Monday, July 15, 2024

PT-6 "The Contrast Between Guilty Judas and Innocent Jesus" (Matt. 27:3-5)

 

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/15/2024 10:21 AM

 

My Worship Time             Focus: PT-6 "The Contrast Between Guilty Judas and Innocent Jesus"

 

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                Reference:  Matthew. 27:3-5)

 

            Message of the verses:  3 Then when Judas, who had betrayed Him, saw that He had been condemned, he felt remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, 4  saying, "I have sinned by betraying innocent blood." But they said, "What is that to us? See to that yourself!" 5 And he threw the pieces of silver into the temple sanctuary and departed; and he went away and hanged himself.”

 

            In our Sunday school class yesterday our teacher continued his summer class on the life of Moses, and yesterday spoke of Pharaoh in length, and as he was talking about Pharaoh I could not help but see some likenesses between him and Judas.  Both men had the opportunity to be hearing from God as Moses was God’s spokesman, and both men turned down the salvation that was offered to them, and both men died without receiving that salvation.  I have to also say that both men were hard-headed.

 

            Now I continue looking at what John MacArthur wrote in this last part of his commentary from this section as I quote it now to conclude this section.  “In utter desperation and frustration Judas defiantly threw the pieces of silver into the sanctuary and departed.  Some interpreters assert that the money was cast into the Temple treasury, suggesting that Judas’s final public act was a gesture of charity.  But naos (sanctuary) refers specifically to the inner holy place of the Temple, where only priests were allowed to enter.  Judas intentionally threw the money into a place where only the priests could retrieve it.  He did not throw it there out of charity but out of spite, wanting them to feel guilty and forcing the chief priests to handle the blood money again themselves.

 

            “Following that, he went away and hanged himself.  Considering himself already cursed because of his treachery and having unrelieved pain from having committed the greatest crime in human history, he may have reasoned that hanging was the only escape and a fitting death, knowing that ‘he who is hanged is accursed of God’ (Deut. 21:23).  We cannot know Judas’s mind, but self-retribution seems a credible explanation for what he did.  If son, he took his own life as an act of ultimate selfpunishment, in a way that was certain to be cursed by God, thereby inflicting upon himself what his overpowering sense of guilt caused him to believe he justly deserved.

 

            “But death does not relieve guilt; it makes it permanent and intensified beyond comprehension.  As Jesus repeatedly declared, hell is a place of eternal torment, of ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’ (Matt. 8:12); 13:42, 50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30).  It is a place of ‘unquenchable fire, where their worm does not die, and the Ere is not quenched’ (Mark 9:43-44).  Judas today cries out in the eternal pain of his undiminished guilt.

 

            “According to Acts 1:8, when Judas committed suicide he fell headlong and ‘burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out.’  Although this account and the one in Matthew report different aspects of his death, they are compatible.  He must have hanged himself from a weak limb of a tree on a hillside, and when the limb broke under his weight he fell down the slope and was crushed on the rocks below.”

 

            This completes this section from Matthew 27:3-5, and I have to say that this is a disturbing portion of Scripture for me, and yet it is a part of the Word of God and needs to be studied.  Lord willing I will began “The Contrast Between The Hypocrisy of Men and the Prophecy of God” which comes from Matthew 27:6-10 and should not take nearly as long as this one we have been looking at has taken.

 

7/15/2024 10:47 AM

 

No comments:

Post a Comment