SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/13/2023 11:53 AM
My Worship Time
Focus: PT-4 "The Precept of True Greatness"
Bible Reading
& Meditation Reference:
Matthew 20:26-27
Message of the
verses: “26 “It is not this way among you, but whoever wishes to
become great among you shall be your servant, 27 and whoever wishes to be first
among you shall be your slave;”
I want to begin this SD with a couple of quotes that
come from John MacArthur’s commentary.
“In
his book A Serious Call to a Devout and
Holy Life, William Law writes,
‘Let every day be a day of
humility; condescend to all the weakness and infirmities of your
fellow-creatures, cover their frailties, love their excellencies, encourage
their virtues, relieve their wants, rejoice in their prosperities, compassionate
their distresses, receive their friendship, overlook their unkindness, forgive
their malice, be a servant of servants, and condescend to do the lowliest
offices of the lowest of mankind.’”
“Another
great saint of past years, Samuel Brengle, wrote,
‘If I appear great in their
eyes, the Lord is most graciously helping me to see how absolutely nothing I am
without Him, and helping me to keep little in my own eyes. He does use me. But I am so concerned that He uses me and
that it is not of me the work is done.
The axe cannot boast of the trees it has cut down. I could do nothing but for the woodsman. He made it, he sharpened it, and he used
it. The moment he throws it aside, it
becomes only old iron. O That I may
never lose sight of this. (Quoted in Oswald Sanders, Spiritual Leadership [Chicago: Moody, 1967], p. 58.)’”
In
verse 27 we can see that Jesus reiterated and intensified His description of
God’s way to greatness as He says “whoever wishes to be first among you shall
be your slave;” The position and work of
a slave were much lower and demeaning even than those of a servant. It is true that a servant was to some degree
his own person. A servant often owned
little more than the clothes on his back, but he was free to go where he wanted
and to work or not work as he pleased.
However a slave and the Greek word for slave is doulus did not belong to himself but he was owned by his master and
could go only where the master wanted him to go and do only what the master
wanted him to do. He did not belong to
himself but was the personal property of someone else.
Now
I want to quote from the letter that Paul wrote to the Philippians in what is a
very famous section of the second chapter, which Paul writes about the Lord
Jesus Christ. “5 Have this attitude in
yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, although He existed in the
form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and
being made in the likeness of men. 8 Being found in appearance as a man, He
humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a
cross. 9 For this reason also, God
highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL
BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and that every tongue will confess that Jesus
Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:5-11).” Now in Matthew 20:27 we stated that the word
in the Greek for slave is doulus and in the highlighted portion of Phil. 2:7 we
see the word bond-servant. The Greek word for “bond-servant” is doulus,
same as in Matt. 20:27. Now I have
written about the fact that most English versions of the Bible do not translate
the word doulus as slave, which is what it means. I believe that the reason that it is not
translated as slave is because of the history of slavery in our country’s
earlier history. There is a difference
between slaves in our countries history and slaves during the time of the Roman
Empire as slaves then were actually important people in a lot of cases. Slaves could even be doctors. I have read that the population of slaves
during the Roman Empire was in fact more than the regular population. I read a book a number of years ago written
by John MacArthur on slavery and that is where I got most of this information
from. I believe that there is only on
translation of the English Bible that translates the word doulus as slave in
all the times that doulus is in the Greek.
John
MacArthur writes from his commentary on Matthew the following. “In several of his letters Paul identified
himself as Christ’s slave (doulus)
even before identifying himself as His apostle.
He greeted the Romans with the words ‘Paul, a bond-servant of Christ
Jesus, called as an apostle’ (Rom. 1:1; cf. Phil. 1:1; Titus 1:1).’ That is why he could say, If we live, we live
for the Lord, or if we die we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or
die, we are the Lord’s (Rom. 14:8). Slaves
were the property of their owners and could therefore be bought and sold. Like such a slave, Christians ‘Have been
bought with a price’ (1 Cor. 6:20; cf. 7:23) and are the property of the Lord
who bought them with His own precious blood (1 Pet. 1:18-19).
Lord willing we will continue looking at this
section in our next SD.
5/13/2023 12:30 PM
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