The Dawning of a New Day
One of the most noteworthy features of our current season of uncertainty is observing how quickly the pandemic and its associated areas of impact (economically, sociologically, politically) removed the illusion of constancy and predictability from everyday life. For most of us, life functions best when we have some ability to predict what the experience of tomorrow might feel like. Emotionally, we need a measure of structure and order to our lives in order to engage with the world around us successfully.
The pandemic has seemingly, for the immediate future, shaken that from our everyday experience. We no longer know what tomorrow may hold. Every day has been a new collision, calamity, or sense of alarm related to rising tensions. Every day has been a new degree of isolation, disconnect, and distance, in a manner that we were not made for. Our global economy, emotional health, and sense of mastery of our world depended on the interconnectivity that the modern wired world provided. Relationships, however shallow, fueled our former lives before the quarantines began.
The shaking of the past six months has exposed how hollow, how meaningless, and how fragile much of the world around us truly is. How much of the tension of the moment - the boiling rage currently directed at ideological enemies and capitalistic constructs - is linked to a deeper nihilistic angst towards this fragile world suddenly turned upside down? The utter meaninglessness of what many invested great time and energy into building is now exposed. “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain,” King Solomon wrote many centuries ago. The vanity of this present world is being laid bare by the shakings brought about by a mere virus.
The bigger concern that the world is not ready to face is the fact that these shakings and troubles are the beginning of much larger ones to come. Whether one believes in biblical prophecy or not, the political, economic, and sociological pressures of the moment are not in and of themselves a destination but a sign of things to come. Helpfully, the trouble of the hour makes biblical prophecy - specifically, the words of Jesus Himself in Matthew 24 - harder to brush aside or merely spiritualize. Jesus was not giving us generic principles, He understood the nature of sin on a societal and global level and how the increase of sin impacts society and the world around us. Whether it be Jesus in Matthew 24 or Paul in Romans 1, the descent of society into greater expressions of collective sin and rejection of the gospel has a destructive and tragic end.
The news, however, is not all “bad”. As a new day dawns for the world related to the final hours of this present evil age, we are also in the midst of a remarkable season worldwide for the body of Christ. As reports from around the world come in - which includes news of a powerful move of the Holy Spirit in Iran - we are, inarguably, in an unprecedented hour for Christianity. The tracks are being set into place by the Holy Spirit for the final stages of God’s grand plan for world redemption. “Unprecedented” has two sides to it in these hours: unprecedented trouble and darkness as well as unprecedented glory and breakthrough at the hands of an unbeatably sovereign God.
The question before us all, then, is this: how will we face the day? How will we respond to the “unprecedented” that is accelerating all around us? The way forward is simple, yet very overlooked. Jesus said, two thousand years ago, these words which are so relevant and urgent for us in this hour:
24 “Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: 25 and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.
26 “But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: 27 and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall.” (Matthew 7:24-27)