SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/23/2022 8:07 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-3 “Conformed to God’s Plan”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
12:15-17
Message of the verses: “15 But Jesus,
aware of this, withdrew from there. And many followed Him, and He healed
them all, 16 and warned them not to make Him known, 17 in order that what was
spoken through Isaiah the prophet, might be fulfilled, saying,”
We want to move a little further into the verses
that we are looking at in this section of Matthew as we look at verse sixteen “and
warned them not to make Him known.” This
is the same thing that Jesus told the leper in Matthew 8:4 “See that you tell no
one.” He also told the two blind men in
Matthew 9:30 “See here, let no one know about this!”
Some may think this to be a strange command, but
there are probably several reasons why Jesus gave such instructions on certain
occasions. MacArthur writes “In the case
of the leper, Jesus prescribed the Old Testament procedure for going to the
priests to have a cleansing verified (Lev. 14:2-32). The testimony of the priests would give
official recognition of the man’s healing and therefore give more dramatic
evidence of Jesus’ messianic credentials.”
Another
reason for Him not wanting to have this told to others is that once again we go
back to the leper who did not follow His instructions, and therefore there were
so many people around Jesus that He was unable to do any work in healing others
and telling them the Good news. Perhaps
Jesus did this so that He could confront people in doing more miracles Himself,
and thus they too could see that He was indeed the Messiah as He did the
miracles and not have someone tell them that He had done them. As we think back about when John the Baptist
sent people to ask Jesus if He was really the Messiah, Jesus did not really
answer them in speaking to them, but He did it by performing many miracles in
order for those that John sent could see for themselves that He was indeed the
Messiah. Luke writes about this as seen
in Luke 7:21 “At that very time He cured many people of diseases and
afflictions and evil spirits; and He gave sight to many who were blind.”
It is Sunday morning and the snow is coming down and
I am to go and teach our Sunday school class, but before that I have to make
sure the driveway is cleaned out so Lord willing, we will finish this section
in our next SD.
1/23/2022 8:23 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment