Tehillah Generation Chapel
Daily Manna
Friday, June 10, 2016
Topic: The empty tomb 63
Reading: Matthew 27:57-66, 28:1-15
Scripture: He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee. (Luke 24:6)
Note: The Jews took offense to the preaching of the cross. They would want to hear none of that. It was only the accursed in society who were punished by death to hang on a tree or cross. Even then, anyone suffering such forbidden and humiliating death was considered not just a disgrace to himself and family, but it became a permanent dent on the person’s generation.
The wait for the Messiah had been long and frustrating. The expectations for a political Messiah were long overdue. They had expected such deliverer to arrive with enormous miraculous power to counter the monstrous political stranglehold that these Gentile superpower of a nation had shackled them with. All the prophets that God sent to the Jews in the past suffered similarly, ignominious death at the hands of these supposed religious people.
Now it had been four hundred odd years or ten generations since God went completely quiet on them as a nation. They hadn’t heard from God and that implied that there had been no luxury of a prophet to kill, who might have tried talking to them to mend their ways and turn back to God.
This period of prophetic hiatus witnessed unprecedented attempts from several messianic pretenders that raised insurrection against their political masters and suffered the ultimate consequences for their blind faith; cruel, humiliating death by crucifixion on a cross. The arrival of Jesus with the unusual ability to feed crowds of over 25,000 people miraculously at a go, halted events of nature as he spoke to the wind and the sea to calm down, walked on water, healed the sick and raised the dead as he willed; raised everyone’s hope to a crescendo of the arrival of a Messiah with the right credentials and clout to unseat the Roman oppressors. Jesus’ rather meek capitulation to death by crucifixion on the cross only confirmed their worst fears of another failed messianic pretender.
Food for thought: The ways of man are not the ways of God.
Declaration: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness. (1Cor.1:23)
©Author: Rev Fred Aboe
