daily java

Daily Java:

Then he added, “Every teacher of religious law who becomes a disciple in the Kingdom of Heaven is like a homeowner who brings from his storeroom new gems of truth as well as old.” (Matthew 13:52)

Experience counts, no matter what the experience may be. And sometimes even though the experience may be far from the kingdom, it will still count in your life and in your teaching of the Kingdom of God and its grace.

Those Jesus was talking to were teachers of the law. They were very very studied men, men of depth and wisdom. They had devoted their lives to the study of the Torah, the law, and were well-versed in it.

The only problem was that they were studying what was essentially a dead disccipline. Jesus had come to set up something new. The old was passing away and the new – the Kingdom of God – was coming in.

On top of all this, their study of the Torah included all of the traditions and regulations that accompanied it. By the time Jesus came along, they had the Torah for more than 1300 years. So it made sense that it had been magnified by interpretations and everything else imaginable. And a lot of these things carried the same weight as the Torah itself. To them, the traditions were important.

But Jesus said that the problem was they had weighed the Torah, with its message of love and forgiveness, down under all these man-made traditions. That made a lot of them mad.

But if they began to think about it, like some of the teachers did when listening to Jesus, they realized that there was something greater than just studying the law. They realized that it was only if the law became part of you and entered your heart that anything good could be accomplished.

Of course, the law was too big to be internalized. There was too much of it. And in their minds, the law and the traditions had become enmeshed to a point that they had trouble figuring out which was which.

Jesus came along with what he called the heart of the law, the point of it all: loving God and loving others (Matthew 22). That could easily be internalized. And if you took that core into your heart, all the rest would be taken care of. It would follow automatically.

If you loved God, you would not worship idols, or do anything else to hurt God. If  you took that core into yourself, you would not do anything to hurt others. You wouldn’t lie, or steal or covet or anything that would damage your relationship with God or with you neighbor.

Not only that, but Jesus expanded the idea of your “neighbor” into that of the community of mankind, not just the guy next door. Who do I do good to? Everybody. Not just people on my block, or my neighborhood, or my town or state or country, but everybody. Even those people who dress funny in Africa.

And those teachers who were full of the knowledge and wisdom of the glory of God were able to take that logical next step of faith: accepting Jesus as the fulfillment of all that they had studied all their lives. When they did that, they were able to take all that knowledge and distill it into their lives and into their hearts. They were also able to help teach it to others in a way that was full and rich and ripe with maturity.

They were not wasted in all that knowledge; they were valuable. Sure, much of it was in the wrong direction, but with Jesus in their hearts and the grace of God in their lives, they were able to use it – all that knowledge – to his glory.

They brought the new gems of truth into their storehouses as well as the old. What a blessing all those teachers of the law who had found Jesus and made that logical next step were to the early church!

To have this man who had been so big in Judaism and the Hebrew law to come in and say, I have something new to tell you. And people heard him expound on all those things that were so relevant to their walk of faith in Jesus.

I had a lot of education in a denomination that in many ways was far from the grace of God, one that was very works-oriented. For a while that depressed me. What good was it?

Then I found the core. After I had taken that natural next step, went to that symbolic next level, it all fit in. All that education was good, it was all useful, because it had immersed me in the written word of God. And I am able to use that flawed education to teach people more perfectly the way of truth. After all, I learned of the Bible and God will always use that study and, if you allow him to do so, level it out to his glory.

It was the same with Apollos in Acts 18. He was well-versed in the law and in the prophets and was a dynamic speaker bringing many into Jesus. But he did not know of his grace or of the continual second chance we have in Jesus. Aquila and Priscilla taught him that new perspective and he was even better at teaching. He was even more dynamic and forceful. And the people who listened to him benefited greatly.

New gems as well as old. What a great and God-blessed combination.