The Great Prophetic Pause
Posted by: biblenotes <biblenotes@...>
From: Martin Overfield
Date: 3 Dec 2001
The Great Prophetic Pause
"And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee ... And he came
to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as his custom was, he
went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and stood up for to read. And
there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias. And when he
had opened the book, he found the place where it was written, The Spirit
of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel
to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach
deliverance
to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty
them
that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. ... And he
began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears."
(Luke 4:14-21)
And here Jesus stopped reading in Isaiah 61:2, at a comma between "the
acceptable year of the Lord" and "the day of vengeance of our God"
(Isaiah 61:1-2). That prophetic comma, representing a pause in the
reading in our English language, has lasted about two thousand years.
It is a "pause" of tremendous significance.
Jesus was telling them that He had come in fulfillment of this Scripture.
But, He had not come to fulfill "the day of vengeance of our God" -- not
yet. That day is still yet to come. We read of that day in Revelation
chapter 19, in which we see Christ returning upon a white horse with a
sharp sword, the Word of God, to devour His enemies.
But, in the mean time this prophecy pauses that the first part, "the
acceptable year of the Lord", might be fulfilled to the utmost extent.
ACCEPTABLE no doubt has to do with the means and the time period
by which humanity may become acceptable to God.
Oh, what a pause in the prophetic scheme! A pause in which God is trying
save all who desire to be saved and who are willing to cooperate with Him in
their salvation. Oh, what grace does He bestow while withholding His
vengeance upon sin and sinners! Oh, how great is the love that stays His
hand for so long a time! How perfect is the peace, the power, and the
purity that He grants the hearts who patiently wait for Him, who occupy
until He comes! How wonderfully far-reaching is His endeavor to embrace the
whole world of fallen humanity in the arms of compassionate mercy as He
commissions His church to "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to
every creature" (Mark 16:15)!
And while on this day Christ contemplates such eternal, infinite musings of
the heart of God the Father, of Himself -- God the Son, and of God the Holy
Ghost, He sees and utterly abandons Himself to the one act of self-sacrifice
that will make such a prophetic pause a reality for the world. He thus
abandons Himself to the path of suffering, shame, and horrific death. He
gave Himself, giving His life that we might live, and dying a death beyond
our comprehension that we might not die a death of eternal consequences
for our sins.
As we contemplate the giving and gifts of this most wonderful time of
year, let us glory and revel in the greatest of all gifts ever given and the
greatest of all loves that prompted such an act of giving.
Here is the meaning of Christmas in a nutshell: G I F T
God
In
Flesh
Triumphant
Yours In Christ,
Martin Overfield
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