that the Lord had visited Capernaum, perhaps had taken in the whole of Galilee, but had come very soon to Nazareth.
Luke, in his record, is wanting to make clear that the Lord Jesus, in His great ministry of preaching and teaching, struck the note of grace at the very beginning—the very first sermon that He preached. The whole subsequent score, the great harmony of the gospel, would be tuned to that keynote: grace.
It was Luke’s particular object to record the gospel of grace. He differs from the other Gospel writers particularly in that matter. Matthew will give us the gospel of the kingdom—not a different gospel, but it has that particular aspect: the kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven.
Others will have their own particular object in writing, but Luke knew quite well what he was after. And so his Gospel, in a peculiar way, is tuned to this great initial keynote: grace.
It is Luke who alone writes of the prodigal son—a great, great story of grace—of the lost sheep and the lost coin, and sets over the whole of his Gospel:
For the Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost.
It is the gospel of grace. And so he puts the Lord Jesus here at the beginning and gives us this:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He hath anointed Me to preach good tidings.
Grace is here. It is not mentioned actually in that word, but it is there in the original language, covered by another English translation: “to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord”—which many of you will know in the original text is the year of grace, the year of divine grace, the grace of the Lord.
That is what comes out here particularly. This is a sermon on the grace of God, by Luke made the foundation of all the ministry and work of the Lord Jesus, and declared to be the object of the anointing—the thing for which Jesus was anointed.
The anointing of the Spirit, then, has the object: grace. Grace for this dispensation, which is the year—the year which began when Jesus came and will end when He returns.
It is a long day, proving to be much longer than anybody expected: not a day of hours, but a day of centuries. Nevertheless, bounded by a beginning and an end. Between those two, the character of this dispensation in which you and I live this day is the great good news as to the grace of God.
Well, to begin with, Jesus said that He was anointed to preach good tidings. Grace is proclaimed.
And grace is proclaimed with a mighty context. There is a twofold background to this declaration of the Lord Jesus under the direction of the anointing Spirit.
Firstly, there is the background of Isaiah 61. Now, if you turn back to that chapter from which this prophecy is taken, you will find its connection there—its literal and actual connection, that is, with this very prophecy.
It is the prophet Isaiah who, in the first place, is speaking of himself. He is not in the first instance thinking of the coming Messiah. He is saying of himself, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He, the Lord, hath anointed me to preach good tidings.” Isaiah was the preacher of the gospel then.
But do you notice the setting? The setting there was the ending of the captivity of the Lord’s people in Babylon. For seventy long, weary years, they had been in exile because of their sin.
After long pleadings, entreaties, warnings, and beseechings, they still went their way. The prophet said:
All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned every one to his own way.
Because of their persistence in that own way—not the way of the Lord—at last the threatened judgment had fallen upon them. They had been carried away into exile and bondage, there according to the prescribed time: seventy years.
Whatever may have been true of some—who may have settled down and sought to make the best of the situation, or even to have a good time with all that Babylon had to offer—there were those who never did so. There was a considerable body of those exiles who longed for home.
“This is not home. We are in a foreign country. This is not the place to which we belong. Yes, you may say that we are romancing about home. It is not all that we in exile imagine it to be. Nevertheless, it is home. We are away from home. This is not our life.”
A little glimpse into how they felt is given us in such words as these:
We hanged our harps upon the willows.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
No song in a strange land. A people in bondage; a people in weakness; a people deprived and stripped of everything that was really theirs by the will of God; bruised in spirit, imprisoned in body, blinded by frustration and disappointment, with an eternal longing in their hearts: “Oh, to get back home.”
But then came the dawn of a day. It broke, and it sounded like a trumpet call. The prophet is crying:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me;
The Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings.
He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovering of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty them that are bruised,
To proclaim the year of grace of the Lord.
Can you imagine what those captives felt like as, with that morning, they heard the cry: “The day of your release has come—the day when you can go home. You can have all that for which your hearts have longed these many years. You can go. You are free.”
That is the first background that Jesus takes up and says, “Yes, but My good news is even better than that.” This world is like that. You men and women are like that. You are exiles from your heavenly home, far from your heavenly home—away from the Father’s house.
You are in bondage, in captivity. The god of this age has blinded your eyes. You are in a pitiable place, more pitiable even than those exiles in Babylon. But listen: I come with good news. I come to tell you, this is the year of the Lord’s release—the year of grace.
That is the gospel He was anointed to preach. That is the first of the two backgrounds of this wonderful first sermon of the Lord Jesus.
Before I pass from that, I want to remind you that He said, “This day is this fulfilled in your ears.” While no doubt literally He was referring to that particular Sabbath day in the synagogue of Nazareth, spiritually it ushered in the day of this very thing for mankind. The day has come for release.
But there is a second background, familiar to many of you. It is the background of that great festival in Israel known as the Year of Jubilee.
Once every fifty years, in the life of Israel, a great festival took place, and it lasted for a whole year. During the fifty years, many a tragedy had been enacted; many a dark shadow had come in to spoil and blight the lives of the people.
Here is a poor family, unable to meet its liabilities and pay its debt. And so, under the law, a mortgage could be taken on that property—their inheritance. Fields could be taken away from them and used to raise the crops to pay their debts, and they got nothing out of it.
A son in a family could be taken and put to forced labour, getting no wages, to pay the debt. Things like that—a lot more things like that—could happen. People during the fifty years were having this sort of experience.
And then, the fiftieth year: the Year of Jubilee. What happened? With the first streaks of dawn on that first day of the Year of Jubilee, the trumpets of Jubilee were sounded.
Those who kept the sons in bondage had to go and say to them, “You can go home. You can go home. I can keep you no longer. It is the Year of Jubilee, the year of release. I have no longer any power to keep you. Go home.”
Use your imagination. A family at home, this festal dawn preparing the home and scanning the horizon for the return of that son who had been kept as a hostage against their debt. Many a home, many a broken family, was mended that day.
And a lawyer has to write across the deed of mortgage, “Cancelled,” and send it to the poor people whose inheritance had been taken away. All that sort of thing was happening all over the land. It was the Year of Jubilee. All slaves must be released. All properties must be returned. Everything must be free.
And listen—watch that scene. The keys are turning in the cells of prisoners, and the gates of the prison courts are being opened, and the jailers are saying, “You can all go now. It is the Year of Jubilee.”
That is the background that the Lord Jesus takes up and says, “You think that was good news to the land, to those homes, to those people? Good news? They heard those trumpets of Jubilee. You think they rejoiced? Indeed they did. But I have a better gospel than that even.”
The gospel—the good news that I have come to preach and to proclaim—is better than return from Babylonian exile, and better even than the Year of Jubilee: the gospel, the grace of God, of eternal salvation.
Yes, “He hath anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor.” The poor. It was a bad thing to be poor in Israel. A creditor could come, take away your son, take away your home, take away your land. A bad thing to be poor.
“To preach good tidings to the poor; He hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, the recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the year of grace of the Lord.” So it is proclaimed with a tremendous background.
But—and I do not think that I am reading anything into this—what the Lord Jesus really did mean, and what it has proved to mean in this long-drawn-out day, is that what came with Him by the anointing is a better thing than Israel had in getting back to the land and leaving Babylon, and a better thing even than they had in their Year of Jubilee once in fifty years.
The year may be a lifetime, but it is not eternity. What He came to give was eternal salvation. Well, I will not dwell upon the details. Of course, prisoners and blind people and bruised people and poverty—they all have a spiritual counterpart.
But the sermon is not finished. Suddenly, strangely, in the course of His discourse, He carries us away back into the days of the two great prophets, Elijah and Elisha.
And He says, as we have it written:
Of a truth I say unto you,
There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah,
When the heaven was shut up three years and six months,
When there came a great famine over all the land;
And unto none of them was Elijah sent,
But only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon,
Unto a woman that was a widow.
I wonder what Elijah would think about that. I do not know whether he knows about it now. He did appear with Moses on the Mount of Transfiguration; he may know more than we think he does. But I am quite sure that if he knows now—or when he does know—he would get a bit of a surprise that the Lord Jesus took up that incident and used it in this way.
What would Elijah say? “Well, yes, it was a terrible day following my declaration: ‘There shall be no rain upon the earth by the space of three years and six months.’ A terrible time. There were many, many poor widows. But the Lord would never let me go to one of them.”
“But one day, one day, the Lord told me to go right outside the land of Israel altogether—to the land of Sidon, to a poor woman who was a widow. I had to go.” Well, we know what happened there.
Elijah would say, “I never realized what I was doing at that time. What was I doing? What was the meaning of it in God’s mind?” Why, the Lord Jesus has uncovered the hidden meaning of this.
In the land of Israel is the place where they think that they have a right to everything. Of course, they are the people. They have the oracles. They have the ordinances. They have the commandments. They have all that which God gave at Sinai. They have got it all. They are the people who have a right to everything.
Self-satisfied, self-important, under judgment because of their pride and their arrogance, they therefore are not suitable subjects for grace. You will never know the grace of God if you have any kind of spirit or mentality like that.
You have got to be like a poor widow—a poor widow who is regarded as an outsider—and you will know grace then.
And that is a discovery for Elijah: that he was enacting, under the direction of the Spirit of God, the gospel of grace. In this sense, it is to those who are aware of their need, really conscious that if they are going to get anything at all, it will have to be by the grace of God—His mercy, immense and free.
Only people who have no sense whatever of merit in themselves, of right to anything at all, can speak like that: “His mercy, immense and free.” And it was a poor widow in the land of Sidon who came to know the gospel of the grace of God.
But the Lord Jesus does not finish there:
There were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet;
And none of them was cleansed,
But only Naaman the Syrian.
Elisha had the anointing. He could, by the anointing, have cleansed all the lepers in Israel, but he was not allowed to go to one of them. It was Israel—it was Israel when Israel was not in a state to know the grace of God.
But there was one man who was a foreigner, an outsider altogether, not in Israel: Naaman the leper. And just to him was Elisha sent. He alone, an outsider, was cleansed of his leprosy by Elisha.
See, the Lord Jesus is putting a tremendous emphasis upon this: the gospel is the gospel of grace.
On the one side, you have no place in this acceptable year of the Lord, this year of grace, with all that it means—you have no place in it if you can still hope to find what you are after in any other direction than the grace of God. You are simply ruled out.
On the other side, if you are such as the widow of Zarephath or Naaman the Syrian—led and governed by this sense of poverty and sinfulness—you are the candidate for the gospel, the good news, the grace of God.
And I think Elisha would be a bit surprised if he knew what he did over Naaman the Syrian was going to be taken up by the Lord Jesus centuries after and used as a vivid illustration of the grace of God—that he was enacting the gospel of grace.
It is proclaimed. It is illustrated and set forth in this vivid and forceful way by the Lord Jesus. But such is the heart of man.
Dear friends, how it is borne out there in that synagogue. He is, by the anointing, proclaiming the good news—the gospel of grace, the Year of Jubilee, the year of the Lord’s release.
They are not prepared to number themselves with the poor, the blind, the imprisoned, and the needy ones. They still stand on their religious dignity as the people, with the result that they reject Him who brought the good news of grace and would destroy Him.
Such is the heart of man. Such is the heart of man. That is what men would do.
They may go to church every Sunday and, in their religion, say, “God be merciful unto us. God be merciful to me, a sinner.” Then you meet them immediately afterwards and say, “Hello, you miserable sinner,” and see what will happen to you. “Oh, no, not having that.”
That is what happens there. He was trying to make them see, on the one side, that they were needing the grace of God—they were needing the grace of God—and, on the other side, that the grace of God had come to them that very day in His Person.
But their blindness is so great and their imprisonment so strong, they are exiled from God so far, that they will take the very Messenger of grace and destroy Him if they can. Grace rejected.
I am not surprised that Nathanael said, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” No, that is Nazareth. But even there—marvel of marvels—He who knew His own native town, He who knew the state of things there, He who knew those people, He who knew their pride, their prejudice, and their bigotry—He knew it.
He had lived there for years. He knew it, He knew it. And this very sermon shows that He knew it. Yet He made that the place for preaching the grace of God. Marvellous.
You would say, “That is the place to be left. Never go there preaching good news. They will not have it. They will not have it. Indeed, you will find that they will more than reject it; they will reject you.”
Nevertheless, the Son of God knew, when He came into this world, the reception He would have. He came unto His own, and they that were His own received Him not. He knew that He came here where He would not be listened to.
But He takes His mercy immense and free. But that is not the end of the story. I am sorry that it is broken up in this way. The end of the story—ah yes, they led Him to the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might throw Him down headlong.
He came to Capernaum, a city of Galilee. He was teaching on the Sabbath day. There was in the synagogue a man who had a spirit of an unclean demon. You know the rest.
How does this really finish? Like this:
And there went forth a rumour concerning Him
Into every place of the region round about.
Grace has been proclaimed. Grace has been illustrated. Grace has been rejected. That is not the end. Here grace is triumphant at last.
There in Capernaum, a poor devil-ridden, dominated creature is delivered. People marvel. The fame, the rumour, went through all the region. What kind of a rumour do you think it was?
You look into this, and you see what they marvelled at: grace—grace coming from His lips, grace coming from His hand, grace coming from His presence. Grace.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because the Lord hath anointed Me
To preach good tidings to the poor.
That is what it meant: those who need it—no, those who know they need it; whose only hope is the grace of God. The year of grace. The year of release. The Year of Jubilee.
Dear friends, that is the effect of the anointing—the task of the anointing. The Holy Spirit has assumed the responsibility for that: the gospel of the grace of God.
You and I come under the most serious obligation. We shall ourselves be children of the grace of God, and we shall be those whose supreme characteristic through all life is grace—grace, marvellous grace.