Will Not Finish

 DEVOTION

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MATTHEW

WILL NOT FINISH

Matt 10:21-23

21 "Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. 22 All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved. 23 When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. I tell you the truth, you will not finish going through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes.

NIV

There are some places in the Middle East that when one member of a family accepts Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, becoming a Christian, that the family disowns that member. In that sense, by considering that person to be dead to the family the brother will betray the brother to death. We certainly know that the Pharisees wanted to kill Jesus because he was disrupting their authority over the people, at least,  that is one of the reasons if not the main reason. Again, perhaps in the Middle East Jews would hate Christians because the Jewish people lived in the Old Testament law. We are not so certain that all men hate us in our culture, in our country today. Although there are individuals who have extreme hatred toward Christians, in fact, they have gone into churches armed wanting to shoot as many Christians as possible. It's possible one of the reasons that we do not feel the persecution that the early church felt is because we may not be threatening the anti-Christian culture, and have succumbed to the pressures of being silent, not talking about religion. It might be one thing to share Jesus with the caveat of being able to have eternal life. However, if we were to preach like John the Baptist or Jesus telling people they need to repent of their sin, we may run into some resistance. We are told that people love the darkness because it can hide their sin or their evil deeds under the darkness of night, and they do not want the light because it exposes their sin. There was something else interesting here as well when Jesus tells them they will not get through all the cities in Israel before he comes back. Jesus could not have meant just those twelve disciples we're expected to visit every city in Israel in their lifetime. Of course, we do not know for sure how many cities were in Israel during that time of Jesus. we also understand they would have had to walk to every city which would have taken a long time. However, Jesus may have been making the point that we will not reach every city or town, or village throughout the world before he returns. Of course, we have much better technology and the ability to travel much faster from place to place so it is possible we could reach every person in this world with the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. However, that possibility would depend on all of us Christians to be sharing the good news of Jesus everywhere we went. If we rely solely on the missionaries or evangelists to travel to every city throughout the world there's not enough of them.  If I were to reach two people for Jesus and each of them reached two people for Jesus and each of those four preach the good news to two people and those eight reached out to two people and then those 16 and on and on and it would only take a matter of days or perhaps weeks and every person on this planet would have been reached or at least, heard the good news. Considering that Jesus left his ministry in the hands of 12 men and we have now millions of believers, it would seem they did a pretty good job or followed the leading of the Spirit. Maybe we could start a revival by just reaching out to two people. Even then, we would not finish.