A few years back, an older pastor friend gifted me a large
portion of his personal library. It was a wonderful gift. I’ve already read
many of the books that he gave me. My personal favorite is Edersheim’s “Life
and Times of Jesus the Messiah”. I was unfamiliar with Edersheim. Now I love
reading his work. There are few
commentaries that read like Edersheim’s.
Case and point.
I’m preparing for this Sundays’ message on the Lord’s
Supper. Here is a brief section on Judas:
“Judas was drawn to Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, and he
believed in Him as such, possibly both earnestly and ardently; but he expected
that His would be the success, the result, and the triumphs of the Jewish
Messiah, and he also expected personally and fully to share in them. How
deep-rooted were such feelings even in the best, purest, and most unselfish of
Jesus’ disciples, we gather from the request of the mother of John and James
for her sons, and from Peter’s question: ‘What shall we have?’. It must have
been sorrow, the misery of moral loneliness, and humiliation, to Him Who was
Unselfishness Incarnate, Who lived to die and was full to empty Himself, to be
associated with such as even His most intimate disciples, who in this sense also
could not watch with Him even one hour, and in whom, at the end of His
ministry, such heaviness was mentally and morally the outcrop, if not the
outcome. And in Judas all this must have been an hundredfold more than in them
who were in heart true to Christ” ~p 473
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