Christ the Lord of All | Holy Week DevotionalMuestra

God is holy. Surrounding God are angels that proclaim, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty,” in never-ceasing praise. God is matchless in purity, sanctity, and holiness. And all things depend on the thrice-holy God for their lives. Everything that lives does so by God’s permission. Consider what that means when we sin. Every lie that you have told was spoken with the breath that God had chosen, in that very moment, to give you. When your heart races with a sinful thrill, it only does so because God has chosen to allow your heart to continue beating.

When God “sees” in the Bible, he makes decisive judgments. In the beginning, God “saw” the things he made and declared that they were good. When God’s people cried out in slavery in Egypt, “God saw the people of Israel—and God knew”; and he acted to redeem his people and destroy his enemies (Ex. 3:25). At Babel, the “Lord came down to see the city and the tower” and rendered his judgments (Gen. 11:5). When Christ came to his people, he saw up close what his people had become—how the teachers of Israel lived and how his temple was being used.

Too often you will hear people say, “the God of the New Testament” and “the God of the Old Testament,” as if to create a distinction between the two. As my eighth-grade history teacher told our class, “In the Old Testament God was wrathful, but then he had a son and lightened up a bit in the New Testament.” I chuckled when I heard it. It’s clever, but it’s wrong.

There is no separating Jesus from “the God of the Old Testament.” Jesus is the God of the Old Testament. Jesus is the one who drowned the world in the flood. Jesus is the one sent the angel of death to destroy the firstborn of Egyptians. Jesus is the one that commanded serpents to kill the unfaithful Israelites in the wilderness. Jesus is the one that commanded, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2). When Christ came into the world, God’s holiness took on flesh.

In our passage today, we see Jesus render his judgments as the Lord of his covenant people. Standing in the temple, he denounces them and promises coming wrath. It was as Malachi said, the “Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple, [but] who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's fire” (Mal. 3:1-2). His judgments are damning.

God’s people were supposed to bring righteousness and blessing to all the nations—and the temple was to be a house of prayer for all the nations as well—but they had made it into a “den of robbers” (Matt. 21:13). The teachers of Israel had become hypocrites. Instead of seeking to bring hope and redemption to God’s people, they tied up “heavy burdens, hard to bear, and [laid] them on people's shoulders” (Matt. 23:4). They loved to be praised by the people, to have the seats of honor, but they “shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces” (Matt. 23:13). They enriched themselves off tithes and offerings (of course, they were also very eager to make sure everyone else gave their tithes and offerings), but they neglected all the “weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness [which] you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Matt. 23:23). They preached, but every convert they made became “twice as much a child of hell” as they were (Matt. 23:16).

Worse still, the leaders of Israel showed themselves to be bloodthirsty. Instead of listening to the prophets, they were like their fathers who killed the prophets. Jesus goaded them, “Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers’ sins” (Matt. 23:32). They killed the prophets, John the Baptist, and were soon to kill Jesus saying, “Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance” (Matt. 21:38). They would wage war against Jesus’ disciples—“some of whom you will kill and crucify” (Matt. 23:34). In response, Jesus would turn their temple—the den of thieves—into rubble. “On you,” Jesus said, will come “all the righteous blood shed on earth… Truly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation” (Matt. 23:36).

Jesus wept over Jerusalem. He is holy and righteous in his judgments, but God does not delight in the death of the wicked (Ez. 18:32). Jerusalem was to be the holy city of his holy people, but it had become “the city that kills the prophets” (Matt. 23:37). But when Yahweh had come in the flesh, they determined to reject and kill him. Like a mother hen, Jesus said he longed to gather them, but now he told them, “[Y]our house is left to you desolate” (Matt. 23:38). Leprous houses have to be removed, brick by brick, lest the corruption be allowed to spread (Lev. 14:43-45). By the time Jesus’ wrath was complete, he warned his disciples, “there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down” (Matt. 24:2).

Do not mistake the new covenant as the time when obedience no longer matters. God has not “lightened up.” God has poured out his mercy upon us so that even the most demonic of sinners can be redeemed and made clean. But his mercy is given for the sake of bringing repentance, not as a means to justify our own evil. The author of Hebrews warns us, “if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries” (Heb. 10:26-27).

God is faithful to his covenant promises. All of them. He has mercy on the humble, the contrite, and repentant. He uplifts the broken. But to those who spurn his gifts, he will be a faithful judge. “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him” (Psa. 2:12).

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