Counting the Costs.

 Counting the Costs

 

If anyone wants to learn more about some of the many meanings of the Sermon on the Mount or what Jesus meant when he spoke to the crowds, please read Tom Bradford’s Lessons from the Torah. This was from lesson 14.

 

For those of us living today who were born in the mid to early part of the 20th century and living in the West, it is hard to accept that now, in the early part of the 21st century, being a Believer is starting to bear a tangible cost, which we could have never anticipated. Being a Believer is no longer an accepted cultural norm nor is it as widely popular. When I was younger man, professing to be a Christian (whether you really were or not) was the expected. In fact, the terms American and Christian were very nearly organically linked. One of the first questions a person might be asked when meeting someone in the local community was "what Church do you go to?" The answer would only rarely be "I don't go to Church" or "I don't believe in God". Today asking such a question is fraught with negative social implications. Being a Believer in Christ is openly criticized in our education system, ridiculed by the mainstream media, and outright rejected and slandered by some of our top level political leadership. It is even called a threat to peace and tolerance by global interests. The general expectation upon Judeo Christianity has become more of an insistence that our faith is to be compartmentalized, unspoken, unrealized in public, and manifested only while we're in Church or Synagogue, or within the privacy of our homes. As a result our beliefs in the God of Israel and in Our Savior Yeshua are something we have become prone to being silent about; we keep it to ourselves for fear of confrontation or finding ourselves on the wrong side of the flow and political correctness of our society.

 

In the Remez interpretation sense, however, Yeshua's words in the 8th Beatitude are referring to the End Times when Believers will be hunted down and severely oppressed, on a worldwide basis. That is, persecution for pursuing righteousness in Christ moves from mere harassment and ridicule (as is now happening in the West) to persecution more as we think of the term; being hated, harmed and murdered. In fact, as we know from Daniel, Jeremiah, Isaiah and Revelation, being a Believer will eventually (in the End Times) be officially considered as making us an enemy of the State.... of global humanity. For now, in the West, the cost of pursuing righteousness is primarily ridicule mostly being incited by the cultural elite. Later the cost may well be our jobs, our personal freedom, and then our lives. I wonder: if so many of us are already reluctant to reveal our faith and instead keeping silent merely to avoid being called out at work or excluded from our desired social circles, what might we do when an admission of faith could bring community exclusion, jail or worse?

 

Some days, the reading is too close to home to ignore. What will we do or say when our beliefs become questioned?

 

Rest well, my friends. You are loved.