Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa! Mea Maxima Culpa!

Today I was on the Shasta College campus here in Redding sharing the gospel with students to whom I hand out leaflets raising questions that relate to Jesus Christ. It's easy because many of the students who pause to take a look at the leaflet are willing to volunteer their opinion of who Jesus is in response to my inquiry. By asking questions and listening first, I find that many students are willing to listen to what the New Testament says about sin, salvation and the Savior. And about every other time I go out there, at least one of the students has been prepared by the Holy Spirit to confess Jesus as Lord. That didn't happen today, but a couple of the young men were willing to read from the Scriptures what the Bible says about Jesus and our salvation and let me pray for them. After several hours of leafleting and sharing, I went upstairs to a room off the balcony above the cafeteria where InterVarsity Christian Fellowship was having a Bible study. We started small but soon an alumnus of Pelican Bay State Prison showed up with his guitar and the group leader mentioned that he was a former drug addict who was a graduate of the Redding Mission's recovery program. A couple of black brothers came in and I found myself sitting beside a lovely young woman from Bethel's school of ministry who was from Romania and was reading the scripture from a bilingual Romanian-English Bible. The Bible study was from Matthew 12, a chapter in which the Pharisees criticized Jesus disciples and Jesus himself, calling them Sabbath breakers because Jesus' disciples plucked some stalks of grain and ate the still tender grains and because Jesus insisted on healing the man in the synagogue with a withered hand on the Sabbath Day. Jesus defended his followers and himself summing up his argument by saying, "If you had known what these words mean, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice' (Hosea 6:6), you would not have condemned the innocent" (Matt. 12:7). The main point of the study seemed to me to be that God was more interested in our heart attitude towards him and towards our neighbors than in ritual obedience. After discussing the Scripture, we joined in worship songs with help from the guitarist and the young woman from Romania and prayed for one another. I went out to my table on the quad in front of the cafeteria to eat my lunch and distribute a few more leaflets. Almost immediately, I was tested on the study: Would I put mercy ahead of ministry? And I flunked bigtime. A lovely young woman approached and since I didn't immediately recognize her, she reminded me of her name (say, Natalie) and that we had discussed the teachings of the Jehovah's Witnesses with whom she had been and still was studying. I instantly remembered her and began my apologetic demonstrating that Jehovah's Witnesses are polytheists. Their calling Jehovah "Almighty God" and Jesus "mighty god" (Isaiah 9:6) and "a god" (John 1:1, New World Translation only) leaves them with not one God, but two, a high God and a lesser god. This is rather like the situation of Greek mythology with Zeus as the high god and other lesser gods like Hermes. The Witnesses limit their god count to two, but they are, nevertheless, polytheists, not true monotheists. But providentially, Natalie was interested in bigger game. She innocently asked me why we believe in the Trinity. Now I was ready to lead her to the biblical answers to that question, but our guitarist, my brother from Pelican Bay, offered to help us out. I was none too pleased with his interruption of an ongoing witness I have been working on for a while, but he had a Scripture and Natalie wanted to see it. When I saw that he was taking us to 1 John 5:7 in his King James Version, I lost it. That verse certainly contains the essence of the teaching of the Trinity: To be continued.