Let’s Not Go There

“Don’t call everything a conspiracy, like they do, and don’t live in dread of what frightens them. Make the
LORD of Heaven’s Armies holy in your life. He is the one you should fear. He is the one who should make
you tremble…
Look to God’s instructions and teachings! People who contradict his word are completely in the dark.
They will go from one place to another, weary and hungry. And because they are hungry, they will rage
and curse their king and their God. They will look up to heaven and down at the earth, but wherever they
look, there will be trouble and anguish and dark despair. They will be thrown out into the darkness.
Isaiah 8:12-13; 20-22 NLT
In 1932 and 1933 the German Protestant Church was deeply troubled. It was
troubled by the moral decadence that had seemed to snowball in a postwar
Germany which had all its illusions about the meaning of life destroyed. It was also
troubled by the rise of Communism with its avowedly atheistic standpoint. Along
with all of this, the church’s influence in the society seemed to be dropping
precipitately. It is little wonder that they felt very much under attack.
So what did the German Protestants do? They looked to governmental politics to
solve their problems. A charismatic politician promised to restore traditional moral
standards and to destroy Communism. So the church most literally “sold its soul to
the Devil,” agreeing to approve anything he wanted since he was their man.
Unfortunately, that man turned out to be no friend of God, or of his Church. The
tragedy was that those facts had been quite evident before 1932 to anyone who
would take the time to look below the surface.
It is no part of my point here to tell you for whom to vote in the next presidential
election. I only want to say that as we American Christians, nearly 100 years later,
face similar challenges, let us for heaven’s sake not believe that any politician is
going to solve our problems for us. As Isaiah said 2700 years ago, “Look to God’s
instructions and teaching.” NO politician, right, left, or center, can save us from
ourselves. Unless the Church of Jesus Christ is reformed from within, no politician
can correct our faults from without. Caesar cannot save us,