JANUARY 05 THE JESUS QUESTIONS Introduction-05: Lessons, Lifestyle, and Parables of Jesus: JQ#1-JQ#33

 

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”!!!