SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/20/2016
10:22 AM
My Worship Time Focus: Unbelief
Confronted
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: John 4:46-49
Message of
the verses: “46 Therefore He came again
to Cana of Galilee where He had made the water wine. And there was a royal
official whose son was sick at Capernaum. 47 When he heard that Jesus had come
out of Judea into Galilee, he went to Him and was imploring Him to come down
and heal his son; for he was at the point of death. 48 So Jesus said to him,
"Unless you people see signs and wonders, you simply will not believe." 49 The royal
official said to Him, "Sir, come down before my child dies.’”
In these last verses from the 4th chapter
of John we have been discussing belief and unbelief and have mentioned that the
word believe in some form or another is a main theme in the book of John, in
fact it is probably the main theme as it is used almost 100 times and the main
verse in John’s gospel stresses this: “30
Therefore many
other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are
not written in this book; 31 but these have been written so
that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that
believing you may have life in His name.” So we come to a man who has a very ill son,
so ill that he believes that he will soon die and the only thing that is on
this man’s mind is to try and do something to save the life of his son, and so
he comes to Jesus to see if He will do a miracle for him. We mentioned different kinds of faith or
belief in our introduction to this portion of John gospel and one of those
kinds of belief takes a miracle to cause a person to believe and this man’s
belief or unbelief as we could say fits into this situation we see in these
verses.
Jesus is back in Cana of Galilee where He had made
the water into wine and even though when we left that story we know that the
only people who knew that Jesus performed that miracle was Mary, His mother,
and the servants, but we can be assured that there were more people who found
out what happened after the wedding or even during the wedding, so people in
this area knew what Jesus did. At this
point I want to quote Dr. Wiersbe which we may see again when I use his
commentary after we get all the way through this last portion of John’s Gospel,
but it fits well in here when speaking of Jesus’ miracles: “Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding revealed
His power over time. The Father is always making water into wine,
but He takes a season or two to finish the work. Jesus made the wine instantly. In this sense, our Lord’s miracles were only instantaneous copies of what the Father
is always doing. ‘My Father worketh
hitherto, and I work’ (John 5:17). The Father is constantly multiplying bread,
season after season, but the Son multiplied it instantly.”
In John MacArthur’s commentary he tells us who he
believes this person was: “The royal official
(basilikos) was most likely in the
service of Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee from 4 BC to AD 39. (It is unlikely that he was in the service of
the emperor, since Galilee was not part of an imperial province.) Antipas was a son of Herod the Great, who
ruled Palestine at that time of Christ’s birth.
After his father’s death, Antipas was made rule of Galilee. Although Rome denied him the formal royal
title, Antipas was nonetheless commonly referred to as king (Matt. 14:9; Mark
6:14). Some have speculated that this
royal official was ‘Chuza, Herod’s steward’ (Luke 8:3), whose wife was one of
the women who accompanied Jesus. Others
think he might have been the ‘Manaen who had been brought up with Herod the
tetrarch,’ who was one of Paul’s co-pastors at Antioch (Acts 13:1). Such identifications, however, are merely
speculative.”
What we see in the beginning of this story is the
imperfect belief of a man in a desperate situation who only as far as he knows,
comes to Jesus because of a desperately sick son, and we will comment more on
this in a bit. First I want to quote one
more paragraph from John MacArthur on a verse that has been puzzling to me: “48 So Jesus said to him, "Unless you
people see signs and wonders, you simply will not believe."” “Faced with the royal official’s fearful, imperfect
faith and the unbelief of the Galileans in general, Jesus issued a stern
rebuke: ‘Un less you people see signs and wonders, you simply will not believe.’ The NASB rightly adds the italicized word ‘people,
since the verb translated ‘see’ is plural.
Jesus’ rebuke encompassed the royal official and all of the Galileans whose
flawed faith disregarded His message and mission of salvation and focused
instead on the sensational miracles He performed on their behalf.”
The Royal official did not care about this rebuke,
but only wanted his son to be healed, and one of the problems that he had was
that he did not realize that Jesus could do miracles from far distances the
same as He did them when the person who received His miracle was near Him or
whom He touched, as happened to the blind man in John chapter nine. He continued to implore Him to come down,
which was a distance of around 16 miles.
Now I want to continue on the thought of this man’s
reason he came to Jesus and we have to understand that even though he wanted to
see Jesus because of his son’s illness I believe that Jesus wanted to see him
to give to him the greatest gift any person can ever receive and that is
salvation. A while ago we look at a
rather long quote from a sermon from John MacArthur where he talked about two
tracks of salvation, and also mentioned that we as humans can never completely
understand this, but the fact remains it is taught in the Word of God. It has been my belief for a long time that
before the foundations of the earth were laid that God the Father chose those
who would receive salvation, and that He would send His Son to die for those
who would receive salvation, and then at the point in which these persons would
receive salvation the Holy Spirit would give them an effectual call, as call
they could not say no to and they would be saved. However in more recent times I have come to
believe that those who would receive salvation would call upon the Lord to be
saved: “that if you
confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that
God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved (Romans 10:9).” As I look back at my own salvation there was
only a bad reason why I went to visit a friend of mine in Florida in January of
1974, but while there God saved me as I listened to His Word preached and heard
how to be saved and was saved, and so I can perfectly understand that the Lord
used a sick son to bring this man to the Lord for salvation as we will see in
our next SD.
Spiritual
meaning for my life today: As I read this section of Scripture and
others like the woman at the well and also Nicodemus’s conversation with Jesus
I can see how all of these had different parts in how the Lord saved me and
that causes me to rejoice over the great salvation that God has given me
through His Son Jesus Christ.
My Steps of Faith
for Today:
Pray that as others read this that the Lord will use it to bring people
to know the Lord Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord, as this is surely one
of the reason I spend time writing these Spiritual Diaries.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible question: “Twelve” (1 Kings 7:23-25).
Today’s Bible question: “What two words express Corinthian opinion of
Paul’s letters?”
Answer in our next SD.
2/20/2016 11:17 AM
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