I think the disciples were somewhat naïve when they first began
following Jesus. However Jesus didn’t downplay what they could expect when he
told them about the persecution, being delivered to synagogues and prisons and even
being brought before kings and governors all on account of Jesus’ name. I can
so relate. When I ran for public office I naively thought I would be serving my
community and trying to set good policy…it never crossed my mind that my real
job was to be a witness to others. “But
make up your mind not to worry beforehand how you will defend yourselves. For I will give you words and wisdom that none of your adversaries
will be able to resist or contradict.” (Luke 21:14-15 NIV)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----It is easy to question the effectiveness of God’s witness protection program. For nearly two-hundred-fifty years the early church saw tens of thousands of Christians subjected to the most excruciating forms of death. Evidently their adversaries resisted and contradicted these words and wisdom. Muslims, Hindus, and atheist states today seem to be resisting and contradicting pretty well, too. I’ve often wondered what thoughts about these words and this wisdom might go through the mind of Christians sitting on their cell floors bloodied by one torture session awaiting the next which might end their lives. I’ve heard that more Christians suffered death by persecution during the twentieth century than during all previous history.
-----Man’s nature is fundamentally dichotomous in two ways. Both pitch his life into risk of peril. His undeniable dichotomy rises from his nature of being a social individual. A simple mental experiment indicates the extreme degree of mutuality about the individual. We’ll drive a person deep into the jungle, far way from anyone else, kick him out buck-naked, and leave. He is now in a situation where his life and welfare depends upon his individual nature entirely, with one exception. Even whatever knowledge about survival he may possess and his very processes of thinking and emoting are constructed from previous social existence. They are not removable as were his clothing which he did not weave from thread he did not spin from cotton he did not grow. With that exception, he is now a total individual. If we could find him in a year, do we suppose he would be alive? If we found him alive, what might his psychology have become? The individual’s existence is deeply embedded in mutuality.
-----I’m supposing that after a year we’d be packing this poor fellow’s bones home. He will have experienced life’s one purely individual event - death standing him alone before his Creator. At this point of individuality his aspects of mutuality will be examined. And with his passing to there, the presently more deniable dichotomy of human nature becomes undeniable.
-----The seen and the unseen. What has been personally experienced and what has only been heard told. The five senses being securely attached to time and space severely limit an individual’s experience. In fact, they nearly invalidate his own meager experience in the face of everything that exists. No person can experience all the planets and stars and galaxies to all edges of the universe throughout all times, let alone anything of God’s spiritual universe. Indeed, earth is a very tiny speck of dust within only this physical place. So the mutuality of hearing witnesses is greatly important to harmonizing this dichotomy. From Christ and all the prophets and others who experienced God to the Spirit, the water, and the blood, to the people around you walking in His light to the martyr before his adversary speaking words given by God, the great unseen is seeable. Seeing the whole of God’s created spiritual and physical existences is wherein the irrefutability of those words are understandable. In your adversary’s moment of pure individuality before God he will stand unable to resist or contradict what you said. And he won’t want to resist if he has also found mutuality with Jesus Christ before then.
-----Every question has its answer.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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