SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/25/2022 11:44 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “Unbelief Builds Up the Irrelevant”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
13:55-56
Message of the verses: “55 “Is not this
the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary, and His brothers, James and
Joseph and Simon and Judas? 56 “And His sisters, are they not all with us?
Where then did this man get all these things?’”
John MacArthur writes this interesting paragraph: “The fact that the citizens of Nazareth did
not regard Jesus and His family as being out of the ordinary completely
undercuts myths that attribute bizarre miracles to Him when He was a child. One story maintains that whenever He found a
bird with a broken wing, He would stroke it gently and send it flying on its
way healed and healthy. This text
completely mitigates against such fabrications.” Now I have stated and even taught in my
Sunday school class that it was not until after the baptism of Jesus done by
John the Baptist that His ministry truly began.
After His baptism the Spirit of God descended upon Him like a dove
lands, very softly, and then His Father spoke out of heaven. After that Jesus went into the wilderness to
fast 40 days in order to be prepared for the task that His Father gave Him to
do, and this was accomplished through the Holy Spirit working through Him in
order to do His Father’s will. So what
He did as a child was really not a part of His ministry other than obeying His
earthly father and working alongside of him until it was time to begin His
ministry.
It
seems that the next paragraph from MacArthur’s commentary goes along with what
I have just written. “When He came to
earth, Jesus emptied Himself of certain divine prerogatives, ‘taking the form
of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men’ (Phil. 2:7). And although He was sinless and morally
perfect during every minute of His life, His perfection was clearly not of the
sort that called attention to itself or set Him apart as strange or
peculiar. To those who knew Him as a
child and young man, Jesus was simply a carpenter and a carpenter’s son. It was partly over the commonness of Jesus
and His family that the people of Nazareth stumbled. They found it impossible to accept Him even
as a great human teacher, much less as the divine Messiah.”
This
truly is a tragic story that we are looking at in this section of Matthew’s
gospel as most of the people living in Jesus’ hometown were like the very hard
soil, which does not produce any crop.
This town had the great opportunity of seeing the Messiah being raised
from a child to manhood, and yet once His ministry began and all the miracles
that He did they were just blind to the truth of who He is. People can find any reason at all not to hear
the truth of the gospel message, and I suppose one of the ones used is to call
the person who is giving the gospel to them a hypocrite. Well the truth is that “all have sinned and
come short of the glory of God,” even those who are giving out the gospel
MacArthur
writes “As means of escape or self-justification, unbelief diverts attention
away from the truth. The genuine seeker
may have many questions about the gospel before he is ready to commit himself
to Christ. But his sincerity is proven
by his willingness to accept the truth once it is explained. Each new ray of light leads him closer to
belief. For the confirmed unbeliever, on
the other hand, each new truth prompts him to raise another objection, and his
argument against that truth pushes him still further from salvation.
“It
is characteristic of unbelief to disguise itself, and in order to hide their
self-satisfaction and refusal to accept the clear evidence about Jesus, the
people of Nazareth dismissed Him on the basis of having known Him since He was
a child and of knowing His family as ordinary citizens of the community. They allowed pride, jealously, resentment,
embarrassment, and a host of other wicked and petty feelings to fill their
hearts and become barriers to salvation.”
Now
my question to those who are reading this Spiritual Diary, to those who know
the truth of the gospel, but are turning their hearts away from that truth is
to think about it, for if you know the truth, the very truth that can change
your eternal address from hell to heaven and turn your back on it then I assure
you that after a while you will permanently turn your back on it and the end
will be something that you will not want at all. I gave out the gospel to my father-in-law for
forty-five years and two days before he died he was wondering what he should do
to which I told him if he wanted to enter heaven that he had to accept Jesus as
his Lord and Savior. Only eternity will
tell if he did that or not.
5/25/2022 12:13 PM
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