Intro to Matthew 22:15-22

 

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/9/2023 8:15 AM

 

Bible Reading & Meditation                                       Focus:   Intro to Matthew 22:15-22

 

Bible Reading & Meditation                                              Reference:  Matthew 22:15-22

 

            Message of the verses:  “15 Then the Pharisees went and plotted together how they might trap Him in what He said. 16 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. 17 “Tell us then, what do You think? Is it lawful to give a poll-tax to Caesar, or not?" 18 But Jesus perceived their malice, and said, "Why are you testing Me, you hypocrites? 19 “Show Me the coin used for the poll-tax." And they brought Him a denarius. 20 And He said to them, "Whose likeness and inscription is this?" 21 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." 22 And hearing this, they were amazed, and leaving Him, they went away.”

 

          We can see right off the bat that the subject in these verses is going to have taxes involved in it, but there is much more that we will see as we move through these verses.  Now we have been looking at three judgment parables that Jesus gives to the Jewish leaders, two in the last part of chapter 21, and then one more as we began looking at chapter twenty-two.  Jesus is in the last week of His life as in a couple of days He will be crucified which will take place on Friday.  The Jewish leaders are still upset at what He did to the Temple, which makes them hate the Lord more and want to kill Him even more. 

 

          Taxes are the thing that Jesus is to be asked about in this section, and it will be with the Pharisees and now a different group will come with them, a group who really don’t like each other but have a common goal of killing Jesus, this other group is the Herodians. 

 

          In this section we will understand what Jesus thinks about paying taxes, especially taxes being paid by the church as we will look into that while looking at this section too.  I was listening yesterday to the sermon that goes along with this section and MacArthur had much to say about churches paying taxes, and also the people who work at the churches in paying taxes.  MacArthur writes in this introduction:  “From time to time certain Christian groups raise an organized protest against a given tax or a particular use of tax money they feel is contrary to biblical principles and the construction.  An outcry was raised some years ago when the United States government ordered churches and other religious organizations to withhold Social Security taxes from the payrolls of all employees except pastors.  Some Christians vociferously argued that the law required the church to take money donated to the Lord’s work and use it to pay the government.

          “It is with the ever-present issue of paying taxes that Jesus deals in the present passage.

 

          I have to say that we will begin to dig into the rest of this introduction in our next SD.  My wife and I have some pretty interesting things gone on this week as on Friday we will celebrate fifty years of being married and our family is in the midst to having a fairly large party for us.  You see when we got married on 08-11-1973 there were only five people at our wedding.  My wife and I along with her parents and the Pastor.  Fifty years later we want more people to help us celebrate our marriage.

 

8/9/2023 8:40 AM