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NASB | Matthew 23:37 ¶ "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. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | Matthew 23:37 ¶ "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who murders the prophets and stones [to death] those [messengers] who are sent to her [by God]! How often I wanted to gather your children together [around Me], as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling. [Luke 13:34, 35] |
Subject: Matt. 23:37 Calvinism or Arminianism? |
Bible Note: Tim: You wrote: "I freely concede that it is possible that 'you would not' could refer to the Pharisees. Grammatically, it could also refer to the children. Contextually, it could also refer to everyone throughout history in Jerusalem who resisted God, as Calvin took it. Personally, I think that the later is more likely than the first two!" I personally hold, with regard to the latter, that Jesus is lumping the Pharisees not with every Jew who has resisted God's call, but rather with everyone who has silenced God's messengers. Abel, for example, was not a Jew nor the ancestor of the Jews, and yet the blood of Abel is on the head of the head of the Pharisees and all their kind (v. 35). What Jesus condemns in this verse is not their own rejection of the message but the shedding of righteous blood in order to shut God's people up, the attempted squelching of God's message. You wrote: "Let's go back to the time of Jesus. Was anyone actually prevented from hearing from or seeing Jesus? No!" Of course some were! As you menitoned in your posts, the Pharisees could not completely prevent the gospel from reaching the ears of their "children," but to say that they were completely ineffective in doing so would be just as wrong as saying the Chinese government doesn't prevent a large number of individuals from ever hearing about Jesus. "The pharisees were afraid of the crowds, which was why they were forced to sneak around and figure out a way to kill Jesus." That didn't stop them, however, from throwing people out of the synagogue, or threatening to do so for listening to Jesus. Not to mention the countless times that Jesus was openly challenged by the Pharisees in public, only to leave them stuttering and red-faced with anger. The gospel accounts indicate that the Pharisees were very openly opposed to Jesus and attempted to guard their flock from Him. This seems to be just what Jesus is referring to in verse 13: "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in" It is quite clear that one of the seven woes is the scribes and Pharisees not allowing their flock to be exposed to Jesus' teachings, and preventing them from following Him. "No matter the 'who' in 'you would not', God willed, but they resisted. :-)" ...which brings me to the other issue: is the will of Jesus in His humanity the same as the will of the Triune God in this case? That is the crux of my question from earlier today regarding Luke 22:42, where Jesus says, "Not My will, but Your will be done." In what I consider to be a parallel passage to Matthew 23:37, we find other interesting aspects of this situation revealed: "When He approached Jerusalem, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, 'If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will throw up a barricade against you, and surround you and hem you in on every side, and they will level you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.'" --Luke 19:41-44 Here again we see Jesus lamenting, even WEEPING, and addressing Jerusalem as a single entity rather than as a group of individual Jews. He expresses a wish that she had "known the things that made for peace." And the heart of his lament is that they are now HIDDEN from her eyes. For its continuous silencing all of the OT prophets testifying to the Messiah, and now the imminent silencing of the Messiah Himself, and the prophets Jesus Himself will send (Matthew 23:34), the city will face utter detruction. And Jesus weeps over it, but never affirms that all citizens of Jerusalem were "given a chance," nor denies that the gospel has been hidden from Jerusalem. Now, certainly there were believing Jews in first-century Jerusalem, just as there were believing Israelites among OT Israel upon whom God had pronounced judgment. That is why I hold that Jesus is lamenting the destruction of the covenant nation among whom He was born, and not telling all the Jews individually that they had been granted the moral ability to receive the gospel. --Joe! |