Each one of the four gospels gives a special viewpoint about Jesus Christ. In Matthew, He’s the king. In Mark, He’s the servant. In Luke, He’s the man. In John, He’s God incarnate.

“In Matthew, it’s logic; it’s, ‘Here’s this and here’s that, and this leads to that,’ ” says Jordan. “Matthew’s written for the religious thinker; the man who’s interested in pedigrees, and heritage, and fulfilling of prophecies.

“In Mark, it’s, ‘Boom, boom, boom,’ action all the time. Mark’s written for the worker; for the action-oriented person. You see these successive snapshots of Christ as the servant working here and here and here. It’s quick little vignettes that go from one thing to the next.

“Luke is written for the intellectual community—the thinking man. He’s writing for the people wanting to look behind the scenes and see the depth of the reality of what’s going on.

“Luke is a storyteller in the greatest sense of the word. He lingers over the narrative and you just sort of flow along with it. You’re interested in the human side of what’s going on because, from the very beginning, Luke gives a very human-oriented account.”

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The whole of the first two chapters of Luke presents information not found in any of the other gospels. He starts with Elisabeth and Zacharias and the events that led up to the birth of John the Baptist and the relationship between Elisabeth and Mary.

By the end of chapter two, the reader’s taken through the Lord’s nativity and seen His parents go to Jerusalem and offer the sacrifice. He gets lost. His parents take Him back at 12 years old.

Jordan explains, “You see Him ‘increase in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God.’ You’re sort of caught up in the story of it. Matthew starts his account with genealogy, and Mark starts his with Christ’s public ministry, but Luke—it’s like he’s thinking, ‘We’re going to start back here and we’re going to get the details of His nativity down. We’re going to understand this thing.’

“And he lingers and labors over giving you all these details about the birth and the things that led up to it, and all the family relations. In the first few chapters you’re taken into the hearts and homes and hopes of simple people; godly people; likeable people.

“I think you can’t help but like Zacharias and Elizabeth, and when I look at what happened to them, I sit there and chuckle over it. I think, ‘Man, here’s somebody I can relate to!’

“You see Joseph and Mary; a young, expectant mother with her first child having to travel away to a strange city to have the birth. You see the anxiety of Joseph as he looked over them. They were a very poor couple. They go to the temple and there’s Anna and Simeon.

“Luke is concerned with the humanity side. He wants to get to this one who’s born and grows up to perfect manhood. Luke sort of says, ‘He’s a man and this is who He is as a man—let’s talk about that!’ ”

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While Matthew’s genealogy goes back to David and Abraham, the source of the great covenants, Luke goes all the way back to Adam. The viewpoint in Luke concerns all of mankind, not just Israel. He constantly includes the Gentile into the picture.”

Jordan says, ‘Luke is a historian. He doesn’t just say, ‘In those days . . .,’ but nails the thing down exactly. He’s done the research and he knows exactly when things are happening. He’s interested in the little, personal, human-interest details.

“When Luke introduces his book, it’s like he’s saying, ‘Hey guys, I’ve been a good historian. I’ve gone and talked to everybody involved in this thing. I’ve got first-hand accounts from all the source references; I’m not just taking second and third-hand information.’ ”

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Luke was a medical doctor and scientist in his day. In Col. 4:14, Paul, who became a close companion of Luke, refers to him as, “Luke, the beloved physician.” But it wasn’t just Paul who loved him; everybody seemed to love Luke.

Jordan explains, “Luke 2:19 reports, ‘But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.’ He says there were things Mary kept to herself that she didn’t share with anybody else but she shared them with Luke. You know they say you share everything with your doctor, but that isn’t always true unless it’s a special doctor. And that’s what Paul says: ‘Luke, the beloved physician.’ ”

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In the book of Luke are many more accounts of Jesus Christ’s healings than in the other gospels. Luke is the one who quotes Christ saying, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.”

It’s in Luke 4:23 that the famous phrase by Christ, “Physician, heal thyself,” is found.

Jordan says, “As you read Luke, you see Luke diagnose the cases as he goes along. It’s fascinating. You know, when a guy’s into something he can’t help but be into it, and Luke doesn’t just say, ‘Peter’s wife’s mother is sick with a fever.’ Luke 4:38 says she was ‘taken with a great fever.’ She wasn’t just sick with a fever. There’s a fever and there’s ‘a great fever.’ And so the doctor says it’s the big-grade one—it’s the high one!

“Luke 5:12 says the man was ‘full of leprosy.’ The other gospel accounts just say ‘a man taken of leprosy.’ Luke says, ‘No, he wasn’t just taken with it; man, this guy’s got it all over. He’s full of it.’ That’s the doctor diagnosing the problem.

“Then there’s ‘the man which was taken with a palsy.’ The man wasn’t just paralytic; he was taken with the disease. In Luke 7:2, when the centurion asks the Lord about healing his servant, it says he was ‘sick, and ready to die.’ I mean, that’s the doctor talking!

“You see the doctor looking at the case and examining it, saying, ‘This is the way the thing is.’ In chapter 13:11, He writes, ‘And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself.’

“You see the doctor looking at the case? And he doesn’t just say, ‘Here’s this woman all bowed over and bent up with arthritis.’ He’s saying, ‘Here’s the situation and she couldn’t do this.’ You see that kind of thing constantly all through the book!

“Luke 8:43 tells of a ‘woman having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any.’ That’s a startling admission by a doctor. I’ve said for years, ‘Doctors say they practice medicine and the emphasis sometimes should be on that word practice.’

“But Mark, when he talks about this woman, he says she spent all of her living on the physicians and didn’t get any better. Well, that’s the way you and I look at it, isn’t it? ‘I spent all my money, ran out my insurance and didn’t get any better!’

“Luke looks at it from the doctor’s point of view. He says she spent all of her living on physicians and obviously he doesn’t approve of that. There’s the healer constantly trying to minister. Mark is the servant—‘Help me, do something for me,’ and they don’t—

but Luke is the doctor who says, ‘Well, is there something else that would help?’ Luke is that human tenderness.

“You need to remember the book’s written by the pen of a physician, and because of that it’s not unusual or unexpected to find the book’s written to the thinking man—

the intellectual community. It’s written to answer the question, ‘Is Christ real? Is He human?’ Can He feel, can He touch me, can He understand me, can He know me?

“Is He just off in a corner somewhere—some ‘holy other’ transcendent one out there on a throne that I can’t get to—or does He know what it is to go to work and pay the bills and come home and eat dinner at the table? Does He know what it is just to be human?

“So Luke takes up the pen and paints the reality of the perfect, sinless humanity of the Son of Man; holy, harmless and separate from sinners in that He did no sin and yet able to be touched with the feelings of our infirmities for He was ‘tempted like in every point as we are.’ The controlling unity and emphasis of the book is the sublime, sinless manhood of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“Luke says, ‘Behold the man, behold the man.’ It’s fascinating that it’s only in Luke that you find Christ say to somebody, ‘Your faith has saved you.’ Luke, of all the gospel accounts, was the first to use the word grace.

“The first occurrence of the word redemption, too, is in the book of Luke. Luke points to the Lord Jesus Christ and says, ‘That Saviour is our Kinsman Redeemer. He’s bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, and in all points He was tempted as like we are and yet He overcame it all by the power of the Spirit of God.’

“When Paul says, ‘Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus,’ he’s not talking about following the Jewish program that Christ followed; he’s talking about the character and virtue—the matchless manhood, the spirit-filled humanity—that you see in the book of Luke.”