Pastor Barry's  "Chapter & Verse"  Day 62

March 3;      Matthew 12:13;       12/260(IV);        ‘Issue of the Heart’

Matthew 12:13 Then He said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." And he stretched it out, and it was restored as whole as the other.

Religion is cruel and the Pharisees were jealous of Jesus.  Put the two together and the religious leaders had no problem being desirous to kill Jesus.  Think of this, the Pharisees represented God to the people.  Just imagine how the common people must have felt when Jesus gladly healed the man with the withered hand and then the religious leaders were mad at Him to the point that verse 14 tells us that the Pharisees plotted to destroy the Lord.  God the Father wanted the people to have a day of rest from work.  That was the reason He told them to do no work on the Sabbath.  But there was the ‘spirit’ of the Sabbath as well, when Jesus wanted to do good for a man whose hand was withered.  When the Pharisees became angry at Jesus, and they always did, Jesus reminded them that if their sheep fell into a pit on the Sabbath, they surely will rescue the animal.  Jesus went on to say that a man was of much greater value than a sheep.  Jesus Christ had the love of God in His spirit, a sacrificial love.  How His heart must have been grieved by the cold and merciless religious leaders. I believe that they deeply resented His healing power that they did not have.  If those hard hearted ‘men of God’ had loved and accepted Jesus, they could have been born again and then baptized in the Holy Spirit.  That would have meant that the same healing power Jesus flowed in would have been theirs.  Jealousy can blind a person to the very thing that they desire and can have if they went about it properly.  A few Pharisees changed, most did not.