Silencing the Enemy

The stories of Jesus being questioned by the Pharisees and Sadducees have been repeated many times in the Gospels. There came a point when the questioning and testing stopped. Jesus was able to silence his interrogators on account of their sheer ignorance, refusal to see the truth in Jesus’ teaching, and their unbelief that Jesus was the Son of God.

The account according to Matthew is as follows:

34When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

They have not stopped testing Jesus. This time the question posed on him was about something Jesus knew because he knows it by heart; and puts the commandments to practice. He lives out these commandments. He is the living commandment.

But this time, Jesus was putting the Pharisees to a test. Jesus goes for the offensive, putting a question of his own to the Pharisees:

42“What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” he asks. They said to him, “The son of David.” 43He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, 44‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet”’? 45If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?”

 

Does God test people?

It is a common belief among the Old and New testament communities that the God they believe in is a God who tests people – a God who lays obstacles and challenges the people’s path to test their determination and resourcefulness, and most of all their faithfulness to the Lord. The prophets had often prophesied about the people of God being put to the test. Job comes to mind when we talk about testing one’s faith.

If there is a test, one man in the Old Testament stands out. That is Moses. Deuteronomy says:

10Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. 11He was unequaled for all the signs and wonders that the Lord sent him to perform in the land of Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his servants and his entire land, 12and for all the mighty deeds and all the terrifying displays of power that Moses performed in the sight of all Israel (Deut 34).

We may not be as time-tested as Moses. Unlike Moses, we may die with impaired vision and abated vigor. But what we are all reminded here is about performance – what is our performance as far as following God’s commands?

In order to gauge our performance, does God put us to a test?

As a young believer, I thought so. There were some teachings in the church which told me so. I thought that poverty, inequality, injustice and oppression were all part of God’s plan. I believed it was God’s will for some people to suffer in misery as in low-wage, backbreaking labor whilst other people are allowed to live in God’s blessings of prosperity, abundance, comfort and luxury.

The Spanish colonizers who brought Roman Catholicism taught us that our poverty and sufferings were God’s punishment to our people who were pagans and rebels. The American colonizers who brought Protestantism with liberal (not liberating) ideas through the Missionaries taught us that we can change our situation if we live up to the ideals of individual freedom and grab every opportunity that comes our way including having our dreams come true in the land of opportunities – that ‘Great American Dream’!

But somewhere along the way, I learned that poverty, misery and sufferings were brought about by colonizers and oppressors who amass wealth and power for themselves at the expense of the people. For me this is not God’s will. It is the will of a very small percentage of the world’s human race that has mastered the skill and built the capacity to lord over the rest of us.

God’s will for you and me is to follow God’s command of loving the Lord with all our heart, souls and mind, and loving and serving others wholeheartedly without expecting anything in return. Loving and obeying God, loving and serving others is in the context of this world where we live in – in the context of suffering and death caused by the forces of death – in this same world where Jesus lived and died 2000 years ago – where we confront today new empires that lord over us.

You can call it a test, a challenge, or a whatever. But we can acknowledge it as a call as well. A Filipino theologian and pastor explained to me that faith is our response to the presence of God. God calls us to participate with what God’s Spirit is doing in the world. The challenge for us, like how Jesus engaged the Pharisees and his detractors, is to silence God’s enemies so that they will speak lies no more and lord over us no more. God is working to silence the enemy. God is eliminating the basis, the foundation, the raison d’être, on which God’s enemies get their so-called legitimacy and power to exist. God’s work is through us. This is not a test. This is not a game. This is not a reality game like Survivors, Amazing Race, and the Biggest Loser. This is reality.

Conclusion

Although Moses was buried in the same valley in which Israel assembled to hear his final message, he did not need a tomb of remembrance. His greatness is that in him was seen all offices of Israel: prophet, priest, ruler, and judge. Yet the most important was his role of interpreting the will and purpose of God.

According to a commentary:

The greatness of Moses lay not just in his noble character or in his astounding achievements. He, not Abraham or Jacob, was the one who truly made his people a nation. Almost singlehandedly he took a group of self-willed, stiff-necked people, loosely knit together by religion and blood, and wielded them into a nation. With a love for his people which burned like a consuming fire, he was willing to be blotted out for their sakes. This passion won their confidence and solidified them under this leadership.[1]

God used Moses, as God used no other up to the time of Jesus, for an instrument of revelation. His sense of God’s presence and his certainty that he spoke for God were central.[2]

Moses obeyed and did all that God commanded him to do. Moses even stood very well against the test of time. He died at the age of 127 with vision unimpaired and vigor unabated. How many of us would like to leave this world with unimpaired vision and unabated vigor?  Unabated vigor is also written as “Nor his natural force abated (Heb: fled).” the ‘vision’ is the vision given to Moses by God of God’s sovereignty.

Vigor and vision are not the physical strength or eyesight, but the love of God expressed in one’s heart, soul and mind. It is to be full of the Spirit of wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to understand and carry out the divine will, through the inspiration of the Spirit.

I believe we can stand the test of time by being able to do God’s commandments distilled by Jesus in the greatest commandments to love God and neighbour.

Amen.

[1] The Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, Volume 2. (New York: Abingdon Press, 1953), pp. 536-7.

[2] Ibid.