EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/7/2024 9:25 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-5
“Saving Faith”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Matthew 27:54
Message of the
verse: “54
Now the centurion, and those who were with him keeping guard over Jesus, when
they saw the earthquake and the things that were happening, became very
frightened and said, "Truly this was the Son of God!’”
The first thing that I want to do is explain why my
study from the book of Matthew is on the evening SD tonight. I have been usually studying 1 John in the
evening, but I was so excited about studying 1 John 1:9 that I just wanted to
do it in the morning, well actually because I was excited that I just got mixed
up and did it this morning. Being
excited about studying the Word of God is a really good thing in my opinion.
I want to continue quoting from
MacArthur’s commentary which goes along with Matthew 27:54. “Only God’s Spirit could have inspired the
confession of the centurion and his men, and only His Spirit could have inspired
them to praise God (Luke 23:47). The
gospel writers, not to mention the Holy Spirit who inspired them would not have
left the soldiers’ meaning open to question.
Had the soldiers had in mind a son of some unnamed pagan deity, Matthew
and the other writers would have made that clear. When Scripture speaks of God in the singular
it always refers to the true God, unless the context specifically indicates
otherwise. Luke did not speak of the
soldiers’ praising their own god or gods, that is, some pagan deity, but rather
‘praising God’ which could mean only the true God. However limited their theological understanding
may have been at that time, those men truly confessed the true Son of the true God.
“The faith of the soldiers is of great significance,
and was especially so in the early church.
Their testimony was, as if were, Jesus’ own final testimony from the
cross. Although given after He had died,
that testimony dramatically proclaimed that His grace extends to every sinner,
even to those who put him to death.
During the very process of His crucifixion, Jesus Christ became the object
of the faith of His crucifiers!
“His prayer ‘Father, forgive them’
(Luke 23:43) did not go unanswered.
First, one of the thieves who had been jeering Christ turned to faith in
Him. Now, after He had breathed His
last, the men who had beaten, taunted, and crucified Christ turned to Him and
were forgiven and saved. Jesus had
declared, ‘And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself’
(John 12:32). The very men who in
unbelief and derision had literally lifted Him from the earth and indeed been
drawn to Him in repentance and faith.
“A contrasting response to that of
the soldiers is seen in that of the crowd of observers around the cross. ‘And all the multitudes who came together for
this spectacle, when they observed what had happened, began to return, beating
their breaths’ (Luke 23:48).
“Like the soldiers, those people were alarmed about
the darkness and the earthquake. And
also like the soldiers, they realized that those terrifying phenomena were no
caused naturally. Many of them
doubtlessly had heard Jesus preach and seen Him perform miracles. Perhaps some of them had themselves been
healed by Him. These people knew much better
than the soldiers what Jesus stood for and who He claimed to be. They knew how He had all but banished disease
from Palestine and had even raised people from the dead. They remembered that, with the rest of the
multitude a few days earlier, they had hailed Jesus as the Messiah. They had heard Jesus’ gracious words from the
cross and could not have helped suspecting that God’s hand was in the awesome
events they were now observing.”
With I will stop, but I hope to
finish this section in the next SD.
9/7/2024 9:45
PM
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