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.