“I have told you these things so that you won’t abandon your faith. For you will be expelled from the synagogues, and the time is coming when those who kill you will think they are doing a holy service for God. This is because they have never known the Father or me. Yes, I’m telling you these things now, so that when they happen, you will remember my warning. I didn’t tell you earlier because I was going to be with you for a while longer.”
John 16:1-4 NLT
It is strange that there are so many points of view regarding God. None of us really know God in all His fullness and we tend to focus on the bits we know and disregard anything else. We blithely talk about an infinite God without really understanding what we are saying. To illustrate this, I once had a conversation with a fellow worker who was a devout Muslim. Every lunchtime, his office door was closed and out came his prayer mat. Even the company’s managing director wasn’t able to disturb him. One day he said to me, knowing that I was a Christian, that we worshipped the same God. I told him that this wasn’t the case because his “god” was an authoritative being called “Allah” whereas I worshipped a Trinitarian God – the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – who wanted a personal relationship with His children, those saved through a belief in Jesus. We pilgrims worship an Omnipresent, Omniscient and Omnipotent God and all we know about Him we find in the Bible and through our personal encounters with the Holy Spirit. But we won’t fully ever know God because making such a claim puts us right back in the Garden. Genesis 3:5, “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil“.
In today’s verses from John 16, we read that there will be some who claim to know God and who will think that they are doing God’s will by killing those whom they perceive as being blasphemers, those who elevate Jesus as the Son of God and follow His ways. Saul, later to be called Paul, was someone who thought this way. We read in Acts 8:3, “But Saul was going everywhere to destroy the church. He went from house to house, dragging out both men and women to throw them into prison“. It took a personal encounter with the living Jesus before Saul could see the error of his ways.
We look back through the last two thousand years and find many occasions where different views of God clashed on the battlefields of towns and villages, in churches and monasteries, in the lives of ordinary men and women. Even today there is sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics in various places in the UK. People with different views of God thinking that they are doing a “holy service” by trying to eliminate those of another persuasion. And as I write the violence between the Jewish state of Israel and the surrounding Muslim nations constantly simmers in a maelstrom of hate and violence.
But we pilgrims are of a different persuasion. We know whom we follow. We are in a privileged position, as we read in 1 Peter 2:9, “But you are not like that, for you are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light”. We know what the true “holy service” comprises. And we praise and worship the One who made it all possible -Jesus.
Jesus, we do indeed offer up our sincere thanks for all You did for us at Calvary. Amen.
Being a Pilgrim 