I agree the police had the right to arrest him. We should obey authorities so long as they do not clearly go against the mandates of God. While preaching the Gospel is often disruptive, and in the NT more than one riot broke out over it, it was not because a captive audience was forced, but because the consequences of the Gospel interfered with the pagan culture or caused the hypocrisy of Judaism to be displayed.
When I first became a Christian at 17, my parents forbade me to read the Bible, hang out with Christian friends or go to Church. I read my Bible in secret, and began to complain to God for putting me in the difficult situation I was in. At 3AM as I poured out my bitter complaint to God, I felt an enormous peace, I knew god was going to fix it. A few hours later my father, a physician, awoke to notice his toes were paralized. An ascending paralasys that now I know to be Gulillan-Barre-Landry syndrome affected him. Within a week I had to stop going to school because I was the only one strong enought to put him on the toilet as by now he could no longer move even his neck. To make a long story short, in those pre-CT scan days, his neurology friends told him he had a brain tumor, and my father came home to die. I laughed at him when he reminded me that without life insurance, our family would sink back into the homelessness from whence we had just began to rise. I told him he would not die, that this was a response to prayer, and that as soon as he relented and allowed me to be a Christian he would be completely healed. While he did not become a Christian, my father became a believer that there must be a God, and relented, allowing me to worship openly. 3 days later my father was walking of his own strength. He currently has NO symptoms of the disease.
I am a physician. I have never seen a recovery from Guillan as that of my father's. Even assuming there was no miracle, the providential timing of the onset and cure of the disease defies all reason. This was before the Guillan-Barre onset of the first flu vaccines, it was a sporadic case, and quite rare back in those days.
What does this have to do with that corner preacher?
More can be accomplished by the fervent prayers of His suffering people than by agressive in-your-face evangelism. I give the Gospel often to people, even patients on occasion. I am a fundamentalist, and I am not ashamed of telling my collegues that macro-evolution is a myth, that there was an Adam and a world-wide flood. However, I try to tell this Truth in LOVE, not in a manner that is basically harrasment.
I will NOT condemn the street preacher. God uses all manner of means to call the lost, as Jesus said "John came this way and I come in the other, so your problem is not the messenger, but the message. (very loose paraphrase). How do I know God did not call this guy to preach in that manner? However, when we disobey authority, wether called to do so by God or not, we must accept the consequences. As the 3 friends of Daniel said to Nebuchadnezzr "we do not know if God will deliver us or not from the furnace, but we will not worship anyone else."
God delivered me dramatically from the circumstances of my home, forcing my parents to allow me the freedom to be a Christian, but had He not, I would have had no right to have been rebellious against them.
JR
