Jesus as Our Model
Chapter five
Sharing with Jesus in Suffering
You don’t know what you’re requesting. Are you able to drink the cup from which I drink or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?
—Mark 10:38
Just as Christ’s sufferings abound in us, even so our comfort abounds through Christ.
—2 Corinthians 1:5
My goal is to know Jesus and the power of his resurrection and a sharing in his sufferings, so that being conformed to his death I may in some way reach the resurrection from the dead also.
—Philippians 3:10–11
I complete in my flesh what remains of Christ’s sufferings for the sake of his body, which is the church.
—Colossians 1:241
Instead, to the extent that you’re sharing Christ’s sufferings, be glad, so you may celebrate with joy when his glory is revealed.
—1 Peter 4:13
Sharing Christ’s Sufferings
A key biblical feature of intimacy with Christ is sharing in his sufferings. If the world hated me, Jesus warned, it will hate you (John 15:18). A Sudanese imam flogged Mariam Ibraheem for two hours for her refusal to deny Christ, leaving her back bloody. Yet she renewed her strength by identifying with Christ. Noting John 15:18, she reasoned, “My Savior had also been whipped, so why would I expect anything better?”2 In Nepal, as Surita’s Buddhist father-in-law beat her head with her Bible, she contemplated Christ’s much greater pain on the cross.3
Whoever heeds you heeds me, and whoever rejects you rejects me; and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me. (Luke 10:16)
Of Saul, who was persecuting the church, the Lord demanded, “Why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4). Jesus’s words here evoke again what he told his disciples in Luke 10:16. Whatever they do to us as we are serving Christ, they do to him. (This may be especially the case for what they do to the lowliest and humblest of believers; see Mark 9:37, 42; Matt. 18:5–6.) In chapter 2, I mentioned the terrible abuse Dr. Helen Roseveare experienced in Congo. She recounts that while she was being abused and felt too numb to pray, she experienced God’s dramatic presence. Not everyone experiences grace this same way during suffering, but we can all learn from her experience.
“Twenty years ago,” she heard the Lord say, “you asked me for the privilege of being a missionary. This is it.” She understood: the privilege is identification with Christ. As she was being beaten, she felt the Lord saying: “These are not your sufferings. . . . These are my sufferings. All I ask of you is the loan of your body.” This assurance didn’t reduce the pain or humiliation, she notes, but it gave it new meaning: “the inestimable privilege of sharing in some little way in the fellowship of his sufferings.”4
Son of Man and Sacrificial Lamb
Jesus’s self-designated title “Son of Man” implies his suffering with us as well as our suffering with him. This image goes back to Daniel 7. Daniel has a vision of four evil empires and their kings as beasts. But then he speaks of God’s own, final kingdom and king not as a beast but as one that looks human, “like a son of man” (Dan. 7:11–14). Identified with the people of God’s kingdom, this Son of Man suffers under the final beast (7:21–22, 25), which Jesus’s contemporaries understood as Rome. Afterward both God’s people and their king would be exalted to reign in glory forever (7:21–27). Yet the king in God’s kingdom is not only human but divine, receiving worship (7:14). Jesus is the divine human, the ultimate Son of Man, who reigns in God’s kingdom.
Identifying with his Jewish people, he suffered with them before beginning to reign. His people were expecting a conquering messiah who would overthrow Rome, but Jesus instead suffered with his people under Rome. Instead of crushing Rome, Jesus let Rome crush him—indeed, on the ultimate symbol of its imperial brutality: a cross. At his first coming, Jesus’s mission was not about conquering Rome—Rome was small fries. Destroying one empire without destroying the spirit of empire merely makes way for other empires. Jesus’s mission was far more urgent and fundamental. Jesus came to conquer sin and death, and thus to begin to transform the world from the inside out. The glory of the new covenant is not external, like that of the Mosaic covenant, which brought plagues and judgment and embodied a revelation even fatally holy. Instead, new covenant glory works internally, conforming us to God’s heart revealed in Christ (2 Cor. 3:6–18).
When the book of Revelation speaks of a “beast” (Rev. 13:1–2), it actually blends the imagery of all four of Daniel’s beasts (Dan. 7:3–7) as the spirit of evil empire more generally. The beast seeks to supplant the lamb (Rev. 13:11), as Babylon strives with the new Jerusalem (contrast Rev. 17:4–5 with 21:2, 18–21). In terms of worldly power, in any conflict between a “beast” and a lamb, most people would place their bets on the beast. But they don’t know that the lamb is the lion from the tribe of Judah. The future belongs not to the conquering beast and his followers, but to the martyred lamb and his followers (compare Rev. 13:16–14:1).
In Revelation 5, John hears about a conquering lion, symbol of power and of the victorious Messiah. But when he turns, he sees a slain lamb, the epitome of weakness and vulnerability (Rev. 5:5–6). At his first coming, Jesus conquered not by force but by submitting to God’s plan on the cross. Now, as the sacrificial Lamb, he begins to open the seals that guide the rest of history (5:5; 6:1).
One of the seals opened by Jesus reveals those who died for him. These martyrs would not be completely avenged until the rest of those destined to be martyred would die (Rev. 6:9–11).5 John describes these martyrs as souls “under the altar,” slain because of God’s message and their testimony (6:9). Why were they under the altar? When priests sacrificed animals, they poured out the animals’ blood at the base of the altar (Exod. 29:12; Lev. 4:7). Just as Jesus was slain like a sacrificial lamb (Rev. 5:6; 13:8), those who share in his death appear as sacrifices. Most of the time we are living sacrifices (Rom. 12:1), but whether in life or in death, sharing in Christ’s sufferings is the privilege of his true followers.
How Far Will We Follow?6
If anyone wants to follow after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. (Mark 8:34)
Early Christian memory is probably right to recognize Mark as a protégé of Jesus’s famous disciple Peter. Mark tells his Gospel especially from Peter’s perspective. Mark starts with Jesus calling Peter (Mark 1:16–18) and then follows Peter’s perspective through Peter recognizing Jesus as the Messiah (8:29), his resistance to Jesus’s impending suffering (8:32), his fumbling at the transfiguration (9:5–6), and to his denial (14:66–72). Peter’s absence at Jesus’s crucifixion becomes conspicuous, but Mark soon resumes with Jesus’s promise to restore Peter (16:7). God may have used prayer to help spare Peter from early martyrdom (Acts 12:5), but Peter was eventually martyred for his faithful witness.
As best as we can reconstruct Mark’s setting, he writes to a suffering audience. They have survived persecution in Rome, when the emperor Nero was burning Christians alive as torches to light his gardens at night. Some of their friends died for their faith; some others may have escaped martyrdom by denying their faith and now are ashamed. Mark reminds them that the great apostle Peter, whom many considered a hero, failed the first time too. Ultimately, the only real and perfect hero of our faith is Jesus, who embraced his own death to give us all life. And as Peter matured and became the fisher of people Jesus originally called him to be (Mark 1:17), so too can we.
The question now is whether we stay on the road following Jesus crossward or whether we abandon him even in our current tests. Jesus is worth everything (Matt. 13:44–46), but admittedly we need help. That is why Jesus taught us to pray, “Lead us not into testing”(Matt. 6:13; Luke 11:4). That is also why he invites us to ask the Father for the power of his Spirit (Luke 11:13; compare Ps. 143:10), who accomplishes in us more than we could ask or think (Eph. 3:16, 20).
Jesus Is the Messiah
When I get to know some of my living spiritual “heroes,” I discover that they are flesh and blood like me, gifted by God and recognizing their dependence on him. Some have even failed him at times. No matter whom we might admire in this world, all of them put together can’t hold a candle to Jesus. Yet the greatest hero came with a secret identity.
Peter was in awe of Jesus—but not nearly as much as he should have been. It takes the first half of Mark’s Gospel for Peter to recognize: “You’re the Messiah!” (Mark 8:29). It takes the second half of Mark’s Gospel for Peter and his fellow disciples to understand what Jesus’s messiahship entails: Their king will be enthroned on a Roman cross, crowned with thorns.
Peter’s confession of Jesus’s messiahship and Jesus’s explanation of what that means is a turning point in Mark’s Gospel. When Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus warns his disciples not to tell anybody (Mark 8:30). This warning fits Jesus’s pattern of controlling unnecessary publicity wherever possible (1:44; 3:12; 5:43; 7:24, 36; 8:26). One reason for this is the danger of overcrowding that the publicity created (1:45; 2:2–4; 3:9–10; 5:24; 6:31). Another reason is that Jesus’s popularity made him a target of those who wanted all the attention for themselves and their own teaching (2:7; 3:6; 7:5; 15:10). The biggest problem is politics: If people viewed Jesus as the messianic king, guardians of public order would want him dead. That was because they would view Jesus as a threat to the current order. They did not understand what it meant for him to be the messianic king.
The heart of Jesus’s public message was that God’s kingdom was coming (Mark 1:15). The good news about the kingdom is really the good news about Jesus Christ as Lord, the kingdom’s King. But it was not yet time to proclaim his kingship publicly, since that would precipitate his execution prematurely. The secret of the kingdom (4:11), therefore, was the secret identity and mission of that kingdom’s King. This secret of the kingdom was revealed at first only to a handful who even themselves barely comprehended it. God’s future reign was already present in a veiled way because the King was present, but at the moment it was just a tiny seed of what the kingdom will look like when Jesus returns to consummate it (4:30–32).
Mark summarizes Jesus’s message in terms of the kingdom (Mark 1:15; 4:11, 26, 30; compare 10:14–15, 23–24; 14:25). Yet instead of Mark’s narrative climaxing with a lavish, public display of power, Mark’s “king” language climaxes with the “King of the Jews” enthroned on a cross, crowned with thorns (15:2, 9, 12, 17–18, 26, 32).
What It Means for Jesus to Be the Messiah
We think of the world today as being moved by prominent figures—Trump or Putin, Netanyahu, or fill in the blank for your own time and place. When Jesus’s contemporaries thought of kings, they thought of rulers who exploited power over others (Mark 10:42). They thought of people like Herod Antipas. Mark calls Antipas a “king” (6:14), since many Galileans viewed him that way because he was a powerful heir of King Herod the Great. But politically, Antipas was just a governor who was a wannabe king.7 And while Herod Antipas pretended to have power, his wife and stepdaughter exploited his own reckless passions that he, lacking power even over his own heart, failed to bridle (compare Prov. 16:32). They manipulated him into beheading a prophet at his own birthday banquet (Mark 6:19–28). Meanwhile, Jesus serves a different banquet, feeding the hungry masses by God’s power (6:41–42).
Herod, of course, isn’t the Gospel’s real king. Toward the end of Mark’s Gospel, the language of “king” applies exclusively and repeatedly to Jesus—as a mocking accusation and charge from his enemies.
People expected the real king to conquer Rome by force. But instead Rome conquers Jesus by force. The real King does not exploit others to serve him; he serves others to the death (Mark 10:45). What kind of king is this?
Once Peter confesses Jesus as Messiah (Mark 8:29), then Jesus is ready to clarify what it means for him to be the Messiah: Jesus is the promised suffering Son of Man (8:31). As in Daniel 7, the Son of Man would reign (see also Mark 8:38). Even at Jesus’s first coming, throughout Mark’s Gospel, spirits, sickness, and storms are subject to him; human beings alone are given a choice. And sinful humans choose power to hurt others.
Satan’s Theology
Have you ever had to comfort someone who felt like God did not come through for them the way they expected? Have you ever faced such a disappointment yourself? Sometimes false expectations about God or his purposes set us up for disappointments. In Mark 8, Peter had some seriously false expectations. In this case, they risked more than disappointment.
So long as Jesus spoke in parables, his disciples requested explanations (Mark 4:10, 34). In 8:32, however, Mark says that Jesus speaks “plainly”—that is, not in parables—this time. Now Peter does understand Jesus’s message—and therefore opposes it! Peter has been happy to follow a conquering Messiah; he did not sign up for following a martyr to the death. So Peter decides to “rebuke” his own master (8:32)!
Mark says that Peter took Jesus aside rather than reprove him publicly; this was because Peter recognized that disciples were not supposed to correct their teachers. But Jesus turns and rebukes Peter openly in front of his colleagues (Mark 8:33). Jesus himself taught, as did other Jewish teachers, that we should start any correction process privately. This occasion is, however, a special emergency (not the last time an exception will be made to Peter’s dismay; see Gal. 2:14). In a culture that valued honor and feared shame, Jesus shames Peter in front of his fellow disciples! They probably shared Peter’s opinion, so Jesus makes Peter’s failure an object lesson for all of them.
“Get behind me!” Jesus demands (Mark 8:33). Disciples were supposed to follow their teachers, not lead them. Jesus’s first recorded words to Peter in Mark’s Gospel were, “Follow me” (1:17). Now he has to remind Peter of his proper place.
But Jesus goes beyond simply reminding Peter of his place. As noted earlier, he calls him Satan! What does Jesus mean by calling Peter Satan? Satan’s kingdom opposes that of Jesus (Mark 3:23–26). Satan therefore seeks to blind people to Jesus’s message (4:15). Now Peter takes on Satan’s role by denying Jesus’s message and seeking to turn him from his mission to the cross.
Rejection of Jesus’s cross (Mark 8:32), and of our sharing in Jesus’s cross (8:34), is satanic theology (8:33). Those who would reign with Jesus must first suffer with him and for him.
What It Means to Be a Disciple of the Messiah
Earlier in Mark, Jesus calls as disciples whomever he wishes (Mark 3:13). Now Jesus invites whoever wishes to follow him as disciples.
Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. (Mark 8:34)
Disciples by definition were supposed to be followers of their teachers. Jesus is no ordinary teacher, however, and following him means following him in an extraordinary way—even to his cross.
People in the Roman Empire understood what it meant to take up the cross. A criminal condemned to death would carry the heavy horizontal beam of the cross through an often mocking mob out to the site of execution. There the condemned would be tied or nailed to the cross naked, to die a slow and agonizing death, especially from dehydration, blood loss, and finally shock. This is where King Jesus is headed, and this is where his disciples must follow.
But guess what? This is not quite how it works out later in the Gospel. When the time comes for Jesus’s disciples to take up the cross to follow him, they’re in hiding. The Roman execution squad thus has to draft a bystander, Simon of Cyrene, to pick up Jesus’s cross (Mark 15:21). That’s because another Simon—Simon Peter—is missing. Simon Peter, who insisted, “Even if I have to die with you!” (14:31).
After calling all his followers to follow even to the death (Mark 8:34), Jesus shifts in 8:35–37 to accounting language and basic math. No amount of profit matters if one isn’t alive to enjoy it. While studying at a university, I explained this basic math to a freshman named John who had just bombed his calculus test. That ten is more than one is simple math; likewise, that a year is more than a day. On an incomparably greater scale, eternity is infinitely greater than the present life. It makes sense to invest our lives in what counts eternally. John soon gave his life to Jesus and became one of Jesus’s most radical followers on the campus, leading far more of his fellow students to Christ than I did.
Jesus warns that whoever wants to save their life in this world by refusing the cross will lose life eternally, and that whoever loses their life to follow Jesus will gain that life eternally (Mark 8:35). Scripture already emphasized that no price in the world is enough to ransom one’s life eternally (Ps. 49:7–9). Even gaining the whole world at the cost of oneself is thus a losing proposition. There is, however, one exception regarding losing one’s life to gain the world. By giving his life, Jesus, the infinitely worthy one, ransomed the whole world (Mark 10:45).
What light does this reasoning shed on Peter’s behavior? Instead of denying himself, as Jesus urges (Mark 8:34), Peter will end up denying Jesus three times (14:66–72). Like the rich ruler in 10:21–22, Peter makes a bad calculation: He values this world more than eternal life. In God’s mercy, though, Peter got a second chance, and God used him greatly.
Suffering Successfully
In virtually all cultures, human beings respect advantages such as power, status, beauty, health, and wealth. This respect raises theological problems for us when these respectable conditions don’t always apply to those we otherwise consider the “best” people. Theologically, we’re tempted to ask, “Why do the righteous suffer?” as if God should make everything better for his own people.
Jihadists persecute and kill our brothers and sisters in northern Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Mozambique. Christians currently face collective repression in Myanmar and in Manipur, India. God’s children flee deadly gang violence, drug cartels, and hostility in Venezuela, Colombia, and much of Central America.8 My wife was a refugee for eighteen months in her nation of Congo.
In the US we sometimes think that our democratic system of government or some actions that we (or our forebears) have done right protect us from such suffering. Somehow, catastrophe can’t come our way because, in some sense, we don’t “deserve” it. This underlying rationale doesn’t always protect us from fear, however. When a loved one dies, we lose a job, or somebody slanders us, we may ask, “What did we do to deserve this?” When public opinions against evangelicals, charismatics, or other Christians rest on caricatures or the worst examples, we reasonably cry, “Unfair!”
Most people in the Bible thought this way too: If you do what’s right, good will come your way. Proverbs shows us that good does usually follow, but how many psalms also lament unjust suffering? Job’s friends recoil to think that a just God could allow Job to suffer if he hadn’t done something wrong. But in the Bible, suffering is not always judgment. Sometimes it is testing. Sometimes it is bad people hurting good people. Often in the New Testament it involves sharing Christ’s sufferings for God’s honor.
The Longest-Range Standard for Success
American culture emphasizes success in this life. It values sacrificing for goals, so long as one achieves success and popularity, wealth and honor. But just as Jesus invites us to value eternal life above life in this world, he invites us to value eternal honor above any honor in this age. When he returns, even the secrets of our hearts will become public knowledge (1 Cor. 4:5; compare Mark 4:22).
In Mark 8:38, Jesus continues his response to Peter’s denial of Jesus’s cruciform destiny. This narrative shows Peter himself as an example of someone ashamed of Jesus and his words, the words that Jesus had just spoken about his death (8:31). Jesus thus warns,
If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels. (Mark 8:38)
The transfiguration that follows this warning (Mark 9:1–8) is a foretaste of the promised future glory at Jesus’s return. It is that glory, not glory in this age, that we should live for. We must therefore weigh our decisions in this world in light of eternity: What will count forever?
Jesus’s first disciples didn’t get it, though they should have. Jesus didn’t choose highly educated scribes, aristocratic priests, or other “important” people. Jesus defended the poor and marginalized (e.g., Luke 4:18; 6:20–21, 24–25). He restored hope to the physically sick and those whose sins had alienated them from polite society. But contemplating Jesus’s coming kingdom, Jesus’s own disciples soon begin to think like this world’s “important” people (Mark 9:34). They want to protect their hero from the needs of mere children (10:13–16) or a blind beggar (10:46–52). They fail to understand that caring for others’ needs is what Jesus’s mission was really about (10:14–15).
Indeed, as noted earlier, two disciples get the idea that they deserve the seats on Jesus’s right and left in his kingdom. Recognizing that many others will covet those seats, James and John want to submit their request in advance (Mark 10:37). Jesus replies,
Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with? (Mark 10:38)
Jesus’s cup is the cup of his death (Mark 14:22–24, 36). Like Peter, confident that he is ready to die for Jesus (14:31), James and John assure Jesus that they are ready for his cup and baptism (10:39). Their spirit indeed is willing, but their unprepared flesh will soon prove weak (14:38). They don’t understand that the places to Jesus’s right and left belong to two robbers (15:27), hanging beside Jesus’s cruciform throne, as he is crowned king of the Jews.
Their fellow disciples are upset with James and John for trying to get ahead of them (Mark 10:41), presumably because they all want to be the greatest (9:34). So Jesus has to explain again that the first will be last and the last first; whoever serves is the greatest (9:35; 10:31, 44). The supreme illustration of this principle is Jesus himself. The Son of Man, whom Daniel said would reign in glory forever, came first to serve and give his life as a ransom for others (10:45).
The values of Christ’s kingdom invert this world’s values. Those who honor Jesus in this world, even at the expense of their own shame, will receive eternal honor when Jesus returns to judge the world. Those who are ashamed of Jesus in this world will bear eternal shame when Jesus returns (Mark 8:38). The real question for us is whether we actually trust Jesus’s message enough to stake our honor and life in this world on him. If we really trust him, we will live for his promise. “Jesus has many who love His Kingdom in Heaven,” Thomas à Kempis lamented, “but few who bear His Cross.”9
Another Chance
As we know from Jesus’s predictions in Mark and from the book of Acts, Peter was eventually restored. He went on to serve Jesus for the remaining decades of his life. Church tradition says that he eventually did take up his cross to follow Jesus to the utmost, crucified upside down in Rome. Mark’s early hearers in Rome would remember Peter as a hero who lived what he preached. But Mark wants us to remember that Peter started out just like any one of us. Jesus is the real hero. He is the one who makes Peter—and us—into fishers of people (Mark 1:17).
If we want to follow Jesus, he invites us to take up our cross and follow. Someday this could entail literal martyrdom; our lives in this age become forfeit the moment we call Jesus Lord. But from day to day this also entails rejecting Satan’s theology of success and power, rejecting those human interests that defy God’s interests.
If someone wants to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. (Luke 9:23)
Why are we also in danger every hour? By the boasting I have about you in Christ Jesus our Lord: I die daily! . . . I fought wild beasts at Ephesus. (1 Cor. 15:30–32; compare 2 Cor. 1:8–10)
It means that we share Jesus’s definition of success and honor in light of eternity, rather than valuing it the way the world defines it. True success—to truly overcome—means denying ourselves in this life rather than denying Jesus and his words.
Jesus as Our Model
Jesus is the ultimate model. Luke emphasizes this point by underlining the many parallels between Jesus in the Gospel of Luke and Jesus’s followers in the book of Acts. For example, the Spirit empowers Jesus while he is praying (Luke 3:21–22), an experience that Jesus explains from Isaiah (Luke 4:18). Likewise, the Spirit empowers the church while they are praying (Acts 1:14; 2:4), an experience that Peter explains from Joel (Acts 2:17–18). Luke likewise underlines the continuity of suffering for the mission. That is why the first Christian martyr’s final sayings echo some of Jesus’s final words:
Jesus in Luke 22–23
Stephen in Acts 7
“They led Jesus away to their Sanhedrin. . . . He said to them, ‘From now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of God’s Power’” (Luke 22:66–69).
“They brought Stephen to the Sanhedrin . . . and he said, ‘Look! I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at God’s right hand!’” (Acts 6:12; 7:56).
“Father, I entrust my spirit into your hands” (Luke 23:46).
“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!” (Acts 7:59).
“Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34).
“Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60).
Lest anyone suppose that Stephen acted presumptuously and wrongly because the ensuing backlash scattered the church, Luke shows us that God was working through his martyrdom. Stephen’s final speech publicly lays out a biblical theology for the church’s mission beyond Jerusalem: Contrary to the ideas of his accusers (see Acts 6:13–14), God was not localized in the temple (7:2–5, 10, 17; especially 7:33, 43–50). Through that message, a seed was sown in one of his hearers (7:58; 8:1) that was later reaped on the road to Damascus, and Paul later on began carrying out the culturally universal theological vision that Stephen had articulated. Meanwhile, the ensuing persecution that scattered the Jerusalem church (8:1, 4) led to the church spreading elsewhere (8:5; 11:19)—as the Lord had always wanted (1:8).
Jesus the king carried his cross, enduring suffering in light of the promised joy beyond it (Heb. 12:2). He invites us who trust him to do the same.
1 On the “one thing lacking,” John Piper remarks, “The love offering of Christ is to be presented in person . . . to the peoples for whom He died” (Piper, “Missions When Dying Is Gain,” as cited in Voice of Martyrs, Hearts of Fire 2, 292).
2 Ibraheem with Bach, Shackled, 186.
3 Voice of Martyrs, Hearts of Fire 2, 220.
4 Roseveare, “Counting the Cost,” 38–39. Similar is the experience of Jon in Malaysia, who while being beaten experienced a vision of Jesus being beaten, and who celebrated suffering for Christ (Voice of Martyrs, I Am N, 118–19).
5 A plaque inscribed with Rev. 6:10–11 appears at the mass grave of 483 Nigerians killed by Islamic militants in 2020 (Weber, “Cheeks”).
6 Here I condense and adapt my article, Keener, “Succeed at Suffering,” with permission from George P. Wood. At its 2025 convention, the Evangelical Press Association awarded this article first place in the biblical exposition category.
7 E.g., Josephus, Jewish War 1.664, 668; Jewish Antiquities 17.188; 18.36, 122, 136; The Life 37, 65; Luke 3:19; 9:7; Acts 13:1.
8 Even in Mexico, 2024 saw “138 verified Christian disappearances” targeting Christians speaking against trafficking and the like (GCR Red List, 17, 26; compare Open Doors, “World Watch List 2025,” 40–41).
9 Kempis, Imitation of Christ, 83 (“On the Few Lovers of the Cross of Jesus”), often cited (e.g., in “Line of Demarcation”; Alcorn, All About Jesus, 243).