SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/17/2023 9:21 AM
My Worship Time Focus: “The Analogy”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matt.
22:19-21a
Message of the verses: “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.’”
Jesus asked them to show Him the coin that was used
to pay the poll-tax, which they gladly did, thinking that He was going to help
them fall into their snare. Now I have
mentioned that the denarius, the coin used to pay the poll-tax was the common amount
that was used to pay a soldier and also was the common amount used for their
pay for one day.
MacArthur
explains: “Although several coinages,
including Greek and Hebrew; were used in Israel at the time, and exchanging
from one to the other was easy, only the Roman denarius could be used to pay
the poll-tax. It was a silver coin,
minted expressly by the emperor, who alone had the authority to issue coins in
silver or gold. All such coins,
including the denarius, bore an engraving of the emperor on one side and an
identifying inscription on the other.”
It
was how this coin was designed that made it very offensive to Jews for several
reasons, which I will explain. For one
thing it was the emperor’s picture that was a reminder of Roman oppression, and
for another reason, the Mosaic law specifically forbade the making of images as
seen in Exodus 20:4 “"You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any
likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water
under the earth.” MacArthur adds “In
modern Israel, certain extremely orthodox Jews strictly forbid the taking of
their photographs, because the resulting picture is considered a graven image.”
Perhaps
the coin that was given to Jesus was minted by Tiberius, and on one side of
that coin would be an engraving of his face, and then on the reverse side an
engraving of him sitting on his throne in priestly robes, with an inscription
designating him as the high priest, and so you can understand why this was
offensive to the Jews. Several emperors,
and this included Julius Caesar, had even accepted appellations of deity for
themselves, and therefore they demanded religious as well as political
homage. This is another thing that would
be offensive to the Jews, and for good reasons.
MacArthur adds “At the appearance of an unusual star in 17 B. C.,
Augustus Caesar had proclaimed a twelve-day celebration, at which the Roman
college of priests, of which he was chief, granted mass absolution from sin for
all the people of the empire. During
that same year coins were minted claiming Augustus as the Son of God. An the idea of a divine emperor was
inconceivably repulsive to Jews.”
I
suppose that most any child would have known the answer to the question that
Jesus asked them “Whose likeness and inscription is that?” Now remember these men were trying to do the
impossible, that is trick the second Person of the Godhead, they figured that
Jesus was now going to speak the fatal words against Tome, and so the men
eagerly replied, they may have even said in unison, Caesar’s. It was because Jesus had claimed to be the
Son of God that these men must have expected Him to denounce as a false god and
blasphemer the caesar whose likeness and inscription He was holding up before
them.
All
that I can say is that they were wrong, and we will talk more about that in our
next SD, Lord willing.
8/17/2023 9:49 AM
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