Dear Friends of “Dial Daily Bread,”
Billions of people on earth are deeply prejudiced against Jesus and His faith. That prejudice has been there in their culture going back for hundreds of years. Yet Jesus assured “us,” “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (see Matt. 28:20). If His presence has been “with” us these 2000 years, why are such huge portions of the human family alienated from Him, opposed to His gospel?
For example: in Japan the masses are Buddhist, innately opposed. In India where the masses are Hindu, they are also deeply resistant. And the billion plus people who are Muslim, whose contempt for Christianity is so well known today. Why? Why could God permit this to happen?
The answer is in Daniel chapters 7, 8, and 9 where we read of “the little horn,” the apostate power that would arise out of the ruins of the ancient pagan Roman empire. This “little horn” would be “granted” to “make war with the saints and to overcome them” (Rev. 13:7). This power has pretended to be Christian while in reality alienating multitudes from Christ through gross misrepresentation of His truth.
The Jesuits are an organization that has taken the name of Jesus, yet has so misrepresented Him that they have been expelled from nation after nation for centuries, creating behind them abhorrence for anything having to do with “Jesus.” They were expelled from Japan in 1587, thus cementing in Buddhism this abhorrence of Christianity. They were expelled from Japan again in 1613, from India and China in 1623, from Abyssinia in 1632.
In England’s imperialist rule over India, Christianity (this time Protestant) was likewise in the minds of the people a representation of the religion of “Jesus,” and there were many good missionaries. Yet Mahatma Gandhi had a real point when he said that all India would bow at the feet of Jesus if His professed people were like Him.
Jesus said of the book of Daniel: “Whoever reads, let him understand” (Matt. 24:15). We can’t understand the world in which we live unless we do. This “little horn” story must be understood!
--Robert J. Wieland
From the “Dial Daily Bread” Archive: August 30, 2004.
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