THE HOPE FOR A NEW REFORMATION
CHIUNE SUGIHARA WAS BORN in 1900 in Japan. His father wanted him to go to medical school, but Chiune deliberately failed his entrance exams so he could attend Waseda University and study English. He received Jesus as his Lord and Savior at an early age, and while at the university, he joined a Japanese Christian fraternity, Yuai Gakusha.
After mastering English, Chiune studied Russian and German. His proficiency in languages enabled him to work in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. While in his early twenties, he joined the Russian Orthodox Church and was baptized Pavlo Sergeivich Sugihara. The two Russian Christian names he took mean “Paul” and “Shepherd/Protector.”
During his early years in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chiune was stationed in Manchuria, a region of northern China under Japanese control. There he witnessed Japanese government officials brutally oppressing the Manchurians. Conscience-stricken over the abuses he had witnessed, Chiune resigned his post in protest.
In 1939, the Japanese government posted him at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania. In December of that year, a Lithuanian Jewish boy invited Chiune and his wife to a Hanukkah celebration. Another Hanukkah guest was a Jewish man who had just escaped from Poland. Through tears, the man told Chiune that his wife and children had been killed by the Nazi invasion and bombing raids.
Chiune knew that Hitler’s war was coming to Lithuania, and he was determined to help Lithuanian Jews escape by way of Japan. He asked his government for permission to issue transit visas so the Jews could escape to Japan. The Japanese government refused. So Chiune prayed for wisdom—then he told his wife, “I may have to disobey my government, but if I do not, I will be disobeying God. I know I should follow my conscience.” His wife agreed.
On July 31, 1940, Chiune put his plan into action. He began writing transit visas by hand at a rate of three hundred per day. He worked long hours, taking quick meals at his desk, writing as rapidly as he could. As word spread, Lithuanian Jews flocked to the consulate, pleading for visas.
On September 4, the Japanese government closed the consulate and ordered Chiune back to Japan. The night before he was to leave, he stayed up all night, writing visas. The next morning, he and his family boarded the train. A crowd of Lithuanian Jews surrounded the train. He handed out the visas he had written, saying, “Please forgive me. I cannot write any more.” But once on the train, he kept writing more visas and tossing them out the window.
No one knows how many people were saved by Chiune Sugihara’s act of obedience to God—and disobedience to his government. Estimates range from six thousand to ten thousand people.1
In 1985, the government of Israel awarded Chiune Sugihara its highest honor, naming him “Righteous among the Gentiles” for disobeying his government and saving so many Jewish lives. The following year, Chiune was called home by the Lord, where he received an even higher honor: “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21, 23). Chiune Sugihara was a man who obeyed God’s truth by disobeying his government.
As Chiune’s story shows us, there are times when obedience to God demands disobedience to the government. Righteous civil disobedience is the only disobedience that God approves.
I am grateful for the example of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who taught us how true biblical civil disobedience should be done. He never crossed the ethical line. He never used ungodly methods. He always stood firmly for justice and God’s truth. Even though he was felled by an assassin’s bullet, he achieved his goal of ending segregation in America.
Dr. King was inspired by a number of Christian writers, including Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, and Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Dr. King was a key figure in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began in December 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. Dr. King’s house was fire-bombed during the boycott, but he continued to preach love as the best weapon against hate.
In his last speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” delivered April 3, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. King said:
I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!
And so I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!2
The following evening, at about six o’clock, Dr. King was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of his hotel room. There is often a price to pay for following the example of our Lord.
Some people claim that churches should never speak out about political issues because of “separation of church and state.” Now, there’s not one line in the Constitution about “separation of church and state.” So where did that phrase come from?
President Thomas Jefferson coined the phrase “separation of church and state” in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut. The Danbury Baptists were concerned that they might lose their freedom of religion, concerned that the government might one day try to regulate, limit, or in some way interfere with their religious expression. Jefferson wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”3
The “wall of separation” President Jefferson referred to was never designed to prevent the church from influencing the government. Instead, it was intended to prevent the government from oppressing and silencing the church. Jefferson would be saddened (and probably infuriated) to see our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom used to deny religious freedom.
Like John Knox and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we must boldly declare that the state has no right to muzzle the church. In fact, one of the chief roles of the church is to hold the state accountable to God. The church wields the power of God’s truth—and God’s truth is much more powerful than man’s sword.
RIGHTEOUS CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
When the government violates any provision of the Constitution, we have a constitutional right and a biblical responsibility to speak out against those abuses and even to disobey the civil authorities. We see this principle again and again in the Scriptures.
When Pharaoh commanded two Hebrew midwives to kill male Hebrew babies, the midwives “feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live” (Exodus 1:17).
When the king of Jericho told Rahab the harlot to turn over the Hebrew spies, she refused—and she was commended in Scripture for her civil disobedience (Joshua 2; Hebrews 11:31).
King Saul once ordered that his own son Jonathan be put to death, but the soldiers refused the king’s order and spared Jonathan (1 Samuel 14:45).
In 1 Kings 18, a man named Obadiah, a palace administrator who was a devout believer in the Lord, hid a hundred of God’s prophets from the ungodly wrath of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel.
Peter and John, in the book of Acts, disobeyed both the corrupt religious authorities and the civil authorities who ordered them to stop preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. Threatened with violence and imprisonment, Peter and John refused to back down. They declared, “We must obey God rather than human beings!” (Acts 5:29).
The Scriptures are absolutely clear: We are commanded by God to obey the law and honor the civil authorities—unless and until those laws and authorities come into conflict with God’s law and God’s authority. There is a clear hierarchy of authority, and God’s authority is supreme over all others.
INTEGRITY IN THE SMALL THINGS
The Bible gives us many examples of how God’s people, who belong to the City of God, can stand firm against the hostility and injustice of the City of Man. A prime example is the prophet Daniel and his three friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Civil disobedience is a key theme of the book of Daniel. In Daniel 3, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to comply with King Nebuchadnezzar’s order to bow down to and worship his golden image. And in Daniel 6, Daniel defies the decree of King Darius requiring that prayers be made only to the king.
These four men belonged to the City of God—yet they were captives of the ultimate City of Man, Babylon itself. They faced tremendous pressure to conform. The government told them to obey—or die. The government told them that the king’s authority was final. The government told them to keep their mouths shut. The government told them to keep their religion to themselves. And the government told them to worship their narcissistic king.
Obey or die—that was the stark choice Daniel and his companions faced. Yet they believed that God was in control of history, and they refused to bow the knee to the idol of the king. So Daniel and his three friends were accused of crimes against the state. They were blamed for the ills of society, just as Christians are often blamed today. For a while, it appeared that God’s enemies had all the power and control.
Yet Daniel and his friends refused to surrender. They continued to trust God. They were called intolerant because they refused to approve and participate in evil and idolatry. Their captors gave them new, Babylonian names, hoping to convert them to the worship of the false Babylonian gods. But Daniel and his three friends—who were only teenagers at the time—refused to compromise. They might have pagan names, but they would continue to serve the one true God.
Not all of the issues Daniel and his friends faced were as obvious as blatant idolatry. Some of the pressures they faced from the Babylonian government were subtler. For example, in Daniel 1:8 we read, “But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way.” In other words, after considerable time in prayer and seeking God’s will, Daniel decided that God did not want him to defile himself with Babylon’s “royal junk food.”
Daniel could have said to himself, “I want to live for God in all the big issues. No idolatry for me! But why make a fuss over a petty little issue like food? The Babylonians eat this royal junk food, and they seem healthy enough. On the small matters, I’m going to go along to get along.”
But here’s the principle that Daniel lived by: Great victories are often won in small matters. If we maintain our integrity in the little things, then the big things will take care of themselves. If we never steal so much as a paper clip from the office, then we’ll never get caught embezzling a million dollars. If we refuse to tell even little white lies, then we’ll never go to prison for perjury. Because Daniel refused to compromise his integrity and faithful obedience to God on the smallest issues, he was prepared to stand his ground on the big issues as well.
THE CROSS OF JESUS CHRIST
These days, one of the issues many churches have begun compromising is the cross of Jesus Christ. One such church was Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, which changed its name to C3Exchange. When the church removed the forty-foot-tall steel cross and the name of Christ from the building, the minister explained, “Our community has been a really open-minded community for some years now. We’ve had a number of Muslim people, Jewish people, Buddhists, atheists…. The cross has become a negative symbol for a lot of people.”4
To all who understand its meaning, the cross of Jesus Christ is the greatest symbol of love the world has ever known. The banishment of that cross from so many churches demonstrates a lack of understanding of what the cross means to those who belong to the City of God. Where there is no cross, there is no good news being preached. As the pulpit goes, so goes the pew. And as the pew goes, so goes the civilization.
One of the ironies of this story is that, as often happens when a church seeks friendship with the world, it begins to die. After removing the cross and changing its name to C3Exchange, the church struggled to meet its mortgage payments. The church moved out and began holding services at a local community center.5
Believers from another church in town, Harvest Bible Chapel, valued that cross. They didn’t want to see that gleaming symbol of the Lord’s sacrifice end up on a scrap heap. So Harvest Bible Chapel moved into the property and reinstalled the cross in time for the Good Friday 2013 service.
The removal of a cross may seem to be a small matter. But we have to ask ourselves—why are so many people in our culture, and in the church, offended by the cross? At its very core, the reason people in our Western civilization hate the cross is the same ultimate reason that the barbarian terrorists hate the cross: This is a spiritual battle. There are powerful spiritual, evil forces that want to suppress the cross of Jesus Christ because it is God’s only answer to sin.
We must always raise the cross high—not in a spirit of self-righteousness, but in a spirit of humility. We have no power to save ourselves—we are saved by the cross of Christ alone.
The City of Man is hostile to us and hostile to our gospel. That’s why Jesus says that we need to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, bless those who curse us, and pray for those who mistreat us (Luke 6:27–28). We must always speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15). Above all, we lift high the cross of Jesus Christ, because—as the apostle Paul reminds us—“the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).
Lift high the cross, my beloved friend. Lift high the cross!
TIME FOR A NEW REFORMATION
Western civilization is the product of the Reformation. The Reformers threw open the windows of God’s light after a thousand years of spiritual and cultural darkness. Today, as the barbarians are again infiltrating our civilization, as the church drifts into error, ignorance, and apostasy, the time has come for a New Reformation.
What would that New Reformation look like?
It would call men and women in the church to repent of all the things they have added to the gospel—or have taken away from the gospel. It would call them to preach God’s truth out of pure motives, instead of from a lust for wealth or fame. It would call them to put away the false teaching and idols of the Prosperity Gospel, the Social Gospel, the Emerging Church, and all the other distortions and perversions of the good news of Jesus Christ.
A New Reformation would expose the lies that have blinded so many professing Christians in our time. A New Reformation would awaken our Western civilization from the false hope that we can bargain with the barbarians or persuade them to turn from their way of destruction. A New Reformation would be rooted in realism, not wishful thinking, and it would recognize that those who seek to destroy our civilization and our faith will never abandon their quest. Only the good news of Jesus Christ can melt a barbarian heart.
A New Reformation would stand in opposition not only to political Islam but would also stand in opposition to the City of Man—our secular Western society, drunk on wealth, power, sexual immorality, and drugs. Much of the Islamists’ hatred of Western civilization is rooted in a mistaken belief that all of the ills of secular society are somehow caused and condoned by the church.
A New Reformation would draw a clear distinction between the City of God and the City of Man. A New Reformation would show the world the face of authentic biblical Christianity—a Christianity that preaches the good news of Jesus Christ without compromise, that demonstrates truth and love in perfect balance, and that cares about people in need but refuses to back down from the truth in the face of threats and terrorism.
A New Reformation is the only hope Western civilization has to reverse its present course of destruction. The God of the New Reformation is the God of mercy and grace. He is the God who hung on a cross to redeem humanity, the God who rose again to prove His divine power.
Today, with arms open wide, the Lord Jesus calls to the world, to all people of East and West, to everyone living in the City of Man, “Repent and come to Me. Come live forever in the City of God. This world is heading for destruction, but I have made a way of escape for you—a way of salvation.”
Come, Lord Jesus!