by Keith Bassham
I was moved several times reading over the Global Partners section of this magazine, as I am sure you will be. The stories of courage and endurance, along with the spiritual warnings, reminded me again of the risk factor built into Christianity. When Jesus invited potential followers to take up a cross, his words were not uttered in some lofty planes of abstraction or metaphor. For those first Christians, the image was concrete and the possibility of winding up on a cross was real.
After all, in the culture Rome had created in the Mediterranean world, even a religious-sounding phrase, such as “Jesus is Lord,” had political implications. If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not. You don’t get much more radical than that in a society trained to see the emperor as god. In other words, it was impossible to follow Jesus Christ without involving yourself in politics, whether you intended it or not. And so Jesus, and Paul later on, issued some counsel on how believers should prepare themselves for the consequences that go along with the risky behavior of being “in Christ.”
Global Partners has done a fine job (edited by Jim Smith, by the way), of showing how that riskiness has been and is working itself out among missionaries today. But the document also has a dozen or more places where you and I can jump on and help shoulder our share of the risk.
One theme is preparation. Several of the accounts speak of how one has to think ahead, and make decisions away from a conflict or struggle. I liken it to the example of Daniel and his friends in Babylon who, when compelled to eat and drink meals they considered defiling, refused. On the surface, the offer from the king’s table may have seemed innocuous, and I can imagine that many saw no harm in it. But Daniel and his friends stood their ground on this “small thing,” and we learn the importance of that decision later when the stakes became much greater.
A few pages over, the same group of young men refuses to worship an image of the king, even under threat of death. No one says it at the time, but I like to think Shadrach or one of the others said to himself, “Are you kidding? We wouldn’t even have lunch with him, let alone worship him!” There was no need to agonize over the decision of whether to bow or not, for the smaller choices made earlier prepared them for the larger ones down the road.
And then, of course, there is the story of the plot to kill Daniel, with the assassins attempting to use Daniel’s religion as their weapon. We are impressed that Daniel followed his regular habit of prayer in defiance of a phony order, again a decision made far earlier in his life, and so he was prepared for the risk.
We North American believers have lived in an environment where our Christianity held little, if any, personal risk. High time we see ourselves differently, and a few minutes spent with risk-takers could help.