Did you know —
God never changes! His truth never changes. His unconditional love and grace never change. His inclusion of everyone and everything in Christ never changes. However, people see Him very differently based on their perspective. Every viewpoint of God is a view from a point.
An honest study of Jesus’ three year ministry on earth reveals that the people whom He hung out with, taught, enjoyed, ministered to and did life with were the lame, the poor, the blind, the brokenhearted, those with no hope, the prostitutes, the drunkards, the thieves, the tax collectors, the sinners, the outsiders, the hard-working “lower class,” the foreigners… the marginalized, despised and outcasts of society. And He loved and enjoyed them!
The ones who rejected Him, vilified Him, mocked Him and wanted Him out of the way were those in control: the top religious leaders, elders, chief priests, teachers of the law, scribes and the Romans who occupied Israel. They all hated Jesus and His message of love, grace and inclusion. Does that tell you something?
For the first three hundred years or so, His new church viewed His message and the resulting Scripture of the New Testament from the eyes (viewpoint) of the marginalized… because that’s who they were! The religious establishment continued to persecute the church. The poor, oppressed and marginalized saw Jesus’ message plainly. Indeed, He came to set the prisoners free, give sight to the blind, heal the hurting and brokenhearted… who, for the most part, were put in their conditions by the greed-driven harsh, dictatorial, controlling ruling class.
Only after Christianity became the “official religion” of the Roman Empire in 313 did people start seeing Scripture from the jaded point of view of the political and religious establishment. The “powerful elite religious leaders” soon took Christ’s message of love, grace and inclusion and bastardized it into their worldly means of control, behavior modification, sin-consciousness, judgmental and exclusive perversion that is the opposite of the truth. That has continued and will continue until His Light eventually exposes all this darkness.
He is in the process of doing just that. Walk in the light as Jesus is in the light and you will experience and enjoy fellowship with Papa, Jesus and The Holy Spirit…and eventually with everyone!
~Paul Gray