EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR
5/29/2026 9:52 PM
My
Worship Time Focus: Pt-2 “The Context”
Bible
Reading & Meditation Reference:
Luke
5:17-19
Message of the verses: ““17 One day He was teaching,
and there were some Pharisees and
teachers of the Law sitting there who had
come from every village of Galilee and Judea, and from Jerusalem;
and the power of the Lord was present for Him to
perform healing. 18And some men were carrying a
man on a stretcher who was paralyzed; and they were
trying to bring him in and to set him down in
front of Him. 19But when they did not
find any way to bring him in because of
the crowd, they went up on the roof and let him
down through the tiles with his stretcher, into the middle of
the crowd, in front of Jesus.”
I continue looking at these verses
from the fifth chapter of the gospel of Luke this evening. It was a long day today, and I say the
highlight of this day is that my wife had her first treatment from what is
called homeopathic treatment, something different than normal treatment for her
cancer which she had for a very long time and it helped actually nothing, and
so after much prayer we decided to go a different route, and my hope in the
Lord is that He will use that treatment to first of all bring glory to the Lord Jesus Christ, who we
owe all things to because of His death on the cross to take away our sins. Jesus said in the Garden of Gethsemane to His
Father, “Not my will by Thine be done, and because of that prayer the Lord
Jesus then went out to pay for our sins as He suffered and died on the cross,
along with being raised from the dead three days later, spending time on planet
earth before He was resurrected into heaven to sit at the right hand of His
Father’s throne. My point in all of this
is that my prayer for my wife is that it is my desire for God’s will to be
done, and yet I still pray that these treatments will be successful and that my
wife through the prayers of the saints that God will bring glory to His name by
allowing this treatment to be successful.
John MacArthur continues to write “With
the disappearance of the Sadducees after the destruction of the temple in A.D.
70 and the Zealots after the Bar Kochba revolt (A.D. 132-35) was crushed, the
Pharisees became the dominant force in Judaism.
With the completion of the Mishnah (the written compilation of the oral,
law, rituals, and traditions) in A.D. 200, and the Talmud (the combination of
the Mishna and the Gemara [three centuries of rabbis’ commentary on the
Mishnah]) in about A.D. 500, the Pharisees’ teaching became virtually
synonymous with Judaism.
“The Pharisees’ theology was in many
respects faithful to the teaching of Scripture.
They believed in the resurrection (Acts
23:6-8), angels (Acts 23:8), demons, predestination, and human responsibility. The looked for Messiah to come and establish
an earthly kingdom, and were devoted to protecting and teaching the law of
God. Ironically, it was their zeal for
the law that caused the Pharisees to become focused on rituals and externally
keeping the law. They abandoned true religion
of the heart for mere outward behavior modification and ritual (cf. Matt.
15:3-6), leading Jesus to scathingly denounce their pseudospirituality: ‘Woe to
you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier
provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the
things you should have done without neglecting the others’ (Matt. 23:23; cf. 6:1-5;
9:14; 12:2; Luke 11:38-39). Even worse,
the wide gap between their teaching and their practice led to gross hypocrisy,
which both Jesus (e.g., Matt. 23:2-3) and, surprisingly, the Talmud (which
lists seven classes of Pharisees, six of which were ‘blind guides of the blind’
(Matt. 15:14), who made their proselytes doubly worthy of the hell to which
they themselves were headed (Matt. 23:15).
The complex set of man-made rules and regulations was a crushing,
unbearable burden (Matt. 23:4; Acts 15:10).
In any case, keeping the law could never save anyone, ‘because by the
works of the Law no flesh will be justified’ (Rom. 3:20; cf. 3:28; Gal. 2:16;
3:11, 24; 5:4)—a truth that the zealous Pharisee
Saul of Tarsus eventually realized (Phil. 3:4-11).
“Luke also notes the presence of teachers
of the law. Also called lawyers (7:30; 10:25; 11:45, 46, 52; 14:3; Matt.
22:35) and most commonly scribes (sixty-three times in the New Testament), they
were professional scholars specializing in the interpretation and application
of the law. They were commonly, but not
exclusively, Pharisees (though distinguished from them by being mentioned separately;
5:21, 30; 6:7; 11:53; 15:2; Matt. 5:20; 12:38; 15:1; 23:2, 13, 14, 15, 23, 25,
27, 29; Mark 7:1, 5; John 8:3; Mark 2:16 refers to ‘the scribes of the
Pharisees,’ and Acts 23:9 to ‘the scribes of the Pharisaic party’). Such scribes were also honored by being
called rabbis (‘great ones’), though others who taught the Word of God might
also receive that title (cf. John 1:38, 49; 3:2; 6:25, where it is given to
Jesus).”
5/29/2026
10:32 PM
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