Luke 24:11 Commentary and Bible Study

You can't possibly read these Gospel accounts following the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ without realising that the disciples were very slow to understand what was happening. Those who had been with the Lord for between two and three years, those who had heard him speak, those who had had everything explained to them at close quarters, those who knew that he was the Son of God? They knew it; they believed it; they had proved it. If you had walked with him and followed him and lived with him, you would have known something of his majesty and his glory, and something of his character, his great warmth, his amazing personality and being – never a word of temper or ill feeling, never a word which was unworthy. Obviously you could not help but know that he was no mere man, that he was the Lord of glory. They knew that and they had come to believe in him. And yet when it comes to his crucifixion, his burial and his resurrection, they don't understand it, even though he has explained these things to them. Are we to suppose that these disciples were far less intelligent than the average person? That they are so slow on the uptake? Are we to suppose that there is some wilfulness in them, whereby they don't want to believe the things that he's saying? Well, we can't suppose that they are unintelligent men for the simple reason that once they are straightened out on these things they are used by God to steer the infant churches through the early days – the persecution of the Jews, the persecution of the Roman Empire – and they prove to be men of great strength. Some of them are going to be penmen, those who will write down the very word of God in the Gospels, and although the words that they actually write are going to be God's words, inspired words, yet when God calls them to write, he inspired them so that their own literary styles were used. So we can see that they' are men of capability and intelligence. Luke uses a strong term for the response of the men to the women’s report: ‘their words seemed to them as idle tales.’ In other words, they actually thought that the women were rather hysterical, and were just speaking the first thing that came into their heads and imagining things. It was not until the Lord Jesus began to appear to them personally and explained these things that they believed. They knew these women well; they had all travelled down from Galilee together with the Lord. But so strong was their prejudice against any possibility of resurrection that they discounted it immediately, and chose instead to malign the testimony of the women. No one could say that they were predisposed to believe in anything fanciful, and it was only with great weight of evidence that they came to believe it and preach it. As Hendriksen comments, ‘What makes the Easter story so convincing is that the disciples of Jesus did not at all expect Jesus to arise from the grave … Yet, after a while, these very men … are proclaiming the startling news to all and sundry and are willing to face any opposition they may encounter.’The disciples were seriously at fault in this unbelief, for they had the Lord’s own words to convince them even before the women related these things. No wonder they are sternly rebuked for their failure to believe (Mark 16:14; Luke 24:25; John 20:27). Yet Christ knows the obstacles in our hearts to faith, and how to remove it (Luke 24:45).