SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/27/2020 9:12 AM
My Worship Time Focus: Christ and
the Law Part 4—The Purpose of Scripture
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 5:20
Message of the verses: “20 “For I say to
you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and
Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
In
today’s SD we begin the last section that covers Matthew 5:17-20 and the title
that John MacArthur has given to each of his chapters in his commentary begin
with “Christ and the Law” and today’s we begin to look at part four “The
Purpose of Scripture.” We will begin to
look at the introduction to this subject in our SD for today.
The
question we must ask and then do our best to answer is “What is Jesus talking
about in this 20th verse of Matthew chapter five?” I’m sure that there are more points from this
verse than the one that I want to point out, but it seems to me that Jesus is
talking about a false salvation that people from the time of Cain, who killed
his brother Able, and that is trying to do it on your own. You can read from Genesis to Revelation and
you will not find a single verse that teaches that salvation can be obtained on
oneself. You will see verses that teach
that after a person is truly born from above that they will work out their own
salvation with fear and trembling, but that happens after they are saved,
always after a person is saved. “8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that
not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; 9 not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.
10 For we are His
workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared
beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Eph. 2:8-10). Here is the story of salvation and then works
to be done for the glory of God, as verses 8-9 tell of how we are saved, and
then verse 10 teaches that the works that we do for the glory of God have been
planned in advance, even before the world was created. Why?
The answer is that all of this will bring glory to God, and that we will
have nothing to brag about like what the Pharisees had during the time when
Jesus was preaching this sermon. John
MacArthur adds “Outside of sin itself, the Bible opposes nothing more
vehemently than the religion of human achievement.”
Let
us look at a story, a parable that Jesus taught to make this point: “9
And He also told this parable to some
people who trusted in themselves
that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt: 10 "Two men went up into
the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 “The
Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: ’God, I thank You that I am not
like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax
collector. 12 ’I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get.’ 13
"But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to
lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, ’God, be merciful to me, the
sinner!’ 14 "I
tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself
will be humbled, but
he who humbles himself will be exalted’” (Luke 18:9-14).
The
tax collectors in Jesus’ day were the most hated man because they were Jews who
were the one’s collecting taxes. There
is a new series that I have watched called “The Chosen” and, to me, it portrays
the life of Jesus and His disciples in a way that probably is pretty
genuine. In the story we find Matthew
the tax collector and they portray Matthew as a hated man just like the gospels
portray him. Matthew has to pay a man to
take him from his rather expensive home to where he is working, as he rides
under a tarp so that no one can see him.
When one compares the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable with the hated tax
collector perhaps Jesus was telling the story of what happened to Matthew, the
dreaded Jewish tax collector.
As
we look at verse 20 we see that Jesus teaches that the sort of righteousness exemplified
by the Pharisees was not sufficient to gain entrance into the Kingdom of
God. Think for a moment of the crowds
that Jesus was talking to and as we read this verse we certainly can believe that
as Jesus speaks of legalistic, works-oriented hearers, that this was the most
radical thing that Jesus had taught.
Think about what some of the people in the crowd may have been thinking “If
the Pharisees with all that they do ‘for the Lord’ cannot get into heaven then
who can?”
John
MacArthur writes “After showing the preeminence (v. 17), permanence (v. 18),
and pertinence (v. 19) of Scripture, Jesus now shows its purpose. From the context of shoes preceding three
verses it is clear that He is still speaking of ‘the Law and the Prophets,’ the
Old Testament Scriptures. In saying that
true righteousness exceeds the kind displayed by the scribes and Pharisees,
Jesus said that, whatever they did with man-made tradition, they did not live
up to the standard of Scripture.
“The
implied truth of Matthew 5:20 is this:
The purpose of God’s law was to show that, to please God and to be
worthy of citizenship in His kingdom, more righteousness is required than anyone
can possibly have or accomplished in himself.
The purpose of the law was not to show what to do in order to make
oneself acceptable, much less to show how good one already is, but to show how
utterly sinful and helpless all men are in themselves. (That is one of Paul’s
themes in Romans and Galatians.) As the
Lord pointed out to the Jews in the first beatitude, the initial step toward
kingdom citizenship is poverty of spirit, recognizing one’s total wretchedness
and inadequacy before God.”
Spiritual meaning for my life today: What I can see from this section that I have
written on this morning is not only have I been saved totally through what
Jesus did for me, and that I have been called to this before the world began,
but that I have to walk in the power of the Holy Spirit to do things that will
glorify God, as I believe that Ephesians 2:10 teaches that in eternity past
that God has given me works to do, and so from salvation to my entrance into heaven
it has been all about God.
My Steps of Faith for Today: It is my desire to do the works that God has
chosen for me to do before the world was created.
7/27/2020 9:59 AM
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