Redeeming a Nation (Timeless Teaching)

by Philip Quenby

  Conclusion.

  Fawcett and his eldest son, who by that stage was accompanying him, went missing in 1925. A younger son several times led search parties into the jungle, but no reliable trace of father or brother was ever found. Intense media interest slowly gave way to apathy and then forgetfulness on the part of all but the closest family and friends. Today, few have even heard of Fawcett. The cities that he searched for so intently have never been found.[108]

  The story of Colonel Fawcett contains a surfeit of suffering: of men in extreme conditions, of a family bereft of loved ones and uncertain whether they live or die, of those perhaps held against their will in some remote encampment or done to death in the most barbaric of ways. On the face of it, it has no happy ending. Yet St Paul would not see it that way, and neither should we. The apostle wrote: “we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (Romans 5:3-5).

  We are right to be outraged by suffering. It is good for us to do all we can to prevent it and to lessen its impact. Yet there is a danger in taking this too far. If we are repelled by suffering to the extent that we are unable to face it, if we are afraid to look upon it in any form and turn away from those whose suffering discomforts us, we deny the positive power of suffering, we detract from the work of Jesus on the cross and we fail to put into practice what he taught. We will seek to cocoon ourselves in material comfort to the exclusion of venturing into those difficult regions where there are spiritual battles to be fought. We will become flabby and inactive, marooned on an island of plenty whilst all around God’s work waits undone. We will look to precisely those things that St Paul told the Christians in Philippi they should disregard. Squeamishness about death and suffering is not just a denial of reality. It is a denial of the will to fight for what we believe. It is a denial of growth in favour of stagnation.

  We have become slaves, devotees of a new religion that promises escape from all hardship and an end to suffering if only we will indulge ourselves to the utmost and always seek our own self-interest. It is all lies and illusion. Through these no good can come.

  48. Praying for our lives

  Nehemiah 12:27-47.

  Key word: service.

  The Great War produced the first widespread experience in Europe of three battlefield phenomena which daily compounded the terrors and discomforts of that conflict: gas poisoning, shell shock and trench foot. Few front-line troops escaped the latter. It was the result of soldiers standing day after day with their feet in the muddy water that collected at the bottom of trenches, never taking off their boots. When the water froze, their feet froze with it, and soon the flesh began to rot. Often, boot leather and flesh moulded together so that men quite literally had to have their boots cut off when they were finally moved back to a rest area. When we survey the attrition of four years of trench warfare, when we read stories of gas attacks and men drowning in mud, it is difficult to take in the sheer ghastliness of what soldiers lived through day by day. It is humbling to think that for the first two years of conflict Britain, alone of the combatant nations, fought with an army composed entirely of volunteers. Only as the dreadful losses from the Somme began to mount was conscription finally introduced.

  The First World War has seared itself into our consciousness because of its many horrors. Not for nothing is it called the Great War. To all other outrages of this most brutal of conflicts is added the poignancy of a generation that for a brief while dared to believe that they had fought a ‘war to end all wars’, but who just over two decades later were fated to send their own sons off to fight again. After that have come wars and more wars. In the whole of the twentieth century, there was only one year when a British serviceman did not die in action: 1968, the year before the army was sent to Northern Ireland. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh month each year we honour those who served and remember those who died in all our wars, great and small. We turn with compassion to those who survived but were scarred physically or emotionally by what they experienced. We acknowledge our debt to each one of them. We thank them for their sacrifice and we recognise that, without them, our way of life might be very different.

  On Remembrance Day, marking the Armistice that ended the Great War, we do all this through ceremony. We gather at war memorials and we go to church. In this way we give meaning and dignity to what we do. This chapter will reflect on what exactly is involved in this process by looking at words that were written a very long time ago. The book of Nehemiah in the Old Testament records events that took place 2,400 years ago (440BC or thereabouts). It may seem incredible that something so old can have anything to say to us today, but the writers of the Bible were inspired by the Holy Spirit (in 2 Timothy 3:16 St Paul calls the words of Scripture “God-breathed”) to create a text through which God still speaks to those who have ears to hear.

  Memorials.

  At the time Nehemiah wrote, Babylon was the regional superpower. It ruled a vast empire, roughly corresponding to modern Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Israel. The Babylonians had a brutally effective way of dealing with conquered peoples: mass deportation. The leading citizens of the Israelite kingdom of Judah were deported by the Babylonians and kept in captivity for 70 years. At the end of that period, they were allowed to go home, which they did in dribs and drabs over succeeding decades. Nehemiah was amongst the later returnees. He found Jerusalem in a sorry state: its walls were in ruins, the people had got into bad ways and enemies were all around. Nehemiah galvanised rebuilding of the walls of the city, but much more importantly he oversaw a rebuilding of the nation – physically, morally, spiritually. He records their trials and triumphs in the first 11 chapters of his book. Then, with his work almost done, in chapter 12 he tells us about the dedication of the rebuilt walls.

  The opening 26 verses of Nehemiah 12 comprise just a list of names. Or, more correctly, they are not ‘just’ a list, because something very important is going on as Nehemiah records the people who worked with him to bring the rebuilding of the nation to fruition. He is building a memorial: not a memorial of stone like the ones we gather round on Remembrance Day, but a memorial of words. He does not want those who come after him to forget what has been done.

  God does not want what he has done to be forgotten, either. Time and again throughout the pages of the Bible, we find God telling his people to remember. He provides symbols to help them do so. At Passover the Jews are to eat unleavened bread flavoured with bitter herbs to recall the bitterness of their captivity in Egypt (Exodus 12:8). We take bread and wine at communion in recollection of the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples before the crucifixion (Luke 22:19). Yet we forget so easily. To overlook the contributions that individual men and women have made to the life of our nation is one thing. To fail to notice what God has done and continues to do for us, to ignore the way that he wants us to live as a nation and as individuals is without excuse. We need to find again what the people of Israel had to rediscover in the time of Nehemiah.

  Service and integrity.

  Amongst other things, we need to rediscover the virtues of service and integrity. These are things that mark out the best of what our forces stand for. Not for nothing do we refer to them as ‘armed services’, because service and high principle are such strong parts of their ethos, putting nation and comrades before self.

  The people of Nehemiah’s day offered themselves to serve for the common good. Priests and their helpers (the Levites), gatekeepers, singers and those in charge of storerooms all came forward. They were joined by those who worked to rebuild the walls and to provide watchmen. Everybody had a role to play, no matter how small. They gave their labour free of charge to help in the great task of rebuilding the nation. All this was well, but there was something even more important. The nation needed to turn again to God, to walk in his ways and to observe his com
mandments. It had to re-learn what was known to previous generations but had been forgotten. Thus they “performed the service of their God and the service of purification” (Nehemiah 12:45).

  There is so much that is good and so much that is right in our land, but it is difficult to avoid thinking that (like the Israelites of Nehemiah’s day) we have lost our way somewhat. We need to take the forms of proper conduct and make them alive and real. With that in mind, it is instructive to compare their actions with ours on Remembrance Day:

  • They had a procession (Nehemiah 12:31 and 38), just as we do.

  • They took their place in the house of God (Nehemiah 12:40) just like us, for a church is a house of God.

  • They sang, gave praise and thanks to God and celebrated joyfully (Nehemiah 12:27-28, 31, 38 and 40), exactly as we do through our hymns and worship.

  • They ritually purified themselves (Nehemiah 12:30), which is what we do when we confess our sins honestly to God and sincerely ask for his forgiveness.

  • They offered sacrifices and made contributions towards the religious life of the nation (Nehemiah 12:43 and 47), precisely as we have the opportunity do through our giving and by our service.

  For the Israelites, this was not a matter of empty ritual. Their hearts were in what they did. Their ritual purity was intended to teach and to reflect God’s holiness and moral purity: Leviticus 16:30. They encircled the walls to mark out Jerusalem symbolically as a place set apart for God and his people. They acknowledged that God had his hand upon their nation.

  The Lord at work.

  We, too, should remember that God has had his hand upon our nation. The last time we held National Days of Prayer in this land was during the Second World War. They were all attended by spectacular results, but two in particular stand out. The first took place just prior to the Dunkirk evacuation (Operation Dynamo). By early 1940 Poland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Norway had fallen in swift succession to German Blitzkrieg. A demoralised France surrendered only six weeks after the start of the Wehrmacht’s western offensive. Despite giving the invaders a modest check at Arras, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was outfought, out-manoeuvred and forced to retreat. Nigh on half a million British and French troops crowded into shrinking pockets around Dunkirk and Calais as their enemy closed for the kill.

  Nobody thought the BEF stood a chance. General Sir Edmund Ironside, chief of the Imperial General Staff, murmured, “This is the end of the British Empire.” King Leopold III of Belgium agreed that “The cause of the Allies is lost.” Against a backdrop of despair Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, supported by King George VI, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and other leading politicians called a National Day of Prayer for 26 May 1940. The response was overwhelming as people begged God for deliverance. Just twenty-four hours later, for reasons that have never been fully explained, Hitler ordered his armies to halt. His generals were dumbfounded, for although the British rearguard fought stubbornly (even to the death) at both Dunkirk and Calais, it is doubtful that a determined German assault could have been long held off.

  For six days following the National Day of Prayer the normally choppy waters of the English Channel were almost dead calm. Allied soldiers scrambled aboard warships and the flotilla of “little ships” that had answered the call to rescue the beleaguered men, whilst the RAF flew round the clock. Planners initially hoped to lift a few thousands from the beaches, but results massively exceeded expectations, with 338,226[109] being brought back to England. When the evacuation was finally over, General Ironside wrote of it: “I still cannot understand how it is that [the Germans] have allowed us to get [our troops] off in this way. It is almost fantastic that we have been able to do it in the face of all the bombing and gunning.” Alexander Cadogen, Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, called it quite simply “a miracle.”

  Even then, the country was not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination. As the Battle of Britain raged, a youth day of prayer was called on 11 August 1940. Within a month the focus of the campaign changed. Airfields, which had been mercilessly pummelled to the point when the RAF was almost on its knees, were unaccountably spared as the Luftwaffe suddenly switched its attention to terror bombing of cities, London first being attacked on 7 September. The Chief of Fighter Command Air Chief Marshall Sir Hugh Dowding stated afterwards: “I can say with absolute conviction that I can trace the intervention of God, not only in the battle itself, but in the events that led up to it; and that if it had not been for this intervention the battle would have been joined in conditions which, humanly speaking, would have rendered victory impossible.” [110]

  Conclusion.

  On Remembrance Day we remember our dead – the “glorious dead” it says on many a war memorial. We need to ask whether we also sufficiently remember the living: the ever-living God. The Israelites under Nehemiah acted with gladness and with hearts on fire for God: Nehemiah tells us that the people “… offered great sacrifices, rejoicing because God had given them great joy … the sound of rejoicing in Jerusalem could be heard far away.” (Nehemiah 12:43). We should reflect on whether we really put God first in our lives, whether there is substance in what we do, or whether it is just empty ritual. We must question whether we sincerely wish to serve others, or only seek to look after ourselves. We have to ask whether we truly remember what God has done for us and genuinely give him credit for it.

  Things do not just happen in life. It was God’s will that Jerusalem should be restored in the time of Nehemiah, but it took that man’s courage and visionary leadership, along with active participation by the whole nation, to bring it about. God gave the Israelites the land of Canaan to be their home, a “land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8), but they had to fight for it. God wishes to bless our nation, to bring us back to him and to restore us in the same way that Israel was restored under Nehemiah, but he will not wave a magic wand to make this happen. He will bring it about through us, every single one of us, and if we do not actively take a hand in the process, it will not come to pass. Our armed forces epitomise service and integrity. We need to bring those same qualities to bear in the service of our nation and of our God. Revival and restoration require that we each resolve to make a reality of God’s words to us, so that we are “for [him] a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:6).

  49. Seeing a way through

  Galatians1:11-24

  Key word: calling.

  In 1890 a British schoolboy attested to the tremendous sense of calling that he felt on his life. He spoke these words to a friend:

  “I can see vast changes coming over a now peaceful world; great upheavals, terrible struggles; wars such as one cannot imagine; and I tell you London will be in danger – London will be attacked and I shall be very prominent in the defence of London … I see further ahead than you do. I see into the future. The country will be subjected somehow to a tremendous invasion … but I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London and I shall save London and the Empire from disaster.”

  The youngster was sixteen years old. His name was Winston Spencer Churchill.

  There is no need to look in Christian literature to find this story: it appears in mainstream history books, related not just by Churchill himself, but confirmed by the friend to whom he spoke, a man called Murland Evans. It is not a wild tale from a distant past, but almost within spitting distance of us: there are people still alive who knew Churchill, who died as recently as 1965. Yet we fail to reflect properly on what the future war leader did on this occasion. He prophesied. Here in our own recent history is an example of a man who foresaw and foretold what was to come. Not a particularly godly man, so far as history records, but a man touched by God for great things.

  A large proportion of the Bible is taken up with prophecy. Of the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, no less than seventeen comprise works of prophecy and there are examples of prophecy scattered throughout most of the remainde
r. In the New Testament the book of Revelation is the major work of prophecy, but there are elements of prophecy in other books, too. Jesus himself prophesied.[111] Now, there are people who say that the prophesies in the Bible cannot be what they appear on their face – they cannot be written by those who say they wrote them, nor at the time when they say they were written – because if they were this would involve telling in advance what will come to pass, and such things cannot happen. Whether that view represents ignorance or wilful blindness each must judge. The rational and open-minded, however, should recognise that there are good grounds for confidence in biblical prophecy. This confidence is based not on blind unreason but on our ability to test and confirm that prophecy is real, that God does empower people to tell forth his Word and on occasion to foretell the future.

  Again and again Churchill showed that he possessed an unshakeable sense of purpose. In My Early Life, he wrote that: “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial ...” This conviction sustained him through a career that was littered with spectacular failures: he was the architect of the disastrous landings at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles during the First World War and by the mid nineteen thirties was firmly consigned to the political wilderness, derided as a madcap and a maverick. Yet in her time of greatest trial the nation turned to him, who had warned so long and so loud about the threat posed by Nazi Germany.