I watch a lot of Alfred Hitchcock's work with my older boys. I recently introduced them to the Alfred Hitchcock Hour, which is a series of short mysteries made for TV.
In one of the episodes, a wealthy woman is seduced by a man she then believes is killed and is communicating to her through a medium who convinces her to give up her entire fortune to aid his work in the paranormal. Her concerned caretaker intervenes and discovers that the two are frauds in cahoots with one another. When the charade is revealed to her by her caretaker, the young woman kills her in a case that is literally that of shooting the messenger. The moral of the story is, of course, that some people are not grateful for being brought out of harmful delusions. They are in love with them, and the person who is attempting to love them by bringing them out of those harmful delusions is seen as their greatest enemy. All messengers eventually get shot.
Of course, everyone who has ever worked in the hospitality industry as a customer service agent already knows that the messenger gets the brunt of someone's unhappy wrath when beliefs about reality do not match reality.
In our postmodern culture, the real world cannot be obtained by subjective observers of it, so as it is often said, the world is what you make of it, or rather in this case, the world is what you make it. You are the creator of your reality. You are the god of your world. You decide what is true and what is not; and this world is constructed primarily to maximize your personal happiness.
Now, of course, we are poor gods and what we make is often self-evidently trash, but we still keep going like little Energizer bunnies as servants of our self-fabricated prisons because we have believed the lie that they will make us happy in the long run even when the evidence tells us otherwise.
And if my understanding of reality makes me comfortable enough, I am happy to live there; and after all, who knows what's true anyway, right?
In comes a prophet of God. Say goodbye that reality. And is he received with joy as a liberator? Far from it. He is the enemy of my comfort, and therefore, of my happiness. How evil do you have to be to try to take away the peace and happiness of another? Such people need to be canceled out of your life in one way or another. Exile/death is the only right response for such a vile foe as is this messenger from God who now contends with our own deified status to see reality as we see fit.
This is, of course, why the world hates the prophets of God even though they are just messengers. But it really isn't the messenger with whom anyone is angry. It is reality itself that is brought in to crush the delusion that something that does not exist exists. We are all like Cipher from The Matrix. We just want to be plugged back into the system of delusion because a reality over which we have no control is much harder to accept. It's harder to accept because it is scarier. We are not the gods of it. We must come into contact with the actual God of it and be accountable to Him for our actions, and this is not what the wicked mind wishes to do.
Hence, we suppress the truth in unrighteousness, and as Romans 1, states, our delusions that give us excuses for our rebellion become our views of reality that are so distorted they distort and destroy us and our children. God is the God of truth, and neither delusions nor deluded people can live in a world where He is the sole Creator and Ruler of it.
Of course, no one can kill reality because no one can kill the God of that reality, but what you can kill, what you can unleash absolute hate upon by murdering him, is the messenger. Like tearing down a picture of an old ex when expectations are met with the disillusionment of reality, the messenger is a representative of the thing (i.e., reality), or the One (the Creator of that reality), hated. Hence, he is murdered as a sacrifice in an effort to save the delusion of self-deification, and only when he is removed can the beguiled rest in his blissful matrix.
No amount of being nice, no amount of saying words the "right" way, no amount of previous loyalties, no amount of little bribes through giving, will stand in the way of such hatred because shooting the messenger is nothing more than a misguided attempt at self-preservation.
Should the prophet be nice? Sure, as long as he isn't compromising the tone of God's message, as it is a part of that message. Should the prophet maintain loyalties in his relationships? Sure, as long as they do not compromise the message. But his tone must be God's if he is to communicate the message accurately. And if the person does not wish to be freed from their delusions, the response will be the same for the messenger as God has received from the hearer of that message. Any other attempt by the prophet to put such a one at ease through fleshly means is simply to fall into a happy delusion the prophet has now built for himself.
The prophet is a sacrifice, but unlike the wicked who sacrifice him for themselves, he sacrifices himself to God so that God's message concerning the nature of reality will reign supreme as the breaker of the bonds of false realities. The prophet cannot make himself more likeable by those who are deceived because he is the enemy of all false worlds, and as such, his enemies wish nothing upon him but his absolute and total destruction.
To love a prophet is a gift from God because the love of God is a gift that can only be given by God. Any attempt by the prophet to fabricate a love for himself out of straw will prove either that he is not a prophet of God or that he will be a severely disappointed prophet when the time of his execution comes.
The prophet is a messenger, and all messengers eventually get shot.
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