Fish Out of Water

This was my first digital drawing for Draw Near. If you look closely, you can see that I drew in the words "Draw Near" in the bottom right. 

This one is slightly modified from the original. The first, instead of saying "the church is designed for persecution," said "the church thrives in it." I got some pushback on Twitter, with one guy responding, "This is empirically false. Persecution has repeatedly wiped out Christian groups around the world, never to return." I think this criticism misses the point. The church experiences different phases. Sometimes it has prosperity (which is not the same as luxury), sometimes it experiences persecution, and sometimes it experiences dispersal. Wheat grows, ripens, and is cut down to be harvested, both for food and for planting. That's not a failure of the wheat, it is its purpose. Early Christians in Jerusalem experiences tremendous persecution, but they spread it far and wide as they fled. Regardless, I changed the heading because I don't feel like defining the term "thrive" to everyone who reads it, and because the actual point of the drawing was to point out the terrible effects of luxury on the church. 

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