SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/30/2021 10:06 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-4 “The Respected Man: A 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.”
I
want to begin with another quote from John MacArthur: “Jesus’ words to those Capernaum Jews was
startling in the extreme. What He said
utterly contradicted everything taught by their rabbis. The twenty-ninth chapter of the apocryphal
book of Second Baruch pictures what Jews believed would be the great heavenly
feast at which all Jews were going to sit down and eat behemoth, the elephant,
and leviathan, the great sea monster, or whale—symbolic of an unlimited amount
of food. In the eyes of many Jews, one
of the most significant and appealing things about the feast was that it would
be totally free of Gentiles.” Great
hatred can be seen in this quotation, and many Gentiles felt the same way about
the Jews too.
Jesus
is saying that at that meal many Gentiles will be present and many Jews will be
absent, as the presumed “sons of the kingdom shall be cast out into the outer
darkness; in that place there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” One of the problems of the Jews is that they
thought they were the only special people of God would enter into His kingdom
which is certainly not true. God desired
the Jews to tell others of the way of salvation, something that they did not
do. Even the disciples of Jesus did not
get it at first. It is because that the
Jews rejected their Messiah, their King whom Matthew is writing about all
through the gospel he writes that they disqualified themselves from God’s
blessing of light and destined themselves for “outer darkness.” Instead of feasting throughout eternity, they
would suffer forever in the horror of “weeping and gnashing of teeth,”
something that Jesus mentions on more than one occasion. MacArthur writes “Jewish tradition taught
that sinners—a term synonymous with Gentiles in their thinking—would spend
eternity in the outer darkness of Gehenna.
Jesus concurred with them about the destiny of condemned sinners (see
also Matt. 22:13; 24-51), but He declared them totally wrong about the identity
of those condemned sinners.”
I
have written about hell in the past and have stated that as of this moment
there is no one there and it will not be occupied until after the tribulation
period when the beast and false prophet, along with Satan will be sent
there. Satan will come out at the end of
the millennial kingdom to start a small conflict at which it will be
stopped. After the earth and universe is
destroyed the Great White Throne Judgment will take place and then those there
will be cast into hell where they will spend eternity. Jesus told a story of the rich man and
Lazarus which shows us where the loss who have died are now. After His resurrection Jesus took all those
who were dead believers to heaven and so only the lost are there now.
There
is a difference between a physical descendant of Abraham, which is a great
privilege and advantage, and a true descendant of Abraham, which are the true
Jews as the children of Abraham’s spiritual faith, not the children of physical
body whom God adopts are His true children.
As mentioned the physical offspring of Abraham will have no place “at
the table with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.” MacArthur adds “By their rejection of the Son
of God—especially in light of the irrefutable evidence of His miracles—they prove
they are really sons of Satan (John 8:42-44).
Because they are false ‘sons of the kingdom,’ they annul the divine
promise, forfeit the divine blessing, and are forever barred from the divine ‘kingdom.’ That was the substance of Jesus’ brief but sobering
message to the unbelieving Jews just before He pronounced the healing of the centurion’s
slave.”
We
can see Jesus give another reaffirmation of the greatness of the centurion’s
faith as we read “Go your way; let it be done to you as you have believed.’ And
the servant was healed that very hour.”
What was Jesus affirmation? That
the servant was healed “at that very moment.”
We can see that the centurion had great faith before the healing so how
much more faith do you think that he had after the healing of his servant by
Jesus?
We
end as we began with a quotation from John MacArthur, a very important
quote: “Jesus did not give the principle
‘as you have believed’ as a universal promise to all believers. The principle of healing in proportion to
faith was sovereignly applied as the Lord saw fit (see also, e. g., Matt
9:29). Paul had absolute faith in God’s
ability to heal him, and he personally experienced, and was often used as the
instrument of, God’s miraculous healing.
But when he prayed three times in great earnestness for his ‘thorn in
the flesh’ to be removed, the Lord’s answer to him was, ‘My grace is sufficient
for you, for power is perfected in weakness’ (2 Cor. 12:7-9).” I have mentioned many times before that the
greatest miracle we see going on in today’s world is that a sinner is saved by
grace. A unbelieving sinner comes to the
realization that he can do nothing about his own sin puts his trust in the Lord
Jesus Christ’s finished work on the cross, and then invites Him in to be his
Savior and Lord. That is the greatest
miracle.
Spiritual meaning for my life today: I don’t want to put God in a box so to say
and think of Him as someone who must do what I ask, but to trust Him with what
He has planned for me to do on earth for His glory.
My Steps of Faith for Today: I trust that the Lord will continue to bring
more and more people to our revival prayer meetings on Wednesday evenings, and
in the end will bring glory to the Lord as He brings revival to a church who
for the most part as turned their backs against God.
3/30/2021 10:45 AM
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