SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/9/2016 10:36 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 Spiritual Resurrection
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: John 5:25-26
Message of the verses: “25 "Truly, truly, I say to you, an
hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God,
and those who hear will live. 26 “For just as the Father has life in Himself,
even so He gave to the Son also to have life in Himself;”
I want to
begin this section with a quote from John MacArthur to show us where we are
going in the study of these two verses: “The
discussions of both the spiritual and physical resurrections may be divided
into three subpoints: the persons resurrected, the power that resurrected them,
and the purpose for their resurrection.”
In today’s SD we will look at the persons.
The Persons: “25
"Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the
voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live (John 5:25).”
We have
written about the words “truly truly” in the past and one of the things that
needs to be noted is that in the Greek language there is nothing more you can
say about something that is true, once you say these words which are only seen
in the gospel of John you must believe that what is being said is true. We spoke briefly about the short phrase “and
now is” in our introduction, but as we look at it in the context of verse 25 we
can see that Christ is speaking of a resurrection that is happen at this time,
or time period as He uses the words “an hour is coming.” Now this is not a literal hour that Jesus is
speaking of but a period of time. MacArthur
writes “The hour of the believers’ resurrection now is in the sense that when
they ‘were dead in [their] trespasses and sins…[God] made [them] alive together
with Christ,…and raised [them] up with Him’ (Eph. 2:1, 5-6; cf. Col.
2:13). Yet the hour is still coming in
the sense that the resurrection of their physical bodies is yet future (1 Cor.
15:35-54; Phil. 3:20-21).”
We have to
understand that while Christ was on earth, after He began His ministry that
began at His baptism, He began to give life to unbelievers. There are seventeen verses in the gospel of
John that the words “eternal life” are in and now once again let us look at our
key verse to the gospel of John, actually two verses: “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.” Jesus is the One who gives life, He is the
One who created life in creation as seen in John 1:1-4 “1 In the beginning was
the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the
beginning with God. 3 All
things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being
that has come into being. 4 In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.” Jesus Christ is the author of life and as we
have seen in this section of the fifth chapter of John Jesus is saying that He
and His Father do the same things, and so just as the Father gives life so does
Jesus give life. I mentioned that “eternal
life” is found seventeen times in the gospel of John, well the word “life” is
used 39 times, so this truly is a key them in John’s Gospel.
Now in our
introduction we wrote about the deadness of all human beings, that is
spiritually being dead when they are born and it takes the Lord Jesus Christ to
give those whom He wants to give eternal life to. We have been over this truth when we looked
at a part of a sermon by John MacArthur entitled “Twin Truths,” so I will not
go over that ground again. Now as we are
on the subject of spiritual death we will look at a quote from John MacArthur’s
commentary from a nineteenth-century Scottish commentator John Eadie who writes
that spiritual death “implies insensibility.
The dead, which are as insusceptible as their kindred clay, can be
neither wooed nor won back to existence.
The beauties of holiness do not attract man in his spiritual insensibility,
nor do the miseries of hell deter him.
God’s love, Christ’s sufferings, earnest conjurations by all that is tender and by all that is terrible, do not
affect him…It implies inability. The
corpse cannot raise itself from the tomb and come back to the scenes and society
of the living world…Inability characterizes fallen man.” With this statement comes a story that I have
used before and it has to do with an undertaker that I know who was asked a
question by a Pastor that I know and the question was “do any of those dead
people you deal with ever express the color of tie to put on them?” Of course the point is the same as this
Scottish man makes that dead people cannot do things like live people can, and
live people in this case are the ones that Christ gives life to.
Spiritual meaning for my life today: I can relate a story that happened right
after I became a believer. I mentioned that
there was hardly a sentence that came out of my mouth when I did not swear, but
right after the Lord saved me I went golfing with a friend of mine who was the
one who gave me the tapes I listened to when I got saved. He told a joke that I will not repeat, but it
had to do with the three persons of the trinity playing golf and in that off
color joke were some swear words that a few days before that would not have
offended me, but after Christ had given me new life they offended me very
much.
My Steps of Faith for
Today: Be ready to tell those whom
God brings onto my path how they too can have new life.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible question: “Graving tool” (Exodus 32:4).
Today’s Bible question:
“For the word to be profitable, with what must it be mixed?”
Answer in our next SD.
3/9/2016 11:27 AM
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