Jesus laments over Jerusalem/Tributes to Caesar and to God/The Widow’s mite

“Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees!”

Jesus as Prophet did not spare the Scribes and the Pharisees of His time. He exposed their deeds and unmasked them before the very people who were the victims of these religious leaders. He did not give any message palatable to their taste. Jesus could not tolerate “Phariseeism”, while forgiving sinners. In the 23^rd chapter of Mathew, He rebuked them on their face, saying seven times, “Woe unto you!” He even called them, “Blind guides”, “Blind Pharisee”, “Whitewashed tombs” Hypocrites”, “Serpents, brood of vipers”.

The Scribes and the Pharisees had the misconception that they were upholding the Law of Moses. They in fact followed the Law of Moses in letter but not in spirit. They preached something, which they could not practice.

These days, there are modern Scribes and Pharisees in our churches. They preach what they do not practice. They bind heavy burden, hard to bear and lay on men’s shoulders but they themselves would not move them with one of their fingers. They quote the Bible verses and ask the parishioners to follow these commandments. They go on adding a list of dos’ and don’ts to the existing list of Old Testament commandments. But they will not help their parishioners in obeying the so-called commandments because they or their own children do not follow such commandments (Vs.4-5).

On Sundays, they long to make long sermons and love to preach, and not to intercede in their closets before God for their sheep. They do not allow others or the budding ministers to give sermons on Sundays. They make their debut only in the pulpits on Sundays and are missing either in their churches or in their houses the other days. They are thus not available to the parishioners who are in need of their prayers or counsels. They do not visit the houses of the poor parishioners nor do they visit the sick. They want their works to be seen by others. They wear special dresses on the dais or in the pulpit but in their secret life they do not practice righteousness and holiness. (Vs.5)

They love the best places on the dais or in the churches (Vs.6). They love greetings in public places and in churches and to be called with suffixes or affixes to their names (Vs.6-10). They do not want to serve their congregations but want to be served by their congregations by tithes and offerings. He who is greatest among you shall be your servant (Vs.11).

They shut up the kingdom of heaven against men. They neither go nor do they allow others to enter to go in. By falsifying the truth of the Bible, they present another gospel to the people. They preach that there is neither hell nor the Devil. They justify divorce and adultery. They do not condemn sin. They question the authenticity of the Bible and its translation (Vs.13).

For pretence, they make long prayers in prayer meetings and in churches. But they oppress the weak people and covet their money. If a single soul is converted, they make his new life in Christ miserable by binding a heavy burden on his shoulder (Vs.14-15).

They are hypocrites, as their inner life does not reveal their so-called righteousness and holiness, which they pretend to possess. They demand and prefer outward sanctification to inward sanctification (Vs.26-27).

They condemn and persecute the true and humble servants of God who do not dance to their tune (Vs.34-35).

When we meditate on the passion of Christ, let us decide today to raise our voice against the modern Scribes and Pharisees in our churches, and to unmask them. If we allow them to practice Phariseeism, we would be partakers of their sin.

Jesus laments over Jerusalem

After exposing the Scribes and the Pharisees, Jesus lamented over Jerusalem. He saw the city and wept over it (Matt.23: 37-39 & Luke 19:41-44).

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!

Behold, your house is left unto you desolate….”

As on today, the same Jerusalem in the land of Israel is still left desolate because they had known the time of the visitation of their Messiah, which was hidden from their eyes. They did not know the things that made for their peace. Even now also, these things are hidden from their eyes. Till this day, they have not accepted Jesus as their Savior. Owing to the afflictions of their enemies, who surround them, they have no peace today. Peace is eluding them. What a pity!

The armies of Titus destroyed the temple built by Solomon in A.D. 70, in fulfillment of the prophecy of Jesus in Matt.24: 2. Not one stone was left there upon another. The temple of Jerusalem was thus razed to the ground. If the people of Jerusalem had taken the lamentation of Jesus seriously and repented of their sin, their city would have been preserved even today.

If today the Jews of the physical Israel accept Jesus and say, “Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord”, the Lord will change the course of history, and will give them peace in place of war.

Now let us leave aside the physical Jerusalem. We, the members of His body, do constitute the spiritual Jerusalem. We are the children of the promise. Today as you read this message, Jesus weeps over our Jerusalem. The Church, which is ordained of God as “the light of the world”, is not shining brightly and steadily but flickeringly. If the Church, the salt of the earth, loses its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out and to be trodden under foot of men (Matt.5: 13-14).

The Church of today is a divided house and has backslidden. It is laden with lukewarmness, worldliness, prayerlessness, unfaithfulness, heresy, rivalry, hatred, etc. To rub salt into the injury, the false prophets and false teachers are throttling the Church from within. Though it has a name that it lives, it is indeed dead (Rev.3: 1).

Is Christ divided? (I Cor.1: 13). No, Christ, the Head of the Christ is not divided. But, the Church, the body of Christ is divided by man – divided mainly on account of some doctrines, some of which are but minor. “There is one body, and one Spirit….” (Eph.4: 4). “By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body…” (I Cor.12: 13). God is not to blame for the division of the Church because He has never intended any such division.

Those belonging to one denominational church look down upon or even hate those belonging to another denominational church. “He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now”. Darkness hath blinded his eyes (I Jn.2: 9-11). “He that loveth not his brother abideth in death” (I Jn.3: 14). Nobody can claim salvation through the Blood of Jesus if he hates his brother and thus abides in death. Whosoever hates his brother is a murderer and no murderer has eternal life abiding in him (I Jn.3: 15). The disciples of Christ Jesus write or preach in a derogatory manner against one another, thereby persecuting the very body of Christ, of which they are themselves, members. “For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Church: For we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones” (Eph.5: 29-30). The Church has thus become a divided house.

Oh, how Jesus wants to gather our spiritual children in His body together as a hen gathers her chickens, under her wings! The demons of drugs and alcohol, divorce and adultery, homosexuality, abortion, lustful pleasures are spreading their tentacles on our spiritual children. The Lord wants to keep them under His wings. Let us confess our sins and iniquities, repent of our backslidings, humble ourselves before the glory of His Cross and turn to God so that God may not send His armies of Babylonians to destroy our spiritual children in the body of Christ. Dear ministers of God, this is a wake-up call for you to fast and pray.

O Jerusalem, do not persecute the prophets that the Lord sends to your churches! In many churches, the pastors stone these prophets who are appointed in the second place in the body of Christ by God. These prophets give warning and prophetic messages to the churches. Let us accept them in our churches and heed to their messages. They function like the white corpuscles in the body of Christ. When some foreign bodies (false prophets/false teachers) enter the body of Christ, these prophets fight the false prophets with the two-edged Sword of the Spirit. They are inbuilt members of the body of Christ. When a human body is short of white corpuscles, it becomes prone to deadly diseases like AIDS.

Tributes to Caesar and to God

When Jesus shut the mouths of the chief priests and the scribes by answering their questions out of His wisdom, they that very hour sought to lay hands on Him but they feared the people for they knew He had spoken the parables against them. Then they sent spies who pretended to be righteous, that they might seize on His words, in order to deliver Him to the power and the authority of the governor (Luke 20:19-26). After eulogizing Jesus, they asked Him whether it was lawful for them to give tribute to Caesar or not. But Jesus perceived their craftiness and asked them to show Him a denarius. He then asked them to tell whose image and inscription it had. When they said, “Caesar’s”, He told them, “Render, therefore, unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s. With this answer, they were silenced.

Jesus marked the line of demarcation between the things of the king and the things of God. In our life, we are not very clear in mind about our duty to our nation and about our duty to God in the matter of payment of tributes. We blur the line of demarcation drawn by Jesus Himself.

As the law-abiding citizens, we have to pay our taxes to the governmental authorities. The account books of churches or Christian organizations should be transparent. It should not be fudged. But, at the same time, we should pay what is due to the Church. We pay to the governmental authorities out of fear. In case of default, the law will catch us. So, we pay our tributes to the government. But we falter to give to God when we receive appeals from churches or mission fields seeking financial support. Churches or mission fields have no sanction of law for enforcing payment of tributes to them. Under the New Covenant, the Holy Spirit exhorts us to pay our free-will offerings cheerfully and not grudgingly.

In the same manner we pay tributes to the Government, we have to pay tributes to God, but with a cheerful heart. Churches and Christian organizations need resources for proclaiming the glorious gospel. They cannot look to the millionaires of this world for financial support. Only the people of God have to give to God liberally and cheerfully. As we give to God’s ministers, we should not treat them as mendicants with begging bowls. They are the servants of the Most High. As per Heb.6: 10, God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love which you show toward His Name in that you minister to the saints. It is indeed a ministry to the saints. By ministering to them, you are showing your love toward God.

In this regard, I would like to testify to a dear servant of God in Nilgris, India who is not popular in the Christian world. My early days of Christian life were influenced by the life of this dear servant of God. Every year he visits the Himalayan countries at the risk of his life for preaching the glorious gospel, carrying and smuggling heavy bundles of Gospel literature into these countries where propagation of the gospel is prohibited. Many years ago, this dear servant of God after finishing his evangelical work in the Himalayan countries was on his way to the South India via Delhi. His train stopped at Delhi. At that time, the Holy Spirit led me to call on him in the Railway Station. Immediately, I went to the Railway Station and ministered to him by giving him some money. When I offered him money, he told me that since he had no money left with him, he had decided to travel in the train without taking any food, and to tell God “If it is Thy will that I should go hungry, I will do so”. For a number of years, he has been publishing a Tamil Monthly, which contains messages giving an account of his experiences in the evangelical field, similar to the Acts of Apostles. He has never bothered to build or establish his own magazine ministry, because he treats his magazine ministry only as a means to the Kingdom of God.

The widow’s mite

Many people asked me whether they could pay tithes under the New Testament. I told them that they could pay more than tithes and that since there was no Levitical priesthood under the New Covenant, they could pay free-will offerings with a cheerful heart to the ministers of God who preach the gospel as well as to the poor saints in their midst. We are under the covenant of grace and not under the Old Covenant. The incident of the poor widow giving her two mites as recorded in the Luke's gospel is the best ensample for us to emulate.

In Jerusalem, Jesus looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury and He saw also a certain poor widow putting in two mites. Jesus said that truly this poor widow put in more than all (Luke 21:1-4). When others put in their offerings for God out of their abundance, this poor widow put in the entire livelihood she had out of her penury.

Here is a poor widow who put in what she had with her. She had no more savings to fend for herself, having dropped her two mites into the treasury. Her name is not mentioned here. The Bible calls her “a certain poor widow”.

Let us note that this poor widow lived under the old dispensation of the Law of Moses. Christ had not yet died for her. The Holy Spirit was not given to her at that time. But still she loved the God under the old Covenant. Nor did she have the wonderful promises of reward or blessings in return for her two mites. She did not have any expectation of reward for her sacrificial offering. She left the place after dropping her two mites. We do not know where she had gone or how she lived the rest of her life.

The Bible also does not tell us how she was induced to make this great sacrifice. When I was a small boy, I had seen a picture of this poor widow with a baby in her hands, though the Bible does not specifically say so. If she had a baby in her widowhood, what made her give all she had to God without caring for her baby? Did she love God more than her baby under the Old Covenant? Dear reader, it is for you to answer.

What a surprise! A poor widow comes near the treasury and drops all her coins and then disappears and that too, without being watched by the priests of the temple! These days, when we give a few dollars to some servant of God, we go about telling the whole world.

It was only Jesus Who had seen the poor widow throw her two mites into the offertory. As we give to God secretly, the eyes of Jesus are on us. Let us give to God without expecting any reward from Him. Let us not heed the preachers of the so-called prosperity gospel. Let us imbibe the poor widow. Let us also be anonymous as “a certain poor widow”.

Let us examine ourselves today. Are we better than the poor widow? How much we have to give to God under the New Covenant now that Christ has died for us and that we have received the Holy Spirit?

(Job Anbalagan)