OUR FATHER ESTEEMS HIS PROPHETS

The Lord Jesus concluded His indictment of the  religious class with a scathing reference to the religious lineage that the scribes and Pharisees has descended from.

They had tried to distance themselves from their spiritual heritage of assaults and murders of the prophets sent by God  by paying hommage at the tombs of prophets who their fathers had killed.

Here, the Lord brings in the concept of spiritual inheritance that bequethed the sins of the father upon the sons when they partake in rebellion against the plan of salvation of God.

Because the scribes and Pharisees had called themselves the sons of those who had persecuted the prophets of old (with the disclaimer that if they had been alive at the time, they would not have participated in the murder of the prophets), the bloodshed spilled by their forebearers all the way back to the murder of the righteous priest Abel by Cain was on their heads. The Lord also mentioned a prophet named Zachariah whom the religious classes murdered in the temple. (This could either have been a prophecy of a murder that did take place in about 60 AD in the temple where a person called Zacharia Baruch was killed in the temple or a reference to Zacharia who was the father of John the Baptist or the prophet named Zachariah mentioned in the Book of Ezra or the book Zachariah. 

Prophetic identification of the Zechariah who was murdered in the temple may be the most accurate interpretation because it would capture the span between the murder of the first righteous priest and the murder of the last righteous priest who was killed in the temple in Jerusalem in 60 AD before it was destroyed in 70 AD as Jesus prophesied. This is speculation but a possible 

Mathew chapter 23 verses 29 - 26 records the final article this way;

29 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you buid the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, 30 and say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.’

31 “Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers’ guilt. 33 Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell? 

34 Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes: some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, 35 that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. 36 Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.

Have mercy on us O God.

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