Troublemakers

Troublemakers

This piece appeared in the Morning Minute, a daily provocative devotional sent out by text by Dr. Howard Dial, a long-time friend. I am on the list of those who receive the Morning Minute. I asked his permission to expand his devotional, which numbered about 500 words, and produce this blog.

The Comparison

Civilizations and nations can shift like the sand in their worldview commitments. We are living to see that in our day. There was a time when Christianity was viewed as a stabilizing factor in our nation, and it has been. But a significant portion of the American citizenry has migrated from trouble-restraining to troublemaking because their worldview has changed. That is the story now. That was the story of Elijah’s day.

King Ahab and the prophet Elijah were contemporaries in the 860s and 870s B.C. But that’s about all they had in common. The biblical record clarifies that Ahab’s worldview sifted from the traditional worldview of Israel so that he “did evil in the sight of the Lord” (1 Kgs. 16:30). Elijah was God’s mouthpiece and the representative of what we today would call the traditional worldview rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Elijah spoke the truth to a wicked and idolatrous Israel which had accepted and functioned with the worldview of Ahab.

God’s Perspective

The divinely revealed fact was that Ahab and his wife Jezebel were moral cancers responsible for the nation’s suffering. America, England, Holland, and Germany were not chosen by God in the sense that Israel was. Israel had the unique role of carrying the lineage of the redeemer. Nonetheless, in God’s Providence, each of these countries has played a role in spreading the Gospel in the last five hundred years. Each was strongly influenced in their development, and each corrupted that influence by abandoning the Judeo-Christian worldview that caused them to flourish. This brief blog is not possible to elaborate on Ahab’s spiritual rap sheet. He and his wife served and worshiped Baal, the god of the Canaanites. Sexual Immorality and child sacrifice (might we say, post-birth abortion) were only a few of their crimes against the holy God of the covenant nation. Their pattern, however, is established.

Germany abandoned the Reformation principles, eventually exchanged them for Nazism, and then mellowed into a godless social democratic structure that proliferates immorality. Holland abandoned the influence of Abraham Kuyper of the 19^th century for secular democratic humanism. England slowly and progressively abandoned the worldview of the Reformation. America, thoroughly integrated with the Judeo-Christian worldview, birthed the Constitution that produced man’s most remarkable civilization. It gave freedom to prosper to the masses and a moral framework of law and order. But she, too, has abandoned this rooting in the Judeo-Christian worldview tradition in exchange for a bastard religion that blends corrupted Christian ideals with secular humanism and depends upon evolution to explain man’s existence leaving him without a moral compass.

Power by Manipulation

Ahad’s public opinion of Elijah is seen in Kings 18:17, where we read, “When Ahab saw Elijah, he said to him, “Is that you, O troubler of Israel?” Today we would describe this behavior as manipulative at best and outright threatening at worst. Recently I watched a documentary film titled “Expelled.¹” Satirist Ben Stein narrated the film. The film documented three tenured professors who were relieved of their positions simply because they published papers advocating consideration of Intelligent Design or promoted research that examined Intelligent Design, not creationism, as the origin of the universe and human life. The institutions at which they taught and researched shouted, “we are committed to academic freedom.” But apparently, academic freedom does not include researching the possibility of Intelligent Design because, as one official claimed, it is equivalent to creationism.

What Are Christians to Do?

Christians should not be intimidated by those who call us “trouble-makers.” Those who mock the God in whom our money proclaims we trust. Biblical Christians are to be the salt of the earth and the light in the dark places. Might it be that God has been sending our nation reminders of His holy sovereignty over all things? A pandemic, social disorder, mass shootings, and economic collapse remind us that we are not functioning by the laws, morals, and values that God has provided for us.

We should vote because it is a God-given privilege. We should support the godly folks at the poles who advocate a Judeo-Christian worldview. However, we should not see a more powerful government as the ultimate answer.

It is time for believers in Jesus Christ to be on their knees, calling out to the Lord for reformation and revival in the church. It is time believers in Jesus Christ take up the great commission of one-on-one proclaiming the gospel as they are going on the normal pathway of life. It is time every believer is engaged in making a disciple out of every new convert. It is time that every believer shepherds the new disciple into church membership for educating, training, and serving. This is how the twelve Apostles and the early church put evil in full retreat so that in less than fifty years, a secularist observed, “They have turned the world upside down.” They grew to dominance in the public square. Pray on, dear Christian, pray on. The real troublemakers in our day are those who defy God’s truth and insist on making up their version of “truth.

Our Prayer

“O holy and righteous God, search our hearts to purify our thoughts and ways so that our contemporaries will be faced with who you are and the hope of the gospel in Jesus Christ.”