Luke 4:18 Commentary and Bible Study

Here the Lord Jesus Christ teaches in the synagogue, and many of those who had known him all his life in that small community would have heard him. He quotes from Isaiah and establishes that he is the anointed one of God. When the Lord came, he was appointed, anointed by the Holy Spirit. As Aaron was anointed with oil, and as the kings of Israel were anointed in a symbolic way, Christ was anointed in reality. This was his task to preach the gospel to the poor and his words are to be taken in a spiritual sense. Not the poor in monetary terms necessarily, not the poor in that they are deprived, though he had a special place in his heart for the deprived. This refers to those who are poor in spirit as the Lord Jesus Christ elsewhere explained in the Sermon on the Mount. This applies to those who are humbled and ready to listen to him. The meaning of the gospel, the way of salvation, is plain and clear by the goodness of God to those who are humble enough to receive it. These words were prophetic of him and what he would do. ‘The acceptable year’ means a year which is shown special favour, and the beginning of his ministry was of course a favoured year. It was the beginning of all that had been prophesied in the Old Testament: that God would send a Saviour, that God would send his Son, that he would come and through his sufferings and death there would be a way made by which sins could be washed away, sins could be forgiven. This was the beginning of it all, Christ the Lord would come from heaven and he would demonstrate that he was who he claimed to be. He would demonstrate his mighty power through healings, signs and wonders and mighty deeds, and he would preach, and then eventually he would be arrested in apparent weakness and be taken and nailed to a cross and there crucified and slain. But he would not just be the suffering of the nails through his hands and feet. He would be suffering far beyond was, for God would put upon him the guilt of all who will ever be forgiven and he would punish his own Son instead of us. The righteous and just God who must punish sin would punish his own Son, co-equal with the Father, equally God, equally eternal. He would come into time, take upon himself a body of flesh so that he could suffer our pain and buy the right to forgive us. And this was the beginning of the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was indeed the acceptable or the favoured, the special year of the Lord.There are two particular kinds of deliverance here in this passage: to preach deliverance to the captives and then later on to set at liberty them that are bruised and it covers two categories. One, on the one hand, there are those who are like condemned criminals in the cell waiting execution under sentence of death and the picture language of the prophet is that when Christ comes, he will set them free. Again, this is a spiritual message. It applies to men, women, young people. All of us are away from God and have sinned away our lives and therefore we are under the righteous judgment of God. We have a great sword of justice hanging over us. We are as it were imprisoned, on death row, unless God forgives us in wonderful mercy. We are all condemned to die and to die eternally. The Lord Jesus Christ came into this world to do something which would make it possible for him to let out all those heading towards eternal hell. But there's another kind of captive. Even while we go on living we are in captivity to our appetites and our lusts, to temptations, to the propaganda of this world. We are driven by strong feelings and desires, and also we cannot improve or mend our ways. We cannot please God. Our lives are fixed in this depraved way of living for ourselves. The Lord Jesus Christ came to do something which would enable him to let us out of the condemned cell and would deliver us from the forces which dominate our lives. The ‘recovering of sight to the blind’ – that is a glorious thing. We are blind. We don't understand the Bible. We don't understand about God, who he is, what he's like. We can't understand what Christ came to do. We don't know the meaning, the purpose of life. Religion is so confusing to us. The Lord Jesus Christ came in order that it may all be plain, so that he could help us to grasp and understand these things: our spiritual need, what must be done to save our souls, how we can walk with him.‘He hath sent me to heal the broken hearted.’ The Greek is very strong. The terms mean those who are completely crushed in their feelings, in their thoughts, and their emotions. Christ came in order to heal the souls of those who are crushed. There are three different kinds of sorrow. Two of them will never save the soul. The third one, which is the most important, will actually secure the blessings of salvation for us by God's grace. The first is a quite natural sorrow or disappointment, heartache, which comes because of the sympathy which is in us for somebody else. We have within us the capacity to be very fond of other people or concerned about them, so we are often very downhearted and disappointed because we love people who let us down. We love people who go seriously wrong and we feel so sorry for them, our children for instance, who get hurt or misbehave. This kind of sorrow doesn't save the soul, but God has put it within us so that we can understand something of God himself: that he is a personal God who can feel pity for us. Secondly, there is a sorrow that we constantly experience because of sin, because of our own sin, and because of the sin of other people, too. We have grief because of our anger, because of our callousness, because of our frustrated ambitions. What gives rise to that? Partly our pride, because of broken relationships, because of self-pity, because of thwarted covetousness, because of drink and drugs. People lie one to another and then they are exposed and they are hated for their lies. This sort of sorrow may help us. When we are down and grieving because of sin, we may see ourselves for what we are. The trouble is we don't like to accept that we are sinful, that others are sinful, that this is a sinful and a fallen world in rebellion against God. But there's a third kind of suffering. It is the sorrow of repentance. Blessed are they that mourn, says the Lord Jesus Christ. Godly sorrow, which makes me repent of my sin, really punctures my pride. I say to myself, I never saw it before, but I am a really corrupt and sinful person. I am so weak. There are so many horrible characteristics in me. It may be that I have to say, I am so greedy; I am so selfish; I am such a liar; I am so dirty-minded; I am so callous and hostile. We see these things in us and we are ashamed of them, and the heart is sick. We regret all our self-worship. We say to ourselves, all my life, I've just done everything for me. I've worshipped me. I've thought what a wonderful person I was. All my work and labour has been for me. I haven't really regarded others very much. When we repent, when we really see our sinfulness and we are broken hearted and we go to God asking for forgiveness, he completely heals us. He washes our wounds. He takes away the guilt of our sin, but he doesn't stop there. He completely heals this broken sinner. He takes the old nature with all its crimes and its character traits that we could not do anything about. He takes the proud person. You couldn't humble him, no matter how hard you tried – he was so full of himself – but God does it. He takes the dirty-minded person and he begins to work on that old nature. He gives us a new nature with wholesome desires.