Good Friday morning! Look at that! It's already 0809, and I'm only just beginning this! The temp is up to 47° though; what a cool morning we had today. That sunrise keeps getting later; soon I'll have to change from writing after I get back to writing the devotional before I leave for my morning walk. Come to think of it that evening sun thing keeps getting earlier too. It got dark on me last night as I was driving home from the countryside.
Jesus replied, "You are a respected Jewish teacher, and yet you don't understand these things?" John 3:10
The first part of Jesus' response sounds a lot like what Nicodemus started the conversation with. Jesus pointed out that Nicodemus didn't understand the Messiah even with all of his Old Testament knowledge. My Bible study notes tell us that knowledge is not salvation. We have heard this before as a warning against intellectual agreement with Jesus without believing in Him. Many find the Bible to be full of wisdom and spiritual insight, and it is, but they fail to believe in Jesus. Belief is more than simply agreeing that there was a man named Jesus who did a few miracles and taught radical ideas. Belief is when you know in your heart that Jesus dying on the cross paid the price for our sin and that his rising again allows us to have eternal life. Belief makes possible our acceptance of the verses that follow this one. Without belief, the great wisdom passed on to us by Jesus in John 11-21 might pass right on by our so very intellectual minds. Nicodemus is not the only person to come to Jesus full of scriptural knowledge and yet short on understanding. I have been in the same place, and I am sure that some of you could say the same. Jesus asked him, "...and yet you don't understand these things?"
Guilty! Many of us have been there. Someone asked us if we believed in Jesus, and we answered something like, "Yes, Jesus lived in the 1st Century and started the Christian religion." At that same time, if someone had asked us if good people would go to heaven, we would have agreed with that and perhaps even told of a few of our own good works that would gain us "positive credit" or some such thing in heaven. For all our knowledge, we were in that state of ignorance where we ignored such honest verses as, "For all have sinned and fallen short of God's glorious standard." (Romans), and "The heart is desperately wicked..." (Jeremiah), and others that point out that no one can save themselves with good works and that all of those good works are like filthy rags. Jesus might reply to one of us now, "You were raised in the church and went to Sunday School, Catechism, etc., and yet you don't understand these things?" Exactly! So many of our friends and neighbors are even as we were, lots of knowledge ABOUT Jesus, but no understanding OF Him. This is not easy to explain. Of course, we learned a couple of days ago that we can't explain the rebirth of the Spirit!
The good news about knowing the Bible intellectually from youth is that when a person comes to believe, reading the Bible again is like discovering a whole chest of buried treasure in a place you had already dug a hole and found a few coins.
Have a treasure-filled weekend in Christ and enjoy the Labor Day weekend!
Bucky
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