Expository Thoughts
Notes on 6:12-19
12. Spent the night praying to God. Isidore Clarius in his orations on St. Luke, published in Venice in 1565, has some striking remarks on the disgraceful contrast between the way in which the apostles were called to their office after a night spent in prayer and the way in which ecclesiastical offices were filled in Italy in his own day. He exposes the system of jobbing, nepotism, corruption, and covetousness which universally prevailed on such occasions and enters a faithful protest against it.
16. Judas Iscariot. One reason our Lord chose a traitor to be an apostle was that the choice finally supplied a powerful indirect evidence of the purity, blamelessness, and faultlessness of our Lord's behavior and ministry. When our Lord was accused before the high priest and Pontius Pilate, if anything could be proved against him, the traitor Judas Iscariot was exactly the witness who could have proved it. The mere fact that Judas never came forward to give evidence against our Lord is a convincing evidence that nothing could be proved against him.
LUKE 6:20-26
BLESSINGS AND WOES
The discourse of our Lord, which we have now begun, resembles, in many respects, His well-known Sermon on the Mount. The resemblance, in fact, is so striking that many have concluded that Luke and Matthew are reporting one and the same discourse, and that Luke is giving us, in an abridged form, what Matthew reports at