An Echo in the Darkness (Mark of the Lion, #2)

by Francine Rivers

“God created mankind to live in a love relationship with him and to reflect his character. People weren’t created to live independent from God.”

Repentance had come through knowledge. But she had no written copy of the Torah. She had no copies of the Memoirs of the Apostles. All she had was her memory.

The appeal was so often the same: Make me comfortable so I can go on doing whatever I want to do. They wanted sin without consequences.

None of them, not even he, seemed to realize they weren’t just physical beings, that God had left a mark upon them by the simple fact of his creation. They preferred their idols, tangible, possessing capricious characteristics like themselves, easily understood. They wanted something they could manipulate. God was inconceivable, intangible, incomprehensible, unexploitable. They didn’t want a life of self-sacrifice, purity, commitment, a life of Thy will be done, not mine. They wanted to be master of their own life, to have their own way, and be answerable to no one.

The Roman’s words had brought the prophecies of Zechariah and Isaiah ringing in his ears. Closing his eyes tightly, Ezra prayed.

And so Marcus did as he was asked. He gave in to his deep need to speak of Hadassah. And all the while he talked of her, he failed to see the irony in what he was doing. For as he told the story of a simple Judean slave girl, Marcus Lucianus Valerian, a Roman who didn’t believe in anything, proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ.