OUR FATHER WHOSE SENT HIS SON TO SAVE THE WORLD

In the book of Matthew chapter 24 verses 1 - 2, the Lord Jesus, having castigated the religious leaders in the temple, departed from there and as they went, the disciples were showing Jesus the buildings of the temple in all their glory.

The Lord gave them a grave prophecy by saying that as improbable as it seemed at the time, every one of the massive buildings of the temple would be  torn down to the foundation leaving no stone standing on another.

This prophecy was fulfilled about 40 years later in the year 70 AD when the Roman army, after a long siege, sacked the city of Jerusalem and tore down every stone of the temple.

1 Then Jesus went out and departed from the temple, and His disciples came up to show Him the buildings of the temple. 2 And Jesus said to them, “Do you not see all these things? Assuredly, I say to you, not one stone shall be left here upon another, that shall not be thrown down.”

With the loss of the temple, the customary and religious practices of Judaism halted and went into a state of dormancy with no temple sacrifies and dedications.

To replace the lost religious functions, the religious leaders of Israel devised a system of traditions that laid out a variety of substitutionary practices that have been observed by the disperate groups of the children of Israel since that time.

However, there are multiple prophetic references to a rebuilt temple and the resumption of the original religious practices that will be one of the harbingers of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.

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OUR FATHER WHOSE SON WAS SENT TO DIE FOR THE WORLD BUT WILL RETURN IN GLORY

The condemnation of the religious leaders concluded in Matthew chapter 23 verses 37 - 38 with the pronoucement of judgement over the city of Jerusalem for it had been the practice of those in it to kill prophets and stone messengers sent from God.

The Lord Jesus revealed that His desire through the history of the city was to gather all of her inhabitants under His wings but the people of the city were not willing to be subject to their God and as such, struck those who were sent as emmisaries from God.

This track record would continue with the Lord Himself where He would fall into the hands of the scribes and the Pharisees and he would be condemned to death and be crucified outside the walls of the city.

The judgement on Jerusalem was that it would soon be left desolate of spiritual importance and they would not see the Lord Jesus again until they fulfiled the prophecy that they would bless the Messiah who would be coming in the name of the Lord.

When the Messiah came to them on the colt of a donkey as desribed in Matthew chapter 21, the religious class could not be induced to say ˋblessed is He who comes in the name of Lordˋ but the time will come when He returns on a white horse, and every eye will see Him returning in glory and they will say, blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.

37 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! 38 See! Your house is left to you desolate; 39 for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’ ”

Amen

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 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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OUR FATHER WHOSE KINGDOM IS A KINGDOM OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

The Lord Jesus, in Matthew chapter 23 verses 27 - 28, drew on a metaphor to describe and expose the nature of the religious leaders who were leading Israel at that time;

27 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. 28 Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

Jesus represented the hypocricy of presenting a fascade of purity in public while concurrently living an unclean and predatory life, as tombs that were painted white and made to look aesthetically pleasing but were concealing the remains of corpses and decay.

The indictment here pointed at the deliberate efforts of the scribes and Pharisees to give the impression to their communities that they were ardent followers of all the laws and worthy to be honored and followed but all the while, they were involved in lawless skulldugery.

Have mercy on us O God.

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OUR FATHER WHOSE SON CLEANSES US FROM ALL UNRIGHTEOUSNESS

Matthew chapter 23 verses 25 - 26 continues with the condemnation of the practices of the religious leaders:

25 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence. 26 Blind Pharisee, first cleanse the inside of the cup and dish, that the outside of them may be clean also.

In this article of indictment, the Lord Jesus used the metaphor of dishes to illustrate the absurdity of the teachings being dispensed by the scribes and Pharisees.

Their fixation on outward appearances was represented by the cleaning of the outside of cups and plates while leaving the inside uncleaned. 

The dishes, representing people who are supposed to be vessels of God, were internally steeped in predatory attitudes while following the creed of self-indulgence.

The Lord Jesus prescribed to the Parisees that they should begin by cleansing the inner parts of the dishes which represented the internal attitudes and intentions.

Once the inner proclivities for abusing other people and being self-indulgent were extricated from the inner lives of people, then the outer appearance would be taken care of. 

This mirrors the teaching of Jesus  in Matthew chapter 15 verse 11 where, in countering the challenge of the Pharisee towards His disiciples for eating without washing their hands, He informed them that ingestion does not make people unclean but rather it is when the internal contents come out in the form of evil words and deeds that causes them to be unclean.

Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.”

Have mercy on us O God.

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OUR FATHER WHO WANTS WIDOWS AND ORPHANS CARED FOR

Matthew chapter 23 verses 23 - 24 continues with the charges that the Lord Jesus brought against the religious leaders who prescribed and enforced the religious practices at that time;

23 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone. 24 Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!

 The indictment that was being brought against the scribes and Pharisees was that they were overtly following the laws of God that were easily seen and could be quantified such as giving to the temple ten percent of everything that they gained  including small herbs that would grow incidentally on their properties.

They made a great deal over these tiny observances but when it came to the heavy matters of law such as the administration of justice, mercy and faith, they were silent. 

The Lord declared that the religious leaders needed to do the small things but without neglecting the more consequential obligations of the law. He gave the metaphor of screening out the gnats while letting camels through to illustrate how the scribes and Pharisees, when formulating a code of righteousness to live by, emphasized the smallest points of law to live under such as tithing herbs while skirting the eternally important  portions of the law that dealt with the postures of their hearts towards God and their fellow human beings.

As  the book of James chapter 1 verse 27 says,

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

Because of this distortion of perpective and priority, they did not highlight the religious practices that God considered to be faultless, Jesus called the religious leaders of Israel blind guides because they could not see the spiritual landscape that the laws they were handling were pointing to and yet presumed to lead the laity in spiritual matters.

Have mercy on us O God.

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OUR FATHER WHOSE THRONE IS IN HEAVEN

Matthew chapter 23 verses 16 - 22 says this;

16 “Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever swears by the temple, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple, he is obliged to perform it.’ 17 Fools and blind! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold? 18 And, ‘Whoever swears by the altar, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gift that is on it, he is obliged to perform it.’ 19 Fools and blind! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that sanctifies the gift? 20 Therefore he who swears by the altar, swears by it and by all things on it. 21 He who swears by the temple, swears by it and by Him who dwells in it. 22 And he who swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God and by Him who sits on it.

The Lord Jesusˋ indictment of the the religious leaders continued and in this passage, those who held the offices and the status of spiritual guides were shown to be unseeing and unwise.

Concerning the protocols of oaths and vows, the scribes and Pharisees had synthesized a pattern of swearing for the people to follow but because they had no understanding of the spiritual infrastructure that facilitated the interactions between the corporeal realm and the spiritual realm, they had prescribed inverted procedures where the people were swearing by the transient sacrifices and by the thin veneer of gold that coated the temple walls.

These formulations derailed the earnest and consequential vows and oaths that the people were trying to make before God because their swearing was being underpinned by items that were not registered as valid enforcers of oaths in the spiritual realm.

The teachings of the religious leaders led people to swear their oaths on the gold that coated the temple walls because, they said, swearing on the temple itself was of no consequence. The Lord Jesus authoritatively illustrated that these teachings were wrong because the gold was not intrinsically sacred or sanctified but rather it was the temple in which God dwelled that was santified and thus oaths needed to be pinned to the temple itself for it was what confered santification to everything else that was in it.

This was also true of the altar which was officially sanctified. The prevailing teaching was that swearing on the altar meant nothing and so it was necessary to swear on the sacrifices that were on the altar. Jesus showed that the altar, which was the instrument of spiritual santification, was what oaths needed to be sworn upon and not the sacrifices that were inately mundane and only gained sanctification by placement on the altar.

The Lord showed that the religious leaders were leading people astray in the matter of having their oaths registered in the spiritual realm and as such, any credit to be gained by swearing an oath and fulfilling it, was lost.

What the scribes and Pharisee had set up was like a fake credit card that people were using to make purchases online. Without their knowledge, the purchases did not go through and when they made payments, they are not recieved and because there is no purchases and there is no payments registered, their credit scores did not improve.

Deutronomy chapter 23 verses 21 - 23 says,; “If you make a vow to the Lord your God, you shall not delay fulfilling it, for the Lord your God will surely require it of you, and you will be guilty of sin. But if you refrain from vowing, you will not be guilty of sin. You shall be careful to do what has passed your lips, for you have voluntarily vowed to the Lord your God what you have promised with your mouth.

As this passage says, there is no obilgation to swear oaths. If a person did undertake to swear an oath, one would incur a risk of failure to fulfill the oath and invite judgement upon themselves but on the other hand, successfully fulfilling oaths in the spirit increased credibility in the spiritual realm. It is this credibility that people are seeking when they make oaths before God and the system devised by the religious leaders deprived the people of this benefit.

Jesus provided a teaching on swearing oaths that would register the oath before God and His recommendation was to swear by heaven because heaven contained the throne of God and swearing by heaven made the one who sits on the throne the enforcer of the oath. This is a fearful position to be in and thus James advises us not to swear in James chapter 5 verse 12 (But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.) but to grow in maturity in the spirit, we must be able to obligate ourselves to tasks and stewardships in the kingdom of God and to have a track record of fulfilling vows made before God increases our standing before the Lord.

So help us O God.

Amen.

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