THY WORD IS TRUTH
John 17:17
“No Prophet Is Accepted In His Home Town”
The two reading do have a common theme and that is the rejection of a prophet.
And the reason a prophets is rejected is that the words of the Spirit of God that are coming form the prophets mouth are rejected because they are convicting the hears of either their sin or their unbelief.
The first reading is from the opening verses of the book of Jeremiah.
And God is calling Jeremiah to be a prophet.
And God says something that many modern unbelievers reject outright.
God tells Jeremiah that God knows him before he was born and God says "before I formed you from the womb I knew you".
Today we treat the unborn as if they were not human and the reason they do is they don’t believe that God forms human beings in the womb.
Many doctors also believe this.
But I tell you as a scientist that there are no genes yet described that control the development of a fertilized egg to a new born in human beings or any other human species.
That is not to say that there are not any developmental genes at all but they have not been isolated yet and identified as developmental genes.
All genes are structural and code for proteins and that is all we know.
There are no behavior genes isolated either that we can shift the blame of our bad behavior to.
But that does not stop us does it.
The bible tells us that sin is in our flesh but as to whether it is in our genes remains to be seen.
In any regard Gods tells us that he himself forms us in the womb and many places in Scripture God's declaration in Jeremiah that God not only knew Jeremiah but also God formed him in the womb.
So lets look a just a few examples.
Did God know others before they were born?
Yes.
What about John the Baptist?
We here about him every advent season do we not?
Didn’t God tell Mary the mother of Jesus that her Aunt Elizabeth was to have a son and that Elizabeth should call the baby John?
And then later God sent his Angel to tell Mary that she was to also bear a son even though she was not married and was a virgin.
When Mary was told this John who was in Elizabeth’s womb "leaped in her womb".
So God knew both John the Baptist and Jesus before they were born.
The list is rather long of babies that were known in their mothers’ womb to God and it should be a subject of sermon.
Both Esau and Jacob where known by God in their mother Rebekah’s womb and the twin boys fought in the womb and Rebekah asked God why?
God knew babies in the wombs as far back as the time of Genesis.
And what was God’s reply as to why she, Rebekah, was having such a rough pregnancy?
God says“"Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger."
God not only knows who these two boys are but what will happen to them in their lives before they were born.
This story is repeated in the twin boys of Joseph the son of Jacob that was taken to Egypt sold into slavery by his bothers.
Joseph’s sons were Ephraim and Manasseh and their inheritance is a story that will soon be the subject a sermon this year.
God knew them also had a plan for their lives.
Did not God know Hanna’s son Samuel before he was born.
I contend God knew every prophet before they were born!
But where in scripture does God tells us that he forms humans inside the womb?
Jesus is identified and is the fulfillment of the Davidic Covenant and he was known as the Son of David.
It was David who over and over speaks of God as taking him from his mother’s womb and forming him there.
In Psalm 22 that describes Christ crucifixion David writes these words about Jesus. “Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you even at my mother's breast. 10 From birth I was cast upon you; from my mother's womb you have been my God.
In Psalm 71 we hear David speaks about this again,
5 For you have been my hope, O Sovereign LORD, my confidence since my youth.
6 From birth I have relied on you; you brought me forth from my mother's womb. I will ever praise you.
And then the most explicit statement of all again in Psalm 139 David says,
13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
The bible is full of this idea of God forming human beings in the womb.
From Ecclesiastes 11 we find these words of God:
"5 as you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.
And it is as true today as it was them.
I took embryology and studied the development of a pig from the fertilized egg to the piglet born from the sow almost slide by slide day by day but no where did they say in one full year of study how this happens.
For it is beyond man's scientific knowledge!!!
Not one gene was shown to be operation not one.
The science of embryology is as ignorant biochemically speaking as God says we are in his word.
So we are left with his claim that he himself does this!
God repeats this through the mouth of his prophet Isaiah 42 verse 2 with these words, “This is what the LORD says— he who made you, who formed you in the womb, and who will help you: Do not be afraid, O Jacob, my servant, Jeshurun, whom I have chosen.
And then God repeats this in 5 he same chapter in verse 24, “"This is what the LORD says— your Redeemer, who formed you in the womb: I am the LORD, who has made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself…
I could go on but I will leave it to another sermon.
For we have the New Testament reading, where the people reject Jesus as a prophet, and where of all places?
We find that Jesus is rejected by his own people in his own hometown where he grew up.
And why do you suppose they rejected him?
Well, did it not Isaiah, the prophet, say that the Messiah would be rejected.
We hears this every advent at least every advent that I have been preaching in this church I have read this passage for the Chapter 53 of Isaiah verse 3:
“He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
And so when Jesus sets out in his ministry we might expect that he would be rejected by his own people in his own home town.
And that is what we see in the New Testament today.
Jesus had gone to the synagogue and everyone had praised him in the country side the region around Nazareth and Jesus went into the synagogue as was his custom for it was the Sabbath day.
And what scripture do you suppose Jesus would read from. Isaiah!
Not surprising, don’t you think?
The scroll was handed to him and he reads form Isaiah 61:1 and verse 2.
Here are the words of Isaiah that Jesus reads to them,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of the sight to the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of God’s favor.
And then he stops reading abruptly as sits down.
But why did he do that?
Why did Jesus suddenly stop reading and sit down!
Jesus has stopped reading Isaiah in the middle of the sentence.
And for a dramatic effect!
What are the words of the rest of the sentence that he dare not read to them?
These are the words of the full passage the words that Christ leaved out.
“And the day of vengeance for our God is the complete passage in Isaiah and he dare not read that to them.
And his sudden incomplete reading and sitting down must have startled them.
For he had their complete attention and this is His moment where all eyes and ears are upon him, and what does he say?
“Today this scripture is fulfilled in you hearing.”
Wow!
What a claim.
He has claimed that He, Jesus, was anointed to preach to good news to the poor and to give freedom and to heal the blind and to proclaim God’s favor.
And how to they receive this?
The first one to speak says, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”
(They only new of Joseph the carpenter and of the boy who worked with his hands in his carpenter’s shop).
How could he be the anointed as the fulfillment of the prophesy of Isaiah?
And they ask him to do what they had heard he did in the near by town of Capernaum.
They want him to prove his miracles for them.
But he refuses to show them and they become angry.
And He says, "I tell you the truth no prophet is accepted in his own town".
I assure you there were many widows in Elijah’s time and there was a sever drought for 3 years but Elijah was not sent to any of them but just to a widow from Zarephath in the region of Sidon.
And Jesus relates that there were many with leprosy in the time of Elisha but he only healed Naaman the Syrian (an outcast).
And this made them even angrier and they took him to the brow of a cliff as to throw him off.
But he walks right through them and no one touched him.
Jesus knew who were his and who were not.
There are many similar stories that Jesus has in which is claims to be God’s son are rejected.
I taught at the Gable house from the 9th chapter of John this Thursday about Jesus healing on the Sabbath a man born blind.
Also fulfilling the Isaiah prophesies and they tried to stone him for it.
And Jesus tells them you don’t have to believe my words. But you must believe in the miracles.
And nothing has changed about that.
The miracle of life is still as miraculous and unexplained as it ever was.
Life did not come about randomly.
The complexity of life and it specific structure proves that it had to be intelligently designed!
This is what God tells us in his Word.
Is this not still the truth?! Thy Word is Truth.
Does not God know us so intimately that he knows who are his and who are not!
And why does he know who are his and who are not, because he form us from the womb.
And what does Jesus say in John 10?
27"My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me;
28and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand.
29"My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand.
30 "I and the Father are one."
Let me close in prayer:
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