21:16,17
The religious leaders question Jesus over the children singing His praises. Jesus is unperturbed by this, and directs them to Psalm 8:2. There are two key things about this. One is the importance of praise from children. The second is that the praise in Psalm 8 is directed towards the Lord, so Jesus is quite clearly claiming equality with God, being perfectly happy to accept praise due only to God. People are always wanting a key verse that confirms the divinity of Christ. The truth is that none of the gospels make sense unless Jesus did think that He was God. Jesus then went to Bethany, a village on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives.
21:18,19
We now get the fig tree incident. Jesus was heading back towards the city and was hungry. So in the space of a few verses we have the divinity of Christ and the humanity of Christ. He saw a fig tree, but it had only leaves, no figs. Jesus cursed the fig tree, pronounced judgement upon it, declaring that it would be forever fruitless. The tree withered at once. In Mark’s account (Mark 11:12-14) we are told that it was not the season for figs, so it might seem a little unreasonable of Jesus to curse it. However, Paul tells Timothy to be ready “in season and out of season” to preach the word. God can come to us anytime and expect fruit. So when God calls on us we should take that as indicative of the fact that we can bear fruit, we should look to His word first, not to ourselves.
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