Judgment on Israel, Matthew 21:23-32

It is at this stage that Jesus begins to talk more pointedly about the future judgment that will come upon Israel.

As we look at the context here and as we talk about what happens historically we see the increasing tension develop between Jesus and the religious leaders. It increases in tension and degree of hostility until we get to chapter twenty-three where the Lord will pronounce several woes against the religious leaders and conclude with a firm statement about judgment against Israel.

A lot of things happen during this week and we will try to cover most of it, even some things that aren't in Matthew.

Last time we saw Jesus perform an action that some people have trouble understanding because it is a difficult passage to go through. It is when Jesus judges the fig tree because it doesn't have any fruit on it. It is not that the Lord just spontaneously gets hungry and then goes to this tree and there aren't any figs on it. The Lord never does anything without a purpose and without significance, and everything that He does has some pedagogical value for us, and it did for His disciples.

The fig tree is often a symbol in the Old Testament for Israel. The abundance of leaves depicts the fact that at a certain time of year, in the spring, with the leaves fully developed, it was reasonable to expect that fruit would be found on the tree. The lack of fruit indicates that there is an appearance of fruitfulness but there is no fruit. The significance of this is that the tree pictures Israel as having the appearance of spirituality but there is no fruit of genuine of real spirituality.

There was no fruit in Israel, and as a result of the fact that they had given themselves over to the external appearance of spirituality, which we call religion, there was no real relationship with God. And because they failed in their purpose God was going to judge them. That is the purpose that is depicted there.

What we learn from studying the Scripture is that biblical truth talks about our relationship with God that is based upon grace and not upon religion. It is based on God's provision for us, it is not based upon things that we do. Ritual had a purpose, but the ritual was no there in order to bring people to God but to teach certain spiritual principles about man's relationship with God. Religion as we usually define it here is that all these systems of thought—whether they are religion or come under the guise of philosophy—where man does the work and then God accepts or blesses it and sort of pats people on the head for having the good intentions or doing the right thing. But biblically speaking grace means that God does all the work. Man is totally incapable of doing anything (Isaiah 64:6) and has no value as far as God is concerned, it doesn't measure up to His standard, so God must be the one to provide us with righteousness. God must do the work in order to bring us to Himself.

Grace means, biblically, that God does all the work; man simply accepts it by faith alone. In spirituality, i.e. a person's relationship with God after they are justified, in the church age we emphasize that this is a supernatural life. It is based on the empowerment of God the Holy Spirit. We can't fulfil the mandates of the New Testament on our own, pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, and produce the kind of spirituality that the Scripture emphasizes.

We are to walk by means of the Spirit, as Paul emphasizes in Galatians 5:16. That means we have to be in a right relationship with God or we can't walk with Him. Once we are in that right relationship--which we talk about in terms of fellowship, that when we sin we confess the sin and we are back in that right relationship--it is not static. It doesn't mean Oh good, I'm in fellowship; it is an active thing; it is enjoying fellowship; it is walking in fellowship; it is abiding in Christ—all these other verbs that we use: walking in the light, walking in obedience.

Obedience in and of itself is not legalism. Why do we have all these imperatives, all these commands all through the New Testament to do all kinds of things and to avoid doing other things? If the presence of commands and prohibitions is legalism then we have problems. But we can't do these things by our own efforts.

This was a problem in the Old Testament. The Old Testament recognized a number of these particular problems as well. They had to learn to walk with God, not on the basis of ritual but on the basis of reality. This was something that was lost in the second temple period, the period where this external relationship developed after the Jews came back from captivity in Babylon. They understood that the reason God disciplined them and sent them into captivity was because of idolatry, and so in order to prevent slipping in to idolatry again they set up all of the additional commandments called the traditions of men or the traditions of the fathers, and then they became as authoritative as Scripture. That is a form of legalism in and of itself.

We have this happen in evangelicalism; it happens in almost any group that I have ever been associated with. I have seen people who have certain ways they want to interpret commands related to no causing others to stumble, or not defrauding others and things like that, and they say, for example, the way to apply this is that women need to wear ankle length dresses, no matter what.

It is more important to follow the Lord than it is to follow the ritual. 1 Samuel 15:22 ^NASB “Samuel said, 'Has the LORD as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices As in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, {And} to heed than the fat of rams'.”

Hosea, in a much later generation at the time of the destruction of the first temple, said: Hosea 6:6 ^NASB “For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice, And in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

This whole concept became lost in the religion of the religious leaders at the time of Jesus, and so Jesus is coming into a head-on confrontation with them over religion. He had come to present the kingdom, the kingdom had been rejected, that generation had rejected the grace offering of the kingdom because they held fast to the fact that they wanted to something to please God and that needed to be the issue. So Jesus is now announcing judgment on that particular generation.

We saw that because the kingdom was not going to arrive that there would not be a manifestation of kingdom blessing and kingdom power in that generation.

The judgment on the fig tree foreshadows three parables we will get to, starting in verse 28, that talk about the judgment that is going to come on Israel.

Matthew 21:23 ^NASB “When He entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to Him while He was teaching, and said, 'By what authority are You doing these things, and who gave You this authority?'”

They are basically asking two questions: By what authority are you doing this and who gave you this authority? Two things that are basically asking the same question.

There is a very large crowd that is meeting there in this outer area called the courtyard of the Gentiles. We are told later that the religious leaders feared what might happen if they answered Jesus' question; they feared what the crowd would do. There were a lot of people there; maybe several thousand were listening to Jesus.

A lot is going on here, and the religious leaders interrupted “while/as He was teaching”. They are challenging His authority because of the things that He has done. He has entered into Jerusalem on the unbroken colt of a donkey, and He had set things up so that it was clear that He was fulfilling prophecy from Zechariah 9:9 of the messianic King entering into the temple, He cleansed the temple, healed the lame and the blind, and He did this by His own authority. Now they are going to challenge Him as to that particular authority.

In Judaism at the time the idea of authority was something that was transferred through what we would call ordination. It was something similar. If you were going to be a rabbi and were ordained you had authority. If that authority was questioned you would be referred back to those who had ordained you. So that is what they are asking Jesus: Who ordained you? Who gave you the authority to do this? By what rabbinical school have you received this authority?

It is very clear from the way they are challenging Him that they are there to indict Jesus. They are there to set a trap for Him, to set up a situation where He will incriminate Himself and make some claim to divine authority. Jesus knows that they know who He is and what His claims are. They know what He has claimed and this has been very clear for over a year and a half now. He has claimed to be the Messiah, the Son of David, and that He has made these claims to be God. They just want Him now to state this in front of all the multitudes so that they can indict Him, and Jesus isn't going to fall into the trap. He recognizes exactly what is going on and He knows what the timetable is, and it is too soon.

Rather than overtly answering their question, in a very sophisticated way he is going to turn it back on them using their own methodology.

Matthew 21:24 ^NASB “Jesus said to them, 'I will also ask you one thing, which if you tell Me, I will also tell you by what authority I do these things'.” He sets them up here and brings up the issue about John the Baptist. Jesus has recognized who John is, knows that he is His forerunner, the one who came proclaiming the kingdom. But they rejected John, his message and ministry.

Matthew 21:25 ^NASB “The baptism of John was from what {source,} from heaven or from men?” By saying “heaven” instead of saying from God He is using a circumlocution in order to not mention the name of God, to show respect for God in Jewish thought. This is typical in Matthew. Remember that Matthew is the only Gospel that uses the phrase kingdom of heaven. This puts them in a quandary and they recognize it. They are bright; they are very sharp. “... And they {began} reasoning among themselves, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ He will say to us, ‘Then why did you not believe him?’”

They understood what the issue was. The issue for Jesus is belief, not ritual. The issue was believing the message of John. John's message was, “Repent and the kingdom of heaven will come”. They were to believe that, that he was the forerunner of the Messiah; that was the content of the message at that point in time in Israel.

John the Baptist would have been the fulfilment of the Elijah prophecy, but because they rejected him he was killed and there will be someone else who will come in the future. This will be fulfilled in the ministry of the two witnesses in the Tribulation period.

Matthew 21:26 “But if we say, ‘From men,’ we fear the people; for they all regard John as a prophet. [27] And answering Jesus, they said, 'We do not know.' He also said to them, 'Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things'.”

One of the things that is significant about this episode and this situation is the role of the chief priests and elders. The chief priests and elders are mentioned several times in Matthew. They are mentioned here but are not mentioned again as the group that is opposing Jesus until we get to chapters 27 and 27. Several times then Matthew mentions them. They are the two groups that are primarily responsible for arresting Jesus and all of the events leading up to His crucifixion.

During this intervening period from chapter twenty-one through chapter twenty-six Jesus will also have confrontations with the Pharisees and the Herodians. He will have a confrontation with the Sadducees in 22:23-33, and then a confrontation with the Pharisees and Sadducees in 22:34-46. Chapter 22 brings all of these different groups together and shows these confrontations, and it is all building to this ultimate rejection and judgment statement of Jesus that will come in chapter 23.

But what is important here to understand the chief priests and the elders is that it was their responsibility for the purity of the temple worship and the purity of what was going on on the temple mount, and they are the ones who will ultimately come and be the chief instigators of Jesus' arrest, trial and crucifixion.

Jesus is avoiding answering their question because if He answers straight up then they will arrest Him right there. It is too early.

This section from vv. 23-37 sets the stage for what follows. There are going to be three parables: the parable of the two sons, vv. 28-32 where we see basically the indictment against the religious leaders; the parable related to the vine dressers, the workers for the vineyard owner, and in that we see the sentence that is pronounced against the religious leaders; the parable of the wedding feast in 22:1-14, and this is going to show the final disposition of the religious leaders. And it is important to understand that these three parables are connected together. Jesus is telling what is going to happen to Israel now as a result of what these religious leaders had done.

The bottom line in looking at these three parables is that they show that this generation that Jesus is talking to is under judgment. It is not talking about Israel as a nation that is going to be permanently replaced by Gentiles. This is a passage that is often used by those to hold to what is called replacement theology as a foundation for their particular view that God brought a final judgment against Israel and that there is no future for ethnic Israel or national Israel in the plan and purpose of God.

A quick summary and introduction to replacement theology. We have to define what it is.

When we use the term “replacement” what it usually means is that something is going to replace or substitute for something else. We have to be careful in thinking about what is replacing what. Replacement theology is not Christianity replacing Judaism. Obviously Christianity is replacing Judaism, but that is not replacement theology.

Three different definitions from three different scholars, two of whom are somewhat dispensational and one is not:

1. Replacement theology declared that the church, Abraham's spiritual seed, had replaced national Israel in that it had transcended and fulfilled the terms of the covenant given to Israel, which covenant Israel had lost because of disobedience.

2. The church completely and permanently replaced Israel in the working out of God's plan and as a recipient of God's Old Testament promises to Israel.

3. According to this teaching supersessionism (that is, the church supersedes Israel) God chose the Jewish people after the fall of Adam in order to prepare the world for the coming of Jesus Christ, the savior. However the special role of the Jewish people came to an end and its place was taken by the church, the new Israel.

So what essentially happens is that when God promised Abraham a specific piece of real estate that would be bordered by the river of Egypt, the Euphrates, and then to the Mediterranean—understood by Abraham to be a literal piece of real estate with literal boundaries—that now, because Israel rejected the Messiah, doesn't mean a literal, geophysical piece of real estate, it refers to heaven.

Part of the problem with this is that this becomes the seedbed, the soil out of which Christian anti-Semitism comes. It doesn't necessarily produce anti-Semitism. Just because someone holds to replacement theology it doesn't mean they are anti-Semitic. But that is the soil out of which anti-Semitism has grown.

Replacement theology was the dominant view of Christianity from the early third century until the middle of the nineteenth century, and it is grounded on allegorical interpretation. In the early church one of the early church fathers, Irenaeus (130-200 AD) in his work Against Heresies he says:

For inasmuch as the former (the Jews) have rejected the Son of God and cast Him out of the vineyard when they slew Him, God has justly rejected them and given to the Gentiles outside the vineyard the fruits of its cultivation.

That is very early in the history of Christianity. Cyprian, who lived around 25 AD, says:

I have endeavoured to show that the Jews according to what had before been foretold had departed from God and had lost God's favor which had been given in the past time and had been promised them for the future, while the Christians had succeed to their place.

In another place he wrote:

We Christians when we pray say, “Our Father”, because He has begun to be ours and has ceased to be the Father of the Jews because they have forsaken Him.

See, there is a replacement going on here.

Augustine of Hippo whose dates are around 400 AD was originally premillennial and held to a literal interpretation. But he institutionalized both allegorical interpretation and replacement theology within the western church tradition. He substitute the new Israel of the Christian church for ancient Israel and this view dominated through the first generation of Protestant reformers—Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldreich Zwingli; all of the Protestant reformers held to replacement theology.

It wasn't until the mid-nineteenth century, as dispensational theology developed, that there was a logical counter to replacement theology.

Two events in the 20^th century caused many replacement theology theologians to reject the term. In the last ten years even the Pope has come out and said, “We reject replacement theology”. Replacement theology is understood by almost everyone to have given birth to the holocaust, so they don't want to affirm that level of anti-Semitism. They use the same verses and the same interpretations as replacement theology but they don't want to be known as believing in replacement theology.

In 1977 the Mennonite European Regional Conference stated:

Jesus came not to destroy the covenant of God with the Jews but only to affirm it in a manner that would bring the blessing of God's people to non-Jews.

The Texas Conference of Churches in 1982 said:

We reject the position that the covenant between the Jews and God were dissolved with the coming of Christ. Our conviction is grounded in the teaching of Paul in Romans chapters nine through eleven that God's gifts and calling are irrevocable.

So there is this recognition that replacement theology is wrong but still there are quite a few who are arguing, writing and teaching that Israel is not longer the people of God and never will be again.

Many modern theologians and denominations reject the extremes to which anti-Semitism went but they still hold to the essence that the church replaced Israel and that there is no future role for the Jewish people.

That is not what Jesus is saying here. What He is talking about here is that this generation, because they rejected the message of the Messiah, is a nation that is going to come under judgment and that they will be removed from the land. That would happen in AD 70. He is not saying that God's promises to the Jewish people have ended, abrogated, or that there is no future for national ethnic Israel.

Romans 9-11 make it clear that the promises and the covenants are still in effect. So in this section Jesus in only condemning the negative volition, the hostility of Jews in that generation.

The point that we learn from this is that the issue for each of us—whether it is them, or in the Old Testament, or it is today—is what we have all through here: believe, believe, believe. The chief priests and the scribes understood this. “If we say that John came from heaven He will say to us: Why then did you not believe him?” At the end of the first parable (v. 32) “For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him.” The tax collectors and harlots believed Him. The issue is that they believed the message of John the Baptist.

The issue is the verb believe. John uses it over 86 times in his Gospel. He doesn't qualify it; he just says believe. That is the gospel of Jesus Christ, that you just believe that Jesus died on the cross for your sins and you will have eternal life.

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