Luke 10:19

19. Behold I give The perfect tense, I have given. The Greek perfect signifies a past act whose effect remains. I have given and the gift still remains. The gift was imparted in the first bestowment of their symbolical office, as one of its significant points. It was probably to cease with their office, though this may not be so certain. The same promise was made even to private believers in Mark 16:18, on which see our note.

Power to tread on serpents and scorpions And as the casting out of demons by the Seventy, and the fall of Satan, which Christ saw, were both actual and physical realities, so was this treading on serpents and scorpions an actual and physical reality. The Seventy during their mission should find a superiority to reptile venom one of their miraculous gifts, as did Paul at Melita. Acts 28:5. But all three of these realities were symbols of the spiritual. They were the type of the final

bruising of the serpent’s head. All the power of the enemy It is not sin which has produced physical evil in the world; for evil, accident, and death existed on earth, as geology shows, before Adam sinned. But sin excluded man from access to the tree of life, from which he had been immortal, and thus sin established that relation of the body and mind of man towards external nature, as that disease and death ensue. Sin, therefore, constitutes to man the power of the serpent’s venom and the scorpion’s sting. Christ here promises to these his followers some faint restoration of the Adamic superiority to the power of the enemy.

The enemy The chief and first old Serpent; the Satan of Luke 10:18, by whose first hostility all other venomous things are poisonous to man.

Hurt you This promise of miraculous power should doubtless be limited by the laws of miracle and faith, as defined in our note on Matthew 17:20.