Luke 3-4

Luke 3:1-20 The Mission of John the Baptist

First portion lays out the historical details of the time (29 AD) and of the region- these details that are
proved true by other facts of historical truth help aid in proving that the book of Luke is true, along with
the gospels and the entire Bible- an imposter wouldn’t use detail, as false details would be easy to
debunk

Verse 2: the word of God came to John in the wilderness- no other people around, so nobody could say
he heard/learned this from someone else- John was filled with the Holy Spirit from the womb, how did
the word of God come to him? A vision, literal words from God (whether verbal, heard them in his head,
etc.)

Verse 7- Mentions John addressing the crowd as a brood of vipers, etc. where Matthew says this was
directed at the Pharisees and Sadducees (which would make sense with the “We have Abraham as our
Father” statement), but I think we can all learn from this reprimand, we have to be willing to examine
ourselves internally and see if we are willing to actually repent and not just have an outward facade

Verse 10-14- The crowd asks for the next steps- do the opposite of what you did before and don’t let
your lifestyle/occupation dictate how you will treat others

Verse 15-17 The people start questioning in their hearts (John was made privy to this through the Holy
Spirit) that John might be the Christ, but he makes it clear that he is not and he is not worthy of those
claims

Verse 21-22- overs Jesus’ baptism very briefly

Luke 3-23-38 The Genealogy of Jesus Christ

Differs from Matthew’s version, several different opinions on why

1. One of the genealogies is actually Mary's.

The simplest solution is that we have genealogies of both parents of Jesus—Joseph and Mary.

In this case, Luke gives us Mary’s genealogy, while Matthew gives us Joseph’s genealogy.

This makes good sense, since Luke’s birth narrative focuses on Mary. Luke tells the story from
her perspective.

This proposal is sometimes linked to the judgment pronounced against the line of Solomon by
Jeremiah, who prophesied that no descendant of Jehoiakim (Jeremiah 36:30) or his son
Jechoniah (Jeremiah 22:24–30) would sit on the throne of David. Jesus avoided this judgment
because he was the legal descendant—i.e. through Mary—rather than the physical descendant
of David—through Joseph.

Matthew, on the other hand, follows Joseph’s side of the story. Matthew’s narrative moves
through the dreams Joseph has.
 One problem with this suggestion is that throughout Luke’s birth narrative, he stresses that
Joseph is descendent of David. He never mentions Mary’s Davidic descent. So, despite Luke’s
emphasis on Mary in his birth narrative, it would be surprising if his genealogy is Mary's.

2. One genealogy is a royal or legal genealogy, and the other is a physical genealogy.

Another possible explanation for the two different genealogies is that Matthew presents a royal
or legal genealogy, while Luke gives a physical, or actual, genealogy.

In other words, Matthew lists the official line of Davidic kings, not Jesus’ actual ancestors. His
point is to show that Joseph is related to that line.

In this view, Luke would be giving us the actual, physical descendants—in other words, a
genealogy in the way we’re accustomed to thinking about it.

This may help provide a theological point, but it doesn’t solve the larger problem created by
having two genealogies: Joseph can’t have two fathers.

3. Joseph had two fathers.

How can someone have two fathers? That’s a fair question—it’s not physically possible.

However, there are two reasons the text can actually be read this way.

First, some suggest that Mary had no brothers to carry on her father’s name at her marriage, so
Heli (Joseph’s father according to Luke) adopted Joseph as his own son. This would then give
Joseph two genealogies—his own genealogy and Mary’s genealogy.

Second, it’s also possible to read Joseph’s genealogy in the context of the Old Testament law of
levirate marriage.

Levirate marriage is described in Deuteronomy 25:5: "If brothers are living together and one of
them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother
shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her."

In other words, this law states that a brother of a man who died should marry his brother’s
widow to produce heirs for him.

In this case, Heli—Joseph’s father according to Luke’s genealogy—and Jacob—Joseph’s father

The important point is that this could explain why Joseph might have two fathers and therefore
two distinct genealogies.

Luke 4: 1-12 The Temptation of Jesus

If we adopt the Revised Version’s reading and rendering, the whole of the forty days in the desert were
one long assault of Jesus by Satan, during which the consciousness of bodily needs was suspended by
the intensity of spiritual conflict. Exhaustion followed this terrible tension, and the enemy chose that
moment of physical weakness to bring up his strongest battalions. What a contrast these days made
with the hour of the baptism! And yet both the opened heavens and the grim fight were needful parts of
Christ’s preparation. As true man, He could be truly tempted; as perfect man, suggestions of evil could
not arise within, but must be presented from without. He must know our temptations if He is to help us
in them, and He must ‘first bind the strong man’ if He is afterwards ‘to spoil his house.’ It is useless to
discuss whether the tempter appeared in visible form, or carried Jesus from place to place. The presence
and voice were real, though probably if any eye had looked on, nothing would have been seen but the
solitary Jesus, sitting still in the wilderness.

I. The first temptation is that of the Son of man tempted to distrust God.

Long experience had taught the tempter that his most taking baits were those which appealed to the
appetites and needs of the body, and so he tries these first. The run of men are drawn to sin by some
form or other of these, and the hunger of Jesus laid Him open to their power-if not on the side of
delights of sense, yet on the side of wants. The tempter quotes the divine voice at the baptism with
almost a sneer, as if the hungry, fainting Man before him were a strange ‘Son of God.’ The suggestion
sounds innocent enough; for there would have been no necessary harm in working a miracle to feed
Himself. But its evil is betrayed by the words, ‘If Thou art the Son of God,’ and the answer of our Lord,
which begins emphatically with ‘man,’ puts us on the right track to understand why He repelled the
insidious proposal even while He was faint with hunger. To yield to it would have been to shake off for
His own sake the human conditions which He had taken for our sakes, and to seek to cease to be Son of
man in acting as Son of God. He takes no notice of the title given by Satan, but falls back on His
brotherhood with man, and accepts the laws under which they live as His conditions.

The quotation from Deuteronomy, which Luke gives in a less complete form than Matthew, implies,
even in that incomplete form, that bread is not the only means of keeping a man in life, but that God
can feed Him, as He did Israel in its desert life, with manna; or, if manna fails, by the bare exercise of His
divine will. Therefore Jesus will not use His power as Son of God, because to do so would at once take
Him out of His fellowship with man, and would betray His distrust of God’s power to feed Him there in
the desert. How soon His confidence was vindicated Matthew tells us. As soon as the devil departed
from Him, ‘angels came and ministered unto Him.’ The soft rush of their wings brought solace to His
spirit, wearied with struggle, and once again ‘man did eat angels’ food.’

This first temptation teaches us much. It makes the manhood of our Lord pathetically true, as showing
Him bearing the prosaic but terrible pinch of hunger, carried almost to its fatal point. It teaches us how
innocent and necessary wants may be the devil’s levers to overturn our souls. It warns us against
severing ourselves from our fellows by the use of distinctive powers for our own behoof. It sets forth
humble reliance on God’s sustaining will as best for us, even if we are in the desert, where, according to
sense, we must starve; and it magnifies the Brother’s love, who for our sakes waived the prerogatives of
the Son of God, that He might be the brother of the poor and needy.

II. The second temptation is that of the Messiah, tempted to grasp His dominion by false means.

The devil finds that he must try a subtler way. Foiled on the side of the physical nature, he begins to
apprehend that he has to deal with One loftier than the mass of men; and so he brings out the glittering
bait, which catches the more finely organised natures. Where sense fails, ambition may succeed. There
is nothing said now about ‘Son of God.’ The relation of Jesus to God is not now the point of attack, but
His hoped-for relation to the world. Did Satan actually transport the body of Jesus to some eminence?
Probably not. It would not have made the vision of all the kingdoms any more natural if he had. The
remarkable language ‘showed . . . all . . . in a moment of time’ describes a physical impossibility, and
most likely is meant to indicate some sort of diabolic phantasmagoria, flashed before Christ’s
consciousness, while His eyes were fixed on the silent, sandy waste.

There is much in Scripture that seems to bear out the boast that the kingdoms are at Satan’s disposal.
But he is ‘the father of lies’ as well as the ‘prince of this world,’ and we may be very sure that his
authority loses nothing in his telling. If we think how many thrones have been built on violence and
sustained by crime, how seldom in the world’s history the right has been uppermost, and how little of
the fear of God goes to the organisation of society, even to-day, in so-called Christian countries, we shall
be ready to feel that in this boast the devil told more truth than we like to believe. Note that he
acknowledges that the power has been ‘given,’ and on the fact of the delegation of it rests the
temptation to worship. He knew that Jesus looked forward to becoming the world’s King, and he offers
easy terms of winning the dignity. Very cunning he thought himself, but he had made one mistake. He
did not know what kind of kingdom Jesus wished to establish. If it had been one of the bad old pattern,
like Nebuchadnezzar’s or Caesar’s, his offer would have been tempting, but it had no bearing on One
who meant to reign by love, and to win love by loving to the death.

Worshipping the devil could only help to set up a devil’s kingdom. Jesus wanted nothing of the ‘glory’
which had been ‘given’ him. His answer, again taken from Deuteronomy, is His declaration that His
kingdom is a kingdom of obedience, and that He will only reign as God’s representative. It defines His
own position and the genius of His dominion. It would come to the tempter’s ears as the broken law,
which makes his misery and turns all his ‘glory’ into ashes. This is our Lord’s decisive choice, at the
outset of His public work, of the path of suffering and death. He renounces all aid from such arts and
methods as have built up the kingdoms of earth, and presents Himself as the antagonist of Satan and his
dominion. Henceforth it is war to the knife.

For us the lessons are plain. We have to learn what sort of kingdom Jesus sets up. We have to beware, in
our own little lives, of ever seeking to accomplish good things by questionable means, of trying to carry
on Christ’s work with the devil’s weapons. When churches lower the standard of Christian morality,
because keeping it up would alienate wealthy or powerful men, when they wink hard at sin which pays,
when they enlist envy, jealousy, emulation of the baser sort in the service of religious movements, are
they not worshipping Satan? And will not their gains be such as he can give, and not such as Christ’s
kingdom grows by? Let us learn, too, to adore and be thankful for the calm and fixed decisiveness with
which Jesus chose from the beginning, and trod until the end, with bleeding but unreluctant feet, the
path of suffering on His road to His throne.

III. The third temptation tempts the worshipping Son to tempt God.

Luke arranges the temptations partly from a consideration of locality, the desert and the mountain
being near each other, and partly in order to bring out a certain sequence in them. First comes the
appeal to the physical nature, then that to the finer desires of the mind; and these having been repelled,
and the resolve to worship God having been spoken by Jesus, Luke’s third temptation is addressed to
the devout soul, as it looks to the cunning but shallow eyes of the tempter. Matthew, on the other hand,
in accordance with his point of view, puts the specially Messianic temptation last. The actual order is as
undiscoverable as unimportant. In Luke’s order there is substantially but one change of place-from the
solitude of the wilderness to the Temple. As we have said, the change was probably not one of the
Lord’s body, but only of the scenes flashed before His mind’s eye. ‘The pinnacle of the Temple’ may have
been the summit that looked down into the deep valley where the enormous stones of the lofty wall still
stand, and which must have been at a dizzy height above the narrow glen on the one side and the
Temple courts on the other. There is immense, suppressed rage and malignity in the recurrence of the
sneer, ‘If Thou art the Son of God’ and in the use of Christ’s own weapon of defence, the quotation of
Scripture.

What was wrong in the act suggested? There is no reference to the effect on the beholders, as has often
been supposed; and if we are correct in supposing that the whole temptation was transacted in the
desert, there could be none. But plainly the point of it was the suggestion that Jesus should, of His own
accord and needlessly, put Himself in danger, expecting God to deliver Him. It looked like devout
confidence; it was really ‘tempting God’. It looked like the very perfection of the trust with which, in the
first round of this duel, Christ had conquered; it was really distrust, as putting God to proof whether He
would keep His promises or no. It looked like the very perfection of that worship with which He had
overcome in the second round of the fight; it wag really self-will in the mask of devoutness. It tempted
God, because it sought to draw Him to fulfil to a man on self-chosen paths His promises to those who
walk in ways which He has appointed.

We trust God when we look to Him to deliver us in perils met in meek acceptance of His will. We tempt
Him when we expect Him to save us from those encountered on roads that we have picked oat for
ourselves. Such presumption disguised as filial trust is the temptation besetting the higher regions of
experience, to which the fumes of animal passions and the less gross but more dangerous airs from the
desires of the mind do not ascend. Religious men who have conquered these have still this foe to meet.
Spiritual pride, the belief that we may venture into dangers either to our natural or to our religious life,
where no call of duty takes us, the thrusting ourselves, unbidden, into circumstances where nothing but
a miracle can save us-these are the snares which Satan lays for souls that have broken his coarser nets.
The three answers with which Jesus overcame are the mottoes by which we shall conquer. Trust God, by
whose will we live. Worship God, in whose service we get all of this world that is good for us. Tempt not
God, whose angels keep us in our ways, when they are His ways, and who reckons trust that is not
submission to His ways to be tempting God, and not trusting Him.

‘All the temptation’ was ended. So these three made a complete whole, and the quiver of the enemy
was for the time empty. He departed ‘for a season,’ or rather, until an opportunity. He was foiled when
he tried to tempt by addressing desires. His next assault will be at Gethsemane and Calvary, when dread
and the shrinking from pain and death will be assailed as vainly. Satan’s next attack will come through
persecution and lead to death.

Luke 4:14-15 Jesus Begins His Ministry

Luke 4:16-30 Jesus Rejected at Nazareth

Luke 4:20-21. And he closed the book, and gave it again to the minister — Τω υπηρετη, to the
servant, who had brought it to him. “From the manner in which we apply the word minister, in
speaking of our churches, the English reader is apt to be led into a mistake by the common
version, and to consider the word here as meaning the person who presided in the service;
 whereas it denotes only a subordinate officer, who attended the minister, and obeyed his orders
in what concerned the more servile part of the work. Among other things he had the charge of
the sacred books, and delivered them to those to whom he was commanded by his superiors to
give them. After the reading was over, he deposited them in their proper place.” — Campbell.
And sat down — The Jewish doctors, to show their reverence for the Scriptures, always stood
when they read them, but when they taught the people they sat down. See Matthew 23:2. Thus
we here find our Lord sitting down in the synagogue to preach, after he had read the passage in
the prophet, which he made the subject of his discourse. The custom of preaching from a text of
Scripture, which now prevails throughout all the Christian churches, seems to have derived its
origin from the authority of this example. And the eyes of all were fastened on him — They
looked on him with great attention, expecting him to explain the passage. And in addressing the
congregation on it, he told them, it was that day fulfilled in their ears — Namely, by what they
heard him speak; words which imply, that, whatever allusion there might be in the prophecy to
the good news of the deliverance of the Jews from the Babylonish captivity, it was primarily and
principally intended to be understood of the spiritual salvation of mankind from ignorance and
error, sinfulness and guilt, depravity and misery, by the Messiah, who, and not Isaiah, nor any
other prophet, is to be considered as speaking in the passage, as is explained more fully in the
notes there.

Verse 30 But passing through their midst, he went away.- How does someone who just ticked off
the entire crowd who had one purpose on their mind, to destroy him, just pass through their
midst?

Luke 4:31-37 Jesus Heals a Man with an Unclean Demon

Luke 4:38-41 Jesus Heals Many

Including Simon Peter’s mother-in-law

Jesus silenced the demons he cast out that were crying “You are the Son of God” because they
knew he was the Christ

Luke 4:42-44 Jesus Preaches in Synagogues