The Rhetoric of Jesus

So I told Dave that I would speak on the rhetoric of Jesus, how Jesus handled the Pharisees as an example for us, and it occurred to me that most people think that Jesus, his teaching from the Sermon on the Mount is comprehensive because he says that you're supposed to pray for your enemies and those who spitefully use you, turn the other cheek, right?

These are the things that we hear people talk about. Love your enemies and pray for them. So I wanted to look at the actual example of Jesus. Well, how did he do this, right? Because he's the one that's going to accomplish his teaching.

He's the example of his teaching more than any of us or more than any figure in church history. So that's why I think this is important. We need to look at his example because that's where we're going to actually see how we should apply his teaching.

Treating Hostile Questions as Traps

All right, so understanding how Jesus treated those who vigorously opposed him, and the Pharisees obviously are at the top of that list, I think is crucial in our society where we see Christianity threatened more and more every day, and we don't need to go through all the examples of that.

One thing I do need to say before I get into these examples, some of them are kind of, you know, harsh or at least direct. Jesus did seem to make a separation at times between those who are the spiritual leaders or the political leaders who are leading people astray and then the actual people, and one of the examples that comes to mind is Nicodemus, right?

Because Nicodemus is a member of the Pharisee class, and Jesus didn't treat him the same way he treated the other Pharisees. He actually did sit down, he was gentle, he dialogued with him. So it is important to recognize this principle that God does resist the proud and gives grace to the humble.

I think that's of paramount importance before getting into any of this because all the things I'm going to talk about are examples of prideful leaders and Jesus dealing with prideful leaders. This is not comprehensive either.

You also have to balance that with the gentleness Jesus had towards those who are humble. But Jesus perfectly exemplified the pattern I think outlined in 1 Thessalonians 5, which says, to admonish the unruly, encourage the faint-hearted, help the weak, be patient with everyone.

So Jesus was patient, but he did admonish, and so we're going to look at those examples of some of that. One of the things that I think is important also to know before we get into some of these specific examples is that Jesus was not trying to win arguments for the sake of self-promotion in a vain way.

He was not looking at people and seeing a challenge. I see that online a lot, right? There's a challenge. Someone's called you out, and now you're gonna try to defeat what they're saying and show that it's foolish.

And sometimes there can be pride mixed in with that. You want to embarrass the person. That wasn't who Jesus was. Jesus, when he did these things, even when he did embarrass people because he did, he did so with the motivation of wanting to protect people.

So he wants to love the people who would be led astray by false teaching, and he also wants to vindicate the work that God was doing through him. And so people who were coming out against that were enemies because of that.

It wasn't because they had personal insults towards Jesus. It's because they were challenging the work of God, and they were endangering others. So I have seven, I believe it's seven, different principles to look at.

I'll just read them for you, the highlights, and then I'll get into the details of it, and we'll read some scripture as well. But yeah, the seven, yeah. So the first one is do not take questions at face value.

Jesus did not take questions at face value. The second one is choose the right setting for conflicts. Third, use coded language at times. That's going to be an interesting one. You probably wonder what that means.

Shift the conversation. Claim the moral high ground. And let's see, expose logical absurdity. So how many was that? Six? I said seven. That was, oh sorry, challenge unqualified authority and expose logical absurdity.

So that's seven. So we'll start with do not take questions at face value. And these aren't laws, obviously, from scripture. These are me like looking at the way Jesus actually handled himself and coming up with or looking at them and then trying to figure out what the principle to apply behind those are.

In Matthew 22, we see the story of the Pharisees, and they're plotting to trap Jesus in what he said and thus discredit him. And you could turn there if you want. The Pharisees went and plotted together how they would trap him in what he said, and they sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians saying, teacher, we know that you are truthful and teach the way of God in truth and defer to no one, for you are not partial to any.

Tell us then, what do you think? Is it lawful to give a poll tax to Caesar or not? And Jesus perceived their malice and said, why are you testing me, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the poll tax.

And they brought him a denarius, and he said to them, whose likeness and inscription is this? They said to him, Caesar's. Then he said to them, then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's.

And hearing this, they were amazed, and leaving him, they went away. So they try to get Jesus on the horns of a dilemma, right? And it's not just the Pharisees. The Herodians are in on it, which means this is not just spiritual, this is a political thing, because the Herodians were a sect that supported King Herod.

They actually were against the Pharisees. The Pharisees wanted a restoration of the Davidic line and the kingdom of Israel, and they were, you know, I don't know if they were directly, maybe you know, they're directly supportive of the Romans, but they were at least somewhat supportive of Herod, though.

So there was a bit of a, you know, Roman influence there, I suppose. And they don't like each other. They don't work together, but they end up working together on this, and if Jesus goes one way, it'll support the Pharisees.

If he goes the other way, it'll support the Herodians, and then, you know, the crowds will split, and they can fracture the support that Jesus has among the people. And the way that Jesus responds is he doesn't take the question at face value.

He doesn't think this is an honest question. He spots that this is an attempt to try to get him to say something that would be imprudent and discredit him in the eyes of the people, and they're not really after the truth.

They don't want an answer, and instead of accepting the terms of the challenge, Jesus impugned the motives of those asking the questions. So he actually went on the offense. He turned the tables on them, which is what we're going to see with Jesus a lot.

Why are you testing me, you hypocrites? I mean, that's not usually the kind of answer you get when, you know, you think you're having a good faith conversation. Jesus doesn't accept this as a good faith question, so he calls them out.

They're hypocrites, and then shows up the coin, as we just read, and he gets out of the dilemma, essentially. He actually shows that they are the ones that are in violation of the standard they're trying to bring to him, because while they want to test his allegiance to Caesar, there's something more important going on, which is they don't actually have an allegiance to God, and that's what Jesus focuses on, is you don't even worship God.

You participate and you benefit from this economic system the Romans have brought. You use these denarii. You participate in all of this, but you don't give God his due, and so it puts them right back in the spot of being on the defense.

They're now the ones on trial, not Jesus, and he does this kind of thing all the time, but the reason that he was able to do that was because he didn't assume that they had good motives, and I think modern Christians would do well to likewise anticipate traps like this from their political enemies, like, you know, why do you hate women, right?

Or, like, how can you believe in a religion that supports some kind of evil that is out of step with 21st century egalitarians? Well, I think Christians need to suppress the urge when this comes up to prove themselves worthy in the standard of the media.

They don't need to, like, impress CNN or anything like that, and they shouldn't feel like these are all good faith questions that, you know, sometimes maybe they are, but you need to use some prudence.

These may not be coming from someone who actually is curious about an answer. These may be coming from people who just want to attack, and so I think that this is one of the things we can learn from Jesus is don't accept their premises.

You can go on the attack against them, actually, and ask them questions that challenge, you know, liberal philosophy or whatever, and you call them hypocrites. You know, there's nothing saying you can't do that.

That's not, like, out of step with loving your enemies, because Jesus loved his enemies, right? And this is what he did. So number two principle that I have is choose the right setting. Choose the right setting.

Another aspect of Jesus's shrewd dealings with the Pharisees was his discernment in choosing the right conditions for engagement, and I think online I see this more, but there is a mistaken, I think, notion among some of the members of, if this means anything to you, the dissident right, you know, not the mainstream conservative right wing, you know, but, like, people who want to go in different directions, and that's kind of a big group, but I've seen this where guys will say, like, you know, you should always, like, no matter what the challenge is, you need to go out there, and if you're called out, you need to start slinging mud.

You need to start punching back hard, and the thing is, Jesus was more able to do that than anyone else. He had supreme knowledge. He had more wisdom than any man has ever had. He could have made anyone look like fools at any time, and yet he didn't always do that.

He actually chose the conditions that he was going to have a disagreement or a dispute with people. So I'll give you some examples. In John 7 -1, we learn that Jesus was unwilling to walk in Judea because the Jews were seeking to kill him, and this was during the Feast of Booths.

His brothers want him to go up to Judea to participate in the feast, and rather than going with them, Jesus suggested that they go ahead, and he creates the impression that he's not going to even attend the feast.

Now, he didn't lie, right? He didn't. Was it deceptive? I mean, I'll let you decide, but he gives the impression that he's not going to go with them. They'll just, they're better off going without him, right, and then the feast happens, and the people there are murmuring about, where's Jesus?

I thought he was going to be here. Well, Jesus showed up, but he shows up unnoticed, and then he's in the temple, so there's no fanfare. If Jesus would have gone with his brothers, they could have intercepted him while he was going right into the feast, and they could have arrested him.

They could have done whatever they wanted, so Jesus secretly comes in, so they don't have that opportunity, and now he reveals himself in the temple. Well, guess what? There's witnesses everywhere. They can't do what they want to do now.

He's got enough support in there that it would be politically imprudent for them. Well, that was smart. That was really shrewd thinking. See, I mean, he could have had an altercation earlier that might not have gone the way that it should have, and instead, he has an altercation on the ground that he chooses.

Very smart to do it that way, so he wasn't avoiding conflict. He wasn't a coward. He's willing to fight, but he wanted to make sure, you know, in military terms, it was the high ground, right? He didn't want to fight them at a disadvantage.

In Luke 4, there's something similar. After informing members of the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth that he would not perform miracles because they lacked faith, it says that they were filled with rage and attempted to throw him down a cliff, so not very nice, especially being your hometown, right?

And as they tried to carry out their plans and chase him out of the synagogue, the text says that passing through the midst, he went his way, so Jesus somehow eluded them. He could have just let them, I mean, he's God, right?

He could have just called down angels or something, but he could have let them carry out their plans. He could have, you know, faced them like a man or something directly, but he decided that, no, it's not my time, and he actually evaded them, and so the fortitude that he had, because he did have fortitude, his bravery was mixed with another cardinal virtue, and that's prudence or wisdom, and that's how we need to fight, too, and where it's challenged is we need to use wisdom.

If we have the option of not engaging, sometimes that's the right option. Sometimes it is, but Jesus was able to tell those things, and I think it's worth noting that not only did Jesus avoid unwanted conflicts, but he also chose conflicts that he did want, so there's times he chose, I'm not going to have a conflict, and there's other times he said, actually, this is the right time to have a conflict, so I'll give you an example of that.

Luke 14, he responded to opposition by exposing the fact that the spiritual shepherds of Israel care more about their own livestock than they did the people under their care, and this is what he said.

He said, and they're accusing him of, you know, breaking the Sabbath and these kinds of things. He says, which one of you will have a son or an ox fall into a well and will not immediately pull him out on a Sabbath, and the scripture says they could not make a reply to this, and you think about that.

They're saying you shouldn't heal on the Sabbath. You shouldn't help people on the Sabbath, and he's saying you help your animals, so what, you don't help people? What's that about, right? He chose to heal on the Sabbath.

He didn't have to heal on the Sabbath. He chose to heal on the Sabbath. That provoked a fight, and that fight was on the ground that he wanted to do it then at that time, so choosing the time, choosing the place prudently is important, and I think modern Christians can learn from this because they should carefully consider the controversial situations they enter.

If CNN wants to do an interview with you, you might want to think about that. Is it going to be recorded? Is it live? Can they edit it? You know, even I have to do this, you know, in regards to my own podcast, my own platform, because allowing bad faith actors to control your public image is very unwise, and there are times, you know, when disagreement is necessary, but there's also social etiquette.

Even online, I've noticed that there's social etiquette. Having someone on my podcast is like having them in my house. I might push back here and there, but it's like it's kind of rude to really go after someone.

You've invited them, so there's a lot of people I'd be fine debating, but it's not going to happen on my platform. I'm not going to expose your errors to my audience necessarily. If you want to find a third party, a neutral party, yeah, I'll go do that.

If you want me on your thing, sure. You know, that's different, you know, unless you're editing it or something, unless, you know, but you got to think about those things, and so I've learned to be cautious about that kind of thing, and I think that's one of the things that we see in the example of Christ.

Using Parables and Coded Language

You've coded language at times, number three. Now, it's no secret that the media, I keep picking on CNN, so why not just keep doing it, they will accuse conservatives of using dog whistles. Have you ever heard that?

You're using a dog whistle. You're telling your deplorable base of supporters the real message, and you're concealing it from the rest of us. Donald Trump is, you know, he's telling everyone, he's signaling to his racist, sexist, you know, homophobic supporters what he really means, and of course, you know, people mock this.

That's ridiculous. He didn't say that, you know, but that's what they'll do, and I think the reason they do that is because that's how they tend to communicate. Like, they like to signal to their base, you know, Trump's Hitler, you know, but they don't say it that way.

They do it in, they couch it, and, you know, they try to give the impression, they insinuate, they're like, this is something, though, that human beings have done for thousands of years. This isn't anything new, and I think conservatives tend to be a little more direct, you know, and Christians being, I guess, you know, evangelicals being sort of part of that base of support.

We tend to be a little more direct, and maybe, I'm going to just say, maybe not as shrewd sometimes. Maybe we should look at, I'm not saying signal the deplorables, but maybe there are times to be indirect, and maybe there are times to try to speak to one audience and confuse another audience at the same time.

Let me give you an example from Jesus. Jesus used parables to ensure that the prideful would not understand his message while the humble would. So, Matthew 21, Jesus told the parable of the wicked tenants, right?

And the Pharisees, in this particular instance, they seem to grasp it. It's one of the few times the Pharisees say, wait a minute, who do you, who does it sound like? Mordecai, who do you think he's talking about?

He's talking about us. So, Jesus tells this parable, and in the parable, there's a landowner, if you remember, and he rents out his vineyard to vine growers to produce a profit. So, he goes on a journey, and then he sends his slaves to them to collect the reward, the produce, the profit.

And what do they do? They beat him up. He sent more slaves, beat him up, I think killed him, right? And then he sends his son, and they kill the son. And then he relates this to Psalm 118, which is a messianic psalm, and he said, it's kind of like this, guys, the stone which the builders rejected has become the chief's cornerstone.

So, it's saying it's just like this parable. They reject all these ambassadors, these messengers, but then the stone which, the Messiah, the stone which they reject becomes the chief cornerstone, and they're replaced, essentially.

The spiritual leaders of Israel are replaced. Well, the chief priest, it says, and the Pharisees heard this parable, and they understood that he was speaking about them. Uh-oh. And they didn't understand until the end, right?

They're listening to this whole story. And Jesus' initial exposure of them is subtle, it's indirect, and he used these veiled critiques in parables. Two chapters later, so that's Matthew 21. Matthew 23 is an entire chapter where he's direct.

He says, woe to the scribes and Pharisees, and he goes, he spells it out. And I think this is something you see in his ministry, is he goes, he progressively goes from these more subtle kind of critiques to very clearly saying, these guys are enemies, these guys are problems, right?

So, there's a time for both of those things, and I'm not taking, I don't know if there's a specific application. I can't tell you today this is how you apply this. It's going to depend on the situation.

I'm just saying, I think from Jesus' ministry, we see that there are situations where maybe it is good and prudent to use couched language. And no one's requiring you to say everything you think, right?

There's some things we believe that are very offensive to the world. You don't have to, when you're engaging with a non-Christian, tell them every offensive thing right off the bat, right? You don't, it doesn't mean you're being compromised.

You just like, just be prudent. Like, you can withhold some information depending on the context. So, I think this shrewdness is important, and we should never shy away from the truth, but we're not required to reveal every offensive belief in every situation.

And there are, like I said before, there are some, I think, more like, in-your-face radical approaches, not mainstream, but approaches where like, that's what you should do. And I don't think Jesus did that.

You know, if he would have done that with the Pharisees, and, you know, from the, out the gate, say, brood of vipers, you know, like, just like John was doing, I don't know how it would have went. You know, that's something, obviously, that God had planned.

And this is more important if you're someone in the room. I don't know if anyone has, like, anonymous accounts online where you can say anything you want and you get away with it. It's important to think this one through for those reasons, too, because you can get doxed.

Sometimes people can't find out who you are. And if you've just made a habit of saying every single offensive thing that comes to your head, even if it's true, there could be consequences for that. So you need to be shrewd.

And, you know, don't pick fights that aren't necessary. Choose your battles. This is also, I think, important to realize that we occupy different stations. So some people may not, they may be self-employed, and they may not have consequences if they say something offensive.

Other people, you might work for, I don't know, the government. And what you say, that can really come back to bite you. That can affect the way you feed your family. You got to, I'm not saying not to say the truth, but you got to think about it.

Is this really the stand? Is this really the fight? If it is, you go for it. But know that there's consequences to that. And we shouldn't apply different standards, you know, we shouldn't apply the same standard to everyone.

There are, I think, different ways of engaging. We can talk more about that. I'm sure there's probably questions in people's minds. Number four, shift the conversation. Shift conversations. One of Jesus' most admired rhetorical traits was his ability to address the heart of the matter.

And I think the rich young ruler is the classic example, right? He comes to God, he comes to Jesus. He says, what must I do to obtain eternal life, right? What does Jesus say to him? Well, have you kept the law?

He doesn't answer the question directly, he answers the question with the question. Actually, first he says, why do you call me good? And then he probes further about why did you, you know, have you kept the law?

And then we find out that the young man actually had an idol, his riches. He trusted in his riches and he lacked faith in God. He wanted to have faith in himself and his own abilities. And so this revealed what was inhibiting the man from actually inheriting eternal life.

And so the young man's issue wasn't that he didn't understand God's requirements, but that he refused to place his faith in God, choosing to rely on his riches. Jesus shifted the conversation from what he thought he was talking about to what he needed to talk about.

Well, this ability to shift the conversation comes into play with his battles with the Pharisees as well. In Mark 2, this is early in Jesus's ministry, Jesus performs one of his miracles by healing a paralytic.

Remember that? And instead of simply healing him, Jesus, what does he say to him? He doesn't say, oh, you're healed. He says, you're forgiven. Well, he could have just said, you're healed, go walk. But he chose specifically to say, your sins are forgiven, knowing that would probably cause a stir and an offense.

And sure enough, it did. And the Pharisees, in fact, it doesn't even say they said anything. He just knew what they were thinking, which is kind of an advantage that we don't have. But Jesus perceived that they were challenging him in their minds.

And he chose not to directly defend his divinity because in their minds, they're saying, he's just blaspheming. He's saying that he's God, his ability to forgive sin. And Jesus could have said, actually, let me prove to you, or let me show you, let me argue from scripture.

He could have gone through a long diatribe if he wanted about who he was. But instead, what he did is he asked them, he said, which is easier to say to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven, or to say, get up, pick up your pallet and walk.

So he asked them a question again in return and gets them thinking. And this forced them to confront the evidence that Jesus was using divine power. And it's very simple. It's very easy to say, your sins are forgiven.

There's no way to confirm that. But if you say that you're healed, well, there's the evidence, the guy's standing right there. So Jesus, in effect, is proving his divinity to them, but he's doing it in a way, he's asking a different question.

He's putting their minds on a different channel than the one it was on. They're so focused on, he just said this, that's what he said. And he wants them to focus on what he did. He shifted the conversation.

And I think if Christians today, in a world where Christianity is constantly challenged, could shift conversations towards the evidence that supports Christianity or highlights the emptiness of non-Christian religions and philosophies, it could make an impact.

You know, the rich young ruler knew he was failing to keep God's law, right? And that was part of the conviction that happened. And really what he needed was, he needed to remind this unbeliever about what he already knew.

And sometimes that's all we need to do, is remind unbelievers about something that they already know to be true. The Pharisees knew this guy was healed, so he reminds them of what they already knew. And that is what shifted it towards, you know, basically in his favor, in his direction, to prove what he wanted.

I recently argued on a podcast, well I think it's actually, I say recently because this is actually tomorrow I'm releasing this, but I'm going to argue, I guess, on a podcast that I think one of the things in apologetics ministries that's a huge weakness is Christian apologists will, on social issues, take 21st century egalitarian assumptions about equality, and they'll try to then get the Bible or God off the hook.

They'll say, yeah, well the Bible talks about slavery, the Bible talks about the way, you know, hierarchies exist in the home with women, you know, patriarchy, men, women, women. Yeah, the Bible says things about homosexuality, but you don't understand.

That's what they'll, this came out in the whole Wes Hough thing, in that initial interview, I forget the guy's name, but the guy who hosted that discussion, maybe you watch it, you remember the guy's the host of that first video?

It was Mark something?

Mark, it was Mark, yeah. I know I mentioned it, but I can't remember his name off the top of my head. But that was his kind of stance, and Wes Hough went along with that a little bit, because it was like, you know, that image of Christians being really mean, get that out of your head, we're not really mean, right?

We're really nice actually, and it's, if you guys who are really mean, but they never challenged the 21st century egalitarian standard, and the Bible's never going to meet that. You're never going to be able to convince someone who believes, you know, that women and men are equal in the home, let's say, that the Bible supports that, or the Bible, like, they're never going to buy that.

So you just, you're better off not reinforcing that standard. And this is something I think we can do when we should shift the conversation when these kinds of things come up, as much as we possibly can, because we're not going to apologize for what the Bible teaches, right?

But what we can do, I think, is we can kind of go on the offense, right? And the fact is, we actually live in somewhat of a horror show, and we're comfortable with our, you know, our lives we have here in the United States, but like, how many things do we engage in that just we're so used to, but they're actually evil?

Think about it for a minute. There's so many modern forms of slavery. There's civil slavery, there's debt bondage, there's generational welfare, which I think, in some ways, people who get on that, you can say there's differences, but people get trapped in these things.

There's pornography addiction, there's the prison system, there's outsourced sweatshop labor, and then we have all the issues of gender and sexuality, transing kids, I mean, literally cutting off certain body parts, right?

And family breakdown, the opioid crisis, we have open borders, the murder of children in the womb, euthanasia. The warfare that we engage in now is with machines. We can wipe out a whole village somewhere in the Middle East, and we don't even have to, there's no humanity.

We don't even have to send anyone. I mean, there's, it's crazy the kinds of things that exist now that even a hundred years ago, they would have looked at us, and they would have said, oh my goodness, that's a horror show.

We just think it's normal. We just, we're used to it, you know? It's somewhere in, it's somewhere in Africa that they're mining the cobalt or whatever it is for your phone. They're, and it's in our pockets, right?

And but we're so good, we don't have slavery anymore. Like, give me a break, right? So I think, this is maybe, I'm getting on my own hobby horse here a little bit, but I think this would be a good skill to develop is shifting the conversation.

So getting people to examine what they already know to be true. They already know a lot of these things are existing out there, but they don't think of them, that they're so used to it being reinforced that the Bible is evil, Christians are evil, they're the source of evil, or not, you know?

The most, the states that give the most per capita to charity are, you know, it's like Mississippi. It's like, it's not what you think. So anyway, I gotta hurry up here because we only have a little bit of time, and there's three more things I wanted to cover here, but number five, Jesus claims the moral high ground.

So from the outset, this is sometimes called assuming the middle, where, you know, you have the right position from the outset, and you assume that everyone should just agree with you, kind of. But in shifting the conversation, Jesus would do, like in Mark 2 again, we go back there, the scribes and the Pharisees challenge Jesus for eating with sinners and tax gatherers, okay?

They're the social outcasts, and that would be like today, he's eating with racists and misogynists and, you know, like terrible people by today's standards. Every youth group tells you that's a bunch of guys with tattoos and prostitutes, but are those really the social outcasts?

I see them making, their house is just burned in LA. They're not the ones that are, you know, it's the deplorables of society that everyone agrees those are bad people. So Jesus is eating with those kinds of people, and they challenge him on how can you associate, right?

But they're not looking at the reason he's associating with them. So he says, it is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.

Think about what he says there. They're sick, they need a physician. Whose responsibility was it to spiritually heal the people of Israel? Not Jesus. Well, I mean, in a cosmic sense, I suppose. It was the Pharisees.

They were the ones that were supposed to be doing this. Why aren't you, you're not helping them. They need help. I'm going to help them. He just exposed them. He claimed the moral high ground. They were saying, you're the one who's deplorable because you're associating with them.

And he's saying, I'm associating with them to help them. What are you doing? What a shift. He turned the tables completely on them. And I think we should use this tactic too. And one of the things that came to mind, this is a political example, but you remember when Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 shipped all these illegal migrants up to Martha's Vineyard?

That was shrewd because he was doing something similar because the accusation was you don't care about these people. But the people who were saying that weren't willing to take care of them in their own neighborhoods.

So he said, well, why don't we put that to the test? Now it's your turn. See if you're willing to take care of these people. And they weren't, of course. And so I just, it came to mind. There's probably other examples, but, you know, you could say the same thing I get about abortion or, you know, other things like Christians are trying to look for policy solutions.

Christians are trying to adopt children. Right. So the bottom line is that those who create Christianity tend to claim the moral high ground and we shouldn't let them do it. Number six, challenge unqualified authority.

This one's super easy. This one's like one of my dad's favorites, I think. You don't know what you're talking about, right? It's evolutionists, right? So Jesus does this in Matthew 12, the Pharisees tried to use the behavior of his own disciples against them.

They're picking grain on the Sabbath. So what does Jesus say to them? Well, yeah, they were picking grain on the Sabbath. And he gives some examples. He says, you realize that David ate the show bread that was reserved for the priests.

You realize that the priests themselves have to do priestly duties on the Sabbath, right? And then he points out that actually the purpose of the Sabbath is for man. Man doesn't exist for the Sabbath.

So the Sabbath is not a moral end in and of itself. So you guys are all wrong about the law. And so basically he says, you don't know what you're talking about. And this is the one thing that they were supposed to be good at.

Like you have one job. The Pharisees, you couldn't even do it. I think the key portion of the story for our purposes is what Jesus said in verse seven. But if you had known what this means, I desire compassion and not sacrifice, you would have not condemned the innocent.

So he's even saying they condemned the innocent. That puts them in the position, again, of being on the defense. So Jesus claimed that the Pharisees did not understand the law, even though they claimed to be experts in it.

Again, he says this later in John 4. He says, if you believe Moses, you would have believed me for what he wrote about me. So you don't even know Moses. You had one job. You weren't able to do it. There's something we can also, I think, apply to ourselves in our situations.