Lk.4:16-18 – 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;
Slavery has an ugly sound and a worse smell about it. Our own country carries the stain of its early history of slavery, man’s inhumanity to man in full display. The Jewish people were not strangers to slavery, they suffered as slaves in Egypt for four hundred years. It was something that the Lord dealt with in His laws that He governed His people with. Every fifty years Jubilee would come and all slaves were liberated. This was part of the underlying message that Jesus was preaching in Nazareth that day. The Jews felt they were slaves to the Romans, Jesus was talking about another kind of freedom, the ultimate kind of freedom, liberation from the shackles of sin. Here is how the Anchor Bible Dictionary describes slavery in the Bible.
“They are my slaves whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt”….. It was regarded as an act of redemption in which God had “bought” Israel for himself. Freed from slavery to Egypt, they were now slaves of God himself. Therefore nobody could now claim as his own private property a fellow Israelite, who belonged by right of purchase to God alone. The Exodus redemption thus provided the historical and theological model for the social and economic practice of redemption and jubilee. Those who are God’s freed slaves are not to make slaves of one another.”
This is what Jesus had in mind as He preached in His hometown that sabbath day, the fulfillment of Jubilee had come, He was proclaiming freedom from the chains of sin for the whole world. That is what the message of the gospel is, the message of liberation. We are no longer bound by poverty, addictions, sickness, and the power of sin itself. Jesus displayed this Jubilee throughout His ministry. He healed the sick by the thousands, He drove out demons, and even fed the hungry. The apostles continued the declaration of Jubilee in their ministry. In that first century the gospel seeds were scattered throughout the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Everywhere it was the same: the sick were healed, demons came out, and the shackles of sin came off. Today we are at the end of this Jubilee but I have a feeling the last moments will be better than the first.
