SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/11/2020
1:19 PM
My Worship Time Focus: “The
Congregation”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 3:7a
Message of the
verse: “7 But
when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism,”
We are now in the first main section
from the outline that John MacArthur has in his commentary, and in his
commentary he will use sub-sections to talk about the Pharisees, the Sadducees,
something that we probably have gone over in the past, but will go over some
more things about these two groups of people who were suppose to be the
spiritual leaders of Israel when Christ came to planet earth. We will begin today with a short introduction
to this main section, and then Lord willing we will begin to look at the
Pharisees in our next SD. One more thing
that I want to again talk about and that is that we only have one more quote
from the “Love in Action” book that I have been quoting since around the 20th
of August of last year, and then on our next SD we will look at the ten
commandments of friendship which will close this little book by David Jeremiah.
There were many people who came out
into the wilderness to see and to listen to John the Baptist, and some of those
who came out, (mostly to cause trouble in my opinion) were the Pharisees and
the Sadducees. John would be ready for
them as we will see once we begin to look at the last part of verse seven.
Now I know that what we are about to
talk about is something that we have talked about earlier, and when we did it
was completely new to me so I look forward to talk about another group of or
maybe better to say sects which include the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the
Essenes. We see the Pharisees and
Sadducees many times in the gospels and in the book of Acts, but not sure about
the Essenes. John MacArthur writes “Most
of the Essenes were unmarried, but they often adopted children from other
Jewish families. These secretive and
ascetic Jews lived for the most part in isolated, exclusive, and austere
communities such as the now-famous Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead
Sea. They spent much of their time
copying the Scriptures, and it is to them that we owe the valuable and helpful
Dead Sea Scrolls—discovered by accident in 1947 by an Arab shepherd boy. But the Essenes had little contact with or
influence on the society of their own day and are nowhere mentioned in the New
Testament.” So that answers the question
that I posed earlier as to whether they were in the New Testament.
The following quote comes from a website called “A
Portrait of Jesus’ World” and it talks about the Essenes:
Who were the Essenes?
“The Dead Sea Scrolls are usually
thought to have been produced by a group known as the Essenes. And the Essenes
are a group that literally abandoned Jerusalem, it seems, in protest... against
the way the Temple was being run. So here's a group that went out in the desert
to prepare the way of the Lord, following the commands, as they saw it, of the
prophet Isaiah. And they go to the desert to get away from what they see to be
the worldliness of Jerusalem and the worldliness of the Temple. Now the Essenes
aren't a new group in Jesus' day. They too, had been around for a hundred years
at that point in time. But it would appear that the reign of Herod, and
probably even more so, the reign of his sons and the Roman Procurators,
probably stimulated a new phase of life of the Essene community, rising as a
growing protest against Roman rule and worldliness.”
Our last quotation from
“Love in Action” is from David Jeremiah’s comments on Romans 12:16, and then as
mentioned we will look at the Ten Commandments of Friendship in our next SD.
Good encouragers have a spirit of humility.
Often we look to
encourage only those people who are “at our level.” For example, if we’re professional people, we’ll
encourage professional people. But what
about the homeless person who walks in and sits down next to us? What about the unlovely person? The shabbily dressed person? Do we find it hard to reach out with
encouragement to those people? On the
following page you will find some important principles for reaching out to
anyone!
1/11/2020 1:46 PM
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