OCTOBER 13 THE JESUS QUESTIONS JQ#28-6 “Why do you test Me, you hypocrites?” (Matthew 22:18)

LIVING FOR JESUS --- Daily Devotional

OCTOBER  13  THE JESUS QUESTIONS   JQ#28-6 “Why do you test Me, you hypocrites?”  (Matthew 22:18) 

365 Prayers to JESUS 

Jesus, the Son of God Most High all Praise and Honor is Yours and Yours alone. God has declared You His Son in whom God is well pleased and commands us to “LISTEN TO HIM”. Lord Jesus the mystery is why did You become flesh, suffer all things as we must suffer and even bother to “Talk” to us at all? Lord we continually choose to go our own way, we defile all the blessings You bestow upon us, we quench the Holy Spirit You have sent to comfort us and still You are there offering us eternal life and  the Truth of God that it was His Choice to Love the world and to have a Plan to save us from ourselves — O Glorious Plan but at such a Great Price and Divine Sacrifice! Lord Jesus, each day You are there with fresh Mercy and we find ourselves once again ready to start a new day so we seek to be centered in Your Will and covered by Your Grace. Thank You Lord for Salvation and for turning our evil thoughts and wicked ways into Praise and Thanksgiving for You have finished Your Work, all we have to do is know You cared enough about us not to let us remain in our sin and provided a solution to our sin problem through Repentance, soften our hearts that we may hear the gentle call of God and accept His Gift!      AMEN

The Jesus Questions

OCTOBER  13    JQ#28-6 “Why do you test Me, you hypocrites?”  (Matthew 22:18)   Jesus cleansed the temple and made it a house of prayer as God had originally intended and once in the temple Jesus answered prayers and healed all who came to Him in the temple and yet His last week on earth was spent in contention with the religious and political rulers? These “contentions” were all centered around “power and authority”. Jesus used each “confrontation” to teach another Truth of God as He addressed each group and exposed the Truth that they were not interested in the work of God but in maintaining their “status quo” in their respective positions of “authority”. Jesus confronted the Pharisees and Herodians and taught Spiritual Law #1 - “Render unto God the things that are God’s things.” (Matthew 22:21) and it was recorded that when the Pharisees and Herodians “…[heard His] words, they marveled, and left Him and went their way.” (Matthew 22:22) As soon as word got around that the Pharisees and Herodians were not able to “entangle Him in His talk” that “The same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Him and asked Him, saying: ‘Teacher…” (Matthew 22:23) and the Sadducees started their confrontation the same way the Herodians and the Pharisees had started, by calling Jesus, “Teacher”. This greeting exposed one of the main problems all the groups were having, and that was that they did not recognize Jesus as the Chosen One, the Messiah. Jesus is the Master Teacher but He is first LORD, so the Sadducees started their attack on God without acknowledging that Jesus was in fact the Son of God sent to fulfill the Law as God Himself had given to the world. The Sadducees concocted an imaginary scenario where there were seven brothers who all married the same woman according to what Moses had taught about raising offspring of a deceased brother and then posed the question to Jesus “Therefore, in the resurrection {in which the Sadducees did not believe in}, whose wife of the seven will she be? For they all had her.” (Matthew 22:23-28) The question Jesus had asked the Pharisees and Herodians still applied, “Why do you test Me?” and Jesus quickly summed up the problem and showed the Sadducees their wrong thinking about the things of God as Jesus answered them: “You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures or the power of God.” (Matthew 22:29) So once again Jesus went right to the point and exposed to the Sadducees that it was their interpretation of "power and authority" that was the true “mistake”. Jesus then said, “But concerning the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God…” (Matthew 22:31) . So Jesus confronts the Sadducees with the Truth of God that God IS the POWER, and that God HAS SPOKEN already and our problem is that we ignore what God has already told us and we interpret His Commands in a way that satisfies our selfish desires! Jesus then gave them Spiritual Law #2 as He quoted God describing Himself to Moses — “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32) So now Jesus has addressed the issues brought against Him by the Pharisees, the Herodians, and the Sadducees and instead of them “entangling" Him in His speech, Jesus has taught them two Spiritual Laws that state that all power  belongs to God and that God is a living God and still involved with our day-to-day lives as “God is the God of the living”. This says to me, that as long as I have breath and life that I must subject myself to the "authority" of God for I have no “power” to interpret or change what God has already spoken to us as a pattern of how to live and inherit the promised land and eternal life — or would you rather listen to men who are interested in maintaining their “power” over the people at all costs, including death to all that get in their way?!?!?!?