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  • Stoel van Moses/Moses' seat
  • This little light of mine
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Moses' seat Matt. 23:2

That disciple whom Jesus loved 

24/2/2017

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Please take a moment to consider the time and the effort God had spent over these many years to come and make Himself known in your own life. Ponder the countless times He came back after each rejection you gave to His call. The continual, patient knocking and waiting at the door to your heart. This is the great underlying theme of the understanding of God’s love for him, that the Apostle John had as he wrote down his record of the Gospel of Christ. He knew himself to be ‘a wicked, lost, hell-bound sinner’ saved by the unfathomable grace of God through the Son of God. To such an extent was his comprehension of this that he durst not bring any attention to himself, but simply out of a great appreciation and thanks wrote of himself as ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’. One would like to think that had yourself been there with the Lord for that last supper, you too would be that disciple that wanted to be so close to his God as to be the one even lying on the Lord’s breast.

The primary theme you get throughout this beautiful Gospel is one where the Father loves the Son (John 3:35; 5:20; 10:17; 15:9; 17:23-26) truly and fully; the Son loves the Father truly and fully (John 14:31); the Father loves us His children, through and because of His only begotten Son (John 14:21,23); the Father loves the world (John 3:16); the Son loves us His friends so much that He laid down His life for us (John 11:3,5,36; 13:1,23,34; 15:13-15). The secondary theme is one where we need to stop loving the world and ourselves (John 3:19, 5:42, 12:43) and fix our love on the Father through His Son and by His Spirit of Truth (John 8:42; 14:17; 15:26; 16:13; 2 Thessalonians 2:13, 1 John 4:6; 5:6-8), this then directly puts us in the position where we are now abiding in the Son, and by inheritance of His position we find ourselves abiding in the Father (John 14:10-23; 15:4-7,10). Abiding in Him is the key. First going to Him each day prayerfully, searching His will through His Word, then going out into the world to live my life. Starting out with the world takes my eyes off Him and my heart away from Him, thus I find myself quickly abiding elsewhere and not in Him (John 12:46). As I abide in Him, the very same love that started out with the Father now forms part of my being and it’s evident result is two-fold: I have a great love for the fellow Christians and I have a great love for the lost and a concern for their souls (John 4:34-38; 13:34,35). Often times we try to fabricate a reason and desire to share the Gospel with others but since it comes from our own selves the desire does not last long. Our zeal impresses many people, but it misses the mark sooner or later because like Paul, the Pharisee, we actually end up doing it carnally all the while telling ourselves we are doing God a great service. But when we abide in Him and He in us, He is the one stirring up our souls with an earnest yearning to see lost souls saved. The Lord spoke stern and hard to the Jews while here on earth, in words they could not understand. Yet even when he spoke to the learned Jew, Nicodemus, and that prominent Gentile, Pilate, He did not make it easy for them by giving the answers they were expecting and wanted to hear, rather He spake in sort of riddles so that they, whom we from the Scriptures can perceive already knew the truthful answers to their questions, had to come to those conclusions and decisions themselves. When He speaks unto plain people who are open to His doctrine He makes it straightforward and to the point, when addressing those who might have an agenda His spiritual talk veils it so that they have to dig for His meaning and they then find it hard because of their carnality. We find however in the end Pilate trying to set Jesus of Nazareth free from the Jews, as one whom he fearfully had to consider as the true King of the Jews (John 18:33-39; 19:19-22) and even as the very Son of God (John 19:7-9). (Note how the Bible only ever ascribes the title, King of the Jews, to the Lord Jesus and not to others such as Herod.) We find also Nicodemus in the end burying the body of the Lord along with the disciples (John 19:38-42). His message did get through to them, yet only God truly knows whether new birth came upon them or not.

When things spiraled out of control, Thomas, who I think is a lot like most of us, lost faith for a while. Peter thought maybe he should correct this confusing situation of hopelessness in his own strength by finding a way of providing meat to eat now that the Lord and His miracles seems to be further away than yesterday. But what does the Lord do? He tells Thomas: “Be not faithless, but believing.” (John 20:27) The fervent Simon He reminds of the purpose whereunto he is called: You’re not being a strong stone [Peter/Cephas] like I want you at the moment; what are you doing fishing? Can I not provide you in a few minutes with more fish than you and these other disciples can eat? You are supposed to be feeding My little lambs and taking care of My sheep. (John 21) Forget about the world, your own problems and your own solutions, other people’s concerns. “Follow thou Me.” (John 21:19,22)
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Our love needs to be set on God the Father through His Son, Jesus Christ, by His Holy Spirit. Our love needs to be set on the sheep of the Good Shepherd. Our love needs to be to the Jews, God’s chosen People. Our love needs to be set on the Gentiles too. If we abide thus in the Father, we find sharing God’s Word and its glorious message come much more naturally and effective. Make sure that you are not fishing for fish, but fishing for men, but first of all anchor yourself in the Lord Jesus Christ and abide in Him, lest all of your efforts be in vain. Be a disciple that realise the true love the Lord Jesus Christ has for you, and work in that same love to take the Gospel to Jew first and also to the Gentile. (Romans 1:16; 2:10)

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The danger of sitting in Moses' seat.

1/2/2017

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It is written of Moses that he was God’s servant, and that he became known as the man of God. Also does Samuel tell us that he was ‘advanced’ by God to a position where he could execute God’s authoritative acts against Pharaoh and before his fellow men. And thus it is that most people from every corner of the earth, today speak with some reverence of this man, whether they claim to believe the Divine Laws given by him or not. God gave him a specific business to fulfil; and that was to establish a recorded way to the Absolute Truth before men and have them believe and follow that way. It was in God’s righteous commandments conveyed by Moses, that the Jews, first of all peoples, were able to see man’s need for complete purity - which is humanly unattainable - to be reconciled to God. It was through his record of the early Messianic prophecies that they were first able to believe like Jeremiah that “The LORD our Righteousness” will Himself work the sacrificial way to purchase redemption for man’s sin. They ended up taking his words so seriously that we are still able today to determine the very words Moses wrote down, sentence for sentence, word for word, letter for letter. None other human writing has been preserved like this. For about three thousand and five hundred years now, preachers and teachers of the Word of God have styled themselves in some way to the likes of Moses, that when they speak, the LORD would speak through them as he did through Moses. Whether they be called Scribes, Pharisees, Rabbi’s, Pastors, Bishops, Elders, Preachers and so forth, the aim is, to speak the truth and have the hearers believe it.


The Incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ the Lord, recognised that any preacher of God’s written Word do indeed carry some of the authority of Moses, and He declared it in a most interesting way. He said in Matthew 23 verse 2 they “sit in Moses’ seat”. It can still today be found to be amazingly true, in as much as once you are presented to a congregation as a teacher of God’s Word, they immediately assume that you carry a substantial and qualified knowledge of whatever the topic is you are discoursing on. The moment you throw out a Hebrew or Greek word along with a lexicon definition, they revere you as scholar and dare not question you because themselves know far less, (or at least so they assume). This situation of what I’ll call Rabbinical Reverence (because it sounds nice) has a very good side to it, and also a tremendously dangerous side, because we not only offer these hearers something as truth, we also cause them to believe it, whether it indeed be true or not.


Is the lack of a desire for soul-winning in churches not related to decades of pastors telling us that the Bible can be shown to contain the Word of God, but cannot fully be the infallible Word of God? That perhaps God used evolution, that He in His great love don’t really mind if we live in sin, that we shouldn’t be too much of a Bible Basher, that there are culturally no more taboo’s except for preaching about Hell. That a loving God won’t cast an idolator eternally into the Lake of Fire. That Jesus is a way to God, but cannot be the only way. So, we see that because of a love for sin and an unwillingness to repent from it, pastors have steered us away from the Truth, and we allowed them.


The result of Rabbinical Reverence however can cause a wonderful spiritual growth in the church as they listen to their pastor who really studied it throughly and whose aim is to make much of the Bible before his flock. Alas! how much more often do we rather have to suffer a preacher, whom with the yearning of preeminence, makes a careless statement of a supposed translational mistake in our Bible “if the original language is to be ‘correctly’ understood”. All this happens in a fleeting moment and without any disclosure of what his sources for this revelation are, his method of deducing this, nor giving the shocked lambs of the Good Shepherd a fair chance to verify his argument. Nor does he offer them the solution of which Bible is supposed to be the correct one. The poor lost lamb stops listening to the message right there and for the rest of the sermon that flaw in his “Infallible Word of God” bothers him. He loses another little bit of faith in this Bible in his hands. The question of why the churches are empty is surely answered by the lost ones saying, “If the Christians can’t figure the Bible out, how are we supposed to do it?” One thing it does produce and which seems to be the aim in most cases is that the preacher looks very learned in front of the people. We perceive that a pastoral lack of meekness, of which Moses and the Lord Jesus was such tremendous examples, have brought the Church in large on the way of Diotrephes, as is written in 3 John 1 verse 9.


The Lord Jesus Christ addressed this in showing that these teachers do not only cause a spiritual hindrance to themselves but to the hearers too. In Matthew 23 He points out, them distorting the truth and exalting themselves while doing so. We need to ask ourselves: “Why do I utter this statement and what do I aim to achieve by it?” If the answer is to issue the truth in humility so that the hearers might be edified in their faith in God, then we do well.


Now to be a scribe and a Pharisee is not the problem in itself, but what we do with the truth when it confronts us, is. Nicodemus and Paul are good examples. We see it in our own lives that when we are humble before God it is a time in which we get the biggest desire to win souls for God. When we exalt ourselves, we lose that care for the souls of others. A recent interaction with a Jewish neighbour showed to me how misled these children of Jacob can become by starting off with traditional Judaism and ending up in all sorts of eastern mysticism. Only the pure written Word of God offered in meekness can open such a one’s eyes. Is it not written in John 8 verse 32 that we shall know the truth and the truth will make us free? In this dispensation of the Church we have but a short time to still work the works of Him that sent us, before the time comes once again for Israel to raise the standard of Christ’s host over the battlefield in the Great Tribulation. Let us work to stablish people’s faith in the Word of God, not demolish it.
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    Moses' seat

    We are very much like the Pharisees mentioned in Matthew 23, where because of our position of teachers/preachers we are able to speak from the seat of Moses, so that men believe our teaching to be from God. Thus we need to take heed that unlike the Pharisees we do not estrange people from God but rather bring them closer unto the Lord Jesus Christ.

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