What is the acceptable year of the Lord?

The significance of the Lord closing the book at this juncture had often been noticed, for the words that follow in Isaiah 61 are “and the day of vengeance of our God.” So that the acceptable year of the Lord covers the period from the time the Lord read these words until the day arrives for the outpouring of God’s judgments on the world. The period of the presentation of God’s grace is “the acceptable year,” a year that has lasted well nigh two thousand years, such is God’s long-suffering; but God’s vengeance, necessary to clear the world of iniquity before the introduction of divine blessing, is but a day, for judgment in God’s “strange work” (Isa. 28:21-22), and He will make it a “short work” (Romans 9:28).

The Lord Jesus at the beginning of His ministry entered into the synagogue at Nazareth, and on the prophecy by Isaiah being handed to Him read from Isaiah 61, the passage, "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 broken-hearted, 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 " — leaving off in the middle of a sentence, for the next words are, "and the day of vengeance of our God" Luke 4:18-19; Isa. 61:1-2. The Lord added, "This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears." The vengeance will be executed for the deliverance of Israel in a coming day; but when our Lord spoke there was the fullest grace for his hearers: it was the acceptable year of Jehovah. There may be an allusion to the year of Jubilee (type of the millennium) when servants were liberated, debts cancelled, and when family possessions were restored to their original owners. But the grace vouchsafed by the Lord brought lasting blessings for their souls.

In grace God was not now making demands upon men which it was impossible for them to fulfil; He was offering them richest blessing through faith in His Son whom He had sent to them. Soon there would be the day of vengeance for all who refused His Son, but now it was God's acceptable year, a prolonged period compared with the day in which there would be the short work of His judgment. We are still in the acceptable year; God is still disposed towards men in grace, and all who heed His message receive His blessing.

The Lord closed the Book at this word, for the next part of His mission, the execution of divine judgment, was not yet. He was able to say, "This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears;" for His words of grace would not only continue till He was crucified, but after He would take His place at the Father's right hand, the message of grace would still go out, not to Israel only, but also to the Gentiles. How wonderful for us that the Lord closed the book where He did, and that the time for God's day of vengeance has not yet come, though come it will, and the day for it draws near.

This name of God occurs over 1,200 times in the New Testament. Eight times it is employed to designate the gods of the heathen world, or distinguished people as in John 10:34 where it speaks of “gods,” quoting from Psalm 82:6-7, where God is seen among the mighty, but telling them they would die like men, for they were but men. Otherwise God (Theos) is invariably translated God. He is presented in two ways, either acting in grace, “the acceptable YEAR of the LORD” (Isa. 61:2); or of acting in government, “the DAY of vengeance of our God” (Isa. 61:2). Note the acceptable year of the LORD, the long stretched-out 365 days of gracious waiting on man for his blessing, as compared with “the day of vengeance of our God,” the short sharp 24 hours in which judgment shall be rendered to every man. “The acceptable year of our Lord” has already lasted nigh two thousand years, and still God lingers in grace over a godless world. But the day of judgment must come, and signs are telling us that day is not far off.

We read the story in the fourth chapter of Luke's Gospel: He stood up, the meek and lowly Jesus, in the synagogue of Nazareth in which He had often sat as a boy, and the book of the Prophet Esaias was given to Him. He turned to the 61st chapter of Isaiah and read those beautiful words concerning Himself, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor, He has sent Me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, to open the eyes of the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord." He ceased to read in the middle of a sentence and put a full stop where in our Old Testament we have only a comma, and He closed the book. Why did He do that? The completion of the sentence is this "And the day of vengeance of our God." He was then and there to open the acceptable year of the Lord, the year of grace, the year of blessing, and to postpone the day of vengeance until that year had run its course. That year has extended until now. In order to open and tell the tale of grace He had to be the man of sorrows in His life and the sacrifice for sin in His death. He was both, blessed by His name, and the grace of God is now in full revelation. But the Jews did not want the grace of God nor Him who brought it to them. It is true they marvelled at His words. They sounded in their ears like sweetest music, but when He showed them how that grace worked, that it reached out to the poor hopeless Gentile, and passed the smug, self-satisfied, self-righteous religionist by, they were filled with rage and took Him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built to cast Him down headlong. They rejected Him and the grace of God, and that is why they wander strangers upon the earth today, and they will never know peace and rest until they receive it on the ground of the grace that He whom they rejected brought into the world. When He takes the book of the Revelation the year of grace will have run to its close and the first hour of the day of vengeance will have struck.

(1) This part begins with a foreshadow at Nazareth of what is soon to be fulfilled in Israel's history. The Lord is seen in the place where He was brought, up and according to His custom He enters the synagogue on the sabbath day. There He stands up to read, and the book of Isaiah being given Him, He opens at the sixty-first chapter, and applies the words of the Man anointed with the Spirit of Jehovah to Himself. It is clear how accordant with the character of Luke the quotation is. It is the "Mediator between God and man; the Man Christ Jesus" (1 Tim. 2:5), whose voice is heard here; and it is as come up out of Jordan; where He has pledged Himself to a baptism to death far different, that the Spirit has come upon Him for His work. He declares here in the first words of His ministry, as Luke gives it to us, the purport of that anointing. The preaching of glad tidings to the poor comes first, and gives character to all the rest. When man is in the place of need he can receive the gospel. When he is consciously a sinner, captive to the sin which he cannot, when he will, renounce, the gospel brings him release. The blind receive their sight. Those bruised in fetters liberty. It is in fact "the acceptable year of the Lord"; the jubilee of God; fuller and more blessed than the law ever proclaimed in Israel.

Now in His Person this had come to them. He was the source of all, the spring of grace and salvation. Where the prophet goes on to "the day of vengeance of our God," the Lord stops short in the middle of the sentence: grace had hastened to anticipate the judgment; although for those who refuse the one there will at last be the other. But judgment lingers with reluctant feet, while those of grace are winged with desire.

The first appearance of Jesus in the synagogue of Nazareth, shows the wide distinction between His grace, and the righteousness in which He will execute judgment in the setting up of the visible kingdom. "He found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the broken-hearted, 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 closed the book, … and He began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. And all bare Him witness, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth" (Luke 4:17-22). But why did Jesus close the book at this point? In the prophecy He was reading, the words with which He concluded stand in the middle of a sentence. The language of Isaiah is, — "to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn; to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness" (Isa. 61:2-3). Why, then, did Jesus close the book so abruptly? If, as is ordinarily contended, the whole of this prophecy is fulfilled in Christianity, if these blessings and judgments are brought about by the preaching of the gospel, why is the quotation so strangely broken off? On this theory it is wholly unintelligible. But what, on the other hand, can be simpler to those who follow Scripture instead of coaxing Scripture to follow them? The first part is quoted because it has its fulfilment, or at least a fulfilment, under God's present dealings. The second part is omitted, because the time for the establishment of the kingdom in outward display, with the execution of God's vengeance, and the blessing "to them that mourn in Zion," had not yet arrived. The abrupt closing of the book shows that the remainder of the prophecy had no fulfilment in Christ's first coming. It awaits its accomplishment on His second advent in power and glory.

Hence the explicit care to base the jubilee on the offering and acceptance of the atonement-day, the most solemn sacrifice of the year. The cornet which was to sound so loud, and bring in the proclamation of liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof, was not on the first of the seventh month but on the tenth. The first was a sabbath too, and distinguished by a memorial of blowing the cornet. It too was a holy convocation: no servile work was to be done, and a fire-offering made to Jehovah. But the tenth was the fast, when no work was to be done, with the most peremptory warning that every soul not afflicted on that same day should be cut off from among his peoples, and that every soul doing any manner of work on that same day Jehovah would destroy from among His people. Christ's atonement alone accounts for this. Therefore the repentance in dust and ashes; therefore too the exclusion of any manner of work. His work, His suffering for sin, explains it all.

The "liberty" which immediately follows is the answer to that work of atonement completed and accepted. It is quite a different liberty from that deliverance from the law of sin and death which we know as Christians as traced in Rom. 8, 2 Cor. 3, and Gal. 5. The jubilee is in no way the type of what pertains to the Christian or the church, but of Israel for the land when Jehovah's people shall be brought into their full promised blessing. Pentecost typifies what we now enjoy by the gift of the Spirit, consequent on Christ our passover sacrificed for us, and His resurrection shown in its wave-sheaf and the wave-loaves, till at an untold moment the heavenly saints are changed and caught up to meet Him for the Father's house. Only this was a mystery not yet revealed in scripture but hid in God. After that, when time begins again to be counted, in the seventh month comes a new series of divine dealings to apply the already accomplished work of atonement to Israel, awaked from their long slumber of death on the first of the month, then brought by self-judgment and humiliation under the atoning sacrifice in power of truth, at length the feast of glory for time and even eternity.

The Lord read the scripture, and He closed the book. I want you at your leisure to look at the prophecy of Isaiah and to observe the wisdom of our Lord Jesus Christ who closed the book at the right moment just as He opened the book at the right moment. And while we love to see how He opened the book and with what a beautiful passage He began, so we must love to see how He closed the book and failed to read the dreadful words that follow — "the day of vengeance of our God."

The acceptable year was come the time of deliverance and of preaching the gospel to the poor; the blind were to have sight given them; but the day of vengeance was not yet. Jesus closed the book, and the day of doom is not yet. The day of grace, the day of joy and peace began with our Lord Jesus Christ here in humiliation. For He was a man come to set forth the love of God; here to pass clay by day, in and out of the places of common resort, and by His words of love and power, by His works of healing and mercy show men God's love for this world. The Lord was the light shining in the darkness. Can you conceive for a moment what the awful condition of this world would be if the revelation made by Christ were suddenly withdrawn from us?

He presents Himself in this character: "The Spirit of Jehovah is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he has sent me to heal the broken-hearted, … to preach the acceptable year of Jehovah." Here He stops. That which follows in the prophet, respecting the deliverance of Israel by the judgment which avenges them of their enemies, is omitted by the Lord. Now Jesus does not announce promises, but their fulfilment in grace by His own presence. The Spirit is upon this man, full of grace; and the God of grace in Him manifests His goodness. The time of deliverance is come; the vessel of His favour to Israel is there in their midst.