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March 21, 2026 |
| Defending Against Offense | ||
Sometimes people say things about Christianity that would offend us. Sometimes they don't mean to offend. Either they don't know anything about Christianity, or they don't know as much as they think they know. Sometimes, though, they are trying to offend.
It would be impossible for us to feel nothing when these offenses come. We just aren't that way.
What are we to do with these offenses?
We shouldn't be surprised to hear things that would offend.
Of course they will say such things. We also say similar things about them. We would be hypocrites to be offended by what they say, but expect them not to be offended at what we say.
Of course they will say such things, and if we try to shout them down, they will just shout back with even more things. Nothing was ever settled that way. Even with threats of violence, the best you can hope for is silence, but the person doesn't change inside.
We need to understand something important. The offense is in us. We are only offended if we allow ourselves to be offended.
If we allow ourselves to be offended by something that was said with the intent of offending us, then we have also allowed ourselves to be manipulated. We have become someone's fool.
It is a weak god who needs to have his followers defend his character.
Islam's Quran, for example, specifies the killing of people who say anything bad about Islam or its god. They appear strong, even dangerous, because of this, but they are weak at their core.
No other religion is like Islam that way. Other religions have, on occasion, gone beyond what their scriptures say and have killed people from other religions. Hindus killed the early Christian missionaries who came to them and their converts. Though their religion did not teach that, the adherents to the religion became offended and acted on it.
Some religions have even killed people from other sects within their religion. It wouldn't be a surprise that Islam has done this from the time of its founding, but Protestants and Catholics got into this for a short period of time.
Christianity never talks about actions based on being offended. Instead it talks about loving, forgiving, and teaching.
The literal reading is "Seventy times seven seven." Jesus intentionally does not give us a number. Knowing us, we would start counting offenses. Love does not do that.Then Kaypha approached him, and he said, "My Lord, if my brother commits an offense against me, how many times shall I forgive him? Seven times?" 22 And Yeshua said to him, "I do not say to you until seven times, but until seventy times 7 7." (Matthew 18:21-22)
The verse does not complete Peter's question. It could have been "how many times shall I forgive him … before I act out on my offendedness and beat him senseless?" Or maybe we would just beat him verbally or wait for a chance to return the favor.
The Bible wants us to be teachers of the truth. We can't do that while we are on the high-horse of offendedness. We are to take the opportunities we get to do this.
Not always, but sometimes we want to defend God because our relationship with God is wrong.
God is almighty and perfectly capable of defending himself.
Sometimes that desire to defend God comes from a place of arrogance. We take the words as a personal attack. In that case, we are really defending ourselves, but we've convinced ourselves we are doing it for God.
There are some people who are certain that God must be just like them, easily offended and quick to retaliate. You see it when they show you a person saying something bad about God, and then something bad happens to that person. God is not petty like that.
Sometimes God does need to take action, but the Bible uses a word for him that should also describe us … longsuffering.
God does not want us defending him. He'll take care of that in due time. Our role is to grab as many as we can out of that "due time."
The best example of this that we have in the Bible comes from Moses and the grumbling Israelites. He is bothered by their grumbling, but God has told him that they are really grumbling against God. They are trying to control God, to faithlessly test him.
So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, "In the evening you will know that it was the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, 7 […] because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we, that you should grumble against us?" 8 Moses also said, "You will know that it was the Lord when he gives you meat to eat in the evening and all the bread you want in the morning, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we? You are not grumbling against us, but against the Lord." (Exodus 16:6-8)
In these verses, we see Moses say that he and Aaron are only doing the will of God. Therefore the Israelites' grumbling is really against God … and God has heard. So Moses is frustrated with them, but he doesn't take it personally.
Note what God is trying to do here. He is trying to get the Israelites to relate to him, not Moses and Aaron. So the provision will be done without Moses and Aaron being involved.
The Lord said to Moses, 8 "Take the staff, and you and your brother Aaron gather the assembly together. Speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water. You will bring water out of the rock for the community so they and their livestock can drink."
9 So Moses took the staff from the Lord’s presence, just as he commanded him. 10 He and Aaron gathered the assembly together in front of the rock and Moses said to them, "Listen, you rebels, must we bring you water out of this rock?" 11 Then Moses raised his arm and struck the rock twice with his staff. Water gushed out, and the community and their livestock drank.
12 But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, "Because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them." (Numbers 20:7-12)
These verses come much later in time. This time, Moses takes it personally. He badmouths the Israelites with, "You rebels."
With his frustration boiling over, he says, "Must we …" He certainly includes God in that "we," but the Israelites will not hear it that way. They will think the "we" is Moses and Aaron. But God is trying to disconnect Moses and Aaron from the miracles. This time, Moses was to "speak" to the rock so it wouldn't look like Moses was doing the miracle.
Then Moses struck the rock twice. The Bible doesn't say it, but I think he struck it once at first, as he had done before, to bring forth water. That didn't work this time. This would have been a wonderful time for him to see his error and give credit to God. He could have said something like, "See, I can do nothing without God," and then spoken to the rock as he had been instructed.
In his frustration, and now with some fear of looking like a failure, he strikes the rock again. God relents. The people and the animals need the water, so he causes water to flow out. The people say something like, "Moses! Moses! He's our man … ."
This is not at all what God wanted. He wants a servant-leader, a person who sees himself as the servant of God's people, not one who calls them names. He wants a leader who doesn't boil over with frustration at God's people. He wants a leader who will follow God's instructions and understand God's goals.
Once we understand that God does not want Christians to riot in the streets whenever someone says something bad about him, failure to riot cannot be seen as a sign of indifference within the body of the Messiah.
That doesn't mean the body is without indifference. There is indifference in the modern church, and not just a little. It only means that we learn nothing about that indifference when people do not rise up and shout back at the people who say horrible things about God.
As said above, our goal is to win converts. Christianity began by doing outreach in the town centers and in the marketplaces. Of course outreach was also at the one-to-one level. After that time, outreach became, "Bring them to church, where the pastor can convert them." In our time, we've seen a return to the original outreach, but in a modern style, with Charlie Kirk as the primary example.
Despite the things they said against him or God, Charlie's response was never indignation or resentment. It was always a reasoned discussion.
We know he was doing the right thing because he was having success, and because they hated him and killed him for it, just as Jesus said they would.
Our knee-jerk reaction to words that could offend us is to strike back. That's what our bodies want to do. If the words were directed against a friend who wasn't present to hear them, we would certainly defend the friend or at least act as a character reference for our friend. So it's a very natural reaction.
God doesn't need a defender, and he doesn't want liars like us to be his character reference. In thinking we should act in those roles, we have aggrandized ourselves.