How terrible for you, teachers of the Law and Pharisees! You hypocrites! You make fine tombs for the prophets and decorate the monuments of those who lived good lives; and you claim that if you had lived during the time of your ancestors, you would not have done what they did and killed the prophets. So you actually admit that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets! Go on, then, and finish up what your ancestors started! You snakes and children of snakes! How do you expect to escape from being condemned to hell? And so I tell you that I will send you prophets and wise men and teachers; you will kill some of them, crucify others, and whip others in the synagogues and chase them from town to town. As a result, the punishment for the murder of all innocent people will fall on you, from the murder of innocent Abel to the murder of Zechariah son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the Temple and the altar. I tell you indeed: the punishment for all these murders will fall on the people of this day!
This is one of those passages that begs us to remember who Jesus is: God, Creator of all things. In this passage where Jesus continues to pronounce woes upon the religious elite and hypocrites, He implies something that must be true, but perhaps we wish wasn't.
Jesus is looking at the hearts of these religious leaders and comparing them to the hearts of religious leaders in the past who defied and rebelled against God and murdered His prophets. The current religious leaders, evidently, stated that they would never have dones such a thing, but Jesus corrects them saying that they certainly would have. Jesus, the judge of hearts, says that the hearts of those murderers in the past and the religious hypocrites of His own day were exactly the same.
It is one thing to say that all of these religious hypocrites have the same bad hearts, but Jesus takes it yet a step further. He declares that since they have the same hearts, they will have the same punishment -those who committed the murder and those who have committed no murder but have the same hypocritical hearts.
We tend to think that we will ultimately be judged on what we did or did not do -that we will be judged according to our deeds and actions. Jesus reminds us that our deeds are a result of our beliefs -not our head knowledge, rather, our heart-beliefs. The heart is central.
This brings us back to where Jesus began this bigger section of Scripture. He bluntly stated that the greatest commandment was to love God with all of our hearts, souls and minds, and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. And He said that all of the laws and the teachings of the prophets were fulfilled by keeping these two commandments. If we could learn to love God with all of our hearts, everything else would fall in line. On the other hand, even if we never actually did anything wrong but failed to love God, we would have missed the entire point of life.
Please, Lord Jesus, continue to teach me to love You with all of my heart. Guard my heart. Seal my heart. Let my heart be Your home.
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