The spirit of the world opposes faith: Yemen as a case example. [John 15].

There was an evangelical booth at the Royal Manitoba Show[1]. Between watching the grandchildren pet animals, and the first races of the quarter-horse season, I had a chat with the older man standing there. We both said our societies are failing, and it feels that the tide is going out: we are left with but a remnant with a saving faith.

And we grieved for England, who had single-handedly evangelized much of the world during Victorian times, bringing nations to the gospel and then leading local churches with righteousness on their return to their home county. For the culture has gone away from the faith: and I see families scrabbling to build traditions, knowing the need for ritual. I seep this locally, where the civil, religious and military ceremony of ANZAC day has become bigger and bigger… while our congregations get smaller and smaller.

And if you stop to pray before food, it is now odd. One does this silently, letting not the spirit of this age completely rule: to do otherwise is to offend those who will be offended, and one has to choose one’s battles. For the faith of many has been lost, and even full denominations have gone apostate.

The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD.”

(Ezekiel 37:1-6 ESV)

However, I think we both fell into an error. We thought that the world would reward those who are righteous, and that society was ever functional. It was ever just. That we ever tried to build Jerusalem in England’s pleasant fields. There has always been opposition. There has always been those who would distort the gospel and corrupt our souls. As the nation falls, the spirit of the age becomes more obvious.

Having enunciated that broad principle, Justice Scalia then upheld Oregon’s decision to deny unemployment benefits to Alfred Smith, a member of the Native American Church, because he was fired for having ingested peyote, a banned substance, as part of his religious rituals. Under Scalia’s iron logic, the disparate impact of this law on Smith did not require Oregon to make any accommodation for his religious beliefs. The denial of unemployment benefits here was collateral damage, given that Oregon did not initiate criminal proceedings against him, as it might have done if he had ingested peyote for recreational use.

Justice Scalia’s dangerously broad neutrality proposition prompted massive disapproval at the time because of the potential breadth of its application. Under that rule, the United States could draft Jews or Muslims into the military and force them to eat pork. After all, they have the choice to go hungry in order to not violate their religious convictions. It could also require commercial Kosher butchers to slaughter meat in accordance with federal health laws inconsistent with kosher rituals.

RFRA’s response established that the United States could not “substantially burden” the religious liberties of any person unless it could show a compelling state interest for the law that caused the burden, and even then it had to pick the least restrictive means to achieve its narrowly-defined public interest. During the more than twenty years that the federal RFRA has been in operation, it has provoked relatively little litigation on provision of services issues, and courts have never read it as a blanket license to discriminate. For the most part the application of the law dealt with matters of faith and religion.

But that has now changed with the new insistence on broad antidiscrimination laws that prohibit any discrimination by any public accommodation, broadly defined, in the provision of any services, however personal or intimate, to gays and lesbians, even when they conflict with the religious belief that marriage is a union between one man and one women.

There is a reason for the church. We remain in this world not because we are an institution, but to do the works of Christ. For no one else will. We have to love each other while we do this, for the remainder of society will hate us.

We should expect opposition, and we should fear it when the world praises us.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. These things I command you, so that you will love one another.

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. Whoever hates me hates my Father also. If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both me and my Father. But the word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled: ‘They hated me without a cause.’

“But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning.

(John 15:12-27 ESV)

We are but responsible for the commands put in front of us, and they are simple and reasonable: to love each other, within our marriages and without: to accept the teaching of the apostles where if differs for men and women (for men and women are different) and to share in the witness and suffering of Christ.

We are not responsible for this culture or that nation: for as righteousness exalts a nation, then surely a nation that abandons the clear witness of God is ready for judgment. And Christ we have abandoned.

The end game in the Middle East is upon us, and it is Malthusian. As these societies have cast out the church and Jewry, the people aligned with God, and tried to impose terror upon the remainder of the world, they are starving [2].

The fighting in Yemen threatens to cause widespread hunger and thirst and displace huge numbers of people, creating another humanitarian disaster in a region already reeling from the crisis in Syria, according to analysts and aid workers.

The impoverished Arabian Peninsula nation of 25 million was struggling with alarming malnutrition levels even before an offensive by Shiite Houthi rebels prompted a military intervention last month by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia. Now, the coalition’s air strikes, as well as the fighting at Yemen’s airports and seaports, are impeding access to food and other supplies.

According to the United Nations and humanitarian aid agencies, major urban centres, including the southern city of Aden, which has a population of about one million, may run out of drinking water. The fighting has displaced thousands of Yemenis, and a continuation of the unrest could produce waves of refugees reminiscent of the flight of Syrians from cities and towns engulfed in that country’s civil war, analysts and aid workers say.

We should not crow over what is happening in Yemen. Yes, they have bought it on themselves, but so have we. Our institutions are now overtly anti -Christian, and anti-Semitic, and our God is living and active. We could implode rapidly: indeed, historically, we have done so within a season: I refer to Cromwell in England, and a war between the states at about the same time my family was involved in taking land from the Maori to found a colony at New Plymouth.

But let us not give up hope. There is a remnant. And those which were dry bones have come back to life.

So let us do our duty and pray that our rulers discover that intelligence is not wisdom, and repent. For the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

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1. My father is quietly proud of his great-grand-daughter, for I saw her handling animals with a natural talent and care.
2. Yes, the internet is back up.