People who snipe with bitter tongues to make snarky comments about God’s people in the earth have forgotten (or perhaps have never known) the care that Jesus displays in the hour of His criticism and trial. The Church is His love!
And, when people choose to make themselves the ‘critical-spirited enemy’ of His church with their bitterly-twisted tongues, Jesus becomes like the sheep before the shearers – He opens not His mouth. But for His loving, adoring disciples, Jesus continues to speak with almighty power. Why?
He is perfect love!
Jesus’ love is manifested both in silence and intimate conversation simultaneously as His constant, self-forgetting, ever-faithful, always abiding love. The “Good Shepherd lays down His life for His sheep” & pleads that they must go free. The Surety is bound, and justice demands that those for whom He stands as a substitute should go free. In the middle of Egypt’s bondage, His voice rang out with power, “Let these men go.” Out of the slavery of sin and Satan, the redeemed must come. In every cell of the dungeons of Despair, the sound is echoed, “Let these men go,” and out come the Despondent and Fearful, for Satan having heard this Voice, had to lift his foot from the neck of the fallen. Death hears it and the graves open up at it, the gates swing open from it, and those who were once dead in the trespasses of their sin rise up with new life to march in the freedom born out of the vengeance that smote His calvary frame.
In His death, He was silent to the snarky, but He spoke with power to His disciples who loved Him…. until every bolt of vengeance was annulled in the immunity born in His body as our Speaking Redeemer!
If Jesus is silent, then you would be wise to check your attitude about “His first ‘love.’” He redeems what He loves with the voice of His power and, like Abel, He still speaks. He said, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me: And I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand.” John 10:27-28.