The Ten Commandments are very similar to treaties of that
time. The parties are the nation and the
Lord who brought them out of Egypt, out of slavery. He has done something on their behalf and the
treaty spells out the terms of the relationship. They are to have no other gods besides Him
and they are to have no images or idols.
We are created in the image of God, He has already given us an image of
Himself, anything else would be blasphemous.
That image tells us that He is a living God as opposed to one that is
simply dead matter. Jesus reduces these
ten to two, love God with all your being and love your neighbor as
yourself. Having seen the fearsome
presence of God, the people want no part of conversation with Him, they want
Moses to be their representative and they will then listen to Moses, it is
safer that way. In this, Moses says that
all this is to test them, test their obedience to the first command, don’t come
near the mountain. They passed that test
but that will not last long.
Jesus meets the temptations posed by satan with God’s
Word. There was nothing inherently wrong
with turning stones into bread but it was a matter of what we looked at earlier
in the week, whose voice would Jesus obey.
Would He obey the voice of desire for food after forty days fasting,
would He obey the voice of satan or would He wait for the Father to speak
concerning all things. Satan’s second
tactic is to quote Scripture concerning Messiah to Jesus to entice Him to
fulfill those words but this, again, was not righteousness because it was not faith. The Father had spoken those words through the
prophets but the time for such things was also determined by Him, to do so
presumptuously was wrong and testing God.
The final temptation is naked blasphemy, it presumes that the kingdoms
of earth belong to satan and his price for giving them to Jesus is
worship. The appeal was to power and yet
Jesus knew better than anyone who has or ever will live that the kingdoms of
earth are fleeting things and the kingdom promised to Him was eternal. This was perhaps the easiest of all to
reject.
How do Paul’s sufferings fill up what is “lacking” in
Christ’s afflictions? The suffering of
Christ is incomplete in that He promised that those who pick up their crosses
and follow Him will continue to suffer but He shares in our sufferings,
participates with us in these afflictions.
The image of Body of Christ to Paul is not simply metaphor but a
physical reality in which Jesus is the head and we are representatively the
body continuing the mission He began in the flesh. As the body of Christ suffers, so Christ
Himself suffers. Also he is referring to
Christ in us in a literal way and so as we as individual Christians suffer, so
Christ suffers. Our call is to walk in
Him, allowing the life of Christ to be lived in and through our lives. We are drawn, by the power of the Spirit in
us, closer than anyone could imagine to God.
Let us this day attempt to live from that place and allow His life to
flow through us to the world.
O worship the King,
all glorious above,
O gratefully sing His
power and His love;
Our Shield and
Defender, the Ancient of Days,
Pavilioned in
splendor, and girded with praise.
O tell of His might, O
sing of His grace,
Whose robe is the
light, whose canopy space,
His chariots of wrath
the deep thunderclouds form,
And dark is His path
on the wings of the storm.
No comments:
Post a Comment