At Luke 10:17, we recall, the Seventy returned and reported to Christ what they had experienced on their travels throughout the country preparing people for his approach. That report is now over, and Luke resumes the record of Christ's journey with the notice that 'As they went on their way, he entered a certain village and a woman named Martha received him into her house' (Luke 10:38). After this there is no further journey notice until Luke 13:22, which suggests that Stage 2 is meant to extend from Luke 10:38 to Luke 13:21.
That gives us a long stage containing only two miracles and filled mostly with lengthy runs of teaching, conversation and argument. Apart from the village mentioned, but not named, at Luke 10:38, no other village, town or city on Christ's route is referred to. Presumably, Luke's selection of material is meant to be a representative sample of the teaching Christ gave and of the discussion and controversy which his claims aroused in all the places which he visited. What in fact was happening is made clear very early on in the stage (see Luke 11:20): through Christ's presence, his words and his supernatural works, the kingdom of God was being brought within the reach of the people in every village and town through which he journeyed; and they had to decide what they would do both with it and with him. [p 216]
Nowhere in this stage does he claim in so many words to be the Messiah; but everywhere the magnitude and significance of his claims are unmistakable. At Luke 11:31–32, for instance, he warns the crowds that his mission to them is more fateful than was Jonah's to the Ninevites and that their response to him will determine the verdict upon them at the judgment. Similarly at Luke 12:1–4 he points out to his disciples that a person's confession or denial of him here on earth will determine whether he himself confesses or denies that person in heaven. In addition at Luke 12:35–48 he tells his disciples that when he returns—and he must be referring to his second coming—he will call them to account for their service for him in his absence. The faithful servants will then be rewarded; but if any professing servant is shown by his record to have been unfaithful, false and in actual fact an unbeliever, it will have the gravest consequences.
Christ's claims, then, were momentous, and yet the time he had to spend in any one town or village presenting those claims and demonstrating the truth of them was at the best very brief. He was, after all, on a journey, passing through these towns and villages on his way from earth to glory. For the people there was so much to decide, so little time in which to decide it, with nothing less than the verdict of the final judgment hanging on their decision. True, indications were given that between his departure and his second coming there would be an interval of some length for reflection, repentance, faith and service. At Luke 12:11–12, for instance, Christ talks of a time when his disciples will be brought before the courts and the Holy Spirit will use these occasions as an opportunity for witness to Christ. That, as we know, did not happen during his time on earth, but only after his resurrection and ascension. And the fact that he promises them that in their time of need the Holy Spirit (rather than he himself) will instruct them what to say, is further evidence that he is referring to the interval between his ascension and return. Again at Luke 12:35–48, as we have seen, our Lord not only indicates that there will be an interval between his departure and his return during which his servants will have to act as stewards for their absent Lord, but he allows that the interval will be long enough for some servants to get the impression [p 217] that the Lord is delaying his return (see Luke 12:45). In spite of this, over and over again throughout this stage the urgency of the situation is emphasized. At Luke 12:20 we are reminded that a man's life is only lent him, and could be asked back 'this very night'. At Luke 11:49–52 Christ announces that the blood of all the prophets which has been shed from the foundation of the world will be required 'of this generation'; and at Luke 13:6–9 he adds, in parabolic language, that this generation is living on borrowed time: the sentence has in fact already been delivered, and while stay of execution has been granted, the sentence will have to be carried out unless there is soon some genuine evidence of repentance on the nation's part. At Luke 12:40, 46 Christ's servants are warned that his second coming will take place when least expected; and at Luke 12:57–59 a vivid metaphor warns not only Christ's contemporaries but all of us, that we are on a journey which will presently land us before the Judge of the Supreme Court unless in the fast diminishing interval between now and journey's end we take steps to settle our case out of court. In other words, in this stage the urgency of the human situation is shown to arise from various causes: sudden unexpected death from 'natural' causes (see Luke 12:20), atrocities or disasters (see Luke 13:1–5), or the intervention of God's providential judgment on an exceptionally wicked generation (see Luke 11:49–51), or the suddenness of the second coming of Christ (see Luke 12:40, 46), while over all hangs the poignant brevity of even the longest life compared with the duration of its eternal consequences (see Luke 12:59).
Christ's claims, then, were immense and urgent; but Stage 2 will also show us in some detail by what criteria his contemporaries judged him and his claims. Naturally enough, like people today, they judged him in the light of their preformed standards, their assumptions about what is most important in life, their concepts of fair play and justice, their ideas on religion, and their opinions, lay or professional, on what the Bible teaches. If Christ had fitted in more with their preconceptions on these matters, more people would doubtless have accepted his claims. As it was, this stage will show that he frequently had to point out that their assumptions, standards, values and concepts were maladjusted and mistaken, if [p 218] not positively perverse and hypocritical. Consequently, when people discovered what Christ actually taught and stood for, their initial reaction was often astonishment (see Luke 11:14, 38) and sometimes outrage and resentment (see Luke 11:45, 53–54; 13:14).
At Luke 10:38–42, for instance, a woman smarting at the unfairness with which she feels her sister is treating her, appeals to Christ to speak to her sister and demand fair play. Christ's reply is the very opposite to what she expects. At Luke 12:13–15 a man, feeling he is being cheated out of his fair share of his father's estate by his brother, appeals to Christ to speak to his brother and insist on justice being done. Christ refuses to do any such thing and brands the man's appeal for justice as a form of covetousness. At Luke 11:37 a Pharisee invites our Lord to dinner and then is shocked by his complete disregard of religious observances which to the Pharisee are of the very essence of holiness. And when Christ proceeds to point out that his religious sense, moral judgment, motives, principles of biblical interpretation and application are all grievously unbalanced, ill-proportioned, false and hypocritical, he and his co-religionists are, not surprisingly, enraged (see Luke 11:53–54).
In this stage, then, Christ calls for a radical reassessment of men's values, proportions, priorities and ambitions, and his call naturally meets with a varied response. The generation of Christ's contemporaries, says Luke 11:29, was exceptionally evil; but on the other hand Luke 13:17 records that the crowd was delighted at the glorious things which Jesus did. Martha, devoted disciple though she was, came near to questioning whether the Lord really cared for fair play (see Luke 10:40); but, of course, she accepted the Lord's correction. Not so some others: they were prepared to denounce his healing of a dumb man as a work of the very devil (Luke 11:15–23).
With this we encounter what is one of the leading themes of this stage: no less than four paragraphs deal with various aspects of the intense hostility and division provoked by Christ's presentation of himself and his claims. At Luke 11:14–28, as we have just seen, some people unable to deny that Christ's power is supernatural, but determined not to admit that it is of God, maintain that Christ is in [p 219] league with the devil; and Christ takes their charge seriously enough to argue vigorously and extensively against it. At Luke 11:53–12:12 the enraged scribes and Pharisees begin positively to hound Christ, and he has to warn his disciples that this persecution will grow to the point where they will be hauled before the courts, and maybe executed. At Luke 12:49–53 Christ goes over to the offensive, so to speak, announcing that he has come to cast fire on the earth, not to bring peace, but to cause division; and he further indicates that the fire he has already set alight is nothing to the conflagration that will follow his death and resurrection. And at Luke 13:10–30 there is a stand-up battle between Christ and a ruler of a synagogue, in which when the ruler criticizes Christ for delivering a woman from a spirit of weakness on the Sabbath, Christ denounces him as a hypocrite in front of the whole congregation and exposes the ruler as standing perilously near Satan's side in the conflict. Obviously, Christ's journey through Palestine to glory was no mere joyride, nor even a ceremonial procession. It lay through enemy-infested territory, with many a citadel, outpost and ambush manned by the enemy's agents determined to resist to the very death the one who had come 'to destroy the works of the devil' (1 John 3:8), to invade his stronghold, to strip him of his armour and to set his captives free (see Luke 11:21–22; 13:16).
If these, then, are some of the leading themes which re-occur throughout Stage 2, the question arises whether we are meant to read the contents of this stage as a succession of independent and more or less unconnected narratives, or as one undivided whole, or as a series of movements of thought each concentrating for the most part on some aspect of the common themes. Here we can let ourselves be guided in the first instance by the four 'opposition' paragraphs, as we may call them, which we have just surveyed. First, we should notice that the fourth of these paragraphs is not only the last paragraph in the stage, but also forms a triumphal climax to the theme of opposition. When Christ refutes the synagogue ruler's criticisms, we are told (Luke 13:17) 'all Christ's opponents were covered with confusion, and all the people were delighted at the glorious things which he was doing'. And this sense of triumph is further enforced by two [p 220] parables depicting the progress of the kingdom of God: one involves a man who planted a mustard seed which grew to such proportions that the birds were able to lodge in its branches; and the other involves a woman who hid some leaven in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened (see Luke 13:18–21). One can easily understand why Luke should have concluded the stage on this note of triumph.
Next, however, we should notice that the first 'opposition' paragraph (see Luke 11:14–28) strikingly resembles this last 'opposition' paragraph both in contents and form. Both occasions involved a miracle, and both miracles involved the deliverance of someone from an evil spirit. In both incidents Christ was criticized and in both his triumphant rebuttal of the criticisms involved him in a discussion of Satan's power and tactics. Moreover just as the main discussion in the fourth paragraph is reinforced with two final stories, one about a man (Gk. anthrōpos—'human being' rather than 'male') and one about a woman, so in the first paragraph the main discussion (see Luke 11:14–23) is followed first by a story of a man (Gk. anthrōpos again) from whom an evil spirit went out, but later came back with seven other worse spirits and, like the birds in the mustard tree, dwelled once more in the unfortunate man (see Luke 11:24–26); and secondly by a story of a woman who wanted to praise Christ for his victory over his critics, but unfortunately did so indirectly by praising his mother and had herself to be corrected. It is at least obvious, then, that Luke intended us to notice the similarities—and the differences—between these two stories, and to reflect carefully on their significance. And if that is so, it would be a reasonable working hypothesis to suppose that the triumph of the first 'opposition' story was meant to serve as a minor climax in the course of the narrative, anticipating the major climax of the fourth 'opposition' story. Similarly with the other two 'opposition' stories. So let us draw up a table of contents for Stage 2 on the basis of this hypothesis and see what it looks like. We cannot expect a stage, dominated by long runs of teaching with very little incident, to show the same clear-cut symmetry as other stages have done; but that matters little. The table of contents will at least enable us to take in the whole stage at a glance and to see what connections [p 221] of thought, if any, there may be between the various parts of the stage (see Table 9). [p 222] [p 223]
Table 9 Stage 2 of the Going Luke 10:38–13:21
| 1 A family dispute: a woman appeals to Christ to tell her sister to take her fair share of the work 10:38–42. | 1 The people seek a sign but no sign is given except that of Jonah 11:29–36. | 1 A family dispute: a man appeals to Christ to tell his brother to divide the inheritance fairly 12:13–21. | 1 The people and signs: they can interpret weather signs but not ‘this time’ 12:54–59. |
| Christ’s verdict He refuses to take away from Mary the good part she has chosen. Martha is anxiously preparing many things, but has neglected the one necessary thing. | Questions of evidence At the judgment the attitude of the Queen of the South and the Ninevites to the evidence available to them will be cited against ‘this generation’ and secure its condemnation. | Christ’s response He refuses to act as judge and divider, but tells of a rich fool who prepared large stocks for many years, forgetting that his life could be taken that very night. | Be your own judge! It is better to judge your own case and to settle with your opponent out of court, rather than to come before the judge, lose your case and receive a long prison sentence. |
| 2 Lessons on prayer 11:1–13. | 2 Woes on the Pharisees and lawyers 11:37–52. | 2 Blessings on true servants 12:22–48. | 2 Lessons on repentance 13:1–9. |
| a Pattern prayer for the coming of God’s kingdom ‘. . . Your kingdom come . . . give us our daily bread . . . forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is in debt to us. . .’ | a False and true proportions and aims in religious practice ‘. . . you clean the outside of cup and plate, but your inward part is full of extortion . . . you tithe mint and rue . . . and pass over the judgment and love of God.’ | a False proportions and aims in respect of material things ‘. . . life is more than food, the body more than clothes . . . you are more valuable than birds, more lasting than flowers . . . do not seek food and drink . . . seek God’s kingdom. . .’ | a False interpretations of God’s providential government ‘. . . do you suppose that these people were sinners and debtors above all others because they suffered these atrocities and accidents? No! . . . unless you repent, you will all perish. . .’ |
| b The urgency of prayer Like the man who went to his friend at midnight seeking bread, we are to ask, seek, knock, because everyone who . . . seeks, finds . . . ‘Your Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.’ | b Principles of accountability in teaching Scripture ‘. . . you load people down with burdens . . . and you yourselves will not raise a finger to touch those burdens . . . Your fathers killed the prophets . . . you consent to what they did . . . Therefore the blood of all the prophets shall be required of this generation . . . You took away the key of knowledge. . .’ | b Principles of accountability in Christian stewardship ‘. . . if the servant begins to beat his fellow servants, to eat and be drunk, the lord . . . shall come . . . and cut him in two . . . the servant who knew his lord’s will and did not do it . . . shall be beaten with many stripes . . . the one who did not know . . . with few stripes. From the one to whom much is given much shall be required. . .’ | b The urgency of repentance For three years the owner has come seeking fruit from his fig tree and has found none. The tree has been given one more year to produce fruit: if it doesn’t, it will be cut down. |
| 3 The opposition defeated: Christ casts out a dumb demon and is accused of doing it by the power of Satan 11:14–28. | 3 Overcoming the fear of the opposition: Christ instructs his disciples how to behave when they are persecuted and brought before the courts 11:53–12:12. | 3 Provoking the opposition: Christ tells his disciples the true purpose of his coming 12:49–53. | 3 Triumph over the opposition: Christ delivers a woman from a spirit of weakness and is criticized for healing on the Sabbath 13:10–21. |
| Christ answers his critics. Satan is not divided. Christ, the Stronger, has overcome the strong and set his victims free. Warning example of a man to whom a demon returned with seven others and dwelled in him. A woman congratulates Christ’s mother, and is corrected. Blessed are those who hear God’s word and do it. |
. . . the Pharisees and the teachers of the law began to oppose him fiercely and to besiege him with questions, waiting to catch him in something he might say. . . | ‘. . . I have come to cast fire on the earth . . . not to bring peace but rather division. . .’ | Christ answers his critics. ‘Ought not this woman whom Satan has bound . . . to be loosed from this chain on the Sabbath?’ Parable of a man who sowed a seed which grew into a tree and the birds dwelled in the branches. Parable of a woman who hid leaven in three measures of meal until it was all leavened. |
The movements
- Deciding life's paramount necessities (Luke 10:38–11:28)
- Seeing God's Word in its true proportions (Luke 11:29–12:12)
- Seeing possessions in their true perspective (Luke 12:13–53)
- Assessing time and the times correctly (Luke 12:54–13:21)
1. Deciding life's paramount necessities Luke 10:38–11:28
i. A family dispute (Luke 10:38–42)
The first story in Movement 1 is brief and comes swiftly to its point: amid all life's duties and necessities there is one supreme necessity which must always be given priority, and which, if circumstances compel us to choose, must be chosen to the exclusion of all others. That supreme necessity is to sit at the Lord's feet and listen to his word (see Luke 10:39, 42). It must be so. If there is a Creator at all, and that Creator is prepared to visit us and speak to us as in his incarnation he visited and spoke to Martha and Mary, then obviously it is our first duty as his creatures, as it ought to be our highest pleasure, to sit at his feet and listen to what he says.
But it is very easy to lose sight of the priority of this necessity and to let other necessities come crowding in and take first place. Nor does one have to be an atheist or a careless sinner to do so. Martha was no enemy of Christ. Far from it, she was one of his most devoted and spiritually perceptive disciples (see John 11). When Christ came to her village, it was she who received him into her home, and it was love and devotion to the Lord that led her to go to an enormous amount of trouble (see John 10:40–41) to entertain him as worthily as she possibly could. That meant, however, that what with the preparation of the guest room, the buying of provisions, the cooking, baking and serving of the meals, and the washing of the dishes, she had very little time actually to sit and listen to the Lord talking. It was not of course that she did not enjoy his [p 224] conversation: she would have enjoyed it as much as Mary; but she had very clear and very strong ideas on what things just had to be done when you were entertaining so important a guest as the Lord. If asked, she doubtless would have explained that true love is practical, and that work must be put before pleasure; and it was this that filled her with resentment when Mary left off working and went and sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his word. It meant that Mary was getting all the pleasure, and Martha was getting all the work, her own share and Mary's as well. To Martha's way of thinking, Mary was being selfish, unprincipled and unfair.
The trouble was that Christ was doing nothing about it; indeed, he seemed to Martha to be encouraging Mary in her wrong behaviour by letting her sit there and talking to her. That very fact, one might have thought, ought to have made Martha begin to suspect that her own ideas must be wrong somewhere; but instead of questioning her own list of necessities and priorities, she went up to Christ and suggested that he was being irresponsible in encouraging Mary to act so unfairly. Martha was wrong, of course, and it was a sad and ironic thing that her love and devotion to the Lord had led her through a wrong sense of necessities and priorities to a point where she questioned the fairness of the very one whom she felt obliged to serve so rigorously.
Gently but firmly Christ had to correct her. It was not that he underestimated the importance of service in general or of her service in particular. Later in this stage (see Luke 12:35–38, 42–44) we shall hear him demand from his servants a readiness to serve at any time and faithfulness and fairness in that service; and what is more he will promise that when he returns he will reward his faithful servants by 'girding himself, making them sit at table, and serving them'. But when he visited Martha's house, he was on a journey (see Luke 10:38). The time he had to spend with the two sisters was limited, and when he left, it would be a long while before he was back again. The question therefore was whether they would cut down work to a minimum, content themselves with few and simple meals and so give the Lord the maximum amount of time to talk to them and enjoy their fellowship, [p 225] or whether Martha would insist on putting on frequent and elaborate meals the preparation of which left her with very little time to sit and listen to the Lord. In those circumstances there is no doubt what Christ would have preferred—he would have preferred Martha's fellowship to her service—nor what he in fact regarded as more necessary for Martha. But Martha's idea of what had to be done, was different from Christ's, and as we can now see, it was false. She meant well, she loved the Lord, she thought she was serving him; but her sense of proportion with regard to what was necessary was in fact depriving the Lord of what he most wished for and depriving her of what was most necessary; and it had come about precisely because she had not first sat at his feet and listened to him long enough to find out what he regarded as the paramount necessity.
The story has its obvious lesson for us. We too are on a journey. Life at the best is short. We cannot do everything: there is not enough time. Like Mary, therefore, (see Luke 10:42) we shall have to choose and choose very deliberately. Life's affairs will not automatically sort themselves into a true order of priorities. If we do not consciously insist on making 'sitting at the Lord's feet and listening to his word' our number one necessity, a thousand and one other things and duties, all claiming to be prior necessities, will tyrannize our time and energies and rob us of the 'good part' in life.
It is no accident, of course, that Martha and Mary's story stands first in this stage. Doubtless chronology decreed that it should stand first. But equally doubtless is the fact that logic (under the Holy Spirit's inspiration) played its part in Luke's selection and ordering of his material. This stage is going to be taken up largely with the need to get life's priorities and proportions right. How shall we ever do that, unless before we do anything else we first sit down at the Lord's feet and let him tell us what life's true priorities are?
ii. Lessons on prayer (Luke 11:1–13)
If life's first necessity is to let the Lord speak to us, its second necessity is surely that we should speak to the Lord. We must pray. Life's highest gifts do not come to us automatically, nor are life's [p 226] most important goals attained unthinkingly. We are not mere cogs mindlessly revolving in some impersonal mechanistic universe. We are persons created by a personal God, made capable of holding converse with him. Next to the wonder of his being willing to talk to us, is the inexpressible honour of our being allowed to talk to him, and by asking him for gifts which he is pleased to give, to develop that personal relationship between ourselves and him which is the chief goal of our creation.
But what should we ask for? What are life's most important and necessary things? And among those things which should we put first as being supremely important and which second? Life is a journey, we are constantly moving forward, we feel we ought to be making some kind of progress. But towards what goal? What should be our chief ambition, what our highest aspiration?
Wisely, having listened to Christ himself praying, one of his disciples asked him to give them a pattern for praying, to tell them what to pray for and how to order their priorities in prayer.
In Luke's record of the prayer which Christ then taught them there are five requests. First come two requests relating to God's own interests: his name and kingdom; then three requests relating to our own: daily bread, forgiveness, and shielding from temptation. God's interests first, ours next. That obviously is the true priority for creatures at prayer.
God's interests first, then. And here, what God is, his character, his glory, these things stand first. We are to pray that his name be hallowed, that is, set apart, regarded with awe as the most holy, valuable, glorious thing in all the universe. Life's values will never be measured properly or seen in their true light unless we see that God's name is not only the chiefest value of them all but the source of all true value which any person or thing possesses. Let God's name be devalued, and God himself dishonoured, then all that derives from him—which is everything—is correspondingly reduced in value and honour. Deny God altogether, and nothing ultimately will prove to have any value at all. And yet in this sorry world God's name is not hallowed as it should be, not by the greatest [p 227] saints, still less by us ordinary saints, not to speak of the profane and godless. We have lost the sense of God's holiness, and we live in a world where sacred things are progressively profaned and life becomes ever more cheap.
But it will not always be so. God has his purposes and plans to bring in his kingdom universally so that his will shall be done here on earth as it is in heaven, and his name be hallowed as it should, and all life's values shine with the lustre and brightness of the jewels of the new Jerusalem. That is God's purpose and it shall be accomplished. But we are not to regard its accomplishment fatalistically. We are actively to pray for it, to align our will with God's will, and to make the coming of his kingdom our chief desire, aim and ambition.
Often unfortunately we do not do so, for we have our own personal ambitions, plans, schemes and purposes in life, and if we are not careful constantly to pray as Christ taught us, they gradually come to fill our minds and horizons, leaving God's plans and purposes little time, space or consideration. Indeed it can happen that we pervert prayer itself by making its chief burden our personal and family interests instead of God's kingdom and purposes. And that is foolish even from the point of view of our own narrow self-interest. No purpose or ambition of our own can make ultimate sense or yield ultimate satisfaction if it is not subordinated to, and part of, the one great purpose behind the universe. It ought surely to be self-evident that it is far more important for our own good that God's kingdom come, than that our own short-sighted will and often misconceived ambitions be achieved. But even this is a dangerous consideration, if it leaves us thinking that our self-interest should be the prime concern in our praying. The first and chief point of the pattern for prayer which Christ has left us is that not our interests but God's must ever be given first place.
God's interests first, then; but after that it is right and good that we pray for our own. Of the three kinds of things which Christ bids us ask for ourselves, one relates to our physical needs, two to our moral and spiritual needs. Again we notice the proportion. Our physical needs stand first: give us day by day the bread we [p 228] need for existence (if that is the right translation, or perhaps, 'for the coming day'; see the commentaries). This is sane and practical. Physical existence with all its recurring needs is the necessary basis, in this world at any rate, for higher, spiritual experience. We are not to despise it, nor, on the other hand, to take it for granted. Indeed, the greatest enjoyment of our physical blessings is to be found in the consciousness that they come from God.
But to one prayer for our physical needs, we must add two for our moral and spiritual needs. Above all things physical we need forgiveness for the sins of our past, and deliverance from temptation lest we fall into sin in the future. And if we need forgiveness as much as we need our daily bread, so does our brother. If, therefore, we come asking God for this prime necessity for ourselves, God will insist that we show ourselves ready in our turn to forgive those who may be indebted to us.
This, then is the true ordering of priorities in the things which we should pray for. But there is another aspect of prayer that will reveal our sense of priorities and our estimate of what is really necessary, and that is, not what we pray for, but the motivation that leads us to pray for it and maintains us in our praying. This aspect Christ now deals with in Luke 11:5–13.
In this connection let us notice first that the gift which the Father is ready to give and for which we should be praying is his Holy Spirit (see Luke 11:13). For Christ's contemporaries this doubtless had a special significance. The prophets had declared that one day God would pour out his Spirit and effect a mighty regeneration of his people Israel (see Ezek 36:26–27), and pour out his Spirit also on all mankind (see Joel 2:28–32; see also Acts 2:16). Generations of the godly in Israel would have prayed for the fulfilment of these promises; and now, though they did not know it, Christ's contemporaries stood on the very eve of Pentecost when the risen Lord, having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, would pour out this Holy Spirit on those who believed (see Acts 2:33). How earnestly or otherwise some of Christ's contemporaries were praying for the Holy Spirit we shall see in a moment. For us who live on the other [p 229] side of Pentecost the situation is, of course, somewhat different. The Holy Spirit, who had not been given as long as Jesus was on earth and not ascended (see John 7:39), has now been given. In that sense the believer on Christ no longer needs to pray to receive the Holy Spirit: he has received him (see 1 Cor 12:13; Eph 1:13). That does not mean, however, that there is no sense at all in which we who live after Pentecost need to pray for the Father's gift of the Holy Spirit. At Ephesians 1:16–19 Paul indicates that he unceasingly prays for those who have already been sealed with the Holy Spirit that God might give them a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him; and again at Ephesians 3:14–21 he declares that he prays God would give them to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man that Christ might dwell in their hearts.
By definition, therefore, asking for the Holy Spirit could not be something which is done once for all. We must, says Christ (see Luke 11:9) keep on asking, seeking, knocking.33 That being so, two things will decide whether or not we persist in prayer of this kind. The first is our estimate of the necessity and urgency of the gift we seek. We ought to be driven by a sense of its utter indispensability, which will make us completely 'shameless' in asking for it (see Luke 11:8).
At first sight shamelessness (Gk. anaideia, EVV 'importunity') might seem to indicate a bad quality; and on some occasions, of course, it does. But its meaning is not always or necessarily bad. It simply describes a person who has no sense of shame, no compunction, in doing something or asking for something. If there are reasons why the person ought to feel compunction or shame, then, of course, shamelessness is a bad thing; but if a man's case is good, then shamelessness in insisting on it, is not blameworthy, but commendable. To illustrate the point Christ pictures a man who has an unexpected guest arrive in the middle of the night, and finds he has no food to offer his guest (see Luke 11:5–8). Being an oriental with an oriental's sense of the importance of hospitality he has no compunction whatever in going to a friend's house, midnight though [p 230] it is, and getting him out of bed to lend him the necessary food to put before his guest. His friend might make some irritable remarks about having to get up at that hour of the night; but he would not find fault with the man's shamelessness. Sharing the man's oriental ideas on the duty of hospitality, he would recognize his shamelessness as perfectly justifiable. In the West we do not think the same way about the urgency of the need to feed visitors who arrive in the middle of the night. An equivalent in our culture would be the question whether or not you should call a doctor out in the middle of the night to visit a sick person. We would feel embarrassed if we called the doctor out for something that proved to be only a minor upset. But if someone in the family suffered a massive heart attack, we would have no compunction at all in summoning the doctor whatever the hour of the night and whatever the weather.
This, then, is the analogy. It tells us that while all who ask for the illumination and strengthening of their hearts by the Holy Spirit, will most certainly receive the gifts they ask for, yet whether we ask and go on asking or not will depend on how indispensably necessary we regard the gift. If, for instance, today we ask for illumination by God's Spirit through his Word so that we may know God and his grace and his purposes more fully, and then tomorrow forget to ask, or to seek in his Word, or to knock on the door of heaven, and carry on forgetting for the next six months, it is obvious that we do not regard the gift we ask for as very important or necessary; and it is unlikely that we shall receive it.
On the other hand Christ guarantees that the one who diligently persists in asking, seeking, and knocking will most certainly be rewarded; and he backs up the guarantee by a second analogy (see Luke 11:9–13). This time the analogy stresses not the shamelessness of those who ask, but the character of the giver and the perfection of his fatherhood. Human beings, Christ asserts (see Luke 11:13), are evil, and yet in spite of it they know how to give good gifts to their children. No normal human father, being asked by his child for bread, would refuse it or deceive the child by offering it something superficially similar, but worthless or dangerous. If, therefore, very [p 231] imperfect human fathers can be relied upon to give their children good gifts, how much more shall the archetype and perfection of fatherhood give the Holy Spirit to those who ask? (Luke 11:13). It was on this certainty, we notice, that Paul was in the habit of basing his requests: 'For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom every family in heaven or on earth is named, that he would grant you . . . that you may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man, that Christ may dwell in your heart through faith. . .' (see Eph 3:14–17).
iii. The opposition defeated (Luke 11:14–28)
So far in Movement 1 we have had two paragraphs. The first was about listening to the Lord speaking to us. The second was about our speaking to God. Now in the third paragraph we meet a man who was dumb. He could not speak to anybody.
All disabilities are sad, but there is something pathetic, almost uncanny about dumbness in a human being. The ability to speak and express oneself articulately, to communicate with others, is a characteristically human faculty, part of the distinctive glory of being man. Dumbness robs a human being of part of what it means to be human; it makes a prisoner of a human personality within his own mind and body.
Christ miraculously cast out the demon responsible for the man's dumbness. But if this miracle was like other miracles which Luke has recorded, it was more than a miracle: it was an enacted parable. Many people suffer from a dumbness that is worse than physical. As originally made, man was intended to hold converse with God. Conscious of himself and of God, man could consciously respond to the Creator, and communicate in words with him who is the Word. But many men in actual fact never speak to God, never pray. They say that there is no Creator for them to talk to; or if there is, they are not interested in speaking with him; or they do not know how to, they cannot, pray. This is self-evidently the work of the enemy. If it is God's desire and design, and man's chief glory, that he should be the priest of creation and articulate creation's response [p 232] to the Creator, that he should talk with God as a son with a father, then it is obvious why it should be of prime strategic importance to the enemy to cripple man's ability to speak with God, to lock up man's spirit within himself, and as far as God is concerned to turn this earth into (to borrow a phrase) a silent planet.
It was a glorious thing, therefore, that which the Saviour did when he cast out the demon responsible for the man's physical dumbness. Luke tells us that when the silence of years was broken and for the first time in life the man spoke, the crowd was amazed (see Luke 11:14). As well they might be: they had grown so used to this man's being dumb, that they had never imagined he could be anything else. Even more glorious, however, is that great spiritual deliverance which Christ chose to illustrate by this miracle. To picture it we may perhaps be allowed to borrow some imagery from an analogy which he himself used in the argument that followed his miracle (see Luke 11:21–22). 'When a strong man fully armed guards his own court, his goods are in peace.' That is, they remain undisturbed and secure, they give him no trouble or anxiety. There for you is the true state of prayerless, spiritually dumb mankind. Their peace, apparent contentment and spiritual silence is the peace of a prison. Chattels of the strong enemy, they ask God for nothing, not even for deliverance, because their prayerless tongues have been chained by a tyrant who has endless devices at his disposal for keeping them quiet and preventing any break-out or contact with the world above. Many of them have even been persuaded that there is no world above (cf. Eph 2:1–3).
In that grim situation we may thank God that he did not wait for the prisoners to invite him in before he intervened. He took the initiative. Strong and fully armed as the enemy was, by means of the incarnation a stronger than he began to invade the prison, overpower the tyrant, and talk to the prisoners. His miraculous release of one prisoner from a demon of physical dumbness certainly astonished the rest of them; but the miracle was intended as more than an exhibition of supernatural power designed to demonstrate the existence of God and his kingdom. It was also meant as a sign [p 233] to encourage men to break their silence, to set them free and get them talking to the Father. Since then, the stronger than the strong by his death has invaded the deepest of the enemy's dungeons and broken his last stronghold. Multitudes have been set free (see Col 2:13–18; Heb 2:14–15). The risen and triumphant Lord has 'distributed Satan's spoils' (Luke 11:22).
We must rein in our fancy, and perhaps apologize to Luke, for we have taken what he records as a simple analogy and used it as though it were an allegory. For all that, we are not far from the imagery which other Christians used. When Paul says (Eph 4:7–13), 'Christ has led captivity captive and has given gifts to men', the gifts he is thinking of are the once-time prisoners of Satan, whom the ascended Lord has set free and given to the church as apostles, evangelists and teachers.
Christ, then, delivered a man from the grip of a dumb demon. The power with which he did it was self-evidently supernatural: no one questioned that. We might have supposed that it would likewise have been self-evident to everyone that this supernatural power was of God; but that would be to underestimate the enemy's hold on the minds of some people, and the sophistication of his opposition to Christ. Some in the crowd suggested that the power Christ employed was of the devil, and others thought that it could well be, and asked him to give them a sign from heaven to prove it wasn't (see Luke 11:15–16). The suggestion was so foolish that we may well be surprised that Christ troubled to answer it. But the suggestion was not only foolish: it was ominous. Captives in Satan's prison they might be, but the kingdom of God had broken through to them (see Luke 11:20). God's finger was touching them; God was speaking to them. What they had just witnessed was a direct, unambiguous, demonstration of the Holy Spirit. Now they must make life's ultimate judgment; and they were on the point of taking a decision which once deliberately made would be irreversible, and would make deliverance for ever impossible. Reject the Holy Spirit, call ultimate good evil, call truth himself authenticated by absolute holiness, a lie, and God himself has no further evidence left, nothing further left to say, which [p 234] could bring a man to repentance, faith and salvation. God himself is reduced to silence (see 1 Sam 19:23–24; 28:6, 15).
If then these men were determined to make this fatal choice, Christ was not prepared to let them make it without knowing exactly what they were doing. Certainly he would not allow them to suppose that it was reason, or true religion or morality that forced them to the choice. He pointed out that in order to reject the evidence of God's Holy Spirit working through him, they must defy common sense, reject common morality, and deny their own spiritual axioms and principles of behaviour into the bargain. Knowingly and deliberately they must call black that which in every other context and circumstance of life they would have called white. It is conceivable that for tactical reasons Satan would occasionally cast out a demon. To suggest that he would do it regularly as Christ did, and so divide and destroy his own kingdom was a manifest absurdity (see Luke 11:17–18). Secondly, his opponents' sons also exorcised demons (see Luke 11:19–20), and it was generally held that they did it by the power of God. Why, then, say differently about Jesus? For one very good reason which Christ proceeded to point out (Luke 11:20). Their sons did not claim to be about to introduce the kingdom of God. Christ did. If then it was divine power that had enabled him to cast out the demon, his claim stood vindicated. It was precisely their unwillingness to accept this claim and its implications for them personally that had led them to their absurd position of suggesting that Jesus was in league with the devil. Moreover—and here comes the analogy which we borrowed earlier—you cannot remove goods from a heavily-armed man who is guarding them unless you first overpower the man and disarm him. The very fact that Christ had delivered the dumb man from Satan's clutches was evidence enough that he was not on Satan's side: as the stronger than Satan he had obviously overpowered him (see Luke 11:21–22).
In the light of this Christ then gave two very strong warnings. First: 'he who is not with me is against me; and he who does not gather with me scatters' (Luke 11:23). Christ's critics were openly against him; and since Christ was engaged in fighting the enemy, it [p 235] was apparent on whose side they stood. Many others in the crowd, however, may well have felt that while they were of course—like all decent-minded people are—against disability and demon possession, and while they considered that Christ's critics were extremists, yet they need not themselves positively and actively take sides with Christ either. Christ warned these people that in the war which he was fighting such neutrality is in fact impossible.
Secondly, he warned the crowds that good as it is to cast a demon out of a man—and he had just admitted that his critics' sons did at times manage to do that—it is not enough (see Luke 11:24–26). It leaves a man clean and refined, but empty; and the danger is that the demon will return with seven other worse demons and reoccupy the man, and he will have no power to resist them. So reformation without regeneration and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is dangerously inadequate. Not for nothing did Christ earlier (see Luke 11:9–13) urge his contemporaries, although the Judaism they belonged to had been purged of idolatry and thoroughly reformed by the exile, to seek ardently the gift of the Holy Spirit. And not for nothing was Peter inspired years later (see 2 Pet 2:20–22) to describe so vividly the dangers of a moral clean up that is not accompanied by the new birth and the receiving of the divine nature (see 1 Pet 1:22–23; 2 Pet 1:4).
Movement 1 is nearly over. It has dealt with many momentous things; but Luke still thinks it worthwhile to add one further detail (see Luke 11:27–28). A woman in the crowd who had heard Christ answer his opponents so triumphantly, complimented Christ, perhaps also confessed his messiahship, by remarking in oriental fashion how marvellous it must be to be his mother. So it was: Christ did not deny it. But wonderful as it was to be his mother, that in itself would not have saved anybody. It is spiritual relationship with Christ, not physical, that is vital. So, without contradicting her well-intentioned remark Christ pointed out where the superior blessedness lies: 'Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it.' At this our memory ought to be stirring. At the beginning of the movement we were told that the 'good part' in life is to sit at the Lord's feet and hear his word (see Luke 10:39, 42). That [p 236] was true, of course; but not all the truth. After all it is not the hearing only, but the keeping of the word of God that counts.
2. Seeing God's Word in its true proportions (Luke 11:29–12:12)
i. The people seek a sign (Luke 11:29–36)
At Luke 11:16 in the course of Movement 1 some in the crowd sought from Christ a sign from heaven. To this our Lord now refers at the beginning of Movement 2, and in so doing he sets the theme which is going to dominate the movement: evidence. The claims of Christ faced his contemporaries with decisions which carried incalculably far reaching consequences. It is understandable that they should ask him to give them indisputable evidence that his claims were true, if indeed they were.
It is therefore at first sight surprising to find him refusing their request. Had he not earlier assured his hearers that everyone who seeks shall be given what he seeks for? Why now refuse the miraculous sign which the people sought? The reason was not, of course, that there was anything wrong or unsatisfactory with the evidence of miraculous signs.34 It was that there was something seriously wrong with the people: 'This generation is an evil generation: it seeks a sign and no sign shall be given it. . .' (Luke 11:29).
Now in one sense all men are evil (see Luke 11:13); but Christ's generation was especially evil. Their very seeking of this additional sign was evil, a form, says Luke (see Luke 11:16), of tempting Christ. Their seeking was not sincere. The proof they professed to be seeking was not logical or scientific proof that the power behind Christ's action was supernatural: everybody was agreed that it was supernatural. The proof they demanded was moral and spiritual proof that the miracle was of God and not of the devil. In theory this is a very important point, which incidentally our modern world is in danger of forgetting. Mere supernatural power is not by itself [p 237] necessarily good; we need to ask about its moral and spiritual quality before we allow ourselves to be influenced by it.
But Christ had already done many miracles of which doubtless they had heard, and in addition, he had just healed a man of dumbness. The moral and spiritual quality of his acts of supernatural power was self-evident and consistent. To suggest that it was not clear, that there was a reasonable possibility that it was evil and that it needed some sign from heaven to prove it was not of the devil, was monstrously perverse. If the kinds of miracles Christ had already done did not prove it beyond all doubt, what kind of miracle would ever prove it? The fact is that the people who demanded another sign would not have been convinced by it or by any number of signs. Their seeking of a sign was not an indication of their willingness to believe if only adequate evidence were provided, but a rationalizing of their unwillingness to believe the perfectly adequate evidence they already had. And it was worse: it was a form of tempting Christ. Had he tried to give them another sign, he would, in their eyes at least, have been admitting that their doubts about the moral quality of his previous miracles were reasonable. Christ was not deceived by such a request for more evidence.
No further sign, then, was given except that of the prophet Jonah: 'for just as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites so shall the Son of Man also be to this generation' (Luke 11:30). This raises the immediate question: in what sense did Jonah become a sign to the Ninevites? Matthew in his account (see Matt 12:38–40) explicitly points out the parallel between Jonah's 'burial' in the whale and Christ's death, burial and resurrection. Luke does not explicitly draw attention to this parallel, and this has made some people think that Luke understood the parallel between Jonah and Christ to lie simply in the fact that they both were sent by God to issue a portentous clarion call to repentance to a people who were under the threat of God's imminent judgment. It may be that this interpretation is right; and if it is, it is apt and solemn enough. In dealing with people whose only response to evidence upon evidence is persistent prevarication, there comes a point where the only hope of bringing [p 238] them to their senses and to repentance is a direct, unambiguous announcement of imminent divine judgment such as Jonah delivered so effectively to the Ninevites.
Two considerations, however, make it reasonable to think that Luke may have seen as much significance in the parallel as Matthew. First there is the meaning of the word 'sign' which forms the central point of similarity between Jonah's ministry and Christ's. In the context (see Luke 11:16, 29, 30) 'sign' means 'miracle'. Jonah's mere appearance in Nineveh and his preaching were hardly by themselves a miracle. And if Christ's contemporaries were determined to reject the evidence of Christ's miraculous deeds, they were hardly likely to regard his preaching as a miracle either. It was the miraculous way in which Jonah arrived at Nineveh that gave force to his preaching and made him a sign to the Ninevites. It would similarly be Christ's death, burial and resurrection that made Christ God's ultimate sign to Israel (cf. John 2:18–22).
Secondly, at Luke 12:50, at the end of Movement 3, Luke has Christ referring to his coming death, burial and resurrection as a 'baptism'. The other Synoptics record Christ's use of this figure on other occasions (see Matt 20:22–23; Mark 10:38–39); only Luke records it in this context. It is difficult to think that when he recorded the parallel between Jonah and Christ at Luke 11:29–30, he saw no connection of thought at all between it and the 'baptism' which he was about to mention at Luke 12:50.
If then we may think that by this parallel between himself and Jonah, Christ was referring to his death, burial and resurrection, it makes his pronouncement in Luke 11:29 a message not only of judgment but of immeasurable mercy. Granted that it was pointless to give the people another sign, since what they needed was to be brought to repentance for their unwillingness to believe the miraculous signs they had already been given; yet God had evidence for them of a different kind, calculated precisely to lead them to repentance; evidence that he loved them in spite of their perversity. He would allow unbelief to crucify his Son. He would then raise him from the dead, and instead of deluging them with judgment [p 239] forthwith, he would offer them pardon, reconciliation and escape from judgment in the name of, and through the sufferings of, the very one they had crucified. If they could not see that love like that was 'from heaven', they would never recognize heaven even if they saw it, and their hell would be self-chosen.
With this therefore Christ proceeds to tell his contemporaries how their case will be dealt with at the final judgment. Popular opinion has it that the judgment will concern itself with assessing how good or bad a person's works have been. And so, of course, it will, when it comes to passing its sentences (see Rev 20:12). But just as no one will ever be saved on the ground of his works however good, so the verdict of final condemnation will turn not on the badness of a man's deeds, but on the fact that he did not believe (see John 3:18) and that in consequence his name was never written in the book of life (see Rev 20:15). That being so, the judgment will necessarily concern itself with assessing what opportunity a man had to believe, what evidence was available to him and what he did with that evidence. According to Christ, who after all will be the judge on that occasion (see John 5:22–24), witnesses will be called to show what other people did with the evidence available to them, and so to establish what the man in question could have done, had he wished, with the amount of evidence available to him.
In the case of Christ's contemporaries the witnesses called will be the queen of the South and the Ninevites (see Luke 11:31–32). The contrast between the queen's attitude and that of Christ's contemporaries will convict the latter of culpable indifference to God's self-revelation. The only clue she had was a report of the remarkable wisdom of a distant king. Yet such was her keen desire for wisdom that she travelled the long distance to listen to Solomon. Compared with Christ's wisdom Solomon's was lowly indeed; but when Christ visited Israel many of his contemporaries made out that they could not see that he was particularly wise, some even condemned him without giving him a hearing (see John 7:50–51). Their lack of interest in the wisdom of God incarnate and their spurning of him will be the ground of their condemnation at the [p 240] judgment. It reminds us that though Christ no longer walks our earth, the report of him has reached us, and we are expected to follow it up actively and vigorously and to seek, ask, knock until we find him. Failure to be interested enough to seek the Lord is damning.
The contrast between the Ninevites and Christ's contemporaries will likewise convict the latter of moral obliquity. Jonah's moral teaching was simple indeed: just a warning that judgment was about to descend on them because of their sin. Gentiles though they were, with no law of Moses to instruct their consciences, they had no difficulty in seeing that they deserved God's judgment; and they repented en masse. Christ's Sermon on the Mount, for all its elevated morality, produced no mass repentance in Israel. They just could not see that they were in desperate need of repentance (see Luke 3:7–9; 7:30–34). And Christ next explains why they could not.
For a man to be enlightened by some evidence or other, the evidence naturally has to be available to him. But that is not all. The light of the evidence must be allowed to enter the man through his faculty of perception. This faculty Christ calls the body's eye (see Luke 11:34), and he compares its function to that of a lamp in a house. If the lamp is functioning properly and placed on a stand, the house is filled with light. If, however, someone were to hide the lamp in some secret place or cover it with a bushel, the house would remain dark. Similarly with a man's faculty of perception. If it is 'simple' (Luke 11:34), that is, open, honest, uncomplicated by ulterior motives and prejudices, it will admit the light of the evidence which God puts before it. But it is all too possible for his faculty of perception to be evil, to become clouded by evil desires and prejudices. In that case, no matter how clear the evidence is, its light will never illuminate his mind and personality, for the very faculty whose function it is to transmit the light now seriously distorts it, or else keeps it out altogether.
Christ warns us not to let this happen (see Luke 11:35); and his warning implies that it is within each man's power not to let it happen. Even an unregenerate man, evil as he is, has enough moral sense to [p 241] know how to give good gifts to his children (Luke 11:13) or to recognize in his quieter moments that he is allowing his ambition or greed or jealousy to distort his perception of some situation or other. So it is with the light of the evidence which Christ puts before him. It is useless, and dangerous, to protest that an unregenerate man cannot know when he is allowing his lust or his greed, his ambition or his fear, to distort his perception of the evidence. He can know it, says Christ, and what is more, he can do something about it, and will be held responsible to do something about it. If he wanted to, he could perceive Christ's wisdom as the queen of the South perceived Solomon's and respond to it, as the Ninevites responded to Jonah's preaching. And if he does not, he will be condemned at the judgment for not doing what he could have done.
ii. Woes on the Pharisees and lawyers (Luke 11:37–52)
We now leave the crowd and follow Christ into a Pharisee's house; but we may expect the topic that has so far been under discussion to be continued, for it was, says Luke (Luke 11:37), as Christ was speaking about the need to keep one's 'eye' from becoming 'evil' and from distorting or excluding the light, that this Pharisee invited him to dinner.
What we are about to witness is very sad. Here were religious people exceptionally devoted to the observance of the laws of the Old Testament. This, one might have thought, would have developed their moral sense and educated their conscience and so have prepared them to recognize the validity of Christ's moral teaching, the moral quality of his supernatural power, the rightness of his demand for repentance and the divine hallmark of the salvation which he proclaimed. Unfortunately, however, they had allowed their eyes to become evil, clouded with greed, vanity and heartless pride. As a consequence what light from the Old Testament had managed to get through to their minds had in the process of transmission been grotesquely distorted. Merely to observe their state will be a fearful warning to us. For let it be said at once that neither the Pharisees nor the experts in the law had deliberately set [p 242] out to be perverse and wicked. The very reverse was their intention. But little by little they had allowed their sense of proportion and their moral judgment to become so distorted by religious pride and mere academic theology that perverse and wicked is what in fact they had become. And when Christ pointed it out, instead of repenting they became his most bitter enemies and relentless persecutors (see Luke 11:53–54). Let us follow Christ's detailed analysis of their condition as Luke has recorded it.
First there was their preoccupation with religious symbols and rituals to the neglect of the moral realities and duties to which these symbols pointed. In the Old Testament God had backed up his demand for moral and spiritual cleanliness by giving Israel certain symbolic ritual washings to perform. The Pharisees made two mistakes over these symbolic rituals. In their zeal to keep the law they had extended these biblical regulations by a thousand and one rules that had no biblical warrant at all; and then they came to thinking that for anyone to disregard one of their additional rules was a serious breach of true holiness. When, therefore, Christ disregarded one of their man-made rules and ate his dinner without first performing a ritual ablution, they were genuinely shocked; their pseudo, man-made standards of holiness made Christ's true unsullied holiness look to them like sin (see Luke 11:38) and prejudiced them against him.
Secondly, they had turned their observance of external rituals into a substitute for morality. Their scrupulous ritual cleansing of cups and plates from ceremonial defilement allowed them to feel they had attained to a high degree of holiness, when all the while they were doing little or nothing about the vastly more serious greed and wickedness which was filling their inner selves with real moral uncleanliness (see Luke 11:39). The answer to greed is not to wash one's hands in water after coming in from the market, nor to cleanse the outside of the cup which one's extortionate profits have filled with good things. The answer is to give the ill-gotten gains away to the poor (see Luke 11:41).35 In this situation to concentrate on [p 243] symbolic rituals is to risk turning them not into pointers to moral duty but into a substitute for it.
Christ's next charge was that in their keeping of God's laws the Pharisees had lost all sense of proportion between one duty and another: they tithed mint and rue and every herb, but neglected justice and the love of God (see Luke 11:42). They took the letter of the law to fanatical extremes, but ignored and contravened its whole spirit and purpose. Now unlike the endless ablutions which the Pharisees had added to the law, tithing was commanded by the law itself. True, to extend tithing to the minutest herbs would suggest an over-scrupulous conscience; but if the Pharisees honestly felt that the law must logically be taken to this extreme, Christ would say nothing to offend their conscience. The law on tithing, he said (see Luke 11:42), had to be kept. But when all was said and done, tithing was a minor duty compared with the immeasurably higher responsibility to love God and to act justly towards one's fellow men. Moreover tithing was instituted in Israel as a means of showing one's love for God by maintaining his temple servants, and then as a means of demonstrating the love of God to the stranger, the fatherless and the widow (Deut 14:29). To tithe mint and rue, and at the same time to practise injustice towards the stranger, the fatherless and the widow and to show no love for God, made a complete mockery of the spirit of tithing and of its true purpose, and turned it into a heartless, mechanical, financial operation.
Next our Lord exposed the false motivation which invalidated much of the Pharisees' religious activity even when it was good in itself. They loved the chief seats in the synagogues and the salutations in the marketplaces (see Luke 11:43). No man can do a religious act for the purpose of self-aggrandizement and simultaneously do it for the glory of God.
Moreover, the moment we admit self-aggrandizement into our motivation, we have distorted our moral judgment. Carried to an extreme, it can make faith in Christ impossible: 'How can you believe', said Christ on one occasion, 'you who receive glory from one [p 244] another, and the glory which comes from the only God you do not seek?' (John 5:44).
Finally, Christ pointed to the serious effect which these Pharisees' false holiness had on the people in general. Impressed by the Pharisees' outward show of strict devotion to religious rituals and regulations, the people were desensitized to the moral corruption which those same Pharisees indulged in in their private and business lives; and thinking that whatever such 'holy' men did was morally acceptable, they would follow their example of greed and wickedness with an untroubled conscience. The sad irony of the situation is vividly brought out by the metaphor which the Lord borrowed from their own ceremonial law in order to describe these Pharisees (see Luke 11:44). According to the Old Testament (see Num 19:11–22) to touch a dead body or bone brought ceremonial defilement. In consequence graves were normally clearly marked, because, if they were not, a pilgrim, say, on his way to the temple could unknowingly walk over a grave, be defiled himself and spread defilement in the temple (see Num 19:13). Ironically the Pharisees' very concentration on the outward observance of ceremonial cleanliness coupled with their grievous neglect of true inner holiness, made them like unmarked graves, only worse: carriers of moral contagion among the unsuspecting public.
It goes without saying that not all Pharisees were like the ones whom our Lord denounced; and even his threefold expression 'Woe to you' (Luke 11:42–44) is more an exclamation of sorrow than a pronouncement of judgement. But it warns us that when it comes to the question of life's most important decisions, religion must be treated with great care: it is, and always has been, notorious for its tendency to get its proportions and priorities wrong.
Hearing Christ's denunciation of these Pharisees, the experts in the law remonstrated with Christ (see Luke 11:45–52); for it was they who by their exegesis deduced from the Old Testament the elaborate rules and regulations which the Pharisees tried to keep. In denouncing the Pharisees, therefore, Christ was implying that the experts' exegesis of the Old Testament was invalid and perverse; [p 245] and to imply that the system of exegesis current in the rabbinical schools was fundamentally wrong was such a radical thing to do, that the experts seem not to have been quite sure if Christ really intended to do it. Did he really understand the implications of his criticisms? 'Teacher,' said one of them, 'when you say these things you insult us also'. But instead of apologizing, or modifying his remarks, Christ proceeded to denounce the theoreticians as directly as he had denounced the practitioners.
The first charge was that they bound burdens on the backs of ordinary people that were hard to be borne, and yet would not touch those burdens with one of their fingers (see Luke 11:46). The heavy burdens were, of course, the ten thousand and one rules and regulations which they manufactured out of the biblical text by their (to them very clever and sophisticated, but to us often very strange) rabbinic analysis and exegesis. So complicated were these rules and regulations that one would have needed to be a highly qualified lawyer oneself to know whether one was breaking the law or not; and a serious attempt to keep the rules turned moral and religious duty into an intolerable burden (cf. Matt 11:28–30). The second part of Christ's charge, however, has been variously interpreted. Some have thought that Christ meant that having bound burdens on others, the theoreticians made no attempt to practise what they preached, but rather used their skill in casuistry to invent endless loopholes and escape clauses to avoid carrying those same burdens themselves. Certainly this was in part true of the Jewish theoreticians; it is in fact a temptation to all religious theoreticians to feel sometimes that their superiority in biblical study and knowledge somehow exempts them from the necessity of actually carrying out the rules which they impose on other people. But the Jewish theoreticians did carry out many of the regulations which they invented, and prided themselves on it. It would seem more likely therefore that our Lord was referring to their heartless, compassionless legalism which delighted in laying down the law, but had little interest in helping the common people whom they despised (see John 7:49), or in relieving them of their burdens. Examples of that attitude are ready to hand in the context. We have [p 246] already met (see Luke 11:15) those who claimed that Christ's deliverance of a man from dumbness was a work of the devil. At Luke 13:10–16 we shall meet another of the same kind: their compassionless legalism will insist that people must not be healed on the Sabbath; they must be left in their misery.
The second charge against the experts in the law was that their hearts were no different from those of their ancestors who had murdered the prophets. 'You build the tombs of the prophets, but it was your fathers who killed them' (Luke 11:47). In building these tombs Christ alleges (see Luke 11:48) they were not only witnessing to the fact that it was their fathers who had killed the prophets, they were thereby showing that they consented to the deeds of their fathers.
At first sight that may seem a hard or even unfair charge. Was not their building of the prophets' tombs a sign of repentance, an attempt to make up for what their fathers had done? Christ will not have it so. The way to honour a dead prophet and to derive spiritual benefit from him is to carry out his message. If Hosea said in God's name 'I will have mercy and not sacrifice' (Hosea 6:6), the way to honour Hosea is not to build him an elaborate tomb and venerate his shrine, but, as Christ exhorted the legalists (see Matt 9:13), to obey his words and show mercy and compassion. But these theoreticians were the very men who along with the Pharisees were about to persecute Christ for criticizing their legalism and moral inconsistency, with the same murderous hatred as their fathers had shown to the prophets who had rebuked them in their day (see Luke 11:53–54). For such men to venerate the relics of the dead prophets was nothing but superstition.
To this second charge therefore Christ added a still more solemn pronouncement (see Luke 11:49–51). His contemporaries were the most favoured of all the generations in Israel's history: on them would come the divine wrath and vengeance that had been building up all through the centuries. This pronouncement raises a very important principle of God's providential judgment. If God is going to intervene in judgment in the course of history, and not wait until the final judgment outside the course of history; and if he is [p 247] not going to visit each generation with judgment immediately it sins, then the question arises how it is right that one particular generation should have to suffer the visitation of God's accumulated vengeance and not another.36
That question Christ now answers (see Luke 11:49–51). His own generation was busy building the tombs of the prophets whom their ancestors had killed. Lest anyone should be deceived into thinking that this was a sign of repentance, the divine wisdom had determined to send to this generation prophets and apostles the like of which no previous generation had ever been privileged to hear: John the Baptist, greatest of all the prophets; then the Messiah himself; then the Christian apostles. Their message would be a more marvellous, more glorious statement of the gospel than any previous generation had ever heard. And in rejecting these prophets and apostles and this gospel this generation would show that they consented with their ancestors who killed the earlier prophets, and thus shared their guilt; and were more guilty than their ancestors because of their rejection of the greater prophets and apostles. Rightly and justly then the vengeance would fall on this generation for the murders of all the prophets from the beginning of the world.
This solemn principle of judgment operated in AD 70 and again in 135 when God allowed the Romans to destroy Jerusalem and its temple, to decimate its citizens, to deport droves of them as captives and to turn Jerusalem into a Gentile city (Luke 21:20–24; 1 Thess 2:14–16). It will operate in even greater measure on apostate Christendom and Judaism at the end of this age.
Christ's final denunciation of the experts was perhaps the most damning of all. 'Woe unto you, lawyers! for you took away the key of knowledge; you did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in you hindered' (Luke 11:52). After all, it was the lawyers' task to expound Scripture so that ordinary people might the more easily understand it, repent, believe, be saved and enter into the spiritual riches of God's word. Yet so divorced from its original purpose had [p 248] their exegesis become that not only did it leave them ignorant of the true riches of Scripture themselves, but it made it ten thousand times more difficult for the ordinary man to understand God's Word than it was before they started. Such exegesis stands self-condemned.
This denunciation of the Pharisees and of the lawyers is one of the most solemn passages in the whole of Scripture. It is not without its lessons for us. If by its citation of Mary and of the unnamed woman Movement 1 has encouraged us to hear the word of God and keep it; if in its early part Movement 2 has encouraged us by the example of the queen of the South to seek the wisdom of God; then certainly the rest of Movement 2 is a fearful warning on how not to hear the Word of God and on how not to treat the wisdom of God. God's Word is given us for our salvation: it is possible to misuse and pervert it to one's own destruction (see 2 Pet 3:16).
iii. Overcoming the fear of the opposition (Luke 11:53–12:12)
At the end of the dinner party the atmosphere in the Pharisee's dining room must have been very tense. When he left the house 'the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him fiercely and to provoke him to speak of many things, lying in wait for him, to catch him in something he might say' (Luke 11:53–54). To describe their attitude adequately Luke has to use the vocabulary of the hunt. They were pursuing Christ as men pursue a wild animal, pressing him here, worrying him there, pushing and provoking him to say something indiscreet which they could pick on as a ground of accusation, or use to trap him. Meanwhile (see Luke 12:1) the crowds gathered in such numbers that they were trampling on one another. For the disciples it must have been very frightening, just the situation in which they might be tempted to tell themselves that faith is a personal and private matter, and that there was no need to advertise their loyalty to Christ too publicly. So Christ began to teach them first that they must confess him publicly, however frightening it might be to have to do so, and secondly how to cope with their fear and overcome it.
He began (see Luke 12:1–3) by warning them against hypocritically trying to hide what they really believe; and the ground of [p 249] his warning was that in the end it is in fact impossible to hide it anyway: 'There is nothing covered up, that shall not be revealed, and hid that shall not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the darkness shall be heard in the light; and what you have spoken in the ear in the inner rooms shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.'
The word for 'hid' in the Greek of verse 2 is krypton, and it takes us back to Luke 11:33 where Christ remarked that 'no one, when he has lit a lamp, puts it eis kryptēn (i.e. in some hidden place) . . . but on the stand so that those who enter in may see the light.' There our Lord was warning against the danger of allowing our eye to become so be-clouded that the light of God's truth cannot get into our darkened hearts. Here in Luke 12:1–3 he warns us against the opposite danger of refusing to allow the light of God which has penetrated our hearts to get out and be known publicly.
But how can anyone overcome the fear that tempts him to keep his faith dark? We can never totally eliminate fear (true, healthy fear, that is, not the neurotic kind): we were never meant to. Fear is a protective mechanism which the Creator himself has put within us. Christ therefore does not simply tell us not to fear, but rather to make sure we fear the things that ought to be feared the most; and fearing them will deliver us from lesser fears. It is an undeniably frightening thing to be threatened by men who have power to kill the body; but when they have done that, they can do no more. It would therefore be very short-sighted to let fear of man's persecution lead us to deny God, for God has infinitely more that he can do: 'But I will warn you whom you shall fear. Fear him who after he has killed has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, fear him' (Luke 12:5). And this bigger fear will deliver us from the smaller fear.
But fear of God's power is only one element in our cure: the other is faith in God's sense of comparative values (see Luke 12:6–7). The odd sparrow that is thrown in for nothing if you buy four others, is present to God's awareness. Even the hairs on our head are numbered. Whether we live or die, therefore, God is at every moment aware of what is happening to us. If that is so, the only other thing [p 250] we need to know is how much he values us. You are of much more value than many sparrows, says Christ; and his cross tells us how much more.
Next there follows (see Luke 12:8–9) an exhortation to get our priorities and proportions right in another area. We should be inhuman if we did not find it a very hurtful thing to be rejected by our fellow man. But to confess Christ will at times involve such repudiation. We must therefore remember that there are two courts to be considered here. There is the court of human society and the opinion of men. There is the court of heaven and the august company of the angels. We must decide which court's recognition is more worth having. To deny Christ before men on earth is to be denied before the angels of God in heaven; whereas to confess him before men is to be confessed by him before the angels of God (see Luke 12:8–9).
Finally, in Luke 12:10–12 Christ bids us consider the comparative seriousness of different sins. A word spoken against the Son of Man can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven; and the relevance of the remark here is shown by the final verses, Luke 12:11–12. Believers in Christ, so Christ now warned his disciples, might expect eventually to be dragged before the courts.
That would be a frightening experience for many of them but Christ comforted them and steadied their nerves by two considerations. First they need not worry what to say when the time came to make their defence: the Holy Spirit would teach them what to say. Secondly, the Holy Spirit would use the Christians' witness in order to present before all in the court his supernatural, divine and final witness to the person of Christ. On trial would be not so much the Christians as the court. Let any judge, any prosecutor, any witness, consciously and knowingly and deliberately blaspheme the witness of the Holy Spirit through the believers, then in their folly they would commit the unpardonable and eternal sin; while still living they would pass beyond the point of no return. The possible consequences for the witnesses, the judge and the jury being potentially so grave, it might induce in the believer on trial more compassion for his persecutors than pity for himself (see Acts 7:60). [p 251]
3. Seeing possessions in their true perspective (Luke 12:13–53)
i. A family dispute (Luke 12:13–21)
The first story in Movement 3, like the first story in Movement 1, is about a family dispute. The similarities between the two stories are obvious; what is more to our point at the moment is to notice the differences. The story in Movement 1 was concerned with the sensible division of time between work on the one hand and listening to the Lord's word on the other. The story in Movement 3 is concerned with rightly sharing out material possessions. So the theme is set: Movement 3 will be largely dominated by the question of material possessions, and the need to see them in their true perspective and to adopt the right attitude towards them.
'Teacher, speak to my brother that he divide the inheritance with me', said the man out of the crowd; and we cannot tell whether the man had a just case against his brother or not, since Christ refused to act as judge or arbitrator. Perhaps he did have a good case; but Christ did not consider it to be his office to adjudicate in the business disputes of men who were not his disciples (see Luke 12:14). One day, of course, he will act as a 'judge and divider' over all men; but that time had not yet come when he was on earth. It still has not come. Moreover, he made his refusal to act in this case the occasion of issuing a warning against covetousness; and the connection of thought seems clear. When it comes to material possessions Christ does not hold that getting our legal rights is necessarily the best thing for us to do. It is possible (though not necessary) that in going for our legal rights in the matter of possessions we could be (sometimes, though not always) motivated by covetousness. In which case, getting our legal rights would be a victory for our covetousness. Christ will never help us to achieve such a 'victory'. 'Watch out' he said, 'and beware of all (that is, every kind of and every instance of) covetousness' (Luke 12:15). Covetousness, apparently, comes in many guises, and more situations display instances of it than we may be aware.
Now the Greek word for covetousness, pleonexia, is interesting: it means 'having, or wanting to have, more (more, that is, than one's [p 252] fair share)'. But the reason Christ gives (see Luke 12:15) why we should beware of such covetousness is even more interesting. The older versions, such as the KJV, and many of the modern ones, render the Greek of this verse 'a man's life does not consist in the abundance of the things which he possesses'. But the English word 'abound', like the Latin word from which it comes, can mean one of two somewhat different things. It originally meant 'to overflow' and therefore 'to be more than enough', 'to be in excess', 'to have in excess'. From that meaning it has come to be used very often to signify not 'to be in excess', but simply 'to be plentiful'. So likewise the related noun 'abundance' is normally used nowadays to mean 'plentifulness'. Now in our Lord's saying at Luke 12:15 the Greek word could likewise have either of these two meanings; but the parable which our Lord then uses to illustrate his saying shows quite clearly that the word is intended in the sense of 'excess', 'being more than enough'.37
Translated literally the Greek says: 'Not in his having more than enough of them does a man's life consist from the things which he possesses.' Our Lord is not saying, then, that a reasonable supply of goods in this life is either wrong or unnecessary: he is saying that necessary to life as enough goods are, a man's life does not consist in what he has over and above what is necessary to meet his needs.
The rich farmer in the parable had a problem. His farms produced such bumper crops that he had not only enough to meet his immediate needs but enough for many years to come (see Luke 12:17, 19). His problem, therefore, was to know what to do with the excess. He decided to store it. But that led to another problem: Where? He had not the room to store it in (Luke 12:17). He solved this second problem by deciding to pull down his existing barns and to build greater, to store the excess in them, and then to retire and enjoy life for many years to come.
And God called him senseless for deciding to store his excess in that way. In the first place he had forgotten that his physical [p 253] life was only lent to him. It could be asked back any time. Indeed it was to be asked back that very night. And with his physical life taken away, it would become immediately apparent that he had made two grievous mistakes in deciding to store his excess goods on earth. Firstly, he would never enjoy them, and they would fall into other hands (see Luke 12:20). Secondly, having planned to use the excess to lay up treasure for himself and not to invest it in God's eternal interests, he would not be rich towards God.
From this we gather the first major lesson of this movement. Material goods are given to us not merely in order to maintain our lives in this world, but so that we may use them in order to become rich towards God; so that investing them in God's interests, we may turn temporary, material, earthly goods into eternal riches. Not to invest them in this way is to deprive oneself of the only riches which are ultimately worth having.
ii. Blessings on true servants (Luke 12:22–48)
The parable of the Foolish Farmer was addressed to the crowds; but it has a voice for disciples as well. So now Christ enlarges on the topic of being 'rich towards God' for the benefit of his disciples. Here the first lesson is concerned with the pull that treasure exerts on our hearts: 'where your treasure is, there will your hearts be also' (Luke 12:34). Store up your treasure on earth, and it will inevitably pull your heart in the direction of earth. Store it in heaven, and it will pull your heart, and with it your goals, ambitions and longings, towards heaven. Heaven is scarcely a reality to a man who is not prepared to invest hard cash in it and in its interests; but by that same token it becomes more of a reality to the man who is.
To invest in heaven in this fashion, we shall need to be freed from anxiety (see Luke 12:22) and fear (see Luke 12:32). If we are anxious that we shall not have enough food and clothes, we shall, if we are not careful, allow our quest for food and clothes to become the major preoccupation of our lives to the neglect, or even to the complete exclusion, of far more important things. It is vital therefore that we see food and clothes in their true perspective. Both are necessary to [p 254] keep life going. But the main purpose of life is not simply to feed ourselves so that we can stay alive. Nor are we given our bodies simply so that we can spend our time and energies clothing them (see Luke 12:22–23). Body and life are given us so that we may seek God's kingdom, his rule, his will. 'Seek', says Christ, 'his kingdom' (Luke 12:31), thus recalling and reinforcing his exhortation in Luke 11:2 that our prime request in prayer should be for the coming of God's kingdom. That is what life is primarily about: to seek the rule of God and its development in our own lives here and now; to seek the extension of that rule in the lives of others; to look for and pray and work for the coming of the kingdom of God worldwide at the return of Christ. And Christ guarantees that if we refuse to live like worldly people who make food and clothes their prime objective in life, and if instead we make the kingdom of God our foremost aim, God our Father, who knows we need food and clothes, will see to it that we get them (see Luke 12:30–31).
Consider the ravens, says Christ. They do not sow nor reap, nor store up food. One might have thought, therefore, that in this very competitive world they would not survive. But they do. God feeds them (see Luke 12:24).
Several comments are in order here. Christ is not saying that birds do not have to work to get their food. Birds have to work very hard at it. Secondly, Christ is not saying that because ravens do not sow or reap or store up food for the winter, we should not either. God feeds them in spite of the fact that he has not given them the ability to do these things. To the squirrel God has given the instinct to store food (not, of course, for the next twenty years like the foolish farmer); it is God's way of feeding the squirrel, and if the squirrel does not use this ability, it will not be fed miraculously. We have incomparably greater God-given abilities than either ravens or squirrels. That is God's normal way of feeding us. Thirdly, Christ is not so unrealistic as not to have noticed that birds fall prey to old age, disease, enemies, famine: Matthew 10:29 quotes him as saying that not one sparrow falls without your Father knowing. Nor does he imply that no believer will ever die of hunger or cold. What Christ [p 255] is saying is that as long as it is necessary for God to leave us in this world to learn and practise the principles of the kingdom, and to work for its extension and to pray for its coming, so long does God undertake that we shall have the food and clothes necessary for the course. When in God's wisdom, the time for the course runs out, we cannot by worrying add the smallest amount to our lifespan anyway: and with that gone, we shall not need food and clothes any more. Why, therefore, worry about them, the smaller things, when worrying about the largest thing of all is no use? (see Luke 12:25).
Let us take one practical example to show the bearing of all this on daily life. To engage in bribery and corruption is obviously against the principles of the kingdom. A Christian business man, threatened with dismissal from his firm if he does not consent to practise bribery, will have to accept dismissal and face many sacrifices in order to be true to the kingdom. But God guarantees him enough goods and clothes to make obeying the rule of God in this world practical. Suppose, on the other hand, he is afraid to trust God, and engages in bribery in order to keep his job and get food and clothes for himself and his family. He will, by Christ's standards, have lost the very purpose of life which made the food and clothes necessary in the first place.
We are then of much more value than the birds (see Luke 12:24). In Luke 12:6–7 Christ used almost these same words in order to strengthen his disciples to face persecution. Now in Luke 12:24 Christ uses them again to strengthen his disciples to resist temptation in the workaday business world. In some countries Christians face persecution, in other countries they do not. It may be that the temptations of the workaday business life are sometimes more difficult to resist than is outright persecution.
Christ has talked about food (see Luke 12:24): now he talks about clothes (see Luke 12:27–28). In this connection not birds, but flowers are used as an object lesson, since it is not our greater value that is now in question, but our greater permanence. The flowers last but a very brief time; and yet God takes great pains in adorning them. They are so short-lived that we might think it was not worthwhile spending [p 256] much effort on them. But God does. And will God not make provision for our clothing and adornment (no mere utilitarian drabness with either Solomon or the lilies) when we must last so much longer?
Luke 12:22–31 then has dealt with the question of getting food and clothes; now Luke 12:32–34 deals with the question of what we should do with life's goods once we have got them: 'Sell your possessions and give alms' (Luke 12:33). To see the command in its true proportion we must pay attention to its context. Christ is not insisting that no Christian should own anything. Martha was not sinning in having a house (see also Acts 5:3–4) in which Christ himself was glad to stay. Nor is Christ saying that it is wrong for a Christian to have treasure. Quite the reverse. He should aim to have as much endurable treasure as he can. That means, however, transferring as much as he can to the heavens, where it is safe from loss, devaluation, robbery or decay. And that in turn means giving as much as he can now to the poor (of whatever kind).
Here the great obstacle to obeying Christ is fear (see Luke 12:32). Our little possessions seem to us so important and valuable that we are afraid of the loss involved in giving them away. To counteract this Christ puts our possessions in their night perspective: 'Fear not, little flock, your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom'. Notice the past tense. He has been pleased to, he has decided to. Indeed, the inheritance has now been confirmed and guaranteed by irrevocable covenant (see Gal 3:15–29). Heirs to an eternal kingdom, why should we be afraid to give away a few temporary possessions? Indeed how are we not afraid to keep hold of too many of them and so fail to turn them into eternal treasure (see Luke 12:33). Pray God we do not fall into the mistake of the Pharisee of Luke 11:39–41: externally and ritually religious, but in practice mean and grasping.
And now in Luke 12:35–48 Christ turns to another consideration that will put material possessions into their proper perspective for a disciple: the second coming of the Lord. The lesson is twofold. First (see Luke 12:35–40), we must not allow our attitude to material goods to render us unprepared for the Lord's coming. Second, (see Luke 12:41–48), when he comes, all his servants will be accountable to him for what [p 257] they have done with their material possessions and with all other gifts and trusts committed to them.
First, then, we do not know the time of Christ's second coming; but whenever it may be, he expects to find us ready to serve him. His expectation is reasonable. To borrow the language of his parables and similes, if we expect God to be ready to answer us when we knock on his door (see Luke 11:9), it is only right that we should be ready and prepared for whatever Christ wants us to do when he comes and knocks on our door (see Luke 12:36). One danger with material goods is that we get so preoccupied with them that we forget the Lord, have little time for spiritual fellowship with him now or for his service. In that case, if he were suddenly to come, how do we suppose that we should instantaneously be found prepared to be granted that degree of intimate and personal fellowship which he promises to his faithful servants (see Luke 12:37)? Moreover daily life with its practical business of work, food and clothes, is meant, as we have just seen, as a training ground where we learn to put into practice the rules of God's kingdom. If like worldly men (see Luke 12:30) we have used life simply to lay up treasures for ourselves on earth; if like the Pharisees of Luke 11:48 we have made little attempt to put the love and justice of God into practice in daily living; how could we suppose that when the Lord comes we shall suddenly find ourselves ready actively to reign with him (see 2 Tim 2:12) and to practise and enforce love and justice as responsible executives in his kingdom?
The second lesson is brought home to us by the analogy of a steward in a large household who has been entrusted with his lord's goods to use them in his lord's absence for the good of his fellow-servants. To understand and apply the analogy correctly, we ought first to ask the question which the first lesson prompted in Peter's mind: 'Lord, are you addressing this parable to us (that is, to your truly converted, believing disciples) or to everyone else (including unregenerate, non-Christian people) as well?' (Luke 12:41). The answer that the rest of the New Testament would give to this question would surely be that while true disciples of Christ are [p 258] stewards of special spiritual gifts (see 1 Cor 4:1–5; Titus 1:7; 1 Pet 4:10–11), when it comes to material goods and natural gifts no man is an absolute owner of these things: all men are merely stewards. We brought nothing into this world and, like the foolish farmer (see Luke 12:20), when we go we shall take nothing out. Goods and natural gifts are temporarily entrusted to men by God, so that they can use them for the good of their fellow-men.
The true believer in Christ will demonstrate that he is such by being a faithful steward; and when Christ returns, he will be rewarded for his faithfulness in the things of this life, by being put in charge of unimaginably larger responsibilities (see Luke 12:42–44). If, however, a man acts as an unfaithful steward and is false to his trust, uses his material goods and natural gifts to indulge himself, cheats his fellow-men, oppresses the poor, or persecutes the true servants of God like the Pharisees and lawyers of Luke 11:47–51, then his unfaithfulness as a steward shows him to be an unbeliever. When Christ returns he will pronounce the man an unbeliever and deal with him accordingly (see Luke 12:45–46).38 There are, it is true, degrees of faithfulness and unfaithfulness, and the best of believers would freely admit that he is an unprofitable servant (see Luke 17:10). But at Luke 12:45–46 our Lord is describing an extreme and clear case. Let a man profess what he will: if he constantly and consistently behaves in an unchristian way, he is not a true believer (see Eph 5:5; 1 John 3:10), and the second coming of Christ will expose him for what he is. Let us therefore make sure that at the coming of the Lord we qualify both for the blessing (see Luke 12:37–38) and for the reward (see Luke 12:44) of the genuine servant of Christ.
Mention of the punishment which shall be meted out to the unbeliever at the second coming leads our Lord finally to state two principles on which his judgment will proceed. First, the more knowledge of the Lord's will there was, the more severe shall be the [p 259] punishment of the man who failed to do it (see Luke 12:47–48). Secondly, the more a man has been entrusted with, the greater will be his responsibility (see Luke 12:48).
iii. Provoking the opposition (Luke 12:49–53)
At the beginning of the present movement we found Christ refusing to be 'a judge and divider' over men (Luke 12:14) during his time on earth. At Luke 12:41–48 he has been pointing out that at his second coming he will most certainly act as judge and divider over all men. Now in this final section of the movement he indicates that there is a sense in which he is already in this present age the supreme divider of men: contrary to popular opinion he has not come to bring peace on the earth, but fire and division (see Luke 12:49, 51).
This statement, like all others, must be read in its context. It is not meant to contradict in advance the later statement of the New Testament: 'and he came and preached peace to you who were far off, and peace to those who were near' (Eph 2:17). But men are sinful and under the power of Satan. To enter into peace with God, they must be roused out of their complacency, repent, believe and be saved. Even to attempt to alert men to their true condition will provoke both human and satanic opposition as we have already seen at Luke 11:15 and at Luke 11:53–54, and as we shall see again at Luke 13:14–17. And since all will not repent, nor desire to be saved, division must come, and so must its temporal and eternal consequences. Christ was not playing at the redemption of mankind; preaching for him was not a game. He had not come to tell people that it did not matter what they believed, that good or evil were all one, both now and eternally, whether they believed the gospel or not, whether they accepted the Saviour or rejected him. He had come to bring, and to force, division. Decision must be made: for Christ or against him (see Luke 11:23), for God or the devil (see Luke 11:15–20), for salvation or perdition, for heaven or hell. And if decision brought division even within the family, then it must be (see Luke 12:52–53).
For the past two years or more he had been preaching to his generation and sooner or later the time must come for forcing the [p 260] division. In one sense our Lord was impatient for that time to come: 'I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!' (Luke 12:49 NIV). And yet the consequences of Israel's decision would be so serious that in God's great mercy and to Christ's infinite cost Israel would not be forced to a final decision about Jesus until they had been presented with the full evidence of his baptism: his sufferings, death, burial and resurrection (see Luke 12:50). Certainly one part of the purpose of his coming was 'to cleanse his threshing-floor' (see Luke 3:17); but in his divine compassion he would not 'burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire' until by his own suffering of the wrath of God he had made it possible for all who would to be rescued from that fire.
4. Assessing time and the times correctly (Luke 12:54–13:21)
i. The people and signs (Luke 12:54–59)
The theme of the judgment which has been so prominent in the earlier movements of this stage continues unabated into this final movement. Here its inherent solemnity is given an added urgency by considerations of time, of the shortness of the interval that separates the present moment from imminent temporal and eternal judgments, and of the length of the sentences that the High Court will impose. The lessons taught in this final movement will naturally be those which our Lord taught his contemporaries in their special historical situation; but the principles underlying these lessons are relevant still.
The first lesson was that judgment was imminent; and Christ rebuked the people's hypocrisy in pretending that they could not see it was so. They could interpret nature's physical signs of approaching storm or scorching heat. How could they not read the signs of the moral and spiritual storm that was blowing up around them (see Luke 12:54–56)?
Surely, to start with, they could sense the growing animosity against him of some of the leading scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees. In a nation that had a long record of persecuting its [p 261] prophets, what did that animosity portend? The charges that they had already brought against him were no trifles: some had already gone so far as to accuse him of being in league with Satan (see Luke 11:15). The charge was absurd; but it showed their determination to deny that he was of God. Soon that must mean a religious trial with its foregone conclusion: a verdict of blasphemy and a sentence of death. Why could the people not see it?
And when the authorities eventually got their way and had him executed, what would that mean? As surely as a south wind would be followed by scorching heat, so surely would the judicial murder of the Lord's Anointed (see Luke 4:18) be followed by the wrath of God upon Israel. Both morality and history must warn the people that it was inevitable. Israel's rejection and persecution of their prophets in centuries gone by had eventually been followed by God's judgment in the form of the exile. Christ was greater than Solomon and Jonah and all the prophets. He was in fact the coming one of whom the prophets had spoken (see Luke 4:17–21). The Pharisees and lawyers were already vigorously opposing his claim. If they carried their opposition to the point of executing him, the case would pass out of their hands into the hands of the divine court; and the sentence which that court would impose on Israel would be long and severe indeed (see Luke 12:57–58). Israel needed to do some very serious and very quick thinking; to see how empty their case against him was and how strong God's case was against their sins; and to come to terms with Jesus before it was too late.
We, of course, know what happened. Israel officially persisted in their opposition and within a comparatively few months condemned Jesus to death. He neither resisted nor retaliated but 'committed himself to the one who judges righteously' (1 Pet 2:23). The judge declared in favour of Jesus by raising him from the dead and sending forth the Holy Spirit in his name (see John 16:8–11; Acts 2:36). Israel was then given space to repent; but when the nation as a nation refused to repent, 'wrath came upon them to the uttermost' (1 Thess 2:16). Israel was scattered among the Gentiles and Jerusalem was given over to the Gentiles to be trodden down until [p 262] the times of the Gentiles should be fulfilled (see Luke 21:24). It would take Israel a long time to pay the last farthing.39
Israel's national experience of God's temporal judgments, however, is only part of the story. There still remains the case between every individual Jew and Christ, and the possibility of that case one day entering the supreme and final court and receiving an eternal sentence. Immediately we begin to think in these terms, we must surely realize that not only Jews but we Gentiles as well are in the same position. Life is a journey soon to be over; and after death comes the judgment (see Heb 9:27). We all should do well to settle matters between ourselves and Christ before we reach the end of the road, so that our case never comes into that court.
Christ is not any man's legal opponent (the meaning of the Gk. word, antidikos, which lies behind the KJV and RV translation 'adversary' in Luke 12:58). Adversary in this sense is what the devil is said to be (see 1 Pet 5:8). Nor will Christ accuse anyone, Jew or Gentile, before the Father (see John 5:45) as the devil constantly does (see Rev 12:10). On the other hand Christ does witness to us that there is a case against us: our deeds are evil (see John 7:7); and he urges on us his salvation. If we dispute these things with him, or ignore him, and our case comes before the final judgment, he warns us that the verdict cannot be anything other than guilty, and the sentence anything other than eternal (see John 3:18–19, 36). He urges us therefore to judge our own case ourselves and to get it settled here in this life so that it never comes into the court of the final judgment.
Elsewhere in the New Testament he tells us simply and straightforwardly how this can be done: 'The one who hears my word and believes on him who sent me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed over from death into life' (John 5:24). The Greek of this statement is decisively clear. It does not simply [p 263] assert that the believer will not be condemned, though that of course is true. It asserts that his case will not even come into court, since it has already been settled, and the believer has already passed over from death into life (cf. Rom 8:1).
Now many people make no attempt to settle matters like this with Christ, because they do not realize it is possible to do so. Somehow or other they have got it into their minds that it is impossible to anticipate the verdict of the final judgment. They need to let Christ who will be the judge at that judgment (see John 5:22) assure them that it is possible.
Others see no urgent need to settle matters with Christ. They have not as yet discovered that their case is hopelessly bad, and that God has already declared it to be so (see Rom 2:1; 3:19–23). They drift on through life towards the final judgment under the comforting, but completely false, illusion that though they are not perfect, they are not bad enough to be damned. If they persist in such unrealism, damned is precisely what they will be. They urgently need to be shown what the real state of their case is. It is to them and people like them that Christ's next lessons are addressed.
ii. Lessons on repentance (Luke 13:1–9)
The first lesson here is on how we should interpret atrocities, such as Pilate committed on some Galileans (see Luke 13:1–2), and accidents, such as befell certain men in Siloam (see Luke 13:4). Believing as they did in God's providential government Christ's contemporaries, like many before and since, were apparently inclined to think that the victims of these atrocities and disasters must have been guilty of extraordinary sins which up to this point might have been kept secret, but which were now exposed by the special sufferings which God had allowed to come upon them as a punishment for those sins. Christ said their interpretation was wrong.
Modern humanists, noticing that atrocities and disasters often happen to good people while thoroughgoing rogues escape, conclude that the unfairness of it all proves their contention that there is no God. Their interpretation is wrong too. [p 264]
Some atrocities and disasters may be allowed by God to fall on certain people or nations as a temporal punishment for their particularly heinous sins. But not all atrocities and disasters are to be viewed as God's visitation of the victims' special sins. To deduce the right lesson from these happenings we must start off on a different tack altogether. We are all sinners. If we compare ourselves with other people, we shall notice real, and sometimes large, differences. They are differences in degree only, however. They do nothing to ameliorate the fact that we all come grievously short of God's requirements. We are all guilty and without excuse. We all stand under God's displeasure. Our lives are all forfeit (see Rom 1:18–20; 2:1; 3:19). The wonder is not that some people are allowed to suffer atrocities and accidents, but that anyone is spared. Certain it is, and Christ solemnly affirms it twice (see Luke 13:3, 5), that unless we repent, we shall all perish, not necessarily in some earthly accident or atrocity, but under the wrath of almighty God eternally. Moreover the fact that we have not already perished is not because we are in any way better than people who have been swept into eternity by some atrocity or accident. It is due to an altogether different cause, as the second lesson in this section will now make clear.
This second lesson (see Luke 13:6–9) is in the form of a parable—which tells of a fig tree whose owner came for three years in succession seeking fruit from it. Finding none he ordered it to be cut down. But the gardener pleaded for a stay of execution for one further year to give him one more chance to do what he could to induce the tree to bear fruit. If after that it still failed to bear fruit, the owner should then have it cut down. He could not be expected to wait more than one year more.
It may be uncertain how many details in this parable are meant to have allegorical significance; but three major lessons stand out clearly. Firstly, Christ was telling his contemporaries that if they did not produce fruit to God's satisfaction they could not be spared indefinitely. Nor, of course, can any other man in that condition.
Secondly, we may notice the difference between what Christ said here and what John the Baptist said in his day (see Luke 3:9). Using [p 265] the same figurative language the Baptist warned the people that the axe had already been laid at the root of the tree. It was waiting only for the order from the owner, and the gardener would pick it up and cut down all unsatisfactory trees. But by the time Christ spoke the present parable, the owner had already issued that order. He had waited three years (the time of Christ's earthly ministry?) for evidence of repentance, and finding no such fruit he had given orders for the fig tree to be cut down. And the tree would already have been cut down, if the gardener had not interceded with the owner and gained for the tree a temporary reprieve, so that he could make one last effort to prevail upon the tree to produce the required fruit. Christ's contemporaries, then, were living on borrowed time. So are we (see 2 Pet 3:9–12). We deceive ourselves if we think that the verdict of the final judgment against the unrepentant and unbelieving is as yet uncertain. The verdict has already gone out (see Rom 3:19). We must repent or we perish.
Thirdly, Christ's contemporaries did not owe their reprieve, any more than we owe ours, to their own goodness or merit, and certainly not to their moral superiority over other people whom they chose to think were exceptionally bad sinners. They owed it, if we may so understand the parable, to the intercessions of Christ. True, at Luke 12:49–53 we saw him divinely impatient to cast fire on the earth and to bring matters to their final issue. Here we see the other side of his character: that same Jesus in his divine compassion pleading for a stay of execution of the sentence that men might have an extended opportunity to repent and be saved.
iii. Triumph over the opposition (Luke 13:10–21)
We now enter the last section of Movement 4. Like the first two sections it too is concerned with the question of the shortness of time. But while the first two sections gravely warned us that men have very little time in which to repent and be saved, this last section joyfully puts the other side of the case: however long anyone may have been in bondage to Satan, he or she can be saved instantaneously. As far as God is concerned no one needs to wait so much as five [p 266] minutes. This lesson, however, Christ had to teach in the teeth of opposition from a ruler of a synagogue, who held that respect for God's law would require a certain woman's salvation to wait until the Sabbath day was over. We need to consider, therefore, the nature of the woman's condition, the nature of the miracle which Christ performed on her, and the true significance of the Sabbath.
We earlier saw [p . 231] that the incident of the dumb man and his healing at Luke 11:14–26 was not only a miracle but also a parable. It is so likewise, and very naturally, with the miraculous healing of the woman in our present story. Whatever name is given to her physical condition, it had certainly robbed her of a significant part of her human dignity: she was permanently bent over and unable to straighten herself up. From one point of view it was simply a physical condition. On the other hand, man's upright stance is more than a mere anatomical fact. Like the faculty of speech of which the demon had robbed the man in Luke 11:14–26, it is a something distinctively human, an appropriate physical expression of man's moral, spiritual and official dignity as God's viceroy, created in the image of God to have dominion over all other creatures (see Gen 1:26–27). By that same token the bent back is the typical physical posture of the burden-bearer and the slave under the yoke, and so becomes a natural and vivid metaphor for the effects of oppression and slavery. Moreover the woman's physical condition was not due simply to physical causes. Christ declared it to be a bondage induced by Satan, whose malevolence has always sought from the very beginning to rob man of his dominion and dignity and degrade him into a slave. Few men and women have bent backs physically: but morally and spiritually all men and women find themselves sooner or later bent and bowed by weaknesses of one kind or another from which they have not the strength to free themselves.
One day, however, so the story tells us, the woman shuffled her way to the synagogue to hear the Word of God, for it was the Sabbath. What word would the Bible have for her and her condition? Left to itself, uncomplicated by Pharisaic traditions of [p 267] interpretation, the Bible would have spoken clearly enough. This perhaps: 'The seventh day is a Sabbath unto the Lord your God: you shall not do any work . . . you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God brought you out from there by a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm' (Deut 5:14–15). Or even this: 'I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt so that you should not be their slaves; and I have broken the bars of your yoke and enabled you to walk upright and erect' (Lev 26:13). The ruler of the synagogue, however, was a Pharisee, and he would have told her that if ever God would be willing to set her free to stand up straight, it certainly would not be today: this was the Sabbath, and it would not be glorifying to God for her to be set free from bondage on the Sabbath. But before he had the chance to say anything, mighty arms stretched out and laid their hands on her, and another voice said, 'Woman, you are released from your weakness'; and immediately she stood erect and glorified God (Luke 13:12–13).
The ruler of the synagogue was indignant and tried to lecture the people on the wrong of coming to be healed on the Sabbath; but Christ exposed his hypocrisy and silenced him. He and his ilk were quite happy to release their oxen and asses from their stalls and lead them to watering on the Sabbath, on the grounds that it was a necessary act of mercy. Yet here was no mere animal but a human being; and not only a human being but a daughter of Abraham (see Luke 13:16), the friend of God, called like Abraham to walk before God (see Gen 17:1); and for eighteen years Satan had bent and bound her double, so that she could no longer hold her head high, lift up her eyes to heaven or look her fellow-men in the face, but only shuffle along in the most abject bondage. Was there mercy for animals, but not for her? Must legalistic religion be allowed, instead of releasing her, to bind on her already broken back burdens impossible to carry (see Luke 11:46)? Christ would have none of it, but demanded that the releasing of a human being from the bondage of Satan was a necessity that must not be delayed: indeed the release was fittingly performed on the Sabbath. [p 268]
At this the ruler of the synagogue and his co-religionists were covered with confusion, and the whole congregation was delighted at the glorious things which Christ was doing (see Luke 13:17). Christ had triumphed. True, the release and restoration of one unknown woman in an unnamed synagogue in Palestine was in one way a very small triumph. But from the tiny seed of that victory would grow a tree greater and more majestic by far than Nebuchadnezzar's (see Dan 4:10–22). Its ramifications would one day spread to the bounds of the universe, until creation herself would be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the sons of God, and all in heaven and earth would find security, satisfaction and delight in the magnificence of his dominion. His work on earth was obscure: few in the world had yet heard of him. But like leaven hidden in meal it would spread until there would be no place in heaven, earth or hell but would feel the force of his triumphant authority (see Luke 13:18–21).
Meanwhile the risen Christ has continued his fight against all perversions of God's gospel that would hold men in bondage, or try to recapture them after they have been set free. Hear him protest through the mouth of Peter: 'Why then do you tempt God by trying to put a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?' (Acts 15:10). Read what he writes by Paul's pen: 'For freedom did Christ set us free: stand fast, then, and do not be entangled again in a yoke of bondage' (Gal 5:1). May he make us his fellow-workers to 'open people's eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan unto God' (Acts 26:18), until man released from his dumbness and woman from her weakness reign in life to the glory of the Creator through Jesus Christ our Lord (see Rom 5:17).
Notes
33 The imperatives in the Greek are all present imperatives, indicating a repeated and not a once for all action.
34 We should be careful not to misinterpret 1 Cor 1:22–23 to the effect that there is something essentially unsatisfactory with our Lord's miracles as evidence. Cf. John 20:30–31; Acts 2:22; 14:8–11; 19:11–12.
35 This understands the Greek of Luke 11:41 as meaning: give away the contents, i.e. of the cup, as alms.
36 The flood and the exile are examples in Old Testament history of this kind of judgment.
37 On the other three occasions where the verb occurs in this Gospel, the idea of excess is clearly present as the RV recognizes: 'the fragments which remained over' (Luke 9:17); 'food enough and to spare' (Luke 15:17); 'of their superfluity' (Luke 21:4).
38 The Greek word apistos can mean either 'unfaithful' or 'unbeliever'. Its opposite, pistos, in the analogy of Luke 12:42, is rightly translated 'faithful' rather than 'believing'. But in Luke 12:46, where the application of the analogy is to the fore, apistos is surely intended to have the meaning 'unbeliever' as it does everywhere else in the NT.
39 It goes without saying that the fact that God used Gentiles to execute his temporal judgments on Israel, no more justifies their barbaric cruelties against Israel than in times past it justified Assyria's atrocities against Israel. The Gentiles shall yet be punished for their anti-Semitism. See Isa 10:5–15. [p 269]
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