Matthew 22:33-36
Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers' guilt. Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell? Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes: some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.
Of Bursting Bags and Guilt by Association
In our text for tonight there is most definitely I think, a spirit of Pharisaism that Jesus is judging here. He is not happy!
Most frighteningly though is the fact that Jesus joins the Pharisees of His day to a spiritual genealogy of both judgement and persecution. The association is so complete in His eyes that He calls them the murderers of prophets from another age and of Zecheriah in particular. Physically of course they were not even born then but spiritually, their present spiritual DNA was so rooted and connected with what happened way back then, that Jesus condemns them for those murderous actions expressed spiritually in the past through the physical actions of others! Judgement, the severest and most terrible of kinds came upon them, that present and living brood of vipers, because they were so intrinsically connected with that wriggling serpent, who had swished his tail in murderous assault throughout the generations. There is most definitely I think, a spirit of Pharisaism that Jesus is judging here. He is not happy!
Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown, commenting on that particular generation says “As it was only in the last generation of them that "the iniquity of the Amorites was full" (Genesis 15:16), and then the abominations of ages were at once completely and awfully avenged, so the iniquity of Israel was allowed to accumulate from age to age until in that generation it came to the full, and the whole collected vengeance of Heaven broke at once over its devoted head. In the first French Revolution the same awful principle was exemplified, and Christendom has not done with it yet."There is a Laodicean laziness among us at the end of this age, a blind quietness born of full bellies, born of an attitude of sin and let sin, born of the seeming inactivity and ignoring of Almighty God. For those that listen however, time runs in its fullness to the top of the container of judgment. The sound of filling bags is coming to an end and I fear the whole boiling water pot is about to fall off the stove and onto the pink and bared flesh of all our looking children, those pale and poor young youths who have been sold a yapping puppy of a faith. Those of us still in the kitchen have but very little time to call these goggle-eyed singing goons back to the God of the Bible, lest they and their milksop teachers both, have red hot bags of 'skubalastic' judgement burst over their guilty by association little heads.
Listen: - Then the Spirit of God came upon Zechariah the son of Jehoiada the priest, who stood above the people, and said to them, "Thus says God:'Why do you transgress the commandments of the Lord, so that you cannot prosper? Because you have forsaken the Lord, He also has forsaken you.'" So they conspired against him, and at the command of the king they stoned him with stones in the court of the house of the Lord. Thus Joash the king did not remember the kindness which Jehoiada his father had done to him, but killed his son; and as he died, he said, "The Lord look on it, and repay!" 2 Chronicles 24:20-22 NKJV
Pray:- Restore us, O God of our salvation, and cause Your anger toward us to cease. Will You be angry with us forever? Will You prolong Your anger to all generations? Will You not revive us again, that Your people may rejoice in You? Show us Your mercy, Lord, and grant us Your salvation. Psalms 85:4-7 NKJV
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