SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/18/2022 9:59 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1
“The Personalization”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
12:34a
Message of the
verse: “"You
brood of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak what is good?”
Jesus changes the metaphor as He
applies the parable of the good and bad trees directly to the Pharisees. Jesus is saying in effect, “You are
immeasurably worse than a group of bad trees; so what you are is a authentic brood
of vipers.” John the Baptist said
something similar as he used this when speaking to the hypocritical Pharisees
and Sadducees who came to him in order to be baptized. “But when he saw many of the Pharisees and
Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers, who
warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”
(Matthew 3:7). Jesus will say something similar later on in Matthew
23:33 “"You serpents, you brood of vipers, how
will you escape the sentence of hell?”
Don’t be afraid to expose those who
teach falsehood, or practice immorality as they are very offended when they are
exposed because they are teaching and living a lie. MacArthur writes “When, in the name of love
and humility, we fail to expose religions, cults, and philosophies that give
men false spiritual hope or we fail to challenge those who promote irreverence
and moral filth, we serve neither love nor humility but sin.”
The example of this comes from our
Lord as He did not shy away from condemning men to their faces, especially when
their sin was cruel, hypocritical, self-righteous, or blasphemous. Jesus came to save people from their sin, not
help confirm them in it by underplaying its seriousness or their guilt. Jesus was not in a popularity contest, and it
was His concern to please His Father, and not men. It is never to God’s glory or to man’s good
to encourage in any way those who do evil or to minimize their sinful things
they do or teach.
I want to close by quoting a
paragraph from MacArthur’s commentary as he talks about vipers, and then, Lord
willing we will continue to talk about vipers in our next SD from this verse.
“Calling the Pharisees a brood of
vipers was a fierce denunciation that everyone understood. Vipers was a general name for a variety of
poisonous snakes common to Palestine and the Mediterranean area. A deadly viper bit Paul on the hand as he
gathered firewood on the island of Malta after a shipwreck, and the native
islanders were amazed that he did not ‘swell up or suddenly fall down dead’
(Acts 28:3, 6).”
2/18/2022 10:18
AM
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