Tag History

His Story Needs No Revision

Todd R 1 Comment

Journalism, particularly newspaper journalism, is sometimes referred to as “the first rough draft of history.”  This phrase is usually attributed to Philip Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post.  It’s a useful phrase because it is flattering to journalists to know that their work is important and meaningful, but also a reminder that their work is inherently imperfect and in need of later revision.  Particularly under deadline pressure, it is impossible to know all the relevant facts and potential angles of any story.  Unavoidable and expedient choices and compromises must be made.  The saying came to mind when I recently read Psalm 33:10-11, which says:

“The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing;
            he frustrates the plans of the peoples.
The counsel of the LORD stands forever,
            the plans of his heart to all generations.”

As I’ve written before, total objectivity is “theoretically impossible for anyone but God Himself.”  The best any news reporting can do is cover a tiny piece of what happens in the world, screening it using whatever judgment they decide to use, and applying imperfect ethical standards.  As I’ve also written, “The dots of the pointillistic narrative are never the full picture and sometimes aren’t the right color.”  Thus is the “counsel of the nations” – incomplete by necessity, biased by choice, and morally imperfect by nature.

In contrast, what God says is true is always true, unlike the 24/7 news cycle where truth is constantly under revision.  The “counsel of the LORD” contains everything we need to know about His plans, is designed by His choice to benefit those He loves, and morally perfect because His nature is holy.  If better counsel existed, He would know about it.  His counsel reliably informs us about how He wants us to view the events of the world, rather than the other way around.  His plans frustrate and overcome the “plans of the peoples”, rather than the other way around.

When Jesus said on the cross that “it is finished,”[1] His payment for our sins was complete.  He lived a perfect life in our place, so that He could be a perfect sacrifice and atone for all the sins of His people in all times and all places.  This was not a rough first draft, but the flawless consummation of God’s plan for salvation “to all generations.”  Jesus made no flawed choices for the sake of expedience, and His work can be trusted at all times.  Whatever you see in the news today, the Good News of the kingdom of heaven is more important, more trustworthy, and provides comfort for your soul.

His Story is the first draft, but it is also the only draft because none other is needed.  His Story needs no revision.

Therefore:
“Our soul waits for the LORD;
            he is our help and our shield.
For our heart is glad in him,
            because we trust in his holy name.
Let your steadfast love, O LORD, be upon us,
            even as we hope in you.” – Psalm 33:20-22

[1] John 19:30

The Death of Chairman Mao – History for September 9

Todd R Leave a comment
Photo by manos koutras on Unsplash

On this date in 1976, Mao Zedong, or Chairman Mao, founder of the communist People’s Republic of China, died at the age of 82.  Some look at Mao’s death as a positive turning point for Christianity in China, since under Mao China had expelled all Western Christian missionaries between 1949 and 1953.  However, while it is impossible to come up with precise numbers across a 3.7 million square mile country, Christians probably were about 1 percent of China’s population when Western missionaries were kicked out, but by the 1980s about 5 percent of the population went by Christ’s name.  The Christian population grew by ten times, while the overall population doubled.  How did this happen?

Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom, authors of the book “Clouds of Witnesses” say the key to this growth was “the resilience of the Chinese believers themselves…securely rooted in Chinese life before Mao.” [1]  In expelling missionaries, Mao was in part responding to “treaty ports” created at the end of the 1839-42 Opium War.  Through these ports foreign powers had extra territorial rights, allowing influences including missionaries to come in, but these ports also allowed opium to flow freely into China from Western countries.  Therefore, in the mind of many Chinese, Christianity became linked with both Western imperialism and opium addiction.  When Karl Marx said “religion is the opiate of the masses” he may have been thinking of this connection.  But native Chinese believers, sometimes planted by Europe-based evangelizing organizations like China Inland Mission, remained behind and spread resilient forms of Christianity that were attractive to the Chinese population.

John Sung
Several of these Chinese Christians are profiled by Noll and Nystrom, including John Sung who lived from 1901 to 1944, before Mao’s communist revolution.  Around Christmas 1926, Sung heard child evangelist Uldine Utley preach a sermon at Calvary Baptist Church in New York, near where he was attending Union Theological Seminary.  This sermon, along with other influences, countered the liberal Christianity he was being taught where the Bible was just “a collection of myths.”  He returned to China, determined to spread the gospel in the land of his birth with frenetic energy.  In a one-year period in 1931-2, Sung and a small group of missionaries “traveled over 50,000 miles, held 1,200 meetings, preached to more than 400,000 people in thirteen provinces, registered more than 18,000 ‘decisions’” for Christ.  Many of these new Christians formed traveling bands themselves.  Sung is considered the last great evangelist in China and Southeast Asia before Mao’s reign. 

Dora Yu
Even earlier, another driver of this resilient, Chinese Christianity was Dora Yu (1873-1931).  Dora’s ministry benefitted tremendously from a 1905 decision by Dowager Empress Cixi to replace China’s traditional Confucian civil service examinations with general public schools.  Under this system, mission-run schools became a valued option, and one of Dora’s early ministries was to train “Bible women” to not only educate women generally, but also to teach them the Bible, pray with them, and teach them to live by faith.  Mostly traveling by foot, in “1903, Dora Yu visited with 925 women and 211 children.”  Later, her ministry grew and she became famous for itinerant preaching, reaching many others who would carry on the Lord’s work.

Because of our proneness to look at
the bucket and forget the fountain,
God has frequently to change His
means of supply to keep
our eyes fixed on the source

Watchman Nee

Watchman Nee
In 1920, Nee Shu-Tsu would hear Dora Yu preach.  Later known as Watchman Nee, he “planted at least four hundred Christian churches over a thirty-year period of active ministry.”  He died in 1972 in a Communist prison after spending 20 years there.  Watchman Nee wrote that “Because of our proneness to look at the bucket and forget the fountain, God has frequently to change His means of supply to keep our eyes fixed on the source.”

Whether it is a European missionary, a child preacher in New York City, a Chinese man temporarily studying in New York City, or a Chinese woman walking miles through the countryside:

“How beautiful upon the mountains
            are the feet of him who brings good news,
who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness,
            who publishes salvation,
            who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’” – Isaiah 52:7

As Jesus said in Matthew 16:18 – “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”  This rock is the gospel of the kingdom of God, and not even a brutal regime like that of Chairman Mao could prevail against it.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Noll, Mark A.; Nystrom, Carolyn.  Clouds of Witnesses: Christian Voices from Africa and Asia (2011).  This post is drawn from chapters 12 and 14.

The Fog God Hath Wrought – History for August 30

Todd R 2 Comments
Photo by Carsten Stalljohann on Unsplash

On March 5th, 1776, a sudden change in the weather led to a decisive victory for the American Revolutionary Army and an end to the British occupation of Boston (see my post on that date here).  On this date, August 30, in 1776, weather intervened again.  The American Revolution could have ended in bitter loss, but for “a peculiar providential occurrence” – Pea-soup fog.  “So very dense was the atmosphere,” remembered Benjamin Tallmadge, “that I could scarcely discern a man at six yards’ distance.”  For the book “What Ifs? Of American History”, historian David McCullough wrote a chapter describing the significance of these events.[1]

After a humiliating loss in Brooklyn (including more than 1,000 surrendered troops), George Washington found himself and his 9,000-man army cornered at the end of a peninsula by a British force numbering over 30,000, plus a vast navy.  Left with few options and overwhelming odds, George Washington quickly ordered the army to evacuate Brooklyn overnight by anything they could find or make that would float, across the East River to Manhattan.  The escape depended entirely on the element of surprise and the cover of darkness.  The scale and boldness of the escape was enormous – one Connecticut man recalled crossing the river 11 times that night, ferrying troops and equipment across.  The evacuation continued well into the morning, when the British might easily have seen what was happening, close in, and utterly destroy Washington’s army.

However, the escape remained concealed under a different kind of darkness, because “a heavy fog settled in over the whole of Brooklyn, concealing everything no less than had the night”[2]  By the time the fog cleared, the escape was complete, and the British, expecting a victorious day, were instead astonished by another overnight, weather-assisted, disappearing act by the American army.

McCullough says that without the fog: “Washington and half the Continental Army would have been in the bag, captured, and the American Revolution all but finished. Without Washington there almost certainly would have been no revolution.”  Because of the fog, “the entire force, at least nine thousand troops, possibly more, plus baggage, provisions, horses, field guns, everything but five heavy cannon that were too deep in the mud to budge, had been transported over the river in a single night with a makeshift emergency armada assembled in a matter of hours. Not a life was lost.”

This was not the first time, nor would it be the last time, that weather – or Providence – would play a key role in the American struggle to break away from British rule.  Therefore, let every people and nation seek the LORD this day, who can wield nature itself in favor of – or against – the very nations.

“Are there any among the false gods of the nations that can bring rain?
Or can the heavens give showers?
Are you not he, O LORD our God?
We set our hope on you,
for you do all these things.” – Jeremiah 14:22

[1] From “What the Fog Wrought.” David McCullough and Robert Cowley.  What Ifs? Of American History (2003).  P. 52-54.
[2] McCullough, David.  1776 (2005).  P. 191.

An Ethic That Prioritizes the Gospel

Todd R 1 Comment

The gospel is more than just the good news that Jesus took the punishment for our sin, dying for sinners like us so that we may be saved.  The gospel is also the good news of what the punishment has been replaced with – the kingdom of heaven.  If the gospel is about a kingdom, our lives should reflect the values of our King and we should seek for others what our King would offer.

This post, another in the series on James 1:27 (“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world,”) is about that verse as an ethic that prioritizes the gospel over all other issues by looking briefly at the issue of slavery.

The period of the American Civil War was similar to modern times in its obsession over issues.  While its naïve and vastly simplified to say the North was anti-slavery and the South was pro-slavery, it is not entirely false either.  Those views were typical of many in each area.  Both sides had a high conviction in their cause, using the Bible to justify why their side needed to win, and at what costs.

Paul’s Concern Was for Individuals
Part of the reason for this confusion comes from the apostle Paul’s comments on slavery, which seem ambivalent to many on the actual issue of slavery.  One relevant passage is Ephesians 6:5-9, in which Paul writes:

“Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free.  Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.”

Verses like these were used to justify slavery during the American Civil War and at other times, by people claiming that Paul did not condemn it.  Since the War, others have said that Paul was cruel not to condemn slavery and a few even refuse to read Paul’s words in the Bible, claiming they have no authority because of this cruelty.  This topic goes way beyond what can be covered here, but the reason for Paul’s seeming ambivalence on the issue is that his focus was somewhere else: on the specific individuals involved in all aspects of slavery, including both masters and slaves.  He even addresses them directly and separately: “Bondservants” and “Masters.”  One group was to follow what was addressed to them, and the other group was to follow what was addressed to them.  Why did he take this approach?  Because people matter more than issues.

Photo by Anthony Garand on Unsplash

Having no power to end slavery, which still exists today, Paul did have influence and authority as an apostle to improve the lives of specific masters (who would have to justify their actions to God), and of specific slaves (who would have to do the same).  Paul knew the real question before him was: If slavery currently exists and I have no power to end it, should I do nothing to improve the condition of slaves until slavery is 100% abolished?  Should Paul have focused on ending slavery, or on improving the lives of people affected by it, and offering them a way to eternal life without slavery?  Paul knew God’s heart goes out to individual souls, and the issue of slavery would be eliminated in eternity.  However, many would condemn Paul for not going straight to an all-or-nothing, hyperbolic position we expect when talking about issues.  Also, it’s not necessarily an either/or, but a matter of priority and emphasis.

Some approach contentious issues like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.”[1]  These burdens take the form of ostracism, public humiliation, insistence on use of #hashtags and slogans, rude comments, and other means of hating others simply because those others don’t think the weight of all the issues in the entire world need to be on everyone’s shoulders.  But Paul presents a contrast to this.  He knew God called him to proclaim grace and peace to all people, in Jesus’ name.  Paul’s ministry saved many souls for an eternity where slavery is no longer an issue, and in the meantime, slavery still exists as an issue people mistreat each other over.  Yes, we should fight for peace and justice, but not at the expense of individuals, on either side.

D. A. Carson, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, said, “The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely changing an economic system…In the final analysis, if you want lasting change, you’ve got to transform the hearts of human beings. And that was Jesus’ mission.”[2]

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln said “My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”  This should be our main concern as well.

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

To start the series on James 1:27 from the beginning, the first post is at this link.

[1] Matthew 23:4
[2] Strobel, Lee.  The Case for Christ (1998).  P. 168