Alexamenos worships his god

But if the Messiah’s crucifixion was scandalous to Jews, it was sheer madness to non-Jews. The early cultured despisers of Christianity had no trouble mocking the very idea of worshipping a crucified man. A famous cartoon from the Palatine in Rome, dated to some point during the first three centuries of the common era, makes the point. It reads, “Alexamenos worships his god,” and features a crucified figure with a donkey’s head (below).

How easy it would have been for the early Christians to tone down the fact of the cross, to highlight instead the life-giving force of the resurrection and the power of the Holy Spirit. How “sensible” it might have been to draw a discreet veil over the manner of Jesus’s death that had preceded this sudden new life.

N. T. Wright, The Day The Revolution Began

Life, Life, Eternal Life

Some of you may remember how Bunyan’s pilgrim, when called back by his wife and children from the journey on which he was setting out, put his fingers in his ears, and ran crying, Life, Life, Eternal Life.

In the same way, my family was against me when God saved me. When I was converted my folks didn’t understood this wonderful moment. They were quite blind. I felt they were my opponents. I was considered a freak. They though that someone has brainwashed me. A heretic with some strange and foreign heresies. I was baptized without their consent. My stepfather didn’t ate with me at the table because he believed that I’ve abandoned the ancestral Orthodox faith, and that was an unpardonable sin. My mother used to come in my room crying and telling me that she would rather see me with a cigarette in my mouth, in a Club with some girls than with a Bible in my hand. She was terrified. But I ran crying, Life, Life, Eternal Life.

This isn’t something new. Jesus said that:

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household. Mat.10:34,35

If this is happening in your life because of your decision to follow Christ, rejoice. You’re on the right path. One of our Romanian saints said once that, When your relatives will surround you like bees or

What is God?

Westminster Shorter Catechism:
„God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth” – a statement wich the great Charles Hodge described as „probably the best definition of God ever penned by man”. J.I. Packer, Knowing God, p.17