100 Prison Meditations: Cries of Truth from Behind the Iron Curtain (7 page)

Why Did Jesus Choose a Devil as an Apostle?

Under Communist pressure, some pastors became renegades. Does this annul the value of their messages of times before?

John records Jesus as saying, “‘Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?’ He spoke of Judas Iscariot” (John 6:70,71). If Jesus knew Judas was a devil, why did He choose him to be an apostle?

We learn the Word of God from the psalms of David, a murderer and adulterer, who normally should have spent his life in prison; from Solomon, never satiated with women and in the end an idolater; from Peter who turned coward when courage was required. God chose these men to teach us to distinguish between the message and the sins of the messengers, to accept our teachers in spite of their weaknesses and their great sins. If we were to reject works of art produced by immoral men, there would remain almost no great works of art.

We are all strengthened by the hymns: “There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins,” and “God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.” These and other familiar evangelical songs were composed by William Cowper, who later became a national poet of Britain, but never again used his gift in the service of God.

Cowper wrote in his hymn that sinners plunged beneath the blood of Christ lose all their guilty stains. But about himself he wrote, “There is no encouragement in the Scripture so comprehensive as to include my case, nor any consolation so effectual as to reach it.” He admitted the free forgiveness of God’s love to every case except his own: “I believe myself the only instance of a man to whom God will promise everything and perform nothing.”

Does this tragic change of attitude, which Cowper kept until his death, diminish his value as a hymnist? We have to distinguish between the song and the composer.

In the West, the lives of political leaders, high-ranking officials, and even church leaders are probed with such thoroughness that even the archangels might not be found faultless if submitted to such examination. It may be better to simply say, “Does this man perform his political, economical, and religious duties well?” The rest belongs to God. No one is without sin and even men who have committed grave offenses have been useful in the kingdom of God.

Perhaps it was to teach us this that Jesus went to the extreme of appointing a devil as an apostle. He could not have chosen worse than that.

Why Did Jesus Not Allow Himself to Be Made a King?

When Jesus perceived that the Jews would make Him a king, He departed (John 6:15). Surely He would have been a better king than Herod and He must have known it. Why, then, did He not accept?

We can only postulate His motives.

One reason would be that the choice would not be His. Nations are fickle: today they elect a king; tomorrow they overthrow him. Christ does not accept the roles we choose for Him. The choices must be His. His decision was to be a Savior for eternal life rather than a king in this life.

On the other hand, the fact that He was a good Savior does not prove that He would have been a good king over Judea, just as a good Sunday school teacher might not necessarily be a good prime minister.

As man, He sometimes showed utter indifference toward human suffering, just as He could also show compassion. None of these attitudes dominated Him.

He chose among them. He was told about innocent Galileans killed by Pilate. A kingly person in the earthly sense would have shown indignation and would have organized the tyrant’s overthrow. Jesus said simply, “Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:2,3).

He is told about a catastrophe, a tower that has collapsed killing eighteen people. Jesus does not give instructions about building more safely in the future, nor does He organize relief for families of the victims. He repeats the above words and makes this another occasion for teaching repentance. He acknowledges only one real motive for grief: that of not being a saint.

This is the correct attitude for a Savior, but not for an earthly king.

When Jesus heals a man inhabited by demons, He causes a large herd of swine to drown (Luke 8:33). Jesus shows callousness toward this destruction of property. But it was acceptable for a Savior to destroy a herd and leave someone impoverished in order to heal His fellow man, and therefore Jesus does not justify Himself.

He achieves the objective to be expected from a Savior. For an earthly king such behavior would not be right.

Jesus predicts a national tragedy: the destruction of the Jewish state. He does not call upon men to risk their lives in defense of their fatherland as a secular king would have to do. He tells His disciples instead to flee (Luke 21:21). The abandonment of their countrymen at such a tragic time forced the final break between Christianity and Judaism.

The Savior had entrusted the disciples with a deposit of eternal truth which had to be kept intact. This was more important than the defense of their land.

So thinks a Savior. An earthly king has another calling. These two purposes do not mix.

Jesus could not be an earthly king, and those who try to make Him the Solver of earthly problems are mistaken.

Why the Outbursts of Rage With Jesus?

The Bible teaches that God is love. It does not teach that He is all love or only love. His actions also have other aspects.

Job said, “God has delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over to the hands of the wicked…He has shattered me; He also has taken me by my neck and…set me up for His target, His archers surround me” (16:11–13). When I read these lines, I envision St. Sebastian pierced with arrows from all sides by the persecutors of Christianity. Job would say that God was the first cause of what Sebastian suffered.

Job surely believed in one God, but speaks as if there were a plurality in Him. He describes God as one would describe an enemy, but says in the same chapter, verse 19, “My witness is in heaven,” which means he visualizes God as one who takes his defense.

Jesus represented God on earth. Whoever saw Him, saw the Father (John 14:9). Jesus could not be all love.

He sometimes burst into what seems to be unmotivated rage. The Pharisee who invited Him to dinner did not make any unkind remark to Jesus or about Him, but merely wondered why Jesus had not washed His hands before the meal. Jesus began to vituperate at all Pharisees, calling them fools and hypocrites.

A lawyer, another guest, tried to do what I also would have done, in an attempt to appease Jesus. In answer, Jesus speaks harshly about all lawyers and even about the lawyers’ fathers (Luke 11:38–52).

Anyone would have objected to such behavior from a guest.

It is best that we accept God and Jesus, His messenger, as they are. It is wrong to impose human ethics and human patterns of behavior upon God.

Jesus wished to die crucified, this being the only way to pay the ransom for human sin. In order to be crucified, He had to arouse violent hatred toward himself. Without this hatred, neither the atoning death of Jesus nor our salvation could take place.

The first apostles had the same aim, knowing that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church. They also willingly evoked hatred toward themselves.

In Rome some Jews believed the message of Paul, others not, but he generalized in accusing the whole nation, “The hearts of this people have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing” (Acts 28:24–27).

Jesus and His apostles often did things that filled others with anger. It was necessary. Similar behavior is practiced sometimes in the underground church today.

About Eternity

Eternity is not endless time. Such a thing does not exist, as there are no spaces without dimension. Eternity is a state in which time no longer exists. The philosopher Boethius has given the definition generally accepted by the Christian church. Eternity is “the total, simultaneous, and perfect possession of an endless life.” As the Greek thinker Parmenides put it: eternity is whole, unique. In eternity nothing has been or will be. “All is at once, one, continuous.”

Imagine a motion picture. When we view it through the projector we see the events recorded on the film successively, and each one seems to be the effect of those preceding. Once in a cinema I found myself praying for an innocent man suffering terribly on the screen. I implored God to save him. But what was to happen was already recorded on the film. My business was only to behold.

We should live with the perspective of eternity in the present, in perfect serenity. Everything has been foreknown, predestined (Romans 8:29). Omar Khayyam expressed it so well:

With earth’s first clay, they did the last man knead
And then of the last harvest sow’d the seed.
Yea, the first morning of creation wrote
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.

Therefore the ideal attitude for a believer is the contemplative one. Jesus says, not just to Martha, but to all men: “You are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part” (Luke 10:41,42). Almost every Christian today would say Mary had made the wrong choice: she had chosen not to prepare a dinner for a dozen hungry men, but quietly to behold the beauty of the guests.

Nowhere does the Bible enjoin us to “Be active,” but on countless occasions we are told, “Behold,” behold without interfering. “Behold, a leper came and worshiped Him” (Matthew 8:2). At that time, men knew no cure for leprosy. Do not interfere unless you are sure of being able to help. Just behold; the Lord will do the rest.

“Behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea” (Matthew 8:24, KJV). One of two things will happen: either you will drown and go to the Father, or you will escape and live for the Father. So, do not panic but simply behold. In all things, the bigger the fuss, the more discordant the results.

We are not yet in eternity, but we can catch a glimpse of it by passing as much time as possible in quiet contemplation.

The Quest for God

The quest for God is old. An Ugaritic poem, “Ludlul bel nemequi” (“I’ll praise the Lord of wisdom”), dating from 2500 b.c., contains the moving verse:

In Isaiah 55:9, God tells us, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”

Men seek the right relationship with God but because His will, His predilections, and His thoughts are unknown to us, we tremble at every step that it might sever the loving relationship.

Such fear disappears only when we pass from relationship with God to possession of God.

In Jesus, the Son of God became man. A marriage feast between the divine and the human natures took place.

I can now say, “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine” (Song 6:3). He is my possession. He disposes of me, but I also dispose of Him. It is no longer a relationship between two entities who can at any moment become separate. The barrier is broken by Christ. God is no longer alone, and the tormented heart of man is no longer single. The heart now responds to God in Shakespeare’s words: “No more can I be severed from your side, than can yourself in two divide” (
Henry VI
).

The difficulty of not understanding God’s way disappears. “Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why have You made me like this?’” (Romans 9:20). The soul which possesses God knows that His control of the world cannot be judged by man’s myopic view. “The deceived and the deceiver are His” (Job 12:16). He who possesses God is satisfied with this and asks no questions.

On the last day, the Lord will say to some, “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23). The Creator longs to know His creation.

He created us, but not as creatures who would remain apart from Himself; He created us that we might live and move and have our being in Him (Acts 17:28). He desires union with us in eternal embrace and not as a knower/known duality. Those rejected in the end will be those who have not realized this and have remained knowers
about
God, but who do not know Him intimately through communion with His Son.

They have had a relationship with a distant God, perhaps even a good relationship, prophesying in His name and casting out devils and doing many wonderful works (Matthew 7:22), but they remained separate from God, unpossessed of Him. They did not belong to their Beloved, and their Beloved was not theirs.

In our quest to know God, we find eternal life. “This is eternal life, that they may
know
You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3).

Relative Weight of Wonders

When I wondered why God does not free us through an angel, as it happened when St. Peter was in jail, I remembered in Acts 2, there are 27 verses about the teachings given by apostle Peter and only nine words about miracles: “many wonders and signs were done through the apostles” (verse 43).

Miracles play a minor role in the Christian religion primarily because it is too easy to regard as miraculous what is not.

Missionaries who went to the Ambrim tribe in the New Hebrides preached without success until they took out their artificial teeth and put them back again. This was the start of a breakthrough. The chief exclaimed that the gods had come to them in the likeness of white men.

Many healings considered miraculous have no more value than that, although I myself have also experienced real miracles of reconstituted health.

What takes place after the miracle can also be a problem. In Shakespeare’s
Henry VI
, when the king heard about a blind man wonderfully cured, he said, “By his sight his sin is multiplied.”

If regeneration does not accompany the cure, the former blind man will be possessed by new passions which will make him a worse man than before. This is also true of other infirmities. I have personally known blind persons healed to the great detriment of their souls.

We should also have in view that some of the biblical miracle stories derive from questionable translations. We are told that Elijah was fed by ravens—
orevim
in Hebrew (1 Kings 17:6). The same Hebrew word is used in Isaiah 13:20 for “Arabs.” What if Arabs fed the prophet?

There have been so many miracles in the course of history. They do not usually convince anyone except sometimes the person who benefits. Jesus told those who sought Him, “You seek Me, not because You saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled” (John 6:26).

In the search for miracles, what counts is the satisfaction of the desires of the self. But Jesus teaches us to deny ourselves. If the self is not put to death, every miracle only increases the demand for more and magnifies egoism. So the Bible does not emphasize miracles, but rather the teaching that brings about new birth.

Let us walk securely according to the biblical teachings, and if God does a miracle, let us rejoice.