Unity vs. Division

I recently visited my daughter’s family, and we went to the Zoo.

My son-in-law wore a tee shirt with a quotation from Harvey Milk on the back and a supposed mathematical equation on the front saying that unity was greater than division.

I’ve been thinking about an example to show that the assertion is seriously confused.

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Consider a large, very large, chamber with knee deep water coated with a flammable substance. I’ve been thinking olive oil, since lamps have been made using it since ancient times. However, olive oil lacks the volatility, the vapor pressure one would expect from kerosene, or gasoline. The advantage is that olive oil smells pleasant, and isn’t toxic.

Back to our very large chamber filled with knee deep water coated with a thick layer of this pleasant, flammable substance.

In this chamber all the people of the world live. No one can remember ever living in any other circumstance. The world is dark, and the people like the oil they are standing in. Some like it to the point of coating themselves with it, and others around them as well.

From above, a gondola is lowered with a middle aged man, 33 years of age. The gondola does not reach the surface of the knee deep water covered with the olive oil. In fact no one can get into the gondola without the help of someone else boosting them up.

The man gets out of the gondola, and begins to talk with the residents. A few respond to their encounter with him, and he boosts them up, so they can get in the gondola. Once there, he cleans all the oil off of them, so that they’re clean.

He chooses twelve and sending them out by two’s, he and they go into the knee deep water and oil and engage the people still living in the chamber in conversation, telling them that they can get in the gondola and be clean too.

Those who respond are brought back to the gondola, boosted up into it and have the oil cleaned off of them.

There is a ladder that extends from the gondola up through the ceiling of the chamber, into the heavens apparently, and those who have been cleaned of the oil climb the ladder, while some return to the people still wandering about in the oil covered water.

They say to those in the water "you don’t need to stay in this place. It’s dangerous, you’ll burn."

Some in the water like the olive oil very much; they go about slathering the olive oil on other people in the chamber telling them how wonderful it is to be coated with the pleasantly smelling oil.

When they see the people in the gondola, who are clean, and those among the people who have re-entered the oil coated water to tell those who remained of the dangers they live in, the people who love the smell and feel of the olive oil become enraged.

They speak of the virtue of unity, that everyone should find joy in being coated in the oil and that those who are in the gondola are divisive and haters.

But I ask you, since those covered in the oil are going to be burned, is dividing the people so that some of them can be saved, less than the unity where all will burn eternally?

All men are called to the salvation that is in Christ, and God provides sufficient Grace for every man to be saved from the eternal fire. Will you embrace that salvation or will you degrade those who call you out of the fire?