SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 6/28/2016 10:11 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 “The Dishonor”
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: John 8:48-51
Message of the verses: “48 The Jews answered and said to Him,
"Do we not say rightly that You are a Samaritan and have a demon?"
49 Jesus answered, "I do not have a
demon; but I honor My Father, and you dishonor Me. 50 "But I do not seek My glory; there is
One who seeks and judges. 51 "Truly,
truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My word he will never see death.’”
I think
that there is one more paragraph from the sermon that I quoted in our last SD
that will help us better understand this section we are looking at today and
probably the rest of the this entire section (8:48-50).
“Now just backing off that for a minute, debates, when they’re lost, deteriorate. And there’s a kind of a four-level way in which this works, and you’ve experienced this. You experience it whenever you get into a debate, if you’re not careful. You can see this. Debates start on an intellectual levels. Somebody says, “This is true.” Somebody says, “Well, this is true.” And you have a disagreement. So you approach your disagreement intellectually. You do it on a mental level. You say, “Well, here’s the proof. Here’s the evidence. This is what I believe. This is why I believe it.” That’s the first conflict level.
“The progression, then, goes to a second level
where it ceases to be intellectual and becomes emotional. This is where
you start getting angry. You can’t get your point across. You can’t
move the other person. The other person doesn’t like what you said
because they don’t like the implications of what you said. They don’t buy
into what you said. The heat starts to rise. And this can happen in
just about any kind of conflict. So you have an emotional level and you
start to engage on an emotional level.
“And that then drops to the third level, which is
verbal abuse. When you can’t make your argument any more and get it
across and you’re angry, you just start firing off the epithets, right?
You just start calling people names. And that’s exactly what you see
here. And then the final step, of course, is you come to blows.
That’s the end. You deck the person you’re trying to convince. You
know, you give them a shot to the chops and leave them in a heap in the gutter
or you wrestle them to the ground and hope you can win.
“But this is how conflict goes. It starts at
an intellectual level, goes to an emotional level, goes to a verbal level, and
then goes to a physical level. And that’s exactly what happens
here. They start with an intellectual conversation about religion.
It descends because they can’t win. It’s impossible for them to
win. They’re talking to the truth, the eternal truth. They can’t
win. Error can’t win. It can’t survive. So they’re done
in. They’re incompetent, ineffective.
“They then descend to the emotional level where
they become angry and bitter and all they can think about is getting rid of him
and killing him, and when they have the opportunity, they descend to this
verbal level, where they’re calling him things like a demon-possessed
Samaritan. In chapter 10, they call him insane.
“And then here at the end of the chapter, it
descends to physical abuse and they pick up stones to try to stone him to
death, and eventually that’s why they killed him because they couldn’t win the
argument and they ran that argument all the way down the scale to the lowest
possible level and nailed him to a cross.”
Okay it was more than one paragraph, but I feel it is necessary for us
to understand this truth. Jesus was not
the one who became angry, but those who were arguing with Him. So what we see in our verses today is this
third level, the angry level which will progress to the fourth level later on.
Name calling is what we see in this section, and these
men call Jesus some of the worst things, if not the worst thing they could have
called Him in that culture, for we have already gone over what they feel about
the Samaritans.
Now we have to look at how Jesus responded to these
insulting words that were thrown at Him.
I surely did not understand that Jesus was answering them in love, but
as I have been studying this section I am convinced that this is how He was
responding. Let us for a moment look at
our verses, the key to the Gospel of John “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.” I bring these verses up to remind us why
Jesus came to earth, and remember He was fulfilling the plan of His Father
which in the end would pay for the sins of those who would accept Him as Savior
and Lord. We have to believe that His
response in love to these men that would eventually kill Him was love, for
remember what He said as He was dying on the cross “Father forgive them for
they know not what they do.” Now one
more thing before we move on and that is when we studied the book of
Revelation, we saw things differently, for beginning at the sixth chapter and
all the way to the 19th chapter we saw a series of judgments which
ended with the return of Jesus Christ to earth to judge between the sheep and
the goats, and then we also saw the great white throne judgments, so the story
will be different, but as of now sinners can still receive the Lord as Savior
and Lord.
John MacArthur writes “By calling Jesus a
Samaritan, the Jewish leaders were in effect labeling Him a false teacher
(because He obviously did not agree with their interpretation of the Law), and
a traitor to Israel (since He allegedly sided with Israel’s bitter enemies the
Samaritans). In their blindness, they
were confident that He must be an enemy of God.”
This was not the end of their insults for they also
said that He had a demon, something they also charged John the Baptist with “"For
John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ’He has a demon!’” They also did this earlier to Jesus as seen
in both Mark and Matthew’s gospels by telling Jesus that He was doing His
miracles in the power of Beelzebul (Satan).
The writer of Hebrews writes the following “4 For in the case of those
who have once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and have
been made partakers of the Holy Spirit, 5 and have tasted the good word of God
and the powers of the age to come, 6 and then have fallen away, it is
impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to
themselves the Son of God and put Him to open shame. 7 For ground that drinks the rain which often
falls on it and brings forth vegetation useful to those for whose sake it is
also tilled, receives a blessing from God; 8
but if it yields thorns and thistles, it is worthless and close to being
cursed, and it ends up being burned.”
We will pick up where we are leaving off today in
our next SD as we look at how Jesus answered their charges.
Spiritual
meaning for my life today: I want to
avoid always the fourth level of confrontation, and love in my actions.
My Steps of Faith for Today: Remember what Paul writes about love “ 4 ¶ Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
Memory verse for the week: (Romans 6:1) “1 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?”
Answer to yesterday’s Bible question: “Pilate” (Matthew 27:17).
Today’s Bible question: (A tough one) “Where was it said, ‘"May the LORD watch between you and me when we are absent one from the other.’” (Think early OT.)
Answer in our next SD.
6/28/2016 10:52 AM
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