SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/27/2017 10:08 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1
Legalism
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossian
2:16-17
Message of the verses: “16 Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day- 17 things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.”
I have mentioned earlier that I am reading a book by John
MacArthur entitled “Slave” and that book has taught me a lot about the fact
that in reality a believer is a slave to God.
Now there is a picture in the Old Testament of what all people are which
is slaves to sin are. The children of
Israel when they were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years by ruthless dictator’s
shows us what a person is when they are born, and that is being a slave to the
cruel master of sin, which is called the sin nature. We are as bad off in our relationship with
God as we can be because being born with the sin nature making us slaves to
sin. When Moses, through the work of God who showed the rulers of Egypt that He
was indeed the One True God because of the miracles that He did caused the
people of Israel to be free from their bondage of their sinful masters the
children of Israel actually became slaves to the Lord who is a completely
different kind of Master. I believe that
this pictures the new birth when a person accepts the salvation that Christ
offers through the good news of the gospel and so we are no longer slaves of
sin but slaves of God. I realize that
the word “slave” or “slavery” is a word that brings about a lot of difficult
thoughts, but being a slave to God is the best thing that a person can be. As mentioned this happens through the work of
Jesus Christ on the cross who has provided complete salvation, complete
forgiveness, and complete victory as we learned when we studied verses 11-15 in
our last section. Now if we have been
completely saved, forgiven, and have complete victory in Christ why would we
want to add something to this, and when we add something to this it is called
“legalism” which is what these two verses speak of. John MacArthur states “Legalism is the
religion of human achievement. It argues
that spiritually is based on Christ plus human works. It makes conformity to man-made rules the
measure of spirituality.” Paul argues
this in these two verses.
John MacArthur quotes a man named Gardiner Spring in his
commentary, and Spring is a man that I have read in the past in my study of the
books of Thessalonians when MacArthur quoted from him there. Gardner Spring writes the following and with
that we will end this SD.
“A merely moral man may be
very scrupulous of duties he owes to his fellowmen, while the infinitely
important duties he owes to God are kept entirely out of sight. Of loving and serving God, he knows
nothing. Whatever he does or whatever he
leaves undone, he does nothing for God.
He is honest in his dealings with all except God, he robs none but God,
he is thankless and faithless to none but God, he feels contemptuously, and
speaks reproachfully of none but God. A
just perception and the duties which result from those relations constitute no
part of his piety. He may not only
disbelieve the Scriptures, but may never read them; may not only disregard the
divine authority, but every form of divine worship, and live and die as though
he had no concern with God and God had now concern with him. The character of the young man in the Gospel
presents a painful and affecting view of the deficiencies of external morality
(see Mt. 19:16-22). He was not
dishonest, nor untrue; he was not impure nor malignant; and not a few of the
divine commands he had externally observed.
Nay, he says, ‘All these have I kept.’
Nor was his a mere sporadic goodness, but steady and uniform. He had performed these services ‘from his
youth up.’ Nor was this all. He professed a willingness to become
acquainted with his whole duty. ‘What
lack I yet?’ And yet when brought to the
test, this poor youth saw that, with all his boasted morality, he could not
deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Christ.”
3/27/2017 10:44 PM
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