Luke 11:19 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Luke 11:19

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A further argument is added to show how preposterous this suggestion was. This is about the bias of unbelief, its willingness to accept arguments in its favour, that it would not accept in any other case. Christ’s opponents were willing to charge him with the most damaging accusation they could think of, because they thought it furthered their cause. The problem here is crass dishonesty, because there is every reason to think that they scarcely believed their own words. They used words as weapons without caring whether they were accurate at all. They would bring Christ down by fair means or foul. How essential is integrity of argumentation. If we employ a lie to advance our position, we become the servant of dishonesty and it will not doubt bite us also. God’s people can never make use of a lie to promote the gospel. There are many things we cannot explain, and many things we do not understand, and we should acknowledge that, but to use arguments that we know are false in order to promote the truth is insanity. These enemies of the Lord claimed to be on the side of truth, but that had abandoned truth in order to defend truth. That must never be done.Christ charges his opponents with gross inconsistency, because they would never have admitted that their ‘sons’ were casting out demons by the power of Beelzebub. The Book of Acts tells us that exorcisms were carried out by the Jews (Acts 19:13). Christ calls them ‘your sons’ not because they were literally sons, but they were from their ranks, trained in their traditions, those who were won to their cause and faithful to their teaching. Gill tells us that their sons claimed to cast out demons in the name of the patriarchs (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, l. 8. c. 2). No doubt they did so fraudulently. Christ however does not address that issue, but focuses on only one thing – the bias of their judgment evident in the accusation against him. In his case, he successfully cast out demons, and even his opponents could not deny this. The success of the Jews in doing this was highly questionable. Leaving aside the question of whether their sons, their disciples, actually succeeded in casting out demons, they claimed to be able to do so. What then was so different about what they claimed to do compared with what Christ was actually doing? It was an enormous condescension of Christ to compare himself with these phoney exorcists, but for the sake of correcting their false charge, and for the understanding of the crowds who heard this false charge, he is ready to make this comparison. Therefore they will be your judges. It is truncated argumentation, a neat way of pointing out their inconsistency. That inconsistency has produced a division within their own ranks. Let their sons be appointed as judges over Christ’s opponents, and let them be made assessors of the validity of this charge against him. They would have to say that it is unacceptable to charge him with evil, and to exonerate the sons, who are doing – or claiming to do – the very same thing. Of course their sons were likely to be as biased as their spiritual fathers, the Pharisees. Christ is not suggesting that this experiment be literally carried out – he is using ‘the words of the wise, and their dark sayings’ (Proverbs 1:6), but it would be a fair test nonetheless. If a fair judgment was made, the sons would have to agree that, where they only pretended to cast out demons and Christ undeniably did so, it was utterly unreasonable for the Jews to charge him with doing what they were not prepared to charge their own protégés with doing.

Application

Unbelief is so often inconsistent. This is not just a matter to not knowing the truth. Honesty would require in that situation, that no argument is presented. But unbelief insists on saying something. It is prepared to use arguments against faith in God, which it would reject when applied to itself. For instance the unbeliever claims there is little historical evidence for the truth of Christianity, and when you hold up the Bible and say, ‘What about this?’, you are told, ‘That doesn’t count; that is a myth; that is a fairy tale.’ And yet he is willing to accept accounts of ancient historical figures on very much less evidence. They claim that miracles are not just unlikely, but impossible, and yet they are eager to tells us that science proceeds on the basis that it constantly re-examines its own conclusions, and cannot arrive at certainty. They claim there is no absolute standard of right conduct, and yet they will condemn a total stranger who harms them on the basis that he knows as well as they do what standard he should live by. How do we deal with such an attack on the faith? Among other things, we show the inconsistency in it. Unbelief lives with its own inconsistencies relatively comfortably, but when they are pointed out, it is deeply uncomfortable. It hopes they would not have been spotted.

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Luke 11:19 Commentary and Bible Study