SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/27/2021 11:34 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 “The
Respected Man: Gentile”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
8:5-13
Message of the verses: “5 And when Jesus
entered Capernaum, a centurion came to Him, imploring Him, 6 and saying,
"Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, fearfully tormented." 7
Jesus said to him, "I will come and heal him." 8 But the centurion said,
"Lord, I am not worthy for You to come under my roof, but just say the
word, and my servant will be healed. 9 "For
I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one,
‘Go!’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come!’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do
this!’ and he does it." 10 Now when Jesus heard this, He
marveled and said to those who were following, "Truly I say to you, I have
not found such great faith with anyone in Israel. 11 "I say to you that
many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; 12 but the sons of the
kingdom will be cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there will be
weeping and gnashing of teeth." 13 And Jesus said to the centurion,
"Go; it shall be done for you as you have believed." And the servant
was healed that very moment.”
We
are talking about some, what some people would say strange things, done by the
Lord Jesus Christ. The first person
Matthew talks about who Christ healed was a leper and not the second person is
a Gentile, and next we will see Him heal a woman. The first person that Jesus led to salvation
spoken of in the Bible was a Samaritan woman found in John chapter four. These are all people that the scribes and
Pharisees hated, and yet Christ loves them, and continues to love people even
today, people that others hate.
There
are some who believe that Jesus did all three of the healings we are talking
about on the same day, and if that is so then Jesus entered Capernaum only a
short while after healing the leper.
Capernaum would be later cursed by Jesus for their missing out on their
great opportunity of having the Messiah live there for a long time, and seeing
many miracles done there by Jesus. “"And
you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You will descend to
Hades; for if the miracles had occurred in Sodom which occurred in you, it would
have remained to this day” (Matt. 11:23).
There is no Capernaum today only ruin, never built again just as Jesus
stated.
Let
us learn more about the centurion who came to Jesus. First of all he was a Gentile, and second was
a Roman soldier, and third he may have been a Samaritan because when Rome
captured countries they would use people from that country to be trained as
their soldiers, so this man, according to the scribes and Pharisees had three
strikes against him. Another thing we
can learn from the account in Luke’s gospel account is that this man actually
came to Jesus through some Jewish intermediaries, because he felt spiritually
unworthy of approaching Jesus personally and perhaps also because he thought he
would be rebuffed because of his military position. “1 When He had completed
all His discourse in the hearing of the people, He went to Capernaum. 2 And a centurion’s
slave, who was highly regarded by him, was sick and about to die. 3 When he
heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders asking Him to come and save the
life of his slave. 4 When they came to Jesus, they earnestly implored Him,
saying, "He is worthy for You to grant this to him; 5 for he loves our
nation and it was he who built us our synagogue’” (Luke 7:1-5). The story in Luke says that as Jesus was
close to where the slave was the man sent others to tell Jesus that he was not
worthy of having Jesus come to his house, and perhaps the man knew that Jews
were not suppose to come into a Gentile’s house. The rest of the story is very similar to
Matthew’s account.
We
will conclude with a quotation about the servant from MacArthur’s
commentary: “Pais, here translated servant, literally means a young child. Luke calls him a slave (doulos), indicating he was probably born into the slave household
of the centurion. In any case, the boy ‘was
highly regarded’ by the centurion, who was now afraid that his servant would
die (Luke 7:2). ‘Lord’, he said to Jesus
through his emissaries, ‘my servant is lying paralyzed at home, suffering great
pain.’ Whatever the disease was, it was paralyzing,
painful, and fatal. Like the leper, it
seems the centurion was reluctant to ask Jesus specifically for a healing,
since he simply states the young man’s terrible condition—although the request
is clearly implied.” I want to continue
talking about the centurion and his relationship to this slave in our next SD
as there are some interesting things to write about concerning the centurion.
3/27/2021 12:01 PM
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