SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 10/20/2023 10:08 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “False Leaders Are Cursed For
Their Subversion”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Matthew 23:15
Message of the verse: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel about on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.”
The following is how John MacArthur begins this
section: “Second, Jesus cursed the scribes
and Pharisees for their subversion of the people. They not only excluded them from the true
faith but subverted them with false faith.”
The truth is that this has continued throughout the Church age, and will
continue until the end of the Church age which will end with the Rapture of the
Church, and when that happened these false leaders will still be their
wondering what happened to the true church.
Don’t be left behind!
The following are some synonyms for the word “Subversion,”
“Rebellion; sedition; treason; and insurrection. I like treason as the best synonym, as that
is what false leaders did then and are still doing today.
I have talked at length about how the people of Israel
were to do different things to help the Gentiles know who God is and what they
needed to do in order to have a person relationship with Him, but in many ways
they failed to do this and these false leaders of Israel made their “religion”
about themselves, and then they went out to make proselytes of others, and thus
taught them their false teachings. Jesus
speaks of this in this verse that we begin to look at today. MacArthur writes “The word proselyte had the
basis meaning of a person who has arrived, and come to be commonly used of an
outsider who was brought into a religion.”
Now if the Jewish leaders would have made the effort in
the right way and for the right reasons, it would have been commendable,
because Israel had been called to be God’s channel for reaching the world for
Himself as mentioned. In the
covenant that God made with Abraham the Lord promised for reaching the world
for Himself through him we read the following in Genesis 12:3 “And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who
curses you I will curse. And
in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.’” MacArthur adds “In the covenant at Sinai the
Lord set Israel apart as a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6),
who like her Messiah, was meant to be a light to the nations (Isa. 49:6).”
The problem as I have already
mentioned is that they did not do what the Lord had covenanted with them to
do. A good example of this is seen in
the short book of Jonah where we read that when God sent him to Nineveh to tell
them the good news, Johan got on a boat and went in the wrong direction. Johan did not want to tell them the good news
that God had given to Israel. “He prayed
to the LORD and said, "Please LORD, was not this what I said while I was
still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to
Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to
anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity”
(Jonah 4:2).
I can honestly say that this is not
one of my favorite verses in the Bible, and I never want to do anything like
this in my walk with the Lord. Lord
willing we will continue to look at this section in our next SD.
10/20/2023
10:36 AM
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