Exercise 1: Rest and Review

Today is a day of rest and review. If you have been keeping up with this devotion daily, give yourself a pat on the back. Great job!!!! Today, you can stop after reading this sentence.

Seriously, you don't have to read the rest.

You can if you want to.

But if you have fell behind on reading this devotion daily, I want to give you a review today over everything we have covered so that you can stop trying to catch up and start going back to reading this daily. So here is my summary of Matthew 1-4.11.

This section of scripture is all about the Presentation of the King. Matthew's plan is to present to us what kind of King, or Messiah, Jesus is going to be. And because he is both the son of David and Abraham, he is going to reign forever and bless the nations.

This king was saved by the obedience of a follower of God, Joseph. Joseph could have had his fiancee Mary stoned which was have killed baby Jesus, but he obeyed God and didn't. So we see that the way to  be the model disciple and follow God is to obey what God has commanded us.

Jesus as the new king was persecuted by Herod, the fake king of the Jews and was worshipped by the kings of other nations. How should we respond to King Jesus?

And Matthew presents Jesus' life as a reenactment of the nation of Israel by showing that Jesus was brought up out of Egypt, just as the Israelites were brought up out of the slavery in Egypt. This is the kind of King Jesus is going to be. He is going to free everyone from their own Egypt, from their slavery to sin, and he will do what the nation of Israel failed to do, he is going to bless the nations.

After thirty years had passed, then appears John the Baptist in this heated political climate of who is the true people of God and how are you the true people of God. Each political group, the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and Zealots all thought that they were the forerunners for the Messiah. They thought that they were doing what was right to be the people of God and cause the Messiah to come and rescue them. Yet John claims he is the forerunner, and he is calling the whole nation of Israel to repent of their legalism and of their idolatry and their sins of not blessing the nations and to be baptized.

Next thing you know, Jesus, all grown up, comes to be baptized by John. He does this to repent on behalf of his people. This was very common to the Jews of the 1st century. What was true of the leader of the people, was true of the people, like David killing Goliath. David represented the Israelites and Goliath represented the Philistines. When David conquered Goliath, that meant that the Israelites conquered the Philistines. So Jesus was repenting and being baptized on behalf of his people. And at his Baptism, the heavens were torn open, the spirit descended on him like a dove, and a voice spoke from heaven saying, "This is my son, whom I love with him I am well pleased." These were three signs that the Jews were looking for to point to who the Messiah was. And all the signs were pointing to Jesus.

Next Matthew didn't just want to show that Jesus was the Messiah, but he wanted to show what kind of Messiah he was going to be. So immediately after his baptism, Jesus went into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. He had a choice, he could choose the "easy" way and receive immediate satisfaction and not go to the cross, or he could choose the "hard" way which required a ton of sacrifice and requires the cross. The easy way is Satan's way and the hard way is God's. Satan's way provided a shortcut for him to be king of the Jews, yet it did not promise that Jesus would reign for eternity, and the nations would not be blessed because Jesus would not have died on the cross for our sins.

This is what we are tempted with daily. And God's way does require sacrifice daily, it is very hard, but it promises eternal satisfaction, and that the nations will be blessed.

So that is what we have covered so far. Make sure to try to keep up with this daily. As we have seen in the last story of the temptations of Jesus, the way that he was able to resist the temptation is because he had hidden God's word in his heart. He had eaten the book instead of food and at every temptation, he quoted scripture to resist the temptation of the devil. He even said this, "Man does not live on bread alone but on the very word that comes from the mouth of God."

Eat your Bible.