Matthew 4:13 Commentary and Bible Study

Matthew uses a strong word for ‘leaving’. This was not just a detail of his itinerary, but the Lord was leaving behind the place where he had grown up. From now on Capernaum would be the centre of his activity in Galilee, and it was here that Peter currently lived (John 1:44), close to the shore of the Sea of Galilee where his fishing business was based (Luke 4:38). Matthew explains this as part of the divine plan for Christ’s life, which fulfilled specific prophecy in Isaiah about where he would minister. The two tribes named, Zebulun and Naphtali, received their allotted territories on the west side of Galilee extending both north and south of the sea, which was the region where Christ would do much of his preaching and where the disciples would also be sent. The Lord worked according to the divine plan. Although in his divine nature he knows all things, in his human nature he consciously cooperated with that plan, knowing the Scriptures not instantly from birth, but studying them from the earliest times (Luke 2:46) and acquiring a knowledge of them that was complete by the time of his three-year ministry. When the disciples acted they sometimes found afterwards that they had unknowingly fulfilled Scripture, but Christ knew all that would take place. Ridderboss says, ‘Although we cannot conclude from the mere grammatical construction “he returned to Galilee … to fulfil” that Jesus deliberately set out to fulfil prophecy by going to Galilee, what we know of His self-understanding and His heed for the prophets (see, e.g., Luke 4:21) makes this certain.’ Christ makes known in this passage in Luke that he is conscious of the fulfilment of Scripture in all that he does. Galilee was to be the place where so many miracles were done, and where his extensive preaching ministry took place. It was away from the nations’ centre of religion in Jerusalem, and allowed him to teach with less interference from the religious authorities, and John tells us that this was a consideration in the decision to move there (John 4:1), and which later confirmed his remaining there (John 7:1). Christ was returning to a region that he had grown up in, and which had also witnessed the miracles he had done in Jerusalem, because many Galileans had come up to Jerusalem for the Passover feast and seen him there (John 4:45). Since this passage is quoted as a fulfilment of prophecy following Christ’s move to Capernaum which is said to be along the sea coast, it seems that ‘by way of the sea’ refers to the sea of Galilee, rather than Mediterranean which was originally part of the tribe of Asher and in those days belonged to Phoenicia.But now a marvellous light shone forth on the people of Galilee, for they began to hear ‘things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world’ (Matthew 13:35), and to see ‘works which none other man did’ (John 15:24). Concerning their sitting in darkness, Hendriksen comments, ‘For centuries those living in this large territory had been exposed to political and military aggression from the north (Syria, Assyria, etc.) and to the corrosive moral and religious influences of a pagan environment.’ They were in spiritual darkness because they were away from God, ‘having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their hear’ (Ephesians 4:18). Now they witnessed the light of the world who showed them the way into the kingdom of heaven.