Are You In, Or Are You Out?

While researching for Luke 12:11, I came across an article on the internet regarding Christians in Egypt. You can go to the original article located at the New York Times website and read it in its entirety at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/world/africa/11egypt.html .

The article highlights are as follows:

CAIRO — Cairo’s highest civil court on Saturday ruled that 12 Christians who had converted to Islam could return to their original church, ending a bitter yearlong battle over identity and minority rights.

It was the second time in recent months that a court has upheld the rights of religious minorities, in a country that is 90 percent Muslim and where the distinction between civil law and religious principles is increasingly blurred.

The case involved Coptic Christians who had converted to Islam to obtain a divorce. The Coptic Orthodox Church does not allow dissolving a marriage. Islamic law, however, allows men to end a marriage easily.

For a time, Christians who converted in order to divorce were allowed by the courts to formally return to their original faith. But in recent years, as a more conservative sentiment has spread throughout the country and the government, the courts have not allowed converts to return to Christianity.

Hooray for religious freedoms in Egypt!!! Now you can legally be in two farcical religious situations at once.

The New York Times reported these facts to celebrate the growth of religious freedoms in the middle east. The sad part is that what they reported to believers like myself, that the religious hypocrisy that Jesus engaged is still alive and some of the players have done so, in His name.

I think of the aforementioned Luke 12:9 where Jesus tells us that we pay a price for denying Him on this earth and that price is His denial of us in heaven on judgement day.