great commission

Over the last week or so, we have been having an interesting conversation around here concerning the topic of why sometime during His Earthly ministry Jesus told some people to NOT tell anyone about His activities, and at other time He told people to proclaim it every where. The question of the hour is….Why?

Comments have been great, and really the question has been answered. I just wanted to sort of wrap things up in a tidy little package for reader perusal and thoughts. I am not really adding a thing to the many great ideas which have been presented.

Perhaps the most overriding point that was made in so many comments was something like this: “God knows what He is doing.” Simple huh? Simple but yet so very true. Like many things we don’t always see clearly exactly why or for what reason things may have occurred, but we can rest assured that God was working His plan in the best way possible to accomplish His plan. As I have heard said around the blog world, “Compared to God we are all morons.” In summation, theorizing is nice, and great study, but ultimately we may just not get it one hundred percent right this side of Heaven.

Let’s move on, then and look at some specifics and examples.

A lot of the injunctions to people not to say what had happened to them had to do with Jesus being able to stay on message.

Jesus’ message then is the same as it is now. Repentance, faith, and salvation. It was not about the healings and the miracles. Those were not the message; those were the proof that His message was real.

We can see in many of these accounts that people came from all over, not always to hear the actual message Jesus had, but simply for what He could do for them. Mark 1:45, Mark 6:54-56

Jesus seemed quite certain of this motivation in the words He spoke to the man seeking to see his servant healed. John 4:48

Jesus was constantly being followed and stalked by the pharisees, which may be why he instructed the leper He healed to go straight to the priests to be pronounced ceremonially clean by them, so that they could not dispute the nature and truth of what Jesus had actually done. Mark 1:41-42

What about the audience for His message? This I just toss out as food for thought and readers can draw their own conclusions. God knows who will respond to His message and who will not. It seems in the cases where Jesus told someone to spread the word, or allowed them to spread the word, there were differences in both the places and the audiences involved. Both the demon possessed in Gadara, Mark 5, and the woman at the well in Samaria, in John 4 seem to fit this thought. Just think about it and chime in if you feel like it!

That’s really all I want to say here, as it’s all been said well thus far in our talks. If you want to catch up on those, just pick the last few Monday’s or Wednesday’s and read up.

Next, we are moving on to Jesus’ clear instructions to us to get out there and  spread the Word, and the unfortunate fact that, for the most part, we don’t.

Until next time!