SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/23/2012 8:25:12 AM
My Worship Time Focus: The First Shall Be Last
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: Mark 10:17-22
Message of the verses: Since we took almost a month to cover the 119th
Psalm I have not gotten to get to the book of Mark much this month and so I
have decided to cover the rest of the 10th chapter of Mark before
returning to the Psalms. We have already
done two messages from the tenth chapter of Mark so far this month.
17 ¶ As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran
up to Him and knelt before Him, and asked Him, "Good Teacher, what shall I
do to inherit eternal life?" 18 And Jesus said to him, "Why do you
call Me good? No one is good except God alone. 19 "You know the commandments, ’DO NOT
MURDER, DO NOT COMMIT ADULTERY, DO NOT STEAL, DO NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS, Do not
defraud, HONOR YOUR FATHER AND MOTHER.’" 20 And he said to Him, "Teacher, I have
kept all these things from my youth up." 21 Looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him and
said to him, "One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to
the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me."
22 But at these words he was saddened, and
he went away grieving, for he was one who owned much property.
When we
first began to look at this tenth chapter of Mark I quoted a section from Dr.
Wiersbe’s introductory commentary that is helpful as we make our way through
this chapter: “He (Jesus) could have
preached long sermons; but instead, He gave us these five important lessons
that can be expressed in five succinct, paradoxical statements.” He also made this statement ad he described
what a paradox is, “A paradox is a statement that seems to contradict itself
and yet expresses a valid truth or principle.”
Example would be the statement that Paul wrote to the Corinthians in
2Cor. 12:10, “When I am weak, then am I strong.” One could ask how Paul could make a statement
like this, but as a believer when we come to the end of our strength and decide
to rely upon the strength of the Lord it is then that we will be strong.
I remember
shortly after becoming a believer and shortly after becoming a member of the
church that I attended for over 32 years that our Pastor stated one morning
that it would make a good sermon if he would go through the N T and speak of
all of the things that happened at the feet of Jesus, for there are many times
when people came to the feet of Jesus, and we see in this section that a rich
young ruler is at the feet of Jesus, but in all of the incidents when this
happened he is the only one who went away worse than he came, and this man had
a lot of things in his favor, and one of them was that he knew much about the
OT. This was a young man, and yet it is
said that he was some kind of a ruler.
John MacArthur speculates that perhaps he was a synagogue ruler. At any rate we know that he was young, rich,
and that he knew his Old Testament. He
surely shows good manners and good morals and he has these things going for him
too.
People
today can have these same qualities and it will do them no good when it comes
to eternal spiritual qualities, for this young man did not have a high value of
salvation, for in his mind he thought that he could do something to earn it,
and there are many today who feel the same way, for they want to put God into a
box and bring Him down to their level, but that will never happen. God never changes for He is the same
yesterday, today, and forever, and this is one of the things that give me the
desire to worship Him. Like people today
this young man thought that at the end of his life he would have more good works
in his favor than bad works and so he would be ushered into the kingdom of God
on this basis. The problem with this is
it is not true. God only wants perfect
people or should we say sinless people in His presence and that means that
Someone had to pay the price of our sins in order for us to be justified before
a holy God, and this rich young ruler was looking him straight in the face and
did not realize it.
When this
man, and people today take the approach of earning their way to heaven they
make salvation cheap, and although it costs those who accept the death of Jesus
in their place free, it was in no means cheap, especially to the Lord Jesus
Christ and His Father who sent Him to accomplish this. Here is something to think about along those
lines. I want to quote the first thing
that we find that the Lord Jesus said while on planet earth, “He said,
"Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know that I had to be here,
dealing with the things of my Father?’”
(Luke 2:49 Message.) We see this
theme throughout the Gospels that Jesus was on a mission and so that is the
firth thing that we read that He spoke of when he was a young man. Now what is the last thing that we read that
Jesus said? We see that Jesus’ last words
from the cross are that “It is finished.”
So when we put these things together we see that Jesus began His life on earth to do His
Father’s will and at the end of His life fulfilled His Father’s will for
Him.
This young
man calls Jesus “Good Teacher,” and Jesus then remarks at this by asking him
why he calls Him good, for no one is good but God was Jesus’ reply. By making this statement to Jesus we get the
impression that he was trying to flatter the Lord. Dr. Wiersbe writes “the Jewish rabbis did not
allow the word good to be applied to them.
Only God was good, and the word must be reserved for Him alone. Jesus was not denying that He was God;
rather, He was affirming it. He just
wanted to be sure that the young man really knew what he was saying and that he
was willing to accept the responsibilities involved.” The rabbis were right, for Paul writes in
Romans 3:12 “THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD, THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.’”
Jesus
points this young man to the Law for He wanted him to see himself as a
sinner. The first part of the Ten
Commandments speaks of how men should view God while the second is about man to
man relationships or people relationships.
We must remember that the Law of God speaks of the holiness of God, and
it was there to show us that God is perfect and we fall short of perfection and
thus shows are need for a Savior.
However this young man did not see himself as a sinner, for He tells
Jesus that he has kept the Law. I have
been told that the hardest commandment of the Ten Commandments to keep is the
tenth. “’You shall not covet your
neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or his male servant
or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your
neighbor (Exodus 20:17).’” This
commandment is the one that this young man had broken, and I believe that the
reason that it is the hardest to keep is because it works in a person’s
mind. If a person sees that his neighbor
has a beautiful wife, in his mind he may covet this man’s wife, or perhaps the
wife is a hard worker and he desires a hard working wife the same can be
true. A woman could do the same thing as
the man and covet her neighbor’s husband.
The point is in this story that this man was rich, coveted riches and
therefore would not follow Jesus for this reason. Paul writes to Timothy “For the love of money
is a root of all sorts of evil (1Tim. 6:10).”
9/23/2012 8:19:58 PM
I did not
have a chance to finish this Spiritual Diary this morning as it took me longer
than I thought it would and we had to leave for church so I decided to add some
more this evening. When we got to church
our Pastor was preaching on the parallel passage to this section from the
Gospel of Matthew and so I did get some move insight into this passage.
Jesus is
said to love this man, and was probably as saddened as the man was when he left
because he could not give up his riches in order to follow Jesus.
It was
during a baptismal service at our church a few months back that our Pastor
allowed a former Pastor who attends our church to be a part of the baptism of
his grandchild. This man was elated to
once again be able to be a part of a baptism and shared a story that goes along
with our subject in this SD, although the outcome is much different. The former Pastor told the story of a young
lady that he had the privilege of baptizing who was told by her father that if
she proceeded in being baptized, which would make her a member of the church
that he would take her out of his will and would not leave to her the one
million dollars that he intended to leave her.
She went ahead with the baptism and after her father died she received
nothing from him. She followed the Lord,
but the rich young ruler decided not to follow the Lord.
It was in
the 1950’s that there were a group of missionaries serving in South America and
it was their desire to communicate with the Aqua Indians, who were a fierce tribe
that had little problems in killing anyone who invaded their territory. The men decided to begin to drop food and
supplies to the Indians in order to make friends with them and then they
decided to land next to a river in order to speak with them. They did make contact with the Indians, but
later that night the Indians killed all of them. Jim Elliot was one of the missionaries who
was killed and he made a statement that is rather famous, and also goes along
with this section. He said “He is no
fool who gives up what he cannot keep, to get what he cannot lose.” The young lady in the story I told this, but
the rich young ruler did not understand this.
We will
continue to look at the rest of the story in the next SD.
9/23/2012 8:40:43 PM
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