LUKE 4:18 - PART TWO.
Bible reading: Luke 4:14-37.
“To preach deliverance to the captives” (Luke 4:18d).
We all have our own presuppositions about who Jesus is, and what He came to do: but one thing Jesus is NOT is a political revolutionary! Jesus did not come to raise an army, and drive the Romans out of Judaea. He did not even secure release from wrongful imprisonment for His relation John the Baptist.
Before we ‘proclaim to captives deliverance’ we must understand who the captives are, and what the nature of their captivity. It would be quite inappropriate, for example, for me to proclaim release for those incarcerated in our prisons - except, one might hope, the spiritual release of the gospel. But Jesus’ “deliverance” reaches beyond politics, beyond crime and punishment, to the very heart of the matter: to the issue of the sin within every one of us.
In this very chapter, one obvious set of ‘captives’ is illustrated in the case of the demon possessed man in the next scene (Luke 4:31-37). But meantime there was another group of ‘captives’ sitting there in the synagogue in His hometown, with their eyes glued upon Jesus, waiting to hear what He would say. They were captive to their own presuppositions concerning Israel’s Messiah, and even thought to murder Jesus after church (Luke 4:28-30)!
So what made them so mad? Was it just that He omitted the bit about ‘the day of vengeance of OUR God’ in Isaiah 61:2? Perhaps not, but rather that He had the audacity to illustrate from other parts of the Scripture that Israel’s ‘God’ was more inclusive than they realised (cf. Luke 4:23-28)!
It appears that the ‘religious’ people of Jesus’ day were particularly susceptible to ‘captivity.’ Later, in the Temple precincts in Jerusalem, Jesus’ declaration, ‘If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’ prompted the response, ‘We were never in bondage to any man’ (John 8:31-33).
What? had they forgotten their own history? Were they unaware of their historical captivity in Egypt? Or more recently, their exile in Babylon? Were they unaware that they had been under the yoke of other nations: Persia, Greece, and Rome ever since? Well, later still, when Pilate asked, ‘Shall I crucify your King?’ the chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar’ (John 19:15)!
‘How can you say, Ye shall be made free?’ continued the earlier interrogators (John 8:33). ‘Amen, Amen, I say unto you,’ began Jesus’ emphatic answer. ‘Whoever commits sin is the slave of sin.’ ‘If the Son therefore shall make you free, you shall be free indeed’ (John 8:34-36).
Outside of Christ, we are all held captive to the world, the flesh, and the devil. Christians must remember that we too were ‘dead in trespasses and sins’ (Ephesians 2:1-3) - not to revel in it, but to celebrate our release (Ephesians 2:4-7). Jesus came to set us free from sin, and to deliver us from its consequences.
"Recovering of sight to the blind" (Luke 4:18e).
There was a man blind from birth, and Jesus’ disciples asked, ‘who sinned that he was born blind? The man himself, or his parents?’ (John 9:1-2). This betrays a complete misunderstanding of sin and its consequences. As I have hinted before, even the distribution of sin’s consequences is not tit for tat, but sometimes somewhat arbitrary.
The point is, the man born blind was both healed, and ‘saw’ and recognised Jesus to be the Son of God (John 9:35-38). Meanwhile, the Pharisees were discovered to be the ones with the greater blindness (John 9:39-41).
One former Pharisee, hitherto known as Saul of Tarsus but now as the Apostle Paul, was commissioned by the risen Lord Jesus to ‘open the eyes’ of the nations, ‘to turn them from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God’ (Acts 26:18). This is Jesus’ own mission, ‘to give light to them that sit in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace’ (Luke 1:79).
"To set at liberty them that are bruised" (Luke 4:18f).
The Greek word for ‘bruising’ here carries the meaning of being crushed. Jesus came to set us free from sin, and to liberate us from its consequences - suffering and death (Isaiah 42:3). This includes releasing us from sickness.
Think of some of the people hitherto held captive by sickness, delivered by Jesus in this Gospel. A leper (Luke 5:12-13); a paralysed man (Luke 5:25); a woman with an issue of blood (Luke 8:48) A wild man with a legion of devils (Luke 8:27-33); a woman bent over by a spirit of infirmity’ (Luke 13:11-13), ‘bound by Satan these eighteen years,’ said Jesus (Luke 13:16).
Then there are those delivered from death, a brief shadow of His own much greater triumph. In His death, death is conquered (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:55-56).
This gives hope to the persecuted church, too. If we die, we die in hope of the resurrection (John 11:25-26).
