SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/3/2022 9:18 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-3 “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 seeks after a sign, and no
sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40 “For as Jonah
was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son
of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (NKJV).
I believe that many people who read different
stories found in the Word of God, and the entire Bible is true, but when they
read stories about things like Jonah being swallowed by a large, very large
fish, they have great problems in believing it.
Well as we work our way through these two verses we see that Jesus
obviously believed in the full literalness of the biblical account of
Jonah. Now if Jonah had not been
literally swallowed and miraculously protected while submerged for those three
days and three nights in the belly of this great fish, that event could not
have typified Jesus’ literal burial and resurrection. As one looks at the story of Jonah they learn
that he was very hard-hearted, and truly had a difficult time in doing what the
Lord wanted him to do, that is go to Nineveh and preach to them. One needs to remember that it was the
Assyrians who would eventually conquer the Northern Tribes of Israel sometime
around 732 B. C. The Assyrians were very
harsh people who when they conquered a city would cut the heads off of their
enemies and make like a pyramid them to display in front of the city. I believe that God wanted these people to
hear about Him through Jonah so that when they conquered Israel’s Northern
Kingdom that they would not be as harsh to them, but the problem was that Jonah
was selfish with His God and did not want others to hear about Him. Now because of the things that happened to
him and the things that he went through it would not be difficult to believe
that he would lie about his experience; but it is difficult indeed to believe
that Jesus would join Jonah in such duplicity or be mistaken about the historicity
of the story. So in declaring Jonah’s
experience to be a type of His own burial and resurrection, Jesus also verified
the authenticity of Johan’s account of himself.
The
following is a quotation from John MacArthur’s commentary: “The matter of three days and three nights is
often used either to prove Jesus was mistaken about the time He world actually
spend in the tomb or that He could not have been crucified on Friday afternoon
and raised early on Sunday, the first day of the week. But as in modern usage, the phrase ‘day and
night’ can mean not only a full 24-hour day but any representative part of a
day. To spend a day, or a day and night,
visiting in a neighboring city does not require spending 24 hours there. It could rever to arriving in the late
morning and leaving a few hours after dark.
In the same way, Jesus’ use of three days and three nights does not have
to be interpreted as 72 hours, three full 24-hour days. The Jewish Talmud held that ‘any part of a day,
is as the whole,’ Jesus was simply using a common, well-understood
generalization.” Now with that said I
have heard other people whom I have a great deal of respect for who believed
that Jesus was actually crucified on a Wednesday, and another one on a Thursday
and it made perfect sense to me. I guess
because I am now older this kind of splitting hairs does not mean so much to me,
but because Jesus died on the cross for me in order to pay for my sins and then
being raised from the dead to prove that the Father accepted what He did is all
I really need to know.
Jesus’
resurrection after three days was not the kind of sign that these unbelieving religious
leaders expected and what they demanded, but it was infidel more miraculous and
more wonderful than the one they were asking for. This was the final sign Jesus
directly gave to the world of His Messianic credentials and saving power. When Jesus was raised from the dead He
appeared miraculously to His disciples on many different occasions after the
resurrection and then He dramatically ascended before their eyes into heaven. Jesus also continued to work miracles through
the apostles as a verification of their unique authority in His behalf. The truth is that the resurrection was the
last sign given to the world that involved that involved Jesus directly His own
resurrection, Jesus told the unbelieving scribes and Pharisees, would be the
only sign from heaven they would receive.
Her
is the problem: the Jewish leaders and for that matter most of the Jewish
people, did not believe that sign either, and they are not the only ones who
have not believed that Jesus arose from the dead three days after His
crucifixion, as many, many people today do not believe it, and the problem is
that one must believe that Jesus died for them, was buried, and arose from the
dead three days later in order to be saved from their sins, and this by far is
the most important decision that anyone will ever make in their life here on
planet earth.
MacArthur
concludes this section: “When a person
is confronted with the living Christ and with His atoning death and
resurrection, the matter of that person’s eternal destiny is determined. To turn your back on Jesus Christ and His
sacrifice for your sins is to show yourself to be the vilest of sinners, no
matter how superficially religious and moral you might otherwise be.”
Spiritual meaning for my life today: It is my desire to tell as many people as I
can about this great and wonderful sign that Jesus is talking about here, so
that their lives will be changed along with their eternal destination.
My Steps of Faith for Today: I trust the Lord to give me the wisdom He
knows I need to teach through the book of Hebrews, and in particular this
upcoming Sunday school lesson.
3/3/2022 10:01 AM
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