Should we protest persecution?

Hey, thanks again for sending in questions related to our recent sermons. This last week, as we’re continuing our series in the Upper room, we got to the passage where Jesus tells his disciples to expect trouble, expect persecution. They’ll be kicked out of the synagogues, some of them even killed as they persecuted Jesus.

They will persecute his followers. So we said we should expect a cost for following Jesus.

If people hated Jesus, they will hate us. We shouldn’t expect any less than that. We shouldn’t be surprised when we run into trials. So the question comes in this week is, should we protest persecution? Should we just let it happen?

Should we fight against it? If we see persecution in our world, should we intervene to stop it? I would say we get a mixed picture in the Bible, in the Book of Acts, after Jesus ascends into heaven and the early church starts to spread and they do start to experience persecution, we get various pictures of how leaders in those days responded to the persecution.

Acts chapter four, where it really kind of begins. You know, they’re told, don’t talk in this name anymore.

And then the believers get together and they pray, and their prayer is, you know, God, consider these threats that we face and give us boldness. They don’t even pray for the threats to end. Their real prayer is give us boldness. And, hey, God, just want to draw your attention to. We are receiving threats and want to make sure that whatever you want to do with that, you do with that.

That’s their prayer. You have to imagine immediately following crucifixion, resurrection, and their minds have kind of been turned upside down. They’re thinking, the worst thing in the thing that we thought was the worst thing in the world. Jesus being crucified actually ended up being the best thing in the world.

What gave us salvation, reconciliation to God.

So now that we’re facing a new troublesome scenario, we don’t even know whether we should pray for it to end. We, because the last thing we thought was terrible, ended up being great. And so now here’s a new thing. So we don’t know if we should pray for it to end. Let’s just make sure God knows about it.

That’s their prayer. And God, give us boldness because we know we need boldness. That’s one way they handled it then. But Paul later, Acts 22, and the crowds are against him. He’s about to get flogged by some tribunal.

He looks up at the person about to flog him and he says, are you allowed to do this to a Roman citizen who hasn’t been tried, and the guy jumps back all surprised. And so Paul is using his rights as a Roman citizen to avoid being hit. And then later in the book of Acts chapter 25, Paul appeals to Caesar, presumably maybe because he thought he was going to get a better trial there.

However, earlier, Paul had this vision of God wanted him to go to Rome. And so perhaps Paul saying, I want to appeal to Caesar didn’t have anything to do with getting out of persecution.

It had to do with God telling him that God wanted Paul to go to Rome. And so we see the disciples and Paul, how they handle persecution isn’t uniform across all different instances. Acts chapter 5, I forgot to mention, the disciples are flogged and released, and they rejoice for being counted worthy of suffering for Jesus name.

So we have a prayer of consider their threats. We have them rejoicing.

And then we have Paul saying, hey, are you allowed to do this to a Roman citizen?

Putting all that together, I would say one, persecution shouldn’t bother us. As we said in the sermon, Jesus said to expect it, same as Peter did. It shouldn’t bother us. It’s okay, certainly, to use our rights as American citizens, since that’s the country we live in, to try to lessen the persecution.

You know, we can appeal to courts, we can use the systems that are in place to try to get out of it.

That’s okay. But I want us to move toward what those disciples did in Acts chapter five, that we rejoice that we get to represent Christ and that we do it faithfully. And if we face persecution, we say, hey, our Lord and Master faced this same kind of resistance. And because we are receiving the same kind of resistance, it must mean that we are preaching the same message he was preaching.

We are living the same kind of lives that he was living.

And that is an honor that we have represented him faithfully. So I would want us to move in that direction, even if we are using our rights to sometimes lessen what we face. So thanks for the question. We’ll see you next time.