WARNING: Your Brain Will Hurt!!!

We protect, sacrifice and are even willing to endure torture for those things that are precious to us, our children for one and our possessions for another. Now holding your possessions as precious is not entirely wrong. My sister in-law would probably protect, sacrifice and endure torture on behalf of her piano. She is not materialistic but she does make her living teaching piano so her piano is precious to her and therefore arguably it is a necessity for her and worth suffering for.

But do we feel the same way about the gospel? The gospel is an idea but is it precious enough to us to need to be protected, sacrificed or tortured for? If the Gospel were a person what would you be willing to do to for it? The Gospel is a person, Jesus of Nazareth, but Jesus is no more the Gospel than Barak Obama is currently the president of the United States of America. Barak Obama is the President and there are people that are sworn to protect, sacrifice and endure torture on his behalf, but it is not the man, but rather the office that they were sworn to; the idea that Barak Obama is the President of The United States of America. Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, but what really matters is the idea of the Messiah; the Gospel which is God's plan to reconcile men to himself. To clarify, just like the President of the United States of America is an office, so too is the Messiah and just like Barak Obama's extraordinary value comes from his being the President so does the extraordinary value of Jesus of Nazareth come from his being the Messiah.

We are not called to be loyal subject of Jesus, we are called to be loyal subjects of the Messiah (the one who brings the Gospel) and that loyalty is what is supposed to cause us to be loyal subjects of Jesus. So the question I am putting before you is not how much do you love Jesus, but how much do you value, how much do you love and how loyal are you to the idea of the Gospel, God's plan to reconcile men to himself?

Is your loyalty to the man Jesus, or to the Messiah? If somehow it was discovered that Jesus was not the Messiah but rather it is someone else would you still be loyal to the Gospel, the idea that men can be reconciled to God? In many if not most of the cases of persecution this is the crux of the matter. Muslims kill Christians because they believe that Muhammad teaches the correct way to be reconciled to God and that is often the basis for a Muslim to convert to Christianity; they have concluded that it is Jesus and not Muhammad that teaches the correct way for a person to be reconciled to God. The Catholic Church persecuted the reformers because the Catholic Church believed that they taught the correct way to be reconciled to God, no one was arguing about Jesus being the teacher, but rather about how to interpret the teacher.

I will admit this is heady stuff because the only way to answer the question is to force the idea that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah away from the idea that there is a way for a person to be reconciled to God. Then a person can step back for a moment and ask where their loyalty lies and if a cult of personality has been built up around Jesus which has undermined the Gospel.