Saturday 28 November 2015

Nations who Reject God

Nations who Reject God

Does God hand nations who reject him over to the consequences of their folly? If it comes to that does the act of a nation and its leaders rejecting God inevitably lead to foolish political decisions?

This would seem likely to be the case, but I would like to establish that it is biblical teaching, not just a likely looking theory.

We have all heard platform speakers who take a short narrative section of the Bible and use it as the “proof” for even the most blatantly un-biblical notions. I certainly don't want to be like that! So how do we try to find accurately what the Bible teaches (if anything) on this question).

First we can check if more general teaching is consistent with our theory being true.

The Bible does say that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps 111:10, Prov. 1:7, Prov. 9:10) and conversely “the fool says in their heart 'there is no God'.” Ps 14:1. So there is a link both between being God-fearing and making wise decisions, and between folly and rejecting God, so this is positive so far.

There are prophecies against Israel's rulers, pictured as shepherds over God's flock, which shed some light:

Jeremiah 10:21 “the shepherds are senseless and do not enquire of the Lord; so they do not prosper and all their flock is scattered." Here rejecting God's counsel on the part of the national leaders has bad consequences for the people.

Ezekiel 34 deals with Israel's corrupt leaders at length and leads up to the thrilling prophecy that YHWH himself will step in and rescue the flock and be their shepherd – a Good Shepherd! But in the early part of the chapter, the faults of the leaders are laid bare, and the fact that (up to a point) God did allow the whole nation to suffer the consequences of their mis-rule: “The word of the Lord came to me “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: ' This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Woe to your shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, cloth yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost You have ruled them brutally and harshly. So they were scattered ...” (my emphasis)

There is a great deal of food for thought in this passage for civic and national leaders – and ministers about what God requires of them, but the point relevant to our discussion is the result of their failure in the case of Israel : God's sheep were scattered. So although he promised – and performed – a wonderful future rescue of his sheep; at that time the natural consequences of these leader's decisions were allowed to follow.

Again from these passages there is a link between leaders rejecting God's way and what God requires of leaders, and harm flowing on the whole nation. This is further support for our theory.

Now to two cases-in-point in the Bible.

The first is the time of Jeremiah. The successive kings and even more so their chief advisers were not men of God. The chief priests were actively opposing the prophet. The people were, as we learn in the later chapters of Jeremiah actively worshiping idols.

The first hurdle, a low one as it happens, is that the disaster which falls on Israel is attributed by the Bible to God's judgement. It is a commonplace in philosophy (and accident investigation!) that the question “What caused this to happen?” can be answered on different levels – all of which can be true. So in this case, it was God's judgement. It was also a result human folly in not taking the advice and the choices that God offered which would have averted the disaster.

As I said in an earlier post, ancient Israel was in a particular covenant relationship with Godnot shared by modern democracies. So some aspects of what God did to Israel when they rebelled against him and worshiped idols cannot be simply transferred to our situation. On the other hand God did punish eve pagan nations for extreme evil, so some of God's warnings of judgement linked to evil acts may well be applicable. But  to be on the safe side, I will not use the level of the cause being God's judgement in looking at our situation.

On the simultaneous level of the cause being human folly and disobedience, there is good support for our theory – except that God's mercy is so great that he holds out open arms to them right up to the end! They continue to reject him!

On the political level the rulers made foolish choices. Flirting with the waning Egyptian empire and rebelling against their powerful Babylonian overlords was proved by subsequent events to be sheer idiotic folly. And God warned them to this effect. So their rejection of God's reality, power and goodness led to them becoming really bad political decision makers. (Or possibly, the same inner workings which made them reject God also had the effect of making them make stupid choices in other areas)

Even on the personal level, they would not go against human pressure and obey God. Near the end, King Zedekiah sough out Jeremiah and asked counsel of God. By this time it was obvious that the court prophets had been, as Jeremiah said, lying in God's name. It was also obvious that the policies urged on the king by the pro-Egypt lobby were a disaster. God told Zedekiah to surrender to Nebuchadnezzar. He promised that if he did, he and his would live. He warned that if he did not the city would be burned and his family killed. Zedekiah did not obey this simple advice. He and the city paid dearly for his poor choice.

Applying this to our situation, we may or may not as nations be incurring God's judgement for our sins: but certainly our leaders and the dominant voices in our countries have been rejecting God and busily sweeping Christian morals and teaching out the door – this has left them wide open to human folly and the deceits of the devil!


My second example is the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.

Jesus wept over the city ans said: “How often have I longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing” (Matt 23:37)

In Luke 19:41 ff, we read: “As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.”

In the light of Jesus sorrow over Jerusalem and his prayer on the cross “Father forgive them ...” It is unlikely that the disaster which did indeed befall Jerusalem was divine retribution! However Jesus does link it to their national failure to recognize him – the Messiah.

This event also seems to support our theory: Had they as a nation recognized Jesus, events would have turned out differently. They did not, and their rejection of God's purposes for them left them open to also commit the political folly which led to their destruction.

So in the modern Western world, to varying extents nation after nation that has in the past given at least nominal allegiance to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has rejected him. Radical secularists have campaigned to remove all overt Christian influence, even Christians have been demoralized and churches infiltrated. Our nations are now left defenseless against human folly and the destructive influence of the devil.


Friday 13 November 2015

My theory "Busted"

Yes, my Theory Crashed & Burned

Last week my theory crashed and burned. As I looked at the Bible prophesies about judgement on non-Israelite nations, I found they did not support the theory I was developing. Embarrassing, yes: but the truth is far more important than any pet theory!

What I thought would be the case was this: The West has cast off God (that is true enough) therefore they have lost their moral compass (also likely true) therefore they have done bad things to a degree which brings about punishment from God.

What I actually found in the Bible was this: Nations did get punished for doing really bad things but the sort of things they were condemned for doing were the sort of thing ISIS is doing now in the middle east – crimes which the Western nations are uniformly recoiling from in horror and moral disgust. In short the Western nations, for all their faults have not been really bad.

Then I also saw a danger of opening the door to progressive moralists who have thrown away the Biblical standards of good and evil, and created their own quite different standards.

The Bible judges phenomena like the social acceptance of “abortion-on-demand” and of sexual immorality which in turn leads to high rates of divorce, with the inevitable follow-on of high incidence of child abuse, as really bad. But progressive moralists applaud these, and bring in their own definition of “evil”: such as Christians being “intolerant”; “capitalism” being inherently evil; failing to “save the planet” as the crime of crimes, and so forth.

One result of this both in Australia and the US, is a political dogma that incites people to hate and deride their own country and culture. This may not be completely new – the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta “The Mikado” has a line about the person “who praises every age but this and every country but his own”. But it is now a very vocal movement.

I do not believe for a moment that this national “self flagellation” is any more wholesome or useful than the medieval personal version.

Yes, our nations in previous and current generations have done bad things. Yes, just as we need to let God search our hearts and to repent and change our ways in personal life, so there needs to be the equivalent in national life. But honesty, not false modesty and false confession is required.

Compared to nations around the globe and back through history, we have been relatively virtuous.
Just remember that at one time that ruthless tyrant Colonel Gadaffi got to be chairman of the UN Human Rights commission! Maybe we should not take criticisms of Western nations by such bodies as necessarily being true!

Another anecdote that comes to mind is this: The mantra has long been that the British colonial system was terribly wicked. But some decades ago I heard a (black) African bishop talk. He said two things that have stuck with me. The first was “You gave us the Gospel. That was good. But you gave it away: you don't have it yourself any more. That is very bad!” the other was this: “In Education and health, in quality of life and quality of government, African nations have yet to return to the levels they enjoyed under colonial rule.” So maybe our forebears were not so bad as they are being made out!

Perhaps the most important flaw in this modern national self loathing is this: these criticisms come from judging our nations by Progressive morals (sometimes even when they come from church leaders and dressed up in Bible verses!) not Biblical morals. And as previously said, progressives for all their good intentions frequently end up calling right wrong and wrong right.

Back to the story ...

Since my previous theory is – as they say on the TV show “Myth Busters” - “Busted!” I need to think again.

My next idea to explore comes from Romans 1, particularly v.21: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened” and the thrice recurring theme in verses 24, 26 and 28 “therefore God gave them over to ...

Our nations did know God. But theological liberals have pushed the knowledge and fear of God out of most churches and rejected the Bible. Concurrently secularists and then Progressives have pushed the knowledge of God and having God the supreme goal of human life and the basis for right and wrong out of most of our social institutions, and swept away social mores based on the Bible's teachings.

Is it possible that God has given out nations over to the natural consequences of this?

Are our cultures declining because we abandoned God as their basis. Are western nations self-destructing because God has given us over to our human folly. One example might be Greece: They have huge economic problems; but the populace vote out governments who advocate the hard path back to national health and vote in ones who promise “an end to austerity” even though this is the path to utter ruin.

Next time I will see if this idea can stand up to a Biblical reality test!

Friday 6 November 2015

Does the Bible apply to Nations

Does the Bible speak to Nations?

We are delving into the question “can the West be saved”. We have established that if there is a God, then the Bible has the best credentials for being God's message to the human race. So a good question to examine is: “Does the Bible have anything to say about the rise and fall of nations and civilisations?”

There is a technical problem to consider before we start. It is this: “to what can we compare Western civilisation as a whole or indeed individual modern nations in terms of entities depicted in the Bible?”

From Moses onwards there is a lot in the Bible about the 12 tribes of Israel, then the unified kingdom of Israel, then the separate kingdoms of Judah in the South and Israel in the North. But these have a special relationship with God: “You have I chosen out of all the nations” so their dealings with God were on a level unmatched by any modern nation.

The nations of the ancient world which did not worship YHWH do indeed come in for mention, but unlike them Western civilisation does have a strong Christian heritage, and although modern nations now boast of secular government, their populations have, perhaps more in the past than the present, claimed to be “Christian”. Since Jesus said: “unto whom much is given, much is expected...” the modern West may face a higher standard of accountability before God.

So modern nations may rate somewhere between the Israelites and the ancient gentile nations.

A further caution comes from Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God under the New Covenant, particularly that, as he said to Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world”. I believe we would be mistaken if we tried to identify any denominational church, let alone any nation with the Kingdom of God, even though both these claims have been made down through history.

With these warnings that we will need to exercise some care in how we extract principles from the Bible which can be validly applied to our quest, let's see what we can find!

Let's start with an easy one – and one I think may be applicable now – Israel in the time of the “Judges”.

The previous happenings under Moses and Joshua had of course been part of a very special covenant relationship and specific promises made by God to Abraham which modern nations cannot claim. Similarly the loss of “the land” and the 70 years exile in the 8th century BC were closely tied up in scripture with the covenant – this time punishments for breach of it.

Even in this period of the judges, cripture makes it clear that what happened was a playing out of the exclusive covenant relationship between Israel and God (eg Judges 2:20 “this nation has violated the covenant I made with their ancestors”), but I am hoping we may find there is also something here we can apply to our modern situation.

In Judges 2:6,7 we read “After Joshua had dismissed the Israelites, they went to take possession of the land, each to their own inheritance. The people served the Lord throughout the lifetime of Joshua and of the elders who had seen all the great things the Lord had done for Israel.

But then things slid. Judges 2: 10ff “After that … a new generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel. Then Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. They forsook the Lord … they followed and worshipped various gods of the peoples around them … They aroused the Lord's anger because they forsook him and served the Baals and Ashtoreths. In his anger against them, the Lord gave them into the hands of raiders who plundered them … they were in great distress. Then the Lord raised up judges who saved them from the hands of these raiders. Yet they would not listen to their judges but prostituted themselves to other gods … Whenever God raised up a judge for them he was with the judge and saved them from their enemies … for the Lord relented because of their groaning under those who oppressed and afflicted them. But when the judge died the people returned to ways even more corrupt than their ancestors ...

The pattern stated here is borne out by the historical cameos which follow. Some of the judges are simply mentioned, but on my count for five of them the cycle of: they reject God – fall to oppressors - cry out to God for deliverance – God raises up a judge and uses him or her to deliver them – they are faithful to God for a while – then they begin the cycle all over; is depicted.

In the history of the Christian West, the pattern may not be quite as clear – there seems never to have been some “golden age” - but certainly in different places at different times there have been revivals of faith in and obedience to Christ, and conversely descents into great evil (often wearing the mast of “religion”).

From the book of Judges we can at least see that these repeated descents are true to human nature, and the revivals due to the continued grace, mercy and power of God. We can also see that whilst the present falling away of Western nations in unison may be novel in Christian history, and the “gods” we are turning to different to the Baals and Ashtoreths, the process itself is nothing new.

It gives us an explanation for what we see currently happening in the world around us and in our own societies. It also holds out for us the hope that as God repeatedly had compassion on those rebellious Israelites when they cried out to him for help, he will have compassion now.