Intro to Acts 8:25-40)

 

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 12/15/2017 10:05 AM

My Worship Time                                                                              Focus:  Intro to Acts 8:25-40

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                 Reference: Acts 8:25-40

            Message of the verses:  “25 So, when they had solemnly testified and spoken the word of the Lord, they started back to Jerusalem, and were preaching the gospel to many villages of the Samaritans. 26 But an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip saying, "Get up and go south to the road that descends from Jerusalem to Gaza." (This is a desert road.) 27 So he got up and went; and there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure; and he had come to Jerusalem to worship, 28 and he was returning and sitting in his chariot, and was reading the prophet Isaiah. 29 Then the Spirit said to Philip, "Go up and join this chariot." 30 Philip ran up and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and said, "Do you understand what you are reading?" 31 And he said, "Well, how could I, unless someone guides me?" And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. 32 Now the passage of Scripture which he was reading was this: "HE WAS LED AS A SHEEP TO SLAUGHTER; AND AS A LAMB BEFORE ITS SHEARER IS SILENT, SO HE DOES NOT OPEN HIS MOUTH. 33 “IN HUMILIATION HIS JUDGMENT WAS TAKEN AWAY; WHO WILL RELATE HIS GENERATION? FOR HIS LIFE IS REMOVED FROM THE EARTH." 34 The eunuch answered Philip and said, "Please tell me, of whom does the prophet say this? Of himself or of someone else?" 35 Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning from this Scripture he preached Jesus to him. 36 As they went along the road they came to some water; and the eunuch said, "Look! Water! What prevents me from being baptized?" 37 [[And Philip said, "If you believe with all your heart, you may." And he answered and said, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God."]] 38 And he ordered the chariot to stop; and they both went down into the water, Philip as well as the eunuch, and he baptized him. 39 When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; and the eunuch no longer saw him, but went on his way rejoicing. 40 But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he passed through he kept preaching the gospel to all the cities until he came to Caesarea.”

            John MacArthur entitles this 20^th chapter in his commentary on the first twelve chapters of Acts “The Faith that Does Save.”  We will be looking at the introduction to these fifteen verses in our Spiritual Diary today.

            I have been studying the Old Testament since around 2005 as I looked at each verse and one of the things that I saw while studying it was that Israel pretty much failed to do what God called them to do.  God did not intend for them to be a reservoir, storing up divine blessings for them, but God wanted them to tell others of His goodness and His salvation, He wanted them to be a funnel through which all of those wonderful blessings could be dispersed to a lost and dying world.  As I have been going over the seven churches in the book of Revelation in order to teach about them to our Sunday school class I have found out that many of those churches were doing the same things that the nation of Israel did, and that is to reject God’s teachings and sin against Him.  This is the very thing that caused God to set Israel aside in order to bring punishment to them, and as I look at the Words that Christ has for several of these churches I see that Jesus Christ was about to punish them. 

            In his introduction to these verses John MacArthur writes about this problem that Israel had and says that first of all Israel became a separatistic nationalism that wanted no contact with the Gentile nations.  He points out that when God told Jonah to go to Nineveh that he went the opposite direction and after spending three nights in the belly of a large fish, he finally went to Nineveh, and after they believed in God it saddened the heart of Jonah. 

“1 But it greatly displeased Jonah and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the LORD and said, "Please LORD, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity. 3 “Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life’ (Jonah 4:1-3).”

            MacArthur writes “The other extreme was that of compromise.  Influenced by the surrounding nations, Israel frequently fell into pagan idolatry.  An idolatrous Israel had no message to give to the idolatrous Gentile nations around her.  By the time of Jesus, the worship of pagan idols was gone, disappearing for the most part after the Babylonian Captivity.  It was replaced, however by a corrupted form of Judaism that advocated salvation by works.”

            Now in keeping with the seven churches in the book of Revelation that I mentioned there was much idol worship still going on in the cities that these churches were and it was a consistent temptation for those who went to those churches to fall back into the worship of idols or to offer a sacrifice to Caesar in order not to be persecuted.  There may not have been idols in Israel, but there were idols in the nations that surrounded them.

            Now since the failure of Israel God cut a new channel through which His blessings could reach the world and that new channel of course was the church.  We have been following the growth of the church in our studies of the book of Acts and we have seen that the church has made its way from Jerusalem to Samaria where the gospel was preached and sinners were saved.  We have noticed that the church at this time was all Jewish, but now it has first of all gone to Samaria we see that this group of people was saved, and now in our verses for this morning we see that there is a Gentile person involved.  This man was what we would call a “big shot” with the Ethiopian queen, and so the gospel would first penetrate the souls of the great African continent.  We have been looking at Simon in our last few SD’s, and saw that his salvation was not genuine, but this man’s salvation was truly genuine.

The Proper Preparation (Acts 8:25-28)

            John MacArthur writes “Genuine saving faith demands the proper preparation.  In the parable of the sower, only the good, properly prepared soil brought forth the fruits of salvation.  The text indicates four features which prepare the soil of the eunuch’s heart.”

            As we begin to look at these verses in the last part of this eight chapter of Acts we will begin by looking at verses 25-28 which speaks of the proper preparation.

            Spiritual meaning for my life today:  I never want to be like Jonah and not have a desire to tell someone about the salvation that only comes through the Lord Jesus Christ.

My Steps of Faith for Today:  Continue to work on the Sunday school lesson for this up-coming Sunday.

Memory verses:  Philippians 4:1, 8 “Therefore, my beloved brethren whom I long to see, my joy and crown, in this way stand firm in the Lord, my beloved.  8 Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.”

Answer to yesterday’s Bible question:  “Cherith” (1 Kings 17:5-6).

Today’s Bible question:  “Who was the wife of Zechariah?”

Answer in our next SD.

12/15/2017 10:53 AM