Trying to understand God’s dealings in human history:
I am constantly thinking about the state of the world, about international relations, about geopolitics, about justice, about culture, about the history of ideas, about theology and philosophy, and so on. I sometimes wonder what it would be like if my major daily concerns were what colour shoes to wear, what party to go to, what selfie to post on Instagram, or what new outfit to buy.
I am afraid I will never know what that sort of life is like. So I am stuck worrying about some of the bigger things in life. Sure, as a believer I am to cast all my cares on Him, since He cares for me. But still, we are called to think God’s thoughts after him, and that includes caring about the things that he cares about, and so on.
So every night as I pray for my ever-growing list of people, I also pray a lot about world events, politics, and culture. I think about these things, I ask questions about these things, and I can often grieve over these things. No wonder some folks much prefer to be mainly concerned about what flavouring they will have on their next frappuccino.
Human suffering and injustice make up a lot of my thoughts and prayers. And I wonder how so much evil can take place, and why God might allow it. For example, I was born when the Cold War was raging, and for the first 36 years of my life much of the world lived under the spectre of godless communism.
After becoming a Christian at age 18, I rejected my own naïve and foolish love affair of Marxism and became much more conservative in outlook. Thus I often worried and prayed about those poor souls living in the hellish Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Like so many others, concern turned to joy when the Berlin Wall finally came down in 1989. But for 72 long years people suffered under Soviet communism. Entire generations of Russians knew little or nothing else. And I pray today for those suffering in North Korea and Communist China and in most Muslim-majority nations. And I ask God, ‘Why?’ and ‘How long?’
Tying these thoughts together are some things I was reading the other day. There are piles of my books laying around all over the place, and often when I peruse a few at the same time I will find interesting connections and associations. One older volume that I was going through is The Theme is Freedom by M. Stanton Evans (Regnery, 1994).
It looks at the fragile state of liberty in America and the West. He begins by noting what had occurred just a few years earlier:
We who survive into the final years of the twentieth century have witnessed an astounding moment in the biography of the human race: The collapse of communism’s despotic rule in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It would be hard to overstate the significance of this immense development, for the affected nations or the world in general.
With the demise of the evil empire, myriad states and subject peoples that suffered the yoke of Soviet bondage have been given a chance to breathe the air of freedom. In the brief period 1989-91, some 400 million captives staged a colossal jailbreak, along the way demolishing a tyrannical system once considered immune to challenge. This surely ranks among the greatest changes in human status, and global fortune, that have ever been recorded….
The lessons that may be learned from this transition are many, and profound. To date, however, there is little to indicate that we have learned them, or are about to. (p. 3)
Some might think his main concern here is political or social, but much of the book makes the case that without religion there is no real ground for liberty. And by religion he primarily means Christianity. Just one quote:
Christopher Dawson, the principal student of such matters, expresses the connection this way: “Without Christianity, there would no doubt have been some kind of civilization in the West, but it would have been quite a different civilization from that which we know: for it was only as Christendom — the society of Christian peoples — that the tribes and peoples and nations of the West acquired a common consciousness and a sense of cultural and spiritual unity.” (p. 28)
And that leads me to another book I was perusing. Old Testament scholar Christopher Wright wrote a short volume in 2017 called Hearing the Message of Daniel: Sustaining Faith in Today’s World (Zondervan). Anyone familiar with the brief Old Testament book knows that Daniel and his friends would have wrestled with God about the same sorts of issues and questions that I and so many others do today.
They also would have asked why God allowed this to happen, and how long this captivity in a pagan land would last. They too would have wondered about justice and fairness and how they, as God’s people, should live in such dark times. Wright offers some helpful remarks here:
Daniel 4 and 5 leave us with an unanswered question regarding the dealings of God in human history. They have certainly answered the question of who rules: God does, and all human authority is subject to him. Both chapters have reinforced that fundamental biblical affirmation. But the question can still be asked as to why Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar were treated so very differently. Why humble the one into repentance, grace, and restoration, but humiliate the other with merely a few hours’ notice of his doom and destruction?
The text gives us no real answer, except for the distinguishing facts of Nebuchadnezzar’s repentance and Belshazzar’s deliberate rejection of the knowledge he had. Yet outwardly, humanly, as far as matters of public observance went, they were both state authorities, both were secular rulers, both were autocrats, both were proud.
So consider the role of Daniel in relation to them both. He was a public servant of both governments and also considered that he was serving the God of heaven by serving both. Furthermore, he was called to be faithful to the demands of the word of God as it was revealed to him in relation to both of these Babylonian rulers. To Nebuchadnezzar he had to give a warning and a challenge to respond, in the hope that he could avert judgment, a word which enabled Nebuchadnezzar to find restoration, after judgment. To Belshazzar, however, Daniel had to give an unequivocal word of irreversible doom. No warning. No appeal. Presumably the time of patience and possible repentance was long past.
How did Daniel know the difference? How did he know what the word of God was in each situation? I suspect that once again it had something to do with his thrice-daily prayer life in the midst of his busy administrative duties. I wonder if, in fact, it was out of that prayer life, combined with his public office, that the sharp edge of Daniel’s true mission was forged. As we said before, Daniel was not a prophet in the true sense. He was a political administrator. Yet he was called on these occasions to deliver the word of God, plainly stated to the point of extreme discomfort, right into the very heart of government.
Now we know from Daniel 7 onwards that Daniel received more insights into God’s dealings in history and the spiritual meaning of the contemporary affairs of his day than any of us are likely to “enjoy.” But even if we never have visions like Daniel’s (which is a relief as far as I’m concerned!) we can emulate both his life of persistent prayer and his bold faith in affirming the superiority of the reign of God over all human authorities.
At any time the secular state, within and under which we have to live and work and carry on our Christian mission, may become a Nebuchadnezzar or a Belshazzar. Our task is to get on with the job God has given us to do but to be ready at any time with the word of witness, with pastoral warning or prophetic protest, undergirded by constant prayer. And we must be prepared to be treated to extremes. Belshazzar’s response (civic honours and high praise) is unlikely to be much repeated. The lion’s den of Daniel 6 seems more probable in today’s world, or, most often of all in our wearily cynical society, we are likely simply to be paralysed by waves of hostile, suffocating apathy. (pp. 122-123)
Application for today
So we have the same sorts of questions being asked then and now. For example, Christians of both the left and the right might ask why God allowed Trump to get into office back in 2016, lose in 2020, and get back in in 2024. And as someone living in the crime capital of Melbourne, I have to ask why Labor keeps getting returned to power, destroying this once great state and causing most of us to suffer so much.
But the truth is, all tyrannies, all evil governments, and all injustice will come to an end sooner or later. Both good and bad government will eventually fall. The Soviet regime lasted some 72 years, the Nazis around a dozen. Sure, it is hellish to be living under such brutal states, but they eventually do come to an end, one way or another.
And our prayers are actually a part of all this. Somehow God’s divine purposes and our prayers can work together. Let me share one concluding story on this. When the USSR and Eastern bloc were still solidly under communist control, I and some 40 other young people went into Ukraine and Russia, mainly to pray and do a bit of public worship where we could.
Most of us on this YWAM outreach did not speak Russian, and we had a KGB ‘tourist guide’ on our bus the entire time. But we could do a lot of intercession. This was back in 1980. Little did we know that by the end of the decade, it would be the end of the USSR and the eastern bloc.
The wall came down in November of 1989, and the rest is history. How much did our prayers help contribute to all this? We will not really know in this lifetime, but I would like to think that they may well have played at least a small role in what eventually transpired.
The moral of the story is this: Trusting fully in God, and engaging in plenty of prayer, are big parts of how we deal with living in turbulent and traumatic times.
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