Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Jesus had just preached a pre-funeral sermon in Matt.

23.

Judaism, as a religion representing the will of God in the world, was about to die, and Jesus was giving it the last rights, but it was not a very pleasant experience.

Funerals, of course, never are, but pastors unusually try to find some good word to say of the deceased.

When Calamity Jane died at 51, but looking like 70 because of her wild life of prostitution and drunkenness, Dr. C. B. Clark, the Methodist pastor who preached the service, concentrated on the small pox plague of 1878.

Jane, though a prostitute, bought drugs with her own money, and she nursed the sick back to health.

The man who lowered her coffin into the grave was C. H. Robinson, who was nursed back to health by Jane.

She lived an awful life, but there was that one redeeming time of selfless caring, and that was the focus at her funeral.

Jesus was not so kind in His pre-funeral sermon on the Jewish leaders of His day.

Matt.

23 is a sermon of 7 woes in which Jesus does not just blast them with both barrels, but with a gattling gun of condemnation.

We don't want to immerse ourselves in this river of verbal blood-letting, but we need to wade into it a little to get a feel for the context.

Jesus left the temple is the way chapter 24 begins, but you have to look back to chapter 23 to see that it was the last time he would set foot in the temple.

He was not just leaving the temple, but he was forsaking it.

He was leaving it behind as a place no longer to be the house of God.

In fact, He says in 23:38, "Look, your house is left to you desolate."

It's your house now, said Jesus, and no longer is it what Jesus called it in 23:13, "My house will be called a house of prayer."

What was God's house was now their house, for the rightful owner was walking away, and leaving it empty of the presence of God.

It was their house now, and they could do as they please, for God was gone.

His efforts to reform the Jewish leaders had failed.

They refused to repent, and so Jesus lays on them the heaviest prophecy in all the Bible.

It was a weight so heavy that there is none to compare.

To compare the burden that was going to come on them with any other would be like comparing the Rock of Gibraltar to a pebble.

Listen to these words of Jesus in Matt.

23:35-36.

"And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berakiah, whom your murdered between the temple and the altar.

I tell you the truth, all this will come upon this generation."

Why was Jesus picking on that generation to suffer the wrath of God for all the murder of just men from the first to the latest?

That sounds unfair to hold them accountable for the whole history of unjust murder.

What we see here is the principle that the more light people have, the greater the accountability.

They were the only generation in history who had the light of the world in their very midst, and yet they refused to see.

Others had some excuse, for they did not see clearly the light of God's will.

They had some basis for their folly and rationalizing their actions, but not this generation.

They had the light shining full force in their eyes, and still they refused to see.

Such flagrant rejection of the truth led them to top off the sins of all history by the ultimate sin of killing their own Messiah-the Son of God.

That was the last straw, and so upon that generation God was going to pour out His wrath.

Having prophesied such doom on Israel, Jesus walks out of the temple never to return.

It was their house now and not His, and it would become their tomb as well in 70A.D.

The Jewish leaders just dismissed all this as the ravings of a mad man.

It was preposterous to think such a judgment would fall on them.

They looked on Jesus as if He were a chicken little yelling that sky was falling.

It was hard to believe, and so we see that even His disciples tried to get Him to cool off and modify His radical words of judgment.

This, after all, was the temple.

It was the place of God's dwelling, and the pride of all Israel.

They tried to get Jesus to reexamine His strong language in the light of the beauty of the temple.

In Mark 13:1, the parallel passage to Matthew, one of the disciples said, "Master, behold what manner of stones and what manner of buildings."

Luke 21:5 is Dr. Luke's parallel passage, and he has some of them speaking of how it was adorned with goodly stones and offerings.

Some of the disciples may have never been to the big city, and they could be seeing the temple for the first time.

They were deeply impressed by it.

The Jewish Talmud said, "He that never saw the temple of Herod, never saw a fine building."

It was started in 20 B. C., and was not completed until 64 A. D., only 6 years before it was destroyed.

It was a marvelous piece of architecture made of white marble and much gold.

It was surrounded by great porches with solid marble pillars 37 and one half feet high, and so thick that it took three men with arms linked to reach around them.

Some of the cornerstones have been found, and they weigh more than 100 tons.

It was like the Rock of Gibraltar, and so awesome that the disciples, by their admiration, questioned the wisdom of Jesus in abandoning the temple.

They were so impressed, but Jesus was not impressed with anything that did not promote the will of God, and so He pours water on their enthusiasm.

He says in verse 2 that this whole impressive structure will be so totally demolished that there will not be one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.

This stone masterpiece will be a stone dump, and its destruction will be as awesome as its construction.

They were trying to get Jesus to be a more positive thinker.

Maybe something can be worked out, and the temple can be saved for the glory of God.

These guys would have joined a save the temple campaign in a moment.

It was the essence of their heritage as Jews.

It was to them what Washington D. C. is to us.

To talk about the total destruction of the temple was like telling us Washington D. C. will be wiped off the map.

But that is the center of our heritage, and the American way of life.

You can't destroy that!

And that is how the disciples felt about the temple.

Jesus is not pleased with this disastrous elimination Himself, but He had done all He could to prevent it.

That was His lament in 23:37, "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing."

You could only be a positive thinker so long in a setting of persistent rejection.

There comes a point where the only alternative left is judgment, and that is where Jesus is.

Jesus is saying that, yes it is a great building, but great will be the fall of it as well.

The disciples were impressed at the massive physical stones, but even these do not provide security from judgment.

There is only one Stone that can give that security, and that is the very Stone Israel was rejecting-namely Jesus.

Jesus told the chief priests and the Pharisees a parable about the tenants who would not pay the landowner his rent.

He sent servants and they beat them.

He sent his son and they killed him, and so he had to come in judgment on them.

Then in the context Jesus says in Matt.

21:42, "Have you never read in the Scriptures: The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone."

Peter before the Sanhedrin in Acts 4:11 says of Jesus, "He is the stone you builders rejected which has become the cornerstone."

Peter in his first Epistle makes a major point of Jesus being the Stone-the solid rock on which we stand.

In 1:4 he writes, "As you come to Him the living stone-rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to Him." Then Peter goes on to make clear that Jesus is the cornerstone of a new temple, and that Christians are now the new priesthood in this temple.

In 2:5-6 he writes, "You also like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

For in Scripture it says: "See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in Him will never be put to shame."

The point of all this is, the physical temple was to be destroyed, but God would still have His temple.

It would be a living temple, not of stones, but of people.

Jesus is more impressed with people than with stones.

These dead stones would be replaced by living stones, and he would be the cornerstone of this greater structure yet, and He will be a stone that will never fall and never perish.

You can build on Him for eternity.

This prophecy of not one stone being left upon another was literally fulfilled in 70 A. D., but Jesus did not wait until then to build His new temple.

On Easter morning, when Jesus rose from the dead, the new temple rose as well.

It took decades to build this temple of stone, but it only took three days to build the temple that would be forever.

It was one of the most offensive things Jesus ever said when He said, "I can destroy the temple of God and rebuild it in three days."

This was the major charge against Him before the Sanhedrin.

It got Stephen, the first Christian martyr, killed as well, for the charge against him before the Sanhedrin, we see in Acts 6:14, was that he taught that Jesus would destroy the temple.

This sort of thing really angered the Jewish leaders, and we hear people just passing by when Jesus was on the cross and they were hurling insults at Him, and Matt.

27:40 says they were saying, "You who were going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself!

Come down from the cross!"

It was the biggest joke in Israel that a man would claim He could destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days.

But each of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John record this, and John gives it in greatest detail in John 2:18-21."

Then the Jews demanded of Him, what miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?