Jesus: the Seven Star General

There is a certain phrase you will hear most Christians say sometime in their lifetime. I'm not talking about the occasional, "amen!" or the spur-of-the-moment "Hallelujah." I'm talking about, of course, the phrase, "This is my favorite worship song." Now people can have all kind of favorites. My favorite ice cream is Cookies-And-Cream. My favorite season is Spring (with Fall coming in a close second). And my favorite Spice Girl is Ginger Spice. I'm sure all of you have different kinds of favorites out there, but can someone really have a favorite worship song? If I'm not mistaken, the whole purpose of worship is to give glory to God...not to bring us enjoyment because of a song's lyrics or rad bass line. Now I know this really is not a big deal, but every time someone says something about how a certain song being their favorite worship song it just makes me think. Maybe a certain song can be someone's favorite way to express to God their feelings and thoughts to Him, but I think we should be hesitant to say a certain song is our favorite. And I am not excluded from this. For those of you that know me personally, I LOVE Hillsong's With Everything. It is a very powerful worship song, but I don't think I should elevate that about any other worship song, because in the end the song is for God, not me.

The reason I bring this up is because the other day we had a high school gathering at The Block (Southeast's crazy youth building). Ryan Post and Matt Bayless led worship for everyone and they played my favo...I mean a great worship song called With Everything. As we were walking out, I heard one of the students say, "Man, they didn't play my favorite worship song!" I then went on to ask which song he was talking about, and he told me it was Mighty to Save. I nodded my head and went away thinking, "He is just so confused. He doesn't know what he is talking about. His favorite song should be Mighty to Save." Okay. Okay. I made up that last part, but the student was literally frustrated because they didn't play his favorite worship song!

That same night, Mark Moore spoke and he paralleled the life of a Christian in school to the battle front for a soldier. He went on to explain the importance of the Phalanx the Romans used to conquer much of the known world. Basically, the Roman soldiers would march in a rectangular formation into battle instead of the lining up like they did in the movie Braveheart. This was the perfect fighting formation because if the first line of soldiers died, there would be someone right behind them to kill the enemy. Mark's whole point was that we as Christians need to fight for our school in Phalanx where we have each other's backs.

This whole idea of Christianity and military reminded me of something one of my professors once discussed in class. He talked about how awesome of a military leader Jesus would be, so I thought I would kind of expand on that. In John 6:15, Jesus has just fed the 5,000 people with just 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish, and then is says that Jesus knew the people intended to make him King so that He would overthrow the Roman rule. Now, if you think about it, these people are smart because Jesus would be an excellent General. The following are statements that point to that very truth.

1) Jesus could feed Hungry Soldiers.

When his army would be surrounded by the enemy, they would cut off all food supplies. The soldiers would not know what to do because they would soon run out of food. However, if you have Jesus as your leader, there is no need to worry. He could take the last couple crumbs of bread and wave His hand over them and voila...Texas Roadhouse bread appears with a side of honey butter! And you know soldiers can get kind of low in their spirits because fighting can be a little depressing...so what would leader Jesus do? He would turn the water into wine to cheer up his fighting men!

2) Jesus could maneuver natural barriers.

Ever heard of the saying "Faith can move mountain"? Well, you are just in luck if your commander-in-chief is the Savior of the World. We are told by Paul in the book of Romans that we must have faith in Jesus Christ. And who has more faith in Jesus than Jesus himself? So lets say that your army is chasing a foe and comes to a Huge mountain, but it would take days to travel around the mountain giving your enemy days to run away. But Jesus just moves the mountain on pure faith and then you are right on their tail! Or maybe you need to forge a river or stream, because your enemy is on the other side. Forget about trying to take days to find a part of the river where it is able to be crossed. Jesus just walks along water building a make-shift bridge as he goes! Jesus would be the ultimate General when it came to natural barriers. Yet there one more skill of Jesus that would be especially helpful for a military leader.

3) Jesus could bring dead soldiers back to life.

Have you ever played Halo or Call of Duty on x-box or playstation? If you have not, let me fill you in. Basically, you play as one person and you try to go through the story line the game has plotted out for you. If you die, you get a chance to start all over. It is not like if you die, you can't play ever again. Now think about if this was real life! As soon as a soldier peels over dead, Jesus walks up behind them and they rise back up to fight some more. This would be worse than any massive zombie attack. Zombies do seem relentless, but you can cut off there head. If you cut off the head of one of Jesus' men, he just sticks it back on, and then you have one mad soldier coming at you. And if someone loses an ear...just ask Peter.

4) Jesus has twelve legions of Angels on stand-by.

I'm not going to spend too much time on this point. Jesus says in Matthew 26 that he could have twelve whole legions of Angels at the snap of his fingers. Just to put that in persepective, a Roman legion probably had about 4,000 soldiers an 300 soldiers on horseback. So that is roughly 52,000 angels. Now if we look back to Isaiah 37:36, we see that only one angel of the Lord killed 185,000 Assyrians. So that means Jesus would have 52,000 heavenly soldiers who could kill around 9,620,000,000 men! That is the entire population of the earth plus about 3 billion people. So forget Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, or Caesar...Give me Jesus!

I have now laid out the reasons Jesus would make a great king or army general. So it makes so much sense why the people in John 6 would want to make Jesus king. He would be unstoppable! But we all know that Jesus did nothing of the sort while he was on earth. He told his followers to turn the other cheek and to not be served but to serve others. Jesus sacrificially died on the cross for us so that we would not have to endure the four things I just listed out. Because at the end of time, Jesus will totally wipe out everything evil and that includes that lying dragon we call Satan. So I can't wait to see Jesus, the seven star general, totally demolish every evil at the final battle!