SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 6/7/2023 9:24 AM
My Worship Time Focus: “The Element
of Perplexity”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
21:10-11
Message of the verses: “10 And when He had
entered Jerusalem, all the city was stirred, saying, "Who is this?" 11
And the multitudes were saying, "This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth
in Galilee.’”
In today’s SD we come to the end of the section of
Scripture from Matthew 21 that we actually began on May 27th, and it
is my hope to finish this section which has been on the Lord’s entrance into
Jerusalem about a week before He would go to the cross and die for our sins.
In
the account of Jesus’ entry by Matthew, closes with an element of perplexity. After the great shouts of acclamation had
somewhat subsided and Jesus had entered Jerusalem, the residents of the city
began to ask the question "Who is this?" Matthew tells us that the
best response the multitude of celebrants could give was, "This is the
prophet Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee.’”
I think that a lot of the people who were attending the coronation
certainly did not realize that this is what it was, but God did. It seems that they just go caught up in the
moment, not realizing why this was going on.
It appears that many of them who had been shouting so vociferously just
did not know what was going on. They had
just proclaimed Jesus, the Son of David as the Messiah, and now we see that many
of them did not know who He was at all and had to ask the question “Who is
this?" I suspect that there are many
people living today that don’t know the answer to that question either. I have to say that there was a lot of emotion
that came from these people as to what was going on, and now it has run its
course things just came to a halt. I
believe that this also can happen to people today as they get excited about
learning who the Lord Jesus Christ is and then a short time later the excitement
is gone. Matthew’s gospel has touched on
this earlier in a parable that Jesus taught about where the seed landed and how
some of the seeds which landed in shallow soil grew fast and died even faster
as there was not enough depth of soil, and this looks to me that this was
happening to the people in this section of Matthew.
MacArthur
writes “The people knew but they would not believe, and because they would not
believe they ceased to know. Like their
forefathers to whom Isaiah preached, they heard but did not perceive and saw
but did not understand, because their hearts were insensitive (Isa.
6:9-10). They heard Jesus’ message, they
attested to His miracles, and they even acknowledged His divinity, but they
rejected His saviorhood. They were
totally earthbound, and materialistic and self satisfied. They were interested only in the kingdoms of
this world, not the kingdom of heaven.
They would have accepted Jesus as an earthly king, but they would not
have Him as their heavenly King.”
With
that we end this section of Matthew 21:1-11.
I am beginning to prepare to teach through the book of Zechariah in our
Sunday school class, as I have not been teaching since some time in February,
taking a break from teaching after 19 months of teaching through Hebrews. In preparing to teach this I can see that
what Zechariah wrote some 500 years later came to happen in this section of
Matthew 21:1-11. The Lord save me as I
listened to preaching on prophecy and I still have a great love for prophecy,
and the book of Zechariah is full of prophecy; some of it has already come to
pass.
6/7/2023 9:57 AM
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