There was an interesting current affairs report this week on a new diet that is catching on around the world. You can eat whatever you like, and exercise is optional; yet people are losing up to four pounds a week using it. I thought it was ironic when I heard the details, that what they were talking about was the only diet known when I was a kid. It's called counting calories.
As long as you don't eat more than 400 calories at a time you can have four meals/snacks a day, eating whatever you like. Of course if it's lettuce and tomatoes, you get a huge bowlful of the stuff, but if it's bacon rinds, then you can fit your whole meal into a normal sized envelope.
Of course what makes this diet so amazing is that it actually works. It's the diet that all of the others have been running away from for the past few decades. They all wanted to find an easier way to do it, and they came up with some amazing excesses in their efforts to avoid the obvious, which is, that you simply eat fewer calories than what your body burns each day. When we do this, our bodies will use up all the stored fat that has been waiting for such a time as this.
But my real point is just how much that is like the truths that Jesus taught. People didn't like them, so they came up with all kinds of replacements. The replacements didn't work, of course (God is not going to be tricked into honouring them.) but they have been immensely popular.
Now, in these last days, the message is going out to people once again, that the sort of things that Jesus said 2,000 years ago, are the only things that will bring 'abundant life' now, as well as the promised eternal life that he spoke about for after we die. The things that Jesus said are not easy; and they are not popular; but they work... just like a low-calorie diet.
We just need to be faithful to offer these truths to a world that has so easily forgotten stuff that is right there in the Bibles they open up in churches every week. As Jesus said of the people in his day, they read with veils over their eyes... veils that need to be lifted by faithful messengers of truth, day after day and year after year, as we move closer to his return.
