The child of God is much advantaged to come to grips with the life lived by his Savior. I would suggest that the insights to be listed here are essential to a proper understanding of that most wonderful of all lives, and thus that the believer is well advised to consciously and deliberately include these realities in his conception of that life.
#6 – Because the Jewish nation was weary of her Roman overlord, and because Jesus claimed to be Messiah and demonstrated that He was able to do miracles, His countrymen again and again insisted that they were willing to have Him as their Messiah/Deliverer. But they wanted Him on their terms rather than His; they were willing to acknowledge that they needed someone to deliver them from Rome, but they denied that they needed anyone to deliver them from sin. Throughout His ministry, Jesus employed a remarkable strategy to unmask the superficial and hypocritical nature of this public adulation paid Him by the multitudes: when confronted by shallow and self-serving proffers of acceptance, He would speak hard words–words which demanded a choice, the morally right choice being indicative of obedience/belief, but also involving a serious price to be paid by the one making that choice. In thus driving His listeners to a difficult decision, Jesus often employed as a foil those Pharisees who had set themselves against Him, and this for two reasons. First, those Pharisees had established themselves as the purveyors of a doctrine of works righteousness (i.e. law-keeping); thus Jesus’ demand that men accept His claim to be the Messiah (most seminally, the God-given Deliverer from sin, Gen 3:16) necessarily entailed the demand that they reject the prevailing pharisaic doctrine. Second, to reject the counsel of the Pharisees could bring awful reprisal (“out of the synagogue,” Jn 9:22, 34-35); thus in making that demand Jesus was testing the genuineness of the very facile offer of the multitudes to accept Him as Messiah. Jesus uses this strategy in challenging the great multitudes following Him in Galilee when He preaches the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:20, cf. 7:13-15), in challenging those who after the feeding of the 5000 would “take Him by force and make Him king” (Jn 6:15, cf. :53-58), and in challenging the willingness of the city of Jerusalem to have Him as king as they had begged when He entered the city of Jerusalem in His triumphal entry (Mt 23:1-39).
(Insight #7 will be posted soon!)
