Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice

“Then the Lord said to me, ‘Go, I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’”  Acts 22:21

The faulty assumption that Paul took a foreigner into the temple led to the riot which resulted in his arrest, but as Roman soldiers herded him toward the barracks, Paul asked to speak to the angry mob.

Though they had been rowdy and raucous, when Paul started speaking their native Aramaic, the men shut their mouths and opened their ears.  They listened as Paul told of his religious training under the popular and revered teacher, Gamaliel.  They let him speak as he recounted his persecution of Christians and even His come-to-Jesus meeting on the Damascus road, but when Paul repeated the command from God to take the gospel to the Gentiles, the crowd lost it.  “Then they raised their voices and shouted, ‘Rid the earth of him! He’s not fit to live!’”(Acts 22:22)

Why the hatred?  Why the venom?  What was it that instigated such rage and wrath that mature, responsible men were “shouting and throwing off their coats and flinging dust into the air”(Acts 22:23)?  Two words—Pride and Prejudice.  THEY were God’s chosen people.  THEY were God’s special children.  Only two groups existed on earth—THEY were in one category, and everyone else was in another, and the “everyone else” really weren’t worth even mentioning, for in the mind of those angry Jewish men, Gentiles had no value and no virtue.  The very idea that God would reach out to such rubbish and desire to rescue and redeem them was absolutely insane and intolerable.  And so they shouted.

We rarely get so loud, but an honest look into our hearts often uncovers the same vices lurking beneath our righteous veneer.  We try to keep them at bay, but sometimes we begin to think—WE are not like the secular scoundrels around us.  WE love God, and THEY do not.  WE know the truth, and all THEY do is ignore it, mock it, and disobey it. I mean, really, “Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God”(1 Cor 6:9-10).  However, before we start pounding our pompous pulpits with this passage, we should keep on reading.  “And that is what you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God”(1 Cor 6:11).

Pride and prejudice have no place among God’s people.
It’s all grace, all the time, for all of us.

Even them.