November 6, 2011 – Luke 17

I have always wondered about the nine lepers who didn’t come back. Did they remain cured. I think there are two ways to see it. They were cured by Christ, but their faith wasn’t strong enough (like the one that came back) to maintain it and they got leprosy again. Or they remained cured even after their lack of faith because of God’s good will. Many people receive gifts from God and do not thank Him for them. Those gifts are not taken away, so I am of the opinion that they remained clean. But you wonder how their lives were affected by that cleansing and what they went on to think. You would like to think that eventually they went on to become Christians after hearing about Christ and connecting the two things, but it is just as likely that they went on to be greedy tax collectors and wasted God’s precious gift.

The left behind sequence is a hard one to figure out. It is my understanding that in the rapture understanding, the ones that are taken are the saved ones. That doesn’t follow from the example that Christ gives. Both with Noah and with Lot, the ones that are left behind are the ones that God chose to save. The ones that were destroyed were the sinful ones. I thought this might be contradicted by the last line when Christ talks about the vultures around the body that is left, but I don’t think so. The left behind rapture group always interprets the taking as something where a person just disappears. Once again, that isn’t exactly the example that Christ gives. In Noah’s case, the flood would have killed people, but their bodies would still be there and the vultures would gather. In Lot’s case, even though it was fire from Heaven, it is not beyond belief that bodies would not have been left behind. So taken may not mean that the body is taken away, but just that the life is, much like the plague upon the first born of Egypt. That would mean that the vultures are around the bodies of those taken and that you want to be one of the ones left behind, like Noah and Lot.