Thursday, May 21, 2015

God's Mysterious Ways

May 21, 2015

St. Paul said, "Who has known the mind of the Lord; who has been his counselor?" (Romans 11:34), echoing Isaiah who spoke hundreds of years earlier, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts" (55:9). Sometimes, those ways are so obtuse that we cannot even begin to see through the mist. The early church father Tertullian wrote that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," but I have often wondered if so much of that blood is necessary. American Christians often think of the Age of Martyrdom as having peaked during the persecution of the church under the early Roman emperors Nero and Diocletian, but more Christians have been killed for their faith in the twentieth century than in the preceding nineteen centuries combined. And if the present trends hold steady, those numbers are only going to increase in the twenty-first century.

The faith and faithfulness of God's people in places like North Korea, China, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa is not generally known. Our secular press rarely reports on such things unless Christians (rarely) happen to be the perpetrators. But the stories trickle out, and horrific they often are. And yet, there are those times when events suddenly take a turn that gives God's people breathing room. I learned of one of those events tonight.

Anyone who was around in the '70's remembers the name of Idi Amin, the military dictator who aided by Libya's Moammar Khadafi, brutally ruled Uganda, using torture, extortion, and murder to maintain control for eight years. The Christian population suffered severely during his reign, and the entire Western world uttered a sigh of relief when he was finally deposed and exiled in 1979. The underground church grew strong during those years, and once he was gone, it exploded with numerical growth.

Tonight, Park church hosted a presentation from AMG International, a mission organization with a significant presence in Uganda. One of our young adults has worked with them for over two years, and our granddaughter Alexandria plans to spend the summer working for the mission. At the close of the presentation, Reuben, the presenter, asked for questions, whereupon one woman asked what danger the spread of Islam has posed to Christians there. Reuben responded that the danger was very real at one time, there being a very influential man who was determined to build a mosque in every place there was a church. The danger is past, Reuben said, because that man is no longer here. His name was Moammar Khadafi.

I am sure that our government's targeting of him had little to do with his determination to build mosques in Uganda, and to whatever extent his demise has stirred things up across the Middle East, it has settled things down in Uganda. As I said at the beginning, I don't pretend to understand the ways of the Lord, but I am grateful tonight that these people who struggled for years under Amin, and are still suffering the devastating social consequences of the AIDS epidemic that has orphaned hundreds of thousands of children, are not tonight having to face the added weight of militant Islam.

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