SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 6/7/2020
9:09 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-5 “The Persecution”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matt.
5:10-12
Message of the verses: “10 “Happy are
those who have suffered persecution for the cause of goodness, for the kingdom
of Heaven is theirs! 11 “And what happiness will be yours when people blame you
and ill-treat you and say all kinds of slanderous things against you for my
sake! 12 Be glad then, yes, be tremendously glad—for your reward in Heaven is
magnificent. They persecuted the prophets before your time in exactly the same
way.”
What
we will begin with today is something that I can call human nature, human
nature that comes from the evil one.
This is not a pleasant subject for a Sunday morning, but I will try and
make this fast. The Romans invented
charges against Christians in the early days of the church charges that
certainly were not true, but charges to help get the furry of those who were
not believers to go against them. The
Romans accused the believers of being cannibals because in the Lord’s Supper
they spoke of eating Jesus’ body and drinking His blood. They also accused them of having sexual
orgies at their love feasts and they also accused them of setting fire to
Rome. They would brand believers as
revolutionaries because they called Jesus Lord and King and they also spoke of
God’s destroying the earth by fire.
MacArthur
writes: “By the end of the first
century, Rome had expanded almost to the outer limits of the known world, and
unity became more and more of a problem.
Because only the emperor personified the entire empire, the caesars came
to be deified, and their worship was demanded as a unifying and cohesive
influence. It became compulsory to give
a verbal oath of allegiance to caesar once a year, for which a person would be
given a verifying certificate, called a libellus. After publicly proclaiming, ‘Caesar is Lord,’
the person was free to worship any other gods he chose. Because faith Christians refused to declare
such an allegiance to anyone but Christ, they were considered traitors—for which
they suffered confiscation of property, loss of work, imprisonment, and often
death. One Roman poet spoke of them as ‘the
painting, huddling flock whose only crime was Christ.’
“In the last beatitude Jesus speaks
of three specific types of affliction endured for Christ’s sake; physical persecution,
verbal insult, and false accusation.”
Those will be the sub-sections that we will begin looking at, Lord
willing, in our next SD.
6/7/2020 9:27 AM
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