Do you easily get offended? How sensitive are you to people’s comments about you either behind your back or in front of you? How many times have you severed friendships, given someone a cold shoulder, left a church, or become passive-aggressive because you were offended?

How easily you are offended is a good indication of how desperate or how light you see your condition to be. If you know yourself to be a wretched sinner and are in desperate need of a savior, you will not be offended easily. The fact that you are offended easily, if you are, shows that you don’t feel yourself to be in desperate need of a savior.

Jesus does something very unkind. So it seems. When a gentile (foreign) woman approaches Jesus to cure her daughter of demon possession, Jesus tells her, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” (Matt. 15:26). Jesus is calling both her and her daughter dogs!

I’ve heard some pastors and Bible scholars trying to skirt around the issue of Jesus’ display of unkindness by softening his words or giving cultural context. But I disagree. I think Jesus meant to offend! But why? Why would Jesus offend this woman who came for help?

Because He wanted to see how desperate she was. If she had said, “Are you calling me and my daughter dogs? Are you saying that you are superior to us because you are a Jew and we are gentiles? You are a pig! I don’t want your pity or your healing. Away with you!,” then she would not have gotten her prayers answered. Not only would her daughter not been healed, she would’ve been lost forever.

But she was so desperate and her condition so dire, she didn’t care what she was called. She absolutely humbled herself and laid down any sense of pride – be it national, racial, or personal. Only when she laid down her pride and was not offended by Jesus’ words, was she and her daughter saved.

Are you at a blissful point where no one can offend you? Have you realized how desperate a sinner you are so much so that no matter what anyone calls you either in front of you or behind your back, you are not perturbed because you know yourself to be much worse than whatever they called you be?

It’s weird but true. The less you feel yourself to be, the greater comfort you have in knowing that Jesus loves such sinners.

PH