With both sadness and gladness, this is the last blog post I will be writing for Worldview Warriors. As I wrote last week, this has been an incredible journey, and it is a journey that is not over. My life has gotten very busy. I teach physics full-time, and I coach fencing part-time. Not only that, but I am also now teaching a Bible study group at my church, and that doesn’t include writing and other things. It simply is getting to be too much.
Since the summer, halfway through my series on Jesus, I started feeling no heart or energy for this blog. It is not that there was anything wrong with it, but I was starting to get to a point where it was more of a distraction than a joy or pleasure. When I wanted to get working on my Proverbs 3:5 book, the blog posts had deadlines and took priority. And I didn’t have much time during the week to write them, and so I would write en masse during my times off to get ahead. It has become more of a chore than a joy. And one thing I don’t want to do is give half-hearted, no-energy teachings through these blogs. Yes, I get some of the greatest sermons ever preached were when the pastor had no prep time or had no energy and was completely reliant on the Lord, and that has happened with my blogs at times, but I can’t live on that. And God doesn’t operate that way. So to honor the series I had chosen to do, I decided to finish it, which I did last month, and that left me these final posts to be a “closing” for me.
Three weeks ago, I wrote about Biblical manhood and why we must not follow the world’s 11th Commandment of “Thou shalt be nice” at the expense of the other ten. Then I wrote about whether you are going to live as a victim or as a victor. I could have written about the Gospel many times, or about our salvation, but I felt that I should conclude my blog posts with those two topics before I say my farewell to the blog. Worldview Warriors is firing up with a very similar vision but a totally new thrust and engine, and what better way to help launch it than with those two posts? All that said, while this is my final blog post, this is not the end of my ministry with Worldview Warriors.
I still have my Proverbs 3:5 book to finish. I have several other books in mind, and one of them is a Lord of the Rings-style epic that is going to be a multi-book series. A central theme behind it will be the effects of true and false teachings. So I am definitely going to continue my book writing. But I have other projects in mind too.
The problem I had with the blog was that it was basically weekly maintenance. I needed to keep producing content to be released a week at a time, and that is the main reason I need to stop with it. I don’t have the time to do it anymore. That said, I have other content I can give Worldview Warriors. So I am not leaving the ministry at all; I am merely changing my role. The problem with the blogs is that they come every week, but they come and are forgotten unless you know where to look for something. What I will be doing is providing more permanent resources.
A church brother made a comment a couple of months ago after Bible study that I should write an evangelism tract on the “Crown of Thorns” because that is a mini-topic I include in multiple presentations that always tends to blow people away. In a short sentence, when Adam sinned, God cursed the ground to produce thorns and thistles. Then, when Jesus died, He wore a crown of thorns and therefore literally wore the curse of sin to the cross. So now that I am done blogging with this one, I can focus on creating one-time material that can be easily referenced and used. Obviously, I can do more than one tract, but it got me thinking. That’s a whole category of things we can produce. I also plan to write articles for Worldview Warriors as well, but these would be longer and more sporadic. Jason DeZurik has also asked if I would be open to speaking and even going on speaking tours. While it is challenging with my teaching schedule, due to having two weeks off in October, December, and March, with June and July off, that is not unreasonable. So I am not going away. I am simply going in a new direction. What I will be producing through Worldview Warriors will be evangelical tracts, booklets, longer-than-blog articles, books, and hopefully getting back into speaking again.
Also, I am chewing on doing some more scientific research. In a year and a half, the 10th International Conference on Creationism will convene, and I have some ideas I am cooking for a research paper. I will need to have it done by the summer of next year if I want a full paper for the 2027 Conference, and if I do just an abstract (which is more likely what needs to be done), I have a bit more time. I am looking at studying the “Uranium to Lead” decay chain in particular because it’s one of the favorites to showcase millions of years, and I’ve seen enough pieces to know there is a severe reason to question it. But I have some ideas that might put these different pieces together in a way that hasn’t been done yet. So I am still chewing on that, but I can’t do that and do my Proverbs book while doing the blog and my Bible study. Something has to be put aside.
So this wraps up blogging for me with Worldview Warriors. I thank you who have read and followed me for the last 12 years. I can still be followed on my personal Facebook page, where I post a devotional from my daily Scripture readings, and I’ll still be sending stuff to Worldview Warriors. What is going to come out of this is better and richer products than what I had before, and as God leads, we’ll see what else He prompts me to do. Farewell, and keep watching Worldview Warriors for a lot more content and a lot more variety of stuff. The fire has been rekindled, things are taking a new shape, and the zeal is just getting going again. Stay tuned because God is not done with us yet.
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These next two posts are going to be my last ones for Worldview Warriors. It has been a great 12-year journey, and so I want to use this final post to reflect on these 12 years I have spent with Worldview Warriors and then share what direction I am heading. I am not leaving Worldview Warriors, but my role with the ministry is going to be changing. So how did this start?
When I joined Facebook back in 2011, it wasn’t very long before I started getting into Creation debates. While believing the Bible’s direct account and knowing Evolution was a bunch of hooey, I was exposed to the science aspects by Kent Hovind and then Charles Jackson, from whom I credit much inspiration. And it was during a number of these early conversations that I met Jason DeZurik online, and he took a liking to both what I said and also my attitude of “not caring” what people thought about it. I just plain said the truth to the best of my knowledge. After taking some time to chat and get to know each other through our casual posts and messages, Jason asked me about joining Worldview Warriors. This was in the same time window in which Charles Jackson invited a friend of mine to the Creation Truth Foundation for their Cadre training. I started blogging for Worldview Warriors in January 2014, and I began the four sets of four days over two years of training at the Creation Truth Foundation that same month. This would officially begin a significant transition period in my life.
However, that transition was already starting. The previous summer in 2013, I could sense I was entering a new phase in my life, and I chose to get baptized as an adult (I had already been baptized as a child) to signify this transition. I don’t remember exactly when, but sometime around this, I went through a thorough examination of myself because I had serious doubts if I was actually saved. I was born into a church, I was raised in the church and on the mission field, I knew the Gospel, I knew the Bible, I had made my first profession of faith when I was seven, and yet, I had to examine myself because when it all was boiled down, it wasn’t my faith. It was my parents’ faith. It was my church’s faith. It was the mission’s faith. It wasn’t really mine. In this searching, I came to the conclusion that I was saved and now the faith was actually mine. Was I saved as a child? Possibly, but I cannot say with certainty. I can say with certainty that when I came out of that searching, I was saved then. Had I died before this time, I do not know if I would have gone to heaven or hell. But I do know now.
That sparked this 12-year journey with Worldview Warriors. The Cadre training was completed in November 2015, and I was commissioned with the rest of my group to teach about Biblical worldviews, emphasizing the Creation aspect, and I have not backed down. I have truly become a “warrior” for the faith. I began teaching a Bible study at my previous church, and now I am at another church. It’s a place where I can be challenged and grow, a place where they can keep me in check, even without direct discipline; just the preaching has done that. In my zeal, I was approaching a dangerous position; God pulled me out of where I was before I would unintentionally damage the church I was in, and He reeled me back in. I still have much room to grow, but I love where I am because we have the same vision. It’s far from perfect, but we have a singular goal: to be like Christ and to walk in the paths God intended for us.
Twelve years have passed. I have blogged every single week (except one, when I was out of town and wasn’t aware I could pre-write them) for these twelve years, and the growth I have experienced and the knowledge I have gained to be able to teach others has been beyond what I can describe. I know it has been a blessing for many of you who have followed me because you have said so. When we look at the stats for our blog viewership, I still hold the record for the most-viewed post. Besides the blogs, I began to write several books, and I am currently working on my 6th. I have been busy teaching at my church, teaching physics at my school, still fencing competitively, but now also coaching at my school. And all this activity has been awesome.
What have I written on? The topics are almost endless. In my blogs, I have generally had three major themes: basic Christianity, spiritual warfare, and worldview issues, namely on origins. I have done many lengthy series, including on the Armor of God, spiritual warfare tactics, what sin is, what prayer is, what the Gospel is, multiple creation topics, and my longest one concluded this past month on the life of Jesus at 52 posts. Just go to the blog and click the tag for my name, and you will find my nearly 630 posts all in reverse order. And I kept a OneNote page full of topics and ideas I could cover. If I wrote on just that alone and did not do anything new, I would have material for literally 4-5 years without too much stretching. But many of them were not to be, and that is perfectly fine.
I have five books published with Worldview Warriors, one fiction and four nonfiction. My fiction novel, Call to Arms, is on its third publisher, and some of that is due to learning the system. My second book came out with the Worldview Warriors Publishing arm, and we “bookified” 60 of my blog posts at that time. I suspect a second book of this type is overdue. Then I wrote three others. One flowed out of a Bible study topic I had taught: Ten Reasons to Believe the Bible. Another flowed out of inspiration from a question Paul Washer asked: “When was the last time you heard a sermon on the attributes of God?” And I could not think of one, so I made one. That became The God of the Psalms. And my most recent, The Doctrines of Genesis, was to showcase how Genesis has the foundation of every central and core doctrine of the faith. I used the Apostles and Nicene Creeds as the framework and showcased where each tenet had some shadow or seed form or purpose laid out in Genesis. My sixth book doesn’t have a title yet, but the central theme is Proverbs 3:5 to “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” As of this post, the first round of editing, which is not complete, has around 25 chapters and 300 pages, all around this one verse.
All that said, as I have mentioned, my time with the blog with Worldview Warriors needs to come to an end. Next week will be my last post, and in that, I will share what I will be doing and the next step of God’s journey for me, as well as a commission for my faithful readers.
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One of the things you will hear from Worldview Warriors on a regular basis is the mindset of being a victim versus being a victor. I cannot tell you how many times I hear our president, Jason DeZurik, pressing this matter. Our culture wants nothing more than to make certain people perpetual victims and others perpetual damned.
A key component of Marxist ideology, particularly through the recent popular “Critical Race Theory,” is the marking of certain people based on a combination of race, economic position, AND religious/political affiliation as “oppressed” and “oppressors.” It is worth noting that the biggest factor here is more religious and political affiliation than actual race or economic status. In Critical Race Theory, the white evangelical is the oppressor because it was that demographic that ruled the slaves and who invaded from Europe. This completely ignores the Arab slave trades, the black slave trades, and the Chinese slave trades, let alone that whites were enslaved just as much. The reality is that no people group has ever escaped the issue of slavery; every people group has engaged in slavery, and every people group has been enslaved at some point in their history. But these teachings only emphasize white slave masters and black slaves, never acknowledging anything else, because that would end their influence. Because of the sins of the past, the white evangelical today, who has nothing to do with that, is still an oppressor because we are living on the oppression of years past. And the black person is a perpetual victim because they were held as slaves in early American history – again, ignoring actual historical context through the ages.
So, we have the blacks and the Hispanics who, because of their low status compared to the whites (according to these policies), need the help of the socialists with grants, scholarships, and hiring diversity exclusively on the basis of skin color and for “reparations,” because clearly, they cannot actually make it on their own. And the whites cannot do anything to make up for sins they never committed because even if they confessed to the ancient sins of the past, they are only doing it to protect their “white privilege,” so they are the abject evil that must be destroyed at all costs.
What is going on here? Among many other things, what I will focus on here is a group of people who, on their own self-declaration of being “experts,” are putting labels on people that define them as they want. And because they are “experts” (who made them an expert? They did.), they are to be trusted. So they label anyone they want, however they want, to fit their agenda. If they chose a certain group to be this, they label them as this and never let them escape from said label. It’s much like the caste system of India. Once you are born into it, there is no escape from it. The point I am trying to drive here is that this world system seeks to label you and never let you out of that label. And that labeling is to make you a perpetual victim and a perpetual slave to their ideals. They follow Georg Hegel, who said, “No man can surpass his own time, for the spirit of his time is also his own spirit.” And for anyone who lives in this world, that is absolutely true.
But as Christians, we are not ordinary people. We are not to be defined by this world; we are to be defined by God. And as Christians, we are more than conquerors. We are not to settle for defeat because some self-deciding people want to play God in our lives. We are to defeat them and overcome them. And I am not merely talking about politically. My very testimony was aptly described this way by a Facebook friend recently: “The ceiling the world put on me became my floor.”
When I was six years old, experts said I would never be able to run, barely walk, and to expect no improvement. I had to have physical therapists walk me through every action I knew at the time, including kicking a soccer ball. Yes, I had to have someone physically take my leg through the motion of kicking a ball because I could not figure out how to do it by watching. When I was 15, I learned two things without a physical therapist: hacky-sack and fencing. And 27 years later, while I don’t do the hacky sack thing anymore, I am still fencing and coaching. While never at an elite level, I have finally become respectable. When I was 18, I was told I would never drive, never go to college, and never live on my own – all things that I have done and am doing. When I was 12, I had no reading comprehension, and while I could recognize words, I had no idea what they were saying. I am a writer (obviously, by writing this post) and an author of five books, with number six soon coming, not to mention my 600+ blog posts. That’s just a sampling. Where every expert said I could not do it, I did it. And people who have gotten to know me have learned that once I set my mind to something, get out of my way because it is going to get done. How did I do all that? Not by my own strength and not by the wisdom of this world. But by and through the power of God.
The world is turning darker and darker. Politically, Trump is nearing the end of his ability to stave off the wicked agenda of the left. And the Church chose to rely on Trump to save them instead of repenting of their sins and turning to Christ. Because they put their hope in a false savior, they will get a false salvation. The most we ever got from Trump and could get from him is a short reprieve from the tightening of the noose. But will we lie down and moan and groan that we are losing the battle? Or are we going to rise up and take the battle where it truly is and hit the enemy in the teeth? Are we made of chocolate (as I wrote about last week), pathetic, weak, softies that melt at the slightest hint of oppression? Or are we the warriors God designed to fight this spiritual battle, to overcome the labels thrown at us, and to stop being victims with no escape and become victors? God saved us to be victors – to overcome sin and to overcome the world.
As Worldview Warriors is firing up again, we will seek to teach this next generation how to fight and how to overcome in Christ and to be someone this world can try to label but can never subdue or control. Don’t be a victim. Be a victor. Don’t let the world dictate your ceiling. While you may have the reality of right now, let that be your floor and let God take you where even wings and Red Bull could never take you.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
The year 2025 is coming to a close, and with that are going to be some significant changes with Worldview Warriors and what is being done. For those who have been following Jason’s “return” to the scene, it seems the ministry is firing back up, but my role in the ministry is going to change. For 12 years, I have been a blogger for the ministry, and at the end of this month, I will publish my final blog post for the time being. I will still be involved and will continue writing, and I will share more of that at the close of the month, but as I close out my weekly blog, I want to leave you all with two critical messages for our day and age.
Those who follow me know that I am not one who readily minces words. I just say it just as I see it and don’t have much of a filter in a very “over-sensitive” culture that has trained people to believe that their emotions are their literal identity and anything that would make them feel bad is an attack on their person. I cannot tell you how many times I will address the tactics and actions people are doing, and they think I am attacking them personally. It gets comical at times, but it’s also frustrating.
Making emotions our identity has led to some excessively weak people who completely crumble just at the word “no,” and it’s been supported by taking the Christian command of hospitality, love, and gentleness and twisting it on its head into what some have called “The 11th Commandment.” What is this unwritten commandment that seems to hold all precedence above any other command? “Thou shalt be nice.” Let’s define this by how it is practiced and used.
Being “nice” today is very much like being “tolerant.” You have to be open-minded to all opinions, treating anyone’s ideas with equal weight, except for any ideas that come from God. Because that, by definition, is not “nice.” You cannot say anything that would dare hurt anyone’s feelings or say they are wrong. Everything must not be merely sugar-coated but made of nothing but sugar. If someone actually wants to kill you and hates absolutely everything you stand for, you cannot stand your ground, but you must love and accept them and let them into your circles and home, and you must not speak against their beliefs or lifestyles. That is what being “nice” means in how it is being applied. No matter what anyone else says or does, the Christian is to be the doormat, a softie, a pansy.
C.T. Studd wrote an excellent essay to counter this: “The Chocolate Soldier.” This whole 11th Commandment of “thou shalt be nice” and “tolerant” is telling us that we need to be made of chocolate – a dandy, a lollipop, taste good, feel good, always hospitable, but never sour, rough, challenging, firm. This is a chocolate soldier. A weak, effeminate man who melts with the slightest amount of heat. We are in a battle, the greatest battle that has been going on for millennia. A battle for truth, a battle for souls, and God does not build his men with chocolate.
Studd went on to describe several men who were made of chocolate. Reuben and Meroz were rebuked in Deborah’s song for their lack of support in the war against Sisera. Balaam sought the wealth of the world and taught Israel to sin because he didn’t have the guts to do it himself. Demas left the faith to seek his own pleasure. Mark quit on Paul early in his ministry but then chose to quit being a chocolate, became Peter’s primary translator, and then a good friend of Paul’s. An old prophet deceived a man of God who rebuked Jeroboam for his idols. The ten spies melted like chocolate before the giants of Canaan and drove the rest of Israel to melt with them. Jonah ran away from God to avoid the task given to him.
Each of these men and tribes showcased at least one time of cowardice, weakness, or softness, and the end result was sin. Disobedience, defiance, worldliness, and frankly, an easy trophy for the enemy. Satan and this world LOVE chocolate soldiers; they’re so easy to devour. There is another key characteristic in this description: cowardice. The “chocolate soldier” is a coward, afraid, weak, pathetic, and caves and surrenders to the opinions and pressures of men and this world easily. And the coward is the first in the list of those who will not enter the kingdom of heaven in Revelation 21:8.
But we are not called to be “nice.” We are called to be men of actual substance. Studd describes what a real man of God looks like with many examples: Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Nathan, Daniel, John the Baptist, and Paul, not to mention Jesus of Christ. There was no sugar or chocolate in them. And when there was, that was when sin came out (except for Jesus, of course). But there was no softness, no sugar, no “niceness,” no “tolerance” as this world wants of us. Instead, there is the rock-hard, firm resolve that changes this world. There is a refusal to back down without any regard to how it is received, and the only care is to be obedient to what God said to say and to do. Now, in this, there is the warning to be innocent as doves, so we are to do all we do without sin. But beware, our culture and many in the church consider standing your ground to be “toxic,” and to say “That does not belong in the church” to be “inhospitable” and “unloving.” And how dare we actually tell a professing Christian they are in error, let alone in heresy and outside the faith, when they have denied, directly or indirectly, Christ, the work of Christ, or even the necessity for Christ. It’s one thing to pursue Christ and be wrong. But when someone is intentionally teaching something in error and has no regard for correction, regardless of which “tone” is used, that must be called out.
Now, to be clear, every one of us has chocolate in us. Every one of us has those moments where we put our guard down and join the “chocolate brigade.” David did, Jonah did, Mark did, but they hated it and repented and rejoined God’s army properly. As for me, it doesn’t take long to see that I am not easily made of chocolate when it comes to truth, but I also know myself in other areas where I certainly have too much chocolate in me. We are to be kind and loving and draw people to Christ, but NEVER are we to be “nice” and cowardly. We must make a stand and not back down, telling this world, “We aren’t going anywhere.” And that is what we are seeking to do with Worldview Warriors. Even as I step down from blogging soon, it only means my job description is changing, not my position or my resolve. I’ll explain more on that in the upcoming couple of weeks.
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Jesus is not done with us. While He ascended to heaven and is reigning and ruling, He has been preparing a place for us, and that place is a city that is so large that it defies physics. It is described as a cube of 1500 miles in each direction, including vertical. Due to the curvature of the Earth, this is an impossibility on Earth. So clearly, the new earth is going to be operating under a different set of physics, or at least a very different type of planet. But not all are going to be there.
Every person is going to face God on Judgment Day. I recently wrote about the resurrection and how everyone is going to have resurrected bodies that will not perish. But there, everyone will give an account for their lives. Every one of us is going to give an account for our time, our choices, our actions, etc. Jesus is going to step up and proclaim to the Father who are His and who He died for. Those whom Jesus defends will be saved from the judgment, and those whom He does not will be cast into Hell.
We have a severe problem in our day and time because we think Jesus is going to cover for everything. The issue of “free grace” and that it doesn’t matter what we do, Jesus died for it all, is not exactly true. It is true, but it’s not the whole picture. Jesus’ death covered our sins; however, Jesus did not die for us to live our own lives. And many people will call upon the name of Jesus, and Jesus is going to say, “I don’t know them.” I am disturbed by the many I hear speak about their salvation with such great confidence, and yet what I hear come out of their mouths is so antithetical to Christian thinking that I really do have to wonder if they have ever heard the Gospel. I am not talking about perfection here; I am talking about direction. I do not believe you are saved if you consistently and regularly put Scripture into question and promote the academics of the world, who are in opposition to God instead. Jesus is not just going to cover for people just because they proclaimed faith in Him. We need to get that through our heads.
Jesus is going to defend those who have His “seed” in them. The Bible speaks of marriage, the most intimate relationship between two people, as our relationship to Christ. Jesus is going to turn away those whom He did not “know.” To “know” is the euphemism of sexual intimacy. I have been trying to figure out a way to describe this discretely, but those who are saved are those in whom Jesus’ “seed” has been planted and which bears fruit. Read all of Jesus’ warnings and parables. If we are the Bride of Christ, we have the “womb” to bear the Seed of Christ, which is supposed to nurture and bear fruit and life. But the problem we have due to modern evangelical methods is that we think we can do the salvation thing without that intimacy, because we are just playing intellectual games, and our religion is just what we intellectually choose to believe. But where is Christ in it?
Do not hear what I am not saying. I am not saying we have to have all our ducks in a row doctrinally, though we cannot ignore them. I am also saying we can’t just claim the name of Jesus and do our own thing. Read Isaiah 4. I heard about it from David Wilkerson, who pointed out that of seven virgins taking hold of one man to have his name to take away their reproach, but he has no obligation to take care of them, and they’ll do their own thing. That is what is happening today. Many are taking the name of Jesus so they can deal with their sin, but it is all on their own terms and doing their own thing. That is not Christianity.
Jesus is not just going to save people because we say His name, do good deeds, or proclaim great doctrine. Jesus is going to save people with whom He has had an intimate relationship AND seed that bears fruit. That’s the other half of it. Having the seed of Christ is not enough; it has to grow and bear fruit. The Parable of the Sower shows that only good soil is going to bear fruit. And pay attention: of the four soils, only one of them was worked and prepared by the farmer for good fruit. The rocky soil and weedy soil were left unattended. And in John 15, Jesus speaks about branches that don’t bear fruit to be cut off and burned. Now, many people will argue back and forth about free will vs predestination, and I’m like, “I see both doctrines running side by side here.” We need to understand that the vine that bears fruit is the one that Jesus works on, prunes, trims, and waters. And if we are a branch that is going to be a hindrance, we will be cut off. Now, Jesus still works despite our flaws and with our flaws already in mind, but we need to take this seriously.
Is Jesus working in your life? Are you being made closer to Him? How do you know? Here are some clues. Are you longing more and more to be like Christ? Are you desiring the world’s pleasure less and less? Are you seeking to be right with God more than you are seeking to be in alignment with the world? What direction are you heading? Do you believe what you profess to believe, or is it actually someone else’s beliefs you are riding? Jesus is going to save those whom He knows and who do His will. And those are the ones in whom we will see the work of Christ being made manifest. But not everyone is going to show this. There are unsaved people in every congregation, just according to statistics, and some of them are the most dedicated, most doctrinally sound, and moral people you know. But are they actually saved? Are you saved? Am I saved? Just before I came to write for Worldview Warriors in 2014, I went through a thorough self-examination, and I had to truly evaluate if I was saved or not, and I praise God that He confirmed I was. Because before them, I honestly don’t know if I could say if I was saved or not, even though I made my first profession of faith when I was seven. For 23 years, I lived riding someone else’s faith. It really did not become mine until I was about 30. I cannot say that I was truly saved prior to this. I may have been, but I don’t know. And I thank God that He did not let me continue that way. It is one thing to say you know Jesus. The real question is: Does Jesus know you?
This concludes my series on Snapshots of Jesus. For December, I have a very different message and direction God is leading me towards, and I’ll share about that then.
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The last thing Jesus did on this earth was to leave it. After He rose, He did not die again like every other person who was brought back to life. They merely had their life restored to them, and then they died again by whatever means they died of. However, Jesus resurrected, and this body would never be able to test death. Jesus had beaten death; He had conquered sin; He perfectly fulfilled the Law, endured the full wrath of God upon sin, and now had the final victory over all things. There was one last thing to do after giving His disciples one final command: to rise to heaven and claim the Throne.
There is a problem in the Church today. Because evil is ever increasing (as Jesus said), we seem to think that Jesus is not reigning and that Satan seems to have this power that is warring and is equal to God. That is not what the Bible teaches. The Bible does not teach a Messiah who would come and then eventually overcome the devil after an intense battle. No, it teaches that Jesus is reigning NOW. Jesus took the throne 2000 years ago. Yes, He was God before, and He is still God now, but in His humanity, He is the King of all Kings, and He is ruling now. What does that mean and entail?
Nothing happens outside God’s sovereign will. Yes, He has allowed the enemy to run wild a bit, but never without a leash. The real enemy is not Satan anymore, and even then, it never was him. He is just a dog on a leash with limits to what he can do. He is just an imp that had no actual power or authority. Our real enemy is ourselves, our own sin, and our own desire to have a say on reality. If we truly believed that Jesus is the King of Kings, we would not be fearing or panicking over what is going on politically or economically. But more so, we would not be trying to advise Jesus on how to reign or to have a say on what we should be doing in our lives.
Is Jesus truly the center of what we believe and the center of what we do? Many want Jesus as Savior but not Lord. You don’t get one without the other. And if Jesus is Lord, that means He is the boss and He says what is allowed and what is not allowed. “Well, what about all the mass shootings and assassinations and crime?” What about them? God has never been under any obligation to prevent crime. Do you want to be under Minority Report? 1984? Brave New World? Because that is what is being asked for. God being sovereign does not mean preventing evil from taking place. It means dealing with evil when it is done, and God will indeed do that. All the evil that is done is going to be dealt with. Just because that justice is not done in our timing or our means of it being done does not make God negligent. He has the record. And the day is coming when judgment is coming. But Jesus is waiting to save whoever can be saved before that happens.
Jesus has a body: the Church. That is through whom He acts to deal with the things of this world and to get the message of salvation to others. A severe problem we have is that we think the problem lies anywhere except ourselves. Why is all this evil taking place? Very simple: because WE (that means YOU and me too) have let it happen. And we expect God to do the dirty work for us. No, WE are the agent by which God has chosen to act, so if we don’t do it, then it doesn’t get done. And then God will move through someone else. But Jesus is reigning now, and when people finally surrender themselves and truly let Him reign, they do absolute wonders. Read Christian biographies. The things I have personally seen are even beyond the miracles recorded in the Bible. If people ask, “Where is the evidence?” or say, “I wish God would actually do something,” He is and He does. But we have to pay attention.
The one thing I keep bringing up that many really don’t like to hear – and those willing have a hard time practicing, myself included – is that if Jesus is Lord, then you are not. We live in a time of many false religions and false Christs. How can I say that? Because so many “Christians” out there believe in a god who is omnipotent but not sovereign. They have a god who can create, save, and give joy and happiness, but it is on the self’s terms. Paul Washer was once asked to come do a teaching on the attributes of God, and he warned the pastor that if he did that and began speaking on the holiness of God, the righteousness of God, and the sovereignty of God, his most loyal congregants would rise up and say, “That’s not MY god!” And that’s the problem: most people’s “god” is really themselves.
Jesus is reigning and He is ruling now, and what He says goes. We don’t get a say in the matter, and any attempt we try to offer God should be considered sin because we are trusting our own wisdom instead of the omniscient one who truly knows everything. How foolish can we be? Don’t answer that, because there will always be someone who takes that as a challenge. If we are followers of Christ, we are not followers of self. If we are following Christ, we listen to and submit to and obey Him, and we are to deny ourselves. Our life as a Christian is not our own, and we need to start living like that. Jesus will let us do our own thing if we insist, but it will not be without consequence, and in reality, we will greatly miss out. And if we are not careful, the small “miss out” may turn into a BIG “miss out.” If Jesus is not our Lord, He is not our Savior.
Jesus is sitting on the throne, and He is guiding and directing all things for His purpose and His glory. He is setting up all of world history and all the nations to come together, and He will deal with them in one fell swoop. He is pulling out whomever He can from the fires of judgment, and then He will bring it all to an end. He will return and deal with those who have done evil in His sight and rescue those who stayed loyal to Him. Let us stop treating Jesus as a soon-to-be ruler but rather as the current and active ruler now and today. And what does that mean? It means if we are obedient to God and we act in the authority He has given us, we will truly be invincible to do all we are called to do, and nothing will touch us except that which is necessary for us to prove we belong to Jesus. So what do we have to fear? The opinions of intellectuals who only think they know something? Let us take solace that Jesus reigns now and He reigns forever, and there is no better King that anyone could ask for.
Next week, I will wrap up this series by analyzing Jesus as both Savior and Condemner.
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After Jesus rose from the dead, there were two tasks He needed to do prior to ascending, besides just appearing and encouraging the believers: Peter, and then final instructions. Why Peter? Peter disowned even knowing Jesus three times. The night Jesus was betrayed, the very night Peter said he would go to prison and die for Jesus, Peter denied even knowing Jesus or being associated with Him. And Jesus was not going to sweep that under the rug.
So, during one of His appearances, Jesus gives Peter another miraculous catch of fish, mirroring the moment the two met, and then gets some one-on-one time with Peter. Three times, Jesus asks: “Do you love me?” And Peter says yes each time. Then Jesus tells Peter to take care of His sheep. Peter didn’t realize what was happening until the third time and renewed his vow to go wherever Jesus went. And Jesus then told him how he would die: by execution, and Peter would be crucified. Yet to show his love for his Savior, he asked to be crucified upside down, a more painful death, lest he not die the same way Jesus did. Then Peter looked at John and asked about him. Jesus basically said it was none of Peter’s business, and John never died a martyr’s death. But not because the Romans didn’t try. He was thrown into a pot of boiling oil and came out unscathed. That is why he was exiled to Patmos.
Then Jesus gathered His disciples to the Mount of Olives for one final set of instructions, and they were simple. First, they were to wait in Jerusalem until they were imbued with power, and then to go make disciples starting in Jerusalem and to Judea, to Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Remember, they were not indwelt by the Holy Spirit yet. Yet when this happened and the disciples were empowered to carry on Jesus’ mission by the Holy Spirit, the religious centers and forces of darkness, who were reeling from Jesus alone, now had a much bigger problem. The very power and authority Jesus had was now with the disciples.
Jesus is in the business of restoration. Peter and Judas are often compared because both betrayed Jesus. The difference is that Peter was grieved that he had betrayed his master, but Judas just felt guilty that he had done a bad thing. Judas would attempt to make semi-amends by returning the blood money he got for giving Jesus to the Pharisees, but they just laughed it off. Judas not only betrayed Jesus, but he got played in doing so. And so Judas went and hung himself, but the tree couldn’t hold his weight, and when his body fell, it burst open. Peter, however, had a spirit like David, who sinned against God, but the weight of it grieved him because he lost his relationship with his God. Peter was similar. He sinned against Jesus, not defiantly, but due to his fear of man. And keep in mind that Peter was a BIG man. He was burly and very strong, not just because of his fisherman trade. And yet he became the biggest baby, cowering before a weak slave girl.
This is what happens when men rely on their own strength. Physical prowess means nothing to the weak spirit. But despite all this, Jesus restored Peter. Now, would Jesus have restored Judas? As Jesus only did what the Father said to do and had marked Judas as a devil from the start, I wonder if Jesus would have forgiven Judas. He forgave all those who crucified Him, knowing they knew not what they did. But would He have forgiven Judas? The empathy part of me says, yes, but the analytical part of me says no. Why? If God rejected King Saul for something far less, why would He spare Judas, when Jesus even said it would be better for him not even to be born? In all cases, Judas never gave it a chance and killed himself before it could have been done.
Then, after Jesus ascended, the disciples went to Jerusalem and met in the upper room, possibly the same upper room where they had the Last Supper. They prayed for ten days, chose Matthias to replace Judas, and then Pentecost happened. Peter the coward suddenly turned into Peter the bold preacher and proclaimed the name of Jesus, showcasing how the languages being heard were the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy. When Peter told the crowd that they had crucified the very Savior they had been waiting for, the crowd spoke up and asked, “What must we do?” And Peter said, “Repent and be baptized,” and 3000 were added to their number that day.
From that time forward, the disciples became the Apostles, and the church spread like wildfire. The world was never the same again. The Sanhedrin tried to stop them, but imprisonment and the Jewish beatings only encouraged them further. The Romans really didn’t care, but then it got worse when Paul was converted, and the entire Roman Empire and the known world were completely turned upside down. The world would never be the same again. God had come to the world, and as the Church obeyed its command to make disciples, everything as previously known would cease to exist. Bars would shut down, the occult businesses would be shut down, and instead in places where there we no schools or hospitals, now these would be built. Take notice that no group in the world has ever built schools or hospitals for the general population, when Christians did not do it first. And any school and hospital that is not run with the Christian mindset or at least a Judeo-Christian ethic tends not to be the best places to be. And this was all able to happen because Jesus left us. Next week, we’ll look at the last thing Jesus did on earth: His ascension.
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After His resurrection, Jesus spent 40 days showing His resurrected body to His apostles and to other disciples. He appeared to His disciples multiple times and had this ability to show up wherever and whenever He wanted, and locked doors were no problem for Him. In one incident, Thomas was not with the other ten, and they all believed, except Thomas. Thomas needed to physically see and touch Jesus to believe it. A week later, Jesus showed up and specifically called out Thomas to touch His wounds; there, Thomas made the first declaration of Jesus as God recorded.
But before these two incidents, on the very day of Jesus’ resurrection, Jesus met two disciples walking away from Jerusalem, noting their very somber state. They were totally stunned at how Jesus was hailed a hero and executed in a span of a few days, and then Jesus, who hid His identity from them, began to explain how all these events were the fulfillment of Scripture, starting with Moses. It was the greatest Bible study of all time, and the two insisted on Jesus staying to eat with them. So He did, and the moment He broke the bread, He disappeared, and they realized it was Him.
Paul reports these sightings and then adds that at one time, 500 had seen Him at once, and at the time of the writing of 1 Corinthians, most of these 500 were still alive. What does that mean? It means Paul said to check him out if someone didn’t believe him.
Many skeptics will go out of their way to say, “Why didn’t Jesus show Himself publicly?” Answer: He did. But why didn’t the Romans take notice? The Roman Empire didn’t care about any of this. Those in Judea were only concerned about law and order. They didn’t care about any of the Jewish religion or rituals as long as they brought in tax dollars and stayed peaceful. And they certainly weren’t going to be bothered with the claims of a man coming back from the dead, except maybe those who saw Him and ended up directly involved in what Jesus was doing. I imagine the centurion who realized who Jesus was when He died would have been very intrigued when the resurrection claims started going around.
It is also worth noting that people didn’t go spreading word about Jesus until Pentecost after Jesus ascended. They all talked among each other, but there was no widespread public sharing about it for those first 50 days. Why? Several reasons. One is that they were still in shock about the whole thing. They were not waiting at the tomb for Jesus to rise as He predicted, so the mere fact that He did rise was just so stunning to them that they could only share with each other. Another reason is that just a few days before, the whole city was shouting for Jesus’ death, and just mentioning Him in public would draw the attention of those who had just gotten Jesus killed. So they weren’t about to go publicly share about this either. But then Pentecost comes and the Holy Spirit comes down, and then it was training wheels off and they went and went BIG. The way historians record the spread of the church matches precisely with how the Bible describes it.
Jesus was not about proving to everyone that He was God, but He provided enough evidence that no one honestly evaluating it could deny its validity. The resurrection of Christ is the most verifiable ancient historical account, and frankly, I would argue even more verifiable than today’s events. Jesus appeared to many different witnesses, and among them were unbelievers. What does that mean? Jesus had hostile witnesses, which means it wasn’t just people who only believed in Him who saw it. No conspiracy could be claimed because a hostile witness could easily refute what was claimed if they were there. But no one ever could stand up and give an eyewitness testimony of anything being faked. Unlike any other myth, counterfeit messiah, or false prophet, Jesus did His events publicly so there would be witnesses. There were no witnesses for Joseph Smith or Muhammad. Everyone else had a private revelation that could not be accounted for, but Jesus showed Himself publicly and went above and beyond any quorum needed for validation.
It is impossible for 500 people to have the same hallucination. It is impossible for multiple people to get the same hallucination multiple times. Jesus did not have a twin brother who pretended to be Him. The body was not stolen, and Jesus did not actually avoid death and came back resurrected at full strength if he just “swooned.” It’s also worth noting that nothing is said about any scars from the whips or even the crown of thorns, just the nails and spear. Jesus showed up in His physical body over 40 days, but He had two jobs to do before He would ascend to heaven. That’s for next week.
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Jesus had died and was buried in a borrowed tomb. We can say “borrowed” because three days later, after the Passover had come and gone, the women who did not have the time to fully bury the body came to deliver and apply the burial spices, about sixty pounds worth, only to find the tomb open and empty. Jesus was gone. The tomb was sealed lest anyone steal the body and proclaim a Resurrection, and the Roman guard would be there with no chance of sleeping on duty under penalty of death. The seal wasn’t merely cracked; the entire stone slab, which weighed several thousand pounds, wasn’t just rolled away but more tossed out of the way. The description isn’t merely to just get the door open, but to knock the door off its hinges. And Jesus was nowhere to be found, and apparently neither were the guards.
The women were baffled until a man approached Mary Magdalene and asked why she was crying. The man comforted her and then called her by her name. Suddenly, she recognized Jesus and sought to cling to Him, but Jesus refused. His glorified body was not fit for that, as He was now preparing for His ascension. So the women ran back to the disciples. Peter and John didn’t even hesitate; they ran to the tomb. Though John beat Peter in the race, John stopped, and Peter ran into the tomb directly. While an angel announced Jesus’ resurrection to the woman sitting on the stone door, here two other angels sat inside the tomb at Jesus’ head and feet, and all that was left were the grave clothes.
There are multiple times in the Bible when someone had died and was brought back to life, but most had just recently died, like the same day, and only a couple of cases had several days pass. But even then, their life was merely restored to them temporarily. Each person who died and was brought back to life would die again when it was their time. But Jesus did not have His life restored to His body; He was resurrected. The body He was born in perished, marking the death of the sin-cursed, but it was changed, transformed, and made new in its glorified form. However, Jesus still bore the five scars from His crucifixion: the holes in both hands and feet and the spear-pierced side. The scars were there, yet fully healed.
Jesus was the first resurrected person, and no one else is going to be resurrected until the time for all judgment to come. One thing that is often missed is that literally everyone is going to be resurrected. Good, bad, young, and old, every person of every point in history is going to die physically (or taken to heaven in some rapture-type thing of which I am not going to delve into), and that body will be resurrected. This is how every person is going to give an account for their lives. We all are going to receive immortal and perfect bodies, bodies that will not die. Those who are in Christ will be welcomed to paradise, but those who are not will suffer the wrath of God for eternity in a body that cannot die. That needs to scare us.
The second “death” is not annihilation or an eternal slumber where even time will forget us. No, this lake of fire is where God’s eternal, righteous, and just wrath is going to be poured out without exhaustion. Unlike man, whose wrath can be exhausted, God’s wrath is never exhausted. While His love and grace and mercy are infinite, so is His wrath, and we are going to glorify God one way or the other: in paradise or in eternal judgment. Those who lived this life in sin and crime and did not meet judgment here on earth will face it with God. And those who did experience judgment here on earth faced their crimes against humanity, not their crimes against deity. The only escape from the judgment for crime against deity is Jesus Christ.
Jesus’ death took the just punishment against sin as though He were the only one to have sinned. But in His resurrection came the defeat of sin, Hell, and the grave, so that all who are “in Christ,” those who died to themselves and submitted themselves to a new Master, will escape it. Just as Noah and his family escaped the Flood by one means of salvation, so we can escape the judgment of God through the one means of salvation: the cross.
Just as Adam and Eve were clothed, Paul uses this notion of being “in Christ” so that when Jesus died, we died, and when He rose, we will rise with Him. However, it’s more than just that. God does more than just see Jesus in our place. When Jesus died, He came back the same God as when He came. He did not change other than having His human nature. When we die in Christ and when we are resurrected in Christ, we are changed. Jesus never had a sin nature to change from; we do. When we die, the law that demands our judgment is still fulfilled. But when we are resurrected, we are raised under a new law that gives us a new master. We experience the resurrection in part in this life because we have a new heart, new mind, new motives, and new drives, but we don’t have a new body yet. That still has to die as well, and then we will receive our new bodies that will not experience the curse of sin. They will be fully functional as they would have been had we never sinned.
How it is going to look can only, at best, be described with “glorified imagination” and I don’t have the time or space, let alone the vocabulary, to describe it. But Jesus’ resurrection is what gives us the hope that we have. It is the resurrection that will enable us to endure whatever this world gives us to offer if only we would start thinking eternally again. But in that eternal thinking is the doom people have if we do not tell them how to escape it. We must see both, and I fear too many of us have fallen for the intellectual game that keeps the reality of things “out there.” Jesus did die for us. He did rise from the grave. He did defeat sin, death, and Hell. But do we live like we believe that?
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The cross is the singular most discussed topic of all of history. There is literally no other event in all of world history that remotely compares to the crucifixion of Jesus. It truly is the singular most important world-changing event. It is because of the cross that we have BC and AD for our calendar. If we did not have the cross, we would be either still counting years by ruler or like the Jews, who started from creation and counted forward. We count from the birth of Christ forward. But the reason we start with Christ’s birth is that that is when the most important person in history was born. But without the cross, Jesus’ birth doesn’t have the same weight. The cross is why Jesus came to us to begin with. All Jesus did and experienced was for this one moment of history that literally changed how everything operates.
The physical torture Jesus endured is beyond harrowing. At the time, it was the most severe form of torture known to man. The whipping was just the opening. Roman soldiers, taking their cat o’ nine tails, edged with glass, rocks, bones, or whatever would rip into flesh easily. And they made a sport out of it – who could make the most devastating blow. Scripture describes Jesus being unrecognizable, just a standing hunk of meat. Some would not survive such a beating due to the loss of blood, let alone any infection that would finish the job. The crown of thorns, the mocking, and the mob assault added to the mix. The crown of thorns not only drew blood but would cause serious head pain that would make anyone lose concentration easily. Getting beaten up and having your beard ripped out in chunks doesn’t help either. And that’s all before being driven down the streets of Jerusalem outside the city, being forced to carry the very cross that would be used to execute Him. Jesus was so weak from all this that He could not physically carry it anymore, and so they had to pull a man from the streets to finish the job. Then, finally, He was nailed to the cross and hung naked, having to rely on His very weak body to get a breath. The very setting of the cross into the hole would make most joints get dislocated.
Often, it could take 2-3 days for someone to finally die on a cross. Jesus didn’t make it for at most six hours, to include the events we know and the three hours of darkness. Jesus died of a burst heart, indicated by the water and blood flowing out of the chest wound from a soldier’s spear, meaning it was already settling out from each other. Then the earthquake happened, and even the centurion on site acknowledged that Jesus was the Son of God.
Jesus’ death on the cross was unlike any other death or self-sacrifice. While it has been echoed in Narina and Lord of the Rings or even Harry Potter, Jesus was the root of it. The notion of a sacrifice preceded Jesus, going all the way back to Genesis. What is unique in the Bible and in Jesus is the key component that the sacrifice must be pure and innocent, and a substitute for others. Absolutely perfect. While other myths would have the concept of a pure maiden giving her life, none of them have a sacrificial element. Only Aslan in Narnia, who is hard to deny was meant to BE Jesus, gets close. But these are all snapshots, pictures, and shadows of the one reality that Jesus did.
Jesus did not die merely sacrificially; He died as a substitute. We had sinned, and we deserved the full wrath of Almighty God. Throughout history, man has sought to downplay the severity of our crime against deity or to increase the value of humanity. We love trying to make our own sins not very significant, and we also love making ourselves victims deserving of being rescued. So we’ll call our sins “mistakes” or “imperfections,” but we’ll say that we are so valuable in God’s eyes that He couldn’t live without us. That’s heresy. Jesus didn’t die to show us how valuable we are to Him. He died because of how heinous our sin is. And we need to remind ourselves every day of the severity of our sin, developing a hatred for it so that we would put it to death. It is such a slap in the face of Jesus to proclaim His death and resurrection and our salvation just to live however we want.
The thing about the cross that we have missed is that we, too, must die. Jesus didn’t merely die as our substitute, representing us. We have to be “in Christ,” which means we must die, too. We won’t face the wrath of God as Jesus did, but our old sinful selves must be put to death so that we may be raised in new life. We love citing John 3:16, but we recoil at Luke 9:23. If we are in Christ, we have a new master, and it’s not sin and it’s not self.
Jesus didn’t die to free us from the hands of the devil; Jesus died to free us from ourselves. Satan is just a deceiver, but he would be completely powerless if we simply didn’t listen to him. All he can actually do is just dangle carrots in front of us, and because we are our own problem, we lunge at those carrots and get ourselves in trouble. And if Satan didn’t do that, we’d still find our own trouble. That’s why Satan simply leaves most people alone because they are so good at their own sin. Jesus died to save us from that. He died to save us from ourselves, so we need to put self on that cross daily so that we live not the very lives that cost Jesus His life to begin with, but that we might live a resurrected life in Christ, which we will cover next week.
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Jesus was arrested and taken straight to trial by the Sanhedrin. They were ready for Him. This shows very easily that the whole thing was a setup. They needed enough of the seventy members to make a quorum, and clearly, they did not call ALL the members for this quorum, but the ones who were opposed to Jesus, not the ones who supported Him. At the seat of judgment, leading this trial, was Caiphas, the High Priest. Caiphas was very political and hated Rome with a passion, but he did everything to keep the peace with Rome, knowing that to trigger Rome would steal their power and would lead to their destruction. Rome was actually beneficial to the Sadducees because Rome kept them in power. And here came Jesus, a very clear threat to the system, and just a few days ago, he made a huge scene with the cleansing of the temple and even evading the tax question. They wanted Jesus dead, but now they had to find a reason to do so.
So they tried to get witnesses to lie about him, but they needed at least two to agree. Despite a multitude of witnesses, none of them could actually agree on it. This trial was a setup, but it was also a rush job. We have an example of another setup back in 1 Kings 21, when Jezebel got two scoundrels to testify together against Naboth and had him executed on false charges so Ahab could take Naboth’s vineyard. Yet here, the quorum could not get any two witnesses to agree until two finally stepped up and relied on Jesus’ claim to destroy the temple and bring it back in three days. And Jesus kept silent until Jesus was forced under oath to say if he was the Son of God. Then Jesus simply said, “You said it,” and then added that He wasn’t merely a human, but the Son of Man referenced in Daniel. They knew precisely what Jesus was saying: He wasn’t just claiming to be the Messiah but to be God Himself. The Sanhedrin found Jesus guilty of death; however, they only had the legal right to execute anyone on Temple grounds. So they went to their next step: appealing to the Romans.
Jesus was sent to Pilate because Pilate had to order the crucifixion. He was expected to just comply with the Jews on their sentences, but Pilate had his own political issues. He was under pressure from the Capitol for carrying out too many executions, and the political pressure with the Passover feast, where over a million people had gathered, equating the population of Rome itself. In the center of it was Jesus: the now-famed miracle-worker who had just raised Lazarus from the dead and created a scene in the Temple. Pilate wanted nothing to do with this and then sent Jesus to Herod, who played the role of a king, but knew more of Jewish custom. Both Herod and Pilate could find nothing wrong with Jesus, who did nothing to defend Himself.
Finally, Pilate got Him back and sought to set Jesus free, baffled that Jesus would not defend Himself. He wondered if Jesus was even taking this seriously enough that Pilate could have Him executed, but Jesus basically said, “You don’t have any authority over Me except what My Father lets you have.” There was nothing Pilate could find. But he had to deal with the Jews. So he offered a notorious criminal, Barabbas, thinking they’d actually choose to have the criminal executed, but they chose Jesus. So Pilate took a bowl of water, washed his hands, and declared he was not going to be held responsible for this. And with that, Pilate signaled for Jesus to be crucified.
The amazing thing in all this is Jesus’ silence. Jesus would not defend Himself. Yes, we know He had to fulfill Scripture and be silent as a lamb before shearers, but Jesus endured all sorts of slander, mockery, and insults and did not raise a finger to defend Himself. Before, He stood when Pharisees tried to stone Him and asked, “For what do you stone Me?” Not this time. Jesus remained silent, demonstrating one of His key teachings: turning the other cheek. This is echoed throughout Scripture: Repay evil with good. Scripture tells us to suffer well, even when people lie and slander about us, and live so that no accusation can be proved. This is no easy task.
There is a place to defend ourselves. Paul did to avoid another farce trial in Jerusalem while under Roman protection, and he appealed to Caesar when it showed he wasn’t going to be able to be released without facing the Jews in Jerusalem. But part of this was knowing that he was to go to Rome. Paul knew his journey wasn’t over. Jesus knew His earthly journey was over. This was to be His death, and it had to be a death in which He gave His life. It could not be taken from Him.
We have a SEVERE problem in our culture, and we don’t have a “doctrine of suffering” because we in the U.S. have not suffered. Sure, we have been mocked and ridiculed, but we haven’t experienced actual suffering for our faith. Yes, I am aware of MLK Jr., and yes, Charlie Kirk is still fresh on our minds, but those were more politically motivated as opposed to Gospel related. They weren’t killed simply because they were Christians and preaching a Christian message. They were killed because their political views, which came out of their faith, had greatly disturbed the status quo.
But we are now at the verge of facing true persecution. With AI and Deep Fakes being very easy to manipulate and perform, it is vital that we learn how to keep our mouths shut – except at the proclamation of the Gospel. We need to learn when to properly defend ourselves and when not to, and at any cost, don’t give the enemy reason to question our character because they’ll see weakness and then seek to get us to say something to incriminate ourselves. We must be watchful.
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Jesus was a man of prayer, and He would make a purpose to sneak out and slip away to be with His Father. Here, Jesus is about to face the very moment for which He came to earth and became a man, and He needed His Father more than ever before. He was about to face the wrath of God and bear the sins of mankind. The one who knew no sin and never experienced the Father’s anger was about to, at the fullest force. Jesus knew of God’s wrath by seeing it in action and the judgment upon mankind throughout the ages; none was a greater judgment than the Flood of Noah’s day. But what Jesus was about to endure was more severe than anything this world has ever known. In His humanity, Jesus needed help more than ever before. So He went to the Garden of Gethsemane to go do battle in prayer before His big showdown.
Jesus had eight of His disciples stand guard because Judas had already left to run his “errand,” and He took Peter, James, and John with Him into the interior. Jesus wanted companions but also knew these three could not go with Him all the way, so He had them stand, watch, and pray while He went further in. Jesus went in with great sorrow. I find myself often skimming over such emotional descriptions because the words simply don’t give the reality of the emotion such justice. To truly describe the grief Jesus was facing at this moment would take pages because we simply don’t have the language for it in just a phrase or word. The grief of a miscarriage or the betrayal of a parent/mentor, as severe as those are and no marginalization whatsoever of that type of pain, doesn’t compare to what Jesus was going through at this moment. Jesus was under such distress and dread of facing the full wrath of the eternal, holy, righteous, and just God that His body began to sweat literal blood. The physical stress caused by these emotions was so great that His heart was about to burst, and His blood vessels couldn’t take it.
Jesus had a simple prayer: “If it may be, take this cup from Me. But not My will but Your will be done.” Jesus was begging His Father to find any other route to save mankind without Him going to the cross. This was a temptation Jesus frequently faced. Why go through the suffering of the cross if He could have been given the world easily by the enemy? Even Peter rebuked Jesus for even thinking of dying. But Jesus knew His mission, and He knew His calling. This was Jesus’ humanity pleading before God for one last attempt at mercy from having to go this route. But as He had done His whole life, Jesus submitted His will to the will of the Father. He was not about to turn back now at the moment of decision.
Jesus went back and found His disciples sleeping. He understood and knew they didn’t have what it took to stand guard. They were emotionally exhausted from the Last Supper meal in which Jesus gave one of the hardest messages He had to give: that He was leaving His friends. It wasn’t just hard on Jesus; it was harder on the Apostles. They didn’t have the Holy Spirit yet, and the very Messiah who had poured His life into them was leaving them. Not without hope, but leaving physically. And Peter was wrestling with the fact that Jesus told him he would betray Him that night. We tend to think they were just tired from the day, but this was an excessively exhausting day mentally and emotionally. As a teacher, I feel fine physically after the day, but I am exhausted mentally. This was an emotional exhaustion, and there was a spiritual pressure here that was even above and beyond that. When I think about this, it is no wonder they fell asleep.
So Jesus went back and prayed again and then found the disciples sleeping again. And Jesus prayed a third time, this time sealing the deal and fully committing Himself one last time to go through with what He was about to face. He knew His mission, He knew the calling, and He had the strength He needed; it was now time to go face it. He got up, and His disciples followed Him straight towards a crowd that was led by none other than their own Judas.
Jesus stood His ground. He was not going to be captured. He was going to surrender. Just in identifying Himself, the group and mob fell backwards. Peter, in such a confused mess, drew his sword and, with bad aim, ended up cutting off Malchus’s ear. Jesus healed him and then surrendered Himself on the premise that they let His disciples go, and they scattered quickly.
One thing needs to be made clear, that I am going to re-emphasize. Jesus was never conquered; He was never beaten. He surrendered. He allowed Himself to be captured for this moment. Every single thing He did in ministry and every word He said was designed to lead up to this moment. Each of Jesus’ miracles was not merely to get the attention of people or to be compassionate to the people, but to prove to the system that He was the Messiah. Each of Jesus’ teachings wasn’t merely to instruct people how to live, but to set the stakes so high that it made Him a threat to the system. And then His rebukes to the system only enraged them all the more, but each step, each miracle, and each word spoken built itself to this moment. Jesus forced the Pharisees’ hands to take action and, in their desperation and in the sovereignty of God, their reaction to Jesus perfectly set up this moment so they would beg for Jesus’ death and do exactly what God intended all along.
I love how God uses His own enemies to fulfill His purposes and give Him glory, and here we are seeing that in action. If the enemies of Christ actually knew what they were doing, they would not have crucified Him. But Jesus directed all these events towards this moment in accordance with the will of the Father, and now it was time to finish the job.
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Last week, I emphasized Jesus’ final teachings from what’s known as the Upper Room discourse, and today, I’ll finish that by emphasizing John 16-17, which is a final teaching on the Holy Spirit and Jesus’ great prayer, the longest recorded single prayer in Scripture.
Jesus spoke of all these things so His disciples would not stumble. The world would come after them because they were associated with Jesus. The authorities would arrest them, beat them, slander them, and seek to do all they could to destroy them. And understand this: the authorities and the church were synonymous in those days. If applied today, the government would be arresting us, but some of the very people we think we should trust are those who will turn us in. The biggest enemies of the Church have been the counterfeits in the Church.
But Jesus said we are not to fear these things, but to know that when they happen, do not be surprised. When Peter and John were arrested in Acts 4 for preaching the name of Jesus after healing a lame man, they sang for joy because they were counted worthy to suffer for Christ. But this joy can only come from the Holy Spirit. It will never come from the flesh. It also must be practiced and prepared before you can actually do this. Richard Wurmbrand told people in the West that we need to practice suffering. One way he would do that was to go through an American grocery store and say, “I can go without that.” And would end up leaving and getting nothing. Yes, he would get food to eat, but 14 years of prison in Communist Romania teaches you to cherish what you have, but also not to indulge in things even when you can. Jesus told us we would suffer, and the US church is the only one so far to not have gone through actual persecution in the way the rest of the world has. Even when the Church had moments of peace from Roman emperors, it was short-lived. So if Jesus says we will suffer, guess what, if we are living the Christian life, we will suffer, and people won’t like us. We need to get used to that.
However, in this promise is another promise of help: the Holy Spirit. The reason why the world is going to hate us so much is not merely because of Christ in us. They will hate us because the Holy Spirit has a primary job of convicting the world of sin, and you don’t even have to say anything for this to happen. Why? Because the Holy Spirit will convict you of sin and warn you against sin, and when you don’t engage in sin when the world seeks to, that action will tell them, “Oh, you are one of those Christians.” Understand that these reactions are actually a cover for their FEAR of God because they know that God is real and that judgment is coming. They don’t just want you to know that this is what is going on. But when this happens, the Holy Spirit will guide us to all truth and even what to say and what not to say.
Then Jesus warns of His death and resurrection again. There will be great sorrow within 24 hours, but great rejoicing just a couple of days later. And when that happens, the disciples won’t need to question what God is saying due to a lack of understanding, because when they ask what they need, they’ll get what they need in prayer. Yet tribulation is imminent.
From there, Jesus goes to His epic prayer of John 17, first praying for Himself, then praying for His disciples, and then for all believers. Jesus prays for Himself for the moment He was about to go through, and that He would be glorified in receiving the judgment of God for the sin of the world. He prays for His disciples that they would be able to endure the trials to come and to be kept and protected. He prays for the rest of the believers for endurance and protection during the times of persecution that they may be good witnesses. And Jesus ended it with the knowledge of God and that the love of God would be on full display among the church.
With this, Jesus finished teaching His disciples and headed for the Garden of Gethsemane, where He would have the battle for His life: the internal battle about whether He would go to the Cross or seek another way.
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John 13-17 contains the final teachings of Jesus’ life before His crucifixion. It was a very difficult time for Jesus because from that point on, Jesus’ disciples would effectively be on their own… except they would not be left on their own. For three years, Jesus had trained His disciples to be teachers and preachers of a new message and to lead a new Kingdom, but none of them got it. None of them would understand what Jesus had been saying all along for another fifty days, and this was the hardest message for them. Because Jesus was leaving and they were going to suffer greatly. In this post, I’ll cover His teachings in John 13-15.
After washing His disciples’ feet, Jesus told everyone that He was about to be betrayed. Then Jesus immediately identified Judas by giving him the dipped bread and told him to do what he was about to do. Once Judas left, no one suspected him. Judas had the money box and suspected Jesus was sent to get something. With that, Jesus announced that He was leaving, and where He was going, they could not come. This was a total heartbreak for the disciples. They knew Jesus was their Messiah, their Savior, and they loved Him and knew He had everything they could ever need and had nowhere else to go. Peter said he would go anywhere, including dying for Jesus, and Jesus simply sighed and told Peter he would deny Him three times that very night.
But Jesus then began to comfort the disciples by telling them what He was going to do while away: prepare a place for them and then come back for them, and they would know where and how to meet Him. Thomas and Philip tried to get clarification on this and never understood that Jesus was not merely the Messiah, but was one with God; by knowing Jesus, they knew the Father. But then Jesus said He would not leave them alone but would give them something far better than His physical presence: the Holy Spirit. And it would be the Holy Spirit who would do more than just comfort them.
The Holy Spirit is called “the Helper,” the “parakletos,” and is so much more than the “helper” that Eve was to Adam. The Holy Spirit is the very engine that makes the car called mankind operate as intended. It is the Holy Spirit who teaches us how to love one another. It is the Holy Spirit who teaches how to obey the Lord. It is the Holy Spirit who overcomes the world and enables us to rise above our culture and live the supernatural life.
I want to dwell on this for a moment because we have a severe problem in our time today. We have a massive movement of making a huge emphasis on the Holy Spirit that attributes practically anything and everything to Him, no matter how ridiculous it is. And we have a reaction to that movement that practically denies anything to do with Him. The Charismatics very well acknowledge the action of the supernatural, but they rarely check what they say or think against Scripture to know what is actually Him or not. But the Reformed cessationists, while doing an excellent job at checking this movement, all but practically deny the actual nature of the supernatural in the process. Many truly think that the nature of spiritual warfare is ONLY regarding teachings, and they miss the mark on that one. What they end up with if they are not careful is a very well-constructed theology, but one that is dead. Both sides have a severe problem: no real power.
The world does not give them the time of day. The world has always had to respect the true Church when she has had power, often to the point of taking it very seriously to try to shut it down. But with only a few exceptions, the government has been very subtle in its opposition to the church. They go after Creationists because that is where a severe threat to worldly ideals lies, but they aren’t going after the church as a whole. Not openly. Just gradually setting things up so that the Church will not raise her head above an accepted level. And I am asking: Why has the church allowed this? And I have to ask myself, why have I been part of “keeping the status quo”? We are to live supernatural lives, and we are satisfied with pure academic lives. That’s not what Jesus intended. Jesus intended for us to be a force that no one could stop, and the source of that force is the Holy Spirit.
After that, Jesus emphasizes making sure our source is Him. We must be attached to the vine and get our source of life from the vine; otherwise, we are merely dead branches, and dead wood is only good for the fire. And worse are branches that don’t produce fruit and are just wasting the vine’s energy. So those will be pruned. It’s a severe warning that those who are supposed to be Christians can’t just get a free ride. But those who engage in the Father’s mission will have a joy beyond anything that we can describe. The mission we are sent to do cannot be done without our power source: the Holy Spirit.
Jesus repeatedly emphasizes to the disciples to love one another. He says this many times in this final teaching. Jesus calls them “friends,” and for God to call you a friend is something special. Never forget, He is still the King, and we are still His servants. We see throughout Acts and the Epistles that the Apostles never lost sight of this. They never forget that Jesus was King and they were but His servants, yet Jesus called them His friends. And that is a severe problem with the world, because the world hates Jesus.
The world has been in rebellion against God from the very start. The world does not want God to rule, and the ultimate reason is that Jesus points out that they are sinners who deserve judgment. The world hates us because we are no longer of them, of their same likeness. We are representatives of God, and they hate God. So why would we want to curry their favor? Now, understand this. They don’t hate God because of ignorance of Him. They hate God because they DO know Him. They DO know that God exists, and they hate Him; they hate God without a cause. But when we have the Holy Spirit, we need to not fear them or their silly arguments or their attempts to weaponize the law against us. Let them try. We go preach Jesus because that is what a Holy Spirit-filled person will do.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
