SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/8/2024 8:51 AM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-5 “Obedience”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
28:19-20a
Message of the verses: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you;”
Perhaps it is best to repeat the last paragraph from
yesterday’s SD in order to begin this SD and make more sense of it.
“The specific requirements Jesus gives for making disciples involve three participles: going (rendered here as go), baptizing, and teaching.”
So we see that the first requirement makes clear
that the church is not to wait for the world to come to its doors but that it
is to go to the world. I have to say that
sometimes waiting is what God wants us to do in order to teach us patience, but
that is not the case here as He says go.
MacArthur adds “The Greek participle is best translated ‘having gone,’
suggesting that this requirement is not so much a command as an assumption.”
Now Jesus’ initial instruction to the disciples was for
them to go only “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” as seen in Matthew
10:6, but let us also look at Matthew 15:24 to get more insight: “But He answered
and said, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’” God’s design was to offer first of all
salvation to the Jews and then to use them as His missionaries to the rest of
the world. MacArthur adds “The gospel is
the ‘power of salvation to everyone who believers,’ but ‘to the Jew first’
(Rom. 1:16; cf. John 4:22).” I will at
this time quote John 4:22 as this to me is a verse that has meant much to me
for several reasons. “"You worship
what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.” Jesus is here talking to a Samaritan woman
and one has to go back to the time when the nation of Israel was split right
after the death of King Solomon. Israel
to the north and Judah to the south and Israel was defeated in 722 B.C. by the
Assyrians and led away to captivity.
They returned as a mixed people as they were married to non Jews, and so
that is the background of this woman, a woman who had five husbands and was not
married to the man she was living with as Jesus points out. Jesus led her to saving faith, and the remarkable
thing to me is that she was the first person He did this for, and as mentioned
this is a woman, and what one could call a half breed. One may think about this and come to the
conclusion that perhaps the reason that Jesus gave salvation to this woman,
being a woman, to one who was not fully Jewish, and could come to the
conclusion that God can call anyone to salvation. Ok I’m done with this point, but felt it
necessary to talk about this woman.
MacArthur goes on “But when Israel as a nation rejected the Messiah-King
who was sent to her in Jesus, the invitation for salvation went directly to the
entire world.” I have to say that it was
good that salvation went to the whole world, but in my heart I love the Jewish
people and have so ever since God called me to be His child on the 26th
of January, 1974, and whenever a person from Israel looks at one of my
Spiritual Diaries that I post on one of my blogs, it makes me feel very good
because of the love I have for the nation of Israel.
It
can be seen that Jesus compared Israel’s response to God’s call to a wedding
feast given by a king for his sons, and this story that Jesus gives is found in
Matthew 22:1-10 which we will look at now.
1 Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying, 2 "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to
a king who gave a wedding feast for his son. 3 “And he sent out his slaves to
call those who had been invited to the wedding feast, and they were unwilling
to come. 4 “Again he sent out other slaves saying, ‘Tell those who have been
invited, "Behold, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and my fattened
livestock are all butchered and everything is ready; come to the wedding
feast."’ 5 “But they paid no attention and went their way, one to his own
farm, another to his business, 6 and the
rest seized his slaves and mistreated them and killed them. 7 “But the king was
enraged, and he sent his armies and destroyed those murderers and set their
city on fire. 8 “Then he *said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those
who were invited were not worthy. 9 ‘Go therefore to the main highways, and as
many as you find there, invite to the wedding feast.’ 10 "Those
slaves went out into the streets and gathered together all they found, both
evil and good; and the wedding hall was filled with dinner guests.” Now there
is more to this parable, but I have given the part of the story that pictures
the Jewish people rejecting their Messiah-King which is very easy to see from
this section in Matthew. MacArthur
describes this by writing “The picture was of an apostate Israel who refused
her Messiah and thereby forfeited the kingdom that He offered to them.” I have to say that I believe that we are in
the shadow of what the Bible calls the Tribulation, and if one goes back to May
5, 1948 they will find that Israel became a nation again, and that to me, set
off a time that had to happen in order for all the events of the end times to
take place. This is an exciting time to
be alive and now that we have a President elect who loves Israel it makes it
more exciting.
I
am going to continue to quote from MacArthur’s commentary in order to finish
this first requirement that I am writing about, and then Lord willing will
begin with the second requirement for making disciples in tomorrow’s SD.
“At
the end of His earthly ministry, Christ had only a small remnant of believers,
and it was to part of that remnant that He gave His commission to evangelize
the world. The first sermon of the
Spirit-filled church was preached by Peter and directed to Jews and Jewish
proselytes who had come to worship in Jerusalem (Acts. 2:22). But God later had to dramatically convince
Peter that the gospel was also for Gentiles (10:1-48).
“As
he traveled throughout Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece, even the apostle Paul, ‘the
apostle to the Gentiles,’ normally began his ministry in a given city at the
Jewish synagogue (see Acts 9:20; 13:5; 18:4).
But his message was always for Gentiles as well as Jews. At his conversion on the Damascus Road, the
Lord said to him,
16 ‘But get up and stand on your feet; for this
purpose I have appeared to you, to appoint you a minister and a witness not
only to the things which you have seen, but also to the things in which I will
appear to you; 17 rescuing you from the Jewish
people and from the Gentiles, to whom I am sending you, 18 to open their eyes so that they may turn from
darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to God, that they may receive
forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among those who have been sanctified by
faith in Me.’”
Just
so you know Paul was repeating what happened to him while he was under arrest
and was talking to one of the kings that were there.
Spiritual
meaning for my life today: I want to mention patience and timing, and
some of this comes from an earlier SD that I posted today from the book of
Nehemiah. Timing of what God is doing
requires me to be patience, something that has always been difficult for me,
but always worthwhile. It took almost
2000 years for God to put Israel back into their land and He did it for many
reasons, and I for one that I am alive during the time when this happened. I am patiently waiting for the next event on
God’s timetable to happen which is the rapture of the church.
My
Steps of Faith for Today: I trust the Lord to do what He is going to do
with me and with my country and with Israel as He will do it in His own timing.
11/8/2024 9:34 AM
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