Persecution : USA

What is persecution? The first thing the believer thinks of are the churches in other countries who travel miles to sit on uncomfortable grounds for hours to hearing what scraps of God’s word that could be smuggled into the place while paying attention to the sights and sounds of their vicinity being aware that at any moment the powers of that country could come in and either take them to prison or have them killed. While that’s true, and while for the past couple hundred years persecution has been worse than the establishment of grace over 2000 years ago, we aren’t looking at all types of persecution and what it does to believers and the lost. How comfortable are you? With everything at our disposal, at our fingertips literally where we can type in a few characters on a website and have something delivered to us the same day and be able to enjoy our trinkets and baubles, we truly lack little. That’s not persecution though, right? Physical persecution is horrific and abhorrent, but there’s also spiritual persecution that we completely write off. Do you tend to get angry when the power goes out? Get angry when someone cuts you off and delays you an extra minute? Get upset with each other trying to decide what to eat where? We are making up reasons to get upset and angry with the gender fluidity argument and the constant DEI programs being shoveled and heaved at us, guys we ARE comfortable. So comfortable that if anything makes us uncomfortable, we abandon our reason, we abandon our countenance, we abandon our trust. Surely none of us have strung a couple of words together out loud or in our mind when the football game didn’t go our way or the food has been delayed to the table at our favorite restaurant, right? If we’re in our services and the preacher starts running over, our minds start to wonder how we’re going to get a seat when the other church down the street gets out before us. Now the big question we have to ask ourselves is did we laugh when we read that or did we think about how holy God is and become embarrassed of how we react to the Almighty God and creator of the universe? Let’s hold our comfort in one hand and our Savior’s decision to step out of His kingdom and off His throne in the other for a brief minute. Put into your minds what we see in the media, in the stores, and scrolling through the internet and have that vision of the cross and Jesus hanging on it. We get our term excruciating from crucifixion, but we’ve underplayed what is excruciating. After being whipped with a device of ropes with metal shards and objects that caused deep lacerations and disfigurations pulling skin from muscle, muscle from bone, and inflicting mutilating injuries. Isaiah 52:14 “Just as there were many who were appalled at him – his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness-“ The CSB puts it, “Just as many were appalled at you— his appearance was so disfigured that he did not look like a man, and his form did not resemble a human being—”. Keep in mind, hours before this, he agonized what was about to happen to Him. Hematidrosis, also known as hematohidrosis, is a rare condition that causes a person to sweat blood or blood-tinged sweat often caused by extreme physical or emotional stress, such as acute fear or intense mental contemplation. We see in the garden the ultimate realization of His humanity. Back to His torture, during these beatings, they would go from the top of the back to the back of the legs. His spine would have been exposed and a historian named Eusebius described the flogging as, “ The sufferer's veins were laid bare and the very muscles, sinews and bowels of the victim were open to exposure.” He was turned over to have His front scourged and marred from the top to the bottom. He was mutilated. His internal organs were piercing out. He was naked and exposed, ribbons of bleeding flesh dangling from His bones. Laboring in His pain they then took a crown made of thorns, not the small barbs from roses, a likely candidate, or one of, being Zizipus spina - Christi (look up for images). Needle-like thorns dug into His forehead, sides, and back of the head. They plucked His beard, what was left of it after the marring, and put a 200-300 lb cross on His open back to carry around ⅓ of a mile. The fact He could stand and try should give you pause. Soldiers asked someone to help the rest of they way, they laid Jesus’ exposed back onto the splintery wood, nailed the equivalent of railroad spike through His median nerve (which if you’ve banged your elbow, imagine taking that nerve clamping down on it and twisting it) and possibly an offshoot of the sciatic nerve in His feet. The stress on the diaphragm from being hung in this position meant that to exhale because the chest was put into an inhale position, He would have to “stand” on the nail in His feet, through the nerves, tendons, everything in the foot to catch a breath. His heartbeat would have been erratic because He would have developed respiratory acidosis and knew after saying 'Lord, into your hands I commit my spirit.' that it was over, SIX HOURS LATER. Now, my question is, was it worth Christ being “uncomfortable” for us? Satan has made us the most spiritually persecuted nation the world has even seen and we don’t even recognize it. We don’t look at the weight of the cross. We don’t look at the weight of our sin and consider what it is to ignore, go against, or outright deny God in His holiness. “How could God allow suffering here?” is what I hear often, but the evil man brought into the world because of his rejection from the One who gave him everything, our free will murdered truth and life and He still asked His Father to forgive us in His suffering. Read this or don’t, but don’t think you aren’t being persecuted, hunted, and devoured with everything available to us in our entertainment, our purchasing power, and our “feelings” that we cling to so much. His persecution was visceral and agonizing. Ours will certainly lead to that and we’ll go to it with a smile on our face believing what we had was the truth when all along our comfort kept us from the relationship God desires to have with us.