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
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