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.)
The anger of Jesus against hypocrisy, especially the pompous pretensions of the Pharisees, was a pure response to real perfidy. The obvious evil of these self-righteous culminated in their desire to kill Jesus; it is historical fact that they were successful. Jesus warned them specifically that their hypocrisy would grow into homicide; in John 8:40, He said, “But now ye seek to kill me” – and they did not even bother to dispute His statement. It is painful, then, to hear the general warning of Jesus to all of us in Matthew 5:20-22. I can honestly say that I have no delight in anyone’s death and certainly no interest in killing anyone; the Lord knows my heart. However, I do get angry, and Jesus is saying that impure anger puts us on the road to murder. Who can argue with Jesus? We are certain that we would never violate God’s prohibition against killing, but the Pharisees would also have felt the same – until they actually killed Jesus. We must be careful, then, to follow Ephesians 4:26a: “Be ye angry, and sin not.” Even our righteous indignation can quickly turn into sinful responses. As we saw yesterday, God’s Word and God the Holy Spirit combine to help us to remove our beam of hypocritical and harmful anger.