SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 6/16/2023 11:03 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “He Accepted Divine Worship And Human Rejection”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
21:15-17
Message of the verses: “15 But when the
chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that He had done, and
the children who were crying out in the temple and saying, "Hosanna to the
Son of David," they became indignant, 16 and said to Him, "Do You hear what these
are saying?" And Jesus said to them, "Yes; have you never read, ‘OUT
OF THE MOUTH OF INFANTS AND NURSING BABES THOU HAST PREPARED PRAISE FOR THYSELF’?"
17 And He left them and went out of the city to Bethany, and lodged there.”
I want to begin by talking about the “chief priests”
who were very ungodly men as I have talked about in earlier SD’s. These men had just witnessed Jesus healing
the blind and the lame and as the text says it was a wonderful thing that Jesus
had done. However once these men had
heard what the children had said they had a great problem with that for they
used a messianic term Hosanna to the Son of David” in speaking of Jesus,
similar to what their parents had used the day before. In his commentary John MacArthur states that
the word “children” means boys and that these may have been boys who had just passed their bar mitzvahs and so this would have been the first
Passover that they had come to the temple.
In the book of Luke we read of when Jesus went to the temple, so this
was something similar. (Luke 2:41-42) “41
Now His parents went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover. 42
And when He became twelve, they went up there according to the custom of
the Feast;”
We can see that these chief priests did not join in
the worship of Jesus, for they were totally jealous of Him, that they became indignant. MacArthur writes “The term indignant carries
the idea of fury and wrath. To those
men, Jesus’ healing of the blind and lame, though incontestably amazing was
repugnant. The Pharisees had charged
Jesus with casting out demons by the power of Beelzebub the ruler of the demons
(Matt. 12:24). The chief priests and the
scribes now perhaps thought the same thing about His healing. Not only did He oppose them as the rulers of
the Temple, but in their eyes He actually worked against God by arbitrarily
healing those they thought were being divinely punished for their sins.”
Similar
to the Pharisees, the chief priests and the scribes felt so self-righteously
superior to the common man, especially to the afflicted and poor who were
thought to deserve their fate, that witnessing no amount of suffering could
elicit compassion in them, as they looked down on the type of people that Jesus
just healed thinking that they deserved what they got. It would have made little difference in what
Jesus did, for they hated Him because He was cutting into their territory,
territory that in about four decades they would lose for good.
MacArthur
adds “Instead of recognizing their authority Jesus condemned their
self-righteousness. Instead of praising
their holiness, He condemned their hypocrisy.
Instead of acknowledging their religious works as pleasing to god, He
condemned them as offensive to God and worthless. Consequently, those men refused to recognize
Jesus even as a legitimate rabbi, much less as the promised Son of David. What was perfectly clear to most of the
common Jewish people in Jerusalem was perfect nonsense to the erudite and
self-satisfied Temple elite.”
We
now move on in our verses by looking at what they therefore said to Him, “Do
You hear what these are saying?” I was
just thinking to myself about that question that these imposters were asking
Jesus and what I thought about is that they were asking this question to Jesus
who was the one who designed man, and a part of that design was making men to
be able to hear. Yes He heard what these
young men were saying. They wanted to
know why Jesus would not rebuke these young men because they were calling Him
the Messiah, similar to what happened the day before when He rode into
Jerusalem and the adults were saying similar things. What they were accusing them of was blasphemy
by calling Jesus the Son of David.
How
did Jesus answer their question? He
simply said yes. Jesus was fully aware
of what was being said, and He was fully aware of its meaning and
significance. Jesus then goes on to ask
them a question, have you never read, Out of the mouth of infants and nursing
babes Thou hast prepared praise for Thyself?
As He did on numerous occasions, Jesus nettled the Jewish leaders by
quoting the Old Testament against them, the accepted experts in Scripture.
Lord
willing we will try and finish this section in our next SD, which will end this
section of Scripture that we have been looking at since the 8th of
June.
6/16/2023 11:47 AM
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