Quote:
Originally Posted by coksiw
Very interesting findings. How would you explain: Luke 11:24-26 and Mt. 12.43-45? |
Let me point towards three things off the bat:
1.) Jesus is using the description of the unclean spirit going out then coming back to make a point about the wicked generation He is condemning. Therefore, the message about the unclean spirit is ancillary to the main topic.
2.) Notice that when the unclean spirit comes back with seven spirits worse them himself, he and they just enter right in and make themselves at home, and the last state of the man is worse than the first.
3.) In Hebrew, seven is not just a number but is also the root word for covenant. To covenant oneself was to "seven" oneself.
Just prior to these comments, He said Nineveh and the Queen of the South would rise up in judgment against that generation and condemn it, because, in the first, Nineveh repented at the preaching of Jonah, and at the second, the Queen of the South traveled all the way from Ethiopia to hear Solomon.
And in both cases, someone greater than both Jonah and Solomon was present, and that generation wasn't receiving Him or heeding His words.
Therefore, the last state of that generation was going to end up worse than the first state of that generation, that is when Jesus first confronted it. And of course, the last state of that generation was the Roman sacking of Judah and Jerusalem in 70AD.
The pertinent issue there being that Judah and Jerusalem were supposing themselves to be in covenant with God, but in fact, were not. Rather, Judah and Jerusalem were in league with Rome. Therefore, the seven worse spirits suggest that the covenant made with Rome was going to come back to haunt and finally destroy Judah and Jerusalem. As it did.
Regarding the unclean spirit: Jesus was purging Judah and Jerusalem of its uncleanness before God through His teaching and works. He was "casting out" the devil, so to speak, from the collective conscious of His people at that place and in that era.
And so, for a time afterward, Judah and Jerusalem remained purged, that is, for the next 40 years or so. The Christ-led revival was overpowering the unclean "spirit" that had been in control of the people of Judah and Jerusalem. But eventually, just as Jesus said, eventually that spirit would return, find the land and the generation cleansed, and decide it was time to come back and lay it waste. And so it did.
In a more practical view, have you ever seen someone backslide? The tendency is not just to revert back to a pre-redeemed, but an otherwise equivalent state of sin, but in fact, to go seven times worse into carnal dissolution and debauchery.
Now, if you have someone who was ideologically possessed, but then was delivered by the power of God in Christ, but then falls away and returns to their vomit, the levels of insanity they then descend into far outpace whatever amount of insanity they experienced prior to their deliverance.