Therefore I send you

Matthew 23:29-33

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?  As a recovering Pharisee, that sounds a might harsh.  Has Jesus not read, “How to win friends and influence People?”  But before anyone becomes foolish and takes the role of judge, it might be helpful to consider who is making the “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Statement.  “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”  Maybe you and I should take off our robes of the judge, and put on humility while bowing to the Almighty.

In that Jesus is all knowing, has already been to the front and rear of what we call past and present, look, listen, and read slowly verses 34-36, “Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.”  The “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” He sent prophets and wise men like John the Baptist, like Jesus taking on flesh, like the disciples, and what did these followers of religion do to them, some they killed, others they crucified, and their blood will be a witness against that generation.  We have Abel’s murder recorded in Genesis 4, while Zechariah’s is recorded in Second Chronicles 24:20-21.  In the Hebrew Bible, Second Chronicles is the last book and Genesis is the first, so it seems that Jesus is citing the whole span of martyrdom in the O.T.

It seems that 70 A.D. was the time Jesus was referring to as the destruction of the temple, we have this account from “The Wars of the Jews, Book 6, Josephus’ notes” that, on the eighth day of the of the Roman month Lous (Jewish month Ab), the ramps were finished and Titus ordered the battering-rams brought up and made ready for an assault on the Temple. With the battering rams in place the Roman siege of Jerusalem, which began at Passover that year, would come to an end.

As soon as the walls were breached on the 9th of Ab in 70 A.D., a Roman military force of about 30,000 troops under the command of Titus marched into Jerusalem and began a systematic slaughter of the Jews and the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem—exactly as Jesus foretold 40 years earlier.

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice