The sermon 'The Hometown Prophet' by Peter Allison delves into Jesus' return to Nazareth, highlighting His role as a prophet and the reaction of His hometown. Initially, the people were eager to hear Him, fascinated by His works and the authority with which He spoke. However, their admiration quickly turned to anger when Jesus claimed the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy in Himself, asserting His role as the exclusive Savior. This message of exclusivity was offensive, as it suggested that salvation is solely through Him, rejecting any self-help or alternate paths. Jesus' teachings emphasized human inability to achieve salvation without divine intervention, further alienating His listeners. Additionally, the sermon discusses the sovereignty of God in choosing whom to save, illustrated by the stories of Elijah and Elisha. Signs and wonders authenticated Jesus' message, demonstrating His divine authority, particularly through His power over demons. The sermon also touches on the historical context, noting increased demonic activity as a result of apostasy. Despite the hostility from His hometown, Jesus' message was clear: salvation is through Him alone, and His authority extends over all creation, including demonic forces.

Please turn with me in your Bibles to the Gospel of Luke chapter 4. I would like to begin reading, picked back up at the 16th verse. So he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up. And as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read. And he was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah.

And when he opened the book he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, Because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. Then he closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down, and The eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed upon him. And he began to say to them, Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. So all bore witness to him, and marveled at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth.

And they said, Is this not Joseph's son? And he said to them, You will surely say this proverb to me, Physician, heal yourself. Whatever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also hear in your country.' And then he said, Surely I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own country. But I tell you, truly many widows were in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a great famine throughout all the land, but to none of them was Elijah sent, except to Zarephath in the region of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow and many lepers were in Israel in that time of Elisha the prophet and none of them was cleansed except name in the Syrian. So all those in the synagogue when they heard these things were filled with wrath and rose up and thrust him out of the city, and they led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, that they might throw him over their cliff.

And then passing through the midst of them, he went his way. Then he went down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee, and was teaching them on the Sabbath. And they were astonished at his teaching, for his word was with authority. Now in the synagogue there was a man who had a spirit of an unclean demon. And he cried out with a loud voice saying, Let us alone.

What have you to do with us? What have we to do with you, Jesus of Nazareth? Did you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God." But Jesus rebuked him, saying, Be quiet and come out of him. And when the demon had thrown him in their midst, it came out of him and did not hurt him.

Then they were all amazed and spoke among themselves, saying, What a word this is! For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and they come out. And the report about him went out into every place in the surrounding region. Now he arose from the synagogue and entered Simon's house, but Simon's wife's mother was sick with a high fever, and they made request of him concerning her, so he stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. And immediately she arose and served them.

And when the sun was setting, all those who had any that were sick with various diseases brought them to him. And he laid His hands on every one of them and healed them. And demons also came out of many, crying out and saying, You are the Christ, the Son of God. And He rebuking them, did not allow them to speak, for they knew that He was the Christ. Now when it was day, he departed and went into a deserted place, and the crowd sought him and came to him and tried to keep him from leaving them.

But he said to them, I must preach the kingdom of God to the other cities also, because for this purpose I have been sent. And he was preaching in the synagogues of Galilee. May his tender mercies come to us that we may live and delight in his word. Almighty Heavenly Father, we have heard your word and we ask now that you might open it to us, you might explain it to us. May you give us ears to hear and hearts to understand.

May you sanctify these sinful lips that they may proclaim what is true and right and beautiful. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, when Jesus returned to Galilee after the Passover, he was something of a hometown hero. All the people from his hometown, the Bible says, had gone down to Jerusalem to the Passover and they saw what he did down there. They saw his works.

They saw him cleanse the temple, taking a whip to the money changers and driving them out. Something that the common man on the street probably applauded. These all were often people who charged exorbitant high prices, and it was somewhat of a racket going on there with the priesthood and the money that was made from all the sacrificial animals that people had to buy. So Jesus drove them out. He singed the beard of the king, as it were, in doing that.

So they saw that. They saw Him do that. They saw Him claim that if they destroyed this temple, that He would rebuild it in three days. They heard Him stump everybody with that claim. A temple that everyone knew had taken 46 years to build, and here was somebody saying he would build it, rebuild it in a couple of days, three days.

Jesus had gone about all Galilee teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, healing all kinds of sickness and diseases among the people. And Matthew tells us that in this time, his fame went throughout the whole land, even into Syria. And they were bringing to him everybody who was sick, who were afflicted with diseases and torments, and possessed with demons, epileptics, paralytics, and he was healing them, all of them. Great multitudes were following Jesus from Galilee, from Decapolis, from Jerusalem, from Judea, and Matthew says, from beyond the Jordan. Jesus was a very popular preacher.

He was famous. He was famous because of what he did. He spoke with authority. It was different from any preaching they'd ever heard before. He also performed all these wonderful works, healing people, things they had never seen before.

He had power over the demons, something that terrified them. Jesus demonstrated His power over them. And so here this famous preacher, this hometown son of theirs, was coming back to their hometown. And they were wanting to hear Him. He went into the synagogue and he read his text from Isaiah that we looked at previously.

And he handed the book back to the attendant, and all the eyes were fixed on Him. What was He going to say? Here was their son, their hometown grown preacher, prophet, Come back. And everybody was wanting to hear Him. All eyes were on Him.

This was somebody that they knew, remember? This is somebody that they had seen grow up. Jesus was about 30 years of age when he began his earthly ministry. So he's maybe this is a year or so after that. So he might be 31.

So he had lived in Nazareth for many years. He worked as a carpenter the Bible says. So maybe these are people who had his furniture that he had made in their homes. They would have seen him in the city of Nazareth as a little boy, then growing up. So many of these People may have known him when he was a child.

And here he was now, a very famous prophet, a very famous preacher. Now, he was liked, we must remember, not because of who he was, Not because he was the son of God the Savior of mankind, but he was liked Because of What he did the signs and the wonders He wasn't liked as Mary Magdalene liked him because he was a great Savior who had forgiven her sin. He was liked because he could impress them with the signs and the wonders that he did. And so this is the setting, if you will, for this sermon that takes place in the synagogue in Nazareth that day. And when the end of that sermon, they no longer liked him.

He was no longer their favorite famous hometown preacher, But rather they were angry. They were angry at him. They were filled with wrath They wanted to kill him and throw him off of a cliff and they said he'd be crushed on the rocks below And what what did Jesus say? That turned their hearts so completely against Him from being those who couldn't wait to hear what He had to say? What did Jesus preach?

Well, it was a message that they did not want to hear. But it was the truth. It was the gospel. And the first thing that Jesus said in His message was to proclaim the exclusivity of Jesus Christ as Savior. He read a text that said the Spirit of the Lord is upon me.

He has anointed me to preach to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted and proclaim liberty of the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. Then he handed the book back to the attendant and sat down and said, today this scripture is fulfilled in your midst. I am that me that Isaiah spoke of. That was probably the first turning, the first turning of their heart against him, just a little bit.

That familiarity was beginning to turn to contempt. You, you, you are just a carpenter's son. You are Joseph's son. We saw you grow up. We saw you when you were little.

We saw you when you didn't know how to walk and we are learning to talk. We saw you making things in your carpentry shop, and you are the exclusive anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ, that's what anointed means, the Messiah. But this was the message that Jesus preached. He said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. And no one comes to the Father except through me.

It's a message of exclusivity. Jesus Christ is the only name, the only truth. He is the only Savior. There is salvation in none other. There is one Mediator.

There is one name under heaven and earth by which we must be saved. And this was offensive to the Jews of Jesus' hometown. It's offensive to the world today, this exclusivity of the gospel message. People are often willing to allow you to say and do, believe anything you want about Jesus, to add Him to their list of Gods, so He becomes another way to Heaven. He's another way, and it's fine for you to have that way.

Other people have another way. But if you dare to say that Jesus is the only way, now you will bring their wrath upon you. A visible wrath. I remember watching a television program, and I don't know who the host was, it was somebody famous. And she had a reformed Christian man on, I think it was a Jew, and she had an Iman on.

And she set it up to ask this question, is Jesus the only way? You see what she was doing. She put in different ways, people of different false faiths, and then said, Is Jesus the only way in front of these people? And thankfully that preacher of the gospel said, yes, He is the only way. And you could just see the visible, visceral reaction of everybody in the room against that.

They turned to wrath. They hated Him for saying that. It's a hard thing to say. Jesus is the only way. And your way, if it is not the way of Christ, is not the truth.

So the people reacted in Jesus' day the same way. See, to say that Jesus is the only way is to say that all the Jews who died in the holocaust without Christ, because they rejected Christ, don't go to heaven. Christ don't go to heaven. The great humanitarian Mahatma Gandhi who said he didn't need Christ will go to hell and face the wrath of God there because he didn't need Jesus. Good people will go to hell because they don't believe in Jesus.

That's what that means. People say, you mean that the only people who practice your religion will be saved? Jesus is the only Savior? The only God? Yes, that's the message that Jesus preached.

And that's the message, that exclusivity of the cross of Jesus Christ, of Jesus Christ the only Savior, turned these hometown people against their own hometown prophet. The exclusivity of Christ means that His Word is the only truth. His Law is the only standard of justice. His wisdom is the only wisdom. As Paul said to Timothy, God only, wise.

There is no knowledge outside the Word of God. But Jesus' message doesn't stop there. The second point of Jesus' message, and the reason that He was rejected, was that He preached the weakness and the inability of people to help and to save themselves. There was no self-help message in his sermon that day. He proclaimed captivity, the poverty and the blindness of the people in front of him.

That's a message that The natural man does not want to hear. We don't want to hear that we are blind, that we can't see where we're going. We can't see ourselves truthfully, that what we think we see is not reality. We don't want to hear that we're slaves and we're in bondage, that we're poor and blind and destitute. We'd rather be told that we're strong and that we just need to get a few things in order and that we can save ourselves, that we're intelligent and that we're good-looking.

But if we weren't blind and deaf, we wouldn't need a Savior. If we could help ourselves, we wouldn't need a Savior. The Jews' response to being told that they were blind and in bondage is, Physician, heal yourself. Don't come seeking to help us. If you're so capable, Then help yourself.

And once we see it in you, then maybe we'll listen to you. There's also an insinuation in Jesus' response that in not working any wonders in their midst like he did in the other places, Jesus isn't treating them like he did the other places. And Jesus' answer to them is rather remarkable. He in essence tells them that salvation is by God's choice and not theirs. Salvation is by God's choice and not theirs.

This is the third point of Jesus' message that caused the people to reject Him. The third component is that God doesn't need us. God doesn't need us. God doesn't save those because they have something in them that makes them desirable. It is not of the man, him who runs, but of God who wills.

Salvation comes to those of God's choosing. And Jesus recounts two historical events to illustrate this to the Jews in his hometown that day. The first account that he says is in the days of Elijah. When Elijah went to Ahab and said, You wicked king, because of your wickedness, not send any rain for three years. God announced the drought to Ahab.

And God sent Elijah to a brook where he was fed by a raven until the brook dried up. And then he sent Elijah to a widow in Zarephath, a city near outside of Sidon. When you remember the story, Elijah arrived in this city, he saw a woman who was gathering sticks and he asked her for a cup of water and a cake. And she said, I don't have any. I'm gathering these sticks to bake my very last cake for my son and I and then we're going to die.

And Elijah said to her, okay, go do that, but make me a cake first. And your oil won't run out and your flour won't ever get empty. And she did. She believed Elijah. She believed the Word of the Lord.

And made that cake for Elijah first. And God provided for her until the rain came back. And Jesus said, you know, there were many widows in that land of Israel, but none of them was helped except this widow who wasn't even in Israel. It was a Phoenician woman. And then he told another account of, in the days of Elisha, how Naaman, who was a general in the Syrian army, was healed of his leprosy, But none of the others around in Israel were healed of leprosy.

Because salvation is of God. It's of God who wills and not man who runs. You remember, interestingly, Nehman initially resisted the idea when he was told to wash in the Jordan. He said, well, we have rivers in Syria that are better. I'm going to go wash there.

He rejected the exclusivity of the message that Elisha gave him. Go wash in the Jordan. Your rivers aren't good enough. Not because there's any difference in the river, but because the difference was in where God chose to work Thankfully his servants Persuaded him that of his error and he went back and washed in the Jordan and was cleansed when no other Israelite was. Now this does not mean that these Nazarenes are not responsible for their unbelief.

They are. In response to their thought why Jesus did not do miracles in Nazareth and anywhere else. Jesus puts the fault on them. He said, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. That's not a commendation of them for their discernment.

It's not a commendation. It's a condemnation. The reason he didn't do any miracles and can't do any miracles is because of their unbelief, as John tells us. And we need to remember, as Calvin reminds us, that none are chosen because they are better than others, or because they are good people and meet some standard of worthiness. But rather, this choice of God proceeds from the wonderful purpose of God according to His inscrutable wisdom and mercy and it is hidden from us though we ought to acknowledge and adore it.

Jesus taught that no one can come to the Father except the Father draw him. Salvation is of the Lord. God is sovereign and not man. And because of this message of the inability of man, the exclusivity of Christ, the sovereignty of God in salvation, The result of those in the synagogue when they heard these things is they were filled with wrath and they rose up and thrust him out of the city and they took him to a cliff to the brow of the hill to throw him over, to kill him. That is the response of the natural man to the exclusivity of the gospel message.

Now this message though that Jesus had was an authenticated message. Signs and wonders accompanied this message of Jesus. The purpose of these signs and wonders was to authenticate the message and the messenger, that this messenger was from God. Remember, when did the first miracles come in the scripture? They came when God called Moses to go to his people and to be his messenger to them, to bring his word to them.

Then God gave Moses signs because Moses asked, how will the people know that you sent me? How will they know that my message is true? What was God's answer? He gave him two signs, the sign of his throwing down his rod, and it turning into a snake, and the sign of him putting his hand into his coat, and becoming leprous, and then taking it out and being healed. God gave signs to Moses and God performed signs and wonders through Moses because Moses was the law giver.

Moses is the one who first wrote the Bible, the Pentateuch. The first five books were put down in writing by Moses. And so God gave Moses signs. God gave the prophets signs. When He sent His Word to His people with a dust that the Lord God gave authenticating signs.

And when God is not giving His Word, we don't find signs in the Bible. We don't find wonders being done. Rather these signs and wonders come, they accompany the giving of revelation. Note the emphasis in this whole passage on Christ's preaching and his teaching ministry. In verse 15, Christ is teaching in the synagogue.

In verse 31, he's preaching on the Sabbath in Galilee, and when they want him to stay longer, he says in verse 42, No, I must be preaching to the other people the kingdom of God, for that is the purpose for which I was sent. Jesus came as a prophet to declare to us the will of God for our salvation. He was both the messenger and the message. And His message was accompanied by these many authenticating miracles. The church doesn't have an innate right to perform these kinds of signs and wonders.

Rather they are given by God specifically to authenticate new revelation, to authenticate His messengers, to attest to the truth and the power of the message. And so we don't see these types of signs and wonders today because the Word of God is closed. New revelation has ceased by God's decree. And so there are no people running around today that can say, thus saith the Lord and bring new revelation and a new prophetic word to us. And so we don't see these signs.

It doesn't mean that God doesn't do miracles. He certainly does. They are just not done by individuals like they were, like Jesus did. Jesus could lay His hands on people and heal them. The apostles could do the same thing.

They could lay their hands on people and heal them. They could say, stand up and be healed. Whereas the signs and the miracles that are done today are done without that being attached to any one particular person. They're not something that somebody can do at will. They're what God does of His own will in his own time and place.

One of the marks of Jesus' ministry is his power over the demons. It's throughout this text and it's throughout the Gospels that Jesus exercised power over the demons. The demons knew who He was. They knew and they recognized His power over them. It's one of the signs that Jesus is the Christ.

Because God promised Adam and Eve that the seed of the woman, which is Christ, would crush the head of the serpent. And Jesus' power over these demons demonstrates that he is the Christ. But notice that he treats demon possessed people like sick people. He doesn't rebuke the people for being possessed by demons. There is a difference between those who are invaded by demons and those who make a pact or a deal with the devil and willingly place themselves under his dominion in order to have access to His power.

See, that was the Pharisees. Jesus called them snakes, vipers. He said, you are sons of the devil. He said, he is your father, the devil. Jesus strongly condemned the Pharisees.

Some of the strongest words in the scripture are spoken against the Pharisees. They were demonic. Jesus called them demon possessed and he rebuked them. He said they were blind guides, that they were blind guides leading the blind. And he pronounced woe upon them and woes upon their doctrine.

And he told the disciples to be wary, to be aware. He cautioned the disciples against the teaching of the Pharisees. But those who were the victims of the demonic work of the Pharisees he did not rebuke he did not treat them any different than he treated any other person who was sick he didn't expect them even to have faith Many times he would tell people your faith has made you well. And people by faith would cry out for healing, would cry out for Christ to work, and Jesus would grant their request, heal them, and say your faith has made you well. But we never see Jesus requiring faith of these whose minds are possessed by the demons.

He healed them. He cast the demons out and then taught them. Have you ever wondered why there were so much demonic activity in Jesus' day? Just read here, he's healing these people from all around the countryside, and demons are coming out of many of them. I dare say many of us, probably very few of us, if you have very infrequently, have ever seen a demon possessed person.

I don't think I have seen a demon possessed person. Although I don't know. And yet this is commonplace. Many of the people that he's healing says have demons coming out of them. What is going on here?

We don't read of this kind of demonic activity going on very often in the Old Testament, if at all either. Well, demonic activity follows, is a result of error and apostasy. It follows where the truth is not being taught. Then superstition blossoms. Where the truth is ignored and forgotten, superstition Blooms, bringing ignorance, bringing darkness, bringing apostasy.

And where there is gross ignorance and darkness and superstition, then demonic activity follows suit. So this is a period of time before Jesus came, when that period of great apostasy, a great darkness in the leadership. Remember these religious leaders, these Pharisees. Jesus called sons of the devil. Snakes, vipers.

How can you escape the condemnation of hell? This demonic activity was the result of great apostasy and wickedness in the land of Israel, an apostasy brought on through the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the other leaders. We see similar superstition and darkness in the period before the Reformation. And Luther is reported to have thrown the ink pot against the devil in the corner. We see it in many countries around the world where the gospel has not transformed the culture like the gospel has Did transform the culture in our our culture a couple centuries ago if you go over to other places Demonic activity is rampant Fear of the demonic is rampant People are afraid to sleep because the demon might come in their nose.

We don't live in that fear. That's relatively, I would dare say, foreign to us today in this land, because of the fruit of the gospel of Jesus Christ. But that's changing. The Jewish religion is an occultic religion. It's not a Christian in any sense.

It's not just that they follow the Old Testament. The Jewish religion follows the Talmud and the Talmud is filled with occultic influence. Jesus called the Pharisees the children of hell. In Revelation, Jerusalem is the great harlot, the one who has committed fornication with the nations of the earth. Rabbi Lapianski, who is the Rosh Yeshiva of Greater Washington, and a Rosh Yeshiva is simply the dean of a Talmudic institution, a Talmudic academy and he is an expert in the Talmud.

He said, quote, Judaism does not speak of the Satan slash devil, but it sees Satan as an agent of God, testing the sincerity of men's deeds, the strength of his convictions, and the stamina of his moral fiber. Although this so-called devil seems to entice man to do wrong, he is not inherently an evil being, rather he is conducting a sting operation, overtly enticing to bad, but in reality working for God." This is an expert in the Talmud. The Talmud is an occultic document. It says, it's saying, Satan is not evil, but he actually is working for God. That's of the devil.

He goes on to say, we also find mention of many types of good magic in the Talmudic sources, such as blessings and amulets, etc. Brothers and sisters, Judaism is an occultic religion. It has been occultic from the days that Jesus walked on the earth and condemned it, and it is only more so today. In the view of the Naamanides, the wisdom of the rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud as well as the Goinim was unquestionable. Their words were neither to be doubted nor criticized.

He says, quote, we bow before them and even when the reason for their words is not quite evident to us, we submit to them." That should remove all doubt that the Jewish religion has anything to do with the Old Testament. It's the Talmud that they follow. It's the Talmud that takes precedence over the scriptures. It's the Talmud that they believe even if they can't understand it. This Manadise Natchmanidus, I guess is one way to say it.

It says that although God was the sole creator of the universe, he created an autonomous system of nature that serves as an intermediate layer between God and man. Between God and this world of nature lies another bridge which we call the occult or the quasi spiritual It has the ability to change and bend the rules of nature through miracles etc See we're beginning to see in our day the rise of demonic influence. It's demonic influence that leads people to cut and to mark themselves. Remember the prophets of Baal that were dancing around the altar, cutting themselves, drawing blood, calling on Baal to hear them, and he never did. We are seeing today the rise of the occult, the rise of the practice of witchcraft, and the fruits of it.

Just walk down the street on almost anywhere now and you see people that are cut and marked, tattooed. That didn't used to be that way. Now I'm not saying everybody that has a tattoo is of the devil. I'm saying that this is one mark in our culture of the rise of demonic activity. Tattoos are condemned, or forbidden I should say, in the scriptures.

And there is a religious significance to them and as well as piercings But Jesus came to the village in Nazareth and to the region in Galilee and defeated Satan Everywhere he went he cast Satan out and demons out of people. He demonstrated his power over Satan and he brothers and sisters has given us to share in that victory over the demonic. As our culture continues its rebellion against God, and as we see more and more signs of demonic activity, we don't need to be afraid. We do not need to fear superstitiously because Christ has defeated Satan. He has demonstrated here in this text and throughout his ministry his power over Satan.

He has given to us, he has promised us that we too will walk on serpents and have power over the demons. Remember the disciples when they came back, they rejoiced at this power over the demons. It was something that new and unexpected for them. But Jesus said, don't rejoice over that. Yes, you do have power over the forces of Satan and over demonic activity in my name but don't rejoice over that.

Brothers and sisters rejoice that your name is in the Lamb's book of life. Almighty Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word, we thank you that you have written it, preserved it for us, we thank you for your power over all of your creation, even over Satan and his forces, Satan and his demons. Indeed, there is no foe, there is no foe that is stronger than you. Grant to us, Father, to walk in boldness, to walk in reliance and trust in you and in your power to protect and to deliver and to save us. In Jesus name we pray, Amen.