I’ve been on Spring Break vacation with the family this past week, so I didn’t have an Easter post before Easter. But here it is now.<\/p>\n
Last September, a commenter at the Shire Network News podcast web site (the old web site, not the shiny new one<\/a>) suggested that "the Bible is very clear that the Jews killed Christ". He went on to complain how Jews were all throughout the US in policy-making and powerful positions. I’d thought that sort of "Christ killer" epithet had gone out with the KKK, but apparently it’s still milling about somewhere on the fringe.<\/p>\n The contributors to SNN, who are mostly Jewish, discussing this a bit in an e-mail exchange, did not take serious offense at this since they understand that this is an extreme minority opinion in the Christian community. Nonetheless, I, the (as far as I know) token Christian in the group, wanted to give them some ammunition from the Christian scriptures in case they ever came across this again.<\/p>\n Firstly, technically speaking, Romans<\/i> killed Christ; their cross, their nails, their manual labor. Shall we then blame all Italians? I think not.<\/p>\n Secondly, from another point of view, I<\/i> killed Christ. If I had never sinned, He wouldn’t have had to die for me. I’m not the only<\/i> person He died for, but my screw-ups were as much a part of it as everyone else’s. The "Christ killer" epithet is thus as appropriate to the accuser as the accused. Might as well accuse them of being human.<\/p>\n And thirdly, there are these words from Jesus Himself (from John 10:17-18<\/a>), where Jesus is talking about Himself as the Good Shepherd. <\/p>\n The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life\u2014only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n So here’s Jesus saying that He himself<\/i> is responsible for laying down His life, blaming no one else. He not only specifically absolved those physically crucifying Him<\/a>, He absolves us of the guilt of being sinful with regards to that being the reason He made the choice. He laid it down of His own accord; no one forced Him to do it. The God of the universe had a choice to make, and He made it, and the guilt that might be associated with it would go the way of all<\/em> guilt for sin; as far as the east is from the west<\/a>.<\/p>\n And, of course, He did say he would "take it up again". The power is all HIs. He is Risen!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been on Spring Break vacation with the family this past week, so I didn’t have an Easter post before Easter. But here it is now. Last September, a commenter at the Shire Network News podcast web site (the old web site, not the shiny new one) suggested that "the Bible is very clear that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,9,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity","category-doug","category-religion"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stonescryout.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n