SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/11/2021 8:01 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “The Barrier of Personal Riches”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 8:21
Message of the verses: “21 Another of the disciples
said to Him, "Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father.’”
It
was last Thursday evening that I was teaching a Bible Study with a few people
in it and one of the men asked me about being an Apostle. I told him that there were certain
qualifications that one must have to be an Apostle, seeing the Lord Jesus
Christ after His resurrection was one of the qualifications and so as far as I
know there are only 13 true Apostles with Paul being the last one as He saw the
risen Lord on the road to Damascus described in the 9th chapter of
Acts. Why do I bring this up? Well as we look at our verse today we see the
words “another of the disciples” and what is meant by that is that there were a
lot of people following Jesus and they were called disciples. Now Jesus did chose 12 disciples and eleven
of them became Apostles as Judas would hang himself and not see the Lord Jesus
Christ after He arose from the dead. The
man we are talking about today was a man who was falling Jesus around. By the way the word disciple in the
Greek/English dictionary means learner or pupil. John the Baptist had disciple in his
group. MacArthur says of this man that “He
was not one of the Twelve, but a hanger-on who had perhaps followed Jesus about
the countryside for a few weeks or months.”
This
man had a similar relationship with Jesus as the scribe did, that is he assumed
that his relationship to Jesus was all it should be. I guess you could say it was not very deep,
but this man made what seemed to be a reasonable request: “Lord, permit me first to go and bury my
father.” What do you think of that
statement? Do you think it was
reasonable? Do you think it was fair to
be able to go and bury his father before he followed Jesus? Would you be surprised to learn that this man
was in it for the money, and so when he got it then he would follow Jesus, but
when he got his father’s inheritance it is doubtful that he would follow
Jesus. Would you be surprised to learn that
this man’s father as in good health and not really close to dying? Well that was the case and Jesus knew all
about it. MacArthur writes “Since the
Jews did not practice embalming; a dead body had to be quickly prepared and
buried. Not only that, but Jewish
tradition required that a person mourn for his deceased father or mother for a
period of thirty days. The final act of
devotion to parents was seeking that they were properly buried. Since Jesus was about to go to the other side
of the Sea of Galilee, a burial obviously could not wait until His return.”
The
expression “let me go and bury my father” is still used in the Middle East today
and means the same thing that this man was talking about. “Bury my father” simply meant staying at home
and fulfilling his family responsibilities until his father died ad he received
his share of the inheritance writes MacArthur.
One
more thing to understand before we end this short SD and that is that “since a
man’s inheritance was customarily lost or reduced if he did not fulfill his
expected responsibilities to the family, the phrase ‘I must bury my father’ was
frequently equivalent to ‘I want to wait until I receive my inheritance.’”
4/11/2021 8:26 PM
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