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.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Matthew 7-9.

I really love to write about the contrast between Matthew 7:1 (Do not judge, or you too will be judged.) and Matthew 7:15-20 (Watch out for false prophets…Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.).  Often times, the first of these is misinterpreted, but the second helps us to understand that we need to dig a little deeper into the verses following Matthew 7:1 if we are going to understand it.  However, today I want to write about the connection I saw today between Matthew 7:7-12, Matthew 7:13-14, and Matthew 9:36-38. Perhaps I should have lumped those first two together and made this a comparison between just two passages, but I am going to stick with viewing it as three.  In the first passage Jesus tells us to ask, to seek, and to knock.  When we ask, He tells us that we will receive, and when we seek, He tells us that we will find, and when we knock, doors will open for us.  We, evil as we are, give good gifts to our children, so we know that God, being good, will give good gifts to those who ask Him.  I find the conclusion which Jesus reaches from this interesting: since God will give good gifts to those who ask of Him, to those who Jesus has just declared evil, we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us.  Not, the way so many misremember, do unto others AS they do unto us.  No, we should do as we would like them to do unto us.  And, that reminds me of another misinterpretation.  We should not do as we think would be best for them, but as we would like them to do to us.  From there Jesus tells us to enter the narrow gate.  And from the two misinterpretations I just identified we do indeed see that what Jesus tells us to do is the narrow gate.  Which brings me to the third of the segments from today’s passage which I want to bring into this theme.  So, what is it that we should be asking God to give us?  We should be asking Him to send workers to harvest the crops of those who are seeking something without knowing what that something is.  We should be asking God to send people, hopefully like us, to show the lost how much God loves them and wants to heal them.  We should be asking God to send 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 5-6.

These two chapters have long been central to my understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.  I would like to start by commenting on what Jesus had to say at the end of this passage.  In some ways I think it sums up much of Jesus’ message: Seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness, and all of the other things you will need will be given to you.  I think that what Jesus says before this tell us how we seek God’s kingdom and His righteousness.  Immediately before saying that, Jesus told us that we should not worry because God knows what we need better than we do.  Then as we continue backwards through the passage, we discover that before telling us not to worry, Jesus told us not to store treasures upon this earth, but rather to store treasure in heaven.  He told us that any treasure we gather on earth will be ephemeral, that is temporary and easily lost, but any treasure which we store in heaven will never be lost.  Further, He tells us that we will expend our effort towards where our treasure is.  If we seek treasure which we can store on earth, we will work towards earthly goals.  However, if we seek treasure which can only be redeemed in heaven, we will work towards heavenly goals.  The same theme applies to what Jesus has to say about fasting, praying, and giving to the needy.  If we do those things for praise from people here on earth, we will not gain rewards in heaven.  So, let us fast, pray, and help the needy without seeking the attention of people, instead let us do such things in order to please God.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Matthew 1-4.

When John the Baptist was preaching he preached “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”  Later, Matthew tells us that after John was imprisoned Jesus began preaching exactly the same message.  We normally teach that Matthew did this to show that John had come to prepare the way for Jesus.  We are not wrong to think that because that was indeed part of Matthew’s message in today’s passage.  However, we miss the similarity between what John says when he condemns the religious leaders for putting their trust in being Abraham’s descendants and things that Jesus said later in His ministry on the same subject.  Matthew was connecting Jesus to a line of teaching among religious Jews of which John the Baptist was a part.  What the original readers of Matthew’s Gospel would have known that we had forgotten until recently is that John the Baptist did not arise out of nowhere to begin teaching.  The Bible mentions two major Jewish religious traditions of the time of Jesus: the Pharisees and the Sadducees.  With the discovery and translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls we learned that there was a third major Jewish religious tradition, the Essenes.  A comparison of what the Dead Sea Scrolls tells us of some of their practices suggests that John the Baptist was part of that tradition.  Matthew knew this, as did those to whom he was writing.

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