EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/22/2026
9:26 PM
My
Worship Time Focus: “Intro to ‘Characteristics of Jesus’
Divinity’”
Bible
Reading & Meditation Reference: Luke
5:1-11
Message of the verses: “1Now it happened that
while the crowd was pressing around Him and
listening to the word of God, He was standing by the
lake of Gennesaret; 2and
He saw two boats lying at the edge of the lake; but the
fishermen had gotten out of them and were washing their
nets. 3And He
got into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him
to put out a little distance from the land. And He
sat down and continued teaching the
crowds from the boat. 4Now when He
had finished speaking, He said to Simon, “Put out into the
deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” 5Simon responded and
said, “Master, we worked hard all night and
caught nothing, but I will do as You say and let down the
nets.” 6And when they had
done this, they caught a great quantity of fish, and their
nets began to tear; 7so they signaled to
their partners in the other boat to come and help them.
And they came and filled both of the boats,
to the point that they were sinking. 8But when Simon Peter saw this, he
fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me,
Lord, for I am a sinful man!” 9For amazement had
seized him and all his companions because of the
catch of fish which they had taken; 10and likewise also were James and
John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And
Jesus said to Simon, “Do not fear; from now on you will be
catching people.” 11When
they had brought their boats to land, they
left everything and followed Him.”
I will now quote the introduction to
these verses from John MacArthur’s commentary.
“The last few centuries have seen an
enormous number of books written about the Lord Jesus Christ. The nineteenth century quest for the ‘historical
Jesus’ saw countless explanations written about Jesus. Most were generated from a rationalistic, naturalistic
perspective, in a purported attempt to get behind the fantasy biblical ‘Christ
of faith’ to the nondivine, nonsupernatural real ‘Jesus of history.’ Their authors’
antisupernatural presuppositions controlled their research, as I. Howard Marshall
notes:
Many of
these investigators believed that the real Jesus must have been an ordinary
person with nothing supernatural or divine about him. His life must have conformed to ordinary
human patterns, and be explicable in purely human categories. For such people the phrase ‘the historical
Jesus’ clearly meant a non-supernatural Jesus. (I Believe in the Historical
Jesus [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977], 110-11).
“It should
come as no surprise that those who began with an antisuper-natural bias wound
und with a nonsupernatural Jesus. Marshall
goes on to note that
In every
case the picture of Jesus was of Jesus clearly fashioned by a
nineteenth-century artist. The process reached
its climax in the so-called ‘Liberal Jesus,’ a somewhat inoffensive teacher
proclaiming ‘the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.’…The most
damning criticism [of the ‘Liberal Jesus’] came from the pen of William Temple,
Archbishop of Canterbury, who said quite simply, ‘Why anyone should have troubled
to crucify the Christ of Liberal Protestantism has always ben a mystery.’ (I
Believe in the Historical Jesus, 113)
“Albert Schweitzer’s famous book, The
Quest of the Historical Jesus, written early in the twentieth century,
chronicled the nineteenth-century quest for the ‘historical Jesus’ and
pronounced all such efforts futile. (Ironically, he then proceeded to set forth
his own skeptical, non-biblical interpretation of Christ’s life.) But the twentieth century would produce its
own aberrant views of Jesus. The influential
German New Testament critic Rudolf Bultmann was noted for his ‘demythologizing’
approach to the New Testament. As a
result, ‘for Bultmann nothing survived of the deeds of Jesus and very little of
his teaching’ (Marshall, I Believe, 126). The so-called ‘new quest for the historical
Jesus’ in the post-World War 2 era concluded, like the old nineteenth-century
one, that little, if anything, could be known about the life of Christ. The closing decades of the twentieth century
saw the rise of Jesus Seminar, whose members also reinvented Jesus to fit their
Scripture-rejecting, anti-supernatural bias.
They even had the audacity to arrogate to themselves the right to vote
on which sayings of His were authentic.
(For a defense of the historical reliability of the Gospel accounts of
Jesus’ life and ministry, see Lee Strobel, the Case for Christ [Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 1998]; for a scholarly critique of critical approaches to
the Gospels, see Robert L. Thomas and F. David Farnell, The Jesus Crisis (Grand
Rapids: Kregel, 1998.)
“But all such skeptical efforts to find the ‘real’ Jesus
are doomed to fail, because they do not look for Him in the only place where He
can be found—the divinely inspired, inerrant historical record of His life and ministry
in the New Testament Gospels. To deny
the truthfulness of the Gospels and then attempt to construct a life of Jesus
is both futile and absurdly hypocritical.
“Luke in the lengthiest of the four
Gospels, but the reader does not have to work through the entire book for the
truth concerning the Lord Jesus Christ to become evident. The real Jesus is
unmistakably revealed in every section of Luke, and no more so than in this
passage. Its eleven verses portray Him as
fully human; He acted and talked like a man, and was accepted as one by the
people around Him. Yet these same verses
reveal that He is more than a mere man.
The profound incident in His life presented here reveals clearly His
essential nature as God. As this story
of a fishing incidents on the Sea of Galilee unfolds, five of Jesus’ divine
attributes are manifested. He is the source of truth, omniscient, omnipotent,
holy, and merciful.”
5/22/2026
10:11 PM
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