Today, I am reading and commenting on  Luke 10-11.

I find it interesting that in today’s passage Luke presents a sort of “second take” on some of the things which he described Jesus teaching earlier.  The passage starts with Jesus sending out seventy-two of His disciples to preach in places where He was going to go shortly, an expansion of when He had earlier sent out just the Twelve.  This gives us a kind of model for how ministry should work.  Jesus sent out twelve, then He sent out seventy-two.  Luke tells us that He sent the seventy-two our in pairs.  He did not send them out alone, but with someone to give them support.  In both cases, those who were sent out came and back and were debriefed.  That is they reported the results of their ministry and the lessons they had learned.   Jesus then helped them put their experience in perspective.  He told them that while He had given them power over spirits and had given them protection against danger, their joy should not be in the power they had, but in being citizens of heaven, citizens of God’s kingdom.

Further on in today’s passage, Luke recounts how Jesus said, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.”  (Yesterday I quoted that from Matthew because I had forgotten that it was here)  As I said yesterday, this seems like a contradiction of what He told them in yesterday’s passage, but it is not.  This saying and the one from yesterday are two sides of the same coin.   In yesterday’s passage, the person who led Jesus to say, “whoever is not against you is for you,” was casting out demons in Jesus’ name.  In today’s passage, Jesus says that those who are not with Him are against Him when people accused Him of driving out demons with the power of demons.  In the previous case, someone had recognized, and was using, the power of Jesus’ name to accomplish good.  Here, people were claiming that the good Jesus was doing (driving out demons) was evidence that He was evil.

I was going to write about Jesus using the idea that no one lights a lamp in order to hide it in a different way in today’s passage, but I have run out of time to work on this.  So, perhaps another time, but I wanted to point out yet another place where Luke showed that Jesus revisited an earlier teaching with a different take on the lesson.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.