A pagan king with a bloated ego set an ultimatum. Pay homage with deep obeisance to his self-monument or burn alive. Three teenage boys stood their ground in a sea of groveling sycophants. They told a rage-maddened king that they didn’t answer to him, knowing full well the mortal consequences of doing so. The petty selfishness of a human ruler had no power to bring them to their knees because they served the King of kings. That King could have brought their enemy to his knees, destroyed him and set the boys up as kings in his place. He could have rained down His own fire on the misguided people who submitted to the despot. Instead, He merely stood in the fire with three teenagers, a shield that made rage impotent.
The great council of elders, appointed by Rome to judge matters considered beneath the empire’s notice and beholden to empirical favor for any authority they wielded, held its own people in a dictatorial vice. Independent thought threatened council members’ precarious position and status; developments not specifically approved by them exposed the lie in their carefully crafted image of themselves as the hands of God. When two fishermen gave sight to a blind man under their very noses at the gate of the temple and declared the council’s guilt of murdering God rather than serving Him, the council used its most drastic measures in retaliation. No longer allowed power over life and death, the members imprisoned the outspoken fishermen and sought to intimidate them with threats and posturing. The fishermen stood their ground in a sea of desperate faces, knowing that the consequences might well involve long-term imprisonment or even being handed over to deadly Roman discipline on false charges, calmly informing the power-crazed council that they did not answer to it. The conviction of the fishermen and their impossible healing paralyzed the council, exposing its true focus and stripping from it the fear it had cultivated in the people it ruled. The fishermen were released and their message flooded the city with hope and courage.
An egotistical man imposed his will on a group of faithful men and women. Unwilling to bend his will to any authority, he twisted the words of God and maligned any who challenged him. He isolated the group from outside influence, refusing to offer welcome to faithful visitors and ostracising any who defied his refusal. The same fisherman that faced the great council wrote to a faithful member of that beleaguered group, setting the example of conviction and encouraging the faithful to remember that they did not answer to any arrogant man. Their joint refusal to comply would sterilize his threats and free them to do the work of God.
Evil has many tricks to confuse our attention, to trick us into answering to the wrong demands. Not only does it launch open attacks from the outside, it creeps in through the chinks to sow doubt and confusion. A misguided sense of respect for human prestige, fear of temporary consequences, and overprioritization of human desires all result in forgetting the Authority above all authorities. Of what are we truly convicted? To whom do we truly answer?
The Word Worker 
