One of the key themes in Paul’s letters to the fledgling churches of the first century is the insistence that Jesus is enough. In Jesus, they have been granted all that is needed. Everything that the Old Covenant foreshadowed is found in Jesus. Everything that the pagan nations ached for and groped toward, has now been revealed in Jesus. All goodness, all pleasure, all wisdom, all blessing is found in Jesus because Jesus is God’s Eternal Son. Jesus is the Executor of God’s estate. He runs the whole show. He has access to everything, and therefore in Him, we have access to everything.
One of the greatest threats to the early church’s grasp of this came specifically from the Jews, the nearest relatives of the Christian Church. The book of Acts clearly shows that the Jews were the center of the persecution of the first Christians (witness Saul/Paul), and in every city Paul proclaims the gospel to the Jews first and then when they have had enough, Paul turns to the Gentiles and this tends to enrage the Jews and before long they have stirred up mobs and riots and chased the apostles out of town. Surely other pagans had their own axes to grind, but the pressure is coming in its most virolent forms from the synagogues.
This pressure included direct political/physical threat and force (beatings, imprisonment, trials), but it also included multiple layers of social force and threat below this: threat of excommunication from the synagogues, being cut off from friends, family, and inheritance, as well as enduring the frowns, the disappointment, the implicit and explicit signs of betrayal, disappointment, let down. And these pressures and tensions aren’t usually just theological or abstract. God made the world such that battles are usually pitched in particular places, on particular dirt. There is usually much more going on than what can be seen in a particular flash of conflict, but the location and occasion for the conflict are relavent. Continue Reading…
