Psalm 94:3-7, 18-23; Isaiah 53:1-12; 2 Corinthians 4:4-14; Luke 13:10-17
Chances
are, that as Western Christians living in the twenty-first century, we don't
see ourselves as oppressed. We
recognized that there have been times in our history in which Christians were
oppressed and that there are places in our world today where Christians
experience oppression, but we don't consider ourselves oppressed. And that's just how our oppressor wants us to
see things.
When
oppression is out in the open and easily recognized, we are quick to look to
God and call out to Him as the only one who can free us from our
oppressors. Our response to oppression
is to rely more and more on God as "the rock in whom we take refuge"
(Psalm 94:22). Throughout the history of
the Church, God has used oppression by the world and by worldly forces to
strengthen His people and draw them close to Himself. Interestingly, the greatest periods of growth
in the Church have occurred when believers were most severely oppressed. On the other hand, the Church experiencing
worldly prosperity and comfort has witnessed the most dramatic declines in her
history.
What's
true of the Church collectively is true of us individually. When things are going well for us we tend to
drift away from God and occupy ourselves with worldly prosperity and its
comforts. But when our well-ordered
worlds get turned upside-down and we fall under the oppression of financial,
physical, or emotional turmoil, we rush to God for deliverance. Yet His answer to our prayers for restored
wealth, health, or peace of mind are often answered very differently than we
desire. Rather than end the little bit
of oppression that has surfaced in our lives, God uses it to show us the
subtle, underlying oppression that has always been there dominating and
enslaving us. More than expose our
oppression, God often magnifies it so that we will see that there is only one
hope of being delivered from it.
Any
believer who doubts that God will use oppression in our lives only needs to
look at what Jesus endured under His Father's hand to see that it is true. Isaiah foresaw the brutal treatment that the
Christ would receive: "He was
oppressed and afflicted …" and "it was the Lord's will to crush him
and cause him to suffer" (Isaiah 53:7, 10). For those who would follow after Jesus, the
same hardships await. The Apostle Paul
and his coworkers in the Gospel experienced it.
But, in the light of why God allowed His own Son to be oppressed for us
and what that oppression led to, they endured oppression with an uncanny hope:
"We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in
despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed" (2
Cor. 4:8-9). What was the basis of such
a hope? The answer is found in the very
next verse: "We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so
that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body" (2 Cor. 4:10).
Through
the oppressive death of Jesus, God freed us from the oppression of sin, death,
and Satan. In Baptism we were joined
with Christ in His death where our oppression ended and the oppressor lost his
claim on us. We have been freed from his
oppression to live the new life that Christ has won for us. In this new life we cannot be crushed, do not
despair, will never be abandoned, and cannot be destroyed no matter how
oppressed our earthly lives become, because God has answered the prayers of His
oppressed people with the deliverance that Christ has secured for us with His
blood. "By his wounds we are
healed" (Isaiah 53:5) and have been delivered from oppression forever.
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