[TheRealThing]

^^ When the Lord Jesus began His ministry, He wasn't here (on earth in Israel) to just get along with folks. In fact, He came with a message of good news for all men. Which of course was that eternal life is extended to all men who would by faith accept Jesus as Lord and Savior.

The orthodoxy of the day heartily rejected that idea as foolishness, as they did Him. Therefore, and I hope that I can convey this accurately, Jesus had to take on the entire Church establishment. Said establishment BTW was also the Israeli government, and as such exercised complete control over every Jew, in that they ruled both the spiritual requirements to which he was held accountable, and the laws and affairs of state to which he was held accountable.

The Lord's earthly ministry was to be a mere 3 years in duration, and since the 'task' which lay before him was rather enormous, He had a very short time in which to wrest the power of the Orthodox Church away from the Priests, Sadducees and Pharisees of the day. All of whom were preoccupied from birth with keeping and the mosaic law as the way to salvation, and could recite the traditions of the Church going back centuries. When I say these guys could quote chapter and verse I'm not kidding, most of them could quote the first five books of the Bible.. Genesis to Deuteronomy; word for word.

Why did the Jew, who'd been looking for the messiah for countless generations, nonetheless reject Him when He came? As I see it, the religious ruling class comprised by the sects I listed above, were not about to let some nobody from Nazareth come into the temple and tell them to worship Him. I mean, they were the ones who knew the Scriptures forward and backwards, not some carpenter. (This although the Bible records clearly the fact that the priests were astonished at the Lord's command of Scripture.) The 'task' mentioned in the paragraph above then, was as follows; One man virgin born of Mary, the Son of God, would have to refocus men's hearts from keeping the law and offering a sacrifice once a year to inherit eternal life. To by faith trust the finished work of the Lord Jesus (that being His substitutionary death on the cross and His resurrection) as the means for his salvation. To do that He would have to get men to trust Him and His work, and not the law that the priests could all quote so well. He was the Messiah, but men would not believe.

Men rejected the lordship of Christ then, and men reject the lordship of Christ now. If you study the Scriptures you will see that the Lord did not mince words with the ruling religious class of the day. Jesus called them a "generation of vipers." He turned over the moneychanger's tables in the Temple when He went there to teach. Matthew 21:12-13 (KJV)
12 And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,
13 And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

And He told religious leaders they were like tombs, whitewashed and beautiful on the outside, but inside they were... "full of dead men's bones." The Lord did not pad around the Levant afraid of offending people. He was bold and He did not mince words. Believe on Him Who loved them and was about to die for them, or perish in error was His message. As the result, the so-called Church leaders of Jesus' day were willing to crucify Him.

In our day it seems, Christians are knocking themselves out in bowing down to the politically correct. We try I believe, to take upon ourselves too much responsibility of the outcome for having spread the good news of Christ. And we may even tend to take too much of the credit when through obedience to Him and in homage to His unspeakable gift of eternal life, we are privileged and fortunate enough to lead someone to a saving knowledge of the Son of God. How the spirit of God reaches out to a man if I understand things, is His purview, not ours. We are to go out into the fields white with harvest, but it is He Who gives the increase of souls. Therefore I believe the Church ought not conform to the world and instead, trust the power of God to save folks. In other words, lay the truth out there lovingly but clearly.

It is not okay to live the homosexual lifestyle. It is not okay to have an abortion. It is not okay to smoke Marijuana, or do myriad other drugs. It is not okay for couples to live together outside the holy bonds of matrimony. Because though Christ came, and by the cross set men free of the law by faith in Him, the Holy Spirit still uses the law to convict men of sin. Not calling sin out for being the destroyer it truly is, merely affords the unsaved a more spacious closet to cram some more of those skeletons into. We shouldn't help people avoid their own conscience pangs by patting them on the head. But neither should we hit them on the head with a baseball bat. When the Lord visited with the Samaritan woman at the well he blurted out the fact that she'd had 5 husbands so far, and the man she was with at that point was not her husband. The Lord's direct candor notwithstanding, she received the water of life with great joy. John 4: 5-26

Culture crusaders are not the bad guys. They're the guys out there pointing men to salvation through the shed blood of the Lord Jesus. It's our job and our charter. Those whom came to the Lord dishonestly to trap Him were lost. This world is presently awash in the dishonesty of the unfortunate lost, and I for one, am sick to death of it. Anybody should be offended by such a dishonest allege as was put forth in the above thread starter, which would equate the Lord's work with the guile and evil machinations of the enemies of God. However, I am seldom surprised when the gospel message stirs up ire in them who hear it.