A Traitor Turns to Christ (Matthew) - Protestant Caucus/Devotional

The twelve apostles included "Matthew the tax-gatherer" (Matt. 10:3). God can use you despite your sinful past.

I remember reading a notice in a local newspaper announcing the opening of a new evangelical church in our community. It gave the date and time of the first services, then added, "our special guest star will be . . ." and named a popular Christian celebrity. In its attempt to appeal to unbelievers or simply draw a large crowd, the church today commonly uses that kind of approach.

Jesus, however, used a different approach. None of His disciples were famous at all. In fact, rather than drawing a favorable crowd, some of them might have repelled or even incited anger and hatred among His Jewish audience. Matthew was such a man because he was a despised tax-gatherer—one of many Jewish men employed by Rome to collect taxes from his own people. As such he was regarded as a traitor by his own countrymen.

The Roman tax system allowed tax collectors to keep anything they collected in excess of what was owed to Rome. That encouraged bribes, extortion, and other abuses.

To compound the issue, Matthew was among those who had the prerogative of taxing almost anything they wanted to tax—roads, bridges, harbors, axles, donkeys, packages, letters, imports, exports, merchandise, and so on. Such men could accumulate enormous wealth for themselves. You might remember another tax-gatherer named Zaccheus, who is described in Luke 19:2 as a wealthy man. His salvation was evidenced by his offer to repay fourfold to those he had defrauded (v. 8).

Some people think God can't use them because they're not famous or because of their past sins. But God has used Matthew, Zaccheus, and millions of others like them. Concentrate on your present purity and let God bless your ministry as He sees fit.

Thank God that he has made you a new person in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). Minister in light of that reality!

Amen!

I know God is no respecter of persons and that all it takes is one sin to condemn us, but having examples like those of people we consider so much worse than us, encourages anyone that their sins can be forgiven, too.

NOW I know that we are not to compare ourselves with each other, as we all answer to God for ourselves, but it’s comforting that God accommodates us in order to convince us that we can come to Him.

Matthew/Levi wrote the record of Jesus' appearance and ministry to a predominantly Jewish audience, probably first issued in Aramaic or Hebrew in AD 45; then retold in the Koine Greek by Levi about five years later.

This fact is an important correlation, ignored by most current commentators, of what a "translation" ought to look like, when performed by the same eye-witness person writing it as being Spirit-inspired Scripture.

Levi's best useful talent was an education (probably as a member of the priestly appointed tribe of John Baptist and his father Zacharias) (Aaronic priesthood) of an advanced level to hold public office for the Roman overlords.

His ability to communicate in writing and to keep the books of an accountant, these qualifications enabled him to author a coherent historical narrative of Jesus' genealogy and birth, from a face-to-face recounting of Jesus' personal narrative by Himself to Levi and the others in this closest group of His student-Apostles.

God's choice and use of an advanced liberal education in theology and the arts of communication are not to be ignored when one reviews the preparation of people like Moses and Daniel and Isaiah and Levi and Saul/Paul of Tarsus and Luke, in setting down the thought-provoking rational precisely transmitted of God's Existence and dealings with the human race and the revelation of its programmed history.

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