The good kind of persecution

Persecution- “The verb διωκω (dioko) means to hound — to cause to take flight, to run off, to coercively drive…” (Abarim Publications)

Because of their rebellion against God, Adam and Eve were “hounded” out of the Garden of Eden. Well, not exactly hounded by God; as THE curator of the Garden, He commanded their exit. My mental picture of this exit is God withdrawing the Eden Garden from around them.

The Garden of Eden is the benchmark, the standard, the model, the ideal. Our evaluations of good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable, and natural and unnatural should be based on life in the Garden before the Fall.

The goal of Bible study, worship, fellowship, and prayer is to remind ourselves that the way of God is better than the way of this world. Our desire as Christians is not to get the unholy, the unnatural, out but the Holy Life, the natural, in. For that to happen, the unnatural must do an exodus. Humans don’t do the hounding; the Holy Spirit does. The Holy Spirit hounds us into the Garden life. He is not trying to get the unholy out but the Holy in.

Adam and Eve were made of the same handful of clay, yet radically different. They were not created to be completely different. They were created to be “complementary different.” They were not created to be equal but equally valued and equal in status. God arranged their similarities and differences to form a single “image” of Himself. To mess with His given image is to distort the beauty and functionality of His image.

The “unnatural” entered the world through the hands of the man and woman. What they wanted, to determine what was good and evil for themselves, was unnatural. Natural is when the Creator directs His agents to work His creation to accomplish His purposes. Unnatural is everything else. The Truth is that death is unnatural; it’s not what God created.

In the Fall, humans’ natures were changed radically and permanently. The change brought death, which was not created. Death is the vacuum caused by the absence of the Creator. The goal of the natural nature is to grow and prosper continually. The goal of the unnatural nature is to consume and prosper. Here is where the old proverb makes absolute sense: “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”

God’s natural nature will continually persecute unnatural nature until the unnatural is eliminated.  Satan’s natural nature will also continually hound God’s natural nature until it becomes unnatural or is eliminated. Light always hounds darkness, and darkness always hounds light. When the Son of the Creator, Jesus, said of himself, “I am the light of the world,” he was saying that he was the original nature of life. Consider his comments on the eye being “the lamp of the body” in Matthew 6:22-23, “…So if the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness!”

We are most familiar with the term persecution, referring to the effort of the unnatural to hound the natural to conform to the “unnatural.” From God’s perspective, He is focused on returning what He created to its original nature, the Garden of Eden. From Satan’s perspective, he is focused on maintaining and expanding his unnatural nature.

 We must constantly remind ourselves that the “natural” way, God’s way, to hound, to persecute, is God-loving. We must be vigilant because the unnatural world’s way of hounding is to make love self-serving. That’s why the unnatural world hounded Jesus to death. That’s why the unnatural world still hounds Jesus’ followers.

If God’s tactic is to hound unnatural humans with His love to rejoin the nature of His presence, his followers should use the same tactic: Love. Human condemnation of the unnatural is doomed not to accomplish God’s purposes. Our condemnation cannot hound people to God; it’s unnatural. But we can love people to God even though it might kill us. For a follower of Jesus, loving comes naturally. (Actually, supernaturally.)

“Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30 CSB)

Photo – I took this photo on my Highway 89 expedition in mid-September of this year. It was taken north of Livingston, Montana.