SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/2/2023 10:39 AM
My Worship Time
Focus: PT-2 “False Leaders Are Cursed For Their Pretension”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
23:29-33
Message of the verses: “29 “Woe to you,
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and
adorn the monuments of the righteous, 30 and say, ‘If we had been living
in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding
the blood of the prophets.’ 31"Consequently you bear witness against
yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. 32 “Fill up
then the measure of the guilt of your fathers. 33 “You serpents, you
brood of vipers, how shall you escape the sentence of hell?”
Let us begin this SD by looking at “Fill up then the
measure of the guilt of your fathers.”
What Jesus is referring to here is that “your scheming to put to death
the greatest Prophet of all,” He is declaring in effect, “will be the final measure
of the murderous conspiracies of your fathers against God’s messengers.” Here is what they were about to do, and that
is they were about to culminate all the guilt of those in the past who killed
God’s messengers. This was the supreme
act of sin against God’s prophets, as they murdered the Prophet-Messiah.
MacArthur
writes “In a final curse Jesus exclaimed, “You serpents, you brood of vipers,
how shall you escape the sentence of hell?”
The question was rhetorical, meaning that they could not possibly escape
the sentence of hell if they carried out the evil intent that now poisoned
their hearts.”
When
I was listening to the sermon that goes along with this section, MacArthur
explains about “serpents,” and also “vipers” which is very interesting to
me. Let me talk about something that I
believe that I heard before and may help us understand more about snakes. In the garden of Eden we read in 3:1 “Now the serpent was more crafty
than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to
the woman, "Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the
garden’?’” Now I want to look at Genesis 3:14 “The LORD God said to the
serpent, "Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all cattle,
And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you will go, And dust you
will eat All the days of your life.”
When I look at these two verses what I see is that the “serpent” must
have had a different form when Satan was using it to talk to Eve, for in verse
fourteen, which is God’s curse on the serpent He says “On your belly you will
go, And dust you will eat All the days of your life.” I realize that some people really like
snakes, but I am not one of them, and I suppose the reason is that they slither
along the ground. Ok back to our section
we are looking at and I want to again quote John MacArthur from his
commentary. “Ophis (serpents) was a general word for snakes, but echidna (vipers) referred to small
poisonous snakes that lived primarily in the desert regions of Palestine and
other parts of the eastern Mediterranean.
Because they looked like a dried twig when they were still, a person
collecting wood for a fire would often pick one up inadvertently and be bitten,
as happened to Paul on the island of Malta.
That particular viper was deadly, and when Paul suffered no harm for the
bite, the superstitious islanders thought he was a god (Acts 28:3, 6). Viper therefore had the understandable
reputation of being both deadly and deceitful.”
It
was way back in our study of Matthew that we learned what John the Baptist had
said about the Jewish religious leaders when they came out to meet him while he
was baptizing people near the Jordan River.
“But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism,
he said to them, "You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the
wrath to come?” (Matt. 3:7). John went
on to say in verses 8-9 “8 "Therefore bear fruit in keeping with
repentance; 9 and do not suppose that
you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father’; for I say to you
that from these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham.” This
happened right before Jesus was baptized, which was the beginning of His
ministry, and now we are at the very end of His ministry and these same leaders
of Israel had not learned a thing. “So
neither the messages of John the Baptist nor of Jesus had any positive effect
on those men, but served only to harden them in their unbelief and in their opposition
to the gospel and to God’s righteous messengers” (MacArthur’s commentary).
He
goes on to writes “In pagan Greek culture, the echidna had long been associated with evil. In their mythology the name was given to a
monster deity that was half snake and half woman and that gave birth to other
monsters, including the murderous sphinx of Thebes.”
During
the time of Christ, echidna was universally associated with extreme wickedness
and danger. As we look at how this word
echidna was used I think that we can understand what it was that Jesus was
calling the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus
was declaring them to be both evil and deadly, and I think that this is a good
definition of false teachers during any time, as they have existed since sin
began on planet earth.
“As
explained earlier in this chapter, the term geenna
(hell) was derived from the name of a valley near Jerusalem where trash and
garbage continually burned. Jesus’
relating vipers to the sentence of hell suggests the common practice of a
farmer’s burning the dried stubble in his field to prepare the land for the
next planting. As the flames approached
their dens, vipers would try to scurry away but were usually unsuccessful and
consumed by the fire. Jesus said, in
effect, ‘You wicked, deceitful men, do you really think you can outrun God’s
fire of judgment?” (MacArthur’s commentary).
Here
is what these men were being convicted of as we come to the close of this section. These false leaders were guilty of keeping
people out of the kingdom, guilty of subverting the people, guilty of
perverting God’s truth, guilty of inverting God’s people, guilty of spiritually
contaminating everyone they touched, guilty of pretending to be righteous while
being malevolent, and worst of all guilty of preparing to execute God’s own
Son.
11/2/2023 11:29 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment