Luke 2:39-40

Luke chapter 2 in verses 39 and 40. And when they had performed all things, according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee to their own city, Nazareth. And the child grew in wax strong and spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon. him. May God bless to us his holy and sacred word. Socrates, the Greek philosopher, once said this. He said, could I climb to the highest place in Athens? I would lift my voice and proclaim fellow citizens. Why do you turn and scrape every stone to gather wealth and take so little care of your children, to whom one day you must relinquish it all. For many people, making money is the top priority, not raising their children. But a study of scripture reveals to us that God puts great emphasis on bringing up our children in the fear and the admonition of the Lord. We often speak of Christ being our example. Few, however, recognize that he provides a powerful illustration of how your child should be. You find in our text God’s watch care over Christ both physically and spiritually. Let me begin as we look at verse 39 and speak about Christ being brought to Nazareth. And when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee to their own city, Nazareth. The first thing we see here is the performance of the law with regard to Jesus Christ. Luke is very careful to explain how Joseph and Mary, how Joseph and Mary, conscientiously, obeyed every aspect with regard to the law of God. In all things, it says here. This included not merely the purification of Mary, who would take care of the Christ’s child, but more importantly, and especially, with regard to Jesus Christ, that we would know that every jot, every tittle of the law regarding Christ was properly fulfilled. Christ’s circumcision, his presentation to God as the firstborn of the family, were absolutely required by the law of God. Christ was made of a woman, made under the law that he might redeem those who were on. under the law. And in order to do that, he had to be a perfect sacrifice. And so we’re told here that nothing was left undone regarding the law. You know, here we, Christ himself can’t perfectly keep it because he is a little infant, but we’re told his parents made sure that the law was perfectly fulfilled in regard to him at this point. As sacrifice under the Lord, we know, has to be without blemish in order for God to accept it. Also will be rejected. Recall when Israel was given the Passover, that God told them that they had to take a lamb without blemish, a male firstborn of the flock, the first year of the flock, and then they had to keep it penned up for four days. They had to watch the lamb and make sure there was no blemish that would crop up before they used it as the Passover lamb. Only then could it be sacrificed for the family and the blood be painted on the doorpost and the lintel so that the death angel would pass over. Jesus, being the lamb of God, Jesus being our Passover, it was important that not a single blemish was upon him with regard to the law of God. Luke assures you that Christ from his youth conformed to every aspect of God’s holy law. God watched over Christ. He made sure that Joseph and Mary did all the law required. Nothing was left undone. So the performance of the law, this is a simple statement, we should see it in light of the context of what Christ is coming to do. Notice secondly, the protection of God. They returned into Galilee. Now, this point, Luke, under divine inspiration, omits two things that Matthew’s gospel relates to us in Matthew chapter 2. One is the visit of the wise men and two is the fact that they had to flee to Egypt. Those two things are not related in this passage of Scripture in Luke. It would appear after the birth of Christ that Joseph and Mary remained for a period of time. We don’t know how long it took the register for the tax. and so forth, but whatever the situation was, they remained for a period of time around Bethlehem. Because when the wise man came following the star, they stopped and asked King Herod, where is he to be born king of the Jews? Well, he asked the scribes and the Pharisees, the religious leaders of the Jews, and they tell him properly from Micah Chapter 5, that it was going to be at Bethlehem. And so they have an idea of where to look, and they head off to Bethlehem. But Herod says, well, you find the child, you tell me, I’ll come and worship him too. While being warned of God, they came, of course, to Bethlehem. They found Christ, they worshipped, and they gave their gifts, but then being warned of God, they didn’t tell Herod. They went back another way. And what did Herod do? Well, he was determined to kill the Christ child, wasn’t he? The king of the Jews that was born. They’re not going to be any rivals to me. And so we find he kills and he slaughters all the infants in Bethlehem from two years of age and under. Terrible slaughtered. God’s watch care is seen, however. Because an angel is sent to Joseph and tells Joseph that take the young child, Christ, and his mother, and flee into Egypt. Chapter 2 of Matthew, verse 13. So he remains in Egypt until he hears that Herod has died. And then an angel told him to return to Israel. But hearing that Herod’s son, Archelaus, now reigns in Judea, Joseph, returns to Galilee in the northern part of Israel, and he’s out of harm’s way. He figures that would be the safest course of action. And so we see the protection of God here. How God watched over Joseph and Mary, and especially Christ, at this time. Now we see the prophetic fulfillment here in this aspect to their own city, Nazareth. Matthew records the reason they returned to Nazareth, which we don’t have here in Luke, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets. He shall be called a Nazarene. Matthew chapter 2 and verse 23. This is why he went back to Nazareth. Now, some have explained Nazarene as referring to a Nazarite, one who lived a separate kind of life, according to Numbers chapter 6. But Jesus didn’t live as a Nazaree. For he drank wine, he was accused of being a wine bivor. Remember Matthew 1119? And he touched dead bodies. We’re going to soon see in Luke 7, the widow of Nain, and Luke 8th, the daughter of Jarius, of Jaris, there is, both of them are raised from the dead by Christ. The word Nazarene here is the idea, or Netser, it signifies the word branch. It means branch. The city being named because of the multitude of plants and trees which grew there. It would appear, however, that Matthew is telling us something else. Not only is the city called a branch, But it also refers to Christ as the branch that is spoken of prophetically in the Old Testament by the prophets. For example, Isaiah 111, and there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, a branch shall grow out of his roots and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. Or in Jeremiah, chapter 23, verse 5. Behold, the days come, said the Lord, that I will raise up on to David, a righteous branch, and a king shall reign and prosper and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. Christ is often called Jesus of Nazareth, or the Nazarene, the branch, interestingly enough. Some of the disciples are called Nazarenes, as if it was a, they called them, like a religious, sect in Acts 24 verse 5. Now, to be called a Nazarene was in some ways to be despised. Remember what Nathaniel said. Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? It wasn’t a place you’d expect anything useful to rise. So as we look at this, from a divine side, Nazareth had messianic connotations to it, because the branch, and he’s coming from the place of the branch, if you would. But from the human side, Nazareth was a despised place. It’s just some remote town. But we have a prophetic fulfillment here. Now let me make a couple practical observations on verse 39. The first is this. You see how God. God’s providence carefully preserves the one he loves. God’s beloved son is targeted for death by the powerful King Herod, who rules over Judean. But he is not permitted the harm to Christ Child. And it reminds me, since we’re studying Revelation, it reminds me of Chapter 12 of Revelation, When the Christ child is born, Satan, the dragon is ready right as soon as he’s born to eat him up. But God preserves the Christ child. God carefully watches over Christ and the malice of men cannot penetrate the shield that is surrounding Jesus Christ. Now, you ought to appreciate God’s beloved people are called the apple of his eye. God promises to be a wall of God. fire around you and to protect you from harm as Zechariah chapter 2 verse 5 indicates. Not a hair of your head can fall to the ground without divine permission. God, as he did with Joe, puts a hedge about his people. And only when God removes that hedge for his own wise purposes, can anybody harm us. The story is told about a believer, Frederick Nolan, who was fleeing from his enemies during a time of persecution in North Africa. Pursued by them over a hill and valley, he’s running for his life and he’s wearing out, and he figures they’re going to catch him eventually. He’s looking for a place to hide, and he fell exhausted into a wayside cave. He figured eventually they’re just going to catch him, and there’s nothing he can do about it. He can’t run any further. while he’s awaiting his death inside this cave he notices a spider beginning to weave a web over the mouth of the cave and believe it or not within a few minutes a little bug had built this beautiful web across the opening of this smaller cave that he had snuck into when his pursuers are a lot of a row of a rock arrived and they were wondering whether Nolan was hiding in the cave. They noticed the spider web and said, well, I can’t be in here. He would have broken the web to get it. And off they went to another place. When Nolan came out of the cave and escaped another way now, he exclaimed. He said, where God is, a spider web is like a wall. Where God is not a wall is like a spider’s web. We should never doubt that God providentially watches over his people. We see how. We see how how he watched over Christ here, the God man. You can’t be touched without God’s permission. The second thing is you learn the need here to compare Scripture with Scripture. The general principle of this is found in the book of 1 Corinthians chapter 2, verse 13, comparing spiritual things with spiritual things. Comparing spiritual things with spiritual. In other words, you are, you are, to set spiritual things that we find in one passage of scripture with spiritual things that you find in another passage of scripture and compare them. They illustrate, they illuminate, with regard to one another. It’s obvious that God meant Matthew and Luke to complement one another. Luke does not duplicate, for whatever reason. God did not have him duplicate duplicate. duplicate what Matthew tells us. You wonder why we have four gospels? Well, sometimes we have different details related in each gospel and we need them both. Or in this case, we need all four, of course, but we need these two in this particular case. There is more depth and explanation provided in Matthew’s gospel regarding our text. In Luke’s gospel, we just are told that they performed the law. They went to Galilee and went to Nazareth, we don’t hear anything else. We don’t, we’re not told anything else. But between the lines here, we see other things are happening from Matthew’s gospel. The best interpreter of Scripture is Scripture itself. Luke and Matthew both tell you Joseph and Mary return to Galee, but Matthew tells you why. How it ended, how this happened, and why they ended up in Nazareth. Let me make this principle perhaps more relevant to you in your everyday situation. Let’s take this subject of prayer. Now you have a passage of scripture in Matthew 7.7 where Jesus says, ask, and it shall be giving you. Perhaps a few texts of scriptures have been more abused than this particular one. It’s as if we could ask anything and we can have. it from Christ. Many people regard that as a blank check. You can ask whatever you want. Fill in the blank as you please. Is God pledging to honor anything and everything you request of him regardless of what it is? Suppose you earnestly pray for a sports car and you want a red Ferrari. Or you request to marry a beautiful Hollywood starlet. You think the Lord is going to answer those kind of prayers. Is he obligated to answer such requests? And this is where comparing scripture with scripture becomes very helpful to us. Now the first thing we should notice is in the book of James, chapter 4, verse 3, James says, you ask and receive not because ye ask amiss that you may consume it on your lust. So here’s one thing is we can ask and not get it, because What we want is not right in the eyes of God. God doesn’t promise to grant all our carnal desires. Ye ask and receive not. Sometimes God denies what we’ve asked. But look at 1 John with me. And chapter 5 verses 14 and 15. Because here we have, I think, the clear indication of exactly what Jesus is talking about. 1 John chapter 5, verses 14 and 15. And this is the confidence that we have in him that if we ask anything according to his will, he he heareth us. And if ye know that he hear us, if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him. Can we get anything we read? request? Yes, we can as long as it’s according to his well, right? And that’s really the, if you compare those two scriptures together, Matthew 7-7, with this passage, it fits perfectly together. And it fits in with the James passage as well. So this is where we always have to compare scripture with scripture. So learn to do that because it’s important to us. We don’t just grab a scripture and run with it. But we try to see how it is used. and get a proper interpretation of it. You have a lesson also here on humility. Jesus grew up in a small town in Galilee called Nazareth. It was an obscure, out-of-the-way place. Not even mentioned, really, in the Old Testament. Jerusalem, Hebron, Shiloh, Bethel, you know, all these great. places that could have been mentioned. We could have been raised in one of these places. They were far more important. But God passed by them all. Chose a rather remote region, obscure region, for Christ to be raised. Now, think about this. Christ is going to spend 30 years of his life in Nazareth, and we have very little. told us about the whole time. And that’s where he spent his formative years, if you would, before he began his public ministry. He grew up there. He grew up from an infant to childhood, from childhood to youth, and eventually into manhood. There’s a black curtain over all that. We have very little, we’re going to see in our next study, Lord Willing, we’re going to get a little bit about, when he was 12, what happened, you know, when he went down to the temple and so forth. But that’s just a little glimpse. We don’t went out with all the other stuff we have really no information about. Scripture simply reveals that he was subject to his parents, as verse 51 tells us at the end of this chapter. He probably worked in the carpenter shop with Joseph. So the majority of his time that he had on Earth is past among some very poor and despised people in a remote region of Israel. He was secluded away. He was kept from the eyes of most of Israel. No special attention was paid to him. He was a man of no reputation. Think of the humility here. Now, you can learn from Christ’s example. We’re often far too ready to seek great things for ourselves. in this world. We want to be among the elite, among the best to be great or famous, to have a place or a title or a prominent portion in society. These things, however, are not important in God’s eyes. There’s nothing wrong or shameful about being common, unknown, and poor in this life. How few show the humility of John the Baptist when it comes to popularity? Remember when his popularity wane and people are saying, well, everybody’s going over to Christ. They’re not staying with you. Was he envious? Was he upset about it? What did he say? He, Jesus Christ, must increase, I must decrease. He saw his task coming to an end. I fulfilled my job. Christ is supposed to come, and I’m supposed to gather a people for him. Are we content to be abased, to be obscure, to be common, as long as Christ is exalted? It is what you are in God’s sight that counts, really, not what you are on the eyes of the world. We should strive to copy Christ’s example. In Philippians, too, humility is rare, but it is a great grace to have. It’s a beautiful grace. Pride exalt self. Humility focuses on God’s glory. And for God’s glory, Christ would be obscure. He’d be in a humble situation. So you have a lesson in humility here. So Christ is brought to Nazareth. We can learn a few of these lessons from this passage of scripture, I think. The second thing we see in our text is this. We see the physical and spiritual development of Christ in verse 40 of our text. When we read these words, and the child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon. Now, we see the bodily development of Christ. He grew. The child grew. We see here that Christ normally developed. like everyone else as a normal human being. I mean, you know, he grew in size and stature. I don’t know. Maybe Mary had, you know, put the little chart on the wall, you know, about the, you know, when you’re this tall, you mark it, I don’t know, what they did back then. But he grew. He grew in muscle strength. He had a true body. Just like yours. He went through the various stages of physical growth, just like yours. every child. John the Baptist, there’s something said similar in chapter 1, verse 80. Notice his soul development. He waxed strong in spirit. Jesus had a human soul or spirit, which had to develop as well. To wax strong, it became stronger, we’re told here. Christ’s mind is understanding. his judgment, his power of reason and memory, all developed. Even when Jesus was a man, there were certain things he speaks about not knowing, like the time of his return, for example. Now, he speaks with regard to his human nature when he says that. Sometimes the finite character of Christ’s human nature is denied. But we can’t deny it. It is true that he waxed strong in spirit here. His faculties of the soul grew from a weaker state to a stronger state, and the progression is noted. Year by year, he became stronger in understanding, in reasoning power, in memory retention, and so forth. His will and affections also grew strong. His determination to act. a certain way and his love of what is good and his hatred of what is evil became firmer and firmer day by day. His soul development. We see his spiritual development also. We read here he was filled with wisdom. Now I suggest to you the idea of being filled here indicates a work of the spirit, filling him, granting him a gift. This wisdom is not human wisdom. This is divine wisdom here. Earth, not earthly wisdom, but the wisdom that is from above, which is pure and peaceable and gentle and easily to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, without hypocrisy, as James 317 tells us. Isn’t this what was promised concerning the Messiah? Do you remember what Isaiah 11 says in verse 2, and the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him the Spirit of wisdom and understanding. The Spirit gave him this gift. This would include the fear of the Lord. He’s filled. This implies a progress. If you fill something, you know, you fill it up, there’s progress. And it implies great indifference. of this gift. Spiritual development. We see the blessed development that he had. The grace of God was upon. Now this is not the fullness of grace, which Christ possessed as the mediator. This was an internal grace bestowed upon his human nature. Remember, Christ’s divine nature cannot be improved. It’s already perfect. There’s nothing that needs to be improved. But as human nature could be granted the various graces of the Holy Spirit, just like you and I. Only in this case, evidently in great abundance, God’s love and favor could rest upon Him just like all believers in joy. Now, it is true that dealing with Christ’s two natures is a difficult thing for us because we don’t, really have anything to liken unto it. He is unique in his person with these two natures. But I think we have to maintain it. As these verses would indicate to us, he has a human nature, he has a divine nature, and they are all in one person, the person of Christ. Now, what are some practical observations we can make from this passage? I suggest you that Christ can sympathize with you in every stage of your life. You have proof here that Jesus Christ was truly and really a human being, as well as God. It’s God manifested in the flesh. How the same person could have two natures, divine and human, takes us beyond what we can fully comprehend. But we see Jesus, went through the various stages of human development from infancy to manhood like everybody else. What does that tell us? He tells us he knows what it means to go through all these stages of life. If you’re a child, Jesus was a child too. He knew what it meant to be subjected to his parents. We were fine out in verse 51. Are you going? your youth? He knew what it was to be in his youth. He knew what it was to be a young person, teenager. He knew what it was to be a man, an adult. So he knows the temperament and nature of the child, the boy, the young man. He stood in your shoes in every facet here. Little children as young as well as full grown adults need to realize how the Savior can sympathize with their situation. Christ can sympathize with you at every stage of human life. Secondly, you have in Christ example, a goal to strive for as Christian parents. Whereas all other children are associated with the corruption that came with Adam’s fall, Jesus Christ was a perfect human being, not tainted by Adam’s fall. Where other children are weak in understanding and resolution, he waxed strong in spirit. whereas other children have foolishness bound up in their hearts, as the book of Proverbs tells us, it becomes obvious in their behavior. He is filled with divine wisdom. While focusing upon the physical well-being of your children, we must always remember the spiritual development, the soul development also of our children, development of their their minds, their wills, their affections are also important, according to the biblical principles. The ability to logically think, to be resolute, to be determined to do good, and to hate evil is something we would want to instill in our children, to learn to love God and their neighbors, is a parent’s responsibility to impress upon their children as well. More importantly, You want your children to be filled with divine wisdom. Do you not? Parents, we had to realize, of course, it takes the grace of God to rest upon your child for the spiritual development to occur. But isn’t that what we should pray for? Isn’t that the end that we’re praying regarding? Yes, we need to teach and train our children in the things of Scripture. Faith comes by hearing and hearing. by the word of God. I like what Paul said to Timothy, from a child, the highest known, the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make the wise unto salvation. So we see the physical and spiritual development of Christ. Socrates is right. Many human beings are only concentrating on what they can gain in this life, the money, the position, or something of this nature. And sometimes the children get in a collective. to tell terribly but we have great emphasis in scripture here in bringing up your children in the fear and admonition of the Lord parents made the example of Christ’s childhood motivate you in this regard we see what was great and good with regard to Christ and that that’s the goal too you know you always talk about what Christ as the teacher you know as the as the as the servant of Jehovah we can look at that but look at him as a as a child these are the things we should strive for. He is an example there too as well. Well let us close with the word of prayer.