The Restrainer

For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. II Thessalonians 2:7

I believe that the restraining power that is keeping back evil from taking over the world today is the Light that is still here, the church of Jesus Christ. That is the thing that is keeping darkness from just totally engulfing the world. “Ye are the light of the world”. But when Jesus takes His church out of this earth, then there will be no longer any restraining power or force and the anti-christ will at that point take over. –Pastor Chuck Smith

When Abraham heard that judgment would fall on Sodom, he was understandably worried about his nephew Lot. So he bargained like an auctioneer going in reverse, pleading for the city to be spared if fifty righteous people could be found there – no, wait, forty-five, do I hear forty? Don’t get mad, but could we go down to thirty? How ‘bout twenty? – and so forth, until God agreed to hold the fire if just ten righteous citizens were located. (Genesis 18:23-32)

Interesting thought: the presence of the righteous can have a restraining effect on the destruction of an unrighteous land.

I don’t take that to mean a Christian population guarantees divine protection for the country it inhabits. Neither Paul’s quote from Thessalonians nor the Sodom story indicate that.

But they do remind us that God’s influence through His people can impact the environment, providing a buffer to the level of judgment or corruption that environment would otherwise face. And should that influence either be muted or removed entirely, all hell will likely and literally break loose.

Muted or removed. The first is a strong possibility; the second is an inevitability.

Muted by Choice —

If we’re muted, that “muting” could be imposed on us with force of law. Or it could be a self-inflicted silencing brought on by our own doctrinal weakness, or our own moral failure and the loss of credibility which always follows.

Doctrinal weakness rears its head when believers neglect personal study of the Word, and when leaders refuse to be clear about what God has or has not said, and/or refuse to preach earnestly about salvation, sanctification, and sacrifice. Leave those three elements out of modern preaching and you’ll get neither milk nor meat, just fanfare being gobbled up by sheep who live on junk food without knowing it.

In that case we’d be muted not because the volume’s turned down, but because the message became so unclear and void of useful direction. When fluff goes out over the speakers, someone usually hits the “mute” button on truth.

Moral failure, whether through the immorality of sexual sin or the immorality of indifference to the poor and hurting, leaves us muted as well, because it leaves us without credibility. When the world sees many a church member using porn, abandoning marriage and family, exhibiting greed, or lacking compassion, our message may be clear and doctrinally sound, but our credibility’s shot. Remove credibility from the messenger and you may as well forget about anyone receiving the message.

— or Removed by Decree

Then again, God’s influence through His people will eventually be removed by decree, because at some point our greatest moment will come when the Father tells the Son, “Go retrieve the Bride.”

Jesus said no one knows the day or hour the Son of Man will return for His own (Matthew 24:36) but He just as adamantly promised that time would come (John 14:3), most likely when we least expect it. (Matthew 24:44)

When it does, it’ll be heaven for us and hell for the nations. Which brings me to something I read a few days ago which has really, as they say, “stuck in my craw”.

I’m in the middle of a biography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas (Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy)  and there’s no way to read it without catching all sorts of parallels and warnings. One point Metaxas makes in the book is especially chilling.

He quotes a Jewish Christian poet named Heinrich Heine, whose books were burned in the infamous 1933 German “purge” of undesirable literature. In one of his books, written a full century before Hitler’s rise, Henie noted the darker impulses, present but restrained, in his country. Then he prophetically described what would happen if those impulses were unleashed in Germany, should the Christian voice be silenced:

Christianity – and that is its greatest merit – has somewhat mitigated the brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the Cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals…A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.

If Christianity’s muted influence in Germany enhanced Hitler’s rise, imagine the wasteland left in the aftermath of the muting, or the removal, of the church today.

“I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.” John 9:4