My Pilgrimage With “Biblical Literalism” Going All The Way To “Do NOT Resist Him Who is Evil”
My Pilgrimage With “Biblical Literalism” Going All The Way To “Do NOT Resist Him Who is Evil”
On Sunday the preacher of the church we were visiting wove the way we can treat the forgotten “un-wars” that America has known, like Korea’s “police action,” into the way that we may be treating the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf: reducing His bloody suffering to some kind of “un-war” that we do not have to take as seriously as His Father expects of us. Being a child of World War Two, where our survival was at stake, that really resonated with me.
However my own reaction to that train of thought took me into my recent decades of struggle with one particular teaching of Jesus that offended the instincts I had developed: “You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you, do NOT resist an evildoer. On the contrary, if anyone slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (Matthew 5:38-39). Jesus’s bloody suffering was His ultimate version of “taking up the cross,” but I eventually discovered that His living out this particular teaching was also supposed to be part of our version of the same.
Growing up in the church almost every Sunday, that “do not resist” teaching was one that I would bump into every now and then. The words of that teaching gradually became familiar, but somehow the obvious shock that it would have caused the original audience that heard Jesus say it never hit me. That may well have been because no preacher or teacher ever spent any time drawing out its implications for their lives. So, I never wrestled with it, and never even seriously thought of adopting it as an instruction for me personally – it was just “there,” in the same bucket of irrelevant says into which I had placed “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:38). And I am fairly confident that that is the same condition for the great majority of Church-going Christians: it is just “there.”
As I look back on my life with respect to responding to the doctrines, commands, and promises within the New Testament, one way of describing it is as a history of learning to understand and experience some specific teachings more literally than I had done before.
The very first instance of that happening was when I was perhaps a junior in high school and met a new student that had just moved to our little farm town of Commack (Long Island) from Texas. It turned out that his Church of Christ family, along with five other similar families had sold their homes, quit their jobs simply in order to plant the Church of Christ in little Commack. I was very impressed by such dedication and seriousness about their Christianity and started visiting their Sunday meetings. I also remember being impressed by their having Communion every single Sunday: “the Lords Service on the Lord’s Day” was one of their persistent mottos. They actually had found that passage in Acts 20:7 and just started doing what it had said! That was the first disciplined response to a specific passage of the New Testament that I ever remember seeing practiced: “read it, and then do what it says!” Wow! One more thing that they did made an even greater impression on me, because they were continually emphasizing it – quoting from Peter, that “corresponding to that, baptism SAVES you” and secondly, ““Repent and be baptized, each of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” In our Biblically complacent Methodist Church, I never remember anyone tying together anything they were doing with specific Biblical passages. And I credit those Church of Christ people with introducing me to the basic idea of “read a passage, see what it SEEMS to be saying, and then DO it or BELIEVE it.” So simple conceptually, yet so potentially explosive – depending upon how far you go with it.
But it set of no explosions with me at the time: I was much more interested in being a typical American teenager than a Biblical Christian!
The first such “Biblical literalism” that did make a permanent impact was when I later began preparing for the Methodist ministry in Williamsport, PA. I had to pass by St. Mary’s Episcopal Church every day on the way to college, and they had a daily Holy Communion, which they called “the Eucharist” or even, “the Mass.” I had just surrendered my life to Jesus the year before and was hungry for opportunities to pray with others. So, even though their liturgy, vestments, genuflections and signs of the cross felt rather strange to me, the obvious godliness of their priest, Lee Burnett, strongly attracted me to keep attending on a daily basis. There were usually only a handful of us there, but to me he seemed to somehow BE in the actual presence of God during the celebration of that Holy Communion.
We struck up a friendship, which led to regular conversations at his home. And when we talked about the special service he kept emphasizing that when Jesus had said “this IS my body… blood” He really meant what those words seem to be saying, and that Jesus was really present Even though what he said seemed strange it is hard to argue with a man who merely believes the actual words of Jesus as if He meant what He actually said! At first, my non-sacramental Methodism influenced me to consider such thinking to be crude and superstitious. But even though my thinking went in that direction, my hunger for God kept focusing me on how he seemed somehow to be in the very presence of God during the Communion service. I pondered and actually struggled with God about this idea of Him actually somehow geographically tying Himself to a specific location on Planet Earth – up until then, He had always only been somewhere “up there.”
But I will never forget the very day that He somehow revealed Himself to me during the Consecration prayers. My “eyes of faith” suddenly opened, and I just knew that He was there! And my life has never been the same: and that was – as I recall – sixty-four years ago! Sermons can be wonderful, hymns can be inspiring, but to be in the actual current glorified presence of the One to whom I had handed over my life was overwhelming – and pretty regularly still is! I cannot imagine any form of valid “Christianity” that is not centered around such a glorious mystery! At most Protestant services, even after a great sermon, I come away with a sense that they are describing a recipe for filet mignon rather than eating the filet mignon (so to speak)! It is one thing to intellectually believe that He meant what He said: “where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:20); it is quite another to exercise the faith to recognize Him in the actual WAY that He said to expect Him! If you read those ancient Christians you can often feel their excitement that His invisible Presence is just as full of glory as His visible presence – as long as you exercise the faith that He authorizes us to have!
For me, it is only after God reveals that glorious mystery to you that you can see the meaning of what Jesus had in mind in John 6:
“Truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day, because my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.” What used to confuse me when we were being “taught” that those words had nothing to do with when He said, “This is my body…blood” became both crystal clear and exciting when that brainwashing was replaced by, “His words mean what they SEEM to be saying!”
I used to exegete that passage into some vague abstraction about an “intimate relationship” – which, of course, it does include. But it is describing a relationship that is as fully human as the bodily intimacy of a husband and wife, much more than even an intimate friendship between two people can create!
Sorry: I tend to get carried away describing this event – It’s because I get to relive it in the telling!
But that Eucharistic revelation to me was probably the real beginning of my instinct that Jesus ALWAYS meant some grammatically natural and literal sense of everything that He taught, commanded or promised. It is true that Jesus did speak in metaphors. He said things like “I am the gate for the sheep” and “I am the door for the sheep.” But, as any good communicator will tell you, when you use a metaphor make sure to use one that your audience recognizes as a metaphor. And using “gates” and “doors” as the “entrance” to something are universally understood as metaphors. But to declare that a piece of bread is His “body” and that a cup of wine is His “blood” would never, ever be understood as a metaphor – as a “mystery,” certainly, but never as a metaphor – not unless you are determined to reject what is obvious. Because even Paul declared that, “the bread that we break IS the communion [Greek, “koinonia” “participation” or “sharing”] of the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:16). Instead of boldly and godlessly declaring that “that CANNOT be true” the person who loves and fears God will zipper their lips and then figure out how it MUST be true without turning Jesus into a teacher of cannibalism! I have worked for a long time and found a way that is able to do it, and so could you, if you really wanted to honor both His authority over you and His Creator-ability to have created light by just saying, “let there be light!” Do you not know the creative power in the words of the One by whom, “ALL things were made through Him, and without HIM nothing was made that was made!” (John 1:3)
It took several decades for that new instinct to eventually sink into me and become a conscious principle by which to receive and experience all that is written down in the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles: there is nothing in the doctrines, commands, and promises of Jesus and His apostles that are not to be believe, obeyed, and experienced until Jesus returns! And the sense in which they are to be received is in the plain sense that was possessed by the vast majority of those who were the “saints” to whom most of the New Testament was written, the way that fishermen, farmers, and carpenters talk and think: “those words inspired by God mean what they SEEM to be saying, even if they seem impossible to understand or to accomplish!”
Now I finally get back to where I began this letter to you, about your sermon.
What your train of thought did was to remind me about the specific teaching of Jesus that has created my greatest inner struggling – that “Do NOT resist him who is evil…”
I started paying attention to that teaching now and then after my reconversion to Him in 1972, but back then I mostly applied it to what was obvious from my historical studies of the ancient churches – not engaging in things like the violence of warfare. Their teaching and behavior about it was very clear and well-articulated.
But the more that His teaching and the way that He lived it out sink into me, the more it rattles me. I am a child of World War Two, and the war against those genuinely cruel Nazis and Japanese conquerors is pretty deeply ingrained within me; it feels exceedingly right and just that such wicked people should “get their lumps”! And even more to the point, I was raised by a step-father who loved to accuse both me and his own two sons of almost anything that popped into his head: angrily calling us “lazy” was pretty typical, and periodically things were even ugly. That helped create an instinct within us of needing to be prepared to defend ourselves against being “attacked,” even if, for me, they were only verbal attacks.
So, when Jesus commands us all to abandon that “fight or flight” instinct altogether in that command, it is – to me and probably others as well – undoubtedly the most personally threatening command I can imagine having to deal with. The Satanic “what ifs” that he pops into our imagination about what could possibly happen to us if we do take His command seriously are endless! And in my long ecclesiastical experience, I have no memory of any group of Christians taking His command as seriously as I am now certain that He meant it to be received: The Mennonites come closest to doing so, but even they tend to focus on simply refraining from violent occupations. Individuals in many different Christian churches have entered into His obedience, but not typically because of how their churches discipled them. Mahatma Gandhi articulated and practiced a version of it better than any Christian preacher I have heard – turning your enemy into your friend by not resisting his violence. But the example that impress and even rattled me the most was that story in Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, when she and her sister Betsie were watching a Nazi guard viciously beat one of the women prisoners. Betsie said words to the effect, “Oh that poor person,” and Corrie of course assumed that she was talking about the poor woman. But she wasn’t – she was talking about the guard! She was so sad for his loss of humanity that she had compassion for him and the horrible destiny that he had carved out for himself. When I read that about Betsie it was as if I was reading about someone from a different planet! I could not even conceive of someone not wanting that cruel guard to be destroyed, and here was Betsy having pity for him and the tragedy that was waiting for him! I knew that she was right, but it just did not compute, if you understand what I mean. Betsie was the perfect embodiment of what Jesus had taught, “Do NOT resist him who is evil…”. That evil guard had someone actually interceding for him, with compassion!
Such unworldly and anti-natural compassion that originally used to characterize their goal of being “just a normal Christian” seems to have evaporated from our religion and become converted into something that virtually all “decent” humans can accept – something universally acceptable as “be a good neighbor, and seek to be kind to everyone for as long as you can.” And yet, Jesus’s way of life intends to stretch us far, far more deeply than that!
Because of the very nature of His command, and because of my particular background from childhood, I can think of NONE of His commands that force me to “die to myself” more than this one. As I said, I have a very strong instinct to see the “bad guys” get their due punishment! And I do not think that I am alone in this. Therefore, it only makes sense that such a common instinct is the very reason that He uttered that command, and uttered it in the shocking form that He did.
Yet, the way that He and his post Pentecostal apostles lived that command out show that it does not turn you into another “Casper Milquetoast” – to declare to those who have the power of life and death over you that they are “whitened sepulchers” is nothing poor Casper could ever manage! But when it came to dishing out violence or receiving it, they were all clear – trust in your Creator alone for any rescue that is needed: “You have condemned, you have murdered the righteous, who does NOT resist you,” James reaffirmed. I used to accept the typical reaction to James, that this only “nonresistance” applied only when your culture was as brutal as the Romans, where a citizen had no legal rights. But Paul DID use his LEGAL rights as a Roman citizen when he appealed to Caesar – but never resorted to the sword or his fists, in imitation of His Master. And those ancient Christians continued quite steadfastly for centuries – UNTIL our Church leaders chose to let His Church become integrated into the fabric of their worldly societies, about which Jesus had declared being ruled by the “ruler of this world” (John 12:31, 16:11), and Paul as the “god of this age” (2 Cor. 4:4).
This one command of Jesus is perhaps one of those “make or break” commands that determine ultimately whether we are serious about His “dying to self” or “bearing our cross” or even “ love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” I can think of no other statement of His that draws a “line in the sand” regarding being yielded to both the letter and the spirit underlying what He said and what He stood for! More than any specific command that I can think of, it forces you to face just HOW much you trust God to protect and care for you rather than keeping the right to some of that self-protection for yourself. For me, that radical command and the trust that it implies has become an integral part of His “narrow way” that leads to life, but which few of us “find.” And, although I am surrendered to it, it is something that does not feel at all natural yet – I gotta kill that instinct, or at least say an “amen” while HE does it! After all, what if He looks at each of us and asks specifically, “show me specifically where and when you chose to NOT resist that evil one and decided to overcome that evil with something good that I supplied?!
What good is it to declare that we have been “born again” if we are still picking and choosing which commands and attitudes of our supposed Master we are going to take seriously. If our highest “dying to self” consists of not being sexually sinful or being financially honest when HIS is for us to know what Betsie ten Boom felt like from the inside, then perhaps He is more of an object of our devotion than our Creator and Master for whom we have the same love that was in the heart of Jesus for His Father.
AMEN?
*****************
Reed
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Reed K.
My Pilgrimage With “Biblical Literalism” All The Way To “Do NOT Resist Him Who is Evil”
On Sunday the preacher wove the way we can treat the forgotten “un-wars” that America has known, like Korea’s “police action,” into the way that we may be treating the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf: reducing His bloody suffering to some kind of “un-war” that we do not have to take as seriously as His Father expects of us. Being a child of World War Two, where our survival was at stake, that really resonated with me.
However my own reaction to that train of thought took me into my recent decades of struggle with one particular teaching of Jesus that offended the instincts I had developed: “You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you, do NOT resist an evildoer. On the contrary, if anyone slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (Matthew 5:38-39). Jesus’s bloody suffering was His ultimate version of “taking up the cross,” but I eventually discovered that His living out this particular teaching was also supposed to be part of our version of the same.
Growing up in the church almost every Sunday, that “do not resist” teaching was one that I would bump into every now and then. The words of that teaching gradually became familiar, but somehow the obvious shock that it would have caused the original audience that heard Jesus say it never hit me. That may well have been because no preacher or teacher ever spent any time drawing out its implications for their lives. So, I never wrestled with it, and never even seriously thought of adopting it as an instruction for me personally – it was just “there,” in the same bucket of irrelevant says into which I had placed “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:38). And I am fairly confident that that is the same condition for the great majority of Church-going Christians: it is just “there.”
As I look back on my life with respect to responding to the doctrines, commands, and promises within the New Testament, one way of describing it is as a history of learning to understand and experience some specific teachings more literally than I had done before.
The very first instance of that happening was when I was perhaps a junior in high school and met a new student that had just moved to our little farm town of Commack (Long Island) from Texas. It turned out that his Church of Christ family, along with five other similar families had sold their homes, quit their jobs simply in order to plant the Church of Christ in little Commack. I was very impressed by such dedication and seriousness about their Christianity and started visiting their Sunday meetings. I also remember being impressed by their having Communion every single Sunday: “the Lords Service on the Lord’s Day” was one of their persistent mottos. They actually had found that passage in Acts 20:7 and just started doing what it had said! That was the first disciplined response to a specific passage of the New Testament that I ever remember seeing practiced: “read it, and then do what it says!” Wow! One more thing that they did made an even greater impression on me, because they were continually emphasizing it – quoting from Peter, that “corresponding to that, baptism SAVES you” and secondly, ““Repent and be baptized, each of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” In our Biblically complacent Methodist Church, I never remember anyone tying together anything they were doing with specific Biblical passages. And I credit those Church of Christ people with introducing me to the basic idea of “read a passage, see what it SEEMS to be saying, and then DO it or BELIEVE it.” So simple conceptually, yet so potentially explosive – depending upon how far you go with it.
But it set of no explosions with me at the time: I was much more interested in being a typical American teenager than a Biblical Christian!
The first such “Biblical literalism” that did make a permanent impact was when I later began preparing for the Methodist ministry in Williamsport, PA. I had to pass by St. Mary’s Episcopal Church every day on the way to college, and they had a daily Holy Communion, which they called “the Eucharist” or even, “the Mass.” I had just surrendered my life to Jesus the year before and was hungry for opportunities to pray with others. So, even though their liturgy, vestments, genuflections and signs of the cross felt rather strange to me, the obvious godliness of their priest, Lee Burnett, strongly attracted me to keep attending on a daily basis. There were usually only a handful of us there, but to me he seemed to somehow BE in the actual presence of God during the celebration of that Holy Communion.
We struck up a friendship, which led to regular conversations at his home. And when we talked about the special service he kept emphasizing that when Jesus had said “this IS my body… blood” He really meant what those words seem to be saying, and that Jesus was really present Even though what he said seemed strange it is hard to argue with a man who merely believes the actual words of Jesus as if He meant what He actually said! At first, my non-sacramental Methodism influenced me to consider such thinking to be crude and superstitious. But even though my thinking went in that direction, my hunger for God kept focusing me on how he seemed somehow to be in the very presence of God during the Communion service. I pondered and actually struggled with God about this idea of Him actually somehow geographically tying Himself to a specific location on Planet Earth – up until then, He had always only been somewhere “up there.”
But I will never forget the very day that He somehow revealed Himself to me during the Consecration prayers. My “eyes of faith” suddenly opened, and I just knew that He was there! And my life has never been the same: and that was – as I recall – sixty-four years ago! Sermons can be wonderful, hymns can be inspiring, but to be in the actual current glorified presence of the One to whom I had handed over my life was overwhelming – and pretty regularly still is! I cannot imagine any form of valid “Christianity” that is not centered around such a glorious mystery! At most Protestant services, even after a great sermon, I come away with a sense that they are describing a recipe for filet mignon rather than eating the filet mignon (so to speak)! It is one thing to intellectually believe that He meant what He said: “where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:20); it is quite another to exercise the faith to recognize Him in the actual WAY that He said to expect Him! If you read those ancient Christians you can often feel their excitement that His invisible Presence is just as full of glory as His visible presence – as long as you exercise the faith that He authorizes us to have!
For me, it is only after God reveals that glorious mystery to you that you can see the meaning of what Jesus had in mind in John 6:
“Truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day, because my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.” What used to confuse me when we were being “taught” that those words had nothing to do with when He said, “This is my body…blood” became both crystal clear and exciting when that brainwashing was replaced by, “His words mean what they SEEM to be saying!”
I used to exegete that passage into some vague abstraction about an “intimate relationship” – which, of course, it does include. But it is describing a relationship that is as fully human as the bodily intimacy of a husband and wife, much more than even an intimate friendship between two people can create!
Sorry: I tend to get carried away describing this event – It’s because I get to relive it in the telling!
But that Eucharistic revelation to me was probably the real beginning of my instinct that Jesus ALWAYS meant some grammatically natural and literal sense of everything that He taught, commanded or promised. It is true that Jesus did speak in metaphors. He said things like “I am the gate for the sheep” and “I am the door for the sheep.” But, as any good communicator will tell you, when you use a metaphor make sure to use one that your audience recognizes as a metaphor. And using “gates” and “doors” as the “entrance” to something are universally understood as metaphors. But to declare that a piece of bread is His “body” and that a cup of wine is His “blood” would never, ever be understood as a metaphor – as a “mystery,” certainly, but never as a metaphor – not unless you are determined to reject what is obvious. Because even Paul declared that, “the bread that we break IS the communion [Greek, “koinonia” “participation” or “sharing”] of the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:16). Instead of boldly and godlessly declaring that “that CANNOT be true” the person who loves and fears God will zipper their lips and then figure out how it MUST be true without turning Jesus into a teacher of cannibalism! I have worked for a long time and found a way that is able to do it, and so could you, if you really wanted to honor both His authority over you and His Creator-ability to have created light by just saying, “let there be light!” Do you not know the creative power in the words of the One by whom, “ALL things were made through Him, and without HIM nothing was made that was made!” (John 1:3)
It took several decades for that new instinct to eventually sink into me and become a conscious principle by which to receive and experience all that is written down in the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles: there is nothing in the doctrines, commands, and promises of Jesus and His apostles that are not to be believe, obeyed, and experienced until Jesus returns! And the sense in which they are to be received is in the plain sense that was possessed by the vast majority of those who were the “saints” to whom most of the New Testament was written, the way that fishermen, farmers, and carpenters talk and think: “those words inspired by God mean what they SEEM to be saying, even if they seem impossible to understand or to accomplish!”
What that preacher’s train of thought did to me was to remind me about the specific teaching of Jesus that has created my greatest inner struggling – that “Do NOT resist him who is evil…”
I started paying attention to that teaching now and then after my reconversion to Him in 1972, but back then I mostly applied it to what was obvious from my historical studies of the ancient churches – not engaging in things like the violence of warfare. Their teaching and behavior about it was very clear and well-articulated.
But the more that His teaching and the way that He lived it out sink into me, the more it rattles me. I am a child of World War Two, and the war against those genuinely cruel Nazis and Japanese conquerors is pretty deeply ingrained within me; it feels exceedingly right and just that such wicked people should “get their lumps”! And even more to the point, I was raised by a step-father who loved to accuse both me and his own two sons of almost anything that popped into his head: angrily calling us “lazy” was pretty typical, and periodically things were even ugly. That helped create an instinct within us of needing to be prepared to defend ourselves against being “attacked,” even if, for me, they were only verbal attacks.
So, when Jesus commands us all to abandon that “fight or flight” instinct altogether in that command, it is – to me and probably others as well – undoubtedly the most personally threatening command I can imagine having to deal with. The Satanic “what ifs” that he pops into our imagination about what could possibly happen to us if we do take His command seriously are endless! And in my long ecclesiastical experience, I have no memory of any group of Christians taking His command as seriously as I am now certain that He meant it to be received: The Mennonites come closest to doing so, but even they tend to focus on simply refraining from violent occupations. Individuals in many different Christian churches have entered into His obedience, but not typically because of how their churches discipled them. Mahatma Gandhi articulated and practiced a version of it better than any Christian preacher I have heard – turning your enemy into your friend by not resisting his violence. But the example that impress and even rattled me the most was that story in Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, when she and her sister Betsie were watching a Nazi guard viciously beat one of the women prisoners. Betsie said words to the effect, “Oh that poor person,” and Corrie of course assumed that she was talking about the poor woman. But she wasn’t – she was talking about the guard! She was so sad for his loss of humanity that she had compassion for him and the horrible destiny that he had carved out for himself. When I read that about Betsie it was as if I was reading about someone from a different planet! I could not even conceive of someone not wanting that cruel guard to be destroyed, and here was Betsy having pity for him and the tragedy that was waiting for him! I knew that she was right, but it just did not compute, if you understand what I mean. Betsie was the perfect embodiment of what Jesus had taught, “Do NOT resist him who is evil…”. That evil guard had someone actually interceding for him, with compassion!
Such unworldly and anti-natural compassion that originally used to characterize their goal of being “just a normal Christian” seems to have evaporated from our religion and become converted into something that virtually all “decent” humans can accept – something universally acceptable as “be a good neighbor, and seek to be kind to everyone for as long as you can.” And yet, Jesus’s way of life intends to stretch us far, far more deeply than that!
Because of the very nature of His command, and because of my particular background from childhood, I can think of NONE of His commands that force me to “die to myself” more than this one. As I said, I have a very strong instinct to see the “bad guys” get their due punishment! And I do not think that I am alone in this. Therefore, it only makes sense that such a common instinct is the very reason that He uttered that command, and uttered it in the shocking form that He did.
Yet, the way that He and his post Pentecostal apostles lived that command out show that it does not turn you into another “Casper Milquetoast” – to declare to those who have the power of life and death over you that they are “whitened sepulchers” is nothing poor Casper could ever manage! But when it came to dishing out violence or receiving it, they were all clear – trust in your Creator alone for any rescue that is needed: “You have condemned, you have murdered the righteous, who does NOT resist you,” James reaffirmed. I used to accept the typical reaction to James, that this only “nonresistance” applied only when your culture was as brutal as the Romans, where a citizen had no legal rights. But Paul DID use his LEGAL rights as a Roman citizen when he appealed to Caesar – but never resorted to the sword or his fists, in imitation of His Master. And those ancient Christians continued quite steadfastly for centuries – UNTIL our Church leaders chose to let His Church become integrated into the fabric of their worldly societies, about which Jesus had declared being ruled by the “ruler of this world” (John 12:31, 16:11), and Paul as the “god of this age” (2 Cor. 4:4).
This one command of Jesus is perhaps one of those “make or break” commands that determine ultimately whether we are serious about His “dying to self” or “bearing our cross” or even “ love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” I can think of no other statement of His that draws a “line in the sand” regarding being yielded to both the letter and the spirit underlying what He said and what He stood for! More than any specific command that I can think of, it forces you to face just HOW much you trust God to protect and care for you rather than keeping the right to some of that self-protection for yourself. For me, that radical command and the trust that it implies has become an integral part of His “narrow way” that leads to life, but which few of us “find.” And, although I am surrendered to it, it is something that does not feel at all natural yet – I gotta kill that instinct, or at least say an “amen” while HE does it! After all, what if He looks at each of us and asks specifically, “show me specifically where and when you chose to NOT resist that evil one and decided to overcome that evil with something good that I supplied?!
What good is it to declare that we have been “born again” if we are still picking and choosing which commands and attitudes of our supposed Master we are going to take seriously. If our highest “dying to self” consists of not being sexually sinful or being financially honest when HIS is for us to know what Betsie ten Boom felt like from the inside, then perhaps He is more of an object of our devotion than our Creator and Master for whom we have the same love that was in the heart of Jesus for His Father.
AMEN?
*****************
Reed
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Reed K. Merino, M.Div.
ReedMerino.com
520-262-0475
Blueprint for a Revolution: Building Upon ALL of the New Testament
