Beholding Our End
Beholding Our End
"But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger. There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile; but glory, honour and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For God does not show favouritism." (Romans 2.8-11)
"I am God, and there is no one like Me, Declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things which have not been done, Saying, My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure...Truly I have spoken; truly I will bring it to pass. I have planned it, surely I will do it." (Isaiah 46.9-11)
From time to time, God grants His People "glimpses of prophetic insight". (1 Corinthians 13.9) To what end? That some may crow about their special revelations, and by them seek elevation and personal advantage? I do not think so.
God sometimes permits us to "see" the future, that we may better prepare ourselves for it, and begin to learn to embrace today, what will overtake us tomorrow. Thus, the Lord is glorified somewhat, through our common-place lives, our ordinary acts of faith and small deeds of obedience.
The greatest responsibility local church leaders have is to prepare and equip their people for the future. Therefore, our view of what is to be, is overwhelmingly important and vastly influential. At the moment the Church in the West is mainly persuaded by three notions:
1) That life is pretty much going to go on as it always has, and the Biblical promise of a Second Advent is spiritual, symbolic, poetic.
2) That the Lord Jesus Christ is going to literally return. But before He does, Christianity is going to conquer the earth, and Christians are going to win dominion over this world and all of its governmental institutions.
3) That the Lord Jesus Christ will Himself literally return. His arrival will be immediately preceded by a season of unprecedented lawlessness, wickedness, social disintegration, and chaos. But the "true" Church will be spared all of this, because God will snatch His People ("rapture") out and away and to the safety of Heaven as history really starts "to go to the dogs".
There is however a fourth point of view, which is not widely preached or subscribed to at this time. It is that the Lord Himself will physically return and that His Advent will be anticipated by a period of unparalleled social, political and spiritual corruption and chaos, degradation and anarchy. But the "true" Church will live through and serve the Lord during this span of agony, which the Lord Himself has described as "a great tribulation"! (Matthew 24.21)
This time of fury will actually be the beginnings of the judgement on and the death throes of satan and the empires of evil which he has spawned on earth in virulent opposition to the Kingdom of God. But in the midst of the ordure and stench of the devil's demise, there will be glory. The Glory of God "in the face of Jesus Christ" (2 Corinthians 4.6), and glorious deeds wrought by His saints. And the most glorious of these will be, that by the grace of God Christians will be empowered to love not their lives unto the death...especially in the West, and especially in our identification with Israel in her final chastening trial. And through our willingness not to shrink from death, and not to hold our lives too dear to lay them down for the sake of the Lamb of God...the devil, his dominions, and his disciples will be conquered.
"The Blood of the Lamb, and their fearless declaration of their faith, have won for them the victory over him (the accuser of our brothers), for they did not love their lives enough to refuse to die for their faith." (Revelation 12.11)
The first "day" of the Church's life belonged to the martyrs. So shall the "last"!
Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch (35-107) prayed, "It is better for me to die on behalf of Jesus Christ, than to reign over all the ends of the earth. Him I seek who died for me. Permit me to be an imitator of the passion of My God."
"He who overcomes, I will grant to him to sit down with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne." (Revelation 3.21)
I recently viewed the final, agonising minutes of a film about the life and the death of modern-day martyr, Edith Stein. ("La Settima Stanza" by Marta Meszaros, 1995)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=piy-9UUagHw
After viewing this completely overwhelming clip, the Lord said to me, "This is how it will be at the end!"
"And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgement was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years." (Revelation 20.4)
Edith was born into an observant Jewish family in Breslau, Germany (Wroclaw, Poland today) on Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement in 1891. At the age of eleven, she gave up "practising my Jewish religion". She was a brilliant and beautiful woman, who studied philosophy, gaining her Doctorate, magna cum laude (with great praise) in 1917 at the age of 26.
In 1922, Edith became a Christian, having been profoundly influenced by the faith and the writings of Teresa of Avila, the extraordinary and redoubtable 1500s Spanish mystic and Church reformer. Upon reading Teresa's autobiography, Edith exclaimed, "This is the truth!" Although her faith and spirituality lay "in the unshakeable truth that the Old Covenant is fulfilled in the New", her decision brought terrible and painful estrangement for Edith from her beloved mother and her family.
Eleven years later, this huge price paid for embracing Jesus as Israel's Messiah and the world's Redeemer, dramatically and massively increased when she turned her back on a brilliant and yet promising academic career, to enter an enclosed, contemplative community...thus devoting herself to a life of perpetual prayer for others. Of this move Edith said, "Those who join the Carmelite Order are not lost to their near and dear ones, but have been won for them, because it is our vocation to intercede to God for everyone."
In the meantime, the black, satanic storm-clouds of Hitler's National Socialism were piling up over Germany. Of this ugly phenomenon Edith said, "The more an era is engulfed in the night of sin and estrangement from God, the more it needs souls united to God...Human activities cannot help us, but only the suffering of Christ. It is my desire to share in it."
November 9, 1938 was "Kristallnacht", when Hitler's war against God's Jewish People became "a national effort". That night the police stood by as Nazi gangs smashed and looted Jewish businesses and shops; 20,000 of Abraham's Children were then transported to concentration camps.
Out of this conflagration Edith prophesied, "The followers of the antichrist desecrate the images of the Cross and they make every effort to tear the Cross out of the heart of Christians...The battle between Christ and antichrist has broken into the open...If you decide for Christ, it could cost you your life."
But this accurately anticipated passion, did not indicate a lack of faith or negativity or defeatism on Edith's part...quite the opposite! "Every man must suffer and die," she said. "But if he is a living member of the Body of Christ, his suffering and death will receive redemptive power from the divinity of the Head. This is the objective reason why all the saints have desired to suffer...I understand the Cross as the destiny of God's People...I felt that those who understand the Cross of Christ should take it upon themselves on everybody's behalf."
"I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, and so, to attain to the resurrection from the dead." (Philippians 3.10-11)
"It makes me happy to suffer for you, as I am suffering now, and in my own body to do what I can to make up all that has still to be undergone by Christ for the sake of His Body, the Church...But part of my work is to suffer for you; and I am glad, for I am helping to finish up the remainder of Christ's sufferings for His Body the Church." (Colossians 1.24)
As the utterly insane and toxic Nazi' hatred of the Jewish People drowned Germany, Edith and her sister Rosa were moved from their convent in Cologne to a Carmel in Holland. She did not "run" to save her own skin, but rather did not want to be the cause of persecution against her Community. "I had heard of severe measures against the Jews before. But now it dawned on me that God had laid His hand heavily on His People, and that the destiny of these people would also be mine."
In Holland at that time, Jewish Christians were exempt from arrest and transportation. Nevertheless, when the Roman Catholic bishops condemned the murderous policies of the National Socialist invaders, this mercy was swiftly and vengefully revoked. Arrests began immediately, and fully-laden trains began their tragic journeys away into the east.
On August 2, 1942, the Gestapo profaned the convent sanctuary to arrest Edith and Rosa. As they were forced away from all that was most significant and comforting, Edith turned to a bewildered Rosa and said, "Come, we are going for our people."
Thus was fulfilled her earlier prophecy, "The Saviour today looks at us, solemnly probing us, and asks each one of us, 'Will you remain faithful to the Crucified?' If you decide for Christ, it could cost you your life. Consider carefully what you promise. The world is in flames. The conflagration can also reach our house."
On August 9, Edith and Rosa reached Auschwitz death camp. (The very name is a horror and execration in the ears of civilised humanity...It leaves the taste of bile in the speaker's mouth!) It is generally believed that they were both murdered in the gas chambers immediately. During the preceding week, the sisters were held at transit camps in Amersfoort and Westerbork. Eye-witnesses reported that during those final days, Edith devoted herself to caring (washing and feeding) children who had been abandoned by devastated Jewish mothers paralysed by fear and grief. "(I did not) know that my brothers and sisters would have to suffer like this," she said. "I pray for them every hour. Will God hear my prayers? He will certainly hear them in their distress."
Her final message sent back to the Carmel in Holland read, "There are so many persons here in need of a little comfort."
A card was later found by her Carmelite Sisters. On the back Edith had written, offering herself "as a sacrificial expiation for the sake of true peace: that the antichrist's sway may be broken, if possible without another world war, and that a new order may be established."
And in her will, she further spelt out her determination, "I beg the Lord to take my life and my death...as an atonement (reparation for injury) for the unbelief of the Jewish People."
Hitler's death camps have justly been described as hells on earth...fires burning night and day, as the devil's disciples sought to dispose of the grim and pathetic evidence of their vile crimes and mortal sins.
But this Edith had foreseen...and much, much more, when in 1939 she wrote prophetically, "The world is in flames...the world is in flames...But high above all flames, towers the Cross. They (the followers of anitchrist) cannot consume it. It is the path from earth to Heaven. It will lift one who embraces it in faith, hope and love, into the bosom of the Trinity."
"Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection...They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword...the world was not worthy of them." (Hebrews 11.35-38)
The Western Church must regain the theology of its own martyrdom swiftly...now! The day is upon us!
At the very least we need to recover the belief that God really does call some of His beloved People to physically follow the pattern of the death and resurrection of His firstborn Son.
"For those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brothers." (Romans 8.29)
We need to be restored to the view that it is precisely by treading the path of ultimate discipleship, that the explosive victory of Jesus' resurrection is expressed in and through us...not just off in some distant place or time, but here and now, in our own history.
"The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves Me must follow Me; and where I am, My servant will also be. My Father will honour the one who serves Me." (John 12.23-26)
Because the Son of God-Son of Man chose to fall to the ground and die, He now brings "many sons to glory". (Hebrews 2.10)
"Even so through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous." (Romans 5.19)
Whenever the devil cuts down one of Jesus' "faithful martyrs" (Revelation 2.13), many more spring up out of the ground sprinkled with their blood, to take their place. Thus satan is overcome, defeated and conquered.
It is always dangerous to speculate...especially spiritually. Nevertheless, had Edith remained at her books and prayers in the sanctified and secure enclosure of her convent, I think it highly unlikely that we would be speaking of her today. She might have obtained some kind of reputation in academic circles, or had a select following as a mystical theologian? But I am confident that she would not be known and loved as she is today.
Because this brilliant and beautiful Jewish disciple of Jesus of Nazareth willingly fell and died in the filth and muck of a Nazi charnel-house...I believe very many young men and women will rise up and lay at the feet of the Crucified, their intellectual brilliance and their spiritual passion, and call out to the Lord with august Isaiah,
"Here am I. Send me!" (6.8)
And perhaps even more importantly, only The Day will finally disclose those tortured and often self-condemned souls who found grace in the extremity of their depravity and wickedness, because of Edith's immolation and her prayers for her killers.
"For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, for we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort." (2 Corinthians 1.5-7)
"Finally, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear in my body the marks ("stigma") of Jesus." (Galatians 6.17)
"Faithful Cross, above all other,
One and only noble Tree,
None in foliage, none in blossom,
None in fruit compares with thee:
Sweet the wood and sweet the iron,
And they Load how sweet is He."
(Hymn 108 PCNZ)
FOOTNOTE It is a venerable view of the Church, that there are three expressions of Christian martyrdom: red, white and green. "Red" martyrdom, of course, indicates the loss of the Believer's physical life for Christ's sake. "White" is expressed through exile and/or a sacrificial lifestyle (which voluntarily embraces poverty, chastity and obedience). "Green" martyrs are those Christian hermits and solitaries who eschew all the comforts and advantages of human society, to be utterly devoted to a life of perpetual adoration of God and intercession for others. Such choose to "die" and are "buried" in this world's wildernesses (both rural and urban)!
