For years, workers and visitors flocked to the sight of silvery dust flakes that floated to the floor in a mill where steel strips rolled over pads in a tall cooling tower. In his book The Heat: Steelworkers’ Lives and Legends, steelworker Joe Gutierrez tells how beautifully “the snow danced in August.”

Then people discovered the dust was asbestos. “Everybody breathed it,” wrote Gutierrez. He now suffers from the slow, choking grip of asbestosis, as do many plant workers.

“Who am I? I’m everybody. Can’t walk too far now. I get tired real fast, and it hurts when I breathe sometimes. And to think we used to fight over that job,” he says.

How many things in our culture resemble the silver flakes in that steel mill? They’re enchanting but deadly. Meditate on Caiaphas with me for a few minutes…

CAIAPHAS WAS A RELIGIOUS PERSON:

He was the virtual leader of the Jewish people, from a  religious perspective. To be high priest, to speak to God for men, and to speak to men for God, should not only have lifted a man into nobility; it should have kept in his view the supreme purpose and the spiritual function of the church, the kingdom, which Jesus Christ the Messiah had come to establish.

We know Christians who have forgotten about the exalted and the pure. They have been distracted by this world and so they play loosely with “Truth” and forget the greatness of the kingdom of God and its richness. Spiritual talk makes them feel uncomfortable and endangers their own “church” or “kingdom” which rules in their own hearts.

CAIAPHAS WAS CLOSED MINDED:

Caiaphas had been influenced by hundreds of years of false teaching, a false approach to Scripture – the pattern for the priesthood for Caiaphas was what had happened in the years before he entered the office – not the pattern God had given him in Exodus and Leviticus. Caiaphas did not keep an open mind, he did not “test all things, hold fast to what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21); he did not have a discerning mind.

CAIAPHAS HAD A DARKENED HEART:

Caiaphas could easily imagine the followers of Jesus getting out of control and the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, could interpret their actions as insurrection. He could then send in the Roman soldiers who would crush the temple and the priesthood and there would go Caiaphas and his priesthood and his pride.

So he made his determination: “He must be put to death!”

The church of Jesus Christ needs members with pure hearts. She needs wise counsel and energy and conversation that is healthy and wholesome. She needs members who are patient and untiring in their efforts to serve.

Listen to the voice of Jesus Christ. Open the gate of your heart wide so that the King of Glory can come in and reign over your thoughts and words and actions.

Paul Holland