SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/16/2022 10:13 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “The Principle Violated”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
15:12-14
Message of the verses: “12 Then the
disciples came and said to Him, "Do You know that the Pharisees were
offended when they heard this statement?" 13 But He answered and said,
"Every plant which My
heavenly Father did not plant shall be rooted up. 14 “Let them alone;
they are blind guides of the blind. And if a blind man guides a blind man, both
will fall into a pit.’”
If one thinks that Jesus and His disciples made
these statements while with the crowd, we can see in Mark 7:17 “When he had
left the crowd and entered the house, His disciples questioned Him about
the parable.” Perhaps they went into the
home that He was staying at while in Capernaum.
So since they were now away from the crowd the disciples asked Jesus “Do
You know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this statement?" Jesus certainly knew that the things that He
had said to the Jewish leaders had undercut the very foundation of the
legalistic system of the Pharisees, and He also knew that they would be greatly
offended by it. It was His plan to
offend them because that is what they needed as I have mentioned in earlier SD’s
that they were a big part of the cult that had turned Judaism into this cult by
adding so many rules and regularities, but the fact that they were teaching a
works righteousness makes them a cult. “8
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it
is the gift of God; 9 not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God
prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Eph. 2:8-10). Notice we are saved by grace through faith,
and it is God who actually gives us the faith to believe, and then come the
works, the works come after salvation as any work an unbeliever does means
nothing to the Lord. We just spent five
days going over the fact that what the Pharisees were teaching was false, that
their way to God was false and so it is no wonder that Jesus said to His
disciples what He said about the Pharisees.
We
know that from this time forward that it will be the purpose of these Jewish
leaders to put Him to death, and at the same time Jesus will continue to oppose
their false statements as He will continue to bring accusations against
them. MacArthur adds “He would accuse
them of not entering the kingdom and of preventing others from entering, of
devouring widow’s houses while making a pretense of prayer, of making their
converts twice as much sons of hell as themselves, of carefully tithing their
smallest herbs but of neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness, of appearing
clean on the outside but of being full of robbery and self-indulgence, of being
whitewashed tombs that contained filthy bones of dead men, of being full of
hypocrisy and lawlessness, and of being of the same character as their
forefathers who killed God’s prophets (Matt. 23:13-30).” I would say that this shows us that Christ
did not back down, and because of who He is all the things that He accused them
of were spot on. The bottom line for
those who read this SD and do not know Jesus Christ as their own personal
Savior and Lord is that you don’t have to be as bad as these Pharisees were but
you are as bad off as they were, for there are only two kinds of people in this
world, the ones who do not know Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord and those
who do know Him as their Savior and Lord.
Yes there will be different degrees of punishment in hell, and different
rewards in heaven, but those are the only two places where people will spend
eternity.
Lord
willing we will continue to look at this subject in our next SD.
7/16/2022 10:37 AM
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