SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/4/2022 10:52 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
“Intro to Matt. 12:1-14”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 12:1-14
Message of the verses: “1 At that time
Jesus went on the Sabbath through the grainfields, and His disciples became
hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. 2 But when the
Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, "Behold, Your disciples do what is not
lawful to do on a Sabbath." 3 But
He said to them, "Have you not read what David did, when he became hungry,
he and his companions; 4 how he entered
the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for
him to eat, nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? 5 “Or have you
not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the
Sabbath, and are innocent? 6 “But I say to you, that something greater than the temple is here. 7
“But if you had known what this means, ‘I DESIRE COMPASSION, AND NOT A SACRIFICE,’ you
would not have condemned the innocent. 8 “For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath." 9
And departing from there, He went into their synagogue. 10 And behold, there
was a man with a withered hand. And they questioned Him, saying, "Is
it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?" — in order that they might
accuse Him. 11 And He said to them, "What man shall there be among you,
who shall have one sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he
not take hold of it, and lift it out? 12 “Of how much more value then is a man
than a sheep! So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath." 13 Then He
said to the man, "Stretch out your hand!" And he stretched it out,
and it was restored to normal, like the other.
14 But the Pharisees went out, and counseled together against Him, as
to how they might destroy Him.”
Well we have made it through eleven chapters of the
gospel of Matthew as we have been working through this book since November 17,
2019. It hardly seems that long as I am
certainly enjoying getting a better understanding of this great gospel that Matthew
wrote to show Jesus Christ is the King, and also to talk about His kingdom.
As
we begin this 12th chapter we can see that there is a dividing of
Jesus’s work that He did while on planet earth, as we begin to look at those
who have a great desire to kill Him, and will eventually succeed in their plan,
but they will only be doing what our Lord allows them to do, and it will, as
always, have Him in charge of things including putting Him to death. They who do this will pay for their sins
someday even though all of this was in the direct plan and purpose of God in
order to care for the sin problem that could not have been dealt with in any
other way.
John
MacArthur writes “Verses 1-21 depict the mounting unbelief of Israel, crystallizing
into conscious rejection, and verses 22-50 depict the blasphemy that follows
the rejection. After the King was
presented and attested, He was then rejected and blasphemed before finally
being put to death on the cross.”
When
we go back to the very beginning of Matthew we saw Herod’s attempt to kill the
Messiah by killing all of the babies that were in the same age that Jesus would
have been. Next when the forerunner,
John the Baptist, confronted the Pharisees and Sadducees by calling them a
generation of vipers and warning them to flee from the wrath to come, then the
rejection became still move evident.
When Jesus began His own ministry the “Jews” became skeptical of Him,
and then that skepticism rapidly escalated into criticism, then open hostility,
and finally direct opposition.
Jesus
then began to increasingly attack the man-made religion or rabbinical
tradition, then the leaders of that religion increasingly attacked Him. They did not want to hear the truth and they
did not want to give up their control, but years later it would all be
destroyed as Jerusalem was once again conquered and the Jews once again became dispersed
around the world. The Jews accused Him
of blasphemy in 9:3, and of fellowshipping with tax-collectors and sinners in
9:11. Then they even accused Him of
being demon possessed in 9:34. The more
directly Jesus confronted the Jewish leaders with their internal sinfulness and
also their external emptiness, the more they hardened their antagonism to
Him. We see that criticism and
indifference grew in sharp rebuke and then into furious rage.
MacArthur
concludes his introduction “One of the primary causes for opposition centered
on observance of the Sabbath, the problem with which the present text (12:1-14)
deals. It deals with the incident that
prompted the opposition, then Jesus’ indictment, instruction, and illustration,
and finally the insurrection against Him.”
Those
are the topics that we will be studying as we make our way through these first
14 verses of Matthew chapter 12.
1/4/2022 11:19 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment