Luke 4:34 - Exposition

Let us alone; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? This man, with his evil spirit, would have been looked on as unclean, and would not have been admitted within the synagogue walls; he had probably crept in unseen. Something in the nearness to the holy Teacher we know compelled the demon to cry aloud. It is strange, this presence of God causing pain. It is the impossibility of the wounded eye bearing light. The cry rendered, "Let us alone," is scarcely the imperative of ἐάω , but an interjection, possibly the Greek reproduction of the Hebrew הּהָאֲ , ah! woe! There was evidently some deeper degree of misery possible for the unhappy spirit; hence its "Art thou come to destroy us?" The same dread appears in the case of the Gadarene demoniac ( Mark 8:31 ; Matthew 8:29 ), where the spirits dreaded being driven into the deep, where such spirits await the judgment, that abyss, literally, "the bottomless place;" any doom seemed to these lost ones preferable to that. I know thee who thou art; the Holy One of God.