Jaw-dropping Jewels about Jesus
Rarely does Jesus, God the Son, do exactly what we expect of Him. It seems odd that He so frequently surprises us, given that He never changes. Hebrews 13:8 makes this absolute statement: “Jesus the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” Still, though He is blessedly consistent in His goodness, Jesus does unforeseen things. Even when He does what is expected, He does not always do it in the way that we anticipate. Let us join with Jesus on a jaw-dropping journey. (I will be using this opening paragraph for each of the brief messages in this series. The following material will change daily.)
As we saw yesterday, Jesus demonstrates an anger that is pure. Hypocrisy particularly angered Him. Jesus, being fully God, had the knowledge necessary to call out the Pharisees (Matthew 22:15-22) and demonstrate their hypocrisy. Because we do not have the fullness of His insight, we should be careful about designating others as hypocrites. However, with the mirror of God’s Word outside and God the Holy Spirit inside, we can evaluate ourselves. Jesus said in Matthew 7:5, “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Here, He uses the hard term “hypocrite” to speak directly to each one of us (and to reveal His anger regarding hypocrisy). Because each one of us possesses a sin nature (and sometimes it seems to possess us!), you and I can be the tragicomic figure of verse 5, turning around and bopping our brother with the beam sticking out of our blinded eye, hurting him rather than helping him. Note that the very real anger of Jesus is beneficial: He provides the simple remedy of first removing the beam. We will consider how to do that next week. For now, let us affirm the following: if Jesus is this angry and concerned about the problem of hypocrisy, then we must face it head on – but, we hope, without the beaning beam.