After the “Red Wave” that didn’t happen during the 2022 mid-term elections, we might be wise to consider Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar, as recorded in the book of Daniel, as well as other Bible passages that declare the sovereignty of God over the nations.

First, let us consider King Nebuchadnezzar, ruler of Babylonia from approximately 605 BC until approximately 562 BC. He is considered the greatest king of the Babylonian Empire.  In biblical history, Nebuchadnezzar is most famous for the conquering of Judah and the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem in 586 BC. Judah had become a tribute state to Babylon in 605 BC but rebelled in 597 BC during the reign of Jehoiachin and then again in 588 BC during the reign of Zedekiah. Tired of the rebellions, and seeing that Judah had not learned its lesson when he invaded, conquered, and deported Judah in 597, Nebuchadnezzar and his general, Nebuzaradan, completely destroyed the temple and most of Jerusalem, deporting most of the remaining residents to Babylon. In this, Nebuchadnezzar served as God’s instrument of judgment on Judah for its idolatry, unfaithfulness, and disobedience (Jeremiah 25:9).

We are most familiar with the accounts of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams recorded in the book of Daniel and the interpretations of those dreams given to him at the King’s own request. Daniel interpreted the second dream for Nebuchadnezzar and informed him that the dream was a warning to the king to humble himself and recognize that his power, wealth, and influence were from God, not of his own making. Nebuchadnezzar did not heed the warning of the dream, so God judged him as the dream had declared. Nebuchadnezzar was driven insane for seven years. When the king’s sanity was restored, he finally humbled himself before God. In Daniel 4:3, Nebuchadnezzar declares, “How great are his signs, how mighty his wonders! His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and his dominion endures from generation to generation.” Nebuchadnezzar continued in  Daniel 4:34–37:

“And at the end of the time I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my understanding returned to me; and I blessed the Most High and praised and honored Him who lives forever: For His dominion is an everlasting dominion, And His kingdom is from generation to generation.  All the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing; He does according to His will in the army of heaven And among the inhabitants of the earth. No one can restrain His hand Or say to Him, “What have You done?” At the same time my reason returned to me, and for the glory of my kingdom, my honor and splendor returned to me. My counselors and nobles resorted to me, I was restored to my kingdom, and excellent majesty was added to me.  Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven, all of whose works are truth, and His ways justice. And those who walk in pride He is able to put down.” (Daniel 4:34-37)

Whether or not King Nebuchadnezzar became a true follower of God is a matter of conjecture, but we do know that God used him as His mighty servant in the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem as had been prophesied by Jeremiah (Jeremiah 25:9; 27:6; 43:10). Whatever the case, the story of Nebuchadnezzar is an example of God’s sovereignty over all men and the truth that “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He will” (Proverbs 21:1).

Turning to the New Testament, we also find declarations of God’s sovereignty over nations. The Apostle Paul told believers living under oppressive rulers in Rome:

“Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.” (Rom 13:1)

The Apostle also urged young Pastor Timothy: that prayers be made “for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness” (1 Timothy 2:1-2). Prayer is the most tangible expression of trust in God.

To quote Jerry Bridges:

“God is sovereign over the nations. He is sovereign over the officials of our own government in all their actions as they affect us, directly or indirectly. He is sovereign over the officials of government in lands where our brothers and sisters in Christ suffer for their faith in Him. And He is sovereign over the nations where every attempt is made to stamp out true Christianity. In all of these areas, we can and must trust God.”©2008 Jerry Bridges.

Back to the 2022 mid-term elections. I, like many others, expected to see something of a “Red Wave’, especially since even some Democrats predicted there would be one. Well, it didn’t happen.

I also confess to knowing some fellow Christians who seem to spend more time in battle for the soul of America than lost souls all around them, separated from God and apart from Christ, who at this very moment living under God’s wrath (see John 3:36). Should be who name Christ just ignore what’s happening in the political arena? By NO means! We should continue to pray for our nation, as well as the rest of the world’s nations, as Paul instructed young Timothy.

At the end of the day, however, we must remain mindful that it is God who raises up nations for His purposes and also tears them down, also for His purposes. I am reminded of the words of Job spoken to one of his ‘friends’, “ He (God) makes nations great, and he destroys them; he enlarges nations, and leads them away.” (Job 12:23),

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Portions of this article have been adapted from Trusting God Even When Life Hurts, ©1988; 2008 by navpress.)

Scriptures cited are from the English Standard Version)

“No, Jesus would not require vaccine passports.”

by Jordan Standridge, The Cripplegate

Samuel Sey tweeted something recently that came as a shock for many christians. A church in Canada is going to reopen next month (after being closed since covid began) but with a twist, they will be requiring a vaccine passport for people to come in the doors.

The writer of the article, who is the pastor of the church, said that if Jesus been alive today, he would have done the same. 

After appealing to science for his decision, the pastor made a shift into theology. He said Jesus would agree with him.

Theologically, the argument is stronger. To be a Christian is to model one’s life after Christ. Jesus always put others first. He gave up his individual rights for the common good and sacrificed for the sake of the weak. He loved others as he loved himself and would have surely done anything to best protect the unvaccinated children in his neighbourhood. A Christian ethic always puts the vulnerable first.

Not only is this argument not strong it is actually quite foolish.

Jesus consistently exposed himself to sick people. People with Leprosy (Matt. 8:2), fevers (Luke 8:38-40), blood discharges (Luke 8:43), demons (Matt. 5:1), and even dead people (Mark 5:21, Luke 8:40) were constantly approached by Jesus without regard for his own safety.

He could have healed everyone he came in contact with yet he didn’t. There were times where he chose not to heal people who needed it. (Mark 6:5) In fact, Jesus could remove not only Covid from this world in a split second, but all pain and suffering whenever he wants. But doesn’t.

Jesus’s mission was not to eradicate suffering in this world, but it was to suffer himself for the sake of the elect. (Heb. 2:9-10) He was willing to die for the sake of the lost! And He expected his disciples to follow suit! (John 15:20)

The only reason you might require proof of vaccines for entrance to a church service is because you have lost sight of the cost of discipleship and are controlled by the fear of death.

You should be willing to die for people to hear the gospel.

Jesus said very clearly that we should be willing to suffer and even die for His sake. (Matt. 10:38, Matt. 24:9)

Paul said that for the sake of his people, Israel, he would be willing to be accursed in their place, if it meant that they would get to go to Heaven. (Rom. 9:3) And Paul believed in a literal eternal hell.

Every follower of Christ should be willing to suffer and die for the sake of expending our energy and our whole entire lives for the lost. 

It is for this reason that it is shocking that there are churches that are forbidding people from coming to church. I know that this is a hot topic and that many people are sensitive about this. I am not against being careful and using wisdom, after all unlike Jesus, we don’t have the ability to heal people. But under no circumstance are we allowed to turn away people from hearing the Gospel and gathering with the saints.

We should be begging people to come, not banning them!

We truly need to pray for pastors around the world. These situations are not easy to navigate. We need to pray for churches to not be afraid. 

We need to pray that elders who are afraid of dying, would remember their high calling and either repent or resign. 

Sadly too many shepherds right now, instead of fighting away the enemy of their sheep, are dropping their staffs and running away, afraid to die.

If you should be willing to be speared in the chest to bring the Gospel to a tribe in Equador, you should be willing to be exposed to a respiratory disease that you have more than a 99% chance to survive.

This is not to minimize the fact that this virus does harm some people in a significant way, but it is to say that if the fear of death is driving you to make your decisions then you are not being a faithful shepherd.

We need to pray for much wisdom from the Lord. Obviously we don’t want to have a martyr complex where we expose ourselves and those around us to unnecessary risks, but we must, if we desire to follow our Lord’s example, be willing to expend ourselves for the Lord. 

I can’t help but think of Peter who was told by Christ that he would die on a cross, (John 21:19) yet boldly declared Gospel, each and every time he had the opportunity, without compromise or concern for his own body.

By all means get vaccinated if you want, protect yourself as best you can, but never forbid people from hearing the good news. Elders, (and really every member of the church) go and preach boldly the word of God, leaving your life in God’s hands.

“Which of you, wishing to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost to see if he has the resources to complete it? Otherwise, if he lays the foundation and is unable to finish the work, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, ‘This man could not finish what he started to build.’ Or what king on his way to war with another king will not first sit down and consider whether he can engage with ten thousand men the one coming against him with twenty thousand? And if he is unable, he will send a delegation while the other king is still far off, to ask for terms of peace.”  Luke 14:28-35

As Christ taught us, let’s count the cost of our lost war.

• Dollars spent on the war in Afghanistan: $2.26 trillion
• GDP of Afghanistan: $19.29 billion
• American soldiers killed in Afghanistan: 3,200
• Terrorist attacks in Afghanistan in 2019: 1,422
• Afghanistan’s share of global deaths by terrorism: 41%
• Years America occupied Afghanistan: 20
• Days it took the Taliban to capture Kabul: 9
• Afghanistan’s ranking on the global terrorism index: 1

You can see in the infographic below, courtesy of Statista, how some of these stats have changed – in fact, gotten worse – over these past years.

This is the legacy of the War in Afghanistan: more terrorism, more instability, and more violence. Despite the UN, despite the World Bank, despite the IMF, despite the American, British, Canadian, French, German, and Italian military, Afghanistan in many ways is in a worse position today than it was even 20 years ago.

The excellent Orthodox conservative writer Rod Dreher recently pointed out that the War on Terror was bookended by men jumping out of American buildings to certain death on September 11th, and men falling off American planes to certain death twenty years later. This outcome was surely unimaginable to President Bush in 2001 when he ordered the invasion, or to President Obama in 2009 when he ordered a surge of US troops; that’s because they didn’t count the cost. Let’s go back, as we always should, to Him whose warnings our ruling class did not heed.

During Christ’s infancy, shortly after the death of Herod “the Great,” a rebel by the name of Judas attacked the Galilean city of Sepphoris and organized an armed revolt against the Herodian dynasty. Unlike that of his forebearer, Judas Maccabeus, this Judas’ revolt failed. According to the historian Josephus, Rome’s Syrian governor burned the city down and sold its inhabitants into slavery.

Sometime during Jesus’ teenage years, Sepphoris was rebuilt by Herod Antipas. Given their profession, and that they lived in nearby Nazareth, it’s likely that Christ joined with His stepfather in rebuilding the city. The young Jesus would have spent days toiling away in the shadow of decrepit former homes and businesses, as He built a new city in the rubble of a former rebel stronghold. (Sound familiar?)

Christ may well have been thinking of the failed revolt in Sepphoris when He spoke about war in Luke 14, just as Vietnam serves as the base-case for invasion and occupation for Baby Boomers, and as Iraq and Afghanistan for Millennials and Zoomers constitute the intellectual and emotional lens through which any possible war is filtered.

The Biblical perspective on war is, as one might expect, nuanced. Some conflicts – such as the Maccabean Revolt and the wars against the Amalekites, Midianites, and Philistines – carry divine endorsement. Some conflicts – such as the First Jewish-Roman War and the Bar Kokhba Revolt – carry divine punishment. Besides the obvious, two things separate the just and unjust war in Christian thought: the primacy of national sovereignty, and a reasonable expectation of victory.

First, God is not an imperialist. In 1 Peter 2:17 (“Honor all people, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king,”) the Greek word basileus is used, which generally means not emperor, but king. A king is sovereign over one nation; an emperor is sovereign over many. Godcreated the nations and divided them:

“When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He divided the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.” Deuteronomy 32:8

Lest we think this is some temporary division of the Old Testament era, Saint Paul repeats this doctrine in speaking to (formerly imperial) Greek pagans:

“From one man He made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands.”

Acts 17:26

He, not us, made the nations. They are not man’s to play with; they are the creation of God, who went so far as to assign them spiritual principalities (see Daniel 10:13, Job 1:6, and, debatably, the aforementioned Deuteronomy 32:8.) Indeed, the very concept that there are laws of war – and therefore that some wars are unjust – comes from Christian thought, seen explicitly in the writing of the Arminian scholar Hugo Grotius. It was that same philosophy that resolved the Eighty Years’ War and Thirty Years’ War in the Peace of Westphalia, which legally instantiated the sovereignty of nations.

Were we honoring this principle in Afghanistan, where our presidents became de facto sovereigns of a foreign nation? Has our war of these past 20 years about redressing the crimes committed against us and protecting our rights and interests? Or was it about exporting our Western, liberal, democratic form of government to nations that have never known it and do not want it?

Even if we leave that aside, the issue of cost is glaringly obvious. What is required for a war to be just is that it be proportional to the crime and worth what we pay, whether financially, or in prestige, or in lives. If the mere presence of an evil foe was sufficient justification for war, Christ would have been encouraging a revolt against the Romans, not repeatedly warning against it. Taking up arms when one has no reasonable chance of victory is what Saint Peter did at Jesus’ arrest – prompting Him to tell Peter to sheathe his sword, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” War must carry a realistic possibility of victory, and it must not be more destructive than the peace.

This does not describe the war in Afghanistan. The invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 was justifiable – we were attacked, and the Taliban was aiding and shielding those who attacked us. What it became was something very different: a war for democracy; a war to enforce a very particular, modern, Western view of politics; a war to build a nation; a war that we did not count the costs of. We spent several times the GDP of Afghanistan to make it a liberal democracy, and we still failed, because the enterprise was absurd from the start.

Now, in the shadow of American humiliation and Afghan ruin, our foes are eager to pick up the pieces we broke. Expect China, Pakistan, Russia, and even India to reconsider their political and economic position in South and Central Asia, and not to America’s benefit – nor Afghanistan’s.

This is, of course, to say nothing of the thousands of men Western powers sent to die in a foreign country, not for national security – that stopped being the goal years ago – but for secular neocolonialism.Our now-abandoned Afghan colony was the fever dream of a political class unmoored from the Bible, unmoored from the Christian view of nations, unmoored from the spirit of Grotius and Westphalia, unmoored from world history, unmoored from a sense of proportion and scale, unmoored from who we are and what our purpose is; a political class which had somehow convinced themselves that they should – and could! – build a little America out of an ancient mountain range in South Asia.

Over $2 trillion spent to remake a country with a GDP of under $20 billion in our image. Over $2 trillion, over 3,000 lives, and a country that is less safe than it was when we started. Christ told us to count the cost of war before it begins; we ignored Him. Now America joins the ranks of the British, the Soviets, the Mongols, the Greeks, and the Persians in the graveyard of empires.

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Charles is a risk analyst and columnist at TownhallFinance. He has written for National Review Online, AsiaTimes, RealClearMarkets, and the Theopolis Institute. @charlesgbowyer

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