SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/11/2024 9:49 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2 “The
Preparation of Hateful Rejection”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
26:3-5
Message of the verses: “3 Then the chief
priests and the elders of the people were gathered together in the court of the
high priest, named Caiaphas; 4 and they
plotted together to seize Jesus by stealth and kill Him. 5 But they were
saying, "Not during the festival, otherwise a riot might occur among the
people.’”
In the last SD I ended up talking about Caiaphas,
and now today I want to continue talking about Caiaphas. Caiaphas was the epitome of the corrupt
religious system that now dominated Israel.
Now you may remember looking at the pieces of the furniture that was in
the Temple, first in the Tabernacle, and it was divided into two parts, the holy
place and the Holy of Holies. In the
Holy of Holies was the Ark of the Covenant and the High Priest would go there
once a year to put blood on it for the past sins of Israel for a year. Now as wicked as Caiaphas was, he alone could
enter the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement and offer the sacrifice. He supervised all the priestly functions in
the Temple and profited from the merchandising there that had so incensed Jesus
that Jesus two times drove out the money changers and sellers of sacrificial
animals as first seen in John 2:14-16 at the beginning of His public ministry,
and then in Matthew 21:12-13 at the end of public His ministry.
In
the verses we are now looking we learn that the Sanhedrin had assembled in
Caiaphas’s house for one purpose and that was to plot how they could seize
Jesus. They wanted to do it so that no
one would know about it, by stealth. By
doing this they would not get the crowd upset, but little did they realize that
after Jesus came riding into Jerusalem on Psalm Sunday that many of the crowd
were upset with Him because they were looking for the Messiah that would get
them out from under the oppression of Rome.
I am not saying that Jesus was not popular, for He surely was, and this
was who these Jewish leaders did it by stealth.
MacArthur writes “Apparently they planned to arrest Him as soon as
possible before He had opportunity to escape or amass further support among the
people. He would then be held in custody
until the Passover crowds had left Jerusalem, making it safer to put Him to
death, perhaps also in secret. Therefore
they were saying, ‘Not during the festival.’”
During the Passover feasts Jerusalem would grow very
large in population as people came to celebrate the Passover there. People were to go to Jerusalem a number of
times a year as the Law stated. Now
according to Josephus, some 256,500 sacrificial lambs were slain during a
typical Passover, and if there were that many lambs offered then there must
have been a great number of people there to partake of the Passover as no fewer
than ten people were to eat of one lamb, the number of celebrants could have
then exceeded two million. Now many of
the worshipers would have been from Galilee and other places where Jesus had
already ministered and gained great popularity for His powerful preaching and
miracle working. MacArthur adds “And a
large number of those admirers admires doubtlessly were among the multitudes
who, only a few days earlier, had strewn garments and palm branches on the road
before Jesus and acclaimed Him with shouts of ‘Hosanna to the Son of David;
blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord’ (Matt. 21:9).”
Now
as we look at this from the standpoint of the Jewish leaders who wanted Jesus
dead this was probably the worst time for it to happen. What they feared was a riot might occur among
the people.
Now
here is something that these Jewish leaders missed in the much study that they
had been doing of the Old Testament, and that all of what was about to happen
was a fulfillment of Old Testament Prophecy.
I have mentioned that in the Old Testament there were prophecies about
the Messiah coming in great power, but there were also prophecies about the Messiah
coming to die. Look at Psalm 22, and
Isaiah 52b-53 and this can be seen. I
suppose that it was human nature for these people to want the powerful Messiah
to come, but first the humble suffering Messiah had to come in order to pay for
the sins of the world, and that was what Jesus was about to do, and even though
these Jewish leaders wanted to kill Him by stealth Jesus was in complete
control of when He would die and prophecy stated He had to die when the
Passover Lambs were slain because He was the ultimate Passover Lamb.
4/11/2024 10:21 AM
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