The Glorious Grind: The Hidden Years Text: Luke 2:39-40
Introduction: The Heresy of Impatience
We live in an age that despises the ordinary. Our entire culture is a frantic flight from the mundane. We want the highlight reel, the viral moment, the overnight success. We want the crown without the cross, the resurrection without the tomb, and the public ministry without the thirty years of silent preparation in Nazareth. We are Gnostics at heart, who believe that what truly matters is the secret knowledge, the spiritual zap, the disembodied experience. We are uncomfortable with flesh, with time, with growth, and with the glorious, grinding, day-in-and-day-out faithfulness that constitutes the vast majority of a godly life.
Because of this, the childhood of Jesus is a profound offense to the modern mind. We are given the spectacular bookends of His birth and His appearance at the Temple at age twelve, but the intervening years, and the eighteen years after that, are passed over in almost complete silence. Our sentimental Christmas cards and syrupy songs try to fill in the gaps with a Jesus who was essentially God in a child suit, a divine being pretending to be a boy, never skinning a knee, never struggling with a wood joint in Joseph's shop, never having to learn His letters. This is not the Christ of Scripture. That is a phantom, a docetic heresy that denies His true humanity.
The Scriptures, in their divine wisdom, present us with something far more potent and far more comforting. They present us with a real Savior who inhabited a real human life, not just for a three-year ministry, but from conception onwards. These two short verses in Luke's gospel are a cannon shot into our therapeutic, impatient, and un-incarnational sensibilities. They teach us that God's plan of redemption was not a frantic improvisation, but a slow, deliberate, and perfectly executed strategy that sanctified the entirety of human existence, including the unglamorous bits. The so-called "hidden years" were not wasted years. They were the years of perfect, filial obedience that laid the foundation for the cross. They were the years where the Second Adam was quietly and faithfully undoing the work of the first.
In these verses, we see the foundation of our salvation being laid, not in a flash of celestial light, but in the faithful completion of covenant duty and the ordinary process of human development. This is the doctrine of the incarnation with its work boots on.
The Text
And when they had finished everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own city of Nazareth.
Now the Child continued to grow and become strong, being filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him.
(Luke 2:39-40 LSB)
Covenantal Bookkeeping (v. 39)
We begin with the quiet conclusion to the whirlwind events of the nativity.
"And when they had finished everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own city of Nazareth." (Luke 2:39)
Notice the emphasis. Luke, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wants us to see the meticulous, box-checking nature of their obedience. They had performed the circumcision on the eighth day. They had completed Mary's days of purification. They had presented the child in the Temple and offered the prescribed sacrifice. They "finished everything." This was not the begrudging obedience of a legalist trying to earn points with God. This was the joyful submission of faithful Israelites, placing the Son of God squarely under the very law He had come to fulfill. This is the beginning of what theologians call Christ's active obedience.
Our salvation depends not only on Christ's death for our sins (His passive obedience), but also on His perfect life of righteousness lived in our place (His active obedience). That perfect life did not begin when He was thirty. It began at His conception and continued through every moment of His existence. Here we see His parents, His legal guardians, ensuring that His life from its earliest days was one of complete conformity to the Torah. He was born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law (Gal. 4:4-5). This verse is the divine record-keeping, the first entry in the ledger that shows a life of perfect righteousness that would one day be credited to our bankrupt account.
And where does this perfect obedience lead them? Not to a palace in Jerusalem, but back to "their own city of Nazareth." This is a profound statement of humility. Nazareth was a dusty, backwater town in Galilee, a place of such ill-repute that it prompted the honest question, "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" (John 1:46). God's plan for world salvation was gestating in the most obscure and despised of places. This is a deliberate rebuke to all our worldly metrics of success and importance. God does His greatest work in the Nazareths of the world, through people no one is watching. The eighteen years Jesus would spend there before His public ministry were not a waiting period; they were an essential part of His work, a period of faithful, silent, filial obedience in the grind of ordinary life.
The Fully Human Savior (v. 40)
Verse 40 is one of the most crucial verses for a right understanding of the person of Christ. It is the definitive refutation of all heresies that would diminish His true humanity.
"Now the Child continued to grow and become strong, being filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him." (Luke 2:40 LSB)
Let the words sink in. "The Child continued to grow." This is not God pretending to be a boy. This is the eternal Son of God, having taken to Himself a true human nature, experiencing the genuine process of human maturation. He grew. This means He was once smaller. He became strong. This means He was once weaker. He did not spring from the womb bench-pressing oxen. He was a helpless infant, entirely dependent on His mother, just like every other infant. He had to learn to roll over, to crawl, to walk, to run. His muscles had to develop. This is the glorious scandal of the incarnation. The one who upholds the universe by the word of His power had to learn to hold His own head up.
And the growth was not merely physical. He was "being filled with wisdom." This was not an automatic, divine data transfer. It was a process. As a true man, Jesus had a true human mind, and that mind had to learn and develop. He learned the Scriptures from Mary and Joseph. He learned them in the synagogue. He learned a trade from his father. He grew in His understanding of His identity and mission. Luke says it again even more plainly later on: "And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man" (Luke 2:52). To deny this process is to deny that He was truly one of us. This authentic human development, free from the stain of sin, was absolutely necessary for Him to be our perfect representative and sympathetic high priest (Heb. 4:15).
And what was the atmosphere, the animating principle of this growth? "And the grace of God was upon Him." This is not saving grace in the sense that a sinner needs it. Jesus was sinless. This word "grace" (charis) means favor, blessing, divine enablement. The good pleasure of God the Father rested upon His beloved Son. It was a tangible reality. People could see it. This divine favor was the sunlight and water for His perfect human growth. It was the power of the Holy Spirit, with whom He was anointed, enabling this perfect development of His human nature. The Father's delight was the air He breathed.
The Pattern for Our Lives
So what does a thirty-year prelude of silent obedience and ordinary growth in a backwater town have to do with us? Everything. It establishes the pattern for our own discipleship.
First, your salvation is grounded in Christ's entire life of obedience, not just His death. The righteousness that is imputed to you by faith is the righteousness of these hidden years in Nazareth just as much as it is the righteousness of the Sermon on the Mount. He was being perfect for you when He was learning to walk, when He was sweeping the shop floor, when He was honoring His parents. Your justification is rock-solid because His obedience was life-long.
Second, God sanctifies the mundane. The vast majority of your Christian life will be lived in Nazareth. It will be lived in the faithful, repetitive, and often unseen duties of your vocation, your family, and your church. It is in the daily grind of changing diapers, balancing spreadsheets, showing patience to a difficult coworker, and honoring your parents that your own growth in strength and wisdom occurs. God is not looking for spectacular; He is looking for faithful. He builds His kingdom through the slow, steady accumulation of small obediences in obscure places.
Finally, the grace that was upon Him is now upon us. Because we are united to Christ by faith, the Father's favor, His good pleasure, now rests on us. "He made us accepted in the Beloved" (Eph. 1:6). That is the atmosphere in which we are now called to grow. We are to grow in strength, putting sin to death and walking in newness of life. We are to be filled with wisdom, steeping our minds in the Scriptures. And we do all this, not to earn God's favor, but because we already have it in His Son. The same Spirit that empowered Christ's perfect human life now empowers our stumbling, yet sincere, efforts to follow Him. He is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, but before that, He endured Nazareth. And in His perfect, patient, and profoundly ordinary life, He purchased our salvation and showed us the way to live.