If you watched the President of the United States last night, you saw a man deeply distressed. He’s a human being with human limitations; his counselors likewise don’t know how to advise him. Whether you’re “red” or “blue” you don’t want to torture a political opponent. We don’t want to indulge in man’s inhumanity toward man, for that’s the spirit itself of Baghdad.
In war and politics there is little room for the kind of love that the Bible says is agape. But in a Christian culture some of it does get through, thank God. Some pundits are comparing our current President’s baffled perplexity with that of Lincoln in our Civil War, but his steadfastness was not stubbornness or arrogance. He was under some divine mandate to preserve the nation which in God’s providence should make possible the free proclamation of the gospel to the world. Now today there is still a divine mandate.
God’s people may be poor and unknown in the world (the Roman Empire rulers didn’t notice Jesus, either), but if they love (with agape), they will have influence. A “remnant” that is truly reconciled to God in this grand Day of Atonement will be agents whom the Lord will employ in some way. They will fulfill the role of those “four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth” that hateful violence shall not break loose until “the servants of our God [are] sealed” (Rev. 7:1-3). That “seal of God” is even now being placed on those “144,000,” a mystic symbolic number whose prayers are in tune with Heaven.
“Democracy” in a Muslim culture is not effective progress. Multiplying “smoke out of the bottomless pit” in a “democratic” plurality doesn’t “lighten the earth with [the] glory” that God wants to happen (cf. Rev. 9:1-3; 18:1-4). But what God does want to happen is that the pure gospel, free of Babylonian confusion, shall penetrate to the consciousness of the warring multitudes of earth. Including those in the Middle East.
The “four angels” symbolize people on earth who pray to that end, with agape. Join them!
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