Very Unlikely You Would Have Believed Either

Last Year in Life of Christ published a post on the challenges the Jews faced when it came to accepting Jesus as the messiah. If everyone in the society that you were raised in believed in a different kind of messiah, along with the fact that there were many others who claimed to be the messiah, you probably would not have believed either. As we have looked at the cities that Paul visited over the last couple of weeks and their responses to the Gospel, I cannot help but ask myself if I would have believed or went along with the rest of society.

The Jews obviously were raising the same challenges that they did during the ministry of Jesus. Now they even had the issue of Paul challenging their Law even more than Christ. The Gentiles were raised in paganistic societies where several dieties were often worshipped and the knowledge of the God of Israel is very limited in comparison to the Jewish people. The Jews at least knew of God's attempts to redeem His people through the Old Testament and Paul is able to utilize that redemptive history to show how God has fulfilled the need for forgiveness through Christ. The Gentiles would not have been as familiar with such a history. The Gentiles also saw Christianity as a sect of Judaism and would have led to even less of a belief in the message of Paul if his own Jewish brothers and sisters were turning the Gospel away and attacking him. Keeping this in mind I am not sure if I put myself into the shoes of the Gentiles that I would have believed either and I can easily see how they reacted violently the way they did when provoked by the Jews to do so.

Think of it this way, If some guy came to us and claimed to be Christ and told us that he is returning, did not perform any miracle (even though Paul and Christ did, would we believe him. What if a guy claimed to be an apostle of God and began to proclaim as a prophet does, would we buy into it? Do any of these scenarios sound familiar? The fact is that similiar events have occurred during our time and we responded the exact same way that the Jews and Gentiles, by not believing and persecuting the individuals. We reacted in such a way, because we taught a different messaage just as the Jews and Gentiles were. Still think you would have believed then? I think we need to be thankful we have a cannonized bible and for being born into a society that already believes in the right message and is free to do so. We also need to be respectful of the individuals who were skeptical about Paul when they first heard the Gospel. I bet you didn't accept the first time you heard the Gospel either.