Jojo Agot

Christian-bashing

In modern America, Judeo-Christian beliefs are often held up to ridicule and disdain by the media. How ironic that the free speech forum that they utilize is ultimately a gift of Christianity- a fact that you could easily miss on Larry King, David Letterman or Oprah.

If you went to Saudi Arabia, you’d never hear a talk show discussing whether Muhammad was really the prophet of Allah. Muslim converts to Christianity are summarily executed in Muslim lands. At last check, Salman Rushdie (author of Satanic Verses) was still in hiding.

If you went to Israel, you wouldn’t hear a broadcast discussing whether Jesus was the Christ (Messiah). Messianic Jews (who believe Jesus is the Christ) have even been expelled or threatened to be expelled from Israel.

If you were in India, you wouldn’t hear an open discussion on whether sacred cows should be eaten. And if you were in China, with its atheistic base, you wouldn’t hear a discussion on whether citizens should be allowed to leave or return to China at will.

We enjoy free speech and other civil liberties precisely because of our Christian heritage.

Source: D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (Thomas Nelson, 2005)

Preconceptions

[This] is how heresies have arisen. The heretics were never dishonest men; they were mistaken men. They should not be thought of as men who were deliberately setting out to go wrong and to teach something that is wrong; they have been some of the most sincere men that the church has ever known. What was the matter with them?

Their trouble was this: they evolved a theory and they were rather pleased with it: then they went back with this theory to the Bible, and they seemed to find it everywhere. If you read half a verse and emphasize over-much some other half verse elsewhere, your theory is soon proved.

Now obviously, this is something of which we have to be very wary. There is nothing so dangerous as to come to the Bible with a theory, with preconceived ideas, with some pet idea of our own, because the moment we do so, we shall be tempted to over-emphasize one aspect and under-emphasize another.

Source: D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, Studies In The Sermon In The Mount (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; 1 v. ed edition, 1958)

Of Suicide and Proper Biblical Context

Always be mindful of reading the Bible in its proper context.

There is an old joke I heard years ago about a person who desperately wanted to know the will of God for his life. He closed his eyes, opened his Bible at random and pointed his finger on the page. He believed that he will know God’s will from the three verses that he will read at random.

The verses he picked were Luke 22: 4, Acts 1: 18 and the other half of Luke 10: 37. Taken together, this is what he got:

“And Judas went to the chief priests and the officers of the temple guard and discussed with them how he might betray Jesus.”

“With the reward he got for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out.”

“Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.””

One Solitary Life

He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village where He worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty. Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher.

He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family or owned a home. He never went to college. He never visited a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place where He was born. He did none of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but Himself.

He was only thirty-three when the tide of popular opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied Him. He was turned over to His enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves.

While He was dying, His executioners gambled for His garments, the only property He had on earth. When He was dead, He was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend. Nineteen long centuries have come and gone, and today He is the central figure of the human race.

All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as that one solitary life.

Source: James Allan Francis, The Real Jesus and Other Sermons (Philadelphia et al.: The Judson Press, 1926), p. 123.

Jesus and History

Jesus Christ, the greatest man who ever lived, changed virtually every aspect of human life—and most people don’t know it. The greatest tragedy of the Christmas holiday each year is not so much its commercialization (gross as that is), but its trivialization. How tragic it is that people have forgotten Him to whom they owe so very much.

Jesus says in Revelation 21:5, “Behold, I make all things new.” (Behold! [idou in Greek]: “Note well,” “look closely,” “examine carefully.”) Everything that Jesus Christ touched, He utterly transformed. He touched time when He was born into this world; He had a birthday and that birthday utterly altered the way we measure time.

Someone has said He turned aside the river of ages out of its course and lifted the centuries off their hinges. Now, the whole world counts time as B.C., Before Christ, and A.D. Untartunately, in most cases, our illiterate generation today doesn’t even know that A.D. means Anno Domini, “in the year of the Lord.”

It’s ironic that the most vitriolic atheist writing a propagandistic letter to a friend must acknowledge Christ when he dates that letter. The atheistic Soviet Union was forced in its constitution to acknowledge that it came into existence in 1917, in the “year of the Lord.” When you see row after row of books at the library, every one of them—even if it contains anti-Christian diatribes—has a reference to Jesus Christ because of the date.

Source: D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (Thomas Nelson, 2005), pp. 1- 2.

The Only Prejudice We Tolerate

We live in an age in which only one prejudice is tolerated– anti-Christian bigotry. Michael Novak, the eminent columnist, once said that today you can no longer hold up to public pillorying and ridicule groups such as African-Americans or Native Americans or women or homosexuals or Poles, and so on. Today, the only group you can hold up to public mockery is Christians. Attacks on the Church and Christianity are common. As Pat Buchanan once put it, “Christian-bashing is a popular indoor sport.”

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