“Render to Caesar”. I actually hear professing christians tell me I’m supposed to pay taxes because Jesus said to render unto Caesar. For the hundredth time, Jesus was NOT telling us to pay taxes. Just the opposite, in fact.
The Pharisees were trying to trap Jesus. They asked if it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar. Not by Caesar’s law, which was a no brainer, but by God’s law.
In the crowd were Sanhedrin priests and Roman soldiers. If Jesus answered yes, he would be in trouble with the Sanhedrin. If he said no, the Roman soldiers had him.
Jesus used the Jewish technique of meeting a question with a question.
He asked for a coin and showed it to the crowd. Then he asked the Pharisees, “whose image is on this coin?”.
The Pharisees answered “Caesar’s”.
With that answer, the Roman soldiers began to lose interest. They knew nothing of God’s law, and didn’t care. Jesus’s next answer satisfied them “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, render unto God that which is God’s “.
The Roman soldiers may have walked away. Jesus had satisfied their curiosity.
But the Pharisees knew better. When Jesus referred to “image”, they knew he was referring to the second commandment, which said they were NOT to bow down or serve any image of any kind for any reason”.
Jesus had answered them correctly, and they knew it. No, they were NOT to pay taxes to Caesar. It was NOT lawful.
They didn’t disagree, because any disagreement would put them in the same hot water they tried to boil for Jesus. They held their silence as he walked away.
By that same token today, we bow and serve Federal Reserve notes, which are nothing more than images on paper. We create the value because we bow down and seve images that are designed to make the rich even richer.
We even fight and die for these worthless images because they say “In God we trust”.
SCOTUS has ruled that this statement means nothing. It’s a kind of ritual decoration. We don’t really trust in God. We trust in worthless pieces of paper with images of dead presidents, controlled by a banking cartel designed for the rich.
Christianity bows and serves this bullcrap😡
