Chapter 9 — How the Ancient Jewish Nation Sealed Their Doom

The A-to-Z story of their rebellion is frightening. Scripture warns us that we stand poised on the brink of a similar disaster.

Could Jesus accuse people of a crime when they were innocent? If someone accused me for example of starting World War I, I would respond that this was unreasonable. I wasn’t even born when it started! Yet Jesus accused the Jewish leaders of His day of guilt for a crime committed before any of them were born. His charge against them sounds unreasonable.

The story is in Matthew 23. Jesus has just upbraided the scribes and Pharisees with a series of “woes” accompanied by vivid flashes of irony and indignation. He concludes by springing on them this charge of murdering a certain Zechariah: “That on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar” (verse 35).

For years I thought this Zechariah was a victim whom Christ’s hearers had personally murdered in the temple during their lifetime, not more than 30 or 40 years previous.

Human Guilt from A to Z

I was shocked to discover that this man was murdered some 800 years earlier. (2 Chronicles 24:20, 21 records the story). Why did Jesus charge this crime on the Jews of His day?

He was not unfair. When we see the principle of corporate guilt, the picture becomes clear. In rejecting Him, the Jewish leaders acted out all human guilt from A to Z (Abel to Zechariah), even though they may not yet have personally committed a single act of murder. They were one in spirit with their fathers who had actually shed the blood of the innocent Zechariah in the temple. In other words, they would do it again, and they did do it—to Jesus.

By refusing the call to repentance which the Baptist and Jesus proclaimed, they agreed to assume the guilt of all murders of innocent victims ever since the days of Abel. One who could not err fastened the entire load on them.

Suppose the Jewish leaders had repented? If so, they would have repented of “the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world” (Luke 11:50). And thus they would not have gone on to crucify Christ.

To understand Jesus’ thinking, we need to review the Hebrew idea of corporate personality. The church is the “Isaac” of faith, Abraham’s true descendant, “one body” with him and with all true believers of all ages. To Jewish and Gentile believers alike, Paul says Abraham is “our father” (Romans 4:1-13). Even to the Gentile believers he says, “Our fathers were … baptized into Moses.” “We [are] all baptized into one body—whether Jews or Greeks” (1 Corinthians 10:1, 2; 12:13). We “all” means past generations and the present generation.

Thus Christ’s body comprises all who have ever believed in Him from Adam down to the last remnant who welcome Him at His return. All are one individual in the pattern of Paul’s thinking. Even a child can see this principle. Although it is his hand that steals from the cookie jar, when mother learns what happened, it’s his bottom that gets spanked. To the child this is perfectly fair.

The Old Testament Makes it Clear

  1. Hosea depicts Israel’s many generations as one individual progressing through youth to adulthood. He personifies Israel as a girl betrothed to the Lord. Israel “shall sing … as in the days of her youth, as in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt” (Hosea 11:1; 2:15).
  2. Ezekiel defines Jerusalem’s history as the biography of one individual:

Thus says the Lord God to Jerusalem: “Your birth and your nativity are from the land of Canaan; your father was an Amorite, and your mother a Hittite. … When I passed by you again and looked upon you, indeed your time was the time of love. … You were exceedingly beautiful, and succeeded to royalty” (Ezekiel 16:3-13).

Generations of Israelites came and went, but her corporate personal identity remained. The nation carried the guilt of “youth” into adulthood, as an adult remains guilty of a wrong committed when he was a youth— even though physiologists say that time has replaced every physical cell in his body. One’s moral personal identity remains regardless of the molecular composition of the body.

  1. Moses taught this same principle. He addressed his generation as the “you” who should witness the captivity to Babylon nearly a thousand years later (see Leviticus 26:3-40). He also called on succeeding generations to recognize their corporate guilt with “their fathers”:

If they shall confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers, which they trespassed against me, and that they also have walked contrary to me; and that I also have walked contrary to them, and have brought them into the land of their enemies; if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they then accept the punishment of their iniquity. … I will for their sakes remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt (Leviticus 26:40-45)

  1. Succeeding generations sometimes recognized this principle. King Josiah confessed that “great is the wrath of the Lord that is aroused against us, because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book, to do according to all that is written concerning us” (2 Kings 22:13). He said nothing about the guilt of his contemporaries, so clearly did he see his own generation’s as the guilt of previous generations.
  2. Ezra lumps together the guilt of his generation with that of their fathers: “Since the days of our fathers to this day we have been very guilty, and for our iniquities we, our kings, and our priests, have been delivered into the hand of the kings of the lands” (Ezra 9:7). “Our kings” were those of previous generations, for there was no living king in Ezra’s day. (See APPENDIX C for a discussion of Ezekiel 18 and corporate guilt.)
  3. The David-Christ relationship is striking. David’s Psalms express so perfectly what Christ later experienced that the Saviour used David’s words to express the feelings of His own broken heart: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Psalm 22:1; Matthew 27:46). Christ is the Word “made flesh.” Nowhere does the perfect corporate identity of a “member” with the “Head” appear more clearly than in this David-Christ relationship. Christ knows Himself to be the “son of David.” He has feasted on David’s words and lived David’s experiences. The perfect picture He sees of Himself in the Old Testament in the experience and words of the prophets, He lives out in His own flesh through faith.
  4. This idea of identity reaches a zenith in the Song of Solomon, the love story of the ages. Christ loves a “woman,” even His church. Israel, the foolish “child” called out of Egypt, the fickle girl in her youthful “time of love,” the faithless woman in the kingdom days, “grieved and forsaken” in the Captivity, at last becomes the chastened and mature bride of Christ. At last, through corporate repentance she is prepared to become a mate to Him.

Would You Have Done Better?

Let us picture ourselves in the crowd that gathered before Pilate that fateful Friday morning. The strange Prisoner stands bound. It is popular to join in condemning Him. Not a voice is raised in His defense.

Suppose you are connected with Pilate’s government, or are in the employ of Caiaphas, the High Priest. You support your family with your wages. Would you have the courage to stand up alone and say, “We are making a terrible mistake here! This man is not guilty of these charges. He is what He claims—He is the divine Son of God! I appeal to you, Pilate and Caiaphas, accept this Man as the Messiah!”

Suppose your own close circle of friends has already joined the mockery and abuse of Jesus. Would you (or I) have the nerve to face them alone and rebuke them for what they do?

Realizing how easily a defense of Jesus might put you on the cross too, would you (or I) dare to speak out? Surely the answer is obvious. We dare not say that the church as a world body cannot know this repentance, lest when we survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of glory died, we pour contempt on His loving sacrifice by implying that it was in vain.

Pentecost: Israel’s History Not Totally in Vain

Jesus’ appeal to the Jews failed to move them. Yet a glorious demonstration of corporate repentance occurred at Pentecost. His calls at last bore fruit.

The three thousand converted that day probably did not all personally shout “Crucify Him!” at Christ’s trial, or personally mock Him as He hung on the cross. Yet they recognized that they shared the guilt of those who did.

But the Jewish leaders stubbornly refused to do so: “Did we not strictly command you not to teach in this name? … You … intend to bring this Man’s blood on us!” (Acts 5:28). In no way would they accept corporate guilt! (We Seventh-day Adventists have also denied ours, for decades.) Thus the Jews denied their only hope of salvation.

Pentecost has inspired God’s people for nearly 2000 years. What made those grand results possible? The people believed the portrayal of their corporate guilt and frankly confessed their part in the greatest sin of all ages, which their leaders had refused to repent of. Pentecost was an example of laity rising above the spiritual standards of their leaders. The final outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the latter rain will be an extension of the Pentecost experience.

A leadership reaction against Pentecost occurred a few months later. The Sanhedrin refused to accept Stephen’s portrayal of corporate guilt through their national history: “You always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who foretold the coming of the Just One, of whom you now have become the betrayers and murderers” (Acts 7:51, 52). They “stopped their ears, and ran at him with one accord; and they cast him out of the city and stoned him” (verses 57, 58).

Do we see the pattern in this? It began with Cain. Generation after generation refused to see their corporate guilt. Finally, impenitent Israel demonstrated to the world for all time to come the tragic end that follows national impenitence. ‘All these things happened unto them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, on whom the ends of the ages have come” (1 Corinthians 10:11).

But in that tragic hour when Israel sealed her doom by murdering Stephen, a truth began to work itself out in one honest human heart. It would lead at last to correction of the sin of Israel. The “witnesses laid down their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul.” This young man’s disturbed conscience thought through the great idea of a worldwide “body of Christ” that would eventually exhibit in full and final display the blessings of repentance which the Jews refused.

Read Chapter 10 — The Urgency of Christ's Call to Repent
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