Redeeming a Nation (Timeless Teaching)

by Philip Quenby

  Such is our current situation. We must change it by laying hold of the victory that Jesus made possible for us. This is our solemn charge: to be soldiers of Christ in the fight for the lifeblood of our land.

  Victory assured.

  There is an air of defeatism in present-day England that should have no place in our thinking. We, of all people, should know with firm assurance that victory is certain, not by virtue of our own strength or cleverness, but by virtue of the God who “will never leave you or forsake you.” (Deuteronomy 31:6 and Joshua 1:5).Truly, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31).

  We must look to the signs of God at work, be alert to his voice and be prepared to catch his vision. For this we need wisdom, understanding and insight, so that we do not just see surface effects but look behind them to spiritual reality. The people of God are reminded time and again that they should not “be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.” (Isaiah 6:9, Matthew 13:14, Mark 4:12 and Acts 28:26). We need discretion so that our words and deeds will be characterised by “what is right and just and fair” (Proverbs 2:9), so that God will thereby be glorified and people will know Jesus through us. We need knowledge to help us tread “the course of the just” (Proverbs 2:8). Above all, we need faith, for it is through God that all this will come.

  With eyes of faith we need to see the reality of both present and past, together with the possibilities of the future. We need to remind ourselves that:

  • Neither present nor past should constrain our view of what is possible.

  • God often chooses surprising people to be his agents - he delights in raising up the lowly to do mighty things in his name, from King David to Joan of Arc and multitudes before and since.

  • The decisions we make have influence – Joan could have ignored her voices and those to whom she was sent could have spurned her. When God is at work, we need to join in.

  • The Lord operates according to his timing, not ours. God is sovereign, but in the interval between Jesus’ death on the cross and his coming again a defeated foe can still wreak havoc. We should thus be neither surprised nor discouraged by evidence of the enemy’s work. Instead of disheartening us, this should fire us with God’s passion for the suffering and the lost. It should encourage us to redouble our efforts.

  Conclusion.

  The story of Joan of Arc is a salutary one: salutary because our country was not then on the side of the angels, salutary because France endured decades of defeat before the Lord brought deliverance and salutary because Joan did not live to enjoy the earthly fruits of her success. Instead, she was captured by the Burgundians and sold to the English, who put her on trial for witchcraft. Under great pressure she at first disclaimed having received any divine commission, but when this did not set her free, she spoke with renewed courage: “If I said that God did not send me, I should condemn myself; truly, God did send me ... I have [abjured] for fear of the fire and my retraction was against the truth.” She was burnt at the stake in Rouen on 30 May 1431.

  All around us, at home and abroad, we see evil on the march. We see the innocent suffer and the wicked prosper. We see God apparently silent or indifferent. So it must have seemed in the long dark years for France before the tide of war turned. It is difficult for us to gain perspective on everyday events, for we do not have the advantage of seeing how things turn out in the end. That is why the lessons of history can be so valuable for us: they provide a chance to see purpose where those involved saw only confusion.

  Pluck a flower and the bloom will soon fade. We have plucked freedom, democracy, rule of law, civil society and countless other good things from the soil of faith that nourished them. Without the Almighty, they are but empty forms and will wither as sure as night follows day. For years, we have lived on the legacy of the past, but this inheritance is fast being spent. We need to breathe fresh life into the empty forms of our society and for that we need the help of the God who will “save” (Proverbs 2:12), “guard” (Proverbs 2:8 and 11) and “protect” (Proverbs 2:8 and 11).

  The Lord has a vision for England. It needs to be our vision, too.

  12. Two tribes

  Jeremiah 8:1-12.

  Key word: destiny.

  There is nothing like comprehensive defeat in war to sow dissent and discord. So it was in England as her gains in France were steadily eroded. Henry VI came of age in 1437, and proved a pitiful king. Military disaster overseas was compounded by incompetence at home, where his wife Margaret of Anjou dominated government. So appalling was the monarch that he was twice deposed (and once reinstated) before eventually being murdered in 1471.

  A weak sovereign and a disputed succession ushered in the dynastic contest known since Victorian times as the Wars of the Roses, comprising over a quarter century of tribal strife under the banners of the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster. From 1450 onwards England was laid low as rival armies pressed the claims of competing candidates for the throne, each descended from Edward III: Henry VI for Lancaster and for York first its duke Richard and then his son Edward, Earl of March (later Edward IV).

  Battles were fought the length and breadth of the land, from small and scrappy skirmishes to great set-pieces. The pendulum swung first one way and then the other. Richard, duke of York gained brief ascendancy after the battle of St Albans in 1455 before the Lancastrians recovered control and the upstart duke was slain in battle at Wakefield in 1460. The tide turned again with comprehensive Lancastrian defeat at Towton in 1461, where the outcome was decided by the late arrival of Yorkist reinforcements under the Duke of Norfolk. After the battle the earl of March, who had already taken the title Edward IV, was formally crowned king and Henry VI fled overseas. In 1469 it was the usurper’s turn to be shunted aside in favour of a reinstated Henry VI, but Edward returned to win decisively at Tewkesbury in 1471 and thereafter held the throne until his death over a decade later.

  All the while, the country and the common people suffered. So weak did royal authority become that for long periods the balance of power was held by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. Such was his influence that he was known as Warwick the Kingmaker. It was his support that enabled Richard of York in 1460 to force Henry VI into recognising him as heir. In 1469, it was Warwick’s changing sides that led to Henry VI being restored to the throne the following year. The earl remained a force in the land until he was defeated and killed at the battle of Barnet in 1471.

  Edward IV died in 1483. Two years later, the wretched conflict came at last to an end when Henry Tudor defeated Edward’s brother Richard III at Bosworth. As Henry VII, the new monarch wisely did all in his power to make sure that a line was drawn under the war. Symbolically, the Tudor Rose included both the white of York and the red of Lancaster.

  Fall from grace.

  A mere forty years passed between England routing the flower of French chivalry at Agincourt in 1415 and the battle of St Albans, with a defeated and divided realm consuming itself in civil war. It would be difficult to believe that a country could fall so hard and fast, were it not that the lives of both nations and individuals provide countless examples of such precipitate decline: “Since they hated knowledge and did not choose to fear the LORD, since they would not accept [God’s] advice and spurned [his] rebuke, they will eat of the fruit of their ways and be filled with the fruit of their schemes.” (Proverbs 1:29-31). England’s fall from grace was neither unique nor inevitable. It was the result of choices made by human beings and their consequences. The nation misused the blessings that God had given it. She became “clay marred in [the potter’s] hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.” (Jeremiah 18:4). The flaw was in the clay itself, not in the potter’s skill.

  The Lord told Jeremiah: “Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.” (Jeremiah 18:2). As the prophet “saw [the potter] working at the wheel” (Jeremiah 18:3), so he learnt of God’s sovereignty (Jeremiah 1
8:5-6), of how nations fall and rise (Jeremiah 18, passim) and of how his own land would be broken and chastised (Jeremiah 19:10-13).

  Changing fortunes.

  Scripture shows us that the Lord works to a plan: a plan to rescue mankind from the consequences of rebellion and sin, to restore the broken relationship between God and man and to bring about a perfect re-creation. In doing so, he will at all times be true to his own character. Were that the end of the story, we might have difficulty accounting for the fact that God has given man free will, so that he can opt for right or wrong, line up on the side of good or evil, choose to love God or to reject him. Jeremiah, however, tells us that our personal destiny is neither fixed nor immutable: it is instead the result of a combination of forces – of God’s activity in our lives and of our own choices.

  This combination appears clearly in the message that Jeremiah brings from God to the Israelite kingdom of Judah shortly before the final cataclysm of defeat and enslavement at the hands of the Babylonians. The Israelites are told that, if only they will turn back to God, this fate can still be averted: “If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned.” (Jeremiah 18:7-8).

  In the same way that we can bring God’s renewed blessing by turning afresh to him, we can lose that blessing by turning away from the Almighty: “if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good that I had intended to do for it.” (Jeremiah 18:9-10).

  In each case, repeated use of the word “if” shows that God’s promises and threats are conditional on man’s actions.

  God has so designed things that, whilst there are certain fixed points, whilst the end result and the principles involved remain constant, he can in large degree accommodate our choices and the different outcomes that come from them. Science hints at the tension that thus exists in the universe between being and becoming, actual and potential: we cannot know with absolute certainty since what is to be depends wholly or partly on choice. In particle physics, for example, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that it is not possible to know both the position and the momentum of a sub-atomic particle at the same time, since the very act of measuring would invalidate the result by changing what is being measured. In mathematics, Gödel’s two Theorems of Undecidability or Incompleteness state that any mathematical system based on axioms[27] contains statements that can be neither proved nor disproved within the system – coming perilously close to saying that, in the strictest scientific sense, we cannot know with certainty that two plus two equals four. In short, our choices are real: what happens is neither scientifically determined nor subject to blind chance.

  Choice.

  Of course, human choice can only operate within the framework that God has set: “’can I not do with you as this potter does?’ declares the LORD. ‘Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand’” (Jeremiah 18:6). There is no point complaining about this. It is just the way things are. The issue is what we do with the circumstances that confront us.

  Our first step must be to recognise who we are and from whence we come: nobody can expect to find their way without correctly identifying their starting point. The starting point for humanity is that we were created by God. The image of clay in the hands of the potter harks back to the making of the first human. The Bible describes our bodies as “houses of clay” (Job 4:19) and “jars of clay” (2 Corinthians 4:7), referring to the time when “the LORD God formed the [first] man from the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7). The fact that we are creatures, not the Creator, has implications for every aspect of our lives and all our relationships – with our fellow creatures and with the world around us, as well as with God. We should thus begin by acknowledging: “Yet, O LORD, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.” (Isaiah 64:8).

  By denying this most fundamental aspects of our being, we make everything topsy-turvy. “You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘He did not make me’? Can the pot say of the potter, ‘He knows nothing.’?” (Isaiah 29:16). For centuries, western thought has aimed either at dethroning God and putting man in his place or, to the extent that the existence of God has been admitted, at making him seem either powerless, indifferent or malign. These efforts are not just intellectually incoherent. They twist us into shapes we were never meant to form.

  Fate.

  Christianity is not a fatalistic religion. It celebrates man’s free will and affirms the difference that we each can make in the world. It trumpets the possibility of change. It holds out the prospect of a wholesale transformation of individuals, of societies and of nations. It permits and indeed encourages dialogue with God. There are, however, proper limits to our ability to question the Almighty: “Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’ Does your work say, ‘He has no hands?’” (Jeremiah 45:9).

  We come back time and again to this: man has a limited grasp of reality. Limited by reason of intellect, limited by being within time instead of outside it and limited in breadth and depth of vision. It is simply unrealistic for us to imagine that we can know enough to see the whole picture as God sees it. This means that we need to learn acceptance. There are things that we need to take on trust from God. This is part of what faith involves.

  St Paul puts it thus: “One of you will say to me: ‘Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?’ But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use? What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath – prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory – even us, whom he called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?” (Romans 9:19-24).

  Shakespeare’s Hamlet confronts issues of free will, fatalism and the desirability of action: “To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?” Each generation must grapple with these issues anew. In doing so, we should remember that acceptance is not fatalism. We are not the playthings of fate, but children of a loving God.

  Conclusion.

  In a snowstorm on Palm Sunday, 29 March 1461 was fought one of the grimmest of all battles. There fell an estimated twenty to thirty thousand Englishmen, a greater proportion of the population than perished on the first day of the Somme offensive in 1916 – one in every hundred, the equivalent of over six hundred thousand today. Towton is the largest, longest and most murderous armed contest ever to take place in these islands. Its closest rival, another Yorkshire bloodbath at Marston Moor in 1644, had only a quarter of the casualties. Shakespeare did not exaggerate when he wrote in Richard II of the coming Wars of the Roses: “the blood of England shall manure the ground and future ages groan ... disorder, horror, fear and mutiny shall here inhabit, and this land be called the field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls.” The carnage was the culmination of disastrous choices by the nation and its leaders.

  We, too, live in an age when our nation has consistently made bad choices over many decades. We have not yet gone so far down the track that we are mired in murderous civil war, but our condition is parlous nevertheless. We live in a land formerly blessed by God to an unprecedented degree, of which the Lord would now be justified in saying: “it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, [so that] I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.” (Jeremiah 18:10). The word
s spoken to the Israelites through Jeremiah apply equally to us: “Look! I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you. So turn from your evil ways, each one of you, and reform your ways and your actions.” (Jeremiah 18:11).

  We have a choice. We must not succumb to despair and say: “It’s no use.” (Jeremiah 18:12). God clearly tells us that disaster is not fixed and certain, but that if our nation “repents of its evil ... [he] will relent and not inflict on [us] the disaster [he] had planned.” (Jeremiah 18:8). We need to seize this opportunity of forgiveness. We must not refuse to turn back to God, nor say: “We will continue with our own plans; each of us will follow the stubbornness of his evil heart. “ (Jeremiah 18:12). We can choose our destiny. It is in our hands.

  13. A tongue of our own

  1 Corinthians 13.

  Key word: love.

  The Bible is consistently rated one of the best-selling books in the world. It has been translated into over 1,600 languages. Year by year, more and more people gain access for the first time to the Word of God. It is therefore chastening to reflect that this is a comparatively recent phenomenon. For the best part of three out of every four years that have passed since Jesus died on the cross, the vast majority of Christians did not have the privilege of reading the Scriptures. Most were in any event illiterate, but even those who could read had no text in their own language. In the west of Europe, the Latin Vulgate was to all intents and purposes all that was available and for the common man certainly it was all that was sanctioned by the church.[28]