Standing in the shopping mall, those tomb-side words on that chill first Easter morning came to me, “They have stolen Him away and we don’t know where they have put Him”, words true for most contemporary Australians. But worse, society’s degraded state of spiritual desiccation is now so far advanced that most don’t even know there has been a theft!
Early Christianity was a Movement that took on and conquered the all-powerful Roman Empire. Roman society was Pagan, largely amoral and pluralistic, everything the Christian world view was not, as well as being actively hostile to Christianity and Christians who were seen as ‘weird and depraved killjoys’. This hostility resulted in persecution, sometimes severe particularly in the reigns of Emperors Nero and Diocletian Nevertheless, by the early 4th century AD, Rome was, at least officially, a Christian Empire. So how did the Roman Empire go from being thoroughly pagan to Christianity becoming the state religion?
As kids growing up, one of the games we used to play was blowing Dandelion seeds from the Dandelion stalk and seeing how the wind took them. Great fun we thought but not Dad who had just dug half a dozen Dandelion weed plants out of his treasured lawn. However, that blowing in the wind game, where we do not know where the wind will take the seed or which will take root and grow, can I think act as a metaphor for how God transmits the gospel.
There seems to be a general ignorance of, or a deliberate unwillingness to accept, that the lamented loss of ‘Western values’ is the result of the decline of Christianity and the corresponding loss of the biblical moral operating system essential to the control of western democracy. Thus, and here is the key issue, the restoration of a biblically controlled democracy and the values flowing from it, requires the re-evangelization of Australia.
"C.T.'s life stands as some rugged Gibraltar — a sign to all succeeding generations that it is worthwhile to lose all this world can offer and stake everything on the world to come. (C.T.’s) life will be an eternal rebuke to easygoing Christianity. He has demonstrated what it means to follow Christ without counting the cost and without looking back.”
Essential to the nature of God is that He is Truth, that is a singular noun, not Truths. However, to use the words of Daniel, in our society ‘Truth has been cast down’ (Daniel 8:12). Indeed, the West is now largely a people ‘who suppress the truth by their wickedness’, and being that God is Truth, the retreat from one singular Truth, is a retreat from God himself.
Easter is a certainly is a time to laugh and dance with joy in what Jesus did for us, but it is also a time to weep Jesus’ tears for people like Jack, our family, friends, colleagues who have rejected Him.
To rebuild western civilization we need to go back to what made western civilization such a powerful force for good and prosperity and that is the Judeo-Christian world view. This is complex as many want the values without the Saviour.’
The Road to Heaven is Strewn with Missional Roadblocks
And he replied: “Go out into the darkness and put your hand in the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”
