When Christ described the working of the false teachers, He was not talking about their characters so much as about the results of their teaching and their policies. Suppose we were to attempt to judge the Lord according to those standards that are accepted in many quarters today. We can well imagine a scene in a Palestinian home during the time Christ was here on earth. Someone would say, "Well this Jesus cannot be a good man, for what He is saying does not make for peace. Now the Pharisees are men of peace. They are such good men. I have seen them praying in the market place. They give tithes of all they possess. They want harmony. But this Jesus is a controversialist. He uses such terrible language. He calls these men ‘generations of vipers,’ and ‘hypocrites.’ Surely we must see that by their fruits ye shall know them, and we shall have to choose the Pharisees."
This passage is often quoted, and often misquoted. When Christ cried out, "Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree corrupt and its fruit corrupt," He was telling these men that there had to be a radical change in their lives. They had not been born again. They possessed only an old nature but they were seeking to adorn it with a substitute righteousness. Men can be deceived by this outward appearance, but God looks upon the heart and is not satisfied with its condition. Men must have a miraculous work performed within their lives so that there will be a tree of life within on which good fruit may grow, or they must recognize that the fruit which God demands cannot grow upon the old dead wood of the human life apart from Christ.
In all these explanations, the important fact is that His enemies admitted the supernatural powers of the Lord Jesus Christ. They could not explain Him on natural grounds. The keenest minds of His day, sharp and critical, were forced to admit that He was outside the common run of men. The explanation of the Pharisees was that the power of Jesus Christ was Satanic power. What He had done they could not deny, so they said that it was done by the power of the prince of the demons. This explanation is as foolish as those that leave out the supernatural. We would be amazed at the stubborn willfulness of unbelief had we not been warned by our Lord of the deep seated reasons for this denial—reasons which lie buried in the recesses of the sinful human heart. Every once in a while, we meet just such arguments in our dealings with men today - with an airy gesture of contempt, they would dismiss the whole question and say with a firm tone that it can’t be so simply because such things are not so.
A good many years ago, commenting upon this habit of some unbelievers, a Scotsman said, "It is very easy to solve an insoluble problem if you begin by taking all the insoluble elements out of it. And that is how a great deal of modern thinking does with Christianity. Knock out all the miracles; pooh–pooh all Christ’s claims; say nothing about Incarnation; declare Resurrection to be entirely unhistorical, and you will not have much difficulty in accounting for the rest; and it will not be worth the accounting for. . ."
We have never found an honest skeptic. Some men claim to be honest skeptics, but before probing very deep the truth comes out. If a man is an honest skeptic he will soon cease to be a skeptic. A man might claim to be a skeptic about the multiplication table, but if he were an honest skeptic, he would soon learn that six times seven are always forty–two… and his honesty would lead him to certain definite fixed conclusions, and he would find himself no longer a skeptic. With the dishonest skeptic, it is quite another matter. If you ask him to count out the eight times seven to see for himself, he will add a piece from his pocket or do away with a piece to make the answer come out according to his preconceived bias.
In the twenty–second to thirty–second verses of Matthew twelve, we are faced with one of the greatest contrasts in the Bible. God Almighty arrays Heaven and Hell in one scene and lets us look at the two. He demonstrates that His ways are not our ways and that His thoughts are not our thoughts. We see that His ways and thoughts are, indeed, above ours, as the heavens are high above the earth.
