The Sword
(September, 2020)
For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
– Heb 4:12
Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. For from now on in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
-Lk 12:51-53
So there was a division among the people over him.
– Jn 7:43
We’re at a fork in the road.
Swords in scripture nearly always speak of war – except in passages like the one above from Hebrews, where the word of God is likened to a sword that divides. Actually, swords always bring both war and division. They force us to choose sides.
I wrote to you about the sword in 2016 after spending nine months in the book of Zephaniah. And that was off the back of Ezekiel 21 – an equally disturbing message. I wrote that the sword coming and God coming were inextricably linked. That’s because it is God who wields the sword.
And his sword is already at work – dividing
- Blind from seeing (Mt 13:13-16)
- Deaf from listening (Jer 25:4; Ezk 12:2; Mk 4:13-25)
- Deceived from discerning (Eph 5:1-21)
- Lambs from wolves (Lk 10:3)
- Those on whom Christ is working from those on whom Christ is falling (Lk 20:18)
- Those who long for his appearing from those who don’t even think about it (2 Tim 4:8)
- Those with hearts on things above from those with hearts on earthly things (Col 3:2)
Remember in Part 1 when I said Israel’s sin was simply behaving like ordinary people? Well, God allows that kind of thing to go on for quite some time. He waits to see whether we really hunger and thirst for righteousness. And then there comes a time – our time; this time we’re living in now – when he no longer tolerates that, and he begins to separate those Christians living like ordinary people from those who seek first his kingdom.
That’s what the sword is doing.
But without even looking at this from a spiritual perspective, we can see separation at work in the world. People are being forced to decide (and declare) where they stand and they are becoming vocal about it. From Stevie Wonder to Robert de Niro, from Gillette to Netflix; celebrities and athletes, small business owners and corporations, big tech, social media, government employees, social influencers, the rich and the entitled – all are revealing what they really believe. All those things they’ve quietly harbored inside – their hatred of good, their disdain for decency – it’s all coming to the surface and they’re choosing which side they’re on.
I’m not simply talking about division along political lines; that’s merely an indicator of deeper issues. No, God is using the current political situation as a catalyst to bring the impurities to the surface and expose what people have really believed all along. Most of it has been hidden behind a façade of pleasantness. Now that façade, presented to us for decades, is being stripped away and the real state of people’s hearts revealed.
You’ve probably noticed, too, that each person, no matter what their stance, claims they’re defending what is right.
A quote here from Peter Craigie might help us understand what is going on:
When evil is pursued and practiced regularly and devotedly, it produces eventually a moral blindness in the perpetrator.[1]
That’s what has happened in society. Which is why you get the incongruity of people who scream about justice and tolerance, practicing injustice and intolerance on anyone who doesn’t agree with them. They’ve pursued evil and are now morally blind, all the while sincerely believing themselves to be morally superior to everyone else (and usually trumpeting that moral superiority loudly as well). Of course, they didn’t always know they were pursuing evil. Their motives may have been quite altruistic. But, as I’ve said before, pursuing anything that isn’t Christ, no matter how noble it seems will, sooner or later, lead away from him.
And so, the world has been turned upside down; black is white, white is black, evil is good, good is evil. These are the people Isaiah spoke of, who turn darkness into light and light into darkness. Those who think they are wise and consider themselves clever (Is 5:20-21). They’re in for a fright.
Let me change gear for a minute.
For the past 15 years one of our biggest dividing lines has been politics. In the place from which I write, the division in society is seemingly irreconcilable. Britain has lived now for several years with the division caused by Brexit. The US seems to be on the verge of civil war. And there have been political demonstrations, protests, insurrections, or rebellions in a multitude of countries around the world.
The other day I heard this assessment of our current predicament:
Trump is a rough cure because we lost our right for a soft cure. Our sin did that. Now we have a man who is a wrecking ball, but he’s [a wrecking ball] in God’s hands.
America (and the world, for that matter) got a wrecking ball because we didn’t repent after 9/11. September 11, 2001 was our wake-up call. But what did we do in response? We decided to wage war, to rampage, to build bigger machines of might instead of humbling ourselves and returning to the Lord. So we lost our right for a soft cure. We chose the sword. So God has given us what we chose.
God will use whatever he wants to achieve his purposes, and he is using a wrecking ball to demolish the things we should have demolished by our humility and repentance. If we had chosen that path perhaps the sword of separation would have been delayed or averted. If we fail to choose it now, it won’t be a sword of separation we experience. It will be the sword of war.
Despite what I believe God is saying regarding judgement, I do believe it can be avoided if his people repent and intercede on behalf of their nation. I don’t mean Christians feeling remorse or saying “sorry” for their sins. I mean Christians changing the way they’re living, giving up their attachment to worthless things, and crying out to God to make them what he needs them to be for what is coming. Things of no eternal importance have to go.
But it doesn’t just mean getting priorities right and dispensing with things that, from an eternal perspective, are worthless. It means spending such time with God that we take on his heart – for our brothers and sisters, for our neighbors, for our cities, for our nations. That’s essentially what intercession is. It doesn’t require anyone with special gifts. It just requires someone willing to “know” God – and everything that word means. God said to Ezekiel that he looked for someone who would build up the wall and stand on behalf of the land so that he wouldn’t have to destroy it. But he found nothing. Nobody was interested. Life was simply too good as it was. Is that our day also?
Years ago I told my church that God was going to shake everything that could be shaken. And that only those things that couldn’t be shaken – only those things that are of God – would remain (Heb 12:26-29; Hag 2:6, 21). In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in the middle of a shaking.
The indolent Christian isn’t going to survive. The complacent Christian isn’t going to survive. The gym-yoga-work-Twitter-Netflix-sports-bar routine isn’t going to turn a nation back to God. And the days of sitting on the fence have come to a close.
God is separating out those he has chosen. Not that a physical separation is necessarily taking place. The weeds grow with the wheat until the final day. But God is forcing people to decide what they truly believe. And he is calling those who have a hunger for him. Actually, he’s probably calling everyone, but it’s only his sheep who are hearing. I know Christians who think everything’s just going on as usual. And so, they continue their pleasant but powerless lives as usual. But his sheep are hearing, and they’re starting to follow. They’re going on a road others will not walk on; a road others think is crazy, fanatical, extreme, misguided. But his sheep hear his voice and follow.
Jesus isn’t going the world’s way, or BLM’s way, or the liberal or conservatives’ way, or socialism or capitalism or feminism or any ism’s way. He’s going his way. You can follow him or you can wait for the sword to do a little more than separate. Thanks to free will, you get to choose. I advise you to choose wisely because, as I’ve said, the sword is not only a tool for dividing, it is a weapon of war.
And war is coming.
I don’t know how it will manifest or when. But it is coming.
The time to choose is now.
- Craigie, Jeremiah WBC, 104 ↑