Luke 2:39-40 – The Young Child Grows
LK2:39 Now when everything had been fulfilled according to YHWH’s law they returned to the village of Nazareth in Galilee. LK2:40 And so the child continued to grow stronger and stronger being filled with wisdom, and God’s unmerited favor was upon him.[1]
[1] God’s unmerited favor was upon him: It is clear the young boy Jesus was not God. Luke does not deal with the flight to Egypt as other Gospels cover this history.
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Preceding:
Nazarene Commentary Luke 2:1-7 – A Firstborn’s Birth In Bethlehem
Nazarene Commentary Luke 2:8-14 – Angels and Shepherds in the Night
Nazarene Commentary Luke 2:15-20 – Shepherds Find the Infant Christ
Nazarene Commentary Luke 2:21-24 – Presenting the Baby to God
Nazarene Commentary Luke 2:25-35 – Simeon’s Blessing and Warning
Nazarene Commentary Luke 2:36-38 – Anna’s Thanks before Those Waiting
Next: Nazarene Commentary Luke 2:41-50 – Twelve Year Old Jesus in the Temple
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- Cheap grace…what??? (melwild.wordpress.com)
What muddies the proverbial waters is that when we define grace as “unmerited favor,” it can be construed by the less faithful as God excusing our behavior.
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Jesus came in the power of God and truth. Peter tells us to grow in the power of God to live in the divine life (2 Pet.1:2-3; 3:18).
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In fact, grace is not about our behavior–about sinning or not sinning–it’s about the power of a New Creation (2 Cor.5:17-21; Gal.6:15). - Incredible – God introduced the Law (commandments) that sin might increase (chixyfied.wordpress.com)
God fore knew that man could never keep the law based on man’s own efforts, so at the fullness of the law era, he brought in Grace where righteousness shall not be placed on man but on God himself - Nativity fiction (chechar.wordpress.com)
we have a fascinating picture of four separate Christian communities in the first century. Two of them, Jewish-Christian, were determined to have a messiah with Davidic ancestry and constructed genealogies to prove it, never dreaming that Jesus could be thought of as having no human father.But gentile Christians in the first century, who came into the new religion directly from paganism and were already infected with myths about licentious deities, had a much different understanding of what divine paternity meant. Plutarch speaks for the entire pagan world when he writes, in Convivial Disputations, “The fact of the intercourse of a male with mortal women is conceded by all,” though he admits that such relations might be spiritual, not carnal. Such mythology came with pagans converted to Christianity, and by the middle of the first century, Joseph’s paternity of Jesus was being replaced by God’s all over the gentile world.
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Whereas Matthew has the Holy Family living in Bethlehem at the time of the birth and traveling to Nazareth, Luke has them living in Nazareth and traveling to Bethlehem in the very last stages of Mary’s pregnancy. Though Luke 1:5 dates the birth of Jesus in the “days of Herod, king of Judaea,” who died in 4 B.C., he wants the journey from Galilee to Bethlehem to have occurred in response to a census called when “Quirinius was governor of Syria.”
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