Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Mark 3:20
And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread.
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.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
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.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Verse 20. Eat bread.] Had no time to take any necessary refreshment.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
There is no small dispute who are here called our Saviours friends, , 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, : various senses are given of this word, but certainly the most ordinary interpretation of it doth best agree to this place. They saw our Saviours 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 Jehus 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.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
And the multitude coming together again,…. Either the multitude that were about the door of this house; insomuch that there was no room about, nor any coming near it, Mr 2:2, or the multitude that came from different parts, and had thronged about him at the sea side, before he went up into the mountain: these understanding that he was come down from thence, and was returned to Capernaum, and was at Simon’s house, flocked thither, in great numbers, to see his person, hear his doctrines, and observe his miracles;
so that they could not so much as eat bread; the press was so great, and their importunities so urgent, either to hear him preach, or have their sick healed, that Christ, and his disciples, had neither room nor opportunity to eat some food for the refreshment of nature; though it was very necessary, and high time they had, especially Christ, who had been up all night, which he had spent in prayer; and had been very busy that morning in calling and appointing his apostles, and instructing them what they should do.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
So that they could not so much as eat bread ( ). Note infinitive with . Apparently Jesus and the disciples indoors with the great crowd in the house and at the door as in Mark 1:32; Mark 2:2 to which Mark refers by “again.” The jam was so great that they could not rest, could not eat, and apparently Jesus could not even teach. The crowd reassembled at once on Christ’s return from the mountain.
Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament
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.
Fuente: Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament
1) “And the multitude cometh together again,” (kai sunerchetai palin ho ochlos) “And the crowd came together, in symphony,” closely associated, in interest and purpose, after He had called the disciples unto Him intimately in the mountain and ordained twelve from among them as apostles, Mar 3:13-19.
2) “So that they could not so much as eat bread.” (hoste me dunasthai autous mede arthon phagein) “So that they were unable to even eat food or bread,” without being disturbed by the multitude of people, who had been drawn to Him because of the notoriety of His healing and teaching and preaching.
Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary
Mar 3:20
. And they come into the house. Mark undoubtedly takes in a somewhat extended period of time, when he passes from the miracles to that wicked conspiracy which the relatives of Christ formed with each other, to bind him as if he had been a madman. Matthew and Luke mention not more than a single miracle, as having given to the Pharisees an opportunity of slander; but as all the three agree in this last clause which is contained in Mark’s narrative, I have thought it proper to insert it here.
It is wonderful that such wickedness should have been found among the relatives of Christ, who ought to have been the first to aid him in advancing the kingdom of God. When they see that he has already obtained some reputation, their ambition leads them to desire that he should be admired in Jerusalem; for they exhort him to go up to that city,
that he may show himself more openly, (Joh 7:3.)
But now that they perceive him to be hated on one side by the rulers, exposed on another to numerous slanders, and even despised by the great body of the people–to prevent any injury, or envy, or dishonor, from arising to the whole family, they form the design of laying hands on him, and binding him at home, as if he had been a person who labored under mental derangement; and, as appears from the words of the Evangelist, such was their actual belief.
Hence we learn, first, how great is the blindness of the human mind, in forming such perverse judgments about the glory of God when openly displayed. Certainly, in all that Christ said and did, the power of the Holy Spirit shone magnificently; and if others had not clearly perceived it, how could it be unknown to his relatives, who were intimately acquainted with him? But because Christ’s manner of acting does not please the world, and is so far from gaining its good graces that it exposes him to the resentments of many, they give out that he is deranged. Let us learn, in the second place, that the light of faith does not proceed from flesh and blood, but from heavenly grace, that no man may glory in any thing else than in the regeneration of the Spirit; as Paul tells us,
If any man wishes to be considered to be in Christ, let him be a new creature, (2Co 5:17.)
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
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 filththe 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 on of Messiahs 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 mans 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 Christs 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 Himselfand that, too, by His own friendswhen 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 Christs 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 Satans 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 mens 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 themsubversive 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 Satanof 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 forceby 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 passionsdivers, as directed towards different objects, but all having a common source and parentageall 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 himselfeven 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 mans soul dies. Over against the words, Repent! Be ye forgiven! stand theseIrreclaimable! 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 sinners soul, have been ascribed to His sacred agency?
II. The nature and design of the Spirits 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. AgainIt has been supposed that the sin against the Holy Ghost was confined to the period of our Saviours 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 Spirits 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 repentanceby resisting the motions of the Spirit, till they are finally withdrawnby 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 unrighteousnessif you are the slaves of lust or intemperanceif the world, with its winning allurements, is enthroned in your heartsor, 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 Lords 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 Christs 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 Saviours 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 Saviours 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 possibleif, as the words of our Lord seem to imply, it was probable even and by no means infrequentit 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 oursours, 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 onial 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 Christand be it remembered that even Saul of Tarsus had long kicked against the goads which urged him toward the kingdomafterwards 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 lastso as by fireinto 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 goodnesswhenever, i.e., we see a truth and do not accept it, because it cuts our prejudices against the grainwhenever 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 needif, 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 formulasor 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. Marks 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 Fathers gloryif, 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 denialsif, 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 himthat 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 ones 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 Gods 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.
Friendships 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 ointmentwhich 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 alternativeto 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. Christs 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 himthat was the witness of the truth they knew. He casteth out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of the devilsthat 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 himwho 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 onial 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 worlds 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 Morisons 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, dont 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. Christs 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 kings name went out to fight against the kings 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 thisthat, 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 ships bottom. Nor will Satan join in destroying his own kingdom. That Christ came and destroyed the works of the devil shows that He is Satans enemy and Satans conqueror.
Mar. 3:29. Penal element in punishment.Punishment has surely an element which is purely penalvindictive, 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 childs 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 natures laws; but beyond that pointit differs in different men, and in different parts of the same manif 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 mariners 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 Gods 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 predecessors 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 havingnay, 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 crimethe 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 sleepWill these hands neer be clean?
Whats 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 sinnd 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.
Fuente: The Preacher’s Complete Homiletical Commentary Edited by Joseph S. Exell
B. OPPOSITION 3:20-27
(1)
From Friends 3:20-21
TEXT 3:20-21
And he cometh into a house. 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.
THOUGHT QUESTIONS 3:20-21
132.
In whose house did this incident occur?
133.
Why such a large crowd? Is Mark complaining about the inability to eat?
134.
Who were the friends making this complaint?
135.
What particular circumstances seemed to disturb His friends? What did they want to do?
136.
Were they accusing Jesus of being insane?
(2)From enemies 3:22-27
TEXT 3:22-27
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 a 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.
THOUGHT QUESTIONS 3:22-27
137.
What authority had the scribes to pass judgment on the miracles of Jesus?
138.
Who was Beelzebub?
139.
Jesus did not evade opposition i.e. on this occasionshow indications this is true.
140.
What is meant by the expression said unto them in parables?
141.
Knowing something of the deceitfulness of Satan why wouldnt Satan on some occasions cast out Satan?
142.
Did Jesus infer there was an evil kingdom over which Satan rules? In what sense would this kingdom be divided?
143.
Who is the head of the house? In what sense divided? Is there a lesson in this parable for us?
144.
What is meant by the expression hath an end in Mar. 3:26?
145.
Who is the house? who the strong man? What are the goods to be spoiled?who is the one stronger than the strong man?
COMMENT 3:20-27
TIMEMidsummer and Autumn, A.D. 28.
PLACEIn the house of Jesus in the city of Capernaum.
PARALLEL ACCOUNTS:Mat. 12:22-30.
OUTLINE1. Opposition from friends, Mar. 3:20-21. 2. Opposition from enemies, Mar. 3:22-27.
ANALYSIS 3:20-27
I.
OPPOSITION FROM FRIENDS, Mar. 3:20-21.
1.
This occurred at home in Capernaum.
2.
The occasion of opposition was the inability to eat.
3.
The form of the opposition was to bodily remove Him from His labors.
4.
The reasonthey feared for His sanity.
II.
OPPOSITION FROM ENEMIES, Mar. 3:22-27.
1.
Jesus is accused of being in league with Satan.
2.
Jesus answers in parables:
(1)
A kingdom divided cannot stand.
(2)
A house divided cannot stand.
(3)
Satan casting out himself is defeating himselfthis would end in his own complete loss.
(4)
There must be someone stronger than Satan to cast out Satan.
EXPLANATORY NOTES
1.
OPPOSITION FROM FRIENDS, Mar. 3:20-21.
Mar. 3:20. As soon as he had returned the crowd was about him again.the vivid description is peculiar to Mark. So that they could not so much as eat bread. So at chap. Mar. 6:31. The activity on our Lords own part is left to be inferred, but it must have been an intense activity of teaching and healing, continued we know not how long.
Mar. 3:21. His friends of Mar. 3:21 are his mother and his brethren of Mar. 3:31. Their coming and calling for him is narrated by Matthew and Luke as well as by Mark, but Mark alone tells of their setting out in search of him and of their motive. Considerably later his brethren did not believe on him (Joh. 7:5), and probably they persuaded his mother on this occasion, playing, perhaps, upon the anxiety of maternal love. These brethren appear to be the James and Joses and Juda and Simon of Mar. 6:3. The question, What was their relation to Jesus? will probably never be settled with unanimous consent. The data being insufficient to furnish a positive decision, temperament and feeling, as well as theological prepossessions, will always be elements in the formation of opinions on the subject. The theories are: (That they were children of Joseph and Mary, younger than Jesus; (2) That they were children of Joseph by a former marriage; (3) That they were cousins, probably orphaned, and in some way adopted into the family. The first is rejected by all Roman Catholic interpreters, by all who share their feeling as to the superior holiness of virginity, and by some besides who feel that reverence is best satisfied by regarding the Only-begotten of God as also the only offspring of his mother. Yet the scriptural argument for it is very strong (see it stated at length by Alford, on Matt. 1355), and its adherents claimprobably correctlythat no other view would ever have been thought of but for unscriptural ideas of our Lords mother. If the first theory is rejected, there is no choice between the second and the third.His friends heard of itof the great throng that was about him and of the busy life he was livingand went out from their home in Nazareth, where they were all living, mother, brothers, and sisters, a little later, when Jesus visited the place (chap. Mar. 6:1-6). The news reached them there, and brought them down to Capernaum, a distance of perhaps twenty miles. They came to lay hold on himi. e, by force, as one who was not fit to take care of himself. They said, He is beside himself, insanea conclusion from the excited life that he seemed to them to be living; perhaps the more plausible from the quietness and placidity of the years that he spent with them at Nazareth. Strangers misapprehended him thus (Joh. 10:20), but so did his nearest friends, Unbelief will misapprehend whether its opportunities be small or great. Even the mother and brethren cannot know Jesus except they be true mother and brethren.
II.
OPPOSITION FROM ENEMIES, 2227.
Mar. 3:22. Mark omits the occasion of this conversation, which is carefully given by Matthew and Lukenamely; the healing of the blind and dumb demoniac (Mat. 12:22), which caused many to inquire, Is not this the Son of David?i.e. the Messiah. The scene is still at home, and most probably in the house of Peter. Pharisees are present (Matthew), and so (Mark) are the scribes which came down from Jerusalem. This language distinctly indicates an embassy, men who had come on purpose to watch and harm him. It is not to be assumed that they were the same as the men mentioned at Luk. 5:17, for some time had elapsed and meanwhile Jesus had been absent from Capernaum. But, whether the same or not, these were spies.Indignant at the suggestion that this was the Christ, they were ready with their explanation of his mighty works, the reality of which they thus explicitly admitted. He hath Beelzebub, or, as the best manuscripts agree, Beelzebul. The name has been variously interpreted. The name from which it came was Baalzebub, lord of flies, the god of the Philistines worshipped at Ekron (2Ki. 1:2) and consulted as an oracle. The god was named, doubtless, from his supposed control over the swarms of flies and similar insects that torment the East. After a time the Jews, thinking all heathen deities to be evil spirits, adopted this name as a title of the chief of evil spirits, but changed it by one letter, making Beelzebub into Beelzebul. Some think that in this change they intentionally degraded and insulted it, even as a word, by turning it into a name which meant lord of dung or of the dunghill. But others, apparently with better reason, make it mean lord of the mansion or of the dwellingi.e. lord of the place in which evil spirits dwell, or, substantially, head of the family of evil spirits, he who rules them as a man rules his household. This sense best corresponds to the form of the word (Meyer) and best suits the allusions in the New Testament. So here: He hath Beelzebul means he is possessed by the spirit who is lord of all the rest, and who orders them in and out at his pleasure, as a man commands his servants.Thus the second clause of their charge is the application of the first. By the prince of the devils casteth he out devils, or demons. In the Greek the use of the recitative hoti (that) before each of these clauses seems to indicate that two separate remarks are quoted. One says, that he hath Beelzebul. Another, that by the prince of the demons casteth he out demons. Luke adds that others, tempting him, asked of him a sign from heaven.
Mar. 3:23-26. The whole twenty-third verse is peculiar to Mark. He called themthe scribes from Jerusalembespeaking their attention and bringing them face to face with himself and their own words. The wonderful calmness and self-control of this reply cannot be too distinctly noticed in connection with the fearful charge that had just been brought against him. No more terrible accusation than this was possible; it was the direct charge of a positive and practical league with infernal powers. But he, when he was reviled, reviled not again: when he suffered, he threatened not (1Pe. 2:23).He said unto them in parables. In illustrative comparisons. The word does not require a narrative, such as we often associate with it. The point lies in the fact of a comparison. But here the fact to be confirmed is given in the first question (Mar. 3:23); it is then confirmed and illustrated by two comparisons, of the kingdom and the household, in Mar. 3:24-25 and it is restated directly in Mar. 3:26.How can Satan cast out Satan? The principle is that no intelligent power works against itself and defeats its own purposes. Observe what is here assumed: it is assumed that the dominion of Satan is an intelligent dominion, with character and purposes; that the kingdom of evil is one intelligent kingdom, managed by one mind who knows what he is doing. The individual spirits that torment men are not identified personally with Satan, but they are identified morally with him; so that their presence is his presence, and when they are cast out he is cast out. Now, it is said that in a kingdom there must be unity of counsel, illustrated first by the case of a kingdom among men. It is notorious that divided counsels, going into action, are the ruin of a state; divided counsels or, more exactly, contradictory counselsnot between rulers and subjects, but in the government itself. How, then, if the kingdom of the prince of the demons be thus divided against itself and act against its own purposes? Illustrated next by the case of a household, regarded, not as made up of individuals, who may disagree, but as under the rule of a householder, goodman of the house, lord of the mansion. If it acts against the character and counsels that govern it, it will be a failure. How, then, if the lord of the mansion be thus divided against himself, acting for the defeat of his own work? And now is made the application. If Satan were casting out demons, he would be rising up against himself. His sole purpose is to injure men. If he brings in health, calmness, purity, reason, godly gratitude, piety, to the souls of men, and if he sets them free from the bondage by which they are held away from these blessings, he will be acting directly against his own nature. Such a work as that of Jesus cannot possibly be attributed to him, any more than demoniacal possession can be attributed to God. Judge a work by its moral affinities. If it is good, it is not of the devil, for he never delivers men from evil, If such a rising up of Satan against himself as the work of Christ would be were proved real, there would be more than danger to his kingdom, He cannot stand, but hath an end, would be the true word. A kingdom so broken would be no kingdom at all.
Mar. 3:27. More than this does Christs work mean. The verse should begin with butBut no man can enter, etc. Not only does Christs merciful and holy work prove him to be no ally of Satan, but if Satans kingdom is being taken away from him, the fact proves the presence of Satans conqueror. No one can plunder the property of a strong lord of the mansion until he has bound the lord of the mansion himself; so, if Jesus is doing a great triumphant work of mercy in setting men free from the inferior agents of Satans kingdom, he must already be master over Satan himself. The defeat of the Lord precedes the defeat of the servants; if the master were at liberty and had the power, he would not suffer his goods to be spoiled.Perhaps there is a special touch of triumph in the closing words. And then he will spoil his house; as if Jesus were regarding the end as absolutely sure and the work as actually begun. Compare Joh. 12:31 : Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out. Here speaks, in Jesus, the consciousness that he is absolutely the conqueror and destroyer of Satans kingdom. Here, as a transition to the solemn words that Mark adds immediately, Matthew and Luke insert, He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad. There are only two sides in this conflict, and they are the side of the strong man armed and the side of the stronger than he. Not to be with the conqueror of Satan is to be with Satan. (W. N. Clarke)
FACT QUESTIONS 3:20-27
164.
In whose house was Jesus living at this time?
165.
What were Jesus and His disciples doing instead of eating?
166.
Just who was involved in the effort to restrain Him?
167.
Why would those who knew Him best think Him fanatical in His work?
168.
How could it be said the scribes came down from Jerusalem when they traveled north?
169.
Why did Jesus call the scribes to Him to deliver His answer to their criticism?
170.
Does the use of the term parable here fit your previous use of the form? Explain its use here. How many parables are used?
171.
Discuss the king, dominion, subjects, and expansion of Satans kingdom.
172.
In what sense does Satan have a house?
173.
Jesus said Satan was dividedexplain.
174.
I thought Satan was an immortal beingin what sense has he an end?
175.
What glorious victory is indicated in Mar. 3:27?
Fuente: College Press Bible Study Textbook Series
(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.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
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.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
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.
Fuente: The Popular Commentary on the Bible by Kretzmann
, [73] 21
[73] Before 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 , 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. Ewald’s view has, however, been followed by Holtzmann, whom Weiss, in the Jahrb. f. Deutsche Theol. 1864, p. 63 ff., and Weizscker, 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 Kstlin is only able to conceive of as arising from the neutral tendency of Mark, Ewald supposes that it originally stood in Mark likewise before , and that in Matthew and Luke it still has the tinge of Mark’s language, in which respect and 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.
. ] 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 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 even a misunderstanding of Mat 13:1 .
The accusation , Mar 3:21 , and that expressed at Mar 3:22 , , 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 is an error (not malicious), and their purpose is that of care for the security of Jesus.
] He and His disciples.
] not even , to say nothing of being left otherwise undisturbed. Comp. Mar 2:2 . According to Strauss, indeed, this is a “palpable exaggeration.”
] 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).
] 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 .
] 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 , 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 . On the contrary, that intelligence arrived at Nazareth, where His relatives were setting out, etc.; but from Jerusalem there had already when Jesus had returned to Capernaum and was there so devoting Himself beyond measure to the people come 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.
] 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.
] namely, . After 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 , Mar 3:21 , and , 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 .
] He is out of his mind , has become frantic; 2Co 5:13 ; Arist. H. A. vi. 22: , and see Wetstein. Comp. Xen. Mem. i. 3. 12 : . This strong meaning (erroneously rendered, however, by Luther: He will go out of his mind) is contestably required by the forcible , as well as by the subsequent still stronger analogous expression . 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 as directly equivalent to ), 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, Weizscker, et al. The omission of the surprising historical trait in Matthew and Luke betrays a later sifting process.
[74] Before 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 , 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. Ewald’s view has, however, been followed by Holtzmann, whom Weiss, in the Jahrb. f. Deutsche Theol. 1864, p. 63 ff., and Weizscker, 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 Kstlin is only able to conceive of as arising from the neutral tendency of Mark, Ewald supposes that it originally stood in Mark likewise before , and that in Matthew and Luke it still has the tinge of Mark’s language, in which respect and 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 . 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 the subject , and adduces, even in his day, two other but unsuitable explanations. [77] According to Schoettgen and Wolf, the disciples ( ) 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 ( ) 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. Kster, 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 and the , Jesus is not in Capernaum, but at the house of a host ; and in spite of Mar 3:31-32 , 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 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 Kstlin, p. 342, has, “after the manner of later pragmatists,” taken the , 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. , , , , . 2. , , , .
[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 ( ) 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 .
Fuente: Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer’s New Testament Commentary
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 mans 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, , was honest error (not wickedness), and that their design was to provide for Christs 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 Christs 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 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 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 Christs 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. Schttgen 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 Lords 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 Lords 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. Christs 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 Lords 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.Christs 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 importsslandering 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 Lords 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 Churchs 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 precede in the best Codd.; and so they are placed in Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf. B., D., G., Lachmann, and Tischendorf read , instead of .
[7]Mar 3:29.The reading , according to B., L., ., and others, is accepted by Griesbach, Lachmann, and Tischendorf. The readings and 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, , 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 , instead of .
[10]Mar 3:35.The after is omitted by Lachmann and Tischendorf, following preponderating authorities.
[11]Namely, that he was in league with the demons.Ed.
Fuente: A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical by Lange
(20) And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread. (21) And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself.
Reader! what a lovely sight it must have been, to have beheld the crowded audiences of JESUS, when on earth. But you and I, may now throng his courts every day, and all the day. And very sure we shall be of welcome. JESUS will not look upon the humblest of his redeemed, with shyness. Sweetly the Psalmist sings of this: and so may you and I. See Psa 100:4-5 .
Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
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.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
20 35. ] CHARGES AGAINST JESUS, OF MADNESS BY HIS RELATIONS, OF DMONIACAL 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 ( Mat 10:23 ), 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.
Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament
20. ] resumed from ch. Mar 2:2 .
. ] shewing that one of the is the narrator.
Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament
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.
Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson
Mar 3:20 . And He cometh home.
Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson
NASB (UPDATED) TEXT: Mar 3:20-27
20And He came home, and the crowd gathered again, to such an extent that they could not even eat a meal. 21When His own people heard of this, they went out to take custody of Him; for they were saying, “He has lost His senses.” 22The scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “He casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons.” 23And He called them to Himself and began speaking to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? 24If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. 26If Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but he is finished! 27But no one can enter the strong man’s house and plunder his property unless he first binds the strong man, and then he will plunder his house.
Mar 3:20 “He came home” This must refer to the same house as Mar 2:1 and possibly Mar 7:17; Mar 9:38.
“the crowd” This was the result of Jesus’ healing and deliverance ministry (cf. Mar 1:45; Mar 2:2; Mar 2:13; Mar 3:7; Mar 3:20).
“that they could not even eat a meal” This was what concerned His family so much. Jesus always had time for needy people. He gave Himself to them.
Mar 3:21
NASB, NKJV”His own people”
NRSV, TEV “his family”
NJB”his relations”
Literally this is “those from his side.” The KJV has “friends,” but apparently this was His mother and siblings.
NASB”to take custody of Him”
NKJV”to lay hold of Him”
NRSV”to restrain Him”
TEV, NJB”to take charge of him”
This is a strong verb in Matthew (cf. Mat 14:3; Mat 18:28), but usually not violent in Mark. It often refers to helping sick people rise by taking them by the hand. His family tried to take Him home forcefully because they thought He was acting irrationally (cf. Mar 3:31-35).
NASB”He has lost His senses”
NKJV, NJB “He is out of His mind”
NRSV”He has gone out of his mind”
TEV”He’s gone mad”
The Greek text is ambiguous as to who made this statement. Was it the family (i.e., NASB, NKJV, NJB, NIV) or something the family had heard others say (i.e., NRSV, TEV)?
The term in this context means “separated from mental balance” (cf. 2Co 5:13). It is often used in Mark for people being “amazed” (cf. Mar 2:12; Mar 5:42).
This shows that although Jesus was popular with the crowds, He was misunderstood by (1) His own disciples; (2) the religious leaders; (3) His own family; and (4) the crowds themselves.
Mar 3:22 “The scribes who came down from Jerusalem” This may refer to those mentioned in Mar 2:6; Mar 2:16, who were apparently an official deputation from the Sanhedrin sent to gather information on Jesus’ teachings and actions.
“He is possessed by” This meant he was possessed by a demon and derived His power from Satan (cf. Mat 9:34; Joh 7:20; Joh 8:48-52; Joh 10:20). The same thing was said of John the Baptist (cf. Mat 11:18). They could not deny Jesus’ miracles so they impugned the source of His power and authority.
“Beelzebul” This indeclinable noun is spelled Beelzebub in KJV, but Beelzebul in most modern translations. The “beel” reflects the Semitic word ba’al, which means “lord,” “owner,” “master,” or “husband.” It was the name for the fertility storm-god of Canaan.
The “zebul” can mean (1) heights (i.e., mountain or heaven); (2) prince (i.e., Zabul); or (3) dung. The Jews often changed the letters of foreign gods to form a derogatory pun.
If it is “zebub” it could refer to
1. the baal of Ekron (cf. 2Ki 1:2-3; 2Ki 1:6)
2. a god of the Philistines, Zebaba
3. an Aramaic word play or pun on “lord of enmity” (i.e., be’el debaba)
4. “lord of the flies” (Aramaic “fly” dibaba)
This spelling, Beelzebub, is unknown in rabbinical Judaism.
For further information on the names for personal evil see The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, vol. 3, pp. 468-473.
“ruler of the demons” The name Beelzebul was not a common name for Satan in Judaism. Jesus uses it as synonymous with Satan in Mar 3:23.
Mar 3:23-26 Jesus showed the logical folly of attributing His power over the demonic to Satan. Obviously a leader against his servants is a disaster!
Mar 3:23 “He called them to Himself” This was to show them (i.e., the scribes of Mar 3:22) that He could read their thoughts (see note at Mar 2:6 b). It also gave them one more chance to clearly hear His message.
“parables” The literal meaning of this term (parabol, used 13 times in Mark) is “to throw alongside.” A common occurrence of life is used to illustrate spiritual truth.
Mar 3:24 “if” This is a Third class conditional sentence meaning potential action.
Mar 3:27 “unless he first binds the strong man” This was a veiled Messianic reference to Isa 49:24-25. It also showed Jesus’ realization that He was stronger than Satan.
The act of exorcism was common in Judaism (cf. Mar 9:38; Act 19:14). What was uncommon is the power and authority exercised by Jesus versus the magical potions and formulas used by the rabbis. Jesus clearly shows that by His coming Satan is already defeated! Augustine even quoted Mar 3:24 as evidence that the promised millennium was already present (i.e., amillennialism).
This verse is often used today as a proof-text for “binding” Satan from Christian meetings. This text cannot function as a precedent for Christians praying against Satan. Believers are never instructed to address Satan. This verse has been turned into a superstitious mantra which is totally out of character with the NT.
Fuente: You Can Understand the Bible: Study Guide Commentary Series by Bob Utley
again. Referring back to Mar 3:7.
could not = . found themselves unable.
not. Greek. me. App-105.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
20-35.] CHARGES AGAINST JESUS,-OF MADNESS BY HIS RELATIONS,-OF DMONIACAL 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 (Mat 10:23), 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 Marks 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.
Fuente: The Greek Testament
Mar 3:20. [Eng. Vers. 19] , 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].- to the house, rather than into the house; comp. Mar 3:21; Mar 3:31.
Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament
Mar 3:20-21
8. JESUS’ FRIENDS ALARMED
Mar 3:20-21
(Matt. 12:22 to 13)
And he cometh into a house.–The meaning probably is found in the margin: “They came home.” That is, to Capernaum (Mat 9:1), the headquarters of their operations.
20 And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread.–Jesus enters upon one of the busiest and most eventful days in all his history. He was so engaged about his Father’s business there was no time for eating.
21 And when his friends heard it, they went out to lay hold on him:–They meant to take him away from the multitude, and to remove him to a place of safety and where he might be given medical attention (if need be) and be absent from the causes of excitement.
for they said, He is beside himself.–Probably the enemies of Jesus started the report that he was delirious, or deranged. The charge of derangement on account of attention to religious matters has not been confined to Jesus. Festus said “Paul, thou art mad; thy much learning is turning thee mad.” (Act 26:24.) Men may endanger themselves on the bosom of the ocean, or in the bowels of the earth, for wealth; or may plunge into the flood of fashion and folly, and vice, and break in upon the hours of repose, and neglect their duties to their family, and the demands of business, and in the view of the world it is wisdom. But, let a godly man lend his time and attention in the same way in building up the kingdom of God and saving souls, the charge comes, he is crazy or a crank he is carried away by an unwise enthusiasm.
Jesus has been constantly teaching and healing amid enthusiastic crowds. Shortly before this he spent a whole night in prayer on a mountaintop, and now he is hindered from taking the necessary food; so his kindred determined to take charge of him, and stop all this. Solicitous of her son’s welfare, his mother goes with them.
Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary
Brother to All Who Will
Mar 3:20-35; Mar 4:1-9
The Pharisees circulated this infamous charge-not because they believed it, but to satisfy the questions that were being asked on all sides. What they affirmed they knew to be untrue; but for selfish reasons they would not confess what they really thought. Such denial of truth is a deadly and unpardonable sin, because it injures the sensitiveness of conscience and produces moral death.
Family ties, Mar 3:31-35. The family of Jesus needed to be taught, though with the utmost delicacy, that they must not attempt to control His public ministry. All who love God and do His will are welcomed into the divine family circle and become blood relations of the Son of God.
The sower, Mar 4:1-9. Note the perils of the hearer, that you may guard against the waste of precious seed. There is a grave peril in the effect of light, fanciful, wandering thoughts. There is great peril also in a mere emotional response-the straightway springing up which has no root, because the heart is hard. There is danger lest the cares of the poor, the riches of the wealthy, and the too eager pursuit of things by other classes may drain away the strength of the soul, so that the Word of God shall be a slender stalk, without an ear or fruit. It is not enough to hear the Word, we must accept it and bear fruit; otherwise the plowing, sowing, and all the operations of nature are in vain. Live up to what you know. Obedience is the key to understanding.
Fuente: F.B. Meyer’s Through the Bible Commentary
so that: Mar 3:9, Mar 6:31, Luk 6:17, Joh 4:31-34
Reciprocal: Mat 5:1 – he went Mar 2:13 – and all Mar 5:24 – and thronged
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Chapter 21.
Christ and His Kinsfolk
“And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread. And when His friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on Him: for they said, He is beside Himself…. There came then His brethren and His mother, and, standing without, sent unto Him, calling Him. And the multitude sat about Him, and they said unto Him, Behold, Thy mother and Thy brethren without seek for Thee. And He answered them, saying, Who is My mother, or My brethren? And He looked round about on them which sat about Him, and said, Behold My mother and My brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is My brother, and My sister, and mother.”-Mar 3:20-21, Mar 3:31-35.
Our Lord and His Kinsfolk.
The story of our Lord’s relations and their well-meant but mistaken intervention is divided into two brief paragraphs by the interpolation of the account of our Lord’s controversy with the Jerusalem scribes. Mar 3:20-21 tell us how reports of Christ’s doings reached them in Nazareth; how they concluded He was beside Himself, and resolved to go and lay hold on Him. Mar 3:31-35 tell us what was the upshot of the journey which they made to Capernaum in order to carry out their resolve. These separated verses clearly belong to one another, and between them tell us the story of the attempt our Lord’s relations made to interfere with Him. We will think first of the interference and the charge brought against our Lord.
The Charge of Madness.
Our Lord’s kinsfolk, when reports of His tireless activities and sacrificial labours reached them in Nazareth, saw in them proof that His mind had lost its balance. “He is,” they said, “beside Himself.” Now it sounds a terrible thing that members of our Lord’s own household should have thought Him mad, and should therefore have tried to put Him under restraint. But that was one of the sorrows Christ had to bear; He was misunderstood in His own home, for “neither did His brethren believe in Him” (Joh 7:5).
The World and its Enthusiasts.
What we really get in their assertion that Christ was mad is often the world’s verdict upon religious and philanthropic enthusiasm. The world honours the man who for the sake of fame risks his life in battle; but if a man risks his life for souls for whom Christ died, it counts him a fool. The only kind of religion the world tolerates is religion of the tepid, Laodicean sort. But religion that breaks through the bonds of respectability and convention, religion that is earnest, red-hot, and means business, it calls “madness.”
It has called it so all down the centuries. “Paul,” cried Festus, “thou art mad; thy much learning doth turn thee to madness” (Act 26:24, R.V.). “What crack-brained fanatics!” was the remark the gentlemen of the eighteenth century made about Wesley and Whitfield. When Christian and Faithful refused even to look at the wares of Vanity Fair, but turned their eyes to heaven, what could the dwellers in the Fair, who regarded these wares as the only things worth having, think of them but that they were Bedlams and outlandish men? And when men like Henry Martyn in modern times let themselves “burn out” for God, when they cheerfully sacrifice every hope of worldly wealth and fame, and think only of the soul and heaven and the unseen Christ, what can men who regard worldly wealth and pleasure and fame as the only things worth living for think of them, except that they are “beside themselves”? It is just the necessary and inevitable verdict of the world upon those who seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.
What is the Verdict on Ourselves?
Has the world ever said this about us? Is not this what is amiss with the Christian Church to-day? We lack zeal, enthusiasm, earnestness. We make compromises with the world. We are not out and out. The world sees nothing to be surprised at in us. And we are impotent as a result. Victory will come back only when we are willing to be counted fools for Christ’s sake, and give ourselves ever, only, all to Him.
The Solitariness of Christ.
“He is beside Himself”-it was just the verdict of the unspiritual person upon the zealous and sacrificial Christ. But it illustrates also the solitariness of Christ. How completely and utterly misunderstood He was! He was misunderstood even in His own home. Men can bear a great deal of opposition and misrepresentation from the world outside, if they find love and sympathy and appreciation waiting for them at home. But Jesus had none. He was the loneliest man who ever walked this earth; the loneliest just because He was the best. In the midst of the crowds that pressed upon Him and thronged Him, in the circle of the Twelve, at the family hearth, Jesus was a lonely man. There was none to understand or appreciate or sympathise. And this solitariness was part of the sore and heavy burden He took upon Himself when for us men and our salvation He consented to live His life of sacrifice and die His death of shame. “I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the peoples there was no man with Me” (Isa 63:3, R.V.).
A Claim Resisted.
Persuaded thus that Jesus was mad and needed to be put under restraint, His brethren, along with His mother Mary, make their way to Capernaum. They found Him engaged in preaching, with a great multitude listening to Him. For some time they seemed to have waited, and then, growing impatient, they send a message to Him-“Thy mother and Thy brethren without seek for Thee” (Mar 3:32). Did Jesus know what they wanted him for? I believe He did. He knew, at any rate, that there was no sympathy for Him amongst His kinsfolk. And so He declined to interrupt His work. “Who is My mother and My brethren?” was His reply to the message. “And looking round on them which sat round about Him, He saith, Behold, My mother and My brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is My brother, and sister, and mother” (Mar 3:32-33, R.V.).
The Cost of Resistance.
What it must have cost Jesus to say this! For what does it mean? It means the setting of God’s work above home-ties and family affection. A young fellow wanting to join the Church came to see his minister in trouble about that verse, “If any man cometh unto Me, and hateth not his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple” (Luk 14:26, R.V.) That seemed to him a harsh demand, and he did not know that he was equal to it. But it comes even to that sometimes. It comes to choosing between one’s nearest and God. It came to that with Jesus Christ. He had to hate mother and sister and brethren for the Gospel’s sake. “A sword shall pierce through thine own soul,” (Luk 2:35), said Simeon to the exultant Mary when she presented her first-born in the Temple. Mary felt the stab of the sword that day; yes, and Jesus felt it too. He was pierced to the heart that day when He forsook mother and sisters and brethren for the Kingdom of God’s sake.
The True Kinship.
“Who is My mother and My brethren?… Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is My brother, and sister, and mother” (Mar 3:33, Mar 3:35, R.V.). There are affinities, our Lord says, more subtle and close and real than those of blood. The real kinship is a kinship of soul and spirit. Our Lord’s one aim in life was to do God’s will. It was for that He came into the world. And it was amongst those who cherished the like aim that He found His real kith and kin. The truth that spiritual kinship is the only real kinship is emphasised again and again in the New Testament. The true sons of Abraham are those who do the works of Abraham. The true circumcision is not the circumcision of the flesh, but of the spirit. The true sons of God are they that are led by the Spirit of God. So our Lord found His real kinsfolk, not in Joseph and Judah and James and Simon; He found His real kinsfolk in Peter and John and Nathanael and Matthew, and in that multitude of unnamed folk who heard the word of the Lord and received it
-In the Kingdom of God.
This was a hard saying for Mary and her sons; but what a glorious word it has been for the world! It has enlarged the limits of Christ’s family. It has multiplied the number of His brothers and sisters. Had kinship been a matter of blood, then you and I, my reader, had been for ever excluded from Christ’s family. But kinship is a matter of spirit, and so it becomes possible to you and me. One day, the Evangelist tells us, a woman in the crowd cried out, “Blessed is the womb that bare Thee” (Luk 11:27). There were many in Palestine who envied Mary the honour of being the mother of such a son. “Yea rather,” was our Lord’s reply, “blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it” (Luk 11:28). There is no need for any woman, as St Chrysostom says, to envy Mary. She can become as closely related to Jesus as His holy mother. “Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is-My mother.” So it becomes open to any one to enter Christ’s family, on condition they do the will of God.
The Family Speech.
“To me to live is Christ” (Php 1:21), said Paul-that is the family speech. “I have but one passion, ’tis Jesus only,” said Count Zinzendorf-that is the family speech. “I worship Thee, sweet Will of God,” sang Faber-that is the family speech. Are we members of the family? How shall we know? Are we doing God’s will? Notice, it is not mere outward connexion with Christ’s Church, nor the observance of the form of religion that gives us a place in the family, but only the doing of the will. Can Christ, as He looks upon us, say, “Behold My brother, My sister, My mother!”?
Fuente: The Gospel According to St. Mark: A Devotional Commentary
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Jesus was kept so busy teaching the people and administering to their afflictions that there was no opportunity for him and his apostles to have their meals.
Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary
Mar 3:20. Cometh together again. If the last clause of Mar 3:19 means a return to Capernaum, again must refer to chap. Mar 2:1.
They could not so much as eat bread. A vivid description of the thronging. Our Lord and His disciples could not find time to have their regular meals. Notice the excitement and popularity was now at its height; the opposition now takes definite form and stems the tide.
Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament
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.
Fuente: Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament
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 Satans 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 Saviors 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 Gods 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 Satans 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 Satans 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.
Fuente: William Godbey’s Commentary on the New Testament
Mar 3:20-35. The Answer of Jesus to the Verdict of the Jerusalem Scribes and the Intervention of His Family.The introduction of this section would naturally link with Mar 3:6. Jesus returns home (presumably, to the house of Simon in Capernaum) after the second scene in the synagogue in Mar 3:1-6. Mk. has broken the thread of the original tradition in order to insert the list of the apostles. He certainly divides Mar 3:20 f. from Mar 3:31-35 in order to associate with the judgment of the relatives of Jesus the still more outrageous verdict of the scribes from Jerusalem. The statement that the relatives of Jesus thought Him beside Himself (perhaps in a state of unbalanced ecstacy), is peculiar to Mk:. It is, however, necessary as leading up to the closing incident of the chapter. The incident in which Jesus disowns His family is only intelligible in Mk. On the other hand, Mk. does not, like Mat 12:22, cite a particular miracle as the occasion of the charge that Jesus was in league with the Evil One. He may regard the saying as a deliberate verdict of the official leaders of religion on the whole activity of Jesus. The relatives of Jesus doubted His sanity: the scribes denied His moral sincerity.[74] The reply to the scribes is given in parables (mentioned now for the first time). The scribal theory of exorcism was easy and convenient, but it implied an illogical division in the Satanic power. Since the overthrow of the spirits of evil is obvious, the advent of the higher power must be presupposed. Like one of the OT prophets, Jesus repudiates passionately the thoughtless denial of the purity of His inspiration. The sin against the Holy Ghost seems to lie in the intellectual laziness and moral insincerity which prefers to confound black and white, rather than recognise the coming of God in a new and unexpected quarter. Mk. may derive his version of the utterance of Jesus from Q (pp. 672, 675, 678). But it differs from the parallels in Mt. and Lk. at one or two points especially in Mar 3:28, sons of men, where Mt. and Lk. have a reference to the Son of Man. It is difficult to decide the question of priority (see Montefiore, i. 117). It is more important to recognise that Mk. seems to know some record or records of the teaching of Jesus from which he inserts sayings that bear on the points of special interest to himself and his readers. What Jesus said about exorcism concerns one of these points.
[74] [Spitta suggests (a) that his friends (21) means not his relatives but his disciples, (b) that the subject of the verb rendered is beside himself is the crowd, which has fallen out of the text together with the miracles recorded by Mt. and Lk.A. J. GJ
Mar 3:22. Beelzebub-lord of flies (c. 2Ki 1:2*). The better reading is Beelzebul, the meaning of which is doubtful, perhaps Lord of dung or Lord of the habitation (see Swete).
Mar 3:31-35. The crowd that gathered in Mar 3:20 is still round Jesus, so His mother and brethren can reach Him only by sending a message. Jesus refuses to recognise their claim to interfere, and enlarges the bounds of the Holy Family to include as His kinsfolk all who do Gods will. This incident, undoubtedly historic, is difficult to reconcile with the story of the Virgin Birth. The silence as to Joseph is sometimes attributed to dogmatic reasons, but is better explained by the probability that he was already dead.
Fuente: Peake’s Commentary on the Bible
Mar 3:20 And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not so much as eat bread. 21 And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself.
As I read this the crowd had located Christ and the disciples and had come together around them with such a press that they could not even eat. The “friends” that heard of this press and that had come to help seem to be external to the apostles – probably other followers/disciples.
We live in a very small home, 800 square foot, and it is split into two levels. All three of our children showed up the same Christmas a few years ago with all their children. Eight adults and eight children in less than 400 square foot when we were all together. Most of the time there were several standing on the stairs or in the kitchen.
My point is this, even in this press of people we were able to “eat bread.” Among the press we could cook and serve meals for all present, but Christ found Himself in such a crowd that they could not even eat. Some crowd!
“He is beside himself” can be translated as it is, or of someone that is amazed, or indeed of someone that is insane, however I think in the context it would be better viewed as the fact that Christ was just so busy with His activities that He may have lost track of time, personal needs and indeed was running on automatic.
When teaching I was teaching a heavy load, class sponsor, had two teenage sons at home preaching weekends and just altogether running on automatic. I had little time to think about anything but all the detail that was going on in my life. I’m sure some thought I was beside myself when they would see me moving from one task to another in a flash that was required to get everything done.
Add to this the fatigue of such a schedule as Christ was keeping and I suspect that the Lord may have seemed to be on automatic pilot, though I am not sure their perception would have been deemed correct by the Lord.
The other Gospel writers do not mention this account leaving one to wonder if this was not Marks impression rather than the facts as others viewed them. Mark being of a younger nature may have just had this impression of the Lord, however the fact that friends came to assist the Lord would indicate that there was a widespread feeling that Christ was over extending Himself.
It may, in view of other passages, be that the Lord was over extended and that he was running close to the edge. Recall His activities when praying about the coming cross. His mind wasrunning all around the coming events. It is not hard to imagine that His manliness was over taxed and that He needed someone to step in and give Him relief.
We often get stuck on His deity or His manhood and forget that the other side was always there as well. He is not just Christ, and He is not just Jesus, He is the Lord Jesus Christ. We would do well to remember both were completely and fully existent within Him at all times.
The point of application might run along the lines pastor/teacher, you are one person, you are a person with limits, and that you should find your limits and live within them.
Referring back to my teaching comments, I felt I had no limits, so I kept taking on more and more without thought to how it was affecting me. I was becoming burdened, I was becoming weaker physically, and I was headed for problems. The physical finally met with collapse when my back went out completely. Stress and fatigue finally gave way to bed rest for a week over Christmas break.
We are physical beings that have limits. Know your limits, but more importantly when you find them keep on the good side of them so that you do not do damage to yourself.
On the other hand, do not use this as license to become lazy and lax in your ministry. God wants our best not our “what we can get along doing with the least effort.”
Fuente: Mr. D’s Notes on Selected New Testament Books by Stanley Derickson
1. The increasing rejection of Jesus 3:20-35
Mark again returned to the opposition theme (cf. Mar 2:1 to Mar 3:6). He directed his readers back and forth between Jesus’ acceptance on a superficial level by the multitudes, His disciples’ growing commitment to Him, and the increasing hostility of the religious leaders. This structural pattern highlights the contrasts between the three groups.
In this section Mark used a chiastic structure to show two different kinds of opposition that Jesus faced, which many of His disciples have faced as well. He used this "sandwich" structure elsewhere too (cf. Mar 5:21-43; Mar 6:7-31; Mar 11:12-26; Mar 14:1-11; Mar 14:27-52). It focuses attention on the central part of the section (chiasm), in this case the serious charge that Satan controlled Jesus.
A The opposition of family Mar 3:20-21
B The opposition of enemies Mar 3:22-30
A’ The opposition of family Mar 3:31-35
Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)
B. The increasing rejection of Jesus and its result 3:20-4:34
As Jesus’ ministry expanded, so did rejection of Him as God’s anointed servant. Mark documented the increasing rejection that Jesus experienced (Mar 3:20-35) and then explained that Jesus taught the multitudes in parables as a result (Mar 4:1-34).
Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)
The plan of Jesus’ family 3:20-21
The picture the writer painted was of Jesus and his disciples in a house in Capernaum. Jews wanting healing or some other favor from Jesus barged right in the door. There were so many of them that Jesus could not even eat a meal much less get some needed rest. The house was completely full of seekers. Probably more people thronged around outside the building trying to get in the doors and windows. The Servant of the Lord was constantly at work serving.
Jesus’ family members heard about His extreme busyness. The Greek term translated "His own people" (NASB, lit. "those with Him") is an idiom meaning His family members, not just His friends. [Note: J. H. Moulton and G. Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, pp. 478-79.] They felt concern for His health. Perhaps they worried that He was not eating properly. They may even have concluded that His overworked condition had affected His mental stability. They decided to come to Capernaum from Nazareth and take charge of Him for His own good. The Greek word kratesai ("take custody" or "take charge") elsewhere describes arresting someone (cf. Mar 6:17; Mar 12:12; Mar 14:1; Mar 14:44; Mar 14:46; Mar 14:49; Mar 14:51). Thus it appears that the best of intentions motivated Jesus’ family. However they misread the evidence. He was not too busy nor was He out of His mind (cf. Act 26:24; 2Co 5:13). He was simply carrying out His Father’s will. Sometimes those who have concern for a disciple’s welfare apply pressure to depart from God’s will. This constitutes opposition, not assistance. Some readers of Mark’s story who suffer persecution from family members for following Jesus can identify.
Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)
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.