In all things Jesus was perfect, and in nothing more than this, that He, knowing all things, the end from the beginning, came down into a scene where He tasted rejection at every step—rejection not merely as a babe when He was carried into Egypt, but rejection all through a life of the most blameless yet divinely ordered obscurity. Then His ministry excited growing hatred on man's part. There is nothing a man more dreads than to be nothing at all. Even to be spoken against is not so dreadful to the poor proud spirit of man as to be absolutely unnoticed; and yet the very much greater part of the life of Jesus was spent in this entire obscurity. We have but a single incident recorded of Jesus from His earliest years until He emerges for the ministry of the Word of God and the gospel of the kingdom. But then He lived in Nazareth, proverbially the lowest of poor despised Galilee—so much so that even a godly Galilean wondered if any good thing could come out of Nazareth. Such was Jesus; but more than this.
When Jesus did enter on the publicity of divine testimony, there too He met opposition, though at first there was a welcome which would have gratified most men; yea, servants of God. But He the Son, the divine Person who was pleased to serve in this world, saw through that which would have been sweet to others when they, astonished and attracted, hung on the gracious words that fell from His lips. And how soon a dark cloud passed over it! For even that selfsame day in which men heard such words as had never fallen on the ears of man, miserable and infatuated, they could not endure the grace of God; and had they been left to themselves, they would have cast Him down headlong from the precipice outside their city (Luke 4:2929And rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong. (Luke 4:29)). Such man was and is. How truly all that was fair was but as the morning cloud and early dew. But Jesus, we see, accepts a ministry of which He knew from the first the character, course, and results, perfectly aware that the more divine grace and truth were brought out by Him, the sterner rejection He should meet among men.