Luke 19:47-20:26
Dear RTB’ers,
The Lord is risen! He is risen, indeed! Hallelujah!!
The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy Him, but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on His words.
Luke 19:47b-48
The scribes and the chief priests sought to lay hands on Him at that very hour, … but they feared the people.
Luke 20:19
And they were not able in the presence of the people to catch Him in what He said, but marveling at His answer they became silent.
Luke 20:26
The chief priests and the scribes have one goal during that eventful Holy Week, to destroy Jesus. They ask Him questions, intentionally designed to make Him fail. But He outwits them each time. And even though they are marveling at His answer, they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge Him for who He is. Nearly a century ago another skeptic got fed up with all the Jesus nonsense that he was hearing and set out to disprove the Resurrection. As I recall, he used only “internal texts” (no outside sources) from that first Holy Week, essentially letting the gospels speak for themselves. In the end that skeptic, who wrote under the name of Frank Morison, not only could not disprove the Resurrection, but ended up embracing Jesus and His truth and came to be a believer himself. His search became a widely popular book, Who Moved the Stone?, originally published in 1930. This Easter morning I would encourage you to order that book or maybe check it out from the library, because without the Resurrection we Christians have nothing! One of my favorite verses (with my own paraphrase) from I Corinthians 15:17,19 is , “…if Jesus is not raised from the dead…, we are, of all people, the most to be pitied.” (See I Cor. 15:12-20.) But we do believe and it did happen!! Praise the Lord, this glorious Easter morning!!.
Blessings!
I’m just now doing readings from late last week and this week, so a late comment:
The verses Fred mentioned today show how much the temple leaders were concerned about what other people thought (Luke 19:48; 20:19). In addition, Luke 20:5,6 shows that they didn’t answer Jesus’s question because they were worried about how the crowds would react. (I wish I didn’t see myself so much in those comments…)
As Fred pointed out, they couldn’t bring themselves to acknowledge who Jesus was. Why? It seems they were blinded by self-interest, either afraid that people would not respect them or might even attack them. They were certainly jealous of the attention they gave his teaching.
Do you ever wonder what would have happened if they had thought less about themselves and supported Jesus as He taught the people and performed miracles?