Following Jesus into danger

The point is that Jesus sometimes, perhaps often times, calls us into danger.  At the very least He will call us out of our comfort zones and therefore out of safety.  Safety is a pretty ignorant case to make after all, isn’t it?  Safety is largely an illusion.  We think if we can just build up enough wealth that we’ll be safe.  Surely we’ve all seen enough millionaires fall from their graces to realize that isn’t the case. 

Or take America as a nation, right?  We have the most superior military that has ever existed.  Our own military generals though say our debt is the greatest threat to our security.  I don’t really see that going away anytime soon, do you?  The Bible warns us early on in the Proverbs that the borrower is slave to the lender.  That applies to individuals as well as nations.  Sometimes it takes a while of course, but it will happen eventually.

Financial security and military security therefore, are interlinked.  Both are false presuppositions, mind you, but they are interlinked all the same.  As I tried to explain to a fellow intern earlier this summer, which is more likely to win a people group over?  Coming in and bombing the hell out of a nation or helping them build schools, hospitals and economic development in general?  The problem is of course that we’re trying to help economic development in developing countries when our own economy is a mess.

Sometimes following Jesus leads us into safety, albeit a different type of safety.  People quote some stupid cliché as being in God’s will is the safest place a person can be but I find no Scripture to back this claim up.  We are safe in the sense of being in God’s hands of course, but don’t be disillusioned into thinking that necessarily connotes physical safety by any measure.  I’m sure there are some obscure passages in the Psalms or Proverbs about God keeping David or Israel safe.  In the New Testament though, there are no such passages that I’m aware of.  If we are to take Jesus at His Word, furthermore, our only conclusion should be that following Him necessitates going into some type of danger.

When we decide to follow Jesus, we are declaring a war of types on the enemy’s kingdom.  We don’t fight against people but against powers and principalities of darkness, that whole thing.  And fight we must.  We just very often think of fighting in a one dimensional sense though is the problem in my opinion.  We think of fighting other people.  We need to focus our fighting on global crises like clean water, malaria, AIDS and rampant unemployment, among countless others to be sure.  As it stands now we instead pour how many hundreds of billions of dollars a year in fighting against an enemy that will never be defeated due to their very structure of decentralization of the Taliban?