Re:Verse passage – Matthew 18:5-14 (day five)
“it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned…. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame… It is better for you to enter life with one eye…”.
This passage contains some of the most shocking language and images that Jesus ever uses. Amputation. Drowning. Gouging. I like what Jon Bloom says about this passage, “Extreme danger calls for extreme measures of escape. Yes, the mutilation imagery is a metaphor, but it is not hyperbole. We know it is a metaphor because the literal loss of a hand or an eye doesn’t get to the root issue of sin. But radical and painful amputation of stumbling blocks out of our lives may be the only way to escape falling headlong into sin’s insidiously deceptive snare.”
So, how do we acquire this same perspective that Jesus has. What would help us feel and think this same way about sin and temptation? Start with an understanding and reverence for the holiness of God. (Fear of the Lord) seeing and sensing God for Who He really is. Bloom continues, “For the Christian, the fear of the Lord does not compete with our joy in the Lord.”
And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord” (Isaiah 11:3).
The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life, that one may turn away from the snares of death. (Proverbs 14:27)
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10)
