Jesus Rejection at Nazarath cont.

Luke 4:25-27

"Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian."

A widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon.
and
Naaman the Syrian (afflicted with leprosy).

Why is this important?

 Taken from  John MacArthur's sermon.

 And if you think that was bad, that Elijah was sent to none of those Jewish widows, this was worse. He was sent to Zarephath in the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow there. Now this is worse. Why? This woman in the land of Sidon, hang on, is a Gentile. It's bad enough to be a woman in Jewish tradition at this time, it's far worse to be a Gentile woman. But to come from Sidon, that is unthinkable. How could God ignore the Jews of Israel? But then how could He possibly send His prophet to go minister to a Gentile widow in, of all places, Sidon? Sidon was Gentile territory on the north coast of Israel, Tyre and Sidon, the two familiar cities. Tyre and Sidon in that Gentile region, Zarephath was a town in between the two, Tyre and Sidon, a Phoenician city. The area was the home... This is even more amazing. The area was the home of the father of Jezebel. You know what his name was? Ethbaal, he was so devoted to Baal He named himself after Baal. Ethbaal means "Baal is alive." And Ethbaal was such a wicked man he murdered his predecessor and he was a priest as well as being a king. He was the king of Phoenicia, Tyre and Sidon, he was the king, he was a Baal-worshiping king, he was also a priest in the temple of Melqart and Astarte, two of the deities in the pantheon of Baal worship. This is the most wretched thing imaginable. This is the father of the apos...of the apostasy, in a sense, in Israel because he's the father of Jezebel who came and polluted Israel worship when she married Ahab, and so forth. And so here God sends His prophet to a woman from the home region of Jezebel, a Gentile widow. 

 So if you look at 1 Kings 17 you see the story. God sends Elijah in this midst of all this famine over to Zarephath, to this widow. This is a widow who believes in the true God. The text of 1 Kings 17 indicates that. She says, "The Lord God of Israel lives." She gives testimony. Somebody had witnessed to her about the true God of Israel and she trusted in the true God of Israel. She is a pagan Gentile widow in the midst of a pagan godless area but believes in the true and living God. And so to her goes the prophet of God rather than to Israelites. Her food supply was down to one little bit of flour and one little bit of oil, enough to make one cake, right? One scone, if you will, one biscuit. And the prophet comes to her and you can read the story in 1 Kings 17, I wish we had time to do it, we don't. And he says to her, first of all, "Could you get me some water?" Huh. And then he says when she's going to get the water, "Can you also take what you’ve got left and make me a meal?" Huh. This is a stranger, she's never met this guy in her entire life, he walks in and says, "Take what you've got, that's all you've got and make me a meal, I am the man of God, I am from the God of Israel." She knows the God of Israel lives. She says it, "The Lord God of Israel lives." Well, I'm from the God of Israel and I'm going to ask you, if you will, to take all that you have left, your last meal before you die, starve to death, and she had a son as well, and give it to me.

The only way she would ever know whether God would supply all she ever needed was to take the little that she had and trust it to him. She figured that out, by the way. She wasn't in the synagogue in Nazareth and it was probably a good thing or she might have been influenced by the crowd attitude. She probably thought like this, "Well, I only have one little cup left, one little bit of oil, that's all I've got. If I give it to him and he is a man of God, then I'll have life. And if he's not, I'll just have one less meal and die half a day sooner. I'm going to die anyway, what have I got to lose?" Pretty good thinking, isn't it? "All I've got is one meal left. I'm destitute. I'm desperate. I'm in poverty. I have nowhere to turn. If I don't trust the God of Israel who lives, if I don't trust the man of God, I'm dead anyway, what's half a day longer? But if he is the man of God, and if God did send him, then I have life." The only way she would ever know was not if he went up in the air and spun around a few times, not if he went out and healed some people, the only way she would ever know that the God of Israel would give her all she would ever need was if she took what she had in her poverty and trusted him with it. She did.

 

 And you remember the story? She made the little cake, the prophet ate it and the next thing that happened was her barrel was never empty. Remember that? It just was supernaturally filled all the time. And the cruse of oil was never empty. It just kept getting filled and filled and filled. That's an analogy of spiritual life and supply. She took the little that she had, she gave it to the man of God and in return she got life, permanent life. And then...and the Lord did another amazing thing. Her son got sick and died, remember? And he raised her son from the dead just because she trusted the tiny bit that she had. She knew that she was the poor, the prisoner, blind, and the oppressed. And Jesus was saying to those Jews, "Let me tell you something, you may be Jews, you may be part of Israel, you may be the people of the covenants and the people of the Messiah, but I'll tell you this, God will save an outcast Gentile widow who admits her spiritual destitution before He'll save you."

 And Jesus wasn't finished. They didn't like this at all.  They're getting angrier by the moment.  They don't even like the fact that He's telling these stories.  Verse 27: "There were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha, the prophet."  Elisha followed Elijah and that was a time, 850 to 790 B.C., disease was a major problem.  Leprosy is a sort of a categorical word.  It's a broad term.  It identifies various ancient skin diseases, everything from superficial diseases to serious diseases.  It may also include what is today called leprosy, but really by that most people mean Hansen's disease, but it included all kinds of diseases of the skin described in Leviticus 13.  They tended to be disfiguring diseases, usually contagious diseases. They made the victim unclean, cut off from all fellowship, all social activity, cut off from the families and isolated because of the contagion that was believed to be a part of these diseases, and Israel had many, many such people with these diseases, many of them.  It was in the time of Elisha, and they didn't like Elisha, he didn't have any honor in his own...in his own country any more than Elijah did.  The people were still worshiping Baal, they were still turning their backs on the true and living God and along came leprosies  everywhere and in verse 27, "There were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet and none of them was cleansed but only Naaman the Syrian."  Oh, man, did they hate this story.

 Now what's wrong with Naaman?  Naaman was a commander-in-chief of a section known as Aram.  He was a soldier.  He was a... He was a big-time soldier.  He commanded a set of troops that were always raiding Israel.  They would come across the border and they would fight and they would terrorize and raid Israel and they would take prisoners and haul the prisoners back to Syria.  He was a Gentile.  He was a Gentile and worse than that, he was a leper, he had leprosy, he was unclean, he was despicable on every count.  On one of his raids he took captive, this is in the stories in 2 Kings 5, first fourteen verses, you can read it yourself, he took back this girl, one of his captives and she became a servant in his house to help his wife.  She had a great attitude, she knew about his leprosy and she said to him, "You need to go find the man of God, Elisha, because God can heal you."  And you know what happened?  He began to believe in the power of the God of Israel and so eventually through some situations, I won't go into all of it, he wound up meeting Elisha.  Here is an enemy, a Gentile, somebody who has sacked and attacked and killed and plundered Israel and he's a leper. This is the outcast of all outcasts.  And Elisha says to him, "The God of Israel is willing to heal you. All you have to do is go over to the river and go down seven times."  One preacher titled a sermon on this, "Seven ducks in a dirty pond." That's essentially...that's essentially what he told him to do. Go over there in this dirty river and just duck yourself seven times.  And he said..."I'll..." he was furious, he was a man of honor and a man of stature and a man of dignity and a man of nobility and he isn't going to humble himself in some kind of humiliating deal and go dump himself down seven times in some dirty river.  He even says, "We have clean rivers in my area, I'm not going in your dirty river."

So he goes back and his servant says, "Well, better a dirty river and a clean Naaman, huh?"  And he starts to think about it and he had second thoughts.  And he realizes his desperation and he realizes there's no relief and there's no cure and there's no healing and there's nothing except the God of Israel.  Is the man of God really the man of God?  Is God really truly God?  Is this really His prophet?  How will I ever know that?  How am I going to know that that's true unless I do what He says?  I have to take my desperation, my destitution, my disease, I have to go over there. I have to do what the man tells me to do.  If I do what the man tells me to do, then I'll know whether he's the man of God, right?

So he goes over there and he does his seven ducks in the dirty river and guess what?  Clean!  Oh boy, you're sitting in the synagogue, you're saying, "This is not going well.  So we are worse than a Gentile widow from Jezebel's hometown.  We are worse than a Syrian Gentile leper.  This is intolerable."

In verse 28, "All in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things."  Let me tell you something, there's nothing worse than spiritual pride, is there?  You know, the Lord had said, "You know, I come to save, this is it.  But I can only save the poor, and the prisoners, and the blind, and the oppressed. That's all I can save and it doesn't matter whether they are a Gentile woman or whether they are a Syrian leper, it doesn't matter who it is, it just matters that they see their bankruptcy, their destitution, and they come to Me like the man who said, 'Lord, I believe, but could You help my unbelief?'  And they may not know everything there is to know and their faith may not be full, but if they'll just come in their desperation and say, 'I don't have a choice, here's all I have and see what I can do with it.'  Then they'll know that I'm the Messiah, right?"

You didn't know either and neither did I until I gave Him my life.  Then I knew.  And you could have paraded before me an infinite number of miracles. They wouldn't have proved anything.  You will never know whether Jesus can save your soul from hell, give you new life, recreate your soul, plant His Holy Spirit there, forgive your sin and send you to heaven until you give your life to Him.

 

All they could think about was that they were below Gentiles.  They didn't even want these stories to be rehearsed again, they didn't like these stories.  And they're so angry with Him because He's insistent on the fact that unless they humble themselves like a Syrian leper, unless they see themselves as no better than a Syrian leper, no better than a pagan Gentile woman, unless they see themselves as no better than outcasts, they aren't going to get saved.  And that is absolutely intolerable to them, to go to someone who is a life-long Jew, a life-long attender of the synagogue, a serious devout Jew and say, "You're no better off than a pagan, you're no better off than an outcast Gentile leper," is unthinkable because they're so committed to the self-righteousness that's a part of a works system.

And so, it says in verse 29, "They rose up." All of a sudden bedlam broke loose in the crowded synagogue.  They cast Him out of the city.  They grabbed Him and in mob violence like a lynch mob, they roared out of the city, led Him to the brow of the hill on which their city had been built. Nazareth sits on a hill, many hills on the hill but it's up a slope. We don't know what brow of it. They found a place, a brow of a hill in which the city had been built in order to throw Him down the cliff.  Deuteronomy 13 said that if you have a false prophet, you can do that, kill him.  They were so entrenched in their self-righteousness, so unwilling to see their sin that when Jesus, the Messiah they had waited for for so long, the Savior of the world came, they tried to kill Him because He threatened their self-righteousness.  There's only one reason why people who know the truth of Jesus don't believe. It is because they do not see themselves as the poor, prisoners, blind, and oppressed.  You see that?  Because you can't be saved if you don't.  God offers nothing to people who are content with their own condition, except judgment.

In their minds they were the respectable.  They were the godly, the chosen, the true worshipers, the legalists, the ceremonialists, the covenantalists.  These other people were wretched, destitute outcasts. They couldn't see themselves as spiritual lepers.  They refused to admit it. They were His relatives and His friends and His neighbors.  How could you... They were His relatives and His friends and His neighbors?  Yeah, and they tried to kill Him.  They hated that message so violently because they would not be humiliated.  You can't get saved unless you're willing to be humiliated and realize your sinful condition.  Again I say, take all the healers, line them up, let them heal all the sick, that doesn't prove that Jesus can forgive sin. Just give your life to Him, He'll prove He can.

They tried to kill Him but it wasn't His time.  Verse 30, instant calm, "But passing through their midst He went His way."  We don't know how that happened.  Some miraculous way He just was gone.  If they wanted proof, all they needed to do was ask Him to save them from their sins, but they had to admit their sins and they wouldn't.

How about you? 

"But passing through their midst He went His way."

 

"This guy." 

:-).

Jesus' Return to Nazareth: Rejection by the People 

Story reminds me that

Isaiah 56:6-7

 "And foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord
to minister to him,
to love the name of the Lord,
and to be his servants,
all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it
and who hold fast to my covenant—

 

these I will bring to my holy mountain
and give them joy in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house will be called
a house of prayer for all nations."

"In your house I long to be;
Room by room patiently,..."