Mark 3:20

CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES

Mar_3:21. His friends.—His kinsfolk or near relatives. Beside Himself.—In an ecstatic state. They thought He was carried away by His zeal and devotion beyond all self-control.

Mar_3:22. Beelzebub.—Beelzebul, meaning either “lord of the dwelling,” or “lord of filth”—the title of a heathen deity, to whom the Jews ascribed lordship over evil spirits. “He hath Beelzebul” is equivalent to saying, “He is possessed not merely by a demon, but by Satan himself.”

Mar_3:27. Spoil his goods.—Snatch and carry off his vessels, or household treasures.

Mar_3:29. Hath never forgiveness.—Hath not forgiveness unto the age or æon of Messiah’s reign. In danger of eternal damnation.—In the grip of an age-long sin. None of the agencies employed by God for the conversion of sinners up to the time of the Second Advent are powerful enough to rescue such an one from the awful state to which he has reduced himself by his own deliberate choice. Here the Saviour leaves the matter, without revealing anything as to the man’s ultimate fate or the ministries of the future world.

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Mar_3:20-30

(PARALLELS: Mat_12:22-37; Luk_11:14-23.)

Christ misunderstood and misrepresented.—The paragraph begins properly with the last clause of Mar_3:19 : “And they went into an house” [see R. V. for variations in reading and rendering]. Robert Stephens, who first divided the Bible into verses, began a verse with these words, as was right; but Beza set the fashion of adding them to Mar_3:19, which was unfortunately followed by the A.V. translators. They really begin the account of Christ’s fourth sojourn in Capernaum, some weeks after His selection of the apostles.

I. Misunderstood by friends.—They judged Him, observes Dean Chadwick, as men who profess to have learned the lesson of His life still judge, too often, all whose devotion carries them beyond the boundaries of convention and convenience. There is a curious betrayal of the popular estimate of this world and the world to come, in the honour paid to those who cast away life in battle, or sap it slowly in pursuit of wealth or honour, and the contempt expressed for those who compromise it on behalf of souls, for which Christ died. Whenever by exertion in any unselfish cause health is broken, or fortune impaired, or influential friends estranged, the follower of Christ is called an enthusiast, a fanatic, or a man of unsettled mind. He may take comfort from the thought that his Master was said to be beside Himself—and that, too, by His own friends—when zeal for God and love for souls kept Him too busy to think of bodily sustenance and rest.

II. Misrepresented by foes.—The scribes are quick to turn to their own advantage the admission of Christ’s friends that He is “beside Himself.” Unable to deny the reality, or the miraculous nature, of the cures He wrought (see Mat_12:22), they insidiously suggest that while His own reason is dislodged Satan himself is in possession of its throne. As much as to say: “He is an incarnation of the Evil One, and by Satan’s own power He expels the subordinate demons.” No doubt that was possible. If Satan, at that particular period, was permitted to exercise, through his emissaries, a certain power over men’s bodies and minds, it is reasonable to suppose that he might still retain authority over those emissaries, and be able to recall them at any time he chose. The only question is, Would he be likely to do so? Would such a policy serve his purpose? To the elucidation of this problem Christ addresses Himself.

III. The scribes triumphantly confuted.—Whether the powers of darkness, presided over by Satan, be compared to a “kingdom,” from the wide extent of their influence, and the completeness of their organisation; or to a “house,” from the closeness of their intimacy, and the identity of their interests,—in either case division is fatal to them—subversive of their design, and destructive of their power. The kingdom is brought to desolation, the house falls to pieces, by the mutual jealousies and aggressions of their component members. Such would be the effect of Satan casting out Satan—of the chief of the devils co-operating with one who went about dispossessing and healing his victims. The conclusion was inevitable: that not Beelzebub, but God, was with Him who did these things; that the kingdom of Satan was being brought to nought, not by internal dissensions, but by external force—by the supervening of a stronger influence and more powerful Monarch.

IV. The true state of the case explained.—Still speaking under the veil of parable or allegory, Christ now draws a picture of a strong man living in the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. The illustration reminds us of the turbulent times of our own country a few centuries ago, when the knights and barons with their retainers, each in his stronghold, maintained an armed neutrality against all comers. But peace which is merely preserved by strength is liable at any moment to be disturbed and overthrown by greater strength. So here: the strong man is bound, his house invaded and plundered. In attempting to expound the inner meaning of this, it may be well to include the further details added in Luk_11:21; Luk_22:1. The “strong man armed” is Beelzebub or Satan: strong by natural endowments, a powerful spirit, who had already even dared to defy the Most High; strong also in “his armour wherein he trusted,” to enable him still to wage war, and after each defeat to reappear, if possible, stronger than before.

2. By “his armour” we may understand his agents, other wicked spirits, who, like himself, kept not their first estate; but, not being so strong and ambitious as he, naturally fell into a sort of dependence on him.

3. With the aid of these his active instruments Satan is enabled to “keep his palace,” i.e. to maintain his dominion over the souls and bodies of those unhappy men who have once been “taken captive by him at his will.” Every sinner may truly be said to be “possessed with a demon,” and sometimes with more than one, as Mary Magdalene (Luk_8:2) and the Gadarene (Mar_8:30). So some are possessed by many sins, “serving divers lusts and passions”—divers, as directed towards different objects, but all having a common source and parentage—all “of their father the devil,” and ever ready to “do the lusts of their father,” as well as to co-operate with and inflame each other.

4. And who is he who proves himself stronger than this strong man, able to bind him and spoil his house? Not one of the same kind, another passion, a stronger devil; but an antagonist in nature and principle, as well as in act. Such was He who spoke these words. His great mission was to “destroy the works of the devil”; and His nature was Divine (see Isa_49:24-25; Isa_63:5). Throughout His ministry Christ invariably acted as a Victor in His dealings with the demons: commanding them with authority; rebuking them; not suffering them to speak; permitting them, as an indulgence, to enter into the lower animals, and wreak their impotent spite on those who had no souls to be destroyed or saved. He also enabled His servants to do the same (Mar_3:15; Luk_10:17). And ever since, though Satan is still permitted to “go about seeking whom he may devour,” he has been restrained from exercising his power in the way of bodily possession; and with respect to the influence which he may still exert over the spiritual part of us, he finds that he has to deal with One stronger than himself—even with Him who, having grappled with and overcome him once for all upon the Cross, is ever ready to renew on behalf of every individual soul the battle that He then fought for the whole human race. By virtue of that victory we are now His “goods,” His lawful “spoil,” His purchased possession; and so long as we fight under His banner we are secure. Satan cannot lay a finger on the man who is alive to the responsibilities of his Christian calling, who is diligent in the use of the means of grace, who lives in the atmosphere of prayer, who “takes unto him the whole armour of God,” “and fights the good fight of faith.”

V. The scribes solemnly warned.—Christ has submitted His claim, in an argument full of sweet reasonableness and touching forbearance, to the better judgment of His foes; but now He declares, with solemn emphasis, as being in possession of the secrets of the Almighty, the principles upon which the world of spirits is administered. He asserts that sin has its scale, its climax. There are sins of instinct, and of passion, and of ignorance. Where there is little light to be guided by, there is little light to sin against. The next step is where there is deliberation before the sin is committed. The last and worse stage is where not only the deliberate judgment is gone against, but the attempt is made to deny the principle of judgment in the soul itself. The hands of the watch move backwards; the lamp flags with the very abundance of oil; the man’s soul dies. Over against the words, “Repent! Be ye forgiven!” stand these—“Irreclaimable! Unforgivable!” These scribes had now wrought themselves up to such a pitch of hatred against Jesus, that they were standing, as it were, on the very brink of the precipice; and in the extremity of His love the Saviour utters this tremendous warning, to keep them from taking the fatal plunge. [In the Homilies that follow, this difficult subject is discussed from various points of view.]

The sin against the Holy Ghost.—

I. The dignity of the person of the Holy Ghost.—This is implied in the assertion, that whoso speaketh against the Son of Man may be forgiven, while he that speaketh against the Holy Ghost cannot. The power of Deity was inherent in the Incarnate Saviour; and He told the Jews expressly that it was by the Spirit of God that He cast out devils. Had He been a created Intelligence, would our Saviour have spoken as He does in the text? Had the Holy Spirit been inferior, in essential dignity, to the Father and the Son, would He have been joined with them in one name in the sacred form of Christian baptism? And would the new creation, the spiritual resurrection in the sinner’s soul, have been ascribed to His sacred agency?

II. The nature and design of the Spirit’s influence.—The Pharisees had sufficient light to remove their errors; and they had conviction enough to lead to a change of heart; but unhappily they resisted both light and conviction: pride and sensuality combined to close their eyes, and led them to spurn the offered grace of the Holy Ghost. Their dreadful sin lay in the act of not being convinced, when a heavenly influence was offered them, and in the blasphemy of attributing the works of Christ to diabolical agency.

III. The precise nature, and the accompanying evidences of the sin against the Holy Ghost.—Some have imagined that the words of blasphemy to which our Saviour refers constitute the essence of the unpardonable sin. But words, considered abstractedly, possess no moral quality whatsoever: it is only as symbols or indices of the mind that our expressions are criminal or otherwise. Again—It has been supposed that the sin against the Holy Ghost was confined to the period of our Saviour’s miracles; and that when the direct evidence arising from these was withdrawn, this sin could no longer be committed. The reverse, however, of this would rather appear to be the case: for our Lord does not tell the Pharisees that they were already involved in the guilt and doom attaching to the commission of the unpardonable sin: He rather cautions them to beware of plunging themselves into so dreadful a situation. In order, then, to guide us in endeavouring to ascertain in what cases the sin against the Holy Ghost may have been committed, we may lay down the two following positions: first, that the sin itself is a wilful resistance offered to the Spirit’s invitations and influence; and, secondly, that its tendency is to shut up the soul in judicial hardness and final impenitence. Both these positions are recognised in Heb_6:4-6, a memorable passage, bearing, I apprehend, upon the subject.

1. The Spirit offers to draw men, but they will not follow Him: He repeats His friendly solicitations again and again; but sensual passions or earthly affections absorb the accents of His monitory voice, until at length it dies away and is heard no more! It is not, I apprehend, because a man is too slothful, or too negligent, or even, in a certain sense, too earthly-minded, that he is in danger of fatally sinning against the Holy Ghost. It is because he hates the renovating power of that Divine Agent. It is because he rebels against the reign of grace and holiness in the heart. It is because he cannot endure the unrivalled supremacy of a spiritual principle bearing down the carnal propensities of the soul, and bringing into subjection every thought to the obedience of Christ.

2. I now go on to remark on that judicial hardness and final impenitence, the latter of which invariably, and the former with few if any exceptions, follows the commission of it. There is only one way in which a sinner can effectually close the avenues of reconciliation against himself, and secure his place beforehand in the regions of eternal woe: that way is by putting himself out of the reach of repentance—by resisting the motions of the Spirit, till they are finally withdrawn—by tampering with conscience, till her energies are paralysed, and he sinks, under a load of unpardoned guilt, into a profound lethargy.

Conclusion.—

1. Every sin is fatal in its tendency. If you are grasping the wages of unrighteousness—if you are the slaves of lust or intemperance—if the world, with its winning allurements, is enthroned in your hearts—or, in short, if you are neglecting the great salvation of Christ,—you are in danger of perishing everlastingly. Let your self-examination, then, be general, and not confined to one point.

2. This subject is replete with salutary caution. Many judicious persons have supposed that a degree of obscurity is permitted to hang around it, in order to put Christians upon their guard, and to lead them to beware of everything which might appear, in the slightest degree, to savour of the unpardonable sin.

3. Lastly, I speak to you in the language of encouragement. The darkest clouds are sometimes tinged with a bright and beautiful radiance. The contemplation of a sin which is pronounced to be unpardonable is certainly solemn, peculiarly solemn; but still, when taken in its proper connexions, it needs to alarm none but the wilful and determined transgressor. On the contrary, the subject forms an occasion of exhibiting, in the strongest light, the rich and abounding mercy of God. It shews us an Almighty Sovereign holding out a sceptre of peace, till the revolting rebel will no longer deign even to cast a look upon it. It discloses to us a Parent pleading with His undutiful children, till His voice dies away in the distance of their determined and fatal wanderings. What inexpressible consolation, then, the subject, rightly understood, affords to every anxious inquirer after mercy!—Wm. Knight.

Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost.—I. What the sin or blasphemy against the Holy Ghost means, and wherein precisely it consists.—I said sin or blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, because some call it the sin against the Holy Ghost, though Scripture itself never calls it anything else but blasphemy, which is worth the observing. It lies in words, is committed by speaking, and particularly by evil-speaking, by reviling and defaming the Holy Spirit of God. There may be, and there have been, several offences committed against the Holy Ghost which yet do not amount to the blasphemy against Him specified in the text. There is such a thing as grieving the Holy Spirit, and quenching the Spirit, when men refuse to hearken to His counsels, to follow His motions, or to obey His calls. But this is not blaspheming Him. There is also what St. Stephen calls resisting the Holy Ghost, which is opposing Him with a high hand and rebelling against Him, and is a very heinous sin; and yet neither is that the same with blaspheming and slandering Him, which is what those Pharisees were guilty of. Ananias and Sapphira grievously affronted the Holy Ghost in telling Him a lie, either presuming upon His ignorance as not knowing it, or upon His patience as if He should have connived at it. But yet that was not so bad as what the Pharisees did in ascribing His works to the devil. The malicious telling a lie of Him, to defame and slander Him, was a more heinous offence than the telling a lie to Him under a weak and foolish persuasion. There is also another way of affronting the Holy Ghost, by vilifying His operations, which yet comes not up to the sin of the text. Upon the day of Pentecost, when the disciples, full of the Holy Ghost, began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance, there were some standing by who mocking said, “These men are full of new wine,” vilifying the operations of the Spirit as the effects of drunkenness. But the men who said it, said it perhaps wantonly or ignorantly, rather than spitefully or maliciously. But the Pharisees who are charged with being guilty of blaspheming the Holy Ghost, they very well knew that what they had seen done could not be accounted for in a natural way; and yet such was their spleen and rage against the gospel, that they chose rather to impute the miracles of our Lord to the devil than to acknowledge the Divine hand, which was so visible in them that they themselves could not but see it, had they been at all disposed to it. I may here also mention Simon Magus as a person who very highly affronted the Holy Ghost, when he offered money for the purchasing His miraculous gifts. But neither was that any such direct blasphemy against the Holy Ghost as what the text mentions; for he had some respect and veneration for the miracles he saw wrought and for the author of them, and was very far from imputing them to the assistance of the devil. The blasphemy against the Holy Ghost was something worse still than anything I have yet mentioned: it was defaming the Holy Spirit of God, and God Himself, under the execrable name of Beelzebub; it was reviling, and that knowingly and desperately, the Divine works as diabolical operations.

II. The heinousness of that sin.—It was a most wicked and impudent lie and slander upon the Holy Spirit, and was flying, as it were, in the face of God. One would think, when God Himself interposes, giving the Divine signal in plain uncontested miracles, that it might become all men to be mute, and to lay aside their otherwise unconquerable rancour and prejudice. But the Pharisees were so resolute and so outrageous in reviling everything that gave any countenance to Christ and His gospel, that they would not spare even God Himself, but called Him Beelzebub, spitefully defaming His most Divine works as being nothing else but diabolical impostures. They saw the miracles of our Blessed Lord, and were very sensible that they were real and true miracles: they knew also that they were wrought in direct opposition to the devil and his kingdom, having all the fair appearances possible of being Divine: nor would they have scrupled to have received them as Divine, had they been wrought by any one else excepting Christ or His disciples. But such was their envenomed hatred and inveteracy against Him and His, that, at all adventures, contrary to all candour or equity, and in contradiction to reason and common sense, they resolved to say, however scarce to believe (for they hardly could be so stupid), that He was in league with the devil, and that all His mighty works which He wrought in the name of God were the works only of Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. There could not be a more insolent slander, or a more provoking outrage against the Divine Majesty, than this. It was sacrificing the honour of Almighty God, and both the present and future happines of men, to their own private humours and party passions; being resolved to take up with any wretched cavil, any improbable and self-contradictory lies and slanders against God, rather than permit the honest and well-meaning people to believe in Christ Jesus upon the brightest evidence of His miracles.

III. Whether any sins committed at this day are the same thing with it, or which of them come the nearest to it.—

1. For the sake of the overtender and scrupulous consciences, I would observe, that roving, and which some call blasphemous thoughts, which rise up accidentally, and as accidentally go off again, are nothing akin to the sin which I have been speaking of, which consisted in premeditated lies and slanders against God, formed with design to obstruct or darken the evidences of the true religion, and to prevent others from looking into them or being convinced by them.

2. Even the atheists or infidels of these times can scarce come up to the same degree of guilt with the Pharisees of old, because they have not seen the miracles of Christ with their own eyes. Rational and historical evidence may be as convincing as the other, when duly considered; but as it strikes not upon the senses, it does not awaken the attention, and alarm every passion of the soul, in such a degree as the other does. For which reason the unbelievers of our times, though abandoned and profligate men, are not altogether so blamable in the opposition they make to Christianity as the unbelievers of old time were. Nevertheless, it must be said, that the obstinate rejecting the miracles of our Lord and of His disciples (which have been so fully attested), and much more the ridiculing and bantering them, and the endeavouring to run them down by lies and slander, is a very high and heinous crime, as well as horrid blasphemy; especially if committed in a Christian country, and in a knowing age, and where men have all desirable opportunities of learning the truth, as well as the strongest motives offered for submitting to it.—Archdeacon Waterland.

Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost.—I. The blasphemy of speaking against the Holy Ghost appears to have been the sin which those scribes and Pharisees committed; for St. Mark expressly tells us that our Lord pronounced these words, “because they said, He hath an unclean spirit”; and He Himself declared (Mat_12:28) that He had “cast out the devil by the Spirit of God,” i.e. by the Holy Ghost; so that if He exercised the power of the Holy Ghost in this miracle which He wrought on the blind and dumb man, the scribes and the Pharisees, who spake against this miracle, by ascribing it to an unclean spirit, or to the prince of the devils, did most certainly blaspheme or speak against the Holy Ghost.

1. It was a wilful and presumptuous sin; for though those scribes and Pharisees had not seen the miracle wrought by our Blessed Lord, yet they allowed and acknowledged it to have been wrought by Him, and not withstanding this they perversely ascribed it to the power of Beelzebub.

2. It was committed against God Himself, whether we consider the Holy Ghost as one person in the Divine Trinity, or even if we consider the Spirit of God as that whereby God the Father acted in such wonderful operations (Mat_12:28).

3. It consisted in despising the word of God, and rejecting His gracious message of peace and pardon to mankind: for this miracle was performed, and wrought in evidence of our Blessed Lord’s Divine mission, in proof that the doctrine which He taught was from God, and that He Himself was the Messias who was to appear amongst the Jews, and was to make an atonement for the sins of all such as believed in Him, and qualified themselves for pardon by faith and repentance.

II. Why, and in what sense, this sin hath never forgiveness.—

1. For the explaining of this aright let it be considered that our Saviour spake this to Jews, and therefore probably suited His expressions to their law, and to the opinions then prevailing among them. And we find that the law of Moses appointed sacrifices for legal defilements, and for sins of ignorance against God, and appointed sacrifices in some cases and penalties in others for wilful sins against men (Leviticus 4, 5, , 6); but for the greater sins against God, such as wilful and presumptuous ones, the sentence of death was pronounced by God against all offenders of this sort, and there was no sacrifice or other means by which the punishment incurred might be taken off or suspended (Num_15:30-31; Num_15:35; Lev_20:10). And this is the very thing which St. Paul means when he says to the Jews, that by Christ all that believe are justified from all things, from which they could not be justified by the law of Moses. Where he plainly asserts that under the Jewish law there were crimes which could not be atoned for and forgiven; and if not under the Jewish law, then not under natural religion, because the Jewish law had that and all its advantages included in it. As to the first sort of sins taken notice of by Moses in his body of laws, viz. those of ignorance committed against God, and those of wilfulness against men, when the sacrifices appointed in such cases are commanded to be offered by an offender, the usual phrase is, “The priest shall make an atonement for him, and it shall be forgiven him.” So that such sins might well be called pardonable ones, there being a method prescribed for the atonement of them. But as to the other sort, that of wilful and presumptuous sins against God, by which His word was despised, such sins were properly unpardonable ones, because the Jewish laws had provided no sacrifice by way of atonement for them. And that the unpardonableness of this heinous sort of sins against God depends upon their having no sacrifice appointed for them appears from Heb_10:28. Now, to bring these observations home to the case before us, the blaspheming or speaking against the Son of Man, or against the Holy Jesus, in His personal capacity, and as man only, might be forgiven to these scribes and Pharisees, because by the Jewish law a provision was made for its expiation. But the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, or the Spirit of God, when it was a presumptuous sin, as this of the scribes and Pharisees was, had no pardon under the Jewish law. God was reproached, and His word was despised, and therefore the soul that thus offended was to be cut off from among His people. Nor was there any pardon provided for it under the gospel dispensation, because, when they thus blasphemed the Holy Spirit of God, by which Christ wrought His miracles, the only means which could redeem the adversaries of the truth from the Divine vengeance was the merit of Christ’s death applied to them by faith; and that benefit they wholly excluded themselves from in the very act of their sinning, which consisted in their rejecting the evidence which the Spirit of God gave of Christ being the Messias and Saviour of mankind. This was, as things then stood with them, an unpardonable sin, either in this age, the age of the Jewish law, or in the age to come, that is, the age of the gospel. But were the gates of mercy for ever shut against these blasphemers of the Holy Ghost? Was the sentence here passed upon them unalterable and irreversible in all cases? No, surely: for, as Athanasius observes, “Our Blessed Lord does not say that it shall not be forgiven to him that blasphemeth and repenteth, but only to him that blasphemeth; and therefore He must have meant this of one that continued in a state of impenitence; for with God no sin is unpardonable.” If such blasphemers could repent of that their heinous sin, no doubt but they might be forgiven it under the Christian covenant: and who can say of any man that all means of repentance are cut off from him? Our Lord said in as strong words as these are, “Whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father”; and yet but a little while afterwards, when Peter denied Him before men three times, and in the most obstinate manner, Christ was so far from rejecting him, that upon his weeping bitterly and repenting he was continued even in his apostleship, and was ever after one of the leaders in that blessed work of propagating the Christian faith. And it is highly probable that some of the three thousand whom St. Peter at his first preaching converted to the Christian faith had thus blasphemed the Holy Ghost in our Saviour’s days; for he describes them as those who “knew the miracles and signs” which God wrought by His Son, and notwithstanding this “with wicked hands had crucified Him.” And yet he calls upon them to “repent and be baptised for the remission of their sins,” and even encourages them to hope that upon so doing they “should receive that Holy Ghost” whom they had so often blasphemed in our Saviour’s miracles. We are certain, likewise, that among those who reviled Christ while He was hanging upon the Cross there were scribes who said, “He saved others, Himself He cannot save”; thereby acknowledging that He had wrought miracles in healing diseases, this perhaps before us in particular, and yet denying that He could “save Himself,” and consequently denying that what He wrought was by a Divine power. And yet we find that our Saviour prayed even for these scribes, saying, “Father, forgive them.” And surely that sin of theirs was not unpardonable upon their repentance, when Christ with His dying breath prayed for their forgiveness.—Bishop Zachary Pearce.

The sin against the Holy Ghost.—I shall never forget the chill that struck into my childish heart so often as I heard of this mysterious sin which carried men, and for aught I knew might have carried even me, beyond all reach of pardon; or the wonder and perplexity with which I used to ask myself why, if this sin were possible—if, as the words of our Lord seem to imply, it was probable even and by no means infrequent—it was not clearly defined, so that we might at least know, and know beyond all doubt, whether it had been committed or had not.

I. The two phrases “this [present] age” and “the coming age,” which our Lord here adopts, were perfectly familiar to the Jews, and had a clear and definite meaning on their lips. “This present age,” or “the age that now is,” was the age in which they lived, with all its apparatus of religious teaching and worship, the age of the Law and the Temple; while “the coming age,” or “the age to come,” was that happier time of which the advent of the long-promised Messiah was to be the sign and the commencement, although it could not fully come until Jesus the Christ ascended into heaven and poured out His Spirit from on high. So that what He really affirmed was, that there is a sin which is just as unpardonable under the Christian dispensation as it was under the Mosaic dispensation.

II. But what is this sin for which, at least in the present world, there is no forgiveness, or no provision for forgiveness? It is that wilful and invincible ignorance which refuses to be taught, that love of darkness which refuses to admit the light even when the sun is shining in the sky. They saw the light, and knew that it was light; and yet they loved darkness more than light, because their deeds were evil. Like the servants in the parable, they said, “This is the Heir,” only to add, “Let us kill Him, that the inheritance may be ours”—ours, and not His. Jesus “knowing their thoughts,” knowing too the desperate moral condition from which their thoughts sprang, simply warned them that it was desperate. They were deliberately sinning against light, against conscience, against all that was true and right and good; in a word, they were “speaking against the Holy Ghost,” the Spirit of all truth and goodness; and so long as they did that there was no hope for them.

III. So far, then, from giving us a dark mystical saying in which our thoughts are lost, our Lord simply states a moral truism, as we might have inferred from the casual and unemphatic manner of His speech. And the truism is that, since salvation is necessarily of the will, if men will not be saved, they cannot be saved; if they will not yield to the Divine Spirit when it moves and stirs within them, they cannot be redeemed and renewed by that gracious Spirit. Under whatever dispensation they live, they are self-excluded from the kingdom of heaven, by the one sin which is therefore called an “eternal” or “æonial” sin.

IV. That this unpardonable sin might be pardoned, that it was the sin, and not the men who committed it, which could never be forgiven, is clear: for many of the Pharisees who had long resisted the Spirit of God in Christ—and be it remembered that even Saul of Tarsus had long “kicked against the goads” which urged him toward the kingdom—afterwards repented of their sin, received His words, believed His works, and were welcomed into the fellowship of the Church. And even of those who never knew an earthly repentance, and of their doom in “the world to come,” this passage says absolutely nothing. It leaves us to our own conjectures, our own hopes; and neither approves nor condemns those who trust that in the world to come even those who leave this world impenitent may be taught “even against their will, and by means of a larger experience, the lessons they would not learn here; and so be brought to confess their guilt and folly, and be taken at last—so as by fire—into the arms” of the Divine Compassion and Love.

V. But where lies our danger of committing this sin against the Holy Ghost, our need therefore of the warning that, so long as we persist in this sin, pardon and salvation are impossible to us? We fall into this sin, must be my reply, whenever we consciously and wilfully resist the Spirit of truth and goodness—whenever, i.e., we see a truth and do not accept it, because it cuts our prejudices against the grain—whenever we know what is good, and yet do it not, because we love some evil way too well to leave it. To speak against any form of truth or any form of goodness which we inwardly recognise as good and true, or even suspect to be true and good, is “to speak against the Holy Ghost”: and, be it remembered, “deeds speak louder than words.” In our religious life we sin against the Holy Ghost if, as we read the gospel, we learn that in Christ Jesus we have precisely such a Saviour from all sin and uncleanness as we need—if, as we read, I say, conscience leaps up in approval of what we read and urges us to accept the offered salvation, and we refuse to listen because we are too engrossed with the outward affairs of life, or too attached to some of the forms of sin from which Christ would save us to part with them yet, we commit the sin which cannot be pardoned, and from which we cannot be saved so long as we cleave to it. Or, again, if after we have accepted, or professed to accept, His salvation, we catch glimpses of new and higher truths, and shut our eyes against them because we do not want to be at the trouble of revising and recasting our theological formulas—or if we are inwardly called to new and difficult duties, and turn away from them because they would impose a strain upon us or a sacrifice which we are not willing to bear,—in thus sinning against conscience we sin against the Holy Ghost. Nor is there any one respect in which we refuse to recognise truth as true or duty as binding upon us, whether in the formation of our political views or the discharge of our political functions, or in the principles on which we conduct our business, or even in the spirit in which we conduct our literary or scientific investigations, in which we do not or may not fall into this very sin. For the Holy Spirit is the Spirit from whom all true thoughts and all forms of goodness do proceed. To close our eyes to any truth, to neglect any duty, is not only to shut that truth out of our minds, and not only to lower and impoverish the tone of our life; it is also to grieve and resist that pure and gracious Spirit by whom we are made one with the Father and the Son; it is to impair the very organ by which truth comes to us, and to cripple the very faculty by which we are enabled for all dutiful and noble enterprise.

VI. There is still, however, one difficulty which must be met, and which I meet the more cheerfully because it will give an opportunity of noticing what is peculiar in St. Mark’s report of this great saying, viz. the phrase, “Whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of eternal sin.” The difficulty I am told is this: “When we read of a sin that cannot be forgiven whether in the Mosaic age or the Christian, we naturally assume our Lord to mean that it cannot be forgiven even when it is repented of; for no sin can be forgiven men until they repent; and our Lord is here drawing a distinction between one sin and all others. What, then, can this distinction be but this: that, though all other sins may be forgiven when men repent of them, this sin cannot be forgiven, let them repent of it how they may?” But we may ask those who urge this objection: How do you know that there are no sins which God will not forgive men even before they repent, and even though they should never repent, at least in this present life? We may suggest that our Lord is here drawing a distinction between outward overt transgressions which may be forgiven us on, or even perhaps apart from, repentance, and the inward sinful principle which can never be forgiven, but must be renounced and cast out. What is the sin which our Lord Himself compares, or contrasts, with the unpardonable sin? It is the sin of speaking against Himself, the gracious Son of Man. It is to deny that there was any manifestation of God in the God manifest in the flesh; in more modern phraseology, it is to deny that there is anything Divine in the Christian dispensation and faith. That, alas! is a sin only too common in our own days. There are intelligent and learned men only too many, and men whom, judged by any other standard, we should all pronounce to be honest and good men, who deny that God has ever given any immediate revelation of His will to mankind, who even doubt both whether any such revelation be possible and whether there be any God to make it. They may have been blinded by intellectual prepossessions or an inherited bent of mind: but are we to blame blind men because they do not see, and to accuse them of a wilful rejection of the light that shines from heaven? And if we do not, will God? The fault may be ours, rather than theirs. We may have turned the very light into a darkness. We may so have misrepresented our Master to them, that, instead of seeing Him as He is, they may have seen only that imperfect and misleading image of Him which we have made in our own likeness. If a man has honestly doubted, if he has followed the inward light and been true to the inward voice, and he should die before discovering that Christ is other and better than he knew, that He is indeed the true light of every man and the very brightness of the Father’s glory—if, that is, he should never repent in this world of his sin in speaking against and rejecting the Son of Man,—will his sin never be forgiven him, or will it not, rather, never be counted against him, however heavily he may reckon it against himself? On the other hand, if a man has not been honest in his doubts and denials—if, besides sinning against the God without him who sought to reveal Himself to him, he has also sinned against the God within him; if when reason or conscience said, That is true and you ought to believe it, or, That is duty and you ought to do it, he has refused to accept the truth, or do the duty which he felt to be clothed with Divine sanctions; if he has consciously shut out the light and refused to walk in it; if, in the language of our passage, he has added the sin against the Holy Ghost to the sin against the Son of Man, and if he should leave the world without repenting of his sin,—how can we deny that he has put himself outside the pale of forgiveness by making forgiveness impossible? What may become of him in that other, future, world we cannot say, we are not told, though we are still allowed to cherish the hope that new moral forces may be brought to bear upon him and may take effect upon him; all we can be sure of is that so long as he deliberately shuts out the light, the light cannot reach him—that so long as he refuses to part with his sin, he cannot be saved from his sin.—S. Cox, D.D.

OUTLINES AND COMMENTS ON THE VERSES

Mar_3:20. The strain of constant publicity.—In the crowd there is no moderation. They can go to a pitch of enthusiasm in one direction, or of animosity in another; but in the presence of Christ they cannot act with calmness. Nothing is so wearing as the excitement of constant publicity. Unless quiet alternate with the excitement of great gatherings, the body wastes, the nerve frets, the mind is jaded, and the soul itself goes stale and flat. Popularity has, accordingly, often a cruel kindness, which claims untimely and exhausting service from him whom it flatters with its approbation.—R. Glover.

Mar_3:21. The taunts of unbelievers.—It is very hard for the Christian to bear the taunts of unbelievers. It is difficult to work bravely on, without the sympathy of one’s fellows; it requires great grace not utterly to lose heart, to bear being called a fanatic, to be sneered at and scorned. To human nature such treatment gives keenest pain; yet God’s grace is sufficient to triumph in us. When we are sorely tried, let us not think of the discouragements, but of Jesus, who bore a shame and obloquy for us far deeper than we can ever bear for Him.

Opposition from friends is very common in the career of reformers and of those who depart from the ordinary course. History is full of instances. It is very frequent, too, in the case of those who, in irreligious families or societies, seek to become Christians. (See Mat_10:24; Mat_10:35-37.) Here is a severe test. But the only way in which this world can be improved and saved is by that faith, and character, and truth which will do right, no matter who opposes. They who when “at Rome do as the Romans do” in matters of conscience, will never change Rome into the city of God.

Friendship’s shortcomings.—

1. Unable to follow the highest moods of the soul.

2. Unable to see the spiritual meaning of outward circumstances.

3. Seeking to interfere with spiritual usefulness.

4. Seeking to reduce life to commonplace order. The sincere servant of Jesus Christ will take his law from the Master and not from public opinion.—J. Parker, D.D.

The zealous spirit.—A zealous spirit is essential to eminent success in anything. Perhaps there is the more need to insist upon this because enthusiasm is out of fashion. It is bad form nowadays to admire anything very warmly. To be strenuously in earnest is almost vulgar. Especially is this so in regard to religion. “Our Joe is a very good young man,” said an old nurse the other day; “but he do go so mad on religion.” That was the fly in the ointment—which spoilt all. Did not Pope say long ago, “The worst of madness is a saint run mad”? And he only put in terse and pithy speech what other people say more clumsily.

1. And yet how can one be a Christian without being an enthusiast? Indifferent, half-hearted Christians are not true Christians at all. The author of Ecce Homo cannot be said to exaggerate in his declaration that “Christianity is an enthusiasm, or it is nothing.”

2. And what good work has ever been wrought without enthusiasm? Said a great preacher: “If you want to drive a pointed piece of iron through a thick board, the surest way is to heat your skewer. It is always easier to burn our way than to bore it.” Only “a soul all flame” is likely to accomplish much in the teeth of the difficulties which beset every lofty enterprise.—G. H. James.

Mar_3:22. Zeal in opposing Christ.—These scribes came all the way from Jerusalem to oppose Christ. Had there been as much earnestness in propagating the truth as there has been in trying to check it, the whole world might by this time have been regenerated.

Satan versus Satan.—Would God that we might hear of strife and contentions in the ranks of the kingdom of darkness! If the public-house keepers might rise up against the gamblers; if thieves and swindlers might but take each other by the throat; if the managers of the horse-races might but begin to make war upon the organisers of the lottery schemes; if drunkards and seducers would but fall out; if only Satan might fight against Satan, and his kingdom fall into bitter, relentless, and uncompromising internecine strife, asking and giving no quarter,—then would it be a good day for this poor devil-ridden world. But no such good thing as this is happening, or ever will happen.—G. F. Pentecost, D.D.

Lessons.—

1. Every argument of truth and evidence of Divinity can be explained away, if only you are bad enough to do it.

2. Falsehood, if indulged, may lead you to lie in the most sacred matters, and utter the most depraved blasphemy.

3. Man has ultimately only the single alternative—to be devout or superstitious; you must be a believer in God, or in a devil.

4. There is no knave who is not a fool; for if he were not a fool, he would not be a knave.—R. Glover.

Mar_3:23. Christ’s question.—Jesus has questions to ask as well as His opponents. Too much attention is given to the answering of questions. We listen to the “How?” and the “Why?” of the sceptic; but are we alive to the advantage that we should gain if we were to propose questions for ourselves?

Mar_3:28-29. Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost.—Blasphemy, that is, speaking against. But thought is speech to God. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter,” says Keats. Heard blasphemy is bitter: is unheard blasphemy less bitter to the ear of the Holy One? And speech is deed. Therefore, “by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” The blasphemy against the Holy Spirit does not demand audible speech. At the very time Christ used this unparalleled language, He was replying to the inaudible speech of the Pharisees: “Knowing their thoughts, He said unto them.” So the essential thing is not in the speech, but in the object of it. “No man can do these miracles except God be with him”—that was the witness of the truth they knew. “He casteth out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils”—that was the lie to their own sense of right. And it was because of that deliberate lie against the light within them that Jesus told them of the sin that hath never forgiveness. Since the departure of Jesus from the earth, the Holy Spirit has been to men the inner light. Magnificent gift! Momentous responsibility! He takes the place of it within us. We no longer obey it, resist it, quench it: we obey, resist, quench Him. He is the Advocate, come to plead the cause of right within us, the cause of righteousness and judgment against us. He convicts the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment.—Expository Times.

Mar_3:29. The soul incapacitated for repentance.—Strength, Purity, Light, Life, and Love,—are not these the foundation pillars of the throne of God? And these are the words under which the nature and work of the Holy Ghost are revealed to us. Now suppose a man by an act of deliberate and conscious choice renounces this God of Holiness, this Spirit of Light, and Life, and Love,—saying, “These are things that I hate. Death and corruption are better than the life of God. His love I trample on and despise.” Imagine a man speaking to himself after this fashion, and proceeding to shape his life accordingly. Would not that be a kind of blasphemy which might well incapacitate the soul for repentance, and so, as a necessary consequence, for forgiveness?—W. R. Huntington, D.D.

The man who blasphemes against the God within him—who calls that right which he knows and feels to be wrong, and who, knowing the good, deliberately says to evil, “Be thou my good,”—is not to be forgiven in this age. No, verily: for this age has brought him all that it has to bring, and he has rejected it: the most penetrating and intimate ministries of Divine Grace have been vouchsafed him, and he has resisted them: let him feel the judgments of this age, since he will not accept its choicest gifts; let him pass out of this age only to enter into the discipline of the next: and as he suffers these æonial judgments, let him consider and reconsider himself, lest he also lose the ages beyond.—S. Cox, D.D.

ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 3

Mar_3:21. The world’s estimate of Christian zeal. The Rev. Rowland Hill, on one occasion, strained his voice, raising it to the highest pitch, in order to warn some persons of impending danger, and so rescued them from peril. For this he was warmly applauded. But when he elevated his voice to a similar pitch in warning sinners of the error and evil of their ways, and in order to save their souls from a still greater peril, the same friends who before had praised him now pronounced him fool and fanatic.

Zeal.—When some one expostulated with Duncan Matheson, the evangelist, that he was killing himself with his labours, and ought to have rest, he replied, “I cannot rest whilst souls are being lost: there is all eternity in which to rest after life is done.”

Earnestness in work.—Soon after Dr. John Morison’s ordination, a neighbouring minister called on him, and said, “You are doing too much; you must take care that you do not overwork yourself.” “Depend upon it,” replied Morison, “the lazy minister dies first.” Six months later he was called to the death-bed of this same minister. “Do you remember what you once said to me?” asked the dying man. Morison could only reply falteringly, “Oh, don’t speak of that!” “Yes, but I must speak of it,” said his friend; “it was the truth. Work, work while it is called day, for now the night is coming when I cannot work.”

Mar_3:23-26. Christ’s actions prove His Divine mission.—When the Netherlanders broke away from the bondage of Spain, they still professed to be loyal subjects of King Philip, and in the king’s name went out to fight against the king’s armies. That was a kind of loyalty which Philip refused to recognise. The scribes professed to believe that the devil was content with loyalty like this—that, in fact, he hugely enjoyed the destruction of his own works by Jesus, and supplied Him with all the help He wanted in that line. A sane man does not burn his insurance policy, and then set fire to his house as a means of providing for his family. A loyal soldier will not undermine his own camp, and blow it into the air, as a means of increasing the strength of that camp. The captain who is anxious for the safety of his ship will not step down into the hold and bore a hole through the ship’s bottom. Nor will Satan join in destroying his own kingdom. That Christ came and destroyed the works of the devil shows that He is Satan’s enemy and Satan’s conqueror.

Mar_3:29. Penal element in punishment.—Punishment has surely an element which is purely penal—vindictive, if the word must be used, but with a Divine vindictiveness. And this seems to be the confession of the human heart in the most differing states of society. An Indian judge tells of the impression produced by a thief who cut off a child’s wrists merely to get some tightly fastened bracelets. As the maimed stumps were held up in court, a hundred voices cried, “Death is not enough.” In the south of France a monster amused herself with her paramour at the theatre, while her little boy was found slowly starved to death, with his cheek laid against a little dog which nestled close to him. Many cried, “The priests are right; there must be a hell.”—Bishop Wm. Alexander.

Unpardonable sin as to the body.—There is an unpardonable sin that may be committed in connexion with the lungs, or with the heart, or with the head. They are strung with nerves as thick as beads on a string; and up to a certain point of excess or abuse of the nervous system, if you rebound there will be remission, and you will be put back, or nearly back, where you were before you transgressed nature’s laws; but beyond that point—it differs in different men, and in different parts of the same man—if you go on transgressing, and persist in transgression, you will never get over the effect of it as long as you live.—H. W. Beecher.

No hope for those past feeling.—A man may misuse his eyes and yet see; but whosoever puts them out can never see again. One may misdirect his mariner’s compass, and turn it aside from the north pole by a magnet or piece of iron, and it may recover and point right again; but whosoever destroys the compass itself has lost his guide at sea. So it is possible for us to sin and be forgiven: recovery through God’s Spirit is not impossible. But if we so harden our hearts that they cannot feel the power of the Spirit, if we are past feeling, then there is no hope.

A terrible text.—In my first charge, when I was young and inexperienced, the very first grave task set me was to carry what comfort I could to my predecessor’s widow, a singularly devout and devoted woman, who, in the depths of her grief, had come to the conclusion that she had committed “the unpardonable sin,” or “God would never have been so hard with her.” No reasonings, no prayers, had the slightest effect upon her, or seemed so much as to touch the fixed idea she had taken to her heart. With an almost incredible ingenuity, she turned all grounds for hope into food for her despair. And in a few weeks she passed from my care into an asylum, only to be carried from the asylum to the grave. For years after I shrank from this text as if it had been guilty of murder. Such experiences bite deep.—S. Cox, D.D.

Shrinking from the commission of this sin.—A striking testimony to the power which these solemn words have had over the minds of men is afforded by the absence of this one sacred name, “the Holy Ghost,” from all the vocabularies of profaneness. It shows how men whom we are accustomed to call bad men have often, after all, more reverence for what is holy than we give them credit for having—nay, more than they credit themselves with having. They may have committed crimes innumerable, and may have boasted of them; still, notwithstanding this, they shrink from the commission of what is worse than any crime—the unpardonable sin. The shrinking is to their credit.—W. R. Huntington, D.D.

This sin consists not in words only.—I remember the case of a young man in college, who, having fallen into a morbid state of mind under the pressure of religious excitement, went out upon a lonely bridge at midnight, and shouted out into the darkness words which he supposed to be the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. It is not easy to believe that for doing this he fell under the fearful condemnation of which Christ speaks. On the other hand, it is not difficult to believe that the sin against the Holy Ghost may have been committed by persons who have never in any spoken utterance blasphemously used that awful name.—Ibid.

Paralysis of the soul.—It is told of some of the Hindoo ascetics, that they will at times, in compliance with a vow, keep a limb in a constrained position until the natural use of it is wholly lost and gone. May not the habitual putting of evil for good and good for evil bring on a similar paralysis of the soul? May not the devotees of the god of this world so keep the vows they make to him, as to rob themselves of the power to take the postures of a holier devotion?—Ibid.

Eternal sin.—

“A sin that passes!” Lo, one sad and high,

Bearing a taper stately like a queen,

Talks in her sleep—“Will these hands ne’er be clean?”

“What’s done cannot be undone.” She walks by

As she must walk through her eternity,

Bearing within her that which she hath been.

“The sin that I have sinn’d is but one scene,

Life is a manifold drama,” so men cry.

Alas! the shadow follows thee too well.

The interlude outgrows its single part,

And every other voice is stricken dumb.

That which thou carriest to the silent dell

Is the eternal sin thou hast become.

The everlasting tragedy thou art!

Bishop Wm. Alexander.

The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.

1. Conflict of Jesus with the blaspheming Unbelief of His Enemies, and His Triumph over Human Wisdom . (Mar_3:20-30.)

2. His Conflict with the well-meaning Unbelief of His Friends; Triumph over Devilish Malice and Human Policy. (Mar_3:20-21, and Mar_3:31-35.)

(Parallels: Mat_12:22-50; Luk_8:19-21; Luk_11:14-26)

20And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread. 21And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself. 22And the scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils. 23And he called them unto him, and said unto them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan? 24And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. 26And if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end. 27No man can enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil [plunder] his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil [plunder] his house. 28Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, 6and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: 29But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of [liable to] eternal damnation: 7 30Because they said, He hath an un cleanspirit. 31There came then his brethren, and his mother, and, standing without, sent unto him, calling him. 32And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren8 without seek for thee. 33And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren? 9 34And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! 35For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother10.

EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL

See on the parallels.

Mar_3:21. When His (friends).—This very important feature in the evangelical narrative is peculiar to Mark. According to Baur, Mark here represents the mother of Jesus, with His brethren, as confederate with the Pharisees. Meyer, on the contrary, shows that their opinion, ὅτι ἐξέστι, was honest error (not wickedness), and that their design was to provide for Christ’s safety. But if they really had thought Him beside Himself, their care for his safety would have taken the form of an attempt forcibly to seize and detain Him. We regard the step as having been the result of timid policy. At the crisis, when Christ’s breach with the powerful party of the Pharisees was decided, they sought by a fiction to remove Him from publicity and a supposed extreme danger. We may regard the adoptive brethren of Jesus as the representatives of this idea; but it is evident that Mary also was drawn into this error of worldly policy (see the notes on Matthew). It is quite in keeping with the character of such a policy, that these brethren soon afterwards sought to thrust Him forward, Joh_7:1 seq.—The household of Jesus did not come from Nazareth to Capernaum, as Meyer supposes, but from the house of their abode in Capernaum to the place where the crowds were thronging Him. That the Pharisees would here come against him with a public accusation would very well be known in Capernaum.—For they said.—Themselves, of course, the household of Jesus; and not, as Olshausen thinks, “it was said” by the malicious Pharisees, or by others generally (Ewald), or by messengers (Bengel).—He is beside Himself.—Not, as Luther says, “He will be beside Himself;” but not, with Meyer, “He is mad.” It is designedly ambiguous, inasmuch as the ἐξέστη may mean, in a good sense, the being for a season rapt into ecstasy by religious enthusiasm (2Co_5:13), as well as, in a bad sense, the being permanently insanc. In His ecstasy, He is no longer master of Himself. The involuntary, religious μαίνεσθαι is, indeed, not an Old-Testament idea, but a Greek one: it was, however, current in the Jewish popular notion; and the more ambiguous it was, the better it would suit the aim of their policy. It must not be confounded, as Theophylact confounds it, with the allegation of Christ’s opponents. 11 On the contrary, if His opponents should say that He was raging in demoniacal possession, the politic answer was at hand, “He is, indeed, beside Himself, but it is in a good demoniacal ecstasy.” According to Meyer, this circumstance cannot be reconciled with the previous history of Mary in Matthew and Luke. The supposition of Olshausen (and Lange), that this was a moment of weakness in her life, he thinks very precarious. And Pius IX. would agree with him, though for a different reason. For the various interpretations of the passage, see Meyer. Euthym. Zigab.: “Some envious ones said so.” Schöttgen and Wolf: “The disciples said that the people were mad.” Grotius: “Report said that he had fainted.” Kuinoel: “It was the message to come home to eat, for maxime defatigatus est,” etc.

Mar_3:30. An unclean spirit.—Characterization of Beelzebub, in opposition to the Holy Spirit.

Mar_3:34. And He looked round about.—Mark often gives prominence to the Lord’s glance around. Here it is in contrast with the indignant looking around of Mar_3:5.

DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL

1. See on the parallels.—Mark omits, among other things, to give us the immediate occasion of the main matter of the section,—the healing of the demoniac. The reason that his friends came out to Him as they did seems to have lain in the thronging of the crowds, and in the fact that there was no room to eat. These facts, however, furnished them with a pretext for rescuing Him from the hands of His enemies, whose designs and power they well knew John came not eating and drinking, and they said He hath a devil. Spirit-like oblivion of the body and of its nourishment, they interpreted as involuntary demoniac enthusiasm. Thus did it seem to be with the Lord at this time; and using this representation, his family went out to gain their object.

2. The choice of the Twelve was soon followed by this erring conduct of His own friends towards Him, several of the Twelve being among them. These, therefore, mistook their vocation, in the same manner as Peter and the sons of Zebedee mistook theirs on another occasion. The new impulse given to the Lord’s cause, and the new step it had taken, is followed by a new defeat and counter-stroke. As soon as He takes assistants to Himself, they aim to infuse earthly policy into His plans.

3. The worst manifestation of the kingdom of evil is the blasphemy with which hypocrites, unconsciously standing in the service of darkness, interpret the most glorious manifestations of the kingdom of heaven as works from below. The blasphemy against the Son of God, as approximating to the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, is the most fearful display of the power of the arch-blasphemer.

4. While the pictorial vividness of the Evangelist is observable throughout the whole of the conflict which he depicts, he, however, omits the sign of Jonas, the statement concerning possession by seven devils, and the like.

5. And looking round.—Jesus, in His conflict with His enemies and the dark kingdom which they serve, does not trust to men, but does trust to His own influence on mankind; that is, he does not confide in His own friends, so far as they would dictate to Him with carnal policy as his natural family; but to His friends as they trustingly hang upon His lips as his spiritual family.

6. Christ’s defence becomes immediately an attack. Earnest apologetics pass over into polemics.

HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL

See on the parallels.—No room to eat. How often did the Lord, in the zeal of His vocation, forget eating and drinking and sleep!—The highest freedom of spirit and self-government are interpreted even by His people as bondage and being beside self.—How much to be reprobated is an ambiguous and feigned adoption of the notions of the enemies of truth, on the part of those who would represent the truth!—The concessions of carnal ecclesiastical policy to the unfriendly world always spring from evil.—The sound concession is the infinite forbearance with which Christ enters into the notions of His opponents to refute their assertions.—Christ exalted equally above the protection of His friends and the attacks of His foes.—Contrast between the Lord’s great conflict with His opponents and his disciples’ slight assistance: 1. Contrast in temper: heroic reliance in divine truth; petty trust in human cunning. 2. Contrast in the conflict itself: simple defence and simple attack; ambiguous apology and mediation. 3. Contrast in the result: high victory; deep humiliation.—The false and the true family of Jesus: 1. The one would watch over Him and His cause, the other will be watched over by Him; 2. the one would lead Him, the other will be led by Him; 3. the one would save Him, the other will be saved by Him; 4. the one would restrain and bring Him into danger, the other will be restrained and bound by His word and Spirit.—The Lord detects and cuts asunder the bands of perilous fellowship between His friends and His enemies: 1. He detects them: worldliness in religion, fear, cunning, and policy; 2. He cuts them asunder by the word of severance, by warning, and by blessing.—The divine dignity of our Lord in the decisive conflicts of His kingdom: 1. As opposed to His enemies, the instruments of darkness; 2. as opposed to His family, as they are confused by the apparent danger of His cause; 3. as opposed to His Church, which hangs upon His lips with child-like simplicity, not suspecting its danger.—Christ says to His people, in the days of apparent peril to religion: My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are My ways your ways.—Christ’s defence is, in its own nature, also a victorious attack.—Blasphemy against the Spirit is eternal guilt, and therefore exposed to eternal condemnation.—The calm declaration of Christ, that He wrought in the power of the Holy Spirit, in opposition to His blaspheming enemies, who charged him with being possessed by the spirit of darkness and working under his influence.—Maintenance of this opposition: 1. Divine repose against devilish excitement; 2. divine forbearance against devilish hatred; 3. divine illumination against devilish confusion.

Starke:—Canstein:—If Christ endures, the Christian Church endures.—Zeisius:—The devil never gives up the work that his name imports—slandering the good; nor do those who are on his side, Joh_8:44.—Quesnel:—We must strive to preserve our honorable name, so long as it is possible.—It is awful to ascribe to the devil that which comes from God. Thus God is made into Satan:—The Creator endures this blasphemy, in His patience and long-suffering, and men will endure nothing. We should be imitators of God.—Wolf does not eat wolf, nor does Satan drive out Satan.—Satan does not persecute Satan, yet Christians persecute Christians. O fearful wickedness!—Rebellion and insurrection are destructive and ruinous.—When once the devil is master of any heart, none but Jesus Christ can drive him out.—Cramer:—Children must honor their parents; but in matters that pertain to office, and the things of God and conscience, they should not be overruled by any.—There is no carnal prerogative in the kingdom of God.—Quesnel:—Ha who doeth the will of God to the end enters into an eternal alliance with God as his Father, with Jesus Christ as his brother, with the angels and saints as his sisters, and with the heavenly Jerusalem as his mother.—Gerlach: According to Mark, Jesus distinguishes general blasphemy against God from the particular blasphemy against the Holy Spirit; according to Matthew and Luke, He distinguishes from it also the blasphemy against the Son of Man: in both cases there is the contrast between a revelation which has been more external, and one which has seized the inner man with more convincing divine power.—He that doeth the will of God:” He means thereby faith, which is the fount and beginning of all holy obedience.—Braune: We must watch over zeal, as over fire in a house. But that cold moderation which the world loves so well is most offensive to Christ, who will spue the lukewarm out of His mouth, Rev_3:16. This is our Lord’s official fidelity.—In the presence of this blaspheming malignity, the Redeemer exhibits a simplicity, a security, a freedom from all bitterness, Which must have produced a sacred impression upon all who beheld, even as upon us now.—It is in the Spirit of God that Jesus overcomes Satan.—Schleiermacher (on the words, He is beside Himself):—So those have always been accounted whom God in hard times has chosen for His special instruments: it was in the time of the Church’s Reformation, and it will always be so again when times of darkness shall return.—There have never been wanting such enemies of the truth, who have similarly sought to put another character upon that one only institute for human salvation which can never find a substitute. But, as in the text, their efforts are always vain.—How far blind and rash zeal may lead men!—“He that gathereth not with Me, scattereth.”—“He that for My sake forsaketh not father and mother is not worthy of Me.”—Christ on the cross: “Behold thy son ! Behold thy Mother!”—There should be, then, no conflict between our natural and spiritual relationships.—All the household must be members of the one same family.

Footnotes:

[6]Mar_3:28.—The words τοῖς υἱοῖς τῶν ἀνθρώπων precede τὰ ἁμαρτήματα in the best Codd.; and so they are placed in Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf. B., D., G., Lachmann, and Tischendorf read ὅσα, instead of ὅσας.

[7]Mar_3:29.—The reading ἔνοχός ἐστιν αἰωνίου ἁμαρτήματος, according to B., L., Δ., and others, is accepted by Griesbach, Lachmann, and Tischendorf. The readings κρίσεως and κολάσεως seem to have been explanatory paraphrases of this strong and pregnant expression.

[8]Mar_3:32.—“His mother and His brethren” is the reading of B., C., D., G., Versions, Griesbach, Scholz, Lachmann; better established than the order in the Recepta, “His brethren and His mother,” which is also adopted by Fritzsche and Tischendorf. Meyer holds to this last, thinking that the mother was afterwards put first on account of her rank, and in conformity with the parallels in Matthew and Luke. It may have been the purpose to make the mother less prominent, in a case of seeming error. An additional clause, καὶ αἱ ἀδελφαί σου, has A., D., E., &c., for it; B., C., L., and many Versions against it. Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf accept it; so also De Wette and Meyer. We think the omission harder to account for than the insertion would be,—which probably had reference to Mar_6:3.

[9]Mar_3:33.—B., C., L., Versions, Lachmann, and Meyer read καὶ οἱ, instead of ἤ οἱ.

[10]Mar_3:35.—The μου after ἀδελφή is omitted by Lachmann and Tischendorf, following preponderating authorities.

[11]Namely, that he was in league with the demons.—Ed.

Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

THE UNPARDONABLE SIN (BLASPHEMY AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST)

Mar 3:20-30; Mat 12:22-37; & Luk 11:14-23. Mark: “And they come into the house; and again a multitude comes together, so that they are not able even to eat bread. And those who were along with Him came out to arrest Him; for they continued to say, That He is beside Himself.” Their common charge against Jesus was, that He is beside Himself; i.e., gone crazy, that He has run mad, and that He has a demon. Look out! If you walk in His footprints, do not be jostled if they speak of you in a similar manner. Matthew: “Then a demonized man, blind and dumb, was brought to Him, and He healed him, so that the blind and dumb spake and saw. And all the multitudes were astonished? and continued to say, Is not this the Son of David?” Mark: “The scribes, having come down from Jerusalem, were saying, He has Beelzebul, and that through the prince of the demons, He casteth out demons; and calling them to Him, He spake to them in parables, How is Satan able to cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, how is that kingdom able to stand? And if it is divided against itself, that house is not able to stand; and if Satan has risen up against himself, and is divided, he is not able to stand, but has an end.” Beelzebub, E.V., is the name of a heathen god, but Beelzebul is simply another name for the devil, as it here occurs in the original. The scribes at Jerusalem had laid all their wits under contribution, and settled down on a theory which they thought would explain all the demoniacal ejectment which Jesus was doing in Galilee; i.e., that He had entered into a collusion with the devil, who is commander-in-chief of these evil spirits, to cast them out. They thought their theory would bear criticism, as, of course, Beelzebul, the prince of devils, had power over all these demons which Jesus was casting out. Do you not see the utter imperturbability of Jesus amid these vile, false accusations? He simply proceeds to answer their argument and expose their sophistry from a logical standpoint, showing up the utter untenability of their exegesis, as in that case, Satan would be divided against himself, and would destroy and utterly break down his own kingdom. Are there not endless division, discord, and disharmony in the kingdom of Satan? Of course there is, hell itself being the very pandemonium of conflict, rage, and all conceivable dissension, animosity, perturbation, variance, and torment. But the point in all this is, that Satan’s kingdom, both in earth and hell, is a single unit of evil, there being no admixture of good, but evil, with all its endless diversifications. And, pursuant to the Savior’s argument, if the kingdom of Satan had a mixture of good and evil, those elements, mutually antagonizing each other, would ultimate in the annihilation of his kingdom. There is no such a mixture in this world, as here we have the two kingdoms at war with each other, and destined, in the case of every individual, the one or the other, to triumph. Hence you will find the argument of our Savior in this case perfectly tenable from the standpoint of fact and logic. Matthew: “If I cast out demons through Beelzebul, through whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they shall be your judges.” We see from this Scripture that the Jews were accustomed to cast out demons. How was that? Do you not know that the Jews, from the days of Abraham, were the chosen people of God? How do we cast out demons? We do it by invoking the mercy and power of God on them to cast out the demons and save their souls; e.g., when we gather around an altar of penitence. In a similar manner did the godly Hebrews cast out the demons by invoking the God of Israel. “And if, by the Spirit of God, I cast out demons, then has the kingdom of God come nigh unto you.” Well said; because none but God can cast out demons. The kingdom of God is the Divine government, in which His power and authority are exercised. Therefore, all of this demoniacal ejectment demonstrates the presence and power of God’s kingdom, involving the logical sequence that the King is present — the very fact which they were so slow to apprehend. Luke: “When the strong man armed may keep his palace, his goods are in peace; but when the one stronger than he having come, may conquer him, he taketh away his panoply in which he trusted, and spoileth his goods. He who is not with Me, is against Me; and he that gathereth not with Me, scattereth abroad.” This world is Satan’s palace, and he is the strong man. So long as he occupies his palace, his goods, which are human souls, are secure in his possession. Jesus is the Stronger Man, who is going to conquer the devil, when He comes in His glory, and take this world out of his hands; i.e., “spoil” it, which does not mean to destroy it; but this is a military phrase, and means to take it as spoils are captured and appropriated by a conquering army. So our Savior, the Stronger Man, in the great wars of Armageddon, is going to conquer Satan, the strong man, and take this world out of his hands; i.e., “spoil” all of his goods, leaving him bankrupt, and locked up in hell. (Rev 20:3.) The Bible is unlike any other book in the wonderful copiousness of its meaning. While the above paragraph is thus expounded, it has another exegesis, equally true and pertinent. While Satan is the “strong man,” his palace is the human heart, and his panoply, in which he trusts, the evil habits into which he leads his miserable votaries. Jesus, the Stronger Man, conquers the devil in regeneration, taking away the evil habits of the converted soul, in which Satan trusted to hold him fast. Then Jesus goes on, sanctifies that soul, “spoiling” the devil of all his goods, as in sanctification He takes the soul completely out of the hands of the devil. We see here, in this last verse, that no one can stand neutral in this terrible conflict between the strong man and the Stronger Man, but every one is forced to take sides, either with Jesus or the devil, as neutrality in this case is downright conservatism to Satan and rebellion against God. Matthew: “Therefore, I say unto you, All sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto the people, but the blasphemy of the Spirit shall not be forgiven unto the people. Whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven unto him; but whosoever may speak against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this age or in that which is to come.” While there is but one God, He is manifested in Three Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, the latter being the Executive of the Trinity. While the personal Father sits upon the throne of the universe, administering the government of the boundless Celestial Empire, the Son incumbers the Mediatorial Throne at His Right Hand, administering the boundless resources of redeeming grace to all the people in this world, and even the earth itself. Both the Father and the Son send forth the Holy Ghost, the Third Person of the Trinity, into this world, to shed light on every human being, convict every sinner, convert every mourner, sanctify every believer, and glorify every disembodied saint, and thus prepare this whole world for heaven. He is the Successor of our ascended and glorified Savior in the execution of the redemptive scheme on the earth. (Joh 16:7.) Hence you see that the Holy Ghost is the Divine Person of the Trinity who deals with human souls, administering the love of the Father and the grace of the Son, saving and sanctifying all who will let Him. There is a great eleemosynary institution for the relief of all beggars, administered by three officers, A., B., and C. A. has his office in London, England; B., in New York, America; and C., is present on the spot with every dying beggar, and ready to dispense the needed alms. Now you see these poor victims of decrepitude and misery must receive the benefits of this philanthropic institution at C.’s hands, as they can never reach A. at London or B. at New York. Here is the dying sinner. The Holy Ghost is with him in his dismal hovel or his gilded palace, ready to dispense to him the infinite benefactions of the loving Father and the dying Son. Suppose he unfortunately reject or grieve Him away, he is at the end of his resources, and must eternally perish. If he will receive the Holy Ghost in conviction, regeneration, and sanctification, He will administer to him all the blessings of the Father and the Son. Blasphemy means contempt. Therefore the ultimate neglect and contemptuous rejection of the Holy Ghost, consummates the sin against Him, which is unpardonable, either in the present age or in that which is to come; i.e., millennial age. Though some very stoutly deny the succession of the gospel age by another, we must remember that the Word of the Lord is the end of all controversy.

Not only this passage, but Heb 6:5, and others, speak positively of the coming age. You now see clearly in what the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is unpardonable, consists. It is clearly revealed and expounded by the Savior in this chapter. It is the imputation of the miracles wrought by the Savior, through the Holy Ghost, to Beelzebul; i.e., the devil. In this way the scribes and Pharisees, and others who followed their influence, committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. A simple analysis of this problem will thoroughly elucidate it. If you impute the work of the Holy Ghost to the devil, your doom is sealed, as it is impossible to convince you. Suppose God literally inundates you with evidence, He must give it all by His Spirit, and you will turn it over to the devil as fast as it comes, and see nothing but the devil in it all. Consequently, you are unconvincible. In this way the antediluvian world was ruined, having sunk so deep in the black darkness of sin, they imputed all the efforts of the Holy Ghost to convict and save them to Satanic influence, thus crossing the dead-line and rejecting God. In a similar manner the Jews, as we see here, imputed the miracles of Jesus to the devil, thus committing the unpardonable sin, rejecting the Son, and sealing their hopeless doom, to the awful destruction which soon overtook them in the Roman wars, as the antediluvians had been destroyed by the flood. In a similar manner the present age is fast rejecting the Holy Ghost, and ripening for the great tribulation, which, to illuminated minds, is already heaving in view, while the wonderful fulfillment of the latter-day prophecies draweth nigh. While the fallen Churches of the present age are fast rejecting the Holy Ghost, pronouncing His work fanaticism, and thus imputing it to the devil, whose trend is the unpardonable sin, the world, with wonderful expedition, is plunging into the same yawning abyss, down Satan’s greased plank of infidelity, which is wonderfully and fearfully on the increase, both in Christendom and heathendom. God, in His mercy, waited on the antediluvians to repent till the last hope had fled. He did the same for the Jews. A similar destruction is on the track of the God- rejecting Gentile world (Rom 11:21), though, I trow, God, in His unutterable mercy, as in former dispensations, will wait till they cross the deadline, the Churches rejecting the Holy Ghost and the world espousing infidelity, and thus all putting themselves beyond the reach of redeeming mercy, and sealing their doom in hell. “Make the tree good, and the fruit will be good; make the tree corrupt, and the fruit will be corrupt; for a tree is known by its fruits.” There is no good in this fallen world; it all comes from heaven; therefore when the Holy Ghost is rejected, nothing but corruption is left.

“O ye generation of vipers, how are you, being evil, able to speak good things? Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” How awfully plain this preaching, calling His intellectual auditors “generation of vipers!” Do not forget that He is especially addressing the preachers and official members; i.e., the scribes and Pharisees. Does not history repeat itself? Shall we be so blind as to leave this with a congregation 1,870 years ago? God forbid! Let us take it home, wake up, and profit by this awful truth. “A good man, out of the good treasure of his heart, bringeth forth good things; and an evil man, out of the evil treasure of his heart, bringeth forth evil things.” How awful the state of the Jewish Church! The leading preachers and laymen in the hands of the devil! “I say unto you, That every idle word which the people may speak, they shall give an account for the same in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou mayest be justified, and by thy words thou mayest be condemned.” Language is the exponent of the heart. God has put us here on probation, trying and testing us for vast eternity. “Idle” is argon, from ergon, “work,” and is the strongest negative in the Greek language when preceding a word. Hence it means the very absence of all work. God has put us here to work in His vineyard. Hence we have no time to lose. Idle words mean idle minds and bodies, which are condemnatory in the sight of God. O the momentous issues which hang on our words, the exponents of both soul and body! When we are idle, the devil always finds an open door. We see here, in the contingent tense, it is our prerogative to so speak as to determine our justification or condemnation before the judgment-seat of Christ.

William B. Godbey, Commentary on the New Testament (1896–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

CHAPTER 3:20-27 (Mar_3:20-27)

CHRIST AND BEELZEBUB

"And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread. And when his friends heard it, they went out to lay hold on Him: for they said, He is beside Himself. And the scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, He hath Beelzebub, and, By the prince of the devils casteth He out the devils. And He called them unto Him, and said unto them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if an house be divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan hath risen up against himself, and is divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end. But no one can enter into the house of the strong man, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house." Mar_3:20-27 (R.V.)

WHILE Christ was upon the mountain with His more immediate followers, the excitement in the plain did not exhaust itself; for even when He entered into a house, the crowds prevented Him and His followers from taking necessary food. And when His friends heard of this, they judged Him as men who profess to have learned the lesson of His life still judge, too often, all whose devotion carries them beyond the boundaries of convention and of convenience. For there is a curious betrayal of the popular estimate of this world and the world to come, in the honor paid to those who cast away life in battle, or sap it slowly in pursuit of wealth or honors, and the contempt expressed for those who compromise it on behalf of souls, for which Christ died. Whenever by exertion in any unselfish cause health is broken, or fortune impaired, or influential friends estranged, the follower of Christ is called an enthusiast, a fanatic, or even more plainly a man of unsettled mind. He may be comforted by remembering that Jesus was said to be beside Himself when teaching and healing left Him not leisure even to eat.

To this incessant and exhausting strain upon His energies and sympathies, St. Matthew applies the prophetic words, "Himself took our infirmities and bare our diseases" (Mat_8:17). And it is worth while to compare with that passage and the one before us, Renan's assertion, that He traversed Galilee "in the midst of a perpetual fete," and that "joyous Galilee celebrated in fetes the approach of the well-beloved." (Vie de J., pp. 197, 202). The contrast gives a fine illustration of the inaccurate shallowness of the Frenchman's whole conception of the sacred life.

But it is remarkable that while His friends could not yet believe His claims, and even strove to lay hold on Him, no worse suspicion ever darkened the mind of those who knew Him best that His reason had been disturbed. Not these called Him gluttonous and a winebibbler. Not these blasphemed His motives. But the envoys of the priestly faction, partisans from Jerusalem, were ready with an atrocious suggestion. He was Himself possessed with a worse devil, before whom the lesser ones retired. By the prince of the devils He cast out the devils. To this desperate evasion, St. Matthew tells us, they were driven by a remarkable miracle, the expulsion of a blind and dumb spirit, and the perfect healing of his victim. Now the literature of the world cannot produce invective more terrible than Jesus had at His command for these very scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. This is what gives majesty to His endurance. No personal insult, no resentment at His own wrong, could ruffle the sublime composure which, upon occasion, gave way to a moral indignation equally sublime. Calmly He calls His traducers to look Him in the face, and appeals to their own reason against their blasphemy. Neither kingdom nor house divided against itself can stand. And if Satan be divided against himself and his evil works, undoing the miseries and opening the eyes of men, his kingdom has an end. All the experience of the world since the beginning was proof enough that such a suicide of evil was beyond hope. The best refutation of the notion that Satan had risen up against himself and was divided was its clear expression. But what was the alternative? If Satan were not committing suicide, he was overpowered. There is indeed a fitful temporary reformation, followed by a deeper fall, which St. Matthew tells us that Christ compared to the cleansing of a house from whence the evil tenant has capriciously wandered forth, confident that it is still his own, and prepared to return to it with seven other and worse fiends. A little observation would detect such illusory improvement. But the case before them was that of an external summons reluctantly obeyed. It required the interference of a stronger power, which could only be the power of God. None could enter into the strong man's house, and spoil his goods, unless the strong man were first bound, "and then he will spoil his house." No more distinct assertion of the personality of evil spirits than this could be devised. Jesus and the Pharisees are not at all at issue upon this point. He does not scout as a baseless superstition their belief that evil spirits are at work in the world. But He declares that His own work is the reversal of theirs. He is spoiling the strong man, whose terrible ascendancy over the possessed resembles the dominion of a man in his own house, among chattels without a will.

That dominion Christ declares that only a stronger can overcome, and His argument assumes that the stronger must needs be the finger of God, the power of God, come unto them. The supernatural exists only above us and below.

Ages have passed away since then. Innumerable schemes have been devised for the expulsion of the evils under which the world is groaning, and if they are evils of merely human origin, human power should suffice for their removal. The march of civilization is sometimes appealed to. But what blessings has civilization without Christ ever borne to savage men? The answer is painful: rum, gunpowder, slavery, massacre, small-pox, pulmonary consumption, and the extinction of their races, these are all it has been able to bestow. Education is sometimes spoken of, as if it would gradually heal our passions and expel vice and misery from the world, as if the worst crimes and most flagrant vices of our time were peculiar to the ignorant and the untaught, as if no forger had ever learned to write. And sometimes great things are promised from the advance of science, as if all the works of dynamite and nitro-glycerin, were, like those of the Creator, very good.

No man can be deceived by such flattering hopes, who rightly considers the volcanic energies, the frantic rage, the unreasoning all-sacrificing recklessness of human passions and desires. Surely they are set on fire of hell, and only heaven can quench the conflagration. Jesus has undertaken to do this. His religion has been a spell of power among the degraded and the lost; and when we come to consider mankind in bulk, it is plain enough that no other power has had a really reclaiming, elevating effect upon tribes and races. In our own land, what great or lasting work of reformation, or even of temporal benevolence, has ever gone forward without the blessing of religion to sustain it? Nowhere is Satan cast out but by the Stronger than he, binding him, overmastering the evil principle which tramples human nature down, as the very first step towards spoiling his goods. The spiritual victory must precede the removal of misery, convulsion and disease. There is no golden age for the world, except the reign of Christ.

William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.

3:20-35 This story about Jesus and his family (3:20-21 and 31-35) brackets a controversy story about Jesus’ exorcisms (3:22-30); this arrangement identifies Jesus’ family with the religious leaders in opposing him.

3:20 That Jesus and the disciples can’t find time to eat emphasizes Jesus’ great popularity with the crowds (3:7-9).

Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

Mar 3:20. [Eng. Vers. 19] Ἔρχονται, they come) Jesus with His new family [This relation of Mark follows, not the order of time, but the change of places; comp. Mar 3:7; Mar 3:13; Harm. p. 311].—εἰς οἶκον “to the house,” rather than into the house; comp. Mar 3:21; Mar 3:31.

Bengel's Gnomon of the New Testament — English translation (T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1860) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

,[73] 21

[73] Before καὶ ἔρχονται εἰς οἶκον would be the place where Mark, if he had desired to take in the Sermon on the Mount, would have inserted it; and Ewald (as also Tobler, die Evangelienfrage, 1858, p. 14) assumes that the Gospel in its original form had actually contained that discourse, although abridged, in this place,which Weiss (Evangelienfrage, p. 154 f.) concedes, laying decided stress on the abridgment on the ground of other abridged discourses in Mark. Nevertheless, the abrupt and unconnected mode of adding one account to another, as here by the καὶ ἔρχονται εἰς οἶκον, as well as the omission of longer discourses, are peculiar to Mark and in keeping with the originality of his work; further, it would be quite impossible to see why the discourse, if it had originally a place here, should have been entirely removed, whether we may conceive for ourselves its original contents and compass in the main according to Matthew or according to Luke. Ewalds view has, however, been followed by Holtzmann, whom Weiss, in the Jahrb. f. Deutsche Theol. 1864, p. 63 ff., and Weizsäcker, p. 46, with reason oppose, while Schenkel also regards the dropping out as probable, although as unintentional.In respect of the absence from Mark of the history of the centurion at Capernaum (Mat_8:5 ff.; Luk_7:1 ff.), the non-insertion of which Köstlin is only able to conceive of as arising from the neutral tendency of Mark, Ewald supposes that it originally stood in Mark likewise before καὶ ἔρχονται εἰς οἶκον, and that in Matthew and Luke it still has the tinge of Marks language, in which respect ἱκανός and σκύλλειν are referred to (but comp. Mat_3:11; Mat_9:36; Luk_3:16; Luk_8:49). Weiss, p. 161, finds the hypothesis of Ewald confirmed by the affinity of that history, with the narrative of the Canaanitish woman, Mar_7:24 ff. Holtzmann appropriates the reasons of Ewald and Weiss; they are insufficient of themselves, and fall with the alleged disappearance of the Sermon on the Mount.

Mar_3:20,[74] 21. Peculiar to Mark, but in unity of connection with Mar_3:22 f.

καὶ ἔρχ. εἰς οἶκον] The choice of the disciples, and what had to be said to them concerning it, was the important occasion for the preceding ascent of the mountain, Mar_3:13. Now they come back again to the house, namely, in Capernaum, as in Mar_2:2, to which also the subsequent πάλιν points back. De Wette is in error when he says that the following scene could by no means have taken place in the house. See, on the other hand, Mar_3:31 and Mat_12:46. Hilgenfeld finds in εἰς οἶκον even a misunderstanding of Mat_13:1.

The accusation ὅτι ἐξέστη, Mar_3:21, and that expressed at Mar_3:22, ὅτι Βεελζεβοὺλ ἔχει, are analogous; and these accusations are the significant elements in Mark,[75] with whom Mar_3:22 still lacks the special historical information that is furnished by Mat_12:22 f. (comp. Mar_9:33 f.); Luk_11:14. In the connection of Mark alone the retrospective reference to Mar_3:10-12 is sufficient; hence it is not to be supposed that in the primitive-Mark that cure of demoniacs given by Matthew and Luke must also have had a place (Holtzmann). See, moreover, Weiss, l.c. p. 80 ff. Mark, however, does not represent the mother and the brethren as confederates of the Pharisees (Baur, Markusevang. p. 23); their opinion ὅτι ἐξέστη is an error (not malicious), and their purpose is that of care for the security of Jesus.

αὐτούς] He and His disciples.

μηδέ] not even, to say nothing of being left otherwise undisturbed. Comp. Mar_2:2. According to Strauss, indeed, this is a palpable exaggeration.

ἀκούσαντες] that He was again set upon by the multitude to such a degree, and was occupying Himself so excessively with them (with the healing of their demoniacs, Mar_3:22, and so on).

οἱ παρʼ αὐτοῦ] those on His side, i.e. His own people. Comp. Xen. Anab. vi. 6. 24; Cyrop. vi. 2. 1; Polyb. xxiii. 1. 6; 1Ma_9:44. See Bernhardy, p. 256. By this, however, the disciples cannot here be meant, as they are in the house with Jesus, Mar_3:20; but only, as is clearly proved by Mar_3:31-32, His mother, His brethren, His sisters.

ἐξῆλθον] namely, not from a place in Capernaum (in opposition to Mar_3:20), but from the place where they were sojourning, from Nazareth. Comp. Mar_1:9, Mar_6:3. It is not to be objected that the intelligence of the presence and action of Jesus in Capernaum could not have come to Nazareth so quickly, and that the family could not have come so quickly to Capernaum, as to admit of the latter being already there, after the reprimand of the scribes, Mar_3:23-30; for Mark does not say that that ἐξῆλθον, and the coming down of the scribes from Jerusalem, and the arrival of the mother, etc., happened on the same day whereon Jesus and the disciples had returned εἰς οἶκον. On the contrary, that intelligence arrived at Nazareth, where His relatives were setting out, etc.; but from Jerusalem there had alreadywhen Jesus had returned to Capernaum and was there so devoting Himself beyond measure to the peoplecome down scribes, and these said, etc. This scene, therefore, with the scribes who had come down was before the arrival of the relatives of Jesus had taken place.

κρατῆσαι αὐτόν] to lay hold upon Him, to possess themselves of Him. Comp. Mar_6:17, Mar_12:12, Mar_14:1; Mat_26:4; Jdg_16:21; Tob_6:3; Polyb. viii. 20. 8, al.

ἔλεγον] namely, οἱ παρʼ αὐτοῦ. After ἐξῆλθον it is arbitrary to supply, with others (including Ewald): people said, which Olshausen even refers to the malicious Pharisees. So also Paulus, while Bengel thinks of messengers. Let it be observed that ἔλεγον, Mar_3:21, and ἔλεγον, Mar_3:22, correspond to one another, and that therefore, as in Mar_3:22, so also in Mar_3:21 there is the less reason to think of another subject than that which stands there.

ἐξέστη] He is out of his mind, has become frantic; 2Co_5:13; Arist. H. A. vi. 22: ἐξίσταται καὶ μαίνεται, and see Wetstein. Comp. Xen. Mem. i. 3. 12 : τοῦ φρονεῖν ἐξίστησιν. This strong meaning (erroneously rendered, however, by Luther: He will go out of his mind) is contestably required by the forcible κρατῆσαι, as well as by the subsequent still stronger analogous expression Βεελζεβοὺλ ἔχει. Hence it is not to be explained of a swoon or the like, but is rightly rendered by the Vulgate: in furorem versus est. To the relatives of Jesus, at that time still (Joh_7:3) unbelieving (according to Mark, even to Mary, which certainly does not agree with the preliminary history in Matthew and Luke[76]), the extraordinary teaching and working of Jesus, far transcending their sphere of vision, producing such a profound excitement among all the people, and which they knew not how to reconcile with His domestic antecedents, were the eccentric activity of the phrenzy which had taken possession of Him. Comp. Theophylact (who regards ἘΞΈΣΤΗ as directly equivalent to ΔΑΊΜΟΝΑ ἜΧΕΙ), Erasmus, Beza, Calvin, Maldonatus, Jansen, and others, including Fritzsche, de Wette, Bleek (according to whom they considered Him as at the least an enthusiast), Holtzmann, Weizsäcker, et al. The omission of the surprising historical trait in Matthew and Luke betrays a later sifting process.

[74] Before καὶ ἔρχονται εἰς οἶκον would be the place where Mark, if he had desired to take in the Sermon on the Mount, would have inserted it; and Ewald (as also Tobler, die Evangelienfrage, 1858, p. 14) assumes that the Gospel in its original form had actually contained that discourse, although abridged, in this place,which Weiss (Evangelienfrage, p. 154 f.) concedes, laying decided stress on the abridgment on the ground of other abridged discourses in Mark. Nevertheless, the abrupt and unconnected mode of adding one account to another, as here by the καὶ ἔρχονται εἰς οἶκον, as well as the omission of longer discourses, are peculiar to Mark and in keeping with the originality of his work; further, it would be quite impossible to see why the discourse, if it had originally a place here, should have been entirely removed, whether we may conceive for ourselves its original contents and compass in the main according to Matthew or according to Luke. Ewalds view has, however, been followed by Holtzmann, whom Weiss, in the Jahrb. f. Deutsche Theol. 1864, p. 63 ff., and Weizsäcker, p. 46, with reason oppose, while Schenkel also regards the dropping out as probable, although as unintentional.In respect of the absence from Mark of the history of the centurion at Capernaum (Mat_8:5 ff.; Luk_7:1 ff.), the non-insertion of which Köstlin is only able to conceive of as arising from the neutral tendency of Mark, Ewald supposes that it originally stood in Mark likewise before καὶ ἔρχονται εἰς οἶκον, and that in Matthew and Luke it still has the tinge of Marks language, in which respect ἱκανός and σκύλλειν are referred to (but comp. Mat_3:11; Mat_9:36; Luk_3:16; Luk_8:49). Weiss, p. 161, finds the hypothesis of Ewald confirmed by the affinity of that history, with the narrative of the Canaanitish woman, Mar_7:24 ff. Holtzmann appropriates the reasons of Ewald and Weiss; they are insufficient of themselves, and fall with the alleged disappearance of the Sermon on the Mount.

[75] It is a hasty and unwarranted judgment that vv. 21, 22 appear in Mark as quite misplaced, and find a much better place just before ver. 31 (so Weiss, Evangelienfr. p. 162).

[76] It is entirely arbitrary for Theophylact, Beza, Maldonatus, Bisping, and others to desire to exclude Mary from sharing in the judgment ὅτι ἐξέστη. No better is the evasion in Olshausen, of a moment of weakness and of struggling faith. Similarly Lange finds here a moment of eclipse in the life of Mary, arising out of anxiety for her Son. If her Son had already been to her the Messiah, how should she not have found in His marvellous working the very confirmation of her faith in Him, and the begun fulfilment of the promises which had once been so definitely made to her!

REMARKS.

To get rid of this simple meaning of Mar_3:21, placed beyond doubt by the clear words, expositors have tried very varied expedients. Thus Euthymius Zigabenus, who in other respects is right in his explanation, arbitrarily suggests for the ἔλεγον the subject τινὲς φθονεροί, and adduces, even in his day, two other but unsuitable explanations.[77] According to Schoettgen and Wolf, the disciples (οἱ παρʼ αὐτοῦ) heard that so many people were outside, and went forth to restrain the multitude, and said: the people are frantic! According to Griesbach and Vater, the disciples likewise went forth after having heard that Jesus was teaching the people outside, and wished to bring Jesus in, for people were saying: nimia eum omnium virium contentione debilitatum velut insanire! According to Grotius, the relatives of Jesus also dwelt at Capernaum (which, moreover, Ewald, Lange, Bleek, and others suppose, although Mark has not at all any notice like Mat_4:13); they come out of their house, and wish to carry Jesus away from the house, where He was so greatly thronged, for the report[78] had spread abroad (ἔλεγον γάρ) that He had fainted (according to Ewald, Gesch. Chr. p. 334: had fallen into a phrenzy from exhaustion). According to Kuinoel, it is likewise obvious of itself that Jesus has left the house again and is teaching outside; while the mother and the brethren who are at home also go forth, in order to bring Jesus in to eat, and they say, with the view of pressing back the people: maxime defatigatus est! Comp. Köster, Imman. p. 185, according to whom they wish to hold Him on account of faintness. So again Linder in the Stud. u. Krit. 1862, p. 556. According to Ebrard, § 70, notwithstanding the εἰς οἶκον and the πάλιν, Jesus is not in Capernaum, but at the house of a host; and in spite of Mar_3:31-32, οἱ παρʼ αὐτοῦ are the people in this lodging,[79] who think, as they hear Him so zealously teaching (?), that He is out of His mind, and go out to seize upon Him, but are at once convinced of their error! According to Ammon, L. J. II. p. 155, the people have gathered together round His dwelling, while He is sitting at meat; He hastens into the midst of the people, but is extricated by His friends out of the throng, because in their opinion He has fallen into a faint. Lange, L. J. II. 2, p. 834, takes ἐξέστη rightly, but regards it as the presupposition of the popular judgment, into which the kinsfolk of Jesus had with politic prudence entered, in order on this pretext to rescue Him from the momentary danger, because they believed that He did not sufficiently estimate this danger (namely, of having broken with the hierarchical party). In this way we may read everything, on which the matter is to depend, between the lines. Schenkel also reads between the lines, that the relatives of Jesus had been persuaded on the part of His enemies that He Himself was a person possessed. It is aptly observed by Maldonatus: Hunc locum difficiliorem pietas facit …; pio quodam studio nonnulli rejecta verborum proprietate alias, quae minus a pietate abhorrere viderentur, interpretationes quaesiverunt. Nescio an, dum pias quaererent, falsas invenerint. According to Köstlin, p. 342, has, after the manner of later pragmatists, taken the ἔλεγον ὅτι ἐξέστη, which originally had the less exceptionable sense of enthusiasm, as a malicious calumny. Thus, indeed, what appears offensive is easily set aside and laid upon the compiler, as is done, moreover, in another way by Baur, Evang. p. 559.

[77] 1. ἐξῆλθον οἱ οἰκεῖοι αὐτοῦ κρατῆσαι αὐτὸν, ἵνα μὴ ὑποχωρήσῃ, ἔλεγον γάρ τινες, ὅτι ἐξέστη, ἤγουν ἀπέστη ἀπʼ αὐτῶν διὰ τὸν ὄχλον. 2. ἐξῆλθον … παραβοηθῆσαι, ἔλεγον γὰρ, ὅτι … παρελύθη τὸν τόνον τοῦ σώματος, ἄγαν κοπιάσας.

[78] Even Schleiermacher (L. J. p. (190 f.) presents the matter as if they had learnt by rumour that He was in an unsettled condition, and that they thought it better to detain Him (κρατεῖν) in domestic life.

[79] Kahnis (Dogm. I. p. 428 f.) also explains it of the hosts and disciples (not of the mother and the brethren). He thinks that they wished to bring Him into the house by saying that He was in the ecstatic state like the prophets.

Meyer — Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament — English translation by Peter Christie, edited by Frederick Crombie (T&T Clark, 1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Mar 3:20 . The traditional arrangement by which clause b forms part of Mar 3:19 is fatal to a true conception of the connection of events. The R. V [20] , by making it begin a new section, though not a new verse, helps intelligence, but it would be better still if it formed a new verse with a blank space left between. Some think that in the original form of Mk. the Sermon on the Mount came in here. It is certainly a suitable place for it. In accordance with the above suggestion the text would stand thus:

[20] Revised Version.

Mar 3:20 . And He cometh home.

The Expositor's Greek Testament, edited by W. Robertson Nicoll (1897–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Verse 20. Eat bread.] Had no time to take any necessary refreshment.

Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

(20) So that they could not so much as eat bread.—The graphic touch, as if springing from actual reminiscence of that crowded scene, is eminently characteristic of St. Mark.

A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

20–30. How can Satan cast out Satan?

20. the multitude cometh together again] i. e. at Capernaum, which, had now become our Lord’s temporary home.

The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

When his friends heard of it,.... Not his spiritual friends, his disciples and followers, that believed in him; but his kinsmen, as the Syriac and Ethiopic versions render the words, who were so according to the flesh; when they heard where he was, and what a crowd was about him, so that he could not so much as take the necessaries of life for his refreshment and support,

they went out to lay hold on him: either out of their houses at Capernaum, or they went forth from Nazareth, where they dwelt, to Capernaum, to take him from this house, where he was thronged and pressed, along with them; where he might have some refreshment without being incommoded, and take some rest, which seemed very necessary: so that this was done in kindness to him, and does not design any violent action upon him, in order to take him home with them, and to confine him as a madman; though the following words seem to incline to such a sense;

for they said, he is beside himself: some render it, "he is gone out": that is, out of doors, to preach again to the people, which they might fear would be greatly detrimental to his health, since, he had had no sleep the night before; had been much fatigued all that morning, and for the throng of the people could take no food; so that for this reason they came to take him with them, to their own habitations, to prevent the ill consequences of such constant exercise without refreshment. Moreover, though this may not be the sense of the word, yet it is not to be understood of downright madness and distraction, but of some perturbation of mind, which they imagined, or heard, he was under; and answers to a phrase frequently used by the Jews, that such an one, , "his knowledge is snatched away", or his mind is disturbed; which was sometimes occasioned by disorder of body: so it is said (z),

"a deaf woman, or one that is foolish, or blind, or "whose mind is disturbed"; and if there are any wise women, they prepare themselves, and eat of the oblation.''

On that phrase, "whose mind is disturbed", the note of Maimonides is,

"it means a sick person, whose understanding is disturbed through the force of the disease:''

and was sometimes the case of a person when near death (a): and it was usual to give a person that was condemned to die, and going to be executed, a grain of frankincense in a cup of wine, "that so his knowledge may be snatched away", or his mind disturbed (b), and: be intoxicated; that so he might not be sensible of his pain, or feel his misery; in all which cases, there was nothing of proper madness: and so the kinsmen and friends of Christ, having heard of the situation that he was in, said one to another, he is in a transport and excess of mind; his zeal carries him beyond due bounds; he has certainly forgotten himself; his understanding is disturbed; he is unmindful of himself; takes no care of his health; he will certainly greatly impair it, if he goes on at this rate, praying all night, and preaching all day, without taking any rest or food: wherefore they came out, in order to dissuade him from such excessive labours, and engage him to go with them, where he might have rest and refreshment, and be composed, and retire.

(z) Misn. Nidda, c. 9. sect. 1. (a) T. Bab. Sanhedrin, fol. 63. 1. (b) Ib. fol. 43. 1. Bemidbar Rabba, sect. 10, fol. 198. 4.

John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

20 And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread.

Ver. 20. They could not so much as eat bread] For when he was in the house to repose and refresh himself, they brought unto him a possessed person.

John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

They could not so much as eat bread - Their time and attention were so occupied that they were obliged to forego their regular meals. The affairs of religion may so occupy the attention of ministers and others as to prevent their engaging in their customary pursuits. Religion is all-important - far more important than the ordinary business of this life; and there is nothing unreasonable if our temporal affairs sometimes give way to the higher interests of our own souls and the souls of others. At the same time, it is true that religion is ordinarily consistent with a close attention to worldly business. It promotes industry, economy, order, neatness, and punctuality - all indispensable to worldly prosperity. Of these there has been no more illustrious example than that of our Saviour himself.

Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

There is no small dispute who are here called our Saviour’s friends, οι παρ’ αυτου, those who were of him, whether it signifieth his neighbours, the citizens of his city, or his nearer relations, those who belonged to the family of which he was (for he had some brethren that did not believe in him, Joh 7:5).

They went to lay hands on him, that is, to take him from the multitude, which pressed upon him by force, (for so the word signifies),

for they said, He is beside himself, εξεστη: various senses are given of this word, but certainly the most ordinary interpretation of it doth best agree to this place. They saw our Saviour’s warmth of spirit and zeal in the prosecution of that for which he came into the world, and did so well understand his person, or mission, and receiving the Spirit not by measure, that they took what he did to be the product and effect of a natural infirmity and imperfect head and disordered reason. The young prophet sent by Elisha was counted a mad fellow by Jehu’s comrades, 2Ki 9:11; so was Paul by Festus, Act 26:24, or by the Corinthians, or some crept in amongst them, 2Co 5:13. We are naturally inclined to inquire the causes of strange and unusual effects, and cannot always discern the true causes, and often make false guesses at them. I am not so prone as I find some to condemn these friends, or neighbours, or kinsmen of Christ, believing that they did verily believe as they spake, not yet fully understanding that the Spirit of the Lord in that measure was upon him, but through their infirmity fearing that he had been under some distraction, and charitably offering their help to him. The next words tell us of a far worse sense the scribes put upon his actions.

Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

20. Could not so much as eat bread — How much our Lord was at this time oppressed by the crowds may be seen by comparing, among other passages, Mar_1:45, and Mar_3:7-9 of this chapter. Indeed, no evangelist conveys to us so strong a view of the immense excitement produced in Galilee by the preaching of Jesus in his early ministry as Mark.

Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Vers. 20, 21. The last clause of ver. 19, And they went into a house, should form the opening sentence of a new paragraph, and should therefore become the first clause of ver. 20, as in the Revised Version. According to the most approved reading, the words are (exhlyon), He cometh into a house, or, He cometh home. There is here a considerable gap in St. Mark"s narrative. The sermon on the mount followed upon the call of the apostles, at all events so far as it affected them and their mission. Moreover, St. Matthew interposes hero two miracles wrought by our Lord after his descent from the mount, and before his return to his own house at Capernaum. St. Mark seems anxious here to hasten on to describe the treatment of our Lord by his own near relatives at this important crisis in his ministry. So that theyi.e., our Lord and his disciplescould not so much as eat bread; such was the pressure of the crowd upon them. St. Mark evidently records this, in order to show the contrast between the zeal of the multitude and the very different feelings of our Lord"s own connections. They, his friends, when they heard how he was thronged, went out to lay hold on him; for they said, He is beside himself. This little incident is mentioned only by St. Mark. When his friends saw him so bent upon his great mission as to neglect his bodily necessities, they considered that he was bereft of his reason, that too much zeal and piety had deranged his mind. His friends went out (exhlyon) to lay hold on him. They may probably have come from Nazareth. St. John (Joh_7:5) says that "even his brethren did not believe on him;" that is, they did not believe in him with that fuiness of trust which is of the essence of true faith. Their impression was that he was in a condition requiring that he should be put under some restraint.

Vers. 20-30. Blasphemy.

Great men are often misunderstood by reason of their very greatness. Aims higher than those of others need other methods than such as are commonly employed by ordinary persons. How much more must this have been the case with the Son of man! His mission was unique was altogether his own. He could not fulfill his ministry and do the work of him who sent him, without stepping aside from the beaten tracks of conduct, and so courting criticism and obloquy. He could not well conciliate public opinion, for he came to condemn and to revolutionize it. For the most part he went his way, without noticing the misrepresentations and the calumnies of men. Yet there were occasions, like the present, when he paused to answer and to confute his adversaries.

I THE BLASPHEMOUS CHARGE BROUGHT AGAINST JESUS. His friends charged him with madness; his enemies attributed his works to the power of evil. In the allegation of the former there may have been some sincerity; those of the latter were animated by malice and hatred. Probably these scribes were sent down into Galilee from the authorities at Jerusalem, to check the enthusiasm which was spreading throughout the northern province with regard to the Prophet of Nazareth. The same charges were brought against him in Jerusalem; so that there may have been an understanding as to the method to be adopted in opposing the great Teacher. The scribes discredited Jesus, first, by asserting that he was possessed by Beelzebub, the Syrian Satan; and secondly, by explaining his power to dispossess demons by the league between him and the lord of the demons, whose authority the inferior spirits could not but obey. There was no attempt to deny the fact that demoniacs were cured; this would have been so monstrously false that to take such a position would have been to ruin their own influence with the people.

II THE REFUTATION OF THIS BLASPHEMY.

1. Our Lord"s reply was on the ground of reason of what might be called common sense. He used two parables, by which he showed the unreasonableness, the absurdity of the allegations in question. Suppose a house or a kingdom to be divided against itself, to be rent by internal discord and faction; what is the result? It comes to ruin. And can it be believed that the crafty prince of darkness will turn his arms against his own servants and minions? So, Satan would "have an end.

2. Having refuted their argument, our Lord proceeded with his own; gave his explanation of what was the spiritual significance of his ministry, especially as regarded the "possessed." So far from being in league with Satan, the Lord Jesus was Satan"s one mighty Foe; he had already, in the temptation, overcome him, and was binding him, and now, behold! he was spoiling the house of his vanquished enemy, in expelling the demons from the wretched demoniacs of Galilee! He could not have done this had he been in league with Satan, had he not already vanquished Satan. Having effected this, he spoiled principalities and powers.

III THE CENSURE OF THIS BLASPHEMY. Our Lord first reasoned; then (as recorded from ver. 28) he spoke with authority, as One in the secrets of Heaven, with power to declare the principles of Divine judgment. There is, he declared, an eternal and unpardonable sin. If the scribes were not committing this, they were approaching it. The sin against the Holy Ghost, the confusion of truth with error, good with evil, is a sin, not of ignorance, Hot of misunderstanding, but of wilfulness; a sin of the whole nature; a sin against the light without and the light within. Our Saviour, in condemning this sin, speaks as the rightful Lord, the authoritative Judge, of all mankind!

APPLICATION. "What think ye of Christ?" To think of him with indifference is unreasonable, and shows the most blameable insensibility to the great moral conflict of the universe, on one side of which Jesus is the Champion. To think of him disparagingly is blasphemy; for "he that honoureth the Son honoureth the Father," and he that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father. It is blasphemy to speak against the character or the authority of the Son of God. What remains, then? This: to think and speak of him with reverence and gratitude, faith, and love. This is just and right; and though Christ does not need our homage and honor, he will accept it and reward it.

Vers. 20, 21. Christ hindered by his friends.

I THROUGH IGNORANCE. Owing

(1) to want of sympathy with him in his higher aims; and

(2) consequent failure of spiritual perception.

II BY CHARGING HIM WITH MADNESS. They had so little of the spirit of self-denial in themselves that they could not understand enthusiasm which would not admit of his attending to his own wants, "so much as to eat bread.

1. They feared also the consequences which might arise from the presence of his enemies. The scribes were there "from Jerusalem," on the alert to find accusation against him; and they must have been observed.

2. But by this charge they discredited the character of his ministry. Who should be supposed to know whether he was sane or not, if not his own family? In attributing to maniacy the Divine works and words of Christ, they did him and all who might through him have life and peace, a cruel, irreparable wrong. So Paul was charged with being beside himself; and all who for Christ"s sake try to live above the maxims and aims of the world will meet with similar judgment. The blow thus struck is not at an individual, but at the spiritual prospects and hopes of a whole race.

III BY UNAUTHORIZED AND UNTIMELY INTERFERENCE.

1. A sin of presumption.

The judgment was hasty and mistaken; the action was unjustifiable, both foolish and wicked.

2. Enmity to God. M.

Vers. 20-22. The Saviour judged by the world.

There were various opinions amongst the multitude. They cannot be indifferent to the work and teaching of Christ. "Some believed, and some believed not." Of those who did not believe all were in opposition to him. This circumstance was

I A TRIBUTE TO THE INFLUENCE AND IMPORTANCE OF THE GOSPEL.

II IT ILLUSTRATED THE IMPOTENCY OF THE CARNAL MIND IN SPIRITUAL QUESTIONS. III IT SUGGESTS THE PERILS TO WHICH THE CARNAL MIND IS EXPOSED. "Lest haply ye be found to fight against God". (Act_5:39)

IV IT SUGGESTS THE DUTY UNDER SUCH CIRCUMSTANCES OF CHRISTIAN TESTIMONY. M.

Vers. 20-30. The sin against the Holy Spirit.

I THE CHARGE AGAINST JESUS. He holds to Beelzebub, and by the chief of demons casts out demons.

1. It was absurd; but absurd arguments readily satisfy passion and hate and those who have no care for the truth. They accused the Saviour, in short, of a self-contradiction in thought and action, which was a moral impossibility.

2. It was wicked. It had the worst element of the lie in it it denied the truth within them.

II THE WORST DEGREE OF SIN. Sin has its scale, its climax. There are sins of instinct and of passion and of ignorance. When there is little light to be guided by there is little light to sin against. The next step in sin is where there is deliberation before the wrong is done. Last and worst is where not only the deliberate judgment is gone against, but the attempt is made to deny the principle of judgment in the soul itself. The hands of the watch move backwards; the lamp flags with the very abundance of oil; the man"s soul dies. Over against the words "Repent! be forgiven!" stand these, "Irreclaimable! unforgivable! J.

Vers. 20-30. Parallel passages: Mat_12:22-37 Luk 11:14-23Mistaken friends and malignant foes.

I MISTAKEN FRIENDS.

1. The connection. Between the appointment of the apostles and the transactions here narrated several important matters intervened. There was the sermon on the mount, recorded in the Gospel of St. Matthew, chs. 5-7; and an abridgment or modification of the same repeated in the Gospel of St. Luke, Luk_6:17-49. Next followed the events recorded throughout the seventh chapter of St. Luke, and which were as follows: The cure of the centurion"s servant; the restoration to life of the widow"s son of Nain; the message sent by John the Baptist; the dinner in the house of Simon, with the anointing by a woman who had been a stoner. Previously to this last had been the doom pronounced on the impenitent cities, narrated by St. Matthew in ch. 11 towards the end; the second circuit through Galilee, of which we read in Luke 8, at the beginning; while immediately before, and indeed leading to, the circumstances mentioned in this section was the healing of a blind and dumb demoniac.

2. The concourse. Our Lord had just returned, not into the house of some believer, as Euthymius thinks; nor into the house in which he made his abode while at Capernaum, as this meaning would require the article; but more generally, "to home," as in Mar_2:1. And no sooner is his return reported than he is followed by a great concourse of people. Again a crowd, as on several previous occasions, especially that mentioned in Mar_2:2, when "there was no room to receive them, no, not so much as about the door," pressed after him. Such was the curiosity of the crowd, and so great their eagerness, that no opportunity was allowed our Lord and his apostles to enjoy their ordinary repasts; "they could not so much as eat bread." This rendering corresponds to that of the Peshito, which omits the second and strengthening negative, for, while in Greek a negative is neutralized by a subsequent simple negative of the same kind, it is continued and intensified by a following compound negative of the same kind. The meaning, therefore, is stronger, whether we read mhte or mhde ; thus, "They were able, no, not (mhte) to eat bread;" or, stronger still, "They could not even (mhde) eat bread," much less find leisure to attend to anything else: though, it may be observed in passing, if mhte were the right reading, the meaning would rather be that they were neither able nor did eat bread. In fact, the crowd was so great, so continuous, so obtrusive, that no time was allowed our Lord and his apostles for their ordinary and necessary meals. From this we learn that our Lord"s popularity was steadily as well as rapidly increasing, and that the excitement, instead of diminishing, was daily, nay, hourly, intensifying.

3. The concern of our Lords kinsfolk. Hearing of this wonderful excitement which the presence of Jesus was everywhere occasioning, his friends or kinsmen were alarmed by the circumstance; and, dreading the effect of such excitement upon his physical constitution fearing, no doubt, that he might be carried away by his enthusiasm and zeal beyond the measure of his bodily strength, and even to the detriment of his mental powers our Lord"s relations went forth to check his excessive efforts and repress his superabundant ardor. The statement is either general, that is to say, "they went forth," or it may be understood in the stricter sense of their coming out of their place of abode, probably Nazareth, or possibly Capernaum. The expression, oi par autou , according to ordinary usage, would mean persons sent by him or away from him, as oi para tou Nikiou , in Thucydides, is "the messengers of Nicias." But the expression cannot mean

(1) his apostles, who though sent out by him and selected for this purpose, as we read in vet. 14, were now with him in the house; nor can it mean

(2) his disciples, or those about him, for this would confound the expression with oi peri auton . It must, it appears, be taken to signify his kinsmen the sense assigned to it by most commentators, ancient and modern. And, though this is a rare use of the expression, it is not quite without parallels, as for example in Susanna, ver. 33, eklaion de oi par authv , but her friends wept;" and in this Gospel, Mar_5:26, ta par authv panta is "all the things from with her," that is, all her resources her living," as we read in the parallel passage of St. Luke.

4. Their course of action. We have now to consider their course of action or mode of procedure, and the object which they had in view. They went out to lay hold of him, and so

(1) to put him under salutary restraint, if the literal meaning of supposed derangement be adhered to. It may indeed mean

(2) to hold him back from such superhuman efforts, in consequence of their believing him to be in an unnatural and abnormal state of mind or body, or both. But, though the word rendered "he is beside himself" is often used in that sense, sometimes elliptically as here and in 2Co_5:13, but mostly in conjunction with nou , or gnwnhv , or frenwn , and so equivalent to parafronein , still it may be employed figuratively, and merely import that he was transported too far. What with the watchings of the preceding night, and the lastings of that morning, and his unceasing labours in addressing his newly chosen apostles, preaching to the people, and working miracles, all of which we learn, by a comparison with the sixth chapter of St. Luke, both mind and body must have been taxed to the utmost, the strain was excessive, they thought, and far too great to be long borne; and so an earnest but friendly interference was deemed by them to be necessary. There is, however,

(3) another view of the matter, which some prefer. They understand the word exesth as equivalent to eleipoyumhse or eleipoquchse , and to denote fainting from bodily exhaustion, and consequently the object of his kinsfolk was to support and sustain him (krathsai). But some resort to the still more questionable expedient of changing the object of the verb just mentioned, and so understanding

(4) that his disciples went out to repress the crowd, for they (i.e. the disciples) said, "It the crowd is mad." This last (4) view is untenable; the preceding one (3) is not well supported; the one going before it (2) is plausible, but rather specious than sound; while the first (1) alone, notwithstanding the difficulty it presents in connection with our Lord"s relatives, is the plain and natural meaning of the expression.

5. Their confined notions of religion. It is painfully manifest that the kinsfolk of our Lord entertained very contracted and very commonplace, or rather indeed low, ideas of religion. They were very imperfectly acquainted with the great object of Jesus" mission; their notions of his work were of the crudest kind; their faith, if at this period it existed at all, must have been in a very incipient state. Their anxiety at the same time for his safety, and their alarm at the public agitation and the probable upshot of that agitation, all combined to force on them the conclusion that he was on the border between fanaticism and frenzy, or that he had actually made the transition into the region of the latter.

6. A common experience. We find in this mistake no new or very strange experience. The Rev. Rowland Hill, on one occasion, strained his voice, raising it to the highest pitch, in order to warn some persons of impending danger, and so rescued them from peril. For this he was warmly applauded, as he deserved. But when he elevated his voice to a similar pitch in warning sinners of the error and evil of their ways, and in order to save their souls from a still greater peril, the same friends who before had praised him now pronounced him fool and fanatic.

II MALIGNANT FOES.

1. The charge of the scribes. The evangelist never suppresses truth; he keeps nothing back, however harsh or unnatural it may at first sight appear. Having shown the effect of the Saviour"s ministry on his friends, he proceeds to exhibit the impression it made on his foes. A notable miracle had been performed, as we learn from St. Matthew"s Gospel, Mat_12:22, a blind and dumb demoniac sad complication had been cured. Now, there are two ways in which men diminish the merit of a good quality, and destroy the credit of a noble action denial is the one, and depreciation is the other. The scribes, or theologians, of the Pharisaic sect, had come down as emissaries from the metropolis, to dog our Saviour"s steps and destroy, if they could, his influence. Had denial of the miracle been possible, it is plain they would have adopted that course; but facts are stubborn things, and denial in the face of facts is impossible. The miracle was too plain, too palpable, and too public to admit denial. The next best thing for their nefarious purpose was depreciation or detraction. "He casteth out devils," they say they could not deny this; "but he hath Beelzebub, and in union (en ) with him, or by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils," or rather "demons," as we have already seen. Beelzebub was the god of Ekron, and got this name from the supposed power which he possessed to ward off flies, like the Latin averrunci or the Greek apotropaioi , who were named averters, which those words signify, as though they possessed the power of averting disease or pestilence from their worshippers. But the name Beelzebub was changed, contemptuously and insultingly no doubt, into Beelzebul, the god of dung; nor is the affinity between the god of flies and the god of the dunghill difficult to discover, while the filth of idolatry is not obscurely implied. Now, this name was given to the evil one, whose proper name is either Satan the adversary, in Hebrew, or Diabolos the accuser, in Greek. Other names he also bears, such as "prince of darkness," "prince of the power of the air," "the tempter," "the God of this world," "the old serpent," "the dragon," and Belial. All of these, more or less indicate his hostility to God and man, his opposition to all good, and instigation to all evil.

2. Confutation. The Saviour refutes this charge by four different arguments. The first argument is an appeal to common sense, the second is ad absurdum, the third is ad hominem, and the fourth from human experience. The first

(1) points out the fact that the stability of a kingdom, or the success of a family depends on unity and peace; as the proverb has it, "Concordia res parvae crescunt, discordia maximae dilabuntur." So the kingdom or family of demons would perish by dissensions. Again

(2) "if Satan cast out Satan not if one Satan cast out another Satan, which is the rendering of some, but, if Satan cast himself out," his policy is suicidal. He had by his demons taken possession of men"s bodies, and thereby exercised his power over his victims; but if he countenanced or combined with the Saviour in casting out these demons, he was destroying his own subjects and diminishing his own power. Thus his kingdom, like many another and many a better, "could not stand," or rather "could not be made to stand" (stayhnai) or, as the other synoptists express it, "it is brought to desolation" (erhmoutai); and, in that case, "house falleth against house," according to Meyer"s rendering of the parallel expression in St. Luke, or, as it stands in the Authorized Version, "a house divided against a house falleth." The conditional proposition in reference to kingdom and house is of that kind which denotes probable contingency, not a mere supposition; but that applied to Satan rising up against himself implies possibility without any expression of uncertainty. Why is this? How can we account for this somewhat striking difference? Because in the former case civil commotions may distract a kingdom, and an unhappy feud may divide a family or household. Such things have occurred; and it is likely enough that they may occur again, and so their occurrence comes within the limits of probability. But, according to the supposition or imputation of the scribes, the thing has already actually occurred, and Satan has risen up against himself, and is divided. Such suicidal policy it would be utterly absurd to attribute to a power so subtle as Satan, unless, indeed, he be supposed to be possessed of less than ordinary worldly prudence. He now turns

(3) to another line of argument which comes home to them more closely. This argument, though omitted by St. Mark, is found in both St. Matthew and St. Luke, and is the following: if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children " sons," in St. Luke cast them out?" This they assumed to do, as we learn from Act_19:13, Act_19:14," Then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists, took upon them to call over them which had evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus, saying, We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth. And there were seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew, and chief of the priests, which did so." Our Lord, in his reasoning and for the purpose of his argument, employs the fact of the assumption which they made, without necessarily admitting the reality of their accomplishing what they pretended. If they were asked by what power or whose aid their sons cast out or took upon them to cast out devils? by Beelzebub or by the Spirit? he knew well what their answer would be, and that they would not acknowledge their children to be leagued with Satan in casting out devils, but that they would contend for the co-operation of Divine power. if, then, our Lord would say, you impute that power which I exert to Beelzebub, and that same power of which they claim the exercise to God, they will be your judges, and condemn you of hostility to me, while you are guilty of such partiality to themselves. There was no escaping from this argument. But he urges

(4) yet another argument one from human experience: How can I rob Satan of his subjects until I have conquered him? And how can I, besides, distribute the spoils of victory unless that conquest be complete? His enemies had accused him of being in alliance with Satan; he argues on the contrary that, instead of being an ally of Satan, he has made open war on him and bound him, invaded his dominions, subdued his subjects, having first overpowered their prince.

III PICTURE OF SATAN.

1. His power. He is the strong man. He is strong in his princedom. He is "prince of the power of the air; " that is, chieftain of those powerful spirits that have their residence in the air. He is strong in his power to destroy, and hence he is called Apollyon, or Abaddon, the destroyer. By his powerful temptations he destroyed the happiness of our first parents and ruined their race. He is strong in the power of cunning. Oh, how subtle, how insidious, how cunning, in his work of destruction! "We are not ignorant," says the apostle, "of his devices." He is strong in the power of calumny, and consequently he is called "the accuser of the brethren," while his accusations are founded on falsehood. He maligned the patriarch of Uz, upright and perfect though he was, misrepresenting that good man"s principles and practice and patience. He is strong in the sovereignty which he exercises over his subjects, and strong in the multitude of those subjects, leading thousands, yea, millions, of men and women captive at his will, and enslaving them with his hellish yoke. He is strong in the fearfully despotic power with which he controls the souls and bodies of his slaves; and every sinner is his slave, and, what is worse, a willing slave, so that, though we urge them by the tenderest motives, address to them the most solemn warnings, allure them by the most precious promises, and appeal to them by the most valuable interests, thousands reject all our overtures, preferring to go on and continue, to live and die, in slavish subjection to the complete control and terrible power of Satan this strong man.

2. His palace and property. St. Luke is fuller in his description here. He speaks of his complete armor, his panoply; he speaks of his palace, the other synoptists speak of his house; he speaks of his goods and of those goods as spoils, the other two speak of his vessels. They all tell us of one stronger than the strong one. St. Luke again tells us that, though the strong man is armed cap-a-pie, and stands warder of his own palace, and keeps his goods in security, yet that he who is stronger than the strong one, having effected an entrance, overcomes him, strips him of his armor in which he reposed such confidence, and distributes his spoils; while the other two Evangelists tell us that, having entered the strong man"s dwelling, he binds the strong man, and plunders, taking as a prey both his house and his vessels the container and the contained. The groundwork of the description is to be found, perhaps, in Isa_49:24, Isa_49:25, "Shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive delivered? But thus saith the Lord, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered: for I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children." But what are we to understand by these particulars? The strong man is Satan, the stronger than the strong man is our blessed Saviour; this world is his palace or house; his goods in general and vessels in particular which are made spoils of are inferior demons according to some, or men according to others, rather both, as Chrysostom explains the meaning when he says, "Not only are demons vessels of the devil, but men also who do his work." In a still narrower sense, man or man"s heart is the palace, and its powers and affections are the goods. The heart of man was once a palace, a princely dwelling, worthy of and intended for the habitation of God. But that palace is now in ruins. We have gazed on a ruined palace; and oh, how sad the sight! Its chambers are dismantled, its columns are prostrate, its arches are broken; fragments of the once stately fabric are scattered about. Ivy twines round its ruined walls, grass grows in its halls, weeds and nettles cover the courtyard. Owls look out of the apertures that once were windows, or hoot in melancholy mood to their fellows. Mounds of earth or heaps of rubbish occupy the apartments once grand and gorgeous. The whole is a sad though striking picture of decay, desolation, and death. Just such a place is the heart of man. It was a palace once; it is a palace still, but the palace is now in ruins, and over these ruins Satan rules and reigns. But what are the goods, or vessels, or spoils? If the unrenewed heart itself be the palace where Satan resides, and which he has made his dwelling, then the powers of that heart for the Hebrews referred to the heart what we attribute to the head its faculties so noble, its feelings so tender, its affections so precious, are Satan"s goods, for he uses them for his own purposes; they are his vessels, for he employs them in his work and service; they are his spoils, for he has usurped authority over them. His, no doubt, they are by right of conquest, if might ever makes right. He is not only a possessor, but wields over them the power of a sovereign. He is enthroned in the sinner"s heart, and exalted to a chief place in his affections. Accordingly, he receives the homage of his intellect, he claims and gets the ready service of his will, he controls the actions of the life; and thus over head and heart and life he sways his scepter, exercising unlimited and incessant control. To one faculty or feeling he says, "Come," and it cometh; to another power or principle of action he says, "Go," and it goeth.

3. His possession, and how he keeps it. In the heart of man there are what Ezekiel calls "chambers of imagery." These chambers of imagery in the human heart are of themselves dark enough and dreary enough; but Satan, if we yield to him and resist him not, for he cannot control us without our consent or coerce us against our consent, will curtain those chambers with darkness spiritual darkness. As long as he can keep us in the darkness of ignorance ignorance of God, of Christ, of the way of salvation, of ourselves, of our slavery, of our responsibility, of our danger, and of our duty he is secure in his possession. "The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them that believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them." By subtlety and stratagem, by wiles and wickedness, he holds possession of those chambers, actually furnishing them with his own hand, while the furniture thus supplied consists of delusions strong delusions, sinful delusions. Even the pictures on the walls are painted by him; scenes base and bad, wicked and abominable, are there portrayed to pervert the judgment and incline it to what is perverse, to debase the imagination with visions foul and filthy, to inflame the affections with objects indelicate and impure. Another effectual way in which Satan holds possession of the palace of man"s heart is by keeping it under the influence of sense. He occupies men with the things of sense and sight, to the neglect of things spiritual and eternal; he employs them with material objects and worldly interests; he amuses them with the trifles of the present time, to the neglect of the interests of the never-ending future; he engrosses our attention with worldliness, vanity, and pride things sensual, earthly, and perishable; thoughts about the body and its wants are pressed on men, to the neglect of the soul and its necessities. Such questions as, "What shall I eat, or what shall! drink, or wherewithal shall! be clothed?" are ever present, while the vastly more important question, "What must! do to be saved?" is lost sight of or left in abeyance. Present profits and worldly pursuits absorb attention, to the neglect of present responsibilities and future realities; the pleasures of sin, short-lived and unsatisfactory as they are sure to prove, divert men"s thoughts from those "pleasures which are at God"s right hand for evermore." But, as the Word of God warns us of Satan"s devices that we may be on our guard against them, it may not be amiss to pay the more particular attention to them. Another way by which he holds possession of the palace of what Bunyan calls Mansoul is delay. This is a favourite method, and one specially successful with the young. "Time enough yet," Satan whispers into the young ear, and the inexperienced heart of youth is too ready to believe the falsehood. He persuades them into the belief that it is too soon for such grave subjects, too early to engage in such solemn reflections. Many other and even better opportunities, they are induced to think, will be afforded; they are yet young and strong, and with a keen zest for youthful pleasures, and the world is all before them. Every year the delay becomes more difficult to break away from, and the delusion the more dangerous; and while the difficulty as well as the danger increases, the strength of the sinner, or his power to overcome the suggestions of Satan, decreases. A more convenient season is expected, and thus procrastination becomes, as usual, "the thief of time; year after year it steals till all is past, and to the mercies of a moment leaves the vast concerns of an eternal scene." But to delay succeeds at length another means by which he keeps possession, and that other means, in one respect the opposite, is despair. Thus extremes meet. Satan had long flattered them with the delusive fancy that it was too soon; now he drives them to the desperate notion that it is too late. Once he flattered them with the false hope of a long and happy future, with death in the remote distance, and with means of grace not only ample but abundant, and power at pleasure to turn to God; now he tortures them with the thought that the day of grace is gone, irrevocably gone. Once he made them believe that the time to break up their fallow ground and sow to themselves in righteousness had not yet come; now, on the contrary, he induces the belief that "the harvest is past, the summer ended, and their souls not saved. Once he deluded them with the thought that sin was only a trifle, and they were willing to lay to their soul the false unction that sin was too small a matter to incur the wrath of Heaven; now he prompts the despairing thought that their sin is too great to be forgiven, and their guilt too heinous to be ever blotted out.

4. The peace he produces. All the while he produces a sort of peace; all the while "his goods are in peace;" all the while sinners are promising themselves "peace, peace; but there is no peace," saith God, "to the wicked." Satan may promise, and even produce, a kind of peace; but that peace is perilous it is a false peace. He may lead them into a sort of calm, but it is the lull before the storm; he may amuse them with a species of quietude, but it is the sure forerunner of the fast-approaching hurricane. The only true peace is that which the Spirit bestows a "peace that passeth all understanding," a peace which the world with all its wealth cannot give, and with all its wickedness cannot take away. This peace is compared to a river: "Then shall thy peace be as a river a river broad and beautiful, glancing in the bright sunshine of the heaven above, and reflecting the varied beauties along its banks; a river deepening and widening at every reach, bearing health and fertility throughout its course, broadening out and expanding at last into the boundless, shoreless ocean of everlasting bliss.

5. Satans defeat and dispossession. Though Satan be strong, there is One stronger than he One "mighty to save," even from his grasp, and "lead captivity captive." That stronger One is the mighty Saviour, whose mission of mercy was meant to take the prey from the mighty, to bruise his head and destroy his works, and so rescue man from the thraldom of Satan and the dominion of sin. Himself mightier than the mighty, he is "able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by him." St. Luke informs us of the manner in which he effects the great emancipation. He comes upon him (epelywn) both suddenly and by way of hostile attack. He comes upon him suddenly, and so takes him by surprise. Satan"s goods are meantime in peace, and he fancies he has it all his own way, and that for ever. The Saviour comes upon the heart enslaved by Satan with the sword of the Spirit, which is the word and truth of God, and immediately the chains are burst asunder and the shackles fall off. Henceforth it enjoys that freedom with which Christ makes his people free. He comes upon the sinner"s soul with the power of the Spirit, convincing of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment. The Spirit takes of the things of Christ and shows them to the sinner, and so the truth is brought home to the heart and conscience; not in word only, "but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance." He comes upon the sinner, whose powers lay dormant, or rather "dead in trespasses and sins," and he awakens the powers that thus lay dormant, and quickens the soul, it may be long dead, into new spiritual life, and makes it "alive unto God through Christ Jesus." But with life comes light. Soon as the life-giving Spirit operates upon the mass erewhile chaotic and dead, living forces are developed, and light springs up; the light of the glorious gospel of the grace of God shines through all that heart, however dead and dark it had been before. Every soul thus awakened, enlightened, quickened, and truly converted to God, is a victory of the Saviour over Satan a trophy snatched from the strong one by him who thus proves himself stronger than the strong man. Every such one is evidence of Satan"s defeat, and proves the destruction of his power, as also his expulsion from his usurped dominion a thorough and blessed dispossession of the spirit of evil.

6. Satans armor. His offensive weapons are his snares, his devices, his wiles, his lies, his lusts; of all these we read in Scripture. But he has other armor; and, as panoply has its root in oplon , or "thing moved about," as the shield, from epw , according to Donaldson, the reference may rather be to defensive armor. The parts of this armor may be regarded as consisting of our ignorance of God and hatred of him, our unbelief and ungodliness, hardness of heart and unrighteousness. Theophylact explains Satan"s armor to be made of our sins in general; his words are Panta ta eidh thv amartiav auth gar opla tou Diabolou , equivalent to "All forms of sin, for this is the arms of the devil." By such armor he defends his possessions and maintains his interest in them; by such armor he repels all attacks on his goods, opposing the impressions of the Divine Word, the influences of the Holy Spirit, and the leadings of God"s providence. Christ captures his arms when he enables us to guard against his devices and wiles, to avoid his snares, to discredit his lies, shun his lusts, and resist his temptations. Further, he takes from Satan the armor in which he places such confidence when he breaks the power of sin in the soul, opens men"s eyes to the perils that surround them, regenerates the heart, and renews the life, humbles their spirit, rectifies their errors, checks their corruption, and, in a word, bruises Satan under their feet.

7. Division of the spoils. This is usually the consequence of conquest. When Satan led the sinner captive and made him his prey, he took him with all he is and all he has for his spoil, employing all his endowments of mind and energies of body, his time, his talents, his health, his influence, his estate, small or great, in his service. But again, in the day of the sinner"s conversion to God, not only is Satan defeated and dispossessed, Christ recovers the long-lost possession all of it for himself. He regains those energies and endowments, that time, those talents, that influence; he restores all to their right use and to the great end for which they were intended. The whole man body, soul, and spirit is brought back to the service of his Maker, and every thought becomes subject to the law of Jesus Christ. Further, the Saviour not only regains those spoils and recovers them for himself, but also, like a great and good Captain, he divides them among his followers. In every case when he defeats, disarms, and dispossesses Satan, Christ shares with his soldiers his servants the spoils consequent on victory. The sinner thus rescued is blessed "with all spiritual blessings in heavenly things in Christ Jesus;" but he is not only blessed in his own soul, he is made a blessing to all around. He becomes a blessing to friend and fellow-man. In this way the spoil is divided and the blessing distributed. He becomes a proof of Divine power and a pattern of purity to an ungodly world; while his talents, be they many or few ten, or five, or one are employed for the good of Christ"s Church," for the perfecting of the saints, for the edification of the body of Christ." To sinners he serves as a beacon-light to warn them of the sunken rocks or breakers ahead, and to direct their course into the haven of heavenly rest. A curious and not uninteresting exposition by Theophylact of the distribution of the spoils is to this effect, that men, being the spoils first taken by Satan, and then retaken by Christ, the Saviour distributes them, giving one to one angel and another to another angel as a faithful guardian, that, instead of the demon that lorded it over him, an angel may now have him in safe keeping of course, in order to be his guide and guard him.

8. Practical lessons.

(1) The sinner still in the power of the strong man should cry mightily to Christ to rescue him from such base servitude, and deliver him from such dreadful drudgery. He, and he alone, can free him from enslavement, because he is stronger than the strong man.

(2) The saint already delivered, while still to be on his guard against Satan, has nothing to fear from his assaults. He can never again regain possession, for he is vanquished, and the means of retrieving his lost possessions and forfeited power are for ever wrested from him. If he goes out of himself without being dislodged, he is sure to return and resume possession with increased forces and power, as the parable which follows in St. Luke teaches.

(3) The believer is bound to bless his deliverer, which he may suitably do in the words"Thou hast, O Lord most glorious, Ascended up on high; And in triumph victorious led Captive captivity .... Bless"d be the Lord, who is to us Of our salvation God; Who daily with his benefits Us plenteously doth load.

(4) Neutrality in this cause is criminal. If we are not on Christ"s side, contending against Satan, we evince our unwillingness that his kingdom should be destroyed; and if not engaged in seeking to bring subjects into Christ"s kingdom, as a shepherd collects his flock and pens them in the fold, we are scattering the sheep away from and leaving them without the place of safety.

IV THE BLASPHEMY AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST.

1. Patristic explanations of this sin. Some have understood it of apostasy in time of persecution. This was the opinion of Cyprian (A.D. 248), who says, in "Epist." 16, that "It was a very great crime which persecution compelled men to commit, as they themselves know who have committed it, inasmuch as our Lord and Judge has said, "Whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I confess before my Father who is in heaven. But he that denieth me, him will I also deny." And again, "All sins and blasphemies shall be forgiven to the sons of men: but he that blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost, shall not have forgiveness, but is guilty of eternal sin" (reus est aeterni peccati)." Some understand it of the denial of the divinity of our Lord, as Athanasius (A.D. 326), who says that "the Pharisees in the Saviour"s time, and the Arians in our days, running into the same madness, denied the real Word to be incarnate, and ascribed the works of the Godhead to the devil and his angels, and therefore justly undergo the punishment which is due to this impiety, without remission. For they put the devil in the place of God, and imagined the works of the living and true God to be nothing more than the works of the devil." And elsewhere the same Father says, "They who spake against Christ, considering him only as the Son of man, were pardonable, because in the beginning of the gospel the world looked upon him only as a prophet, not as God, but as the Son of man: but they who blasphemed his divinity after his works had demonstrated him to be God, had no forgiveness, so long as they continued in this blasphemy; but if they repented they might obtain pardon: for there is no sin unpardonable with God to them who truly and worthily repent." Others again have understood it to consist in the denial of the divinity of the Holy Ghost. Thus Epiphanius (A.D. 368) charged with this sin the Maccdonian heretics, because they opposed the Godhead of the Holy Spirit, making him a mere creature. In like manner Ambrose (A.D. 374) accused these same heretics of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, because they denied his divinity.

2. The two most important patristic authorities on this subject. These are Chrysostom (A.D. 388) among the Greek Fathers, and Augustine (A.D. 396) of the Latin Fathers; both near the close of the fourth century. The former on the nature of the sin itself says, "For though you say that you know me not, you are surely not ignorant of that also, that to expel demons and cure diseases are the work of the Holy Spirit. Not only, then, do you insult me, but the Holy Spirit also. Therefore your punishment is inevitable both here and hereafter." Again, in reference to the unpardonableness of this sin, he says, have said many things against me that I am a deceiver, that I am an opponent of God. These things I forgive you on your repentance, and I do not exact punishment of you; but the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven even to the penitent." And how could this have reason, for truly even this sin was forgiven to persons repenting? Many, then, of those who said these things believed afterwards, and all was forgiven them. What, then, does he mean? That this sin above all is least capable of pardon. Why at all? Because they were ignorant who Christ was; but of the Holy Spirit they had had sufficient proof. For truly the prophets spake by him what they did speak, and all in the old dispensation had had abundant knowledge of him. What he means then is this: "Grant it, you stumble at me because of the garb of flesh I have assumed; can you also say about the Holy Spirit that you are ignorant of him? Therefore this blasphemy shall not be forgiven you; both here and there you shall suffer punishment. Further on he proceeds to say, "For truly some men are punished both here and there; others only here; others only there; while others neither here nor there. Here and there, as these very persons (i.e. the Pharisees), for truly both here they suffered punishment when they endured those irremediable sufferings at the capture of their city; and there they shall undergo the most severe punishment, as the inhabitants of Sodom, and as many others. But there only, as that rich man when tortured in flames was not master of even a drop of water. Some only here, as the person who had committed fornication among the Corinthians. Others again, neither here nor there, as the apostles, as the prophets, and as the blessed Job; for what they suffered did not belong to punishment, but was exercises and conflicts." The blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is, according to Chrysostom, greater than the sin against the Son of man, and, though not absolutely irremissible to such as repent, yet in the absence of such timely repentance it will be punished both here and hereafter. Augustine has several references to this sin, but his opinion of the matter may be briefly summed up in continued resistance to the influences of the Holy Spirit by insuperable hardness of heart, and in perseverance in obduracy and impenitence to the last. Thus in his Commentary on Romans he says, "That man sins against the Holy Spirit who, despairing or deriding and despising the preaching of grace by which sins are washed away, and of peace by which we are reconciled to God, refuses to repent of his sins, and resolves that he must go on hardening himself in a certain impious and fatal sweetness of them, and persists therein to the end." He further insists that neither pagans, nor Jews, nor heretics, nor schismatics, however they may have opposed the Holy Spirit before baptism, were shut out by the Church from that sacrament in case they truly repented; nor after baptism in case of falling into sin, or resisting the Spirit of God, were they debarred from restoration to pardon and peace on repentance, and that even those whom our Lord charged with this blasphemy might repent and betake themselves to the Divine mercy. "What else remains," he asks, "but that the sin against the Holy Spirit, which our Lord says is neither forgiven in this world nor in that which is to come, must be understood to be no other than perseverance in malignity and wickedness with despair of the indulgence and mercy of God? For this is to resist the grace and peace of the Spirit of which we speak.

3. Modern expositions of this sin. Some of these reproduce or nearly so the interpretations of the ancients. They may in the main be divided into three classes. The first class consists of those who, like Hammond, Tillotson, Wetstein, understand the sin in question to be the diabolical calumny of the Pharisees, in ascribing to the power of Satan the miracles which the Saviour by the Spirit given him without measure performed. Here was evidently the mighty power of God, but these men, maliciously, wantonly, and wickedly, as also presumptuously and blasphemously, pronounced the miracle just wrought before their eyes and in their presence to be an effect produced by the evil one. The connection instituted between the twenty-ninth and thirtieth verses of this third chapter of St. Mark by the word oti , corresponding to the parallel dia touto of St. Matthew, and the imperfect elegon , equivalent to" they kept saying," are both in favor of this interpretation. Under this first class are several modifications, such as that which proceeds on the supposed distinction between "Son of man" and "Son of God," as though he said that whosoever spake a word against Jesus as the Son of man, having his divinity shrouded and veiled in his humanity, might obtain forgiveness; but blasphemy against him as the Son of God, evidencing his divinity by miracles, could not obtain forgiveness. Another modification understands our Lord"s warning the Pharisees that they were fast approaching an unpardonable sin by wickedly rejecting the Son of man as a Saviour; that one step further one other blasphemy, that of the Spirit who, if not then, might hereafter reveal this, or a coming, Saviour unto them, would deprive them of the means and agent and so of the hope of salvation, and consequently of pardon. Yet another modification is that of Grotius, following in the steps of Chrysostom, to the effect that it is easier for any or all sins to obtain forgiveness than that this calumny should be pardoned; and that it will be severely punished both in the present and coming age. The second class, to which Whitby, Doddridge, and Macknight belong, holds that the Pharisees, by their conduct on this particular occasion or at the time then present, were not guilty of the sin referred to, and in fact that the sin against the Holy Ghost could not be committed while Christ still abode on earth, and before his ascension; because the Spirit was not yet given. They hold, therefore, that after our Lord"s resurrection and ascension, when he would send down the Holy Ghost to attest his mission, and when his supernatural gifts and miraculous operations would furnish incontestable proofs of almighty power, any such calumny or blasphemy uttered against the Spirit then would be unpardonable. The reason was plain, because the Son of man, while he was clothed in human flesh, and his divinity shrouded from human sight, and while his work on earth was not yet finished, might be slandered by persons unwittingly, or, according to the Scripture phrase, "ignorantly in unbelief;" but once the Holy Spirit had come down, and shed the light of heaven over the events of the Saviour"s life from the cradle to the cross, and had illumined with glory unspeakable the scenes of Gethsemane and Calvary and Olivet, making plain to every willing mind the momentous import of all those marvellous transactions, the blasphemy of the Spirit could not then be in ignorance or for lack of sufficient demonstration; but presumptuous against light and against knowledge, from sheer malevolence and unaccountable malignity. The Pharisees were preparing for this they were approaching the brink of this fearful abyss, and our Lord warns them back before it was possible for them to take the fatal plunge, and involve themselves in ruin without remedy. A third class of interpreters generalizes the sin in question in much the same way as we have seen Augustine do, and resolves it into continued resistance and obstinate opposition to the grace of the gospel, impenitently and unbelievingly persisted in till the end. This is the view which Dr. Chalmers elabourates with great eloquence and power in his sermon on "Sin against the Holy Ghost." In that sermon we read as follows: man may shut against himself all the avenues of reconciliation. There is nothing mysterious in the kind of sin by which the Holy Spirit is tempted to abandon him to that state in which there can be no forgiveness and no return unto God. It is by a movement of conscience within him, that the man is made sensible of sin, that he is visited with the desire of reformation, that he is given to feel his need both of mercy to pardon, and of grace to help him; in a word, that he is drawn unto the Saviour, and brought into that intimate alliance with him by faith which brings down upon him both acceptance with the Father and all the power of a new and constraining impulse to the way of obedience. But this movement is a suggestion of the Spirit of God, and, if it be resisted by any man, the Spirit is resisted. The God who offers to draw him unto Christ is resisted. The man refuses to believe because his deeds are evil; and by every day of perseverance in these deeds, the voice which tells him of their guilt and urges him to abandon them is resisted; and thus the Spirit ceases to suggest, and the Father, from whom the Spirit proceedeth, ceases to draw, and the inward voice ceases to remonstrate and all this because their authority has been so often put forth and so often turned away. This is the deadly offense which has reared an impassable wall against the return of the obstinately impenitent. This is the blasphemy to which no forgiveness can be granted, because, in its very nature, the man who has come this length feels no movement of conscience towards that ground on which alone forgiveness can be awarded to him, and where it is never refused even to the very worst and most malignant of human iniquities. This is the sin against the Holy Ghost. It is not peculiar to any one age. It does not lie in any one unfathomable mystery. It may be seen at this day in thousands and thousands more, who, by that most familiar and most frequently exemplified of all habits, a habit of resistance to a sense of duty, have at length stifled it altogether, and driven their, inward monitor away from them, and have sunk into a profound moral lethargy, and so will never obtain forgiveness not because forgiveness is ever refused to any who repent and believe the gospel, but because they have made their faith and their repentance impracticable The whole mysteriousness of this sin against the Holy Ghost is thus done away. Grant him the office with which he is invested in the Word of God, even the office of instigating the conscience to all its reprovals of sin, and to all its admonitions of repentance; and then, if ever you witnessed the case of a man whose conscience had fallen into a profound and irrecoverable sleep, or, at least, had lost to such a degree its power of control over him, that he stood out against every engine which was set up to bring him to the faith and repentance of the New Testament, behold in such a man a stoner against conscience to such a woeful extent that conscience had given up its direction of him; or, in other words, a sinner against the Holy Ghost to such an extent that he had let down the office of warning him away from that ground of danger and of guilt on which he stood so immovably posted." There are some modifications of this view which it may be well to notice. One is that which makes the sin against the Holy Ghost to be resistance to conscience as the voice of God in the soul the voice which the Holy Spirit employs in testifying to truth and goodness, and in reprobating sin and recommending the Saviour. Another modification is that which makes blasphemy against the Holy Ghost to consist in the expression of malignant unbelief of, and wilful apostasy from, the truth of God, and that, because it is the Holy Ghost which illumines the understanding and applies the truth to the heart of believers.

4. Remarks on the foregoing theories. In our observations on the foregoing theories we do not deem it prudent dogmatically to determine which of them is the correct one. In an ease where such diversities of opinion have prevailed, even among the ablest scholars and the most eloquent theologians, it is better that every one should be persuaded in his own mind. We may, however, be permitted to state that view which has recommended itself most to our mind, and some grounds for the preference to which we think it entitled. The view held by the first class above mentioned appears to us on the whole the most tenable, for

(1) it is most in harmony with the context, as it stands both in this Gospel and that of St. Matthew. The Pharisees had witnessed an undeniable miracle in the cure of a blind and dumb demoniac; but, instead of acknowledging the finger of God in the miraculous cure, they ascribed it to complicity or collusion with the power of darkness. This was a gratuitous and malicious calumny; it was a sin of speech as well as of thought a blasphemy, in fact, in the literal sense. The form which the sin is represented as taking is that of speech, as appears plainly from the contrast between speaking a word against the Son of man and speaking against the Holy Ghost. Again,

(2) the allegation of the second class, that the Holy Ghost was not given till after the Ascension, though quite true in reference to the disciples, does not apply to the Master, to whom the Spirit was given without measure from the first. Further,

(3) the view of the third class, so ably advocated by Dr. Chalmers and many others, and which in substance was that held by Augustine, appears too wide in extent and too general in its character; whereas the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is something peculiar and special, and of rare occurrence. Besides, if the sin in question consisted in obstinate resistance to the gospel, continued till that resistance culminated in final unbelief, it would Be little, if anything, different from sin in general which, by obstinate continuance therein, becomes unpardonable, and that, not from lack of cleansing power in the blood of Christ, nor from any peculiar aggravation, but solely on account of continued persistence therein.

5. Perilous approximations to this sin. That marry have been unduly exercised and harassed by fancied guiltiness of this sin, is certain; that some have despaired or become melancholy on this account, is credible; that many have been driven to insanity by it we can scarcely believe. To any who are troubled with anxious thoughts about the matter we may say that, according to the theories of the first and second classes, they could not have committed the same sin in kind as they did not, like the Pharisees, see the miracles wrought by our Lord, nor did they witness the supernatural operations of the Spirit after his descent at Pentecost whatever the degree of their sin may have been; while, with respect to the third, the sin being that of continued resistance, they have only to abandon their dogged opposition, the abandonment of which their very anxiety proves to have become already an accomplished fact. To all, of whatever class of opinion, who are apprehensive earnestly apprehensive and afraid of having committed this sin their very uneasiness on that score is proof of their guiltlessness of the fancied crime, for these very upbraidings of conscience prove incompatibility with commission of this sin. At the same time, there are approximations to this sin which we should most carefully guard against. A rejection of the truth of Scripture wilfully persisted in; or trifling with the operations of the Holy Spirit in the heart; or ridicule of religion and opposition to its ordinances in general; or hostility to Christianity in particular; or contempt, malevolence, and slander directed against God and the things of God, or against the Church and people of God; or mockery of sacred things; or blasphemous suggestions harboured and indulged in each of these involves an awfulness of criminality and a fearfulness of guilt that betoken a considerable similarity or close approximation to the heinousness of the unpardonable sin. We do not affirm that any of these is actually that sin, but only such an approach to the verge of the precipice as is sufficient to startle men to a sense of danger, and drive them back before they venture a step further. Alford, who makes the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost to be a state of wilful, determined opposition to the present power of the Holy Ghost, in which state or at least approaching very near to which the act of the Pharisees proved them to be, compares, among other Scriptures, Heb_6:4-8 and Heb_10:26, Heb_10:27. But the purport of the last-cited Scripture is that, in case the sacrifice of Christ is rejected, there is no other sacrifice available, all others having been done away, and consequently no other means of escape from the wrath of God; while the former passage refers to apostasy so aggravated as to render restoration impossible, because the persons guilty of it felt away in spite of the clearest possible evidence to the truth of the Christian faith. Another Scripture frequently compared with that before us is 1Jn_5:16. The there mentioned as tending unto (eiv) death is regarded by some to be the act of denying Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of God, or the state of apostasy indicated by that act; others hold it to be apostasy from Christianity, combined with diabolical enmity, and that in the face of extraordinary evidence; but it appears to be a specific act of sin, of the commission of which the evidence is clear and convincing, distinct and precise such an act of apostasy as blasphemes the Holy Ghost by ascribing his operations to Satanic power. This sin unto death is certainly the nearest approach to the unpardonable sin, if it be not, as many hold it to be, identical with it. Of the three different readings, krisewv, kolasewv , and amarthmatov , the last is the best supported; while the expression "an eternal sin" signifies either a sin that is not pardoned or a sin of which the punishment is not remitted. The connection of the aphoristic expression which immediately follows in St. Matthew, viz. "Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit," is briefly but correctly pointed out in the remark of Chrysostom, "Since they did not reprove the works, but calumniated him that did them, he shows that this accusation was contrary to the natural sequence of affairs. J.J.G.

The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

To eat bread - That is, to take any subsistence.

John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.

The friends of Jesus think Him out of His senses:

v. 20. And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread.

v. 21. And when His friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on Him; for they said, He is beside Himself.

No sooner had Jesus returned to the city and to the house, no sooner had He come home, than a crowd again assembled. So urgent were they in their demand to see Him that Christ and His disciples were not even given time to partake of the necessary food needed to sustain life. If the eagerness of these people had only been for the Bread of Life, if they had only been hungering and thirsting after righteousness, there would not be a discordant element in the entire story. But their object was more than ever a glimpse of the great Healer and Benefactor; His message interested them little or not at all. In the meantime those nearest to the Lord, His relatives, His mother and His brothers, who are mentioned also at the end of the chapter, were becoming worried about Him. They had heard about the multitudes and their intense insistence upon seeing Jesus and giving Him no rest. So they set out from where they were with the purpose of taking Him under their care; for they had gained the impression, and no longer made any effort to conceal it, that He was in an unhealthy state of excitement, due to overwork, bordering on insanity. This peculiar idea, which was not at all flattering to the Lord, was due to lack of proper knowledge as to His power. Jesus was the Son of God, and He might become tired and weak, but He would not submit to the extent as was supposed by His relatives.

Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Observe here, 1. How truly our Lord’s words were verified, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, Joh 4:34 : for he and his apostles going into an house to refresh themselves in their hunger, the people pressed upon him so fast to hear the word that he regards not the satisfying of his hunger, but applies himself to instruct the people.

Lord! how exemplary was thy zeal and diligence in preaching the everlasting gospel to a lost world! As it is instructive to, may it be imitated and followed by, all thy ambassadors.

Observe, 2. The rash censure of our Saviour’s friends, that is, his kinsmen, concerning this action, in neglecting to eat bread, and suffering the multitude thus unseasonably to press upon him.

They conclude, he is beside himself, out of his right mind; and accordingly went out to lay hold upon him.

Learn hence, (1.) That the forward zeal and diligence of Christ and his ministers in preaching the gospel, is accounted madness and frenzy by a blind world. But they may say with the apostle, If we be beside ourselves it is to God, 2Co 5:13. But who were persons that thus looked upon our Saviour as beside himself? Verily his own kindred and relations according to the flesh.

Learn hence, (2.) That oft-times the servants of God meet with the strongest temptations from, and are most discouraged and molested by, such as are their nearest relations by blood or alliance. This is a great trial, to find our relations setting us back, instead of helping us forward, in the ways of religion; but we must bear it patiently, knowing, that not only others of God’s children, but Jesus Christ, his own and only son, did experience this trial.

Observe, 3. The malicious and wicked slander which the scribes endeavoured to fix on our blessed Saviour; namely, that he was possessed by the devil, and by a familiarity with him, and help from him, cast forth devils out of others.

Good God! how was thine own and only Son, the holy and innocent Jesus, censured, slandered, and falsely accused of the worst of crimes: of gluttony, of blasphemy, of sorcery! Can any of thy children expect freedom from the persecution of the tongue, when innocency itself could not protect thy holy Son from slander and false accusation?

Observe, 4. Our Saviour’s answer, and just apology for himself, in which are contained, (1.) A confutation of their calumny and slander.

(2.) A reprehension of the scribes for the same. To confute this slander, our Saviour, by several arguments, shows how absurd and unlikely it is that the devil should cast out himself, and any way seek to oppose and destroy his own kingdom. As if our Saviour had said, "Is it likely that Satan would lend me his power to use it against himself? Surely Satan will do nothing to weaken his own interest, or shake the pillars of his own kingdom. Now if I have received any power from Satan, for destroying him and kingdom, then is Satan like a family divided within itself, and like a kingdom divided against itself, which can never stand, but be brought to desolation."

Our Saviour having sufficiently shown that he did not work his miracles by the power of the devil, he next informs them from whence he had that power, even from God himself; and accordingly he compares Satan to a strong man well armed, with weapons to defend his house; and he compares himself, clothed with divine power, to one that is stronger than the strong man.

So that the argument runs thus: The devil is very strong and powerful, and there is no power but God’s only that is stronger than his. If then, says Christ, I were not assisted with a divine power, I could never cast out this strong man, who reigns in the bodies and souls of men as in this house, for it must be a stronger than the strong man that shall bind Satan; and who is he but the God of strength?--

Learn hence, That Christ’s divine power only is superior to Satan’s strength. He only can vanquish and overrule him at his pleasure, and drive him out of that possession which he holds either in the bodies or in the souls of men.

Observe, 5. The charge which our Saviour brings against the scribes and Pharisees’ blaspheming his divine power in working miracles. He charges them of sinning the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost. All sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven, but he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost, hath never forgiveness.

As if Christ had said, "All the reproaches which you cast upon me as man are pardonable; as when you check me with the poverty and meanness of my birth, when you censure me for a wine-bibber, a glutton, a friend and companion of sinners, and the like unjust crimes. But when you blaspheme that divine power by which all my miracles are wrought, and, contrary to the conviction of your own enlightened minds, maliciously ascribe all my miracles to the power of the Holy Ghost, this makes your condition not only dangerous but desperate, because you resist the last remedy, and oppose the best means for your conviction. For what can be done more to convince you that I am the true and promised Messiah, than to work so many miracles before your eyes to that purpose?

Now, if when you see these you will say, it is not the Spirit of God that works these, but the power of the devil: as if Satan would conspire against himself, and seek the ruin of his own kingdom; there is no way or means lift to convince you, but you will continue in your obstinacy, and malicious opposition to truth, to your unutterable and inevitable condemnation.

William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

20. Could not so much as eat. The multitudes were so eager to hear, or be healed, and Jesus so ready to bless them, that there was no time for meals.

B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.

Then he went home

"Then Jesus went to the house where he was staying."

they could not even eat bread

The word "bread" represents food. AT: "Jesus and his disciples could not eat at all" or "they could not eat anything" (See: Synecdoche)

they went out to seize him

Members of his family went to the house, so that they could take hold of him and force him to go home with them.

for they said

Possible meanings for the word "they" are 1) his relatives or 2) some people in the crowd.

out of his mind

Jesus' family uses this idiom to describe how they think he is acting. AT: "crazy" or "insane" (See: Idiom)

By the ruler of the demons he drives out demons

"By the power of Beelzebul, who is the ruler of the demons, Jesus drives out demons"

translationWords

bread

seize

scribe

Jerusalem

demon-possessed

Beelzebul

demon

unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.

20. συνέρχεται πάλιν ὁ ὄχλος. The πάλιν looks back to Mar 3:7-8. The crowd, with the freedom of Orientals (Trench, Parables, p. 302n.; Tristram, Eastern Customs in Bible Lands, p. 36), came in and filled the house. These verses (20, 21) are preparatory to 31–35, which show who come next to the chosen Twelve; it is a circle which anyone can enter.

ὥστε μὴ … μηδέ. The authority for μηδέ is ample ([607][608][609][610][611][612][613][614] and μηδέ is required by the obvious meaning. With μήτε the sentence would mean “so that they were not able nor ate bread,” which is hardly sense; but in modern Greek the difference between μηδέ and μήτε seems to have vanished. Winer, p. 614. This was no solitary instance of the difficulty; Mar 2:2 and Mar 6:31 show that the pressure of the multitudes was a grave inconvenience. It hindered the training of the Twelve. As usual, it is omitted by Mt.

[607] Codex Alexandrinus. 5th cent. Brought by Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Constantinople, from Alexandria, and afterwards presented by him to King Charles I. in 1628. In the British Museum. The whole Gospel. Photographic facsimile, 1879.

[608] Codex Vaticanus. 4th cent., but perhaps a little later than א. In the Vatican Library almost since its foundation by Pope Nicolas V., and one of its greatest treasures. The whole Gospel, ending at Mar 16:8. Photographic facsimile, 1889.

[609] Codex Cyprius. 9th cent. One of the seven uncials which have the Gospels complete, the others being אBMSUΩ. At Paris.

[610] Codex Regius. 8th cent. An important witness. At Paris. Contains Mar 1:1 to Mar 10:15; Mar 10:30 to Mar 15:1; Mar 15:20 to Mar 16:20, but the shorter ending is inserted between Mar 16:8 and Mar 16:9, showing that the scribe preferred it to the longer one.

[611] Codex Nanianus. 9th or 10th cent. Gospels complete.

[612] Codex Sangallensis. 9th or 10th cent. Contains the Gospels nearly complete, with an interlinear Latin translation. The text of Mark is specially good, agreeing often with CL. At St Gall.

[613] Codex Petropolitanus. 9th cent. Gospels almost complete. Mar 16:18-20 is in a later hand.

[614] n asterisk denotes that the word is not found elsewhere in N.T., and such words are included in the index, even if there is no note on them in the commentary.

ἄρτον φαγεῖν. See on Mar 7:2; also Dalman, Words, p. 112.

Cambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges (Cambridge University Press, 1896; 21 vols, various authors incl. Carr, Maclear, Plummer, Farrar, Lumby, Moule, M. R. James, Simcox) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

20-35.] Charges against Jesus,—of madness by his relations,—of dæmoniacal possession by the Scribes. His replies. Mat 12:22-37, Mat 12:46-50. Luk 11:14-26; Luk 8:19-21. Our Lord had just cast out a deaf and dumb spirit (see notes on Matt.) in the open air (Matt., ver. 23), and now they retire into the house. The omission of this, wholly inexplicable if Mark had had either Matt. or Luke before him, belongs to the fragmentary character of his Gospel. The common accounts of the compilation of this Gospel are most capricious and absurd. In one place, Mark omits a discourse—‘because it was not his purpose to relate discourses;’—in another he gives a discourse, omitting the occasion which led to it, as here. The real fact being, that the sources of Mark’s Gospel are generally of the highest order, and most direct, but the amount of things contained very scanty and discontinuous: see Prolegg. ch. iii. § viii.

20. πάλιν] resumed from ch. 2:2.

ὥστε μὴ δ.] shewing that one of the αὐτοί is the narrator.

Henry Alford, The Greek Testament (1849–1861) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

20-35. Jesus, at home again, is met by the opposition of the Scribes, and by the attempt on the part of his family to restrain him.

It is evident that there is both a logical and a chronological relation between this attitude of our Lord’s family and this new phase of the opposition of the Scribes. The logical relation is found in the language of the two. His family said, he is beside himself; the Scribes said, he is possessed by the devil himself. The close juxtaposition of these in the narrative shows that Mk. had this logical relation in his mind. On the other hand, the interruption of the story of his family’s attempt to restrain him by the introduction of the other account, and the resumption of the former in v. 31, is not explained so well by any other assumption as that there was really such an interval between the family’s original purpose and their arrival on the scene of action, which was filled up by the controversy with the Scribes. Jesus makes this opposition the occasion of teaching, of which it is easy to miss the point, and which has been badly misunderstood. In regard to the charge that he is in collusion with Satan in casting out demons, his point fully stated would be, that such collusion is possible up to the point where it involves an actual arraying of Satan against himself. And Jesus turns their charge against themselves by his counter-claim that his whole action is hostile to Satan, making such collusion impossible. And this is the acumen of his statement about the sin against the Holy Ghost. In the case of the Scribes, their charge had been very close to that sin, when they said that the Spirit in Jesus was the Devil instead of the Holy Spirit, involving a complete upsetting of all moral values, and a stupendous and well-nigh irrecoverable moral blindness in themselves. That is, their whole error lay in their failure to value the moral element in Jesus’ works. It is not implied at all that his family was in sympathy with the Scribes, their apprehension being simply that his mind was unsettled, and that he needed to be put under restraint. This lack of sympathy with him on the part of his human family led Jesus to point out the higher reality of spiritual relationship and association.

20. ἔρχεται—comes. εἰς οἶκον is here probably the colloquial anarthrous phrase, equivalent to our home. The gathering of the Scribes from Jerusalem and the visit of his family would probably both of them be at Capernaum, and this points to his own house as the one meant here, RV. margin.

ἔρχεται instead of ἔρχονται, Tisch. WH. RV. א B Γ mss. of Lat. Vet. etc.

Καὶ συνέρχεται πάλιν (ὁ) ὄχλος—And (the,) crowd gathers again.

ὁ before ὄχλος Tr. (WH.) RV. א ABDLcorr. Δ 209, 300, Memph.edd. The article is rather favored by Mk.’s habit of correlating persons and things with previous mentions of the same in his account.

πάλιν—again. This refers to 2:1, 2, and denotes a repetition of what occurred then in the same place. μὴ δύνασθαι μηδὲ—not able even.

μηδὲ, instead of μήτε, Treg. WH. RV. ABKLU Δ 28, 33 etc.

ὥστε μὴ.1

International Critical Commentary — older volumes (1896–1929), various authors — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Again. Glancing back to the many notices of crowds in the preceding narrative. This reassembling of the multitudes, and its interference with the repast of Christ and the disciples, is peculiar to Mark.

Marvin R. Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament (1887–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.