“I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for the salvation of all who believe, first of the Jew, and also of the Greek” Romans 1:16.
Paul, in the flesh, had reason to be ashamed of the gospel he preached, because it contradicts everything that is believed to be true and sacred among his contemporaries. For the Jews, the gospel was the worst blasphemy because it affirmed that the Nazarene who died cursed on Calvary was the Messiah, for the Greeks this was the worst nonsense because it affirmed that this Jewish Messiah was God made flesh, that is why Paul knew that when if he opened his mouth to speak of the Gospel, he would be completely rejected. and ridiculed, despised, unless the Holy Spirit intervened and acted in the hearts and minds of his listeners. Today, the primitive gospel is no less scandalous, because it still contradicts the principles or “isms” of contemporary culture: relativism, pluralism, and humanism.
- Are we living in the age of relativism? a belief system based on the absolute certainty that there are no absolutes.
- We hypocritically applaud men who seek the truth.
- But publicly execute anyone arrogant enough to believe they have found it.
- We live in a time of self-imposed darkness and the reason is clear.
- The natural man is a fallen creature.
- Morally corrupt.
- Stubborn in his autonomy (that is.
- In his autonomy).
- He hates God because he is just and he hates his laws because they censure and restrict his evil.
- He hates the truth because it reveals what it really is.
- It almost erased what’s left on your conscience.
- Therefore.
- Does fallen man seek to advance the truth? especially the truth about God? as far as possible.
- It goes as far as necessary to suppress the truth.
- To the point of affirming that such a thing does not exist or that.
- If it does exist.
- It cannot be known or have anything to do with our lives.
- It is not God who hides.
- It is man.
- The problem is not the intellect.
- It is the will.
- Like a man hiding his head in the sand to avoid attack by a rhinoceros.
- Modern man denies the truth of a just God and his moral absolutes.
- Hoping to silence his conscience and forget the judgment he knows.
- To be.
- Inevitable.
- Is the Christian gospel a scandal for man and his culture because it does what it most wants to avoid? wake up from your self imposed? sleep? to the reality of his fall.
- Of his rebellion; It calls you to reject your autonomy and submit to God.
- Through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.
Are we living in a time of pluralism, a belief system that puts an end to the truth, declaring that everything is true, especially when it comes to religion. This may be difficult for the contemporary Christian to understand, but Christians who lived in the first centuries of faith were marked and persecuted as if they were atheists; the culture around them was imbued with theism; the world was full of images of gods, religion was a growing enterprise; men not only tolerated the gods of others, but also The religious world went very well until Christians arrived and declared that “the handmade gods are not gods”. They denied the Caesars the honors they demanded, refused to bow to the other so-called “gods” and confessed jesus. only as Lord of everything. The whole world was left silent in the face of this arrogance and reacted furiously against Christians’ intolerable intolerance of tolerance.
This same scenario abounds in our world today. Against all logic, we are told that all positions on religion and morality are true, however different, contradictory. The most surprising thing about all this is that, thanks to the tireless efforts of the media and academia, this quickly became the opinion of the majority, however, pluralism does not address the problem and does not cure malaria, only anesthesia to the patient so that he no longer feels or thinks, the gospel is a scandal because he awakens man from his sleep and refuses to let him rest on such an illogical basis. How long are they going to liw between two thoughts?If the Lord is God, follow Him; But if it’s Baal, follow him.
The true gospel is radically exclusive. Jesus is not a way, but not all other lanes are the way. What if Christianity took another small step towards a more tolerant ecumenism, and changed the final article?By the indefinite article ‘one’, the scandal would disappear; the world and Christianity could be friends; However, when this happens, Christianity will cease to be Christianity, Christ will be repudiated, and the world will be left without Savior.
We live in an age of humanism. In recent decades, man has struggled to purge God of his conscience and culture. It demolished all the visible altars of the? Only God alive? and he erected monuments for himself, with the zeal of a religious fanatic, he became the center, the measure, and the end of all things. It praises your innate worthiness, demands the honor of your self-worth, and promotes your personal satisfaction and self-realization as the highest good. He justifies his guilty conscience with the remnants of an old-fashioned religion of guilt. He seeks to shed all responsibility for the moral chaos that surrounds him, blaming society, or at least the part of society that has not yet reached his level of understanding. The slightest suggestion that his conscience might be right in his testimony against him, or that he might be responsible for the world’s almost infinite diseases, is unthinkable. For this reason, the gospel is a scandal to fallen man, because it exposes his delusion about himself and convinces him of his fallen situation and his guilt. This is essentially the? First action? of the Gospel; This is why the world hates the preaching of the true gospel so much. Ruin your party? to reveal? destroys his fantasy and exposes that “the king undresses”.
The scriptures recognize that the gospel of Jesus Christ is a “stumbling block” 4 and a “madness” for men of all generations and cultures. However, trying to remove the scandal from the message is to invalidate the cross of Christ and his salvation. We must understand that the gospel is not only scandalous, but is supposed to be scandalous!Through the madness of the gospel, God destroyed the wisdom of the wise, thwarted the intelligence of the great spirits, and crushed the pride of all men, so that in the end no flesh can boast in his presence, but as it is written: “He who boils, boasts in the Lord. “
Paul’s gospel not only contradicted the religion, philosophy, and culture of his day, but it declared war on them. He rejected the truce or treaties with the world and settled for nothing less than an absolute abandonment of culture to the lordship of Jesus Christ. We do well to follow Paul’s example. We must be careful to avoid the temptation to adapt our Gospel to today’s fashions or the desires of carnal men. We have no right to distort, soften its offense, or civilize its radical claims, to make it more attractive to a fallen world or carnal members of the church. Our churches are full of strategies to be more “kind”, put the gospel in another package, remove the stumbling block and soften the edge of the sword, to be more palatable to men of the flesh. We must be sensitive to what we are looking for, but we must understand that: there is only one who seeks and that is God. If we strive to make our churches and our messages comfortable, let us make them comfortable for Him. If we want to build a church or a ministry, we will do so with a passion to glorify God and with a desire not to offend His glory. It doesn’t matter what the world thinks of us! We do not seek honor on earth, but honor in heaven must be our wish.