“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor” (Luke 4:1818The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, (Luke 4:18)). It was the characteristic of grace to come to such. The great business of Christ was to preach, that is, to present God. The Holy Spirit gives the right word at the right time and in the right way.
“This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:2121And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. (Luke 4:21)). The Lord does not reason; He says, Here it is. The way of God is to present what we want. You want salvation; there it is. You want mercy, and there it is. God alone can have us come, by grace, into the place of a sinner. They wonder at His precious words, but soon ask, Is not this Joseph’s son? Was He ashamed of being the carpenter? Grace goes down to the lowest need. But man will take occasion to despise grace, because it is clothed in humiliation. He cannot but see God, but he steps aside to look at the humiliation and so show out the hatred of his heart.
God’s grace is despised and His sovereignty is hated. God did not despise Nazareth, but man despises Jesus because He came out of Nazareth. Even the guileless Nathaniel asks, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” How little appreciation of the way of grace there is even in the godly!
Christ comes into man’s misery and finds him where he is. Could an angel? No; he stays in his proper position, doing the Lord’s commandments and hearkening to the voice of His word. An angel ought not to come down to me in my sins; God only can in His grace. And man despises the lowliness to which grace brought Him wretched man!
“But I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land; but unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian” (Luke 4:25-2725But I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land; 26But unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. 27And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian. (Luke 4:25‑27)).
But Israel ever resisted grace, and yet it was ever the way of God’s delight. Witness the widow of Sarepta in Sidon and Naaman, the Syrian leper. Grace overleaped the bounds of Israel. They might be enraged, but grace does overstep their limits. They rose up to thrust Him down who had denied their privileges, but He passed through (vs. 30) to renew the work of grace elsewhere.
J. N. Darby (from The Man of Sorrows)