When Elijah spoke for God to Ahab the King of Samaria, Ahab addressed him: "Is it you, you troubler of Israel" (1Ki 18:17)? Elijah was just calling the northern tribes to reject the Baals and return to the Lord who had spoken to His people from Sinai. Those who tell the truth are often blamed for the truth to which they bear witness. Eastern potentates would often kill the unfortunate messenger that brought portentous or disastrous news. In the Greek tragedy Antigone, the messenger who, against his will, reports to King Creon that Antigone has given burial rites to her brother, Polynices, says "No man loves the messenger of ill" (Sophocles, Antigone, 311), which is a form of our adage "Don't kill the messenger." Nothing much has changed.

We Christians often approach our culture and the people who are imprisoned by it with a message of the decadence and impiety of our way of life. Such a message is condemned as unkind, unhelpful, and even seditious. To be honest, none of us is pleased by a report of bad news. It is so easy to blame the messenger, because it keeps us from assessing our well-established prejudices. The Christian faith often comes upsetting the apple cart of our cheap and easy "truths;" challenging us to confess our own sin and to accept the exclusive claims of the divine lordship of Christ. It tells us to abandon all that we hold dear and to cast ourselves upon the resources of someone other than ourselves. It pleads with us to reject self-justification and trust Christ and His righteousness alone for salvation. It requires that we give up trust of institutions and men to repose quietly in His arms for all comfort and consolation. It is no wonder that the Christian Gospel is reviled everywhere, even and sometimes most viciously within those institutions that make claim to the name of "church," by men who want to reduce the church to their possession.