January 24 Sermon: Fulfilled in Your Hearing

Consider these questions as you listen to this week’s message from Psalm 19 and Luke 4:14-21:

1. How does the Psalmist in Psalm 19 emphasize the two primary ways through which God makes Himself known to us, and what significance does this hold for understanding God's character?

2. In Luke 4, Jesus reads from the book of Isaiah and declares that the year of the Lord's favor has come. How does this declaration relate to the concept of the Year of Jubilee, and what does it signify for those who believe in Jesus?

3. How does the idea of God liberating and forgiving His people connect with the concept of God's grace and redemption in both the Old and New Testaments?

Transcript:

Our God is a God who rescues His people. He does not leave them on their own, but instead comes to us and shows us who He is. We see this God we serve not only in the Majesty of His creation, but also in His word and in the person and work of Jesus Christ. God's rescue of His people is not done from afar, but instead, He comes near to us and delivers us. In both of our scripture lessons this morning, we see this God, this God of love and mercy, and how He comes to us. Our Old Testament lesson comes from the hymn book of ancient Israel. This Psalm of David is one that's pretty well known.

As we read through it, you may have remembered some verses you memorized in Sunday school or on Wednesday night programs. There's a lot of hit records in there. We know a lot of these verses. This Psalm shows us that there are two primary ways that God makes Himself known to us. One of the confessions of our church, the Belgium confessions, also has these two ways of knowing God. It spells it out for us. It shows us that we know God by two means, through His creation and through His word. And we see this expressed very clearly for us in Psalm 19. Right there, right there in verse one, we see a verse that we have heard so many times. The heavens, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies proclaim the work of His hands. The Majesty of our God is clearly seen in His creation. This past Tuesday at our Bible study of the text that we have every Tuesday at noon, I asked for examples of things that we see in creation that confirm to us the splendor of God. And what I love about that discussion is the scope of which people share when that question is asked.

From the vastness of space all the way down to the amazing detail that we see in the most minuscule cells as we put our eyes up to a microscope. The heavens declare the glory of God. Sunrises and sunsets declare the glory of God. The trees of the field clap their hands at the grandeur of God's creation. And the first time your child or your grandchild grabs your finger with their tiny little hand, you know God's design. There are so many things that do this for us that we may even sometimes miss them because we're just so used to the grandeur of God's creation. When I was younger, my cousins and my aunt, who is here today, would come and visit us from Chicago, where there is a lot of light. And my cousin, Prentice, he's about my age and so he would often come and spend the night with us. And one night we were getting back late at summer, and you know how late it gets dark here, but it was dark out. And we pulled up in front of our house and I got out and went inside. And after about, oh, two minutes, three minutes, I said, Where in the world is Prentice?

And I looked around the house and he wasn't there. I finally went out and he's standing out by the car like this, looking straight up. And I walked up to him and I'm like, What are you doing? I didn't even look up. And he said, There's so many of them. I was used to it. He was right. There were so many of them. I was so used to the beauty of it that I took it for granted. It took his observation for me to really appreciate how beautiful it really was and how fortunate I was to be able to see that on a regular basis to take in God's Majesty. But we can do what I did in so many ways. It's easy for us to take some things for granted. But here in our text, the Psalmist calls us back. And through this hymn, he reminds us of this amazing, mighty and creative God that we serve. He tells us that creation is a voice, a voice that goes forth and tells of God's glory all around us. But there's only so much that we can know through creation. We can know that there is a grand designer who placed the stars in the heavens, sustains their creation, and even put together the complex coding in our DNA, but we need something else.

We cannot know God's standards apart from His law. And so the Psalmist, in his hymn here, moves us toward the revealed word of God. It tells us that the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, they make wise the simple. Even though we are certain of God's existence from His creation, we need something to come to us from outside of us to tell us who this God is. And David tells us that this law of the Lord is righteous and enduring and pure, and it's sweeter than honey. But what is perhaps most interesting about this transition from the talk of the beauty of creation to the law of God is the switch in the way the Psalmist addresses God here. In the first six verses of Psalm 19, we see a general name used for God. In the Hebrew, it's L. But from verse seven and beyond to the end of the chapter, in our English Bibles, we see the word Lord in all capital letters. And as you probably know, in the original language, this is telling us that this is the personal name of God, Yahweh, a name that was so revered by the Hebrews that they wouldn't even say it.

When they would come across it in their readings, they wouldn't say Yahweh. They would say Adonai, which in Hebrew was Lord. Because they dared not to utter the holy name of God. So when David talks of the law of the Lord, he's moving to a more intimate, personal name for God. This law is how we know who God really is. What God needs us to know about Him, He doesn't leave to chance. He comes near to us with clear words. And these words show us who God is, and they cause us to love God and His word. They show us how to live, but it also does something else that is very important. In verse 12, we read the Psalmist asking for forgiveness of hidden faults. God's law is perfect. And even though we strive to keep His law, we are inherently sinful creatures. And we will see and do things and sin even without knowing it. We need God's forgiveness, not only from the things that we do, but even the things that we don't do and the things that we aren't even consciously aware of that we're doing that is violating this law of God.

And the Psalmist makes it clear that we are in need of forgiveness and intervention by God. Even though we have this perfect law from God, we don't keep it as we ought. And we are desperately in need of the grace of God to have our sin debt forgiven. And we see this theme, expresses itself as we fast forward into our New Testament lesson this morning. As we find ourselves in the fourth chapter of Luke today, we see Luke speeding up the story of Jesus a little bit. He leaves out a whole lot of details about the fame of Jesus. He simply tells us that a report went out to the surrounding country. No details. Just that people are knowing who Jesus is and He's teaching in the synagogues of the region. Luke then tells us that Jesus has come to Nazareth. The hometown Rabbi has come home. And just as he always does, he observes the Sabbath, and He went to the synagogue there. He's given the scroll of the book of Isaiah, and he enrolls it to a certain place, and he reads from it. The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Jesus then gives the scroll back to the attendant and sits down and He says, Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. Jesus has come. As we have seen, as we've dug into the early ministry of Jesus the last few weeks, we've seen that Jesus has been anointed and He's going forth in this earthly ministry. And here is Jesus telling us that He is the moment of what the prophet, Isaiah, has written. He's proclaiming good news to the poor. He's proclaiming liberty to the captives and giving sight to the blind and giving liberty to those that are oppressed. Jesus has been doing those things in his earthly ministry. But there's something deeper going on in this text and in the text that He's quoting from Isaiah. It's easy to come to these verses and think that the message of Jesus was simply to help the poor, to liberate the oppressed, and to help the blind. No doubt, social justice was and is a primary theme for Jesus and for Christians.

And we're called to do those same things. But we don't want to miss the deeper level of what's going on in this text and in the text he's quoting from Isaiah. Several years ago, maybe not several, four or five, I had taken a bunch of kids on a youth trip. And on the way home to help them decompress from the work for the week and get to know them a little bit better, we went to the one place in the world where I have connections, Sandusky, Ohio, where I worked for eight years and six of them with Pastor Gary, who's here this morning. And when I say I have connections, it's because I have some friends who live on some amazing property. A friend of mine tells me that it's the only property like it in the world. Because we were right by Lake Erie and they lived on a Peninsula that went up on Lake Erie. And over here was Sandusky Bay, and here was Lake Erie. And so we were taking these kids and these are landlocked South Dakota kids. There were two girls and as we were going, as we were driving up the Peninsula, there's a brake wall on the side to protect these houses and protect everything.

On the other side is a beach. This Peninsula property, the reason it's so unique is my friend's backyard is on a bay. He then has a front yard and then a road, and then he's got a beach that's his own property. I mean, it's wonderful. We get there and we park and I see two girls who obviously did not see over the break wall and see Lake Erie, and they've got their towels and they've got their bathing suits on and they're walking and talking and I'm like, Caitlin, McKinsey, where are you going? They're walking to the bay. I mean, it's seven feet deep and muddy water. We're going to swim. I'm like, The lake's over there. I was actually ahead of them. And I watched. And these girls stepped up over the break wall in their eyes when they saw the vastness of a great lake. They thought a mile-wide bay was a great lake. And then they stepped over and they saw the real thing. And so when we come to what Jesus is saying here, we want to see it for all the vastness and beauty. We want to swim in the lake of God's word, not the bay.

Again, Jesus came to give sight to the blind and released the oppressed. But each and every one of those people that he did those things for in his earthly ministry still died. They were still victims of the curse. The blind that Jesus healed may have one day gotten sick and lost their sight again. No matter how many people Jesus healed, they were not released permanently from the tragedies and trials of this life. Even Nazareth, who was raised from the dead, ultimately met his final demise. The effects of the miracles we see in the New Testament are great. But Jesus came to show us something greater and to do something greater. The miracles that Jesus performs are written down to show us two things, that He has divine power and He's appointed by God the Father, and to point us to something deeper about His ministry and what He came to do. We read of Jesus healing the blind because we're blind. In our trespasses and sins, we cannot see God. He proclaimed liberty to the captives because we are all captive to our sin. The law of God that our Psalm this morning spoke of convicts us of our sin.

The words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart are not always what they should be. We need God to come to us and to forgive us not only of the sins we know, but the sins we aren't even aware of. In verse 19 here in Luke, we read that Jesus came to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Our English language and our cultural context really don't get down to the significance of this statement, this declaration that Jesus is making. The year of the Lord's favor is also known as the Year of Jubilee. In the old covenant, this was a year that happened every seven years, and the debts of everyone were forgiven, completely wiped out. As we look at the work of Jesus, that is precisely what He accomplished in His death and resurrection. In our sin and in our unbelief, we were poor, we were held captive, we were blind, and we were drowning in the oppressive debt of our sin. But Jesus has come to us and given us new life and declares to us that our debt has been wiped out. It's the year of Jubilee. And it's because of Christ work for us that we are not only free of our debt, but on account of Christ, we are declared righteous.

We've not only had our sin debt brought to zero, but we've been given His righteousness. And that is truly good news to proclaim. In Christ, it is the year of the Lord's favor. That is a promise that lasts. It does not fade. It is not temporary or merely confined to fortune or good health in this life, but points us forward to the promises of God, of eternal life, the consummation of all things, and the resurrection of our bodies. A promise that does not fail because God's word is perfect and is more precious than gold and sweeter than honey. And it's because of this good news that we can now serve our neighbors with confidence, not with hopes that God will bless us or liberate us because we've obeyed Him and we've done a lot of good stuff. Instead, we now serve others because God has liberated us. We were blind, but now we see. We were captives, but He liberated us. We were poor in spirit, and yet He came to us with good news. Out of gratitude for what God has done for us in Christ, we go now to those who need to be served and we share that hope that does not fade.

Now to this great, liberating, eternal King, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.