Ep. 59: Authority

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LUKE 10:17-24

Whether or not the Seventy actually returned to Jesus before the feast of Tabernacles, it is convenient to consider the result of their mission. It had filled them with the joy of assurance. The outcome had exceeded their expectations, just as their faith had gone beyond the mere letter into the spirit of his words. As they reported it to him, even the demons had been subject to them through his Name, as Edersheim now declares:

‘The great contest had been long decided, it only remained for the faith of the Church to gather the fruits of that victory. The Prince of Light and Life had vanquished the Prince of Darkness and Death. The Prince of this world must be cast out. In spirit, Christ gazed on ‘Satan fallen as lightning from heaven.’ As the Lord beholds him. He is fallen from heaven from the seat of power and of worship; for his mastery is broken by he who was stronger than he. The authority and power over ‘the demons,’ attained by faith, was not to pass away with the occasion that had called it forth. The Seventy were the representatives of the Church in her work in preparing for the Advent of Christ. As already indicated, the sight of Satan fallen from heaven is the continuous history of the Church. What the faith of the seventy had attained was now to be made permanent to the Church, whose representatives they were.’

For the words in which Jesus now gave authority and power to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy and the promise that nothing should hurt them, could not have been addressed to the Seventy for a mission which had now come to an end, except in so far as they represented the Church Universal. This is for us, too! It is almost needless to add that those ‘serpents and scorpions’ are not to be literally but symbolically understood.

Yet it is not this power or authority which is to be the main joy either of the Church or the individual, but the fact that our names are written in heaven. And so Jesus brings us back to his great teaching about how the need to become like children is the secret of true greatness in the Kingdom. This sentiment almost reached its climax in the thanksgiving, that the Father in heaven had hidden these things from the wise and the understanding and revealed them to babes. As we view it in the light of those times, we know that ‘the wise and understanding’ - the Rabbi and the Scribe - could not from their standpoint have perceived them. And so it must ever be, that, not as ‘wise and understanding,’ but only as ‘babes’ can we share in that knowledge which makes us wise unto salvation.

This is an extract from the book, Jesus : Life and Times, available for £10 here (Finalist for Academic Book of the year at 2023 CRT awards)