Matthew 22: The Messiah Is David’s Lord

Jesus is becoming ever bolder, ever more direct, ever more aggressive in demonstrating who he truly is: the Savior, God, King who has come to redeem humanity and restore the world by seeking out the lost and the broken and the hurting and the struggling and bringing them to the foot of God’s throne in mercy and grace.

And we’re continuing in that exact same pattern today as we get into Matthew 22.

Jesus starts revealing more explicitly than ever that he is the long-awaited Savior and King and God.

He does that in three ways.

1. Jesus Is the Lord of King David

Number one, he’s in the middle of a debate with the entrenched religious leaders, those same entrenched religious leaders who rejected him.

The children and the peasants were throwing down their robes and their branches as a way of lifting up their rightful King, but the entrenched religious leaders said, “No, we still don’t believe it. We’re still not convinced. We still aren’t there.”

Just like before, when they demanded another sign before they were willing to believe, now, in the same way, they’re demanding more of an explanation before they believe.

The things they’ve seen and heard have not been enough for them.

So they are still stonewalling Jesus.

And Jesus says, “Okay, well, how’s this?”

He takes them back to one of the most famous passages in all of Scripture.

It’s from Psalm 110.

This was one of the most beloved Messianic Psalms, Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. The Pharisees and the Sadducees, the scribes, the religious leaders, all of the rabbis and so on and so forth in the first century, they all pointed to Psalm 110 and said, “This is showing us what the coming Messiah is going to look like.”

And in Psalm 110, David says this:

“Yahweh says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool for your feet.’”
—Psalm 110:1, WEB

David is talking about that coming Messiah who was going to be born from the line of David, right?

So the Messiah is actually going to be David’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great, and so on and so on, grandson.

He says:

“Yahweh says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool for your feet.’”
—Psalm 110:1, WEB

That’s a prediction that the enemies of the Messiah will be put under his feet.

Why does Jesus quote that?

He quotes that because the Pharisees and the Sadducees have a real problem with the way that he claims to be the Messiah.

Jesus claims not only to be a Davidic king. He claims not only to be the rightful King of Israel from the line of David.

He claims to be the God of Israel.

He claims to be the God-King of Israel and of all the world.

They wanted a Messiah who would be a great military leader and a great king who would conquer Rome and then conquer the rest of the world so that everybody else would have to live under the thumb of the Empire of Israel just like they had to live under the thumb of the Empire of Rome.

We’ve talked about this.

The Pharisees and Sadducees and so forth, they were hyper-Zionists. They were extreme Zionists.

They wanted a worldwide Israelite Empire where everyone else was a servant or a slave to Israel and the Israelites.

That was nothing like the vision God cast in the Old Testament.

But that was the way that we as humans take God’s Word and we twist it and distort it for our own gain and benefit.

They wanted a Davidic king from the line of David who would rule Israel well and would conquer Israel’s enemies and turn Israel into the world superpower.

They wanted Israel to be the new Rome.

They wanted Israel to be the new Egypt.

They wanted Israel to be the new Babylon.

Israel to be the new Persia.

Israel to be the new Greece.

I don’t know why they would want that.

Those nations were evil.

I don’t know why they would want to imitate an evil empire, but that is where these Pharisees and Sadducees were.

And so when Jesus claimed not just to be a Davidic king, not to be a military ruler who’s going to conquer Rome and all the other nations, but instead to be the Savior of all mankind, of the lost and the hurting and the broken and the struggling, who loves Jews and Gentiles alike, that rubbed them the wrong way.

When Jesus claimed not only to be the rightful King of Israel, but also to be the God of Israel, when Jesus claimed that he has God’s divine authority, God’s kingly authority, when Jesus claimed that he is the God who created them, who covenanted himself to them, who brought them out of Egypt, who brought them into exile, and who now is calling them to gather around his throne alongside every other tribe and tongue and nation, that felt like blasphemy to these Pharisees and Sadducees and teachers of the law.

And so they keep calling Jesus a blasphemer and a heretic.

And Jesus says, “Here’s the problem with what you’re saying. Everything I’m claiming about myself was prophesied in the Scriptures.”

He says every big claim I’m making for myself was foretold by the prophets.

Every single big, scary, even blasphemous-sounding claim that Jesus makes about himself was clearly spelled out in the Old Testament for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, who really looks and listens.

And he says, “Here’s your favorite Messianic prophecy. It backs up what I’m saying.”

David says:

“Yahweh says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool for your feet.’”
—Psalm 110:1, WEB

He says David had called his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson his Lord.

Now, in the ancient world, you could not be the lord of your father or your patriarch.

If you were the father and this person was your son, you were above your son in the social hierarchy. You were above your son in the rankings.

Your son could not be above you.

You had to die for your son to ascend to the top spot.

This was a literally patriarchal society.

That’s what it’s called.

I know that nowadays people talk about the patriarchy and stuff like that as, like, a kind of a philosophical concept, like a feminist social critique, stuff like that.

That’s not what I’m talking about.

This was a society that literally was run by patriarchs, the rule of the father.

So in every family, the father was the head of the family until he died, period.

In every tribe, the patriarch, the head elder of the tribe, was the head of the tribe until he died, and so on and so forth.

In some places in the world, that is still basically how it works.

But this was literally a patriarchal society, and that meant that you could not be ranked above your father.

You could not.

It was not possible.

You could not be ranked above your ancestor, your patriarch.

Now, David is a patriarch of the coming Messiah.

The coming Messiah is a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, right?

They call him Son of David, descendant of David, offspring of David.

So David is his patriarch.

David is his elder.

That means that David is ranked above this person who’s descended from him.

I know this is kind of weird, kind of complicated, because our society just doesn’t work this way.

But the point is, David’s descendant cannot be David’s Lord.

That is not how society worked at that point in time.

David’s descendant cannot be David’s superior.

He cannot be David’s King.

He cannot be David’s elder.

So Jesus is saying David is saying something humanly impossible here.

He says, “The Messiah will be my Lord. The Messiah will be my elder. The Messiah will be my patriarch.”

That word that he uses there, kurios, for Lord, that is a word that was sometimes used to describe the feudal lord over, like, your patch of land, the landlord, right?

That person was essentially king over whatever the square mileage that they owned was for the people who were living on their land.

Sometimes you would use kurios to describe, like, your feudal lord, your landowner who basically owns you, your master.

But in Hebrew culture, in the Old Testament, among the ancient Israelites, kurios was also the word that they used to describe God.

God is the kurios.

He is the feudal Lord.

He is the master of the Israelites.

David says the coming Messiah will be my feudal Lord, my master.

The coming Messiah is the kurios that I, as an Israelite, serve and worship.

David says in the most famous Messianic prophecy in the Old Testament, the one that all the Israelites grew up hearing and memorizing and learning to love and look forward to, David said right there, the Messiah is not just my descendant.

The Messiah is my Lord.

The Messiah is not just my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandkid.

The Messiah is my kurios.

The Messiah is my master.

He is not just my offspring.

He is not just a king in my family.

The Messiah is the God of the universe.

David worshiped the coming Messiah in Psalm 110.

So Jesus says to the Pharisees and Sadducees, the entrenched religious leaders who rejected him because he did not come as a great Davidic king who would conquer Rome and subjugate the world to Israel, but instead came claiming to be the God of Israel, he says, “David worshiped me as God. You better worship me as God too. I am your kurios. I am your Lord, just like I am David’s Lord.”

So number one, Jesus claims he is Lord over King David.

He’s not just a king.

He is David’s God.

He is a descendant of David, an offspring of David, a son of David, who is also the God of David.

2. Jesus Has Authority Over Human Governments

Number two, Jesus claims that as the God of David, as the God of Israel, as the God of the universe, he bears God’s divine, kingly authority to ordain human governments and uproot human governments.

So some scribes and religious leaders come to him, and they try to trap him again.

They say, “Hey, so, we want to know what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?”

They’re trying to trap him because the Israelites hated paying taxes to Caesar.

They hated having to pour out their taxes to a pagan king who claimed to be God.

So Caesar claimed to be God on earth.

He claimed to be a god.

He claimed to literally be a divine figure.

Each Caesar was exalted in the Roman kind of mythology to god status after their death.

Now, later in the first century, after all this takes place, beginning with Emperors Nero and Domitian and some of the later Caesars, they start to exalt themselves to divine status during their own lifetime and demanding to be worshiped there during their lifetime.

One of the reasons that Christians were persecuted later in the first and second and third century is because the Caesars demanded that absolutely every religious group, regardless of what other gods they worshiped, must also make sacrifices not only for Caesar, but to Caesar, must make sacrifices to Caesar as a god himself.

So there is this pagan, idolatrous, blasphemous, wicked ruler over the Roman Empire who is taxing the Israelites at insane and exorbitant rates.

It varied from one place to another, but at the absolute worst, sometimes people were taxed up to 85% of their income, up to 85% of their resources each year, and they had absolutely no way of stopping it or fighting back.

So look, I don’t like paying, collectively, I think, 25 or 30% of my income in taxes.

Honestly, it’s probably more than that when you add up sales tax and everything else.

America hides just how much we’re taxed pretty well.

But I don’t like paying all that in taxes, but my situation is so much better than what it would have been back in the Roman Empire, right?

But so this pagan, blasphemous king levies these insane taxes on his subjects.

And because that is true, constantly there were Israelite rebellions stirring up.

Groups like the Zealots—that was essentially a gang and a terrorist group kind of all rolled into one, which is sort of how most terrorist groups run, right?

The Taliban is not filled primarily with devout Muslims.

ISIS is not primarily filled with devout traditional Muslims.

It’s filled primarily with 18-year-old dudes who want to blow stuff up and want to push people around and want to enact violence and stuff like that.

That’s how it’s been in most terrorist groups for most of history.

That’s how it was with the Zealots.

That was one.

They were basically a gang and a terrorist group all in one.

Simon the Zealot was a former Zealot who left behind his gang, left behind his terrorist group, and started following Jesus and living a life of peace.

There was a group called the Sicarii.

There were others.

But there were constant Israelite uprisings.

Gangs formed.

Terrorist cells formed to wreak havoc on the Roman Empire in revolt against these taxes.

So if Jesus says, “Yeah, it’s great to pay taxes to Caesar. That’s awesome,” then people are going to say he’s collaborating with this pagan king.

And at the same time, if he says, “No, do not pay taxes to Caesar,” then the Romans will come and kill him tomorrow.

So he’s in a nearly impossible position.

He has to thread a needle.

So what does Jesus say?

He says, “Well, look at that coin that you got there. Whose face is on that coin?”

They say, “Caesar’s.”

And he says, “Okay, well, I think that answers it. If his face is on the coin, give it back to Caesar. Give the things to Caesar that are Caesar’s, and give the things to God that belong to God.”

Give Caesar the taxes he demands.

Give him the basic obedience to the laws.

Give him the basic devotion that comes with being a subject of a kingdom.

Don’t be constantly revolting.

Don’t be constantly stirring up insurrections.

Give them the basic obedience that every person owes to their nation.

But give your worship, give your spiritual devotion, only to God.

Obey Caesar in every way that Caesar is entitled to, but never disobey the Lord on Caesar’s behalf.

So pay your, unfortunately, exorbitant taxes, but do not worship him.

Obey his sometimes unjust laws, but do not sacrifice to him as a god.

Jesus says:

“Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
—Matthew 22:21, WEB

Now, in order to say that, Jesus has to have a level of authority that is way beyond just a rabbi or a teacher or even a prophet.

Jesus is speaking with God’s authority.

He is ordaining the human government of Rome.

Jesus is claiming, as he says all of this, that he has the authority, the divine, kingly authority, to ordain human governments and uproot human governments.

So one, Jesus is the kurios, master, the God of King David.

And two, Jesus is the God who ordains and uproots human governments.

3. Jesus Has Authority to Pronounce What God’s Law Really Means

And three, Jesus claims that he has God’s divine, kingly authority to authoritatively pronounce what God’s law really means.

The Pharisees and Sadducees, they ask him two questions about the old Mosaic law.

Again, they’re trying to trap him.

They are trying to get Jesus to either, one, say, “No, don’t worry about the law of Moses. Forget about it. Just disobey it,” in which case he would be nullifying part of God’s Word, in which case he would be a blasphemer, in which case they could stone him as a heretic.

Or two, if he says, “Yes, you need to strictly adhere to this rule and this rule and this rule and this rule,” then they can say, “Well, why haven’t you strictly adhered to all these rules up to this point? Why haven’t you followed this thing? Why haven’t you done this thing? Why haven’t you done this thing?”

They can point to ways in which Jesus has not followed the exact Mosaic law to the letter.

He never breaks the law, but he hasn’t followed the popular Pharisee interpretation of the law.

So again, they’re trying to trap him.

But Jesus says two things.

One, he says, “You’ve been fundamentally misunderstanding and misapplying the law your whole life.”

He says, “You’ve been completely mischaracterizing the law.”

Jesus affirms the Old Testament law.

Jesus says:

“For most certainly, I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not even one smallest letter or one tiny pen stroke shall in any way pass away from the law, until all things are accomplished.”
—Matthew 5:18, WEB

He says this law is absolutely valid.

The law of Moses is good.

The law of Moses is righteous.

The law of Moses is God-given.

The law of Moses is authoritative.

Jesus affirms the law of Moses.

But he says, “You fundamentally distorted the law of Moses.”

He says, “You have fundamentally taken the law of Moses out of its intended purpose, out of its intended context. You have taken the law of Moses, which was meant to be a gift, which was meant to help the people of Israel, which was meant to form the people of Israel into a community that reflects God’s goodness and God’s glory and God’s righteousness and God’s compassion, and you’ve turned it into something that crushes people.”

You’ve turned it into something that kills.

You’ve turned it into something that drains people.

You have turned something meant to be life-giving into something that is soul-crushing.

You’ve turned it into a stick to beat people with when it is supposed to be a gift to bless people with.

He says, “You have fundamentally misunderstood the core of the law, because the core of the law, all of it, all 613 of these laws, are ultimately about exactly one thing. They are about teaching the people of God to honor the God of the universe by loving him and loving people.”

All 613 of the laws are ultimately about honoring the Lord and honoring the people he created in his image, serving the Lord and serving the people he created in his image.

At the very heart of the law is the notion that we were created, we were designed, God breathed life into us so that we could find our ultimate joy in worshiping him as our Creator.

And because we worship our Creator, we live in love, in harmony, in service, in embrace, in whatever—I can’t think of the word—but we live to love and serve and lift up every other person in the universe who bears God’s image.

That is what the law is ultimately about.

Even the weird laws, even the kind of violent laws, at the very core, they are about creating a people who love the Lord and love each other.

Jesus says, “You have fundamentally distorted God’s law so that it is no longer about loving the Lord. It is about power and prestige for you. It is no longer about loving others. It is about controlling others and remaining on the top.”

The Purpose of God’s Marriage Laws

And he uses a very specific example to show us how that works.

He says, “You have completely distorted specifically the marriage laws in the Old Testament.”

This has come up several times throughout the Gospel of Matthew.

This is something Jesus was very serious about, and this is something that Matthew works really hard to point out to us and to keep drawing our attention to again and again and again.

Jesus says the way that you Pharisees and Sadducees apply the marriage rules in the Old Testament is completely wrong.

He says the way that you religious leaders in Israel apply these marriage laws in the Old Testament is completely contradictory to the purpose of these laws.

So we’ve talked already about how the way that the Pharisees and Sadducees applied the marriage laws was that men could divorce their wives for any reason and women couldn’t do anything.

That was not the purpose of those marriage laws.

And at the same time, now he says, “You have completely misunderstood the complex marriage laws because you have turned them into chains around people. You’ve turned them into shackles around people, when the point of all of those complex marriage laws was to do two things.”

Number one, it was to protect women from exploitation.

And number two, it was to create stable, healthy, two-parent families for each generation of children.

That is the purpose of those marriage laws.

We reflect God’s goodness and God’s glory when we protect people in general from exploitation.

In the ancient Near East, when women had absolutely no legal rights or legal standing, women were especially vulnerable to exploitation.

So we reflect God’s glory in that context by protecting this very vulnerable population that is women.

So the ancient laws about marriage in the Old Testament were about protecting women from exploitation.

Read those ancient laws.

Go do a Google search.

Yes, a lot of them are weird.

Some of them you might find offensive if you’re a modern, like, third-wave feminist.

Then a lot of them will rub you the wrong way.

But that’s because God is creating laws to protect women from exploitation in the context of the ancient Near East, where it was not possible, it was not an option, to just say, “Men and women are equal in society now.”

That literally would not have computed for people.

So what he has to do is he has to take that culture where women have no rights and no standing, and he has to work within what is possible to get through the heads of the people to create a system that protects women from exploitation.

And when ancient Israel followed those laws and it protected women from the worst forms of exploitation, they were reflecting his goodness and his glory to a watching world.

And at the same time, those complex marriage laws about how if you do this thing, then you have to marry that person, and if you do that thing, then you have to marry that person, and if you guys do this thing, then you have to marry that, and so on and so forth, the point of this was to create stable, healthy families for each new generation of children.

This is meant to protect each new generation of children from the foolishness and the selfishness and sometimes the downright cruelty and stupidity of the generations that came before them.

It is a fact.

It’s a fact, okay?

You may not like this, but it is a fact that children almost always do better in a two-parent family than a one-parent family.

They almost always do better when their two biological parents are together and stable.

Now, sometimes you have to split up.

Sometimes there is no way around it.

Sometimes one or the other of those two parents is actively harmful towards the child, and you have to get them away from that.

Sometimes there are cases like that.

But as a general rule, children are so much more likely to flourish and thrive.

They are so much more likely to have stable mental health.

They are so much more likely to develop solid skills to deal with life and to thrive as adults when they come from a stable two-parent family.

There are exceptions to that.

You might be that exception.

But in the overwhelming majority of cases, children thrive in stable two-parent families in a way that they have a very hard time doing in a one-parent family, in a broken family, and so forth.

And so, just for one thing, take this as some encouragement, okay?

You don’t have to be a perfect parent.

If you have kept your child’s family stable and together, you have already done 50 or 60% of the work to help them thrive later in life.

Again, that does not apply in an abusive environment.

That does not apply in a truly toxic environment.

But if you have kept your child’s imperfect but safe and stable family together, you’ve already done so much of the work to help them grow up to be a stable adult.

That’s a long tangent.

But the point is this.

Those complex marriage rules in the Old Testament were ultimately about protecting women from exploitation and creating stable and healthy families for each generation of children to come.

But the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the entrenched religious leadership, had taken them and turned them into something that doesn’t protect women at all, and turned it into something that doesn’t preserve stable families at all.

He says, “You’ve distorted the purpose of God’s law. You’re so obsessed with the letter that you’ve completely missed the spirit.”

So he says, “I’ve come to set the record straight.”

Jesus is claiming that he has God’s divine, kingly authority to authoritatively pronounce what God’s law really means.

He says, “When I speak about the law, it is not just an interpretation. When I speak about the law, God is speaking about the law.”

He says, “My interpretation of the law is exactly as authoritative as the law itself, because I’m the one who gave it. I’m the one who wrote it.”

He says, “I am the lawgiver who spoke to you through Moses.”

Savior, King, and God

So Jesus claims that he is the kurios, master, Lord, God of David.

Jesus claims that he has the authority, the divine power, to ordain and uproot human governments.

And he has the divine authority, as divine lawgiver, to pronounce what God’s law really means.

So the correct response to all of this is what?

It’s to throw yourself on the mercy of Jesus as Savior, to submit to him as King, and to worship him as God.

That is the right response to all three of the things that Jesus reveals about himself here in Matthew 22.

But that is not what the religious leaders do.

Instead, the religious leaders and all of the unbelieving Israelites, they reject Jesus.

They oppose Jesus.

And they plot for ways to kill Jesus, to get rid of Jesus.

And Jesus sees their hearts.

He sees their continued hardness of heart.

He sees their continued rebellion.

And he gives them another warning.

The Wedding Banquet

He tells them another story.

It’s the parable of the Wedding Banquet.

He says there was a great king who held a great wedding and a great wedding feast.

And he sent out invitations to all the nobles, all the highborn people, all the folks that you would typically expect to be at the great Wedding Banquet of a great king.

But they all rejected his invitation.

Some of them even went as far as killing the messengers that he sent out.

These are acts of malice.

They’re not just turning down the invitation.

They are actively rebelling against their King.

They are actively rejecting their King.

They are actively shaming their King.

He says, “You guys are like those invitees from that Wedding Banquet. The King has sent out his invitation for you to come and rejoice and celebrate and rest with him, and yet you have rejected and not only rejected, but opposed your King.”

So he says the King says, “Never mind. I’m going to instead invite all the poor, all the homeless, all the destitute, all the rejects, all the outsiders, all the marginalized, all the people who are outside the lines, all the people who are outside the fences of society, the people everybody else avoids, the people everybody else looks down on, the people everybody else rejects. I’m going to invite them to my Wedding Banquet. I’m going to make them the new nobles. I’m going to make them the new highborn. I’m going to make them the new elite, the new powerful.”

He says, “I’m getting rid of the old court, and I’m bringing all the people who were rejected by the world to be my new court.”

He says, “You should have been the first and most faithful followers of me. God himself came down from heaven and is speaking to you now, and you should have been the first people who came and threw yourself at my feet. But instead, you rejected me.”

But you know who’s not going to reject me?

The sinners and the Gentiles.

The prostitutes.

The tax collectors.

The gang members.

The lepers.

The Samaritans.

That Roman centurion that I met.

That Canaanite woman that I met.

The sinners and the Gentiles, they’re going to see me and hear me, and the Spirit is going to work in their hearts, and they’re going to submit to the Spirit instead of resisting the Spirit like you did.

They’re going to throw themselves on my mercy to save them.

They are going to bow before my throne as their King.

They are going to lift me up in worship as their God.

They’re going to be saved.

They’re going to be redeemed and restored.

They are going to be gathered into God’s kingdom, while unbelieving Israelites will be banished from God’s kingdom.

You Are Part of the Lost Jesus Came to Seek and Save

He’s talking about you and me.

If you have thrown yourself on the mercy of Jesus to be saved, if you have bowed down at his throne to serve him as your King, if you have lifted him up in worship as your God, then you are redeemed and you are being restored.

You are part of the lost that Jesus came to seek and save.

And he sought you and he saved you, so you’re not lost anymore.

Now you are part of God’s kingdom and God’s family and God’s people.

He has gathered you together into his covenant.

So now you belong to the Lord.

There’s not some special thing you have to do.

There’s not some special prayer you have to repeat after me.

If you have thrown yourself on his mercy, bowed down to him as your King, worshiped him as your God, then you are saved.

You are part of God’s people.

And he’s gathered you as his disciple.

He said:

“Come after me, and I will make you fishers for men.”
—Matthew 4:19, WEB

Follow me, and I will make you a fisher of people.

I will send you out into my harvest.

I will send you out to find the lost and the hurting and the broken and the struggling and introduce them to the God who wants to redeem and restore them.

That is who we are.

That is our calling, our identity, and our life purpose.

So go out today and ask the Lord, “Show me someone that you want me to go speak your truth into.”

Go fishing.

Go harvesting.

Go do the kingdom work that Jesus has gathered us together into today.