Two thousand years later, it’s still looking like He’s right. Today, the Nazarene, the carpenter from Galilee, is the single most divisive force on the planet Earth.

We are dumbstruck with wonder as we witness today how His predictions are fulfilled, once again, by the world-wide and intense controversy over a simple movie, “The Passion of the Christ.” By almost all accounts, it is based on the four gospels of the New Testament of the Bible. These gospels have been around two thousand years. How much shock value can they continue to have? How can the gospels continue to cause such controversy?

We wonder at how Jesus of Nazareth, who had neither riches nor armies, can now command the faith of two billion of the world’s peoples. He built no cities. He conquered no nations.

We wonder how He could have known circa 30 A.D., or how His disciples could have believed circa 100 A.D., that His prophecies about His divisiveness would be fulfilled in such a definitive, dramatic and cosmic way?

As our wonderment subsides, we are left with this tenet of faith: the divisiveness of Jesus Christ is not caused by what He taught or what He did, but by who He is.

Jesus Christ knew that divisiveness was central to His mission. So just as we accept and believe in Jesus Christ, we must accept the division He causes. We must not reject or deny it.

Opposed to Jesus Christ are the elites who control government, media and academia. They condemn divisiveness in any form. They reject divisiveness because it destabilizes the status quo they created and seek to maintain. They frown upon disagreement because they rightly presume that sharp disagreements lie with them.

For these reasons, elites now claim that only unity is good. Our current President echoed elite views when he campaigned on the slogan: “I’m a uniter, not a divider.”

But the unity elites seek to impose is false, forced and inhuman. Inhuman, because it is the unity of an animal herd, always to be yoked to those who ride before it. Forced, because it is the unity of all slaves under one slave master. False, because it is the unity of a deluded mind unable to free itself from the lie that there is no division - between good and evil, truth and falsity, salvation and perdition.

Putting all the lies about “unity” aside, we know that divisiveness is a fact of life. Many lines divide us - black and white, rich and poor, old and young. But the most trenchant division that still affects mankind, after two thousand years, all over the world, is this: Who confesses Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior? Who does not?

Rather than submit to the elite plan for unity, let us embrace Jesus’s plan of division. It is a division that may unify, but not because of the lies and lashes of those who would master it. It will unify by individuals freely choosing to follow Jesus Christ.

If the division over Jesus Christ remains, the want of its resolution will cause controversy and tension. That tension commands the attention of every individual, thusly: “You have two choices. Choose.” The choice carries grave consequences. Christians believes that one choice leads to repentance, conversion and salvation. The other choice leads to condemnation.

But it is the choice and not the division that causes condemnation. It is the division that allows a choice in the first place. Without that choice, man could not choose freely to be saved, just as, in the beginning, man could not have chosen to fall.

Mankind, already fallen, needs that second choice. And by divine grace, the divisiveness of Jesus Christ gives it to us.

Next: Pt. 2 of 3 - Separation