Expect the world to say the worst.Īmid this rich vocabulary of verbal attack, the New Testament sends no mixed signals as to whether Christians will be maligned.
#Drunkards revilers 1 thessa how to#
He and his apostles, and the early church, model for us how to receive and respond to slander and reviling. We see it at Jesus’s crucifixion, where “those who passed by derided him” with their words, and the chief priests, scribes, and elders “mocked him,” and “the robbers who were crucified with him also reviled him in the same way” (Matthew 27:39–44).īut Jesus not only endured it he prepared us for it as well. Reviling is an attempt to injure with words (1 Peter 3:16). To take our cues from specific biblical texts, revile can mean “to speak evil against” (Matthew 5:11 Mark 9:39 Acts 19:9 23:4) it is the opposite of verbally honoring someone (Mark 7:10). One dictionary defines it as “to criticize in an abusive or angrily insulting manner.” Of the English terms, revile may be the least common in normal usage today. Early Christians were so accustomed to being spoken against that they developed a rich vocabulary (if you call it that) of being slandered, reviled, insulted, maligned, mocked, and spoken evil against (at least six different Greek verbs, along with several related nouns and adjectives). Slander and revile are two of the main words for verbal attack in the English New Testament, and both occur frequently. And verbal persecution is not less than persecution because it’s verbal.
#Drunkards revilers 1 thessa torrent#
At times, these attacks escalate to physical persecution - the stoning of Stephen, the martyrdom of James, the imprisonments of Peter and Paul, the crucifixion of Christ - but what remains constant, and significant, is a torrent of verbal persecution against Jesus and his people.
Leaf through the New Testament, and you’ll find verbal attacks on Jesus, his apostles, and his church on nearly every page.
And as public discourse falls to new lows in the digital age, God has not left us without a guide for how to respond to the pain when we are persecuted with words. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21). God made a world in which words are powerful. Words can hurt, even when directed from an unknown profile online. The spirit of the old adage “words will never harm me” is not the sentiment of the Scriptures.
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