Moment in the Word
Wed, 09/01/2021 - 1:04pm
admin
By:
Edwin Woolsey
Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. Matthew 10:16
Truly, the Church inhabits a very tenuous position in this secular world, and Christ's admonition to be "wise as serpents, and harmless as doves" has never been more true since the days of imperial Rome. However, currently finding ourselves on the wrong side of a fight for the protection and preservation of innocent life, our militancy may return to haunt us in the future.
If Evangelical Christians are in fact "pro-life," then the defiant stance of opposing various measures to slow the spread of a world plague makes our intransigent behavior appear hypocritical after the deaths of 650,000 Americans and 4,470,000 dead globally.
If we really advocate for the preservation of life, then besides merely holding crosses of PVC pipe beside the highway, taking offerings to buy billboard space, or constructing mock cemeteries that represent aborted babies... we might want to actually save lives by quarantining, social distancing, donning masks, or maybe even getting shots... rather than making ineffective symbolic gestures to stroke our egos rather than safeguard life. It's just a thought... but always remember that the unrepentant world studies the discrepancy of our faith under a microscope to marginalize the truth of our witness and cast aspersions on Christ's Gospel. Precisely for this reason St. Peter warned, "...let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men's matters (1 Peter 4:15)," because there is no glory or commendable virtue in duplicity.
Rather than fighting on the wrong side of a political controversy that has absolutely nothing to do with either the preservation of innocent life or the promotion of Jesus' Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20), maybe we should return to Christ's order of being "wise as serpents, and harmless as doves," rather than being meaner than snakes and dumber than a box of rocks!