SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/28/2017 8:15 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-2 “Legalism”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Colossians
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.”
When God created man, man was perfect in his communion
with God and had a desire to worship God because he knew that God had created
him and therefore he knew that He was his God.
When sin entered into mankind through Adam and Eve’s fall man still had
a desire to worship, but because of his sinful nature he could not worship God
in the way that God desired him to worship.
Now because man still has a desire to worship, man comes up with rules
and regulations to fulfill this need, and fulfilling this worship in the wrong
way was one of the great concerns of Paul.
In Titus 1:14 and 15 Paul tells Titus to make sure that those under his
care should 14 “not paying attention to Jewish myths and commandments of men
who turn away from the truth. 15 To the pure, all things are pure; but to those
who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their
conscience are defiled.” MacArthur
writes “Romans 14-15 and 1 Corinthians 8-10 also discuss Christian liberty and
the only legitimate reason for restraining it:
to protect a weaker Christian brother or sister.”
Now we have gone over before in our study of Colossians
what these false teachers were trying to tell the Colossian believers and that
is that Christ was not enough that He was only the beginning and they needed to
add to what He had done for them in their salvation and their growth or
sanctification. In the OT book of
Leviticus chapter eleven we learn about food and drink as a part of the dietary
laws and this may have been where these false teachers got this idea of food
and drink. However we know that Christ
fulfilled the Law and the Colossians were under the New Covenant thus the
dietary laws of the Old Covenant were no longer in force as Jesus made clear in
the seventh chapter of the gospel of Mark:
“14 After He called the crowd to Him again, He began saying to them, "Listen to Me, all of you, and understand: 15 there is nothing outside the man which can defile him if it goes into him; but the things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man. 16 [["If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear."]] 17 When He had left the crowd and entered the house, His disciples questioned Him about the parable. 18 And He said to them, "Are you so lacking in understanding also? Do you not understand that whatever goes into the man from outside cannot defile him, 19 because it does not go into his heart, but into his stomach, and is eliminated?" (Thus He declared all foods clean.)”
In the tenth chapter of the book of Acts Peter sees a
vision three times in which he saw all kind of animals that Jewish people were
not to eat because of the dietary laws.
Peter tells whom is talking to him in the vision that he had never eaten
these, but was told to rise, kill and eat.
Peter was getting a message that the OT laws were not the same in the
New Testament since Christ had fulfilled these Laws while on the earth. Now to be sure this was more than about
dietary laws for Peter as he would soon go into a Gentile’s house, which was
also not legal for a Jew to do and it was there that he would lead the first
Gentiles to Christ. Things were indeed
different since Christ fulfilled the OT Law.
One more thing to discuss in this SD and that is what
Paul writes about “festival and new moon.”
The Jews had many annual Jewish celebrations like Passover, Pentecost,
the Feast of Tabernacles, or the Feast of Lights. They would offer sacrifices on these days as
the OT Law required along with the new moon which was the first day of the
month. The Jews had two different
calendars, one was for their festivals and the other was political in
nature. Their calendar consists of 30
day months and I am not sure what they did with the extra five days that are on
our Julian calendar as there are 365 and ¼ days in our calendar as we add one
full day on the 29th of February every four years calling it leap
year. At any rate Paul is saying that
these celebrations are not to be celebrated anymore as they too were a part of
the OT Law which Christ fulfilled. The
false teachers were undoubtedly trying to cause these believers to add these in
their worship.
3/28/2017 8:50 PM
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