11:2-13 Notice the order in this prayer. First, Jesus praised God; then he made his requests. Praising God first puts us in the right frame of mind to tell him about our needs. Too often our prayers are more like shopping lists than conversations. These verses focus on three aspects of prayer: its content (11:2-4), our persistence (11:5-10), and God’s faithfulness (11:11-13).
11:3 God’s provision is daily, not all at once. We cannot store it up and then cut off communication with God. And we dare not be self-satisfied. If you are running low on strength, ask yourself, How long have I been away from the Source?
11:4 When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he made forgiveness the cornerstone of their relationship with God. God has forgiven our sins; we must now forgive those who have wronged us. To remain unforgiving shows we have not understood that we ourselves deeply need to be forgiven. Think of some people who have wronged you. Have you forgiven them? How will God deal with you if he treats you as you treat others?
11:8 Persistence, or boldness, in prayer overcomes our insensitivity, not God’s. To practice persistence does more to change our heart and mind than his, and it helps us understand and express the intensity of our need. Persistence in prayer helps us recognize God’s work.
11:13 Even though good fathers make mistakes, they treat their children well. How much better our perfect heavenly Father treats his children! The most important gift he could ever give us is the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1-4), whom he promised to give all believers after his death, resurrection, and return to heaven (John 15:26).
11:14-23 A similar and possibly separate event is reported in Matthew 12:22-45 and Mark 3:20-30. The event described by Luke happened in Judea, while the other took place in Galilee. According to Luke, Jesus spoke to the crowds; in Matthew and Mark, he accused the Pharisees.
11:15-20 Some of the Pharisees’ followers also were exorcists—that is, they drove out demons. The Pharisees’ accusations were becoming more desperate. To accuse Jesus of being empowered by Satan, the chief of the demons, because Jesus was driving out demons was also to say that the Pharisees’ own exorcists were doing Satan’s work. Jesus turned the religious leaders’ accusation against them. Jesus first dismissed their claim as absurd (Why would the devil drive out his own demons?). Then he engaged in a little irony (“By whom do your sons cast them out?”). Finally, he concluded that his work of driving out demons proved that the Kingdom of God had arrived.
Satan, who had controlled the kingdom of this world for thousands of years, was now being controlled and overpowered by Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus’ Kingdom began to come into power at Jesus’ birth and grew as he resisted the wilderness temptations. It established itself through his teachings and healings, blossomed in victory at his resurrection and at Pentecost, and will become permanent and universal at his second coming.
11:21, 22 Jesus may have been referring to Isaiah 49:24-26. Regardless of how great Satan’s power is, Jesus is stronger still. He will overpower Satan and dispose of him for eternity (see Revelation 20:2, 10).
11:23 How does this verse relate to 9:50: “He that is not against us is for us”? In the earlier passage, Jesus was talking about a person who was driving out demons in Jesus’ name. Those who fight evil, he was saying, are on the same side as the one driving out demons in Jesus’ name. Here, by contrast, he was talking about the conflict between God and the devil. In this battle, if a person is not on God’s side, he or she is on Satan’s. There is no neutral ground. Because God has already won the battle, why be on the losing side? If you aren’t actively for Christ, you are against him.
11:24-26 Jesus was illustrating an unfortunate human tendency: Our desire to reform often does not last long. In Israel’s history, almost as soon as a good king would pull down idols, a bad king would set them up again. It is not enough to be emptied of evil; we must then be filled with the power of the Holy Spirit to accomplish God’s new purpose in our life (see also Matthew 12:43-45; Galatians 5:22).
11:27, 28 Jesus was speaking to people who put extremely high value on family ties. Their genealogies were important guarantees that they were part of God’s chosen people. A man’s value came from his ancestors, and a woman’s value came from the sons she bore. Jesus’ response to the woman meant that a person’s obedience to God is more important than his or her place on the family tree. Consistent obedience is more important than the honor of bearing a respected son.
11:29, 30 What was the sign of Jonas (Jonah)? God had asked Jonah to preach repentance to the Gentiles (non-Jews). Jesus was affirming Jonah’s message. Salvation is not only for Jews but for all people. Matthew 12:40 adds another explanation: Jesus would die and rise after three days, just as the prophet Jonah was rescued after three days in the belly of the great fish.
11:29-32 The cruel, warlike men of Nineve (Nineveh, capital of Assyria), repented when Jonah preached to them—and Jonah did not even care about them. The pagan queen of the south (Sheba) praised the God of Israel when she heard Solomon’s wisdom, and Solomon was full of faults. By contrast, Jesus, the perfect Son of God, came to people that he loved dearly—but they rejected him. Thus, God’s chosen people made themselves more liable to judgment than either a notoriously wicked nation or a powerful pagan queen. Compare 10:12-15, where Jesus says the evil cities of Sodom, Tyre, and Sidon will be judged less harshly than the cities in Judea and Galilee that rejected Jesus’ message.
11:31, 32 The people of Nineveh and the queen of Sheba had turned to God with far less evidence than Jesus was giving his listeners—and far less than we have today. We have eyewitness reports of the risen Jesus, the continuing power of the Holy Spirit unleashed at Pentecost, easy access to the Bible, and knowledge of 2,000 years of Christ’s acts through his church. With the knowledge and insight available to us, our response to Christ ought to be even more complete and wholehearted.
11:33-36 The light is Christ; the eye represents spiritual understanding and insight. Evil desires make the eye less sensitive and blot out the light of Christ’s presence. If you have a hard time seeing God at work in the world and in your life, check your vision. Are any sinful desires blinding you to Christ?
11:37-39 The hand-washing ceremony was done not for health reasons but as a symbol of washing away any contamination from touching anything unclean. Not only did the Pharisees make a public show of their washing, but they also commanded everyone else to follow a practice originally intended only for the priests.
11:41 The Pharisees loved to think of themselves as “clean,” but their stinginess toward God and the poor proved that they were not as clean as they thought. How do you use the resources God has entrusted to you? Are you generous in meeting the needs around you? Your generosity reveals much about the purity of your heart.
11:42 Rationalizing not helping others is easy because we have already given to the church, but a person who follows Jesus should share with needy neighbors. While tithing is important to the life of the church, our compassion must not stop there. Where we can help, we should help.
11:42-52 Jesus criticized the Pharisees and the experts in religious law harshly because they (1) washed their outsides but not their insides, (2) remembered to give a tenth of even their garden herbs but neglected justice, (3) loved praise and attention, (4) loaded people down with burdensome religious demands, (5) would not accept the truth about Jesus, and (6) prevented others from believing the truth. They went wrong by focusing on outward appearances and ignoring the inner condition of their hearts. People do the same when their service comes from a desire to be seen rather than from a pure heart that is full of love for others. People may sometimes be fooled, but God isn’t. Don’t be a Christian on the outside only. Bring your inner life under God’s control and your outer life will naturally reflect him.
11:44 The Old Testament laws said a person who touched a grave was unclean (Numbers 19:16). Jesus accused the Pharisees of making others unclean by their spiritual rottenness. Like unmarked graves hidden in a field, the Pharisees corrupted everyone who came in contact with them.
11:46 These “burdens grievous to be borne” were the details the Pharisees had added to God’s law. To the commandment, “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8), for example, they had added instructions regarding how far a person could walk on the Sabbath, which kinds of knots could be tied, and how much weight could be carried. Healing a person was considered unlawful work on the Sabbath although rescuing a trapped animal was permitted (14:5). No wonder Jesus condemned their additions to the law.
11:49 God’s prophets have been persecuted and murdered throughout history. But this generation was rejecting more than a human prophet—they were rejecting God himself. This quotation is not from the Old Testament. Jesus, the greatest prophet of all, was directly giving them God’s message.
11:51 Abel’s death is recorded in Genesis 4:8. For more about him, see his profile in Genesis 4, p. 17. The prophet Zacharias’s (Zechariah’s) death is recorded in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22 (the last book in the Hebrew canon). Why would all these sins come upon this particular generation? Because they were rejecting the Messiah himself, the one to whom all their history and prophecy were pointing.
11:52 How did the legal experts remove the “key of knowledge”? Through their erroneous interpretations of Scripture and their added man-made rules, they made God’s truth hard to understand and practice. On top of that, these men were bad examples, arguing their way out of the demanding rules they placed on others. Caught up in a religion of their own making, they could no longer lead the people to God. They had closed the door of God’s love to the people and had thrown away the key.
11:53, 54 The teachers of religious law and the Pharisees hoped to arrest Jesus for blasphemy, heresy, and lawbreaking. They were enraged by Jesus’ words about them, but they couldn’t arrest him for merely speaking words. They had to find a legal way to get rid of Jesus.