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But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness Gal 5:22 |
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Dear
Friend,
If you do not already have a habit of gathering daily manna the first thing in the morning (we can look at the example given to us in Exodus 16 and find the pattern for collecting daily manna), make it a habit. Establish your life and your schedule to allow you the necessary time to do your daily collection first thing every morning to give you the strength to make it through the day. And remember that today’s manna will not be sufficient for tomorrow; tomorrow’s manna must be collected tomorrow morning. Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Today's Passage : Subject:Peter Confesses Jesus as the Christ Bible Verse:Matthew 16:13-17 (ESV) "Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.”" Message:
Christ once again withdraws from the crowds to be alone with his disciples, knowing that, after the visit from the Pharisees and Sadducees of Jerusalem, the die had been cast that would put his arrest and execution into motion. Caesarea Philippi was a town at the extreme north edge of Galilee; the map shows it to be in “Gaulanitis” but it had, in fact, been annexed into the Herodian kingdom (although its tetrarch at this time was yet another, different, Herod — “Herod Philip II”). The ruins today lie in the Golan Heights; so they had withdrawn up into the mountains.
Saint Peter, by Giotto
Peter (by Giotto)
Jesus asks them who the “Son of Man” is. This expression seems to give a lot of people a lot more trouble than it warrants. It was an idiom in both Hebrew and Aramaic, used as a synonym for “man” when the speaker meant to emphasize a person's humanity. When Jesus uses it, He is fixing firmly in mind that He is a human being and shares with us, fully, what we might call “the human condition”.
Christians sometimes become so enthusiastic about the divinity of Christ, that they lose part of the message. Jesus corrects this by calling himself the Son of Man, again and again, to fix in our minds that He was fully human. In fact, He uses it so often, and so pointedly, that it is treated (in the context of Christianity) as a proper noun, a name of Christ. And actually, the same applies to the term “Son of God”, for the expression is used in the Old Testament in a variety of circumstances — most broadly, perhaps, in Exodus 4:22-23, “Thus says Yahweh, Israel is my first-born son, and I say to you, 'Let my son go that he may serve me'” — and, when Gabriel tells Mary that her son will be the Son of God, there is no reason for her to think He would necessarily be divine.
It was only in retrospect that the term became a proper noun, a name of Christ, and even so we can differentiate it from the common usage only by context. For example, in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ himself says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” (Matthew 5:9) It is the translators, not Matthew, who capitalize the “S”: the original Greek for today's passage reads “son of man” and “son of God”.
But Peter clearly intends the term to indicate the divinity of Jesus. He is saying that Jesus is, in fact, God's only begotten Son; for yet again, God the Father is our Father as well as Christ's; but He is Christ's Father in a second sense specific to Christ, as well as in the sense that He is the Father of all men, both us and Christ. We say that God the Father created all people, but begat Jesus, to differentiate.
Thus Christ, in the last sentence, speaks of “my Father”, which He does whenever He wants to emphasize the special relationship between himself and God the Father, the relationship of God to God.
Meditation : Prayer : Now unto him that is able to keep me from falling, and to present me faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen. |
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