The following is Part 4 of 6 from a booklet by Rev. Blake Purcell titled Swords into Plowshares, Three Dimensions of Bringing Peace on Earth (and Ukraine)Isaiah 2:1-4, 11
Part II
Part III
Part IV. Dimension III The Cost of Peace on Earth
God clearly tells us that there is a cost to having real universal harmony that exalts Christ. Isaiah 66:2 reads, but this is the man to whom I will look, he who is humble and contrite in Spirit and who trembles at my word. God will only work through a person, a local church, or a national church that is broken before Him and His word. This brokenness is seen in a number of ways.
Vulnerability
Isaiah 2 has an oblique reference to the flipside of this happy song. Really why did the Communist Party invite me to speak to them in 1991? Because they were interested in Christ? No, they were interested in our lives. Our lives caused them to invite us. What in the world, they were thinking, could possess someone to bring children into their mess? This was truly baffling to them, and that made them think, there must be something behind this kind of commitment, something mysterious and powerful. Of course, when they found out what it was they thought, “Oh, that’s not mysterious and powerful, there must be some other reason”. (Later on a KGB agent told me he knew what is was. We were CIA agents stupid enough to bring their kids in on their work.)
In Isaiah 11, the lion lays down with the lamb, but in Matthew 10:16 we find “phase one” of that event, Behold, I send you out as sheep amidst wolves. The folks at the Communist Party knew that I had come defenselessly, with Emily 6 years old, Graham 4, and John Mark 2, and Cathy soon to give birth to Lewis. In their eyes I had come to a sword fight with a plowshare, and to a spear fest with a pruning hook.
Just to clarify, if you are a suburban cowboy like me, you don’t know the difference between a plow and a plowshare. I just found out. Below is a picture educating us. The plowshare is the actual metal blade, not the whole machine (which obviously I have never used).
What we now realize after 25 years in Eurasia is the very thing that the world thinks is our greatest weakness is actually our greatest strength. When we look through Isaiah 2’s metaphors to the whole Bible, we understand that world peace only happens when God’s people are sent out to be sheep among wolves and plowshares among swords.
Humility
For God to look at us and use us to usher in global brotherly love what else must we be? Isaiah 66:2 tells us. We must be humble. In Isaiah 2 the Church is a receptacle that the nations flow into and get mixed together. Isaiah 66:18, 19 tells us that God’s people will come from all nations as a grain offering that is mixed together in His house. These images are previews of what the New Testament calls the soma, or body, of Christ. Only this identity capsulizes how the universal Church of Christ is to live globally.
Paul goes out of his way to emphasize the fact that this new name for God’s people specifically means Jews and Gentiles together as one people of God. I Corinthians 12:12, 13, reads, For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
Paul emphasizes in I Corinthians 12 that by body he means literally an organism that has separate members that cannot live at all, or, at least cannot thrive, without one another. We see this also in Ephesians 4:16, from whom (Christ) the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love. So, the Jewish Church in Jerusalem could not live or thrive without the Gentile church in Antioch. And those Greeks could not live without the Barbarians and Scythians that eventually came to Christ.
Has God designed any national church to be essentially and permanently self-sufficient? If we are by definition and in God’s reality a global body, then the answer has to be, “no.” If any church is in a body that goes beyond their political borders, it is by nature a hand in Venezuela in need of an eye in Japan, or a mouth in America in need of a backbone (which is our situation in the USA) in Russia. Our members were designed and created by God to be dependent on one another.
We have had the privilege of seeing this reality up close and personal. The churches that we minister with and to and the pastors we train have a lot to offer any American church. All of them pay a high price to be Protestants and Evangelicals in the anti-Protestant, anti-Evangelical Russian Orthodox and Islamic and brutal world of Russia and the Former Soviet Union. One pastor has had his church forced to move locations 5 times in 9 years. One of our pastors in a closed country to our south has been arrested twice just for being at worship. His sister was fined $3,000 for organizing a woman’s conference. The police with AK 47s and dogs surrounded the women, praying in the woods.
Here in the 275 million person Russian speaking world, because every Evangelical church is in a struggle to survive they know they really need one another. They don’t let non-essentials divide them, and they don’t vaunt their faith over one another and gloat if they find a fault in someone else’s beliefs. Do Americans need to learn to endure this kind of opposition and yet still do effective evangelism and mercy ministries that transform their culture, and to get along with each other? You decide.
Pastor Eric Sauder’s church in Springfield, MO, has a sister church relationship with Ravil Kunakayev’s church in Tyumen, Siberia. Pastor Eric told me a few years ago that Ravil’s church, with 50 members and a $20,000 a year budget, has larger Evangelical and cultural footprint in their city in Siberia than Eric’s church has in Springfield. Eric’s church has 200 members and a budget of $300,000 a year.
Eurasian churches have been designed by God to make them dependent on other’s strengths, and likewise God has ordained weaknesses in North American churches can only be helped by those outside the North American culture.
Only an American church that shows brokenness and humility before God’s word will God honor. And only the American church actually living as a real interdependent part of the global body is showing this kind of brokenness and humility. Only that kind of church is actually working toward peace on earth, good will toward men.
Boldness
Isaiah 11:4 pictures another character trait that a church working toward world peace must have. There we read, He shall strike the earth with the rod of His mouth. This shows us that when the word goes out globally, it must go out boldly. Ephesians 5:11 reads, take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead, expose them. I think that a good example to the whole world is the church in the Ukraine. Not only have some of the Orthodox priests stood between protestors and the police as shown in the photo from Part I, but the church in the Ukraine has been bold in word as well.
In April 2014 Christianity Today was given the public statement of Valery Antonyuk, vice president of the All Ukrainian Union of Evangelical Churches, Baptist.
A Message of Reconciliation:
During this time of fateful change in the life of the Ukrainian nation, the Church and each Christian individually cannot remain spectators on the sidelines of the battles and losses. The Church serves society and mourns together with it. We went through difficult days together with the nation – we served through prayer, evangelism, volunteers, medical help, clothing, and food. Today a time has come for a ministry of active reconciliation, which will help maintain unity in our country and nation.
We supported the nation's demand to put an end to the tyranny of the authorities and repressions by the police. Now it is important to restore justice and due process of law in the country, to form a government that has the people's trust, and provide fair presidential elections. We believe that those guilty of crimes against the people will be justly judged, and that peaceful citizens will be protected.
But on behalf of the Church we must say more, we must speak the whole truth; we must say that which is still hard to accept and fulfill; that, which is a precondition for a better future.
Therefore the Church calls the Ukrainian nation to more than just feelings of human justice – to Christian forgiveness, grace, and reconciliation. We pray to God for repentance for the guilty. However at the same time we ask victims to forgive those who are already repentant as well as those who are still lost… Without repentance, grace, forgiveness and reconciliation, the country will remain divided and in conflict. This is the precondition for a deep spiritual transformation of Ukraine…
We call on the Evangelical churches of Ukraine to serve to bring peace between people and healing to the wounds of war. We do not call black white and do not justify crimes or even mistakes. But we, as Christians, forgive, because we have been forgiven by God. He reconciled us to Himself, and gave us a message of reconciliation. This grace-giving Word to our whole nation should be heard from Lvov to Donetsk, from Kiev to Simferopol.
We also call upon the international Christian community asking for prayer and intercession for the Ukrainian nation and for help with peacemaking. We mourn for the victims, and thank God for His grace toward Ukraine, and pray for peace and spiritual revival in our nation.
Jeremiah 23:29 reads, Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer which breaks the rock in pieces? In the Bible swords are only beaten into plowshares by the hammer of the word of God proclaimed boldly as the Church in the Ukraine is doing.
Ultimate Trust
The final and most critical way the Church has to be broken before the word of God to be “looked at” by God is real trust in God and his ways. We find out in Isaiah 31:1, Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the Lord!
As I said already, the main reason a nation, church, or person is not passionate about world missions, and does not take some level of ownership of an international effort, is a lack of love for Christ and zeal for His sacrifice to be rewarded. But secondly, it is because that person, or nation, or church trusts in the flesh for world peace and law and order. I believe much of the American church is anemic globally and apathetic and ineffective in missions because they do not believe the global preaching of the Gospel through the church are the one and only source of genuine long-term universal security.
For instance, if you ask an American Christian, especially a Calvinistic Scotch-Irish Southern Presbyterian, such as I am, during a time of global threat if we should double our military spending, he will say, “of course.” If you ask the same man, since only the Gospel through the Church bring real world peace, should we not double the size of our missions budget?” he will say, “Are you nuts, during a time of threat to our national security? Never!”
Jeremiah 17:5, 7 proclaims,
Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his arm, whose heart turns away from the Lord. Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.
