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About Jesus - Steve (Stephen) Sweetman The
Synagogue Of Satan This
past Yom Kippur, just around our corner in our small Canadian city, a
young man shot up a synagogue, severely injuring a policeman for life
who was hired to guard the Jews in the synagogue. A second policeman
arrived who shot and killed the shooter. A week later my wife and I
went for a walk, but not by the synagogue where a meeting was in progress
with police protection. "It's too dangerous to walk by the
synagogue", my wife said. This thought would never have crossed
anyone's mind in our city in times past, but I guess those times have
passed. A
few days later while walking by the synagogue I recalled Jesus calling the
synagogues in Philadelphia and Smyrna the "synagogues of Satan"
(Revelation 2:9, 3:9). Why did Jesus utter such anti-Semitic words,
and since Jesus did, can I? To
begin, we must realize the more we know about the era in which any
Biblical text was originally spoken or penned the better we will
understand and apply it today. Ignoring such details ends in
misunderstanding and misapplying the text. Hosea 4:6 says that God's
people are destroyed due to lack of knowledge that Daniel 12:4 suggests is
increasing exponentially. We must take advantage, then, of this
knowledge. What we must not do is interpret the Biblical text based
on a 21st century western-world mindset.
You
may say you have no way to learn this knowledge.
I say we do. We simply
fail to take advantage of such knowledgeable scholarship, seminary
professors that don't require us going to The
above-mentioned synagogues opposed Christians by slandering them and by
handing them over to the authorities to be imprisoned and executed.
Christians in the first-century Greco/Roman world suffered more than we
can imagine. They struggled with the state, with polytheistic
religion and the Jews. Life's challenges hit them the moment they
woke in the morning. Not
participating in polytheistic life made it next to impossible to earn a
living. Most calling themselves Christians today would have
forfeited their faith. That's just part of Jesus' rationale for
using the words "the synagogue of Satan". Of course, when
Jesus uttered these words He was on His universal throne, battling His
enemies (1 Corinthians 15: 24 - 25). He knew things about these
synagogues we know nothing about. While
on earth, Jesus spoke to the Jewish leaders in like fashion by calling
their father the devil, not Abraham as they claimed (John 8:44). He
did so because they routinely failed to obey the God they claimed to
serve, who was His Father, making Him God's Son. In stark contrast,
Jesus encountered a Jewish prostitute and didn't associate her with the
devil. He just said, "Neither do I condemn you. Go and
sin no more" (John 8:11). Can
I follow Jesus' example and call our local Jewish synagogue the
"synagogue of Satan"? A little bit of history tells me I
can't. Our local synagogue has little similarities to those in
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