SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/8/2017
11:01 AM
My Worship Time Focus: Christ
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Acts 3:18
Message of the
verse: “18 "But the things
which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that His
Christ would suffer, He has thus fulfilled.”
I am sure that we realize that when Peter uses the word
Christ that it means Messiah, and we see in this verse that what God had
planned in eternity past concerning His Messiah have taken place, and that the
fact that the Jews rejected Him and even executed Him had not thwarted God’s
plan. I want to go back to look at some
of the verses in the 2nd Psalm.
“7 "I will surely tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to Me,
’You are My Son, Today I have begotten You. 8 ’Ask of Me, and I will surely
give the nations as Your inheritance, And the very ends of the earth as Your
possession. 9 ’You shall break them with a rod of iron, You shall shatter them
like earthenware’ (Psalm 2:7-9).” When
we look at verse seven we see the phrase “Today I have begotten You,” and this
speaks of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and so we can see from this verse
that the work of our Lord is surely not complete even after He was crucified by
the Romans in compliance with the Jews.
We learned in our study of the 17th chapter of John that is
called “Christ’s High Priestly Prayer,” which previewed what Christ is doing
now in His ministry in heaven as He is praying for His children. So the point is that His work still goes on in
spite of the fact that He was crucified.
Now we can also see that the plans of God concerning the
Messiah were first announced by the prophets in the Old Testament beginning
with Genesis 3:15 “15 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."” This was
the very first prophecy of the coming Messiah and in this verse we see a
reference to the virgin birth. We can
also look at the end of Isaiah 52 and all of Isaiah 53, along with the 22nd
Psalm to see more prophecies of what the Messiah was to go through in His
sufferings. Zechariah 12:10 tells us “"I will pour out on the house of
David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of
supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they
will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly
over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn.” John MacArthur writes that “God used their
evil intentions to fulfill His own purposes (cf. Acts 2:23; Gen 50:20).”
He goes on to write “Peter portrays our Lord as Servant,
Jesus (Savior), Holy and Righteous One, Prince of Life, and Christ (Messiah;
John 1:41; 4:25). He convicts his
hearers of disowning, denying, and executing Him. They must have been wondering, as did the
crowd on the Day of Pentecost, ‘What shall we do?’ (Acts 2:37).
In the second part of his sermon, Peter gives them the answer. His sermon is a classic example of how to
present the gospel. Before the good news
of salvation in Christ must come the bad news that men are sinners.”
Yes that is certainly the truth when it comes to being a
witness of the saving faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. After all Jesus came to earth to die for our
sins so we surely must admit that we are sinners before we can be saved,
realizing that Jesus paid it all, and all we need to do is to confess we are
sinners and that we sin and then accept what Christ has done for us, invite Him
into our lives to be on the throne of our lives and we will then be born-again
into the family of God where we will live with Him forever.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible
question: “Jochebed” (Numbers 26:59).
Today’s Bible
question: “What two New Testament books
give the genealogy of Christ?”
Answer in our next SD.
9/8/2017 11:27 AM
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