Luke 4 Bible study: Today, in your hearing

Luke names the Holy Spirit at each step of these days. At the baptism, "the Holy Spirit descended in a bodily form like a dove on him" (3:22). Then "Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness" (4:1), "for forty days, being tempted by the devil" (4:2) (tap tempted, devil). After the devil "departed from him until another time" (4:13), "Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee" (4:14). And in the synagogue at Nazareth the first words he reads are "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor" (4:18). Here is what almost everyone misses: Luke says he went into the wilderness "full of the Holy Spirit" (4:1) and came back "in the power of the Spirit" (4:14), with the forty days of temptation between, and the reading he finds in Nazareth begins with the Spirit (4:18). Luke doesn't stop to explain how these fit together, and these notes don't either. The chapter on Leviticus 8 draws a line, labelled there as a reading, from Aaron's anointing to 4:18. Between the baptism and the wilderness Luke gives Jesus's line back to "the son of Adam, the son of God" (3:38), and Favor's Luke 3 sets those words beside the devil's first words, "If you are the Son of God" (4:3), in Back to Adam, "the son of God".

1 Kings 17:9→leads toLuke 4:25-26

The LORD sent Elijah to "Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon" (17:9), to a widow there (17:9-10). In the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:16), Jesus said, "But truly I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up three years and six months, when a great famine came over all the land" (Luke 4:25). "Elijah was sent to none of them, except to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow" (Luke 4:26). Jesus names this very event: the town, the land and the widow of 1 Kings 17. 1 Kings says the LORD's word came to Elijah about rain "in the third year" (18:1); Jesus speaks of "three years and six months" (Luke 4:25). These notes set the two side by side and don't work out how they fit.

σήμερονsemeronsay SAY-mer-on

Strong's: "on the (i.e. this) day (or night current or just passed); generally, now (i.e. at present, hitherto)". "He began to tell them, “Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”" (4:21). Luke's Greek has the word 11 times (counted in RP2018, the Byzantine text the WEB translates), and this is the second. The first is the angel to the shepherds, "For there is born to you today, in David’s city, a Savior" (2:11), and Favor's Luke 2 studies it there. Here it is Jesus who says today, and it is the first time Luke gives the word from him. Later he says it to Zacchaeus, "Today, salvation has come to this house" (19:9).