SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/27/2022 8:04 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1 “The
Challenge”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matt. 12:38a
Message of the
verse: “Teacher, we want to see a
sign from You.”
I mentioned in my last SD that we will be looking at some
sub-sections under that main section I wrote about yesterday entitled “The Last
Sign,” and today’s sub-section is entitled “The Challenge.”
I also mentioned that in this section the people who were
probably talking to Jesus were a group of scholars and religious leaders and
they considered no person outside their own ranks to be qualified to teach them
the least truth about Jewish law and tradition.
Tradition was certainly a problem with these Jewish leaders teaching as
they many times forgot about the truth from the Scriptures and put more emphasis
on tradition, something that was really not in God’s covenant with them. Now as these leaders were addressing our Lord
as “Teacher” it was both sarcastic and hypocritical. Now it was sarcastic in that they really
considered Jesus to be a heretic and also a blasphemer, and we will see that
their intention here, similar to previous occasions, to expose Him as a false
teacher. Also it was hypocritical in
that they used the title to show mock respect for Him in front of the crowd and
possibly to try to put Him off guard by flattery, but the truth is that this
could not happen, that is putting the Son of God off guard as He knew what they
were thinking and what they were planning to do to Him.
John MacArthur writes “The request we want to see a sign
from You amounted to an official demand for Jesus to prove Himself to be the
Messiah. For the sake of the people, the
question was posed in a seemingly courteous and respectful form, but its
purpose was to prove that Jesus was not the Messiah but a blasphemous
imposter. Because the scribes and
Pharisees were the uncontested experts on the law, the people would expect them
to know how to properly test the claims of anyone who posed as the
Messiah. The implication of the question
was that , if Jesus was the Messiah, He would have no trouble performing an
appropriate sign to validate His identity.”
These “leaders of Israel” did not specify the kind of
sign they wanted, but it must have been an absolutely extraordinary one and of
perhaps worldwide magnitude, something like causing the sun to stand still or a
constellation to change its configuration, or perhaps the moon to race across
the sky. The truth is that Jesus had
already performed thousands of public miracles of healing, casting out demons,
and even raising the dead. The
additional sign now demanded was therefore obviously meant to be an even on a
grander scale.
Whenever I had read this passage before I truly had a
difficult time in understanding why these men were asking for a sign as
mentioned above Jesus had done things that no human had ever done on such a
large scale, like raising many people from the dead, and healing people who
could not talk or walk, but after listening to John MacArthur’s sermon on this
section I learned that these false leaders were asking for things like we see
in the quote that he gave above. They
were not looking for a Messiah they were looking for someone to do tricks that
they wanted Him to do, and they would get none of it. There was enough evidence that Jesus gave to
show that He was their Messiah, and the point is they did not want this man to
rule over them as they said the night that they had one of their mock trials
for Jesus.
2/27/2022 8:25 AM
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