Pray for His purpose or we can waste a life (from a Perspectives testimony). I also read this today in Joy Loewen’s thoughtful book, Woman to Woman, Sharing Jesus with a Muslim Friend, “Freedom and healing are the twin ministries of the Holy Spirit”. Purpose, freedom, and healing can only be accomplished/completed by belief in Jesus. That is what went wrong in Germany and what is wrong with our warring world today. Dietrich continues, in ETHICS, pages 100-109. He writes about bourgeoisie that is inseparable with reason. His meaning describes people who repeat the phrase, “Jesus is God” without understanding its true meaning. He believed that the poor worker’s statement “Jesus is a good man” had more meaning than the bourgeois’s statement. I would ask where the discipleship in the church was and who was teaching the everyman. Was there the snobbery about who might grasp this simple truth? His example is the revolutionary concept of nation for that time. “It sided with the people against the government, with becoming against being, and with the organic against the institutional. It was thought from below, in opposition to thought from above”. He compares Prussia, in the NE portion of Germany, “No political unit has ever been more alien and indeed hostile to nationalism when was Prussia”. I have not studied the history of these few years surrounding WWII. My Dad was in a control tower near London directing planes. That is the history I am close to. I do know that the Soviet Union remained neutral with Nazi Germany until attacked in June 1941. Dietrich lists technology, people movements, and nationalism as the three contributions to the revolution and war. He thought the masses and nationalism to be hostile to reason. Another result of the French Revolution was a western godlessness and a religion of hostility to God. I wonder if we have ever recovered? This distance from God is how man destroys himself. “It is the protest against pious godlessness in so far as this has corrupted the Churches….God would rather hear the curses of the ungodly than the alleluia of the pious”. While America is the real west, He writes about our Constitution that, “American historians can say that the federal constitution was written by men who were conscious of original sin and of the wickedness of the human heart”. He thought Christians had the only base for democracy….it is a western (again, meaning Western Europe) void, a rebellious and outrageous void, and one which is the enemy of both God and man…The burden of yesterday is shaken off by glorifying the misty past, and tomorrow’s task is evaded by speaking rather of the coming millennium…With the loss of past and future, life fluctuates between the most bestial enjoyment of the moment and an adventurous game of chance”. He says about being under surveillance, “And even the tacit confidence in one’s fellow-man, which rests on the certainty of permanence and constancy, is now superseded by suspicion and an hour-to-hour watch on one’s neighbour”. He is discussing the genuine decay around him but let me close with this observation. 2 Thes 2:7, “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way”. The place where the miracle of God is proclaimed is the Church and the two things that still have the power to avert the final plunge into the void is faith and force which the Bible calls the ‘restrainer’.
