Nicodemus (2)

John 3:1-15. 16-21.

Pharisee’s: The Pharisee were a small (roughly 6,000 in number), legalistic sect of Jews who were known for their rigid adherence to the ceremonial fine points of the law. Their name means “separated one.” They may draw their values from Ezra 7:10 “For Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the Lord, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel.” This does not sound like a bad thing, does it. Is God’s word good? Of course it is. Is following God’s word desirable? You know that is it. So why do Pharisee’s get a bad rap in the gospels?

Jesus’s encounters with the Pharisees were usually apprehensive and abrasive on both fronts.

Jesus would contradict the Pharisee’s philosophies, and the Pharisees would end up embarrassed. Now I don’t know about you, but usually I do not jive well with those who embarrass me, neither did the Pharisees. Because of the embarrassment and the challenge to their way of life, the Pharisees sought to kill Jesus on multiple occasions.

Pharisees "follow the guidance of that which their doctrine has selected and transmitted as good, attaching the chief importance to the observance of those commandments which it has seen fit to dictate to them" and they "passed on to the people certain regulations handed down by former generations and not recorded in the Laws of Moses" . Although the phrase "Oral Law" is not used, it appears Josephus understood that the Pharisees affirmed a body of traditional interpretations, applications, and expansions of the Old Testament law communicated orally.

There were many false Messiahs that came both before and after the one true Christ.

In his article titles “False Messiahs in Judaism”, Rabbi Moshe Daniel Levine had this to say about the false Messiah’s

“A detailed account of all false Jewish Messiah’s recorded in history could fill a book, and this precludes the mention of hundreds of claimants list to the dustbin of history. While the setting and scope of each of these stories widely differ, they are united by failure and false hope — the vast majority causing death and destruction, loss of property, or conversion.”

If you could be born again and then lose your salvation, you did not have eternal life. You had 5 year life, 10 year life, ect. But God has given us eternal life, and that which is settled for eternity can never be undone in time. No one who has been born again will ever be unborn. Once born again, always born again. It is a sovereign work of God, it is an irrevocable work of God in the soul. - Dr. Steven Lawson