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I’m now sitting in the chapel of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School among several hundred church planters. I see these men and women as courageous warriors. They are the ecclesial gladiators who enter the coliseum with a pocket size Bible to fight the spiritual powers of the world.

Let me give you an example. Michael Card is a popular Christian musician and writer, known for his theologically informed lyrics. Card recounts the story of a Masai warrior who demonstrated inspiring faith and courage in his quest to see his own people come to Christ. His name is simply Joseph, the man who stepped into the public square and changed his community through the word of Christ. Joseph exercised the kind of courage and faith that church planters need. Actually, all of us who follow Christ need it. Following is his story:

“One day Joseph, who was walking along one of these hot, dirty African roads, met someone who shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with him. Then and there he accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior. The power of the Spirit began transforming his life; he was filled with such excitement and joy that the first thing he wanted to do was return to his own village and share that same Good News with the members of his local tribe.

Joseph began going from door-to-door, telling everyone he met about the Cross of Jesus and the salvation it offered, expecting to see their faces light up the way his had. To his amazement the villagers not only didn’t care, they became violent. The men of the village seized him and held him to the ground while the women beat him with strands of barbed wire. He was dragged from the village and left to die alone in the bush.

Joseph somehow managed to crawl to a waterhole, and there, after days of passing in and out of consciousness, found the strength to get up. He wondered about the hostile reception he had received from people he had known all his life. He decided he must have left something out or told the story of Jesus incorrectly. After rehearsing the message he had first heard, he decided to go back and share his faith once more.

Joseph limped into the circle of huts and began to proclaim Jesus. “He died for you, so that you might find forgiveness and come to know the living God,” he pleaded. Again he was grabbed by the men of the village and held while the women beat him, reopening wounds that had just begun to heal. Once more they dragged him unconscious from the village and left him to die.

To have survived the first beating was truly remarkable. To live through the second was a miracle. Again, days later, Joseph awoke in the wilderness, bruised, scarred—and determined to go back.

He returned to the small village and this time, they attacked him before he had a chance to open his mouth. As they flogged him for the third and probably the last time, he again spoke to them of Jesus Christ, the Lord. Before he passed out, the last thing he saw was that the women who were beating him began to weep.

This time he awoke in his own bed. The ones who had so severely beaten him were now trying to save his life and nurse him back to health. The entire village had come to Christ.”1

Footnotes:

1 Michael Card, “Wounded in the House of a Friend,” Virtue (March/April, 1991), quoted in John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad! (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 93-94.

This week I enjoyed sauntering through Barnes and Noble with a freshly poured latte in hand. Something about the wafting aroma of espresso in between consecutive rows of newly printed books fuels the imagination. After thumbing through a few titles, a particular sign caught my attention which read “Belief in God.” Beneath the sign were several popular books such as Christopher Hitchens’ god is not Great, The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins and other works from notable atheists.

I turned to the nice old man who was just a few steps away at the info counter and suggested that the sign was incorrect. After he flashed a look of concern, I let a momentary pause hang in the air before I relieved his distress by proposing a new title. “It should actually read ‘Unbelief in God’ based upon the books which you feature.” He responded with agreement, but was insufficiently motivated to do anything about it.

This little incident got me thinking about the way atheists argue against God’s existence and how the Church can appropriately respond. In addition to speaking from sound theological and philosophical reason, we can benefit from listening to key thinkers in the scientific world. As you might expect, an important voice in this conversation is the late Albert Einstein.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was the most significant physicist since Sir Isaac Newton. In the seventeenth century Newton effectively launched classical physics, inventing calculus along the way as the language to describe his discoveries. Einstein’s great achievement was that he succeeded in describing reality at certain boundary conditions where classical physics broke down—really fast objects and extremely small or large objects. In so doing, he established two foundational pillars of modern physics—general relativity and quantum mechanics. Einstein’s discoveries resulted in such practical innovations as nuclear power and the Hubble Space Telescope. Einstein is often remembered for his celebrity-like status and womanizing, but one of his lesser-known qualities was that, unlike so many popular scientists today, he was a theist. Einstein’s religion did not include a personal God, but he nevertheless stood humbly in awe at the elegant order of the universe. When asked by an interviewer if he was an atheist, the famed scientist responded:

I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.1

Footnotes:

1 First published as “What Life Means to Einstein,” Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929. Quoted in Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 386.

Opposition, if it is intense and sustained enough, can sap people’s resolve and make their goals seem less important than perhaps they thought in the heady beginning. To say the least, no movement in history has managed to thrive through 2000 years of protracted persecution, save one—the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Since their inception, the people of God have suffered physical torture, intellectual ridicule, and social ostracism, yet they have never ceased to strive and grow. It leads to the question: What has infused the Church with such an inextinguishable tenacity? One incomparable promise from their Master, that’s what!

After warning His disciples against spending their lives solely in a chase after worldly goods, Jesus tells them what they ought to prioritize. “Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you,” (v. 31). Pursue God’s rule in the world, honor His name, obey His Word, and proclaim His gospel. It would not be an easy task. The world would rage against them, hate them, and even seek to kill them, but Christ tells His disciples, “Fear not.” The Father is committed, willing, and even pleased to finally give them the kingdom. The Lord’s address, “little flock,” reflects the tenderness with which God cared for His people throughout biblical history. The Old Testament speaks often of God the Shepherd caring for His sheep, both with gentleness and with a mighty, ruling arm to dispense reward and recompense (see Isa. 40:10-11; also Ps. 23:1; 28:9; 74:1; 77:20; Jer. 13:17; Zech. 11:11; 13:7). Jesus’ words must have been enormously comforting to the disciples, for they would have known their Shepherd could never fail to deliver what He had promised.

The earliest followers of Christ were in a precarious position. A tiny minority in a hostile pagan culture, they were reviled because of their allegiance to Jesus Christ. Arrested and jailed, hauled before godless kings and governors, hated, ridiculed, and even killed, the Church would not rest until her Lord returned. Two thousand years later, the Lord has not returned, and believers are still in a precarious position. The Church in the West is pilloried in the media, ostracized in the academy, and generally dismissed by the cultural elite. In other parts of the world, Christians are still imprisoned, beaten, tortured, and even killed for their faith. Even so, there is one truth which infuses the battered Church with hope: if the world’s hostility has not changed, then neither has the Father’s promise. Through mockery and derision, insult, slander, and even death, the Father is still pleased to give His people the kingdom.

Many Christians listen every night to the evening news and see a near hopeless situation. The culture seems bent on careening into every evil it can devise. Abortion is entrenched, homosexuality is all but mainstream, greed, lust, and avarice run unrestrained, and neither reason nor law seem capable of stemming the tide. In such a dark day, we must raise our voices to hearten one another with the promise of final victory. If there is any sure promise in Scripture, it is that the Lord will one day return to establish His glorious reign, and His people will sit and rule at His side. Christ’s Church may be a “little flock,” but we have the King of Kings and Lord or Lords as our Shepherd!