seeing while dining (2)

The year is around AD 30; an unnamed Pharisee has Jesus as a dinner guest. The Pharisees were a religious political party; each and every one was highly respectable, seriously powerful and diligently righteous. The great and the good. Early on, Jesus revealed that distress awaited them.

 

After that the lawyers at the dinner – presumably these weren’t Pharisees – voice their reaction to the dire diagnosis and prognosis which Jesus had given to the Pharisees. So, it seems thar Jesus felt he needed to be more specific with regard to their own bleak future – and the reasons why. Three reasons for their inevitable future distress.

(1) “Distress awaits you lawyers also in that you load the people with unbearable burdens, and you yourselves do not touch the loads with one of your fingers.” These were religious-law-lawyers. They authoritatively told the people all about the laws of God. Obedience to the laws of God (as stated by the lawyers) had eternal consequences – not merely earthly ones. They told the people exactly what to do and what not to do – or suffer the justice of God. They burdened the people – and provided to them no possible way out of their failures, harms and evils. They were trapped in badness.

(2) “Distress awaits you in that you build the tombs of the prophets – in fact your fathers killed those prophets. In that way you are witnesses to, and you approve, of the deeds of your fathers, because they indeed killed them, and you build their houses. And, on account of this, the wisdom of God said, ‘I will send out to them prophets and sent-out-ones, and some of these they will kill and persecute,’ with the outcome that the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may be required from this generation, from Abel’s blood to Zechariah’s blood; he perished between the sacrificial altar and the house. Yes, I state to you, it will be required from this generation.”

The lawyers were strongly warned of the distress which was awaiting them in connection with “the prophets”. Over the preceding 2,000 years (backwards from around AD 30), God had sent prophets to the people with messages of hope. The people could turn back to their God and live again, free of sin and guilt, and in relationship with Him…

For instance, one prophet (there were many) had spoken and written these words around BC 725: “Look and see, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Immanuel means “God with us”.

 

Rather than magnify the message of the prophets - hope from the Lord God for those who would turn back to Him – the lawyers buried the prophets. Distress awaited them. In addition, Jesus said that distress awaited all of their generation (and all of our generation) who decided to kill and bury Jesus along with those many prophets of old. 

(3) “Distress awaits you lawyers in that you took away the key of knowledge; you did not enter in yourselves, and you prevented those entering in.”

“The key of knowledge”? Taken away by these religious-law-lawyers? These lawyers were absolutely focussed on outward deeds. Stop the bad; do the good. That’s the way the people were told to go. What they didn’t ay was that any and every person had been called, by the prophets and others, to return to the LORD God of their fathers, to receive from Him forgiveness and then to enjoy the knowledge of the LORD God as a friend throughout life and for ever.

They had thrown away that key without going in. They were stopping others going in. Distress awaited them. I fear distress awaits us also. Unless…