SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/13/2020 10:14 AM
My Worship Time Focus: “The Evil
and Danger of Condemning Character”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
5:22c
Message of the
verse: “and whoever shall say, ‘You
fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.”
Once again we will lean on John MacArthur to understand
another word, and this time we will look at the word fool. “Moros’
(fool) means ‘stupid’ or ‘dull’ and is the term from which we get moron. It was sometimes used in secular Greek
literature of an obstinate, godless person.
It was also possibly related to the Hebrew mara, which means ‘to rebel against.’ To call someone ‘You fool’ was to accuse them
of being both stupid and godless.”
We have been looking at verse 22 for three days now and
we can see that the verse shows increasing degrees of seriousness. First of all if a person is to be angry we
see that is the basic evil behind murder, and then we move to slander which is
a person with a term such as Raca that we looked at yesterday, and this is even
more serious because it gives expression to that anger and it also condemns a
person character. By calling him a fool
is even more slanderous still.
In the book of Psalms we can see two times that it tells
us “the fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ (Psalm 14:1 and also
53:1 and then we can compare these with Psalm 10:4 “The
wicked, in the haughtiness of his countenance, does not seek Him. All
his thoughts are, "There is no God.’”
Whenever I have seen verses like these it makes me think of April first,
or April Fool’s day. Now if we would
move into the book of Proverbs we could see that it is filled with references
and warnings to fools. One you may not
think of is found in Luke 24:25 which is a very familiar passage about Jesus
walking on the road to Emmaus and in that verse we read “And He said to them,
"O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have
spoken!” I want to talk about this verse
in what is going on in our world today.
I have mentioned many times in my Spiritual Diaries that I was saved
after listening to sermons on the “Rapture” and “The Second Coming of Christ.” There is a problem in today’s Christian
circles and that is that this is not spoken of a lot, and this is a big mistake
for as we look at our world of Covid 19 today we can see shadows of what will
happen during the Tribulation Period, and the Rapture must take place before that
period. Do you think that Jesus would
say to us that we are foolish because we have not believed the Word of God,
both in the prophets and also the letters of the New Testament and not told
others about it? Probably yes.
Because of the things that are found
in the Word of God we know that fools of the worst kind do exist. As believers it is our obligation to warn
those who are clearly in opposition to God’s will that they are indeed living
foolishly. We can show a person exactly
from the Word of God as a warning that they are living foolishly. We would not be wrong in doing that, but we
have to use openness in doing that.
MacArthur adds “Jesus’ prohibition is against slanderously calling a
person a ‘fool’ out of anger and hatred.
Such and expression of malicious animosity is tantamount to murder and
makes us ‘guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.’”
He goes on to describe Hell: “Geena is
derived from Hinnom, the name of a valley just southwest of Jerusalem used as
the city dump. It was a forbidding place
where trash was continually burned and where the fire, smoke, and stench never
ceased. The location was originally desecrated
by King Ahaz when ‘he burned incense in the valley of Ben-Hinnom, and burned
his sons in fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the Lord
had driven out before the sons of Israel’ (2 Chron. 28:3). That wicked king had used the valley to erect
and altar to the pagan god Molech, and altar on which one’s own children
sometimes were offered by being burned alive.
It would later be called ‘the valley of Slaughter’ (Jer. 19:6). As part of his godly reforms, King Josiah
tore down all the altars there and turned the valley into the garbage
incinerator it continued to be until the New Testament times. The name of the
valley therefore came to be a metonym for the place of eternal torment, and was
used by Jesus eleven times.” I can’t
help but think about the abortion clinics where live babies are murdered around
the world every day.
If a person is called a fool it is
the same as cursing him and murdering him, and to be guilty of that sin is to
be worthy of eternal punishment of “fiery hell.”
Spiritual
meaning for my life today: Looking
more deeply into this section of this chapter I am reminded of the fact that
sin and sinfulness begins in the heart.
Warren Wiersbe wrote many time “The heart of the problem is the problem
with the heart” and he may have been thinking of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount
when he said that.
My Steps of Faith for Today: The Proverbs
instructs us to keep our hearts clean, and that seems to be a full time job.
8/13/2020 10:53
AM
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