{"id":5639,"date":"2019-09-30T04:10:59","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T04:10:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/churchedge.com\/illustrations\/index.php\/2019\/09\/30\/the-two-evil-responses\/"},"modified":"2019-09-30T04:10:59","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T04:10:59","slug":"the-two-evil-responses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/the-two-evil-responses\/","title":{"rendered":"The Two Evil Responses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In his sermon \u201cTake Your Best Shot,\u201d Gordon MacDonald uses a negative approach to warn of evils we must avoid.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHere are two major forms of evil erupting out of the human experience.  One is the crowd\u2019s irrational, angry, brutal resistance against God, his purposes, and his people.  The other is Pilate\u2019s saying, \u2018I don\u2019t want to be identified with it.\u2019  In silence and complicity, he backs off, washes his hands, and decides it would be better to do nothing.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat bothers me most is my strong suspicion that I could have been in the crowd&#8230;.  I can see the possibility of being so defiant against God that I would have joined the crowd saying, \u2018Crucify him!,\u2019 self-righteously justifying myself.  I can also see myself as Pontius Pilate saying, \u2018I don\u2019t want anything to do with this,\u2019 and letting it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his sermon \u201cTake Your Best Shot,\u201d Gordon MacDonald uses a negative approach to warn of evils we must avoid. \u201cHere are two major forms of evil erupting out of the human experience. One is the crowd\u2019s irrational, angry, brutal resistance against God, his purposes, and his people. The other is Pilate\u2019s saying, \u2018I don\u2019t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[649,3050,1272],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5639"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5639\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}