SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/1/2022 9:47 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “The Reply”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew 12:39-40
Message of the verses: “39 But He answered
and said to them, "An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign;
and yet no sign shall be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet; 40
for just as JONAH WAS THREE DAYS AND THREE NIGHTS IN THE BELLY OF THE SEA
MONSTER, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of
the earth.’”
We can see that the first part of our Lord’s reply,
the response to the hypocritical challenge for the request of a sign, reflected
the wicked expectations of an evil and adulterous generation. The truth is that the scribes and the
Pharisees, who were actually the so called spiritual leaders of Israel, has
caused the nation to wonder far from God’s Word, as their traditions were more
important to them than the Word of God.
They were ensnared in the superficial, self-righteous, and legalistic
religion because all of their study of the Scriptures was doing them no good
because they were not truly believers.
Now during that time period or I could say dispensation, the Holy Spirit
did not indwell a believer all the time, but as seen in David’s prayer of repentance
found in Psalm 51, he asked the Lord not to take His Holy Spirit from him, and
so there were people who were filled from time to time with the Holy
Spirit. One more thing that I want to
say about this is that once the Rapture has taken all the people of the church
age from the earth then when people become believers in the tribulation period
they too will not all have the Holy Spirit indwelling in them as this time
period reverts back to the OT dispensation because it is the last part of the 480
year prophecy found in Daniel chapter nine.
Jesus
spoke of a person being an adulterous just by thinking about another person
with lust on your mind for them. John
MacArthur writes “The unbelieving Jews were not only physically and mentally
but spiritually adulterous because they had breached the vows of their unique
covenant relationship with God, a relationship the Old Testament frequently
speaks of in terms of marriage (see Ps. 73:27; Isa. 50:1; Jer. 3:6-10; 13:27;
Hos. 9:1). Their idolatry, immorality,
unbiblical traditions, and hardness of heart marked them as an evil people. During the Babylonian captivity, Jews had
forsaken formal idolatry, in the sense of worshiping physical objects carved
from wood, stone, or metal. But in tis
place they erected idols of man-made tradition in which they trusted and put
their hope. They had abandoned the
Canaanite gods for ones of their own making and in doing so were just as much
in rebellion against the true God as when they offered sacrifices to Baal or
Molech.”
A
true believing Jew, and there were some who would recognize their Messiah when
he came, would realize that Jesus was indeed their messiah because they had a
relationship with the Father, and so they would then have a spiritual
relationship with the Son, just as did the godly Simeon and Anna did as
evidenced in Luke 2:25-38; John the Baptist Matt. 3:14, and also the twelve
disciples with of course the exception of Judas. It was because they knew the Father, they
knew the Son and did not need a sign in order to verify His identity.
I
will close with this and that is because of the great prophecy found in the 9th
chapter of Daniel many of the true Jews would have realized the time period in
which the Messiah would come, and in fact those kings from the middle east did
realize when the Messiah would be born and spend a long journey coming to look
for Him, and He was probably about two years old when they found Him, and not
at His birth like we see in Christmas stories.
3/1/2022 10:17 AM
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