In Luke 10:21–24, the Lord refers to those who see and hear certain things. He calls them blessed. In the immediate context, He is talking about His disciples, especially the seventy who had just returned from a preaching tour in Israel. These seventy had healed the sick and cast out demons in the name of the Lord through the power He had given them.
Some would assume that the blessed are all believers. Unbelievers would not be blessed.
That is undoubtedly true. A believer has eternal life. An unbeliever does not. In that sense, a believer is happy (blessed). An unbeliever is not.
But the Lord means more than that in these verses. I suggest that many believers might not be blessed in the sense that the Lord is discussing. This is true in spite of the fact that all believers have eternal life.
The disciples in these verses are not just believers. They are following the Lord. They are doing His work. God did not give all believers in the first century the ability to cast out demons and heal the sick. Because of His disciples’ willingness to follow the Lord in obedience, they had the privilege of seeing things others did not.
They also got to hear things that not all believers heard. In v 23, it says that the Lord taught the disciples privately. Those believers who were disciples of the Lord had the blessing of being taught by Him; He did this when crowds were not around. He spent time with these obedient believers. He explained things to them. We can only imagine the things they heard! They were a happy (blessed) group.
The inverse is described in John 2:23–25. John says that many believed in Jesus. These people were believers. They had eternal life. In that sense, they were blessed.
But in another sense, they were not. John says that Jesus “did not commit Himself” to these new believers. They were not willing to follow Him as disciples. They did not see the things the disciples saw. They did not hear the things the disciples heard. They did not get to spend time with the Lord in private. What a blessing they threw away.
If we are believers in Jesus Christ, we have received the greatest blessing in the world. We know we have eternal life and will live with Him forever.
We are not one of the seventy. While we don’t have the power to heal the sick or cast out demons, we can still see and hear the Lord. But that won’t happen if we don’t follow Him as disciples. We will not be blessed because we will not see the Lord working in our lives, transforming us into His image (2 Cor 3:18; Rom 12:1–2). We will not hear Him speak to us in His Word and challenge us to greater intimacy with Him.
John 3:16 tells us that if we are believers in Jesus Christ, we have the gift of eternal life. In this, we are blessed. But may we also be blessed in the sense the Lord means in Luke 10:21–24.
