SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/8/2017 11:01 AM
My Worship Time Focus: Christ
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Acts 3:18
Message of the verse: “18
"But the things which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the
prophets, that His Christ would suffer, He has thus fulfilled.”
I am sure that we
realize that when Peter uses the word Christ that it means Messiah, and we see
in this verse that what God had planned in eternity past concerning His Messiah
have taken place, and that the fact that the Jews rejected Him and even
executed Him had not thwarted God’s plan.
I want to go back to look at some of the verses in the 2nd
Psalm. “7 "I will surely tell of
the decree of the LORD: He said to Me, ’You are My Son, Today I have begotten
You. 8 ’Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as Your inheritance, And
the very ends of the earth as Your possession. 9 ’You shall break them with a
rod of iron, You shall shatter them like earthenware’ (Psalm 2:7-9).” When we look at verse seven we see the phrase
“Today I have begotten You,” and
this speaks of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and so we can see from
this verse that the work of our Lord is surely not complete even after He was
crucified by the Romans in compliance with the Jews. We learned in our study of the 17th
chapter of John which is called “Christ’s High Priestly Prayer,” which
previewed what Christ is doing now in His ministry in heaven as He is praying
for His children. So the point is that
His work still goes on in spite of the fact that He was crucified.
Now we can also see
that the plans of God concerning the Messiah were first announced by the
prophets in the Old Testament beginning with Genesis 3:15 “15 And I will put
enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall
bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel."” This was the very first prophecy of the
coming Messiah and in this verse we see a reference to the virgin birth. We can also look at the end of Isaiah 52 and
all of Isaiah 53, along with the 22nd Psalm to see more prophecies
of what the Messiah was to go through in His sufferings. Zechariah 12:10 tells
us “"I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of
Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me
whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only
son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a
firstborn.” John MacArthur writes that
“God used their evil intentions to fulfill His own purposes (cf. Acts 2:23; Gen
50:20).”
He goes on to write
“Peter portrays our Lord as Servant, Jesus (Savior), Holy and Righteous One,
Prince of Life, and Christ (Messiah; John 1:41; 4:25). He convicts his hearers of disowning,
denying, and executing Him. They must
have been wondering, as did the crowd on the Day of Pentecost, ‘What shall we
do?’ (Acts 2:37). In the second part of his sermon, Peter gives
them the answer. His sermon is a classic
example of how to present the gospel.
Before the good news of salvation in Christ there must come the bad news
that men are sinners.”
Yes that is certainly
the truth when it comes to being a witness of the saving faith in our Lord
Jesus Christ. After all Jesus came to
earth to die for our sins so we surely must admit that we are sinners before we
can be saved, realizing that Jesus paid it all, and all we need to do is to
confess we are sinners and that we sin and then accept what Christ has done for
us, invite Him into our lives to be on the throne of our lives and we will then
be born-again into the family of God where we will live with Him forever.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible question:
“Jochebed” (Numbers 26:59).
Today’s Bible question: “What
two New Testament books give the genealogy of Christ?”
Answer in our next SD.
9/8/2017 11:27 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment