2) Jesus Said He Wanted to Offer Nothing to Gentiles! The fact that Christianity has become a religion largely of Gentiles who literally worship Jesus is a huge irony, because in his ministry, Jesus said he intended to offer Gentiles nothing. Matthew 10:5 shows Jesus giving his disciples firm instructions to “go nowhere among the Gentiles.” It’s true that Chapter 8 of Matthew and Chapter 7 of Luke show Jesus healing the servant of a Roman soldier. However, this happened only after the soldier said he was unworthy of Jesus’ attention. It’s also possible that Jesus assumed the servant was a Jew, because, as shown in Matthew 15:21-28, when a woman who was indisputably a Gentile asked for healing for her daughter, Jesus initially ignored her. She was so persistent with her pleas that his apostles wanted to silence her. But they didn’t ask Jesus to do that by helping her. Instead, knowing his attitude toward Gentiles, they urged him to send her away. When she finally knelt before Jesus, making it impossible to continue to ignore her, he told her he was sent “only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” He then made clear that he considered her as a Gentile to be no better than a dog, adding that it wasn’t fair for dogs to receive food intended for children. Only when she pointed out that even dogs eat crumbs from their masters’ table did Jesus praise her for her faith and give her the help she wanted. Further evidence that Jesus had a harsh attitude toward Gentiles comes from the fact that, after his death, resistance from his disciples caused Paul problems in his Gentile conversion efforts (see Galatians 2:11-14). Christianity eventually became a religion of Gentiles not because of any personal outreach to them by Jesus during his lifetime, but because of the work of Paul and the fact that most Jews, whom Jesus was really reaching out to, rejected it.
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 05:53:13 +0000
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