Reject God’s Messengers Who Were Sent For Your Eternal Benefit
Reject God’s messengers who were sent for your eternal benefit
Bro Yeow Chin Kiong | 5 April 2026 | Matthew 23:33–39
Matthew 23:33–39
"Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell? Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes: some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, 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 Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate; for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, 'Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD!'"
In the closing verses of Matthew 23 — the final words of Jesus' great Sermon of Woes. And these verses do not end quietly. They end with a cry of grief from the heart of the Son of God. To understand them well, we need to approach them honestly and carefully, because these words have been tragically misread and misused across the centuries in ways that have caused immense suffering. This lesson calls us to read them as they were intended: as a mirror for ourselves, a warning to the Church, and ultimately, an expression of the love of God that refuses to give up.
The Responsibility That Came With a Declaration
To understand the weight of Matthew 23:33–36, we need to hear it alongside one of the most sobering verses in all of the Passion narrative — a declaration made by the crowd at the trial of Jesus:
Matthew 27:25
"And all the people answered and said, "His blood be on us and on our children.""
These words, spoken by the crowd before Pontius Pilate, have echoed through history in ways their speakers could never have anticipated — and tragically, they have been used, wrongly and repeatedly, to justify some of the worst persecution the world has ever seen.
Antisemitism has stained human history for centuries.
In the Ancient Period, Jewish refusal to worship Roman emperors drew accusations of aloofness and contempt. In the Middle Ages, Blood Libel accusations falsely charged Jews with murdering Christian children — lies that led to mass executions. The Crusades from 1096 saw Jewish communities massacred along the Rhine River by those claiming to march for Christ. Jews were expelled from England, France, and Spain.
During the Black Death of 1348–1350, they were falsely blamed for poisoning wells. In the 19th century, the Russian Empire confined Jews to a designated region and subjected them to violent pogroms. Then came the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, stripping Jews of citizenship. Kristallnacht in 1938 burned over 1,400 synagogues in a single night. And the Holocaust — the systematic murder of approximately six million Jewish lives — stands as history's most devastating testimony to where unchecked hatred leads.
Even today, as recently as March 2026, two men were arrested in London in connection with an antisemitic arson attack on Jewish volunteer ambulances.
This history demands absolute clarity about what Matthew 23 is — and is not.
What Matthew 23 Is — and Is Not
Matthew 23 is not antisemitism. It is not hatred of the Jewish people. It is not a licence for any Christian — in any generation — to direct anger, contempt, or violence toward Jewish people as a race or community.
Jesus was Jewish. His mother was Jewish. His disciples were Jewish. The scribes He rebuked were Jewish — professional scholars who had devoted their lives to copying and studying the very Scriptures that pointed to Him. The early Church was born out of a Jewish community in Jerusalem. The Apostle Paul, who wrote so much of the New Testament, was a Jewish man of the tribe of Benjamin who grieved so deeply for his people that he wrote words that still stop the breath:
Romans 9:1–5
"I tell the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises; of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, the eternally blessed God. Amen."
Paul would have given up his own salvation for his people. That is not the language of someone who hates a race. That is the language of a man who loves his people so deeply that their rejection of Christ breaks his heart.
Matthew 23 is a harsh, specific, targeted rebuke — directed not at the Jewish people as a whole, but at the scribes and Pharisees who held religious authority and were using it to shut people out of the Kingdom rather than lead them in. Jesus was not condemning a race. He was confronting leaders. There is a profound difference.
We must also be careful with our words. When we repeatedly tell someone they are hopeless, useless, beyond rescue — those words take root. They shape people. They can become self-fulfilling. The way we speak about any group of people matters enormously. Directing collective blame at an entire community for the actions of some of its leaders — whether in the first century or the twenty-first — is not the way of Christ.
The Blood of the Righteous — From Abel to Zechariah
Jesus makes a sweeping declaration in verses 34–35. He speaks of the blood of righteous Abel — the very first murder in human history — all the way to Zechariah, son of Berechiah, who was stoned to death in the court of the house of God itself. The account of Zechariah's death is recorded in 2 Chronicles:
2 Chronicles 24:21–22
"So they conspired against him, and at the command of the king they stoned him with stones in the court of the house of the LORD. Thus Joash the king did not remember the kindness which Jehoiada his father had done to him, but killed his son; and as he died, he said, "The LORD look on it, and repay!""
Here is the tragedy in full: Zechariah's own father, Jehoiada the priest, had protected and raised the king Joash. He had devoted his life to the wellbeing of the very man who ultimately ordered his son's death. Kindness repaid with murder. The messenger silenced. And as Zechariah died, he did not curse — he called on God to see.
This is the pattern Jesus is naming. From the beginning of Israel's history to its latest pages — the righteous blood of those sent to speak God's word had been shed by those who should have received them.
It is worth pausing to ask: why does God keep sending messengers anyway? Why does He not simply walk away from a people who have consistently rejected His word? The answer comes in the very next verse.
"O Jerusalem" — The Grief Behind the Warning
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!"
After seven woes. Not anger. Grief. The image Jesus uses is one of the most tender in all of Scripture: a mother hen, wings spread wide, desperately trying to gather her chicks to safety under the shelter of her body. This is not the image of a judge pronouncing sentence. This is the image of a parent whose heart is breaking.
How often I wanted to. Again and again and again — God sent His servants. Not once, not twice. How often. Prophets — generation after generation — the desire was always the same: to gather, to protect, to bring home. And every time, the answer was the same. But you were not willing.
The desolation that follows — "your house is left to you desolate". It is the consequence of a refusal.
Don't Kill the Messenger — The Responsibility of Correction
One of the most important applications of this passage is both simple and searching: do not kill the messenger. This is a principle with profound implications for how we receive correction — in our personal lives, in our communities, and in the Church.
Think of David. God sent the prophet Nathan to confront him after his sin with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah. Nathan did not come with a direct accusation — he came with a story, a parable of a man who had a single lamb, taken by someone with everything. David burned with anger at the injustice in the story, and Nathan said: you are the man. And David did not argue. He did not reach for his power or his position. He did not have Nathan silenced or removed. He said: I have sinned against the LORD. That is what repentance looks like in a man of power.
The prophets were killed because those in power could not bear to hear that they were wrong. They could not — or would not — ask the two questions that every word of correction requires: is this true? And if it is true, what must I change? If the scribes and Pharisees, if the kings and priests of Israel, had been willing to sit with those two questions when the prophets spoke — not one of those prophets would have been harmed. The tragedy is not that the correction came. The tragedy is that it was rejected.
Blessed are the persecuted — Jesus had said that in the Sermon on the Mount:
Matthew 5:10–12
"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you."
To be persecuted for speaking the truth is not a failure. It is a mark of faithfulness. But it demands courage — because the messengers of God have always spoken into environments that did not want to hear them. And the call remains: speak anyway.
The Responsibility God Entrusted — and the Call to the Church
God chose Israel for a specific and extraordinary purpose. The lineage of Jesus — the Saviour of all humanity — had to be born of a woman, from a people, through a nation whose story was woven through with the promises of God from the days of Abraham. The parable of Matthew 21 captures the weight of this responsibility painfully: a landowner rented out his vineyard, and when he sent servants to receive its fruit, they beat them, killed them, and sent them away. He sent more. The same result. Finally he sent his son — surely, he thought, they will listen. They killed him too.
The responsibility was immense. And yet the pattern of rejection repeated itself.
We have been entrusted with the gospel — the message that changes everything. And like Israel before us, the temptation is always to hold that treasure rather than spend it, to protect it rather than share it.
Galatians 3:21–29
"Is the law then against the promises of God? Certainly not! For if there had been a law given which could have given life, truly righteousness would have been by the law. But the Scripture has confined all under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. But before faith came, we were kept under guard by the law, kept for the faith which would afterward be revealed. Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise."
There is neither Jew nor Greek. In Christ, the division that defined so much of human history is dissolved. The promises made to Abraham — the covenant, the calling, the inheritance — now belong to everyone who is in Christ Jesus, regardless of ethnicity, background, or history. The walls are down. And with that extraordinary inclusion comes an extraordinary responsibility.
Galatians 4:4
"But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law,"
The Church must not be like the tenants in the parable — those who received the vineyard and kept its fruit for themselves. We are not here for entertainment. We are not here to be comfortable. We are here to carry the message. As Jesus said in Luke 17:10, when we have done all that we were commanded, we are simply unworthy servants who have done our duty. This is not a burden — it is a privilege beyond anything we deserve. And it calls for faithful stewardship: of our time, our resources, and above all, of the gospel we have been given to share.
Luke 17:10
"So likewise you, when you have done all those things which you are commanded, say, 'We are unprofitable servants. We have done what was our duty to do.'"
Money, resources, the practical means of ministry — these are to be managed prudently. But the impulse behind their management must always be the spreading of the gospel.
Each Person Bears Their Own Responsibility
One final truth from this passage must be stated clearly. The guilt of those who rejected and killed the prophets belongs to those individuals — not to their children, not to their descendants, not to an entire race or people across thousands of years of history. God's own law makes this plain:
Deuteronomy 24:16
"Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their fathers; a person shall be put to death for his own sin."
Ezekiel 18:19–20
"Yet you say, 'Why should the son not bear the guilt of the father?' Because the son has done what is lawful and right, and has kept all My statutes and observed them, he shall surely live. The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself."
The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father. This is God's own standard of justice — and it demolishes every attempt to use Matthew 27:25 as justification for collective punishment of the Jewish people. Each person stands before God for their own choices, their own heart, their own response to His word.
Matthew 23 ends with the Sermon of Woes — but it does not end without hope. Not all of Israel rejected Jesus. Many did not. The early Church was filled with Jewish believers who received their Messiah with joy.
The Invitation — Look in the Mirror, Then Go
This lesson asks us to do two things.
The first is to look in the mirror.
Matthew 23 was written for everyone who says one thing and does another — for everyone who holds a position of responsibility and uses it for their own benefit rather than the benefit of those in their care.
The scribes and Pharisees were not uniquely wicked people. They were people with power, privilege, and religious knowledge who gradually stopped asking whether they were doing God's will and started asking how to preserve their own.
That temptation is not ancient history. It is the temptation of every person in every generation who carries any kind of influence or responsibility in God's house.
The second thing is to go.
The message of God's love — the message that cost the lives of prophets and ultimately the life of the Son of God Himself — has been entrusted to us. Not to be protected behind the walls of our church buildings. Not to be discussed only among ourselves. To be carried out into the world where people are still waiting to hear it. We are the messengers now.
Receive the message. Live it. Carry it. That is our duty — and our privilege.
