Reflective Bible Study

If we were to take a poll and ask people what point in history they would have wanted to live, we would likely discover that one of the greatest, most desirable points people would choose would be living in Judea during Jesus’ life on earth.

While the disciples knew they were special and privileged, they probably didn’t realize just how special they were in the whole timeline of history. While we often look back and perhaps have wanted to have seen Jesus with our own eyes, hear His teaching with our own ears, and experience His miracles first hand, those of us living after Jesus walked the earth are not alone in this desire.

In Luke’s gospel, he records Jesus turning to the disciples and telling them this same idea about those living in the past – before Jesus walked on the earth. Luke describes what happened by saying, “Then Jesus turned to the disciples and said to them privately, ‘How fortunate you are to see the things you see! I tell you that many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see, but they could not, and to hear what you hear, but they did not.’” (v. 23-24)

Those living before Jesus arrived on earth longed to see that day. Even going as far back as Adam and Eve, they believed their first son, Cain, was the one God had promised.

But even though we don’t get to be a part of the privileged group of disciples who spent 3+ years with Jesus, we are more privileged than those who lived before Jesus because we have the gospel record that we can look back on. Those living before Jesus came to earth had the symbolic sacrificial system as their promise pointing forward to Jesus and His ultimate sacrifice, but those of us living after can actually see how amazingly Jesus fulfilled every part of the Jewish sacrificial system.

This leads me to purposefully decide to focus on where God has placed me in “His Story”. I may not be a part of the early church, but that doesn’t stop me from being a significant part of His church today. God created me at this point in history for a reason and He knows what He is doing. Just because I didn’t get to see Jesus’ ministry with my own eyes the first time around doesn’t mean I will never see Him. It simply means I have something extra special to look forward to when arriving in heaven!

Of all the introductions to the gospels, the gospel of John stands out as especially unique. While Matthew opens with Jesus ancestry, Mark opens with a simple statement, and Luke opens with a reason for writing, John immediately points us back to the very, very beginning – and specifically on Jesus’ divinity.

While the language John uses is very simple, the concepts he describes are incredibly profound.

It is at the close of this introduction where a verse stands out to me as being incredibly profound – and it is a verse that we are tempted to miss or skim over when reading.

In verse 16, we read, “Each of us has received one gift after another because of all that the Word is.” While this is profound, John continues by describing the gifts he is referring to: “Laws were given through Moses, but kindness and truth came into existence through Jesus Christ.” (v. 17)

John describes the Law as a gift that God gave. While the Law was given through Moses, it originated because of the Word and it was given as a gift. God gave us life, He gave us the Law, and He didn’t stop there.

After describing the gift of the Law, John now introduces us to Jesus Christ – the Source of kindness and truth – who is another gift. God showed kindness towards us by sending Jesus to live among us. It is through this act that we see God is interested in having a relationship with us. John tells us that we can only see God’s true character by looking at Jesus – and Jesus is the Source of all kindness and truth.

We could also parallel this by saying that Jesus is the Source of both God’s Love and God’s Law. Jesus balanced perfect love with perfect obedience to the Law that was given through Moses.

John summarizes one reason we need Jesus by saying, “No one has ever seen God. God’s only Son, the one who is closest to the Father’s heart, has made him known.” (v. 18)

The message John gives is simple: If you want to know what God is like, simply look at Jesus. Jesus is the only way we can truly see God’s character, and in Jesus, we can see how God balances the gifts of law and love.

Have you ever misjudged something? Perhaps, in a heated discussion, you took one side, believing that it was the better option only to realize later that you chose incorrectly.

Even trickier than misjudging something/someone, we can place our view (i.e. opinion) of something as the only way to see the situation and ignore all other possibilities.

Our passage for this entry demonstrates how one can place their view of a situation as the only “right” way. In this passage, the synagogue leader demonstrates this narrow mindset. He acknowledges Jesus ability to heal, but He discounts everything else about this situation – such as the cause of the disability, the length of the disability, and the glory being given to God because of this healing, etc.

The unfortunate thing about the situation we see in this passage is that it is easily repeatable today, though with a few twists. If we brought this situation into modern times, and a woman had this disability for 18 years, our culture would praise the physician who prescribed or the surgeon who operated, and not on the God who healed.

In this synagogue, the leader could only see Jesus as a “man”, specifically as a doctor, trying to steal attention to Himself and away from God. The synagogue leader completely ignored the reality that this woman’s disability was caused by something in the spiritual realm, and that the only way Jesus could have healed her was through tapping into a spiritual power – which is another way to say that Jesus healed her through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Today, too often we look at physical symptoms and try to diagnose physical causes. This works well in the case of injury. For example, the ambulance brings a scraped up and bleeding person to the emergency room – the cause: an automobile accident; or a man’s arm is bleeding near his shoulder – the cause: a bullet punctured his skin. With cases where we are physically injured, we can almost always find a physical cause for the injury.

But where this doesn’t work well is diagnosing physical symptoms in cases where there is not physical injury. Why is this individual depressed? Sure it could be a hormone imbalance (which is physical), but that still could just as easily be described as another symptom (i.e. part of a chain reaction), and not really the root cause. Why is this person obese or withering away from malnutrition? It could be from what they are eating, and their portion sizes, but that could also be another symptom of something else: such as eating too much to distract from a painful hurt in the past, or eating as little as possible to become what they believe to be “attractive”. Physical symptoms like these are traced to spiritual and emotional causes, and it is only when we open our eyes to the holistic view of each individual person can we begin to see causes that stretch beyond what can be measured physically.

Which leads us to the big idea in this passage: How many times do we look only at the symptom of an issue and not the cause? How often do we discount the physical symptoms we experience as only physical problems and ignore their spiritual and emotional roots?

I am not a doctor, nor do I even claim to be close to one. I simply have observed how too often, the chronic, persistent pain present in our lives is a spiritual issue – and something that only God can heal.

The woman who was healed in this passage gets that this is spiritual issue. I’m positive that at some point during those 18 years, she had visited a doctor – a doctor who simply checked her out for physical causes to the disability and found none.

Jesus gets that this is a spiritual issue as well. Spiritually caused illness needs a personal Savior as its source of healing. This is as true today as it was when Jesus walked the earth in the New Testament.

When reading about the fate of Judas Iscariot, the chief priests’ and leaders’ words and actions surprise me. On one hand, they are apathetic towards Judas Iscariot over his regret, but when he throws their money back at them, they now see it as a problem.

After Judas throws the 30 pieces of silver at them and leaves, Matthew tells us, “The chief priests took the money and said, ‘It’s not right to put it into the temple treasury, because it’s blood money.’ So they decided to use it to buy a potter’s field for the burial of strangers. That’s why that field has been called the Field of Blood ever since. Then what the prophet Jeremiah had said came true, ‘They took the 30 silver coins, the price the people of Israel had placed on him, and used the coins to buy a potter’s field.’” (v. 6-10a)

What strikes me as a little humorous about what happened is that the money probably originated from the temple treasury to begin with. If so, that would mean that the Israelite religion God had originated paid for the death of His Son. But by not accepting the money back, the Israelite religion wasn’t willing to accept they had done anything wrong.

The chief priests and leaders know that this is blood money, so they used it for as low of a task as they could think of: purchasing a field to bury strangers.

But Matthew draws our attention to the realization that none of this decision making was done by chance. God knew exactly what would happen, and through Jeremiah, He predicted in detail the amount and the fate of the money that was used to betray Jesus.

In this event, Matthew again draws our attention to the truth that nothing about the crucifixion weekend was a surprise to God. Everything that happened that weekend happened for one single purpose. That purpose was opening the way for our salvation.

I doubt the chief priests and leaders realized they were playing into Messianic prophecy, but their actions while they were apathetic and/or hostile towards Jesus actually caused them to fulfill prophecies that pointed to Jesus as the Messiah who God sent.

This tells me that even when we don’t think God is present or that He cares, He is still able to move behind the scenes directing our lives. While we might not understand what is happening at that moment, we can trust that in the future, we can look back and see how God led every step of our lives.