They hated him because he told the truth

There's an internet meme out there of a Chick Tract.  If you know what Chick Tracts are, great, if not, I'll try to fill you in. They were insanely popular tracts that were all about various spiritual matters from a Christian, specifically protestant, perspective.  And these tracts were given out for halloween, given to university students, left at bus stations, that kind of thing, and usually had some kind of alarmist message: Someone goes to a party, folks there are playing with a Ouija board, said protagonist plays along, ends up getting scared, runs out of the house, gets hit by a car, goes to hell.  Tale as old as time.

And these alarmist tracts have made up memes, and one of the most popular ones right now is this one, where it is Jesus confronting people, and his speech bubble could be, well, pretty much anything.

There are lots more like this, I'm not going to bother finding them all for you.  Just know that they're out there, folks, and you can view them at your leisure.  But buried in the memes is a glimmer of truth, which is that people hated Jesus because he told them the truth.  Now, what you have to remember about Jesus Christ is that he was put to death, and was put to death not for being too milquetoast, you know.  He was put to death because he told the truth, and the truth was hard to hear for his original audience, and for us as well.  If you want a real idea of how pronounced that actually is, then witness the dispute that happened between the people and Stephen.  Stephen, the deacon, filled with the Holy Spirit, went and represented the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the people who had been involved in killing Jesus.  But it's not as though they had only been involved in killing Jesus, you know.  Something that you can easily forget about the scriptures is that they're not a big long story about people getting things right over and over again.  The Bible doesn't do the whole white hat thing, giving you heroes who are flawless and great and can do what they want on account of being the handsomest people in the plot.  No, the Bible gives you a real story of real people.  And as you know from your own life, real people aren't perfect.  All the stories that the good people of Israel had been telling themselves had been stories where they'd been lionizing themselves by lionizing their histories.  Their ancestors had obviously been chosen by God based purely on how wonderful they were, and that would obviously spill over to them as well.  But Stephen breaks it down for them in exhaustive detail, beginning with Abraham, and going through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, and tells the people that they are every bit as culpable as all their ancestors in resisting the word of God.  This is key, especially when presented to a people who would fully believe that their birthright is magic, which it isn't .  And when Stephen speaks to them, he lets them know that as their ancestors killed the prophets sent to them, so too did they kill the Son of God and King of Glory himself, Jesus Christ.  And when they said this, they had a sad reaction.

They stopped their ears, and rushed at him, ran him outside and stoned him to death.  This is a very different reaction to that of the crowd at Pentecost.  When Peter preaches at Pentecost, and reminds the crowd that they crucified the Lord and Messiah, they were cut to the heart, asked what they should do, and were baptized.  Stephen's crowd went the other way, and killed the one speaking to them.  But that didn't change the content of the message that was taught, nor its veracity.  In other words, the word was still good, was still true, no matter how the people reacted to it.

And this is what we mean when we talk about spiritual milk.  That is, we need to deal with the fact that the absolute basic content of the Christian faith truly can be condensed down to John 3:16 - For God so loved the world that He gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.  That passage is spiritual milk, the basics, the cornerstone of the Christian faith, without which nothing else can or does make sense.  If you approach the Christian faith with the idea that you are in some way different than a sinner, or that God owes you anything, if you approach the Christian faith with the idea that it is about creating justice here on earth, or a utopia within the kindom, then Christ will remain a stumbling block for you always.  He will always be a stumbling block for you because what he does it to forgive sins, which implies that there are sins to be forgiven.  But if you go through the scriptures, to the history of all the people whom you look up to and realize that they are, in fact, sinners, but sinners whom God loved, then you can also realize that maybe God can love you as well, a sinner though you be.

But that's not what we want to do.  What we want to do is to legislate all that sin away, to blot it out and to imagine that we actually don't have it.  And we will go so far as to turn away from all the prophets in the scriptures, all the messengers and emissaries of God who will let us know that we do, in fact, have that sin.  But we are not just being lectured and hectored, we are being brought, through repentance, to faith in Jesus Christ, the one at the right hand of God, who is the way, the truth and the life.

Hopefully, you can see how important this is.  If you were required to believe in your own goodness, eventually, in order to deal with the dissonance that would create, you would have to kill those who point out to you that you're not as perfect as you think you are.  It's either that, or sink into despair.  But if your righteousness depends on God himself, not on you, then you can realize that Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, Peter, John and Stephen are all sinners, but sinners who believed in the work of God to forgive the sins they had. This is testimony that is so powerful that one of the men who assisted in the killing of Stephen came to faith in Jesus Christ as the one who forgives, and helped to explain the concept of grace to all of us.  It's a wonderful thing to see happen, for Grace to be so important to someone that they will help all of us sinners to understand, through several letters, that Jesus comes to forgive sins. The real sins that we have.  Don't stop your ears to that message, and don't hate Jesus, or the disciples for telling you the truth.  You will only end up stumbling over Christ instead of embracing that cornerstone, and that foundation.