"The Time Is Coming"

If you haven't read my post from yesterday I want to suggest that you do so before you read this new one or you might not be able to make a critical connection. We're walking our way carefully through Jesus' last teaching session with his Apostles before his arrest, trial and crucifixion. John is the only one of his biographers who gives us much detail about Jesus' final meeting with these very ordinary Jewish men and the information we obtain from it is truly remarkable. One more example:

"All this I have told you so that you will not go astray. They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God. They will do such things because they have not known the Father or me. I have told you this so that when the time comes you will remember that I warned you. I did not tell you this at first because I was with you." John 16:1-4

Now there's a great recruiting poster - put out of the synagogue in social disgrace and ultimately killed in the name of God! If I put myself in their shoes, I'm thinking, "ARE YOU SERIOUS?! No way. Maybe I need to re-think this deal. Think I'm going back to fishing or farming or just sitting in the shade."

As a Christian, far removed in space and time from those men, to me the most remarkable statement here is about the ignorance of those who would treat them in such a way. We're talking about their relatives, former schoolmates, childhood friends, people they had known all their lives turning their backs on them with utter contempt, all because "they have not known the Father or me." That statement surely generated some very difficult discussion among those men because in the theology they had always known, Yahweh was the very center and core of their existence. Jesus' strong statement that they had not "known the Father" had to be quite difficult for those men to process.

My spirit swells with appreciation and gratitude for those 12 men who braved unimaginable challenges and constant life and death threats to carry out the mission of their Lord and ours. Eventually, all of them died a violent death, with the possible exception of John, and today we stand on their brave shoulders. I am very thankful to John for giving us all of this detail found nowhere else in the New Testament. He was there, he saw and heard it all and for me his testimony is sufficient for me to believe.  HALLELUJAH!