GOD’S WORD FOR DECEMBER 31 ~ ~ Matthew 12:1-3 ~ ~ “At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat. 2 Now when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath!” 3 But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions.”
Oh, how glorious it would be, to go back, knowing what we know now, from the Word of God, and listen to Jesus as He spoke in Matthew chapter 12.
Verses 1-14, as the Pharisees berated Him for working on the Sabbath, I can imagine the thoughts going through His mind, as He was taken back to when He and the Father created the World, Man, the Universe, angels, and all things. How all things were created through Him, and how He and the Father rested on the seventh day and called it holy. Maybe His mind then went forward to when God had to endure the disobedience, compromise, and blasphemies of His beloved people, and He had to write specific laws, which would point to Him, and His coming, His salvation for all people, and yet……these people, whose sinfulness was the cause of so much anguish to a Loving Father, are telling HIM that He is disobeying HIS laws!!! The human side of Him must have wanted to be angry over their arrogance, while the Loving Father in Him felt pity for their ignorance.
I’m sure He wanted to somehow get the idea across to them that the Sabbath, the Laws, and the Temple rituals, like the showbread, are pathways to God, not ends in and of themselves, and, therefore if they would truly know God, like David did, they would know when God was using it for a lesson to them. (vs. 3-6)
This might be when He said verse 7, “But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless.”
After He attempted to leave, and crowds followed, but He needed to be on the Father’s timetable. After He healed the possessed man, and the people praised Him, there they were again!!! The Pharisees!! He knew their thoughts before they spoke, so, possibly, He approached them with His answer, which must have set them back a bit!!! (v. 25)
As He read the minds of the Pharisees, perhaps He remembers reading the mind of
another being, eons and eons ago, back in the days when all the angels worshipped the Trinity with one pure heart…..except for one…Lucifer…
Maybe in His mind, He went over the beauty of the “Number One” angel at the feet of the Father’s throne, but with betrayal hidden in the recesses of his mind.
As He explained “spiritual warfare 101” to the Pharisees, it’s a possibility that He saw again the deception of that one poisonous entity, and how that deception grew to an evil that swept away one third of heavenly hosts.
As He looked at the Pharisees, with their hatred for Him, but outward devotion to God, He recognized its source. He knew where their thoughts and whisperings were derived from, and His Words to the men were just as much to satan himself, as He gave him the message He’d given him many times through the years…..”you will not win”.
His message to the Pharisees, and to all mankind, is “do not compromise”…”He who is not with Me is against me”(v.30)…..When it comes to spiritual warfare, there can be no compromise. This is the mistake the fallen angels made….a little compromise, and the deception took hold, and they could not bring themselves back to the Lord they so loved!!!!
This is why Jesus describes that as the unforgivable sin. Sinning against the Holy Ghost cannot be forgiven, probably because it directly involves the greatest compromise with demonic forces and the deception and hold will be too great to allow repentance, which is necessary for forgiveness.
When Jesus goes on to say a tree is known by its fruit, and men by their words, the Pharisees see an opening. They request a sign. They’re saying, paraphrased, in v. 38,
“What about you, what are YOUR fruits? Let us see something to judge YOU by.”
I’m sure Jesus’ mind went back to the days of Moses, and the signs He did for the Children of Israel, miraculously bringing them to freedom, only to have them grumble and whine about how “good” they had it in Egypt.
Jesus told the Pharisees, in effect, “ A sign? Really? A sign? Have I not shown your people enough signs through the ages? What did you do with them? Did you see the Father’s Love in those signs and wonders, did you see the Son in those things, as the Creator of the Universe and Lord of Lords, or did you just explain them away, or soon forget them? The next great sign I will do, will be to throw down the forces of evil once and for all. Death will be swallowed up in victory, and you…….you will need to repent and be saved from your own sins……sins you don’t even know, at this time, that you have, because of the very same deception that you are defending so fiercely against Me. The irony of this is thick with meaning.
He goes on to tell them that in order to be healed of their sins, they need to fill their lives with Him and the Father, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and keep the deceptions and demonic powers from re-infecting them.
Even then, I’m quite sure, His mind wandered back to that first deception, leading to that first sin that began all this, and gave satan the right to occupy and spread that poison throughout mankind, as he did throughout the angelic forces of heaven….but only for a time…..only for a time!!!