by Brian Thornton from the Voice of the Sheep Blog
Comments in Red by Pastor Bill Farrow
It’s amazing what one finds when one stops parroting others and reads the Bible for one’s self. [Of course, this is a common failing in our society. We’d rather do anything but work for ourselves. Pascal said that men: "Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things."[1] Sadly, men's minds must be occupied with something! And so, they occupy it with trivialities. Things that do not matter in the long run. That. in turn crowds out the things that do matter. The greatest of these matters are the things of God with the result that men do not know the very God is their Creator. A friend [of Brother Thornton] tells the story of how, when he and his wife began to discover the real truths of God’s character and who He really is, his wife proclaimed, “That was not in my Bible before!” I remember having that same epiphany myself some years back. But, I must sadly confess that the more people I talk to, the more I realize that the professing church is in a very sad state of affairs. [How true it is, and how shocking! people are startlingly illiterate of the things of God and embarrassingly unembarrassed about the ignorance! It is bad enough that the society at large has little knowledge of the things of God, but the professing Church has virtually just as little.] It is one rooted in biblical illiteracy, and it results in people professing the name of Christ who do not really know the Jesus of Scripture. The god they worship is, sadly, a figment of their imagination. He exists only as an apparition in their minds. He has been conjured up out of thin air. In the words of Andy from Shawshank Redemption, “He’s a phantom, an apparition, second cousin to Harvey the rabbit…”. [I fear many would dismiss this as radical and judgmental. They would view it as harsh and condemning and find any number of ways to cast Brian's opinion aside as irrelevant and immaterial. But He is correct in His assertion. The God that many, even in most Bible-preaching churches today, is not the God of the Bible; and the Jesus Whom most people profess to follow is not the Christ of the Scripture.] What I want to do in this post and maybe a couple of others is to display the real Jesus, the Jesus of Scripture. [There is nothing more that any preacher CAN or OUGHT to do!] Quite honestly, I want to quash the Jesus that is prevalent in so many minds and rules in so many churches. This will not be a comprehensive or exhaustive look at Christ, for the whole world would not be able to contain the books that would be required to do such an examination. My plan is simply to reveal some things that I am convinced people who profess faith in Jesus don’t even know or realize is true about Him. [How could they, as they rarely, if ever look at the only thing that could reveal those to them, that being the Word of God, the Bible?] Who knows, even you may come away from this exclaiming, “That Jesus was not in my Bible before!” After Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by the devil, He begins His earthly ministry by returning to Galilee and the surrounding country, teaching in the synagogues and being “glorified by all”. When He comes to Nazareth, though, something different happens. As in all the surrounding areas, He goes to the synagogue and begins reading from the Scriptures and speaking to the people. One would think that He probably preached a message of hope and encouragement, or perhaps one of forgiveness and acceptance. No. Not here. In Nazareth, Jesus opens His mouth and preaches on the doctrine of election in two sentences. And what He says infuriates the people so much that they try to throw Him off a cliff! [It is scenes like that we OUGHT to be using to model our ministries after and using to shape our outreach strategies on; but no, we are shaping them using the world’s techniques. Somehow we have confused the need to be like Christ with the need to achieve results and accomplish a goal. Christ has not called us to get the result, but to be faithful to the calling.] Here is what He said that made the people so mad: But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian. When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. – Luke 4:25-29 Why did the people get so angry at this? All He was doing was recounting a couple of Old Testament stories about Elijah and Elisha and how they each had healed someone. What’s the big deal? The big deal was that the person healed in each instance was not Jewish. They were outsiders. They were the scum of the earth in the eyes of Israel. here is what John Gill says about what Jesus was preaching that day regarding starving widows and lepers: to none of the poor widows in the land of Israel was the prophet sent, to supply them with food, and relieve them in their famishing circumstances, as might most reasonably have been expected…Our Lord meant to observe, by this instance…that God bestows his favors on persons in a sovereign way, and sometimes upon the most unlikely; as in a time of famine, he overlooked the poor widows in Israel, his peculiar people, and sent his prophet to a Gentile woman in one of the cities of Sidon In other words, God chose one person over and above some others. He demonstrated His favor over one person at the expense of some others. [Of course, that doctrine always lights the fires in the hearts of fleshly people. Those who are thinking more of men than of the glory of God are upset when men are not at the center of the plan, even when it is clear that God is the One that is at the center of that plan.] Consider also Gill’s comments on Jesus reference to the lepers in Elisha’s day: and none of them was cleansed; from their leprosy, by any direction of the prophet, but Naaman, who was not an Israelite, but a Syrian: he was cleansed and cured of his leprosy, being ordered by Elisha to dip himself seven times in Jordan, which he did, and was healed Why did Jesus do this? Why did He not preach a message of love and acceptance and tolerance for all people? Why was He not positive in His message? What kind of evangelist was this, anyway? Surely He knew that what He was about to say was going to incite the people. [An interesting question…the only conclusion is that He deliberately provoked them – a fascinating concept given the popular conceptions of God] Yet truth is truth, and God is God. Jesus asserted the sovereignty of God in His sermon that day. He showed that God is the one who does the choosing – He alone determines on whom his favor will rest – and the people hated Him for it. Consider these final thoughts from Gill: these two instances of Elijah and Elisha, the one supplying the wants of a Sidonian woman, and the other healing a Syrian leper, when no notice were taken by them of poor widows and lepers in Israel:for by these instances they perceived, that they were compared to the Israelites in the times of wicked Ahab and Jezebel; and that no miracles were to be wrought among them, or benefits conferred on them, though they were his townsmen; yea, that the Gentiles were preferred unto them: and indeed the calling of the Gentiles was here plainly intimated, which was always ungrateful and provoking to the Jews; and it was suggested, that the favors of God, and grace of the Messiah, are dispensed in a sovereign and discriminating way, than which nothing is more offensive to carnal minds. Is that offensive to you? Do you rail against the idea that God chooses one over the other? Bow your will to Scripture, for the Word of God is saturated with that truth from Genesis to Revelation. Don’t shoot the messenger. It’s there. Go read it for yourself. This is the Jesus most Christians don’t know. [This is, indeed a Christ that most people do not know, a deliberately confrontive, even offensive Christ. One Who stands before people and calls them to think forcefully and even offensively (though surely not vulgarly). It is the Christ that appears time and again during the Gospels. It is the Christ that appeared to both the people and to the leaders. It is the Christ that was eventually crucified!] ___________________________________
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