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

 

SEPTEMBER 13  THE JESUS QUESTIONS  

JQ#28

 “Why do you test Me, you hypocrites?”  (Matthew 22:18)

LIVING FOR JESUS  Daily Prayer    

JESUS, the Son of God Most High all Praise and Honor is Yours

 and Yours alone. God has declared JESUS His Only Begotten Son,

 God declared the He is well pleased with “HIS SON” and 

commands us to “LISTEN TO HIM”. 

Lord Jesus, the mystery is why did You become flesh, 

suffer all things in life as we must suffer them and why would You 

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 daily quench the Holy Spirit You have sent to comfort us and

 still You are there offering us forgiveness of all our iniquities and

 reward Repentance with eternal life! The Truth of God is that it was

 His Choice to Love the world and to have His 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 You have 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

Jesus cleansed the temple and made it a house of prayer 

as God had originally intended for His Holy Temple in Jerusalem 

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 it is interesting to note that 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 

that 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 ALREADY SPOKEN 

——— 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 asked the Sadducees if they remembered the Scriptures

 where God is quoted 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 stated in

 

Spiritual Law #2 - “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 concerning

 the pattern of how to live our daily lives abundantly and to 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?!?!?!?

SEPTEMBER 12 THE JESUS QUESTIONS JQ#28 “Why do you test Me, you hypocrites?” (Matthew 22:18)

 

SEPTEMBER 12  THE JESUS QUESTIONS  

JQ#28

 “Why do you test Me, you hypocrites?”  (Matthew 22:18)

LIVING FOR JESUS  Daily Prayer   

JESUS, the Only Begotten Son, was Obedient to the Father’s Will,

 endured a Cruel Sacrificial death, and though He was Innocent, Jesus

 took upon Himself the pain that must be paid for each and every 

sin in the world — a pain that cannot be described in terms that can

 fully expresses the agony that Jesus, the Very Son of God Suffered 

on our behalf, for You Lord Jesus are Innocent yet You became Guilty

 for our sakes, and there is nothing we can do but to raise Praises 

of Gratitude to say Thank You for becoming sin for us! Lord, 

this world consumes us daily and even on the best of days we truly

 fall short of Your Glory and on the worst of days it seems like 

we have somehow blinded ourselves and let the lusts of the world 

call us away from Your Path of Light into the darkness of disobedience.

 Forgive me Lord and turn my heart from the world back to Your Word.          

AMEN

THE JESUS QUESTIONS

Jesus used this Question “Why do you test Me…?” not as a Question

 per se but to let the legalists plotting against Him know that He knew

 that they were “testing” Him! The first group to try “testing” Jesus

 was the Pharisees who sent their disciples along with the 

Herodians which should have raised suspicions and eyebrows in 

Jerusalem because the Pharisees and the Herodians were political foes

 but had joined forces on this occasion to attack Jesus? Historians list 

the Pharisees as a Jewish sect that believed the way to God

 was through keeping the law as written in the entire Old Testament and

 “According to Josephus, the Pharisees were the group most 

Influential with the people, [the Pharisees] were noted for their 

accurate and therefore authoritative interpretations of Jewish law,

 and had their own traditions and way of life to which they 

were faithful. They had a simple standard of living and cultivated

 harmonious relations with others.”  

The Herodians differed politically from the Pharisees in that the Herodians

 wanted to restore a Herod to the throne in Judea and the Pharisees

 wanted to restore the kingdom of David.  Jesus posed such a great

 threat to both sects and political parties that they put aside their 

political differences and were plotting together how to kill Jesus

 to protect their traditions and centuries old way of life in which they

 held “offices of power” over the multitudes. Thousands of years earlier

 there was a multitude of Israelites that were slaves in Egypt and God

 sent Moses to free them for Egypt’s power and authority and now

 Israel is crying for “deliverance” from the power of the Roman Empire

 and God sends His Only Begotten Son to deliver them from their 

bondage to sin and to free them from the “political powers” that

 now enslaved the multitudes with their interpretations of God’s Law. 

The first attack coming from this hybrid group did not catch Jesus off 

guard because He had earlier Taught His disciples, saying,

 “Take heed, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees 

and the leaven of Herod.” (Mark 8:15) 

This quote from Jesus taken in this context of Him Teaching

 in the temple of God in Jerusalem at the Passover feast 

(which celebrated their “exodus” from Egypt) makes the 

warning of “leaven” even more critical in understanding that Jesus

 had come to set the multitudes free  that they might for themselves 

go in and inherit God’s “Promised Land”.  The joining of these 

political foes against Jesus demonstrates the desperation 

of  “power mongers” to retain their “powers” at all costs,

 in this case they were willing to do what Jesus had just Taught in 

His Three Parables on “Power and Authority” that 

“Then last of all [a certain king] sent his son to them,

 saying, ‘they will respect my son’ — but — when they saw the son, 

they said among themselves, ‘This is the heir. 

Come, let us kill him and seize his inheritance.’”

 (Matthew 22:37-38) 

This attack against Jesus by political foes uniting forces to maintain

 their respective “offices of power” is a reflection of our modern society

 as we have seen that all politics and political parties are on the

 “attack” against God and His Authority, our political parties who

 are “political foes” are united in their attempt to undermine God 

and His Law and it is all done that they might retain their political office —

 Does the term “Political Correctness” ring a bell?!?!? 

It is also interesting to note that the “attack” from the Pharisees (the lawyers)

 and the Herodians (doctrines of men) centered around asking Jesus 

“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” (Matthew 22:17) 

which is obviously about “money and power” and physical things of

 the world — so that is why Jesus turned their “test” into a “Spiritual Lesson”

 as He had them look at the image of Caesar and Jesus Taught

 Spiritual Law #1:  “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, 

and to God the things that are God’s”. (Matthew 22:21) 

This Spiritual Law #1 enforced  two other Truths of God 

(T1) “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil…” (1 Timothy 6:10) and

 (T2) “Thou shalt not make …any graven image…Thou shalt not 

bow down thyself to them…for I the LORD your God [AM] a jealous God…” 

(Deuteronomy 5:8-9) 

Whenever we find ourselves questioning the “authority of God” we should

 revisit the Lessons of Jesus and these “Spiritual Laws” given to 

answer the “legalists” and the “doctrines of men" which are simply

 man’s interpretation of God's Law enforced by earthly authority on the populace —

 can any law be truly “legal” 

if it is not approved by the Divine Law Giver???