Mark 12 Devotional
by Pastor Lawrence

           With the changing of the guard again politically in January, believers will be asking new questions pertaining to our submission to state government.  There is nothing new under the sun; the Church has been grappling with these types of issues for two thousand years.  Thankfully, in our life time, these questions have never centered on the possibility of the shedding of blood due to our identification with Christianity, and, hopefully, we will not have to ask those questions anytime soon.  But there will still be some tough questions to answer in the coming years. 

           In vv.13-17 of our text this morning, the Pharisees and some Herodians ask Jesus a question, the answer to which seems rather obvious to us today.  They ask him, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?”  A few years prior, in 6 AD, Judas the Galilean had led a rebellion against the Romans during the time of the census (See Acts 5:37) saying that true Jews shouldn’t pay taxes to Caesar since he was a pagan king who set himself up to be worshipped as a god.  He and all his followers were executed by the Romans.  Nevertheless, his teachings had affected the mindset of many of the Jews of the day, and they too questioned the idea of paying taxes to Rome. 

           Prior to the Roman occupation, the only tax that the Jews paid was the temple tax, and it was paid in pure silver coins with no images printed upon them.  The whole purpose of the money changers, whom Jesus drove out of the temple, was to make it easier for the Jews to pay the temple tax with pure coin, since the religious authorities would not allow the Roman coins to be accepted into the temple treasury.    

           Of course, the religious authorities didn’t really want to know the answer to the question that they were asking him.  It was merely a trap, for they believed that no matter what answer he gave would cause half the Jews to turn against him since there was quite a variety of opinions on the matter.  Some were isolationists wanting nothing to do with the Roman government, others were integrationists having to walk in both realms daily, and still others were zealots who were actively trying to thwart the Roman government looking for opportunities regularly to kill any agent working for the Romans. 

           We don’t have the exact same groupings of people today.  As far as I know, no one in our church is seeking to actively overthrow the government, but there are certainly passionate people on both sides of many issues.  And we all think that we know what Christ would have for us all to do.  But the truth of the matter is, Christ’s wisdom is so far above our understanding that we too would marvel if he came out and told us the answer. 

           In most cases, unless an issue is directly addressed through the law of God, we have to make our decisions prayerfully and humbly as we search the Scriptures for wisdom and principles to live by.  We will not all come to the same conclusions, but we must be able to defend our actions scripturally all the while listening respectfully to those who disagree with us.  This is part of what it means to walk with the wise.  May the Lord continue to give us light in these dark days and help us to understand the times in which we live that we might know what we ought to do.