Who are the persecuted? How do they respond to persecution? They are the passionate followers of Jesus Christ who are harassed in any way for their love of righteousness and love of Christ.
In
Matthew 5:10, Jesus said,
"Blessed are those who are persecuted." The Greek word is
dioko, which has the following meanings: to pursue, drive away, harass, trouble, and mistreat. (Source: MacArthur,
The Beatitudes, p. 195, and BlueletterBible.org.) It is a perfect passive participle. The perfect tense speaks of an event that happened and has continuing results. The passive voice means it is something that happens
to you, not by you. Three times in three verses this word
dioko is used, and there is nothing mild or tame about it; it is an intense word for being mistreated.
The persecuted are believers all through the centuries who are mistreated in big and small ways. Martyrdom and persecution are not things that happened to the church just in times past, though it certainly did. One of my academic assignments in graduate school was to trace the persecution of the Early Church until AD 300. It was an intense study filled with many stories of heroes and heroines for Christ. In the 20th century, there were more believers killed for their faith than all the preceding 19 centuries combined!
Today, the country where it is the most dangerous to be a Christian is Nigeria, where followers of Jesus are being exterminated; it is so sad. I am thankful that President Trump and others like Senator Ted Cruz are sounding the alarm.
Who are the persecuted? They are the ones who are reviled. The word here is
oneidizo, which means to mock, throw in the face, to abuse with vile and vicious words. It is the same word used in
Matthew 27:44:
"Even the robbers who were crucified with Him reviled Him with the same thing."
George Whitfield was one of the greatest preachers in the history of Christendom. One of the first Christian biographies I read while in seminary was Arnold Dallimore's
George Whitfield. Wow, what a man of God. He preached to crowds of up to 30,000 people in America in the 1700s with no amplification, according to Ben Franklin, who loved to hear him preach. Whitfield said, "There I was honored with having stones, dirt, rotten eggs, and pieces of dead cats thrown at me." Benjamin Franklin said this about his preaching: "It was wonderful to see the change made by his preaching in the manners of the inhabitants of Philadelphia. From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if the whole world were growing religious." (
Source.)
Jesus also identified the persecuted as those who will have all kinds of evil spoken against them falsely. As followers of Jesus today, let us remain faithful no matter what objects are hurled at us, be they physical or spiritual.
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