JANUARY 05 THE JESUS QUESTIONS Introduction-05: Lessons, Lifestyle, and Parables of Jesus: JQ#1-JQ#33 (Matthew 1:1 thru 3:17)

 JANUARY  05  THE JESUS QUESTIONS   Introduction-05: Lessons, Lifestyle, and Parables of Jesus: JQ#1-JQ#33  (Matthew 1:1 thru 3:17)

LIVING FOR JESUS   Daily Prayer   

JESUS, ever will I praise Your Name, for You are ever-Faithful and Your Glory will endure forever! Lord I praise You for Loving me and dying for me while I was lost in my sin — Your LIGHT has led me into a new day where I pray that my new song will be to “work until Jesus comes!” Lord, You have directed my paths to this point and I pray that my eyes and heart will be kept firmly fixed on You and the kingdom’s work and that I will be a good “witness” to Your Love. Lord Jesus, again and yet anew do I yield my life to serving You and to telling Your “Good News” to those You send my way.      AMEN

THE JESUS QUESTIONS

Jesus told His disciples and even the Pharisees and Sadducees that the Holy Spirit would be a “witness” to who He really was — and Matthew, being an eyewitness who was led and Divinely inspired by the Spirit of God, wrote for a permanent record the events that point clearly to Jesus being the Divine Son of God sent to earth by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with a specific Purpose. Matthew was primarily writing for the Jews because before the birth of Jesus, it was the Jewish Holy Scriptures (known today as the “Tanakh” or modern “Hebrew Bible”) that the Jewish nation Israel had been reading for thousands of years and were waiting expectantly for the Messiah, God’s Anointed! The prophets from Jewish history were led by the Holy Spirit to write down the “signs” that would point to the Messiah, just like the New Testament writers Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were led by the Holy Spirit to write down eyewitness accounts of how Jesus fulfilled those prophecies of old. You cannot read the Holy Scriptures (the Old Testament and New Testament) without seeing God, His Plan, and the fulfillment of all the Spirit led prophecies that God uses (present tense!) to “lead His people to the Promised Land”. Matthew wrote in his Gospel of Jesus Christ that which was contained in the Jewish Holy Scriptures (the Old Testament of our modern Bible) that pointed to Jesus being the fulfillment of prophecy recorded in the Tanakh. What Matthew wrote about Jesus is true for all that will “seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness” and is fully documented in the New Testament. God has a Plan and a Purpose for each individual person that breathes the breath of life imparted to us by God as was demonstrated by God breathing life into Adam whom God personally created with His own hands as His last act of His Divine Creation. “This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown. For the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground. And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. The LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed…Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and to keep it.” (Genesis 2:4-15) God “Spoke” everything into existence except man and woman — it was “Personal” with God in His creation of mankind, for only with mankind did God use His own Hands to form man and then God “breathed” (with His Own Breath) life into the man — it is imperative for us to note that only after mankind receives the “breath of life from God” that we become a “living being”!  After forming man, God then used His own Hands to form woman out of the rib of the man that He had just breathed His “Breath of Life” into, Eve was the second operation accomplished by God Himself demonstrating His “Hands On” commitment to mankind — and to “seal the deal” and to show that God had all His Creation planned out before “the beginning”,  we read of God’s “intent” for mankind to be special: “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness’…So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:26-27) So let us approach this “Introduction” of God’s Plan for the world as documented in the Gospel of Matthew in this way: The Old Testament is a written record of God revealing His Plan and “how” He intends to “execute” His Plan. The New Testament is a written record of eyewitness accounts of the fulfillment of prophecies in the Person of Jesus Christ as well as general prophecies regarding the “completion” of God’s Plan for all Mankind. Again, the fact that Matthew writes primarily for the Jews is because it is through the Jews and the nation Israel that God has intended to use the nation Israel from BEFORE the beginning of mankind to fulfill God’s Plan for the salvation of the world! The main point is that BEFORE man came into existence God “had a Plan” — and the obvious Truth of God in that statement is that God made His Plan before mankind was created therefore mankind must accept that God is in control and is the Master Plan Maker — and life for mankind must fit God’s Planned Purpose — for God alone is the giver of life, the Creator — and everything made by  God is His Creation — get that part straight and the rest of your life will be a piece of cake! St. Matthew was part of God’s Plan to reveal the Messiah and His Purpose for the world — “For God did not send [the Messiah] His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” (John 3:17) Good Plan don’t you think??? — No wonder it’s called “THE GOOD NEWS”!!!