Why would anyone who claims to worship God even consider committing murder? Don’t say they haven’t. Men and women—Jews and Christians—have been guilty of murder most foul. The Pharisees did their level best to kill Jesus…and finally succeeded. Other Jewish leaders later tried to kill Stephen…and succeeded. In fact, the most severe persecution of Christians in the very earliest times came, not from Rome, but from Jews.

And while the Jews, in later years, would suffer greatly at the hands of the Romans, the time would come when they were in far greater danger from Christians as Christians murdered Jews in some kind of bizarre, terrible payback in the generations that followed. In Lebanon, Muslims kill Christians and Christians kill Muslims. In Ireland, Protestants killed Catholics and Catholics killed Protestants. In Palestine, Jews kill Muslims and Muslims kill Jews.

What’s wrong with this picture? All these people claimed to worship the same God. They may use different names, but they’re talking about the same God. All these groups claim to worship the God of Abraham (by whatever name), but what we need to understand is that it was that same God who wrote, with his own finger, Thou shalt not kill. Why, then, down through history and to the present day, do we kill each other with such regularity?

Is religion hard or easy? Is it complicated or simple? If you listen to some teachers, you would think that there is nothing to it at all. All you have to do is give your hand to the preacher and your heart to the Lord and it’s a done deal. After that, just go to church from time to time and the rest doesn’t matter very much.

But most of us know intuitively that there is something wrong with that picture—it just doesn’t feel right. Surely there has got to be more to it than that. Surely, after we’re saved, we can’t just go back and live our live just as we’ve always lived it. On the other hand, there are those who make religion nearly impossible. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day were a case in point. They had a terribly long list of things you had to do, things you couldn’t do. In fact, they had taken a day—the Sabbath day—that God had intended to be liberating and turned it into a burden. Matthew connects one of Jesus’ great promises to a conflict on just this point. It also helps us with this question of religion being hard or easy.

Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and you shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Could Jesus Christ come tonight? Is it possible that you could walk out on your back porch before bedtime and see a great light in the sky as Jesus and all the holy angels are returning to Earth in great power and glory? Well, no. No, Christ won’t come tonight. Now, I don’t mean that he couldn’t come if he decided he would come, but if we’re supposed to believe the Bible then there are some things that are supposed to take place before Christ returns. What’s the point in Jesus giving his disciples all those signs of his impending return if he’s just going to brush them aside and come anyway.

There are times that I’ve suspected that some preachers are afraid that we sinners will not repent unless we think the end is at hand. If we think Christ wouldn’t come back for at least another year, then we’ll plan on getting our act together and repenting in about 11 months. So it is tempting, as a preacher, to say, You might not have that 11 months! And, of course, you may not.

I certainly believe that the return of Christ may be imminent—but not tonight. And the reason I think this is a prophecy in Malachi, chapter 5:

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

Have you ever encountered a prophet? I mean the real thing, the genuine article. I’m not talking about some guy with wild eyes and a bad hair day who’s telling you, The world is going to end next December 13th at 4:23 in the morning. No, I’m talking about an authentic sent-from-the-Lord type of prophet.

Prophets true and false come in many different descriptions, and sometimes the ones sent by God don’t really know who they are. They don’t realize the significance of what they are and what they’re doing and what they’re saying. How do you evaluate a prophet? How would you know if one came on the scene and really had a message from God? Make no mistake about it; there are false prophets out there—and false prophets, obviously, deserve no consideration at all.

One thing you can know: those that set dates for the return of Jesus Christ are surely uninspired and can be safely ignored. Why would I say that? Well, because Jesus himself said it in Matthew 24. There are also those who prophesy the future, but teach against God’s law. In another day in time, you could stone those fellows. Today, you can just shut the door in their faces without incurring any displeasure from God. But there is another group of prophets (or people who claim to be, at least) who are not so easily defined.

Years ago, while living in England, I saw some graffiti on an overpass that declared “War is Obsolete”. This was in the glory days of the “Ban the Bomb” movement. There were well-intentioned people who favored unilateral nuclear disarmament. The British could afford to think that way, because the American bombs could be counted on to keep the Russians in check.

At the time, I wrote a magazine article that opined that war was far from obsolete—that history told us Man had never developed a weapon he did not eventually use. Time passed, and so did my opinion. In fact, it has been 60 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and no one has been killed by a nuclear weapon in all that time. No one could hope to win a nuclear war, and so there was no reason why any sane person or nation would start one. In all those intervening years, the only nations that had any nuclear weapons were allegedly sane.

Well, more time has passed, and now we have to deal with powers that show very clear signs of not being very sane. And the insanity has allowed nuclear materials and technology to leak out of their tightly sealed boxes and into the hands of people who are certifiably insane. Mutually Assured Destruction was a reasonable doctrine in a world where we were dealing with reasonable people who loved life. Now we are dealing with unreasonable people who care nothing for life, not even their own. You could even say that they love death.

I don’t think we yet understand the religion or the psychology of the 9/11 hijackers who brought down the World Trade Center. But with the advent and spread of the suicide bomber, everyone is now thinking that we will ultimately have to deal with nuclear suicide bombers, and that is truly unimaginable.

I live in the country, near a small city. Some people, out where I live, sleep with the windows open and night and don’t bother locking the doors when they go for a walk. But not far from here, just a few days ago, a high-school student and three accomplices robbed a man at gunpoint, took him to a nearby lake, shot him in the back of the head, and left his body there on the beach. Just another senseless act of violence. You can probably find one very much like it in your local paper.

It would have been just another mysterious homicide except for what followed. The killer took a friend or two from school out to the lake to show them the body. These friends told other friends, who then went out to see the body, and so on. In all, over a dozen students had seen the body, and many more at the school had heard the story of the killing. Yet, not one reported it to the authorities—until one anguished student who had heard the tale reported it—four days later.

What’s wrong with this picture? The school district has a good reputation. It’s not a bad community, at all. But the local prosecutor said this, It is stunning that we have a society so deviant that people would treat a body like a tourist attraction. I know that some will argue that allowing millions of abortions in this country has so cheapened life that these kids didn’t really think of this man as a life. But abortion laws didn’t cause this. They are another symptom of the same disease. So what brought us to this coarsening of our attitude towards human life?

Have you ever wondered why religious people can be so hard-nosed and intolerant? No, I’m not exaggerating—religious people can get in bitter arguments with one another over small matters of doctrine or belief. So much that men won’t speak to one another. People can be ostracized from their families. They can get into fistfights and even, in history, kill over fine points of scriptural interpretation. The intolerance can even affect whole nations and races of people.

The Eastern and Western churches divided themselves over several differences, but one of the chief points of contention was the question of whether the Holy Spirit came out of the Father and the Son…or out of the Father through the Son. There is a distinction to be made there, but is it really worth dividing whole religions over? Instead of respecting one another, people were dis-fellowshipped and excommunicated—whole churches, whole countries were cut off from one another.

This was serious business. And in Jesus’ day, there was a party of Jews who wanted him dead. If you believe that minor doctrinal differences are the real reason behind such intolerance and hatred, you’re just not thinking. The real reason is fear. Jesus understood this and, on sending out his disciples, warned them very carefully about it. We’ll find that passage in Matthew, chapter 10.

Have you ever wondered why healing played such a big role in Jesus’ ministry? Probably not, because it seems like the most natural thing to do. What would you do if you had the power to make the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? Wouldn’t you go down to visit your local hospital and straighten out a few problems?

But the real mystery may not be why Jesus healed, but as to why, often, he did not heal. When you realize that Jesus did not empty every sick bed in Israel, you suddenly bring into focus the truth that when he did heal he apparently had some reason in mind or some motivation for it beyond mere compassion. Jesus’ compassion cannot be called into question, but there were times when he did heal and times when he did not.

One thing that Jesus’ healing did is prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he had the power to forgive sin. Healing is, in a way, a metaphor for salvation. No, it’s more than a metaphor—it’s what salvation is: a repairing of destruction, a putting right of things gone wrong, the healing of a life, the giving of the beginnings of hope. The healing of a withered arm is one thing; the healing of a withered life, a withered soul, a withered heart is another. In his healings, Jesus proved that he had the power to do both.