Piper's Notes

March 25, 1984 (Morning)

Bethlehem Baptist Church

John Piper, Pastor

CHRIST IN COMBAT: OFFENSE BY THE SPIRIT

(Luke 4:16-21)

And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he went to the

synagogue, as his custom was, on the sabbath day. And he stood up to read;

and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book

and found the place where it was written, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me

to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at

liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."

And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and

the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to

them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

In Luke 4:18-19 Jesus reads Isaiah 61:1-2.

He sits down, looks at the crowd of worshipers in the synagogue at Nazareth, and

says, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." They may have

thought that Jesus was another prophet like John the Baptist, announcing that the

Messiah would soon come. But that is not what Jesus meant. In Luke 7:20 John the

Baptist sends and asks Jesus, "Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for

another?" Jesus answers indirectly by saying to John's messengers, "Go tell John

what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers

are cleansed, and the deaf hear; the dead are raised and the poor have the good

news preached to them. And blessed is he who takes no offense at me" (Luke 7:22-

23). So what Jesus meant in the synagogue at Nazareth was that the day of

Messiah has arrived. The hoped-for king, son of David, liberator, Savior, world ruler,

bringer of justice and peace -- Messiah has come.

But the way Jesus quotes Isaiah 61 reveals a mystery about the Messiah's

coming.

It is an extraordinarily short scripture reading for a synagogue service. He breaks off

right in the middle of a verse. Jesus says in Luke 4:19 that he has been sent "to

proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" and he stops. But Isaiah 61:2 says "to

proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God."

Why didn't Jesus finish the sentence? Because there is a mystery about his

coming, namely, that it is a two-act drama. The Old Testament prophets (like Isaiah)

saw the drama whole and didn't separate the two acts by centuries. They anticipate

salvation and judgment together. The year of liberation and the day of vengeance

were all one.

But when Jesus comes he says (in John 12:47-48), "If anyone hears my sayings

and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world

but to save the world. He who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a

judge; the word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day." The first

coming of Jesus Christ ushered in the acceptable year of the Lord -- a year (i.e., a

space of time) for salvation not judgment. Paul says in 2 Cor. 6:2, "Behold, now is

the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation." We live in a day of great

grace and patience. God withholds his judgment and offers full amnesty to our

rebellious hearts while the acceptable year lasts. But when the day of salvation is

over, and the time appointed by the Father has come, then the day of vengeance will

arrive and the prophecy of Isaiah 61:2 will be completed. Paul says in 2

Thessalonians 1:7-8 that at the end of this interval of patience "the Lord Jesus will

be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance

upon those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the gospel of our

Lord Jesus Christ." Therefore, what Jesus says in Luke 4:18-19 at the outset of his

ministry is that he is the Messiah and that he is ushering in a day of good news -- a

day of release and healing and liberation; and for now the day of vengeance is

postponed.

Before we look at what this good news is, let me give two reasons why I think Luke

4:18-19 describes not only the mission of Jesus but also the mission of the church.

First, Jesus met his disciples after the resurrection just before he returned to heaven

and said, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so send I you"

(John 20:21). Disciples of Jesus are an extension of Jesus' mission in the world. We

are to be like him in his suffering for others. He is the light of the world and we are

little beams or little reflections of him (Jn. 12:36; Mt. 5:14-16).

The second reason I think Luke 4:18-19 describes our mission as well as Jesus'

mission is that the church is called the body of Christ (Eph. 1:22-23; 4:15-16). Just

as our bodies are what people see of us so the church is what people see of Christ.

As our bodies put our will into visible action so Christ puts his will into visible action

through the church. Therefore, the mission which Christ once performed in his own

physical body on earth, he now performs through his corporate body the church.

So every time you read what Jesus did or said, always give attention to two things:

what he did for you, that you could not do for yourself, and the example he gives to

you. Everything Jesus said and did was to make us trust him and imitate him.

Everything he did is a ground for faith and a call to action. 1 Peter 2:21 says, "Christ

suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps."

"Suffered for you" -- that's your salvation which he purchased at a cost we could

never have paid. "Leaving you an example" -- that's our illustration; though we can't

atone for sins we can take up our cross and endure hardship to lead people to one

who can.

So to encourage our faith and call ourselves to action let's trace Jesus'

footsteps and listen to his words.

First, I want us to see the crucial work of the Holy Spirit in Jesus' life. In Luke 1:35

Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit. Then in Luke 3:22, when Jesus was thirty

years old, the Spirit descended on him like a dove at his baptism. This was a

special anointing for ministry and a sign of his Father's love. Then in Luke 4:1,

"Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit for

forty days in the wilderness, tempted by the devil." In the wilderness Satan tried to

allure Jesus away from his mission as the suffering servant who would die for our

salvation. Jesus resisted this temptation by the word of God and the Spirit of God

and he came forth like silver.

I want you to see a beautiful contrast here between two sources of power.

Remember (in Luke 4:3-13) Satan tempted Jesus to avail himself of his rights and

power as God's Son to get the pleasure of food, the glory of a world ruler and the

acclaim of a wonder-working Messiah at the door of the temple. But Jesus kept his

face set towards the cross and renounced that kind of power. And the result is given

in v. 14: "Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee." He refused to seek

pleasure and power by Satan's agenda and the result was the enjoyment of the

power of God.

And the same thing is true for us. "Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw

near to God and he will draw near to you" (James 4:7-8). Every pleasure and every

power offered to you in the way of sin will destroy your pleasure in the long run and

rob you of all power in the end. But if you resist and draw near to God, he will come

to you in the power of the Holy Spirit and everything you think you have given up will

be repaid one-hundredfold. You were made for God and nothing can compare with

being filled with the power of his Spirit.

So Jesus returns like David, having bound the Goliath of Satan in the wilderness,

and now he is ready to go on the offense and rout the Philistines and set the

captives free. He could have chosen other texts to read in Nazareth. But he chooses

Isaiah 61:1-2 to show that he comes in the power of the Spirit. Verse 18: "The Spirit

of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the

poor." His mission is all the more relevant for us, because the same Spirit that leads

him into battle, has also been given to us. In the wilderness Jesus fought on the

defense by the power of the Spirit. In the synagogue at Nazareth he takes the

offense by the power of the Spirit. He sounds the trumpet for battle and calls us up

out of the trenches to fight at his side with the weapon of the gospel.

Two weeks ago Noël and I took some of our day off to survey the personal computer

scene, and we learned how easy it is to be so entranced by man-made machines

that our perception of spiritual reality becomes clouded. Well, this past Thursday we

had the opposite experience. We spent about six hours with Leighton Ford and

Gottfried Osei-Mensa, being briefed about the ongoing work of the Lausanne

Committee for World Evangelization. The Lord is good: if he allows one day off to

obscure our vision of the spiritual warfare raging around us (in order to humble us

and give us some empathy with those who struggle with the delusion of pervasive

secularism), he gives us another day off to blow the haze away and clarify the

horrible scenes of battlefield carnage. Leighton Ford sees four major battlefronts

where unbelief and sin and misery should be fought by the church of Christ in the

coming decades.

1) Urban centers. By the year 2000 (16 years away), the Population Reference

Bureau estimates that 51% of the world's people will live in major cities. Mexico

City is expected to top 31 million people by that time. It already has a population

under 14 years old greater than the population of New York. The cities must be a

major front in our global strategy. As a church in the city we have a greater

responsibility than others to fight on this front and to train others to.

2) Islam will be a greater challenge than Marxism. The only popular enthusiasm

for Marxism, says Ford, is where the people have not lived under it. But Islam has

750 million adherents in 152 countries with an increasing zeal to extend its

influence. Presently there are only about 500 Protestant missionaries fighting on

this 750-million person front. And if you think it's hopeless, listen to this promise

from Isaiah 19:25, "In that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a

blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying,

'Blessed by Egypt my people and Assyria the work of my hands …"'

3) Ford sees the need to re-evangelize the secular West. The widespread

influence which Christianity had in this country collapsed in an astonishingly short

period of time historically speaking. We never were a Christian nation, but it was

not that long ago that the evangelical presence in this country significantly

influenced almost all our institutions and thought patterns and world views. What a

shame to evangelize an unreached culture in the two-thirds world only to see it

collapse into secularism in a half-century because we don't know what went wrong

at home. The revitalization of the western church and the reevangelization of

secular western man are a crucial front in the church's global strategy.

4) The fourth great battlefront for the church in the future is the poor. We may

quibble over whether there is hunger in America, but there is no question about

other parts of the world. Leighton Ford reported that 150 million people in Africa

today are on the verge of starvation. He said food is so scarce in Ghana (where

there are four times as many Christians as Muslims!) that you can't even go

unless you bring your own food. The lives of millions hang in the clouds -- will it

rain?

Then after six hours with Leighton Ford and Gottfried Osei-Mensa later that evening,

when the boys were in bed, Noël and I read together a sermon of Jonathan Edwards

preached in 1733 entitled, "The Christian Pilgrim." In it he said, "We should desire

heaven more than the comforts and enjoyments of this life … Our hearts ought to be

loose to these things, as that of a man on a journey … These things are only lent to

us for a little while, to serve a present turn; but we should set our hearts on heaven,

as our inheritance for ever" (Works II, 243). So when last Thursday was over my

heart was saying to the Lord: I know my life here on this journey is very short

compared to eternity; I know that this world is the battlefield of indescribable

carnage as unbelief and sin send people into temporal and eternal misery; I know

that there is incomparable glory and joy promised to those who will suffer with Christ

in the warfare of the gospel (Rom. 8:17f); and I know, O God, how prone I am to

retreat from the field of battle to try to have the ease of heaven now without following

Christ into combat. Guard me from this folly; keep my mind awake to eternity; give

me the compassion of Christ; thrill me with the adventure of cosmic combat in the

power of the Holy Spirit; put me on the offense with Jesus and give me endurance in

the struggle 'til he comes or until I die.

Luke 4:18-19 gives us our mission.

Jesus came with good news to the poor. Specifically: release to the captives,

recovery of sight to the blind and liberation for the oppressed. This text is subject to

two misuses right off the bat. The first is the misuse that limits the poor and

captives and blind and oppressed to physical and social states. But Jesus said in

Revelation 3:17, to the church of Laodicea, "You say, 'I am rich, I have prospered,

and I need nothing'; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and

naked." The arrogant, self-satisfied, wealthy American is utterly poverty-stricken and

miserable in God's eyes and ought to be in our eyes. Most of you work with those

people and your heart should go out to them just like Jesus' did to Zacchaeus.

But the other misuse of this text is to say what I said, and then sit back and think

we are following Jesus when we feel no compassion and take no action on behalf of

people who are materially poverty-stricken and hungry, who are captured unjustly

behind visible iron bars, who are physically afflicted with diseases like blindness and

who are oppressed by heartless human power-brokers. We must be a church that

does not make these two mistakes. We should feel compassion for the rich who are

bringing eternal misery on themselves through slavery to comfort, and we should feel

compassion for the poor who are crushed by present circumstances in addition to

their eternal plight.

Let's look at some examples from each of these three categories of captives, blind

and oppressed. Let it be declared unashamedly and reasonably that the greatest

and most loving thing we can do for anyone is release them from the captivity of sin

(Rom. 6:22-23), heal them from the blindness of unbelief (Acts 26:17f; 2 Cor. 4:4)

and set them at liberty from the oppression of Satan (2 Tim. 2:26). Efforts at social

improvement that neglect this great goal will be looked back on by poor people in

hell as a horrible form of ecclesiastical malpractice.

It is true that when a person becomes a follower of Jesus his life changes. But it is

also true that the way we win people to the greatness of Christ includes doing the

great things he was sent to do. A verbal witness to the value of Jesus Christ without

a life of radical commitment to the things he stood for will produce converts who are

carbon copies of our fallen culture. Therefore, lifestyles of simplicity for the sake of

love are essential if we want to make true disciples.

Specifically, to follow Jesus in proclaiming release to the captives, we should be

mobilized to help people be released from the captivity of alcohol, drugs,

pornography, homosexuality, gluttony. It ought to grieve us that creatures made for

God are held captive by a foreign power. Our zeal for the glory of God should fire us

to win them back to their rightful sovereign.

There are other kinds of captives that followers of Jesus ought to stand up for. An

editorial in Friday's Tribune said, "Hundreds of people are under arrest or have

disappeared [in El Salvador]. All independent press and broadcasting have been

destroyed by the army and the oligarchy. What is left of the press is controlled by

the hard right hand and the armed forces." Whether you think the elections in El

Salvador today are a sham or not, the point is this: there are right-wing and left-wing

governments in this world which imprison people and dispense with people in ways

that would enrage us if they were applied to our own family. The global application of

the golden rule means we must speak up against forces that usurp the place of

God.

Martin Niemöller died three weeks ago at the age of 92. He was a German pastor

who survived the Dachau concentration camp. He once said,

"In Germany they came first for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I

wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because

I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade-unionists, and I didn't speak up

because I wasn't a trade-unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't

speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time

no one was left to speak up" (Christian Century, March 21-28, 1984, p. 296).

But the followers of Jesus will pray and speak and work not only against unjust

captivity but also against disease. Many will become doctors and nurses and give

themselves especially where there is much misery and little medicine. Others of you

will visit the sick and bring comfort and strength. Others will seek the gift of faith and

healing to pray for miracles of recovery. But nobody who follows Jesus will be

indifferent to disability and disease. Freely we have received our health, freely let us

give.

Finally, we follow Jesus in setting at liberty the oppressed -- the ones who

are powerless and abused by the heartless.

The Bible is strewn with references to the orphan, the widow and the sojourner. So it

warms my heart to see how much adopting and foster-parenting is happening at

Bethlehem, and how the young and old are joining hands with Rollin and others to

visit and care for our shut-ins; and how Phaitoon is forming house-churches for the

Asians and others are planning new English classes. I was glad that we spent

$15,000 to make our church more accessible to the handicapped. I was glad that so

many of you attended your caucuses last week and supported resolutions on behalf

of the most oppressed and disadvantaged minority in America -- the unborn.

When the Spirit of the Lord is upon us and He anoints us to share in the ministry of

Jesus, we will pray and speak and work for the release of captives, the recovery of

sight for the blind and the liberty of the oppressed, as long as the acceptable year of

the Lord lasts. And then will come the day of vengeance and the day of reward. The

tables will be turned. The narrow, rocky Calvary road will open into endless fields of

thick green grass and crystal streams and cool winds and warm sunshine, precious

friends, perfect health and the presence of Jesus; and this slight momentary

affliction will give way to an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.