Luke 4:28 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

Ver. 28-30. Unhappy Nazareth, where Christ had now lived more than thirty years! They had seen him growing up, increasing in wisdom and stature, and in favour both with God and man, Luke 2:52; they had had the first fruits of his ministry, and, Luke 4:22, they bare him witness, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth; they knew his education, so as they could not think he had this wisdom and knowledge from any advantages of that, but must have it from Heaven; yet when they hear him preaching, and but touching them for their contempt and rejection of him, and tacitly comparing them with their forefathers in the time of Ahab, and preaching the doctrine of God's sovereign and free grace, and hinting to them that the grace of God should pass to the Gentiles, while they should be rejected, they are not able to bear him. Thus, Acts 22:21, the Jews heard Paul patiently, till he repeated God's commission to him to go unto the Gentiles; then they cried, Away with such a fellow from the earth, for it is not fit he should live. This was according to the old prophecy, Deuteronomy 32:21, (applied to the Jews by the apostle, Romans 10:19), that because they had moved God to jealousy with that which is not God, he would move them to jealousy with them that are not a people, and provoke them to anger with a foolish nation. This is further matter of observation, that wretched sinners, who cannot obtain of their lusts to be as good and holy as others, yet are ordinarily so proud, as they have no patience to hear that others are better than they, or have or shall have any more special share in God's favour. Those of Nazareth which were in the synagogue hearing these things, are filled with wrath, thrust Christ out of the city, as not fit to live among them, and go about to kill him, by throwing him down headlong from the brow of the hill upon which their city was built. But he passing through the midst of them went his way. How he got out of their hands, when they had laid hold of him, the Scripture doth not tell us, nor is it our concern to be curious to inquire. We read much the like passage, 1 Thessalonians 8:59, when the Jews had taken up stones to stone him. We know it was an easy thing for him, who was God as well as man, to quit himself of any mortal enemies; but how he did it, whether by blinding their eyes, or altering the nature of his body, and making it imperceptible by them, or by a greater strength than they, (which the Divine nature could easily supply his human nature with), who is able to determine?