Matthew 22 shows a theological battle between Jesus and the apostate Jewish leaders of his day. The skirmishes comprise four rounds of Q&A. They occurred on Tuesday of Passion Week in AD 30.1 We have seen two in previous posts.2 We will review these before looking at the other two.
Question 1
In the first clash, the Pharisees asked, “Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?” (Matt 22:17). Just two days before the Pharisees challenged him, Jesus had entered Jerusalem as Israel’s true King. This Palm-Sunday entrance fulfilled part of a key prophecy in Zech 9:9–11, to which we will return below.
Jesus used one of Caesar’s symbols to win this round of questioning. He said, “Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny” (Matt 22:19). In Greek culture, “special advent coins were struck … to commemorate the parousia of an emperor.”3 These coins then portrayed the Emperor’s reign.
Inmillennialism emphasizes that parousia does not represent a point-in-time coming. It “denotes a state, not an action. We never read of a parousia to, always of a parousia with.”4
The coin to which Jesus referred represented Caesar’s reign and kingdom, his parousia. Jesus would reign in his own parousia soon. Paying tribute to Caesar in his parousia did not conflict with obeying Christ during his.
Jesus one, the apostate Jewish leaders zero.
Question 2
The Sadducees asked the second challenge-question. “In the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? for they all had her” (Matt 22:28). Jesus destroyed the premise upon which this question rested. Abraham is alive and post-mortem existence is real. The Sadducees were wrong from the start.
The Lord also demolished their supposed impossible resurrection result. He did so in two phases. The first involved the levirate law of the Mosaic age (Matt 22:24; cp. Deut 25:5–10). In the resurrection of the messianic age, “they neither marry, nor are given in marriage” (Matt 22:30; cp. Luke 20:34–36 ESV).
Physical birth would not determine entrance into the messianic-age kingdom (John 1:12–13). Records of marrying and giving in marriage would be irrelevant, even dangerous (cp. 1 Tim 1:4; Titus 3:9). The two sexes (male and female) would not determine covenant participation (Gal 3:28).
Physical birth would not grant participation in the messianic kingdom and physical death would not end it (John 3:3, 5; 11:26). During Christ’s reign, his followers would neither hunger nor thirst (John 6:35). Its citizens would “regard no one according to the flesh.… If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:16–17 ESV).
These statements are not about the physical characteristics of Christ’s parousia (i.e., kingdom). They are comparative, not absolute. They contrast life in the messianic age to that in the Mosaic age. Jesus and the apostles did not deny physical birth, death, hunger, thirst, and marriage in the messianic age in an absolute sense. They were speaking of spiritual realities. The messianic age would be “the new age of resurrection-life.”5
The second phase of Jesus’s rebuttal involved absolutes. There would be a physical resurrection at the end of Christ’s parousia (i.e., kingdom; cp. 1 Cor 15:23). Afterward, Christ’s followers would be “as the angels of God in heaven” (Matt 22:30). Birth, death, hunger, thirst, and marriage would then cease in every sense.
These arguments silenced the Sadducees. Jesus two, the apostate Jewish leaders still zero.
Question 3
The third round was brief (Matt 22:34–40). It began when the Pharisees returned to ask, “which is the great commandment in the law?” (Matt 22:36). Perhaps they wanted to pit Jesus against one or more sects of the Jews. “Some thought the commandment of the sabbath was the greatest.… Others give the preference to circumcision.… Others say of the phylacteries, that the holiness of them is the greatest of all.”6
With consummate wisdom, our Lord identified the two fundamental commandments.
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Matt 22:37–40)
No one could find fault with his answer.
The Jews expected some physical activity would be “the great commandment” of the law. They continued to focus on the Mosaic age.
Jesus pointed to the spiritual worship of the messianic age (cp. John 4:21–24). In that age, his servants would obey “from the heart that form of doctrine to which [they] were delivered” (Rom 6:17 NKJV).
Jesus three, the apostate Jewish leaders zero.
Question 4
In the fourth round, Jesus asked a question of the Pharisees.
What think ye of Christ? whose son is he? They say unto him, The Son of David. He saith unto them, How then doth David in spirit call him Lord, saying, The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool? If David then call him Lord, how is he his son? (Matt 22:42–45)
Jesus quoted from Ps 110:1 to form this question. The New Testament quotes this verse more than any other Old Testament passage. Its message lies at the heart of the gospel of the kingdom (e.g., Matt 4:23; 9:35; 24:14).
The Pharisees’ failure to answer showed they did not understand Jesus, his message, or his mission. Let us observe the Trinity, the timing, and the triumph of Ps 110:1 to avoid their predicament.
The Trinity in Ps 110:1
The Trinity is implied in Ps 110:1. King David speaks of two of the three Divine Persons. “The LORD (i.e., God the Father) said unto my Lord (i.e., God the Son), Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool” (Ps 110:1).
This question challenged the monotheism of the Jewish leaders. It required them to acknowledge at least two Lords. And Jesus’s implication was clear—he is one.
The Timing of Ps 110:1
The Son is sitting at the Father’s right hand during the messianic age. The Apostle Peter taught this 50 days after Jesus’s resurrection. He did so by quoting Ps 110:1 (Acts 2:30–34).
On the Tuesday of Passion Week, Jesus had said the Temple’s fall would be “the sign of [his] coming (parousia) and of the end of the [Mosaic] age” (Matt 24:3 ESV). This happened in AD 70, creating a 40-year transition period from the Mosaic age to the messianic (kingdom) age. The Son sits on his throne during the new age.
Paul placed the resurrection of believers at the end of the messianic age. Every man will rise “in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming (lit., in his parousia). Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father” (1 Co 15:23–24a).
The New Testament uses Ps 110:1 to show Christ is reigning during the messianic age.
The Triumph of Ps 110:1
Consider the triumph of Ps 110:1. Paul said the resurrection would bring the end “when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Cor 15:24–26; emphasis added).
We must not overlook—or deny!—Christ’s victory during the messianic age. “The expression ‘under his feet’ is an OT figure for total conquest. Verse 25 is an allusion to Psalm 110:1 (cf. Matt 22:44).”7
During his messianic-age, God the Father will fulfill his promises to God the Son. Here are a few examples:
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel. (Ps 2:8–9 ESV)
All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you. (Ps 22:27 ESV)
He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth. They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him; and his enemies shall lick the dust. The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents: the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts. Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations shall serve him. (Ps 72:8–11)
As promised, we return to Zechariah for our last example. After foretelling Palm-Sunday, God said,
I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off [in AD 70]: and he shall speak peace unto the heathen: and his dominion shall be from sea even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of the earth [during the messianic age]. (Zech 9:10; emphasis added)
Conclusion
Jesus put his adversaries to silence during these exchanges. The fundamental issue involved the kingdom of God. The parousia of Christ versus the parousia of Caesar (Q. 1). The superiority of the resurrection-age versus the death of the law-age (Q. 2). The spiritual worship of God in the messianic age versus the localized and physical (i.e., carnal) worship of the Mosaic age (Q. 3). And, finally (Q. 4), the triumph of the kingdom of God in history compared to the failure of the apostate Jewish nation to bring deliverance (Isa 26:18).
Jesus won the skirmishes 4-0.
Let us embrace a prophetic model that allows us to answer these questions the way he did. Inmillennialism shows the required order: Jesus’s resurrection and ascension (AD 30)—>Jesus’s enthronement (AD 30)—>Jesus’s coming (parousia), the Temple’s fall, and the end of the Mosaic age (AD 70)—>the (continued) reign of Christ and his subjugation of all his foes during the messianic age (parousia)—>the resurrection in which Christ defeats death, his final foe.
Soli Deo Gloria!
Footnotes
- A. T. Robertson, A Harmony of the Gospels for Students of the Life of Christ (New York: Harper, 1922), 159.
- Here, here, and here.
- Georg Braumann, “Present—παρουσία (parousia),” in The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, ed. Colin Brown (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976), 2:898.
- W. E. Vine, Collected Writings of W. E. Vine, 5 vols. (Nashville: T. Nelson, 1996), 5:149.
- Peter W. L. Walker, Jesus and the Holy City: New Testament Perspectives on Jerusalem (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 289.
- John Gill, An Exposition of the Old and New Testaments, 9 vols. (1809–1810; repr., Paris, AR: The Baptist Standard Bearer, 1989), 7:262.
- W. Harold Mare, “1 Corinthians,” in Romans–Galatians, vol. 10 of The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976), 285. Emphasis added.
