09/08/2026
Those Who Kill the Prophets
Before He was crucified, Jesus said on the Mount of Olives, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you!” (Luke 13:34). He was expressing the grief of God who sent messenger after messenger, only to see them rejected and killed.
Israel had a bloody history of rejecting God’s messengers, including Jeremiah — the weeping prophet, who spent forty years telling a nation what it did not want to hear.
Jeremiah preached to his nation, the people of God, given God’s covenant with the law, the temple, and the promises, which they broke repeatedly.
He confronted their idolatry, the altars to Baal in high places, and their child sacrifices. He confronted the injustice and their false security. They believed they were Abraham’s children, and God would never judge them.
Therefore, Jeremiah was hated. The people beat him and put him in prison. They plotted to kill him. They lowered him into a cistern to die in the mud. The word of the Lord through Jeremiah was harsh and not well received.
The world of Jeremiah was not unlike our own. On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking at a university event. Charlie stood before crowds of young people and spoke plainly about the claims of Christ, the dignity of the unborn, the reality of sin, and the goodness of God’s design for marriage and family. He did not compromise the message to accommodate society’s deviations from God’s norms.
Like Jeremiah, he confronted a culture that was out of step with God’s covenant. Charlie addressed the moral order of the new covenant given to us by Jesus Christ. As Jeremiah was, Charlie was told he was the problem.
The world did not kill Charlie Kirk because he was unkind. It killed him because it could not bear what he said. Mankind’s problem with sin goes the whole way back to Adam and Eve. The root of the original sin is our thinking that we have a better idea than God’s. So we succumb to the temptation to be like God and create our own path to destruction. When prophets try to warn us, those overcome by evil turn angrily against the prophets.
An overlooked part of Jesus’ story sounds all too familiar today. The Roman governor, Pilate, wanted to de-escalate the situation with Jesus. So, he gave the angry mob a choice. He offered to release Jesus, or another prisoner. They shouted for Barabbas, a man imprisoned for murder, a hardened criminal with blood on his hands.
Many in America are still choosing Barabbas.
We shouldn’t be surprised that people find the message of Jesus and Charlie to be offensive. Jesus is labeled as “a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense” (1 Peter 2:8). Isaiah had said it first: the Lord would be a sanctuary to some and a stone of stumbling to others.
Paul wrote that the word of the cross is “folly to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18). Not because it is foolish, but because it exposes folly.
The Gospel message tells the truth about ourselves. It says we are not basically good, and have fallen short of the glory of God. It says our righteousness is as filthy rags, and that the only way to heaven is through the cross of Christ.
This only becomes a comforting message when we come to the end of ourselves and realize that Jesus will freely save anyone who accepts His gift of salvation.
Jesus did not send us to affirm the culture of the world. He called us to be the light of the world, to be a contrast to all the darkness.
Those who live in darkness can be much like the Pharisees, who Jesus compared to their father,, Satan, who comes to steal, kill, and destroy.
More: http://light-pollution.blog
