Tag Archives: rise

Time Out To Teach

Bible Study, , , ,

TIME OUT TO TEACH

They left that place and passed through Galilee. Jesus did not want anyone to know where they were because He was teaching His disciples. He said to them, ‘The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill Him, and after three days He will rise.’ But they did not understand what He meant and were afraid to ask Him about it (Mark 9: 30-32).

Time was getting short for Jesus. He needed to get the message across to His disciples. He was going to die at the hands of the authorities but they needed to know that it was all planned. It was urgent that they understand so that it would not take them by surprise. However, death would not be the end for Him. It would be part of the process. Unlike any other person before Him, death would not hold Him in the grave. With all the earnestness He could muster, He assured His disciples that He would rise again.

But they were deaf to His words. Uncomprehending. It was not His words that they did not understand but the very thought that anyone would rise from the dead. This was such an important message that He took His disciples somewhere out of reach of the crowds so that He could have time out with them, alone. But they just didn’t get it!

They came to Capernaum. When He was in the house, He asked them, ‘What were you arguing about on the road?’ But they kept quiet because on the way they argued about who would be the greatest. Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, ‘Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and servant of all.’ He took a little child whom He placed among them. Taking the child in His arms, He said to them, ’Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.’ (Mark 9: 33-37).

Here are some loaded statements. It is glaringly obvious at this stage that the disciples were just ordinary men. They were still without the Spirit. They lacked understanding and the old nature was still very much at work in them. In spite of every effort Jesus made to get them to understand that He did not come to get rid of Rome and set up a renewed Davidic kingdom in Israel, that’s what they believed and that’s what coloured their thinking. Everything He taught them was filtered through this expectation.

Of course that meant that they were the favoured ones who would hold high office in this new regime, or so they thought. They continually squabbled over the same thing – who would hold the highest office under Jesus? Their thinking was worldly; they wanted to go up, not down. Underneath the surface of this band of “followers” a power struggle was going on, and Jesus was well aware of it. It was His passion to promote unity among them by teaching them to submit to one another, but they had other ideas. Not even His patient teaching and example would shift this pernicious ambition from their minds.

In this atmosphere of constant competition, Jesus made a shocking statement – shocking because it cut across everything they believed at that moment. From the lowest rungs of society He had called them. They were catapulted from being nobodies to being somebodies because they were the disciples of the most powerful and popular rabbi in all Israel. It must have gone to their heads, especially when He taught about God’s kingdom. Now He informed them that the most important people in this kingdom were those who served. That was something they did not want to hear.

To crown it all He called a small child to Him. If they didn’t understand His words, He would give them a visual aid they would not easily forget. Picking up the little one, He made another startling statement. “Do you see this child?” He asked them. “If you want to be really great in God’s kingdom, you will need to get down on his level and accept him. Yes, even become like him.”

What? Become like a child? What did He mean? What is the most glaring characteristic of a child? Humility? Not really. Trust? Perhaps. Spontaneity? Maybe. Dependence? Absolutely. Whatever other characteristics a child might have, every single child from birth is absolutely dependent on someone else for survival. Left to himself he will die.

Strangely enough, it is dependence that cancels out pride. Children are taught to become independent so that they can grow up and leave home. In the kingdom of God, the opposite is true. It takes a lifetime to learn to be utterly dependent on God. That’s true humility, and when you do that, you will be able to bend down and accept a child as your equal.

Jesus taught His disciples, on the eve of His death:

I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing (John 15:5).

If unity with His disciples was His goal, then dependence was the way to that goal. To be one with Him means to be utterly useless without Him.    

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Have you read my new book, Learning to be a Son – The Way to the Father’s Heart (copyright 2015, Partridge Publishing)? You’ll love it!

Available on www.amazon.com in paperback, e-book or kindle version or order directly from the publisher at www.partridgepublishing.com.

Check out my Blog site – www.learningtobeason.wordpress.com

 

Dead Wrong, Devil

Bible Study, , ,

DEAD WRONG, DEVIL

Then He began to explain to them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that He must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him. But when Jesus turned and looked at His disciples, He rebuked Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ He said. ‘You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns’. (Mark 8: 31-33).

Strange, isn’t it, how a person can be so right and yet so dead wrong at the same time! Peter got it right when he confessed Jesus to be the Messiah but, in the very next breath he cancelled his confession with his foolish rebuke.

It was important for the disciples to understand the full extent of who and what the Messiah was. The Old Testament presented two streams of prophecy. Messiah would be both king and servant. What the disciples recognised in Jesus was His power and authority; they had no problem believing that He could overthrow the Roman occupation and set up His rule over David’s realm. They believed it and they wanted to believe it because they ached for the time when the Romans would be thrown out of their land once and for all.

They were so consumed by this expectation that anything Jesus said to the contrary went in one ear and out the other. After all, the very announcement that kicked off His public ministry had to do with the coming of God’s kingdom. They were commissioned to preach it and to demonstrate it by doing the same miracles He did.

What was this talk about being killed and rising again? The other stream in the Messianic prophecies that He would also be the Ebed Yahweh – the Servant of Yahweh – an office which included suffering, they dismissed without giving it a thought. They wanted and needed a powerful ruler to get rid of Rome – bottom line.

They did not understand that God’s agenda was very different from theirs. They were looking for a restoration of the greatness of David’s reign and a return to the comfort of their temporal circumstances. God was about dealing with a far more serious and sinister issue, sin and the alienation from Himself that it had caused. His kingdom was not about geographical boundaries and earthly kings but about restoring the righteousness in their hearts and lives by transforming them from within.

Why did Jesus call Peter Satan? Actually, He didn’t. He addressed the real but unwitting source of Peter’s rebuke. Just as Peter was open to the influence of God and accurately identified Jesus as the Messiah by divine inspiration, so he was equally open to the devil’s lies. He revealed his erroneous expectation of who Messiah really was by opening his mouth and blurting out his rebuke.

Jesus addressed the devil as though he were there in the flesh. “This time, Peter, it’s not God speaking through you but the devil and what he said is nothing but a distractor and I will have none of it.” At that moment, Peter was acting in the flesh. He had no understanding of God’s mind. It would take time and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit for Peter to learn to view life from God’s perspective.

Jesus tried hard to prepare His disciples for His passion so that they would not be thrown into disarray when it happened. But so strong was their desire and their expectation that Messiah would deal, not with sin but with Rome that all His efforts fell on deaf ears. Even His strong rebuke did not help to get His message across. He told them the same thing time and again but when the time came, and He was arrested, tried and nailed to a cross, they still didn’t get it.

It seems that Judas even tried to force His hand by betraying Him to the Jewish authorities, which proved all the more that Rome was not on His agenda. Rather than showing His hand as Judas expected and acting against Rome, He submitted to the cross and He rose from the dead, just as He said He would. Only then and finally, after Pentecost, did the penny drop and everything He said fall into place.

We are really no different, aren’t we? Our expectations of Jesus centre so much on our creature comforts that we turn away in disappointment and disillusionment when Jesus does not meet our expectations. God is less interested in our comfort than our character. It is sin that He deals with, not circumstances. His promise is that He will transform us into the image of His Son, so matter what it takes. In the end, we decide how tough it will be by our response to His training.

As one mom said to her son when he resisted going to bed, “You can go easy or you can go hard, but you are going to bed anyway!”

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Have you read my new book, Learning to be a Son – The Way to the Father’s Heart (copyright 2015, Partridge Publishing)? You’ll love it!

Available on www.amazon.com in paperback, e-book or kindle version or order directly from the publisher at www.partridgepublishing.com.

Check out my Blog site – www.learningtobeason.wordpress.com