Chapter 36 - The Condemnation of False Spiritual Leaders—part 2 Proclaiming the Judgment (23:34-36)

36 The Condemnation of False Spiritual Leaders—part 2 Proclaiming the Judgment (23:34-36)

Therefore, behold, I am sending you prophets and 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, that upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Truly I say to you, all these things shall come upon this generation. (23:34-36)

For centuries the Jews had awaited the arrival of their Messiah. The abiding hope in the heart of the Jew was that the day would soon come when the Messiah’s arrival and establishment of His kingdom would usher in the enduring age of promised blessing for God’s people. Every Jewish woman longed to be mother of that Messiah, and every Jewish man thought of rising to that place of prominence, honor, and service.

Yet when the Messiah did come and did offer His kingdom and did promise blessing and hope and salvation, instead of receiving Him in faith and love His people rejected Him in unbelief and abhorrence. They so despised Him that they murdered Him and persecuted and often murdered His followers.

In that grievous epoch in the history of Israel, God’s uniquely chosen and blessed people confirmed that they preferred falsehood above truth, darkness above light, iniquity above righteousness, their own worthless works above God’s divine grace, damnation above salvation, Satan’s way above God’s. They were called out by God’s grace and given His promises and covenants and laws. Yet when those blessings came to perfect consummation in the coming of their long-promised Messiah, the Lord and Savior, they rebelled against Him and put Him to death.

Leading that rejection were the scribes and Pharisees, the epitome of false spiritual leaders. Those self-righteous, legalistic, hypocritical haters of God hungered and thirsted not for righteousness but for the blood of the righteous. At the very moment Jesus addressed them face to face in the Temple, they were plotting His arrest and murder. In so doing, they were, as Jesus had just declared, filling “up then the measure of the guilt of [their] fathers” (Matt. 23:32).

The phrase “fill up” is often used in Scripture in relation to sin, wrath, and judgment when those have reached their full limit. It depicts a cup filled to the brim with sin, which becomes a cup of condemnation. The cup that is full of sin is full of punishment to the same level. When sin is full it brings wrath, which when full brings judgment, which when full brings eternal destruction. Isaiah exclaimed, “Arise, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the Lord’s hand the cup of His anger; the chalice of reeling you have drained to the dregs” (Isa. 51:17). Jeremiah declared, “For thus the Lord, the God of Israel, says to me, Take this cup of the wine of wrath from My hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send you, to drink it’” (Jer. 25:15). Habakkuk warned Judah that “the cup in the Lord’s right hand will come around to you, and utter disgrace will come upon your glory” (Hab. 2:16). In the seventh bowl judgment in the final days, God will give Babylon, the paradigm of false religion, “the cup of the wine of His fierce wrath” (Rev. 16:19).

The scribes and Pharisees, and with them most of Israel, were about to fill up the limit of their sin. When man irrevocably rejects God, God irrevocably rejects him, giving him over to his own willful wickedness. When men “did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer,” Paul says, “God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,. . . and, although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them” (Rom. 1:28, 32). Because Pharaoh had irrevocably hardened his heart against God, God confirmed that hardening (Ex. 9:34-35; cf. 4:21; 7:3, 13; 10:1). When Judas had irrevocably committed himself to betraying Christ, Jesus told him, “What you do, do quickly” (John 13:27), not approving what Judas had determined to do but divinely confirming that decision.

Ever since there have been righteous men there have been persecutors and murderers of righteous men, who are a rebuke to unrighteousness. Whenever a society has the opportunity to express its hatred of righteousness, which reflects its hatred of God, it will abuse and, if possible, destroy the righteous people who belong to God.

After Jesus finished His series of seven curses against the scribes and Pharisees (vv. 13-33), He added another word of warning, declaring that their judgment was both inevitable and imminent.

JUDGMENT WAS INEVITABLE

Because the cup of their sin and the cup of God’s wrath would very shortly be filled up (vv. 32-33), therefore the judgment of the scribes and Pharisees was inevitable.

“As evidence and verification of that judgment,” Jesus said, “Behold, I am sending you prophets and 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.” In other words, after they crucified Him, their Messiah, they would proceed to kill and crucify His followers, especially the godly men He would send as His emissaries—the New Testament prophets and wise men and scribes.

In mentioning both kill and crucify, Jesus was probably referring to Jewish and Roman means of execution, respectively. Jesus was crucified, of course, as also was Peter according to tradition. Stephen was stoned, and James was put to death by the sword (Acts 7:58-60; 12:2). Other believers in the early church were murdered by those and countless other methods.

“Some of My followers,” Jesus predicted, “you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city.” All of the apostles experienced abuses for their faith, as did most other believers. “Five times I received from the Jews thirty-nine lashes,” Paul recounted. “Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned” (2 Cor. 11:24-25). Before his conversion, Paul had himself been in the vanguard of those who persecuted Christians from city to city (Acts 8:1-4; 9:1-2), and after his conversion he was the recipient of such persecution. He was opposed in and frequently driven out of many cities, including Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:45, 50), Iconium (14:1-2), Lystra (14:19-20), Thessalonica (17:5-10), Berea (17:13-14), Corinth (18:12-18), Jerusalem (21:27; 23:12), and Caesarea (24:1-9). Believers in the early church were continually hounded by the false spiritual leaders of Israel, who sought to stamp out the gospel of Christ.

Characteristic of Matthew’s gospel, the three titles prophets and wise men and scribes were uniquely Jewish. Although He was speaking of the apostles and other teachers, preachers, and writers of the New Testament age, Jesus used Old Testament terms His hearers would be sure to understand. Those Spirit-endowed leaders would be used of God to minister His gospel to the world and to complete His written Word in order that men might accurately hear the full message of His grace and be saved.

But those men would also fulfill another purpose, less consciously but as divinely ordained as that positive one. Just as they would be ministers of salvation they would also be ministers of judgment. Just as they would lead many to accept Jesus as Savior and Lord, they would also lead others to confirm their rejection of Him as Savior and Lord. “I am sending them to you,” Jesus said to the unbelieving scribes and Pharisees, “that upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth.” While others were having the opportunity to receive Him, they would have further opportunity to reject Him—which they would do. They would have additional chances to reject Him in order that they might pile upon themselves an even greater weight of guilt, which would earn them even more severe judgment (cf. Rom. 2:5).

Hops (that) relates to purpose, meaning “in order that” or “for the purpose of.” It was fully within God’s purpose that the wicked leaders of Israel, along with all other Jews who rejected Christ, have the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth come down on their heads. As far as the hardened scribes and Pharisees were concerned, the only gain they would receive from hearing more of the gospel would be more guilt and greater judgment.

It is not that God desires for men to reject His grace and be condemned (2 Pet. 3:9) but that when they persist in rejecting Him, they bring upon themselves the righteous outpouring of His wrath. The more they hear of His truth, the more accountable and guilty they become if they continue to reject it.

The scribes and Pharisees had all the accumulated revelation of the Old Testament, and for three years they had even received the perfect revelation of God’s own Son. And the more they accumulated God’s revelation without believing and following it, the more they accumulated God’s wrath and judgment in direct proportion. They and their generation could be held guilty for all the righteous blood shed on earth, because no generation in history has had or will ever have more of God’s light. They had God incarnate in their midst, who was Himself all truth and all light, yet they would not have Him.

The western world today is in a similar situation. The church has not always witnessed to Christ as clearly, fully, or lovingly as it might, but no generation in history, outside of that of Jesus’ own day, has had more access to God’s truth and the way of salvation than twentieth century western man. In addition to having great light, we have had benefit of the accumulated light, power, and blessing of the gospel for 2,000 years. Yet each successive generation seems to reject the gospel more vehemently, amassing for itself greater guilt and therefore greater judgment.

Paul testified, “For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.” The great difference, he went on to explain, was that to the saved they were “an aroma from life to life,” whereas to the lost they were “an aroma from death to death” (2 Cor. 2:15-16). In other words, every time the gospel is proclaimed, it either draws men to Christ or drives them further away. Because it runs so contrary to popular notions about God, that truth is difficult for many Christians to accept. But the New Testament makes abundantly clear that the purpose of the gospel is not always to bring salvation; it has the equally divine purpose of bringing judgment. As the saying goes, the same sun that softens the wax hardens the clay. God not only is a God of love, mercy, and grace but of holiness, wrath, and judgment; and Scripture is equally emphatic about both aspects of His nature.

When men receive God’s Son and are saved, He is glorified because His grace is vindicated; and when they refuse His Son and are condemned, He is glorified because His holiness is vindicated. Knowing how troublesome the second part of that truth is even for many believers to accept, Paul went on to assert that he was “not like many, peddling the word of God” in ways that were pleasing to men, “but as from sincerity, but as from God, [he spoke] in Christ in the sight of God” (2 Cor. 2:17). Lest any of his readers think he was simply expressing personal fanaticism, the apostle categorically asserted that he was speaking not only sincerely but from God and in God’s sight.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul presents the same truth in a somewhat different light. He anticipated that some people would object to his teaching that God “has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires,” and would ask, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” (Rom. 9:18-19). In reply the apostle said,

On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use, and another for common use? What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so in order that He might make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, (vv. 20-23)

God is God, and whatever He does is right by definition, because He is both the source and the measure of what is right.

In God’s final word to mankind in Scripture, He declared, “Let the one who does wrong, still do wrong; and let the one who is filthy, still be filthy; and let the one who is righteous, still practice righteousness; and let the one who is holy, still keep himself holy” (Rev 22:11). As men are in the end, so they will be forever. And whether in His gracious saving of those who receive His Son or in His holy judgment of those who do not, He will be glorified forever.

From the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the Jews had been killing God’s people and storing up greater and greater wrath and judgment. Unrighteous Cain slew righteous Abel, his brother. He could not tolerate his brother’s purity and godliness, because righteousness itself is a type of judgment on sin, exposing it for what it is.

The identity of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, has long been debated among Bible students. According to 2 Chronicles 24:20-21, Zechariah the son of Jehoiada was stoned to death by order of King Joash for his relentless stand against idolatry. His murder “in the court of the house of the Lord” occurred about 800 B.C., long before the end of the writing of the Old Testament.

Over twenty men by the name of Zechariah are mentioned in Scripture, indicating that it was a very popular name. Among the hundreds or perhaps thousands of Zechariahs who had lived before Christ it would not be surprising if more than one had been killed in the Temple. Because Jesus was pointing out the extensiveness of persecution of righteous people, beginning with Abel and ending with Zechariah, it would suggest that He was covering the whole of Old Testament history, from creation to the end of the prophetic period. It is also significant that Zechariah wrote more of the coming Messiah than did any other prophet except Isaiah.

The prophet Zechariah, whose father’s name was Berechiah (Zech. 1:1), was among the last prophets of Israel and apparently the last to be martyred. And although the Old Testament does not report his being murdered between the temple and the altar, it seems certain he was the Zechariah to whom Jesus referred.

It is significant that Jesus said, whom you murdered, speaking directly to the scribes and Pharisees but including all unbelieving Israel (v. 36). Although the murder of the prophet had been over 500 years earlier, the wicked leaders the Lord now addressed had participated in it. By their murdering Jesus, the incarnation of righteousness, they proved their complicity in and solidarity with the persecution and murder of every righteous person who has ever suffered at the hands of evil men.

JUDGMENT WAS IMMINENT

Truly I say to you, all these things shall come upon this generation. (23:36)

All these things—that is, the multiplied guilt and judgment that unbelieving mankind had been accumulating since the Fall—was about to come down upon the head of this generation. There is no reason to believe Jesus was speaking any way but historically when He spoke of this generation. It would be that generation who would experience the total destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple less than forty years later, in A.D. 70., a time Jesus called the “days of vengeance” (Luke 21:22). He had in mind not only those to whom He was then speaking but all other false leaders and unbelieving Jews living at that time—in other words, the nation of Israel as a whole. In a tragic chronicle, its people have continued in suffering from then until now.

In the year 66, Jewish revolution again broke out against Rome. Having taken as much as they could tolerate of Roman oppression, injustice, and pagan ways, the Jews turned against their rulers. Largely inspired by the Zealots, the party of radical nationalists known for their guerilla tactics and frequent terrorism, many Palestinian Jews took up whatever arms they could find and joined in rebellion. Rome struck back by slaughtering thousands of Jews in northern Galilee, and eventually Titus came down to Jerusalem with an army in excess of 80,000 men. After stationing his army throughout the city as well as all around it, the general demanded its immediate surrender. When the Jews replied with mocking laughter and attacks on the soldiers, the troops began a massacre that almost defies description. (See chapter 29 of this volume for a vivid eye-witness account by the famed Jewish historian Josephus.)

About that same time, the Gentile inhabitants of Damascus are said to have slit the throats of ten thousand Jews living among them. Several centuries later, the Roman emperor Theodosius II enacted a legal code that declared Jews were inherently inferior and did not deserve the same legal protection and privileges as other people. Tragically, those anti-Semitic views came to permeate subsequent western culture and law. In A.D. 630, the Byzantine emperor Heraclitus banished from Jerusalem the Jews who had begun to resettle there.

During the first crusade, which began in 1096, the established church in Europe instigated what was declared to be a holy war to deliver the Holy Land from the Muslim Turks who had ruled it for many centuries. Fearing Jews would want to resettle and reclaim the land for themselves, many crusaders engaged in brutal massacres of European Jews, supposedly in the name of Christ, as they marched toward Palestine. Sometimes the soldiers would herd all the Jews in a town or city together and give them an ultimatum to confess Christ and be publicly baptized or else be killed. Some Jews made a verbal profession merely to save their lives, while others refused and were slain where they stood. The atrocities included trampling Jews under their horses’ hooves as well as other means of execution too brutal to mention. Rather than face such humiliation and horror, many Jews committed suicide when they were informed that crusaders were approaching.

For many years Jews had experienced a relatively safe and untroubled asylum in England. But when a Dominican monk in the thirteenth century began to study the Hebrew Scriptures in order to be better able to witness to Jews, he himself converted to Judaism and was circumcised. In an irate reaction, the Roman Catholic Church had all Jews expelled from Cambridge.

In other parts of Europe Jews were falsely accused of counterfeiting coins and other serious crimes. After sham trials or no trial at all, the accused would be tortured, imprisoned, exiled, or executed. Sometimes all Jews in a community would be required to wear identifying arm bands or badges to set them apart. In London a group of Jews had their arms and legs tied to horses that were then driven off in opposite directions, and after the bodies were ripped apart, the remains were draped on gallows for the townspeople to see.

When the black plague swept across Europe in the fourteenth century, killing hundreds of thousands, many people blamed the Jews. In France they were accused of poisoning water wells, and in one town a synagogue filled with worshipers was burned to the ground. In desperation, many Jews fled to Poland and Russia in the farthest reaches of Europe, where many of their descendants still live today.

Having considerable freedom in Poland, they established several outstanding Talmudic schools and seminaries. They were later oppressed by the church for a while, but nevertheless joined the government and the church in fighting the Russian Cossacks. When the Cossacks were victorious, they vengefully massacred thousands of Jews.

Jews who fled to Spain found poor refuge. Among their worst persecutors were King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the two monarchs who commissioned Christopher Columbus’s first ventures to the new world. That country was described by one Jewish poet as the hell of the Jews. During the Spanish Inquisition, the graves of those who had converted to Judaism were dug up and the bodies desecrated. The heirs of those proselytes had their property confiscated as a warning to others who might consider converting. Every Jew was made to wear a symbol of burning crosses, and in 1492, the year Columbus began his first voyage, most of them were expelled from the country. A large number emigrated to Russia, where persecution in varying degrees has persisted to this day.

In medieval Germany, Jews were accused of using the blood of Christian children in their Passover rites. Some were even charged with stabbing the host (the bread served in the Catholic mass and believed to turn into the actual body of Christ) to make it bleed—thereby reenacting His crucifixion. Those accused of such things were tortured and killed in a variety of cruel ways.

For many centuries anti-Semitism polluted most of western civilization. In 1894 a Jewish army officer named Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused and convicted of treason simply because he was Jewish. His conviction precipitated the removal of all high-ranking Jews from the French army.

Despite the continued persecution, twenty million Jews still lived in Europe at the outbreak of World War II. In what has come to be termed “The Holocaust,” Adolph Hitler hideously exterminated at least six million Jews in Germany and Nazi-occupied territories. Those demon-inspired atrocities were not grounded so much in religious as racial prejudice, with Jews being declared racially inferior.

With little respite, for two thousand years the Jews have endured persecution after persecution, being maligned, falsely accused, treated unjustly, denied dignity and jobs and schooling and citizenship, driven out of country after country, and not infrequently massacred without mercy—for no other reason than being Jewish.

The modern state of Israel bears the marks of much of that persecution, including Titus’s destruction of the Temple, the excavated partial western wall of which is now called the wailing wall. There are also more modern relics there, such as tanks and other armored vehicles intentionally left to rust in public view as reminders of the costly battles Israelis have fought and continue to fight in defense of their new nation since it was founded in 1948.

Through all those horrors and systematic attempts at their extermination, the Jews remain. They remain because the holy God who preserves them will not be thwarted by the evil hosts of both men and demons who seek to destroy them.

Yet as Jesus gravely declares in this passage, the divine preservation of the Jews is not only for God’s purpose of ultimately redeeming His chosen people but is also a perpetuation of their punishment. It is a continuing chastening that they will endure until Israel declares in faith, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord” (Matt. 23:39; cf. Ps. 118:26).