Heads Up

We must not think that Jesus (Mt.21.18-27), was simply angry at the tree and struck out against it like a child might throw down a cell phone and break it just because he can’t make it work. Jesus was not being petulant. He was teaching an important lesson with two points. First, the religion of…

We come now to Jesus’ final break with Judaism, and we should be aware by now of how it is unfolding. We have read about the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem by which the Lord presented Himself as Israel’s true King, knowing that He would be rejected by both the leaders and the masses…

“And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple and he healed them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the son of David!” they were indignant … Jesus said to them, …have you…

When Jesus drove the money changers (Mt.21.12-17) and those who were selling animals for sacrifice from the Court of the Gentiles, He justified His action by a comparison of two Old Testament phrases. In the first, Isaiah referred to the temple as a “house of prayer” (Isaiah 56.7). In the second, Jeremiah says that the…

The twenty-first chapter of Matthew marks the beginning of the end of Jesus’ ministry, though we are only two-thirds of the way through the Gospel at this point. Matthew 21 marks this beginning because it records the events leading to Jesus’ final break with Judaism. We looked at one of these events in the last…

“And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!’ And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, ‘Who is this?’ And the crowds said, ‘This is…