Tuesday of Holy Week, March 31, 2026
Matthew 21:23–32 | Naomi Miller
When Jesus entered Jerusalem on the back of a borrowed donkey, all of Jerusalem was faced with a single great question: Who was the Messiah to come—and could he be this Jesus of Nazareth? When the chief priests question Jesus’s authority, they are really asking the same question. The answer depends entirely on what they believed Israel’s problem to be.
As my young adults group worked through Experiencing God together, I was struck by Blackaby’s (accurate) assertion that we are often tempted to wait for God’s confirmation of our own will, rather than waiting for God to reveal His will.
The scribes and elders had their own idea of how Israel might be saved. To them, the problem appeared obvious: Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and finally Rome had devastated Israel’s land and scattered their people. The militaristic Messiah they waited for would drive away these oppressors and bring about a new golden age for Israel. The problem was external, and could be fixed by an “external” Messiah.
Yet God’s Messiah, the perfect Lamb parading into Jerusalem on a donkey, was nothing like the Messiah of the chief priests. God saw an internal problem far deeper than the oppression of Rome: he saw the oppression of sin in the human heart. Just as Israel could not free themselves from the might of Rome, the hearts of Jews and Gentiles alike were held in bondage to sin, and the righteousness of the chief priests and all their sacrifices could never free them from that captivity. According to God’s perfect justice, because every human has sinned (and the wages of sin is death, Rom 6:23), every human deserves death. However, in His love, God offered His Son on our behalf. He was rejected so that we might be accepted; He lived a sinless life yet took our sin upon Him, so that we might be clothed in His righteousness. In order for the chief priests to accept Christ as Savior, they had to agree with God’s diagnosis of their problem, and therefore accept that their own imperfect righteousness could never justify them before God.
Matthew’s account of Jesus’s conversation with the chief priests suggests that they already understood the deeper issue, but were not willing to admit it. When Jesus asked them whether John’s baptism was from heaven or from earth, they knew the correct answer, but were paralyzed with hesitation because of their pride and their fear of man.
Truth demands action. Jesus is the only way to the Father. If we are to believe the Truth (Christ, John 14:6), He will not leave us unchanged. We will have to admit our need of a Savior, not of our external problems, but of the problem of sin, which is the root of all our external issues. God loves us too much to offer us a false remedy. Rather, He offers us His Son, at infinite cost to Himself, so that we can not only be redeemed also adopted into His family (Rom 8:32; 1 Pet 1:18–19; Gal 4:4–5).
Living according to the truth requires taking an honest look at ourselves and at God. We must be willing to consider our own righteousness as nothing for the sake of Christ (Phil 3:7). Let us learn from the hesitancy of the scribes and chief priests, and let us ask God to open our eyes to see our situation as it truly is, so that we can understand our need for the Messiah He has sent, and accept Him with open arms.
Prayer:Father, You see what I cannot always see, and know that the deepest trouble is not outside me but inside me. I confess that I have defined my problems by what I can point to, and have missed the sin that runs underneath all of it. You loved me enough to send Your Son into that deeper place, to bear what I could not, and to bring me home. Teach me to agree with Your diagnosis. Open my eyes to my real need, and give me a heart willing to receive the Messiah You have actually sent. In Jesus’ name, Amen.