Pastor,
I woke up around 3:30 this morning with a head full of thoughts that I am trying to connect, so I decided I would share them with you, since you like to think. You must feel free to comment as you feel led, I have not written anything in several years and have no idea why this popped up. I don’t even have a title for it.
Perplexing Issues:
The core of this whole jumble seems to be that life defies time, logic and reason. We should keep building (including the USA) but there is an overriding law or laws that prevent what is logical from bearing fruit. Change does not happen the way it seems to us that it should, or Rome would still be master of the world. Yet it may be, but I will get to that later.
The chief agent that works to stop a logical progression and turn things in a different direction is death. Empires die, ideas die or get mangled, and we die. Yet through all this death and illogical change, some things that stand out in Genesis give us proof that there is indeed a thread connecting all of life, and it is this thread that gives us any continuity at all. Why is there still an Egypt? Or, on a minimal scale, from empire down to city, a Rome? The Bible has a place for all these, one the world doesn’t want to acknowledge, because the continuities that avoid death by themselves becoming part of the process of change call for design, and design demands a Designer.
Reason and logic would call for a continuity on which the world would build in a coherent fashion. Yet in every instance, a form of death disrupts the logical progression of that time, and brings in another plan that calls for an adjustment of “logic and reason” so that it is never brought to any completion. Or it doesn’t seem to be. If we look again and think more carefully, it is an overriding plan that stays intact, and the changes are part of a continual struggle between what we can call the Designer Plan, and its foe, the Enemy Plan.
The Bible, in the letter to the Hebrews, recognizes that even the greatest of the Levitical priests could not continue by reason of death. So it was also with the greatest of the prophets. So it is with men, likewise with things, institutions, and governments. Since change overrides our desire to attain and retain, Conservatives are fighting against the leviathan of incessant change, and the desire for change is erroneously confused with true progress by Progressives (or Liberals). This accounts for the outcome of elections, where the winner is change, not retention of that which is satisfactory and on which one can build (but never keep). It is not the candidate who wins, but the issue of change. But we must get back to our road to Rome.
Before Rome there was Greece, a rather intellectual culture on which it seems reasonable that a world in which continuity prevailed could have continued indefinitely to build, but it didn’t. Oddly, Greece is still a nation, while the status of earthly Rome is that of a city. But the existence of Greece appears not to be affecting the world as did ancient Greece. However, it is entirely possible that such a Greece, already glorifying man with its great art, advanced medicine for its day (including what it borrowed from the Assyrians), and involvement of religion in man’s life, would not have become involved with the Jews’ controversy with Christ.
It is precisely the appearance, life, death and resurrection of Christ that provided the one victory that is essential to the never-ending Kingdom that has eluded man since he began to multiply on the earth, carrying the most dreaded evils known on earth in his genes. When did Christ come? “In the fullness of time” is how the Bible describes it. What did He do? It appears He irritated his contemporaries to the point of getting Himself killed on a Roman execution cross. That is what the historians see, if they consider Him at all.
What the historians and not enough Christians see is that He ended the reign of death, the agent of disruption and all the world’s ills. We do not see the culmination of His work yet, but it is there. It is there at the fullness of time. That is rather a puzzling term to those who wonder, “then why do things go on as they always have?” Because we can make no more than technological changes in our way of life. And who appeared to rule the world in the fullness of time? Rome, which this thesis asserts was and is, the last empire.
Historians and Bible teachers inform us that Constantine had a vision in which the words were given to him, “In hoc signo vinces.” (By this sign you will conquer.) Whether the Roman emperor was ever really Christian or desperate enough to believe anything he deemed supernatural is immaterial. The message is for the world, or rather, that part of the world and every generation from that point on that believes in Christ. Rome, dying as a political empire, would spread over the earth in the form of the Church. It is significant that through the next fifteen centuries, Christians would see the continuity of the church seated at Byzantium or Constantinople, and then Rome. The Scriptures were hidden away in remote monasteries, early church history has been preserved to some extent in various elegant shrines of interest (even if not entirely accurate as to location) and a roster of members numbering in the billions, even if only nominal.
Fifteen hundred years is a long time when measured by the subjective lifespan and work of man, and during that period, the Church maintained varying degrees of power and control. The Roman empire had changed from a center of world military and political power to the visible seat of the Church … a temporary political position gave way to a more enduring spiritual leadership, the outward appearances of which are very active today.
Luther, meaning to clean house, seemed to Rome to be challenging its political and spiritual authority, but rather than being executed, Luther and others participated in the spread of the knowledge of the Bible (although disagreeing with one another on many issues) and largely lived out their lifespans, leaving in their wake a number of church groups who all express an affinity with Christ and His mystical body, the Church or Bride of Christ. Such may have been a surprise to the world, or that portion of it that cares, but not to the Lord. He knows no surprises.
At the end of Hebrews 2:14 is a short phrase that sums up the mission of the Christ: “that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.”
The import of that phrase reaches far beyond the sadness at losing mother or children. It reaches into the very heart of the Godhead and all that God is, being “the way, the truth, and the life.” Whether the death of grandma or the death of an empire, it is death that ultimately destroys men and empires, generations and ideas, and challenges the very authority of God to rule His creation.
Christ’s death destroyed Satan’s power over death, but it is the Resurrection that produced eternal life for man and God’s Eternal City (not Rome): the New Jerusalem.
What is playing out now is the final battle of a defeated enemy, to take with him to Hell all that he can of what God has created. Thus Rome, not the British empire or the “American empire” which is rapidly going the way of all other such pretenders to world power, is still the last — and remaining — world empire because it has outlived all others.
Taking a spiritual view of history puts the pieces in order, so that we are able to understand why logic and reason, coupled with or pitted against one another, do not work as they might. While we as the world’s present generation, coming and going with births and deaths, seek various scientific powers to make logic and reason work as we want them to do, a spiritual view reveals quickly why they don’t, never have, and never will. Our logic and reason are operating in our material world and under our faulty direction.
Logic and reason work very well indeed, but under the eternal and omniscient control of God. So it is also with faith. Faith appears to have produced little more than various religions that war with one another, until inquiring minds approach the God who created it all, revealed enough to give us confidence, and unraveled for us the deepest mysteries of which we are capable of considering.
To God be the glory.
Written April 27, 2009, © By Dorothy Anne Seese
PUBLISHERS NOTE: One month after the Federal Observer commenced publication in July of 2001, we were privileged to begin carrying the works of one of the most prolific and talented writers in America, Dorothy Anne Seese. Dorothy passed away a while back and her wisdom is sorely missed. What you are about to read, Is a letter written to her Pastor. (J. B.)