Today's Devotion

Wednesday of Easter 4, April 29, 2026 - Luke 10:1-22

In the name of + Jesus. Amen.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Jesus sends out “seventy-two others - men who were not to become apostles after His ascension - to prepare for His coming. These men came back from this mission rejoicing that “Even the demons are subject to [them],” though this subjection was in the name of Jesus. Our Lord cautions them not to “rejoice in this,” but rather “rejoice that your names are written in heaven,” says Jesus. Our Lord urges them to remain humble, to focus on their salvation as their real reason for joy. The seventy-two were given “authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy - but it is the fact that Jesus crushed the head of the devil (Gen 3:15) at the cross and atoned for us that causes us Christians to rejoice. Any authority or ability that we have in the kingdom is by grace.

The authority is not ours, but belongs to Jesus, and it was given Him by the Father.

And we see Jesus Himself rejoicing “in the Holy Spirit” for this very reason, by the Father’s “gracious will” that “these things,” these revelations of the kingdom, were given “to little children,” even as the wise and powerful of this world have been passed over. For the real revelation of the kingdom is “who the Son is.” And it is only by the Father’s will that anyone can make this confession. It is supernatural, as our Lord explained to Simon Peter when He confessed who Jesus really is (Matt 16:17).

Prefiguring what we will see after our Lord’s ascension, we see the Jewish cities of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum resisting the Gospel, but Jesus points to the receptivity of Gentile cities, like Tyre and Sidon. For the seventy-two were armed with the Word of Jesus: “The one who hears you hears Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me, and the one who rejects Me rejects Him who sent Me.”

This is how the kingdom of God exists in our fallen world today. It is preached into existence by men called by Jesus, to those whom the Father wills should hear and believe. And we continue to rejoice that the names of the redeemed “are written in heaven.”

Amen.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.