Eight More Reasons To Expect Persecution

An old friend who is a keen student of Church history has been telling me for thirty years that “The only hope for the American Church is persecution.”

I fear that he’s right, and as much as I’d love to see a vibrant Church in my country, I can’t say that I’m embracing persecution.

But neither am I surprised by it.  Last week I wrote about our unrealistic expectations in light of the prophecies of Jesus and the Apostles (What in the world did we expect?).

 

And there’s more to it than that.  Just below I’ve listed eight more reasons we should have expected persecution.  May God use this material to strengthen your resolve and prepare you and others for what is to come.

1. As many have pointed out, there is no prediction of an American Christian nation in the Bible. Peter said we should not be surprised by our suffering (I Peter 4:12).  And no wonder: The New Testament insists that we are aliens here, pilgrims and strangers, a tiny flock in a great big world that doesn’t like God.  Most of Jesus’ followers who have ever lived have endured harsh treatment from their neighbors.

Our two hundred years of freedom, favor and prosperity in America have been experientially wonderful for us and providentially wonderful for the advancement of the Kingdom of God in the world.  But the United States is not the Kingdom of God in the world (John 18:36) and we’ve had no reason to expect that these blessings would continue indefinitely.

2. Marxism is a nineteenth century product that is, generation after generation, appealing to the young and naïve. When I went arrived on a college campus in 1970, everybody was talking about Marxism. It sounded great: a “band of brothers,” no more cutthroat, capitalism, “all for one and one for all,” “share and share alike,” a perfect communal world where government will disappear.

Fortunately, most of my professors had the sense to tell us why Marxism doesn’t actually work.  Today’s youth-worshipping professors are mostly too weak-kneed to tell their students the truth. The latest generation of young Marxists is ripping up our cities with their elder’s approval.

3. Theological liberalism sold out America to humanism one hundred years ago, opening the door for the secular-humanist world view to replace the Judeo-Christian world view in America’s corridors of power.

Gresham Machen, in his monumental 1923 work, Christianity And Liberalism, demonstrated clearly that theologically liberal Christianity is a different religion from actual Christianity. What was supposed to be a new and improved version of the faith led us directly to clueless denominations, purposeless congregations, gospel-less pastors, situational ethics and a host of social evils.

Theological liberalism is not now and never has been a friend of grace and an ally of true Christ-followers. It is one with the “world system” and has no fear of God in its collective soul.

 

4. Bible-believers have predicted judgment on America for many years. When I became a Christian in 1972, I began to hear preachers say that, owing to our national apostasy, our abandonment of God’s truth, “If God doesn’t judge America, He’s going to have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Is there some reason why God would have changed His mind in the ensuing decades?

5. God uses ungodly rulers to judge ungodly people. Are 21^st century Americans going to vote for godly leaders?  Here are three great old sayings, the first of which is from the Scriptures:

• Nations tend to get leaders who reflect the character of their (“…like people, like priests,” Hosea 4:9)

• People groups tend to end up with as much government as they need. Our founding fathers said that our constitution would only work for a moral, religious, self-governing people.  Is this what we are today? We should not be surprised that Americans are favoring an ungodly socialism over the republican form of government which the founders gave us.

• Nations tend to get the kind of government which they deserve.

6. God uses foreign nations to judge apostate nations (that is, nations which have abandoned the truth). The prophet Habakkuk’s initial complaint to God was about the injustice of the Jewish people. God’s answer to His distressed servant was that He was going to use the Babylonians to punish the chosen people Habakkuk was complaining about.

All “America-as-God’s-other-chosen-people” thinking aside, our nation has been saturated with Biblical truth and the Christian gospel, perhaps to a greater degree than any in history.  Having thrown off God’s claims and commands, can Americans expect to see anything less than judgment, perhaps at hands of nations which are further from God than our own?

7. God’s prophetic calendar is tied to Israel, not to America. American believers have a habit of assuming that we’ll never suffer the way the rest of God’s children have suffered.  When combined with the pre-tribulation rapture view – which I’m not critiquing in this post – the resultant view is that certainly the rapture will occur before American believers are persecuted.

More than once I’ve heard believers respond to descriptions of the horrors of the “tribulation” period by remarking flippantly that they “don’t care” because “we’re not going to be here anyway.”

8. Associating ourselves with political figures and movements usually backfires, resulting in disdain for the Church. We never seem to learn this lesson. Political figures and movements don’t preserve nations from destruction and judgment; only God’s providence or His heaven-sent revivals can do that. At the end of the day, or the term, or the movement, the political figure is often disgraced and the Church’s credibility is degraded.

So what do we do now? 

 

Whatever you believe about Christian involvement in the broader culture, there’s no question that as blood-bought, regenerated, Spirit-empowered people, we must exhibit God-infused love and God-inspired courage while offering the life-giving gospel of God to a confused and suffering world.