Sri Lanka, Persuasion, and Resurrection

April 29, 2019 at 5:15 am Leave a comment

There is this telling line that describes the way in which the apostle Paul conducted his ministry: “Every Sabbath he reasoned in the synagogue, trying to persuade Jews and Greeks” (Acts 18:4). Paul, when it came to sharing the gospel, sought to persuade. And, by all accounts, he was quite successful. What began a small group of hundreds of Christians in the first century now numbers 2.18 billion.

The Christian faith has always had an affinity for persuasion. There is a whole subset of Christian teaching categorized as “apologetics,” which is meant to defend the faith against those who would attack its integrity and persuade those who question its credibility. Indeed, persuasion is critical to the Christian mission. Christians are called to make winsome, reasoned, intelligible arguments as to why Jesus is the Messiah in the confidence that God’s Spirit will bring people to faith in Jesus as the Messiah.

Not everyone, however, operates in this way of persuasion.

Last Sunday, as Christians in Sri Lanka were celebrating the resurrection of Christ, a spate of coordinated, terrorist attacks were launched by nine suicide bombers at three churches and three hotels in the island nation’s capital, Colombia, killing around 250. There were warnings in the days and weeks before the attacks, which Sri Lankan officials failed to heed. One of the suicide bombers had been previously arrested, but was then released. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attacks, although the extent to which the terror group was involved remains unclear.

Tragically, these kinds of attacks have become unsurprising. In 2017, 18,814 people were killed in terrorist attacks worldwide. This represents a whopping 27% decline in deaths from the year before. Many, many people have lost their lives in these acts of evil.

Behind terrorism lies an ideology that those who disagree with you, whether their disagreement be theological, philosophical, ideological, or political, cannot and are not to be persuaded. Instead, they are to be defeated and destroyed. This way of thinking is as horrifying as it is frightening. But it is also, ultimately, unsuccessful.

At the dawn of the third century, when Christians were being severely persecuted by the Romans, a church historian named Tertullian famously wrote to the Church’s persecutors:

Your cruelty, however exquisite, does not avail you; it is rather a temptation to us. The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.

And seed it was. When Tertullian wrote these words, there were around 19,000 Christians in Rome, about 4% of the city’s population. 50 years later, that number had grown to 78,000, around 17% of the city’s population. By the year 300, there were nearly 300,000 Christians in Rome, which constituted over 66% of the city’s population. Christians were killed. But the Christian Church could not be stopped. The persecutors’ terrorizing overtures were unsuccessful.

As it was in Tertullian’s day, so it is in our day. The threats of those who despise Christians are simply no match for the persuasive and attractive truth of Christianity. Those who lost their lives in Sri Lanka while worshipping the risen Savior on Easter are not extinguished. They are simply now waiting – waiting for the One who, on the Last Day, will call forth their bodies from their graves. To quote Tertullian once more:

The resurrection of the dead is the Christian’s trust … Life is the great antagonist of death, and will in the struggle swallow up for salvation what death, in its struggle, had swallowed up for destruction.

A terrorist may be able to take a life with a bomb, but he cannot extinguish that life for eternity. Just like some soldiers, a long time ago, were able to take a life with a cross, but they could not extinguish that life for longer than three days. Of this we are called to persuade people. Of this I am fully persuaded.

Christ is risen. And because He has risen, Sri Lankan Christians will rise. And so will we.