Luke 11:24

The unclean spirit when he is gone out of the man passeth through waterless places, seeking rest, and finding none, he saith, I will turn back unto my house whence I came out. And when he is come, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more evil than himself; and they enter in and dwell there; and the last state of the man becometh worse than the first.

This parable of the wandering demon, like all the words of Jesus, is true either in or out of context; and out of context, this is a marvelous teaching of the futility of negative morality, or religion. Barclay titled this section, "The Peril of the Empty Soul," stressing (1) that a man's soul may not be left empty, (2) that a genuine religion cannot be erected on negatives, and (3) that the best way to avoid evil is to do good.[32]

However, it is a mistake not to see more than moralizings in the parable before us. Jesus had already spoken this parable, much earlier in his ministry (Matthew 12:43f), making it a prophetic warning of Israel against rejecting her King; and here it is spoken again, near the close of his ministry, and at a time when the final rejection of himself by the secular Israel was rapidly approaching.

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The man in whom the evil spirit was = Israel.

The going out of the demon = the rebirth of the nation under the preaching of John the Baptist.

The swept and garnished period = the emptiness of Israel's inadequate regeneration. No meaningful change in the people occurred.

The restlessness of the demon = the relentless and unresting hostility against Jesus of the evil powers.

His repossession of the victim = total repossession of national Israel by Satan's evil forces. This refers to the judicial hardening of Israel.

The state "worse than the first" = the hardened secular Israel, as fully expounded in Romans 9-11.MONO>LINES>

In the earlier incident recorded in the other two synoptics, Christ warned the Pharisees of the unpardonable sin; here Christ warned them of the judicial hardening that would accompany their rejection of the Lord. In the earlier episode, the wandering demon was used as a prophetic warning; here it was repeated as an explanation of what had already occurred.