Luke 8
Luke 8 • 5 min. read • grade level: 9
THIS chapter opens with the account of the still larger ministrations of this blessed servant throughout every city and village, preaching and evangelizing the kingdom of God, and in company with the twelve who were to be witnesses of these things, and of His manifold labors in service towards Israel. “Certain women,” “a remnant according to the election of grace,” followed Him, and ministered “of their substance” to the destitute heir of all Jewish inheritance. There, in the presence of many which “were come to Him out of every city,” He utters the parable of the sower; and this kind of teaching at once discloses to us God’s judgment of Israel nationally. They are now to be dealt with as “seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.” If you hear without a heart to heed, your hearing will only harden you the more. So it was with Israel; but the Lord contents Himself that the seed will not fall always in unsuited and unproductive soil, but that honest and good hearts will be found which, having heard the Word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience. The seed will not be confined to the barren unfruitful spot. “God is no respecter of persons.” (Acts 10:3434Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: (Acts 10:34).) “But in every nation,” wherever, in the largeness of the grace of the sower, the seed should be sown, and wherever it grew, it would be accepted of God. God “lighted a candle” on the earth, that all they which enter in may see the light; therefore take heed how you hear, for you are responsible, and will be called to an account for it. If you “have,” you shall have more; you have something to build on; if you “have not,” you shall even lose the semblance of it. In a word, the Lord now says, I shall no longer recognize family or class relationships. My own mother and brethren I recognize not as such from nature, but my mother and brethren are those which hear the word of God and no IT. “From henceforth,” said the faithful revealer of the thought here mysteriously announced, “know we no man after the flesh.” Such was the peculiar self-denying path the Lord now opened to His disciples, which He more practically instructs them in by the vicissitudes they endure in passing over “the lake.” He is asleep, as if personally unconnected with their circumstances. His disciples awoke Him by the agonizing cry, “We perish!” so little prepared were they for the path of “faith” over the sea of life; and here they first learned that Jesus commands the winds and water, and they obey Him. To remove the hindrances to the growth of this faith in the human heart is, I apprehend, the Spirit’s object in placing before us the following acts of our Lord. We have here man as he is by nature; a legion of perverse, ungovernable, and senseless passions: all educational restraints, “chains and fetters,” no barrier to the spring tide of their desires: a fool, one that saith to everyone, I am a fool.
“He wore no clothes,” and the haunts of the dead, “the tombs,” were his abode. But the word of Jesus, the word that can control the winds and the waves, can emancipate poor man from this grievous thralldom; and many such are found sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in their right mind. Yet how unpopular His gracious work to the covetous Gadarenes of this world! “They besought Him to depart from them!” Blessed gentle Jesus returned where the people received Him. He is a ready visitant to them waiting for Him. And there too He gives a fuller illustration of His grace to answer the faith of the most wretched. The ruler of the synagogue, a person of considerable note among the Jews, enlists the sympathies of Jesus for his only daughter, who “lay a dying,” and beseeches of Him to come into “his house.” Jesus accedes to the request of the supplicating Jew, who, in the spirit of his nation, seems to recognize no power in Christ but in person. Jesus is on His way to assuage the bitter cry the hand of death was wringing from His people; but as He went, as He journeys along to the great day of Israel’s final, complete, and death-released deliverance, He is not unmindful or insensible to the touch of faith from the most despised and unheeded. A woman, who, whatever her condition had been, is now destitute and penniless, all her living having been spent in her search after health. Twelve long years of sickness and expenditure only found her, having spent all her living upon physicians, and neither could be healed of any. Job-like, wealth was gone, and health was unattainable; not a shred of earthly hope remained. Jesus, the fountain of grace and mercy, is on His journey; she, by the eye of faith, knows Him. Unseen, she touches Him, and immediately a stream of mercy imparts life and vigor to her. “She was healed.” Another striking type of the Church, who, without hope or enjoyment on earth, by faith finds all her life and blessing in Jesus, not as appropriating Him exclusively to herself, for that is high-mindedness, but, as He passes on to the ruler’s house, through faith engaging His best services—yea, while the blessings of His grace and affiliation are ringing in her ears, the doubts of the extent of His power are uttered by the Jew in unhappy discordance around, while she, of no earthly hope, drinks largely, through faith, of the fountain of life. The Jew, in unbelief, cries out, “Thy daughter is dead, trouble not the Master;” death has laid his rude hand on what was most dear to me, and, alas! there is none to help— “our hope is lost.” (Ezek. 37:1111Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. (Ezekiel 37:11).) But, behold! Jesus pursues His way, un-riveted from His purpose, through storms of unbelief and scorn, till that wondrous hour when He shall take the virgin daughter of Israel (now sunk in the sleep of death) by the hand, and shall sound “ Arise,” and, before wondering multitudes, her spirit shall come again, and she shall arise straightway. But on this scene for the present the curtain falls, and the charge is, “that they should tell no man what was done.”