Who Is Ashamed-God or Me?

On an icy winter day many years ago in Greene City, Pennsylvania, our first little girl was skipping along beside me as I did our grocery shopping. Arms clutched around a huge brown bag, heavy on my feet because our second daughter was soon to be born, I suddenly slipped on a patch of ice. My arms flew out, my legs went up in the air, and I landed squarely on the side of my forehead. I painfully sat up, gathered my scattered belongings, put my hand up gingerly to the side of my right eye, and felt a rapidly rising lump, which was soon to close that eye and turn blue-black. A passerby stopped to help me, but I assured him I was all right and I would go not to the hospital but to the fish counter of the A & P, where I was sure they could give me a lump of ice and I could sit down until the dizziness stopped.

Embarrassment and shame flooded the child at having a mother whose plight might make anyone connected with her seem ridiculous. Running ahead of me she was soon busy examining vegetables on the other side of the store from the fish counter, so that no one would think she belonged to me.

How quickly Peter dissociated himself from Jesus when he saw the Lord being led off by soldiers to be tortured and examined. Not only fear but shame swept over him as he disclaimed any connection with this man whom he loved, and had believed to be the Messiah. The apparent unkinglike weakness of being spit upon and slapped blotted out, temporarily, the loyal love and trust, and Peter was ashamed of his former connection with One who was being led off to judgment. This is the same person who a short time before had answered Jesus by saying, “Thou art the Christ.” It was also the one who had “rebuked” Jesus for saying that “the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31).

It was after Peter’s rebuke that Jesus asserted that following him included the need to deny self, take up a cross, and be willing to lose one’s life. “Whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s … shall save it.”

Often we think of physical martyrdom in connection with this statement and the question that follows it, “What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Mark 8:37). But it is very important to see what comes next in the context.

“Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” There is a coming time when Jesus will no longer be rejected and spit upon; no longer will his disciples be tempted to be ashamed. There is a coming time when there will be blazing glory surrounding the Second Person of the Trinity as he comes in his magnificent beauty accompanied by angels. The desire then will be to be claimed by him as one of his people. There is a serious warning connected with the promise given to us.

What is involved in fulfilling the admonition to “deny self” and not to be ashamed? There is the promise that there will be moments of danger during which other people, described as “this adulterous and sinful generation,” will be full of ridicule and criticism that will threaten the believer’s ego and make it easy for him to deny the words of Jesus, the word of God, rather than denying self.

“But I’m not ashamed of Jesus,” we might say, without thinking of the fact that the statement is strong: “Whosoever is ashamed of me and of my words.…” John describes Jesus: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.” And God had had Moses write, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.… So God created man in his image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

It is easy to be strong and brave about the past. It is especially easy to fight battles after they are over. The danger is in slinking away in the present moment of discomfort or attack. “No, no, no, I don’t really believe all that literally. I believe in a spiritual application. You see, it is all religious. No, of course I do not take the biblical view about science and history. But I do believe in all this spiritually.” Who doesn’t “believe” some kind of “spiritual” thing today? Mysticism of some sort is easily accepted by twentieth-century people. The Bible can be considered acceptable as long as it is equated with other religious pronouncements and kept in its place.

Jesus is not talking about an airy fairy spiritual moment when he speaks of the coming time of his return. He means something, not nothing, by his warning that there is danger of our missing the opportunity not to be ashamed of his words. The moment will be past one day, and there will be no more opportunity to be unashamed. We can’t go back and do it over again. It is a serious thing to be told that we have a period of time during which we can be not ashamed of Jesus and his word.

Paul says strongly (Rom. 1:15, 16), “I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.” What is the Gospel of which Paul declares he is not ashamed?

In First Corinthians the connection is clear, even as it is in John. The need is always to go back to the beginning and understand the continuity. That “the first man Adam was made a living soul” is important for our understanding that Jesus is “the last Adam.” The One who is coming back again in glory is the One who was there in the beginning and who made all things, who made man in his image.

The desire to be praised by men for finding clever substitutes for the explanations given in God’s Word—can this be reduced to being “ashamed”? Being ashamed is a subtle thing. A child can easily be embarrassed into a kind of denial that is temporary and not serious. A child of God also becomes embarrassed, and Satan works on this sudden embarrassment to pressure God’s people into outward actions based on the feeling. These actions then speak to God and the angels, giving declaration of our being ashamed.

Who matters most? Who are we trying to impress?

“Ye shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the LORD your God, and none else: and my people shall never be ashamed” (Joel 2:27). May we take our opportunity now to stand before the accusations that hit us from strange sources, and be unashamed.

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