We live in a time when everyone wants to be the victim. This is a therapeutic age, and everyone wants to be the hurt one, the aggrieved one, the one with emotional scars—so that the certified therapists can validate us in our wounding, stamp our cards, which will then require the outside world to feel sorry for us.
This is, of course, perverse, and contrary to how Jesus has taught us to walk. But in an ironic way, this scramble to be a bona fide victim is the result of the triumph of Jesus. The Lord is the one who established, as the central story of the world, how the respectable ones railroaded an itinerate preacher from God, and how they masterfully operated the machinery of justice to accomplish this great injustice.
But Jesus did this in truth, and God vindicated Him in His righteousness by raising Him from the dead. And when Jesus told us to take up the cross to follow Him, He was saying that we were to be victims also, sheep to be slaughtered. But we were to follow Him, believing in, and preaching, the resurrection of the dead, which puts all genuine victims completely out of reach. The world, the emperor, the state, the fanatics, the thugs . . . all of them cannot reach us. God has prepared a Table for us in the presence of our enemies. With salvation’s walls surrounded, thou mayst smile at all thy foes.
This is not so that we may gloat. We do not stand on salvation’s walls so that we may do a little jiggy taunt. We may and must rejoice. We may be filled with gladness. We may sing hallelujah, the smoke from her rises forever and ever. But we may not respond to the victory of God in the same way that Christ’s enemies taunted Him when He was on the cross. If we do, we will discover to our dismay that the enemies of Christ that we were taunting were actually Jesus Himself. And we will say, “Lord, when did we ever see You . . .?”
This is the Table of that rejoicing, and this is the Table that teaches us to rejoice in victory properly.