Once Again-Here is Danger-Loss of Our Soul

If you do not grieve over Jerce Reyes Barrios, a Venezuelan Soccer player, tortured by Maduro’s dictatorship, and then sent from the US, by President Trump’s instructions, to a prison in El Salvador, you would not have grieved over the Jews, Romas, Confessing Church Pastors, etc. sent to concentration camps in the Nazi lands. You would have been an indifferent citizen who paid no attention to what was happening in your country or someone who knew and just didn’t care. Or sadly you would have been part of those goons who rounded the people up and sent them off to die. 

 If you are not troubled by Trump, by press secretary Karoline Leavitt, by supposed prophet Julie Green insisting that judges, if they oppose Trump’s rulings, should be impeached, or as Green suggests imprisoned, possibly even hung, then you are walking in the shadow of those who once destroyed a democracy in 53 days

 If it does not strike you as strange that Trump is insisting that the pardons that Biden gave to the January 6th Committee is not valid perhaps you have not followed the Committee’s process as they investigated the attempted coup on that 6th. Perhaps you did not hear the testimonies of the police who were badly hurt—who cannot work now because of those attacks. Perhaps you do not realize that Trump wants to jail many members of the committee. Democracies do not jail members of committees for hearing and listening to witnesses. 

 In the book of Mattew in the Bible one is told of the great judgement when the Lord Jesus comes in His glory. Jesus speaks of this. First, Jesus already knows that there are both sheep and goats and He divides them putting the sheep on his right side and the goats on his left.

 Notice Jesus doesn’t divide them that way because of their good or bad works. The sheep have already been made sheep. That was Christ’s work on the cross. The goats formed themselves into goats, C.S., Lewis would have called them humans becoming monsters such as one meets in a nightmare. 

 But there are rewards and punishments—the sheep, because they were sheep, gave the hungry something to eat. They gave the thirsty something to drink. They invited the stranger in. They clothed the naked and visited the sick. They went to those in prison. 

 The goats did none of this! 

 And Jesus equates the good to others as good to Himself. The lack of caring of others with the lack of caring for Him. 

 There is a Kingdom, present and yet still coming. There is a King present and yet still coming. I have no doubt that those gifted with His grace will at least eventually see that a stranger went off to a prison in a foreign land and he did not deserve it. Bring him home! I have no doubt that those gifted with His grace will embrace the good judges who want the stranger who had been tortured to be free. I have no doubt that those embraced in the King’s grace because of His cross will, since His throne is set on kindness, truth, and justice, seek only kindness, truth, and justice.