Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
Why is there so much opposition when truth is proclaimed, even sometimes in the church?
For example, Bible teaching is clear as sunlight that the New Covenant is the "better promises" of God, and the Old Covenant is the worthless promises of the people (cf. Heb. 8:8-10): yet Old Covenant ideas keep cropping up, and there is tension and suspicion where there should be pleasant fellowship and harmony among the people of God ("Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity"! Psalm 133:1).
Like the prophet Jeremiah who was hounded and cursed in Jerusalem by God's own people until he longed for a place in the wilderness where he could cry and cry ("Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night ... in the wilderness ..." (Jer. 9:1, 2); people who love the truths of the Bible weep today. Jeremiah was not a psychopath; the truth is that his opposing people were at war with God Himself. After Jeremiah's death, the Jews began to recognize how he was the greatest of the prophets whom God had sent to them; yet they made his life a hell on earth for him.
The Son of God came one Sabbath day to a congregation of God's true people in the town of Nazareth, and told them He was the true Messiah their people had looked for, for millennia. Result? The people of God who "kept" the holy Sabbath tried to kill Him (cf. Luke 4:16-29). The common people "heard Him gladly" but the higher you went in the hierarchy of the true church of that day, the more bitter was the hatred that the meek and gentle Jesus provoked (Matt. 12:37; John 1:11).
A delegation from the intellectual capital of the then world came to invite Jesus to come and teach them in Greece. The temptation for Him was enormous--get away from this bitter prejudice where he could go and teach receptive people; but He chose to stay and go to His cross and be crucified by the leaders of God's people (cf. John 12:20-27).
He has told us not to be surprised by the painful opposition coming sometimes from God's true people in the last days. As Jesus prayed, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34), so He prays today.
And the prayer will be answered: God does forgive His people for opposing and rejecting the beginning of the latter rain and the loud cry; but He will also be very severe. He gives any generation only one chance to accept or reject "the beginning" of that rare and most precious gift of the latter rain. Let no idle word escape our hearts from now on!
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: November 28, 2007.
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