Well, good afternoon. We're going through Matthew again using the historic faith commentary series on Matthew. Today we're in Matthew chapter 12, and I won't be going through it verse by verse. Most of it is describing different incidents like healing on the Sabbath and that. There's a lot of interesting Jewish background information that is explained in the commentary. I really encourage you to read. But just to be able to fit in some of the other points, we won't be looking at them today.
I'm going to start actually in verse 19 of chapter 12. It's talking about Jesus, the prophecy from Isaiah. He says, " He will not quarrel or cry out. Neither will any man hear his voice in the streets. " Now, that may sound strange because Jesus preached in the streets. He preached everywhere. But what the prophecy meant, or how the early Christians understood it, is Jesus wasn't glamorous. I mean, he didn't shout at people. He was meek and lowly. He preached, but he wasn't a big noise maker, that sort of thing.
In fact, so often when he healed people, he would say, " Don't tell anyone. " He wasn't trying to draw crowds to himself. Now, of course, they came, but he set the example of just being meek himself. And then Isaiah goes on to say, " He will not break the bruised reed nor quench the smoking flax until he sends forth judgment to victory. " I know most of my life, I mean, I read that prophecy both in Isaiah and then in Matthew's quotation, and I didn't know what that meant.
He won't break the bruised reed, or quench the smoking flax. I mean, I just read it and went on without any idea what it meant. Now, you may have been different. I don't think it's a great mystery out there, but it was to me for a long time. The early Christians have several explanations, so maybe I don't need to beat myself up too bad for not understanding it, because they weren't sure exactly themselves. Now, what it's talking about, of course, is the gentleness of Jesus. That part, everybody understood.
But now exactly what the bruised reed meant, what it pictured, they gave three different explanations, all of which are plausible. One could be the weak faith of the Jews. The Jews were God's designated people at that time when Jesus was on the earth, but their faith was very weak. The fact that their Messiah comes and only a small, very small percentage of them ended up believing him after he did so many incredible miracles.
As we mentioned last week, is more than all of the Old Testament prophets put together, including Moses, Jesus did far more miracles, and yet the people still didn't believe. So the bruised reed might mean just the weak faith of the Jews that he could have crushed if he had dealt with them more harshly than he did. But it could also be talking about the spiritual condition of the Gentiles. If the Jews had weak faith, the Gentiles at that time had no faith at all, not in the true God.
And so he, not only when he was on earth, but when working from heaven, was very gentle with the Gentiles to not crush and drown out their faith. Or it could be talking about just repentant sinners everywhere, at any time in history, that Jesus came, as He said, to save sinners and to bring them to repentance. So I don't like using the saying, " Jesus loves sinners. " I don't know if the Bible uses that word. The Pharisees called him a friend of tax collectors and harlots. But he did show love to sinners.
He did not brush them away. He dealt with them gently and yet assertively, too, so that they would come to faith. So it could mean you know any of those three, and all three of them would actually fit. And I think sometimes prophecies had more than one application. The same thing with the smoking flax, the early Christians gave three different explanations. One, the remaining faith that was among the Jews.
In other words, the smoking flax, you'd be looking at something that was either, in this case, just almost dying out. It was smoldering that the Jews were just about to be cast off from the kingdom as a nation, not as individuals, but as a nation. And Jesus didn't quench the smoking, the little bit of faith that was there, he tried to bring it back up and not put it out.
Another explanation, if he's talking about the Gentiles, that the flame was just starting for the Gentiles, like flax that was just starting, it was smoldering because it was just getting going. And so he breathed on that and helped to build it up, to kindle it into a strong fire. And then again, if it's talking about sinners, sinners, rather, the smoking flax would be a symbol of sin, the fire of sin that he quenches, but not in a way that he cast sinners away.
Rather, they felt drawn to him to repent of their sins. Now, the next part of that prophecy, and in his name, the Gentiles will trust, I wanted to talk about for a moment, it's not hard to understand. Everyone who reads that knows what that means, and they know how it was fulfilled. What most people don't realize, unless they go back and look in Isaiah, and then if they do, they're just puzzled and they shrug their shoulders like I did most of my life. It's like, okay, Jesus is quoting this.
No, is it Jesus or this is maybe Matthew? No, this is Matthew saying this. He's quoting from the Septuagint. Now, I never knew that when I was little. And like I say, I would look up these prophecies. This is only one example all throughout the New Testament. You look up the prophecy, how it's quoted in the New Testament and the Old Testament is not even there. And you know I just always put that off to inspiration when I'd ask you know a minister when I was young, " What is this?
How come this isn't in the Old Testament? " " Oh, well, that's the work of the Holy Spirit. You know That's how inspiration works, " or something like that. No one ever explained, " Oh, well, Matthew is quoting from the Septuagint, " or Paul is quoting from the Septuagint. So it wasn't until I was reading the early Christians that I understood for the first time myself that, " Oh, the reason it's not in our Old Testament is because our Old Testaments are based on the Masoretic text.
" And Jesus and the Apostles, Matthew, nearly always are quoting from the Septuagint. I think Paul always does. Matthew is, because he originally wrote it in Aramaic, he couldn't, in the original version, quote from the Septuagint. And so some of his quotes, most of them fit the Septuagint, but some of them would fit the Masoretic text or would at least come closer to it than they would to the Septuagint.
But yeah, it's too bad that to see the early Christians, when they looked this up, well, yeah, it was right there in Isaiah. But when we look it up, it's not there. That's been a terrible loss that we can blame Jerome. Now, I quote from Jerome a lot in this commentary. He was not a bad exegete of Scripture.
I didn't find too much fault in his explanation of Matthew, but I would greatly fault him for when he did the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, that he did it from the Masoretic text without permission, and certainly without the commission from the Pope. He was commissioned by the Pope to do a new translation, but he wasn't told to do it from the Masoretic Text. He did that on his own, and that was a terrible thing for the Western Church. Okay, moving on.
Jesus casts out a demon from a person, and, you know, the scribes and Pharisees said, " Oh, well, he casts out demons by the power of Beelzebub. " And Jesus says, " And if I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore, they will be your judges. " Well, what is he talking about there? Well, I think the best explanation is he's talking about the Jewish exorcists. There were Jews who were able to cast out demons.
I mean, again, these were still God's people, and He gave people power to do that. And if they weren't doing it legitimately, they at least were pretending or made people believe they were. I quoted here from Josephus, and I'll just read this. And it's interesting, Josephus was a Pharisee, and Jesus is talking to the Pharisees here. And this is what he wrote. Now, I'm saying Josephus is saying this. I'm not saying that this is necessarily correct.
He said, " God enabled Solomon to learn the skill of expelling demons. " Now, there's nothing in the Old Testament about that, a knowledge that is useful and therapeutic to men. Solomon also composed special prayers by which mental disturbances are alleviated. He left behind him the method of using exorcisms to enable people to drive away demons so that they will never return. And Solomon's method of cure is still effective to this very day, he's writing in the first century.
" For I have witnessed a certain man of my own country named Eleazar. I saw him releasing demon-possessed people in the presence of Vespasian, who was later becoming the emperor, his sons, his captains, and the whole multitude of his soldiers. And it could have been legitimate exorcisms. And again, it is possible God gave Solomon wisdom beyond that of any human. So he may have given him wisdom special prayers to cast out demons. I can't say that it's false. I can just say the Bible doesn't say anything about it.
It could be simply very likely a man-made Jewish tradition. So this is what he's talking about. He's saying, well, if you're saying, " I'm casting them out by Beelzebub, " well, who do your sons? In other words, who do your Jewish ones cast them out? You believe in them. You give them credence that God is the one casting out the demon. So why do you turn around and hypocritically accuse me of doing it by the power of Satan or one of his henchmen? And so he said, " Therefore, they will be your judges.
" In other words, these exorcists, if you believe in them, that just the example there, the hypocrisy in that manner, they are your judges, that you're being a hypocrite and inconsistent to not acknowledge it when I'm casting out a demon. Okay, this next verse, again, one, I did not understand when I was growing up. I don't think I ever understood it until I read the early Christians. And it's a verse they quote a lot.
I ran across it, not only in Matthew, looking at their writings on Matthew, but right now I'm working on a commentary on Romans, and I run into it even working on Romans. It's just a verse. They quote it a lot. And it says, " Or else, how can one enter into a strong man's house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man? Then he will plunder his house. " That's Matthew 12:29. Now, this verse has a lot of important truths in it. Now, who is this strong man?
How can one enter into a strong man's house? Well, it's Satan. He's the strong man, and he's called " strong " because he held fallen mankind in his power. Ever since Adam and Eve listened to him, mankind has been under the power of Satan. Jesus, I'm trying to find the quote here. It's from 1 John. It's not Jesus, it's John. He says, " The whole world lies under the wicked one, " talking about Satan. Jesus does call him the ruler of this world. Paul calls him the God of this world.
So he's obviously got strong power over fallen humans. And one of the reasons we needed Jesus Christ, the early Christians did not have the penal substitution view of the Atonement. Most of them, I'm not sure that any of them held to that view that Jesus was put to death because God required a price to be paid to him, that God required somebody to be punished. And if he didn't punish us, he was going to punish his son instead.
I don't think you'll find that in any early Christian anywhere until you get to maybe Augustine or perhaps even beyond him. And said most of them, although there were different views of the Atonement or I should say different aspects, I don't think one thing sums it all up. I think a lot of things happened in the death of Christ. The one they talk about probably the most is today known by the name of the Christus Victor theory of the Atonement.
They didn't use that term themselves, but this idea that Jesus freed us from Satan's power, that this is how the Atonement worked, except that would have never, the early Christians would have never said that's the totality, but that was one of the main aspects of the Atonement that Jesus had to come down and bind Satan and defeat him. And so Jesus talks about this. How can one enter into a strong man's house? The strong man's house would have been mankind, or it could be translated household. That was us.
We were the ones under the power of Satan, and someone needed to bind him. He wasn't going to just let mankind go for free. Someone had to be stronger than him. And it says, and plunder his goods. We were his goods, okay? So you bind him, and then he's helpless, and you plunder his goods. You can bring people free from under his power. Of course, most people remain under his power, but it's not because they have to. They have a way out. Unless he first binds the strong one, then he will plunder his house.
And that was Christ. And by dying faithfully, allowing Satan to have him put to death when he was innocent, when death had no hold on Jesus Christ, no right to him. The only ones who were subject to death were those who sinned. And so when you have a man who had never sinned, then this was a violation of the whole code of the universe that he would be put to death.
And so by Satan overreaching himself, he sent Jesus down into Hades, which had been his realm in one aspect, and Jesus plundered all of the ones in Hades, not everyone, but those who would listen to him and said he preached to the spirits in prison. And Paul talks about in Ephesians how when he rose on high, he brought these various captives with him into paradise. So that's one aspect that he plundered Satan's household.
He also did it here on the earth by bringing people out of the realm of darkness into his kingdom. So that's all I'm going to say. There's a lot more on that. I go into it in a little bit more detail in the commentary. And then in the CD set I have that's on the historic faith on the Atonement. I talk about it there in a lot of detail. If you haven't listened to that message yet, it's one of the ones on the historic faith. I would encourage you to do that.
All right, now Matthew 12:31 through 32 caused a lot of people a lot of concern. Jesus said, " Therefore I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven men. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of man, it will be forgiven him. But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, either in this world or in the world to come.
Now the setting is Jesus has just cast out a demon from a man who was both blind and mute, and apparently he was blind and mute because of the working of this demon on him who possessed him. And immediately, you know, the Pharisees did not believe. And Jesus is warning them. They were on the verge of committing this sin against the Holy Spirit. He didn't say that they had committed it. And I'm guessing they had not because on the cross he said, " Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.
" And I think he was speaking that about everybody there and the scribes and Pharisees were there mocking him. So if they were forgiven at the cross, then I don't think they had committed the unforgivable sin. But I think he's telling them they were close to it. They better take heed and warning. Now, the early Christians tied this in, this sin that is not forgiven, the sin against the Holy Spirit, with what is spoken of in Hebrews chapter 6. And I'm going to just read that. I know you're familiar with this verse.
It says, " For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away to renew them again to repentance, seeing they crucified to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put Him to open shame.
" So the early Christians understood what is spoken of here because these are people who've partaken of the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit to be this same blasphemy of the Holy Spirit if they turn against God. Now, what kind of sin is that? The early Christians said, " First you have to have the Holy Spirit if you're going to sin against it.
" So this would normally be Christians, although the Jewish nation had a measure of it, so I think it would be possible for some of the Pharisees to have sinned against the Holy Spirit. We just don't know if that happened. There's no clear statement. But it's a warning to Christians who have received the Holy Spirit. But now where the worry comes in is, in fact, all of my life, I've known of people saying, " I may have committed the sin against the Holy Spirit, and they're in all of this despair.
" And I think you can safely say if somebody's repentant, it's pretty likely they have not sinned against the Holy Spirit. I think someone who sins against the Holy Spirit does not repent, that, yeah, their heart is hardened, and they're blaspheming, speaking against the Holy Spirit, if not in words, at least in their deed. And they never come back to Christ.
I mean, I've known plenty of people who have fallen into sin and fallen away from Christ, who have lived the rest of their life, are now dead, and never came back, never repented. And I think it's a good possibility they had sinned against the Holy Spirit. The warning is there that we need to be careful. We don't need to take for granted our salvation that we can behave any way we want, and that God is our slave, that He's going to have to give us our final salvation when we die, because He doesn't.
Hebrews makes that clear as why Martin Luther didn't like Hebrews, because it makes it clear. It's not just faith alone that what we do our whole life is going to affect our final salvation. On the other hand, like I say, because we've taken a step not in willful rebellion against God, I don't think we have to be all worried and wrought up. I've committed this sin against the Holy Spirit.
There's no forgiveness for me, because I think as long as we are truly repentant that there is forgiveness and that the fact we are repentant is indicative of the fact that we haven't sinned against the Holy Spirit. And I noticed in reading the early Christians, they're very strict on discipline, and they talk a lot about this. They give a lot of warnings in their sermons and in their writings about the sin against the Holy Spirit and what Hebrews says.
On the other hand, there's never an example that I have come across where the church put somebody out and said, " You have sinned against the Holy Spirit. You're eternally lost. You can never be admitted back into the church. " I've never seen an example of that. So I don't know that we humans could ever make that judgment, but it exists, and God does make that judgment. So we should take that to warning, but without despairing when we commit sins and repent of them.
Okay, in that same passage, Jesus goes on to say Matthew 12:36, " But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give an account on the day of judgment. " I think this was still aimed at the Pharisees who were saying these things. But it's interesting, he doesn't say you will give an account for every evil word. Obviously, you will, but he says every idle word. What does that mean? John Chrysostom gives this definition. He said, " A word is idle when it is not according to the facts.
It's idle when it's false or carries an unjust accusation. " And some persons also say that idle means anything that is vain, for instance, provoking inordinate laughter or something that's filthy or immodest or coarse. So that encompasses a lot of things. And he says, " We're going to give an account. " Now, it doesn't mean if we spoke an idle word that we're eternally lost or anything, just that we're going to give an account and it could affect our salvation, or he wouldn't be bringing it up.
It could affect what our eternal reward will be. Even if it's not a matter that causes us to lose our salvation, it could affect our reward. We're going to give an account for it. So I'm wanting to comment on this verse just because we need to be careful as Christians. Too many Christians view gossip as a little minor sin, just, you know, kind of like telling a white lie or something like that. Well, it's not.
When you're running somebody else down or spreading maybe false rumors, you think they're true, but it turns out they're not, ridiculing them behind their back. That's a serious sin. In fact, in Romans chapter 1, it's listed there with murder and sodomy and all of these gross sins. You've got gossip right there in the middle of them. So God looks at it very seriously.
He looks at coarse jesting, obscene jesting, things like that, that we should never, as Christians, ever be hearing that from one another or partaking of it. And if we do, we should just repent sorrowfully before God and any other person that we may have spoken coarsely to or something like that, because it is definitely an idle word. Or we just pass on rumors. I mean, maybe it's not even hurting someone. It's just rumors that are out there that are false, that could have repercussions on other things.
I would say that's easily an idle word. We're saying something that's not true as Chrysostom had defined it. Okay, so a warning there for all of us. All right, now moving on to still chapter 12, verse 39 and 40. Jesus is talking to the scribes and Pharisees and other people. He said, " But no sign will be given to it. " He talked about a wicked, an adulterous generation seeking a sign. He says, " But no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.
For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. " Now, that's in itself not a teaching that I think would be new to any of you. We all know about that, that Jonah was in the whale's belly, Jesus was in the belly of the earth three days. And he's saying that's the only sign you're going to get. The empty tomb is going to be your sign.
Unfortunately, most Jews didn't believe in the empty tomb, and the scribes and Pharisees tried to blot it out by bribing the guards to say His disciples had stolen his body. But it's still the thing, even today, that is one of the, what would you say? Foundations of faith, one of the basic aspects of faith is believing in the empty tomb, and believing in that sign that Jesus gave us of he died, was buried, and rose again from the dead.
Now, one reason I wanted to mention this here today is something I've heard from a lot of people over the last, say, 30 years. When, you know, they're aware that I'm someone who has studied the early church for so many years, they'll ask me this question, " Okay, what about Jesus? It says He was in the grave three days and three nights. " So since he was resurrected on Sunday, I don't think anyone doubts that, that would mean he actually was put to death on Thursday, not on Friday.
I mean, if one person has asked me that or made that claim, I would say at least a dozen have. I've heard it quite a number of times. Probably more than a dozen people have brought that up to me. And I've seen it in pamphlets, in Christian magazine articles, and things like that. And what it amounts to, I mean, these people are, I think, well-meaning, but there is sort of a spiritual arrogance. Harry Argo, if you know who he is, he's the one who made me aware of this. C.S.
Lewis used this expression of chronological snobbery, meaning that people today think they know more than Christians who lived before them. Now, C.S. Lewis may have been guilty of some of that himself, but I thought it was a very good phrase because it exists everywhere. This idea, " Oh, we know more than those people way back then. " And they're talking about people who knew the apostles or knew direct disciples of the apostles who were taught by them. And oh yeah, we know more than them.
And yeah, the fact that they said Jesus died on Friday, well, that doesn't count for anything, you know, because it says three days and three nights. So, you know, we know more than that. Well, we need to be, like Jesus said, you know, meek and lowly to learn from him. And if he was meek and lowly, as I said, we need to be ourselves. And to just brush off the early church like, " Oh, they don't know what they're talking about. " Well, the problem is we who don't know what we're talking about.
I mean, Mark writes this. This is Mark 15:42. He says, " And now when the evening had come, because it was the preparation, that is the day before the Sabbath. " It's describing about taking Jesus off the cross, okay? And not finishing the anointing because it was the preparation day. Well, the preparation day was Friday. I mean, I don't think anyone disputes that, any Bible scholar. And Mark makes it clear, it says the day it was the day before the Sabbath. Again, every Bible scholar knows the Sabbath is Saturday.
So, I mean, there's just no disputing that. So what do we do with three days and three nights? He died on Friday, then he was in the tomb Friday night, Saturday night, just two nights. And it wasn't three full days. It was just parts of three days. Particularly if he rose early Sunday morning, and apparently he did, because the women came there early to finish anointing him, and he was already resurrected when they got there. So, what do we do with that?
Well, this didn't bother the early Christians at all, because they recognized it as a figure of speech. And that's the advantage of where you have native speakers. Yeah, they're aware of a figure of speech, three days and three nights. To somebody, an English-speaking person in the Western world in this century, well, if you said that outside of the Bible context, people would take that to mean literally three days and three nights. That's what it would mean to us.
But they recognized it as a figure of speech, an idiom, which we have, I was just looking it up, there are 25,000 idioms in the English language. I've just listed a few of them. We use all the time and we don't even think about it. This was a site for non-native English speakers explaining English to them that if you're going to understand English, you're going to have to understand English speakers use idioms all the time. And so you better learn these idioms or you're going to be very confused.
And it listed some of them to cut corners. Well, we use that all the time. We know what that means. But literally to cut, maybe take scissors and cut it. I mean, you know if someone like, " Huh? " He said he cut corners, that means he got something and he cut it. If you were trying to make it sound literal, and see, that's what people are trying to do with three days and three nights, you better bite the bullet. Boy, someone reading that, you know, much later, I need to take a bullet and bite it.
Why did he say that? I'm going to give you a heads up. Now that's a pretty new one. I remember when that first came started being used, and I didn't know what it meant. I mean, I got an email from someone and said, " I'm going to give you a heads up. " And it's like, " I'm going to give you a heads up. " I was reading it as a literal thing. I had not heard that expression before. I mean, it's not something that's been around a long time. If you think it has, it's not. And I was like, it doesn't make any sense.
What's this person talking about? You know I was doing the three days and three nights thing and finally I asked someone, you know what this is talking about? Oh yeah, heads up means, you know, blah, blah, blah. Well, okay, I'm slow sometimes to pick up the newest lingo. I've got a beef with somebody. Again, you can't take it literally. So yeah, we get hung up on something because we're not recognizing a figure of speech that they spoke a certain way that we don't.
In fact, Justin Martyr, he understood Jonah to not be three literal days and three nights in the whale's belly. Again, just parts of them. That made sense to them. It doesn't make sense in the English language, but the Bible wasn't written in English, and it wasn't written for 21st Century Westerners. So, yeah, we can learn from the early Christians on that, you know, having native speakers living in that century.
Okay, now a passage, and it may be, I'm sharing these things with you today, and you may be thinking, well, David, I understood all of these passages. So I'm picking the ones that were hard for me, and there may be other ones that are hard for you, and these ones you've already had down pat. But hopefully most of us are in the same ditch on this. Now, this one, I mean, I honestly had no idea, and I must have read this hundreds of times throughout my life. What on earth is it talking about?
Matthew 12:43 through 45, " When an unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he travels through dry places, seeking rest, but finds none. Then he says, " I will return to the house I came from. And when he has come back, he finds it empty, swept, and adorned. Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there. And the last state of that man is worse than the first. So it will be the same for this wicked generation.
Now, that's the clue to understanding this, that last sentence, " So it will be for this wicked generation. " But see, I never made that connection, and none of the preachers I'd ever heard made that connection. They usually would just read this if they were going through that passage and make a brief comment and move on. ' Cause it's like, I remember thinking, well, I don't know if I want to cast a demon out of a person. I mean, it sounds like you cast the demon out.
The demon's going to go out and doesn't have a home, so he's going to come right back and repossess the person, but he's going to bring seven demons with him, and the person is going to be in the worst situation than before. And so he was like, wow, what does this mean? This doesn't make any sense. Why is Jesus saying this? Or if he's describing how exorcism works, why would anyone cast out a demon? You know Well, he's not talking about exorcism here.
Again, the key is that last one, so it will be the same for this wicked generation. And again, the early Christians got this right off. I didn't as a 21st century Westerner. So they understood, okay, he's talking about, he's giving a parable here. He's not describing exorcism, how it works, but he's given a parable. Now he had just cast out a demon. And so, you know, it was a fitting application. But he's talking about the Jewish nation, okay? This is when an unclean spirit has gone out of a man.
The man represents Israel, okay? So when did they have an unclean spirit originally? Well, this was back during their 400 years of captivity in Egypt. When you look at the sons of Israel, the 12 sons of Jacob, outside of Joseph, I mean, they're not very godly people to speak of. You don't look at them as being particularly spiritually strong or righteous. And that was just his immediate children.
Well, yeah, you go very many generations beyond that, and it's very easy to imagine how people fell away from the worship of God. And then they were made slaves there in Egypt, and they lived 400 years or more in an idol worshiping nation. That's why they so easily went back to worshiping a golden calf, which the calf or sacred bull was something the Egyptians worshipped. So, yeah, they had fallen under the power of Satan during that captivity. Probably most of them had turned to idol worship.
I mean, look at just the hard time. They gave Moses who came there to deliver them, and they weren't very appreciative of it. So, yeah, they were like somebody who had an unclean spirit possessing them during that time period, but then he's gone out of a man. So when was this unclean spirit cast out? It was when they were delivered from Egypt and given the law. And with the law, they begin to learn about God that they aren't to have any idols.
They're not to have any other gods, which they probably did during all that period in Egypt, and all of these other things that God taught them through the law. The law does contain a lot of regulations that was, I think I mentioned it either today or last week, served as a guardian to keep them in check, but it also contained eternal principles that are still binding on Christians today, like loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. So that's when the demon was cast out, okay? So the demon's cast out.
He goes through dry places. Well, that's the Gentiles. They were the dwelling place of demons. Paul says that the idols they worshipped, they were actually giving the worship to the demons. But then here comes the Christians, and they go out to the Gentile world. We read more about Paul in Acts who went to the Gentiles, but eventually all the apostles, they started off only serving the Jews because that was the commission given them, but eventually they also went out to the Gentiles as well.
Plus, there were a lot of other apostolic men and women who were out spreading the gospel. So the Gentile world that had once been this safe place for the demons, suddenly they're being assaulted. They have all these Christians coming and casting demons out of people and bringing the Gentiles away from idol worship.
When you get into the fourth century in the Roman Empire, most of the Christians, by the end of the fourth century, I should say most of the Gentiles by the end of the 4th century living in the Roman Empire had given up worshipping idols, the direct worship of demons. Now, they weren't the best Christians either, but they had given up this idol worship.
So the demons, this demon who's been cast out of the Jewish nation, and this is a parable, yeah, he goes to the Gentiles, but then he goes through dry places seeking rest, but finding none. So he can no longer have rest among the Gentiles. They're the ones who in the bulk make up Christ's disciples. So he goes back to the Jews. I'll go back where I used to be, you know, way back before the law was given, and he finds it, Jesus describes it empty, swept, and adorned.
Well, yeah, the Jewish nation now had cast off their Messiah, rejected him, persecuting His disciples, and then in AD 70, their temple is destroyed, their priesthood is destroyed, they're under the power of the scribes and Pharisees. So yeah, he finds it a lot better place than it ever was, and hey, let's come and inhabit here. So Jesus is warning them, " This is what's going to happen to your nation that is going to become a dwelling place of demons. " And it's remained that way, you know, pretty much until today.
Now, we do have the blessed hope that Paul gives in Romans that at the end of time that the Jews will return to God, the Jews living at that time, or at least there will be a major turning back to God. But that hasn't happened yet. People get excited about the nation of Israel, but they're not over there in faith. I mean, if you've ever been there, you know that most Jews over there don't even believe in God. I mean, they're in worse shape than they were in Jesus ' day. At least they believed in God.
At least they were living by the law. I mean, today, there's the ultra-orthodox who live by the law, but they detest Christians and they, you know, burn down churches and things like that. And then most of the nation don't even believe in God, or at most, they're agnostic, or at best, I should say they're agnostic. So, yeah, it hasn't happened yet, but there is a promise of things to come.
Now, there is a principle we can take from this parable, and the early Christians do apply it this way, not as the main meaning, but just as a warning that when we become a Christian, particularly back then, they were coming from idol worship. I think it's a good practice today when someone is baptized that we should do today, but they did it back then. The person would renounce Satan, his pomp, and his angels, everything having to do with Satan before they were baptized. So they renounced Satan and his demons.
You know, any demons that had possessed them before baptism were cast out. They were cleansed when they were baptized. And the Christian said, " But now if you go back to your old master, then it's going to be like this parable that if you go back, if you fall away from Christ, that the demons can come back and take control of your life. Even if they don't possess you, they can do that once you left Christ, but they can also rule you just indirectly, which is what's usually going to happen.
" So there is a moral principle there for us to follow. So again, there's more gems in Matthew chapter 12 that I encourage you to read the whole chapter. And again, in the Matthew commentary, you'll find a lot of more interesting discussions there about the Sabbath, some of the teachings of the Jews about the Sabbath, and all of that. So that'll end this afternoon's discussion. Thanks for your attention.