The servant of the Lord glories in the fact that He has been
hidden away for just the right moment in history to be revealed and in whom the
Lord shall be glorified and then says it was all wasted, it has come to
nothing. In Jesus, it looked like this
very thing happened at the crucifixion.
The disciples believed Him to be Messiah and yet if it were true, it
certainly came crashing to an ignominious end that Friday on Golgotha. How could Messiah fail to be Messiah unless
He wasn’t Messiah after all? The passage
doesn’t end there though. In response to
His despair at what seemed like failure the Lord announces that the mission is
even larger than the apparent failure, it is to save the world, not just the
nation. Have you ever experienced what
looked like failure and defeat in a ministry or mission you felt/knew you were
called to? Perhaps that failure isn’t
final and that the ultimate outcome is greater success than you imagined.
The opinions about Jesus’ identity were varied enough to
include the possibility that He was John the Baptist raised from the dead. John did no signs when he was alive. He only proclaimed and baptized for
repentance of sin, pointed forward to the coming of another. Why, then, did anyone come to the conclusion
that after his death he was raised and his spirit inhabited Jesus? John clearly pointed to one greater than
himself. Why did all not see that Jesus
was that one? Herod’s mistake is
understandable. He had a guilty
conscience, not only about John’s death but about the sin he was living in by
having married his brother’s wife.
Others, like John’s disciples, perhaps hoped that this was true, but
John would have been horribly disappointed in this. His disciples probably thought that his
ministry had failed but they would see that his ministry, nothing more than a
voice in the wilderness, was no failure at all, he was the harbinger of Messiah
and the first to correctly identify Jesus.
Paul says that not only did he not seek the approval and
acceptance of his apostleship from the Jerusalem party he also openly rebuked
one of them, Peter of all people, over his own hypocrisy. Peter apparently had been eating with
Gentiles (forbidden under the Law) until some others from Jerusalem, some of
James’ people, came out and then Peter ceased this practice. James, the brother of Jesus, was clearly the
leader of the group at this time. Paul
says there is no righteousness under the Law.
He was born a Jew, into the covenant, under the Law, unlike Gentile
sinners and yet when he saw righteousness in Jesus he realized that he offered
justification in a way the Law could never do, there was always guilt. The Law offered temporary justification so
long as sacrifice could be made but it was always likely that sin would still
happen. In Jesus, Paul saw true grace,
that what looked like failure, the cross, was amazingly redeemed unto success
in the resurrection. My hope is built on
nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.
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