Bible Studies

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... I implore You, look on my son, for he is my only child ...
Luke 9:38


I can’t help but ask myself what impact these father’s words had on Peter, James and John in particular. A familiar chord rang in them. A chord they shared on a mountaintop visit. Another father imploring a son...to be seen. Had they, too, attempted to meet this father’s need, and failed? Scripture doesn’t specify (here in Luke,) though I’m inclined to believe this transpired while the three were on the mountaintop with Jesus. But it still had to cause their blood to race and their heart to pound, for now the imploring was being laid at the feet they heard God speak of as the Messiah...the Kinsman Redeemer. And even if their understanding remained incomplete, surely they stood now, with bated breath. Watching. Waiting. Seeking the answer.

This passage engages Jesus immediately in the spiritual realm. The Kingdom of God’s door had just sprung open for human eyes to see. His Father had just declared, for human ears to hear and perceive, that He was God’s Beloved Son. And now another father, holding a beloved and only son, stood before him. Amazing to me, this human father recognized the realm in which the battle lay. Not the physical shadow, but the spiritual reality. This father, from whatever insight he’d been given, knew an entity to be at work. An entity intent, not on good and prospering, but on harm and destruction. An entity the father recognized as entering and departing his son at will.

At first the extent of demon possession in Israel at this time is surprising, then disconcerting, then totally logical. Why wouldn’t the enemy of men’s souls be highly active when they recognize the presence of God among them? After all, they knew Jesus, face to face, in the Kingdom of God they had chosen to leave. And they recognized Him now, they knew His voice, and they feared the purpose for which He had come. And in their on-going animosity for all that is pure and holy, their contaminating talons dug in everywhere. And as their numbers were limited, they came, they went, as the need and their own dark purpose dictated. Whenever God steps on the scene, it lies within their nature to come in legionary force themselves. Does that maybe explain the phenomenal spiritual activity of our own day? Might we take note and drawn upon the discernment ours in Christ?

Was that not what this father did now? He discerned the difference between an illness and an activity spearheaded from another realm. And he came to the Great Physician of all realms, pleading with Jesus to look on his son. And Jesus, from the power of the Kingdom of God, did just that. The man’s son found wholeness and was restored to his father.

Truly, this is what the Kingdom of God is all about. A power struggle, that isn’t really a struggle at all, exists between darkness and light. And when light even draws close, darkness knows itself already defeated and flees.

Isn’t that why James tells us, Resist the devil and he will flee from you?

Unlike those upon the mountaintop, they don’t misunderstand the Kingdom of God, they simply deny it, and do all within their power to thwart its operation in the visible world.

May we, through the discernment that comes from the Father Himself, be lead like the father of this passage, to turn to the true Kingdom, and to the power of the Beloved Son, the only power from which darkness flees.

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