many illustrations of a more
special character. The difficulty of the position in which our Lord was
placed by the ensnaring question of the Pharisees and Herodians
respecting the lawfulness of paying tribute to Caesar, and the divine
wisdom of his answer (Matt. 22:15-22: Mark 12:13-17; Luke 20:20-26)
cannot be perfectly understood without a knowledge, on the one hand, of
the political condition and feeling of the Jews as subjected to the
dominion of the Romans, which they thoroughly detested, and of which
dominion the tribute money daily reminded them; and, on the other, of
the hatred which both Pharisees and Herodians bore towards Christ, and
their anxiety to find a pretext for accusing him to the people or before
this same Roman government.

To apprehend the force of our Lord's argument from the Pentateuch
against the error of the Pharisees: "Have ye not read that which was
spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the
living" (Matt. 22:31, 32), we must understand the _form_ in which the
Sadducees denied the doctrine of the resurrection. They denied, namely,
the existence of spirits separated from bodies. Acts 23:8. To them,
consequently, the death of the body was the _annihilation_ of the whole
man, which made the very idea of a future resurrection an absurdity. Our
Saviour showed from the writings of Moses, whose authority they
acknowledged, the error of their assumption that the spirit dies with
the body. Thus he demolished the ground on which their denial of a
future resurrection rested.

The psalmist says of those who hate Zion: "Let them be as the grass upon
the house-tops, which withereth before one plucketh it" (Eng. version,
"before it groweth up"): "wherewith the mower filleth not his hand, nor
he that bindeth sheaves his bosom." Psa. 129:6, 7. For the illustration
of these words we need a double reference, (1) to the oriental custom of
constructing flat roofs covered with earth, on which grass readily
springs up; (2) to the division of the year into two seasons, the rainy
and the dry, upon the commencement of which latter such grass speedily
withers. Another reference to the same oriental roofs we have in the
words of Solomon: "The contentions of a wife are a continual dropping;"
"a continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are
alike" (chaps. 19:13; 27:15), where we are to understand a c