The Final Days of Jesus – Tuesday: Story and Verses Part 3 of 8

"Final Days of Jesus" Reflections | Tuesday

Three recent posts on our website that share some introductions, details, verses, and songs related to this week are:

Holy Week Will Be Here Soon Worcester, Massachusetts

The Final Days of Jesus – Palm Sunday
The Final Days of Jesus – Monday

Also, the publishing group Crossway has not only released the book, The Final Days of Jesus: The Most Important Week of the Most Important Person Who Ever Lived , they have produced a thorough collection of beautiful images and thoughtful videos to help reflect on what was going in Jesus' life during this crucial week in history. The following posts will feature the manuscripts for each video they produced in correspondence with each day of Holy Week. Enjoy.

The Final Days of Jesus | Day 3: Tuesday

The Lesson from the Fig Tree

Matthew 21:20-22 | Mark 11:20-26

Jesus Teaches in the Temple

Matthew 21:23 – 23:39 | Mark 11:27 – 12:44  | Luke 20:1– 21:4

Jesus Predicts the Future

Matthew 24 – 25 | Mark 13:1-37 | Luke 21:5-36

You'll remember that on Palm Sunday, Jesus had made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and then on Monday he made quite the scene, declaring the temple to be – not a house of prayer as it was intended – but rather a den of thieves. 

All of this combined to put Jesus on an inevitable collision course with the Jewish authorities. And he spends all of Tuesday interacting with them, meeting their objections, and raising questions of his own. 

But what exactly made the Jewish leaders so mad?

What exactly were their objections against Jesus? 

Why precisely was he viewed as such a threat?

And at this point in time, before Calvary, what were their options and what was their strategy?

Jesus Becomes a Greater Threat to the Jewish Leaders

At every moment during Passion week, the leaders were watching Jesus. They were watching him in order to show him to be wrong. 

To the Pharisees, Jesus was still the kid from Nazareth, who was to them still a young man. And here is this young man making these absolute claims and he had never been trained. So Jesus was an uneducated Jewish upstart kid who threatened everything that they knew. 

Jesus Answers the Jewish Leaders Unanswerable Questions

When Jesus engineered the house cleaning of the temple, the decommercializion of the temple on Monday, this, of course, was hailed by his Passover pilgrim followers and others. They thought that it was great that he had broken the monopoly for at least one morning or afternoon.  

Now this put the authorities in something of a panic. They somehow have to drive a wedge between Jesus and his followers. Because now they really want to get rid of this troublemaker, now also for economic reasons. 

So they're trying to get Jesus to "mispeak" himself. The questions are baited. They can't be answered really. They're just like the old, "Can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it himself?" They're unanswerable, self-defeating questions. And yet, it turns out Jesus answers every one of them correctly.

Jesus Marked to Be Arrested

The Jews had this semi-autonomous status with regard to their internal and political affairs. So as long as things were calm and peaceful, the Romans allowed the Jews a certain amount of autonomy. 

But at the same time, the Jewish leaders are beginning to feel that there's something that ought to be done in order for things not to spin out of control with regard to the Roman overlords.

Their entire goal was to find a way to arrest Jesus by stealth. That's why they then had to turn to Judas. 

Next post: The Final Days of Jesus – Wednesday: Story and Verses Part 4 of 8

    

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