Oh, my friends, it's Matt, this is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast, and in the last couple

of episodes this week, as we've been getting toward the end of Matthew chapter 23, there's

been a lot of passion because there's a lot of passion in the text, and there's just

no nice way to slice it. Jesus is having is very direct, ultimate, public, final, verbal

confrontation with the enemies of the redemptive plan that is the religious leaders, the Pharisees,

they're extra super disappointing because it's supposed to be their job to help people

understand the redemptive plan and to keep an eye out for the redemptive plan and to connect

people with the redemptive plan, but Jesus is charging that they do the exact opposite,

and that for all of their long lineage intellectually and spiritually tracing back centuries

to their particular class of religious leadership, they've always got it wrong. They've opposed

the prophets at every turn. They've killed the prophets, and in the passage that we've

been looking at, Jesus in keeping with the parable that he told there at the end of chapter

22, he's effectively saying, you killed all the prophets who've been sent before. Now the

king, God, has sent his own son to say, surely these tenants whose job it is to take care of

this project I have going will respond well to my own son, but in the parable from the

end of 22, those tenants don't respond better to the son. They're even more opportunistic

and angry in response to the son, and they kill him thinking that now they can take full

control of the entire operation around here. And so Jesus is intoning, you killed everybody

sent before. Now he sent his son. You're going to kill me too. And further, you're going

to kill the people who I send who come next. So that's been tough language. And we've spent

a lot of time on it. And I thought we could use a little pseudo academic aside to go and

track down a question that is buried in here that is really kind of off topic, because

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