SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/23/2022 9:55 AM
My Worship Time
Focus: PT-2
“Unbelief Burs The Obvious”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
13:54
Message of the verse: “54 And coming to
His home town He began teaching them in their synagogue, so that they
became astonished, and said, "Where did this man get this
wisdom, and these miraculous powers?”
I suppose that what we see here in this verse is
that for a second time the people of Jesus’ home town have rejected Him to be
their Messiah. The problem with this is
because it was so obvious that He was who He said that He was for they marveled
at the many miracles that He had done, yet did not believe in Him. We have been talking for some time now about
all of the great miracles that Jesus had been doing and I have to believe that as
we look at these ending verses from the 13th chapter of Matthew that
the people in His home town knew all about it, but for some reason were blinded
to who He was.
John
MacArthur writes “Jesus had not studied in any of the famous rabbinical schools
and had no more formal training in the Scriptures than the average Jewish
man. Consequently, when He taught in the
temple during the Feast of Booths, the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem marveled at
Him, ‘saying, ‘How has this man become learned, having never been educated?’’
(John 7:15). Despite the absence of
traditional credentials, His spiritual and moral wisdom was so true and
profound that it could not be refuted even by His severest critics.”
It
was not only His great wisdom that Jesus showed but He had displayed
supernatural power that all but banished sickness and disease from Palestine
and had performed miracles of nature that astonished the most hardened
skeptics. Now at the very least it
should have been clear that Jesus was a prophet of God who was unequalled by
any of the Old Testament era. So the
question is “How could the people not believe Jesus was from God, when only
divine power and wisdom could explain the greatness of what He said and did?”
Back
in the second chapter of John’s gospel we saw Nicodemus come to Jesus by night,
and at that time he immediately acknowledged that Jesus had “come from God as a
teacher; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him” (John
3:2). Back in the 12th
chapter of Matthew the Pharisees knew that Jesus was doing great miracles,
something that they could not deny, but their great problem was that they hated
Him so much because Jesus was causing them to lose power over the people of
Israel and so they stated that Jesus was doing the miracles in the power of
Satan.
It
was like the scribes and Pharisees, that the people of Jesus’ hometown
synagogue refused to make the logical and obvious connection between His power
and His divinity because they were willfully unbelieving. As we look back at the parable of the seed we
can see here that the seed fell on the hard soil of Nazareth, and God’s truth
could not make the slightest penetration.
Here are the words that Jesus said to Nicodemus, “He who believes in Him
is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has
not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light is
come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for
their deeds were evil. For everyone who
does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds
should be exposed” (John 3:18-20). These
words are not only true of those in Jesus’ hometown, but for all who know the
truth even today and turn their back on it.
The
ones who heard and saw Jesus did not reject Him for lack of evidence but in
spite of overwhelming evidence they rejected Him, and for that their punishment
in hell will be harsher than those who never heard of Him.
We
move forward to look at Acts 4:13 “Now as they observed the confidence of Peter
and John and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were
amazed, and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus.” Things still remained the same even after
Jesus went to heaven.
MacArthur
writes “When a person willfully rejects the Lord, even the most compelling
evidence will not convince him of divine truth.
Cultists and liberal theologians who refuse to acknowledge Jesus as the divine
Son of God can find countless ways to discount or explain away the most obvious
truths of Scripture. They then
congratulate themselves for their intellectualism in explaining Scripture without
accepting its truths, for seeming to honor Christ without believing in Him or
what He taught, and for calling themselves by His name while denying His divine
nature and power. To such false
disciples Jesus continues to say, ‘Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’
will enter the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of My Father who is
in heaven’ (Matt. 7:21; Luke 6:46).”
There
are people who hear the truth of the gospel many times, and yet keep looking
and asking for more evidence are in reality just trying to find a way to not
believe it. Jesus explained in the story
of the rich man and Lazarus, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets,
neither will they be persuaded if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:31). MacArthur concludes “The person who does not
accept the light from God he already has will not believe no matter how much
more light he is given.”
I
will end this SD by asking a question, only wanting a one word answer. “What does a person have to do in order to
end up in hell?
5/23/2022 10:33 AM
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