A confident, Christ-centred response to rising anti-Christian aggression
As the western society turns against people of faith, it is imperative that we respond with absolute confidence in Yahweh as the ascendant, active force in human affairs.
Jesus warned us of persecution. In the West, we are beginning to feel the early tremors. Opposition is mounting. Newly empowered anti-Christian ideologies strut the world stage as if their time has come.
What the new social engineers are doing is easy to see. As Christians, that is not our core concern. The changes we are experiencing in the socio-political climate should lead us to ask the greater question: what is God doing… and why?
God is not an idle retiree. He remains the God of nations. Whatever is happening in western societies, we must still view our world as God’s world; our circumstances as those he has created, enabled, or permitted; and our future as one he will use to reveal his glory.
Drawing on decades of experience working among persecuted believers, Ray Barnett looks at current trends through the prism of the Old Testament prophets and New Testament writings. He leads us towards understanding what God might be doing in our time, among the nations and among us, his people. The better we understand, the better we can respond with Christ-centred clarity as men and women of hope in the face of rising antagonism.
INTRODUCTION
I recall a couple of recent elections in my country. As they drew near, Christians prayed fervently that God would raise up a God-fearing man or woman to steer the country.
In one election, a Christian did become our political leader. Praise and thanksgiving were the order of the day. God had answered prayer.
In the second of the two, the same prayers were met with the election of an anti-Christian, secular humanist. From the day of the election, it was anticipated that the new government’s agenda would include many of the things Christians lobby against, abortion on demand even up to the time of birth, the trans-gender ideological push, the radicalisation of school curricula, the outlawing of public words and expressions of faith and more.
For some, the mood the following Sunday morning took on a perplexed and, perhaps in some quarters, a rather depressive character.
READ MOREThe dilemma was whether God had answered our prayers both times. Or only once.
He certainly seemed to answer prayer by providing a Christian leader. But what about election number two? Might unbelievers taunt us just as Elijah taunted the prophets of Baal? “Shout louder!… Perhaps [God] is deep in thought, or busy, or travelling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.” Did God fall asleep at the wheel? Can the population of a democratic country overturn his sovereign purposes?
To the secular mind, political movements and events must be explained without the notion of God. A secular historian examining the change of governments and the rise and fall of nations will discover the contributing actions of this person or that group, poor campaigning, natural disasters, plagues, or famines. For them, God cannot be seen. What the secular world does see is Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Alexander and the long line of Caesars right through to modern tyrants and teetering Western democracies. All can and must be explained entirely in political or materialistic terms.
Consequently, emotions can rise or fall as the political pendulum swings to the right or the left, from libertine to tyrannical. The broader the swing of the pendulum, the scarier the ride.
As believers, ought we to be different? Was Paul serious when wrote, “There is no authority except that which God established”? Was it just a generic comment about government as a concept, or did he actually mean this government and that prime minister or president?
Here’s the key question: If God is in control of his world, then why...? Why a swing against Christians? Why a culture of death through abortion and euthanasia? Why are anti-Christian ideologies gaining the upper hand? What is to be gained from God allowing Christians to be silenced and banished from the public square?
For us as Christians, some facts remain absolute: God has not retired. We remain certain that God is not a second-tier player attempting to mop up the mess. But what he is doing is not always obvious. Sometimes it seems counterintuitive.
Speaking of the sovereign rule of Yahweh, Walter Brueggemann writes,
In public places, Yahweh's rule is at best hidden, hidden in the historical-political processes that can be given other, more convincing explanations...[1]
Brueggemann’s point is that even if we cannot see behind the curtain of human affairs, we know what the pundits of our society have never imagined: Yahweh reigns. As God’s people, we have no need for “more convincing explanations” of the social and political upheaval tumbling around western democracies. The more we understand God as revealed on the pages of his word, the more we can begin to understand his ways.
The empire of western culture does seem to be teetering on the brink. There may also be some pushback. We see both, like a tug-of-war as social and political forces clamour for supremacy. Anecdotally, there is a strong movement of young adults towards Christ. At the same time, there is a dark surge towards the nihilism of total, unaccountable “freedom”.
The premise of this book is that spiritual and emotional stability in these troubled times will come from lifting our eyes to see what God might be doing, exposing ourselves to him and his infinite wisdom. Only then can we calculate a Christ-honouring response of faith, confident that God will “prepare a table before us in the presence of our enemies.”
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Important
These pages were written for modern Western Christians.
We can scarcely comprehend what it must be like to watch as Nebuchadnezzar’s men stoke the furnace to seven times hotter or roll back the covering of the lions’ den. Our brothers and sisters in many, many countries are in that situation right now. The persecution they face is a direct result of the powers of darkness and their manic antipathy to the gospel.
We are not critiquing them. Better, we should learn from them! Our task is to understand what God might be doing for us and to us, and to respond with Christlike wisdom in our culture, in our day.
Note re the name of God:
Throughout I have used the customary method of identifying when the name Yahweh is used by the Old Testament writers. Our English Bibles have done this by writing the word “Lord” in small upper-case letters, i.e. Lord. In my opinion, this is important. God gave us his name and said that it should be used throughout all generations. It is the name in which he introduced himself to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt as he rescued them and entered into a covenant with them. Its meaning is usually given as “I Am Who I am”, a name indicating absolute self-existence, neither added to nor subtracted from by any person or power outside himself. Yahweh is eternally changeless and thus utterly dependable. You will know, I think, that the Hebrew the writers left the vowels out of God’s name so that it was forever unspoken by human lips. They simply said, “The Name”. “Yahweh” is a reasonable and generally accepted attempt at replacing the vowels. On occasions, I have written Lord, on others have used the name Yahweh by way of reminder of just who we are talking about, and where, at times, it may add a little weight to our understanding.
[1] Walter Brueggemann, Interpretation and Obedience, p88
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