SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/30/2021 11:01 AM
My Worship Time
Focus: “The Call of Judas”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
10:4b
Message of the
verse: “and Judas Iscariot, the one
who betrayed Him.”
The things that we will looking at in these next couple
of SD’s about the call of Judas will take some hard thinking to understand what
I am going to write about. I suppose
that one of the reasons that we has humans don’t always understand the things
of God is because first of all we are human, and second we do not know, and
perhaps will never know the deep things of God.
I have mentioned in many of my SD’s that to understand as best we can
about the attributes of God will then help us better understand some of the
deeper things about God.
We have mentioned that Judas is always mentioned as the
last apostle in all of the lists of the apostles, but there is no specific
mention of when he was called in the Gospels.
We see him first in Matthew’s listing with no indication as to where or
how Jesus called him, and so obviously he was attracted to Jesus, and he stayed
with Him until the end of or Lord’s ministry, far past the time when man of the
other false disciples had left Jesus as seen in John 6:66.
As far as evidence that Judas had a spiritual interest in
Jesus we cannot find any. So what was
the reason that Judas was attracted to Jesus?
I think that it is safe to say that from the beginning that Judas
expected Jesus to become a powerful religious and political leader and so he
wanted to use the association with Him for selfish reasons. Judas could see Jesus’ obvious
miracle-working power as well as His great influence over the multitudes. Think about if what Judas was thinking would
have been true of Jesus as being a political ruler who could lead the Jews
against the Romans and defeat them.
Think about it in the miracles that He did as far as feeding the people
by manufacturing food for them and if any got killed then He could just raise
them from the dead. I think that this
was appealing to Judas’s thinking. The
problem was that is not what Jesus was going to do, at least not at this time,
that is defeating the Romans. However
when one looks at the prophecy of the tribulation period and at the end of it
when Jesus comes back to planet earth to defeat those who are fighting as
described in Revelation chapter nineteen then one could say that Jesus will be
defeating the Romans as the prophecy of Antichrist shows that the antichrist
will actually bring about and be leader of the territory of which the Roman
Empire had.
We do not find any interest in the coming kingdom for
Christ’s sake, or even for the sake of his fellow Jews, but only for the sake
of whatever personal gain that he might derive from being in the Messiah’s
inner circle of leadership. I think that
we can be sure that Judas was motivated by selfishness, that he nevertheless
followed the Lord in a half-hearted way, that is until he was finally convinced
that Jesus’ plans for the kingdom were entirely opposed to his own plans for
the kingdom.
John MacArthur writes “Christ chose Judas intentionally
and specifically, ‘for Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe, and who it was that would betray Him’ (John 6:64). Although the disciples did not at the time
understand what He meant, Jesus alluded to His betrayal a year or more before
it occurred. ‘Did I Myself not choose
you, the twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?’ Jesus told them soon after the false
disciples at Capernaum turned away from Him.
John explains that ‘He meant Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he,
one of the twelve, was going to betray Him’ (vv. 70-71).”
Lord willing that in our next SD we will begin to look at
some of the OT prophecies that speak of the betrayal of our Lord.
8/30/2021 11:26 AM
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