Kingdom Postponed; Judgment; What is Gehenna? Matthew 23:29-24:2

We are studying in Matthew in a passage where Jesus sayings are not designed to win friends and influence people. It is His last public message He is announcing through seven woes condemnation upon the religion of the Pharisees, and by extension that is a condemnation of all religions that reject the grace of God through the provision of God's Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ.

We have studied the first six woes and with this seventh woe Jesus is bringing these seven woes to a climactic conclusion. He is confronting the Pharisees with a history that has gone on for centuries among the Israelites, among the Jewish, people in rejecting the prophet the prophets in the Old Testament, of persecuting them and murdering them. He says in this section that all of the prophets predicted the Messiah would come, and all of these predictions were complete at this time, and yet there is still a continued rejection of Him as the one who fulfills these prophecies, at least as far as the first coming was concerned.

What He says to the Pharisees and this is that this rejection of Him by them also makes them culpable, responsible; in the same way their forefathers were responsible for the rejection of the prophets. They too share in that accountability and that rejection because they are rejecting Him as the Messiah.

That is clear from verse 35 when He says that on you, on that generation of religious leaders, may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth from Abel to Zechariah. The implications of that are profound. He is saying that that generation is responsible in some way, and to some degree, because they share in the history of rejection that preceded them.

Then Jesus foretells their future judgment: that He is going to send more prophets, wise men and scribes, and they too will be rejected, and they will be arrested, scourged, and some will be crucified. The implication is that those who reject those future messengers are also accountable and share in the responsibility for this.

We see that one sobering application of this is that whether a person is an unbeliever or a believer there still remains an accountability for how he responds to what is revealed in God's Word. When we reject it we stand in the path of those generations that rejected the prophets, and we stand in the same path as the religious leaders who shared in that responsibility and that rejection of the prophets; which emphasizes for us how important it is for us to learn the Word and to respond to the Word.

As we have seen in this last section that started at the beginning of chapter 21 Jesus is presented to Israel as her messianic King and He is rejected. He is publicly presented on what we call Palm Sunday and then He is rejected by the nation, by the national leadership that represents them, but not by all of the people. And then in this chapter we see that Jesus is rejecting the nation through these eight woes.

The reason there's a difference there is one textual problem. So everybody talks about seven woes, so there's 7+1 as I've explained the last two weeks. And the emphasis here is on the distinction between religion and Christianity. God hates religion. Religion is man doing the work: man going through ritual, morality, works, his own efforts, whatever he thinks of that he thinks will impress God. God will reject that because everything flows from the root of a corrupt sin nature, and if the root is corrupt the fruit is corrupt. No matter how morally or ethically good we are, no matter how sincere we are, it all flows out of a fallen nature. And unless that's corrected there is there is no hope.

God corrects that when we trust in Christ. Then we are given Christ's righteousness and we are given new life, we are born again, and that is all based on grace. That is what Christianity is: God doing all the work and man simply accepting it by faith.

This is what lies behind these 7+1 woes. The Pharisees are consistently described as hypocrites, and in context that is describing those who are claiming to have a path to God but they are rejecting it, they are preventing others from coming to Jesus as Messiah. He is offering the kingdom and even though they believe in the kingdom they are keeping them from coming to the kingdom.

So here we come to the seventh woe. This seventh woe is the climax, the pinnacle of these seven woes. Matthew 23:29 ^NASB "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous".

Now, as we saw in the previous woe that began in verse 27 He said: "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness."

There is an obvious transition from the fact that He is already talking about these tombstones to how they are treating these tombstones and monuments in the previous section. We talked about the whitewashed tombs. It was a standard practice at that time in second temple Judaism to whitewash the tombstone. So if there was a cave or there was a hollowed out area where they were buried in the back, then a stone was rolled over the front. That was whitewashed. If somebody was buried in the ground, that was whitewashed. It would warn those who were coming not to touch the ground because that was unclean ground, because it had been corrupted by the death that is there.

The reason that death always made a person unclean in the Old Testament didn't have anything to do with biology or germs or corruption or bacteria or anything like that, it was because death was the penalty for sin. It was a constant reminder of the corruption of the human condition because we are all fallen.

So they were simply whitewashing and covering up what was on the inside, and that is what Jesus is saying: that our very nature is like dead men's bones, unclean. And you can't you can't camouflage, you can't somehow cover it up by simply whitewashing, which is the procedure of religion—just cover up through ritual activity or through morality or through ethics or something of that nature.

And so Jesus builds on this image He has already come to and talks about them in terms of a current practice. This relates to two different groups. He talks about the tombs of the prophets and the graves of the righteous. And these tombs refer to, on the one hand, the burial grounds for prophets from the Old Testament, and then the righteous is a term to refer to religious leaders of the past. These groups have been combined before in Matthew.

We have seen them mentioned in Matthew 10:41, which talks about "He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophets reward", and "He who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward". This was a standard distinction at that time. It is used again in Matthew 13:17, "Many prophets and righteous men". These were two different words and they treated them differently. They were honoring them, they were building tombs for them that they would decorate and honor in a way that would that would indicate that they were glorifying their past.

The picture that I have associated with this verse is a picture of a cave where a number of ossuaries were found. An ossuary is a bone box. And by the first century what they were doing is when people were buried, after a year when the body decomposed and all that was left was the bones, in order to conserve space they would pull the bones together and put them in a bone box. Then they would decorate them with various designs. In fact, the high priest of this time, Caiaphas, was buried in a very highly decorated bone box, which was discovered archaeologically and is on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

So this funerary art was very common at this particular time, and they also would paint the walls of the of the tombs and write various poems and things of that nature in order to bring honor and glory to these particular righteous.

It also speaks of the tombs of the prophets. This was a tomb that was built during the time of the Maccabees was called the tomb of Zechariah, but that is not where Zechariah who is mentioned later in this in this passage is buried. It may be another Zechariah because there were quite a number of Zechariahs during the Old Testament and up to the up to the first century.

In Matthew 23:30 Jesus addresses the claim of the Pharisees. ^NASB "and say, ‘If we had been {living} in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in {shedding} the blood of the prophets.’"

They are saying this: "We wouldn't have done that. We would not have stoned them; we would not have rejected their message. We love God; we love His Word. We would not have participated in the persecution of God's prophets." And Jesus is going to completely refute this statement when He states it this way:

He says, "If"—and it doesn't mean that it is true; it just means you're assuming it's true for the sake of argument—"we had lived in the days of our fathers, this is what we would have done. We would have not been partakers of them in the blood of the prophets". That phrase, "blood of the prophets" is a metaphor, a figure speech for their death. So "we wouldn't have been participants in their death". And then Jesus rejects this clearly.

Matthew 23:31 ^NASB “So you testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets." He says, therefore you are witnesses. You claim that you wouldn't have done that but you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.

As you look at that you may say, well wait a minute, it seems like something's missing. It seems like I'm missing part of the argument. And that has to be provided and supplied from the context. We see a parallel to this in Luke.

Luke writes this: "Woe to you for you build the tombs of the prophets and your father's killed them. In fact, you bear witness that you approve the deeds of your fathers, for they indeed killed them and you build their tombs".

It seems like something is missing here. How is it that they are approving what their forefathers had done, because they're doing the same thing? Their forefathers rejected the prophets and their announcement of a coming kingdom, and a coming Messiah. These Pharisees have the coming kingdom being presented to them. They have the Messiah in their presence. They are doing the same thing. They are rejecting Jesus as Messiah and they are rejecting his kingdom. Their rejection of Him puts them in the path and in the flow of their forefathers who rejected the messengers of God.

We saw Jesus refer to this earlier in Matthew chapter 21. We studied a series of parables where Jesus was showing the indictment against the Pharisees after they questioned him about their authority. And in the second parable, which is the parable of the vineyard owner, He talks about this vineyard owner who has leased out his vineyard to sharecroppers who are raising the grapes. When vintage time came, he sent his servants—that is, the landowner who is who is God—to the sharecroppers that they might receive its fruit. They are there to get the profits from what is been made off of the grapes.

Matthew 21:35 ^NASB “The vine-growers took his slaves and beat one, and killed another, and stoned a third. [36] “Again he sent another group of slaves larger than the first; and they did the same thing to them." That means they beat them, killed them and stoned them. Then, last of all he sent his son, which of course is a reference to Jesus Christ. [37] “But afterward he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ [38] “But when the vine-growers saw the son, they said among themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and seize his inheritance.’[39] “They took him, and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him."

So Jesus clearly indicts the Pharisees. He points out that they are hypocrites and claiming that they would not have rejected the prophets, they would not have participated in the evil deeds of their forefathers, and Jesus says, "No that's exactly what you're doing by rejecting me and rejecting the message of the kingdom".

So then in the next passage He all but commands them to go ahead and kill Him. The way he states it is this way in 23:32 ^NASB "Fill up, then, the measure {of the guilt} of your fathers".

"Fill up then the measure of your fathers' guilt", and the term "fill up" basically means to bring it to completion. This process started centuries past with generation after generation that rejected the fathers' prophets, rejected the message of the coming Messiah, rejected the commands to repent and turn back to God, and He is saying, "Bring this to its logical conclusion", which means of course to kill him.

And then he says something in verse 33 that is really designed to gain their approval and to make up with them! He calls them serpents brood of vipers. "You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell?" This is always translated "hell" and this is a big problem.

First of all, he calls them serpents, and this term immediately takes us back to the first time we see a serpent in the Bible, in Genesis chapter three, when Satan indwells a serpent and sneaks up on Eve. He said: "Now what did God say about this fruit? Did God really say you shouldn't eat it? Did God really say you would die?" And she gets sucked into his line of argumentation. As a result, she looks the fruit and thinks it looks good, and if the serpent is right and the reason God doesn't want us to eat the fruit's will become like God, He is just jealous. Maybe I'll eat it and I'll be like God.

When she ate of the fruit sin enters into human history. But she is she's not the head of the race, so just enters into human history; it's not determinative for the fall of the race. That is Adam's responsibility as the head of the race. That's why the text talks about Jesus as the second Adam. It's the first Adam that eats of the fruit. When she entices him he eats it she offers it to him, He eats it and they are both then spiritually dead.

When God shows up to talk to them He concludes that part of the conversation with a series of announcements of the consequences or the judgment upon man. In Genesis 3:15 He says to the serpent that that there would be this conflict between his descendents, and the seed of the woman. He talks about the seed of the serpent versus the seed of the woman.

When Jesus takes this phrase, which He echoes from John the Baptist, He calls them serpents and then a brood of vipers. That's just the descendents of vipers. So it's the same idea built off of Genesis 3:15. He calls them the seed of Satan. That is always going to make your enemies feel good about you, especially religious enemies.

This goes back to Matthew 3:7. When we studied this at the very beginning of Jesus ministry when John the Baptist has come on the scene. Remember John the Baptist has so many people coming down to see what he's doing down on the Jordan. He is baptizing people but he's offering the kingdom, challenging them to repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Those who responded were baptized, and so as word got back to Jerusalem, the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem had to send out investigation team to see who this man was, is he a genuine prophet. Is he the Messiah, who is he, what's his message and so this is why they showed up, and when they showed up were told in verse seven: "But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, 'Brood of vipers'.

So John isn't really winsome when it comes to his approach to the religious leaders either. He says, "Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" Notice, wrath to come is not eternal wrath. It is temporal judgment; it is not eternal judgment.

This phrase "wrath to come" is used in first Thessalonians 1:10, where Paul says to the Thessalonians that they that "they are waiting for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come". That phrase "wrath to come" in the context of 1 Thessalonians isn't talking about eternal judgment in the lake of fire. It is talking about the future, eschatological judgment that comes on man, during that period known as the time of Jacob's trouble, the time of Daniel's 70th week, or we call it usually the Tribulation, that seven-year period that comes after the Rapture of the church.

It doesn't come immediately after the rapture, there is a transition there, it will begin when the Antichrist signs of peace treaty with Israel that will allow them also to rebuild the temple. But that's all part of the future and will get into that when we get into our study of the next two chapters that focus on that Tribulation period.

So Jesus is making the same kind of condemnation in verse 33. He says, "How can you escape the condemnation of hell?" Now this term that is translated hell is not a term for the lake of fire. It is often mistaken to be that way, and we I did one whole class on this on a recent Sunday morning. I'm just going to summarize it briefly in the next 10 minutes or so.

The English word hell comes from a Nordic term for a place where people went and were punished after they died. That really doesn't relate well at all to what the scriptural text says so when it's talking about the condemnation of hell we have two options. Option one is, this is referring to eternal condemnation in the lake of fire, which a lot of people teach. Option number two is that this refers to God's judgment in history, either on Israel or possibly even some other judgment, such as The tribulation.

We have to understand this terminology. The word hell translates the Greek word Gehenna, but Gehenna itself is borrowed or transliterated over from the Hebrew which is ge-hinnom. The word ge is the Hebrew word for valley, and the word hinnom is a person's name. It was the Valley of Hinnom, and it was located just to the south of the old city of Jerusalem. The Hinnom Valley had a significant role in the history of Israel. But it makes more sense if one were translating this not to call it hell, that's an interpretation. Just bring it over from the original and call it the Valley of Hinnom.

In this case Jesus would be saying that this is the condemnation of the Valley of Hinnom. What is the Valley of Hinnom? What would that condemnation be?

In the Old Testament this was a place where the Israelites sinned by committing child sacrifice and burning their sons and daughters in the fiery arms of an idol called Molech. This was a sacrifice of their children, the next generation. And we are told that this happened quite frequently. This is one of the reasons that God brought judgment on that generation and destroyed Jerusalem and the temple at the first destruction, which was in 586 BC.

2 Chronicles 28:3 Moreover, he burned incense in the valley of Ben-hinnom and burned his sons in fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD had driven out before the sons of Israel.

2 Chronicles 28 ^NASB "Moreover, he burned incense in the valley of Ben-hinnom and burned his sons in fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the LORD had driven out before the sons of Israel." They thought that this would placate the gods.

Jeremiah 7:31 ^NASB “They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, and it did not come into My mind." God is speaking here and He says which I did not command of this was the indictment against that generation and so for several generations.

There were Israelites kings and others who taught the people to sacrifice, to immolate their children on the arms of Molech. And this took place in the Valley of Hinnom, so it was indeed a bloodied ground, just a horrible scene. I cannot imagine, and neither can you, somebody who would take a child, an infant and burn them alive as a way to placate God. It's just unimaginable. Gehenna, then, became a place where God would then judge them for what they had done to their children.

For her sins of idolatry Judah was going to be punished in the very same place in this Valley of Hinnom. It would become a place of condemnation, and that condemnation was judgment for their sin. It wasn't an eternal judgment in the future; it was a judgment that occurred the first time in the Valley of Hinnom in 586 BC. And in Jeremiah 19:6 Jeremiah predicted that for punishment for their sins that very same Valley that had witnessed the death of their children would witness their death at the hands of foreign invaders, and that is where they would in turn be buried as they were slaughtered by the Babylonians in 586 BC.

Jeremiah 7:31, 32 ^NASB “They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, and it did not come into My mind. Therefore, behold, days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when it will no longer be called Topheth, or the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of the Slaughter; for they will bury in Topheth because there is no {other} place [no more room]."

That is the announcement they will be so slaughtered by the Babylonians that they will bury until there's no more room.

Jeremiah 19:6 ^NASB "therefore, behold, days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when this place will no longer be called Topheth or the valley of Ben-hinnom, but rather the valley of Slaughter." So twice that is prophesied.

In terms of our conclusion: Historically, the Valley of Hinnom was not used in the Old Testament as a reference to future eternal judgment in the lake of fire, but as a place of divine discipline, a place of divine judgment or condemnation on historical Israel in 586 BC. This was because of their spiritual failure, because of their spiritual idolatry, because of their rejection of the message of the prophets and God's plan of salvation. And so it became a symbol for spiritual failure, for condemnation and shame, and divine discipline in time and not in eternity.

Now this is used in the New Testament. In Matthew 5:22 ^NASB "But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, ‘You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty {enough to go} into the fiery hell [literally, the Valley of Hinnom]."

And then a few verses later, Matthew 5:30 ^NASB “If your right hand makes you stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; for it is better for you to lose one of the parts of your body, than for your whole body to go into hell [Valley of Hinnom].

Then when we look at this, the Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, is taken to be one of two things again. It's either eternal condemnation or its temporal judgment, and most people take it and interpret it as eternal condemnation. That's why it is translated "hell". They're saying this is because of if you commit this, you're in danger of hell.

Now the Arminians, that is, those who do not believe in eternal security, will come and say, See this is a passage where it says that even if you trust in Jesus, if you hate your brother you're going to lose your salvation and you're in danger of judgment in the lake of fire.

When I taught this a couple years ago back in her, maybe even three years ago back. There was a new member of the congregation who had been here maybe five or six weeks, and she actually she's not here this morning. She actually serves in the chaplain's office in jail and she really studied that lesson.

I got a call maybe five or six months later from David Dunn over at Grace Bible church who also works down at the jail. He said I have to tell you this story. It is that I was down there at the jail and they would get this guy who is an Arminian and is always coming up with these objections to eternal security. He came up to me the other day with Matthew 5:22 and said: "How can you believe in eternal security when this passage says that if you hate your brother you're going to go to hell?"

See, that's what it looks like. If you take the take Gehenna as eternal condemnation you're forced to go no eternal security. And David said before I could begin to answer, this chaplain assistant started taking him through the Old Testament passages on the Valley of Hinnom, explaining to him exactly what the Valley of Gehenna was used for, and what it signified, and then walked him into the New Testament and went through it. David said: "My mouth was hanging wide open".

Afterwards he said: "Where in the world did you learn that?" Of course, this is how David would have answered it, but not too many people are taught that. Well. She said: "I got from my pastor." He said, "Who is your pastor?" She said: "Well Robby Dean is my pastor." David said: "Well, of course. It makes perfect sense now!"

This is the issue, so if this describes the eternal judgment in the lake of fire then we have to throw out eternal security. There are sins Jesus didn't pay for. There are sins, God wasn't aware of in his omniscience, and that just doesn't fit with many passages of Scripture.

So what Jesus is talking about is, if you continue in certain sins then you run the risk of divine discipline in your life. And what He is going to say to the Pharisees is the same thing, and that is that you're risking divine judgment on the nation. That's what He saying in Matthew 23.

Matthew 10:28 is another passage: "Do not fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul but rather fear him is able to destroy both soul and body in hell", that is, in the Valley of Hinnom.

That is divine judgment in time. Fear the one who can bring you under divine discipline for your disobedience and rebellion. This is the same thing He saying in the parallel passage in Luke 12:5.

Now in our passage, when He refers back in verse 15 to the Pharisees as sons of the Valley of Hinnom, they are identified with that kind of judgment. They're bringing another form of idolatry into Israel that is just as destructive, and therefore He is saying that that He condemns the Pharisees, "because you are your recruiting these proselytes and they're going to be just as much a part of the condemnation as you are".

Then He comes to verse 33: “You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell [the condemnation of Gehenna]?"

That condemnation is looking forward to the destruction in 70 AD. The second time the temple is destroyed is for idolatry, just as the first time. But it's not a physical idolatry where there was worshiping idols of wood, stone and metal, it is a spiritual idolatry where there was worshiping their own false set of standards, their own religious ideas.

Now when study this one objection that comes out that people may ask is that there are places where the fire of Gehenna is said to be eternal. How do we understand that? That would seem like that would be the lake of fire. One place that we have this is in Isaiah 66:24 ^NASB "Then they will go forth and look On the corpses of the men Who have transgressed against Me. For their worm will not die [talking about the maggots which were continually feasting on the corpse] And their fire will not be quenched; And they will be an abhorrence to all mankind.”

But see, that's talking literally about these corpses, it is not talking about the lake of fire. That is just using that term to refer to something that goes on for a long period of time, because in the context those bodies are not going to be eternally consumed. The physical body is corrupt in the grave, so it can't be talking about eternal.

Jeremiah 17:4 says the same kind of thing, as well as in Jeremiah 21:12 where God says to Israel ^NASB "For you have kindled a fire in My anger Which will burn forever." But God is not still angry with Israel so that term "burn forever" is hyperbole. He did not burn in his anger against Israel forever and ever. that that judgment was culminated in 586 BC.

Jeremiah 21:12 ^NASB "O house of David, thus says the LORD: “Administer justice every morning; And deliver the {person} who has been robbed from the power of {his} oppressor, That My wrath may not go forth like fire And burn with none to extinguish {it,} Because of the evil of their deeds."

He's going to announce a judgment then on the house of David and He says, "and burns of the no one can quench it because of the evil of your doings". Well that had a temporal reference point, it does not always mean eternal; you have to look at the passage. So these passages are simply using a hyperbole to express the seriousness of the of the punishment.

So when Jesus speaks to the Pharisees and calls them brood of vipers, "how can you escape the condemnation of the Valley of Gehenna", He is talking about the same thing, a temporal judgment.

Matthew 23:34 ^NASB “Therefore, behold, I am sending you prophets and wise men and scribes; some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city". He is talking about what He will do. He, Jesus now is going to send representatives. This is a subtle claim for deity also, because previously He talks about how the prophets were sent by God. Now He is saying He will send prophets and wise men and scribes. So He takes upon Himself the deposition of deity, and the one sending them.

So he talks about this is prophecy of what will take place in the apostolic age. "Some of them you will kill and crucify that took place". Many of them took place in the agency of Saul of Tarsus, who became the apostle Paul. "Some of them you will scourge in your synagogues". Paul got some of that along the way where he talks about this in the second Corinthians, how he was scourged and how he was beaten and how he was left for dead. Also we know that he was persecuted by those in Jewish synagogues who followed him from city to city.

So this is fulfilled in the in the New Testament. We see a reference to this also in Acts 7:54-60 where the Jewish religious leaders stoned Stephen. Later there would be others who would be crucified.

Matthew 23:35 ^NASB "so that upon you [your generation] may fall {the guilt of} all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar."

Now Abel starts with A; Zechariah starts with Z, but Jesus isn't talking about everyone from A to Z. That is not how the Hebrew alphabet is organized. Jesus is talking about the very first death of a righteous person in the Old Testament in Genesis chapter 4 when Cain murdered Abel. The way the Hebrew Bible is organized, Second Chronicles is the last book in the section of the writings, not Malachi. So in the organization of the Hebrew Bible, the last person who is killed is Zechariah the son of Jehoiada. And then you say wait a minute. Jesus says this is Zechariah the son of Berechiah, so that that presents a problem. There is no certain solution to this problem, but there are two or three options that are very reasonable ways of explaining this.

This is most likely referring to what occurred in Second Chronicles 24:20. We are told there that the spirit of God came upon Zechariah the son of Jehoiada the priest. The word "son" can be descendent of, so it could be his grandfather, his great-grandfather, his great-great-grandfather. It doesn't have to be his immediate father. So his father could have been named Barakat.

These names are very, very, common. Just like recently there was a tomb that was discovered that had an ossuary that was 'Yeshua of the son of Josef". Of course the liberals are all leaping to the conclusion: "Jesus wasn't raised from the dead, we've got an ossuary here!" Well, Joseph and Jesus were extremely common names, like Bill or Mark or Tom in our culture. There were probably dozens of people who were named Jesus, whose father's name was Joseph, just as at the time of Zechariah there were probably many who were born to fathers who were named Berechiah.

But the connection in Second Chronicles is because this is during the reign of Joash and is to connect this prophet Zechariah to the high priest, Jehoiada who is responsible for a great revival during that particular time. That is why you would not go to the immediate father and we are told in verse 21: "So they conspired against him, and at the command of the king they stoned him with stones in the court of the house of the Lord." This is just another example of ongoing negative volition and it reminds us very much of what is going on throughout all of history, the rejection of God and His messenger.

Two things we need to note about this verse in Matthew. First of all, this is a pattern of rejection of God's prophets, and as such, Israel stands as a paradigm and as a representative of the entire human race, that no matter what the evidence or the rationale of the logical issues may be, rejection of God, rejection of His Word, rejection of the Messiah is not a rational issue. You can't argue somebody to faith in Christ by reason. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't use reason as a way of pointing out flaws in their reason or that belief in Jesus is rational but the ultimate problem isn't rational, the ultimate problem is spiritual.

This is what Paul says in Romans 1:18, 19 ^NASB "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them."

Romans chapter one says that there is the witness of the heavens that is more than enough to hold everybody accountable. But in addition to that every single human being is created in the image and likeness of God, knows that God exists, but is suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.

The second thing that we need to understand and learn from this passage is that at the time of Jesus the Old Testament canon was set. That's important because we know that that later books were not were not added. If you come from a Catholic background you know about the set of books called the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha was never accepted by Jews as part of the Old Testament Scripture. That would change the order of the books. The Apocrypha wasn't accepted officially by Christians until the Roman Catholic Church accepted it as part of the canon at the Council of Trent in the 1540s after the Protestant Reformation. It was part of their reaction to the Protestants. But this tells us that by the time of Jesus the canon was already set and accepted. It began with Genesis and ended with second Chronicles, just like the present canon of the of the Old Testament.

Matthew 23:36 ^NASB “Truly I say to you, all these things [that condemnation, that judgment of Hinnom] will come upon this generation".

You have rejected the Messiah; you are going to be judged for another. Some people take this generation to refer all Jews, and that's part of anti-Semitism. It is not talking about all the Jews; it is talking about this particular generation. Others have tried to extrapolate this to refer to all unbelievers. He is talking about what is happening then and it refers to what will occur in AD 70. But there are others who try to make this refer to many other things. We have to understand it in its historical literal context.

Jesus, looking over Jerusalem, said: Matthew 23:37 ^NASB “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling."

Two things we should note about this verse. Number One: The will of God is to save people; the will of God is to gather them under his wings. The will of God is to bring people into salvation, but He is not going to override human volition. This is the error present in Calvinism. It is a determinism that they hold to. Jesus said: "I wanted to do that". God's will is to gather them to save as many as He can. The problem is, individuals are not willing. Why? They're suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. And so the judgment is announced.

Matthew 23:38 ^NASB “Behold, your house is being left to you desolate!"

He says "your house" in here. This is a reference to the temple. Your house is left to you desolate. So this means that at this point, and actually since Matthew 12, the destiny, the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple will be set. He has set their house desolate, and so the armies of Titus of Rome came in and completely destroyed Jerusalem and burned the temple to the ground.

And then in Matthew 24:1 ^NASB "Jesus came out from the temple and was going away when His disciples came up to point out the temple buildings to Him".

As Jesus leaves are there any goes away from the temple, and He was going over to the Mount of Olives, His disciples are going to ask him a question. They question him about the buildings of the temple: "Is that what you're referring to, that the temple is what will be destroyed?" The temple is what will be abandoned literally. That's what that word means in the in the Greek: to be abandoned. That this is going to be abandoned and then Jesus' answer to that which will set up the next chapters.

Matthew 24:2 ^NASB "And He said to them, 'Do you not see all these things? Truly I say to you, not one stone here will be left upon another, which will not be torn down'.”

And if you go to Israel, you go to the temple mount. "You would come to the Western Wall Plaza, where Jews come to pray and what you have left here is these huge massive stones. These were part of the wall that surrounded the temple complex at the time of Herod. These were the stones that were pushed down at that at that time.

One man once asked me and said: "Well the Scripture says and not one stone will be left on another, but it looks to me like there all the stones left at the at the Western Wall that one on top of another doesn't seem like Scripture was fulfilled." But the question is the buildings of the temple. What you see with the Western Wall is simply a restraining wall that was built on the temple complex so that all of the weight from the buildings would not cause this to the land to spread out and you'd have a stable foundation. This is what Jesus is talking about. This is what is asked raise asked about the buildings not about the restraining wall, so this has nothing to do with the lack of fulfillment. What we see here is the remains of what happened in AD 70.

So to wrap this up, what we see here is the condemnation that is announced on that generation. And Jesus then finishes up in Matthew 23:39 ^NASB "For I say to you, from now on you will not see Me until you say, ‘BLESSED IS HE WHO COMES IN THE NAME OF THE LORD!’”

This is a quote from Psalm 118:26. When Jesus came into Jerusalem, when He was presented as the King on Palm Sunday, they were singing Psalm 118. They were singing, "Blessed is here comes the name of the Lord". Those were Jesus followers. Now He is saying until the nation as a whole and the religious leaders of Israel welcome him as the Messiah, He will not come. And so the focus at this point shifts to another coming, to a second coming, and that will be the topic of the next two verses—not the rapture but the second coming of Christ.

That's the question the disciples will ask: What are the signs of your coming and the end of the age, not the signs of the rapture.

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