Not a Trickle

As we watch our culture disintegrate, seemingly in fast forward, we must guard ourselves against the contortions of unbelief. Whatever is currently happening, unbelief is always able to turn that into an argument for remaining in unbelief.

Before the decay of our culture was well-advanced, unbelief was always able to say “it is not that bad,” and dismiss the prophetic seers in our midst as cranks and misfits. But now that the problem is obvious to pretty much everyone, the voice of unbelief is immediately at our elbow whispering that the situation is so bad as to be hopeless. Too hot, too cold, and never just right.

The gift of reformation and revival is not a matter of past trajectories. We worship and serve a God who declares things that are not as though they were. We serve a God who gives a promised child to an old woman, barren her whole life. We serve a God whose declared intention is to save the world. We serve a God who raises the dead.

Whenever something remarkable happens in history, after the fact any competent historian can demonstrate how inevitable it all seems to us now. But Monday morning quarterbacking, however penetrating it is, is not faith. Faith is what overcomes the world, John tells us, and not astute analysis after the fact.

And so we gather, but we do not want to gather in our unbelief. We do not assemble as a collection of people with a spiritual hobby. This is not the weekly meeting of our club. In Christ Jesus, we are the new humanity, together with all His people all over the globe, and nothing whatever can be done to stop the growth and expansion of this new humanity, until the earth is as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. His purpose in this is an inundation, not a trickle.