The Lord promises one who will come and be His servant. This is the beginning of the Messianic
prophecy we know as the Servant song. This
servant will be gentle and will do justice.
He will deal gently with those who are like bruised reeds and faintly
burning wicks. He will establish justice
not only among God's people but all over the earth. The inhabitants of the coastlands, those who
go down to the sea, those who live in the desert are all commanded to praise
the Lord for this new thing He will do. These
would all be Gentiles, non-Israelites. This
one will establish true justice everywhere.
His kingdom is without limitation or walls, it knows no racial
identity. Do we see ourselves as
servants like this one, dealing gently with one another and working for justice
in His Name?
One of the most unjust professions in the Roman empire was
that of tax collector. They essentially
purchased a territory in which they could collect taxes on personal property
and income. The collector would estimate
the takings, offer that amount for the franchise, and then extort more by over
valuing the assets on which the tax was levied.
The system encouraged greed and all manner of sin in order to get the
desired return. They were hated among
all, particularly the Jews, and Jewish tax collectors were especially hated
because they were, in essence, enemy collaborators. For Jesus to call a Jewish tax collector to
be a disciple was strange to say the least.
It would have caused everyone, particularly the disciples He had already
collected, to question Him. Jesus,
however, was not a messiah to the religious people only, His kingdom and
purpose was to unite, not divide, God's people.
As He says here with respect to fasting, the Lord was doing as He
promised, a new thing.
Paul was a Jewish rabbi who had trained under one of the
greatest rabbis who ever lived, and the Lord sent him to the Gentiles. A man who was raised to believe that the
Gentiles were unclean, a lower class of people in the eyes of God, a man who
hated Jesus and hated the church was transformed by the power of God and the
love of God into a man who saw it as grace that he was given the gift to preach
the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles.
If you ever doubt the transformative power of Jesus, just consider Paul's
life and then ask for that same power for your own life. He may be the most incredible man of his
time. Let us consider no one to be our
enemy, simply one to whom God has not yet revealed the mystery of Christ and
for whom we should pray for Him to come.
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