Synoptics - Matthew 22-23

And so, to remind ourselves of where we are, back in Matthew 22, verse 41, Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, What do you think about the Messiah, whose son is he?

And they said to him, The son of David. And he said to them, Then how does David in the Spirit call him Lord, saying, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies beneath your feet.

If David then calls him Lord, how is he his son? No one was able to answer him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask him another question. Now, we pretty much addressed this last time, but I had mentioned that there was one particular element of this that I wanted to cover before we moved into Matthew chapter 23.

And that was an argument that I had mentioned maybe to you briefly in the past, but working through it, I think, again, helps to provide an example of how we need to do exegesis, how we need to handle the text of Scripture.

The text that is cited, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies beneath your feet. We are familiar with that text from Psalm 110, verse 1. And if you look back at Psalm 110, you'll notice what we mentioned on the last Lord's Day.

It says, And the Lord, in all casts, Yahweh, says to my Lord, and that's in small letters, well, the L is capitalized, and it's O-R-D in normal font. Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.

And I explained last week, this is Yahweh says to my Adonai. And I did have one question afterwards that some people were a little confused, because in the New American Standard, in the New Testament, it's just the Lord said to my Lord in all caps.

That's just because that's how the New American Standard does all Old Testament citations. So when you see L-O-R-D in caps, but a different font size like that, versus this, that's Yahweh, the name of God in the Old Testament, and this is Lord, but that's only relevant in the Old Testament.

That's not going to be relevant in the New Testament. Different Bible translations will use different ways of indicating Old Testament citations. And the New American Standard happens to use all caps, and so everything ends up in caps, which is one of the reasons it's harder to use the New American Standard electronically now, because if you want to cut and paste, it looks like you're screaming at everybody because it's all caps.

And that's become screaming in electronic form. But in the Old Testament, you'll notice it says the Lord, Yahweh, says to my Lord, my Adonai, sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.

Now, I don't recall that anyone in this group was at the debate that, or maybe you've seen it, though I don't know that too many people in this group would be watching TVN very often, but last year, Michael Brown and I debated Sir Anthony Buzzard, and another fellow whose name honestly escapes me, on the subject of the Trinity versus Unitarianism.

And Sir Anthony Buzzard's primary, well, he brings it up in all of his presentations. One of his main arguments against the deity of Christ is based on this text. So let me present his argument, and then I'll see how you handle it.

Unless, of course, you've already watched that debate, and then you'll know how to handle it, but that would be to your advantage. Sort of like last night, we had a quiz about young David down here on the front row, and I just felt it was a little bit unfair that certain people, I mean, I got nine out of 20.

I thought I was pretty good. I mean, especially in some of the questions are like, where did he first get lost? You know, I chose a place that looked like they might have been hunting. I thought that was a fairly safe thing.

But I know they were not. You don't go hunting in the Phoenix Zoo. That's sort of illegal, isn't it? I mean, that's not fair. They're in a cage, you know? What do we want today? Bear. Let's see. Look up bear.

There it is over this way. Come on, boys. Go get that. Go get something there. Yeah, all right. Anyway, you'd only get to go to the Phoenix Zoo if you did that once, and then after that, I don't think they'd let you in anymore.

But anyway, so I'll see how you guys handle this particular presentation. The argument goes like this. He says, this is one of the most important Christological texts. It's quoted very often in the New Testament, and he's right.

And in it, Yahweh says to, and the normal word for Lord in the Hebrew Old Testament, when it's referring to God, is Adonai. Adonai. But this isn't Adonai. This is Adoni. It's pointed just a little bit different.

And he says, Adoni is always used of human lords. Of human lords. And so, the Hebrew text itself tells us that Yahweh is speaking to a human lord, Adoni, not Adonai. And he will point to certain footnotes, certain footnotes in the New American Standard that actually says Adonai.

You see, it's not Adonai. It's Adoni. It's sort of a Trinitarian conspiracy. And what you've got here is a clear differentiation in the original language. And if this Lord, the Lord said to my Lord, if that second Lord is Jesus, then clearly this is a human individual.

Because every single time Adoni is used in the Old Testament, it's about a human individual. So, did you, you've heard me talk about this before, so that's probably not really a different answer than the one I've given.

That could be dangerous. Just so you know. But if you want to be brave, and throw that out there. Because the question is, verse 45, if David then calls him Kurios, how is he his son? And the argument would be, the argument is, a lesser will never call a superior Kurios.

I'm sorry, a superior will never call a lesser Kurios. And so, if the Messiah is lesser than David, then David would never call the Messiah Kurios. Okay? But, speaking of the deity of Christ, anyone? Yes, sir.

It's in the Hebrew. He's right. The Hebrew does make a differentiation in the vowel pointing. And the vowel pointing of Adoni is always about a human person, never about God. So, Jesus can't be God. Yes, sir.

That's exactly right. The, you may recall, I don't know how many months ago it was, sometime last year, I seem to recall showing you, I've got it somewhere here on my iPad. I could probably track it down if I knew where to look real quick.

Hebrew at the time of the New Testament did not have any vowel points in it. The vowel pointing was added by a Jewish group called the Masoretes about somewhere at the earliest 700 to 800 years after Christ.

And so, the fact that this has been pointed as Adoni rather than Adonai is nothing more than a recognition that the Jews, almost a thousand years after Christ, rejected him as Messiah. That's really all this is.

And yet, because of not having that one little piece of information, a lot of people are just absolutely stumped by that argument because, well, Hebrew, that's the language of the Old Testament, and that just must mean something.

And if it's pointed in that way, and those Masoretes, you know, we know that they preserved the text. Well, we've got to be very careful about that. The vowel pointing of the Hebrew text comes long after the Christian era, and long after these folks were already aware of how often this text was used by Christians to present the deity of Christ.

And so, it is an editorial choice in the point of Jewish scribes, nearly a millennium after Christ, seven to a thousand years, depending on where you put it, to point this as my Lord in a lesser form.

Yes, sir. Oh, I thought that was a hand. Okay, just stretching out the fingers. Got you going. All right, all right. Okay. Yes, sir. Well, there's no question that the Jews fully understood the significance of the Christian use of the 110th Psalm, and that they viewed it as messianic, and that there does seem to be something here.

Yahweh is speaking to someone who is placed at his right hand, and enemies are placed beneath his feet. This had already been interpreted as a messianic psalm. This was in reference to the Messiah, but there was no unified single view amongst the Jews as to exactly what the Messiah was supposed to be.

There was disagreement, and so when Jesus asks this question, they are not able to answer him. It says, answer him a word, possibly because they were so frightened as to be able to open their mouths at that point, given what had happened earlier in the chapter with the Sadducees.

But it does reflect the fact that while they saw that there was something in this text, they really didn't have a full understanding of how these messianic prophecies were going to be fulfilled. And we can understand that, because part of the messianic prophecies, we think of many of them are about the victory of the Messiah, and the establishment of Israel as the banner of the nations, and all these things.

But then you also have Isaiah 53, and you have the suffering servants, and you have sacrifice language, and how do you fit all that together? And until you have the fulfillment, it was very difficult to put it all together into a coherent whole.

And that's why, that's one of the reasons I chuckle so much at reading the Book of Mormon, for example. The Book of Mormon is just such a massive pile of anachronism. It's incredible. Because the Book of Mormon has people in the Old Testament period, long before the coming of Christ, using all this language, referring to it as Christ, including the word Christ, which is actually Greek, it's not even Messiah.

I mean, if it was reflecting some Hebrew way of thinking, it would use Mashiach, not Christos. But anyway, referring to Him as the Christ, and talking about the cross, and all these things would have been just completely non-understandable to people of that time.

But Joseph Smith sticks this in the mouths of people, of course, who never existed, Nephites and Lamanites, and stuff like that. But throws all this back into the Old Testament, even before the revelation of the mystery, which is found in the incarnation of Christ, His death, burial, resurrection, and outpouring of the Spirit.

It's all thrown into the Old Testament at that point. So it becomes a real anachronism in that way. So there's where having just a small piece of information about how we got the Bible helps to expose what's really a very poor argument.

In regards to someone who denies the doctrine of the Trinity. So with that, we then turn to Matthew 23. That's why if you've got the synoptic parallel, that's fine, but you can just look at Matthew 23 because we're going to be primarily dealing with it for the foreseeable future until we get to Matthew 24, which normally comes after Matthew 23.

I wish that wasn't the case, but that's the way it is. I have mentioned already to you that Matthew 23 is a bit of an embarrassment to many people in New Testament studies today. The reason being, historical, and that is, I know, especially for the young people who are in here, World War II probably seems like ancient history to you.

It's not. There are still people around who fought in that war. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, the very last man who had fought in World War I died. And so there are still lots of World War II veterans around, though they are passing away very quickly.

And so for you, it's studying almost ancient history. For me, I remember my parents talking about what it was like to live through the war years, and I had a relative that came back from the South Pacific, and he had been on a 1 .1 anti-aircraft gun, and how his hearing was forever damaged as a result.

I knew him, and his hearing was forever damaged as a result of that, and battled in the South Pacific, and things like that. And so for me, it's a whole lot more close and real than I think for the next generation that don't have that connection.

But you know that probably the one thing that is fairly well known in the present generation, younger generation, concerning World War II is what is called the Holocaust. And initially, that term was not just limited to the murder of Jews.

There were many, many others, millions of others, that were killed along with the Jews, including gypsies, believe it or not, that lived in Hungary and places like that. There were many hundreds of thousands, millions of other people that were killed.

But the focus was primarily upon the desire to exterminate the Jewish people. And approximately 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis. And there's all sorts of connections between the Nazi Party and various religious groups in Germany.

The Nazis didn't just pop into existence one day, the day before the war started. They had come along. It's interesting, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. After the defeat of Germany and its allies, the Austrian-Hungary allies in World War I, there was horrific economic collapse in Germany.

There are pictures of people with wheelbarrows full of money going to buy a loaf of bread. Super hyperinflation to where a loaf of bread would be millions and millions of what we would call dollars or deutschmarks or whatever.

And when you have that kind of economic and social upheaval and collapse, people are willing to buy into anything that will bring normalcy and security into their lives. And as it has been well said, the Nazis made the trains run on time.

And they did. And they brought normalcy and they brought order. And people are willing to turn a blind eye to a lot of things if those same groups will bring order to their lives. And that's what took place.

That included the German churches that willingly cooperated with, especially the Lutheran churches, willingly cooperated with the Third Reich. And obviously when the Nazis first came into power, all those atrocities were in the future.

It was a slow thing. They began slowly pushing through their agenda and things like that. It very frequently happens in that way. The long and short of this, the relevance of this to Matthew 23, is that after the defeat of Germany, certain schools in Germany had long been the leaders in New Testament studies, especially schools such as that at Tübingen.

And primarily German rationalists, I mean they're way liberal and so on and so forth. And much of the fundamentalist movement at the beginning of the last century was in reaction against the German schools.

But American seminaries have always shown themselves to have this odd desire to be accepted by that wing of what's called scholarship. Because the world looks at them as being true Bible scholars. You know, Bart Ehrman is a true Bible scholar because Bart Ehrman is willing to say that the Bible's a fraud.

If you actually believe the Bible's true, then you're not really a true Bible scholar, you see. And so there is this willingness to embrace all this kind of liberalism. And the Germans were leaders in this and they re-emerged as leaders even after World War II.

But now there was a cultural burden of guilt as the pictures from Auschwitz and Dachau and Buchenwald become published. And what results from all of that is a pendulum swing that exists to this day. It hasn't gone back to where...

Well, I was listening to a debate just late this past week and the atheist proponent, a man by the name of Hector Avalos, was basically saying that the primary influence on Hitler was Christian antisemitism primarily mediated to Hitler via Luther.

And when he did touch upon the Bible, he did so in such a way as to point to texts like Matthew chapter 23. Remember, I already mentioned to you what happened with the Passion film and the statement of the Jews, let his blood be upon us and upon our children's children and so on and so forth.

And certainly Paul was an anti-Jewish bigot despite the fact that he was a Pharisee. But anyway, the terrible things that he says in 1 and 2 Thessalonians about the Jews and the wrath of God abiding upon them.

If any of these texts have been cited in the past, and according to Hector Avalos, John 8, 44, where Jesus said to certain Jews, you are of your father the devil, appeared on road signs in Nazi Germany.

And so the fact that Jesus talked to certain Jews 2 ,000 years ago who wanted to have him killed and who eventually were allowed to do that, someone can abuse that 1 ,900 years later and somehow that means there's something wrong with the New Testament.

This is the kind of thinking. You know how it is in a politically correct world like we live in today. Logic and rationality go out the door. What something meant at the time it was written, the context in which it was written, that's irrelevant.

As long as somebody is offended by it today, well, then that's a terrible, horrible thing and we shouldn't believe these things. If we're really good, loving Christians, we should love people enough to say that Matthew was wrong in all the things that he said.

And of course, it fits in with that viewpoint that Matthew was just representing this early period of the Christian church where they were in such conflict with the Jews and so he's biased and blah, blah, blah.

Once you cut up the New Testament into little bitty parts and start setting them in opposition with one another, you can come up with anything. The reality is, as we saw last week, we see this conflict during Passion Week and we see the Pharisees coming at him and we have questions about politics and the Sadducees came at him and you've had this growing crescendo of conflict and it's not because these people are Jews, because Jesus is a Jew.

And it's not the Jewish people as a whole. You have wonderful things said by Matthew and by Luke of Jewish people like Simeon and Anna and you're going to have, even after the crucifixion, you've got Nicodemus and you've got Joseph of Arimathea and you've got positive things being said.

The idea that any of these people have some kind of racial idea in mind is so absurd that normally you just laugh at it but since it's repeated so often in our culture and since so much of our cultural conversation is done in 22 second sound bites on CNN that never allows for a background, never allows for context, never allows for any kind of rational discussion whatsoever, that we have to think about these things and recognize what's really going on.

And so you look at Matthew 23 and it is the fitting conclusion for the development of conflict and the woes that are pronounced in this text are woes that have been well deserved. And notice how before the woes start, notice what Jesus says.

Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples, saying, The scribes and the Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses. Now remember, we have a chapter division here, but chapter divisions in the Old Testament were introduced in I think the 1300s.

Chapter divisions in the New Testament in the 1400s and the chapter and verse divisions which we have today, specifically the verse divisions in 1551. Okay? So it's so easy for us, reading books in the Western culture, to take that form and stick it here.

And so Matthew 23, new section, as if Matthew wants us to see this as the new section. No. Somebody within the past 600 years put a chapter break. It makes sense. I mean, you wouldn't want Matthew to be all one chapter.

It's easier to find Matthew 23, 13 than it is to find verse 1174. Okay? So it does help us to navigate better, but the problem is it imposes an outline into our minds that wasn't there when Matthew wrote this.

And so very frequently, we'll start at the first verse of a chapter and what was going on at the end of the last chapter, either we don't even recognize it, don't even look to see, or in our minds, well, since the author broke it, well, the author didn't.

And especially when it says, Then Jesus spoke to the crowd. This is the then comes right after and no one asked Him any more questions. He had just asked them a question about the nature of the Messiah and had shut their mouths.

They were unwilling to answer the question. And so here are guys who are dressed to the nines in religious garb. They have phylacteries. They have boxes on their foreheads that have Scripture quotes in them.

They do the prayers. They have the most light of anybody. And what does that mean? That means they have the least excuse of anybody. And so I would say that this chapter does contain the strongest language in the New Testament.

I mean, I think there might be one verse in Paul that rivals Matthew 23 in its in-your-face-ness. Okay? But this is some of the strongest language. And it's embarrassing to many people that how could lowly Jesus, meek and mild, ever speak like this?

Well, I don't know about you, but whenever I meet people who are always meek and mild, there's nothing in this world that can get them to be anything but meek and mild. I find that really weird. In fact, I don't find that respectful.

I don't find that something to be emulated. There are things in this world that are worthy of being passionate about and about speaking strongly about. And if you can't do that, then I say there's something wrong with you.

And the world only wants the Jesus of the manger. They do not want the Jesus of Matthew 23. Because He clearly believes there's right and wrong. And in this instance, what's very clear is the one attitude we never want to have.

I mean, if there's any attitude that we want in our prayers to go, Lord, don't let me be like that. It's not the publicans. And it's not the sinners. It's the Pharisees. It's the people who have to wear sunglasses if they have so much light.

And that they call light darkness and darkness light. That's the worst attitude. That's the sin you want to avoid. Big time. And yet, it's a huge temptation. There's no question about it. So, the scribes and Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses.

Therefore, all they tell you, do and observe, but do not do according to their deeds, for they say things and do not do them. They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are unwilling to move them with so much as a finger.

But they do all their deeds to be noticed by men, for they broaden their phylacteries and lengthen the tassels of their garments. They love the place of honor at banquets and the chief seats in the synagogues and respectful greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by men.

But do not be called rabbi, for one is your teacher and you are all brothers. Do not call anyone on earth your father, for one is your father, he who is in heaven. Do not be called leaders, for one is your leader, that is Christ.

But the greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted. And then you have the eight woes. But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.

So, there's the background. He makes sure we know who we're talking about. The scribes and the Pharisees. Now, for us, scribes is somebody who sits around writing stuff. And yes, they probably were involved in the reproduction of the scriptures, the copying of the scriptures.

But they were also involved in the interpretation of scriptures. They were sort of lawyers, scribes. In fact, there are times that you may have noticed in the parallel where one gospel calls somebody a lawyer and somebody will call them a scribe because there is an overlap in these areas.

These are people whose job it is to make known the scriptures. Remember back in Ezra and Nehemiah? Remember when all the people gathered and it was commanded to bring forth the book of the law and they read the book of the law and the people wept and they repented and it was wonderful and it was great and there were people set aside specifically to instruct the people about the law.

Well, that's the beginning of the scribes and Pharisees. It started well. Most things that go horribly wrong actually start with good intentions. Okay? Church history is a long series of falling into apathy and apostasy and then there's a renovation movement and then there's a slow decline in the renovation movements and the renovation movement itself now becomes the instrument of bringing about more decline and apostasy and then there's a new renovation movement and it just happens over and over again and what you have here is the result hundreds of years later of something that was good.

We need to have people who concentrate on the ministry of the scriptures and making it known and teaching everybody and that's a wonderful thing right up until those very same people don't actually believe what it is that they're teaching and it becomes a mechanism whereby they enrich themselves at the cost of others and wow, that continues to happen even in our day.

Amazing how that is. So you have the scribes and the Pharisees and they have seated themselves in the chair of Moses. Now, there may be something there of saying, well, they put themselves there, not God.

But what is the cathedra of Moses? That's what the literal Greek term is. Cathedras. That's where the term cathedral comes from when you see there's a cathedral downtown and that's where the bishop of the Diocese of Phoenix in the Roman Catholic Church, that's where he would be centered is where the cathedra or seat is and hence you have the seat of Peter for example in Rome.

This is the cathedras, the seat of Moses. And so what does Jesus mean when it literally says upon the seat of Moses the scribes and Pharisees have sat? What does that mean? Well, there was a archaeologically speaking and we've got about five minutes here, I think I can squeeze all this in.

Archaeologically speaking, there was something called the seat of Moses in most synagogues. As we have dug up synagogues and examined their construction and so on and so forth, you can learn a lot from that kind of work and it's unfortunate that that kind of work doesn't go on anymore in primarily Muslim lands, which I find interesting.

As we found these synagogues, there would be a stone seat in the front and it was referred to as the seat of Moses and it would be from this position that the scriptures would be read. Remember when Paul is on his missionary journeys with his companions and they go into the synagogue and they're given the scriptures, the scrolls, and they're asked to read and they turn to a Messianic text and then use that to proclaim the Messiahship of Jesus.

So this seat is where the scriptures would be read out from and instruction would be given and it's called the seat of Moses because, well, who's the preeminent name as far as the foundational documents that would be read there?

I mean, the people of God would say the Shema each morning and they would begin their worship with this confession of faith. Shema Yisrael Eloheinu Yahweh. Where does that come from? It comes from Moses.

It comes from Deuteronomy. And so what Jesus is saying is these scribes and Pharisees, they sit on Moses' seat and to sit there brings certain responsibilities because if you're going to sit on Moses' seat, you better teach what Moses taught because you are, in essence, claiming his authority.

I mean, you wouldn't sit on it if you actually disagreed with what Moses was saying or if you thought that you had something better than what Moses had. And so they sit upon Moses' seat and if it is translated correctly as they have seated themselves, there might be some sense that they've done so illegitimately and it might come out in what's said in verse 3.

Therefore, all that they tell you, do and observe, but just don't do according to their deeds for they say things and do not do them. Now, what's the fundamental accusation there? Well, what's the phrase in verse 13 when the woes start?

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, and what are you? Hypocrites. Hypocrites. The primary assertion of verse 3 is they're hypocrites. They tell you certain things, they don't do certain things. Now, he's also going to say that there are certain things that they do that we shouldn't do, such as the core bound rule and things like that.

So, one of the questions is, was Jesus, and we'll pick this up next time, but in verse 3, was Jesus actually in a blanket way saying that they had some type of infallible authority and you should just be bound to that but to recognize that these particular men are hypocrites?

Is that all he was saying or is there something more here? That's O Great Keeper of the Notes where we will pick up with Matthew 23 .3 next time around. Okay? Alright, let's close the Word of Prayer. Our gracious Heavenly Father, we thank You for this opportunity to begin opening this text.

We thank You that we can consider such things as what was going on, the background of Your Word and that these things shed light upon Your Word. Most importantly, we want to hear what our Lord said and we want to avoid the attitude, the spirit, of the scribes and Pharisees.

So, help us to examine ourselves. Help us to follow after our Lord Jesus. Help us to understand His words and to apply them to our lives. We pray in Christ's name, Amen.