Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 27-28.

Traditionally, when the crowd responded to Pilate during Jesus’ trial, “His blood is on us and on our children!” it has been interpreted as the Jews taking responsibility for Jesus’ death.  From that many Christians have interpreted the suffering of the Jews over the centuries as being God’s judgement upon them for His death.  Some have even gone so far as to interpret it as justification for hating Jews and doing horrible things to them.  However, it struck me that nowhere does Matthew identify the crowd as Jews.  Yes, I know that a crowd gathered in Jerusalem in the First Century right before Passover would have been overwhelmingly made up of Jews, but that’s not the point.  Throughout his Gospel, Matthew repeatedly refers to “Jews” opposing Jesus.  So, it occurred to me that when Matthew refers to the crowd here he intends for us to view ourselves as part of that body.  When the crowd cried out “His blood is on us and on our children!” we were part of that crowd.  The guilt for Jesus’ unjust crucifixion lies not on the Jews, nor on the Romans, not even on Pilate or the Sanhedrin.  It lies on all of us.  If not for my sins, if not for your sins, Jesus would not have died on that cross.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 25-26.

Chapter 25 contains three parables.  I am going to look at how these three interact to teach us a lesson.  Each of the three has its own lesson, but those three lessons combine for a larger lesson, or maybe it’s just that the three lessons fit into each other.  The first parable teaches us that we cannot wait until just before judgement to begin serving God because we do not know when our time will be up.  The second parable teaches us that we must make use of the gifts which God has given us.  The final parable actually teaches us two lessons.  The first, and most obvious, one is that what we do for the most unfortunate members of our society are the things we have done, or not done, for Christ.  Second, it teaches that we will not know when we have, or have not, taken advantage of our opportunities to serve Christ.    The middle parable is the one which scares me the most because I feel like I was the one given five bags of gold, but have only produced the results of the one given a single bag.  I do want to look closely at what the one given a single bag did wrong.  His failure was not in that he did not make the most of his opportunity.  His failure was that he failed to do anything with it.  This is the same failure which the goats in the third parable made.  When given the opportunity to serve Christ by serving others, they passed.  Going back to the second parable, the man given five bags of gold was rewarded because he made the most of the opportunities which God gave him.  So, the lesson we learn is that we should take advantage of every opportunity we see where we might have the opportunity to serve God.  Perhaps it is not an opportunity which God has sent our way, but better to do good for someone where God was not directing us than to miss an opportunity which God directed to us.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 23-24.

Today’s passage begins with Jesus warning us against lifting some people up as more righteous than ourselves, from giving titles to people which imply that they are intermediaries between God and ourselves.  He warns us that such people do everything for people to see so that they might be admired for their apparent righteousness and that they do not practice what they preach.  Jesus further warns that elevating people by giving them titles which suggest their understanding of God supersedes what we are capable of is a form of idolatry.  We cannot surrender our responsibility to use our abilities to understand what God desires of us to someone else.  We are to neither hold ourselves up as exemplars of righteousness whom others should follow nor should we hold someone else up as more righteous than ourselves for us to follow.  When Paul wrote to the Corinthians that they should imitate him, he made clear they were to do so only insomuch as he imitated Christ.  When  we hold someone up as a model to follow it should be because we see Christ through their actions, but we are still responsible to study Scripture for ourselves, and listen the the prompting of the Holy Spirit.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 21-22.

When I started to read this passage I thought I might write about the triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the clearing of the temple, but I was really struck by what Jesus said after He told the parable of the two sons.  First, there is the outright message of the parable that it better to initially reject God and then later reconsider and do His will are better than to verbally acknowledge God but do not do His will.   However, what really struck me was when Jesus condemned the religious leaders who did not repent and turn to God even after seeing the impact doing so had on “lowlifes”.  I have usually hear this interpreted, not incorrectly, as Jesus telling us yet again that those we as a society view as reprobates and losers are more open to God’s word than those we view as upright and models of behavior.  As I said, that is not incorrect, but I realized today that Jesus was also saying that we should be inspired to do better by the way they respond to God’s love.  Those of us who have been transformed by the Holy Spirit should be inspired by the transformation those who are society’s “losers” go through when the Holy Spirit touches their hearts.  When we see what God has done for them, we should see how far we still are from His ideal and be inspired to allow the Holy Spirit to do even more work in our lives.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 18-20.

As I first read through today’s passage I was going to write about what Jesus says about being like a child in order to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  But as I went back through the passage I was struck by the fact that Matthew transitioned from Jesus talking about how we should confront our fellow Believers when they sin to talking about forgiving those who have sinned against us.  I am not sure that I have ever heard someone connect the two to each other.  When you consider that in many manuscripts verse fifteen in chapter eighteen reads, “If your fellow believer sins against you,…” the fact that Matthew immediately follows Jesus’ teachings about confronting them with His teaching about unlimited forgiveness gives Jesus’ instructions much greater depth.  When we go to the one who we believe to have sinned against us we need to make sure that we are not being the servant who is the prime subject in the parable Jesus told to illustrate how we should forgive (or to be more precise, how we should not not forgive).

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 15-17.

I am going to start today by commenting on the story about the feeding of the four thousand.  The main thing I want to point out is that Matthew does not speak about what Jesus taught that day.  He does tell us that Jesus healed many who were brought to Him that day.  So, perhaps Jesus spent those three days just healing people, but I think it more likely that He spent those three days repeating things He had said during the Sermon on the Mount.  My point is that we often interpret the Gospel accounts as if the only things Jesus said were those the Gospel writers recorded.  We need to realize that just because a teaching in one of the books of the New Testament is not directly based on the “red-letter” words of Jesus does not mean that it is not based on Jesus’ teachings.  Having written that I want to go back to the beginning of today’s passage.  When Jesus explained to His disciples why eating with unwashed hands does not defile us, He said that evil thoughts which come out of the heart are what defile us.  He listed murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander.  Now what is interesting is that most of those are not thoughts as we normally think of them. For example, murder is an action.  Which brings me back to my point about Jesus not only teaching at the times when the Gospel writers recorded that He taught.  If we go back to the Sermon on the Mount, we see that Jesus taught that hating someone is just as much of a sin as murdering them.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 13-14.

Today’s passage contains several parables.  I am going to skip over the parable of the sower because I have written about it several times (and will probably do so again in the future).  The next parable is the parable of the weeds, which teaches the opposite message of a saying often quoted for military operations which goes, “Kill them all, let God sort them out.”  In this parable Jesus’ teaching could be summed up as “Let them all live in peace, God will sort them out.”  It is not our job to decide who should be, or shouldn’t be, admitted into the kingdom of God.  Rather, our job is to tend God’s field and allow God to sort the crops from the weeds after the harvest.  After explaining the parable of the weeds Jesus told two parables comparing the kingdom of heaven to a great treasure.  Both of those parables suggest that if we truly understand what God is offering us, we will give up everything else that we have, or could have, and will expend all of our efforts to have it.  Finally, today’s passage concludes with the account of Peter walking on water.  We often hear this story and make the main take away that Jesus walked on water, but that is not the main take away.  The main take away is that Peter walked on water, but only so long as his focus was on going to Jesus.  As soon as Peter got distracted by the wind, he began to sink.  Peter was able to do the same thing Jesus did, when he did so in order to get closer to Him.  The same is true of us, we can perform the miracles Jesus did, as long as we do so in order to become closer to Him.  If we allow the things of this world to distract us, we will begin to sink.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 10-12.

When Jesus sent the Apostles out to preach that the kingdom of God was near while healing the sick and bringing comfort to the emotionally scarred (many of those we see today as suffering mental illness would have been considered demon possessed in First Century Judea, and I am not convinced that they did not have a better understanding than we do), He told them that they had been freely given, so they should freely give.  Interestingly, right after telling them that He also told them not to take any money or supplies with them, but to live off of the generosity of those whom they met on their travels.  He also told them, and thus us, that He was sending them out as sheep among wolves.  So, they, and we, should be shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.  A little later, when Jesus was preaching to the crowds, He declared that God had hidden His message from the wise and learned while revealing it to little children.  He did not mean that the wise and learned could not learn God’s message.  Rather He meant that the desire of the wise and learned to appear sophisticated caused them to miss what was obvious to those who were willing to be considered simple.  Along the same lines, Jesus told His disciples not to worry about what they would say when put on trial because the Holy Spirit would speak through us.  We get a further insight into what Jesus means by that when He tells us that a good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored in him.  The results of our actions will reveal our true intentions.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.