Luke 16:17 Commentary and Bible Study

This is similar to Christ’s saying in Matthew 5:18. The Pharisees are up against the word of God. There is absolutely no hope that they will prevail against it, but that is what they are trying to do. They have heard Christ preaching to them the word of God, and they have rejected it. They have not just rejected it, but hit back at it. They will accept no message which tells them that they are sinners, that threatens their high regard for themselves. They will fight back with the weapon of self-righteousness, and dismiss the Scripture’s charges against them. That is something they can only succeed in doing for a time. They can only do it, while they are able to take advantage of God’s delayed judgment and of the darkness of this world that helps them conceal what they are. God has given a licence to this world which allows the darkness to continue for a time. But eventually not a single word, not a single letter of a word, not a single stroke of a per in forming a letter will be changed. The word of God as it has been given and preserved in this world will come to pass, and God will cause it to be fulfilled. Can heaven and earth pass away? Not in man’s estimation, for he trusts in the stability of the physical world more than in anything else. But it is prophesied that the heavens and earth will pass a way, and when that happens, man’s confusion will reach no bounds. There is something more certain, more reliable, more unchangeable than the mountains and the seas and the earth and the heavens, and that is the word of God. We ought to count on the stability of God’s word and nothing else, for everything else will fail. This is Christ’s promise to us, and it is the assurance that he lived by as a man on earth. In context, it is a warning to the Pharisees who ought to have given up their fight against the preaching of Christ in an instant.