AUGUST 13 THE JESUS QUESTIONS
JQ#24
“Is the power and authority of baptism
from heaven or from men?””
(Matthew 21:25)
LIVING FOR JESUS Daily Prayer
JESUS, my Lord and my God, all my Praise and Glory is raised to You!
You Lord are beyond any description and Your Greatness is more
than can be compared! O Lord, words alone cannot express Your Glory,
Lord it takes the Pure Holy Spirit to fully Praise You. We are not yet
what You have purposed us to become and I certainly have much work
to be done in my life to achieve Your Purpose for my poor wretched
soul which is still growing in Your Spirit each day. I suspect that it
will be a wretched soul until my wretched body decays into the
wretched earth, but Lord Jesus, grant it Lord that I will die each
day to my wretched self that Your Love, Peace, Joy, and Righteousness
will increase in my life that is now wholly surrendered unto You.
AMEN
THE JESUS QUESTIONS
Jesus addressed the “indignant” accusations of the chief priests
and scribes (that were in the temple of God in Jerusalem watching
Jesus do “wonderful things” which could only be accomplished
by the Messiah) by rebuking them with the very scripture they
themselves were supposed to be teaching. Instead of teaching
“God’s Commands” to the multitudes the scribes and chief priests
were endeavoring to make political and economic gain for themselves
in God’s temple in God’s Holy City, Jerusalem! (Matthew 21:12-16)
After Jesus rebuked the “indignant” chief priests and scribes that
had seen Jesus executing the duties of the “Office of the Messiah”
right before their very eyes in the temple of God in Jerusalem, Jesus
“left them and went out of the city to Bethany,
and He lodged there.”
(Matthew 21:17)
The chief priests and scribes in the temple in Jerusalem had been
executing the duties of their offices with rulings that had been handed
down to them from the Sanhedrin Supreme Court located just
outside the Eastern Gate of Jerusalem in Bethphage on the
Mount of Olives for hundreds of years. The curse that slowly but
surely overcomes all men seeking “power and authority” overtakes
the power seeker when he tries to assume the “power and authority of God”
and even the strongest of men succumb to the “power curse”!
Each man that “succumbs” then contributes to the decay of the
“command of God” as they inject personal opinion and personal desire
into what they would like to see as a “command” and thereby the
“command of God” is defiled bit by bit by the defiled selfish desires
of the doctrines of men——— and eventually what surfaces as “legal”
as declared by the Sanhedrin becomes the “doctrines of men” taught to
the multitudes by the chief priests and scribes but bears only a slight
resemblance to a “command of God”. The transition from the
“command of God” to the “doctrine of men” is a slow and subtle “cancer”
infecting all “power usurpers” and is most often shrouded in “entitlements”
and after successive (or more accurately in today’s terms, “progressive”)
rulings of each “Supreme Court” are handed down, and there eventually
comes that time when in order to make room for more “personal”
interpretation in the interest of “self-promotion” and “vote-buying
entitlements”, the “command of God” must in some cases be eliminated
altogether! If you think this has not happened in America, look at
the United States Supreme Court decisions and plot them on a
time line against the moral decay milestones our society has experienced
from the time that we were the greatest country on earth to our present
3rd world status! Notice particularly on the moral decay timeline
the correlation between moral decay and the removal of God from
our government and prayer from our schools! What one must
conclude (when the Truth of God slaps you in the face) is that Jesus
knew something and that indeed each society and every generation
must address His Question:
“Is the power and authority of baptism
from heaven
[God the Father]
or from men?”
(Matthew 21:32 JQ#24)
because you cannot answer that Question without realizing that
each society is ruled by a “government” and the important question in
any society is not “Who the government rules?” but the really critical
question is “Who rules the government?”
For Example: At one time when our society
was a majority Christian nation and the people took
active part in the American government,
there was a Godly meaning to
“a government of the people, by the people and for the people”
but now that America is described as
“whatever we once were,
we’re no longer just a Christian nation…”
(former President Barak Obama Email to CBN News 2007)
and Christian prayer has been removed from our public schools,
the sacrifice of the unborn
{abortion}
for “commercial endeavors”
{death for profit}
is endorsed by the United States Supreme Court and is the
“law of the land”!
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{Note: This original August 13th devotional was written
in 2016 BEFORE the Presidential election and in 2022 Roe v. Wade
was overturned by the Supreme Court as a result of efforts by new judges
appointed by the winner of the 2016 election but there is still much work to
be done in bringing America back to our Christian roots!}
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Least our society forgets, “We the People” must stand
in Holy Judgement before the eyes of the True and
Only Supreme Judge, regardless of what “earthly laws”
are passed by an “earthly Supreme Court”!!! It is truly important
that we as a society, we as a family, we as the Church, and
we as individuals give an honest answer to this Question
and admit to ourselves what we truly believe about
“baptism”, “power and authority”, “heaven”,
and how they all relate to
“Jesus”, “Faith”,
the “doctrines of men”
and the “commands of God”!
