SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/8/2020 10:22 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “The Effect on Our View of
Ourselves”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 5:21-22
Message of the verses: “21 "You have
heard that the ancients were told, ’YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT MURDER’ and ’Whoever
commits murder shall be liable to the court.’ 22 "But I say to you that everyone who is
angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to
his brother, ’You good-for-nothing,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court;
and whoever says, ’You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the
fiery hell.”
In
our past Spiritual Diaries we have written at length about how the scribes and
the Pharisees had convoluted the law because they knew that they could not keep
it and so made into something that they felt they could keep in order to have
righteousness before God, but all they were doing was self-righteousness and so
the first effect of Jesus’ words to the crowd is to shatter the illusion of
this self-righteousness. The scribes and
the Pharisees, like most people throughout history thought that if there was
one sin that they did not commit that it would be murder for whatever else they
may have done, at least they had never committed murder.
MacArthur
adds “According to the rabbinic tradition, and to the beliefs of most cultures
and religions, murder is strictly limited to the act of physically taking another
person’s life. Jesus had already warned
that God’s righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and the Pharisees (v.
20). As the chosen custodians of God’s
Word (Rom. 3:2) the Jews, above all people, should have known that God commands
heart-righteousness, not just external, legalistic behavior. But because most of them had come to converse
in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, and because
the rabbis had created a vast collection of traditions, which they taught in
place of Scripture itself, the Jews of Jesus’ day were ignorant of much of the
great revelation God had given them.
Rabbinic interpretation of Scripture also obscured the divinely intended
meaning.” I would suspect that this was
something that happened later on in the history of the church when churches
like the Catholic churches discoursed people read their Bibles and the mass was
in Latin.
We
have looked at earlier that the traditional command “you shall not commit
murder” was certainly scriptural, as it was a rendering of Exodus 20:13. However the traditional Jewish penalty, “whoever
commits murder shall be liable of the court,” has fallen short of the biblical
standard in several ways as John MacArthur points out: “In the first place it fell short because id
did not prescribe the scriptural penalty of death (Gen. 9:6; Num. 35:30-31;
etc.). The traditional penalty for
murder was liability before a civil court, which apparently used its own
judgment as to punishment. In the second
place, and more importantly, God’s holy character was not even taken into
consideration. Nothing we said of
disobedience to His law, of desecrating His image in which man is made, or His
role in determining and dispensing judgment.
In the third place nothing was said about the inner attitude, the heart
offense of the murderer.”
As
we look at the rabbis, scribes, and the Pharisees combined we see that the
confined murder to being merely a civil issue and they had confined its
prosecution to a human court. I would
have to say that before I read this chapter many years ago that that was my
attitude too. Another thing that this
group of Jewish leaders was that confined its evil to a physical act. Now because they did this, they flagrantly
disregarded what their own Scriptures taught.
David said a long time before these men was born in Psalm 51:6 “Behold,
Thou dost desire truth in the innermost being, and in the hidden part Thou wilt
make me know wisdom.” Remember that
Psalm 51 was a Psalm written by David after his sin with Bathsheba and also his
murder of her husband. I want to now
look at Psalm 15:2 to compare it with 51:6 “He who walks with integrity, and
works righteousness, And speaks truth in his heart.” We will conclude this SD with a quote from 1
Samuel 16:7 “But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not look at his appearance
or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees
not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at
the heart.’”
8/8/2020 10:59 AM
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