Trampled Under (foot). (Mat 7:6). The foot of the wicked (swine), the workers only of law-keeping, and the preachers of obedience without the PW as their master use the feet to trample the truth of the PW (pearls). This occurs when precious truths of what is primarily the Messiah Jesus and his foreshadowings as the basis for the law are mistakenly preached to those who hate the truth. The audience can turn on the preacher violently, and “trample” the Prophetic Word by making it so relegated and common that it becomes mixed with the religious offscouring of the world. This trampling of the Prophetic Word is not its deletion from the Church, but its debasement by priority. The lesson is that must identify the audience before we risk not only disgracing the PW but threatening our own lives by the resulting rage of the swine.
This evangelistic discernment is illustrated dramatically by Paul in Acts 14, preaching in the cities of Lystra.
And there sat a certain man at Lystra, impotent in his feet, being a cripple from his mother’s womb, who never had walked: The same heard Paul speak: who stedfastly beholding him, and perceiving that he had faith to be healed, Said with a loud voice, Stand upright on thy feet. And he leaped and walked.
The problems inherent in indiscriminate, mass evangelism is in view. Mass evangelism in our age has, however, removed the threat of physical abuse and murder as a reaction to the gospel specifically because of nearly 1800 years of the trampling of the “pearls,” making a certain debased view of the Prophetic Word mainstream. The Gospel has been transformed into a proposition, a concept, a feeling, a declaration without a necessary concomitant demonstration. This makes it go down easy as a homey, platitudinous, prosaic notion that many more people will gladly accept. A Gospel message symbolized by “Jesus saves,” “the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin,” and “for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son” are not pearls trampled underfoot, they are more like cheap, shiny stones that have been made to replace them so that the Church can seem to gain converts. Without these phrases conceptually qualified only by the supernatural prophetic word of demonstration, they are powerless. Were it only the case we still lived in an age when Man was without so many of his advanced linguistic and philosophical methods of equivocation that Messianic Prophecy could again be trampled unambiguously as “pearl of great price.”
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