Paper Thin

I stumbled across Christopher Hitchens wrath worthy book ‘God is Not Great’ at Barnes and Noble Sunday evening. I usually avoid secular hate propaganda, but my faith has been rock solid as of late. I flipped open to a random page , to my surprise, was the topic of the mornings sermon on Mark 7:24-30:

Jesus got up and went away from there to the region of Tyre. And when He had entered a house, He wanted no one to know of it; yet He could not escape notice.
But after hearing of Him, a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately came and fell at His feet.
Now the woman was a Gentile, of the Syrophoenician race. And she kept asking Him to cast the demon out of her daughter.
And He was saying to her, “Let the children be satisfied first, for it is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
But she answered and said to Him, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table feed on the children’s crumbs.”
And He said to her, “Because of this answer go; the demon has gone out of your daughter.”
And going back to her home, she found the child lying on the bed, the demon having left.

What was interesting, that Christ’s ‘harsh’ initial rejection of the Syrophoenecian woman, was chalked up by Hitchens, to racism, because she was a Gentile, simple as that, cut and dry. Here we see how easy it is for secular crusaders to employ contextomy to build arguments that hold water with unbelievers. While I’d like to think so called intellectuals do ‘research’, I believe in this case research would have refuted his case.

When we look at the same account in Matthew 15, Christ had withdrawn, that is, he went to rest. As Pastor Miessler pointed out, he was constantly hounded by miracle seekers. While he IS God, in his humbled state, he was still man and needed physical restoration.

We dare not say Christ a racist, for we read in Matthew 15:24 a statement of purpose.

But He answered and said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Christ’s central focus to his ministry was to Israel. In fact, in John 4, prior to the feeding of the 5000, also mentioned in Mark, Christ most compassionately dialogues with the woman at the well:

You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.
But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.

We see here, ‘salvation is from the Jews’, yet she was a gentile and did minister to her.

It’s people Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins who are, at least on the literary front, spearheading the ‘intellectual’ attack on religion. Dawkins claims his attacks are relegated to only ‘pen and paper’ as an attempt to disguise his hatred.

We all know, Mr. Dawkins, that the pen is mightier than the sword.