SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/10/2016
11:29 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
The Christ PT-1
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: John 4:20-26
Message of
the verses: “20 “Our fathers worshiped in this mountain,
and you people say
that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship." 21 Jesus said
to her, "Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this
mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 22 “You worship what you
do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 "But an hour
is coming, and now is,
when the true worshipers
will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father
seeks to be His worshipers. 24 “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit
and truth." 25 The woman said to Him, "I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called
Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us." 26 Jesus said to her, "I who speak to you am
He."”
We left the woman realizing that to whom she was
talking to was no ordinary man, for what kind of a man could have known the
things about her the Jesus knew unless He have supernatural power, so she
became convicted of her sin and then she says to Jesus “Our father worshiped in
this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men
ought to worship.” As I was making my
way through the book of Deuteronomy over the last week or so one of the things
that I saw again in it was that God was telling the people of Israel that there
would come a day when He would chose a place for them to worship Him. As I continue to read through the OT it will
be seen that God chose Jerusalem for this place, and chose Solomon to build the
first temple where the Ark of the Covenant would be housed in the Holy of
Holies and other places of the temple would be made similar to what the Tabernacles
was like. However when Jesus comes on
the scene the Lord is about to have Jerusalem and the temple destroyed again,
and this time by the Romans, which happened in 70 AD, so the kind of worship that
was taking place in Jerusalem in the temple would stop. It actually stopped after the death of Christ
as the curtain was torn in to from top to bottom after He died to show that all
could come to worship the Lord in the way that Jesus was telling this woman.
Now as far as the mountain she was talking about we
looked at that in an earlier SD. This
statement that she made about worshiping in that mountain and the place in
Jerusalem was one of the things that divided the Jews and the Samaritans. Since
the Samaritans only believed the Pentateuch and canonical they believed it was
Mount Gerizim. John MacArthur writes “It
was a nearby Shechem that Abraham first built an altar to God (Gen. 16:6-7),
and was from Mount Gerizim that the Israelites proclaimed the blessing of
obedience to God’s commandments (Der. 11:29).
The Jews, accepting the complete Old Testament cannon, recognized that God
had chosen Jerusalem as the place where He was to be worshiped (2 Chron. 6:6;
cf. Pss. 48:1-2; 78:68; 132:13).”
Jesus makes it clear to her that both of these
places would be irrelevant in the near future as He says “an hour is coming
when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.” This, as we stated above will happen in the
future, but as of right then Jerusalem was the place for true worship and Jesus
then says to her ““You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know,
for salvation is from the
Jews.” Now we have mentioned that
the Samaritans did not use the entire OT and because of that they did not
understand all that God was saying. John
MacArthur writes about a twofold sense in which salvation is from the
Jews: “first, the revelation of
salvation came first to them and then to the rest of the world (Rom.3:1-2;
9:3-5); and, second, the source of salvation—namely the Messiah—was Himself a
Jew (Rom. 9:5).” Under the New Covenant the place of worship will not be the
issue, but the nature of worship will be the issue “when the true worshipers
will worship the Father in spirit and truth.”
MacArthur says that “spirit” means human spirit and not the Holy Spirit.
We will look at this in greater detail in our next
SD.
Spiritual
meaning for my life: Learning more about worship is something that
I continually need.
My Steps of Faith for Today: Learn more about worship.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible question: “In the city of David among the kings” (2
Chronicles 24:16).
Today’s Bible question: “At the feeding of the 5,000 who told of the
boy with the loaves and fishes?’
Answer in our next SD.
2/10/2016 12:04 PM
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