12/01/2023 – God’s Will and Our Expectations
Luke 4: 24 “Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. 25 I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. 26 Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27 And there were many in Israel with leprosy[g] in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.” 28 All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. 30 But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
One strategy of false prophets is to fill our heads and hearts with false expectations. This strategy works very well for them. The sin of presumption is one of the most common in God’s people. We claim and declare often without knowing or understanding God’s plans. It may seem like harmless behavior to us; but in reality, it is a grave sin that leads many in the church to ignore their true calling while waiting for “great things” that God has not planned or promised to do.
There, in a synagogue in Nazareth, was their Lord and God speaking directly to them, and they only saw a carpenter who could never fulfill their expectations of liberation from the Romans. Who were they waiting for? What should he look like? What should he speak? What is your expectation? What must God do to meet your expectations? What must he do to make you believe him? He is God! He does as He wants and uses who He wants.
Here the Lord reminds his people about three truths that have always been very difficult to accept:
- God’s people have often rejected those whom God has sent.
- God punishes rebellion harshly, and
- God extends His grace to who He wants when He wants and where He wants.
The people understood these truths very well and reacted with anger to them. Christ announces here God’s grace to the Gentiles, which has always been God’s purpose. But above all Christ affirms that God is the one who sends his grace, who takes the initiative, who heals and saves from pure grace whom He wants. This is the statement of Jehovah to Moses: I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.