Mark 14:17-21 ESV
“And when it was evening, he came with the twelve. And as they were reclining at table and eating, Jesus said, ‘Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.’ They began to be sorrowful and to say to him one after another, ‘Is it I?’ He said to them, ‘It is one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread into the dish with me. For the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.’”
What does it mean if someone betrays you? I looked the word
up in several dictionaries and in a thesaurus and this is what they rendered: “to
break one’s promise,” “to be disloyal to,” “to be unfaithful to,” “to break
faith with,” “to inform on,” “to give information to an enemy about someone you
know,” and “to treacherously reveal secrets or information about someone who
trusted you with that information,” etc.
I see this as a trusted relationship where one person in the
relationship turns on and turns against and breaks faith with the other person
and deliberately reveals private conversations which had occurred just between
the two of them, and with the full intention of doing the other person harm.
And it can be that the full intention of the relationship, on the side of the
betrayer, was for the full purpose to eventually betray that person.
So there is a lot of deception that goes on in these relationships,
which can involve the betrayer disguising who he really is from the very beginning
of the relationship so that the relationship never was, in truth, what the
other person (the one being betrayed) had believed it to be from the onset. So
this is like one person (the betrayer) pretending to be your friend (or love)
and then you finding out further on down the road that none of it was ever
real.
I believe that is one of the worst betrayals of all when you
learn that the relationship you thought you had with someone was never real,
even from the start, but that the whole thing was a mirage, a fake, a phony, an
act, and a deception. For that person was always just using you to get what he
wanted. But all the time in which he was pretending to be your friend and your
confidant, he was betraying you behind your back.
Now Jesus was God in the flesh and so he knew that Judas was
going to betray him. He knew all things so he most likely knew when he chose
Judas to be one of his disciples that this was his betrayer. I have not ever researched
this subject, to the best of my recall, but I assume Jesus knew that Judas was
going to betray him even before he chose him, but that he knew this was God’s
plan that he had to be betrayed to the death.
But for most of us who are human beings and who don’t know
all those kinds of things, it can come to us as quite a shock if we thought
someone was our best friend or our confidant or the love of our lives only to
have that person betray us, and even worse if we find out that person had
betrayed us even before we became close friends and companions and that he/she
never was who we believed him/her to be. That can totally undo some people.
But if we face the reality of the world that we live in
presently, we have to come to the understanding that this is happening big time
in our present age and it is only going to get much worse. For this is what the
Scriptures told us would take place in the last days:
“For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people” (1 Timothy 3:2-5 ESV).
Already we have to know that we are all being spied on
through our smartphones and internet connections and TVs. All you have to do is
to have a conversation with someone and then get on the internet and see how
many times when you do a search it immediately knows what you want after you
put in one or two letters, or else what you talked about starts showing up in
ads. Or it doesn’t have to be a conversation, but it can be something you did a
search on or that you previously purchased with a credit card.
And then we must also face the reality of what Jesus said
when he told his disciples, his followers, that if they hated and persecuted
and mistreated him that they will treat us the same who are following him with
our lives. And so, although we should not live in fear, and we shouldn’t become
hermits who withdraw from relationships with all people, we must face the
reality that not everyone we know, and even may befriend, is who he or she says
they are. So even our closest friends may be those who eventually betray us.
And this is why our trust has to be in the Lord and not in
humans, and this is one of the reasons why we have to believe the Scriptures
and the words of Jesus, so that when we come up against these things that we
were warned about that we don’t let them crush us and take us out, and so that
they do not injure our faith and our walks with the Lord, and so that we don’t
end up getting angry with God and rejecting him for not rescuing us.
By
G. M. Eldridge
“He
will wipe away every tear from their eyes…” Revelation 21:4
In the moment He appears
And the light from heaven shines,
I’ll forget ev’ry fear,
Ev’ry pain I’ll leave behind.
Then I’ll see Him as He is
And I’ll know Him as I’m known.
Ev’ry tear wiped away when I go home.
Ever present is the tho’t
That a moment waits for me
When unworthy as I am,
His glory I will see.
I will empty all my praise
Before my Father’s throne.
Ev’ry tear wiped away when I go home.
If the trial I endure,
And your presence I can’t find,
Be near me, Lord, I pray,
Bring back unto my mind
That your promises are firm
And I’m never on my own.
Ev’ry tear wiped away when I go home.
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