July 26, 2025 • 15 mins
The King Nobody Wanted narrates the intriguing tale of Jesus in a relatable, everyday language. Drawing from the timeless King James Version of the Bible, this podcast weaves a captivating narrative thats both genuine and compelling.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter six of The King Nobody Wanted by Norman F. Langford.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter six,
Friends and Foes. Jesus thought the time had come to
visit Nazareth. Before he had gone away, there was nobody
who thought that he was a person of any great importance.
(00:23):
But he had become a famous man. The whole of
Galilee was talking about him now. And now he was
at home with his friends and family again. On the
Sabbath morning, he went to the old familiar synagogue. There
was a full congregation that day for every one supposed
that Jesus would preach. He had never preached in Nazareth before.
(00:47):
When the time came to read the scripture Lesson, Jesus
walked up to the front. He took the role from
the minister and found the place he wanted. It was
in the book of the prophet Isaiah. He began to read.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he
has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
(01:07):
He has sent me to heal the broken hearted, to
preach liberty to the prisoners, and recovering sight to the blind,
to free those who suffer, and to say that God
will be good to his people. Jesus stopped reading and
handed the roll back to the minister. He sat down
in the seat from which Jewish preachers always spoke to
(01:29):
the people in the synagogue. The whole congregation was very still,
waiting to hear what Jesus had to say. That was
an exciting lesson he had read from the scriptures. It
made the people think of the Messiah. Some day a
preacher would be able to say, this has all come true,
and that would mean that the Messiah had come. Jesus
(01:52):
looked round at the faces he knew so well. Thirty
years he had lived among these people. Now he was
back to tell them so something that they had never
known before. He began to speak to day. He said,
you are seeing this scripture lesson come true. A thrill
ran through the audience. The scripture had come true. The
(02:14):
Messiah was really here. Could he mean that he was
the Messiah? The people gasped, some laughed, others were angry.
They started to talk among themselves the Messiah him, Why,
that's only Jesus, the carpenter's son. Everybody knows who Jesus
is lived down the street. Since I don't know when
(02:38):
who does he think he is. Jesus again raised his
voice above the others. I know what you are going
to say. You are going to quote that old saying,
doctor cure yourself. You are going to tell me to
start doing the things I am supposed to have done
in Copernium. I'm not surprised. A servant of God never
(03:00):
forget to any honor among his own people. The same
thing happened to the prophets long ago. Don't expect me
to do anything wonderful here in Nazareth. You wouldn't believe
it if you saw it. Why do you think you
ought to get any special favors from God? A great
roar went up from the congregation. All his old friends
(03:22):
got up from their seats and rushed to the front
of the synagogue. They took hold of Jesus and dragged
him out of the building. At the edge of the town,
there was a high cliff, and they took him there
to throw him down on the rocks below. But Jesus
slipped out of their hands and turned around. Calmly. He
(03:44):
walked through the crowd. Nobody had the courage to touch
him again. Jesus never went back to Nazareth any more. Once,
when he was preaching in another town, somebody came and
told him that his mother and his brothers had come
to take him home. They thought that he ought to
stop this nonsense of pretending to be the Messiah. But
(04:07):
Jesus would not go home with them, for they did
not believe in him. It was better to stay with
his disciples. He was at home with those who trusted him.
My mother, he said, my brothers. He looked around at
his disciples and said, these are my mother and my brothers,
my own disciples. Anybody who obeys the will of God
(04:31):
is my brother, and my sister and my mother all
in one. That's the kind of family I want back
in Nazareth, nobody thought that Jesus was of much account,
but in other places he meant everything to the people
who needed him. The Pharisees were often glad to see
him go away, but the poor and the sick could
(04:52):
never see enough of him. Once there came to Jesus
a man who was sick with the dreaded leprosy. A
leper's skin is deathly white, and his flesh is rotting,
and he is sure to die of the disease. Nobody
needed help more than a leper did, but no one
would ever touch him. The people back in Nazareth were
(05:14):
too proud to admit that the carpenter's son from down
the street might be the Messiah, but a leper did
not have any pride. This leper came to Jesus and
fell on his face before him, crying out, Lord, if
you will do it, you can make me clean from
this disease. Then Jesus did what everybody else was afraid
(05:35):
to do. He reached down and put his hand on
the sick man and said, I will be clean. At
once the man was healed of his leprosy. Jesus told
him to go and give thanks to God and not
to tell anyone what had happened, but the leper could
not help telling. Jesus became still more famous as the
(05:59):
man who he the sick. Another time, he made a
blind man see again. The Pharisees tried to get this
man to say that the person who cured him had
not been sent from God, But the man who had
been blind knew better. When the Pharisees tried to threaten him,
he did not give an inch. He said, whoever heard
(06:21):
of anybody opening the eyes of the blind since the
world began, But this man did it. How could he
have made me see if he hadn't come from God.
When Jesus heard of this, he went and found the
man who had been blind and asked him, do you
believe that I am the son of God? The man answered, yes, Lord,
(06:42):
I believe. The blind man had found his Messiah. Then
there was a man who was paralyzed so that he
could not move. His friends wanted to bring him to Jesus,
but there were so many people standing round the house
where Jesus was teaching that they could not get near him.
(07:02):
But somehow or other they must get the sick man there.
Like many of the houses in Palestine, the house has
a flat roof with a stairway leading up to it.
They placed their friend on a mat, carried him up
the stairs, and cut a hole in the roof. After
fastening a rope to each corner of the mat, they
(07:23):
gently lowered him to the floor, right at jesus feet.
Jesus was glad when he saw the faith they had
in him. He looked at the helpless man and said, man,
your sins are forgiven you. There were scribes and Pharisees
standing there, waiting as usual to find fault with Jesus.
(07:44):
They began to talk among themselves. They said, who is
this who is talking as if he were God? Such blasphemy.
Who can forgive sins except God himself? But Jesus knew
what they were saying, and he answered them, which do
you think is easier to say your sins are forgiven
you or to say to this man, pick up your
(08:07):
mat and walk away. I will show you that I
can do one as well as the other. He turned
to the paralyzed man and said, pick up your mat
and go on back to your house. The sick man
got up from the floor, rolled up his mat, put
it under his arm, and went home. As he walked
(08:28):
there was a song of praise to God in his heart.
And many of the people who saw what had happened
were so surprised that they did not know whether to
be glad or to be afraid. But they all agreed
on one thing. They said, we have seen strange things
to day. Nothing that God did seem to please the Pharisees.
(08:50):
But there was one thing that made them as specially angry.
He was not so careful as they thought he ought
to be about keeping the law. Now the law meant
everything to the Pharisees. They were so much in earnest
about keeping God's law that they were not satisfied with
what was in the scriptures. They followed many rules which
(09:12):
had been made up since the scriptures were written. Unless
a man kept all these rules, it did not matter
to the Pharisees how much good he did. Jesus was
always getting into trouble with them. About the Sabbath, the
Pharisees had a list of thirty nine different kinds of
work that nobody was allowed to do on the Sabbath day.
(09:35):
This list included so much that unless a Jew was careful,
he would be likely to break the Sabbath without even
knowing it. If he tied a knot that could be
untied with one hand, that was our right. But if
he took two hands to untie it, then he had
broken the Sabbath. He even had to be careful about
(09:56):
sitting in a chair, for if he happened to drag
his chair across the dirt floor, the Pharisees said that
he was plowing, which was a great sin. On the
Sabbath day. It was forbidden to make a fire on
the Sabbath, and so if a woman wanted to cook
hot food, she had to cook it the day before
and keep it warm. But that did not mean that
(10:18):
she could set it on a stove, for the stove
might get hotter than it was and make the food hotter,
and that was just the same as making a fire.
The only safe way to keep a meal hot was
to wrap the dishes in cloth or pigeon feathers. Jesus
did not think that rules like this were what the
(10:39):
scriptures meant when they said remember the Sabbath day and
keep it holy. He did not think that this was
the way to honor God. And because Jesus did not
agree with them about the Sabbath, the Pharisees were always
watching him for a chance to put him in the wrong. Once,
when Jesus and his disciples were walking through a field
(11:00):
of grain on the Sabbath day, the Pharisees saw that
the disciples were eating some of the grain. There was
nothing wrong with eating it if they were hungry, but
the trouble was that in order to get the grain,
they had to pluck the ears. That, said the Pharisees
was harvesting. Moreover, they had to take the ripe ears
(11:21):
and rub them in their hands to get rid of
the chaff. The Pharisees thought that that was just the
same as thrashing such things to do on the Sabbath day.
The Pharisees stopped the disciples and demanded to know why
they were doing something that was against the law. It
was really Jesus with whom they wanted to pick a quarrel.
(11:42):
And so Jesus answered for the disciples. Why you must
have read in the scriptures that King David and his
soldiers once went into the temple and ate some of
the holy bread, which only a priest is allowed to eat. Surely,
if David could do a thing like that, my disciple
can pick a few ears of grain in a field.
(12:04):
You don't understand what the Sabbath is for. Jesus went on,
we aren't supposed to be slaves to the Sabbath. This
day is meant to do us good. The Sabbath was
made for man. Man was not made for the Sabbath.
Then he added something else, which took the Pharisees by surprise.
(12:24):
The son of Man is lord also of the Sabbath.
They were puzzled. Jesus was talking again as though he
was the Messiah. So far as the Pharisees could see,
Jesus was just a preacher who broke the law. The
Pharisees began to watch him still more carefully. They found
another chance to get him into trouble. Soon after this,
(12:48):
Jesus had gone into the synagogue to teach, and in
the synagogue was a man whose hand was withered and useless.
On any other day, there was no doubt that Jesus
would heal this man. But this was the Sabbath, and
it was against the law to heal anybody on that
day unless he were in danger of dying. A man
(13:10):
with a withered hand could surely wait another day. Surely
even Jesus would not dare to break the rules again.
Jesus knew that they were watching to see what he
would do. They would never forgive him if he made
a move to heal this man. He called out to
the man, stand up up here in front of everybody.
(13:31):
When the man had come to the front, Jesus turned
to the pharisees. I am going to ask you something,
he said. If any one of you owned a sheep
and it fell in a pit on the Sabbath, wouldn't
you lift it out? And don't you think that a
man is worth more than a sheep. You say that
it is against the law to heal a man on
(13:51):
the Sabbath. I say that it is always right to
do good to somebody on the Sabbath day, just the
same as any other day. He looked around at the
whole crowd. He was angry. Now would they actually let
a man suffer one more day than was necessary? He
turned back to the man with the useless hand. Stretch
(14:15):
out your hand, he commanded, And when he spoke, the
withered hand was healed and made as good as the
other one. The Pharisees went out of the synagogue, and
their faces were hard with anger. He has gone too far,
they said to one another. He is breaking all our
good rules. It is not safe for the country to
(14:37):
have him around. He ought to die. They really meant it.
They thought they were doing the right thing. They were
afraid of what Jesus would do. The Pharisees even called
in some of their enemies to ask their advice about
the best way to get rid of Jesus. Meanwhile, Jesus
had gone out of the city to be alone again.
(14:59):
On a lonely mountain under the moonlight, he prayed to
his father all night long. Back in the city, men
were planning to take his life, and out on the mountain,
Jesus prayed for power to do good to men. End
of Chapter six
Chapter six of The King Nobody Wanted by Norman F. Langford.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter six,
Friends and Foes. Jesus thought the time had come to
visit Nazareth. Before he had gone away, there was nobody
who thought that he was a person of any great importance.
(00:23):
But he had become a famous man. The whole of
Galilee was talking about him now. And now he was
at home with his friends and family again. On the
Sabbath morning, he went to the old familiar synagogue. There
was a full congregation that day for every one supposed
that Jesus would preach. He had never preached in Nazareth before.
(00:47):
When the time came to read the scripture Lesson, Jesus
walked up to the front. He took the role from
the minister and found the place he wanted. It was
in the book of the prophet Isaiah. He began to read.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he
has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
(01:07):
He has sent me to heal the broken hearted, to
preach liberty to the prisoners, and recovering sight to the blind,
to free those who suffer, and to say that God
will be good to his people. Jesus stopped reading and
handed the roll back to the minister. He sat down
in the seat from which Jewish preachers always spoke to
(01:29):
the people in the synagogue. The whole congregation was very still,
waiting to hear what Jesus had to say. That was
an exciting lesson he had read from the scriptures. It
made the people think of the Messiah. Some day a
preacher would be able to say, this has all come true,
and that would mean that the Messiah had come. Jesus
(01:52):
looked round at the faces he knew so well. Thirty
years he had lived among these people. Now he was
back to tell them so something that they had never
known before. He began to speak to day. He said,
you are seeing this scripture lesson come true. A thrill
ran through the audience. The scripture had come true. The
(02:14):
Messiah was really here. Could he mean that he was
the Messiah? The people gasped, some laughed, others were angry.
They started to talk among themselves the Messiah him, Why,
that's only Jesus, the carpenter's son. Everybody knows who Jesus
is lived down the street. Since I don't know when
(02:38):
who does he think he is. Jesus again raised his
voice above the others. I know what you are going
to say. You are going to quote that old saying,
doctor cure yourself. You are going to tell me to
start doing the things I am supposed to have done
in Copernium. I'm not surprised. A servant of God never
(03:00):
forget to any honor among his own people. The same
thing happened to the prophets long ago. Don't expect me
to do anything wonderful here in Nazareth. You wouldn't believe
it if you saw it. Why do you think you
ought to get any special favors from God? A great
roar went up from the congregation. All his old friends
(03:22):
got up from their seats and rushed to the front
of the synagogue. They took hold of Jesus and dragged
him out of the building. At the edge of the town,
there was a high cliff, and they took him there
to throw him down on the rocks below. But Jesus
slipped out of their hands and turned around. Calmly. He
(03:44):
walked through the crowd. Nobody had the courage to touch
him again. Jesus never went back to Nazareth any more. Once,
when he was preaching in another town, somebody came and
told him that his mother and his brothers had come
to take him home. They thought that he ought to
stop this nonsense of pretending to be the Messiah. But
(04:07):
Jesus would not go home with them, for they did
not believe in him. It was better to stay with
his disciples. He was at home with those who trusted him.
My mother, he said, my brothers. He looked around at
his disciples and said, these are my mother and my brothers,
my own disciples. Anybody who obeys the will of God
(04:31):
is my brother, and my sister and my mother all
in one. That's the kind of family I want back
in Nazareth, nobody thought that Jesus was of much account,
but in other places he meant everything to the people
who needed him. The Pharisees were often glad to see
him go away, but the poor and the sick could
(04:52):
never see enough of him. Once there came to Jesus
a man who was sick with the dreaded leprosy. A
leper's skin is deathly white, and his flesh is rotting,
and he is sure to die of the disease. Nobody
needed help more than a leper did, but no one
would ever touch him. The people back in Nazareth were
(05:14):
too proud to admit that the carpenter's son from down
the street might be the Messiah, but a leper did
not have any pride. This leper came to Jesus and
fell on his face before him, crying out, Lord, if
you will do it, you can make me clean from
this disease. Then Jesus did what everybody else was afraid
(05:35):
to do. He reached down and put his hand on
the sick man and said, I will be clean. At
once the man was healed of his leprosy. Jesus told
him to go and give thanks to God and not
to tell anyone what had happened, but the leper could
not help telling. Jesus became still more famous as the
(05:59):
man who he the sick. Another time, he made a
blind man see again. The Pharisees tried to get this
man to say that the person who cured him had
not been sent from God, But the man who had
been blind knew better. When the Pharisees tried to threaten him,
he did not give an inch. He said, whoever heard
(06:21):
of anybody opening the eyes of the blind since the
world began, But this man did it. How could he
have made me see if he hadn't come from God.
When Jesus heard of this, he went and found the
man who had been blind and asked him, do you
believe that I am the son of God? The man answered, yes, Lord,
(06:42):
I believe. The blind man had found his Messiah. Then
there was a man who was paralyzed so that he
could not move. His friends wanted to bring him to Jesus,
but there were so many people standing round the house
where Jesus was teaching that they could not get near him.
(07:02):
But somehow or other they must get the sick man there.
Like many of the houses in Palestine, the house has
a flat roof with a stairway leading up to it.
They placed their friend on a mat, carried him up
the stairs, and cut a hole in the roof. After
fastening a rope to each corner of the mat, they
(07:23):
gently lowered him to the floor, right at jesus feet.
Jesus was glad when he saw the faith they had
in him. He looked at the helpless man and said, man,
your sins are forgiven you. There were scribes and Pharisees
standing there, waiting as usual to find fault with Jesus.
(07:44):
They began to talk among themselves. They said, who is
this who is talking as if he were God? Such blasphemy.
Who can forgive sins except God himself? But Jesus knew
what they were saying, and he answered them, which do
you think is easier to say your sins are forgiven
you or to say to this man, pick up your
(08:07):
mat and walk away. I will show you that I
can do one as well as the other. He turned
to the paralyzed man and said, pick up your mat
and go on back to your house. The sick man
got up from the floor, rolled up his mat, put
it under his arm, and went home. As he walked
(08:28):
there was a song of praise to God in his heart.
And many of the people who saw what had happened
were so surprised that they did not know whether to
be glad or to be afraid. But they all agreed
on one thing. They said, we have seen strange things
to day. Nothing that God did seem to please the Pharisees.
(08:50):
But there was one thing that made them as specially angry.
He was not so careful as they thought he ought
to be about keeping the law. Now the law meant
everything to the Pharisees. They were so much in earnest
about keeping God's law that they were not satisfied with
what was in the scriptures. They followed many rules which
(09:12):
had been made up since the scriptures were written. Unless
a man kept all these rules, it did not matter
to the Pharisees how much good he did. Jesus was
always getting into trouble with them. About the Sabbath, the
Pharisees had a list of thirty nine different kinds of
work that nobody was allowed to do on the Sabbath day.
(09:35):
This list included so much that unless a Jew was careful,
he would be likely to break the Sabbath without even
knowing it. If he tied a knot that could be
untied with one hand, that was our right. But if
he took two hands to untie it, then he had
broken the Sabbath. He even had to be careful about
(09:56):
sitting in a chair, for if he happened to drag
his chair across the dirt floor, the Pharisees said that
he was plowing, which was a great sin. On the
Sabbath day. It was forbidden to make a fire on
the Sabbath, and so if a woman wanted to cook
hot food, she had to cook it the day before
and keep it warm. But that did not mean that
(10:18):
she could set it on a stove, for the stove
might get hotter than it was and make the food hotter,
and that was just the same as making a fire.
The only safe way to keep a meal hot was
to wrap the dishes in cloth or pigeon feathers. Jesus
did not think that rules like this were what the
(10:39):
scriptures meant when they said remember the Sabbath day and
keep it holy. He did not think that this was
the way to honor God. And because Jesus did not
agree with them about the Sabbath, the Pharisees were always
watching him for a chance to put him in the wrong. Once,
when Jesus and his disciples were walking through a field
(11:00):
of grain on the Sabbath day, the Pharisees saw that
the disciples were eating some of the grain. There was
nothing wrong with eating it if they were hungry, but
the trouble was that in order to get the grain,
they had to pluck the ears. That, said the Pharisees
was harvesting. Moreover, they had to take the ripe ears
(11:21):
and rub them in their hands to get rid of
the chaff. The Pharisees thought that that was just the
same as thrashing such things to do on the Sabbath day.
The Pharisees stopped the disciples and demanded to know why
they were doing something that was against the law. It
was really Jesus with whom they wanted to pick a quarrel.
(11:42):
And so Jesus answered for the disciples. Why you must
have read in the scriptures that King David and his
soldiers once went into the temple and ate some of
the holy bread, which only a priest is allowed to eat. Surely,
if David could do a thing like that, my disciple
can pick a few ears of grain in a field.
(12:04):
You don't understand what the Sabbath is for. Jesus went on,
we aren't supposed to be slaves to the Sabbath. This
day is meant to do us good. The Sabbath was
made for man. Man was not made for the Sabbath.
Then he added something else, which took the Pharisees by surprise.
(12:24):
The son of Man is lord also of the Sabbath.
They were puzzled. Jesus was talking again as though he
was the Messiah. So far as the Pharisees could see,
Jesus was just a preacher who broke the law. The
Pharisees began to watch him still more carefully. They found
another chance to get him into trouble. Soon after this,
(12:48):
Jesus had gone into the synagogue to teach, and in
the synagogue was a man whose hand was withered and useless.
On any other day, there was no doubt that Jesus
would heal this man. But this was the Sabbath, and
it was against the law to heal anybody on that
day unless he were in danger of dying. A man
(13:10):
with a withered hand could surely wait another day. Surely
even Jesus would not dare to break the rules again.
Jesus knew that they were watching to see what he
would do. They would never forgive him if he made
a move to heal this man. He called out to
the man, stand up up here in front of everybody.
(13:31):
When the man had come to the front, Jesus turned
to the pharisees. I am going to ask you something,
he said. If any one of you owned a sheep
and it fell in a pit on the Sabbath, wouldn't
you lift it out? And don't you think that a
man is worth more than a sheep. You say that
it is against the law to heal a man on
(13:51):
the Sabbath. I say that it is always right to
do good to somebody on the Sabbath day, just the
same as any other day. He looked around at the
whole crowd. He was angry. Now would they actually let
a man suffer one more day than was necessary? He
turned back to the man with the useless hand. Stretch
(14:15):
out your hand, he commanded, And when he spoke, the
withered hand was healed and made as good as the
other one. The Pharisees went out of the synagogue, and
their faces were hard with anger. He has gone too far,
they said to one another. He is breaking all our
good rules. It is not safe for the country to
(14:37):
have him around. He ought to die. They really meant it.
They thought they were doing the right thing. They were
afraid of what Jesus would do. The Pharisees even called
in some of their enemies to ask their advice about
the best way to get rid of Jesus. Meanwhile, Jesus
had gone out of the city to be alone again.
(14:59):
On a lonely mountain under the moonlight, he prayed to
his father all night long. Back in the city, men
were planning to take his life, and out on the mountain,
Jesus prayed for power to do good to men. End
of Chapter six
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