The Second Preaching Tour

149:3.1Not­with­stand­ing the fa­vor­able re­cep­tion of Je­sus and his teach­ings by the com­mon peo­ple, the re­li­gious lead­ers at Je­ru­sa­lem be­came in­creas­ingly alarmed and an­tag­o­nis­tic. The Phar­isees had for­mu­lated a sys­tem­atic and dog­matic the­ol­ogy. Je­sus was a teacher who taught as the oc­ca­sion served; he was not a sys­tem­atic teacher. Je­sus taught not so much from the law as from life, by para­bles. (And when he em­ployed a para­ble for il­lus­trat­ing his mes­sage, he de­signed to uti­lize just one fea­ture of the story for that pur­pose. Many wrong ideas con­cern­ing the teach­ings of Je­sus may be se­cured by at­tempt­ing to make al­le­gories out of his para­bles.)

149:3.2The re­li­gious lead­ers at Je­ru­sa­lem were be­com­ing well-nigh fran­tic as a re­sult of the re­cent con­ver­sion of young Abra­ham and by the de­ser­tion of the three spies who had been bap­tized by Pe­ter, and who were now out with the evan­ge­lists on this sec­ond preach­ing tour of Gal­i­lee. The Jew­ish lead­ers were in­creas­ingly blinded by fear and prej­u­dice, while their hearts were hard­ened by the con­tin­ued re­jec­tion of the ap­peal­ing truths of the gospel of the king­dom. When men shut off the ap­peal to the spirit that dwells within them, there is lit­tle that can be done to mod­ify their at­ti­tude.

149:3.3When Je­sus first met with the evan­ge­lists at the Beth­saida camp, in con­clud­ing his ad­dress, he said: “You should re­mem­ber that in body and mind—emo­tion­ally—men re­act in­di­vid­u­ally. The only uni­form thing about men is the in­dwelling spirit. Though di­vine spir­its may vary some­what in the na­ture and ex­tent of their ex­pe­ri­ence, they re­act uni­formly to all spir­i­tual ap­peals. Only through, and by ap­peal to, this spirit can man­kind ever at­tain unity and broth­er­hood.” But many of the lead­ers of the Jews had closed the doors of their hearts to the spir­i­tual ap­peal of the gospel. From this day on they ceased not to plan and plot for the Mas­ter’s de­struc­tion. They were con­vinced that Je­sus must be ap­pre­hended, con­victed, and ex­e­cuted as a re­li­gious of­fender, a vi­o­la­tor of the car­di­nal teach­ings of the Jew­ish sa­cred law.