SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/5/2023 9:45 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-4 “The Confrontation”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Matthew 21:23
Message of the
verse: “23
When He entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came
to Him while He was teaching, and said, "By what authority are You doing
these things, and who gave You this authority?’”
Jesus Christ had been teaching on planet earth in
Israel for three years and had done mighty deeds as He went about through Judea
and the rest of Israel. Everyone had
heard of Jesus including this group who is confronting Him at this time, and
they all knew His claims of coming from God, something they did not want to
believe because it was messing up their false religion they had going on. There was a healing that Jesus did when He
healed a paralytic and then stated that his sins had been forgiven, and this
got the Pharisees in an uproar. The said
that Jesus was blaspheming in their hearts but Jesus read their minds which
should have tipped them off that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. Jesus then healed the man and He then said
that the Son of Man had “authority on earth to forgive sins” (Matthew 9:2-6). The crowd that witnessed this healing
glorified God, but not the Pharisees who also witnessed it, and like I said
that they did not want Jesus horning in on their little false religion which
they used to control the people.
The chief priests and also the
elders in the Temple also knew what the crowds knew that Jesus taught
authoritatively and this is what got them so upset as we touched on earlier, He
was not a part of their little false religion.
Jesus taught with a clarity, definitiveness, and certainty that was
completely lacking in the pronouncements and interpretations of the scribes as
seen in Matt. 7:29 and Mark 1:22.
MacArthur writes “As in many liberal church circles today, a key
qualification for acceptance was lack of dogmatism. Virtually every doctrine was open to
reinterpretation and revision, and absolutes were shunned as presumptuous. Human wisdom had long since replaced divine
revelation, and Old Testament Scripture was cited primarily to support their
humanly-devised religious traditions.
When Scripture conflicted with tradition, tradition prevailed (Matt.
16:6). In the minds of most Jewish
religious leaders, there were many authorities but none that was exclusively
authoritative, not even Scripture.”
In our Sunday evening services at
our church the pastor has been going over some of the terrible things that are
going on in our country, and one of the things that is going on is there is no absolute
truth. The Bible has the absolute truth,
and people do not, for the most part want to listen to it. The pastor showed a video of a man in a
college asking different people if they thought it would be all right for him
to say that he was six and a half feet tall, when actually he was much shorter
than that. None of them had a problem
with that. There were other things that
were not true that he would ask these college students and none of them had a
problem with that, things like would it be ok with you if I were to say that I
was a woman. When there is no absolute
truth then a person can do anything anytime and not have any consequences for
their actions. People will have to
answer to these kind of things when they meet the Lord, and the Bible makes it
clear that every person who has every lived on planet earth will answer to the
Lord either about the things that they did right for the cause of Christ of the
things that they did wrong, and by that I mean not accepting the forgiveness
that the Lord Jesus Christ provided while on the cross. There will be two judgments in the future,
the judgment seat of Christ for believers which will go on in heaven while the
tribulation period is going on here on planet earth. The other judgment is the “Great White Throne
Judgment” where only unbelievers will be their trying to tell the Lord the good
things that they did in their own strength for Him. After that judgment is over all who are there
will be cast into hell, and that is an absolute truth, so everyone on planet
earth has to make the decision of trusting Christ for the forgiveness of their
sins or not trusting Him, which will turn out very badly.
Well I kind of went down a rabbit
hole, getting a bit off the subject, but it is my hope to finish up this
section in our next SD.
Spiritual
meaning for my life today: Remember
the absolute truth of the Word of God and follow it.
My Steps of Faith for Today: Trust the
Lord to continue to guide me as it is my desire to do the will of God in all
that I do.
7/5/2023 10:20
AM
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