SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/21/2021 10:02 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-3 “Intro
to Matt. 8:1-15”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
8:1-15
Message of the
verses: When Jesus first called His
twelve disciples He charged them to go to the lost sheep of Israel, “telling
them to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons;
freely you receive, freely give” (Matt. 10:5-8). However there became a problem and that
problem is that when we get to the 12th chapter of Matthew’s gospel
we find out that the Jews were convinced, mistakenly, that Jesus was doing this
in the power of the devil. “But when the Pharisees heard this, they said,
"This man casts out demons only by Beelzebul the ruler of the demons’”
(Matthew 12:24). Jesus then had two
things happen, the first was that He began to teach in parables, and the second
is that He turned His attention to the establishment of the Gentile church.
In
John’s gospel we also see that the recorded miracles that Jesus did was to
prove the divinity and messiahship of Jesus.
We can see that John testified to this in the 20th chapter of
his gospel: “30 Therefore many other
signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not
written in this book; 31 but these have been written so that you may believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life
in His name.”
It
is no small wonder that Jesus’ miracles that He performed caused many people to
want to come to Him, but in most cases it was just to have their physical
problems healed, and not their spiritual problems, which is by far the most
important. John MacArthur said in his
sermon on this section that Jesus took care of all the physical diseases in Palestine
while ministering there for three years.
As mentioned before we only hear of a few of the miracles that He
performed, the ones that demonstrate some kind of spiritual message. It is hard to imagine that the Jews wanted to
and finally killed Jesus, and also hard to imagine that at the end of His
ministry that only 120 people were the ones who were saved and were the ones
that He would use to begin His church.
Man surely is spiritually dead.
I
will conclude this introduction by quoting four paragraphs from John MacArthur’s
commentary on this section:
“In
the first three miracles of Matthew 8, the Lord healed a leper, a paralytic,
and a woman with a fever. Beside the
fact that each of them involved healing, these three miracles have four other
common characteristics. First of all, in
each of them Jesus deals with the lowest level of human need, the
physical. Although even earthly live
involves much more than the physical, the physical part has its importance, and
Jesus was lovingly sympathetic to those with physical needs. He thereby revealed the compassion of God
toward those who suffer in this life.
“Second,
in each of the first three miracles, Jesus responded to direct appeals, either
by the afflicted person himself or by a friend or relative. In the first case the leper himself asked
Jesus to make him clean (8:2); in the second the centurion asked in behalf of
his servant (v. 6); and in the third (v. 14), several unnamed friends or
relatives asked on behal of Peter’s mother-in-law; as we learn from the
parallel account in Luke 4:38.
“Third,
in each of the first three miracles, Jesus acted by His own will. Though He was sympathetic to the needs of those
who were afflicted and was moved by the appeals for help, He nevertheless acted
sovereignly by His own volition (vv. 3, 13, 15).
“Fourth,
in all three miracles Jesus ministered to the needs of someone who, especially
in the eyes of the proud Jewish leaders, was on the lowest plane of human
existence. The first person He helped was
a leper, the second was a Gentile soldier and his slave, and the third was a
woman. We learn from John that Jesus
first revealed His messiahship to a despised Samaritan adulteress in Sychar
(John 4:25-26), and we learn from Matthew that these three miracles of His
earthly ministry served the humblest members of society. Our Lord showed special compassion toward those
for whom society had special disdain.”
3/21/2021 10:31 PM
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