The Friday after the First Sunday after the Epiphany of our Lord
Posted on January 17, 2025 by under
Scripture: St. John 10:31-38 (NKJV)
10:31 Then the Jews took up stones again to stone Him. 32 Jesus answered them, “Many good works I have shown you from My Father. For which of those works do you stone Me?”
33 The Jews answered Him, saying, “For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy, and because You, being a Man, make Yourself God.”
34 Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, “You are gods”’? 35 If He called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken), 36 do you say of Him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’? 37 If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me; 38 but if I do, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, that you may know and believe that the Father is in Me, and I in Him.”
Devotion
“For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy, and because You, being a Man, make Yourself God.”
The leaders of the Synagogue were close, but as the ones to whom the Word of God came, they should have known from Scripture that God was going to become man. Jesus wasn’t merely making Himself out to be God, He was truly God who became man. Had they believed Scripture, they would have believed in Jesus. Instead, they blaspheme God by denying the Christ.
This blasphemy continues to this very moment. There are countless scholars and theologians who will hold up Jesus as a great moral teacher while denying His divinity. The irony of holding to such a position was famously pointed out by C. S. Lewis. If Jesus is not truly God in the flesh, that would make Him a liar and hardly a great man; or else Jesus would be a lunatic, merely a man who lived a deluded life believing He was God. Again, that would hardly make Jesus a great man.
The real liars are the leaders of the synagogue who should have known better, had they truly believed Scripture. These liars also act as lunatics, seeking to kill Jesus: “Then the Jews took up stones again to stone Him.” The delusion of sin is to see God as the reason for the problems of this world, rather than seeing Christ as God’s solution for the real problem, which is sin.
Collect: O Lord, we beseech Thee mercifully to receive the prayers of Thy people who call upon Thee; and grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfill the same; through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever One God, world without end. Amen.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
