1984 ain’t got nothin’ on 2020! And now, apparently, 2021. While this is a blog committed to Christian apologetics, the defense of the truth claims of Christianity, it is also committed to the defense of Truth. Since we live in deeply secular, postmodern times, Truth as objective facts regarding the nature of things has become a casualty of the times. As a Christian parent who has sought to persuade my children that Christianity is true, I’ve also sought to persuade them that the truths of Christianity apply to all of life, including politics, culture, economics, everything. So I’ve brought them up in a proudly American home, and taught them that America is a providentially exceptional nation that has brought more liberty and prosperity to more people than any nation in the history of the world. While flawed, because all systems filled with fallen human beings are flawed, America is something worth standing for, and fighting for. As Benjamin Franklin was supposed to have said coming out of the constitutional convention, we have a republic, if we can keep it.
But in standing and fighting we must always remember that in the long run, none of what is happening now matters. As Christians our hope is in Christ alone, and in eternity alone. Anyone at all familiar with history will realize how fleeting all political power is. Hitler’s thousand year Reich lasted all of 12 years. Napoleon thought he was hot stuff, until he wasn’t. The Roman Empire made it 500 years, and then it fell apart. The Soviet Union and Marxism, which they declared the final Hegelian fulfillment of history, lasted all of 70 years. You get the picture. America has had a good run, but America is not forever either. Yet “We the people” have a responsibility to do whatever we can to continue the blessings of liberty our Founding Fathers gave us. Most Americans, including most Christians, don’t have any idea how rare political and economic liberty is, and how tenuous. We tend to take freedom for granted, as if it’s the natural order of things. It isn’t. It’s more like the description Thomas Hobbes gave the “natural” order of things: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hope, and action, are required if we’re to prove the Founders right, and Hobbes wrong.
One of the reasons a tiny fledgling movement of Jewish Christians against all odds were able to eventually bring down the mighty Roman Empire is hope. Hope in the Christian context is not pie in the sky, wishful thinking, but expectation of what is sure or certain. Our hope is not in our circumstances or other people, in ourselves, our bank accounts, looks, talents, brains or brawn, or in governments, but in God, and God alone. Hope in God, trusts in God. What does that look like lived out in our lives? It looks like one of my favorite verses in Isaiah, “You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you.” The word for peace in Hebrew is a familiar one, shalom, in addition defined as completeness, soundness, or welfare. There is a sense about it of not being shaken, of a confident calmness that comes from something outside of us. That would be God. We don’t create our own peace because it comes from outside of us. It is granted to us by him.
I’ve found as I’ve grown older that the sin I most repent of is my lack of trust in God. Why? Because I find it so easy to look to things other than God to define my reality. I try to fit him into my story, instead of mine fitting into his. When looked at clearly, it is really rather simple, even if at times very hard. Either Romans 8:28 is true, or it is not: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” I’ve joked with my kids over the years that Paul certainly couldn’t mean all things. I can see most, maybe even 98%, but all? Yep, that’s what Paul, and God’s word, says. It doesn’t say all things are good, only that God works all things for our good. That’s why we live in hope, in a lightness of being only available to those who are called according to his purpose. Things outside of true tragedies need never shake us, and even then our hope in him is the only thing that can sustain us through it. Our ultimate hope, you see, is only hope if it is forever.
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