Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore, let us go forth to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach. For we have no continuing city here, but we seek one to come.
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When anyone opposes God's truth, he is traveling down the road of insanity, and the more vigorously he opposes what is right, the farther down that road he must go. We only have two choices: either believe the truth or be unreasonable. I have seen a few of God's own children oppose His truth so vehemently that outrageous statements flew out of their mouths, statements which they normally would never have made. This quarreling against truth produces a kind of temporary insanity that, until you have witnessed it yourself, is difficult to imagine. It is both frightening and heart-breaking.
The Bible gives us examples of such rebellious rage against the word of God. When motivated by it, some of God's own people "crossed the line", so to speak, into the dark realm of insanity as they tried to discredit both the truth and the messengers by whom it was sent. The rulers of the Jews were envious of Jesus' popularity among the ordinary citizens of Israel. "The common people heard him gladly", wrote Mark, and when the elders saw that, it infuriated them. They saw Jesus' power and goodness and wisdom as a threat to their status and to their continued control over the nation of God's people.
On one occasion, these rulers sarcastically condemned "the common people" who loved Jesus because, according to them, they were ignorant of the law of Moses. In fact, they said that those ordinary people were cursed because of their ignorance of the Law (Jn. 7:45-49). At another time, Israel's elders boasted of being "Moses' disciples" (Jn. 9:28) rather than Jesus', and in foolish attempts to make a division between Jesus and Moses, they conspired several times to use Moses' commandments to entrap Jesus in his words (e. g. Mt. 22:15-33).
The purpose of these efforts to entrap Jesus was to demonstrate to onlookers that the things Moses wrote, teachings that Israel's rulers claimed to uphold, were contrary to Jesus' teachings. That is what the Pharisees and Sadducees wanted the people to believe about Jesus. They knew that if they could persuade their fellow Israelites that Jesus taught things contrary to Moses' Law, then the people would not follow Jesus any longer. The scribes and Pharisees, as well as other elders in Israel, labored constantly to make themselves appear to be the defenders and protectors of God's commandments through Moses and to make Jesus appear to be the enemy of Moses' Law. And it is this very desire of theirs to appear to be God's designated defenders of the Law that makes one event late in the gospels all the eerier. For in their fervor to destroy Jesus, the rulers of Israel rejected the very Law of Moses that they claimed to uphold, and they incited the multitude of God's people in Jerusalem to do the same. Here is how this strange story came about:
Moses prophesied to Israel that they would someday reject the direct rule of God over them, wanting a human king instead, so that they would be like other nations in their form of government (Dt 17:14). And just as Moses had foretold, the elders of Israel approached the prophet Samuel in a later century with a demand for a king (1Sam. 8:4-5). Samuel went before the Lord, weeping because of Israel's desire, but his grief could not match God's. Responding to His weeping servant, a grieving Jehovah said, "They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them." God assented to Israel's request, but He required them to follow Moses' instructions concerning who could and could not be king over them. When they chose a king, said God through Moses, the Israelites could by no means choose a foreigner to be king over them. "One from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee; thou mayest not set a stranger over thee which is not thy brother" (Dt. 17:14-15).
What love from God! In effect, He was telling His people, "If you are determined to reject Me, then let Me tell you how to do it in the least harmful way." There is no love anywhere like the love that God has for His people. One would expect that the rulers of the Jews should cling to His wonderful, merciful commandments, and so they appeared to do, until their hatred of Jesus brought out what was really in their hearts.
When the Jewish elders arrested Jesus and brought him before Pontius Pilate, they tried every scheme at their disposal to have him condemned to die. At first, Pilate refused, seeing through their false accusations and discerning that the driving force behind their hatred of this pathetically beaten prisoner was envy (Mk. 15:10). With every passing moment, their rage grew. They finally had Jesus in their clutches, and they were determined not to miss this golden opportunity to have him condemned. As Pilate's resistance to their unjust accusations continued, the flame of the Jewish elders' desire to kill Jesus consumed all sense of justice and reason, and the demon of madness drove them to contradict the very Law that they had all along claimed to love.
The elders of Israel, along with everyone else in the civilized world, knew who was Emperor of Rome at that time. He was Tiberias, an extremely paranoid and perverse man who had ordered the execution of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent Romans for treason, based upon the merest whispers of accusation. His paranoia turned brother against brother, friend against friend, mother against daughter, husband against wife, as people in Rome rushed to the authorities to accuse others before those others could accuse them. To accuse another of making treasonous statements against the Emperor became a very convenient and swift way for one to get rid of any person that one might not like. So filled with fear were the streets of Rome during this time that it was as if a demon of fear ruled the Empire instead of a man. Historians have given to those years an appropriate name: "The Reign of Terror".
Knowing all of this, and knowing that Pilate would cave in to fear if he thought he would be accused of conspiring against the Emperor, the Jewish elders finally resorted to threatening Pilate with an accusation of treason. Jesus, they said, claimed to be a king. How could Pilate, then, refuse to execute him? Was Pilate friendly to a man who would rebel against the Emperor? Pilate understood exactly what they were suggesting, and there was little that he could do about it. The final blow to his resolve to release Jesus was the cry of the multitude that had followed the Jewish elders to Pilate's Judgment Hall, "WE HAVE NO KING BUT CAESAR!"
In other words, the Jews were saying to Pilate, "WE are loyal subjects to Tiberias Caesar because we want this rebel killed . . . Now, where do you stand?" Pilate was trapped. When faced with the certainty of being reported as lenient to a man who claimed to be king instead of Caesar, he felt he had no choice but to order Jesus to be crucified.
Those who claimed to love to protect the Law of Moses, which said that they should never own a foreigner as king, now demanded Jesus' execution on the grounds that they owned no king but Caesar. Their fierce opposition to the truth of God had driven them into a raging madness. Under normal circumstances, most of these Israelites would have expressed strong dislike for Caesar and his rule over them. They wanted Rome's legions to leave their land-when they were sane. Under normal circumstances, many of them would have opposed Roman rule by quoting the Law, where it is written that Israelites should have no foreign king. But now, their ability to reason was shattered by their passionate hatred of the Son of God, and in their furor, they uttered words that they themselves knew were evil, but they could not at that point control themselves.
Many of God's children in our time are taught that to be born again is to "get saved" and that if someone is born again, then he should claim that he is a already saved. On one occasion some years ago now, I had the opportunity to show some zealous children of God, from the Scriptures, that such was not the case and that salvation is the future reward for those believers who stand true to Christ until the end. Conversion is when we are born again, and salvation is when we receive our new, glorified bodies at the return of Jesus. We have not received our salvation now, just because we have left the ways of sin, any more than the Israelites had reached the Promised Land just because they had escaped from Egypt. They had to cross the wilderness with God to reach Canaan, and we have to live in this world faithful to Christ in order to receive our promised inheritance.
The people at that meeting did not believe what I was telling them, and as the discussion continued, they became increasingly hostile in their attitude and tone. At one point, as I reasoned with them from the writings of Paul and others in the Bible, and as it became increasingly apparent that those holy men did not support the doctrine that these precious but misguided saints had been taught, the anger of one woman in this assembly of "Charismatic" believers, erupted.
"'Paul', 'Paul', 'Paul'", she said, her words dripping with sarcasm as she mocked my references to Paul's writings. "Why don't you ever say anything about Jesus?" she demanded.
I replied with all the humility that I knew how to show, "Well, Jesus said several times, 'He that shall endure to the end shall be saved.'"
She was not favorably impressed, but she did become quiet.
I continued answering, as best I could, the questions that now were beginning to be shot at me like arrows. It seemed to me that the truth was being made very clear for them. I even dared to entertain hope that some would understand. But finally, as I responded to one question by referring to Paul's words about our great need for patience so that we could be saved in the end (Rom. 8:24-25), Brother Asa, one of the leaders of this group of saints, burst out with great bitterness, "I don't care if it IS in the Bible; I know I'm already saved!"
Now, I felt certain that Asa cared whether or not something was written in the Bible, just as I felt certain that his wife, the angry woman mentioned above, respected whatever Paul had to say about anything. But their opposition to the simple truth of Christ had driven them both down the road of insanity to the point that they would dare to say blasphemous words that they would not ordinarily have said. She, scorning Paul and his writings, and he, condemning the Bible itself if it contradicted what he believed.
The conversation had now gone far enough. I knew that I must drop the subject and take my leave of the assembly. I did not want to provoke Asa or anyone else to go any farther down the road they were on that night. I knew that the Lord might hold me accountable if I willingly provoked His children beyond their strength.
It is unreasonable to oppose the truth of God, and if opposition is pursued with vigor, unreasonableness can evolve into sheer insanity. I have seen it happen in the lives of some otherwise precious and intelligent children of God, and it is a frightening scene. The experience taught me to fear before God because none of us is immune. The lesson for us is to stay humble, ever ready to listen, and always slow to speak. Jesus said it best in the garden of Gethsemene after he prayed to his Father not to send him to the cross: "Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done." With that attitude, the attitude of a servant, we will never wander away from the light and into the heavy fog of madness.