[Mk. 11; Lk. 19]
1. We can’t have Jesus (...God, salvation...) on our own terms.
2. it’s possible to be very zealous in religion, and still be crucially wrong (Rom. 10:
"Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Since they did not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness." (Rom.10:1-3)
It seems very likely that so many of the same people who were praising Jesus on Palm Sunday, are calling for his crucifixion by [Good] Friday.
3. You really can’t trust the crowd/consensus/what’s popular, even among the professing people of God, for knowing what is the real thing when it comes to religion/Christianity.
[cp. vv.28-32 – Parable of the Two Sons. There will be many surprises when it comes to ‘who’s in and who’s out’ of God’s kingdom]
4. First there must be cleansing from sin and what is offensive to God, before the blessings of his salvation can be received from the Lord.
5. The Lord Jesus is the Savior-King who will bring God’s saving reign to this fallen world, with final blessing and glory for all who have repented and believed in Him.
1 comment:
"In 2 Corinthians 10:5, Paul talks about 'pretensions that set themselves up against the knowledge of God.' . . .a pretense is a plausible lie, with enough truth to be believable. The lies that capture us as Christians usually seem to fit well within the borders of our Christianity. Perhaps postmodernism and sexual immorality are not the greatest threats to the church of Christ in our day. Perhaps we are in more danger from the subtle lies that flow from subtle shifts in how we understand the gospel. We have not forsaken the faith, but we may have redefined it in ways that are fundamentally different from the gospel laid out in Scripture.
"This redefinition of the faith does not happen all at once. It may not even surface in the public theological discussions of the church. Rather, the redefinition is a process of subtle steps at the practical level of the church's fellowship, life, and ministry. Hope in Christ gets replaced with Christian activity, emotional experiences, Christian fellowship, or something else, without anyone consciously redefining or forsaking the faith.
"All of the isms we have considered (formalism, legalism, mysticism, activism, Biblicism, "Psychology-ism," and "Social-ism") are attractive because they each emphasize one important aspect of the gospel. . . .
"The danger occurs when we reduce the gospel to any one of these elements" (pp. 10, 11).
from "How People Change" by Timothy S. Lane and Paul David Tripp
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