Give Unto Caesar...

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we are in the middle of Passion Week. We’re talking about the final week of Jesus’ ministry. We’ve talked about the triumphal entry and some of the following events there, and we are about to have some questions from the Pharisees and Sadducees, if I’m not mistaken.

What we need to do first is remember that this is the time when the Passover lambs are being examined to see if they are indeed without spot and blemish. At the same time that’s happening, the Father has arranged for his son to be questioned with some very penetrating questions – at least they would seem formidable to us because the Jews had been asking these questions of one another for a long time and not always come up with any kind of good answer.

His enemies think, “Ah, let’s use our standard trick question that no one could ever answer, and that will prove he’s not Messiah. He’s certainly not God. He doesn’t know everything. Watch this!” Yeah, watch this.

The first group that approaches is the Sadducees. The Sadducees are the temple authorities. This is the high priest and his extended family. Being the high priest they are in charge of the temple, and the question they ask is legitimate, which is why Jesus answers it, although their motives are far from pure. They come and simply say –

By what authority doest thou these things? and who gave thee this authority?

Jesus has cleansed the temple. He’s taking command of the whole temple area. He isn’t allowing people to go through and buy and sell. The whole thing is being disrupted and he’s sitting there in the center of the temple teaching like he’s a prophet or God or something. So far no one has had the guts to do anything about it.

The temple authorities really should. Even if this were Elijah or Isaiah or Moses they should at least have the guts to step forward and say, “Excuse me, sir, why are you doing this and why do you think you have a right to do it?” They finally do but they’re hoping that Jesus can’t give an answer that will satisfy them, and that thus he will look foolish before the crowd.

Jesus’ answer at first seems out of left field like, “That’s not an answer.” In fact, a lot of people think, “Ooo, he’s being sassy to them. Go Jesus!” No, he’s not. What he says is legitimate. He answered and said –

I also will ask you one thing, which if ye tell me, I in likewise will tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven or of men?

So we’ve got, “I will not answer, cannot answer your question until we establish something first, and that’s the baptism of John.” He doesn’t explain why, and they may or may not have understood it, but once Jesus said it, it was such a simple obvious question. And remember, Jesus is surrounded by crowds who have come to hear him teach. They can’t just say, “No, you first,” or “We asked you.” They’re stuck. It’s a simple yes/no question. This is not a big deal but they panic and they withdraw a moment and reason among themselves.

“If we say John came from heaven, then he’s going to ask ‘Why didn’t you believe him?’ And if we say of men, the people will stone us because they’re convinced that John is a prophet.” So they realize they have no comfortable answer and they come up with the greatest pragmatic answer ever, “We cannot tell.” Great, you’re the temple authorities and you cannot tell. Jesus does not rub it in. He does not make fun of them. He simply says, “Then neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things.”

Well, he just did. The point is his authority publicly, officially, legally was announced by John in terms of John’s prophetic office, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. One comes after me who is mightier than I, whose sandals I’m not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Ghost.”

Here the question is that not every prophet stepped into the temple and made alterations. That was a rather rare thing. Usually they would speak to the priest and let the priest do it, but here Jesus is taking command of the temple. “You’re acting like you’re a priest!”

“Well, do you remember John the Baptist?”

“Yeah.”

“He was a priest and the son of a priest. His birth was announced in the temple miraculously by an angel, and he baptized me.”

We think in terms of New Testament baptism and that’s proper. That’s part of what happened with Jesus as he identified with his people, but there’s something else going on there. Remember the story that no sooner has Jesus been baptized than the Holy Spirit descends upon him and anoints him to be our prophet, king, and priest. In other words, the baptism prepared him for his role as our great High Priest.

In the Old Testament we look back to when the tribe of Levi is set apart. There was a ritual cleansing – yes, a sprinkling – whereby the whole tribe was set apart. The priests needed to be cleansed before they began their office.

Remember when Jesus came to John, John said, “Shouldn’t you be baptizing me?” and Jesus says, “No, it becomes us to fulfill all righteousness, that is to keep the law.” Jesus joined with us in part to share everything we share, and his people will receive baptism so he does, but there was no obvious law requiring it. There is a law that says that priests should be cleansed before they’re anointed. That would seem to be what he’s pointing at.

“You want to know why I’m doing this? Let’s talk about John, a supernaturally-born child, his birth revealed in the temple to a priest, he’s the son of a priest, he cleansed me and then I was anointed by the Father. I think that qualifies me as priest, don’t you?” That’s all implied in the, “I’m sorry, I can’t answer your question,” because he just did. So the Sadducees back off on this one and don’t know what to do.

Then Jesus launches into a couple parables that portray the doom of Israel, the apostate Israel as a nation, and God’s taking his vineyard, his kingdom, his inheritance from them and giving them to a new people.

Then along come the Pharisees and the Herodians. The Pharisees we remember are extreme nationalists but they’re polite about it. Basically they’re cowards. They don’t like Rome. They think Rome has no right being there. They’d gladly see Rome kicked out, but they’re not going to say that. The Zealots will say that, and the Zealots end up being crucified and thrown into prison and things like that, so the Pharisees aren’t going to go that far. But they don’t like Rome and they don’t like Herod. Herod is Rome’s puppet on the throne of Galilee.

Then there are the Herodians. The name speaks for itself. They are the support group to Herod and they’re trying to tell Israel, “Well, Herod is kind of the messiah. He’s a king, the king of the Jews, and he’s a great guy and he’s done great things and he’s kind of our shield against Rome. But he’s also an agent for Rome and so has lots of power. If you will receive it, this is the messiah that was to come.”

Most people weren’t buying that, but still that was there. The Pharisees and the Herodians absolutely hate each other’s guts as they represent different political agendas, but somehow they managed to get together because neither of them likes Jesus.

They come all fawning and humble-like and say –

Master, we know that thou art true and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men. Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou?

Notice it’s not, “What has God said?” because they don’t consider him the authority. They just want his purely human opinion. It’s a trap and here’s the question.

Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?

Again it’s a simple yes/no question, but it comes with practical consequences. If Jesus says no, it’s not lawful, then he’s a tax rebel and whatever exegetical support he may have from the Mosaic law, it doesn’t matter really to anybody, and particularly it’s not going to matter to Pilate, the Roman governor. All the Jews have to do is say, “Hey, we’ve got this guy over here saying, ‘Don’t pay your taxes,’” which in the end is what they did do when they couldn’t come up with anything else. “So you need to deal with him.” And Pilate, without a blink, would say, “Oh, tax rebel? We know what to do with those, throw them in prison and crucify them and that’s that.”

It’s not the way to the cross the Father has planned, and he would be dying as in Rome’s eyes a convicted criminal, and that’s not how this has to work. Rome has to declare him innocent. So that’s the one side.

The other side is he can say, “Well yes, but the law said that you cannot set a foreign king over you. We thought you claimed to be Messiah, a king, something like that, and yet you’re telling us we ought to pay tribute to this Gentile, this unbeliever, who takes this money, and who knows what horrible things he did with it.”

In fact, Rome did horrible things with the tax money and would do yet more horrible things before this is all over. Some of those taxes may have fed the lions that Christians would later be thrown to. They would support the lifestyle of adulterous homosexual violent murderous emperors. So there’s all kinds of good reasons for not paying these taxes. “Doesn’t that involve us in all the evil of the empire if we surrender?” There does not seem to be a good answer and they figure, “Whatever he says, yes or no, we’ve got him.” The text says –

But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny.

They bring him a denarius, the Roman coin, a day’s wages. It’s the price of tribute, which when you think about it is actually light compared to what we pay these days. So they produce tribute money from their own pocket. They have this coin. That’s important. Jesus doesn’t have one. He doesn’t have much of anything. He doesn’t ask Judas, “Hey, have we got anything in the bag?” He simply turns to them and says to the Pharisees and Herodians, “Can you show me a coin?” and they come up with one. He says –

Whose is this image and superscription?

They look at the coin and say, “Well, Caesar’s of course.”

“So it’s Caesar’s money, minted by Caesar and for Caesar, and yet somehow you have it. Isn’t that strange? I wonder why you have it. Oh, that’s right. He provided it for you so you would have a medium of exchange and a way to pay your taxes to pay for all the services he renders, some of which you don’t want but some that you do.

“He maintains the roads in relative peace and maintains the seas to keep them free from pirates. There’s something like a postal service, at least for official documents. You’ve got justice, which at least is evenly handed out, if not always correct. He does a lot of things for you, and you ended up with his money. It’s his money.”

It’s important that the word is ‘render.’ That means give back. “You ended up with Caesar’s money. He would like it back. Give it to him.”

There’s so much going on here that I won’t even try to touch on it all, but at the very least it does explain something about the nature of financial transactions. If I give you a loaf of bread and say, “That will be 25 cents” and you say, “Oh, I’ve got that” and then hold onto it and say, “but I’m not giving it to you,” you’re a thief.

“No, I want the 25 cents.”

“No, you’re a wicked person. I’m not going to pay for it. You might go home and do all kinds of horrible things with that 25 cents. You may go spend it on some anti-life homosexual transgender cause. I can’t risk that because I know you’re not even a Christian, so I’m not giving you any money.”

“You’re stealing my money!”

“Better you than me.”

That’s theft. We recognize it in any other situation. And by the way, when we go to a store, whether it be a grocery store or McDonald’s or Starbucks or something, and we spend money for a product, we don’t know what those people are doing to do with that money. Some of these organizations do contribute to very wicked causes or help fund very wicked candidates, as the case may be.

We could argue, “Well, I should just be free to take a Big Mac off the counter and leave with it, because I’m not going to give them money because they’re going to do evil things.” No, that was theirs. It’s called stealing. You cannot simply take it and walk off. You are a thief at that point.

Are we morally obligated to boycott such industries?

Apparently not. There was no, “…and you should boycott Caesar.” Boycotting the government is tax revolt, which is the very thing Jesus is not pushing for.

The Bible uses extreme examples to make a point. If we cannot refuse to give tax money, to pay our bills to a very wicked ruler – remember, Caesar claims to be the son of God. It doesn’t get much worse than that, and yet Jesus says, “Pay your bills to them.” It doesn’t say, “But make a fuss about it.” It’s just, “Pay them because they’re providing a service.”

The fact that you may not want them to be the ones who provide the service does not matter because you use the service. You walk those roads. You sail those seas. You put Roman stamps on your envelopes, or whatever the equivalent was, so pay your bill.

The same thing for us. Do we have to boycott wicked industries? You can if you want but there’s nothing in scripture that suggests you’re morally obligated to.

In other words, you’re not morally implicated in other people’s spending of their money.

Thank you. That’s exactly what I wanted to say but I couldn’t come up with the words.

One of my previous pastors – Emily’s pastor still – calls it secondhand sin. You are not responsible for secondhand sin because you’re not doing it. If you have done a legitimate transaction with another, where you give something that you want to give away for this other item, and you have both agreed that this is what you want to do for this amount, that is where your moral responsibility ends.

Again, you can say, “Hey, I don’t like that company and all their policies, and therefore I’m not going to buy stuff from them,” but that doesn’t change their policy in any way. Boycotting is something from the late 1800s and early 1900s with a lot of Marxist influence on it – the poor oppressed rising up against their oppressors – so we should be very careful when we start using some of those historical means to try to get our point across.

Also they’re just very rarely effective.

I think the only one that has been effective is some of the stuff with Target when they went way over the top with some of their transgender stuff and they lost so much revenue that they have backpedaled significantly compared to where they were.

The other thing I was thinking is there’s a point where Jesus tells Peter to go pay the temple tax. Think of who was running the temple and how the temple was being run. He doesn’t say, “Don’t pay it because bad people could use it.” Rather, it was let’s fulfill that law and that role. So it’s not about how the other person is going to use the money, because you could say that about church, too. “I don’t like how the church spends the money so I’m not going to tithe.”

And a lot of people say that, actually.

Or “I’ll just give it all to my own personal causes because I know that I will use my money better than other people,” which is again very prideful and self-righteous.

And whether it’s church or state, in both cases we’re ignoring God’s due order and thinking that simply because they’re not living up to God’s standards, we don’t have to either. No, that’s not the way it works.

For a lot of people, what we’re saying here is going to be revolutionary. “Wait, I always thought…” Well, this is why we study the law of God in all of its fullness, and particularly look at how Jesus interprets it because he is the infallible explainer of what God intended.

He’s the one who fulfilled it in God’s eyes, so his interpretation holds all the weight, actually. Nobody else’s interpretation counts.

There is one more thing, though. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Caesar does have a legitimate claim on some things like this tax money to pay for the services rendered. By saying that, the implication is there are things that don’t belong to Caesar. Jesus doesn’t talk about what those things are specifically, and whether or not there are other things that are on the same level.

He could have said, “And render to Starbucks the money you owe them for the coffee you drank,” but that’s not the point here. He’s talking about the higher priorities we have in life, the more demanding, the ones that God has ordained, so he ends with this –

“And render unto God the things that are God's.”

A lot of people look at that and say, “Oh, so we have a division between what we owe to the state, our political debts, and what we owe to God, which is apparently a separate category. We give some money to the state because we kind of have to, and we give other monies to God.”

That is not what he is saying because in the context we have to ask, “What is God’s?” Well, I am, all of my money, my life, my future, my sexuality, my pastimes, time itself, the state I live in, the country I live in, the civil government under which I serve. Caesar himself belongs to God. So this is a not a nice bifurcation or dichotomy or division. This is not a division between God’s stuff and other stuff.

This is yes, Caesar has some legitimate claims because God has given him those legitimate claims, though he may abuse them and push them more than he should, but even Caesar himself and your political life belongs to God. Yield up your political life to God so when God says this, you don’t get to argue with God about whether or not you have to pay your taxes, because your tax money belongs to God and he said give it to Caesar so do that and don’t talk back.

It doesn’t say give Caesar his money and God his money. That’s not the noun.

That’s not the noun. It is rather all that God owns we are to turn back to him because we got it from him. Everything comes to us by pure gift through Christ, and we are to give it back to God in service. In some cases that does mean giving him money, paying our tithes, giving offerings and such, but on a more general term it means yielding up our lives with all of our possessions. Think whole burnt offering and tribute offering as pictures of this.

I belong wholly to God and all my stuff does too, so I lay it at his feet and then he tells me what to do with it. I seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and part of that is observing the political niceties that he has told me to do and not arguing about it because I think I know better than God.

When they heard these words they marveled like, “Uh, we never heard that before. Huh, so there’s a third possibility? Whoa, we missed that,” and they go their way.

Well, the Sadducees are back the same day. The Sadducees, we’re reminded in the text, were the liberals of the day. They received only the five books of Moses. They didn’t trust the prophets. They did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. They did not believe in the soul or spirits. They did not believe in angels. It’s amazing that they tried to believe in some sort of God, apparently a kind of deistic god.

This is their hobbyhorse. “We’ve used this before and no one has ever been able to answer it. We’ll turn the law of God, the book of Moses, back on this idea of resurrection, score a point for ourselves, and make Jesus look like a fool,” so they come and bring before Jesus the case of the Levirate marriage. This is tied to the office of kinsman redeemer. Let me read what they say –

Master, Moses said, If a man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife and raise up seed unto his brother.

This was one of the duties of the kinsman redeemer. The kinsman redeemer must be next of kin of the brethren who still live close together. If one of their kinsmen dies, then the nearest kinsman is to step in and avenge him if that’s an issue. If there are no children, marry the widow and raise up seed. The first child born of that union will bear the name of the first husband and receive his inheritance in Israel and all of his titles and rights and such.

The kinsman redeemer of course also – if such a person didn’t die but was simply sold into slavery or taken in battle – he was supposed to redeem him. And if he got into debt and lost his lands he’s supposed to redeem and buy back the land, so that’s the kinsman redeemer. They’re focusing on the one part of marrying the widow to raise up children. Simple enough. How complicated could this be?

Now there were with us seven brethren, and the first, when he had married a wife, deceased and, having no issue, left his wife unto his brother. Likewise the second also, and the third, unto the seventh.

So one by one, seven brothers. Each one is apparently obligated by the law to marry the woman and faithfully does, and yet in no cases God blessed the union with children, and each one dies. This is when you don’t want to marry this woman. “My first husband was run over by a train. My second husband was hit by an airplane. The third one fell off a cliff when an earthquake cracked open beneath his feet.”

And the common denominator? If this were Agatha Christie we would know what to think about this woman.

Yes, exactly. So they run through all seven and there are no children. One of the other gospels tells us, just to make it very clear, “his wife deceased.” The other gospels are clearer that there are no children. If there had been a child then you might say, “Well, the one that produced children, that’s the real marriage.” No. Probably they know of a historical situation where this really happened; otherwise you could say, “Oh, God would never let that happen. You’re making it up.” They probably had names and such so they could say, “Yes, this did happen.”

So here’s the point. All seven of these guys married this woman, but in your perspective, we take it, there will be a resurrection when they all come to life. “Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? For they all had her.”

Ooo, that sounds so hard. Do we become Mormons? Except it’s backward. “She gets seven husbands through all eternity.” They see the absurdity of that. The Pharisees apparently had never been able to answer, and the Pharisees did believe in the resurrection and this was a point of contention between them. If the Pharisees had come up with an answer this would not be a trick question. It already would have been answered.

Nobody knew how to answer them. They just knew there was something wrong here somewhere, but they don’t know what it is exactly.

Jesus again, without missing a beat – his bluntness here is staggering. “You do err. You’re wrong. You don’t get it because you don’t know the scriptures nor the power of God.”

The power of God is pretty straightforward and easy, that God can raise the dead and such. But “you don’t know the scriptures” – I don’t know for how many years I looked at that and said, “Apparently I don’t either because I don’t know what in the world you’re talking about.” I was well into my career as a schoolteacher and Bible teacher before any light dawned. “What in the world in scripture suggests that there’s no marriage in heaven? I mean it makes sense, but where does the Bible say that and why does Jesus condemn them so bluntly for not getting it?”

Eventually I discovered a passage in Ecclesiastes that talks about the marriage of your youth and then you die and things end and I was like, “Okay, that’s close. It’s not exactly it.”

Then eventually approaching the topic from a whole different direction, not planning on approaching it at all, I’m just doing stuff in Genesis where I usually am stuck, and Genesis says to fill the earth. There’s a limit set on how many people God is going to allow to be born into the world. There’s a finite goal represented by a time limit and a number limit – the number of souls, the number of people – that would constitute filling the earth.

We don’t know what that is. God has not told us, and any trip down 99 in California or any flight over the Great Plains will tell you we’re not anywhere near there yet. The earth is far from being full, despite all the brouhaha a generation or so ago about overpopulation. The earth is severely under-populated. God pushes for a population explosion but he wants it to be done by his people, and the Fall kind of screwed that up temporarily.

As we look at the gospels in the New Testament that’s still the promise – all nations blessed, all nations Jesus’ disciples, the prophet say the whole earth full of the knowledge and the glory of the Lord as waters covers the seas, so that hasn’t changed.

We also get the New Testament additional help of marriage as an image of Christ and the church, and as the reality comes to fullness and fulfillment the image falls away. But they didn’t have that in the Old Testament so that’s cheating.

They had hints. Israel is Jehovah’s wife, but you’re right, that wasn’t clear. And the same thing was hinted in the Sabbath day, actually. The first Sabbath, God did his work and rested, so man should be able to do his work, that of subduing the earth and exercising dominion and filling it, and then there’s an end and then begins glory and eternal rest.

The original creation ordinances all pointed to time as we know it, this historical process of developing this world as being finite and limited. There will be an end, and when that end comes then the earth is full and God blows the whistle and calls time. There will not be any more marriage because there’s no need for any more children. As Lewis would say, the number of souls that Maleldil read in his father’s mind from the beginning of time, we’ll hit that number.

Evangelical evangelists used to be a little more aware of this I think than they are these days, because some would approach their evangelistic endeavors very seriously with the idea that there will be a day when that last soul will believe in Jesus and that will end history. “What if someone I preach to today is that last soul? What if the last convert here tonight is the one who calls time on the game and Jesus returns before we get to go home?” That’s kind of awesome. It’s kind of scary.

It's none of this Left Behind nonsense, it’s just that there’s going to be an end, and when that end comes then there’s no more need for more people so there’s no more need for children and thus there’s no more need for marriage, since one of the central functions of marriage is to produce seed for the kingdom of God. Anyway, that’s what’s going on here. Jesus reveals stuff that we didn’t really know from the Old Testament. He says –

For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.

That is beyond human sexuality as we currently understand it. But then rather than just leave it there he says, “But you want proof from scripture. Actually you want proof from the Torah because you don’t even believe the prophets.” There are all kinds of places you can go in the prophets to prove the doctrine of resurrection. He picks something wholly obscure. He goes back to the burning bush. You go back to the beginning of the law, or almost, to Moses and sort of to Genesis. At the burning bush God said, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

In the original in Exodus the verb is not there. It’s been supplied by the translator. The point is not the “is,” it’s the “of.” I, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. He doesn’t say, “I was the God of Abraham.” That would imply that Abraham doesn’t exist anymore. He identifies himself as the God of Abraham and the God of Jacob and the God of Isaac, which means in Jewish thought and biblical thought they’re still alive. So much for your idea that there no spirits. Here are three.

The whole Bible looks down on the idea that the soul is meant to be by itself. If they’re alive as spirits, that’s not satisfactory. They need to come back to life. So the fact that they still exist and here’s the thing – “I am the God of Abraham” – what do you mean “of”? It means a covenant relationship.

God promised salvation. If you’re dead, God hasn’t kept his word yet. God hasn’t fulfilled his commitments. God hasn’t kept his promises, so you need to come back to life. Simply God claiming them as his own means he will save them because God is faithful, and that means the resurrection of the dead. He is not the God of the dead but of the living, or all live to him, one of the other gospels says.

Everyone is astonished. They’ve never heard this before. They’ve never thought about this. They’ve probably never thought about interpreting scripture this way before. They were looking for just simple straightforward things, and this requires a little bit of thinking, of meditation.

The Pharisees and Sadducees hear that he’s put them both to shame, and they’re gathering and commiserating or mocking each other as the case may be, and one of them, a lawyer, raises a question –

Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

And Jesus answers, but interestingly enough earlier we’re told in Luke’s gospel that Jesus had turned this on one of his questioners. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” “You’ve read the commandments. How do you read the law?” and the man says, “Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” So Jesus was not the first one to say it. He elicited that same response from someone else earlier, but he repeats it now with divine authority.

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

This is the Shema. It’s taken from Deuteronomy 6. It is the confession or creed and prayer that every Jew recited every day, so they knew this. They had memorized this one.

It’s not one of the ten commandments. They were trying to get Jesus to set one commandment over against another. This is the nature of legalism and Pharisaism. “Which is the really best commandment? What’s the most important commandment? Because I bet I kept it and I bet you didn’t. You kept those lesser commandments but I kept the important one,” and all that kind of nonsense.

Jesus said, “Forget arguing over the ten. That’s not the point. They are all ultimately reflections and derivations of the greatest and central command which is to love God with your whole being, which you all know because you say it every day. This is the first and great commandment. The second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

When he says second he doesn’t mean this is a wholly different commandment and that loving God is the most important thing, and once you’re done loving God then you should really seriously think about loving your neighbor. This is the same commandment seen from a different angle.

Throughout Paul’s epistles he will refer to this and he doesn’t quote the first version – “Love God with your whole heart, soul, and mind.” He keeps quoting the second – love your neighbor as yourself. “If there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

He keeps saying it. Why is that? Because it’s the same commandment, because you cannot love God if you don’t love your neighbor. To put it in concrete terms using the ten commandments, if I kill my neighbor and steal from him and cheat against him with his wife and lie about him and ruin his reputation and offer his child as a human sacrifice and won’t let him off work on the Sabbath day so he can worship and rest, then I don’t love my neighbor and I don’t love God.

However, if I love God, can I love God and break my oaths and commitments, not give my servant a day off, can I sacrifice my children or his on an altar – no. These things all hang together. What makes the first the first and the second the second? The first is framed in terms of our direct relationship with God, and the second in terms of our relationship with men, but it’s the same commandment.

The Heidelberg Catechism comes close to being guilty of this. I won’t charge it with error, but it asks how are the commandments divided. For once I appreciate a passive sentence because it doesn’t say divided by who. God didn’t divide them. We’ve divided them for convenience’s sake.

We look at the first four and say, “That emphasizes our duty to God, and the last six emphasize our duty to man,” and that’s true to a point as far as it goes, although the third commandment requires us to keep our covenants and commitments, and the fourth commandment requires us to give laborers a day off, so it’s not as air-tight as some people seem to think it is, but that’s something we’ve imposed upon it.

Jesus does call them two commandments, but then he says, “On these two commandments hold all the law and the prophets,” meaning that they’re the same in function.

Yes, on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. All of God’s moral and spiritual revelation hang on these two. There’s no separating them. You can’t go through the rest of the law and the prophets and pick out this and that – “Wearing blue fringe, that’s really important!” “No, not playing football on the Sabbath day is really important.” “How about saying yes ma’am and yes sir, that’s really…”

All of those things have their place but that’s not the heart of the law. The law is to love God with your whole heart, soul, and mind, and so love your neighbor as yourself. Whatever else is involved has to be understood in terms of that, not as an autonomous “Here is a rule that I may keep to earn brownie points with God and to be better than all you slobs.” This is the point and the end and the goal of the law.

One of the other gospels has the lawyer say, “Well, you have answered well!”

“Why, thank you.”

Yes, he has indeed. Jesus now turns to them and it’s his turn. He asks them a question that should be easy but it wasn’t for them. He says –

What think ye of Christ? whose son is he?

They figure, “Oh, this is easy. A first-year catechumen would know this one. Messiah is the son of David.” “Yeah, son of David. Yeah, we got that one. That’s easy. Ask us a hard one.”

“Really? If that’s so, in Psalm 110 why does David call the Messiah Lord, my Lord, Adonai, if he’s his son?”

If the Messiah is simply a human descendant of David, the general reckoning of the day would be, “Well, the father is greater than the son, and the grandfather greater than his son, and his, and so on, so David should be the greater one and his son is somewhere down the line.”

The great-grandfather does not come to a little baby boy and say, “Oh my Lord, how may I serve you?” That’s not the way the world works and yet that’s essentially what David does. He says that Messiah is his Lord, and the word is the same word that’s used describing Israel’s relationship with Yahweh. It’s not Yahweh, it’s Adonai, my Lord, the one who is my sovereign Lord and my God.

How then doth David in spirit call him Lord, saying, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool? If David then call him Lord, how is he his son?

Jesus is not saying that he’s not the son of David. He’s just saying that there’s more to it than that and you’ve missed the obvious, which you’re awfully good at. That’s this whole section right here.

And no man was able to answer him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions.

But the testing is not done because he’s going to stand six trials. He will stand before Annas, who the Jews reckon is the rightful high priest (‘rightful’ being somewhat open to quibbling), Caiaphas his son, who the Romans appointed as the current high priest, before the Sanhedrin, which was the assembled senate of Israel, then before Pilate who’s the Roman Governor, then before Herod who is the tetrarch of Galilee and thus Jesus was officially one of his subjects, and then back before Pilate – six trials. At each one they try to find fault. They try to find some impurity.

The Jewish trials just simply end up in rubberstamping one another and saying, “Well, he claimed to be the son of God so that settles it. We don’t need any evidence, including all the false witnesses we bribed.”

Pilate tries to get out of it by passing it on to Herod. Herod is not interested and simply passes him back. By implication he finds no fault because if Jesus claims to be a king, he’s a rival to Herod. If Herod saw any reason to be afraid of this guy as a political rival, he would not have hesitated to kill him. Then it comes back to Pilate who, as the representative of the Roman government, will declare, “I find no fault in him.” When he sends him to the cross, he sends him with the superscription of the crime as simply, “He’s the king of the Jews.” Rome declares Jesus publicly to be innocent – a legal declaration. “He’s innocent and, by the way, he’s also the king of Israel. We say so.”

So the Passover lamb, having been thoroughly questioned, poked at, prodded, and checked out will go to the cross, pure and without blemish or spot, and everybody will know it.

Let me know if I’m reading too much into this passage, but we have actually just covered five questions. My notes erroneously said that we were going to talk about three questions today, and there were five. The first had to do with priestly authority, which is not where I would have expected it to start, given that I thought we were covering three questions. I would see a prophet/king/priest motif.

One of them is Jesus and the other one I’d forgotten about, but it was just right there.

Right, but there is a pattern, and there is a prophet/king/priest pattern. It’s just backwards at first and then it flips and kind of leaves us waiting for the last priestly question.

Interesting. I will have to think about that. And of course you said five, so we should probably consider covenant formatting as well.

Yes, covenant points too, but I didn’t quite see them.

The second question would make sense, the question about Caesar’s authority, the recognition that there is delegated authority. As for the rest, nothing jumps to mind particularly because you would expect the question about the greatest commandment to follow the third point. There’s something we can think about and hypothesize and come back to some day.

But that’s for another time. It is time to wrap up with some recommendations.

I’m going to recommend Brave Men by Ernie Pyle. Ernie Pyle, if you are not familiar, was a war correspondent in World War II. He was present at the invasion of Sicily and also of Normandy and lots of other places. Brave Men is mostly a compilation of his talking to individuals preparing for those invasions and following those invasions, some character sketches. It’s really good.

Some people are like, “This isn’t a great book because it’s really just a compilation of newspaper articles,” because that’s what it is, and to the modern ear it can feel repetitive because people tend to be like other people, especially people in similar circumstances, which these men were. It’s worth a read if you’re curious about the mind of a soldier.

That reminds me of something that in one form I haven’t recommended at all, but at one level I have. The war correspondent thing reminds me of G.A. Henty, who was also a war correspondent and foreign correspondent in general.

I had no idea!

Yeah. That’s where he got most of his material. He wrote a series of young men’s adventure stories in the early 20th century. The language is a little outdated for most people, but children with a decent education in literature can read it to profit. They’re clean. They reflect a Christian world and life view because that was where he’s coming from. They’re not explicitly Christian as far as I know.

Sometimes he had to shoehorn that in. When he’s talking about ancient Egypt he’s like, “These false priests were secretly Christians.” I’m like, “Hmm, I don’t know about that one.”

Yes, there’s that. Having recommended Henty, I then proceed immediately to recommend Heirloom Audio’s audio production of a number of his books. My friend Bill Hyde is in charge of Heirloom Audio and he’s pushed for audio dramas on Drake and Lee and all kinds of people. William Wallace is another. I’m not one for audio dramas as such, but people who are have listened to them and told me, “Hey, this is great. We sit around as a family and listen to these things.”

They are at least as historically accurate as Henty was, and Henty was a pretty good historian. They feature as the voice of G.A. Henty the actor Brian Blessed, whom you may know from Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, and Henry V. He played in all of those. He’s the big burly guy whose pastime was climbing Mt. Everest and things like that. Before the current rush of “anyone can go to space,” I heard he was in training to be an astronaut in case such a thing ever opened up, and he was getting on in years already then. I don’t even know if he’s still alive but he’s a fantastic actor. His heart was very much into this project.

I ghost-wrote the homeschool curriculum for it, and the first time Bill sent me a sampling of what was going on the file simply said, “Blessed.” I thought, “Okay, so you consider this to be blessed of God.” It was a long time before I figured out, “No, that’s the actor’s name.”

Anyway, if you like such things, this is maybe more for older children and young teenagers, but all families have enjoyed it. You can go to Heirloom Audio’s website and browse and find what era and character appeals to you and you’ll probably enjoy it.

Mine is a recommendation from my husband because I have not read this book yet, but I mentioned it to other people recently and they went, “Ooo, you should recommend that.” It’s called 2084 and the AI Revolution: How Artificial Intelligence Informs Our Future. It’s by John Lennox.

He’s a Christian and a mathematician and he’s looking at the progress AI has made in terms of what it does, and things it could potentially do – the projections and such – but he’s also looking behind some of that at the notions of things like transhumanism, which folks like Elon Musk are dabbling into, of how can we basically make ourselves live forever using machines.

He addresses those things in terms of scripturally what does it mean to be human and to have a soul and to make and create things. As Christians what does that really mean and how can machines not do those things? What are the problems? How far should we let those things go?

Overall, David really enjoyed the book and found it very helpful in thinking about the ongoing increasing quantity of things that AI seems to be able to do so well for us. As a teacher, that was a huge issue in the last few years and still is, as students would say, “Why do I need to learn to write? The AI can write for me and it can write better than I can.”

It can write better than you can right now because you have not yet learned to write, and you never will if you continue to use ChatGPT to write your papers.

Exactly. As an example, I’ve seen lots of things that they turn in that AI wrote, and the AI still is programmed by people and it still has a bias and should not be handling the scriptures for us.

The only caveat I put on the recommendation is that he goes a little wonky in terms of taking AI into the book of Revelation, doing some interesting – I don’t even know if it’s Dispensationalism or what – but seeing somehow AI in the mark of the beast and some of those things getting all intermixed.

Nothing new there.

So with that, it still has a lot of great things because I don’t know how many authors as Christians have actually tried to address AI so far.

And how many even understand it. That’s been a repeated complaint of my husband David, who actually works in the field, and says there are not enough Christians who actually understand this technology. They’re all just scared of it, so it’s nice to hear of a mathematician who can actually speak with some expertise.

Thank you both for this conversation. It’s been a delight and I look forward to next time. Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband and aforementioned technologist.

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