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Bro. Bill Nichols
Okay, we're up and going now. We're going to finish, we hope, Luke 4 today. I'm going to just read it first. Luke 4, starting with verse 28, and just go down through, and then I'm going to highlight some things I want you to focus on as we go through, and then we'll go back and backtrack.
And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath. And they rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him into the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong.
But he, passing through the midst of them, went his way, and came down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee, and taught them on the Sabbath days, and taught them. And they were astonished at his doctrine, for his word was with power.
And in the synagogue there was a man which had a spirit of an unclean devil, and cried out with a loud voice, saying, Let us along. What have we to do with thou, Jesus of Nazareth? Art thou come to destroy us?
I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God. And Jesus rebuked him, saying, Hold thy peace, and come out of him. And when the devil had thrown him in the midst, he came out of him, and heard him not.
And they were all amazed, and spake among themselves, saying, What a word is this! For with authority and power he commendeth the unclean spirits, and they come out. And the fame of him went out into every place of the country, round about.
And he arose out of the synagogue, and entered into Simon's house. And Simon's wife's mother was taken with a great fever, and they besought him for her. And he stood over her, and rebuked the fever, and it left her.
And immediately she arose and ministered unto them. Now when the sun was setting, all they that had any sick with diverse diseases brought them unto him, and he lay his hands upon every one of them, and healed them.
And the devils also came out of many, crying and saying, Thou art Christ, the Son of God. And he rebuking them, suffered them not to speak, for they knew that he was Christ. And when it was day, he departed, and went to a desert place.
And the people saw him, and came unto him, and state him that he should not depart from them. And he said unto them, I must preach the kingdom of God to other cities also, for therefore am I sent. And he preached in the synagogues of Galilee.
Let us pray. Most gracious Heavenly Father, thank you for this day, and thank you for the blessing of bringing us together here to study your holy word. Thank you for giving us this place to come to, and thank you for giving us the Holy Spirit to guide us, and the Son to redeem us.
Bless us and keep us, and go through the services today, in Jesus name we pray, Amen. So there are five things, at least Brother David talks about the thirty things that happened to us at the moment of acceptance of the Lord.
There are at least five things that Jesus did as part of his three year earthly ministry. His ministry began at the time he came up out of the Jordan River, actually going into the desert area to be tested.
When he came out from the desert area to be tested, his ministry began, and it lasted as an earthly ministry about three years. We saw four examples of those things that Jesus did in this period of his passage, and the fifth one will be revealed later at the appropriate time.
Now there's probably a lot more things to talk about than just these things. Jesus will do the following things. He will heal the sick. As we read that, we saw several instances where Jesus healed the sick.
He healed Peter's mother-in-law. He cast out devils, or cast out demons. He taught, and he preached. There are four things. At the appropriate time, he will do a fifth thing. He will atone for the sins of the elect.
Not the sins of everyone. He does not atone for the sins of everyone that sinned, only of the elect who sinned. So let's begin. We're going to go back just a little bit and we're going to have to because 28 says, and all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath.
So what things did they hear that made them full of wrath? Well, the first thing they heard was in Luke 4, 25, I tell you the truth. Many widows were in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, when great famine was throughout the land.
But unto none of them was Elijah sent, save Serapita, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. So there was plenty of people that were widows in Israel at that time, but only to this one was Elijah sent.
And the second thing that they didn't like to hear was in Luke 4, 27. And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Elisha, the prophet. And none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian. And when they heard these things, they were filled with wrath.
This is Luke's first mention of any hostile opposition to Christ's ministry. What seemed to have sparked the fury of the Nazarenes was Christ's suggestion that divine grace was given to the Gentiles, while there were plenty of Jews available with the same maladies.
There were plenty of Jews that had devils. There were plenty of Jews that were sick. There were plenty of lepers. There were plenty of people to go around. He could have reserved his goodness for the Jews, but he chose to share them with the Gentiles.
And that was an issue with the Jews. Verse 28, again. And they all in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath. And they rose up and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill where on their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong.
But he, passing through the midst of them, went his way. Now we talked about that last week, and I thought it was kind of funny that that's the very miracle that he chose to show them. They asked for a miracle, and he just disappeared.
I guess he just disappeared. At least he went out with them in seeing him. The implication is, though, that this was some sort of miraculous escape. It's just the first, mentioned in Luke, of several similar incidents in which he escaped a premature death at the hands of a mob.
There were several places where this kind of incident is mentioned. In John chapter 7, you don't need to go there, it's just a quick verse. Then they sought him to take him, but no man laid hands on him, because his hour was not yet come.
And in John 8, verse 58, it says,. And Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Adam was, I am. Well, that made them unhappy, because what he's doing is claiming to be the great I Am.
Then they took up stones to cast at him. But Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed them by. So in other cases, they wanted to stone him, and he just walks through the middle of them, and apparently they don't see him.
And in John 10, verse 39, it says,. Therefore they sought again to take him, but he escaped from their hand. So what we have here is just another example of a miraculous escape. The question is, why must he escape all of these incidents?
It wasn't his time. It wasn't his time, because his mission had not been complete. That's something we can take a little heart in. I don't think the Lord's going to take any of us until whatever mission he has for us is complete.
Unfortunately, we don't know when that mission will end. So he may take any of us today. But if he does, as Paul said, I'm not sure which one I'd rather have, whether to be with him, or to be here doing his work.
And he said, it's better that I be here doing his work for you guys. For me, it would be better if I went. So he passed through the midst of them, and went his way, and came down to Capernaum, a city in Galilee, and he taught them on the Sabbath days.
Who did he teach on the Sabbath days? Those that were in the synagogue. Part of his mission was teaching the good news of the gospel. And he hadn't had time to teach all the good news yet. And they were astonished at his doctrine, for his word was with power.
There are some other versions. The English Standard Version translates that word not as power, but as authority. And in some ways, that's a better word, authority, rather than power. If you have authority, you have the power.
If you're God, and you have the authority, you have the power. The word is the same word, as sometimes it's translated power, sometimes authority. Scribes quoted other scribes to establish the authority of their teaching.
Sometimes they even quoted the scripture. But they always quoted something to establish their authority. And Jesus is not quoting things to establish his authority. He's not quoting Isaiah. Sometimes he does, but he doesn't always.
He is his own authority. I'm going to read one more verse out of Isaiah. Matthew 28, verse 18. I'm going to read this one twice, once now and once in a few minutes. And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.
Or you could have read that as saying, And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All authority is given unto me in heaven and in earth. He doesn't have to quote someone else as an authority. In fact, it was this matter of authority that was a major issue between Jesus and the Jews.
They thought that his speaking with authority challenged their authority. So he's not quoting the Targums like they did. He's not quoting the scripture like they did. He is speaking directly as one that had authority, not one that's borrowing his authority from someone else.
Any comments or questions? And there's going to be another passage or two that's going to show great interest as we go through. The first thing they say after they say, You're the Son of God? We know who you are.
You're Jesus, the Son of God. Are you come to destroy us? So they recognize that he has the authority, the power to destroy them, and that he's going to. They just don't want it to be now. And we're going to get to those passages very quickly.
In fact, at 33, we're going to begin that whole passage. Okay, verse 33. And in the synagogue there was a man which had a spirit of an unclean devil and cried out with a loud voice. Now, having a spirit of an unclean devil indicates that the man was under the internal control of an unclean devil or a demon.
In all cases dealing with Jesus and demonization, the demonized person was actually indwelt by a demon who totally controlled the body of the victims, even to the point of speaking through them. We have that in Mark 5.
Causing a derangement, we have that in John 10. Violence, we will have in Luke 8, and we'll get to that passage in a minute. Rendering them mute, which was a problem for the disciples in Mark 9. But going on here, Luke 33.
And in the synagogue there was a man which had the spirit of an unclean devil and cried out with a loud voice saying, leave us alone. What have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? They know he's Jesus of Nazareth, but they know more than that.
Art thou come to destroy us? Implying that they understand that he can. I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God. And so you're absolutely right. They understand exactly who they are. Who Jesus of Nazareth is.
The other Nazarites didn't, but the demon-possessed one did. Demons always recognize Christ immediately when they see him. They are not blinded. I'm glad you brought that up. They are not blinded by Satan, by the prince of this world like people are.
They have a clear vision of who Jesus is. They always recognize him immediately. And Jesus rebuked him saying, hold thy peace and come out of him. And when the devil had thrown him in the midst, he came out of him and heard him not.
And I've got a question. Why do you think Jesus did not want the devil to speak of him, of Jesus? What the demons have just said is, we know who you are, Jesus of Nazareth. We know you are the Holy One of God.
We know that you have the ability to destroy us. And what Jesus says to them is, hold thy peace. Come out of him, but don't say anything about it. And when the devil had thrown him in the midst, he came out of him and heard him not.
And my question is, why did Jesus not want the devil to speak of Jesus? Okay, that's a possibility that he did not want to imply that they had any authority. He didn't want his message to be in any way delivered by them.
Now, will he allow his message to be delivered by people that are not quite all we know and hope them to be? Let's say, okay, go ahead. Will Jesus allow people who are proclaiming part of his gospel to have an influence in a positive way toward their audience in spite of the fact that they are wrong in many things?
I'll say it that way. And in fact, the disciples wanted at one point to silence a person that was not exactly what they were and he said, leave them alone. So he will allow, for example, can anybody that attends a Catholic church be saved while he's at the Catholic church?
What about a Mormon? What about a Muslim? I think that he allows his people to get his message from whomever he brings them in contact with. And sometimes it is just exactly like we would approve of, like the disciples in Jesus' case would have approved of.
And sometimes it's of ways we would not approve of, but it's always in a way that he approves of. If they actually are saved, it's only because he approved of it. Something funny. He studied to find what he's saying.
And you know, I can kind of see that. And let's suppose you are an elect person that's attending a Catholic church and you're seeing that service every Sunday. It will make you study to see whether it's true or not.
Well, let's go on and pick up Mark 1 chapter 23. Mark chapter 1 verse 23. And I think you'll recognize this. And there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit. And he cried out saying, let us alone.
What have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? Art thou come to destroy us? I know thee, who thou art, the Holy One of God. And Jesus rebuked him saying, hold thy peace and come out of him. And when the unclean spirit had torn him and cried out with a loud voice, he came out of him.
And they were all amazed in so much that they questioned among themselves saying, what thing is this? What new doctrine is this? For with authority he commands even the unclean spirits and they do obey him.
John, he recognizes, they recognize that Jesus has authority over the demons. And immediately his fame spread abroad throughout all the region round about Galilee. That's the same exact same incident.
It's just told from the perspective of Peter through Mark rather than from Paul through Luke. Later we have an even more familiar account involving Jesus casting out demons. I want to look at it in Luke 8 verse 26 and then in Matthew.
And I'm just going to quickly read them and then we're going to point out a couple of similarities, a couple of differences. And they arrived, this is Luke 8 verse 26, and they arrived in the country of Gardenius which is over against Galilee.
And when they came forth to land, there made him out of the city a certain man which had devils a long time and wore no clothes, neither a boat in any house but in tombs. And when he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him.
And with a loud voice said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou son of God? Most I. I beseech thee, torment me not. For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. For oftentimes it had caught him and he was kept bound with chains and in fetters and he'd break the bands and was driven of the devil into the wilderness.
And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion, because many devils were entered into him. And they besought him that he would not commend them to go out into the deep. And there was a herd of many swine feeding on the mountain.
And they besought him that he would suffer them to enter them. And he suffered them and then went demons out of the man and entered the swine. And the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake and were choked.
So the whole herd, there was enough demons to go around for the whole herd to get one, just pigs. The demons were not choked, the pigs were choked and the pigs all died. Well, I'm going to tell you one time when he will do it, when he cast them into the lake of fire eternally.
And another one, you.
Have another one? Torment them. So there will be a time when he does torment them by throwing.
Them into the lake of fire. I guess he can put a herd on them right now if he wishes. After all, he's God and he has authority and power over them and they know that he can. But he allowed them, I mean, he could have just said, get out of, they like to dwell in bodies.
And he could just have consigned them to not have a body. Well, he kind of did here. They got, they jumped into the pigs, the pigs ran into the ocean and drowned. And.
Now where they are, where are they? They got to find somebody else. Cast them out. I always.
Just, and I say it has to do, I guess, with your background. I always just took that to mean, don't cast us out into the sea because that's where they went. So I don't know that that's the answer, but that could be one.
And so, okay, you can go where you want to go. You can go into the pigs. They'll take you out and they'll drown and you'll be in the deep where you didn't want to be. They are not clever enough to outsmart the Lord.
Oh, but they are clever enough to outsmart us. So you got to be careful. And one thing I wanted to comment on when you, when you, Brother David talked about, he kind of quoted an authority, right? He quoted, he quoted a person who quoted a person.
Brother Rocky was the authority that you quoted. And what he told you, he quoted from someone else. Both you and Rocky and me are not speaking as a person of authority because we don't have it. Only God has it.
So Brother Rocky wouldn't say, I am going to cast your demon away. There are people that do that, but he wouldn't speak that way because he was not speaking with authority. He was relying on someone else's authority.
The person that actually has the authority, that's who he's counting on. And, uh, okay. Anything else? And the answer I believe is yes. And, and, and here's what, uh, they, here's what they're going to accuse Jesus off in a little while.
Casting out the demons by the power of demons.
I think so. And, and I think so. And I don't see that well. I don't think that, because like you said, that would be hurting himself. Like what Jesus said, a house hurting himself. But that doesn't mean that they couldn't be doing other stuff that doesn't hurt themselves that make it look like the Holy Spirit.
What we should do is put on the context of that passage where he said that the house be divided. We should look at that very carefully. Because it may be just a specific case where that can't be true.
I do. And I, you know, I wish we'd have had this conversation before and we could have already researched a lot of it, but that's something. That's something that needs to be.
Done. That's what, that's what I tend to believe, but I'm, I'm no. And, well, here's one thing we do know.
Jesus came and spoke with him and said, all authority is given unto me in heaven and in earth. So he has the authority. He has the power. No one else has it. Only people that can display power are those that have him as their source of power.
Any other thing that happens is in some sense a falsehood. Counterfeit. Counterfeit.
I have books about it. It's getting into the church here in this country. And I told Terri, I said, I don't even have it that way. She said, well, you can't put God in a box. I said, no, but God can put himself in a box, but he won't break his word.
And in Hebrews 1, 1 through 3, he said, I don't do it that way anymore. Now, how can you say that and then do it without being a liar? So he put himself in that box, Terri. He said, hmm, you know, so he didn't agree or disagree, but he'll think about it.
That's what I like about my friend. But isn't that correct? I mean, God can't lie, right? So he is in a box. If you want to use the terminology, there's things God is, and you can't change that. So in a sense, that's what people see.
People, when they say you can't put God in a box, what they're trying to say is you can't do anything you want to do. You can't win because God is just, you can't, you can't find God. So that means I can do anything I want to do.
That's what they mean sometimes. So it's just so many false arguments. You can't fight them all, it seems like. But anyway, back to this, I think, I think if God said that these things will pass away, talk about tongue speaking and words of knowledge and all that.
And we can go back to 200 A .D. or 285 A .D. where E. Price Osborne was writing a commentary on 1 Corinthians and he gets to the tongues part and he says, this I cannot speak to with knowledge for it go over and happens in the church.
What does that mean? It was gone.
But there is a, there is a time, I believe, when it will come back. At least. And so and so we may be we may be coming into the edge of that now. Who knows? You're right. You're right.
We're like, here's the stuff. This is that one church in Dallas, one time where they had hearing rooms, where they get in a room together and they have one person basically, basically tell them their future.
But there was the Holy Spirit telling them what their future was. So, I mean, that, that could easily be divine stuff, just like a fortune teller. It's just with a different link. And so I do think there's plenty of demonic stuff going on.
Aside from the whole him the devil cast out. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah. And so I definitely think that has permeated big time.
Well, there was one more passage I kind of wanted to read. I'm not going to. It's Matthew 8, 28 version of the same account that we just looked at. But here it says, there met him two possessed with devils.
That's two demon possessed men. In Luke and in Mark, it only mentions one. So is that a contradiction? It's not because the Bible will not contradict itself. But evidently, one of the men was more dominant than the other and served as the spokesperson for the two.
I'd never really seen that until I went back to here. And I had a problem when he said, and there met him two possessed with devils coming out of the tomb, exceedingly fierce, so that no man might pass that way.
And they said, and they cried out saying, what have we to do with thee, thou son of God? Who is the ones that are crying out? Not either of the two men. It's the, it's the legion. It is the legion of demons that are calling out.
Further down it does. Yeah, it does. It says, and I believe it does. Okay, it's, it's, this is the passage. This is the passage with the, with the pigs. It does talk about the herd of swine. And, and, and the important part was not whether it was two men or one man.
It was that however many there were, one of them served as a spokesperson.
Yeah, I hadn't either until actually John MacArthur brought that to my attention in his commentator, commentary.
That there were two men. Mark's description of this event and Luke's description only mentioned one of them. But that one was the spokesperson for the two of them. It would be like if, if two people were possessed by demons and they were together, one of them would be more dominant than the other one.
And when Jesus was to cast them out, one of them would have spoke. Oh, it's like, it was like when Nadler and, and the other guy and Adam Schiff both ran to the mic to sum up. And, and, and Nadler, Nadler got, be the one that summed it up and Schiff was angry.
So, so one of them, one of them must serve as the spokesperson. I doubt that I can find anything. But what we'd have, we'd have the answer to our question that we asked earlier today off, off tape. I know we can, we can edit that out.
That is, that is such a strange theory. And it is so satisfying in many ways. It explains a lot of things that. Yeah. It even has the, the, the two becoming one. That's, that's, that's creepy enough to write a book.
You're right. Yeah. Uh huh. Uh huh. Oh, did she look that up? Or you looked that up? Yeah. And, and that, the bottomless pit is the storage place for them before they're cast into the lake of fire. Yeah.
Good. Yeah. Yeah. But they know there's. Yeah, they know that. They know, they know. But they're just, they didn't know whether it was their time or not. They, yeah, they did. They did. Well, we didn't, I, I was totally convinced we would get through with chapter four.
But we, we didn't make it. And we're already into your time. Most gracious Heavenly Father, thank you for this day and thank you for all the many blessings that you've given us. Thank you for giving us the Holy Spirit to guide us in our search for truth.
And thank you for giving us your Son that came to redeem us for our sins. Go with us through the service today. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.