Jesus is Cool

Peter was gracious enough to both host and cook this week.  And I must say, his cooking has improved.  Great job on the mashed potatoes, Pete!  After stuffing ourselves with some good food, we crashed on the couches and slowly made our way into Matthew 14.

We started with a discussion on Matthew 12:32, which states that blaspheming against Jesus is forgivable but blaspheming against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven by God.  This is something rather difficult to grasp.  In context, Jesus is warning those accusing Him of casting out demons by the power of demons that they are calling the Holy Spirit a demon.  Conceptually, it sounds like taking a position against the Holy Spirit is so much more severe than taking a position against Jesus that it won't ever be forgiven.  I thought that perhaps this is due to the fact that the Spirit is our spiritual connection to God.  Other thoughts were that having a 'settled attitude' against the Holy Spirit is something that never changes in a person.  Altogether, this is a strange topic.

So Jesus does some cool things in Matthew 14 that we all really liked.  Upon learning of the death of John the Baptist, He attempts to find a place where he can be alone and pray.  However, a crowd finds Him and follows Him, so He heals many of them and then begins teaching them.  The crowd is so enthralled by Him that he teaches them into the evening and the disciples want to send them away to eat.  But Jesus provides.  Through a miracle of food multiplication, the entire multitude is fed and continues to listen to Him.  The following evening, Jesus finally dismisses the crowd so he can go up a mountain and pray by Himself.  So when you stop and think about it, Jesus healed, taught, and fed a huge (5,000+ men) crowd for more than a day all while he really wanted to be alone.  That's rather humbling for me.

We also went on a rabbit trail talking about ghosts and demons and whatnot.  I'll list a couple of comments that I thought really stood out.  First, we have confidence in Jesus that we are protected from demonic control or possession.  Second, we feel most attacked when we are furthering God's kingdom.

Finally, we had some challenging discussion on the nature of faith.  For example, what is it?  How do we grow it?  We don't have to earn or work for salvation, so do we have to work for faith?  This is all good stuff and I would be interested to hear more ideas on faith when we meet next week.

Speaking of next week, we'll be reading Matthew 21 and discussing Matthew 16 - 21 next Tuesday.  As always, the details will be posted in the calendar as soon as I know them.

God Bless!