When we teach Free Grace, which is Biblical to the core, it is strange that the people one would expect to be open to it are often not. It would make sense that students of the Bible–including seminary students, professors, pastors, Sunday school teachers, and long-time members of evangelical churches–would be the first to see the truth of that grace. But that is not what we commonly find. Such folks are usually closed to accepting Free Grace. Many times, the people who believe it are the ones we would least expect.

Even though this might surprise us, it shouldn’t. In the Gospel of Luke, in the Lord’s very first sermon, He said this would be the case (Luke 4:16-30). He was speaking in the synagogue of the town where he grew up. The people there had the OT Scriptures (v 17). They heard those Scriptures read every Saturday. They were Jewish and knew the Messiah was coming.

But they also had much more. They had seen Jesus grow up. They would have seen His character. Even if they didn’t realize He had never sinned, surely they would have noticed that He was a righteous man. In their very midst He lived a life that would have stood out. Even a casual observer should have realized He was not like other men in the town or, indeed, any man they had ever met. They also knew that He had performed wonderful miracles of healing (v 23). In the synagogue that day they also acknowledged that He was an amazing teacher of God’s Word. Luke writes that they “marveled at the gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth” (v 22).

We know, of course, that He was more than a Man who spoke gracious words. He was the greatest teacher who ever lived. They had the privilege of having Him expound a portion of Isaiah in Person in their synagogue (vv 15-19). If ever a group of people should have been open to what God had said, it was the people in that meeting.

But how did they respond? They were completely closed to His message. They were offended by Him. God had been gracious to them by allowing the Christ to grow up in their town and even teach in their local synagogue. But then Jesus told them that His grace was even greater than that. His grace would extend to the Gentiles (vv 24-27).

The Gentiles were people one would not expect to respond to God’s grace. They were not given the Scriptures. They didn’t live in the land where the Christ came to minister. They certainly did not grow up in His hometown. He was not sent to their countries to perform miracles. He did not preach in their cities. But the Lord says that when people like that hear the message, they are often much more open to the grace of God and the teachings of the Scriptures than those we would logically assume to be.

The Jews at Nazareth could not tolerate such grace. They were so closed to what Jesus was saying that they attempted to kill Him (vv 28-29).

All of this, of course, was a rebuke to the Jews of Christ’s day. How insane was it that they were closed to the truth, while those with none of the privileges they had were open? When we teach grace, we so often find the same situation. People we don’t expect—people with little or no theological training—often hear the message of grace and are filled with joy. The most theologically astute are often not.

We see that this is true not only in our day and the days of the Lord; it was also that way in OT times. Jesus told the Jews in the synagogue that day that this was the case. When Jesus pointed out that their very own Scriptures teach this phenomenon, it should have caused them to step back and consider how they were responding to what the Lord was saying. But it didn’t.

The Lord gave them two examples from the OT to demonstrate that many times those who are open to God’s Word are those whom we’d least expect. The people in the examples include two Gentiles, a military leader and a widow. In the next two blogs, I would like to look at these examples.