Have you ever landed great seats at a concert, show, or sporting event — seats right down front, near the center of the action? That’s very much how I think about my position as an employee at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center over the past forty years (now retired), a career spent assisting in the development and testing of satellite control centers and directing the operation of various scientific missions.

As one who had joyfully studied physics and astronomy in college, I landed an enviable front-row seat to watch (and participate in) the technological advances in aerospace engineering and the growth of the scientific disciplines I so love. In fact, my last 25 years were spent helping to manage science operations on the celebrated Hubble Space Telescope program.

Astronomical Growth Spurt

During my tenure at Goddard, satellite-borne telescopes successfully peered above the filtering and blurring effects of earth’s atmosphere for the first time. Book publishers have frankly been busy ever since, rewriting and revising astronomy textbooks for all grade levels, as fresh discoveries now occur virtually every semester.

ESA/Hubble

The Hubble mission alone has contributed immensely to our understanding of the cosmos. Who knew, for instance, that the universe was not only expanding, but accelerating? Who foresaw the immense morphological variety and complexity of planetary nebulae (see embedded photos) — faint, disk-like objects named by William Herschel upon finding them in his telescope more than two hundred years ago? Who could fathom that true planets around other stars are so commonplace that many can be detected through the periodic dimming of their stars when these “transiting exoplanets” pass in front of them? Who also knew that supermassive black holes occupy the centers of nearly every sizeable galaxy?

All these insights and many more were brought to textbooks through solid observational evidence collected by Hubble. Follow-on investigations and even more discoveries are now being made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

Written Across the Sky

To those who have ears to hear, these wonders all marvelously confirm the truth given us in Psalm 19:1–2:

The heavens declare the glory of God,     and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.Day to day pours out speech,     and night to night reveals knowledge.

Indeed, many glorious attributes of God are now loudly and profoundly declared to us nightly from diverse space telescopes and ground observatories all around the world. Among the qualities demonstrably proclaimed are his intellectual genius, his endless creativity, his eternal power, his exquisite, beautiful, and purposeful craftsmanship, and his divine nature (see Romans 1:20).

“The deeper you look and the more you listen, his genius, creativity, power, and beauty only become clearer.”

Equally marvelous, it is undeniably the case that the deeper you look and the more you listen, his genius, creativity, power, and beauty only become clearer. Why is the universe expanding? We don’t know — but he does! Scientists attribute it to something they call “dark” energy — dark because it’s unknown.

Planetary nebulae are now understood to be stars in the death throes of existence — literally throwing off portions of their outer layers in response to collapsing and rebounding material at their cores. How do the size, mass, and spin of these dying stars dictate the location and shape of the layers expelled? We don’t know!

Why do exoplanet systems look so different from our solar system? We don’t know! Many have Jupiter-sized planets very close to their stars or Neptune-sized icy bodies farther away. Why don’t all sizeable galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers? We don’t know! Our large and beautiful celestial neighbor, the Triangulum Galaxy, Messier 33, apparently does not.

Unimaginably Complex

Ah, but these are the simple questions. How our space-time, matter-energy universe actually works at its most basic level gets as infinitely deep and amazing as a graph of the Mandelbrot set. Why, even the lowly proton itself — the building block of every atom — has now been described as “the most complicated thing that you could possibly imagine. . . . In fact, you can’t even imagine how complicated it is.” The proton is apparently a quantum-mechanical object that exists as a haze of probabilities — a sea of transient gluons, quarks, and antiquarks — in some sense indeterminate until an interaction with it, or observing it, causes it to take a concrete form.

In addition to dark energy, there is evidence for the existence of an unknown type of matter that is gravitationally controlling the members of the (proton-based!) periodic table of elements that we at least recognize, if not understand. Like dark energy, it is simply called dark matter since we don’t know what it is either. Between the two — dark energy and dark matter — the standard model of the cosmos accepted by most astronomers today admittedly can’t account for about 95 percent of what it postulates is “out there.”

And just how quantum fields and particles interact at the most minute scale (if one can even define such) does have cosmic implications, like whether the universe will expand forever or ultimately collapse upon itself. This is why cosmologists and astrophysicists study phenomena like colliding neutron stars and black holes. Their velocities and energies reveal truths about the nature of matter and antimatter that are extremely difficult to discern — even using our most powerful particle colliders. Thus, no matter what corner of the universe you examine, the nature and operation of the processes involved are inevitably more exquisite and complex than first realized.

ESA/Hubble

Heavenly Calling Card

God actually appears to delight in this heavenly complexity. We find a number of places in his word where he uses the heavens to set forth the extent of his knowledge, power, and might.

Psalm 96:5: “All the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens.”
Psalm 147:4–5: “He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names. Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.”
Isaiah 40:25–26: “To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name; by the greatness of his might and because he is strong in power, not one is missing.”
Isaiah 55:9: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

“You might say that, in some sense, our Lord uses the heavens as his calling card.”

You might say that, in some sense, our Lord uses the heavens as his calling card.

YHWH

If so accepted, what might the name on his calling card be? Well, he revealed one to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14) — the great Jewish tetragrammaton, the four letters YHWH, variously translated as “I am what I am,” “I am that I am,” or most simply, “I am.” He is the ultimate reality, the one underlying all existence. Because he purposed to do so, he commanded the cosmos into existence from nothing (Psalm 33:6–9; 148:3–5; Hebrews 11:3).

What makes more sense than an infinite being designing a universe that’s both infinitely revealing and confounding? Indeed, the more intently you look at the universe, the more it looks unsearchably complex, mysterious, and exquisite (Psalm 145:3).

NUMBER 1/137

Even secular scientists wax theological when they discover aspects of the underlying mathematics of the universe that defy explanation. The great physicists Richard Feynman, Paul Dirac, and Wolfgang Pauli all felt this way about the strange, dimensionless number 1/137 that nearly perfectly defines something called the “fine-structure” or “electron-photon coupling constant.” Feynman wrote,

It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered . . . and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from. . . . Nobody knows. . . . You might say the “hand of God” wrote that number, and “we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.”

PRECISION TUNING

Indeed, for as much as we don’t know about how the universe actually works, astronomers now acknowledge (some reluctantly) that the fundamental values of things like the ratio of the electromagnetic force to gravity and the value of Einstein’s “cosmological constant” (which represents the energy density of space) could not be even minutely different from their measured values or the universe as we know it would not be able to function. The former value must be exact by one part in 1040, and the latter by at least one part in 1090 (Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis, 142, 152).

For context, the estimated number of subatomic particles in the whole universe is on the order of 1080. Imagine trying to be so exact that you could confidently count all the subatomic particles in the universe plus or minus one — and then somehow be ten billion times more accurate still! This is the level of precision in the physics that underpins reality.

ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE

Commenting on these constants and many similar ones that appear to be exquisitely fine-tuned to produce an orderly universe, the famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking noted, “The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life” (Return of the God Hypothesis, 141).

Indeed, during the last several decades, there has been a demonstrable shift from the belief that life-bearing planets like ours must be commonplace in the cosmos, to the scientific realization that we’re more likely rare, or possibly even unique. This is not only because our atoms are fine-tuned to hold together properly, but because the unlikely circumstances of humanity’s placement in a spiral galaxy, around a relatively quiet star of the right color, at the right distance from it, held stable by a large moon, on a planet with sufficient mass to hold an atmosphere and water, having the right atmosphere, having a protective magnetic field, and so on, all multiply together as improbabilities to yield something nearly impossible.

Contemplating such facts, British physicist and author, Paul Davies, wrote: “The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge. You see, even if you dismiss mankind as just a mere hiccup in the great scheme of things, the fact remains that the entire universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life — almost contrived — you might say a ‘put-up job’” (Source).

This postulate actually has a scientific name, the Anthropic Principle, which basically states that the universe exists in a way that it allows observers to come into existence. While nuanced and still debated, one version of the principle, espoused by the man who coined the term “black hole” (John Wheeler), suggests on the basis of quantum mechanics that the universe — as a condition of its existence — must be observed. Coupled with the new understanding that each proton in the universe somehow requires the interaction with another particle or an observer to dictate its ultimate properties, this makes the whole theory both more believable and more unfathomable. To me, these qualities beautifully describe the Lord himself.

Honestly, my faith is also strengthened knowing that God, who built such scientific conundrums into creation and gave us the Scriptures, kindly described his activity thousands of years ago in these understandable words (Isaiah 45:18):

Thus says the Lord,who created the heavens     (he is God!),who formed the earth and made it      (he established it;he did not create it empty,     he formed it to be inhabited!):“I am the Lord, and there is no other.”

ESA/Hubble

‘What Is Man?’

Many people tell me that when they learn about the immense objects in the heavens or the almost unimaginable distances to the stars, they feel incredibly insignificant. One can hear the same sentiment from King David in Psalm 8:3–4:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,     the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,what is man that you are mindful of him,     and the son of man that you care for him?

Compared with the size of the universe — even one star in it — it’s true: we’re of very little account. But stars and galaxies aren’t the most impressive item of God’s creative work. Genesis tells us clearly that the creation of Adam and Eve was the pinnacle of God’s activity in the creation week. After everything else was formed, the triune God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). Genesis 1:27 goes on to say, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

As stunning as they are, galaxies were not made in the image of God. It is men and women, boys and girls, who are rational and moral beings made like God himself. If he counts the trillion upon trillions of lifeless stars and has names for them all, do you think the eight billion or so human beings alive today, who exist in his very image, escape his moment-by-moment attention? In Matthew 10:29–30, Jesus says that our Father knows the whereabouts of every sparrow, and that even the hairs on our head are numbered (maybe he has names for them too?!). We should judge our significance to him in the light of these truths.

Hark! The Herald Heavens Speak

Psalm 19:1–2 tells us simply but so profoundly, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.” The complexity, size, power, and grandeur of the universe are God’s intentional gifts to us. They are meant to help us understand what he is like — to lovingly help us apprehend our Maker as the unsearchable ultimate reality that he is.

Indeed, the heavens are declaring at this very moment that our God is magnificent beyond comprehension. Listen to them. Hear how their countless hosts strive day after day and night after night to declare the least part, the smallest measure, of his great glory. It is never enough; it never will be; it never can be. He is infinite. Have you heard their voices? Have you joined their chorus?

Dazzling phosphors in the night,     Silent orators, so bright,How I marvel at your story     And the Hand behind your glory.

For nearly four centuries, the frequency of abortion in America has depended on how citizens and residents answered five questions:

Anatomy: Is the being in the womb human?

Bible: Is Scripture’s teaching on the sacredness of human life binding on us?

Community: What kind of advice and support do vulnerable women receive from boyfriends or husbands, parents or friends, employers, or anyone to whom a woman might look for emotional and financial help?

Danger to women: What is the likelihood of an abortion ending with not just one victim but two?

Enforcement: In what informal and formal ways do those with influence and resources protect the most vulnerable?

How do we answer these questions today? One article does not provide enough space to spin out each of these threads historically (if you want to read more, Leah Savas and I have done that in our book, The Story of Abortion in America). But some changes are evident: Americans now have more awareness than ever before of what unborn children look like, and less knowledge of what the Bible teaches. The influence of community and the possibility of enforcement have fluctuated over the years. The danger to women has sharply declined. Let’s unpack these changes one by one.

‘A’ Is for Anatomy

The most popular seventeenth-century guide to pregnancy and fetal anatomy, The Midwives Book, echoed ancient and medieval contentions that unborn children have “first the life of a Plant, then of a Beast, and lastly of a Man.” But in 1839 Dr. Hugh Hodge, brother of theologian Charles Hodge, spoke of the unborn child’s continuous development from conception.

Other doctors conveyed Hodge’s teaching to their patients, who without seeing an unborn child were proceeding on faith. A breakthrough in popular understanding came at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, where more than two million people waited in line to view twenty-four sculptures that showed human development in the womb. The next mass education came in 1965 when a Life magazine cover showed Lennart Nilsson’s photograph of an unborn child floating within an amniotic sac. This issue was Life’s all-time fastest seller at checkout counters. And now, 3D and 4D ultrasound lets a woman see not a baby but her baby.

‘B’ Is for Bible

In an era of frequent Bible reading that lasted until early in the twentieth century, it was hard to miss God’s creative involvement in human life from its beginning. Colonists read in the Psalms, Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Luke, Galatians, and other books, not only that we are made in God’s image, but that he “knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13).

Bible readers and hearers also imbibed sensational detail about what evildoers do to unborn children. When an Israelite town did not surrender to an evil king, “he ripped open all the women in it who were pregnant” (2 Kings 15:16). Hosea prophesied that “Samaria shall bear her guilt . . . their pregnant women [shall be] ripped open” (Hosea 13:16). The Ammonites were guilty because “they have ripped open pregnant women in Gilead, that they might enlarge their border” (Amos 1:13).

Volumes other than the Bible, like The Midwives Book, featured the sacred and secular overlapping seamlessly. Jane Sharp quoted from or alluded to the Bible at least thirty times. She twice referred to Psalm 139’s “knitted me together,” but also noted Genesis 1, 2, 3, 4, 17, 29, and 30, as well as other passages from Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 Chronicles, Psalms 113 and 127, Matthew, John, Acts, and Hebrews. Sharp frequently referred to “the law of God,” “the laws of God,” and “the blessings of God.”

Pastors in early America cited the Bible in speaking out against abortion. In 1869 the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America declared that it viewed “the destruction by parents of their own offspring before birth with abhorrence.” But in 1908 Dr. Walter Dorsett at an American Medical Association convention complained that “Few sermons are preached from the pulpit for fear of shocking the delicate feelings of a fashionably dressed congregation.”

Some pastors were bold, but avoiding any mention of abortion was common in churches during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. WORLD surveyed pastors in the 1990s and the 2010s. While some such as John Piper spoke out, I could accurately headline the articles “Silence of the Shepherds” I and II. The A and B trends — more anatomical knowledge, less Bible knowledge — pretty much canceled each other out.

In early America, as the delightfully named book Sex in Middlesex (the Massachusetts county I grew up in) showed, community pressure on young men meant that pregnant, unmarried women could generally count on marriage before going into labor. If young men hesitated, old men intervened. They rarely needed shotguns, but every father had one.

The growth of large cities beginning in the 1830s broke down community protection and left more women and children at risk. Pastor Isaac Ferris in the Mercer St. Presbyterian Church spoke to three hundred young New Yorkers in 1852 and said an apprentice or clerk a generation earlier lived with his employer’s family, “but now it is sadly altered. The lad is left on the wide world — he is surrounded by the mercenary and the callous.” Self-indulgence with no supervision left young men in a moral maelstrom.

Ferris jump-started the YMCA movement as a way to form new communities, and YWCAs soon followed. Unmarried women surprised by pregnancy often went to homes away from home. Some had non-euphemistic names like the Erring Women’s Refuge. Starting in the 1970s crisis pregnancy centers tried to create supportive communities. Many pastors, even if they did not speak about abortion, prodded their congregations to support compassionate alternatives to abortion.

‘D’ Is for Danger

Until the 1830s abortion was often fatal for the mother as well as the child. Ingesting an abortifacient was playing Russian roulette: Place a bullet in a revolver, spin the cylinder, point the muzzle at your head, pull the trigger. Letting an abortionist invade a uterus was the equivalent of two bullets in the cylinder. Only utter desperation, or unrelenting pressure from an unloving lover, would lead a woman to accept a one-third risk of death.

At that time surgical abortion hadn’t changed much in two millennia. Around the year AD 200, the theologian Tertullian described how an abortionist inserted into the uterus “an annular blade, by means of which the limbs within the womb are dissected,” along with a blunt gripper “wherewith the entire fetus is extracted by a violent delivery.”

The surgical trauma was bad enough, but then infection arrived. Abortion became a little less dangerous for mothers when specialists with steady hands and extensive experience began doing more abortions than neighborhood hacks. In the late nineteenth century, knowledge of antisepsis spread: Cleanliness in abortion was not next to godliness, but the Maryland Court of Appeals in 1901 recognized the difference antiseptic procedure made when it declared, with some tunnel vision, that “death is not now the usual . . . consequence of an abortion.”

As use of antibiotics spread after World War II, the concerns about personal danger that had kept some women from obtaining abortions dropped steadily. New York City went from 144 abortion deaths in 1921 to 15 in 1951. The number kept declining: Although abortion propagandists in the 1960s claimed “thousands” of women were dying in abortions, Planned Parenthood medical director Mary Calderone acknowledged in 1960 that for women, “Abortion is no longer a dangerous procedure.”

‘E’ Is for Enforcement

In the late nineteenth century newspapers regularly reported that abortion was arousing “intense feeling.” The Wisconsin State Journal reported an arrest “on the charge of seduction and abortion made by the parents of a girl 14 years old. . . . The arrest causes intense feeling.” But with all the intensity, it was still hard to lock up abortionists.

In 1904, Dr. Rudolph Holmes successfully urged the Chicago Medical Society to create a Committee on Criminal Abortion. Holmes became chairman and pushed his colleagues to try “influencing the daily press to discontinue criminal advertisements.” Abortion was illegal in Illinois and every other state, but the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers still ran thinly veiled ads for it. Holmes visited editors who dropped the ads, particularly when postal authorities issued a stop order against mail delivery of publications sustaining abortion.

By 1910, though, Holmes was despairing. He noted in a medical journal that abortionists, denied newspaper advertising space, printed business cards and distributed them through brothels and rooming-house landlords. He said Chicago abortionists had their own legal department, with witnesses on tap and ready to swear that “the young woman had an operation elsewhere and the doctor was merely performing a life-saving operation.” He said the coroner’s office investigated not more than one percent of abortion deaths in Chicago: “The persons who perform the operations find it easy to cover up their tracks, and it is difficult to get witnesses to testify in cases of this kind.”

Doctors in other cities shared Holmes’s pessimism about enforcement. In 1912 Dr. M.S. Iseman offered an acidic city-by-city tour of how laws were not working at street level. During five years in Washington, D.C., thousands of abortions led to “only nine indictments for abortion and three convictions — not enough to do more than to slow down slightly the traffic to abort.” In New York City, abortion was rampant but “in some years not a single indictment follows. . . . It is difficult to say which is the stronger attraction for the lady visitors to the metropolis — the horseshow, the opera, or the gynecologist.” In Atlanta, “After years of suspended animation, the police made a solitary arrest for the crime of abortion.”

The Heart-Changer

Moving forward a century to a time when more people call themselves pro-choice than pro-life, we should be aware of the limitations of enforcement in red states, particularly in their blue cities. It’s hard for me to believe that a jury of twelve randomly chosen people in my city would ever imprison an abortionist. With danger to the mother no longer a deterrent, and wherever enforcement is unlikely, the ABCs — anatomy, Bible, community — are the bulwarks for life against death.

That realization is especially important now that American society suffers from structural abortionism. The frequent corporate response to Dobbs — paying travel costs to legal-abortion states for employees in pro-life states — shows abortion’s economic role. Many organizations structure their workforce on the assumption that young female employees will always be available to show up in the office for full-time work. Corporate and government offices, instead of pretending that differences between men and women of childbearing age don’t exist, should and could be more creative in promoting shared jobs, flextime, on-site infant care including feeding times, work from home, and other pro-life scheduling.

Beyond economics, we should also recognize that an underlying cause for many abortions, like much of homelessness, is the catastrophic loss of relationships. Churches can and should be gospel-formed communities that communicate to unhappily pregnant women: There’s room here for you.

Pro-lifers in deep blue states may despair, but in one respect they may have an advantage. To be successful, laws restricting abortion need to pedal in tandem with lives devoted to expanding compassion. In red states the temptation will be to put politics in the front seat. In states where protective laws are so dead-on-arrival that millions of babies are likely to be dead pre-arrival, changed hearts are the only hope — and the gospel is a heart-changer.

Few saw as much as Peter did.

One of the first disciples, and chief among them, he heard Jesus’s public teaching, and his private explanations. He saw Jesus heal, raise the dead, and feed thousands with a few loaves and fish. He walked Galilee with Jesus, on land and sea.

Along with James and John, Peter witnessed the transfiguration, and accompanied Jesus deep into Gethsemane to pray on the night before he died. Then, watching from a distance on Good Friday, Peter saw what Jesus did, and did not do. Jesus’s enemies mocked him, slandered him, insulted him, maligned him, reviled him — as verbal thrusts of contempt conspired with nails and spear.

How Jesus handled it left an indelible stamp on Peter. And it came to mark his letter to insulted, maligned Christians, tempted to respond in kind to their revilers. In short, “When [Jesus] was reviled, he did not revile in return” (1 Peter 2:23).

Mindful of God

The holy composure that Jesus showed when mistreated, and while dying in agony, was not only truly divine, but like Christ himself, fully human.

“Not reviling in return” didn’t just happen. This is not how humanity naturally responds when verbally attacked. No, for years Jesus prepared for it. He trained his soul for these trials. Through rhythms of communion with his Father and compassion for immature sheep, through seasons of prayer and ceaselessly rehearsing what “is written” in Scripture, through shaping his own pliable human soul with habits of Godward praise and glad obedience, Jesus had long readied himself for the gauntlet of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

Christ was not caught off guard when they first flogged him with words. Jesus knew that mocking would come, and warned his men of it ahead of time. He would be “mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon” (Luke 18:32). “See, we are going up to Jerusalem. And the Son of Man will be . . . mocked and flogged and crucified” (Matthew 20:18–19; also Mark 10:34). Not only flogging and crucifixion, but also mocking would be a genuine trial, requiring his readiness.

How did he prepare for the onslaught? In the words of his watching disciple, Jesus entrusted himself “to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23). He lived “mindful of God” (1 Peter 2:19), not just fellow man. He readied himself for the assault of spoken and acted evil by becoming the kind of man who would not respond in kind.

Mocked and Maligned

Preparation was one thing. Many are willing to talk theory. But when mocking words begin to fly, they often sting and disorient far more than anticipated. After his arrest,

the men who were holding Jesus in custody were mocking him as they beat him. They also blindfolded him and kept asking him, “Prophesy! Who is it that struck you?” And they said many other things against him, blaspheming him. (Luke 22:63–65)

They shuffled him off to the puppet king Herod, who “with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him” (Luke 23:11). Then back to Pilate, and Mark reports in more detail what shape the mocking took: they clothed him in purple, put a crown of thorns on him, and saluted him in jest, “Hail, King of the Jews!” They struck his head with a reed, spit on him, and knelt down in sneering homage (Mark 15:17–19; also Matthew 27:28–31). Once they had nailed him to the cross, the soldiers came by for another round; they “mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine” (Luke 23:36).

Now that he seemed safely affixed to the cross, his own countrymen unleashed the barrage they had waiting. Passersby “derided him, wagging their heads” (Matthew 27:39). Even as he writhed in agony, and public humiliation, they taunted him: “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself!” “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross” (Matthew 27:40).

Even the dignitaries of Israel could not hold their tongues but descended into the same cowardly insults: “He saved others; he cannot save himself.” “He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him” (Matthew 27:42). “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him” (Matthew 27:43). Never one to exaggerate, Luke simply reports that “the rulers scoffed at him” (Luke 23:35).

Even the two criminals crucified to his left and right “reviled him in the same way” (Matthew 27:44; Mark 15:32).

Reviled, Keep Trusting

How, then, did Jesus respond?

Clearly, he was capable of putting it all right back in their face with some perfectly crafted reply. No one had a way with words like Jesus. When he chose to speak, even foes confessed that “no one ever spoke like this man!” (John 7:46). None could silence the proud with one simple word like Jesus. Yet hear it from eyewitness testimony: “When he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23).

Jesus had cultivated a life of trust in his Father. He was ever “mindful of God.” Then, even when the thrusts of reviling and mocking came, he did not let the hurt pierce his heart, and he did not respond to evil with evil. Instead, he continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. Mindful of his Father, he could trust that justice would come in due time, and at least in this moment, it was not his own to enact. The wicked words of man would not unseat his own obedience to God. If we only had such wherewithal today.

This, of course, was not raw willpower, without joy. When pummeled by spoken contempt, Jesus would not fail to practice what he had preached: “Rejoice and be glad . . . when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you” (Matthew 5:11–12). He was a man of sorrows, but not joyless. In the whole horrible enterprise, says Hebrews 12:2, Jesus endured the cross “for the joy that was set before him.”

Joy does not mean fun. There was nothing fun about the odium and shame of the cross, nor its nails, nor its blasphemies. Nor was it without the deep joy that could sustain him.

Gethsemane and Golgotha were not yet the time, but they prepared the way. The day would come to “leap for joy” (Luke 6:23). Which leads to Peter’s emphasis on what Jesus did not do.

Do Not Respond in Kind

Jesus did not descend into the very sin that had been sinned against him. He did not give in to evil by repeating it. “He did not revile in return” (1 Peter 2:23).

On such authority, Peter says to his embattled readers, “Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling” (1 Peter 3:9). No matter what terrible evil has been uttered against you, keep your tongue from speaking evil (1 Peter 3:10). Have you been slandered? “Put away . . . all slander” (1 Peter 2:1). The kingdom-disqualifying sins of others, including reviling (1 Corinthians 5:11; 6:9–10), are no excuse to give ourselves to sin. Would you too go to hell because the hell-bound scoff at you?

On the one hand, Peter should not have been surprised to see Jesus’s response to reviling. This very concept of not responding in kind had been one of the hallmarks of Christ’s teaching. Turn the other cheek. Go another mile. Give him your cloak as well. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Still, Peter marveled to see the Christian ethic in its first and greatest act. It’s one thing to hear of a miracle; another to see it for yourself. And he would see still more.

Bless Your Revilers

Remarkably, Jesus didn’t stop at holding his tongue, magnificent as that was. He spoke blessing, rather than curse. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Human, he could find the impulse to respond in kind. But holy, he acted the miracle of not reviling in return, and then went even further. The joy that led him not to respond in kind held his peace and filled his mouth with words of blessing for his foes.

So Peter writes, “Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless” (1 Peter 3:9). Who would dare venture such an ethic without the teaching and example of Christ? Christians are constrained not to silence, but to righteousness. Peter would have us be ready, in fact, to speak with grace and truth: “Always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.” And however well-meaning or slanderous their talk, do so “with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15).

Paul also got the message, and gave it: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. . . . Repay no one evil for evil” (Romans 12:14, 17).

Blessed and Vindicated

In the end, Jesus not only blessed but he was blessed.

God did not leave him in utter humiliation, but exalted him. He did not abandon him to the tomb, but raised him. God counted to three, and fully vindicated Jesus with resurrection life, then counted to forty, and raised him up to heaven, and then seated him on heaven’s very throne. And in his threefold rising, Jesus looked in triumph over his enemies and saw them put to shame.

So too, “you will be blessed,” writes Peter (1 Peter 3:14). In fact, you already have a down payment: “If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you” (1 Peter 4:14). True, insults will not first strike us as blessings. But then, like Jesus, we go to work on them by the Spirit, mindful of God. With the calculus of heaven, which is never flippant, but ever earnest, we learn to live what Jesus taught and realized:

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven. (Matthew 5:11–12; also Luke 6:22)

When mocked, maligned, reviled, we follow in Jesus’s steps (1 Peter 2:21). In him, we do not sin in response to sin. And one day soon, if not already in this life, the folly of our revilers will be exposed. “When you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame” (1 Peter 3:16).

When Reviled, We Bless

Make no mistake, we do not take reviling lightly. We do not celebrate opposition to Jesus, in and of itself. And true reviling is unavoidably painful. We don’t seek it, try to provoke it, or enjoy it. Not eager for it, yet we are willing for Jesus’s sake to endure it — when it comes.

In times when talk is cheap and unbelievers are prone to take aim, we look to our Lord, admire his magnanimity, and, when attacked, we seek to walk in his steps.

As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 4:12, “When reviled, we bless.”