Not obliged to perform a sign:'The Pharisees and Sadducee's request'
The Pharisees and Sadducees came to Jesus and tested him by asking him to show them a sign from heaven.
He replied, “When evening comes, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,’ and in the morning, ‘Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” Jesus then left them and went away.
Matthew 16:1-4
Right after Jesus had performed the famous 'bread and fish' miracle in Matthew 15, He went to the region of Magadan where Pharisees and Sadducees wanted to test Him by requesting a sign from Heaven. The fact that they approached Jesus to test Him also meant that they either heard about Jesus or they may have seen Him in action before. But it did not seem to be enough, thus they requested a sign from Heaven.
For the Sadducees and Pharisees, an expected sign from Heaven was what they needed to be convinced about Jesus (if they really intended on accepting Jesus). In response to their request, Jesus refused to perform any sign and these are some of the reasons:
1. Jesus did not need to prove to anyone that He was the Son of God: ' In Matthew 3, when Jesus meets John the Baptist, God speaks and confirms Him as His Son (reference Matthew 3:17). Interestingly, right after that Heavenly confirmation, Jesus is led into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil in Matthew 4. Look at what the enemy tells Jesus in the first temptation: 'If you are the Son of God,command these stones to become loaves of bread. But He answered: 'Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God' (Matthew 4:4)
Satan wanted Jesus to prove that He was the Son of God by performing a miracle but Jesus refused because God had already confirmed publicly the sonship of Jesus in Matthew 3:17. We can only learn that the word that God spoke publicly was enough to Jesus and He did not need any sign to feel secure or remove any inner doubts. This explains his response in which He says:...'Man shall live not by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.
By refusing to perform the miracle to prove His Sonship, Jesus was living according to what God had spoken earlier in Matthew 3:17 rather than living through signs and wonders.
Even in our lives, as God-sent, we will face people who will constantly present tests in front of us to find out if we are who God says we are. But I have good news: 'If God has already said who you are, then you do not need to submit yourselves to man-made tests in order to prove yourself. Your faith must be rooted in God's word and not in signs and wonders.
Unfortunately, we are also living in an age where so many fellow pastors and Bible teachers feel the pressure to constantly prove their identity in the body of Christ by performing miracles and they even go to the extent of faking miracles for the sake of proving who they are in Christ. There is no need for that. If God said who you are, then the opinions of others do not matter and you are not under obligation to perform miracles or to submit to man-made tests. Be free by knowing the truth that comes from God.
In Matthew 16:1-4, the same evil tendency that tempted Jesus in the wilderness is also manifest in the request of the Pharisees and Sadducees and this section leads me to the second reason why Jesus refuses to perform the miracle.
2. Who the Pharisees and Sadducees truly were:
'In our common use of the English language, the term Pharisee is pretty close to an insult and nobody wants to be called a Pharisee or a Sadducee. Since I was a child while attending in Catholic church, I always remembered the terms being used in a negative connotation and as time went on, I had gathered a set knowledge of the meaning of the terms 'Pharisee and Sadducee', but I never really took the time to study the concise historical definition of those terms.
I promise you that if you study the real historical meaning of who the Pharisees and Sadducees were, you will then understand why Jesus was always clashing against them. So I ventured myself to study the historical meaning of those terms and this is what I found out:
* The Pharisees and Sadducees were sectarian groups within the Jewish religion divided over religious beliefs. To understand the reason Jesus clashed with them, we should first have an overview of their theologies:
A) The Pharisees: the Pharisees had a strict observance of the written BUT they also believed that God provided for an Oral law in addition to the scriptures. And this is where the danger lied because the Oral law left room for innovation and the chief Pharisees could permit themselves to add on all sort of teachings, fables and stories through the Oral Torah thus opening ways for manipulation just like preachers who rely on stories or fables to develop their sermons while over looking the scriptures. The pharisees can easily operate in groups where people do not bother to verify or check their words against the scriptures. By using the Oral Torah, the pharisees misled the people in whom they were a lot of illiterate individuals.
B) The Sadducees: the Sadducees were a Jewish sect or group mainly composed of rich,elite or upper class society members. Therefore, they had a sophisticated life provided by financial security. They rejected Oral Torah and only accepted the written Torah as the sole source of Law. Now, at this point they should be commended but according to historians, the main reason as to why they only accepted the written law was because it protected the interests of the priesthood hierarchy contained in the ancestral lineage of Aaron. Therefore the elite class of the Sadducees was mostly made up of rich people and priests. The problems with Sadducess were mostly the things they rejected among others:
*The concept of afterlife * The concept of rewards or penalty after death *The resurrection of the dead * The existence of the spirits and angels (Reference Acts 23:8)
The core doctrinal drivers included in the rejection of the Sadducees is quite worrisome and dangerous in the same time . Even more concerning is the fact that some unrenewed Christians (especially in the western first world) are in agreement with the Sadducees on a certain number of points.
Firstly the rejection of concepts such as afterlife and 'rewards and penalties' also means that the Sadducees had their minds focused on their lives on Earth and that they never envisioned a life beyond death. This could explain the hypocritical lifestyle they had adopted since they did not believe in any form of repayment after life.
Secondly, their refusal to believe in the resurrection of the dead also meant that they refuted that God is the God of the living (reference Mark 12:27).
Thirdly ,their unbelief in the existence of spirits and angels contradict some of the texts included in Genesis (written by Moses) where there are mentions of angels. The same unbelief in the existence of spirits constitute an extreme danger especially for spiritual warfare; it would be similar to not acknowledging the existence of Satan.
After studying the Sadducees, I realize that there are 'churchgoers' (not necessarily Christians) who don't believe in the existence of Hell, or even in the existence of Satan. The Sadducees were a Jewish upper class who could afford to get through the challenges of life with their prosperity. And please, do not get me wrong: 'prosperity is a good thing'. But it should not blind us to the realities of the supernatural. Many Christians are falling in the trap of 'prosperity comfort' that offers medical aid,insurances, credit cards, loans,etc...and in the process they don't believe in the existence of Satan.
And lastly, if you read in Matthew 16:4, Jesus describes them as an evil and adulterous generation. For a long time, I always thought that Jesus was probably using the term 'adulterous' as a metaphor. But on the contrary, Jesus used the term 'adulterous' in its literal term. The passage of John 8:1-11 and the fact that Jesus mentioned the term 'adultery' more than once suggests that the practice of adultery was very common during His time.
In the passage of Matthew 16:1-4, it becomes clear that Sadducees (and the Pharisees) were seen as holding an 'evil and adulterous' lifestyle and this could explain why the Sadducees did not want to believe in the afterlife,death, rewards and punishment. They were so consumed at living their evil lifestyle that a denial of a judgement or of hell was a getaway for their conscience.
Does it not sound similar to today? We have plenty 'churches, clergies and church goers' who deny the existence of Hell, judgement Day, simply because they want to protect the practice of certain sinful lifestyles and clear their conscience by denying the the existence of Hell or of a Judgement.
Therefore, even today, we still have Pharisees and Sadducees in our midst.