Faith is being sorely tested today. Whichever way one looks there is room for much disquietude. If we had been told ten years ago that Germany, the home of the Reformation, the land of Martin Luther, should call upon the pastors of that land to sign a document in which Germany is put before God, nationalism before Christ, and a dictator’s edicts before the Bible, and submit to state dictation of a pagan nature, in order to retain their posts, we should have said it was not possible. Yet, so it is.
And what is the result? Many pastors have taken firm ground. Many are in prison for refusing to conform to a pagan state. The persecution has indeed outwitted itself, in that it has driven these pastors and many in their congregations to the conviction that their faith is worth standing up for, and if necessary to die for. Many have swung from modernism to fundamentalism. Persecution is vivifying and purifying the Church.
News comes from Mexico, that if a missionary, say of American or British nationality, leaves the country on furlough he is not allowed to return. They are bent on strangling Protestant missions in that land.
Italy is using repressive measures to make gospel effort in that land more and more difficult. She thrusts Protestant missionaries out of Abysinnia with scant courtesy.
Russia—holy Russia as she was called—is dominated by an anti-God campaign.
And what shall we say of heathendom, enslaving millions in its terrible grasp, India, China, Japan, Central Africa, the Sudan, and many other lands?
When we come to the homeland, we find modernism sapping the faith and vigour of gospel effort at home and abroad. Two or three out of every hundred alone darken the door of church, chapel or meeting room, and many alas! of this small minority are mere formalists. Worldliness marks the profession of Christianity. Sin is ignored. Hell is a myth in the judgment of many.
Well might the Lord, with prophetic gaze, looking down the centuries, exclaim, “When the Son of Man comes, shall He find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8).
In answering the demand of the Pharisees as to when the Kingdom of God should come, our Lord referred to ancient history.
Look at the days of Noah. Things were pretty bad. Who paid any attention to this preacher of righteousness as he implemented his preaching by an outward and visible sign, even the building of the ark on dry land, far removed from the waters of sea or lake? Scripture tells us eight alone out of all the population of the world availed themselves of the ark, and millions perished in the waters of judgment. Our Lord also referred to Sodom and Lot. How many of the guilty cities of the plain escaped the fiery tempest? Only four persons; indeed only three, for Lot’s wife became a pillar of salt.
It will be thus when the Son of Man comes.
What then is our remedy? Our Lord tells us—“to pray and not to faint” (Luke 18:1). We must keep up our link with God. Prayer is the antidote to fainting. Do we faint? We do not pray. Do we pray? We do not faint. Prayer, linking up with God and heaven, is our great resource.
Our Lord stressed importunity. He instanced in parable the case of a judge, who feared not God, nor regarded man—a judge you see again and again delineated in the pages of Josephus, the Historian of the Jews at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans under Titus—a judge without principle or compassion.
A widow pleads her case, a woman bereft of her natural supporter. Who cares for a widow?—her influence is nil, and the judge cares not one straw that her adversary should have justice meted out to him.
But she persevered in importunity, and at last the judge gave her what she wanted and what justice demanded, not because of equity, but simply to escape her importunities. They wearied him, and he would fain be free of what wearied him, and for his own ease, and not justice, did he at last act, and so the widow won the day.
So graciously does the Lord exhort to importunity in prayer in these days of difficulty. It is evident the Son of Man must take up the reins of government. God doubtless is allowing evil to come to a head, so that the day may be hastened when the prophecy shall be fulfilled, “I will overturn, overturn, overturn it: and it shall be no more, until He come whose right it is: and I will give it Him” (Ezek. 21:27).
He will overturn all that is of evil and sin, rebellion and lawlessness. “Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land; and I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come” (Hag. 2:6-7).
What a day that will be when the Son of man comes! There may be widespread declension on every hand; the apostasy is surely well on its way. Faith must cling all the more to God. Things are surely moving towards the time when the Son of man shall come.
And before the Son of man comes to take His rightful place in this world, He shall come into the air to call His own to glory, and the cheering word to us is, “Behold; I come quickly,” and the exhortation is, “Hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown.” May the hope cheer us, and the exhortation find us paying heed to it.