By Kerwin Holmes, Jr.

If the joy of the LORD is our strength, then it is safe to say that in much of the Church in the West we have been most depraved and depressed and debilitated before these trials ever began.

It can be stated that much of the passing months has been spent with political posses and pundits firing scatter shot across the bow of many nations across the world, trying to hit something in order to make an exclamation of jubilee from being “effective.” Surely, cries of “I got him! I got him!” can be heard routinely on the airwaves as we lurch forward into each new crisis and each new outrage to obstruct our vision of our ship’s wayward course. Of course, these pundits insist that we are all in this same storm together as they fire scatter-brained across the ships of our nations– and we applaud them when they hit someone on our opposing side. But it is strange how they never run out of ammo, much like they also never run out of paychecks while many of us do. One meme remarked early on that though we may be in the same storm of the current panic, we are not all in the same ship. Well, to some extent that is true. But reality of the fact has also shown that to not be the case when it comes to the general welfare of our nations. We are very much in the same ships. And there is much friendly-fire and not-so-friendly-fire going on. Some of our ships are set to sink, and it won’t be from a foreign attack. Gideon’s horn has sounded– but we are not at all in that elite company of 300 warriors.

Still, while the panic rises to terminal velocity of peak stupidity, let us be aware that we are now being told to wear face shields and goggles lest we catch any disease in the known world, where just months prior we were told masks were ineffective. A mere year ago such a thing would be largely and rightly considered obsessive-compulsive. After all, we do no such thing with AIDS or tuberculosis– or even the seasonal flu which annually kills tens of thousands. Many of us do not even change our diets from the threat of death from diabetes in the United States– which annually kills hundreds of thousands. But let one lone sickness with an about *93% survival rate thus far for those who contract the disease, not even adjusting for age and comorbidities (or recording errors) and merely dividing the total number of recorded deaths by the recorded recovered cases (data sources are once again posted here and here), disturb our peace– right in the midst of a very opportune election cycle after four years of Capitol Hill corruption and intrigue– and we now are hunkered down…macing one another…shooting at one another…and wishing death upon one another…all for that ever elusive call to “love our neighbor.” There are multiple instances for two of those situations where similar things have occurred over the past couple of months across the USA.

And, well, can you feel the love tonight?

For several months, the tragic death of a man named George Floyd has caused a ripple of many political movements, and with those have come some blessings, one of the greatest, in my opinion, being the exposure of the Marxist roots of the Black Lives Matter movement. I have long known about those roots, and that is in part why I have written in contrast to and in direct opposition toward the agenda of that movement, and even in part that slogan, which is strategically tied to the movement in a bait-and-switch motion. But, sometimes people need to hear from the horses the sound of neighing. And even now, some people apparently need a National Geographic documentary to come in tow. Still, such an event has exposed the lock-downs as political beasts rather than medical ones. The promised and agreed upon two weeks of lock-downs have now nearly become half a year.

Be that as it may, you may get the sense that from the tone of this post, there has been a lot on my mind about recent events, and that some of it is a bit sharp to the touch. That would be accurate. Yet, I have already written a bit on the current situation with posts that still stand the test of these months of time, and may very well last as reminders long after this season is passed (I won’t repeat myself here). I have written on the Christian tendency to kowtow to anyone with social capital not willing to let Christians be seen under favorable circumstances…aka…Christians being fearful of not appearing to be nice. I have also written about the Christian leadership’s tendency, particularly in what is known as “Big Eva” or the massive evangelical corporate relationship bubble, to be hypocritical and ineffectively indecisive on championing God’s Word unto death…even social death. The god of comfort whom they worship is very different from the God testified in 2 Corinthians 1:3.

I would waste too much time rehashing those things now. Just know that in the face of government once again intruding upon the worship of the Church, this time in the state of California, elders of several churches and even elders from a well-known Reformed congregation have finally seemed to have realized that Christ reigns on a throne that does not exist in another dimension or reality. The same evangelical voice that compared such persons to Arians earlier has very quickly cautioned others from falling into the same trap as these Christians– for the love of God and neighbor, of course. He even mentions capital (as in social capital) in that piece. How nice of him to do so.

I know immediately that many Christians will decry my saying these statements in this manner, as if they and their elders are not faithfully proclaiming Christ to society at large by deciding to not sing in worship and to not meet while mobs of protesters and rioters do whatever they wish to public buildings, historical markers, and private stores (and even as sometimes Church congregations join them). I wish to respond by observation rather than by condemnation, and I believe that I have waited long enough to have observed some things with a degree of sobriety.

What I am about to say I in no part and by no means address to those who are most at risk and vulnerable to the present virus from Wuhan. I have already stated that it is prudent and even Biblical to shield those persons from exposure, and even to quarantine individuals with the virus from those who are most mortally vulnerable to this disease.

Now, allow me to be frank:

In Louisville, Kentucky, yes, the same city where the mad mayor prohibited the celebration of Easter/Pascha despite the modifications and safety measures being taken (Easter/Pascha is the annual celebration where the Church rejoices in the joy of the LORD in the Messiah’s victory over death, sin, the grave, sicknesses, and all that has beleaguered humanity in this fallen world), there is a Seminary that has required all of its returning students to surrender to any and all edicts coming from both the government and the university in the name of Jesus. This would include the prior ban on Easter/Pascha and anything coming down the pipe in the foreseeable future.

All of this comes when just recently the overtly politically-partisan funeral service for Rep. John Lewis, a man who admirably marched for his “God-given” rights of liberty in his earlier years but who also morbidly trampled upon the God-given rights of the unborn for most of his political life and who did a rather useless sit-in on Capitol Hill to take away the God-given rights of the masses to defend their lives and livelihood with firearms (as the US Constitution states), featured an astonishingly blasphemous message that John Lewis took upon his own body the sins of the USA to the point of even bearing our iniquities so that by his stripes we are healed.

…Nevertheless, in order to obey God we must love our neighbor and not assemble in religious buildings…as those blasphemers did at this man’s funeral.

Ah, now I am sure that the Lord in His grace was pleased to see His people not celebrate His resurrection from the grave after being cruelly murdered, nor His ascension 40 days later, because of how legitimately terrified we all were from dying from a disease. Yes, yes. Jesus Messiah of God, we know how much You have conquered death for us and saved us by Your miraculous power, and even granted us by Your law to the Ancient Israelites wise quarantining measures, and even healed by Your own hand those languishing with pains and anguishes of sickness, showing by Your triumphant rising from the depths of the Earth that we are to live forever with You in bliss, and how You have called upon us to give thanks to You always and as often as we assemble, giving a testimony of remembrance by the Eucharist of Your death in the body and blood symbolized/imaged by the bread and wine of communion…but this sickness is serious business. It comes from China, and they are known for producing quality products.

Does this seem harsh? Will it seem harsher if I remind you that your faithful forebears in the Church’s past went to the grave assembling in secret even at the graves of the martyrs only to be betrayed by interlopers who spied on them, and to be sent to Roman executions by the State? Would it disturb you to tell you that faithful Christians did worship processions in public in Persia even as those authorities sent soldiers to cut them down? Should I remind you that in the millennia of plagues that the Church worldwide has faced, the believers treated the worship of God as sacrosanct, even to the point of carrying the bread and wine of the Eucharist to the bed-ridden and sickly?

Should I have to tell you that if you cower so well before the advance of a mostly benign virus (again, so far, *93% survival rate), you should not expect to bear your chest with such conviction to the bayonet point or the bullet of an anti-Christian State’s army of oppressors?

You may say that I am harsh. You may say that I am not being nice. Well, we now know from the Messiah’s own example that such an accusation needs to be routinely qualified to be some actual sin, which neither of those things inherently are. I will disagree with those accusations while making one concession: what I am being is being frank.

The principal argument made against a position like mine is that the Church in the United States has not yet reached a point of persecution and singled out oppression like is happening to the Church under the CCP in China (well, the Uighurs are likewise being persecuted, so perhaps the “singled-out” part needs to be qualified as well?). My response to such a ludicrous statement is simple:
Do you wish to wait until that happens when your own government by contract and the highest law of the land, the US Constitution, grants you the ability to resist these unjust decrees? Would you rather stay in the pot until it is boiling and then cry “Ouch!” once it does? Should we wait until all of the civil liberties for which we are civically responsible to safeguard, even as we protest and demand change for many who only have truly been able to fully enjoy those things for about 60 years, be stripped from us before we protest? Do you wait until your nation’s leaders put you on the cross before you proclaim the Gospel against their national sins? Well…if you do that, you most likely won’t need the cross.

Be wise as serpents, yes, and as innocent as doves, yes. But it is a Hell of a lot harder to be so innocent when there are laws in your nation’s Constitution forbidding you to freely and peacefully assemble and worship God than it is now when those laws are not yet written therein.
Keep that in mind.

We as the Church need to rediscover who we are and who our King is and what He does in this world– in His world.

Many of us are waking up to the present reality and the ways that we, as the Church, have largely failed to respond to the Gospel’s call socially (yet again even in the midst of these calls for “social justice” so-called), and how we have spurned the commandments of our LORD. And many of us are tempted to weep and mourn now as we read over again the Scriptures and read the times and see how we have stumbled and erred. But now is not a time for weeping and mourning. Now is a time, as in the times of Nehemiah, to repent and to rejoice that the Spirit is making us rightfully gaze again upon the glory of the Son and render to the Father what is His alone. Repair the breach. Proclaim the law of God. Love God. Love people. This day is holy as it is, now.

The joy of the LORD is our strength.

We had best get to His work, then.

[*Edited on August 2, 2020. An earlier version stated that the survival rate was 99.9%. The actual numbers will remain tricky to determine due to errors and incomplete data. See an LA Times article on that here and an epidemiologist statistician’s point of view here.]

[Addendum, November 18, 2020. It does turn out that my original description of the survival rate was not far off at all. And given that the survival rate by any measure does not justify the outrageous lengths of government and social engineering enacted and promoted for this disease, I counsel all who would read this to consider their options of appropriate protest and refusal even if they are not willing to act in such a way now.]