Blandina continued to live on in Christian memory as one of the brave women martyrs of the early church, such as Perpetua and Felicita. During the early church, she gave hope to many Christians, with the knowledge that God would sustain them in persecution, regardless the weakness of their bodies and the violence of their enemies.

When the Roman authorities hung Blandina to a pole and exposed her to a crowd of blood-thirsty spectators, they thought they could frighten anyone who rebelled to their rules. What they didn’t know is that they were holding her up as an example that gave new strength and courage to other Christians.
The Persecution at Lyons
Contrary to popular opinion, the Romans were not in the habit of killing Christians. Many disliked them and distrusted them, particularly in the beginning, when their teachings seemed too new and strange. But only a few emperors launched a sustained program against them – most famously Diocletian, who in 303 AD started a persecution that lasted eight years.
Some violent persecutions came from crowds who looked for a reason for their calamities. This is what happened in the region of Vienne and Lyons (ancient Lugdunum), in what is now southern France.
A lively community of Christians, including Romans, Greeks, and Gauls, lived there. The famous theologian Irenaeus, who was probably born in today’s Turkey, served there as a presbyter.
By the year 176, the people of Vienne and Lyon had suffered one disaster after another – from a deadly plague to repeated raids by Germanic tribes, Many people believed the gods were taking revenge against the Christians who refused to worship them. Because of this, they kept Christians away from communal areas such as the baths and the forum, and attacked them with insults, beatings, robberies, and stoning.
In 177, this violence reached its peak as a frustrated mob brought the Christians to the magistrates. After admitting their faith in Christ, Christians were sent to prison to wait for the governor’s verdict. The local bishop, Pothinus, was imprisoned in spite of his old age and poor health, and died in prison two days later.
Slaves received the worst treatment because, by law, they were allowed to be tortured in order to obtain information. The authorities even arrested pagan slaves who worked for Christian families, as they were most willing to offer information in order to escape torture. In fact, in an effort to give the authorities what they wanted, some of them denounced practices these families had never followed, such as eating human flesh and living immoral lives.
Blandina
Blandina was a Christian slave who refused to give up her faith and to give any information. Because of this, she was cruelly tortured. Her martyrdom is described in a letter which might have been written by Irenaeus and has been preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea (who wrote after Diocletian’s persecution).
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Written by David B. Garner |
Tuesday, December 19, 2023
Sinners’ hearts are “deceitful” and “desperately sick,” their deeds never wholly good. Seeming goodness suffers from a subterranean subterfuge. This means not that everything you do is 100 percent evil but that nothing you do is 100 percent pure. In the eyes of God, incomplete holiness is unholiness. Mixed motives are not pure motives. Partial truths are distortions, violations of God’s will and Word. Since sanctification is not complete, even for Christians, the heart is not a pretty place. Depraved sinners need the cross of Christ to crush our sin, its guilt, and its power. We need Christ’s resurrection power to raise us from death to life.

God crowned His creation-launching handiwork with the formation of man.
So God created man in his own image,in the image of God he created him;male and female he created them. (Gen. 1:27)
Read that verse again. The Creator made us like Him. The heights of our created dignity boggle the mind. Though God is Spirit (Westminster Shorter Catechism 4), our being made in His image (imago Dei) means that we mirror Him in every aspect of our being, material and immaterial. From our biology to our ideology, from our guts to our goals, from our lives to our loves, as individuals and in our relationships—we reflect our Maker.
Created male and female, we do not possess the image of God only to drop it when we want. We are image bearers, and image bearing is inescapably, therefore, what we do. At every microsecond of our existence, we live before and in relation to the God who made us in His image. Here we stand. We can do no other.
Yet the beauty and towering grandeur of our image bearing suffered a short life. On the heels of the original and “very good” creation (Gen. 1:31), our covenant head, Adam, along with his wife, Eve, snubbed their Creator King. Disobeying His word, they cast themselves and their offspring into the pit of sin, its guilt and its perversion. This image-deforming act birthed corruption and banished us all with humanly irreparable consequences.
Adam and Eve became moral contortionists, twisted in on themselves. Designed for rich fellowship with the holy God, now as self-glorifying narcissists, our guilty first parents and their offspring face alienation from Him, while we stubbornly chase our own pernicious, me-myself-and-I ways.
Distorted, deceived, and desperate, image bearers flip God’s world upside down. Created to think in accordance with God’s thoughts, our distorted minds believe and speak deceiving words. Formed to glorify God, our distorted hearts twist divine affection into self-love. Designed to obey God’s Word, our stubborn wills insist that lawlessness is freedom. Intended for life in Him, without divine rescue, we die estranged from Him. In all things, we spurn the Word of God and turn from the God of the Word.
It is no wonder that the Bible paints our sin so hideously. Sin in all its forms is idolatry. In our sin, we demand subjection from the King of the universe. Then we exchange Him for would-be gods beaten into the shape of our perversion on the anvil of our own steely hearts. Once magnificent, we are now maimed image bearers who fabricate gods of our liking, gods that reflect us.
This sinful distortion is what we call depravity.
Drawing on the root pravus (crooked), the Latin word depravare means “to distort or disfigure.” The term depravity graphically captures the Bible’s teaching concerning the damaging and damning effects of sin. What was by original creation straight is now warped by the fall; what was pure is now putrid. With hardened hearts and skewed minds, we are bent in on ourselves, undesirous, unwilling, and unable to turn rightly toward God. Formed in the image of God, we are now deformed. Depravity desecrates dignity.
It is often asserted that total depravity does not mean that we are as bad as we could possibly be but rather speaks of the permeating reach of sin. In a very impor­tant sense, this is true. God kindly restrains humanity from the depths of evil that our hearts would cherish and chase. While the breadth/depth distinction clarifies something, however, we must be careful. Taking total depravity lightly manifests depravity; trivializing it masks its deceptive power.
Paul notably urges us to take sin’s force seriously:
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. (Eph. 2:1–3)
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Written by Kevin P. Emmert |
Sunday, December 3, 2023
Because we belong to the Lord Jesus and are made to be like him, we cannot find our true identity by looking inside ourselves. The Lord’s Supper subverts the notion that identity is an individualistic enterprise because in this meal we participate with Christ. “The cup of blessing that we bless,” Paul writes, “is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16). Thus, many Christians rightly call this meal Communion. By it, we fellowship with Christ and remember that we are people who live in vital connection with Christ.

Identity — it is one of our society’s greatest obsessions today. Even we Christians can preoccupy ourselves with knowing who we are and what our purpose is. This pursuit is not altogether bad. The desire to understand who we are and what we are here for is natural and God-given. The problem arises when we look in the wrong places to discover our identity and purpose.
Many look to social media, self-help resources, life coaches, models of the psyche — you name it — for direction and affirmation. We may even naively accept mantras like “Be true to yourself” and “You do you,” thinking we can determine our own identities and express them however we want. But such paths lead only to more confusion and despair.
If we as Christians want to understand who we are, we must look to Jesus Christ. As the God-man, he is the true revelation of both God and of humanity. He alone can reveal to us who we are. And one concrete way he reveals our identities is through his appointed Supper.
People Who Remember
The Lord’s Supper, along with baptism, is one of the most debated Christian practices. Believers from various traditions disagree over what exactly happens during the meal; we also disagree over how frequently it should be celebrated. Despite such disagreements, all Christians agree on at least this: the Lord’s Supper is a meal whereby we remember who Christ is and what he has done for us (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24–25).
Many of us do not realize, however, that the Lord’s Supper is also a time when we remember who we are in Christ. In a key way, the Table strengthens our identity in him. Indeed, Christ himself forms and fortifies our identity in this meal because he is present to us and lives in us (John 14:20, 23; 17:23, 26). Just as food and drink strengthen the body, so Christ’s body and blood, received by faith, strengthen our souls in a way that helps us understand ourselves.
The Lord’s Supper shapes our identity in part because the meal is analogous to the Passover. The Passover was a ritual feast whereby the Israelites meditated on God’s saving actions and reassured themselves of who they were as God’s people. They identified themselves with the exodus generation every time they celebrated the rite.
When Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples on the night before his death, he did far more than identify with the exodus generation; he gave the meal greater significance because he was about to accomplish his mission as the true Passover Lamb. Just as the historical exodus and old covenant defined Israel’s existence, so Christ enacted a new exodus and a new covenant that now defines our existence in him — our very identity and way of life. And when Jesus commanded us to eat in remembrance of him (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24–25), he was not instructing us to simply ponder past events, just as he was not simply recalling the exodus when he celebrated the Passover with his disciples.
Many today think that to remember is to merely think about something from the past. But biblically, to remember involves bringing the past into the present and allowing the past to actively shape the present.
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