Shout it aloud, do not hold back. Raise your voice like a trumpet. Declare to my people their rebellion and to the house of Jacob their sins. (Isaiah 58:1)

Those who call themselves Christians often do not know what God is like, and the more they find out, the less they like him. Or, if they wish to maintain their pious profession of faith, they would insist that God is not as the Bible presents him, even as they claim to believe every word that it says. But if the Bible were to become a man to say and act out what it contains, most of them would not recognize him. In fact, they would declare him an unloving extremist with thoroughly unchristian traits, so much so that they would take up a hammer and nail him to death in the name of God.

This was what happened in the first century, when the religious people conspired with the heathens to silence Jesus Christ. The Bible came alive and became a man, and they murdered him in the name of the same Bible. They are still doing this today. Everywhere, “Christians” continue to hunt down Jesus Christ so that they could silence him, to put him to death, so that their strange doctrines and powerless traditions may continue in the name of this same Jesus.

The Jesus in their sermons carries little resemblance to the Jesus in the Bible, perhaps because they are the very kind of people that Jesus attacked. The Jesus in the Bible contradicted the religious leaders on their false doctrines and traditions, and he embarrassed them about their intellectual and ethical failures. He made their shortcomings explicit and traveled all over the place to advertise them. He liberated people from the paradoxical doctrines and oppressive traditions that men invented in the name of God. The Jesus in the Bible made the religious establishment angry, angry enough to murder him.

The Jesus in the Bible attributed people’s failure to their lack of faith, encouraged hope in miracles, became angry with people when they were hardened against his healing power in order to secure their own tradition and reputation, and turned over tables when merchants defiled the place of worship. The Jesus in the Bible cursed a fig tree because it could not bear fruit out of season, and then cursed an entire people to destruction because it failed to bear spiritual fruit. He raised a widow’s son from the dead, not only to authenticate a new revelation, but out of compassion for the woman, and blasted the religious hypocrites for opposing such a ministry.

The Jesus in the Bible rebuked with a loud voice, with demeaning insults and threats. This is so much a characteristic that his own disciples were sometimes afraid to ask him questions. This has always been a facet of God’s anointed servants. The prophet must shout with a loud voice, like the blast of a trumpet. He must not hold back as he declare the sins of the people. He is to show no restraint in the volume and content with which he attacks them. The people who think that this is wrong are out of touch with the Bible, and out of touch with the Word who became a man and walked among us.