SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/2/2017
7:33 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 The
Appeal
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Acts 2:37-40
Message of the
verses: “37 Now when they heard
this, they were pierced to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the
apostles, "Brethren, what shall we do?" 38 Peter said to them,
"Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the
forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
39 "For the promise is for you and
your children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call to Himself."
40 And with many other words he solemnly testified and kept on exhorting them,
saying, "Be saved from this perverse generation!"”
I mentioned in our last Spiritual Diary that this
section, “The Appeal,” will take us a few days to get through so we begin this
journey in this morning, praying that God will open our eyes to see the truth
that is found in this section, a section that will see the first believers come
to a saving knowledge in the Lord Jesus Christ in the church age, so because of
that it makes this section very important to all who follow in coming to know
the Lord as their Savior and Lord.
I think that we have to put ourselves in the position of
these Jewish people who were listening to Peter preach this sermon, as many of
them were, as he said, the ones who were out their yelling to have Jesus
crucified, and yet God in His great mercy and grace, along with His great love
is now through the Holy Spirit going to open their eyes to see what they did
was so very wrong, and then bring them into a saving knowledge of Jesus
Christ. Peter’s sermon was hard on these
people, and yet there are many people today who if they were alive back then
would be in the same boat as these people who were listening to Peter, as they
would also desire to put our Lord to death.
After the people heard Peter’s sermon the Bible says that
“they were pierced to the heart.” John
MacArthur writes “Katanusso (‘pierced’)
appears only here in the New Testament.
It means ‘to pierce,’ or ‘to stab,’ and thus depicts something sudden
and unexpected. Stunned by their
inability to evade the indictment that they were guilty of heinous behavior
before God, they were overcome by grief and remorse.” I don’t think they realized it right away,
but this was a very good position for them to be in.
We can understand some of the reasons for their
anguish. The Jewish people have been
looking for the Messiah to come for years, in fact all the way back to when
Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament which contained first of
all the first prophecy of the coming of the Messiah: “And I will put enmity Between you and the
woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And
you shall bruise him on the heel’ (Genesis 3:15).” As we have mentioned in earlier SD’s that the
phrase “see of the women” as seen in this passage as “her seed” is only found
here in the entire Bible. This speaks of
the virgin birth of our Lord Jesus Christ as He had no human father but was born
through a woman. And so the One they had
been looking for came and they helped put Him to death as all humans have done
because “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”
Next reason “They themselves had done it. It would have been bad enough to learn that
Messiah had been killed. Far worse was
the knowledge of their complicity in the crime.
That no doubt produced in them a deep sense of guilt. They could not imagine a greater sin than
killing their Messiah,” writes John MacArthur.
The third cause of their anguish was fear of Messiah’s
wrath, for after all since they know that He had risen from the dead probably
thought that He may come after them for being a part of this evil task.
The last reason for their anguish is that they were
devastated by the understanding that what they had done could not be
undone. Perhaps we have all been there
in certain things we have done that we know are wrong and we wished that we
could go back in time and not do that certain task that we did. I know that I have had that experience more
times than I care to admit.
Spiritual meaning
for my life today: Just as these
people were about to learn that when they did something terribly wrong that God
loves them and desires to forgive them and have a relationship with them.
My Steps of Faith for Today: Trust the Lord to give me the grace to learn
from the mistakes that I have made, to use them for His glory and my good as He
works them out in my life.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible
question: “Jesus” (Luke 7:50).
Today’s Bible
question: “Paul saw in a vision a man
from what place asking him to come and help?”
Answer in our next SD.
8/2/2017 8:06 AM
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