Month: June 2019

I just had a very strange interaction on Facebook… A friend of mine posted the following video of the Protestant evangelist Todd Friel:

One of his friends, a man called Simon, responded with the following curious assertions:

His response struck me as a strange for several reasons, but first and foremost because it demonstrated very clearly that Simon was rather unfamiliar with the New Testament! I responded by pointing out that Jesus would absolutely call other people wrong. In fact, at times He could be quite mean, even to the point of calling people names:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites… You fools and blind men… For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. Even so you too outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness… you brood of vipers” 

Matthew 23:15, 17, 27-28, 33

He was even known on occasion to flip tables!

And making a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables – John 2:15

John 2:15

Naturally, there are many other Scripture passages which I could have quoted, not least Jesus’ exclusive claims about Himself:

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

John 14:6

With wearying predictability, rather than adjusting his statement, Simon immediately accused me of “judging” him. Some folks really love to jump to play the victim card even at the mildest of challenges. I wonder if he would have said exactly the same thing if I had pointed out an error in his arithmetic…

Amusingly, he then tried to quote Romans 2 to me:

You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?

Romans 2:1-3

At this point I suggested to him that, while I’d be happy to discuss that passage with him, it probably isn’t a good idea to quote the Bible at a Christian right on the heels of making a demonstrably false statement about Jesus. He then said that he didn’t want to discuss his beliefs with me any more, so I closed by saying that hopefully I had at least disabused you of the notion that “Jesus would never call other people wrong”. I concluded with a passage which denies this explicitly:

“[Jesus said] ‘You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God'”

Matthew 22:29

…and, for good measure, I also included a passage where Jesus teaches His followers about judgement:

“Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly”

John 7:24

Needless to say, he wrote with the following:

…and then thirty seconds later deleted the thread.