Groupthink

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"When morning came, all the chief priests and the elders of the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death". Matthew 27:1

Reading that today brought tears to my eyes. I know it is part of the story of redemption and a part of God's plan but in my heart I grieve. This world can be so cruel. Jesus Christ, the pinnacle of God's love, being plotted against by greedy, vain men with the earthly power to kill him. Knowing the full story we can rejoice even more in the sacrifice that Jesus submitted to but in my mind I wonder about the motivations of these evil plotters.

"All the chief priests" - Annas, his son-in-law Caiaphas, and no doubt a slew of their cronies. The "elders of the people" - those a step below the chief priests? Perhaps these elders were serving a system of advancement, both in reputation and financial gain and were motivated only by that. In Matthew Chapter 21 we read of Jesus entering the temple and driving out the money-changers and all who bought and sold in the temple.

Roman and Greek money was not allowed in the temple because both often depicted images on people on them which was strictly forbidden in Jewish law, so money needed to be changed into accepted Temple currency. Perhaps these money changing businesses were owned or controlled by these chief priests and therefore why Jesus was viewed as such a threat.

But today how can we apply this passage of scripture to our lives? It's easy to read scripture, especially those passages that tell a story and distance ourselves from them. Yet as my heart grieves for what happened all those years ago to our Messiah, I think I can take this example into my life for today in this way - personal motivation and corporate acceptance of a mindset.

A short story and then I will close. Years ago, during the time in the Charismatic Churches that prophecy, prophets, and training people in the prophetic was popular, my husband and myself were connected somewhat to that stream, yet never fully integrated in it for reasons that would require a completely separate writing. But for the purpose of this one, I will recount a night that we ended up walking away from a place that we were connected to in our hearts as we both had been given a gifting in the prophetic. We used to have meetings in the small chapel of the church we attended once a week for the purpose of having a "prophetic meeting". One night, the last night we ever attended, one of the leaders declared he had a dream the night before and this dream was instructions from the Lord about "people" who would disagree with essentially him, and these people were to be avoided...seems ridiculous now but at the time it hurt our hearts greatly to decide to walk away from the group as we recognized the manipulation and vanity of the speaker and his desire to build a ministry.

Since it was a well established meeting we had been attending we could have made a choice to prevent the amputation from it by going with the group instead of the direction that God was directing us to go. It was the correct choice - and - it pales in seriousness to what was happening to Jesus but it can be connected in this way, to keep yourself in tune with the Holy Spirit and shun a group mindset that is patently wrong to your walk with the LORD and what you are hearing from Him - even if it is coming from within the walls of a church. These guys were the accepted leaders of that time. It's a scary thought that a group of religious leaders would take "counsel together" to murder our LORD.