I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 19-20.

    I never before noticed that in Luke’s account of the story of the servants given money to invest on their master’s behalf all of the servants started with the same amount. The point is still much the same. However, this story focuses much more on what we do with the opportunities which God gives us and less on how gifted we were in the first place. The lesson from this story is very clear. The more we do with the gifts and opportunities which God gives us, the more we will have to do it with. If you are a gifted athlete and you work at your athleticism, you will become an even more gifted athlete. If you have opportunities to help those in need and you work hard to help them, you will have more opportunities to help those in need. Take the opportunities and gifts which you receive and make the most of them. When you do so, you will find yourself with even more opportunities and gifts.

    When the religious leaders asked Jesus by what authority He took the actions He took, it was an attempt to trap Him into saying something they could use to bring charges against Him. It was an attempt to get Jesus to say something which could be interpreted as a challenge to the authority of Rome. However, Jesus turned it back on them by asking them to either reject or support the ministry of John the Baptist. They were unwilling to do either because they had failed to do follow John’s teachings but to deny that John had divine inspiration would diminish them in the eyes of the crowd. However, they saw the trap Jesus had laid for them and tried to turn it on Him with their question about paying taxes to Caesar. Once again Jesus was able to turn their question back on them. They thought that they had trapped Jesus between declaring rebellion against Rome, by rejecting Rome’s power to tax, or angering the crowd, by supporting Rome’s authority to tax.
    In both of these cases, Jesus refused to allow His opponents to frame the debate. Instead, He framed the debate on other issues. In the first question, by asking them the basis for John’s authority, He made the question about what made someone or something an authority. In the second question, on the issue of taxation, He changed the question to a question of where your loyalty lies. There are many intricacies to Jesus answer, but the most basic understanding would not have been missed by anyone present. The coins had Caesar’s image on them. Everyone present would have been aware that in Genesis it declared that each and every one of us has God’s image on useach and every one of us has God’s image on us.