Seeing God's Plans

I had some thoughts this morning about the inability (or stubbornness) of the Jewish leaders to recognize Jesus as the Messiah.  Why couldn’t they believe in Him; they knew a Messiah was promised the Jewish nation, for this was the core of their Temple preaching.  They were telling the Jewish people to have faith and, as all the books of the Old Testament emphasized, they must do the will of God, as spoken by the prophets or written in the law, until the Messiah came.

A common reason given for the Jewish leaders’ rejection of Jesus is that they feared loss of their honored positions (a matter of self-love), or that they feared the power of the Romans (if Jesus was the warrior/king many expected the Messiah to be).  But what if it wasn’t either of those things they feared; what if it was their own death?  What if they feared not the suffering of their status, or even the suffering of the Jewish nation, but their own death suffering?  There were Jewish sects which believed the Messiah’s coming would signal the end of the world, and many did not believe in an afterlife.  What if they feared their own death, a very personal matter, which is rarely spoken of aloud?

Looking at the events of the world today, do we fear a Second Coming for the same reasons?  I admit that the thought is sometimes in the back of my mind.  It’s kind of like in the movies when the good guy is disarming the bomb and you see the seconds ticking down:  5, 4, 3, 2, …  You know positively that the good guy will be saved, but your instinct says there’s going to be an explosion.  You think you know the ending, but you’ve never seen this movie before.  In matters of God, this is where trust is needed.  Our prayers shouldn’t be about the outcome we want or fear (God knows these things), rather it should be like the personal prayer of Mary to Jesus at Cana: “They have no wine.”  And then trust.

Despite all the history of the Jewish nation, all the times God promised His love and care for “His people”, it seems that at its core the Jewish leaders did not believe that the coming of the Messiah was a good thing --- they could only see bad results and the end of things as they were.  But God saw things better than they could.  I am confident He still does, and pray that “Jesus I trust in You” often.

 

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Meanwhile, I like my life, and am open to what God’s plans might be for me --- even if I sometimes don’t understand why.  He shows me many things, like my gutter clogs and overflow a while back, which will be ended with my new gutters being installed tomorrow.  And like the gutter salesman who came over 2 weeks ago, and then began talking of how he and his wife were becoming Christians, after having been raised atheist.  Answering his questions for a couple of hours was another thing God willed me to do, and I don’t know the ending of that story either.