SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/9/2016
9:29 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 Jesus’ Passion for Reverence
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: John 2:12-17
Message of
the verses: “12 After this He went down to Capernaum, He
and His mother and His brothers and His disciples; and they stayed there a few
days. 13 The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 And He found in the
temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers
seated at their tables. 15 And He made a
scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and the
oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their
tables; 16 and to those who were selling
the doves He said, "Take these things away; stop making My Father’s house
a place of business." 17 His disciples remembered that it was written,
"ZEAL FOR YOUR HOUSE WILL CONSUME ME.’”
I think we first of all need to review what the
Passover Feast was all about. It began
when the Lord brought the tenth and final plague on the nation of Egypt, when
the Lord sent the angel of death to kill all the first born of the Egyptians
which would finally bring Egypt to her knees so that she would let the people
of Israel go and leave Egypt for they were slaves to the Egyptians. God instructed Moses to tell all the children
of Israel to slay a lamb and each family was to eat the lamb in the evening and
there were laws as to how they were to do this, but on this first Passover they
were to take the blood of the lamb and put in on the door posts of their houses
so when the death angel saw the blood he would Passover their houses and not
kill their first born. This is seen in
the book of Exodus chapter twelve and verses 23-27. This is celebrated in the month of Nisan
(March/April) of our calendar. The lambs
were to be brought into the house and stay with the family for one week before
they were to kill it and this was done between 3:00 and 6:00 PM. After that celebration there followed the
Feast of Unleavened Bread where the children of Israel did not eat any leaven
for that week. The Passover mentioned in
this section of John is the first of three Passovers mentioned in John’s gospel
(see 6:4 and 11:55).
We talked about Jesus going into the temple to drive
out the money changers and kick those out of the temple area who were selling
sheep, oxen and doves and in John MacArthur’s latest sermon which he preached
in Dec. of 2012 he stated that this certainly was a miracle, and even though
one may not think of this being a miracle think about one Man going into the
temple area and doing what Jesus did and have no one try to arrest Him or do
any harm to Him and there is where you see the miracle.
Now we mentioned why it was that Jesus did this and
it was because He cared so much about what His Father thought about this kind
of thing that He wanted to cleanse the temple for that reason. We too are to care about what our heavenly
Father thinks and I suppose one of the things that breaks the heart of God is
the killing of millions of babies each and every year, as this not only goes on
in our country, but around the world. We
as believers are to hate what God hates and we know from Scripture that God
hates the killing of innocent people, including unborn babies in the womb. I am not saying that we are to do like Jesus
did, for Jesus did not harm anybody when He did this, but we are to vote for
people who are against this kind of thing.
Another thing that we can learn from this section is
that this is a preview of what will happen to those who do not know the Lord
Jesus Christ as their personal Savior and Lord when He returns as described in
the 19th chapter of the book of Revelation, only this time He will
harm people as it is described: “From His mouth comes a sharp sword, so that
with it He may strike down the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of
iron; and He treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God, the Almighty
(Rev. 19:15).”
One more thing I want to mention and that is at the
end of His ministry Jesus will do this again as described in Matthew 21:12-16;
Mark 11:15-18; and Luke 19:45-46.
We see in the last verse of this section “His
disciples remembered that it was written” in Psalm 69:9, “Zeal for Your house
will consume.” John MacArthur quotes R.
C. H. Lenski who writes: “The stern and
holy Christ, the indignant, might Messiah, the Messenger of the Covenant of
whom it is written: ‘He shall purify
the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold
and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering of righteousness,’ is
not agreeable to those who want only a soft and sweet Christ. But John’s record here…portray[s] the fiery
zeal of Jesus which came with such sudden and tremendous effectiveness that
before this unknown man, who had no further authority than his own person and
word, this crowd of traders and changers, who thought they were fully within
their rights when conduction their business in the Temple court, fled pell-mell
like a lot of naughty boys.”
Spiritual
meaning for my life today: Remembering the fear of the Lord each day is
something that I try and do, not that I am afraid of losing the gift of
salvation, but that I don’t do what the Lord has for me to do.
My Steps of Faith for Today:
Continue to remember the fear of the
Lord.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible
question: “A serpent” (Exodus 4:3).
Today’s Bible
question: “Through whose poverty does
the Christian become rich?”
Answer in our next SD.
1/9/2016 9:57 AM
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