I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 4-5

Yesterday I wrote that Jesus’ mother was almost certainly Luke’s source for chapter 2.  Today’s passage was clearly based on the recollections of Jesus’ disciples, but not necessarily members of the Twelve (we know from Acts that there were others who followed Jesus from the beginning).  A careful reading shows us that while Luke did his best to put the stories he relates into the order they happened he was not entirely sure how stories he got from one set of sources matched up with those from other sources.  For example, it seems likely that Luke’s story about how Peter, James, and John came to follow Jesus, which appears at the beginning of chapter 5, preceded the end of chapter 4.

Speaking of Luke’s account of how Peter, James, and John came to follow Jesus (the fact that Andrew is not mentioned suggests that he is Luke’s source for this account) I want to point out something I never thought about before.  When Jesus was finished speaking from Peter’s boat, He told Peter to put back out and let down the nets.  Peter’s response was essentially, “We fished all night and did not catch anything.  There aren’t any fish out there, but I will humor you and put out the nets.”  The result was a catch so large that, even after he called James and John to bring their boat out to help, it almost sank the boat.  Then Jesus called them to follow Him and told them that from now on they would be fishing for people. The story makes the point that sometimes God will direct us to repeat something we did in the past that failed.  To put it another way, we should not give up trying to reach people for God just because they rejected our message in the past.