And in the morning you say, ‘Today there will be bad weather, because the sky has grown dark and red.’ Hypocrites, you can discern the face of the sky, but can you not recognize the signs of the times?”
In these verses Jesus rebukes the religious leaders sternly, yet justly, exposing their spiritual blindness. He points out that they are able to observe the outward signs of the sky and predict the weather, but they do not want to, or cannot, recognize the “signs of the times”: the presence of the Messiah and the beginning of the kingdom of God. The problem is not a lack of reason or observation, but a heart closed before the truth. This word reminds us that outward wisdom has no value if a person does not have spiritual alertness to recognize God’s work in his own time.