And He was casting out a demon, and it was mute; when the demon had gone out, the mute man spoke; and the crowds were amazed. But some of them said, “He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons.” Others, to test Him, were demanding of Him a sign from heaven.
But He knew their thoughts and said to them, “Any kingdom divided against itself is laid waste; and a house divided against itself falls. If Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand? For you say that I cast out demons by Beelzebul. And if I by Beelzebul cast out demons, by whom do your sons cast them out? So they will be your judges. But if I cast out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.
Luke 11:14-20
We read Luke 11 earlier this week as a family, and I was struck by this particular passage as an illustration of a point we have seen several times over the past several weeks in our Wednesday night Bible study. Our study was on Bible difficulties, those verses and passages of Scripture which skeptics and Bible deniers like to point to as evidence that the Bible is merely a human book rather than divine in origin.
Over the course of a dozen or so weeks we examined some tricky passages like 1 Kings 22 and 2 Chronicles 18 in which the Lord is said to have sent a lying spirit into the mouths of the prophets of Ahab, Leviticus 11:20-21 which gives a description of some sort of winged, jumping insects, the book of Joshua with its record of the conquest of Canaan which some mistakenly call “genocide”, and the law found in Exodus 21:17, Leviticus 20:9 and Deuteronomy 21:18-21 where parents are commanded to stone to death their stubborn and rebellious sons. In every case we found reasonable explanations for the apparent difficulties and concluded that none of them constituted a legitimate objection to the truthfulness of the Bible.
What does that have to do with the account of the deliverance of the demon-possessed man in Luke 11? Let’s look at that passage more closely, and then I will explain the connection.
When Jesus healed that man, there were some people in the crowd who said that he cast out demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons. The name Beelzebul comes from Baal-zebub, who was the Canaanite god of Ekron during Old Testament times (2 Kings 1:2). The slight change in spelling may be due to a mispronunciation or it may have been an intentional slight (from Baal-zebub meaning “lord of the dwelling” to Baal-zebul which sounds like “lord of the dung”). Either way, it had become a popular name for Satan, the prince of the demons.
Jesus responded first by pointing out the foolishness of such an objection. Why would the king of the demons want to cast them out of a man? Presumably he would have sent the demons out to do exactly what they were doing: possessing, terrorizing, and destroying vulnerable men. Why then would he oppose their vile work? He wouldn’t. The very idea that Satan would deliver a man from bondage to a demon is ludicrous, for it implies that Satan’s kingdom is somehow at war with itself.
So on one hand, their objection to Jesus’ power over the demons was foolish, but on the other hand, it was an absolute refutation of their own claims. If they were right, and Jesus was casting out demons by Satan’s own power, then shouldn’t we assume that their own exorcists were operating by the same power? After all, the Jews did have some men who tried to cast out demons using ritual incantations, and apparently they were sometimes successful. By whose power were they performing their work?
Talk about laying the hammer down! Jesus wasn’t messing around with these guys. What they were saying was blasphemy, that Jesus was a tool of Satan (and worse, because in Mark’s account they said that he was possessed by Satan). But in reality, they were simply displaying their irrational hatred for God and for Jesus whom he had sent.
Now the only other alternative was that Jesus had cast out the demon by the power of God himself. This meant that the kingdom of God had come upon them – the king was standing in their midst! And there can be only one reasonable response to such a display of power and authority: to bow down and pay homage to the king. Yet this is the one thing the unbeliever refuses to do, and so he cannot help but cling to the objections either foolish or self-refuting, because to do anything else is to admit defeat and confess Christ Jesus as Lord. And this is exactly what Jesus means when he says in v.28, “blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.” Only those who will admit the truth, that Jesus is the Son of God, and submit to him as Lord will be blessed.
Much like those Jewish skeptics who would rather believe that Satan stood against himself than confess that Jesus is the Christ, the modern skeptic will believe God’s word is fatally flawed, even when his best arguments have been shown to be either foolish or self-refuting.
But Jesus rebuked their unbelief and so should we. It is not the objection of intelligence or reason or science but a sinful heart which refuses to submit to God in spite of the overwhelming evidence in favor of the truthfulness of his word. Faced with the implications of Jesus’ lordship and rightful authority, men would rather embrace the irrational and foolish. We must call them to repentance and faith, standing with absolute confidence on the authority of Scripture. There is nothing to fear from the objections of unbelieving men, and a blessing promised to all who believe and obey God’s word.