Devotional Luke 20: The Authority of Jesus and Frustrated Traps Study on Luke 20: how Jesus answered the questions about his authority, taxes to Caesar, and the resurrection in the Kingdom of God. Topics: Devotional, New Testament.

Devotional Luke 20: The Authority of Jesus and Frustrated Traps

Today, I’m sharing a few more things I noticed in the book of Luke, chapter 20.

First, remember that conversation we had about the tactics the enemy uses to stop us from fulfilling our purposes? Well, in this chapter I found another tactic they use: discrediting your authority.

In this chapter, while Jesus was teaching in the Temple, the chief priests, scribes, and elders came to question him to challenge Jesus’ authority to preach what he preaches and do the things he does. They wanted to put his authority to the test by setting traps to ruin his reputation. Except Jesus is much wiser than all of them combined, and their plan backfired😅

When they asked that question challenging where his authority to preach and act comes from, Jesus asked them whether John the Baptist’s baptisms came from heaven or from men. In other words, Jesus hit them with a “Uno Reverse” and placed them in a dilemma. They had two options:

1. If they said it came from heaven, they would be legitimizing the things John the Baptist preached; they would have to consider him a prophet, and consequently, validate the legitimacy of Jesus’ authority because of his identity as mentioned by John the Baptist.

2. If they said it came from men, they would be discrediting everything John the Baptist said and the belief of the people, who believed he was a prophet. Therefore, they would be the ones facing the risk of being stoned by the crowd.

So, they preferred to say they didn’t know, and Jesus replied that he wouldn’t tell them either since they didn’t answer😅

Still, they weren’t satisfied and tried to set other traps to catch him “blaspheming” so they could judge him and sentence him to death. So, they decided to ask Jesus if people should pay taxes. Jesus asked them to hand him a denarius and asked whose face was engraved on the coin; they answered Caesar’s. Then Jesus responded: give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. They ended up agreeing because it was correct.

Still not satisfied, they tried one last trap/dilemma. This time, they asked Jesus: since Moses taught us that a widow’s brother-in-law must marry her to raise up offspring for his deceased brother; in the case of a woman who married a man with 6 brothers and successively married his brothers as each one died, whose wife will she be in the world to come?

Jesus answered that in the world to come, we will be resurrected, but as children of God like the angels of God, who do not marry and do not have reproductive organs. Therefore, she will not be anyone’s wife. Upon hearing this, they finally gave up trying to catch him making an error in interpreting the Word. And they began looking for other ways to kill him.

Here we can see that one of the best tactics the enemy uses is ruining a person’s reputation. We see this even today. It happens very frequently nowadays, especially with cancel culture and the current intolerance of ideas.

We can also see that God commands us to obey the governing laws in the city, state, or country where we live, even if we don’t agree with them, as long as they do not violate God’s Laws. Only in that situation should we disobey the laws of the place where we live, work, socialize, etc.

Finally, we also realize that in the Kingdom of God there will be no husbands and wives, and no sexual organs. That is, there will be no marriages, sex, etc. A lot of things that we might take for granted here on earth as human beings will be different there in the Kingdom of God as children of God. Very interesting, and it raises a lot of questions too.