Doing an injury puts you below your enemy; revenging one, makes you even with him; forgiving it sets you above him. – Nylic Review
To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing and be nothing. – Elbert Hubbard
Sure Offences
Trespasses and offences are inevitable on this side of living. It takes dying to feel no more pain. According to Jesus the great Jewish teacher, “There will always be temptations” (Luke 17:1, Living Bible). The King James Version (KJV) says, “It is impossible” for offences to not “come.” In other words, even if you raised your holy fence so high against offences, and did not go looking for them, they could still “come” over to you in your peaceful house, in your cosy office, in the holy sanctuary; they could “come” to you far up in the sky, out in the lonely desert, at sea, or on land; they could “come” to you anywhere, in multiple shapes and sizes, and times without notice.
This world has plenty of people with flaws, or what we might perceive as flaws; people of a different temperament, a different character, a different religious or social perspective than ours. We sometimes must deal inevitably with some of these, through whom offences sometimes find a way to “come.”
Unmeetable Expectations
Sometimes offences come because we expect people to be what they are not, what they cannot be, or what they are unwilling to be; we expect from them what they do not have, what they cannot give, or what they are unwilling to give – to us. Sometimes the expectations are so high that even angels cannot meet them to our unreasonable satisfaction; then we are offended, not so much from their denying us that ‘right’ as from our frustrated lack of power to force it from them.
Offences and Responses
Offences come not so much from a trespass as from the mode of our interpretation of and response to an actual or perceived trespass. The same blow that makes one party to cry could make another very happy, depending on each one’s ‘interpretation’ of that blow. See the following example, a story of early Christian persecution.
40 …They called in the apostles and had them flogged. Then they ordered them never again to speak in the name of Jesus, and they let them go.
41 The apostles left the high council rejoicing that God had counted them WORTHY to suffer disgrace for the name of Jesus (Acts 5:40-41, New Living Translation).
How could anyone rejoice at being so severely and publicly beaten? How could anyone respond with joy to blows? How could anyone respond so positively to suffering and disgrace? Didn’t they feel the pain from those whips? Or had they been enjoying ice cream? Would you have reacted the same way? We may then repeat that the pain we sometimes feel is not so much from the wrong as from 1) our interpretation of the ‘wrong’ and 2) the nature of our response to that ‘wrong.’
A young employee said “good morning” to his boss who was coming out angry from a room where he had made a bad business deal. What the boss heard instead was, “good money?” Thinking that the employee had been listening to the discussions in the room, and taking what he had heard as an audacious sarcastic remark, he screamed at the boy, calling him unprintable names. Only in the afternoon when his emotions had cooled did he learn the truth to his mortal shame as his deputy drew his attention to what the boy had said and how devastated he had felt since morning. What offended the boss was not so much what the young employee had said. The problem was his interpretation of what was said and how he chose to respond to what he thought he heard.
A five-year old girl meant to give her hardworking mom a surprise one morning. She was going to clean the kitchen while Mom was outside doing the morning laundry. In the process of ‘cleaning,’ she knocked down the china jar of fresh milk, and spilled it all over the floor. The mother rushed in, stunned at the disaster. The girl froze, unsure of what to expect…
Offences will cease their ‘comings’ when we no longer have an address on the earth, but we could minimise their comings if we lived like we had no address on the earth. You empower over your life whomever you allow to ‘give’ you offence that you receive. They master you who can madden you. Manage your offences. According to Elbert Hubbard, “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing and be nothing.” That is not practicable on this side of living, unless in the metaphorical sense in which it means, ‘To avoid criticism, be dead.’
Migrant Offences
According to one of the first-generation followers of Jesus, offences could be migrant, like Satan the proverbial roaring lion that “walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). They often “come” without invitation, in a major or minor form. They could come through a person or through a work instrument connected to a person. They could come when somebody somewhere steps on toes, or even steps on souls; or when somebody somewhere is the recipient of those inevitable pains. Offences or trespasses do not need a visa to “come,” but forgiveness is prescribed as a mode of response to them.
I met an old school friend one day on the street; he had fallen from faith because he felt that God had not made him tall enough. When I tried to talk him back to his deserted track, he advised that I shouldn’t bother, because he was fulfilling prophecy. I wondered how that could be. He promptly pointed me to where it says in the Holy Bible that in the last days the love of many would wax cold (Matthew 24:12). His present state was a fulfilment of that scripture, he argued. Strange. But I was sure that the same Bible also said that in the last days God would pour out His Spirit upon all flesh, and that sons and daughters would prophesy, dream dreams, and see visions (Acts 2:17). He chose the waxing-cold last-days scripture; I preferred the other last-days prophecy. Offence had come to him from a most unexpected ‘source.’ Indeed, his problem was not the ‘offence’; it was his reaction to the ‘offence.’ If he was angry with God because he was not tall, what should others do who were much shorter? Strangely, some of those shorter men are making a fortune from movies based solely on their very diminished stature, from the same ‘problem.’ It is the paradox of offences and responses: one man turns his offence into pain; the others turn the same offence into money.
Pervasive Offences
Speaking on this subject recently at a conference, I attempted a census of who had been offended and by whom. It was clear to all that offences come to everybody, and everyone has also been the instrument of offence to someone else at some time in some way.
Persons of every category suffer offences and trespasses from those they directly and indirectly relate with. There are clergy bleeding from wounds inflicted by congregation members for whom they have laboured; there are members damaged by pastors they had trusted, some of them vowing to have nothing more to do with anyone who bears the offensive title of ‘man of God’; there are children carrying painful memories of shameful abuses that they suffered from those they called Dad or Mom; there are also parents suffering terribly from wounds inflicted by children they nurtured. There are others who have piled up files of bitterness, against the boss who took their job away, against the tenant who stole their house, against the ‘friend’ who destroyed their marriage, against the government that never cared, against that terrorist tribe that ravaged them, or against ‘those people’ who turned the course of their common pleasant history into irreversible shame. What will I say about wives deformed for life by the man they called a lover, or wives whose pestilent lives and razor tongues have caused some man a ruin from which he will never recover? There are pains on individual and community levels. Everyone has been hurt at one time or the other, or has inflicted hurt on others. I probably didn’t mention your case, yet Jesus was still correct: “offenses must come,” which is not the hard part of it. The trauma is in how they sometimes ‘come’; the suddenness and vehicles of their coming.
Visitors Without Visa
It is impossible to not have offences, or to never offend any. Offences are part of life on the earth. One is either the subject or object of an offence. They “must” come, no matter how righteously one lives. Sometimes they come as deliberate or inadvertent provocations, for example, the drunk driver who damages the pretty car of a most careful driver, the careless housekeeper who forgets to turn off the tap and ruins those imperial rugs forever, the boss who opposes all that is goodly and godly, the ‘absent’ father who does not provide all the care, the friend who turns out to be worse than Judas Iscariot in an agonizing night, etc. It is impossible to not have to deal with offences. Jesus stresses the point in the use of the imperative modal verb “must”; they “must” come, no matter how cautiously and virtuously one lives, but that is not all. The critical point is how one receives or relates with them when they arrive.
To be continued…
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https://selar.co/m/kontein-trinya1?search=forgiveness – Forgiveness
https://selar.co/903394 – Balaam
https://selar.co/443i94 – Mystic Markets
https://selar.co/q4454b – Beyond Holiness
https://selar.co/1g4486 – Stray Bullets
There’s an insatiable thirst to read on sir because of the insights that I’m gaining but I’ll patiently wait for the next and the other parts.
Thank you so much sir.
Great grace in JESUS mighty name.
Amen.
Now that it is clear that everyone living on earth will encounter offenses, it is important to actively learn how to respond to these offenses appropriately. This way, we can avoid becoming a source of offense to others.