My dear Christian friend:
It is that time of celebrating the national identities of two of the great liberal democratic republics of our world. This time our Canadian friends are experiencing the promise, and always the frustrations of new leadership, and we in the United States are deep in the throes of the all too long process of choosing new leadership. This is something always proclaimed as critical to the future of humanity, at least that is what many so called experts and pundits will say. Is it false pride or a lack of perspective that cause many to invariably make more of these things than they deserve? For will this not all be repented again in a few years with the same exaggerated hype.
This all, however, will be but a brief note in our histories, and mean much less in God’s redemptive plan. I know there are some who have displayed an unimaginable smugness, who have taken what were for thousands of years the standards and values for our civilizations altering or obliterating marriage, more recently biology, even the value and place of our Christian faith. Our academies, and leaders with proper political correctness hailed these changes, for they see truth as an illusion, virtue as an unnecessary intrusion, and destiny as a myth. They have thus eroded the foundations not just of our faith, but the very bedrock of our societies, yes, the basis of our great republics. Yet this all is either a fraud or has or will be proven harmful, all of it..
As such they have no desire to honor the unbelievable sacrifices and selflessness of those who settled this vast continent, those who gallantly insure freedom and liberty for millions in Europe and East Asia. They have no praise for those who expended so much in the decades of the “cold” war, and then of the stalwart stand of a President, Prime Minister, a Polish Pope, and millions at prayer to see the impossible crumbling of the iron curtain. Yet this is the truth! Is not the defeat of Nazism, and Soviet Communism the victory of virtue and the strength of our great republics? Yet our current elitists are uncomfortable with such truth, instead they expend such effort to apologize for all such victories, and why there are now few such victories over evil.
Still, despite such efforts there is truth, virtue, and if we are not too bold to say an inexplicable destiny for those who trust and embrace the one true God. We know or sense, deep inside ourselves, that there is so much more. As the Word states we are being prepared for “a glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17). The narrative of the book of Revelation is of this God overcoming evil and all sorrow, and the realization of the divine promise; the marriage of the Lamb, the New Jerusalem. Of this heavenly city described in ways that stretches human language of dazzling beauty coming down to earth. We learn there is no need for a Temple, for the whole earth is now to be filled with God’s glory.
Christianity does not teach a retreat from a wicked and perverse world, but instead everything is to be refreshed, healed, made whole. And indeed all ‘creation waits with eager longing…” for our awakening as His children (Rm. 8:19). What began in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost will at last be completed. As that prayer we often recite each week states, “…thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What this means is that God’s redemptive plan is far greater than any of us knows; despite the carnage, regardless of atrocities committed, the senseless deaths, the incompetence of those supposedly in charge, we will see victory. And more nothing we do for Him is without value, nothing we under take is worthless, for again as Paul sates, “beloved…be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” (1 Cor. 15:58). Think of it, what we do for Him counts; and all this travail over political leadership will, unless they labor in His name, means in the end very little. What will count, what is not in vain, is what each of us do for Him, what we do for His Kingdom.
And it is this “Kingdom on earth,” that will be God’s final great gift of grace to we who believe, as all heaven and earth will, in Him, be renewed.
Holding to Him who holds all things in His hands,
Thomas R. Wyatt
