SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/19/2023 8:21 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2 “The Poverty of Riches”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Matt. 19:23-26
Message of the verses: “23 And Jesus said
to His disciples, "Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter
the kingdom of heaven. 24 “And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to
go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
God." 25 And when the disciples heard this, they were very astonished
and said, "Then who can be saved?" 26 And looking upon them
Jesus said to them, "With men this is impossible, but with God all things
are possible.’”
We have talked in earlier SD’s as we were studying
Matthew that our Lord had repeatedly emphasized that following Him required
willingness to sacrifice everything a person had, and this included economic,
personal, social, and all else. Matthew
10:37-39 tells us “37 “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy
of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. 38 "And he who does not take his cross and
follow after Me is not worthy of Me. 39 "He who has found his life will lose it,
and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.” The truth is that a person must desire
salvation more than anything else, so that no sacrifice is too great to make
for Christ’s sake. We see this truth in Matt. 7:14 “the gate is small and the
way is narrow that leads to life, and few are those who find it.”
MacArthur writes “Duskolos (hard) is used in the New Testament only here and in the
parallel synoptic accounts (Mark 10:23; Luke 18:24). Jesus went on to explain that, as far as a
rich man entering the kingdom of heaven is concerned, hard is equivalent to
impossible: “Again I say to you, it is
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to
enter the kingdom of God.”
“This expression easier for a camel to go through the
eye of a needle was a Jewish colloquialism for the impossible. It was probably a modified form of a Persian
expression for impossibility, “easier for an elephant to go through the eye of
a needle,” that is quoted in the Talmud.
Being the largest animal known in Palestine, the camel was substituted
for the elephant.”
There
are some who have used this quote to say that it is impossible for the rich to
become believers, and that is certainly not the case for many rich people have
become believers in our Lord Jesus Christ and have come to salvation through
Him. This being said they make up
stories to show that a camel can go through the eye of a needle, and one case
is that if a camel is put into a blender that the camel could go through the
eye of a needle one drop at a time.
Others have stated that there was a place in Jerusalem called the Needle’s
Eye and that is what Jesus is talking about.
Why would a person want to put a camel through that place when down the
road there was a place that easily could bring a camel into the city?
We
will end with another quotation from MacArthur’s commentary: “Other scholars have suggested that scribal
error changed the Greek word kamilos (a
large rope or cable) into kamilos (a
camel). But a large rope would also be
impossible to thread through the eye of a needle. More than that, it is hard to conceive that
the scribes who made copies from the original manuscript all made the same
mistake and made it in all three gospel accounts.”
I
am going with the word impossible and we will talk more about it in our next
SD.
3/19/2023 8:47 AM
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