Thought from today’s Bible reading from John 5.
Despite the evidence that was being presented to prove that Jesus was the promised Messiah, many of the Jews rejected Him. So Jesus, rather than accusing them Himself of rejecting the Christ, used those things which had been written by Moses.
“Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; the one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?” (John 5:45-47).
Moses was held in high regard by the Jews because he was the one who delivered the law from God. So Jesus used their regard for Moses to try to make them think. They rejected Jesus but claimed to accept Moses. But Jesus said, “If you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me.”
These Jews would certainly say that they believed Moses. Their problem was that they had missed the point of not only the writings of Moses, but the entire Old Testament. Paul tells us what the purpose of the Old Testament was:
“Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith” (Galatians 3:24).
The Law was given to point the way to Christ. The fact that these Jews were rejecting Christ proves that they had a fundamental flaw in their understanding of the Law. We need to be careful of what we believe. We must base our beliefs on Scripture and continually evaluate our beliefs as we learn more of God’s will to be sure that our thinking is in line with what the word of God teaches. We do not want to find ourselves to be condemned by the word of God as these Jews were of the Law of Moses.
Tomorrow’s reading: Matthew 12:1-21; Mark 3; Luke 6
[I’m using the Chronological reading plan on the Bible Gateway website if you’d like to follow along, too.]
Daily Notes & Observations contains all 365 articles from this series and is available in paperback from Gospel Armory.
