"Do not say, ‘I sinned, yet what has happened to me?’ for
the Lord is slow to anger. Do not be so
confident of forgiveness that you add sin to sin." There is the balance of understanding the
Lord. He is slow to anger, and "forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin" but He will by no means clear the
guilty. Paul says " What
then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By
no means!" We have been
set free from the law and its judgment because of the righteousness of Jesus in
fulfilling the Law but that is not license to sin, we know what sin is because we
also have the Law that defines righteousness but we also have the proper
interpretation of the Law in the person of Jesus, the living and incarnate
Word, living in us by the power of the Holy Spirit. We have been redeemed from sin and death by
the sacrifice of Jesus but the result of that is that He is not only savior of
our lives but Lord of our lives as well.
We have been given a new Spirit to lead us into righteousness. Let us awaken to that reality and live by the
Spirit.
The people of the village didn't receive Jesus because He
was going to Jerusalem. The Samaritans
were particularly inhospitable to Jews and even more particularly those who
were going to keep a festival in Jerusalem.
They thought that Jerusalem was the height of the apostasy of the
nation, that the place God had chosen for worship was Mt Gerizim in Samaria
where they worshiped, where the blessings were pronounced in Deuteronomy, so
they were hostile toward Jerusalem which they considered a center of
idolatry. Jesus' first response to one
who offers to be His follower was to say the Son of Man has no place to rest His
head, probably a reflection on what has just occurred. We have to be prepared for rejection and
persecution on this journey, recognizing that the world rejected Jesus and that
this is not our home.
Is this a literal 144,000?
It seems unlikely given the penchant for numbers with 12's as their
base. There were twelve tribes, twelve
apostles, etc and twelve was a full complement.
Jacob had to add Joseph's sons to round out the twelve, the apostles
felt duty bound to add a twelfth after Judas' death, this was a particularly important
number and 12,000 times 12 would indicate a large number of those to be sealed
as the Lord's own, a significant remnant.
The angels with the power to harm earth and sea were told to wait until
this sealing was complete, but there will come judgment on the earth when God
has His own sealed and numbered. Let us
live according to our faith and evangelize like there is no tomorrow.
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