I’ve mentioned Richard Wurmbrand before on this blog. However, there’s something in his story that doesn’t get much attention these days. Let me approach it from a different direction.
First, we need to deal with the high probability that historical accounts of Christian persecution are often inflated. It’s the same bogus tendency to “gild the lily” in accounts of Jesus’ life, His crucifixion in particular. There’s a ton of nonsense in Christian mythology. Thus, many of the most popular accounts of early persecution are highly embellished. There was persecution, but we have to wade through a lot of nonsense about it.
Second, most persecution was political in nature, not a direct hatred for Christian faith. That’s still true today. The vast majority of hassles we face today are scattershot aimed at everyone who dissents from the globalist or Zionist agenda. They aren’t picking out genuine faith in the crowd.
By contrast, John’s Revelation refers to a very purposeful and direct opposition to that genuine faith in Christ. What we are facing today is simply the incremental loss of social and political convenience for mainstream Christian religion. The very real persecution Christians faced in the First Century was significantly different.
What Wurmbrand and his kind faced was a genuine anti-faith persecution. However, we must note that the communist ideologues made no distinction between various theologies and church traditions. It was a blunt hatred for religion itself. Thus, in his books, Wurmbrand tracks the abuse dished out to a wide variety of Christian expressions, some we would flatly disown as any kind of biblical faith.
Which brings me back to a point I’ve tried to make in the past: It’s more important to have boundaries than where they are. Nothing says you are obliged to call someone “family” whose doctrine is way out in the field, but there is a very real practical reason for helping them when tribulation starts taking a bite out of our witness. Whatever measures there are that helps them helps us, as well. We need to pray and consider carefully what constitutes harmless cooperation with allies versus what kind of cooperation is compromise with evil. Most believers with whom I discuss this are either wide open, or tightly closed up. There’s darned little in between.
Also, contexts can change, and so might the things you’ll compromise on now versus then.
But the basic principle here is that we need to know where our boundaries are, and where they should be. There’s nothing we can do about how God chooses to bless and prosper someone with a different doctrine. Give Him glory and don’t waste time and resources carping about it. We have way too many church folks playing the game of ignoring the whole discussion of what constitutes a contextual ally. For them, everyone is either family or enemy. That is not biblical. The Exodus saw a significant number of non-Israeli folks making the trip with them, and even aiding some in the Conquest.
If the real enemy — Satan and his allies in God’s courts — doesn’t differentiate between who is close covenant family, then it’s just about pointless that we should. The real issue is not that we are fighting human agents, but that we are resisting that transcendent enemy force. For Radix Fidem and friends, we need to keep track of what they are doing. Whatever problems we have, it’s the work of those higher spirit beings. There is no way we can avoid having tight consistent boundaries for our faith and religion, but that is not the issue when it comes to the broader threat from human lackeys of that enemy.
We do not restrain the hand of God, nor His plans. We are fortunate indeed to be included. Know what you believe, and stay with it. But that’s your weapon against spiritual forces. Don’t use it as a weapon against the hapless idiots whom the Devil and his friends are using. God Himself warned that there will always be folks who won’t see things the way we do, and He still loves and cares for them. We need strong habits of discerning faith itself, so that we are being kind to His people regardless of the packaging. That in itself is part of our warfare against Darkness.
