Consulting by RPM || Free Advice Blog

The Worthy King

I’m sharing this on a Tuesday because I was traveling and don’t want to keep missing my “Sunday” posts…

In church, because of the lyrics of a song we were singing, I started thinking about the character of Jesus. (If you’re not a believer, you can still appreciate the “character of Jesus” as depicted in the gospel accounts.)

After the Last Supper, when a mob came out with clubs and swords to take Him into custody, Peter intervened with his own weapon in a misguided attempt to save Jesus. (Of course, Jesus saves Peter, not vice versa, in the grand scheme.) Everybody knows the famous line when Jesus says to Peter, “Put your sword back in its place, for all who take up the sword die by the sword.” (This has been adopted by popular culture as “live by the sword, die by the sword.”)

However, as I stressed in this essay, what Jesus said next is incredibly intimidating. He continued with Peter: “53 Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? 54 But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?”

As I commented in that essay:

Do you understand what a bad*ss Jesus was? He had the option of calling down heavenly slaughter upon His enemies, but refrained from doing so, electing instead to let these ignorant fools mock Him and torture Him to death. And why? Because that’s how much He loved them. That type of moral strength should make your jaw drop.

Now, was Jesus a sucker? Did people take advantage of Him? Did He not know how the world really worked? Did He not know what you had to do to “get ahead in life”?

Now what really struck me in church this week, wasn’t the stuff about the twelve legions of angels, but the line that came right after it. Jesus didn’t say to Peter, “Oh, I have to be arrested, tortured, and murdered, because otherwise humanity is lost.” No, instead His argument was that this needed to happen to fulfill the Scriptures. If God said it through His prophets, then it was going to happen, end of story. To suggest otherwise was talk from the devil. It’s always impressive if someone is willing to endure torture and death for a cause, but when the cause is, “The fulfillment of the Word of God,” it is extra admirable.

Just to top it all off, when Jesus was dying on the cross, it occurred to Him to look up to heaven and say, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.”

As Bob Dylan says, you’re going to have to serve somebody. If you think you don’t serve any man (or woman), you might be right, but Dylan elaborates: It might be the devil, or it might be the Lord–but you’re gonna have to serve somebody. I choose the Lord.