Too Heavenly, No Earthly Good God's Creation Being Lost To Satan
By Al Cronkrite The Covenant News ~ September 21, 2007
A friend of mine told me about the Sunday sermon at his Reformed church. The guest preacher arrived in a Cadillac sporting a flowing beard that looked like the picture on a Smith Brothers cough drops box (older readers will remember the simile), donned his fancy phylacteries, began with a humorous reference to long Puritan sermons, and spoke with vigorous gesticulations for an hour. His text was “Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord.” Hebrews 12:14
According to my friend, the sermon provided a detailed analysis of sanctification making the proper distinction between justification and sanctification and exhorting the congregation to pursue a sanctified life. Prolix, but not a bad sermon.
Following the service, my friend approached the pastor with a concern that when “peace” is mentioned in the text the tendency of the hearer is to put peace at the pinnacle of Christian endeavor and to condemn confrontation and disputations. He also mentioned that without obedience to God’s Laws there can be no justice and without justice there can be no peace; adding that Jesus never made peace with the Pharisees and that putting forth the Christian religion is itself a battle. He said the guest preacher seemed to agree but with an unctuous reluctance.
Sermons on peace and sanctification are necessary and proper, but considering the times in which we live they are tragically inappropriate.
The United States of America is part of God’s creation. He pronounced it “good”. It is being stolen by the Devil and used by Satan as an instrument to bring the entire world into his dominion. Our people are being deceived, our freedom is being sacrificed, our wealth is being dissipated, our culture is being destroyed, the tenets of Christianity are being declared illegal, and we are on the brink of being enslaved by our own government. Our preachers should be aflame with resistance but instead they ignore Satan’s victories by spewing forth a pietistic humanism that placates but fails to educate the people. The Devil is winning by default! Sometime ago I wrote an article about the similarity between Hitler’s Germany and our America. Read here how Christians helped Hitler rise to power.
The preacher my friend described is an exceedingly brilliant individual, a teacher of preachers. His inability to discern the difference between a time for war and a time for peace may be typically pedantic but it is a Christian tragedy. Witnessing the degradation and enslavement of a people, seventy percent of whom claim the name of Christ, with hardly a whimper from the pulpits is and should be an excruciating experience!
If this preacher wished to select a text that included the word “peace” he might have related it to the illegal war we are now fighting in Iraq, a war that now threatens to expand to Iran as well.
The war in Iraq has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and it is being supported by many mislead Christians as a preemptive strike against an aggressive enemy when none of the nations being attacked ever threatened us or had the wherewithal to do so. As my friend pointed out to his visiting pastor, there can be no peace without justice and the present nation of Israel was unjustly established on land that did not then nor does it now belong to the Jews. Our support of that injustice plus our political meddling in the internal affairs of the nations in the Middle East has provided the impetus for a warranted Islamic animosity. The nations we are bullying are military pigmies compared to the US. We have projected another gross injustice into a land where we do not belong and baring a genocide of horrible proportions it will never succeed.