Give unto God...


He said to them, “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” 
Luke 20:25 


Perhaps you have heard the saying, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Possibly, no greater example of this can be seen in the many confrontations Jesus faced than here in the 20th chapter of Luke. It is in this chapter where we read the religious leaders teaming up to challenge Jesus with the goal of discrediting him and swaying the hearts of the people away from him by challenging his authority as a teacher. In verses 19-26, we read of a challenge posed to Jesus by spies who were sent to him to try and trap him. In Matthew and Mark’s Gospel, we read more specifically that it came by the Pharisees and the Herodians which was meant to serve as a political, religious, and social dilemma of paying tribute to the Roman empire.

It is interesting to me that in their coming to Jesus they first flatter him with insincere words, but words which do describe Jesus pretty accurately. Jesus is a true teacher of God and does teach correctly. Afterwards, they then challenge him about whether or not one should pay the tax. This, they thought was an irresolvable problem and would surely bring Jesus a lot of problems. If he were to say yes, we must pay the tax, would be problematic and unfavorable with the people since the Roman empire was heavily taxing the people. However, to say that they should not pay the tax would cause him to be seen as a disruptor of order and would be treasonous and deserving of the death penalty by Roman law. The third option would be for Jesus to remain silent, a response that was a great embarrassment to the religious leaders back in chapter 14 (see last Monday article: Silent Pharisees).

However, Jesus is no fool. First of all, notice the word render. It is the word apaditimato which means to pay back, or to give back. This would infer that a person owed some sort of debt and was obligated to pay back what they owed. He asks them for a coin, which would have been minted with Caesar’s image on it as well as the phrase “Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus”. He tells them simply to give back to Caesar what is in his control. But then he takes a step further. He challenges them to give back to God, what is His. Jesus makes a distinction between that which is Caesar’s and that which belonged to God. The religious leaders’ minds would probably wander back to what they had read in the Torah of how “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female” (1:27).

And just like that Jesus evades their trap and silences these Jewish and religious leaders which sets the stage for the Sadducees to mount their attack. But before moving on, take a moment to meditate on that truth for a moment. If we are all created in the image of God, and Jesus instructs us, through His word, to render to God that which is God’s, then what are we to give to Him? The answer: everything.

Grace and Peace,
Alex Galvez

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