A sermon preached at Covenant Presbyterian Church of Fort Smith, Arkansas on September 21, 2025.
Now he was casting out a demon that was mute. When the demon had gone out, the mute man spoke, and the people marveled. But some of them said, “He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of demons,” while others, to test him, kept seeking from him a sign from heaven. But he, knowing their thoughts, said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and a divided household falls. And if Satan also is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand? For you say that I cast out demons by Beelzebul. And if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own palace, his goods are safe; but when one stronger than he attacks him and overcomes him, he takes away his armor in which he trusted and divides his spoil. Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and finding none it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there. And the last state of that person is worse than the first” (Luke 11:14–26).[1]
The first thirteen verses of the eleventh chapter of Luke’s gospel are in essence Jesus’ response to one request, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). Jesus responds first with the Lord’s Prayer, providing a succinct model or pattern for our prayers, followed by a parable teaching us the attitude we are to have when we pray, all of which presumes that we pray. Knowing how to pray is of course no benefit if we don’t do it. But what exactly is prayer? The Westminster Shorter Catechism helpfully answers, “Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies.”[2] Prayer is not meditation or reflection or introspection; it is speaking directly to God, offering up, confessing, and thanking him, which is why our prayers commence by addressing “Our Father in heaven” (Matt. 6:9).
Although most of our prayers, I would presume, are prayed silently, this has not always been the norm. The personal prayers of antiquity were more often prayed aloud; silent prayers were seemingly suspicious.[3] You may recall when Hannah prayed at the temple in Shiloh, “her lips moved, and her voice was not heard,” leading Eli the priest to wrongly presume she was drunk (1 Sam. 1:12-16). Or consider the personal prayers of Jesus recorded in the Gospels: They were remembered and recorded because they were heard. This is not to say that our personal prayers must be audible (unless you struggle with staying awake when praying . . . Then, maybe you should try it!), but it does help us understand Luke’s placement of the spiritual deliverance of a speechless man directly after Jesus’ teaching on prayer.
David declares, O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise” (Ps. 51:15), and “He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God” (Ps. 40:3). But what if you opened your lips and nothing came out? What if you could not audibly praise the Lord? What if you could not sing a new song or a song of praise? What if you could not pray, as Jesus taught us? And what if the reason was the diabolical bondage of the devil?
The Diabolical Bondage of the Devil
Luke records, “Now [Jesus] was casting out a demon that was mute. When the demon had gone out, the mute man spoke, and the people marveled” (Luke 11:14). The demon was mute; the man was spiritually impaired. He could not audibly profess, pray or praise. As sad as this was, consider that he was a living, breathing depiction of all who do not believe.
The apostle Paul explains in the tenth chapter of Romans, “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved” (Rom. 10:9-10). The essence of Christianity is not membership in a church or aligning with shared biblical values or serving in ministry, as noble as these aspects of Christianity may be, but is belief in and profession of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Apart from faith and profession, whatever it is, it’s not Christianity. And Satan knows this well and so mobilizes his minions to keep the unbelieving in bondage, to keep them from professing, praising, and praying.
When Jesus exorcized the mute demon, the people marveled at what they had witnessed, but marveling is not believing. Many marveled at Jesus but few followed him in faith.Some responded antagonistically, “He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of demons” (Luke 11:15). The name “Beelzebul” is taken from the first chapter of 2 Kings referring to the god of Ekron,[4] but over the centuries, the name became an idiom for Satan himself, as it is used here. Note that they did not doubt that the works of Jesus were supernatural. Their challenge is that what he did was not of God; Jesus was doing the devil’s handiwork. Such is Satan’s strategy, leading the lost to call evil good and good evil, to call darkness light and light darkness, to call bittersweet and sweet bitter,[5] to call the work of the Son of God the work of the devil.
Others responded skeptically, trying “to test him . . . seeking from him a sign from heaven” (11:16). They could marvel at the miraculous, perhaps concede that it was the work of God, but they wanted more, “a sign from heaven.” And yet, even a cursory reading of all four Gospels reveals that Jesus worked a multitude of miracles, and the apostle John says there was so much more that wasn’t recorded.[6] And this too is Satan’s strategy, leading the lost to look for more than the truth, a lustful discontentment, and a constant desire for the experiential, even the entertaining. Rather than listening to Jesus’ words and looking to his works in faith, their doubting hearts were like the false teachers the apostle Paul warned about, “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7).
Jesus of course knew their thoughts but also the condition of their hearts. They are not only spiritually mute but blind too, unable to see the embodied revelation of God before them, rendering their objections illogical and incoherent. Some will go to great lengths, even abandoning the truth, to preserve their unbelief. And so, Jesus beautifully and brilliantly challenged their objections with common sense: “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and a divided household falls” (Luke 11:17). Inner division not outer conflict is often the reason for downfall and will inevitably lead to ruin. And Satan, though evil, is not stupid; he would never attack himself.
To his common-sensical statement, Jesus then adds the practical: Their own brethren were exorcizing demons too. Were the same allegations hurled at them? Were they supposedly playing in Beelzebul’s band too? Luke doesn’t waste the ink to answer this, because the problem was not the exorcism of demons, or any of Jesus’ other miraculous works. The problem for both the antagonists and the skeptics was Jesus himself; he was the problem. They would not, they could not, believe on him.
The Life-giving Freedom of Christ
It is helpful to remember what started all of this: “[Jesus] was casting out a demon that was mute. When the demon had gone out, the mute man spoke, and the people marveled” (Luke 11:14). Jesus liberated the man from demonic possession and oppression. Perhaps to explain what he had done, and certainly to negate the false allegations made, Jesus provides the following analogy: “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own palace, his goods are safe; but when one stronger than he attacks him and overcomes him, he takes away his armor in which he trusted and divides his spoil” (Luke 11:21-22). The strong man is the devil who, fully armed with his fellow fallen angels, guards .the souls of his persuasion or possession. But at his most powerful he is no match for one stronger, who not only attacked but defeated the strong man. The one stronger is Jesus!
Writing to the Colossians the apostle Paul explains that through faith in Christ, God has brought us to spiritual life, “having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:13-14). Following this imagery of our sin debt nailed to the cross, he then pulls back the curtain, so to speak, revealing the spiritual result of Christ’s victory. Paul says, “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him” (Col. 2:15). The “rulers and authorities” Christ disarmed were not the Jewish leaders or the Roman empire but the devil and his demons, who were bound through the power of the cross, shamed through the folly of the cross, and ultimately defeated through the victory of the cross. In the second chapter of 1 Corinthians, Paul explains that in Christ’s crucifixion the demonic powers though they thought they were winning were in fact losing,[7] that through Christ’s death and resurrection God’s plan of redemption was confirmed and the demonic realm’s doom sealed.
In his righteous life and sacrificial death, Christ destroyed the works of the devil[8] and his power of death. As a result, Hebrews tells us Christ also delivered “all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Heb. 2:14-15), referring to our slavery to sin and death. We are then, in Christ, brought to spiritual life, no longer fearing death because of God’s gift of eternal life, no longer enslaved to sin but freed to obey. The antagonists and skeptics who would not believe on Jesus, were just as captive as the demon-possessed man, in a sense. They did not know the freedom Christ gives to all who believe.
Christian, the devil is your enemy, but he is a defeated enemy, bound in the scope of his influence, and destined for eternal torment. It is no wonder he “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet. 5:8); his defeat is confirmed, his doom certain. Though he is evil, do not let your imagination ascribe him authority he is not due. As Martin Luther sang,
And though this world, with devils filled,
should threaten to undo us,
we will not fear, for God has willed
his truth to triumph through us.
The prince of darkness grim,
we tremble not for him;
his rage we can endure,
for lo! his doom is sure;
one little word shall fell him.[9]
Our victory will never be found in fearing evil, or the evil one, but fearing God through faith in Christ. And victory will never be known through evil, or by the evil one, but “thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere” (2 Cor. 2:14).
We are then ambassadors in and for Christ. We are not merely spectators but participants in the kingdom of God. “Whoever is not with me is against me,” Jesus said, “and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:23). In Christ, we are gatherers, telling everyone who will listen of the life-giving freedom of Christ.
The Evidential Presence of the Kingdom
In the midst of objections and false allegations, Jesus makes this startling statement: “But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 11:20). The expression “by the finger of God” is an ancient idiom for the powerful work of God,[10] but according to the parallel account in Matthew serves as a synonym for the Spirit of God.[11] The people marveled at the miraculous but did not see it as the Spirit of God at work, and the evidential presence of the kingdom of God. It is a sad depiction of their spiritual blindness but simultaneously a glimpse of Christ’s coming kingdom.
To understand this, we may distinguish between the earthly kingdom and the heavenly. Of course, God is sovereign over all, but since the Fall this world has been in rebellion and so dominated by sin and death. But when Jesus came, heaven came to earth so speak, not in the form of the new creation-realm but as the king coming to give the gracious gift of citizenship in his heavenly kingdom by making new creations of all who believe. So, when Jesus says, “if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you,” he is saying that by evidence of exorcisms, not to mention a multitude of other miracles, the king has come to redeem his own. But witnessing the evidential presence of the kingdom of God and believing in the Son of God are not the same thing, as the following parable reveals.
Revealing aspects of a realm we cannot see, Jesus describes what happens when a demon is exorcised and the state of freed person. The demon “passes through waterless places seeking rest, and finding none” (Luke 11:24) readies himself for a return. The freed person has cleaned himself up, turned over a new leaf, seeking this time to try hard to live a better life. And the person’s hard work and self-improvement are a success, not for himself but for the returning demon and a party of seven, where they enjoy plenty more room for more evil. The result, Jesus says, is “the last state of that person is worse than the first” (Luke 11:24-26).
Jesus’ parable reveals that religion apart from Christ and moral improvement apart from his spiritual presence leads only to emptiness and possibly the eventual influence of evil. As Phil Ryken puts it succinctly, “Moral reformation without spiritual regeneration even leads to demonic domination.”[12] But when we believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, he fills the empty room of our soul with his Spirit. And through his indwelling presence, he opens our mute lips to profess faith, to praise the Lord, and to pray in his name. And so, we have assembled here today with lives transformed and tongues unleashed to praise the Lord. Have you believed? Or do you remain among the antagonists and skeptics? Or have your eyes been opened to see him as your Savior? Is your tongue ready to praise? Then believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, right now and you will be saved. If you have believed, praise him, with your lips, yes, and with your life. Let all that is within you praise the Lord. Amen.
[1] Unless referenced otherwise, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (Wheaton: Crossway Bibles, 2001).
[2] “The Shorter Catechism” Q. 98, The Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms (Lawrenceville: PCA Christian Education and Publications, 2007), 400-401.
[3] https://brill.com/view/journals/nu/41/1/article-p1_1.xml
[4] 1 Kings 1:2
[5] Isa. 5:20
[6] John 21:25
[7] 1 Cor. 2:8
[8] 1 John 3:8
[9] Martin Luther, Frederick Henry Hedge, trans., “A Mighty Fortress,” Trinity Hymnal, Revised Ed. (Suwanee: Great Commission Publications, 1990), 92
[10] Ex. 8:19
[11] Matt. 12:28
[12] Philip Graham Ryken, Luke, Vol. 1 (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2009), 605.
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