Once again, the Lord makes His complaint against Israel, and
it is because there is no knowledge of Him in the Land. The priest and prophet are held responsible
and accountable for this lack of knowledge.
They are the ones responsible for making Him known to the people. The accusation includes that they " feed on the sin of my people; they are greedy for their iniquity." The priests received a portion of the sin
offering, the sacrifice, so as sin increased, the priests had bounty. The right thing to do would be to call for
true repentance, not simply more sacrifice.
As the prosperity of the people increased, so did their financial
ability to sin, they could afford more sacrifices, they took the mercy of God
for granted. Everyone benefited from the
arrangement, people and priests alike were prosperous and they covered their
bases with sacrifices to Yahweh and offering worship to the Baals who might
help them as well. Prosperity is always
difficult.
As I have written before, it always takes my breath away
when Jesus stretches out His hand to touch the leprous man. Clean and unclean were significant ideas in
Judaism and when you touched something unclean, you became unclean for a period
of time. The transfer only went one way,
you couldn't communicate clean to another person but if they were healed of the
unclean condition, how do you do the math?
The paralysis in the man brought by his friends surely was related to some sin in his life
since Jesus forgave the sin before pronouncing the healing. He didn't do things just to be provocative. This situation is much the same as the clean
and unclean issue, Jesus wasn't a priest and there was no sacrifice so He
couldn’t pronounce God's forgiveness, but the argument from lesser to greater
seems to indicate if He can heal the paralytic then He can surely forgive
sins. Who is this man?
Many prophesied over Paul concerning what would happen in
Jerusalem. Paul, however, persevered in
going. There is an important lesson for
the church concerning prophetic words here.
Paul knew that these prophecies would come to pass but also knew that all
that mattered was the Lord's will. These
prophecies did not dissuade him from acting in accord with the Lord's
will. There were times when he was
prevented from going somewhere and he did not push on. Prophets sometimes believe that they get
words that must be heeded but, at least in this instance, the prophecy was
simply this will happen, Paul had to know whether that course of action was
God's will or not. We are not always
called to avoid difficulty, no one wanted Jesus to go to the cross but it was
necessary. Prophecy given still requires
prayer in the one to whom the word is given.
In the end it boils down to is God calling me to something more
difficult than I would prefer.
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