Some
things just aren’t possible. You can’t be on a winning sports team if everyone
on the team works hard to make sure the other team wins. If you just hand the
ball to the other team and stop defending, they will score. If you score on
their behalf, you can’t gain more points than they do.
The
religious leaders have leveled two charges against Jesus. They have charged
that He is demon possessed and that He uses demonic powers to perform His
miracles, specifically, that when He casts out demons from other people, He is
using the demonic power to do so.
Jesus
uses a simple logical argument to refute their claim. He wraps it in a parable,
a story from everyday life, in order to make it more understandable, but it is
a logical argument. He starts His argument with the simple question. Stated as
a statement rather than a questions it would be: Satan won’t drive out Satan.
The
power Satan possesses can’t be used by him to destroy himself. To put it
another way, Satan won’t commit suicide using his own powers. You can’t choke
yourself to death with your own hands. You pass out first, and then your hands
release their grip and you recover. Armies who keep attacking and defeating
themselves lose the war. You can’t send all your customers to your competitors
and stay in business forever.
So
Jesus said that you can’t drive yourself out of yourself. Satan can’t drive out
Satan.
So
what does this mean to us, in our lives today? If there are fundamental Truths
that are not being taught, or there are errors in those truths, then the work
can’t be of God. Satan will include just enough truth to fool people. His
schemes will look similar to the Truth with one or two fundamentals wrong. True
Satanist are not going to try to teach Truth. They are going to continue to
teach lies. That is their mission and they are comfortable with it.
If
you find yourself connected to a group that is missing the fundamentals, then,
in the famous words of Monty Python, “Run away, run away!”