Tuesday, 29 July, 2014

Tuesday, 29 July, 2014

Judges 2:1-5, 11-23    
William Wilberforce, Social Reformer 

Reading the book of Judges can be very depressing.  It recites much conflict, violence, and war, even civil war.  It tells of temptations to evil and unfaithfulness to God, wandering away from the truth into the worship of idols, misguided actions, political assassinations, and even human sacrifice.  Nowhere else does the Bible portray ancient Israel as so rebellious against God and so desirous of becoming like their idolatrous pagan neighbours.

Yet, through all this perversity, there are glimpses of God’s everlasting love and faithfulness, which never change.  In Judges 2:1-2 God tells the people, “I will never break my covenant with you….  But you have not obeyed my voice.”  All through those wicked years, God raised up judges who were faithful and righteous, and the people would temporarily return to God.  There were leaders like Deborah, a faithful prophet as well as judge, Gideon, who showed great trust in God against all the odds, Samson, who started off so well before he gave in to temptation, who repented in the end and trusted God in his final act.  Even the beautiful story of Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi and their faithful love is set in the time of Judges.  Four of the heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11 come from the book of Judges. Yes, during times of great evil God chooses and empowers people with faith, enabling them to accomplish much good.  There is always a remnant of people who keep God’s ways, and sometimes there are leaders who act in outstanding ways to display God’s light in the darkness.

Today we commemorate one such leader, the English politician William Wilberforce.  As a very wealthy young man, he became a British MP in 1780.  Five years later he experienced a revolution of thinking, a “conversion of the heart,” when he embraced Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour. He threw himself into projects for the moral improvement of English society and pre-eminently for the abolition of slavery.  The wealthy upper classes in Britain collected a great deal of money (estimated at 80% of Britain’s foreign income) from the slave trade and from slaveholding in the West Indies, which Wilberforce recognized was a great evil.  He brought before Parliament a bill to end all traffic in slaves, opposed by the party of the slave traders and slave owners, who defeated it time after time for the next twenty years, until Wilberforce’s persistence and moral assurance carried it through.  He then started to campaign against all slavery, and finally, a couple days before his death on July 29^th, 1833, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire.

God’s love and faithfulness never change.  Sadly, neither does basic human behaviour apart from God.  In the time of Judges, politics and religion were intermingled, and the Israelites, who thought themselves “God’s chosen people”, were just as guilty of moral turpitude, violence, and tribal warfare as their neighbours.  In the time of Wilberforce, politics and religion were intermingled in Christendom, with the British considering themselves God’s chosen people, but theirs was a kind of Christianity that did nothing to confront the prevalent moral turpitude, the love of money fostering the slave trade, and tribal warfare even between so-called Christian nations.  Wilberforce, with true religion, stood as a beacon displaying God’s light and truth in his evil age.

We too live in an evil age, no longer part of Christendom, an age where moral turpitude is flaunted openly, where the love of money wreaks great hardship on the poor and causes destruction of the good creation on which we all depend, an age where violence and tribal warfare, much of it religious, infect human society as much as ever before and inflict great hardship and suffering on millions of innocent people.  But God’s love and faithfulness never change.  God still has witnesses who are beacons displaying God’s light and truth in our evil age.  Even in the political realm, like the faithful judges of old, like Wilberforce and others in the British Empire, we have people even in the political realm who are beacons displaying God’s light in the deep darkness.  Today, as examples, I think of Martin Luther King, of Jimmy Carter, and of Archbishop Desmond Tutu with Nelson Mandela.  You can surely think of many others, active Christian politicians who demonstrate God’s justice and righteousness in the midst of sin and corruption.

Let us pray that God will so fill us that we too may be faithful witnesses, showing God’s way of love, justice, and mercy to all we meet, caring for people in need, and keeping ourselves unstained from this evil world (James 1:27).

 -- Robert Kruse