Dr Paul Allen

The heat was on. The Smyrna police hunted for Polycarp , the revered bishop of that city. Already they had put other Christians to death in the arena; now a mob cried for the leader. Polycarp had left the city and was hiding out at the farm of some friends. As the soldiers moved in, he fled to another farm. Though the aged churchman felt no fear of death and had wanted to stay in the city, his friends had urged him to hide, perhaps fearing that his death would demoralize the church. If so, they were quite wrong. When the police reached the first farm, they tortured a slave boy to learn Polycarp’s whereabouts. Then they rushed, fully armed, to apprehend the bishop. Though Polycarp had time to escape, he refused. “God’s will be done,” he resolved. Instead, he welcomed his captors as guests, offered them food and asked for an hour alone to pray. He took two hours. Some of the captors seemed sorry to be arresting such a nice old man . On the way back to Smyrna, the police chief ...

English: Saint Polycarp (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Philippians 2:5–11 “So that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow…and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord , to the glory of God the Father” (vv. 10–11). At age eighty-six, Polycarp , the second-century bishop of Smyrna and disciple of the apostle John, was brought to the Roman authorities and ordered to confess that Caesar is lord. Though doing so would have saved his life, Polycarp refused and was murdered, inspiring others to remain faithful. Considered apart from Polycarp’s story, it was not unusual to refer to Caesar as kurios, the Greek term for “lord.” In the original Greek, kurios can mean simply “sir” as a polite and slightly exalted way of referring to another human being. Or, it can refer to a master of many slaves or servants. However, neither of these meanings were in mind when Rome applied the title kurios to the emperor. Instead, kurios signified divinity when used of...