Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
Luke 7:31–35
“John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is justified by all her children” (vv. 33–35).
Unlike those who heard and believed John the Baptist’s message of repentance and were baptized, the Pharisees and lawyers did not recognize God’s wisdom in graciously providing salvation to those who knew that they could not rest their salvation on their own obedience (Luke 7:29–30). Falsely considering themselves more righteous than they were, these Jewish authorities missed God’s purposes in extending forgiveness to sinners.
This failure to grasp the righteousness of God prompted Jesus to issue a critique of His generation in today’s passage (Luke 7:31–34). Clearly, our Savior did not mean that all His first-century contemporaries fell under His rebuke. Luke has just made a positive evaluation of some in Jesus’ audience (Luke 7:29), and we read of many occasions on which Jesus commended the faith of some of the people whom He met during His earthly ministry (e.g., see Luke 7:1–10). Instead, His disapproval is confined to the Pharisees, lawyers, and others who did not trust in God’s messengers John the Baptist and Jesus.
Luke 7:32–34 records the substance of our Lord’s critique. He says that those who rejected John and Jesus were like children who complained that others did not dance when they played the flute and did not weep when they played a dirge. He then reflects on how the Pharisees and lawyers complained when John came fasting and Jesus came feasting. Basically, Jesus meant that the people who rejected His ministry and that of John had made up their minds not to be pleased by anything God chose to do. Most of the religious leaders were unsatisfied when John came fasting and living an austere life to illustrate his call to repentance, but they were not looking for the Lord to speak to them in a more joyful way either, for they likewise griped when Jesus celebrated God’s redemption of sinners and fellowshiped with them. The problem, Jesus taught, lay not in the Creator’s messengers but in the hard hearts of those who opposed them. They would not receive His Word no matter what.
Jesus concluded by saying, “Wisdom is justified by all her children” (Luke 7:35). Sometimes the Greek verb that we translate as “justified” (dikaio) simply means “to demonstrate,” and that is the sense here. God’s truth and wisdom are revealed in the results that they produce. The fact that tax collectors and other sinners were believing the message of John the Baptist and Jesus and finding reconciliation with God proved that John and Jesus had both come from the Lord.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
Dr. R.C. Sproul writes in his commentary on Luke that “wisdom is shown to be wisdom by its fruits, by the results that are manifested.” The fruit of the ministry of John and Jesus is very plain for those with eyes and hearts to receive it. Apart from God’s gracious intervention, however, no sinner can see and believe the wisdom of God revealed by John and Jesus. As we share the good news of Jesus, let us pray that God will give people hearts to believe it.
for further study
- Psalm 95
- Ezekiel 12:1–2
- Matthew 11:16–19
- Hebrews 3:7–4:13
the bible in a year
- 1 Samuel 7–9
- Luke 13:1–21