AP

John 16:2-3   They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God.  They will do such things because they have not known the Father or me.

Like many of the things Jesus spoke about to his disciples the night before he died, this declaration to them had its fulfilment in their lifetime, but also has continued to be relevant to the situation in which his followers had been finding themselves for the last 2,000 years.

In their lifetime they had to face ardent persecutors like the zealous Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, who, in God’s name, after the martyrdom of Stephen, “began to destroy the church.  Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison” (Acts 8:3).

In our time, many of our brothers and sisters in Christ in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia are being imprisoned, brutally treated and killed in God’s [ie Allah’s or Vishnu’s or Shiva’s, etc] name!  Saul, and modern persecutors, are extremely zealous in their persecution of Christians because they ‘think they are offering a service to [their wrong understanding of] God’.

As Jesus made clear, true life is not about being sincere, it’s about knowing the one true God, his Father, who can only be known through him.  He had said at the beginning of this conversation with his disciples: “I M the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).  All this is so fundamental to the validity of the Christian Gospel that we cannot escape its importance.  This, of course, puts us on an inescapable collision course with our present culture that makes ‘sincerity’ the essential thing, even if it means being sincerely wrong.

So persecution is what we can, and MUST, accept, and learn to live with (or die with), until Jesus Returns in power.  It comes as a ‘package deal’ with faithful preaching of the Gospel.  And the only ‘solution’ to it is praying and leading people to knowing Jesus, and, through him, to knowing the Father!  So let us be at it – praying, and taking every opportunity to share the Gospel!  Saul’s whole life and purpose was changed on his way to Damascus when he met the risen Christ, and, as a result, people were saying: “Isn’t he the man who raised havoc in Jerusalem among those who call on this name?  And hasn’t he come here to take them as prisoners to the chief priests?”; and Luke tells us: “Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah” (Acts 9:21-22).

And he became ‘Paul the apostle’ whom God used so powerfully for many years to reveal his puposes and to build his Church, and to set the future course of the Church through his Holy Spirit-inspired letters.

– Bruce Christian