Persecution

Every one of Jesus’ original followers were heavily persecuted, typically to death:
  1. Peter was crucified upside-down on an X-shaped cross, likely because he told his persecutors that he didn’t feel worthy to die the exact way Jesus did.
  2. Andrew was flogged severely by seven soldiers, then crucified on an X-shaped cross in Patras, Greece. He was tied to the cross with ropes to prolong his suffering, and preached to his persecutors for two days before dying.
  3. James the son of Zebedee defended his faith in a trial, and was beheaded in Jerusalem (Acts 12:1-3). Right before his beheading, a Roman officer knelt beside James to also accept a new faith in Christ.
  4. John was boiled in a basin of oil but delivered from death, then sentenced to the island prison mines of Patmos by Domitian, then later freed due to old age and died peacefully in Ephesus (Turkey).
  5. Philip was stoned and crucified in Hierapolis, Phrygia.
  6. Bartholomew/Nathaniel was flayed to death by a whip in Albinopolis, Armenia.
  7. Matthew was sentenced to death by Hircanus and stabbed with a spear in Ethiopia.
  8. Thomas was likely stabbed with a spear in India.
  9. James the son of Alphaeus refused to deny his faith and was likely thrown over a hundred feet down from the southeast pinnacle of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, then was beat to death with a fuller’s club when they found that he survived the fall.
  10. Simon the Zealot was likely crucified in Roman Britain.
  11. Jude/Judas the son of James was likely clubbed to death or impaled with arrows.
  12. Matthias (appointed to replace Judas Iscariot) was stoned and then beheaded.
  13. Paul/Saul of Tarsus suffered a lengthy incarceration that permitted him to write most of the New Testament, and was likely tortured and then beheaded by Nero in A.D. 67.
  14. Luke was hung as sentencing for preaching in Greece.
  15. Mark was dragged to death by horses through the streets of Alexandria, Egypt.

Christianity is the only faith that treats persecution an inherently positive experience:

Legitimate persecution isn’t merely martyrdom complex:
  • Christianity has a long history of people all over the world consistently vandalizing, verbally assaulting, and mistreating them.
  • Except for when Christians run those countries, it’s nearly always proportionally higher than other people groups.

Jesus practically promises suffering and persecution:
  • It’s nothing personal, since they hated Jesus as well (John 15:18-20).
  • History has shown that the Church expands its influence every time authority figures have tried to shut down or oppress Christianity.

Persecution is power games

Everyone who hates God will hate God’s people by association.

The world’s authorities abuse power to prove they’re more powerful than God, and feel they will have subdued or killed Him if they can capture, coerce, or kill all Christians.

The politician Saul Alinsky describes the Satan’s playbook well:
  1. Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
    • Power comes from either money or people.
    • People without power must build it from flesh and blood.
  2. Never go outside your peoples’ expertise.
    • It results in confusion, fear, and retreat.
    • Feeling secure adds to anyone’s backbone.
  3. Whenever possible, go outside the enemy’s expertise.
    • Find ways to increase insecurity, anxiety, and uncertainty.
  4. Make the enemy live up to their rule book.
    • If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters.
    • You can kill them with this because no one can obey all their rules.
  5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
    • There is no defense: it’s irrational and infuriating.
    • It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
  6. A good tactic is one your people enjoy.
    • They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more.
    • They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.
    • A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag, so don’t become old news.
  7. Keep the pressure on and never let up.
    • Keep trying new things to throw the opposition off-balance.
    • As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.
  8. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
    • Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.
  9. The best tactics develop operations that keep constant pressure on the opposition.
    • The unceasing pressure gives reactions from the opposition essential for your campaign’s success.
  10. By pushing a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.
    • Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.
  11. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
    • Never let the enemy score points from catching you without a solution to the problem.
  12. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
    • Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy.
    • Go after people and not institutions since people hurt faster than institutions.

The psychologist Philip Zimbardo charted exactly how people become evil:
  1. People start by mindlessly taking a first small step, usually because an authority figure told them to.
  2. If they have any attacks of conscience, they justify their actions by dehumanizing their victims.
  3. By doing someone else’s will, they feel anonymous and, thus, morally exempt from their actions.
  4. Within a short period, the culture adapts to endorse when people don’t take personal responsibility for their behaviors.
  5. The culture’s power structure will mandate blind obedience to authority figures.
  6. Eventually, everyone will adapt to the group’s rules without asking questions.
  7. Finally, everyone will passively tolerate evil through inaction or indifference.

Even in tyrannical societies, most of the people are simply watching:

Persecution comes as a cycle

Christianity and society have a unique trend across centuries that always plays out the same way.

First, every society is relatively open to missionaries and new Christians:
  • Except for some opponents, the public will coexist peacefully with Christians if they keep to themselves and limit how much they share the Gospel.
  • While some groups (e.g., witch doctors, idol crafters) will protest, Christians will still have their normal civil liberties available to them.

Eventually, the Satan will inspire people to reject Christians:
  • That society will reject Jesus’ message, not the Christians themselves, but they’ll usually imply the Christians deserved it.
  • It’ll be publicly shameful (maybe even taboo) to profess a faith in Jesus.
  • Since the Satan is constantly rearranging his strategy, this will never show predictably, and the culture defines how it’ll express itself.

From there, Christians will start incurring public shame:
  • They’ll start losing their status and reputation in their communities.
  • Large organizations may close off business to distinctly Christian organizations (e.g., faith-based not-for-profit organizations).
  • Unless they renounce their faith, their biological family and long-standing friends will slowly alienate them.
  • Officials will forbid or restrict certain Christian practices like public evangelism, expressing faith or simply praying perceptibly.
  • The government strategies to deter Christianity can include exploiting ambitious church leaders, tempting pastors with money, using pastors’ sins to blackmail them, and making laws that inhibit Christians to freely assemble.
  • Even if the government doesn’t get involved, it’ll often require churches to register their gatherings and report to them.

Soon, Christianity becomes illegal to practice in public:
  • Churches will often lose their government authorization unless they comply with anti-Christian values.
  • Evangelism and public worship will become illegal.
  • Officials will detain and possibly beat Christians after warning them.
  • This can happen very rapidly, sometimes in the course of one day!

Depending on the leadership’s decisions, merely existing as a Christian becomes illegal:
  • The types of persecution will vary on a dictator’s disposition and how much he hates God.
  • Christians will often have to endure incessant and oppressive government regulations.
  • At its most extreme, Christians are incarcerated and tortured.
  • Occasionally, particularly cruel nations will force them to perform in blood sport.
  • Leftist countries often mandate “rehabilitation programs” or sending them to “re-education centers”.
  • At the worst, Christians may live under a persistent threat of mass genocide.

The most evil and cruel leaders never last more than a few years, but nothing promises the persecution will stop:
  • The power shifts may bring in new leadership, but each leader has a unique agenda, and not all of them will remove existing legal precedent.
  • Most of the time, the trends will cycle back-and-forth between permissive and malice, but will rarely stop completely.
  • Occasionally, the trends will rapidly pivot, especially during a regime change.
  • Often, in high-information societies, the trends will pivot very rapidly across months or weeks.

Despite the hardship, the Church will persist:
  • Historically, the Church has thrived while standing against evil authorities who kill and destroy.
  • The Holy Spirit has a wide variety of creative measures, including miracles and “strange coincidences” that work in believers’ favor.

Preparing beforehand

Suffering is guaranteed, but we should work to reduce it when reasonably possible.

Before we encounter suffering, we must devote ourselves wholly to our spiritual journey:

“Liberal” Christianity can never survive persecution:
  • If the Bible has faults, there’s no substance to disprove the assertions of the world.
  • Without the God of the Bible, God is dead.
  • If the story of Adam and Eve and our fallen state isn’t strictly true, the Gospel and Jesus aren’t necessary.
  • If there’s no reason we have to believe core Christian doctrinal ideas (e.g., Jesus was born from a virgin) then God isn’t necessarily capable of causing dramatic miracles.
  • And, without the Bible, God’s plans for Israel aren’t clear, and there’s nothing for Christians to hope for.

Irrespective of persecution, we must discover God for ourselves:
  1. The culture of Christianity moves forward by powerful language that speaks influential truth.
  2. A good sermon is a powerful story that alludes to good theology.
  3. Good theology is a strong philosophy that anchors to the Bible.
  4. The Bible is God’s Word, which is the creative output of the living God.
  • Simply repeating a Bible verse never strengthens a believer, but it becomes unstoppable if a believer fully understands what it means.
  • We must sort out our individual salvations, fearfully and shaking, before we encounter outward persecution (Philippians 2:14).

The authorities aren’t as powerful as they seem

Frequently, government authorities are relatively untrained in Christianity, so they’re often educated enough to know the word “bible” or a cross symbol, but wouldn’t detect subtler things:
  • Hidden compartments hidden underneath a vehicle’s upholstery.
  • Secret pockets inside heavy clothing.
  • A Bible in a phone app if it doesn’t have the symbol or name.
  • A text file of a Bible in a computer named something else or renamed as a different file extension.
  • A media file with an unusual amount of metadata in it.
  • However, they will detect anything that appears out-of-place, such as a second calculator app or any strange lumps.

Persecution is practically measurable on a chart, and falls into the same predictable behaviors:
  1. Public shaming and ridicule
  2. Verbal assault and screaming
  3. Violence and taking away rights

Beyond intentionally targeting Christians, persecution tends to happen through several major vectors:
  1. Border “guards” will inspect possessions and demand you unlock your phone. They’ll spend 1–3 minutes visually reviewing what’s in your phone, and will often look for something to demand financial compensation over.
  2. Monitoring internet traffic by looking for keywords (e.g., “bible”, “Jesus”), which can expand vastly into synonyms or aided by artificial intelligence.
  3. If they find a high-profile person who disagrees with them or their methods, using a search warrant about something (which may have nothing to do with the subject in question) to very thoroughly investigate them and all their connections, and possibly sentence them to prison/death even without finding anything.

Even the devil makes mistakes:
  • While he tries to look invincible, he often makes the mistake of helping or even creating Christians.
  • He’ll frequently show his hand out of pure anger, and often shows more truth in that anger than anyone can suppress.

Through all the hardship, the Holy Spirit will still shine through:
  • Christians will lose families, friends, reputations, and opportunities, and they’ll still be joyful.
  • While the free world has a difficult time imagining this, the persecuted Church treats this as normal.
  • Sometimes, a Christian’s abusers will convert merely by seeing that unworldly joy while they’re persecuting them.

How to prepare

When the Church goes underground, everyone who wishes to keep their faith will have to suffer:
  • Be prepared to suffer because the police will take you immediately if you’re not ready.
  • Some Christians contend that “submit to authority” (Romans 13:1-7) means permitting them to exploit you, but we must be gentle and clever (Matthew 10:16).

Respond to the world’s attacks with Christ-like behavior:
  1. Stand in the authority of the one living God.
    • He appoints all power, including money and people.
    • To build power without honoring God is vanity (Ecclesiastes 1:14).
  2. Don’t claim anything beyond God’s word.
    • Only stand confident in what you know.
  3. Humbly accept when you don’t know something.
    • You don’t have to know everything because God knows.
    • Your peace in Him is your ministry to others.
  4. Openly confess your sin when anyone calls you on it.
    • Own what you’ve done and vow to never consciously sin again.
  5. Patiently endure criticism and shame.
  6. Don’t concern yourself with evil.
  7. Regardless of what happens, trust the Lord and let the Church aid you when it can.
    • God is always in control, even when you feel it’s hopeless (Matthew 28:20).
  8. Even if the world looks terrifying, it’s not as scary as they imply.
    • They can only destroy your body (Matthew 10:28).
    • God has the power to build and destroy everything as He wishes, so you should pity them more than fear them.
  9. Expect the Satan to work tirelessly to destabilize you.
    • Trust the Holy Spirit for patience, wisdom, and willpower to confront the world’s representatives.
  10. You’re a representative of Christ, so act like it.
    • Worldly people often know that antagonizing you will provoke you to violence, which they can then justify action against.
    • Endure the suffering to show your new nature.
  11. Ignore the world’s strategies against you.
  12. Anticipate that the world will hate, misrepresent, misunderstand, misquote, and alienate you.

The specifics on how believers can stand against authority depends heavily on personality and skill, but falls under a few general themes.

Learn how to speak carefully to keep secrets:
  • People who ask probing questions have no right to demand an answer, so nobody is obligated to give one (Matthew 11:25).
  • On the other hand, avoid confrontations, since it will lead to arrests, beatings, and likely death, and is very inappropriate for a child of God (1 Corinthians 6:1-5).
  • Thus, try to find a way to speak truth that also hides realities which may harm other believers.
    • You can be compliant and pleasant while not directly answering their questions.
    • State the law when they ask your purpose.
    • Give away as much information as possible that has nothing to do with the people you’re protecting (e.g., less-relevant but highly private information like medication usage or sex life).
    • Use obscure or intellectual-sounding words to hide clearly illegal things.
    • Use pseudonyms and alternate names frequently for proper nouns (which is precisely why the Bible’s disciples had several names).
    • Trust the Holy Spirit whenever you’re uncertain what to say (Luke 12:12).

Learn to stay silent:
  • Silence has tremendous value because it’s very difficult to legally convict someone on silence alone (Proverbs 29:11).
  • Every stray word could devastate an underground church, so work very hard to hold your tongue (James 3:6).
  • Most people are accustomed to frequently talking, so we must train ourselves to it before we encounter it.
  • Ministering to other Christians comes through silence far more than speaking.

Learn Morse code before you need it:
Morse code can be absolutely crucial for communication with others.

Stay in constant connection with other believers as much as you can:

Handling the worst

Prison, of any sort, is a new ministry opportunity:
  • Your fellow cellmates are literally a “captive” audience to the Gospel message.
  • Solitary confinement can become a blessing in spiritual meditation and prayer if you use the time correctly.
  • Even though enduring years and decades of prison feels impossible, it only happens one day or one minute at a time, so don’t imagine any farther out than that.

Be prepared for torture:
  • Torture can be very painful, but your suffering is saving 50-60 Christians who could go to prison as well if you disclose key information about them.
  • If you permit it, that torture will cleanse you spiritually, similarly to how spankings make a child more well-behaved (Proverbs 13:24).

The most significant battle in prison is within your mind:
  • Winning against persecution requires keeping yourself together despite the fears and unknown possibilities.
  • The fear of things is always worse than the thing itself.
  • You can maintain your strength through your love for others and ability to handle pain, but only through the Holy Spirit (Zechariah 4:6).
  • The only way to resist brainwashing and indoctrination is through clarity of mind, which comes through pureness of heart (Matthew 5:8).
  • Many prisons are run by image distortion experts who fully control the prisoners’ environment.

Without enough severe pain, we lose all sensory awareness of anything outside that pain:
  • At specific thresholds, we lose our capacity to detect our reputations, then other people in general, then finally even the presence of God.
  • At those times, we must focus on the present moment and God within it to find peace in the pain.
  • The most important thing to focus on is steady breathing.
  • All the sacrifice must be a matter of love and duty to the Church, not just survival.

We must perform vigils to fight solitude and loneliness:
  • Vigils are devoted routines of steady prayer, which can often take more time than we have throughout the day!
  • Mentally travel around the world, praying for people you know of and their groups.
  • Rejoice with those who rejoice by imagining the details of their happiness outside prison (Romans 12:15).
  • Recite Bible verses from memory, which is where all that prior Bible study paid off.
  • Create stories and jokes as you imagine everything.
  • While all this sounds like what crazy people do, staying mentally busy allows us to stay in a solitary situation indefinitely.

Beware of the “moment of crisis”:
  • Torturers work to attain a specific state of mind where a person has been completely broken down.
  • At that point, a Christian will feel that nothing really matters anymore.
  • In that state, a Christian will give names, renounce Jesus, pledge allegiance to the Party, plead guilty, and anything else the torturer wants.
  • At that moment, the Holy Spirit is with us, as well as other believers in spirit (Romans 8:38-39).
  • Never forget that our spiritual inheritance is stored in heaven, so a breakdown of faith doesn’t necessarily mean we lose our salvation (1 Peter 1:4).
  • If we can get past that moment of crisis, our faith will be dramatically refined!
  • Once that happens, the torturer will give up or kill us, since they now know they can’t change us anymore.

Persecution is standard

Persecution against Christianity has been “normal” for 2,000 years:
  • Christians have been shamed, beaten, flogged, imprisoned, exiled, and killed for their faith since Jesus gave His life.
  • And, for the end to come, it must get worse (2 Timothy 3:1-9).

As a Christian, even if you suffer losses from standing against evil, He will repay all losses you experience in His name when He returns (Matthew 19:29).