What we have in our hands is a crisis, a world crisis. Like all crises, they unfold human failures, human sin, human defects, human greed, and human pride. Nothing despairs man more than hopelessness in the face of an insurmountable pandemic unprecedented in scale in recent times. Every human arsenal and intelligence summoned is to prevent this overwhelming death from claiming more lives. Fragile lives everywhere, at the same time, have pointed out fragile nations. The boast of power in economy, the mastery in technology, the enormous self-assurance in acquired knowledge in every field of science, have all been to look pathetically puny in the spread of an invisible, virulent pathogen.

A world crisis must speak to a world church - the universal church; but the universal church is made up of one and the many members in the one mystical Body of Christ who is the Head of His Body. The one member who hears tells the whole church to heed. For the Head who tells one tells all. The Head who speaks to one speaks to all. All are to hear. He commands our hearing and longs for our attentiveness. The act of God speaking is His claim of a world He created and came to redeem on His Cross. Whatever is the rebellion of the world, His loved and redeemed Body is the beloved of His heart. To His beloved church He brings a word first. In hearing, we perceive, in perceiving, we bear God’s burden – feeling His feeling, grieving His grief, understanding His heart on behalf of a world that is alienated from Him and from His Life. A world deaf to God’s Word has become a world left on its own. A world run by its own power, consumed by its own lust, deceived by its own illusion, and ruined by its own success.

What is God’s critical word to the church, His people? What is He saying to the pastors and shepherds of His flock? Isn’t every crisis, big or small, a crisis of the human heart? For if it concerns the heart, it is then a moral issue. The God who comes from without begins His work from within – at the center of the human self. Israel’s irrevocable relation with her Creator and Redeemer has been the repetition of this one undeterred lesson – until the very center and soul of Israel is put right with God Himself, the circumference is awry.

The Scottish theologian P.T. Forsyth, at the height of the Great War (WWI) pointedly addressed the church of Europe in crisis and its crumbled foundation:

…it is anthropocentric religion, which has displaced theocratic. That is to say, it is man’s preoccupation with humanity and its spiritual civilization or culture. It is the religious egoism of Humanity, i.e. man’s absorption with himself, instead of with God, His purpose, His service, and His glory. It is a greater anxiety to have God on our side than to be upon His. We are willing to owe many things to God, only not ourselves and our destiny absolutely (18).¹

Egoism is the growth of the human self without God. Religious egoism is the growth of the pseudo-spiritual self in the guise of God. The appearance is maintained without the reality. The adoption of God in varied forms is the self-assurances of our need for God that affects a sense of God being on our side – “willing to owe many things to God”. “Only not ourselves and our destiny absolutely” is perhaps the crisis of all crises of ourselves the church and the world over. The church is dire perhaps more than any other. Forsyth’s century old discernment of the European church in crisis, in the midst of a brutal war, spoke then and speaks now.
The church then was one that, through lip-service, acknowledged the Reign of God, but gave no heed to the governing of God. All the external trappings were done and accomplished for God, but He was not obeyed in the raising of God’s dwelling place within their hearts.
The Cross of God’s Son is admired and religiously revered from afar. The cross is a theological relic that has courted spiritual diggers and fascinators by Europe’s finest, but the Christ crucified that effectually turns a man and causes him to cry, “I shall give thanks to You with uprightness of heart, WHEN I learn Your righteous judgments” (Ps 119:6. Emphasis mine) is a rarity, if not an abysmal absence.
“When” is the incisive timing and determinative moment – at the point, the Cross as God’s judgment judges sin in a man. This is when a man knows sin in his own person, when he sees sin as in himself more than the wrong he has done. His sin is that which violates the holiness of God and cannot be put right by all of one’s strength. The holiness of God is against the sin of man. Sin cannot be parleyed, it cannot be ameliorated, it must be atoned. A man cannot atone himself. The Holy One of Israel is the initiator. He is the lover, the reconciler, the redeemer, the comer, the Who came to earth in the Person of His Son, Jesus Christ. The Incarnated One, God’s Son, Jesus of Nazareth atoned sin by His willing death unto resurrection – an act that enacted and released a mighty power, one moral in nature that ascended as the one only eternal offering to the satisfaction of the Father. Pentecost became the day in divine calendar where this personal power of God was carried by the Spirit and inspirited into men and women.

This Cross’s power was love’s power, the power that met the standard of God’s holiness. This power broke sin and dealt with the consequences of sin. This power imbued with righteousness judges sin and sinner – which in turn cleanses his conscience and frees his heart in righteousness, remaking him in all his days in the righteousness of God.

The righteousness of God imaged through grace by love in man is the righteousness that unites God and man in oneness. The Psalmist’s depiction is prayed inspirationally here: “Lovingkindness and truth have met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other” (Ps 85:10). This is the consummation of redemptive love. It is as Oswald Chambers in “My Utmost for His Highest” on 17th January wrote, “... I receive His nature and hear His call, the voice of Divine nature sounds in both and the two work together.”² The basis of a man’s relation with God is the nature of God’s own person shared and imparted into him. To attempt or concoct any other way is a sure path to idolatry.

This present crisis, as will every crisis to come, is the outworking of His judgment in love reaching us through grace in bringing us to Himself for the purpose of being made one with Him. First, no crisis will end or pass without our utter helplessness confessed and secondly, our unwholesomeness fingered by the ever pressing in of the Kingdom of God. God cannot Reign and yet not govern.

^{1 Forsyth, Peter Taylor. The Justification of God. New York. Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1917.}

^{2 Chambers. Oswald, “My Utmost For His Highest.” Michigan. Discovery House, 1927.}