SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/24/2021 11:08 AM
My Worship Time Focus: Matthew the
Tax-Collector
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
10:3b
Message of the
verse: “Thomas
and Matthew the tax collector;”
Today
we begin looking at Matthew the tax collector, and one may find it a bit
unusual that the only mention of Matthew in the gospel that he wrote was in
this verse and also Matthew 9:9. Unfortunately the New Testament reveals little
about Matthew even though he wrote one of the great gospels found in the New
Testament.
We know that Matthew was a Jew and
also that he worked for Rome in order to collect taxes from the Jewish people,
which made him very unpopular with the Jews.
He made his money by extracting more taxes than what Rome demanded of
him and this made the Jews even more angry with him.
We do see his calling by our Lord in
Matthew 9:9 something we have already looked at. “As Jesus went on from there, He saw a man
called Matthew, sitting in the tax collector’s booth; and He said to him,
"Follow Me!" And he got up and followed Him.”
John MacArthur writes the following
about tax collectors: “They [tax
collectors] were so despicable and vile that the Jewish Talmud said, ‘It is
righteous to lie and deceive a tax collector.’
Tax collectors were not permitted to testify in Jewish courts, because
they were notorious liars and accepted bribes as a normal part of life. They were cut off from the rest of Jewish
life and were forbidden to worship in the temple or even in a synagogue. In Jesus’ parable, the tax collector who came
to the temple to pray stood ‘some distance away’ (Luke 18:13) not only because
he felt unworthy but because he was not allowed to enter.
“Matthew was hardly proud of what he
had been, but he seems to have cherished the description as a reminder of his
own great unworthiness and of Christ’s great grace. He saw himself as the vilest sinner, saved
only by the incomparable mercy of his Lord.”
In studying the book of Hebrews in
order to teach our Sunday school class John MacArthur tells a story about a
prostitute who came to his office because she was feed up with her life and
wanted to have it changed. She prayed to
receive Christ but when MacArthur asked her to burn her book which had all the
names of her “Johns” in it she refused because there was a lot of money
involved. She stated that she probably
was not a true believer. Now in the case
of Matthew who was certainly making more money than this woman, when he was
called by Christ he gave up everything in order to follow the Lord, not caring
about the money he would be losing.
When Matthew left the tax collecting
business he brought some of his friends to meet with Jesus and they had a big
dinner party. The scribes and the
Pharisees did not even care that he had left the business as they asked Jesus’
disciples why He was eating with that kind of a crowd.
Matthew was not only a faithful man
but he was humble and this can be seen by the fact that he did not want to be
noticed which can be seen in the other gospel writings. I mentioned the dinner party that he gave for
Jesus in order to introduce his friends too and this is only mentioned in the
other two gospels of Mark (2:15) and also in Luke (5:29).
Matthew’s humility may have been
born out of his great sense of sinfulness as He saw God’s grace as so
superabundant that he felt unworthy to say a word. Matthew was the silent disciple, until the
Holy Spirit led him to pick up his pen and write the very first book in the New
Testament which consists of twenty-eight powerful chapters on the majesty,
might, and glory of the King of Kings.
MacArthur concludes “God took that
outcast sinner and transformed him into a man of great faith, humility, and
compassion. He turned him from a man who
extorted to one who gave, from one who destroyed lives to ne who brought the way
of eternal life.”
Lord willing in our next SD we will
begin to look at the following “James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus (Judas the
son of James), and Simon the Zealot.”
This comes from Matthew 10:3c-4a.
8/24/2021 12:05
PM
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