"On every page of the God-breathed writings are many thoughts that stretch out like long, clear arms of light across the darkness, discovering things otherwise hidden and illuminating wider areas than those of the immediate context. They are searchlights. I have selected one in each chapter of Scripture, for at least one central thought in every chapter should arrest the mind and affect the life," wrote G. Campbell Morgan, a skilled, wise, warm-hearted Bible teacher who conducted a classic 3-year study called Life Applications from Every Chapter of the Bible. Here is the fruit of that research—summarized, illustrated, and amplified with useful details—on all 66 books of the Bible.
DEUTERONOMY, JOSHUA, JUDGES, RUTH,
1 JOHN, 2 JOHN, 3 JOHN, JUDE, REVELATION
favored! The Lord is with you." This is how the angel Gabriel, sent from God, addressed Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus. (She later became one of the key eyewitnesses Dr. Luke interviewed as he wrote his Gospel and the Book of Acts.) Gabriel was sent to inform Mary of the tremendous part she would be playing in the divine activity of human redemption. The angel uses terms of great respect for this special person who would experience unparalleled sacred joys and sorrows. The literal translation of "highly favored" is one endowed with great grace or favor from God, whom Mary already knew and trusted. Two extreme attitudes toward Mary must be rejected to be biblically faithful. The first is that which places her between humanity and the Son of God. That is idolatry and its effect has been disastrous. The second is that which neglects to hold the mother of our Lord in the esteem due her. Mary was a member of sinful humanity who needed and shared in the redemption provided by her Son, but the honor conferred on her was of the highest. Our thoughts about Mary and our language concerning her should not lack the dignity and respect of the angel's words. Mary was a wonderful example of motherhood, so we should always think and speak of her honorably.
Luke 2:49 "Did you not know that I must be about My Father's business?" These are the first recorded words of our Lord. He was now twelve, and went up with His parents and a caravan of relatives to Jerusalem for the Passover feast. In those caravans the men usually went first, the women held the rear position, and the children were sandwiched in the middle for safety. On the first leg of the journey home, Mary and Joseph realized they made wrong assumptions about where Jesus was, and hurried back to Jerusalem to find Him. Three days later, they found Him in a very sensible place: "in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, both listening to them and asking them questions. All who heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers" (verses 46-47). Mary, however, said to Him, "Son, why have you done this to us? Look, Your father and I have sought You anxiously." Jesus's reply, highlighted above, reveals genuine amazement that they did not know where to look for Him. Even at this young age, Jesus had a clear sense of His identity and mission. The "must" behind all His doing and teaching was always the same: doing the will of God. Despite Mary's temporary frustration here, this points to what a great thing it is when partly as the result of our training and example, the children we influence relate all their lives to God by complete trust and surrender.
Luke 3:23, 38 "Jesus ... the son of Adam, the Son of God." The genealogy of Jesus the Christ in Matthew 1 and here in Luke 3 reveal that Mary and Joseph came of the same stock, both of the house of David and seed of Abraham. The Gospel of Matthew records Joseph’s genealogy, establishing Jesus’s right to rule through the kingly line of Solomon. The Gospel of Luke records Mary’s genealogy, which is identical to Joseph’s except that she came from
King David’s son Nathan, not Solomon, so the descendants after David are
different. Before David, Luke's genealogy stretches all the way back to Adam, who like Jesus is called the son of God. Our Lord was The Son of God in a unique sense, but as the son of Mary—a child of the human race—He was also a Son of God. By sin humankind is cut off from God and lost. Jesus was sinless in His human nature, "full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). That enabled Him to act with God for men, "for there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus."
Luke 5:21 "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" This was a question asked by the enemies of our Lord because He said to a man, "Your sins are forgiven." The theology of His accusers was right on this point, but wrong in their application of it. Only God can forgive sins, but in a limited sense people can and usually should forgive sins against their own person. When one brother forgives another for the wrong he has done him, the one who was forgiven will feel thankful, but that forgiveness will not completely lift the burden from his conscience or cleanse the stain from his soul. When God forgives, He does both. King David understood that, which is why he said after confessing sins that affected many people, "Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight" (Psalm 51:4). Jesus is God. He could and did forgive sins in this ultimate sense—and still does.
Luke 7:44 "Do you see this woman?" Jesus was invited to dinner by a Pharisee named Simon. As they and others ate together, suddenly a local woman with a bad reputation burst into the dining room, weeping at Jesus's feet. As Simon observed what was happening, he concluded that since the Lord allowed this awkward situation to continue, He lacked perception about the kind of woman she was. Jesus now intervened with a question to help Simon understand that Simon instead was the one lacking perception. The Lord helped Simon—and us—to see the woman as He saw her. Jesus actually looked at her; Simon did not. Simon judged her by her past, Jesus by her present. For us, like Simon, it is not easy to blot out a past and free ourselves from prejudice. Yet that's exactly what the Lord does, not unrighteously but righteously: He knows the power of His own grace. It cancels the past and gives its own beauty to the soul. When we allow memories of the past to blind us to a genuine transformation produced by God's grace, we are thinking too little of grace.
Luke 8:25 "Where is your faith?" Jesus and the apostles were on a small fishing boat when a sudden and severe storm came upon them. The Lord, who initiated this trip, was asleep by now. He was soon awakened by His terrified disciples, whose distress was more than just for themselves. They cried out, "Master, Master, we are perishing!" Perhaps they were thinking that if that boat went down, all went with it: His mission and all their hopes. To that cry He immediately responded with tenderness and strength by changing the circumstances from storm to calm. He demonstrated the truth later written in the hymn "Peace Be Still": "No water can swallow the ship where lies the Master of ocean and earth and skies." Then the Lord Jesus asked, "Where is your faith?" as a rebuke for their distress, demonstrating to them and us His desire that we have so much confidence in Him, we remain undisturbed amid all disturbances. How often we are anxious over our own deep concerns or even over His! In the hour of storm we imagine everything is about to perish. Then He still says to us, "Where is your faith?"
Luke 9:18 "As He was praying alone, the disciples were with Him." This paradox is a revelation. Jesus was not actually alone since His disciples were with Him, but He was praying apart from them. Often we are told He left them when He would pray. A careful study of the Gospels leads to the justifiable conclusion that our Lord did not pray with His disciples. He commanded them to pray, He taught them to pray, and He promised them great blessings when they prayed in His name, which is in accord with all He is. But His praying was on a different plane. His approach to the Father was different from that of sinning humanity. He had claims that we ordinary men and women do not: those of divine Being and equality of Sovereignty. Therefore He prayed on earth alone and He intercedes for His people in heaven alone. That is why the unbiblical idea of the intercession of saints is utterly false. It is right that we should pray for each other, for we are commanded to. Of unparalleled power and comfort, however, is the fact our Intercessor has a right of access that can never be shared by any of His creation.
Luke 10:21 "He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit." Dr. Luke includes a time note here that is significant: "in that same hour." The Lord Jesus had sent out 70 of His disciples in groups of pairs to, like Him, proclaim the Kingdom of God in word and deed. Now they returned and gave Him news of their success. In their joy was a subtle element of peril. "Lord," they said, "even the demons are subject to us in Your name!" Jesus responded, "Rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven." Within the hour of saying that, joy from the Spirit prompted Him to say out loud to the Father, "I thank You, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to babes." He thanked the Father for His sovereign election of the humble and His rejection of the proud. Then He said to His disciples, "Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! I tell you that many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it." Jesus's joy points back to this text: "The joy of the Lord is your strength" (Nehemiah 8:10). We may test our strength by discovering the reason for our joy. If an element of self-glorying creeps in, we are weakened. If our joy comes from the sovereign wisdom and grace of our God, we are strengthened in our service to Him.
Luke 11:35 "Beware that the light within you is not darkness." Is it possible for light to be darkness? That question may be answered by asking another, growing out of the earlier words of our Lord on this occasion: Is it possible for a lighted lamp to be darkness? It is. That lighted lamp is no better than darkness when it is put out of sight in a cellar or under a bowl. It serves as a useful source of light only when it is placed on a stand so people entering may see by it to guide their steps. Light hidden is darkness. Truth disobeyed is valueless. If the will of the Lord, clearly revealed to us and apprehended intellectually, is not carried out in practice, the light within us is darkness. Jesus said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows Me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life" (John 8:12). He also said conclusively, "This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Those who do evil hate the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But those who live by the truth come into the light so it will be easy to see that what they have done is with God's help" (John 3:19-21).
Luke 13:33 "I must go on My way today, tomorrow, and the day following." Just before the Lord Jesus said that, some Pharisees came up to Him, warning Him to flee since Herod Antipas wanted to kill Him. Jesus replied, "Go tell that fox, 'I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will be perfected.'" Then He reiterated that point, revealing His own undisturbed outlook upon His work and quiet intrepidity. Today and tomorrow constituted the good words and deeds He still had to do. That third day was the way of the Cross and all that issued from it by the counsel of God. To Him the whole pathway of power and perfecting through suffering was marked out by God, and no hostility of rulers or malice of kings could deflect Him from that path. In this consciousness lay the secret of our Lord's strength. In proportion as we His disciples are in fellowship with Him, we too may move forward in life and service without disturbance or hesitancy. No hostile power is strong enough to prevent us doing whatever work God appoints. If that pathway leads through apparent defeat and much suffering, it too will lead to perfecting. We can say with King David, "He has made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and secure." To realize we are in the will of God is to be delivered from anxiety about the secondary things of circumstances. If sometimes we seem in their grip, we know all the time that they are in the grip of God.
Luke 15:32 "Dead, and is alive; lost, and is found." That is inside information from Jesus on God's perspective of people once lost to Him and then restored. He had just finished three parables about three lost things: lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son. One contrast in what is famously called the Parable of the Prodigal Son is a double one, dealing with the experience of man and the experience of God. The man away from God is dead. There is a sense in which he still lives, but everything is less than real, withered at the heart, and unfinished: he lacks spiritual and eternal powers and joys. To God that man is lost. In that loss God is defrauded of what is rightfully His, which brings Him great sorrow out of love as well as justice. The man restored to God is alive. There remain things from which that man is yet excluded, but everything for him now is touched with life and strong at the center. He experiences the profound peace and power of abiding in Christ. To God that man is found. In his restoration, God is blessed. We miss the deepest note of the parable if we do not catch the delight and joy of our Father God when the lost is found. The man or woman lost to God is dead. He or she found by God is truly alive.
Luke 17:17 "Where are the nine?" The way Jesus asked that question, you can almost hear the sorrow in His voice. On the border between Samaria and Galilee, 10 lepers had appealed to Him for help. He put their faith to the test by commanding them to fulfill the laws of Moses by showing themselves to the priests. As all 10 lepers walked away, they were healed! That was sure to cause excitement since perhaps no priests from Moses's day on had ever seen leprosy completely healed. Perhaps those laws were made to later highlight the Messiah's healing ministry. It was when only one of those lepers—a Samaritan, an outcast according to most Jews back then—came back to thank the Lord Jesus that He posed His question. He was pleased by the glad outpouring of a grateful heart, and obviously missed that of the 9 who had at least some faith and were healed, but didn't return to say thanks. One can't help wondering if Jesus still asks this question. Do we undervalue how much our rightful expressions of praise, adoration, and gratitude mean to Him? All such worship gladdens His heart, however amazing that fact may seem to us.
Luke 18:27 "The things that are impossible with people are possible with God." These words of our Lord are capable of two interpretations: 1. That God is able to do what people cannot. 2. That people are able to do with God what otherwise they cannot do. The second is the correct interpretation. The first is so evidently true, it didn't need to be said in this situation. The second exactly answered the difficulty in the minds of those who were perplexed: If a wealthy person, whose power and influence is great, cannot secure entrance into God's Kingdom, then what chance is there for a person of lesser power and influence? Our Lord's answer immediately reveals the profound mistake that created the problem: no person enters into the Kingdom by his or her own power and influence. He or she must go to God directly and humbly. If the Rich Young Ruler had acted alone with God, he would have followed Christ at all costs. All seemingly insurmountable difficulties of desire, inclination, and fear are overcome by God when a person yields him or herself completely to God in submission and faith. That which a person cannot do alone or with others, he or she can do with God alone.
Luke 19:42 "If only you had known!" Those words were spoken by our Lord with weeping. He looked at Jerusalem, knowing with pain in His heart that its doom was sealed because its people failed to recognize the visitation of their own Messiah. The spiritual blindness of Jerusalem's religious leaders was such that they did not discern the meaning of that visitation. The result was inevitable: there could be no escape from the coming devastation of A.D. 70. Here we see the heart of God, vastly greater than the heart of man. It is mastered by holiness and justice, but nonetheless moved by compassion. There can be no sacrifice of the principles of righteousness, but there is no selfish joy in the calamities that overtake a sinful city. "If only you had known" suggests all the blessing for the city that Jesus wished upon it, and shows His sorrow over its refusal of such blessing through its blindness. Happily, that is not the end for Jerusalem and the Jewish people. Isaiah 53 predicted what will happen in our future: when multitudes of new Jewish believers recognize their past blindness for the folly that it was and embrace the Lord Jesus Christ/Messiah in saving faith upon His triumphant return.
Luke 20:44 "David therefore called Him Lord. How then is He his son?" In that question, the Lord Jesus fixed the attention of His enemies upon a mystery about the Hebrew Messiah from Psalm 110, written by King David, who sung of the Messiah as his sovereign Lord. Where the mystery comes in is that all the Jewish people knew their Messiah or Savior was prophesied from 2 Samuel 7 to descend from David himself. How could the Messiah be David's Lord and son at the same time? Psalm 110:1 reads, "The Lord [Hebrew, Yhwh: the self-Existent and Eternal] said to my Lord [Hebrew, Adon: lord, master, owner—either divine or human], 'Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet." The idea that a son should rule over his father was unthinkable in that time and place. What then did David mean? The Lord Jesus Christ [the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew term Messiah] was obviously trying to make the religious leaders He was speaking with face this conundrum in their sacred writings so they could understand His sacred identity as the Messiah. Once any person does that, the mystery is solved. The two genealogies of Jesus given in Scripture reveal clearly that He descended from the line of David. Paul the apostle explains the two Lordships this way at the beginning of his majestic letter to the Romans: "Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the Gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by His resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 1:1-4).
Luke 21:28 "When these things begin to be fulfilled, look up and lift up your heads." What things will produce in Christ's disciples a hopeful look and erect, confident bearing? The same things that make everyone else around the world tremble with fear: upheaval politically, socially, economically, morally, emotionally, militarily, and even astronomically. Why? Because, as Jesus goes on to explain, all those things mean that "redemption is drawing near." When wild confusion is all around us, God is surely at work and moving forward by necessary turmoil towards His steadfast purposes of love. This certainty comes only by faith, but the foundations of that faith rest securely in the Lord Himself. Therefore we who love Christ are commanded, "Lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees; make straight paths for your feet.... Let us be grateful for receiving a Kingdom that cannot be shaken" (Hebrews 12). Indeed, "God will invade.... When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks onto the stage the play is over.... It will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you chose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. It will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it."
Luke 23:34 "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." This reveals the humanity of our Lord and is also a perfect revelation of the heart of God. His plea was not that willful sin should be excused. The men who nailed Him to His cross were ignorant: they had no understanding of the monstrous deed they were doing, for they had been commissioned by others who were likewise ignorant. The Lord Jesus, therefore, prayed for them, and the salvation of some of them is described in the Book of Acts. Divine justice is eternally reasonable, for the judgments of God are based on His perfect knowledge not of actions alone, but of the motives that prompt them. Yet those motives, while the result of ignorance, may be utterly unworthy and needing the forgiveness of God. For this the crucified Lord had the right to ask because of the deepest fact about His cross: He was there "by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God," as Peter declared in Acts 2 to thousands, including those who crucified Christ. Jesus, whose name means Savior, was set upon the redemption of His people at uttermost cost. In His prayer at the cross we see the justice and mercy of God in perfect harmony.
Luke 24:51 "While He blessed them, He parted from them." The last words and activity Christ's apostles observed of their Lord were His blessing and uplifted hands. So much had taken place before of the 40 days they spent with their risen Lord—how those days must have flown by! Dr. Luke records that the disciples so marveled over His glorified body, Jesus said to them, "See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself; touch Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.... While they still could not believe it because of their joy and amazement, He said to them, 'Do you have anything here to eat?' They gave Him a piece of broiled fish; and He ate it before them. Then He said to them, 'This is what I said before: that everything written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.' Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them, 'Thus it is written, that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day, and that repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things'" (verses 39-48). That blessing Jesus gave as He ascended into heaven is more than an expression of His desire for His own to be happy; it is a declaration of His ability to give them the only true happiness. When we remember His uplifted hands, there can be no doubt or fear when menacing hands stretch out to harm or trouble us. When we hear His voice pronouncing blessing, it does not matter what voices slander or curse us, for we know our peace and joy are assured.
