Losing to win
This week's study is on Romans 12:1-2:
These verses come after a long lesson from Paul to the Roman Gentiles he wrote the letter to about Israel. Israel was persecuting the church. Still. Decades earlier, Israel had betrayed Jesus and forced the government to execute him in cold blood. The Gentile Christians hated the Jews. But Paul was like "God loves the Jews too, and even though they're being your enemies right now, God has in mind a greater good than what you see." Paul praises God and then shares these verses, which fly in the face of what is natural for people to do.
Instead of telling the Christians to gun up and defend themselves and their churches and their culture, Paul tells them to offer their bodies as living sacrifices. Instead of taking the fight to the Jews, who were in the wrong, he tells them to lose. It's a continuation of Jesus' teaching to turn the other cheek It is an easy lesson to digest when you're sitting in a theologians chair, but very difficult to digest when it's your cheek that's getting slapped, and when you're the one getting beaten in the streets by thugs with pipes and chains, trying to intimidate you into submitting to their dead religion.
It's natural for us to want to rise up and destroy people who do that to us. Every time I hear about Christians being persecuted, I am enraged. I want to beat and torture the people doing that to them. It breaks my heart to hear about how mean people are to Christians in the Muslim world, and in godless Communist nations. But Paul (and Jesus, for you people who like to nitpick everything Paul writes) says that it's not our fight. And not only is it not our fight, but we're to accept it, and go along with it. It blows my mind!
I can identify a bit with Peter when his best friend Jesus was ambushed in the early morning hours by thugs bent on shaming and killing him. (Think SWAT team.) Peter drew his sword and took a swing at one of the attackers. Imagine how angry he must have been to see that happen! And no amount of Jesus telling him in advance would probably have prepared him for it. Nobody's like "Oh, this is the moment where this great man I love and admire is going to get dragged off and beaten and killed. That's fine." But Jesus was not there to win a swordfight.
So decades later, these same scoundrels who got Jesus killed were still persecuting his people, torturing them, killing them, slandering them to the authorities to get them arrested, having their property confiscated, etc. People in the church were probably furious about it. But Paul told them to just take it. Be pansies. Lose the fight.
How is getting beaten "a holy and pleasing proper form of worship?" You might ask Jesus that as he was beaten and whipped, slandered, and nailed to the cross, while his few possessions were confiscated by the corrupt state. How is that winning? Because God is greater. Eternity belongs to him. What is the span of our lives in the context of eternity? It's like getting pricked by a needle at a blood drive.
The world thinks in terms of that tiny span of time. It doesn't understand anything outside of that context. It's Satan's realm, because Satan will be cast into the lake of fire when the world ends. That is all of the time he has, forever, but it's not all of the time we have. But the world's values are based in that. And living in the world, we adopt those values if we don't know any better.
So think of all of the stupid political causes we get caught up in: Abortion. Gay Marriage. Prayer in Schools. Illegal Immigration. The US 2016 Elections. The Slandering of Christians by the Media. Gun Control. Government Corruption. These are all things that the church and various Christian groups campaign over, but what do any of them have to do with the gospel? How is your position on any of them going to express Christ's love and grace to a world of people who haven't yet entered eternity? And those aren't even the same level of outrage as having a mob of thugs drag you out of your car and beat you because they saw a Bible on the seat next to you.
There are people in our world who are our enemies right now. They persecute us, attack our families, steal our property, kill the people we love, protect and glorify the people we hate, and slander us and our beliefs. But fighting them in any form other than stating the truth is not our fight. If you read the Bible, our destiny in this world is to lose, not to win. Winning is for eternity, by the grace of Jesus Christ dying on the cross for our sins.
Religious Christian zealots drive me crazy. A couple of the disciples were Zealots, and Jesus had to keep disappointing them by demonstrating that he wasn't a political Christ. He didn't come back to reverse the flood of Romans swarming the Holy Land. He didn't take the throne in Palestine to make Israel great again. He didn't take the possessions of the rich to relieve the suffering of the poor. He got arrested on trumped up charges, tortured, slandered, and killed. He lost. Or that's how it would have looked to any of us who were there at the time.
When I think of zealots, I think of the failed student uprising in Iran, where thugs on motorcycles would rush the crowds with baseball bats and beat people who were saying things they didn't like. Some of them brought guns and shot people. From their perspective, they were protecting what was right and holy. But what evil they did! When we're pushing people and attacking them and "discipling" them into doing what we think is right, we're like those thugs. We ride in in the name of order and enforce rules we think are right. But from the perspective of the people we ride up on, we're vicious thugs.
For the record: Jesus won. And he won big. Nothing the Israelis or Romans did to him mattered one bit in the long run. They did everything they could, and he still won. Satan mobilized everything he had, and all it did was help Jesus win harder. Satan is the eternal loser. He's going down in flames.
Imagine if Jesus was conformed to the thinking of the world and not to the thinking of eternity. "I don't want to put my mother through that if I get arrested." "My carpentry business will really suffer if people hear about what I'm saying." "I've seen what those soldiers can do to a man, and there's no way I'm going to be nailed to one of those crosses like that!" Would he have died for our sins, if that was his perspective?
Instead of taking the perspective of the world, we should seek the perspective of eternity. Being generous is easier when you have the treasures of heaven at your disposal. Being merciful is easier when you have access to all of God's limitless grace. Being brave is easier when even the worst tortures and most horrific deaths will be reversed forever. We can try to be zealots and protect what we have now, or we can be Christians in the sense of being like Christ. Jesus lost the silly fight the world picked with him, and won eternally in every way that matters. We should try for that ourselves.
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
These verses come after a long lesson from Paul to the Roman Gentiles he wrote the letter to about Israel. Israel was persecuting the church. Still. Decades earlier, Israel had betrayed Jesus and forced the government to execute him in cold blood. The Gentile Christians hated the Jews. But Paul was like "God loves the Jews too, and even though they're being your enemies right now, God has in mind a greater good than what you see." Paul praises God and then shares these verses, which fly in the face of what is natural for people to do.
Instead of telling the Christians to gun up and defend themselves and their churches and their culture, Paul tells them to offer their bodies as living sacrifices. Instead of taking the fight to the Jews, who were in the wrong, he tells them to lose. It's a continuation of Jesus' teaching to turn the other cheek It is an easy lesson to digest when you're sitting in a theologians chair, but very difficult to digest when it's your cheek that's getting slapped, and when you're the one getting beaten in the streets by thugs with pipes and chains, trying to intimidate you into submitting to their dead religion.
It's natural for us to want to rise up and destroy people who do that to us. Every time I hear about Christians being persecuted, I am enraged. I want to beat and torture the people doing that to them. It breaks my heart to hear about how mean people are to Christians in the Muslim world, and in godless Communist nations. But Paul (and Jesus, for you people who like to nitpick everything Paul writes) says that it's not our fight. And not only is it not our fight, but we're to accept it, and go along with it. It blows my mind!
I can identify a bit with Peter when his best friend Jesus was ambushed in the early morning hours by thugs bent on shaming and killing him. (Think SWAT team.) Peter drew his sword and took a swing at one of the attackers. Imagine how angry he must have been to see that happen! And no amount of Jesus telling him in advance would probably have prepared him for it. Nobody's like "Oh, this is the moment where this great man I love and admire is going to get dragged off and beaten and killed. That's fine." But Jesus was not there to win a swordfight.
So decades later, these same scoundrels who got Jesus killed were still persecuting his people, torturing them, killing them, slandering them to the authorities to get them arrested, having their property confiscated, etc. People in the church were probably furious about it. But Paul told them to just take it. Be pansies. Lose the fight.
How is getting beaten "a holy and pleasing proper form of worship?" You might ask Jesus that as he was beaten and whipped, slandered, and nailed to the cross, while his few possessions were confiscated by the corrupt state. How is that winning? Because God is greater. Eternity belongs to him. What is the span of our lives in the context of eternity? It's like getting pricked by a needle at a blood drive.
The world thinks in terms of that tiny span of time. It doesn't understand anything outside of that context. It's Satan's realm, because Satan will be cast into the lake of fire when the world ends. That is all of the time he has, forever, but it's not all of the time we have. But the world's values are based in that. And living in the world, we adopt those values if we don't know any better.
So think of all of the stupid political causes we get caught up in: Abortion. Gay Marriage. Prayer in Schools. Illegal Immigration. The US 2016 Elections. The Slandering of Christians by the Media. Gun Control. Government Corruption. These are all things that the church and various Christian groups campaign over, but what do any of them have to do with the gospel? How is your position on any of them going to express Christ's love and grace to a world of people who haven't yet entered eternity? And those aren't even the same level of outrage as having a mob of thugs drag you out of your car and beat you because they saw a Bible on the seat next to you.
There are people in our world who are our enemies right now. They persecute us, attack our families, steal our property, kill the people we love, protect and glorify the people we hate, and slander us and our beliefs. But fighting them in any form other than stating the truth is not our fight. If you read the Bible, our destiny in this world is to lose, not to win. Winning is for eternity, by the grace of Jesus Christ dying on the cross for our sins.
Religious Christian zealots drive me crazy. A couple of the disciples were Zealots, and Jesus had to keep disappointing them by demonstrating that he wasn't a political Christ. He didn't come back to reverse the flood of Romans swarming the Holy Land. He didn't take the throne in Palestine to make Israel great again. He didn't take the possessions of the rich to relieve the suffering of the poor. He got arrested on trumped up charges, tortured, slandered, and killed. He lost. Or that's how it would have looked to any of us who were there at the time.
When I think of zealots, I think of the failed student uprising in Iran, where thugs on motorcycles would rush the crowds with baseball bats and beat people who were saying things they didn't like. Some of them brought guns and shot people. From their perspective, they were protecting what was right and holy. But what evil they did! When we're pushing people and attacking them and "discipling" them into doing what we think is right, we're like those thugs. We ride in in the name of order and enforce rules we think are right. But from the perspective of the people we ride up on, we're vicious thugs.
For the record: Jesus won. And he won big. Nothing the Israelis or Romans did to him mattered one bit in the long run. They did everything they could, and he still won. Satan mobilized everything he had, and all it did was help Jesus win harder. Satan is the eternal loser. He's going down in flames.
Imagine if Jesus was conformed to the thinking of the world and not to the thinking of eternity. "I don't want to put my mother through that if I get arrested." "My carpentry business will really suffer if people hear about what I'm saying." "I've seen what those soldiers can do to a man, and there's no way I'm going to be nailed to one of those crosses like that!" Would he have died for our sins, if that was his perspective?
Instead of taking the perspective of the world, we should seek the perspective of eternity. Being generous is easier when you have the treasures of heaven at your disposal. Being merciful is easier when you have access to all of God's limitless grace. Being brave is easier when even the worst tortures and most horrific deaths will be reversed forever. We can try to be zealots and protect what we have now, or we can be Christians in the sense of being like Christ. Jesus lost the silly fight the world picked with him, and won eternally in every way that matters. We should try for that ourselves.
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