Lessons

Matthew 20:15a Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?

If you had no idea what parable this came from, if these words stood alone, do they not teach you a truth about our Lord? We are always looking for context and that is right and good in the sight of the Lord, but can we just as easily overlook a vital truth because we want the context to control the vision?

We know the Lord to be kind, merciful and loving. We go through this life and often wonder why are we going thru these troubling times. We never seem to make sense of some things. We do not see a lesson. We do not grow. We see no blessing come to anyone in a circumstance and suddenly it is why, why, why.

We hear it from the secular world all the time. Why would a god do such a thing? Nothing we say will ever satisfy them. We turn things back on them and exclaim, it is because you do not have faith. If this be true, then what does that same faith do for us when we fail to understand? Can we accept we are His and He has the right to do with us as He pleases without explaining Himself?

Do you know the second half of Matthew 20:15? The context you seek!

Matthew 20:15b Is thine eye evil, because I am good?

If we truly are in Christ, we are members in one body, and He is good, how is it our vision isn’t good?

Because we see things with secular eyes?

1 Corinthians 12:16 And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?

If you are neither ear nor eye you still receive instruction from the Head, your Lord Jesus Christ. Truth runs thru your very being, is that not enough or do you have to understand every little detail before you will believe?

Sitting

Luke 2:46 And it came to pass, that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions.

When I began this series, I made an assumption that Jesus might have very well been Bar Mitzvah’d during the Passover season. This is an assumption based on Jewish traditions and issues which are not clearly identified within Luke 2. It is through my studies and understandings that I draw this conclusion which is conjecture not fact, which is opinion not theology. This is what Matthew Henry had to say about Luke 2:46.

The third day they found him in the temple, in some of the apartments belonging to the temple, where the doctors of the law kept, not their courts, but their conferences rather, or their schools for disputation; and there they found him sitting in the midst of them (v. 46), not standing as a catechumen to be examined or instructed by them, for he had discovered such measures of knowledge and wisdom that they admitted him to sit among them as a fellow or member of their society.” Matthew Henry

Joining these men by sitting in their midst entreats Jesus as a man, as one of them, which speaks only to their attitude towards Jesus and not that of Jesus Himself. The twelfth year of age in Jewish custom is a preparatory year. It is a year which does not free that child to act as a man, but to prepare him for his obligations. Jesus, being perfect in performance in all things would never, in His perfection, have overstepped His bounds and sat with the elders without consideration of His duties and obligations.

We can for all practical purposes feel compelled to understand the possibilities surrounding scriptures. We can say, “It is my opinion”, “I see the possibility.”, even go so far as saying “It is my understanding.”; but we must not put forth these things as doctrine and truth. To do so would be to overstep our duties and responsibilities.

Jesus Christ in truth may be revealed in private but that does not give us the right to make doctrine of it. The Holy Bible alone dictates doctrine.

but his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.”, and so should we.