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Tag: Slaughter of the innocents

Father forgive them for they know not what they do

The first saying of Jesus as He hung on the Cross, living up to His Name, which was to save His people from their sins was “FATHER, FORGIVE THEM FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO” (Luke 23:34). These are wonderful, wonderful words of Love.

Let’s break this saying down into its individual components as we try to understand the depth of what Jesus meant.

FATHER
The address was a direct and personal address to God as His Father. This was establishing the fact that He was the Son of God in whom God was well pleased. Jesus said He and the Father are one, in other words. If the Father was God, so was He. This is GOD asking GOD to forgive.

FORGIVE THEM
Whom was Jesus asking to forgive?

  • The men and women who shouted “Crucify Him”.
  • The religious leaders and their followers.
  • The indifferent Pilate, the inebriated Herod
  • In essence, transcending all barriers of time, all sinners, including You and Me

FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO
I wish that Jesus had spelled out what the people did not know, for which they had to be forgiven.

WHAT was it that the people DID NOT KNOW?
The people did not know 

  1. THE WILL OF GOD
    In the Garden of Gethsemane we see Jesus, in agony praying and submitting to the will of God as he prayed “Not my Will, but thy (God’s) Will be done”. What was this will of God? Isaiah 53:10 states “Yet, It was the Lord’s will to crush Him (Jesus) and cause Him (Jesus) to suffer”. It was the Lord’s will that Jesus had to suffer and die and bring salvation to all. Luke 23:24, records that PILATE handed over Jesus to the People’s Will, but the people and Pilate were mere ACTORS in the grand design of God’s Will. There were merely doing without knowing what God wanted them to be doing.
  2. THE TRUTH (VERITAS) about the CROSS
    that it was indeed a fight of the ages, a battle that began in Genesis in the garden and now was being finished (Tetelastai) on the Cross, and its outcome.

    In John 8:32 we read “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free”
    WHAT WAS THIS TRUTH?

    To know THE Truth, we need to go back to the very beginning; to Genesis. To the time of  
    ADAM and EVE
    in the garden. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God (The fall of Man), God prophesied against Satan who had caused Adam and Eve to disobey Him.
    The prophesy was “I will put enmity between the seed of the woman (Jesus) and the serpent (Satan), you shall strike His heel and He will crush it’s head.”
    So, Satan knew that his doom was foretold and he could do nothing but wait.
    CAIN is BORN.

    Satan acts, thinking he is the one who has come to deliver (the seed of the woman). Satan gets Cain to kill Abel.
    God tells Cain “Sin is crouching at your door, you must master it” (Genesis 4:7)
    Adam and Eve proliferate, the earth gets filled. Satan entices people to sin until the time of
    NOAH’s FLOOD
    . God in his wrath almost destroys ALL of mankind by a flood.
    From Noah and his Son’s and their wives, the world is repopulated. Satan goes back into slumber until one day when
    MOSES IS BORN.
    Could this be the seed of the woman, the deliverer?  Satan entices Pharoah and in the birth of Moses, “BABY BOYS are KILLED”.
    Though Moses is miraculously saved, He could not be the one, since he himself sinned. Satan must be now at a little ease. Then came the
    TIME OF THE KINGS.
    Satan continues to live in the LUXURY of DECEIT for a while until one
    BETHLEHEM
    NIGHT when  he is AWAKENED from his sleep, as he hears
    FOOTSTEPS of the wise men (MAGI)
    in Herod’s court. He hurries to Herod’s palace and find’s the magi asking, “Where is he who is born the king of the Jews?”
    Satan hears the heavenly angelic choir sing and the shepherds talk about this baby boy called Jesus as the one who has come to Save and deliver God’s people.
    Knowing that the deliverer was born, he gets back to his ways of trying to kill the seed of the woman; and pulls out from his bag of evil tricks, the same plan as in the time of Moses (the mistaken deliverer) which he puts into action. There is another Slaughter of the INNOCENTS;
    ANOTHER BLOODSHED OF BABIES.
    But by divine intervention, Joseph and Mary escape with Jesus to Nazareth and hence the fulfillment of the prophecy, “He shall be called a Nazarene” (Matthew 2:23)
    30 years pass by and we see Jesus walking along the banks of a river and his harbinger John the Baptist, proclaiming
    BEHOLD THE AGNUS DEI
    , the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world and at the
    BAPTISM OF JESUS,
    Satan hears along with everyone else, the very voice of God, saying
    “BEHOLD”, THIS IS MY SON, WITH WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED.”
    Immediately after that proclamation, Satan knew who his target was and so goes to tempt Jesus when Jesus is physically weak (yet spiritually fortified) after 40 DAYS AND 40 NIGHTS of fasting.
    Jesus engages in the the fight of the ages as he fences with Satan using the Word of God to defend himself and deal offensive blows. In all of this Jesus did not sin nor knew no sin, and He could not be touched. This only vexed Satan even more and so he devises an evil plan and entices the religious leaders, poisoning their hearts.“The religious leaders plotted to kill Jesus” (John 11:45-53)
    Fearing this was insufficient, he wants to make sure that his plan to kill the seed of the woman wont fail again. So he poison’s a friend and disciple of Jesus, Judas Iscariot who betrays Jesus. After the
    BETRAYAL OF A FRIEND
    , Jesus is handed over to be crucified. THE FIGHT IS ON FULL SWING . JESUS IS CRUCIFIED and Satan thinks – “hah, now it is finished. I have won”.

    What Satan failed to have realized is that in all his calculations, he had not considered a critical fact into his equation. He was suddenly GUILTY OF MURDER.
    God had said. “The soul that sins shall die (Ezekiel 18) and that “ the wages of sin is death” (Romans 3:23)
    But Jesus had never sinned.  Satan had no right whatsoever to kill Jesus.

    THIS TICKED GOD BEYOND BELIEF and his emotions and actions is recorded in Habakkuk 3: 11-14
    Vs. 11: Sun and the Moon stood still in the heavens, At the glint of your flying arrows, At the lightning of your flashing spear. When Jesus died, darkness came over the land.
    Vs 12: In wrath, You strode the earth, And in your anger, you threshed the nations.
    Vs. 13: You went out to deliver your people (Jesus’ birth) To save your anointed One (Jesus on the Cross) You crushed the leader of the land of wickedness (Satan crushed) You stripped him from head to toe.
    Vs. 14: With his own weapon, you pierced his head. The cross, looks like an inverted sword, wielded into a head (skull). Interesting, isn’t it that the hill on which Jesus was crucified was shaped as a head, a skull and hence called Golgotha.
    From verse 13 of this scripture, we see that God was INFURIATED, STRIDING THE EARTH in his WRATH and ANGER and as in the time of Noah, He could have destroyed it all, if Jesus had not stepped in and INTERCEDED, saying “Father, Forgive them for they know not what they do.”

    This is the truth that Satan does not want you to know, that at the end of the faded storm, as the mist cleared, there was one hero, one champion, one victor standing , and that was the Lord Jesus Christ.

NOW YOU KNOW THE TRUTH – There is no excuse “Captivity has been set, Salvation bought for you and me. Cause Satan is defeated and Jesus is the Champion” and this TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU AND ME FREE.

“FATHER, FORGIVE US FOR WE DID NOT KNOW”, but now we do.

A call for warriors, not just workers

It is the eight anniversary of the infamous and heinous attacks by kamikaze terrorist groups commonly referred to as the September 11 attacks or the 911 attacks. Although superficially it may seem as if the attacks were orchestrated against the American public, when America had to surrender its innocence of the nation’s invincibility, on deeper thought, it was an attack against all those whom the terrorists deemed as ‘infidels’; those who did not belong to their faith. It came with the slaughter of many innocents and eight years later, we remember the fallen.

But in our remembrance, let us NOT just remember those fallen on the day of the 911 attacks, but let us also remember those who are under the bondage on THE fallen (Satan and his angels).

In the wake of the 911 attacks, the then President of the United States, George W. Bush Jr., said the following words in his Radio address to the nation – “This will be a different kind of conflict against a different kind of enemy. This is a conflict without battlefields or beachheads, a conflict with opponents who believe they are invisible”. While President Bush eluded this reference to the physicality of the war at that time, it is nonetheless accurate of a war that began centuries ago, when God cursed the fallen one (Satan) in the garden of Eden who had tricked God’s priceless of creation to fall from their relationship with God (Genesis 3:15).

We are in a conflict (at WAR) in spiritual realms with an enemy that is invisible to the human natural eye. But this INVISIBLE enemy is NOT INVINCIBLE as God has equipped us with an armor (Ephesians 6:10-18) and endowed us with weapons of warfare(2 Corinthians 10:4).

We are all called to work for God and sadly many of us stop at being just workers for God. We are not to be mere workers but warriors as well, engaged full time in spiritual battle, snatching those under the clutches of the fallen one so that they no longer are fallen. We are asked to beat our plowshares (workman’s items) into swords (warrior item) and our pruninghooks (fisherman’s item) into spears (warrior item) and let those who are weak proclaim that they are strong (Joel 3:10). Those who were commissioned to work and rebuild the Temple of God under the leadership of Nehemiah, held in one hand the materials for the building and in the other hand a weapon (Nehemiah 4:17). We are called not to be just workers but warriors as well.

Equipping ourselves with the armor of God, let us affirm to engage in spiritual battle this day, and when we win this day, the 11th of September will no longer be known as an American memorial day, but as the day all followers of Christ Jesus declared in one voice: “We will not go quietly into the night (darkness)! We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on (abundantly)! We’re going to survive (death has no power over us)! Today we celebrate our Independence Day (by no longer staying fallen or under the bondage of the fallen one)!”

Points to ponder:
Are we engaged for spiritual warfare? Are we equipped with the Armor of God? Let not just work, but fight as well.

Joel 3:10 (KJV)
10
Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong.

2 Corinthians 10:4 (KJV)
4 (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)

For your viewing pleasure, our 3 year old son telling us the Armor of God. Note how he ends it with, “the word of God, the Bible” 🙂

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