tribulation

 

A part of this life is tribulation. They don't have to be massive tribulations like the early Christians underwent. You don't have to be fed to lions or crucified like Jesus on a cross. But, things will go wrong in sort of a steady random stream. It isn't clear why. One idea is that our response is what matters. Like when you're trying out to be a starship captain on Star Trek one of the final tests is a no-win situation where your ship is going to be destroyed and everyone's going to die a horrible death in the vast emptiness of black space. There will be no final log only the silence of hundreds of crew members dying in the vacuum. The point of the test is to see how well you fail. It's almost like they picked the idea right out of the Bible. If you look at early Christians and Jesus message, failing was a large part of the right answer. The first 15 verses of Matthew chapter 5 makes that clear. You're supposed to be happy when people hate you for Jesus' sake. Your rewards will be big in heaven. As Time wore on though people started wearing thin on tribulation. They wanted rewards now and no tribulation ever. Unfortunately that isn't going to work. We're taking the same test today they were taking 2,000 years ago.