Chapter 4 – One God Translation

Luke

   4 Jesus, full of holy spirit,[369] returned from the Jordan and was led by the spirit in the desert. 2 For forty days he was tempted by the Devil.[370] All that time he ate nothing, so at the end he became hungry. 3 The Devil said to him, “Since you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” Jesus answered him, 4 “It is written, ‘People are not to live by eating bread only.’”
    5 Then the Devil took him up and showed him all the world’s kingdoms in a moment of time. 6 The Devil said to Jesus, “I will give you all this authority and the glory of these kingdoms, because it has been handed over to me and I can give it to whoever I want. 7 So if you bow down and worship me, you can have all of it.” 8 Jesus replied, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God[371] and serve only Him.’”
    9 Then the Devil led Jesus to Jerusalem, had him stand on the top of the Temple, and said to him, “Since you are the Son of God, jump off here. 10 As it is written, ‘He will command His angels to take care of you, 11 to hold you up so you will not trip over a stone.’” 12 Jesus replied, “It is written, ‘You should not test the Lord your God.’” 13 When the Devil had finished every temptation, he left Jesus until another opportunity arose.
    14 Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the spirit. News about him spread throughout the whole surrounding region. 15 He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone was praising him.
    16 He arrived in Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day as he always used to. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. He opened the scroll and found the place where it is written: 18 “The Lord’s spirit is on me, because He anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor. He sent me to announce the release of those held captive and the recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the downtrodden, 19 and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” [372]
    20 He rolled up the scroll, handed it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 “Today this Scripture is being fulfilled as you are hearing it read,” he said to them. 22 Everybody was speaking well of him, and they were amazed at the gracious words he spoke. “Is this not Joseph’s son?” they asked. 23 Jesus responded, “I am sure you will quote me this proverb: ‘Doctor, heal yourself!’ and say, ‘Do here in your own hometown what we heard you did in Capernaum.’ 24 I am telling you the truth: no prophet is welcome in his own hometown. 25 I guarantee that there were many widows in Israel during Elijah’s time, when there was a drought for three and a half years, causing a great famine throughout the country. 26 Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27 And there were many lepers in Israel in the prophet Elisha’s time, but none of them was healed except Naaman the Syrian.” 28 When they heard this everyone in the synagogue became furious. 29 They got up and threw him out of the town, and dragged him to the top of the hill their town was built on, in order to throw him off the cliff. 30 But he passed through them and went on his way.
    31 Jesus then went to Capernaum, a city in Galilee. He was teaching them on the Sabbath day, 32 and they were amazed at his teaching because his message carried such authority. 33 There was a man in the synagogue who was under the influence of the spirit of an evil demon.[373] He shouted out, 34 “Leave us alone! What do we have to do with each other, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are — the holy one of God!” [374] 35 Jesus reprimanded him, “Be quiet and come out of him!” Throwing him down in front of them, the demon came out of the man without hurting him. 36 Everyone was amazed and asked each other, “What is this message? With power and authority he commands evil spirits, and they leave.” 37 Word about Jesus spread everywhere in the surrounding region.
    38 Jesus left the synagogue and went to Simon’s house. Simon’s mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked Jesus to help her. 39 Jesus stood over her and commanded the fever to leave her, and it did. Immediately she got up and served them.
    40 While the sun was setting, people brought to Jesus everyone who was sick from various diseases. One by one Jesus placed his hands on them and healed them. 41 Demons came out of many people, the demons shouting,[375] “You are the Son of God!” But Jesus reprimanded the demons and would not allow them to speak because the demons knew he was the Messiah.[376]
    42 When daylight came Jesus went out to a quiet place, but the crowds searched him out and found him. They tried to stop him because they did not want him to leave. 43 But he said to them, “I must preach the Gospel about the Kingdom of God to other towns also, because I was commissioned for this purpose.”[377] 44 So he continued preaching the Gospel in the synagogues of Judea.

Luke

[369]

There is no definite article in the Greek. Holy spirit is the creative operational power and presence of the One God (and later of the risen Jesus). Holy spirit is thus defined in the Hebrew Bible which provides the indispensable background for understanding the NT. There is no “third Person” in the NT. And even in 325 AD the Church was uncertain about how to define the spirit. The mind of Christ is equated with the spirit of God in 1 Cor. 2:16, citing Isa. 40:13, LXX.

[370]

The Devil or the Satan is positively not an internal tempter, i.e. human nature! He is always a person, and always external and not to be confused with sin in the human heart. He is the great deceiver of the world (Rev. 12:9), and one of his greatest achievements has been to deceive some Bible readers into believing that he does not exist. This is to wipe out the whole NT dimension of spiritual evil. Demons are supernatural non-human personalities who spoke to Jesus and he to them (Lk. 4:41, where the grammatical agreement shows even more clearly than in English that it was the demons who spoke to Jesus and were rebuked by him). The demons recognized, when the public generally did not, that Jesus was the promised Messiah. On no account should the demons be written out of the historical accounts. The word “demon” never means a human being, much less a mental disease. The demons can of course cause mental illness and evils of all kinds.

[371]

Jesus of course was a unitarian believer in the One God of Israel and knew nothing of a post-biblical triune God.

[372]

Jesus stopped his quotation of Isa. 61:2 and did not go on to mention the prophecy of the future day of God’s vengeance and wrath.

[373]

In the Greek world demons, spirits could be viewed as good or bad. But in Scripture they are strictly evil and opposed to God.

[374]

According to Luke 1:35, a definitive verse for identifying Jesus, Jesus was holy, being the miraculously generated Son of God.

[375]

The personality of the demons is quite clear and even clearer in the Greek here. It was the nonhuman demons who cried out and were able to recognize that Jesus was the Messiah. To say that these were just mentally deranged human persons is to make nonsense of the historical narrative.

[376]

Once again the demons are perfectly clear in this historical narrative, and it is nothing less than an assault on the truth of the Bible to try to explain them away. The word “demon” in Greek means a supernatural, non-human personality, definitely not a human person, much less a mental disease. Cp. James 2:19: “The demons believe in the One God and tremble.” This is self-evidently not true of mentally ill people.

[377]

There is no clearer purpose statement in Scripture than this from the lips of Jesus. Preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom was his task and ought now to be the task of his body, the Church. But one can listen in vain to hear contemporary preachers and teachers define the Gospel as Jesus always did. Preaching the Gospel about the Kingdom of God is Jesus’ and the whole Bible’s programmatic statement of the content of the Christian faith. It is predominantly an announcement of God’s great plan for the future of this planet. Without a true “eschatology” (understanding of the future) there can be no genuine Gospel. Jesus should be allowed to set the pace for and define the content of all Gospel preaching (Heb. 2:3). For further material on the Kingdom, please see our articles on the Kingdom at restorationfellowship.org and the 260 15-minute downloadable radio programs on the Kingdom. See also my The Coming Kingdom of the Messiah: A Solution to the Riddle of the New Testament.