Luke 12:56 Commentary and Bible Study

‘Ye hypocrites’, he says to them. That charge seems strange. We might charge the people with ignorance – they fail to see the significance of the one who is among them; we might charge them with foolishness – they fail to take advantage of his teaching and his sign miracles; but why hypocrisy? The hypocrisy relates to their ability to do one thing, and their inability to do something else. We would not normally charge a person with hypocrisy who could ride a bicycle, but who was unable, for instance, to play the piano. Hypocrisy suggests there is deceit involved. How is that so? Because the ability which they have so clearly demonstrated with regard to the weather, is being suppressed when it comes to Christ and his ministry. It is the suppression of, or the failure to make use of, that ability when it comes to his message to the nation which makes them to blame. Unbelief is after all a matter of the will. That is why we are to blame for it. It is not because we lack information from God, but because we do not want to receive that information. The people rejected the gospel because they could see well enough that they would have to give up too much in order to become the disciples of Christ. They would have to turn from their lives of sin, from their pursuit of their lusts, and from their refusal to have God rule over them, and they would have to submit entirely to Christ’s Lordship. But that, they would not do. That is why they were hypocrites. It was well within their means to study the Scripture and to listen to Jesus’ teaching and match up the prophecies with what they were seeing before their eyes, but they refused to do it. Their interest in him went so far and no further.‘How is it?’, he asks them. Of course the Lord knows ‘how it is’, but he is drawing attention to something in their behaviour which they are unwilling to face up to, which need to think about, and which reveals their true blameworthiness. In spite of the response of the nation, the people fell far short of true faith in Christ. They were a privileged people, because they had been born into that very time chosen by God in which he would visit the earth in the person of his Son. ‘He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. ¹¹ He came unto his own, and his own received him not’ (John 1:10-11), and it was entirely their responsibility that they knew him not. How enthusiastically the Jews should have welcomed the Messiah, but they wanted a different sort of Messiah: a Messiah who would boost their national pride, and accept them as they were, without being transformed by the new birth.