Exhortation, November 2

Exhortation for November 2:

On the eve of the Reformation, the church was more geographically limited than it had been for a millennium, and it was on the defensive. Long before, Christianity been forced underground in its birthplace in the Middle East, and had been routed by Islam throughout North Africa and Asia Minor. A half-century before the Reformation, Constantinople fell to the Muslims, and the Eastern Christian empire all but collapsed.

Christendom was threatened from every side, and to human judgment, the MAIN thing that was needed, the ONLY thing that would preserve Christendom, was a unified front, a strong and single fortress to resist the attacks of Islam. But at the very moment when all human wisdom said Christians had to stick together, God decided to do something else. He decided to cut Christendom in pieces.

This is often the way God works. The early church was set in the midst of a pagan empire and confronted with hostile Jews, but God caused her to erupt in an internal struggle with Judaizers about circumcision and the keeping of the law. Shortly after the Roman empire had become Christianized, it was broken up by conflicts over Arianism.

The same is happening today. In a time when Christians nationally need to hang together to resist the assaults of secularists and neo-pagans, God is taking up the sword to divide brother from brother, son from father, son-in-law from father-in-law, daughter from mother. Just when we need to be strong, He makes us weak; just when we need to be united, God seems intent on dividing us.

This seems wasteful and counterproductive. What does God hope to accomplish? How can dividing us fulfill His purpose of making us one as He is One? God's foolishness is wiser than men, and this is one of the main ways that God renews the church and the world. In the course of the first five centuries, the church that had been embroiled in a conflict with Judaizers expanded to swallow up the Roman Empire. And the Christendom that was divided into warring factions in the sixteenth century is now appearing with new vigor in Seoul and Kinshasa, in Lagos and Lima.

God knows what he is doing. He takes up the knife, like a priest of the old covenant, to dismember us, but having slain us He puts us on the altar to transfigure us into smoke. He tears us apart so that He can patch us together in new and better ways. He breaks the one loaf of the church, and He breaks members of the church, so that blood can be poured out as rich wine. He kills only to raise us up.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, November 02, 2003 at 07:59 AM

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