The Scofield Reference Bible tells you Jesus Christ was 26 when His ministry began but He was actually 29. If you add three and a half years to that, you get 33 AD and that’s the common date of the death of Christ.

What’s so interesting is how there are all these years of silence between age 12 and 29 and the Bible pretty much just passes over this period of His life.

“If you ever wondered what the Lord was doing during that some 18-year period, in Mark 6:3 is an interesting little verse,” says Jordan. “In Mark 6, when the crowd is looking at Christ and they’re going to identify Him, they say, ‘Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon?’

“The Lord had a reputation around His hometown as being the carpenter. If you lived in the West years ago and you were the blacksmith, you’d be the ‘Village Smithy,’ as Longfellow would have called it. And so Christ obviously had a life and He obviously was doing things and was known in the community as someone who was involved in life and the community constructively.”

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In Luke 2:52, we’re told of His youth, “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.”

Jordan says, “That’s what was going on during that period and all this stuff about Him—all these hallucinations you here in mythology about how He went and did this thing over here and did that thing over there and all these goofball traditions that people come up with. That’s all they are. They’re just folklore. And you don’t need to enhance the reputation of the Lord with spook stories about Him making things levitate and all that kind of business when He’s a baby.

”He lived, just like you and I live, and, as the verse says, He increased in wisdom and in stature and grew in understanding and in favor with God and man. Now, the French writer Godet once made this statement, and I think it’s an interesting way of putting it: ‘Our Lord had an inward development which resulted in a state of perfect receptivity for the measureless communication of the divine Spirit.’

“And what he’s saying is that’s what Christ did up between the last time we saw Him in the Book of Luke at age 12. The Lord lived in such communion with God the Father, and in such communion with the Word of God, that He had a receptivity to what God would communicate to Him.

“You remember He’s ‘the man Christ Jesus,’ and we’ve talked about how the Lord laid aside the free and independent exercise of His attributes of deity—one of which would be omniscience, or knowing everything—and depended upon God the Father and God the Holy Spirit to provide Him those things.

“And so He lives and comes to this consciousness of receptivity with God, so that what you’re going to see here in Luke 3—it’s important to see the transition from His private life into His public ministry came because of the Lord’s positive response to the signal given in the ministry of the forerunner of the Messiah, John the Baptist.

“It comes just from the personal viewpoint of the Lord Himself—not Israel and not the world having Him introduced to them—but just from the Lord’s viewpoint, and Luke’s going to focus on that aspect of it.

“When we get down and we see about His baptism and the Spirit descending on Him and the Father speaking from heaven, you’ll see how Luke . . . In Matthew and Mark it says, ‘This is my beloved Son in whom I’m well pleased,’ but you look down in verse 22 of Luke 3 and what the Father says here is, as Luke records it, ‘Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.’

“Matthew is making the pronouncement for the audience, but Luke focuses on the fact that, ‘You know, when the Lord said that, it wasn’t just an announcement for the audience out there; it was something personal to the Lord going on here.’ He says ‘thou art,’ the singular pronoun. ‘In THEE I’m well-pleased.’ It’s that personal intimacy between the Lord and His Father.

“When I think about these things and get involved in looking at it all that way, you’re going to see this all the way through Luke. Luke always keeps that intimate touch and sometimes you forget that between the Lord Jesus Christ and the Father was an intimacy of fellowship as members of the Godhead, one having stepped out of the independent exercise of His identity and taken on human flesh—the veil made in the likeness of sinful flesh like you and me.

“The fascinating thing to remember about that is what you see in the Lord Jesus Christ is the Father living in Him just as He desires to live in us, and just as He has that intimacy with the Father, that’s the kind of intimacy we’re privileged to have because we’re in Him. And there’s an awful lot of wonderful, magnificent, marvelous, personal things like that all the way through the book of Luke.

“Luke has such a different view and perspective of the same events than Matthew or Mark, where it’s, ‘Boom-boom, here’s what it is and here’s what it means and here’s what you gotta do about it.’

“Luke is constantly just looking at who Jesus Christ is and, ‘Here’s how He was and how He related to it.’ And so, what Luke is doing is he’s setting up the stage. Politically, Israel is under the heel of a corrupt governmental system—a bunch of Gentiles that are just corrupt and abusive.

“Our Lord comes on the scene out of private life where He’s grown in favor with God and men and is receptive to what God’s doing in His nation and the time schedule of God’s Word.

“John the Baptist comes out as the forerunner to signal that the nation should prepare herself for the coming of the Messiah. The forerunner’s activity gives the signal to the Lord Jesus Christ that it’s time to move from private life to public life.”