Mental Anguish & Persecution

The prophet Jeremiah (chapter 30, verse 07) foretold of a time of Jacob’s trouble unlike anything ever seen on earth before then. The prophet Daniel (chapter 12, verse 01) seemed to reinforce this idea by referring to a time when Michael will stand up, and there would be a time of trouble such as nothing the earth had seen before then. Most of Revelations seems to describe a time near the end of the world where “trouble” is the understatement of history itself. A time where persecution would appear to be the norm; a time when following God is a crime punishable by death; a time when the only way to escape certain torture and death is to simply listen to what you are told by the ones in power to tell you. While the intensity foretold in scriptures is like nothing we have ever seen, the scenario itself is not something new.

I am reminded of three Hebrew boys, taken captive from their native home of Jerusalem and dragged to Babylon. They remained faithful to God despite the difficulties thrown at them. But one day they were taken to a great assembly with the King and ordered to worship a golden image of the King, symbolizing the eternal kingdom of Babylon itself. They refused. The penalty was certain death, death by burning alive. They continued to refuse. The King’s ego was damaged, his mercy in offering another time to worship them rejected, he lost his control and ordered the furnace be heated up seven times hotter than normal. His intent to kill those who would not obey him was clear.

A rational man in the Hebrew’s position could have easily bowed-down to avoid all this hoopla. After all, God knows what is on the heart, right? In fact, a modern day Christian might have known how to turn this seeming contradiction into something to be proud of. Instead of actually worshipping the image, they could bow down and pray for the soul of the King to the true God (while bowing of course). This way they worship God in their hearts, while not offending the King. No fire drama here. But the 3 Hebrews would not so compromise.

A rational man would realize that by being so uncompromising in how they lived their beliefs that they were provoking the King to anger, and forcing God to have to save them similar to jumping off a cliff first and then demanding God do something about it on the way down. If they could just take the day-off in their values systems, or not be so rigid in applying them, they could avoid angering the King and risking what was sure to be certain death. After all, if they knew what the meeting was for (pretty hard to miss the construction of a ninety foot solid gold statue of a king), why not just skip it and call in sick so no one blames you for not being there?

A rational man could have surmised that since God allowed Nebuchadnezzar to become king and had so blessed him with a dream of the future kingdoms of earth, that they should follow this blessed King of God and do whatever he says. After all if God did not want a ninety foot solid gold image to be built, why not simply destroy it like He had destroyed other things in the past? Maybe God allowed the ninety foot statue to be built in order to accomplish some greater purpose. A rational man would choose expediency and life rather than obstinacy and death.

The 3 faithful servants valued their lives. They did not have a death wish. They did not relish the idea of being burned alive. But they could not disobey the council of their mothers and fathers in their ears; they should bow down only to God. This was not a lack of humility on their part; it was obedience to an unseen God in whom they firmly believed. At least in their story, there was a point to be made. The king lost his best soldiers trying to throw the Hebrews into the furnace. But the Hebrews walked among the flames, only their ropes burning off. They were undamaged, and Nebuchadnezzar recognized the fourth man as the “Son of God”. Through their perseverance and dedication to obeying God, even to the point of certain death, the entire Babylonian kingdom heard about the God of Israel.

At the end of time, the world becomes divided into two camps; those who serve the invisible God of the Bible in whom they have come to trust with their very lives; and those who do what is expedient to survive, possibly even claiming to worship God, but never letting God affect their hearts or lives in a meaningful way. John (favored disciple of Christ) through his revelations sums it up this way … “let he is holy be holy still. And let he who is unholy be unholy still.” These have long been the scariest words in all of scripture for me personally. They represent a paradox I have been unable to get my mind around.

The closer I get to God, the more wicked I realize I am. To actually achieve holiness is to allow Christ to change the entirety of my life, but the ability to recognize this work has taken place is not something we will have any training in. None of us have yet reached perfection, yet those who remain alive to see Christ coming in the clouds will stand in that day without a shield between them and God. And so the source of our pain, the thorn in our shoes, the greatest worry to occupy the mind of a Christian will not be our physical fate, our lack of food, our horrific surroundings, perhaps even the fates of those we had come to love who have not made the choices to follow God. Our greatest concern will be inward, have we truly let go of the sin we have clung to our entire lives? Or are we merely denied acting on our sinful natures by the conditions around us? Are we in fact holy or merely deceiving ourselves as the wicked so often do? Our minds will search for un-confessed sins, but find none.

You see no one knows your evil better than you do. You can put on a mask for the world to see, for your family to see, in front of your church brethren. You can pretend to have a servant’s heart and mind, and seem to know your scriptures very well. But it is possible to remain unaffected by the saving grace of God as you continually refuse to allow Him to change the core of who you are, by daily forgetting to submit your will to Him first. When there is no more time for repentance, and achieving change through the power of His Holy Spirit which has been withdrawn from the earth; in that great day of Jacob’s trouble, will we be found wanting?

For years, I have known Adventists who bought property away from the cities. Some who have reported to have buried canned foods in caves in the mountains for “use” during the time of trouble. Those poor Christians, have missed the point of these prophesies entirely. God has already assured us that our physical safety will be protected (a thousand shall fall at thy left side, and ten thousand at thy right, but it will not come near you – says David in the Psalms). Our food and water will be sure as it was for Elijah who received each day’s meal from the Ravens bringing him bread in an otherwise famine filled land. I used to joke that my Raven will bring me pizza. The caves of the earth may indeed provide us shelter, or perhaps the jails and prisons of the land (where we may find the last few who truly need to hear the message we bring with us). But to place our emphasis on preparing for the last great troubles by trying to be physically secure is to doubt God, and to miss the point of preparation completely.

It is not our diet that needs adjusting, it is our character. It is not our homes in the cities than need to be abandoned it is our propensity to hold on to sin and refuse to let it go. It is our minds that need an overhaul not our vehicles. We do not need to bury food in the earth, we need to bury sin in the grave once and for all and find ourselves ahead of the curve when it comes to being Holy still. It is TOO easy to compromise our values and be pragmatic about what we believe and how we live it. We are trained cattle to march to whatever banner and directions we are given that keep us alive physically with no thought of the cost to our souls. Our compromises with evil are training us to compromise our eternal lives in the end of all things. We have so long indulged the idea of control that it has become a part of the fable we hold on to. It is long past time to relinquish control and let Christ do His saving work in minds and hearts of each of us.

Remember when the doctor tells you … “this is going to hurt.” The doctor is not being a Sadist, and does not enjoy inflicting pain for a living. Rather, the doctor administers to us what may hurt us in the form of a pinprick, or sometimes worse, because our greater good requires it. Our Lord gives us insight into these prophetic writings not to scare us as if we were the wicked to be punished in the end, but to keep us from becoming the wicked, to help us avoid the coming pain, and to help us focus on what is truly important. The time of Jacob’s trouble is fast approaching our world as it has been for the last 50 years. We are wandering towards it even now.

Even in the United States that has long been a beacon of religious freedom, currently there are well meaning Christians who would impose their own standards of morality upon the remainder of the country as the law of the land. They fear that Muslims are out to do the same, or Atheists, or worse. They fear that we have turned away from God as a nation and the only way to return to Him, is to make His laws our laws. But in this effort, they totally miss the mark. It is not our laws that need amending it is our hearts and minds. It is not even our actions that must change nearly so much as the motives that lay behind them; only Christ can offer us this freedom, and only when we allow Him to do so. While men continue to attempt to tell us what is right, we must learn to go to Him, and find it for ourselves. We must learn what it is like to be led of Christ, rather than of men; for men are bound to lead us into darkness as the time grows short.

We must learn to be like the 3 Hebrews of old. They did not attempt to enforce their beliefs on others, only to offer others the witness of their lives and if needed their deaths while obeying the commands of our God. They were human just like us, wanting, needing, loving the same way we do. But unlike us, they were willing to enter the grave following what they believed to be true, from the hands and writings of an unseen God, than to obey the dictates of the men in power in front of them. They did not bring spears and swords with them to fight the evil servants of the king. They offered no resistance to the mighty soldiers who bound them. Instead they let their words state the love in their hearts when they told the king, he need not give them another chance. They could only bow to their unseen God, and if that cost them their lives, so be it. This was a mark that Christ had been active in the hearts and minds of the 3 servants.

I wonder as our time of trials and testing begins, will we be so similarly minded? Will the effects of Christ changing our hearts be so evident in our thinking that we could not even consider the demands of men not to follow Him? Or will we find a life of compromise with evil now simply continues right through to the end, without even second thoughts that rational is not what God is looking for. He is looking for those who trust in Him no matter what life brings, no matter how the outcome looks to us, and to the end, even if it means the end of our mortal life on this planet. I hope He finds this in each of us …