Luke 12:1-12 Acting and Blasphemy

Luke 12:1-12 Jesus speaks to His disciples. The crowds were building. So much that they were stepping on each other. In this section Jesus gives some seemingly eclectic comments, that build on His earlier discussion in Luke 11:33-36. He is elaborating on the inner person and the importance of being open to the Holy Spirit interiorly.

         First He warns against the leaven (yeast) of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. In our day, hypocrisy has come to mean saying one thing and then living differently, not to the same standard that one espouses. In Jesus' day, the word referred to acting. Those who put on a play were actors, just as in our day. So from Jesus' words, he said that the Pharisees were acting, but that this acting was yeast. Elsewhere, yeast is a type of sin. During the Passover, Orthodox Jews would (and still do) make bread without yeast (Exodus 12:15-20), to symbolize the life of Christ without sin. Yeast is that which puffs up. In Matthew 16:6-12, Jesus explains that the leaven is the teaching of the Pharisees. Their teaching puffed them up. In Paul's passage warning the Corinthians about allowing a brazen adulterer to continue to fellowship with them, he uses this analogy to make a slightly different point. (I Cor 5:6-8). A little bit of yeast makes the whole loaf rise. A little bit of sin that is tolerated affects the whole congregation. It didn't take much of the Pharisees' teaching and acting for them to get puffed up to think they were something in God's kingdom. So Jesus warned His followers not to think that by acting a certain way, they were now something in God's kingdom; they should always remain humble.

         The next passage is related (Luke 12:2-3) in talking about the secret things becoming known. Earlier (Luke 11:33-36) He advised them to allow the light of God's revelation to illuminate their whole being. Here He warns them that the secret things that they thought they could hide would eventually come to light. The Watergate scandal might be a modern example of this on a national scale, but actually it will happen in each person's life. There are the innumerable scandals where politicians or preachers or other prominent figures are revealed to be engaging in secret sin. In the case of actors, it does not seem to impact their career much, but for those whose career depends on people trusting and believing what they say, it can be career ending. Solomon had actually warned about this (Eccl. 10:20), but in Jesus' case, He was simply continuing the warning about the Pharisees' acting righteous in public but harboring secret sins.

         In the next section, Jesus talks about the judgment of God, the final outcome of our souls. (Luke 12:4-10). It is not just that our careers may be ruined when our secret sins are outed. At the final judgment, anyone who confesses Christ before others will be owned by Him, but anyone who denies Him before others will be disowned by Him. We should not fear people who can kill us, that is our body, but the One who will ultimately decide whether we are to be with Him or cast into hell for eternity.

         Luke 12:10 is a difficult verse. After saying that whoever refuses to confess Him before men He will disown before God, Jesus then says whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man (Himself) it will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven. He then goes on (Luke 12:11-12) to explain the role of the Holy Spirit in giving people what to say when they are brought to trial on account of confessing His name.  I think that the only way to interpret verse 10 in is the context of what went before and what comes after. Specifically, Jesus is talking about being persecuted and actually put on trial for His sake. In that circumstance, under torture or other duress, He will forgive those who say something wrong about Him. But the Holy Spirit will be present with any Christian in those circumstances, giving them words to speak. If these words are rejected - if this direct connection to God at the moment of trial is deliberately broken - then God has no other means of grace by which to save a person. Perhaps it is implicit that under trial the presence of the Holy Spirit will be much more powerful than at other times so that His leading will be unmistakable and the power to walk out His provision will be amply present. He has made provision and we need to receive it.

         In Mark 3:28-30 Jesus makes a similar comment about blaspheming the Holy Spirit, but in that context, it was because they said Jesus had an unclean spirit, and that He cast out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of the demons. But the underlying concept is the same - that if we reject all the means of grace that God has provided, then He cannot do anything else. In Mark 13:11 Jesus commented about the Holy Spirit giving words to speak when we are brought before men, but this was in the context of talking about the end times, that family members would turn on one another, resulting in people being put on trial for their faith.